Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Dostoevsky later recalled, “We Petrashevskyites stood on the scaffold and heard out our sentence without the slightest repentance … almost every condemned man was certain that it would be carried out and we suffered through at last ten horrible, immeasurably horrible minutes awaiting death.” At the last moment, there was an announcement that Nicholas had commuted the death sentence to exile and hard labor in Siberia.

In Siberia, “contact with the people, fraternal unity with them in common misery, the understanding that you had become just like them,” transfigured Dostoevsky. The writer had not been an atheist (“In our family we knew the New Testament from early childhood”), but in Siberia he became a Russian Orthodox fundamentalist and turned from socialist to monarchist.

When he became tsar in 1855, Alexander II’s first act was to pardon the political “state criminals”—the Decembrists and Petrashevskyites, and in late 1859 Dostoevsky was at last allowed to return to St. Petersburg, where he resumed his literary career, publishing the sensational House of the Dead, a reportage of his years in Siberia. This was his only work that Tolstoy valued unconditionally.

Dostoevsky remained grateful to Alexander II for his mercy, and Karakozov’s assassination attempt in 1866 stunned him. When he learned of it, Dostoevsky, forty-one at the time, a small, lumpy, and unkempt man, rushed to see the poet Maikov, also a monarchist, and shouted in a trembling voice, “They shot at the tsar!”

Prince Meshchersky, the St. Petersburg publisher of the semi-official publication The Citizen and fierce opponent of liberal reforms, hired Dostoevsky as editor in 1873 (Dostoevsky started his famous Diary of a Writer there), and he recalled that the writer’s “soul burned with fiery loyalty to the Russian Tsar … I had never seen or met such a total and focused conservative … The apostle of truth in everything, major and trifling, Dostoevsky was as strict as an ascetic and as fanatical as a neophyte in his conservatism.”⁵

When he heard of the attempt on the tsar’s life, Dostoevsky was writing his novel Crime and Punishment, which may be his most popular work. The story of the St. Petersburg student Raskolnikov, who killed an old pawnbroker with an ax to prove to himself that he was a superman and could be compared to Napoleon, already posed the quintessential “Dostoevskian” question: “Am I a quaking creature or do I have the right?” Karakozov’s act of terrorism (which Dostoevsky interpreted in that proto-Nietzschean key) gave the writer the idea to express what “filled my mind and heart” in his 1872 novel, The Devils. “I don’t care if it turns out to be a pamphlet, I will have my say.”

Prince Meshchersky claimed that Dostoevsky hated revolutionaries. Dostoevsky poured out this hatred in The Devils. He based it on the trial of a revolutionary group led by the fanatic Sergei Nechaev, who had executed their comrade, accused by Nechaev of being a traitor in 1869.

Dostoevsky avidly followed the trial in the press. The newspapers were, as usual, an important source of inspiration for him in those anxious days. In 1867, Dostoevsky wrote to a friend, “Do you subscribe to any papers? Read them, for God’s sake, you can’t do otherwise nowadays, not to be fashionable but because the visible connection among all public and private affairs becomes stronger and clearer.”

Dostoevsky’s marked interest in “despised” newspapers was innovative for Russia. The police blotter created a background for allegedly real, “Dostoevskian” characters with their exalted speechifying and mad deeds in a phantasmagorical atmosphere.

Dostoevsky’s prose moves, breathes, pulses like a living organism, pulling the reader into its cruel, paroxysmal world (Dostoevsky was an epileptic). His words, sometimes running off in all directions, then gathering into a thick, sticky mass, form a fabric that yields to translation with difficulty. People who have marveled at the originals of Van Gogh’s tight-sprung paintings in museums, acutely feeling the bite of each nervous stroke, and then looked at the same works in reproductions, even faithful ones, will understand what I mean. Dostoevsky should be read in Russian.

In early March 1877, the frigate Svetlana (named after the popular ballad by the poet Zhukovsky, Alexander II’s tutor) sailed into the port of Norfolk, Virginia. On board the ship an eighteen-year-old marine guard was reading Dostoevsky avidly. He began with The Devils (which shook him to tears) and then intended to move on to Crime and Punishment. His nineteen-year-old cousin had sent him both books, supervising his reading.