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78 Chapter Six “God Sent Her to Us as a Reward for Our Sufferings”: The Origins of Dostoevsky’s Preoccupation with Child Sacrifice in the Dialogue Between Time and The Insulted and Injured T H E P R O B L E M of redemption preoccupied Dostoevsky in the early 1860s, after his return to St. Petersburg from Siberian exile. There were good reasons why this should be so. The sensation of awaiting what he thought would be his execution by firing squad, only to receive a last-minute reprieve, was seared in his consciousness. This traumatic, near-death experience was followed by what he experienced as the living death of prison. “I consider those four years a time when I was buried alive and closed in a coffin,” he later wrote his brother Andrey (Pss, 28.1:181). After the living death of prison, Dostoevsky spent several years languishing in what he called the “provincial stagnation” of Semipalatinsk, where he did compulsory military duty. The 1850s was a decade of anguished existential marginalization; Dostoevsky experienced his return to the intellectual life of the capital in December 1859 as a kind of resurrection back into life. On arriving back in St. Petersburg ten years after his departure in convict’s chains, Dostoevsky immediately began writing again. He undertook an ambitious publishing venture with his brother Mikhail, launching the monthly journal Time in 1860. His writings from this period—The Insulted and Injured, Notes from the House of the Dead, and the essays written for Time—place the need for individual and communal redemption at the center of attention. They assess several potential vehicles of redemption and come to different conclusions about their efficacy. The dialogue about redemption carried throughout Dostoevsky’s novels and journal essays starts here, in the early 1860s. Through this early multiperspectival conversation about different ways to salvation, Dostoevsky embarks on the paths of inquiry that eventually lead to his mature antisemitism. “God Sent Her to Us as a Reward for Our Sufferings” 79 Each of these works begins with the premise that a fallen state exists, argues the need for redemption, and considers various possible catalysts or vehicles of change. They conceive of this fallen state in similar ways, as social or familial conflict—the estrangement of nations, classes, and family members from one another. In Time, Dostoevsky argues that redemption can be found through art; The Insulted and Injured and Notes from the House of the Dead rescind this hope. They counter Time’s optimistic predictions of immanent rebirth through the experience of beauty with stories of how art fails to revive those who place their hopes in it. These fictional writings go a step further. In addition to disappointing hope for redemption through aesthetic experience, they address the possibility of resurrection through vehicles associated with Christianity. The Insulted and Injured, published serially in Time throughout 1861, contrasts the failure of art to the success of child sacrifice; little Nelli’s ambivalent selfsacrifice succeeds where the semiautobiographical narrator’s ministrations through art and caritas fail. “Mr. –bov and the Question of Art,” published in 1861 in Time, is one of Dostoevsky’s most important critical essays. He makes grand claims for art in this essay, arguing that we can experience morally transformative impressions when reading works like The Iliad or Pushkin’s poetry or looking at a statue like the Apollo Belvedere. Such individual moral transformations , he maintains, will contribute to the resurrection of society as a whole. The beauty of the Apollo Belvedere “impresses itself on the soul,” he writes; “such impressions last a whole life” and can influence one’s actions many years later. Imagine that a young man gazes at the statue for a few moments, Dostoevsky suggests; “some kind of inner change happens in the person, some kind of rearrangement of parts,” he believes, “in one moment making what’s there not what was there before” (Pss, 18:78). Russians have access to their national idea, “panhumanism” or reconciliation , through works of art like Fet’s poetry. The spirit of panhumanism [obshchechelovechnost'] expressed in art “will soon renew our social life,” Dostoevsky declares.1 In contrast to this optimism, The Insulted and Injured dramatizes the failure of literature to make anyone better or solve any problems. The novel, subtitled “From the Notes of an Unsuccessful Literary Man,” goes a step further and makes this failure personal: the narrator is a semiautobiographical figure, resembling Dostoevsky himself, and the literature that fails is...

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