Icon and Axe

2. The Agony of Populist Art

THE CENTRAL FACT of the populist era, which haunted the imagination of its creative artists, was that all of Russian life was being materially transformed by modernizing forces from the West. Even in its initial stages under Alexander II, this process had gone far deeper than the massive Westernization of aristocratic thought under Catherine and the extensive administrative and technological changes under Peter. The only previous confrontation comparable in psychological effect was that of the seventeenth century. Like that century, the populist era was distinguished by profound schism and search that affected all of society and culture. Just as the most dynamic and original movement of the seventeenth century was that of the schismatics and other defenders of the old ways, so the most arresting movement of the Alexandrian age was the heroic populist effort to defend the old patterns of life and culture. This similarity helps explain the peculiar fascination of the Russian populists with the Old Believers and the period of Russian history that stretched from the Time of Troubles to the advent of Peter the Great.

Both the Old Believers and the populists were defending a partially imagined and idealized past along with very real forms and practices of Old Russian life. Each was basically a peaceful, non-revolutionary movement which was, however, sometimes allied with violent insurrectionaries: the peasant rebels and student terrorists respectively. But there was a critical difference between the late seventeenth and the late nineteenth century. For the Old Believers and peasant rebels who defended Old Muscovy all had a clear religious faith and a clear idea of the enemy—whether it was the rituals and priests of the new church or the administrators and bureaucrats of the new state. The St. Petersburg populists, on the other hand, had no such clear faith and no agreed conception of what or who was the enemy. They were, for the most part, “repentant noblemen” projecting the anguish of earlier aristocratic thought onto Russian society as a whole. They were determined to overcome their own “superfluousness” by becoming active agents of a new communal form of social life, anxious to overcome their alienation from the real world by establishing direct personal contact with Russia as it really was.

The desire for realism, for the remorseless honesty of the natural scientist, produced a sense of despair among the young intelligentsia as they went forth to discover the long-forgotten masses. But the certainty that Russia was somehow destined to produce a new kind of society, perhaps even a “new Christianity,” rescued most of them from the total Weltschmerz of the aristocratic century. Indeed, whereas suicide was the besetting moral illness of creative thinkers in the “romantic” first half of the nineteenth century, insanity tended to be the curse of the “realistic” second half. Many of the most original and imaginative figures of the populist age —revolutionaries like Khudiakov and Tkachev, writers like Garshin and Uspensky—went completely insane long before they died. The “mad summer” of the mid-seventies seems at times like part of a confused dream sequence in which the main characters suffer from nervous tics, alcoholic addictions, aimless wanderings, epileptic fits, or neurotic oscillations between extreme exaltation and bleak depression. All of these disorders were widespread among the “cultural pioneers” of the populist age.

One disturbing factor was the fact that the urban intellectuals were looking to the simple people at precisely the time when they were losing their sense of purpose and identity. The peasantry had been confused by the emancipation and was tending to lose confidence, not just in the Church, but in the entire animistic cosmology of Russian rural life. For the primitive peasant imagination of pre-industrial Russia, the world was saturated with religious meaning. God came to man not just through the icons and holy men of the Church but also through the spirit-hosts of mountains, rivers, and, above all, the forests. Each animal, each tree had religious significance like the details in a medieval painting. Belief in the magic power of words and names persisted; the fear of naklikanie, or bringing something upon oneself merely by mentioning its name, was widespread, and one always referred to the devil by such euphemisms as “he,” “the unclean,” or “not ours.”

Christianity had melted into and enriched this world of primitive nature worship without supplanting it. Religious rites, particularly the ever-repeated sign of the cross and the “Christ have mercy” prayer in the orthodox liturgy, were often little more than an animistic effort at naklikanie—at summoning up God’s power and force by endless repetitions of His name. Trees and birds were thought to have derived their present characteristics from their imagined relationship to the events of Christ’s life and death. And the revered intermediaries of the gods of nature—swans or mountain birds—were often brought in for the cure of a dying man when a “wonderworking icon” had failed.

As the mentality of the Russian intelligentsia sought to enter into the plight of the masses, it tended to feel even more keenly than the peasants themselves the waning of these naive and superstitious but beautiful and ennobling beliefs. The vague pantheism of the peasantry was easier to accept than the doctrines of the Church, and it appealed to the romantic imagination of the populists. But they were forced to recognize at the same time that these beliefs were powerless to relieve the dislocations and suffering of peasant life.

The basic cause of the madness and near madness of the populist age was the unresolved (and largely unacknowledged) conflict that existed within the intelligentsia between its relentless determination to see things as they really are and its passionate desire to have them better. It was the old conflict between harsh facts and high ideals—lifted, however, to a new level of intensity by the conviction that facts and ideals were but two aspects of one Truth. The populists followed Mikhailovsky in contending that both objective and subjective truth were contained in the Russian word pravda and that both must be realized by those “servants of truth,” the Russian intelligentsia. The optimistic Comtian belief that there was no contradiction between the truths of science and those of morality was particularly hard to sustain in Russia, where analysis tended to lead to revulsion and ideals to utopianism.

The agony of populist art resulted essentially from its unique sense of tension between things as they are and as they should be. The tension between the limpid realism of Tolstoy’s novels and the muddled moralism of his religious tracts is a classic illustration. But this conflict is illustrated even more dramatically in the brief career of Vsevolod Garshin, one of the greatest short-story writers of modern Russia.

Garshin was born in the first year of Alexander’s reign, and he had an early brush with the “new men of the sixties” when his mother eloped with a revolutionary, taking the four-year-old Garshin with her. He read Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? at the age of eight and developed a life-long interest in the natural sciences while at the gymnasium. With his first short story, “Four Days,” in 1877, he proved himself a master of clipped realism. It is a compelling, semi-autobiographical account of a Russian volunteer lying wounded for four days on the battlefield, driven almost to madness not so much by his own suffering as by his inability to explain why he killed a poor Egyptian peasant fighting for the Turks.

When a Pole made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of a Tsarist minister in February, 1880, Garshin suddenly became possessed with the idea that he must save the life of the young would-be assassin. Garshin wrote and visited the minister, but all to no avail, as the Pole was led through the streets, humiliated, and publicly hanged, in an obvious effort to discourage further terrorism. Garshin had never been a terrorist, but this action and the general reaction that set in in the 1880’s demonstrated to him the illusion of the populist belief that there could ever be an alternative to the horror and cruelty of the real world. Uspensky had already reached that conclusion in his mammoth study of the Russian countryside, The Power of the Earth, which proved the prelude to insanity. Garshin, just before he too went insane, suggested in the manner of Dostoevsky’s Idiot that perhaps insanity was the form that sainthood must now assume in the world. His masterpiece of 1883, “The Red Flower,” tells of a man committed to an insane asylum because of his neurotic preoccupation with ridding the world of evil. Removed from the real world, he clearly does go mad—imagining that all the evil in the world is concentrated in one red flower in the courtyard. Plucking the red flower becomes in a sense the dying gesture of the modern Don Quixote, for whom there is no longer any place in the real world. He is found dead in the garden.

When they placed him on the stretcher, they tried to loosen his hand and take out the red flower. But the hand stiffened, and he took his trophy down into the grave.¹

The dark thought that those within asylums are more complete human beings than those who commit them became a recurrent theme of Russian literature—from Chekhov’s uncharacteristically terrifying tale Ward No. 6 to the cri de coeur of the 1960’s by the dissident writer whom Soviet authorities had sent to a mental institution: Ward 7 by Valery Tarsis.

By the narrow standards of physiological realism painting was bound to be the most successful art medium, and the painters of the populist era felt generally less deeply perplexed than writers or composers. Yet the history of painting and, even more, of its impact during this period illustrates the same movement from realism to moral agony and madness that was characteristic of much populist art. The story is told succinctly in one of Garshin’s short stories, “The Artists,” in which an innocuous painter of idealized landscapes is contrasted with another artist, Riabinin, who seeks to render realistically the expressions of suffering on the face of workmen and finally abandons painting to become a village schoolmaster.²

The real-life counterpart of Garshin’s hero was the new school of painters known as the “wanderers” (peredvizhniki). They were a kind of artistic by-product of the iconoclastic revolution. Rebelling in 1862 at the proposed subject for the painting competition in the St. Petersburg academy, “The Entrance of Odin into Valhalla,” they resolved to paint henceforth only live Russian subjects and to use a remorselessly realistic style. They accepted ostracism from the academies with populist eagerness and proved true “wanderers” in their search both for subject matter and places of exhibition.

The leader of this new school of painting was Ilya Repin, whose famous canvas of 1870-3, “Haulers on the Volga,” may be regarded as the icon of populism. It presented a realistic portrayal of popular suffering in such a way as to arouse in the sensitive viewer’s mind the hint of a better alternative. For behind the dark and beaten-down figures of the haulers there looms the distant, brightly colored boat itself; and, in the middle of the picture, a good-looking young boy has lifted up his head and is staring off out of the picture. To the young students who saw this picture, its meaning was clear: the boy was raising his head up in a first, subconscious act of defiance and was looking inarticulately to them, the student generation of Russia, to come and lead the suffering people to deliverance.

Recognizing the popularity of the new realistic style, the government enlisted the talents of one of Russia’s best painters, Vasily Vereshchagin, to serve as official artistic chronicler of the Russo-Turkish War. But some of Vereshchagin’s paintings were awesomely realistic in portraying the horrors of war and inspired emotions other than the intended one of patriotic exultation. His three-part study, “All Quiet on the Shipka,” which showed a soldier gradually freezing to death, inspired Garshin to write a poem, “The Exhibition of Vereshchagin,” contrasting the horror of the scene in the painting with the blasé, well-dressed viewers walking past it.³

Another creative genius of the populist era, Modest Musorgsky, also tried to describe people at an art exhibition with a total realism that described the viewers as well as the paintings in his “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Like Garshin’s poem, Musorgsky’s tone poem was part of a strange artistic quest for both realism and redemption which led to brilliant and original results.

Musorgsky was the most distinguished member of a group of musical iconoclasts known as the “mighty handful” (moguchaia kuchka), or “The Five,” whose rebellion from established musical conventions almost exactly parallels that of the “wanderers” in art. This group sought to lead Russian music on a special path that would avoid sterile imitation of the West and also sought to “wander” in search of new forms of musical construction. The organizer of the group and founder of the Free Music School, which became the populist rival to the conservatory, was Mily Balakirev, a native of Nizhny Novgorod, who gathered about him a group of talented musicians influenced by the new materialism and realism of the sixties: a chemist, Borodin; a military engineer, Cui; a naval officer, Rimsky-Korsakov; and Musorgsky, a young military officer who had been devouring the works of Darwin and living in a typical student commune of the sixties. The mighty handful sought a new popular style of music; and Musorgsky went far toward creating one.

Musorgsky was the consummate “man of the sixties” in his passion for realism and novelty, his rejection of sentimentality, melodrama, and classical art forms. He was convinced that “nothing that is natural can be either wrong or inartistic,”⁴ and that art must “plow up the black earth … the virgin soil … that no man has touched” rather than “reclaim tracts already fertilized”; it must “penetrate unexplored regions and conquer them … past all the shadows, to unknown shores …”⁵

His means of plunging on into the deep were those of the populist age carried to new extremes. He sought to derive all his music from the hidden sounds and cadences of human speech. Beginning with the texts of Gogol, whom he felt to be the closest of all writers to Russian popular culture, he moved on to try to reproduce in music the themes and hypnotic repetitions of Russian oral folklore, the babble in the market place at Nizhny Novgorod, and the mysterious murmurs of nature itself. In a manner reminiscent of Ivanov’s quest in painting, Musorgsky insisted that he sought “not beauty for its own sake, but truth wherever it be.”⁶ But unlike Ivanov, Musorgsky was a true populist, priding himself on his lack of formal musical training and insisting that “art is a means of conversation with the people, and not a goal.” He sought “not merely to get to know the people but to be admitted to their brotherhood,” and stated his populist credo in a letter to Repin, whose “Haulers on the Volga” had been a major source of inspiration for his music:

It is the people I want to depict; sleeping or waking, eating or drinking, I have them constantly in my mind’s eye—again and again they rise before me, in all their reality, huge, unvarnished, with no tinsel trappings! How rich a treasure awaits the composer in the speech of the people—so long that is, as any corner of the land remains to which the railway has not penetrated.…⁷

In his effort to reproduce and bring forth the true national music that he felt lay within the Russian people, he moved slowly toward the musical stage. Since Gogol ceased writing for the theater there had been little of true value written for the stage, which was dominated in the third quarter of the nineteenth century by Ostrovsky’s colorful but ideologically insipid théâtre de moeurs.⁸ On the musical stage, however, there had been a steady development since Glinka of a body of native Russian operas rich in choral music and based on thematic material from Russian history and folklore. More impressive than any plays produced before Chekhov’s great successes in the 1890’s was the rich body of operatic literature that appeared during that period and included not only comfortably lyrical works, such as Sadko and Eugene Onegin, but certain important, idiosyncratic operas that are less familiar outside, such as Rubinstein’s Demon, Dargomyzhsky’s Rusalka, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Maid of Pskov.

Music, the universal language, was a means of communicating with the new, more polyglot audiences of the late imperial period; and the serious musical drama was a way of effectively conducting that “conversation with the people” which was Musorgsky’s conception of art. The subjects which he chose to talk about with his audience in his later years were drawn entirely from Russian history. The various scenes of his operas were viewed not as constituent parts of a drama so much as “illustrations to a chronicle,” which dealt with the destiny of the Russian people. A simultaneous drift toward historical subject matter was also noticeable in the paintings of the “wanderers.”

One of the peculiar traits of Russian realism was that the boldest and most resolute followers of an art based on the study of the surrounding world very willingly abandoned this reality and turned to history, that is, to a domain where the immediate connection with actuality is, naturally, lost.⁹

The domain of history held out the promise of prophetic insight. Moscow, the great repository of Russian tradition, was specially revered by Musorgsky’s circle, who gave it the name of Jericho, the city which had brought the Jews into the promised land of Canaan. The heartland of Russia was the new Canaan for the restless artists of the populist age. They wandered through it like holy fools of old, and turned to the ever-expanding volume of writing about its history rather in the way monastic artists had previously studied sacred chronicles in search both of worthy subject matter and of personal reassurance and inspiration. Their attention gravitated toward the late Muscovite period: a time similar to their own in spiritual crisis and social upheaval. The same fascination that produced Repin’s image of Ivan the Terrible with his murdered son and Surikov’s picture of Morozova dragged into exile (as well as some of the most popular plays of Ostrovsky and A. K. Tolstoy) also led Musorgsky to devote most of his last thirteen years to two great historical operas dealing with the late Muscovite period.

The first of these operas, Boris Godunov, deals with the beginnings of the century of schism; the second, Khovanshchina, with the end. Taken together, they begin on the eve of the Time of Troubles and end with the self-immolation of the Old Believers and the coming of Peter the Great. They are permeated with the desire for artistic fidelity to the musical laws of speech and emotion; historical fidelity to the known desires and habits of the leading characters; and theatrical fidelity to such traditions as there were in Russian opera since Glinka. But the real triumph of these operas—that which gives them a unique place even in this century of rich operatic accomplishment—is that they tell with artistic integrity much about the aspirations of the populist age itself. A key to understanding his music—and perhaps the populist movement itself—lies in the confession that he made to Balakirev just a year after resigning his army commission:

I was oppressed by a terrible disease which came on very badly while I was in the country. It was mysticism, mixed up with cynical thoughts about God. It developed terribly when I returned to Petersburg. I succeeded in concealing it from you, but you must have noticed traces of it in my music.…¹⁰

This is as close as we are ever brought to the origins of the strange nervous disorder which framed his career and led him to drink himself into derangement and death. It is probably not accidental that he was occupied at the beginning of his career with translating Lavater, the spiritualist and physiognomist who had fascinated Russian mystics of the aristocratic century with his claim to be able to read the nature of men from the shape and expression of their faces; or that the greatest aria in Khovanshchina should be Marfa’s strange aria of prophecy and divination. Musorgsky himself was endowed with a strange genius for penetrating through the outer veil of speech and action to the inner desires of his fellow men. There are traces of prophecy in Boris, though they are often concealed from view by the distracting addition of the Polish scene (demanded by Musorgsky’s original theatrical producers); by the melodic and melodramatic additions of the Rimsky-Korsakov and other revisions used in present-day productions; and above all by the dramatic and critical overemphasis on the role of Boris, which has become conventional since Chaliapin.

If Boris is the sole—or even the main—focus of interest, the opera becomes little more than another of the many historical melodramas on themes that were characteristic of national theaters in the late nineteenth century. It is, indeed, rather lacking in subtlety and moral sensitivity when compared with the accounts of Karamzin and Pushkin, from which Musorgsky derived his story. Only when the opera is placed in the context of populism does the uniqueness and power of Musorgsky’s version become fully apparent. For, just as his friend the populist historian Kostomarov insisted that the simple people rather than tsars were the proper subject of the true historian, so does Musorgsky make the Russian people rather than the figure of Boris the hero of his opera.

The Russian people frame the entire drama. It begins and ends with them. Boris is guilty before them from his first words, “My soul is heavy,” to his last cry, “Forgive”; and the only alibi he ever offers comes at the height of his maddened clock monologue, when he claims that it was not he who killed the infant Dmitry but “the will of the people.” It is the people’s plight that is the focus of Musorgsky’s attention; the climax of the opera comes in the last scene, which shows the people in the Kromy Forest after Boris is dead. This is a pure addition to the Pushkin version and to Musorgsky’s own first version. But unlike the addition of the Polish scene, the forest scene was Musorgsky’s own idea—one that drew from a variety of impressions he had gathered throughout the 1868-72 period. He discussed its contents with numerous historians and critics and wrote it in a state of enthusiasm at his “novelty and novelty—novelty out of novelty!”¹¹

The “revolutionary scene,” as Stasov called it, reflects with astonishing insight the revolutionary longings of the age in which Musorgsky lived, whatever it may or may not tell us about the original Time of Troubles. The scene was banned from public performances during the Revolution of 1905. The activities of the mob in the forest reflect in microcosm the search for a new basis for authority in late Imperial Russia. The people in the forest— like the populists who were headed there—have lost confidence in the Tsar and have a new and heady belief in the elemental strength and wisdom of the people. As the curtain opens, they are rejecting and deriding the first of five figures that come before the people as a possible alternative to the authority of the dead Tsar. They are mocking and torturing the boyars, the hereditary aristocracy that has gained its authority through an unholy alliance with the Tsar: “Boris stole a throne and he stole from Boris,” they chant as they give the Boyar Khrushchev (sic) a whip for a scepter and a 100-year-old peasant woman for a “queen.” The scene of mockery swells to a crescendo, with the magnificent chorus based on an old popular rhythm: “Slava boyarinu, Slava Borisovu,” which becomes a kind of leitmotiv for the entire scene. Enthusiastic students left the theater singing this anarchistic chorus through the streets of St. Petersburg as Boris made its spectacular entry into the repertoire early in 1874 on the eve of the mad summer that took them off into Kromy forests of their own.

The second alternative to appear before the mob is the prophetic holy fool, or yurodivy, who had told Boris in a preceding confrontation before St. Basil’s Cathedral that the “Tsar-Herod” had lost the right to pray for intercession from the Mother of God. He represented the quixotic longing to follow Christ, the half-heretical voice of Christian prophecy which was so deeply enmeshed in the populist mystique. But his fate in Kromy Forest, like that of the fools who “went to the people,” is to be robbed and humiliated by an ungrateful mob. His last coin is taken from him; and he retreats to the back of the stage to make room for the next suitors for the affections of the uprooted masses.

They are the vagabond, pseudo-holy men, Varlaam and Missail, who come out of the depths with bass voices and baser motives to fan the flame of revolution. It is these forest monsters who advise the mob that the Tsar is “a monster eating human flesh”; and they trigger a swelling chorus singing the praises of “power, beautiful power,” “terrible and capricious power.” The orgiastic climax comes with the women’s cry of smert’! (“death”), and then the music swirls and degenerates into a kind of chaotic anticlimax. It is all a kind of uncanny picture of the populist revolutionary movement that was to come: inspired by vagabond conspirators from outside, finding climactic release only in a tsaricide in which women played a prominent part, and dissolving shortly thereafter.

Just at this moment of revolutionary excitement a fourth alternative leadership for the mob is heard offstage: the sound of two Polish Jesuits from the entourage of the False Dmitry chanting a Latin prayer in measured tenor notes. Varlaam and Missail’s booming bass voices incite the mob to haul off these “ravens and vampires,” even though they themselves are committed to the support of Dmitry. The Jesuits are hauled off to be lynched. They represent Latinstvo, the oldest and most enduring symbol of Western ideology, which is rejected with particular violence by proponents of a special path for the Russian people, whether presented in an old Catholic or in a new liberal form. It was the unfortunate fate of the two Jesuits to arrive on the scene—like the constitutional proposals of Alexander II’s last years—at the precise moment when revolutionary passions were aroused and their fate foredoomed. These two Jesuits are disciples of the sinister and diabolic Rangoni, who is not present in Pushkin’s play but dominates the Polish act in Musorgsky’s final version of the opera: a kind of reminder that Musorgsky’s age was more profoundly anti-Western than Pushkin’s.

Finally, the fifth and last external force to come before “the people” appears: the False Dmitry himself, who is hailed as the new Tsar by the gullible mob. The masses in Kromy Forest, like those of Alexander’s time, thus end up no better off than they were to begin with. They have a new tsar, who—we have been repeatedly led to believe—will probably be worse than the one he replaced, which was indeed the case with Alexander III.

This is the final message that comes at the end as the mob leaves the stage, trailing blindly behind the False Dmitry. Bells ring; a red glow from a distant fire lights the background; and the humiliated fool steps forth. He, like Boris before him, can no longer pray; and as the orchestra clears away the echoes of praise for God and Dmitry with a few lacerating chords of grief, the fool brings the opera to an end:

bitter tears

tears of blood

weep, weep, Orthodox soul

soon the enemy will come

and the darkness fall

the dark darkness

impenetrable …

weep, weep, Russian people,

hungry people.¹²

Musorgsky had plunged out into the deep but had not found “the other shore.” The bark is lost at sea, a helpless prey for alien currents. We are left only with the cry of the man in the boat, in all its honest, agonizing simplicity.

He had written to Repin that “a true artist who should dig deep enough would have cause to dance for joy at the results”;¹³ but fathoming the depths further led him only to “songs and dances of death,” his most famous song cycle. The melancholia which overcame him—and which Repin has preserved in the haunting portrait of him painted two weeks before his death —is amplified in Khovanshchina, the chaotic and unfinished first part of a trilogy which occupied much of the last eight years of Musorgsky’s life. The ostensible theme is the end of Old Russia in an orgy of wild excess, Khovanshchina, that ends in the self-immolation of the Old Believers in the last act; and the coming victory of “new” Russia that is foreshadowed by the offstage sounds of the coming Preobrazhensky regiment at the end. Yet there is no clear message; people no longer seem capable of affecting or even understanding what is going on. The mob at Kromy was at least able to look for answers and follow leaders, whereas the streltsy can only drink, dance, and give way to another mob which murders their leader, Khovansky. The arias of Boris involve a recognition of sin and a search for expiation; but those of Shaklovity, Marfa, and Dosifei are only lamentations and divinations, obscure in meaning and charged with foreboding. Gradually one senses that Russia is only superficially the subject of the opera, even though Musorgsky spent endless months studying Russian history before writing it. Russia is rather the background against which two deeper forces are contending for the destiny of men: the God-saturated world of nature and pride-saturated world of material force. Khovanshchina stands as a kind of mammoth naturalistic tone poem that begins at sunrise and ends in moonlight, that begins by the river in Moscow and ends with a fire in the forest. The Christian substratum of Boris Godunov (and of early populism?) has been eliminated. The two scenes devoted to the streltsy show them as—to cite the phrase of the scribe in the opera—“beasts in human shape.” In the carousing scene, they become, in effect, a mob of dancing bears exiled from humanity in the manner of peasant folklore. They are reminiscent of an extreme and debauched revolutionary circle of Musorgsky’s time which mystified the police by referring to itself as “the Bear Academy.”¹⁴ Their leader, Ivan Khovansky, is a “white swan” who is first hailed and then mocked after his assassination with the hushed and beautiful line “Glory and honor to the white swan.”

If the defenders of Old Russia are corrupt, the advocates of innovation are also: the venal Prince Golitsyn and the self-satisfied Emma from the German suburb.

Meanwhile, with increasing frequency, the dark figures of Old Believers move in and out, singing choruses and muttering semi-intelligible prayers. Hovering over all this strange, disconnected activity like a druid priest watching the senseless struggles of animals in the forest stands Dosifei, the leader of the Old Believers. At the end he beckons his followers to join him in mounting the great funeral pyre which will return them to the elements through fire. The contrast between the long and beautiful aria with which he bids farewell to earth and the shrill, banal chords used to announce the approach of Peter the Great’s army suggests that the bleak world of the elements brings man closer to truth than the dazzling world of artificial invention.

The real conflict in Khovanshchina is between these two primal forces: the real world of nature and the artificial world of human striving. Both old and new Russia have succumbed to the latter, Musorgsky seems to be saying through the figure of Marfa, the leader of the sisterhood of feminine Old Believers. Marfa seeks to expiate her sin of having loved Andrew Khovansky, the symbol of Old Russia, and is thus led to join Dosifei in the final scene of immolation. The venal Khovansky does not understand her and elopes with the German girl, Emma; and the streltsy are spared at the last minute. Thus physical life survives while spiritual life seeks release in death. Both Old and New Russia tried to kill Marfa: Golitsyn by drowning her, Khovansky by seducing her. But Marfa survives so that she may voluntarily free herself of the world and its chains; and music from the divination scene returns in reprise in a particularly beautiful fashion as Golitsyn sets off for exile.

In the course of successive drafts of Khovanshchina, Marfa became the main character. She was, together with the great contralto Daria Leonova —for whom Musorgsky was a touring accompanist in his last years—the “missing madonna” of his lonely life, the “damp mother earth” of his naturalistic cosmology. He gave to Marfa—and to Leonova who sang the part—his most beautiful love music and his most haunting music of foreboding and prophecy. One evening shortly before he died—apparently from epileptic alcoholism—he was accompanying Leonova on the piano as she was singing selections from the still-incomplete Khovanshchina for a small group of friends. When she came to the line “Glory and honor to the white swan,” Musorgsky suddenly stopped at the piano. A strange shudder ran through the whole group, and neither Leonova nor Musorgsky could go on. It was the moment of truth—or perhaps a decisive instant in his own final turn to insanity. A shudder was the last stage direction he had written in for the fool after his last lament in Boris Godunov, and now the full impact of the shudder had come back to him.

Wagner alone in the nineteenth century had a conception as vast as that of Musorgsky. He too sought to transcend the conventions of the operatic stage with a new type of music drama to be constructed out of a new musical idiom and rediscovered pagan folklore. It was largely fear of succumbing to the influence of Wagner (who had come to St. Petersburg in 1862-3) that the “mighty handful” came together in the sixties. If Musorgsky’s rival musical culture was less successful in terms of formal perfection and subsequent influence than that of Wagner, the difference between their two independent and simultaneous careers tells us something about the inner aspirations of the Germanic and Slavic worlds respectively in an age of awakening national self-consciousness. Unlike Wagner, for whom the Downfall of the Gods was seen as the prelude to a new heroic age, there is no hint of redemption as Musorgsky’s Brünnehilde mounts her final funeral pyre. Whereas Wagner had sought to uncover the music of the future, Musorgsky had sought to recapture the music of the past—actually writing some of Khovanshchina in the hook note style of the Old Believers. There is no Siegfried in Musorgsky’s “popular music drama”; no prize songs in his sunless song cycles; no tinsel of religion or nationalism. Instead, there is a kind of Eastern resignation of willful striving, a strange mixture of clairvoyant insight and realism with no way out.

Similar to Musorgsky in many respects is the figure of Fedor Dostoevsky: another epileptic artistic genius who died just a few weeks before the musician early in 1881 and was laid to rest near him in the graveyard of the Alexander Nevsky monastery. Like Musorgsky, Dostoevsky illustrates the agony of art in the populist age: the tension between relentless realism and the search for a positive message in the people. Like Musorgsky’s operas, Dostoevsky’s novels offer a tragic depth and dramatic power that was not present in the fashionable plays of the time, let alone the newly popular operettas of Offenbach and Strauss. Like Musorgsky, Dostoevsky had a special reverence for Gogol and considered himself a child of the sixties. The epilepsy that affected Dostoevsky was more intense but less debilitating than the creeping madness of Gogol and Musorgsky. Dostoevsky was able to bring his work to a greater measure of fruition than either of these two figures.

His cosmology of characters and ideas belongs, in many ways, more to the twentieth than to the nineteenth century. One Soviet writer at the end of the Russian Civil War was hardly exaggerating when he said that “all contemporary literature is following in Dostoevsky’s footsteps … to talk of Dostoevsky still means to talk of the most painful, profound issues of our current life.”¹⁵ Ilya Ehrenburg, writing during the period of forced industrialization in the thirties, called Dostoevsky’s novels “not books, but letters from someone close” which alone tell “the whole truth” about human nature.

It is a truth which is undeniable and deadly. One cannot live with it. It can be given to the dying as formerly they gave last rites. If one is to sit down at a table and eat, one must forget about it. If one is to raise a child, one must first of all remove [it] from the house.… If one is to build a state, one must forbid even the mention of that name.¹⁶

The Soviet Union came close to such a prohibition during the era of high Stalinism; for truth was to Dostoevsky both Christian and anti-authoritarian. Dostoevsky fused, if he did not altogether harmonize, Gogol’s search for religious faith with Belinsky’s passionate anti-authoritarian moralism to provide a new type of positive answer designed for those who had experienced the iconoclasm of the sixties.

Dostoevsky’s positive answer did not bypass or even transcend the real world but rather penetrated into it. From the time of his first bleak novel of urban life, Poor People in 1845-6, Dostoevsky was unwilling to gloss over unpleasant facts or offer romantic flights to far-off lands or distant history—even Russian history. He is relatively indifferent to scenery or even beauty of language; his subject matter is prosaic and contemporary— much of it taken directly from the newspapers. His focus is on people, and on the most real thing about them: their inner drives, desires, and aspirations. Amidst all the crime and sensualism of his novels the focus is always on psychological development, never on physiological details. He was a “realist in the higher sense of the word.” As he wrote at the end of the sixties:

If one could but tell categorically all that we Russians have gone through during the last ten years in the way of spiritual development, all the realists would shriek that it was pure fantasy! And yet it would be pure realism! It is the one true, deep realism; theirs is altogether too superficial.¹⁷

Thus Dostoevsky takes us “from the real to the more real.”¹⁸ A veteran of the Petrashevsky circle—the first expressly devoted to “social thought”— of arrest, mock execution, and Siberian exile, Dostoevsky resolved in the late sixties to find that which was most real in the confused experience of the intelligentsia. His method is that of “deep penetration,” proniknovenie, a term of which he was particularly fond. He was prompted to fathom these depths not only by his own traumatic experience in prison but also by his association upon return with the so-called pochvenniki, or “men of the soil.” This group, led by the remarkable Muscovite critic Apollon Grigor’ev, sought to oppose both the romantic idealism of the older generation and the materialism of the younger generation with a kind of Christian naturalism, which they felt could be the basis of an original and independent Russian culture. They sought to penetrate through life’s artificial exterior for a “restoration in the soul of a new, or rather a renewed, faith in the foundation [grunt], the soil [pochva], the people—a restoration in the mind and heart of everything immediate [neposredstvenny].”¹⁹ Criticism, Grigor’ev felt, must be “organic”—taking account of the historical, social, and spiritual forces as well as the physiological forms of life and art. Ostrovsky’s dramatic portrayal of Muscovite and provincial life was thought to have prepared the way for a new popular literature by moving back into the soil and away from aristocratic convention.

Dostoevsky moves beneath the surface in the first remarkable literary creation of his period of post-exilic prophecy: Notes from the Underground of 1864. Then, having presented the dark recesses of malice in human nature, he plunges on from the real to the more real: to the deeper reality of human nature as a divided complex of feeling and intellect.

The problem of division within man had fascinated Dostoevsky since the time he wrote his Double in 1846 and called his divided hero “the greatest and most important type which I was the first to discover and proclaim.”²⁰ In Crime and Punishment of 1866, the first of his great novels, he presents us with a hero, Raskolnikov, whose very name has the word for “schism” within it. Already in this work we see the beginning of his more grandiose conception of bringing the divided inner impulses of men into open confrontation and attempting to overcome the sense of separation and division in modern man. In this as in his other great novels he presents ordinary Russians not in any epic, descriptive sense but in a dynamic state of development. His characters become actors in a broader human drama where all are involved in the fate of each. The scene is the city, primarily St. Petersburg: “the most abstract and contrived city on the entire earthly sphere.”²¹ There are no happy pastorales to relieve the tension. The stage is filled with the babel of intellectualized chatter and a sense of continued expectation and suspense. The scenario is that of the detective stories and melodramas that were currently popular all over Europe. But all of these ingredients are lifted to the level of a modern passion play, for the drama is, in truth, played out on a stage which has salvation at one end and damnation at the other. Through Dostoevsky, the novel form became invested with the dimensions of religious drama; and the ideas of salon thinkers were developed to their extreme and brought into conflict before the largest single audience available in Russia: the subscribers to Katkov’s Russian Herald.

The unique importance of Dostoevsky for Russian cultural history— as distinct from the world-wide development of psychology, literature, and religious thought—lay in his attempt to uncover some new positive answer for humanity in the depths of Russian popular experience. At about the same time in the late sixties that Musorgsky was beginning the first of his epochal “popular music dramas,” Dostoevsky turned his attention toward the composition of a novel that would deal not with underground men, crime and punishment, but with redemption and renewal. Like Gogol, he turned to his Russian “divine comedy” after going abroad; and his first effort, The Idiot, of 1867-8, reveals some of the incipient madness of the late Gogol in its agonizing incapacity to create a credible image of pure goodness. Dostoevsky brought with him the faith of the pochvenniki that ultimately all men were in harmony and that there were no unbridgeable barriers between one man and another, or between the world of men and that of the insects below and the angels above. The division between the actual and the ideal—the real and the more real—is ultimately artificial; but it can be overcome only by penetrating deeply into the entire problem of division.

Schism had been a deep and abiding theme of Russian history in the Romanov period. The seventeenth century saw the separation of the government from the people; the eighteenth, the aristocracy from the peasantry; the early nineteenth, the intellectual from the non-intellectual aristocracy; and the mid-century, the “sons” from the “fathers” within the thinking elite. In writing The Idiot Dostoevsky proved that the mere injection of a Christ-figure into this situation is not enough. Dostoevsky’s would-be redeemer is incomplete in the novel without his alter ego, the sensualist Rogozhin, with whose life and fate that of “the Prince-Christ” Myshkin is completely inter-twined. The helpless idiocy of Dostoevsky’s holy fool at the end of the novel is in many ways reminiscent of the final cries of anguish by the fool at the end of Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov.

To overcome the separation in Russian life, it is necessary to fathom that separation which lies at the base of all others: the separation from God. Thus, while still in the last stages of writing The Idiot, Dostoevsky first conceived of a new novel to be called “The Atheist” or “The Life of a Great Sinner.” In it a man was to lose his faith and embark on a search for positive answers that would lead him eventually to a Russian monastery and the recovery of faith at a higher level. It was to be “a gigantic novel,” after the writing of which “I shall be ready to die, for I shall have uttered therein my whole heart’s burden.”²²

Thus, whereas Musorgsky in the Kromy scene of Boris ends his search for new answers with a cry of total despair, Dostoevsky’s cry at the end of The Idiot is only the beginning of his search. But whereas Musorgsky was closer to the populists of the seventies in looking for sociopolitical leadership in the Kromy Forest, Dostoevsky was closer to the realists of the sixties in looking for metaphysical truth in the real St. Petersburg. Whereas Musorgsky looked to the Russian past, Dostoevsky looked to its present and future. The realism of historical lament in the one gives way to the realism of religious prophecy in the other.

In his first outline of “The Atheist” late in 1868, Dostoevsky indicated his intention to spend at least two years in preparatory reading of “a whole library of atheistic works by Catholic and Orthodox writers.” From atheism his hero is to move on to become a Slavophile, Westernizer, Catholic, flagellant sectarian, and “finds at last salvation in the Russian soil, the Russian Saviour, and the Russian God.”²³ He attaches repeated importance to the need he feels to be in Russia to write such a work. The two great novels which he wrote during his fascination with this never fully realized idea both take the problem of separation out of the individual into a broader and more distinctively Russian context. The Possessed of 1870-2 anatomizes the ideological divisions in Russian society as a whole. The Brothers Karamazov of 1878-80, which is the closest Dostoevsky came to giving finished form to “The Atheist,” illustrates the separation within individuals, society, and the family itself. The Brothers focuses on the ultimate form of human separation: that which leads man to murder his own progenitor. If The Possessed depicts “Turgenev’s heroes in their old age,”²⁴ the social dénouement as it were of the philosophic nihilism of Fathers and Sons, The Brothers lifts the conflict of fathers and sons to the metaphysical plane, on which alone it could be overcome.

The scene of The Possessed is Skvoreshniki, the provincial estate which bears the name of an outdoor house for feeding starlings and migratory birds. It is in truth a feeding place for the noisy black birds of revolution, a way station through which the unsettling ideas of the aristocracy are migrating out from St. Petersburg to the Russian countryside. All the characters are interconnected in a hallucinatory forty-eight hours of activity, most of which is a compressed and intensified version of real-life events. In a series of strange and only partially explained scenes we see the movement of Russian thought from the dilettantish aristocratic romanticism of Stepan Trofimovich, with whom the novel begins, to the activity of a host of young extremists. Conversation leads directly to murder and suicide; the “literary quadrille” of intellectuals to a strange fire. “It’s all incendiarism,” cries out one perplexed local official, adding prophetically that “the fire is in the minds of men and not in the roofs of houses.” But he and others not caught up in the hot stream of ideas are powerless to understand, let alone check, the conflagration of events. This is a novel of ideas in action, and those who are not intelligentnye (whether they be babbling bureaucrats or garrulous liberals) are foreigners to it.

At the center of the drama stands Stavrogin, the magnetic yet empty aristocrat around whom the other characters, in Dostoevsky’s words, “revolve as in a kaleidoscope.” “Everything is contained in the character of Stavrogin—Stavrogin is EVERYTHING,” Dostoevsky wrote in his notebooks.²⁵ An air of mystery hangs over his entrance onto the scene. His face is likened to a mask; and his first activities—grabbing one man by the nose and biting another one’s ear—are seen as offenses against society by a “wild beast showing his claws.” Like the beast of the apocalypse, this human beast has many heads. He is the progenitor of all the “devils” in the novel (“Devils” being a more accurate translation of the Russian title, Besy, than “Possessed”).

Superficially he is “a paragon of beauty,” surrounded by women, yet unable to have a complete relationship with any of them. Dasha is only a nurse to him, Lisa an unsatisfactory sex partner, and Maria Lebiadkin a maimed and estranged wife. There is a hint of illicit relationship with a small girl in his confession; but whether or not the novel includes this section, the story is still dominated by his ideological relationships with other men. Three of his disciples are among the most original creations in Russian literature: Shigalev, Kirillov, and Shatov. Each is inspired by Stavrogin with an idea that drives him to destruction. Each incarnates one aspect of the revolutionary trinity, liberty, equality, fraternity. Their collective epitaph is provided by the words of Babeuf, which Kirillov writes just before killing himself: Liberté, égalité, fraternité ou la mort. Shigalev represents absolute equality with his demand that mountains be leveled and human anthills raised in their place. Kirillov preaches absolute freedom, which he asserts by committing an heroic and purely ideological suicide. Shatov’s ideal is absolute fraternity, which he associates with the peasant life of the Russian people.

Shigalev is modeled on Bartholomew Zaitsev, one of the most extreme iconoclasts of the sixties, who had been a close journalistic associate of Pisarev and then had fled abroad to join Bakunin in active revolutionary agitation. Kirillov offers a majestic distillation of the Schopenhauerian argument for suicide and is one of Dostoevsky’s greatest creations. The only ultimate way to prove one’s freedom is freely to will one’s own destruction. Any other act merely serves some earthly purpose and is subject to the various determining factors of the material world. But uncaused suicide is a supreme vote of confidence in man’s freedom from, and triumph over, the natural world. By this one heroic stroke man can become a kind of God.

Shatov is, together with Kirillov, the figure with whom Dostoevsky demonstrates greatest sympathy. They are both brought back from America to Russia by Stavrogin to live on Bogoiavlensky (Epiphany) street. They are both looking for a new epiphany, the appearance of the lost God: Kirillov in himself, Shatov in the Russian people. Shatov was originally modeled on an Old Believer whom Dostoevsky met in 1868; but he becomes a kind of God-seeking spokesman of Dostoevsky’s own curious brand of populism. Stavrogin has taken away his belief in God and his roots with his peasant past. Unlike Kirillov, whose name is derived from one of the founding saints of Russia and whose dedication to an idea is saintly in intensity, Shatov is plagued by doubts, as his name (derived from shatanie, or “wavering”) indicates. Whereas Kirillov’s moment of truth comes in self-destruction, Shatov’s comes in hitting Stavrogin. “I can’t tear you out of my heart, Nicholas Stavrogin,” he cries, as he—like populism itself—slowly drifts into alliance with the revolutionary forces around him. “I believe in Russia … in Orthodoxy … I believe that the new advent will take place on Russian soil.… In God. I, I will believe in God.”

Stavrogin is the dark, malignant force in Russian intellectual life which kept Dostoevsky, like Shatov, from making a confident affirmation of belief in God and of harmonious communion with his creation. Dostoevsky is very explicit in stating what the nature of that evil force is, when he compares Stavrogin to the radical Decembrist Lunin and the brooding poet Lermontov:

There was perhaps more malice in Stavrogin than in these two put together, but this malice was cold, calm, and if one may put it that way rational, which means that it was the most abominable and terrible kind of malice.

Stavrogin’s evil is reason without faith: cold intellect born in aristocratic boredom, nurtured during a scientific expedition to Iceland, confirmed by study in a German university, and brought by way of St. Petersburg to the Russian people. It is because he is rational, because he is “a wise serpent” that his power is so truly terrifying.

Yet Stavrogin is also a symbol of the Russian intelligentsia, a bearer of its prophetic hopes, which Dostoevsky himself partially shared. Stavrogin was tutored by Stepan Trofimovich, the incarnation of the romantic aristocratic intellectual; he is compared to figures like Lunin and Lermontov and represents a kind of fulfillment of both of their quests. He was created by Dostoevsky in the midst of his search for a new positive hero. He bears the Greek word for cross (stavros) within his name, has been to Jerusalem, and is called “Prince Harry,” Shakespeare’s future king Henry V who was destined to save England after sowing his wild oats. In his notebooks Dostoevsky referred to Stavrogin as “Prince” and, in a key chapter heading, as “Ivan the Tsarevich”: the murdered son of Ivan the Terrible whom Russian folklore taught would return to deliver Russia. In some sense, Dostoevsky is saying that the future of Russia belongs to Stavrogin: to the aristocratic intelligentsia. The intelligentsia—the alienated and elect of history—cannot be bypassed because it is possessed by ideas; and without “a great idea,” “the people cannot live and will not die.”

The drama of the novel results largely from the struggle of two very special personalities for the raw power that Stavrogin generates and the dark fire that he bears within him. Traditional and revolutionary ideals are struggling for the mind—and thus the future—of Russia. The old is represented by a woman, Maria Lebiadkin, the new by a man, Peter Verkhovensky. The names immediately dramatize the contrasting forces. Maria suggests, of course, the mother of God, the missing Madonna; Peter suggests Peter the Great and the arrogant march of technology and irreverent innovation. Lebiadkin is derived from “swan” (lebed’), the popular symbol of purity, grace, and redemption; Verkhovensky from “height,” the classic symbol of pride and arrogance.

The old never has a chance. Just as Musorgsky’s “white swan” is killed early in Khovanshchina, so is Dostoevsky’s afflicted with some strange, deep wound even before we meet her. Yet she never blames Stavrogin, who has spurned and humiliated her. Feeling that “I must have done him some wrong,” she accepts suffering gladly in the spirit of the Old Believers and denounces Stavrogin as the False Dmitry before dying with her infant baby.

The new and victorious force is that of Verkhovensky, who is, of course, modeled on the conspiratorial Nechaev. Unlike Nechaev, however, who rejoiced in the total nihilism of his revolutionary ethos, Verkhovensky feels the need of links with the prophetic intelligentsia. Without Stavrogin, he considers himself only “Columbus without America, a bottled fly.” Verkhovensky’s revolutionary party gives us a kind of anticipatory glimpse at the conspiratorial confusion of the Bolsheviks awaiting the arrival of Lenin at the Finland Station. The scene in which Verkhovensky inspires a thug to desecrate an icon by putting a mouse inside its container is an anticipation of the organized sacrilege by the league of the militant godless. The Shpigulin scene, in which Verkhovensky appears in the streets actively agitating among striking workers, illustrates Dostoevsky’s unique ability for depicting where events were going rather than merely where they had already been. Based on the first real industrial strike in Russia (which occurred in St. Petersburg in May-June, 1870, while Dostoevsky was completing the novel), the scene is treated not as an isolated, economically motivated demonstration of confused protest but rather as part of the fire in the minds of men. The professional revolutionary organizers who were not to move in among the urban workers for some years are already there in Dostoevsky’s novel.²⁶

The future, we are led to believe, belongs to Verkhovensky; for, although his immediate plan came to nought, he escapes at the end and is the only major figure who still seems to have a future ahead of him. There is, to be sure, the hope voiced by Stepan Trofimovich in his last wanderings that the devils will be driven out of Russia, which will then sit repentant at the feet of Christ in the manner of the passage in Luke (8:32-7), which introduces the novel. But compared to most of the rest of the action, this is an unconvincing, almost comic scene—prophetic in some ways of the shortly forthcoming “movement to the people” by the “repentant nobility” and by the other great novelist of the age, Leo Tolstoy.

However repelled by the idea of a coming rational social utopia, Dostoevsky was fascinated by it. This was the “Geneva idea,” so called perhaps because it represented a mélange of the ideas of two famous Genevans: Calvin’s moral puritanism and Rousseau’s boundless faith in human perfectibility and equality. Dostoevsky’s own image of the new social order was in part drawn from impressions of Switzerland and tales of Bakunin; and it is to Jura, Switzerland, center of Bakunin’s revolutionary socialist activities at that time, that Stavrogin makes his final flight abroad. He becomes “like Herzen a naturalized citizen of the Canton of Jura” just before he returns by railroad to commit suicide; just as Kirillov’s last self-applied name before his suicide was “citoyen du monde civilisé.”

The “Geneva idea,” with its emphasis on the bourgeois ideal of citizenship, is less attractive to Dostoevsky than the “dream of the golden age,” which we first meet in Stavrogin’s confession and which is presented much more sympathetically in A Raw Youth, the otherwise less successful novel that he wrote in the mid-seventies, between The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov. A Raw Youth was published in the populist journal Annals of the Fatherland, and presents a generally more complimentary picture of radical aspirations than The Possessed. An older figure dreams of the golden age of perfect harmony after seeing Claude Lorraine’s painting “Acis and Galatea” in Dresden; Dostoevsky interjects:

Marvelous dream, lofty error of mankind. The golden age is the most implausible of all the dreams that ever have been, but for it men have given up their life and all their strength, for the sake of it prophets have died and been slain, without it the people will not live and cannot die.…

But Rousseauism becomes merged with Christianity in this new, more positive image of the golden age. For the old man concludes:

… I always complete my picture with Heine’s vision of “Christ on the Baltic Sea.” I could not get along without Him. He comes to them, holds out His hands, and asks them, “How could they forget Him?” And then, as it were, the scales would fall from their eyes and there would break forth the great rapturous hymn of the new and last resurrection.

In The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky anatomizes this myth of a Christianized utopia. His famed “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” depicts the fundamental split within this very dream between social and material well-being and the freely given love of Christ. The Inquisitor defends his authoritarianism as a form of philanthropy which keeps ordinary people from being weighed down by the “unbearable burden” of freedom. The people, he points out, are grateful for the assurance of daily bread and are dependent on—even attached to—his despotic leadership.

Dostoevsky’s Inquisitor represents all political authority which recognizes no higher principle than the effectiveness of its own exercise. He is a dedicated, rational man; and it is these qualities that make authoritarianism, whether Catholic or socialist, so seductive.

The Inquisitor claims to have improved on Christ’s work, to have remedied the mistakes Christ made in not succumbing to the temptations in the wilderness. He incarnates the principle of “truth without Christ,” the cold certainty of the crystal palace, of Euclid’s geometry and Claude Bernard’s physiology, which Dostoevsky felt must inevitably be extended to a society not carrying within itself the image and ideal of Christ.

But Dostoevsky had written long ago that

I am a child of the age, a child of unbelief and scepticism; I have been so far, and shall be I know to the grave … if anyone proved to me that Christ was not the truth, and it really was a fact that the truth was not in Christ, I would rather be with Christ than with the truth.²⁷

Alyosha Karamazov reacts to the legend which his brother Ivan relates by saying: “Your inquisitor does not believe in God, that is his secret.” But his real secret seems to be that he believes in God without Christ. Dostoevsky, following Belinsky, seems to believe in Christ even without God. Ivan Karamazov’s recitation of human cruelties and atrocities just before reciting the legend leads him to “return his ticket of admission” to heaven and, in effect, accuse God of being the author of human suffering. The only explicit answer given to the Inquisitor is the final kiss of the silent Christ: an implausible, almost desperate call for freely given love as the only Christlike answer to human pride.

In his last journalistic writings—and particularly his speech dedicating the Pushkin memorial in the last year of his life—Dostoevsky plays anew with the seductive idea that the Russian people carry within themselves a unique consciousness of the reconciling qualities of Christianity. He speaks of the “Russian idea” of universal reconciliation through love and suffering as an antidote to the “Geneva idea” of organized theocracy. In the West generally “all is now strife and logic,” driven on by “the dream of Rothschild,” the thirst for wealth and power.

The idea that Russia was the bearer of some new Christ-like harmony among the nations is often extrapolated from his works as the essence of Dostoevsky’s “message.” Yet it would be more accurate to speak of it as his private version of the myth—common to populists and Pan-Slavs alike— of a special path of Russian development that would redeem the errors of recent Western history. He loved the idea, but his belief in it—like that of Shatov, its most articulate fictional exponent—was hypothetical, even “wavering.” Sometimes—particularly in his Diary of a Writer—Dostoevsky’s position seems chauvinistic, and he is usually characterized as an extreme conservative. But he is not at all interested in preserving the status quo, let alone returning to some idealized past. He is merely opposed to the “less real” ideals of the political and industrial revolutionaries. He is a counter-revolutionary in De Maistre’s sense that a “contre-révolution ne sera point une révolution contraire mais le contraire de la revolution.”²⁸ But Dostoevsky was not primarily a social theorist or philosopher but a master of suspense, a novelist of dramatic temperament. Thus, it is best to look to his novels—and above all to The Brothers Karamazov, his last one —for such “answers” as Dostoevsky may have sought to provide in this age of agonized agitation and social messages.

In The Possessed we are led to believe that the entire intelligentsia is possessed, that Verkhovensky and Stavrogin are the true and logical heirs of Stepan Trofimovich. There is no way out, and Stepan Trofimovich’s last repentant wanderings are even less convincing than Raskolnikov’s final “conversion” in Crime and Punishment. In The Brothers, however, Dostoevsky, unlike Musorgsky, is able to end on a note of hope, without either the melodramatic deus ex machina of eleventh-hour repentance and conversion or the romantic blending of religion with nationalism. Dostoevsky had experimented earlier with both answers, and there is both a melodramatic murder and a romantic image of the “Russian monk” at the center of The Brothers. But both the “repentance” and the “conversion” of the Karamazovs is incomplete and unconventional.

Yet Dostoevsky does conclude that man can eliminate the need for salvation by raising himself to the level of a superman for whom “all is permissible” since there is no God. The idea of a new breed of men “beyond good and evil” motivated the ideological murder by Raskolnikov and ideological suicide by Kirillov and lies behind much of Ivan Karamazov’s thinking about the central crime in The Brothers. Yet Ivan is a tortured figure who comes close to the madness that was so characteristic of the age. Ivan wants to believe in God but is visited only by the devil; and there is, seemingly, no way out.

But Ivan is only one of three brothers, all of whom share in the common crime of patricide. The name of Smerdiakov, the illegitimate fourth brother who actually commits the crime, suggests the word for “stink” (smerdet’); and the word Karamazov is a compound of words meaning “black” (Tatar kara) and “grease” (maz’). Like Sophocles in Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare in King Lear, Dostoevsky’s drama deals with injustice to one’s father. Yet unlike these, The Brothers Karamazov is not a tragedy. None of the three brothers dies; and the story sounds a final message of redemption.

Essential to any understanding of this “message” is the fact that it is conveyed dramatically and not didactically. The “Legend” in itself solves nothing for Dostoevsky—although it may for those who read it and take sides between the protagonists. It occurs relatively early in the novel and is itself an episode in the confrontation of the two extremes among the brothers: the humble Alyosha and the proud, intellectual Ivan. The movement toward resolution of this familiar Dostoevskian antinomy proceeds through the third brother, Dmitry, the most original creation of the novel. Dmitry is closest to the crime and is put on trial for it—thereby becoming the focus for most of the drama.

Dostoevsky’s allusions to dramatists help us to understand Dmitry’s curious nature. Shakespeare was to Dostoevsky not merely a writer but “a prophet sent by God to proclaim to us the mystery of man and of the human soul”; and much of that mystery was for Dostoevsky contained in Hamlet, to which there are many allusions in The Brothers. One of the most important of these occurs at the climax of the prosecutor’s summary at the trial of Dmitry, where he contrasts “Hamlets” to “Karamazovs.” The immediate usage is ironic; but in the “echo” of this contrast which is sounded in the courtroom discussions, it becomes clear that Dostoevsky was contrasting intellectualized “liberal” Europe with spontaneous, earthy Russia. For the former, life itself is problematic and all questions are “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought”; for the latter there is a passionate love of life that lives for and fathoms each immediate experience. Dmitry is related to Demeter, the goddess of the earth; he is the pochvennik incarnate, a lover of the immediate and spontaneous. Dmitry and the peasants in the audience “stand firm” not only against the half-lies of witnesses and judges but against the whole artificial, casuistic procedure of human trial itself.

Dmitry’s vibrance and honesty at the trial is not just a reflection of his “broad Russian nature” but also of the half-hidden influence on Dostoevsky of the dramatist who made perhaps the greatest impact on him of any single literary figure: Friedrich Schiller.²⁹ The Brothers is saturated with borrowings and citations from Schiller—particularly from those hymns to human freedom and perfectibility: The Robbers and the “Ode to Joy.” For his last and loftiest work, Dostoevsky returns, involuntarily perhaps, to this influence of early youth and subsequent source of inspiration “for my finest dreams.” Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor is essentially a projection of the inquisitor in Don Carlos; and just as the inquisitor’s opposite in Carlos is the spontaneous brotherhood of Posa and Don Carlos, so the brothers Karamazov as a whole provide the alternative to the closed world of Dostoevsky’s Inquisitor. The Karamazov alternative to both Hamlet and the Grand Inquisitor unfolds in terms of an aesthetic theory which Schiller propounded as his alternative to the arid rationalism of the French Revolution but which he himself was never able to incorporate fully into any of his own dramas.

In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind of 1794-5 Schiller contended that both the rational and sensual faculties were necessary attributes of the fully developed man; but that they were incomplete and even conflicting forms of good. In seeking to harmonize them one cannot use any abstract philosophic formulas which would automatically lead to a one-sided dominance by rationalism. One must rather undergo an aesthetic education (Erziehung) through developing the instinct for play (Spieltrieb). Children, who make up their rules of play as they go along and spontaneously reconcile their conflicts without formal regulations and imposed rules, provide the key to harmony for the perplexed adult world. Man was born not to repress but to fulfill his sensual self through play which is the fruit of love, “the ladder on which man climbs to the likeness of God.”³⁰

Dmitry’s love of life and his exuberant spontaneity (as well as his numerous citations from Schiller) all suggest that he is a kind of incarnation of this spirit of play. He startles people with sudden outbursts of laughter. The play instinct gives him a special attraction to beauty, which is “not just a terrible, but a mysterious thing. There God and the devil strive for mastery, and the battleground is the heart of men.”

The battleground is also inside the Karamazovs; and the passionate Dmitry alone transcends and thus resolves the dialectic between the feeling faith of Alyosha and the rational brilliance of Ivan, between one brother visited by God and another visited by the devil. Dmitry teaches the Karamazovs to “love life more than the meaning of life.” Love of life is part of the love of all created things. Man was for Schiller the supreme participant in an endless festival of creation; and Dostoevsky seems to be beckoning us to join it. The sin of social utopias is that they cut off the spontaneity of this creative process; they “deny not God, but the meaning of his creation.” Dostoevsky seems to be saying that even if man cannot believe in God he must love and rejoice in the created universe. Man must enjoy “the game for the sake of the game,” as Dostoevsky explained his own passionate love of gambling. As distinct from the ordered and rational habits of ants,

man is a frivolous, improbable creature, and like a chess player, loves only the process of attaining goals, not the goal itself.

In defiance of Bazarov’s contention that “two times two is four and the rest is nonsense,” Dostoevsky’s man from the underground even suggests that “the formula two times two is five is not without its attractions.”³¹

Dmitry is resigned to his fate not by any exercise of logic but by a dream of a cold and hungry baby and a sudden, supra-rational desire “to do something for them all, so that the babe shall weep no more.” Dostoevsky heavily underlined these lines in the original sketch for this chapter. Dmitry’s “something” is to accept imprisonment and even blame. Though he did not commit the crime, he recognizes that “we are all responsible for all” and gladly goes with the convicts—and with God:

If they drive God from the earth, then we shall shelter him underneath the earth! … singing from the bowels of the earth our tragic hymn to God, in whom there is joy! All hail to God and his joy!

Dmitry’s own “Ode to Joy” reaches a feverish, Schilleresque climax in his cry:

… There is so much of strength in me that I shall overcome all things, all sufferings, just in order to say with every breath: I am! In a thousand agonies—I am! I writhe on the rack—but am! I sit in prison, but still I exist; I see the sun, and—even when I don’t—I know that it is. And to know that the sun is—is already the whole of life.

After the trial Dmitry’s joy is dampened with illness and second thoughts; but he is cured and his faith in life restored through the sudden irrational desire of the once-proud Katya to accompany him in suffering and exile. “For a Moment the Lie Becomes Truth” is the title of this section. Two times two has, for a moment, become five, for the underground man has suddenly discovered the sun and decided to reach for it with an act of implausible moral heroism. Katya helps win Dmitry—and through him the Karamazovs—back to life.

“… Now let what might have been come true for one minute.… You loved another woman, and I love another man, and yet I shall love you forever, and you will love me; do you know? Do you hear? …”

“I shall love you, … Katya,” Mitya began, drawing a deep breath at each word, “… All my life! So it will be, so it will be forever.…”

But how does this Schilleresque play of instinct and pantheistic love of life acquire any specific link with Christianity? Perhaps in substituting Christ for Posa and Carlos as the ideological adversary of the Grand Inquisitor Dostoevsky is saying that Christ alone can fulfill their romantic longing for some new brotherhood of freedom and nobility. Yet there is no conversion of Dmitry; and in the Schilleresque moment of irrational truth between Katya and Dmitry, Alyosha, the man of faith, “stood speechless and confounded; he had never expected what he was seeing.” Alyosha’s teacher, and the major Christ figure in the novel, the monk Zosima, had already bowed down before Dmitry as if to say that God himself has need of such men.

Zosima does, of course, bear a Christian message. He is a composite of the most holy traditions of Russian monasticism: he bears the name of the co-founder of Solovetsk and the attributes both of Tikhon Zadonsky and Father Ambrose of Optyna Pustyn. But he does not bring salvation in the conventional monastic way. Old Karamazov says that Zosima is in reality a sensualist; and the lecherous old man is proven partly right by the smell of corruption that emanated from Zosima’s body after death and destroyed his claim to sainthood. The one key conversion that Zosima effects, that of Alyosha, takes place after the latter, too, has experienced his “breath of corruption” by visiting Grushenka (“the juicy pear”). His conversion over the putrefying body of Zosima is completely devoid of the miracle and authority which the Inquisitor glorified. Like the murder, which it parallels, Alyosha’s conversion occurs at night in a manner that is not clinically disclosed. It takes place amidst tears and under an open sky and leads immediately not to a state of beatified withdrawal but to falling on the ground and embracing the earth and then to Alyosha’s decision to leave the monastery and go out into the world.

We do not know what the future of Alyosha—let alone Dmitry and Ivan—might have been, for in The Brothers we have only the first part of a projected longer work of which he was to be the ultimate hero. The name is again significant, for it is the diminutive of Alexis, calling to mind the idealized figure of Alexis Mikhailovich and the popular folk hero, Alexis the man of God. Yet The Brothers stands complete in itself; and within it there comes at the end a beautiful subplot which ties together dramatically and ideologically the Schilleresque themes and Christian elements in Dostoevsky’s cosmology.

The story of “the boys” gives us our only image of Alyosha in action after his conversion. For the most part it is pure Schiller. The setting is boys at play, free of all restraining influences, rejoicing in their spontaneity of expression, their sense of daring, their playful rejection of all that impedes the game of life. Then, into this scene comes something that Schiller and the romantics had viewed as foreign to “the aesthetic education of man”: uncaused and irreversible suffering. The very exuberance of children makes their capacity to wound one another’s spirit terrifyingly great; and the slow death of the frail little boy Iliusha is clearly related to the mockery of his playmates.

The seemingly disconnected story is related to the novel as a whole in a number of important ways. The principal ringleader of the gang, Kolya Krasotkin, is an echo of Ivan: a detached intellectual who attempts to repress emotion and dreams up the crime which others act upon. Just as Ivan’s hypothesis that “all things are permissible” provides the basis for a patricide which others commit and are punished for, so Kolya rigs up the trap which causes a peasant inadvertently to kill a goose and be punished for it. Dostoevsky tells us that there was no trace of corruption about little Iliusha’s body (in contrast to that of Zosima) after death. In his death Iliusha atones, as it were, for the crime of the Karamazovs by embracing his own father and nobly defending him from the taunts of the doctor, who mocks his poverty. Even more important, over his grave Kolya and the other boys suddenly feel reconciled to the world and to one another. Alyosha, who has been with them as friend and observer, is able to build on this moment of friendship and harmony; and we suddenly find him solving with Kolya the problem he was never able to solve with Ivan:

“We shall remember his face and his clothes and his poor little boots, and his coffin and his unhappy sinful father, and how boldly he stood up for him alone against the whole class.”

“We will, we will remember,” cried the boys. “He was brave, he was good!”

“Ah, how I loved him!” exclaimed Kolya.

“Ah, children, ah, dear friends, don’t be afraid of life! …”

Love and bravery, the qualities of adventure, are more important than morality, let alone logic, in the festival of life. The boys suddenly find themselves with a new faith in life, a life that must go on for Iliusha’s sake.

“Hurrah for Karamazov,” Kolya shouted ecstatically.

“And may the dead boy’s memory live for ever!” Alyosha added again with feeling.

Their last gathering by Iliusha’s little stone recalls the Biblical parable about the stone that was rejected becoming the cornerstone of the new building and also the incident where Iliusha was stoned and humiliated. The scene seems to illustrate the central message that Ivan and all other proud men of intellect have yet to digest: that “except ye … become as little children ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” The “Hamlet question” about the meaning of life is not answered but transcended by a naive and animated leap of faith.

“Karamazov,” cried Kolya, “is it really true what religion says that we shall all rise from the dead and live and see one another again, all of us and little Iliusha too?”

“Surely we shall rise, surely we shall see and gaily, gladly tell one another about everything that has happened,” Alyosha answered, half laughing, half in enthusiasm.

The meaning of this reconciliation over the dead body of Iliusha is that of the passage from St. John which Dostoevsky placed at the beginning of The Brothers: “Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” New life comes out of death: old Karamazov’s, Zosima’s, and above all that of the innocent little boy. The one essential miracle is that of resurrection: the recurring wonder of nature and the central miracle of Orthodox Christianity. One rediscovers God not by studying dogma but by believing in His creation. Christ’s first miracle—turning water into wine at the marriage festival in Cana of Galilee—is the biblical text which leads to Alyosha’s conversion; and his first impulse is to embrace the earth. Christianity is the religion not of the ascetics and puritans but of the “dark” Karamazovs who rejoice in God’s creation and seek to enjoy it. It is the fulfillment of the law and the prophets, not of the Old Testament, but of the romantic apostles of creative freedom; a religion of adventure. Its only dogma is that freely given love in the imitation of Christ will ultimately triumph over everything, for in the words of a Kempis “love pleads no excuse of impossibility.”³²

In his final Christian affirmation as in his focus on man’s inner nature Dostoevsky was not typical of his age. The trend had been to move away from religion, whether toward the nihilism of the Stavrogins or toward the preoccupied agnosticism of the modern world. One then found a kind of consolation in quasi-religious social ideology, whether of a radical populist or a reactionary Pan-Slav nature. Dostoevsky was too deeply affected by these trends to attempt with any confidence a full reaffirmation of traditional Christianity. His faith is rather that of a realist in search of “the more real.” There are, perhaps, two icons for this deeply personal and precarious faith.

The first is the image of the Sistine Madonna, which he always kept over his writing desk as if in defiance of Bakunin and the revolutionaries who would have thrown it on the barricades at Dresden. (Dostoevsky himself caused a minor uproar in Dresden when he defied the guards in the museum to climb onto a chair for a closer look at the painting.)³³ The Madonna depicted the source of all creation, the supreme mother, with the consummate technique of European art in which his own novels are steeped. This painting was a reminder of the “marvelous dead” that lay buried in the “strife and logic” of post-Christian Europe and which he hoped to resurrect through the rejuvenated Christian commitment of the Russian people and the prophetic power of his own art.

The second icon of Dostoevsky’s anguished faith is a picture of hands. The Brothers is filled with hands and feet. They are the implements for doing things in this world, symbols of the “harsh and terrible thing” of love in action as opposed to love in dreams. “What have I come for?” asks Katya rhetorically in the last scene with Dmitry, “to embrace your feet, to press your hands like this, till it hurts.” Hands have been a symbol of laceration throughout the novel. In the fable of the onion we are told of a peasant woman who lost her last chance for salvation from the fiery lake of hell by trying to beat off the hands of others who sought to grasp the onion which the peasant woman once gave in charity and which God in his compassion had extended to her. The hands of innocent children beckon Ivan to rebellion against God. He tells Alyosha about the murderer who held out a pistol to a baby and waited to blow its brains out until the precise moment that the baby extended its little, trusting hand to touch it. Then he is driven to insanity by the image of a five-year-old girl tortured by her parents and left in an outhouse with her face smeared in excrement by a sadistic mother who sleeps calmly in the warm house while the little girl prays without any resentment to “dear kind God” and “beats her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and cold.” Ivan rebels against God because of the need to avenge the tears of the little girl; and even Alyosha admits that he would be unwilling to accept any ideal harmony that tolerated the sight of “that baby beating its breast with its fist.” Yet Dmitry is led to accept his fate by the dream in which “a little babe cried and cried, and held out its little fists blue from cold.”

The final message of redemption occurs at the end of the story of “the boys,” which is also the end of the novel. Just before, we are given a last pathetic image of the suffering of Iliusha’s bereaved father. Last seen sobbing incoherently by his dying son “with his fists pressed against his head,” he returns to dominate the early part of the funeral scene. He is all hands: grasping at the flowers from the bier, embracing the coffin, crumbling the bread and throwing it in the grave. In a masterly inversion of the scene in which Dmitry is forced to take off his boots and expose his ugly feet in court, Dostoevsky leaves Iliusha’s father kissing the boots of his buried boy and asking, “Iliusha, dear little man, where are thy little feet?”

When they leave the old man’s room and go back into the open air, the boys are suddenly impelled to sound a final joyful chorus. There was a hint of it in the mysterious metamorphosis of Iliusha’s dog “Beetle” (Zhuchka), whom Iliusha had tortured and driven away (in a way prescribed by Smerdiakov) into Kolya’s dog, “Ringing of Bells” (Perezvon), who turned the last visit of the boys to Iliusha almost into a time of joy. The ringing of church bells provides the transition from Katya’s scene with Dmitry to the funeral of Iliusha. But the sound of bells soon gives way to one last “Ode to Joy.” It is almost as if the choral movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which Bakunin had exempted from destruction by revolutionaries, were suddenly being acted out; as if each “beautiful daughter of the divine spark” (as Bakunin used to address his anarchistic followers) had suddenly reached the moment in the Schiller-Beethoven text when “all men shall be brothers” and the “aesthetic education of mankind” shall be completed by the realization that “above the vault of stars there must live a loving father.”³⁴

In this joyous final moment of The Brothers the image is again that of hands. They are not joined in prayer as Dürer would have them or making the sign of the cross in the manner of either the Orthodox or the Old Believers. Least of all is the image one of hands raised to salute Caesar or register votes in some parliamentary body. Rather it is the picture of the hands of children joined near a grave in an unexpected moment of warmth which overcomes all sense of schism and separation, even between this world and the next. A shared newness of life has mysteriously come out of the death of their little comrade. “Let us be going,” says Alyosha. “For now we go hand in hand.” “Forever so, hand in hand through all of life!” echoes Kolya “rapturously.”

The image of reconciliation is profoundly Christian. It is very different from the late Ibsen’s pagan picture of hands joylessly joined by shadow people on an icy mountaintop over the dead body of John Gabriel Borkman. Yet Dostoevsky’s novel ends not with the traditional heavenly hallelujah but with an earthly cry of joy. As they go off hand in hand to enjoy the funeral banquet and life thereafter, Kolya calls out, and the boys echo, one of the last and best hurrahs in modern literature: “Hurrah for Karamazov!”