At the heart of Russian literary thought about the family in the 1860s and 1870s – in particular Dostoevskii’s thought – stands Ivan Turgenev’s 1862 novel Fathers and Sons. Although that work is ostensibly about chaos and destruction, as embodied in the ‘nihilist’ Bazarov, both the family structures depicted in it and the structure of the novel itself are remarkably harmonious and stable. Not only does Bazarov’s callow friend Arkadii have a loving and devoted father and uncle, but Bazarov himself has salt-of-the-earth parents who worship the ground he walks on. The novel is built on the classic structure of comedy: by the end, the disruptive character who calls the social order into question (Bazarov) has been neutralised (by typhus), and an idyllic family group, which has incorporated the peasant mistress and her illegitimate son as lady of the manor and young master, gathers to celebrate a new patriarchal order presided over by the just-married son Arkadii.
Dostoevskii’s creative efforts in the last years of his life were dominated by his desire to produce his own ‘Fathers and Sons’. His last three novels, The Devils, A Raw Youth, and The Brothers Karamazov, can be seen as in part motivated by this quest to rewrite Turgenev. Dostoevskii’s vision of the late-nineteenth-century Russian family is the polar opposite of Turgenev’s comedic idyll. As the former famously wrote in the drafts to A Raw Youth: ‘In everything is the idea of decomposition, because everyone is separate and there are no bonds remaining not only in the Russian family, but even simply among people’ (XVI, 16).1 The question of the historical and sociological accuracy of Dostoevskii’s view of the family is beyond the scope of this essay, but I suspect that he greatly exaggerated the magnitude of the changes in the Russian family from the 1840s to the 1870s. His views can be seen perhaps most vividly in the 1876 sketches to which he gave the heading ‘Fathers and Sons’. In the space of less than two printed pages of the Academy edition of his works, Dostoevskii presents a grim kaleidoscope of family disintegration: a boy sits in a juvenile penal colony and dreams of being rescued by his relatives (whom he imagines as princes and counts); a man kills his wife in front of his nine-year-old son, who helps him hide the body under the floor; a father, who has learned after his wife’s death that their son is not biologically his, abandons the boy on the street in the freezing cold; children run away from their father (XVII, 6–7). There is also an allusion to the recently reported Kroneberg child-abuse case, in which a father was charged with the torture by beating of his seven-year-old illegitimate daughter (of which more later), and to homosexual seduction in a public bath. This unrealised ‘Fathers and Sons’ was to depict a familial nihilism far beyond the imaginings of Turgenev.
We know from the essay portions of the Diary of a Writer that Dostoevskii saw the depiction of the Russian family’s dissolution as a civic duty. In his view, only by first recognising and describing the chaos could one even begin to dream of a new form of order. Dostoevskii writes in the Diary of a Writer for January 1877:
There are the features of some kind of new reality, completely different from the reality of the becalmed and long-established Moscow landowning family of the mid–upper circles, whose historian for us was Count Lev Tolstoi. [. . .] And if even an artist of Shakespearean dimensions would not be able to search out a normative law and governing thread in this chaos in which for a long time, but especially now, our social life has abided, then who at least will illuminate even a part of that chaos, without even hoping to find the governing thread? [. . .] We indisputably have a decomposing life and consequently a decomposing family. But there must also be a newly forming life, based on new principles. Who will notice them, and who will indicate them? Who can even begin to define and express the laws both of that chaos and of the new creation?
(XXV, 35)
Throughout the Diary of a Writer Dostoevskii repeatedly casts Russia’s social dilemma in terms of ‘fathers and sons’:
The ‘accidental’ quality of the contemporary Russian family, in my opinion, consists in the loss by contemporary fathers of any universal idea in relation to their families, universal for all fathers, binding them all together, an idea in which they themselves would believe and would teach their children to believe, would convey to them this faith in life.
(XXV, 178; July–August 1877)
You are the fathers, they are your children, you are contemporary Russia, they are the future Russia; what will happen to Russia if Russian fathers evade their civic duty and begin to seek solitude or more precisely isolation, a lazy and cynical isolation from society, their nation, and their most important obligations to that society and nation?
(XXV, 192; July–August 1877)
Dostoevskii’s last three novels are devoted to exploring the ways in which the fathers of Russia have failed in their obligations to the sons, and therefore to the nation’s future. In the process Dostoevskii questions accepted definitions, both radical and conservative, of the family itself.
The decomposition of the Russian family is, in Dostoevskii’s view, at least in part the result of experimenting with new forms of family life by radical intellectuals from Aleksandr Herzen to Nikolai Chernyshevskii and beyond. In both life and literature, these thinkers sought ways to disrupt the bourgeois patriarchal order, usually through the toleration of adultery. Irina Paperno, who has thoroughly analysed the experiments of Herzen and Chernyshevskii, highlights the positive significance of the new family arrangements:
In accordance with a cultural tradition that associated stability in marriage with the stability of society at large, Chernyshevsky proposed to make the rearrangement of family life into the basis for the rearrangement of society. [. . .] But contrary to the opinion of Chernyshevsky’s critics, the form of adultery advocated in the novel was not intended to undermine or destroy society. What appeared as a form of adultery [. . .] was for Chernyshevsky the foundation for emotional and social harmony and equilibrium.2
What seems to be lacking in the theories and practice of these intellectuals, and what Dostoevskii was to emphasise in his critical and literary responses, is any serious thinking through of what happens to the children produced by non-traditional sexual arrangements. In his highly influential novel Who Is to Blame? (1845–6), Herzen, himself illegitimate, depicts illegitimacy as one of the evil products of the stable patriarchal family. This is presented most pointedly in a scene in which the tyrannical landowner Negrov orders his valet to marry the peasant woman who has borne Negrov’s daughter. In anticipation of the order, the valet says: ‘Whom can we oblige if not Your Excellency; you are our father, we are your children [vy nashi ottsy, my vashi deti].’3 In contrast, Dostoevskii is preoccupied with the illegitimate and/or abandoned children sired not by old-fashioned patriarchs but by intellectuals under the ideological influence of George Sand, Aleksandr Druzhinin, Herzen and Chernyshevskii. Druzhinin’s Sand-inspired novella ‘Polinka Saks’ (1847), in which a civil servant nobly steps aside so that his wife can be united with her lover, thus earning her undying admiration and devotion, was of particular interest to Dostoevskii. Arkadii Dolgorukii, the narrator of A Raw Youth, clearly attributes his own illegitimate origins to the fact that his father, the nobleman Versilov, had read the novella just before visiting his estate, where he began an affair with a married serf woman, Arkadii’s mother. Arkadii sarcastically refers to Druzhinin’s story as a literary piece ‘that had a boundless civilising influence on the generation that was then coming of age in Russia’ (XIII, 10; Pt 1, Ch. 1). In The Devils (where ‘Polinka Saks’ is also mentioned – see X, 409–10; Pt 3, Ch. 3), the liberal Stepan Verkhovenskii is discovered by his radical son Petr reading Chernyshevskii’s novel What Is to Be Done? (1863), in which a ménage à trois on rational principles figures prominently. Stepan has claimed that the novel represents ‘our idea’ (X, 238; Pt 2, Ch. 4). Almost immediately afterwards, Petr reminds Stepan that he had questioned Petr’s parentage in conversations with Petr himself during his adolescence.
In the Diary of a Writer, Dostoevskii’s most striking case in point of what happens to the children of radical experiments with the family is the suicide of Herzen’s own daughter Liza. Liza was the product of Herzen’s affair with Natalia Tuchkova-Ogareva, the wife of his friend Nikolai Ogarev.4 She killed herself in Florence in December 1875 at the age of seventeen (almost six years after Herzen’s death). Dostoevskii wrote about her suicide and especially her suicide note (which he embellished with a couple of telling details) in the Diary of a Writer for October and December 1876. In the essays Dostoevskii does not mention her name but identifies her rather unmistakably for his readership by calling her ‘the daughter of a too-famous Russian émigré’ (XXIII, 145). Liza’s suicide appears to have been prompted by an unhappy love for an older married man, but Dostoevskii traces it – or rather the malicious tone of it as reflected in her suicide note – to her irregular upbringing and in particular to the role of theory in family relations: ‘I expressed the supposition that she died from anguish [toska] (a too early anguish) and the aimlessness of life – only as a result of her upbringing, perverted by theory, in her father’s home, an upbringing with a mistaken conception of the higher significance and aims of life, with the intentional destruction in her soul of all faith in her own immortality’ (XXIV, 54; emphasis mine). Earlier, in the Diary of a Writer for March 1876, Dostoevskii had seen a glimmer of hope in the possibility that the children of the liberal and radical experimenters with the family would revolt against their parents not by means of suicide but by finding a new path:
What could the children of that time see in their fathers, what memories could they have preserved about them from their childhood and boyhood? Cynicism, desecration, merciless attacks on their children’s first tender holy beliefs; and quite often the open debauchery of their fathers and mothers, with the assurance and the teaching that this is how it should be, that these are the true ‘sober’ relationships. [. . .] But since youth is pure, bright and magnanimous, it may of course happen that some of these youths would not want to take after such fathers and would reject their ‘sober’ instructions. [. . .] And it is perhaps those very youths and adolescents who are now seeking new paths and who begin directly by repulsing that hateful cycle of ideas that they encountered in their childhood, in their pitiful natal nests.
(XXII, 102)
In his novels Dostoevskii presents a range of possibilities for the children of what he calls (in A Raw Youth) ‘accidental families’, from suicide to the Christ-like behaviour of Alesha Karamazov, itself a kind of radicalism in the opposite direction from that of Herzen.
Dostoevskii’s last three novels focus on sons of the new, ‘decomposed’ Russian family who encounter their fathers for the first time only after reaching maturity. In The Devils and A Raw Youth, the contribution of radical ideology to the family’s disintegration is pronounced; by the time of The Brothers Karamazov one has a sense of a more pervasive and deeply rooted evil undermining the foundations of the Russian family and society. The hero of The Devils, Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovenskii, is a liberal of the Herzen generation who has seen his son Petr only once since his infancy. The child’s mother died in Paris when he was five years old and he was sent to Russia, ‘where he was raised by some kind of distant aunts somewhere in the backwoods’ (X, 11; Pt 1, Ch. 1). When the twenty-seven-year-old man appears in Mrs Stavrogina’s salon near the beginning of the novel, it takes his father several minutes to recognise him, even though his arrival has been expected (X, 143–4; Pt 1, Ch. 5). Arkadii Dolgorukii, the illegitimate hero-narrator of A Raw Youth, was raised ‘v chuzhikh liudiakh’ (by strangers; XIII, 14; Pt 1, Ch. 1) almost from birth and comes to know his father and mother only at the age of nineteen. Arkadii has a vivid memory of meeting and ‘falling in love with’ his father on one occasion as a child, after which he was packed off to a boarding school where he was mercilessly taunted about his parentage. His life since then has been given up to dreaming of his father Versilov: ‘I wanted all of Versilov, give me a father . . . that’s what I demanded’ (XIII, 100; Pt 1, Ch. 6). Fedor Karamazov, of course, abandons not one but three (possibly four) sons after the deaths of their mothers, as described by Diane Oenning Thompson in a chapter effectively entitled ‘Forgetting’. Thompson eloquently summarises the failings of most of the adults in The Brothers Karamazov:
What should be remembered, children, neighbours, family, serfs who have legitimate claims on the attention of those responsible for their welfare, have been ignored, neglected, obliterated from memory. [. . .] Forgetting, here in the form of social and parental neglect, functions as a critical index of morality, personal, familial, societal and national.5
In The Brothers Karamazov, as in The Devils and A Raw Youth, the action proper of the novel begins as the sons make the acquaintance of the fathers who ‘missed’ their childhood, boyhood and youth.
In all three novels, fathers and sons separated physically have created mental images of each other – have ‘invented’ each other. Stepan Verkhovenskii writes letters about his intimate affairs to a son in Paris who, far from being the sympathetic confidant Stepan imagines, turns out to be a vile intriguer who blurts out Stepan’s indiscreet complaints and fears in the middle of Mrs Stavrogina’s crowded drawing room:
‘You wouldn’t believe it, right next to the happiest lines he writes the most despairing ones. In the first place, he asks my forgiveness; just imagine, the man has only laid eyes on me twice in his life, and that was by accident, and all of a sudden now, when he’s about to get married for the third time, he imagines that by doing so he’s transgressing some kind of parental obligations and begs me at a distance of a thousand versts [a ‘verst’ (versta) is approximately equal to one kilometre] to forgive him and give him my permission!’
(X, 161; Pt 1, Ch. 5)
The narrator tells us that Stepan’s disappointment in his son is ‘a deep and real sorrow’ (X, 163; Pt 1, Ch. 5). In A Raw Youth, Arkadii Dolgorukii similarly has to cope with a reality that fails to live up to the dream: ‘It turns out that this man is just my dream, a dream from my childhood. It’s me who invented him this way, but in reality he turned out to be someone else, falling far short of my fantasy’ (XIII, 62; Pt 1, Ch. 4). And Dmitrii Karamazov reveals his own fantasy at the meeting in Father Zosima’s cell: ‘“I thought . . . I thought,” he said somehow quietly and with restraint, “that I would come to my native town with the angel of my soul, my fiancée, in order to cherish him in his old age, but I see only a debauched sensualist and a base comedian!”’ (XIV, 68–9; Bk 2, Sec. 6). In each case the fantasy is based on almost nothing, but it takes on reality as an obstacle to the already difficult process of a father’s getting to know his adult son.
The orphaned children in these novels cope with their abandonment in two major ways: by finding surrogate fathers who provide the love and moral guidance their biological fathers have deprived them of, and by seeking closeness and solidarity with their siblings. Arkadii’s surrogate father is, ironically, his legal father, the peasant Makar Dolgorukii, who offers Arkadii a model of ascetic pilgrimage and the quest for blagoobrazie (blessed form), in stark contrast to the Herzenesque godless theorising of Versilov. An artistically more successful version of a similar relationship is embodied in Alesha Karamazov’s devotion to the elder Zosima. Dmitrii’s connection to his serf ‘father’ Grigorii is more elemental and earthy, based on the very mundane tasks Grigorii performed for the abandoned boy: ‘This old man – after all, he carried me in his arms, gentlemen, he bathed me in a trough when everyone had abandoned me, a three-year-old child, he was my own father [otets rodnoi]!’ (XIV, 414; Bk 9, Sec. 3).
God is of course the ultimate ‘surrogate father’, but one who is also capable of abandonment, as dramatised most vividly in The Brothers Karamazov. It is not surprising that Ivan Karamazov is drawn to a medieval Orthodox tale about the Virgin’s journey to hell in which it is said of some sinners in a burning lake that ‘God is already forgetting about them’ (XIV, 225; Bk 5, Sec. 5). Versilov depicts a world without God as a world in which humans would discover a new brotherly love: ‘Orphaned people would immediately begin to press more closely and lovingly to each other; they would seize each other by the hand, understanding that now they alone were all in all for each other. [. . .] They would become tender to each other and would not be ashamed of it as they are now, but would caress each other like children’ (XIII, 378–9; Pt 3, Ch. 7). Arkadii and his sister Liza find, if only briefly, this kind of tenderness and consolation in each other in the midst of their ‘accidental family’ (XIII, 161–2; Pt 1, Ch. 10). Throughout The Brothers Karamazov Alesha strives to provide for his brothers the love and caring their father has denied them, and often succeeds. As well as such love, sibling hostility also surfaces in both novels. In a brilliant set piece Arkadii’s half-brother, Versilov’s legitimate aristocratic son, treats him like a footman (XIII, 397–401; Pt 3, Ch. 9). Ivan and Dmitrii Karamazov are locked in rivalry over a woman, and Smerdiakov – who may or may not be the Karamazovs’ brother but who certainly thinks he is – hates Ivan, Dmitrii and Alesha. The ancient history of brotherly hostility is evoked in The Brothers Karamazov through references to the biblical stories of Cain (XIV, 206, 211; Bk 5, Sec. 2, Sec. 3) and Joseph (XIV, 266; Bk 6, Sec. 2).
In contrast to Arkadii and the Karamazovs, Petr Verkhovenskii has neither surrogate father nor siblings, and this may account for the fact of his almost unalloyed evil. Instead of seeking a surrogate father, he sets himself up as a despotic father-figure to his cell of five conspirators: ‘What is needed is a single magnificent, idol-like, despotic will, which rests on something that is not contingent and that has its own independent existence’ (X, 404; Pt 3, Ch. 3). Instead of a true sibling he has a parodic double in the form of Fedka the Convict, a serf whose life of crime is blamed on the fact that Stepan ‘lost him at cards’, i.e. sold him into the army in order to pay his gambling debts (X, 181, 204; Pt 2, Chs. 1–2). Stepan is confronted with his responsibility for Fedka in the middle of his appearance at the literary festival sponsored by the Governor’s wife. A provocateur in the audience interrupts Stepan’s incoherent speech:
Stepan Trofimovich! [. . .] Here in town and in the outskirts Fedka the Convict, an escaped prisoner, is now prowling around. He has been committing robberies and not long ago he committed a new murder. Allow me to pose the question: if fifteen years ago you had not given him up to conscription in order to pay your gambling debts, that is if you hadn’t simply lost him at the card table, tell me, would he have ended up in a Siberian prison? Would he be cutting people’s throats, as he is now, in the struggle for existence? What do you have to say, Mr Aesthetician?
(X, 373; Pt 3, Ch. 1)
The question, parodic as it is, resonates as a question about Stepan’s responsibility for his own abandoned son, who like Fedka is ‘prowling about the town’, perpetrating atrocities and murder, including ultimately the murder of his ‘sibling’ Fedka.
Responsibility is the key question when considering the Russian family, as the title of Herzen’s novel, Who Is to Blame?, reminds us. In Dostoevskii’s novels, Russian fathers do not prove to be very good at accepting responsibility for what has become of their sons. Stepan claims rather unconvincingly to have suffered throughout his absentee parenthood:
[Petr says] I gave him neither food nor drink, I sent him off from Berlin to *** Province, a babe in arms, in the mail, and so on and so forth, I’ll admit it [. . .] ‘You,’ he says, ‘gave me no drink and sent me off in the mail, and then you robbed me.’ But, you unfortunate man, I cry to him, you know I suffered in my heart for you all my life, even if I did send you off in the mail!
(X, 171; Pt 2, Ch. 1)
Versilov too refuses to accept full responsibility for his ‘accidental family’, yawning openly in response to Arkadii’s tales of his forlorn childhood (XIII, 98, 101–2, 103, 110; Pt 1, Chs. 6–7). And of course Fedor Karamazov’s sense of guilt over the abandonment of his sons is virtually non-existent. At the meeting in the monk’s cell he manages to shift the focus of blame to Dmitrii, the ‘parricide’ (XIV, 69; Bk 2, Sec. 6). Fedor’s evocation of the ultimate crime of parricide is subliminally bolstered by two of his references. He twice alludes to Schiller’s play The Robbers (Die Räuber, 1782), which includes the speech: ‘The laws of God and Man are set at naught, the bond of nature is severed, the primal struggle is back, the son has killed his father.’6 In addition, Fedor’s repeated mention of the murder of von Sohn, whose name can be translated as ‘by [the] son’, increases the weight of the premonition that Dmitrii is to kill his father. In all three novels, the centre of attention becomes the sins of the sons, not the fathers: Petr’s incitement of riot, chaos and murder; Arkadii’s plan to blackmail an older woman into a sexual relationship; and, of course, the long-drawn-out scene of Dmitrii’s trial for murder, in which the words ‘ottsa ubil’ (he killed his father) become an insistent refrain.
The speech at the trial by the defence attorney Fetiukovich poses the problem of the family in the starkest terms. Fetiukovich, a deconstructionist avant la lettre, calls into question the existence of all the elements of the alleged crime. The centrepiece of his summation is his reduction of the terrifying taboo word ottseubiistvo (parricide) to the status of predrassudok (lit. ‘prejudice,’ but with the connotation of ‘superstition’). Fetiukovich asserts that blood relationship is not sufficient to make one worthy of the name of ‘father’:
Yes, it’s a terrible thing to shed the blood of one’s father – the blood of the one who conceived me, the blood of the one who loved me, the blood of the one who did not spare his own life for me, who ailed along with me in all my illnesses since my childhood, who suffered for my happiness all my life and who lived only through my joys and my success! Oh, to kill such a father – but it’s impossible even to think of such a thing! [. . .] [But] my client grew up with only God’s protection, in other words like a wild beast. [. . .] We will prove [. . .] that the progress of recent years has reached even Russia in its development and we will say straight out: the one who conceives a child is not a father; a father is the one who both conceives and is worthy of the name of father.
(XV, 168, 170; Bk 12, Sec. 13)
If Fedor has not earned the title of ‘father’, the logical conclusion is that Dmitrii’s alleged murder of him is not parricide: ‘No, the murder of such a father cannot be called parricide. Such a murder can be accounted a parricide only through superstition [predrassudok]!’ (XV, 172; Bk 12, Sec. 13). Fedor seems to have had a premonition of the defence attorney’s argument when he says to Alesha: ‘In today’s fashionable world it’s become the thing to consider fathers and mothers a superstition’ (XIV, 158; Bk 4, Sec. 2).
The use of the word predrassudok in relation to the family marks Fetiukovich as a person conversant with radical ideology, despite his constant references to the gospel. In The Devils, the town radicals at a secret gathering begin a discussion of the predrassudok of the family:
‘We know, for example, that the superstition about God originated in thunder and lightning,’ the female student suddenly burst in again, almost jumping at Stavrogin with her eyes. ‘It’s very well established that primitive humanity, frightened of thunder and lightning, deified their unknown enemy, sensing their own weakness in relation to it. But where did the superstition about the family (predrassudok o semeistve) originate? Where could the family itself come from?’
‘I think that the answer to such a question would be indecent,’ Stavrogin answered.
(X, 306; Pt 2, Ch. 7)
Stavrogin’s answer points to a fact that Fetiukovich also stresses: the family originates in the act of sex. This fact is used by Fetiukovich to undermine the supposed holiness of family ties:
The sight of an unworthy father, especially as compared with other fathers, worthy ones, of the other children his age, inevitably suggests painful questions to the youth. His questions are answered pro forma: ‘He conceived you, and you are his blood, and therefore you must love him.’ The youth involuntarily falls to thinking: ‘But did he love me when he was conceiving me?’ he asks, becoming more and more amazed, ‘did he really conceive me for my sake? He didn’t know me or even what sex I was at that moment, the moment of passion, perhaps inflamed by drink, and maybe he passed on to me his inclination to drunkenness – that’s the extent of his benevolence . . . Why do I have to love him, just because he conceived me, and then failed to love me my whole life?’
(XV, 171; Bk 12, Sec. 13)
The defence attorney’s speech evokes two reactions in his audience. The sophisticated townspeople, including ‘fathers and mothers’, applaud the idea that sons have a right to demand that their fathers explain why they should love them (XV, 171; Bk 12, Sec. 13). As a conversation between two of the onlookers goes: ‘“If I had been in the defence attorney’s place I would have said straight out: he killed him, but he’s not guilty, and the hell with you!” “But that’s just what he did, only he didn’t say ‘the hell with you’”’ (XV, 177; Bk 12, Sec. 14). The other reaction, borne out in the guilty verdict by the muzhichki (peasants) on the jury, is expressed by another member of the audience: ‘Yes, gentlemen, he’s eloquent. But after all, we can’t allow people to bash in their fathers’ heads with steelyards. Otherwise where will we end up?’ (XV, 177; Bk 12, Sec. 14).
Is the family a sacred institution or is it a superstition? Does the name of ‘father’ have to be earned by one’s actions? Dostoevskii had tackled the same questions in the Diary of a Writer for February 1876, and had come to conclusions that are superficially similar to those of Fetiukovich, even as he did rhetorical battle with an attorney, Vladimir Spasovich, who later served as a prototype for the sophistic defence attorney in The Brothers Karamazov (XV, 347). The second part of the Diary of a Writer for February 1876 deals with the Kroneberg child-beating case (actually Kronenberg but I will use Dostoevskii’s spelling), referred to earlier. The child in this case had been raised by Swiss peasants and then by a pastor in Geneva until the age of seven, when Kroneberg took her with him to Russia. Dostoevskii quotes the defence attorney’s speech, which defends Kroneberg’s rights as a father to punish his own child: ‘I think that to persecute a father because he punished his child painfully but justly does a disservice to the family, a disservice to the state, because the state is only strong when it is founded on a strong family’ (XXII, 68). Dostoevskii argues, however, that a father’s rights must be earned, and that a father who missed his child’s infancy, who doesn’t really know his child, has a long way to go before he has any claim to sacred rights:
These creatures [children] only enter into our souls and become attached to our hearts when, after giving birth to them, we follow their development from childhood, without being separated from them, from their first smile, and then we continue to become close to them in soul every day, every hour over the course of our whole life. That is a family, that is something sacred [sviatynia]! After all, families are also created, not given ready-made. [. . .] The family is created by the untiring labour of love (neustannym trudom liubvi).
(XXII, 69–70)
Dostoevskii refuses to admit an a priori sacredness for the family: ‘We love the sacred thing that is the family when it is in fact sacred, and not just because the state is firmly founded on it’ (XXII, 72).
Why is it that in his essays on the Kroneberg case Dostoevskii seems to agree with Fetiukovich that a father has to earn his parental rights by ‘the untiring labour of love’, while in The Brothers Karamazov that position is lampooned? The difference is one of context and purpose. Fetiukovich presumes that Dmitrii actually did kill his father, and is trying to help him evade responsibility by arguing that that father was not really a father at all. He is trying to get a guilty man off the hook. In the Diary of a Writer, Dostoevskii is trying to put the father Kroneberg back on the hook. Kroneberg has no more right to be absolved because ‘the family is a sacred thing’ than Dmitrii, had he actually killed his father, would have a right to be absolved because ‘families are created through the untiring labour of love’. Dmitrii is no longer a child. Just because his father failed in his responsibilities to him, Dmitrii is not excused from the requirement to engage in ‘the labour of love’, no matter how unworthy the object, from his own position as adult son.
Dostoevskii offers an answer to the radical student’s question, ‘Where does the family come from?’ in the drafts to The Brothers Karamazov. Father Zosima was to have said, ‘Bog dal rodnykh, chtob uchit’sia na nikh liubvi. Obshchecheloveki nenavidiat lits v chastnosti’ (God gave us relatives so that we could learn through them how to love. Lovers of humanity hate persons in particular; XV, 205). It is somewhat strange that this statement did not make it into the novel, linked as it is to Ivan’s struggle with his inability to ‘love his neighbour’, his repulsion from the sight of a ‘litso v chastnosti’ (‘person [lit. face] in particular’). The family situation presents this dilemma in its most concentrated form: in the family we are bound by nature to people whom it is our duty to love, but whose personalities, moral character, even physical appearance, we may in fact dislike or hate. Thus, as Zosima in this draft indicates, loving our families can be excellent practice for loving all our fellow human beings. Such love is truly labour (trud), but it is also the only way to have any sort of claim to familial rights, as Dostoevskii points out in the Diary of a Writer for July–August 1877: ‘Only with love can we buy the hearts of our children, and not merely with our natural rights over them’ (XXV, 193).
The most beautiful family love in Dostoevskii’s world is that which is given freely, not in exchange for good behaviour. Arkadii Dolgorukii’s mother in her Christian naïveté expresses this idea with inadvertent humour in a dialogue with Arkadii: ‘“Family love is immoral, mama, precisely because it is not earned. Love must be earned.” “Well, you’ll earn it some day, but meanwhile we love you for no reason at all.” Everyone burst out laughing’ (XIII, 212; Pt 2, Ch. 5). A similar idea is expressed in The Brothers Karamazov by Snegirev and approved heartily by Alesha:
‘Allow me to complete my introductions: my family, my two daughters and my son – my brood, sir. If I die, who’s going to love them? And while I’m alive, who besides them is going to love nasty old me? This is a magnificent arrangement the Lord has set up for every person of my type, sir. For it is necessary that even a person of my type be loved by at least someone, sir.’
‘Oh, that’s so very true!’ exclaimed Alesha.
(XIV, 183; Bk 4, Sec. 6)
‘The family is created by the untiring labour of love’, but before offering that love one cannot first demand proof of it from the other. The most meaningful examples of family love in Dostoevskii’s last three novels are those in which nothing is offered in return: Arkadii’s love for Versilov, Alesha’s love for Fedor and Stepan Verkhovenskii’s love for his son Petr, which is lost in the face of the grown son’s evil but recovered at the brink of death. Petr has been absent from Stepan’s thoughts during his final pilgrimage, but he surfaces, named by an affectionate diminutive, in Stepan’s last words before lapsing into unconsciousness:
Long live the Great Idea! The eternal, boundless Idea! Every person, no matter who, has a need to bow before the Great Idea. Even the most foolish man has a need for something great. Petrusha . . . Oh, how I want to see them all again! They don’t know, they don’t know that even in them the very same Great Idea is contained!
(X, 506; Pt 3, Ch. 7 – emphasis mine)
Stepan’s remembrance of ‘Petrusha’, the son he lost through his failure to perform the untiring labour of love, is all the more poignant for having come far too late.
One aspect of the father–son relationships in Dostoevskii’s last novels that I have not yet discussed relates to the role of women. In both A Raw Youth and The Brothers Karamazov, a major component of the plot is a sexual rivalry between father and son. Both Arkadii and Versilov are obsessed with Katerina Nikolaevna Akhmakova; Dmitrii and Fedor are locked in a fierce struggle over Grushenka. (In both cases the son ‘gets the girl’ in the end, as the father has been neutralised by madness [Versilov] or murder [Fedor].) Such relationships are often called ‘Oedipal’, with the Freudian sense of the term in mind. It could be argued that Dostoevskii’s version of the father–son rivalry is closer to the original myth of Oedipus (and its treatment in the tragedy by Sophocles) than to Freud’s version. Freud’s Oedipus theory arose in the context of the intact bourgeois family, in which children are lodged close enough to their parents to observe ‘primal scenes’, and mothers are on hand to notice childish masturbatory play and threaten castration. But Oedipus, like Arkadii and Dmitrii, was an abandoned child, left ‘on Cithaeron’s slopes / in the twisting thickets’ because of the prophecy that he was to kill his father and marry his mother.7 In both Oedipus the King and Dostoevskii’s novels, the father, encountered for the first time in adulthood, is perceived not as a father but as just another man. Although both Arkadii and Dmitrii express horror at the thought that they are competing sexually with their own fathers, one does not have the sense that the horror goes very deep (certainly not deep enough to stop the competition). The explanation for this surely lies in the fact that these sons have not known their fathers as fathers on an everyday basis, from childhood on. They meet their fathers on equal ground, man to man, as Oedipus met Laius at the crossroads. For Freud the emotional weight and significance of the story lie in the fact that the son eliminates his father and has sex with his mother. But when read from the vantage point of Dostoevskii’s preoccupations of the 1870s, it becomes a story of abandonment. It is Laius’ abandonment of Oedipus that makes psychologically possible the realisation of the prophecy he fears. Oedipus kills a father who is not really a father (and marries a mother who is not really a mother) in Fetiukovich’s sense, and in the definition offered by Dostoevskii in the Kroneberg essays.
In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Milan Kundera returns to the Oedipus of Sophocles, ostentatiously omitting any mention of Freud. His hero Tomas offers a metaphorisation of the Oedipus tragedy that has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with guilt and responsibility, specifically the responsibility of those who led the countries of Central Europe into communism:
Oedipus did not know he was sleeping with his own mother, yet when he realised what had happened, he did not feel innocent. Unable to stand the sight of the misfortunes he had wrought by ‘not knowing’, he put out his eyes and wandered blind away from Thebes.
When Tomas heard Communists shouting in defence of their inner purity, he said to himself, As a result of your ‘not knowing’, this country has lost its freedom, lost it for centuries, perhaps, and you shout that you feel no guilt? How can you stand the sight of what you’ve done? How is it you aren’t horrified? Have you no eyes to see? If you had eyes, you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes!8
This is the dimension of the story that is also closest to Dostoevskii –and even to Freud, if we look beyond the ‘scandalous’ sexual content of his theory to its moral core. As the historian of psychoanalysis John E. Toews has recently written: ‘recognising ourselves in Oedipus is something of an ethical achievement, an assumption of guilt and responsibility in the creation of human suffering, including our own’.9
The question ‘Who is to blame?’, fathers or children, emerges in an interesting way in the historical development of Freud’s theory. Freud began with the ‘seduction theory’, which posited that adult neuroses stemmed from actual sexual abuse by parents of their children. This theory ‘blamed the sufferings of the younger generation on the secret sexual perversions of their hypocritical elders, on those who held power over their fate and who had betrayed their trust. It traced the source of human suffering to the acts of the powerful and absolved the victims of complicity in their fate’ (Toews, ‘Having and being’, p. 69). The development of the Oedipus theory shifted responsibility from parents to children: ‘After 1897 Freud’s focus shifted to the agency of the child as a sexual subject, to the originating role of infantile psychosexual “desire” in the formation of the human subject and its inner conflicts’ (ibid., p. 71). Frederick Crews offers a much less sympathetic description of this shift: ‘Psychoanalysis came into existence when Freud reinterpreted the very same clinical data to indicate that it must have been his patients themselves, when scarcely out of the cradle, who had predisposed themselves to neurosis by harbouring and then repressing incestuous designs of their own.’10 Crews discusses the development in the 1980s of ‘recovered memory therapy’, in which patients are guided to ‘remember’ childhood sexual abuse by their parents (abuse which the patients had somehow completely repressed until therapy ‘recovered’ the memory of it). Crews sees this development as another swing in the pendulum of blame from one generation to the other: ‘If early events are to be regarded as causes of later neurosis, it is easier to picture them as physical assaults on the child than as mere imaginings about penisectomy at the hand of a father who, the toddler supposedly reasons, must adopt that means of keeping him from realising his goal of fornicating with his mother’ (Crews, The Memory Wars, p. 22).
The artistic complexity of Dostoevskii’s world makes such extreme vacillations impossible, just as it makes impossible the explanation of all psychic disturbances by a single factor such as sexual abuse. In Dostoevskii’s vision, guilt is not passed back and forth between fathers and sons. The defence attorney in The Brothers Karamazov tries to pin blame and responsibility on the fathers by selectively quoting the New Testament, Colossians 3:21: ‘Ottsy, ne ogorchaite detei svoikh’ (Fathers, do not provoke your children – XV, 169, 601n; Bk 12, Sec. 13). He leaves out the two phrases that bracket this command in the Bible and that, when restored, are a microcosm of the Dostoevskian view of the family. The phrase quoted by Fetiukovich is preceded by a paraphrase of the Fifth Commandment: ‘Children, obey your parents in everything, for this is your acceptable duty in the Lord’ (Colossians 3:20).11 Children are responsible too, and their responsibility is mentioned first. Even more significant for Dostoevskii’s universe is the phrase that follows the attorney’s quotation: ‘Fathers, do not provoke your children, or they may lose heart’ (Colossians 3:21; emphasis mine). The father’s duty not to provoke his children is not for the purpose of avoiding being murdered by them, but of preserving their spiritual strength.
In the last analysis what is most important for Dostoevskii is not one’s generational position. Neither father nor son is categorically guilty or innocent. As a result, one cannot, like Spasovich, absolve Kroneberg by virtue of his being a father, or, like Fetiukovich, absolve Dmitrii by virtue of his being a son. The key moment is the individual’s own acceptance of responsibility, as Dostoevskii illustrates vividly in the Diary of a Writer for July–August 1877, in an imaginary speech by a presiding judge to a real-life couple who had abused their children:
The main thing is that there is much to forgive on both sides. They [the children] must forgive you for the bitter, difficult impressions on their childish hearts, for the hardening of their spirits, for their vices. And you must forgive them for your egoism, your neglect of them, the perversion of your feelings for them, your cruelty, and the fact that you had to sit here and be tried because of them. I say this because you will not accuse yourselves for all this when you leave the court, but them, I’m sure of it! So as you begin the difficult labour of raising your children, ask yourselves: can you blame all these crimes and misdemeanours not on them but on yourselves? If you can, oh, then you will succeed in your labour!
(XXV, 191)
One must not be misled into thinking that this remarkable speech is directed only at the fathers; it could just as easily be directed at sons like Dmitrii, Arkadii and Petr. The ‘untiring labour of love’ that creates the family must be carried out by everyone.
Dostoevskii’s definition of the family – the family that can truly be called a sacred thing – conforms neither to the conservative’s blind worship of the name of ‘father’ nor to the radical’s attempt to ‘make the rearrangement of family life into the basis for the rearrangement of society’ (Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism, p. 157). For Dostoevskii, the traditional relationship of father and child must be preserved, but must be based on the difficult, day-to-day labour of love – not merely on biological connection and the title of ‘father’, a title which fathers like Stepan Verkhovenskii, Versilov and Fedor Karamazov assume only when it is convenient for them. If a conservative (or a liberal masquerading as a conservative, like Spasovich) claims to value the family because it is the foundation of the state, Dostoevskii, in both his artistic and journalistic works, values the family because it is at least potentially the foundation of the spiritually healthy individual. Like Freud he seeks the origins of spiritual disease in childhood, but he does not fall prey to determinism. The best proof of this is the three (or four) Karamazov brothers – all abandoned and abused, but each with his own spiritual and moral path.
I would like to thank Robert T. Conn and Duffield White for their comments on this essay.
1 See the admirably succinct discussion of Dostoevskii’s view of the Russian family in W. J. Leatherbarrow, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamazov (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 21–30.
2 Irina Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 157.
3 A. I. Gertsen [Herzen], Povesti i rasskazy (Stories and Tales) (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1967), p. 106.
4 See the excellent discussion of Liza Herzen’s suicide in Irina Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 178–82.
5 Diane Oenning Thompson, ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ and the Poetics of Memory (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 165.
6 Schiller, Five Plays, trans. Robert David MacDonald (London: Absolute Classics, 1998), p. 167.
7 Sophocles, Oedipus the King, in Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 154. Fedor’s accusations of Dmitrii in the elder’s cell are an echo of the prophecy that haunted Oedipus’ father Laius: ‘the thing he feared, / death at his son’s hands’ (p. 142).
8 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), p. 177.
9 John E. Toews, ‘Having and being: the evolution of Freud’s Oedipus theory as a moral fable’ in Michael S. Roth (ed.), Freud: Conflict and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1998), p. 67.
10 Frederick Crews, The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute (New York: New York Review of Books, 1995), p. 57.
11 The Fifth Commandment reads: ‘Honour your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you’ (Exodus 20:12).