Satisfactory definitions of the Russian terms intelligentsiia and intelligent or intelligentka (as the individual male and female members of the group are respectively known) are elusive.1 For one thing the terms are somewhat anachronistic. Although it now seems that the word intelligentsiia occurs at least as early as 1836, when it appears in a diary entry by the poet Zhukovskii,2 it was evidently not used in the mid-nineteenth century by or about the group which is now commonly described as the intelligentsia. It therefore does not occur in Dostoevskii’s works of the period 1861–2, which are examined here, although it does appear to have come into common use slightly later as Dostoevskii’s novelistic career blossomed. A further difficulty lies in the fact that the term does not really denote a distinct social group but rather a collection of deracinated individuals from various social backgrounds who share certain attitudes, including an aspiration to create a new identity based on their cultural and political role in society rather than on their economic position. Nor, given the uncertainty about what precisely the term denotes, can there be complete agreement as to when the force which we now call the intelligentsia came into being.
The Russian term intelligentsiia itself is of Western origin, being derived, it seems, from the Latin intelligentia, ‘intelligence’. This etymology suggests a group perceiving itself, perhaps generally perceived, as a product of Westernisation, a group for whose development the reforms of Peter the Great (sole ruler 1696–1725) created propitious conditions and which was brought properly into being by the flowering of Western culture in Russia under Catherine II (ruled 1762–96). And yet within little more than a century this alien growth was clearly felt to have become so peculiarly Russian in character that the Russian term denoting it began to be used as a neologism in Western languages, which had no resources of their own to describe it. The word ‘intelligentsia’ appears in both English and French in the early years of the twentieth century, first in relation to the Russian educated class itself and then also to denote certain groups in other societies. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its first recorded use in English seems to have been by Maurice Baring in 1907, while the same source suggests that it soon took on a rather pejorative sense in English usage: in a work by H. G. Wells, published in 1916, for example, a character defines the intelligentsia, with a combination of reverence for bourgeois decorum and disdain for intellectual life, as ‘an irresponsible middle class with ideas’.3
Modern English lexicography tends to give the term ‘intelligentsia’ both the broad sense of ‘part of a nation, orig. in pre-revolutionary Russia, that aspires to intellectual activity’, and a narrower sense of ‘the class of society regarded as possessing culture and political initiative’.4 Similarly French lexicography describes the ‘intelligentsia’ as ‘ensemble des intellectuels d’un pays’, and (specifically in relation to nineteenth-century tsarist Russia), ‘classe des intellectuels, réformateurs’.5 The conjunction of ‘culture’ and ‘political initiative’, intellectual life and reform, which is contained in these English and French definitions of the term ‘intelligentsia’ (a conjunction that may seem rather curious to the English mind), is implicit in the definition of the term by the minor Russian writer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Boborykin, who spuriously claimed to have coined it: ‘the most educated, cultured and progressive stratum of the society of a given country’.6 Soviet lexicography, on the other hand, identified only one of these meanings, the first, broader meaning, describing intelligentsiia as the collectivity of those who perform intellectual labour and have special training and knowledge in various branches of science, technology and culture. This Soviet definition deprived the concept of properties that were unacceptable to Soviet officialdom and yet inherent in the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Russian intelligentsia and its Soviet successors, namely the independence and – in the political conditions of tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union – the consequent subversiveness, potential or actual, of the grouping. For the intelligentsia was a group apart: since culture, as Herzen observed, put down a boundary in Russia which much that was abominable never crossed,7 the intelligentsia staked a claim to more civilised territory than other elements in Russian society, but at the same time it could not become a part of power, observing it instead from outside, as the late Soviet dissident Siniavskii has put it.8 It represented public opinion in a society in which educated, cultured, morally concerned, socially aware individuals, whatever their position on a notional political spectrum, were alienated from the government. Indeed the alienation of educated opinion from government and the formation of the intelligentsia are really the same process. Moreover, in a state that tolerated no heterodoxy, the activity of this ‘critically thinking minority’, to use an expression given currency in the late 1860s by Lavrov, was always liable to take on a political dimension and lead its members into conflict with the state, as a result of which many of them – like Dostoevskii himself in the late 1840s and 1850s – suffered more or less life-threatening persecution.
Let us turn from the independence and essential subversiveness of the role of the intelligentsia to the preoccupations of its members and the qualities of their thought. The intelligentsia is notable, from the age of Catherine, for its breadth of culture and the range of inter-related fields and questions covered in its writings. In addition to a rich imaginative literature it produced a large corpus of literary criticism, which examined among other things the nature of beauty and inspiration, the relation of art to reality, the function of art, and the mission of the writer and critic. In its excursions into literary history the intelligentsia dwelt particularly on the development in Russia of a secular literature of a Western sort and on the relationship of that literature to Russian society. It discussed social questions, often seen through the prism of imaginative literature, literary criticism and literary history, including the predicament and role of the intelligentsia itself, the nature of the common people or narod (though this entity is arguably a construct of the intelligentsia itself as much as a social reality), and the relationship between the intelligentsia and the narod. Examination of political questions tended to be less explicit but often, insofar as censorship allowed, touched upon serfdom and urban poverty and on the nature of autocracy and its perniciousness or suitability in Russian conditions. Essays in what might be best described as moral philosophy included evaluations of Russian and Western mores and enquiries into the themes of egoism and altruism, duty, service and self-sacrifice. There were discussions of a theological nature into the relationship between rational knowledge and faith and the differences between Orthodoxy and the Western forms of Christianity, and at the same time speculation on the extent of the jurisdiction of scientific method, its implications for religious faith, and the similarities and dissimilarities between science and history. In the field of history itself thinkers reflected on the principles that might underlie historical development, on the existence or lack of pattern in history, on chance and necessity, the role of Providence and great individuals, and the role of the state in Russian history. Almost invariably Russian thinkers were also – perhaps above all – preoccupied with the problem of the historical destiny of individual nations, the relationships between nations and in particular the relationship of ‘Russia’ to ‘the West’ (though these two concepts, it should be noted, reached beyond geopolitical entities and were no less broad and abstract than the concept of the narod).
However, the categories under which the preoccupations of Russian thinkers can be listed constantly overlap. It would be hard to classify most of the major Russian thinkers of the mid-nineteenth century – Belinskii, Chaadaev, Chernyshevskii, Granovskii, Herzen, Kavelin, Khomiakov, Ivan Kireevskii – as primarily sociologists or political economists or political commentators or theologians or moral or political philosophers, let alone metaphysicians (though clearly literary criticism was the main vehicle for Belinskii’s ideas and history for Granovskii’s). For on the whole these thinkers tend to resist confinement within specific intellectual disciplines and the consequent fragmentation of knowledge. Their endeavours in the many fields of ‘science’ (the Russian term, nauka, has a broad scope) are generally held together by the centripetal force of moral zeal, faith or conviction in some system, ideal or idea. This force lends their thought a fierce engagement or ‘commitment’, to use Isaiah Berlin’s term.9 Russian thinkers, like Marx, tend to want not only to understand the world but also to change it: they aspire to translate utopian dream into reality, and desire – at their most millenarian – to realise the kingdom of heaven on earth. Their striving for integrity or wholeness and purpose is partly defensive, a response to the fear that the centre cannot hold, an attempt to create a bulwark against the social fragmentation and ontological disintegration threatened by rapid economic and social change and the influx of Western values. But in a more positive sense this striving is to be conceived as a reassertion of a spiritual quest for a synthesis of reason and faith or – in the case of radical thinkers who had lost faith – a replacement of the Orthodox Christian vision with a new, equally coherent, all-embracing, all-explaining set of values.
The minority cultivating intellectual life in the conditions and of the sort described manifested immense ambition. This intelligentsia wished to transcend the limits that seemed to many Russian thinkers from the midnineteenth century to inform Western life as a whole. It was the peculiar destiny of the Russians, Herzen claimed, ‘to see further than their neighbours, to see in darker colours and to express their opinions boldly’.10 Characteristic of the Russian spirit, at least as most nineteenth-century Russian thinkers conceived of it, is a restless expansiveness compatible with the immensity of the Russian landscape, a yearning to be free of constraint like the Cossacks who roamed at the limits of the Muscovite state. A people with a spirit of this sort was likely to chafe at the restrictions – temporal laws, rules, conventions, proprieties – imposed by the well-ordered, economically effective society in which industrious and thrifty citizens aspired to enjoy the fruits of their labour and legal protection of their persons and property. It would despise materialism, which it associated with the bourgeois world whose triumph was confirmed by the suppression of republican insurrection in France in the ‘June Days’ of 1848. Against this world successive Russian thinkers at both ends of the political spectrum, Romantic conservatives like the Slavophiles (and Dostoevskii himself) and socialists like Herzen, Chernyshevskii and the Populists, railed repeatedly. Any thinker who rued a perceived lack of a sense of limits in the Russian character, such as Chicherin, tended to be regarded as dry, formalistic and even alien – in fact like tsarism’s officials, many of them of Germanic origin, whose position disqualified them from inclusion in the ranks of the intelligentsia.
The Dostoevskian novel is on one level a quintessential expression of the life and thought of the Russian intelligentsia as it has been described here. This statement is valid in the sense that many of Dostoevskii’s characters represent artistic embodiments of the ideas, values, attitudes, concerns and moods of the intelligentsia. As Martin Malia observes in his essay on the intelligentsia: ‘in his various Raskolnikovs, Verkhovenskys and Kiril[l]ovs’ Dostoevskii ‘has given perhaps the most unforgettable, if highly caricatured, portraits’ of the new rootless intellectual, the ‘insulted and the injured’ emerging from the underground, ‘from all the human degradation of sub-gentry Russia’ into ‘the light of “consciousness”, “humanity”, “individuality”, and “critical thought”’ (Malia, ‘What is the intelligentsia?’, p. 11). But the statement also holds good in the sense that Dostoevskii himself was an intelligent, both inasmuch as he made a livelihood by intellectual activity and – more importantly for us here – in that it was his vocation, or perhaps mission is a more apt word, to help to construct a broad, humane culture characterised by passionate engagement with ideas, moral commitment, a quest for the integration of reason and faith, and great, even millenarian, expectations. As evidence of the scope and consciousness of this mission we may point to the fact that Dostoevskii, more than any of the other major classical novelists, participated in another medium which flourished alongside, or rather developed hand in hand with, imaginative literature as a vehicle for the expression of the intelligentsia’s ideas and aspirations, namely what was known as ‘publicism’ (publitsistika). (The term ‘publicism’ is as unfamiliar in English as the intellectual group to whose life it gives voice and may therefore be more naturally – though also more cumbersomely – rendered as ‘social and political journalism’ or ‘writings on current affairs’.)11 It was in publicism, through his own contribution to the polemics of the early 1860s, that Dostoevskii organised the coherent view of the world that informs the novels for which he is chiefly remembered. We shall therefore examine his journalism of 1861 and early 186212 and then look more closely at one work in particular, his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863), a memoir of his journey to the West in the summer of 1862, which encapsulates the qualities we are associating with the intelligentsia and links his early publicism to his major fiction.
Intellectual life in Russia after the Crimean War (1853–6) was characterised by an increasing fragmentation of the intelligentsia into factions, the sharper definition of the factions, and the politicisation of their outlooks. That part of the intelligentsia which described itself as Westernist split more clearly in the late 1850s into two groups, the embryos of which were apparent in the previous decade. A moderate faction, associated with the ‘men of the 40s’ and labelled ‘liberal’, advocated gradual, limited, peaceful change through reform carried out by the existing state. A radical faction, dominated by younger men and influenced by utopian socialism, dreamed of more far-reaching social change and – if it was necessary to achieve such change – political revolution. At the same time the Slavophiles – that is to say that section of the intelligentsia which in the 1840s had opposed the Westernisers – became more active after the so-called ‘seven dismal years’ of reaction (1848–55) with which the reign of Nicholas I (ruled 1825–55) had ended. Alongside Slavophilism there emerged a further expression of Romantic nationalism in the form of ‘native-soil conservatism’ (pochvennichestvo) formulated by Grigorev, Strakhov and Dostoevskii himself.13
One sign of the reinvigoration of intellectual life and the crystallisation of factions in the intelligentsia was the increase in journalistic activity and the clarification of journals’ individual ideological positions. Certain journals that had been established in the reign of Nicholas were revived (for example, Notes of the Fatherland [Otechestvennye zapiski] and The Contemporary [Sovremennik], both of which adopted a more or less radical stance, and Library for Reading [Biblioteka dlia chteniia], which under the editorship of Druzhinin espoused the cause of art for art’s sake, a cause that in Russian conditions was by no means apolitical). At the same time entirely new journals were now created (for example, Russian Herald [Russkii vestnik], which represented the renascent ‘liberalism’, Day [Den’], an organ for Slavophilism, and Russian Word [Russkoe slovo], which in due course became a mouthpiece for nihilism). Dostoevskii himself was de facto editor of two journals which sprang up in this period, Time (Vremia, 1861–3) and Epoch (Epokha, 1864–5), both of them formally managed by his elder brother Mikhail.
Time fully conformed to the norms of the publicism through which the intelligentsia expressed itself. The conjunction of cultural and political roles that has already been noted is explicitly accepted, for the journal is described on its title page as ‘literary and political’. It engaged in topical debate on a multiplicity of subjects. The subjects of Dostoevskii’s own contributions to it ranged from the development of literacy among the masses and the emancipation of women to aesthetics, literary criticism, literary history, Russian history in the Muscovite and Petrine periods, and ultimately the question of Russia’s relation to Europe. The polemical nature of Dostoevskii’s journalism – which incidentally already displays the lively dialogic form characteristic of the major fiction – is evident from the very titles of some of his pieces: ‘A Reply to Russkii vestnik’, ‘A Necessary Literary Explanation’, ‘Two Camps of Theoreticians’ or – in the Epoch period – ‘Mr Shchedrin, or the Schism among the Nihilists’. We might add that these articles also suffer from what might now seem flaws that are inseparable from the publicism of the age, such as irritability, personal animus, discursiveness, repetitiousness, the interpolation of long quotations from other works and fondness for the seemingly interminable paragraph. (Not all of these flaws remain flaws, however, when transported into Dostoevskii’s fiction and embodied in fictional characters.)
Dostoevskii helped to define his outlook by means of polemical offensives on several fronts. The Slavophile Ivan Aksakov, in spite of the fundamentally sympathetic attitude of the pochvenniki towards Slavophilism, was castigated for the theoretical nature of his views, an allegedly aloof attitude towards contemporary Russian literature, intolerance, and lack of capacity for reconciliation (XIX, 58–63; see also XX, 6, 8–13). Nor did Dostoevskii idealise pre-Petrine Muscovy or take such a wholly negative view of Peter the Great as did the Slavophiles, since he recognised that Peter was right to carry out his reforms, even if the form which those reforms took was ‘wrong’ (XIX, 18; XX, 12, 14–15). Within the Westernist camp advocates of art for art’s sake were chastised for supposedly running the risk of fettering the artist by altogether prohibiting ‘accusatory’ literature (XVIII, 79). The moderate journal Russian Herald was attacked for its denial of national character (narodnost’) (XIX, 18, 173), for its bookish distance from real life (XIX, 108, 123), for its Anglophile stance (XIX, 139, 177), and for its assumption of a policing role in literature (XIX, 116). Together with Notes of the Fatherland and The Contemporary, Russian Herald was also taken to task for its comments on Pushkin, whom Dostoevskii already regarded as a true voice of the Russian people, taken as a whole (XIX, 112, 114–15, 132–8). However, it was Westernism in the extreme radical form it began to take in the latter half of the 1850s, through exponents such as Chernyshevskii (up until his arrest in 1862) and Dobroliubov (up until his death in 1861), that evidently seemed to Dostoevskii most objectionable and – because it was in the ascendant – most threatening, and it was perhaps this body of thought that served as Dostoevskii’s most useful polemical target.
Dostoevskii holds it against the radical view of the world – and more broadly against the Western intellectual tradition from which that view stems – that it relies exclusively on the findings of human reason and disregards the higher understanding to which spiritual insight may lead. In particular he rejects the claims made by his radical contemporaries on behalf of that crowning achievement of rational enquiry, the natural sciences, which were making great advances in Dostoevskii’s lifetime. Radical thinkers in general and Chernyshevskii in particular ingenuously believed that by applying scientific method – by which they understood observation, experimentation, measurement and formulation of ‘laws’ – one could fully know, describe and predict every aspect of the world, including human behaviour, the art that humans had created, and the societies in which they lived. The triumph of reason, manifested in scientific discovery, seemed to assure the further march of the technological progress generated by the industrial revolution and the perfection of human institutions and societies. For Dostoevskii this position was highly abstract, simplistic and ‘theoretical’: it did not take account of the complexity of disorderly reality which will not always fit into neat intellectual schemes and may not accord with the needs of human nature. One could not calculate and precisely foresee ‘every future step of all mankind’. There were things – The Iliad is an example to which Dostoevskii alludes in one article of this period, ‘Mr —bov and the Question of Art’ – whose usefulness could not be measured ‘in pounds, puds, arshins, kilometres, degrees and so on and so forth’ (XVIII, 95).14
A second source of conflict was the radical view of the function of art and its importance in human life. In his famous – or to his opponents, infamous – dissertation on aesthetics, ‘The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality’, Chernyshevskii had rejected the essentially Platonic notion that there exists beyond everyday reality a higher plane of perfect forms whose beauty writers, painters and musicians strive to capture in their art. He asserted instead that the material world, the mundane here and now, is all there is and that art is a more or less mechanical reproduction of it. The success of a work of art, Chernyshevskii believed, should be judged against some educative or civic criterion. Dostoevskii vigorously challenged this utilitarian view of art, which stemmed in part from an exclusively rational and scientific approach to human creativity. For Dostoevskii art answers man’s eternal craving for beauty, a craving which is normal, healthy and at least as vital in his life as those physical appetites which seemed to the radical camp to be of pre-eminent importance. Moreover, aesthetic beauty had for Dostoevskii a moral and spiritual dimension which it could not in Chernyshevskii’s view possess: the beauty embodied by great art Dostoevskii equates with harmony, tranquillity, spiritual perfection. As for utility, the true work of art could not help but be ‘modern and real’, whereas when art was pressed into the service of some topical cause and thus deprived of freedom of inspiration it lacked ‘artistry’ (khudozhestvennost’) and lost its capacity to exercise an influence (XVIII, 70–103, esp. 93–4, 98, 101–2; XIX, 181–2).
A third area of disagreement with the radical thinkers concerned the philosophical materialism they espoused. Chernyshevskii is an atheist who follows Feuerbach in holding that God is a creation of human consciousness rather than a supreme being with an objective existence. After the fashion of crude materialists such as Büchner, Moleschott and Vogt, he contends that people are the product of their physiological composition and environment, that their actions can be described as reactions to various stimuli, that they have no spiritual dimension or independent will, and that they are therefore not morally responsible for their actions. From this determinism there flows a view of crime as a consequence of material hardship, social inequality or institutional failings. In this event individual responsibility for ‘bad actions’ – as Chernyshevskii coyly calls crime – is diminished and moral judgements of the wrongdoer tend to lose force. To Dostoevskii, on the other hand, those who reduced the world to an exclusively material dimension and denied the existence of free will lost sight of an inalienable part of human nature and tried to confine mankind in a prison (ostrog) more fearsome than the Siberian jail in which Dostoevskii had himself been incarcerated.
A fourth objection to Chernyshevskii concerned his utilitarian ethical system, which denied the existence of altruism and conceived all actions as driven by man’s selfish desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain. The goodness of an action, according to this ethical system, is not intrinsic but relative to the degree to which the action furthers an end that is perceived as good or bad. The greatest good is the good of the greatest number. Chernyshevskii reconciles this ethic with socialism by means of a ‘rational egoism’ according to which humans, although driven by selfishness, may also be persuaded, since they are rational beings, that it is in their own interests, as members of society, to derive their selfish pleasure from performing acts of general utility. For Dostoevskii Chernyshevskii’s rational egoism takes no more account of human nature than do his aesthetic doctrine or his materialism. For humans have an innate love of their neighbours, a capacity for compassion and for personal fulfilment through self-sacrifice, and an ability sometimes even to derive pleasure from pain (IV, 56, 67–8; XIX, 131–2).
Beyond all these differences lay fundamental disagreements as to whether human nature was everywhere the same, what future Western civilisation had, and how useful the West was as a model for Russian development. The radical thinkers were cosmopolitan, in that they assumed that humans in all places functioned in the same way. Dostoevskii, on the other hand, insisted on the importance of one’s own climate, upbringing and ‘soil’ (XIX, 148). He castigated those who sought to create a universal ideal character for mankind, ‘some highly impersonal thing’ that was invariable in spite of climatic and historical circumstances (XX, 6–7). Repeatedly he likened those who would with equanimity erase national differences to worn coins which one could see were of a certain metal but whose nationality and year of coinage had been obliterated (XIX, 29, 149; XX, 6). It was not just that Russia was socially different from the West in that it had nothing like the English lords or the French bourgeoisie and would not in future have that bane of Western life, a proletariat (XIX, 19). More importantly, the Russian people had a character of their own. They possessed an innate moral rightness, depth and breadth (XIX, 185) and were free of the ‘national egoism’ of the English, French and Germans (XX, 21). Their most distinctive characteristic, paradoxical as it might seem, lay in their universality, as attested by their capacity to receive as their own the culture of the West (XVIII, 99).
Nor, finally, did Dostoevskii share Chernyshevskii’s belief that the Western peoples, far from being decrepit, were only just beginning to live their historical life and that their thought provided a key to the solution of Russia’s problems. On the contrary, it was precisely the fracture produced by Westernisation between ‘society’, which was ‘civilised “in the European manner”’, and ‘the people’, that is to say the narod (XIX, 6; XX, 15–17), that the Russian intelligentsia now had to try to heal. Dostoevskii argued that the government, by means of the emancipation of the serfs in February 1861, had begun the task of filling in the moat that separated the two Russias; now ‘society’ must complete the task by earning the trust of the people, loving them, suffering, absorbing the ‘popular element’, transfiguring itself (the biblical allusion is implicit in the verb preobrazit’sia) (XIX, 7–8). As to the feasibility of this task, Dostoevskii is full of optimism. Members of the educated class had not ceased to be Russian as a result of Westernisation; national character (narodnost’) continued to exist. Having passed through an age of ‘civilisation’, during which Russia had come close to ‘Europe’, educated Russians now sensed the need to turn to their native soil. There, armed with the awareness of their universality gained as a result of their metaphorical journey to the West, they would find their true identity through coalescence (slitie) with the people (XIX, 6–8, 18–20, 113–14).
Many of the main ideas and conclusions put forward in Dostoevskii’s publicism in 1861 find equally vigorous, adversarial, multifaceted, but more succinct, coherent, powerful and ambitious expression in his travelogue, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. Here he again addresses questions of literary history and ethics and discourses on human nature, the relation of culture and society to ethnic character and the relationship of Russia to the West. In the process he challenges the assumptions of the Westernist intelligentsia about the continuation of its civilising role, seeks to undermine both the liberalism and the socialism espoused by that intelligentsia, and begins to outline an alternative utopian model based implicitly on Orthodox spirituality.
Russian literature possesses a large corpus of accounts of travels in foreign lands, from examples from the age of Catherine such as Fonvizin’s Letters from France (1777–8) and Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveller (1791–2) to works by the Westernisers of the age of Nicholas I such as Annenkov’s Letters from Abroad (1841–3) and Parisian Letters (1847–8), Botkin’s Letters from Spain (1847–9, republished in book form in 1857), and Herzen’s Letters from France and Italy (1847–52). Grigorev, while abroad in 1857, wrote a book To Friends from Afar, which was never published but evidently contained much that prefigured Dostoevskian themes and imagery.15 The journal Time printed travel sketches by other less well-known writers. At the radical end of the spectrum stand Mikhailov’s Paris Letters and London Notes (1858–9), and Shelgunov’s essay ‘The Workers’ Proletariat in England and France’ (1861), all of which were published in The Contemporary. In the summer of 1862 Herzen was embarking on a further cycle of letters, Ends and Beginnings, which while not exactly of the genre of the travelogue were close to it. In these letters Herzen – whom Dostoevskii met in London in July of that year – reiterates theses from his cycle From the Other Shore, namely that contemporary bourgeois civilisation was a ‘despotism of property’, a consummation of the mediocre and the vulgar, which worshipped Baal and in which individual characteristics were lost. This world had reached the limit of its development, and its centres, Paris and London, were ‘closing a volume of world history’ (Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, pp. 1680–749). Thus Dostoevskii’s Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, which purport to be an account of his first trip abroad in the period June to September 1862, belong to an established tradition. Indeed it is clear that the Winter Notes are conceived as a distinctive contribution to this tradition. For in the first chapter, when he belatedly appreciates the beauty of Cologne Cathedral, Dostoevskii compares himself to Karamzin, who had wanted to fall on his knees before a Rhine waterfall in atonement for not having done justice to it the first time he had seen it (V, 48). The second chapter Dostoevskii begins by quoting an aphorism from Fonvizin’s Letters from France (V, 50), on which he comments at length in chapter 3 (V, 53).
The genre of the travelogue, like the genre of the novel to which Dostoevskii was shortly to progress, offers considerable opportunities to the Russian intelligent as he has been depicted here, with his wide-ranging cultural, moral, social and political interests, his quest for comprehensive, nationally or universally valid explanations of things, and his large horizons, both geographical and spiritual. It allows enormous freedom to describe, report or discourse on whatever he will: a building, a town or natural scenery, the thoughts and emotions excited by them, the people he has met and the conversations he has had with them, the plays he has seen and the galleries and museums he has visited, the history, politics, literature and manners of the country to which he has been. The travelogue may be both concrete and abstract, objective and subjective, descriptive and reflective, cerebral and emotional. Most importantly, it afforded unlimited potential for comparison of the Russian world and the world beyond Russia. The Russian examples of the genre do of course tell us something about life in the foreign lands – mainly England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Switzerland – visited by the Russian travellers. And yet they were also essays in a form of Russian cartography: they represented explicit or implicit attempts to define the social, cultural, moral and spiritual topography of Russia herself at a time when it was becoming urgent for Russians – or at least for the Russian intelligentsia – to find a plausible and distinctive definition of their nation’s identity.
It soon becomes clear in the Winter Notes that Dostoevskii is more concerned with cultural and spiritual space than with geographical territory. For the traveller – whom there is no need to see as a narrator independent of Dostoevskii himself – treats geographical space in cavalier fashion. We are told at the outset that in the course of two and a half months he has visited, among other places, Berlin, Dresden, Wiesbaden, Baden-Baden, Cologne, Paris, London, Lucerne, Geneva, Genoa, Florence, Milan, Venice and Vienna (V, 46; Ch. 1). However, any hope the reader may have of an orderly account of this itinerary is immediately dashed. There is no material at all on three of the countries that Dostoevskii says he has visited, Switzerland, Italy and Austria, and none on Germany beyond the introductory chapter. It is only after he has showered the reader with impressions of Berlin, Dresden and Cologne (and the impressions of Cologne are based partly on his second visit to the city, on his way home from Paris) that Dostoevskii describes his departure from St Petersburg en route for the Russian border with Prussia. Although the traveller arrives in Paris before he visits London, he chooses to describe London before Paris. Moreover, the longest chapter in the work, Chapter 3, does not relate directly to the physical journey at all but describes a mental excursion supposedly undertaken while Dostoevskii is on the train conveying him to Paris. Indeed the heading of the chapter describes it – aptly, if the fiction that it is the physical journey that is in the foreground is to be maintained – as ‘completely superfluous’. And so carried away is the traveller by his thoughts in Chapter 3 that he seems to forget where he is and thinks he is nearing the Russian border with Prussia when in fact it is France that he is approaching (V, 63).
The real purpose of the Winter Notes, then, is not to give an account of a breathless touristic journey along the itinerary which the traveller misleadingly advertises on the first page of the work but to conduct the reader on an odyssey, spanning almost a hundred years, through carefully mapped cultural and spiritual territory. The land through which we first pass on this odyssey, after the fleeting, flippant, provocatively superficial preliminary impressions of German cities, is ‘Russian Europe’ (V, 63–4; Ch. 3), that is to say the world of the Westernised Russian educated class since the age of Catherine, to which Chapters 2 and 3 of the Winter Notes are dedicated. ‘Russian Europe’ is conceived as a sort of colony of ‘Europe’ or ‘the West’, which is itself a ‘land of holy miracles’, a ‘promised land’ (V, 47; Ch. 1), the source of almost every worthwhile Russian development in science, art, citizenship and humanity (chelovechnost’) (V, 51; Ch. 2). Russians have been bewitched by ‘Europe’ and have found it impossible to withstand her influence (V, 51; Ch. 2). With its uncritical worship of Western fashions and practices and their habitual rejection of native ones as barbaric (V, 61; Ch. 3), the Russian educated class in general is implicitly likened to those Russian tourists who, once they cross the Russian border, remind Dostoevskii of little dogs running around in search of their masters (V, 63; Ch. 3). This state of thraldom, whose development Dostoevskii charts in the works of Fonvizin and Griboedov, began in the age of Catherine, but its consequences were not at first so far-reaching or serious as they have subsequently become. In the eighteenth century Russians harboured a naive faith in the efficacy of things European and a misapprehension that when the nobleman had donned silk stockings, wigs and a sword he was a ‘European’ (V, 56–7; Ch. 3); and yet mores remained patriarchal, noblemen still took bribes, brawled and thieved (brali, drali, krali) and life was more straightforward as a result, so that even the Russian peasant, the muzhik, knew where he stood. In due course, though, this masquerade, the ‘phantasmagoria’ of French fashions, settled very well in Russia, particularly in St Petersburg, ‘the most fantastic city with the most fantastic history of all the cities on Earth’ (V, 57; Ch. 3), and ultimately Westernisation threatened to obliterate national personality, as Dostoevskii, in his publicism, had feared it would. There emerged a self-satisfied educated class, a ‘privileged and approved handful’ divorced from the mass of ‘simple Russians’ fifty million strong (V, 51, 59; Chs. 2, 3). These ‘Europeans’, convinced of their civilising vocation, decided questions from on high, believing that
there is no soil, there is no people, nationality is just a given taxation system, the soul is tabula rasa, a little piece of wax out of which one can in an instant mould a real person, a universal everyman (obshchechelovek), a homunculus [the artificial man whom medieval alchemists dreamed of creating] – all one has to do is apply the fruits of European civilisation and read two or three little books.
(V, 59; Ch. 3)
The urgent need for Russia to liberate herself from this thraldom is pointed up by a comparison of the traveller’s own position with the national destiny. For the fate of the Russians in general, who live without a business or cause of their own, is compared to that of the passenger who passes the time with idle thoughts in the train. It can be tedious and even distressing to be transported, cared for and cosseted, to sit and wait. One is tempted to jump out of the coach and run alongside the train: it might be perilous and tiring to do so, and yet one would have found a purpose, one would be doing something oneself and one would not be locked inside if the train were to crash (V, 52; Ch. 2).
Having alerted his readership to the dangers of continued cultural thraldom Dostoevskii then presses home the case for national emancipation by recording his impressions of the hearts of darkness of ‘European Europe’, that is to say London and Paris, to which Chapters 4 of the Winter Notes are devoted. Any reader of Westernist sympathies who might argue the case for Western superiority over Russia on the grounds that the Russian state is oppressive is immediately disarmed by Chapter 4, in which Dostoevskii is concerned to establish the pervasiveness of espionage (shpionstvo) in French life. This phenomenon Dostoevskii first experiences in the form of police surveillance of foreigners on the train taking him into France and then encounters again as his Parisian landlady and landlord labour over a report on their tenant for the police (V, 64–8). There follows in Chapters 5 a devastating denunciation of British and especially French mores that is reminiscent of Fonvizin’s condemnation in the 1770s and has a similar purpose: to challenge the sense of adulation of the foreign model which, after a period of Russian intoxication with German cultural influences in the 1820s and 1830s, is again regnant. At the same time, in Dostoevskii’s treatment of the bourgeoisie, as in other respects, the Winter Notes represent a continuation of a debate precipitated in the Russian intelligentsia in the 1840s by Herzen’s scathing attack on the class in his Letters from the Avenue Marigny.
Dostoevskii deplores the numerous vices of the French bourgeoisie. The class – and indeed the French more generally – allegedly exhibits not only an extraordinary proclivity to shpionstvo, but also a lackey’s nature, a gift for flattery, a conceited conviction that Paris is the centre of the universe, a taste for oratory and an infatuation with eloquence, which the traveller finds everywhere from the law courts to the Pantheon (V, 82–90; Ch. 7). It is prone to sentimental hypocrisy and has a craving for ‘the elevated’, for ‘inexpressible nobility’, which is manifested in the melodrama. (Dostoevskii emulates Herzen in examining the bourgeoisie’s preferred art forms as a key to its morality.) It loves stability and propriety, which are maintained – not least by means of the material reward of virtue – in all the variants of melodramatic plots that Dostoevskii rehearses at the end of his work (V, 95–8; Ch. 8). There is a deceit and falsehood in bourgeois mores that are embodied by Parisian woman as Dostoevskii describes her in his closing satire on the virtue of bourgeois matrimony. Game, intrigue and pretence are everything for this affected, unnatural, unintelligent but modish and superficially attractive coquette. She is adept at feigning feeling and is less concerned that love should be true than that the display of it should be convincing (V, 92–3; Ch. 8).
The most deep-rooted flaw in the bourgeois nature, it seems, is materialism. The desire to make a fortune and accumulate as many material possessions as possible has become more than ever before the ‘main code of morality, the catechism of the Parisian’, the only key to respect and self-respect, despite his tendency to flirt with nobler ideas and to parade a love of virtue in the theatre. So powerful is the mercenary instinct that stealing in order to make a fortune is condoned, whereas stealing for a motive such as procuring food to stay alive is considered unforgivable (V, 76–8; Ch. 6). The bourgeois preoccupation with money and possessions is evident in the institution of marriage, a ‘matrimony of capital’, as Dostoevskii puts it. Marriages are contracted on the basis not of love but self-interest: conclusion of the contract is preceded by financial calculation designed to reassure both sides that there is ‘equality of pockets’. This mercenary way of life, Dostoevskii maintains, is ‘on its soil’ in France, autochthonous, national (V, 91–2; Ch. 8). Not that one should assume that such mercenariness is exclusive to the French bourgeoisie. The French workers too are highly acquisitive, which is why the bourgeois, in spite of his complete triumph in 1848 and his security under Napoleon III (ruled 1852–70), is so afraid of them (V, 78; Ch. 6). As for the French agriculturalists, they are ‘arch-proprietors’, ‘the best and fullest ideal of the proprietor that one could imagine’ (V, 78; Ch. 6). Nor is the evil confined to France: what one finds there is the ‘source and embryo of that bourgeois social form which now reigns throughout the world in the shape of eternal imitation of the great nation’ (V, 92; Ch. 8).
London, on a superficial level, is very different from Paris. Here Dostoevskii is disoriented by the noise, bustle and congestion of city life, the railways above ground and under it (the first length of underground line was then being built), and the boldness of the spirit of enterprise. He is shocked by the extremes of rags and riches: ‘terrible corners’ like Whitechapel, with its half-naked, wild and hungry people and the social problems of pauperism, drunkenness and prostitution, stand in stark contrast to magnificent parks and squares. And yet the descriptions of London and Paris in the Winter Notes merge seamlessly into one another (V, 68–9, 74; Ch. 5) and the principles at the heart of the two cities are not fundamentally dissimilar. The worship of acquisition and profit may be more blatant, less hypocritical, in London, where the spirit of Baal reigns. Nevertheless the ‘personal principle’, which is engaged there in a stubborn struggle to the death with the need of humans somehow to live together in a community, an anthill, without devouring one another, is ‘pan-occidental’ (vseobshchezapadnoe) (V, 69; Ch. 5).
It is indicative of the general distaste in the Russian intelligentsia for capitalism and liberal politics that there are substantial points of contact between Dostoevskii’s critique of the bourgeoisie and Chernyshevskii’s. Both writers contend that abstract freedoms are meaningless for the majority under the material conditions of the bourgeois order. Chernyshevskii, for example, argued in an article on French politics of the period of the Bourbon Restoration that legal rights had value only when one had the material wherewithal to take advantage of them.16 Similarly, Dostoevskii maintains that although in theory liberté, one of the great slogans of the French Revolution, is the freedom of all to do what they like within the law, in reality one may only do what one likes when one has a million, and a person without a million is one with whom others do as they wish (V, 78; Ch. 6). Like Chernyshevskii again, Dostoevskii also disparages eloquence as a flatulent liberal virtue: reporting on the practice of allowing liberal deputies representation in the French legislative assembly under Napoleon III, he dismisses their fine speeches as empty rhetoric, words which lead to no disturbance of the good order of the city (V, 86–7; Ch. 7).
Nevertheless the polemical energy of the Winter Notes is directed as much at the contemporary radical camp and socialism as at the bourgeois order and liberalism. Even on the stylistic level the Winter Notes run counter to Chernyshevskii’s writings. For one thing Dostoevskii’s traveller seems to parody Chernyshevskii’s informal, at times infantile, dialogue with his readers and his frequent parenthetical explanations. For another he cultivates an apparent disorderliness and unreliability which fly in the face of the careful, honest exposition that scientific method demands, apologising for straying from the subject and even confessing to a tendency to lie (V, 47, 49, 74, 93; Chs. 1, 5, 8). On a more substantial level, Dostoevskii recoils at Chernyshevskii’s reverence for the achievements of Western technology and challenges his assumption that scientific progress represents an unqualified good for mankind. Thus whereas Chernyshevskii admires suspension bridges as feats of Western engineering,17 Dostoevskii is wounded by this evidence of Western superiority and consequently harbours a silent malice towards the man collecting tolls from visitors to the recently completed bridge at Cologne (V, 48–9; Ch. 1). The Crystal Palace (for Chernyshevskii a symbol of the radiant utopia of the future) is presented by Dostoevskii as an awesome, overpowering temple to a false god, which seems to demand to be worshipped by the silent hordes of visitors and before which individual humans are humbled and submissive (V, 69–70; Ch. 5).
Most importantly Dostoevskii takes issue with Chernyshevskii’s rational egoism and tries to demonstrate the impossibility of building a socialist utopia on such a foundation. He mocks the unsuccessful attempts of early French socialists such as Cabet and Considérant to put their utopian schemes into practice. Such schemes, he believes, were bound to founder on the requirement to sacrifice an element of personal freedom in exchange for guarantees of food and employment. For people prefer complete freedom (volia) to constraint (invoked by the recurring image of prison [ostrog]), even though when they are at liberty they may be beaten and unemployed and threatened with starvation. No matter that the socialist will call them idiots for not understanding where their interest lies and say that even the ant is more intelligent because in the anthill – an image used by Chernyshevskii in a positive sense18 – everything is neatly arranged and everybody is full and happy and knows his job. In any case the Western socialist, Dostoevskii argues, seeks to create a brotherhood where, given the isolation of the individual person, who demands rights with a sword in his hand, none can actually exist. Nor was there any hope that the flawed Western personality, driven by its heightened sense of self as an ‘autonomous, separate principle absolutely equal and of equal value to everything that exists apart from it’, would change. For regeneration takes thousands of years, and can only take place at all when such ideas as true brotherhood have entered ‘the flesh and blood’ (V, 79–81; Ch. 6). Thus the view of societies as being founded on certain moral principles deeply rooted in the nature of a people – in this case the French – enabled Dostoevskii to tar socialists with the same brush as the bourgeoisie, difficult as the feat might seem at first sight.
In contrast to the soul-destroying socialist dystopia emanating from France Dostoevskii offers his own utopian alternative rooted in what he perceives as Russian reality. In Dostoevskii’s utopia the rebellious and demanding personality (lichnost’) of Western society is replaced by one which offers itself up completely and unconditionally to the collective, so that brotherhood may flourish. Society, for its part, acknowledges that such sacrifice is too much to ask, and in its concern for the welfare of all its members, offers whatever it can give, including constant protection and concern. Such willing, conscious and unforced self-sacrifice for the benefit of all, the laying down of one’s life for others on the cross or at the stake, by no means amounts to an obliteration of the personality, a reduction of the individual to impersonality (bezlichnost’). On the contrary, Dostoevskii sees it as an expression of the highest development of the personality, a supreme exercise of free will. Indeed self-sacrifice, free from any consideration of self-interest, is what a normal person inclines to, a ‘law of nature’, Dostoevskii remarks, challenging Chernyshevskian axioms. However, realisation of a utopia based not on rational egoism but on altruism is contingent upon the existence of the loving, harmonious, communal principle at a deep, subconscious level in the nature of the tribe. Dostoevskii reassures his readers – lest they fear that the nation’s historical experience has brutalised the Russian narod – that this principle may survive despite the suffering, ignorance, servitude and foreign invasions that a people has endured (V, 79–80; Ch. 6). Evidently it is primarily the common people, about whom Dostoevskii apparently spoke with naive enthusiasm when he met Herzen in London in July 1862, rather than Westernised educated society, who have preserved this principle in Russia and give Dostoevskii hope that utopia may be realised there. The people’s powerful spirit is briefly glimpsed in the Winter Notes in the unassuming person of Pushkin’s nurse Arina Rodionovna, without whom, Dostoevskii surmises, there might have been no Pushkin, the prophet and harbinger who was so closely linked to his native soil (V, 51–2; Ch. 2).
Thus in the final analysis Dostoevskii offers alternative conceptions of personality, which flow from the instinctive Western and Russian natures respectively, and correspondingly antithetical social visions. One type of personality is dynamic, to be sure, but also selfish, materialistic, destructive of community and therefore ultimately unfulfilled. Despite its intellectual strivings and its promotion of the concept fraternité, it will achieve only the dystopia which Dostoevskii claims to have seen at first hand in ‘Europe’. The other type of personality is loving, yielding, finds fulfilment in communion with the larger flock, and is capable of realising true brotherhood, bratstvo. In Russia, where this type of personality supposedly prevails, it will be possible, as the bubble of the bourgeoisie bursts (V, 78; Ch. 6) and the old world dies, to construct a utopia based on nature and feeling rather than reason.
It has been argued here that our understanding of Dostoevskii’s fiction is enriched if we remember that the author vigorously participated in the life of the Russian intelligentsia in the early 1860s as the ideological fissures within it widened and as the political positions of the emergent factions hardened. To be sure, Dostoevskii was concerned to save literature from those who demanded journalism of it, and by embodying polemical ideas in characters who live out their potentialities he rises, as a novelist, above partisanship. Nevertheless his fiction is itself saturated with the themes with which journalism was preoccupied. Engaged as nineteenth-century Russian novelists in general are with topical issues, in none is the link between publicism and fiction quite so close and indissoluble. Concerns of lasting universal validity that are explored in Dostoevskii’s novels – for example, the catastrophic loss of the individual’s moral bearings in a world in which religious faith is being undermined by reverence for rational knowledge, and the attendant threat of ontological crisis, social disintegration and political revolution – grow out of the local polemical ferment among the group which sustained an independent culture and social and political thought in the period of reform after the Crimean War.
The Winter Notes, with their sweeping glance at Russian and Western culture and mores and their over-arching interest in human nature and the moral identity of peoples, illustrate the link between publicism and fiction more clearly than any other work of Dostoevskii’s. For they look both back to the polemical articles of 1861, whose conclusions they distil, and forward to the thematically related but more overtly fictional Notes from Underground (which, however, Dostoevskii still conceived in the first instance as an ‘article’ for Epoch, in other words a further essay in publicism, in which he would review Chernyshevskii’s novel What is to be Done?). In particular the Winter Notes address the question of national self-identity which above all others had preoccupied the intelligentsia at least since 1836, the date of publication of the ‘Philosophical Letter’ in which Chaadaev (from whom Dostoevskii distances himself in the Winter Notes [V, 50; Ch. 2]) had dismissed the Russians as a people living outside history and occupying no mappable moral or spiritual territory. With their critique of the morals and social and political values of ‘Europe’ and of ‘Russian Europe’ the Winter Notes throw down a challenge to the Westernised intelligentsia. At the same time they contribute, with an ambition and polemical tone typical of that intelligentsia, to its fevered speculation about the prospects for regeneration in a country which is not yet completely conquered by Europe’s rationalist intellectual tradition or corrupted by its bourgeois ways.
1 See, for example, Michael Confino, ‘On intellectuals and intellectual traditions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia’, Daedalus 101 (1972), no. 2, pp. 117–49, and Martin Malia, ‘What is the intelligentsia?’ in Richard Pipes (ed.), The Russian Intelligentsia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), pp. 1–18.
2 See Sigurd Shmidt, ‘Otkuda vzialas’ “intelligentsiia”?’ (Where does ‘intelligentsia’ come from?), Literaturnaia gazeta, 1996, no. 23 (5 June).
3 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, 20 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), vol. 7, p. 1070.
4 Ibid.
5 Grand Larousse de la langue française, 7 vols. (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1971–8), vol. 4, p. 2744; see also Le Grand Robert de la langue française, 2nd edn, 9 vols. (Paris: Le Robert, 1985), vol. 5, p. 659.
6 See Shmidt, ‘Otkuda vzialas’ “intelligentsiia”?’ The italics are mine.
7 A. I. Herzen, Ends and Beginnings; see My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, trans. Constance Garnett, revised by Humphrey Higgens (London: Chatto and Windus, 1968), vol. 4, p. 1720.
8 Andrei Sinyavsky, The Russian Intelligentsia, trans. Lynn Visson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 2.
9 Isaiah Berlin, ‘Artistic commitment: a Russian legacy’ in Henry Hardy (ed.), The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996), pp. 194–231.
10 See Herzen’s introduction to his From the Other Shore, trans. Moura Budberg (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1956), p. 6.
11 These are the translations offered in The Oxford Russian–English Dictionary by Marcus Wheeler, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 650.
12 See especially the following articles: ‘Gospodin – bov i vopros ob iskusstve’ (Mr —bov and the question of art) (XVIII, 70–103); ‘Knizhnost’ i gramotnost’’ (Love of books and literacy) (XIX, 5–20 and 21–57); ‘Poslednie literaturnye iavleniia: gazeta “Den’”’ (The latest literary events) (XIX, 57–66); ‘Obraztsy chistoserdechiia’ (Models of candour) (XIX, 91–104); ‘“Svistok” i “Russkii vestnik”’ (‘The Whistle’ and ‘Russian Herald’) (XIX, 105–16); ‘Otvet “Russkomu vestniku”’ (A reply to ‘Russian Herald’) (XIX, 119–39); ‘Po povodu elegicheskoi zametki “Russkogo vestnika”’ (A propos of ‘Russian Herald’s’ elegiac notice) (XIX, 169–77); ‘Rasskazy N. V. Uspenskogo’ (The stories of Uspenskii) (XIX, 178–86); ‘Dva lageria teoretikov’ (Two camps of theoreticians) (XX, 5–22); and the invitations to readers to subscribe to the journal Vremia for 1861 (XVIII, 35–40) and for 1862 (XIX, 147–50).
13 On native-soil conservatism and its representatives see Wayne Dowler, Dostoevsky, Grigor’ev, and Native-Soil Conservatism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982); idem, An Unnecessary Man: The Life of Apollon Grigor’ev (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995); Linda Gerstein, Nikolai Strakhov (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971); Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865 (Princeton University Press, 1986), especially Chapter 4.
14 Puds and arshins are Russian pre-revolutionary units of measurement of weight and length respectively.
15 Dowler, An Unnecessary Man, pp. 111–15.
16 Chernyshevskii, ‘Bor’ba partii vo Frantsii pri Liudovike XVIII i Karle X’ (The struggle of parties in France) in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (hereafter PSS), 16 vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo ‘Khudozhestvennaia literatura’, 1939–53), vol. 5, p. 217.
17 Idem, ‘O prichinakh padeniia Rima’ (On the causes of the fall of Rome), PSS, vol. VII, pp. 662–3.
18 Idem, ‘Lessing, ego vremia, ego zhizn’ i deiatel’nost’’ (Lessing: his life, times and activity), PSS, vol. 4, p. 210.