The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Realisms 139

Petrovich, a police investigator, is a key instrument of Raskolnikov’s salvation, and by the end of the novel almost functions as his spiritual foster father and confessor. The police officers on the Petersburg streets of Crime and Punishment are attentive, compassionate professionals, concerned to protect young girls from abuse and to prevent suicides. Makar Devushkin, timid impoverished clerk of Dostoevsky’s earliest “Gogolian variation,” Poor Folk, repeats Akaky Akakievich’s humiliating scene in front of his department chief but with this important difference: where Gogol’s downtrodden clerk receives a bawling out that leads to his death, Devushkin’s boss, seeing his underling’s shabbiness and misery, slips him a 100-ruble note. Given Dostoevsky’s own poverty and experience with punitive institutions – and Tolstoy’s inexperience with both – this difference is worth pondering.

Tolstoy’s reluctance to work with types is related to the high value he puts on gradual, minute-by-minute effort and change. Idleness, anger, “lying on the couch for months” not so much thinking about that specific pawnbroker as simply not taking oneself in hand to act in a positive way (as Raskolnikov’s best friend Razumikhin acts; he is, for Dostoevsky’s palette, a very Tolstoyan hero): these were the errors that led Raskolnikov to murder, and that will lead Pozdnyshev to murder his innocent wife in “The Kreutzer Sonata.” Tolstoy’s novels center squarely on the conviction that we act not out of our ideas but out of our bodies. And if ideas have logical consequences, then bodies have needs. Since these needs arise out of our most basic anxieties and hungers, we all recognize them and share them. We build structures to contain them so that our consciousness and energies can be freed up for other tasks. In Tolstoy’s patriarchal, work-oriented, hearth- and agrarian-centered worldview, marriage should be one such structure. Closely connected to marriage is habit. Indeed, for Tolstoy, the most satisfying type of love was not romantic-erotic or melodramatic – selfish states that were bound to collapse – but habitual kindness, attentive to the other’s tiny, ongoing idiosyncratic needs, what he called “active” love.

Tolstoy, perhaps unfairly, did not see enough of this stable, finely differentiated love in the Dostoevskian landscape, love that feared crises rather than flared up eagerly during them. In a related complaint, Tolstoy also professed surprise at Dostoevsky’s “careless,” and in his view often monotonous, narrative style. The charge might appear odd, given the brilliant diversity and manifest excitement of a Dostoevskian hero’s high-pitched life. But Tolstoy’s own fictive scenarios suggest that he considered crisis and hysteria in themselves monotonous, homogenizing behavioral states. For the duration of this unnatural condition, people tend to sound and act alike, regardless of what might have triggered the blow-up. For Tolstoy, only stable forms of living and