Dostoevsky and the Catholic Underground

Conclusion

198 Conclusion “The play’s the thing Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” —William Shakespeare, Hamlet DOSTOEVSKY SHARED with former political prisoners throughout nineteenth-century Europe the difficulties of reestablishing his career and personal reputation after imprisonment and exile. His reading of literature about prison (Dumas’s Le Comte de Monte-Cristo or Dickens’s The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club), his own encounters with Polish and Russian subversives, and his extensive familiarity with Russian émigré writings exposed Dostoevsky to the transnational experience of political exile. Yet, to distinguish himself from this crowd of conspirators and to distance himself from his progressive past, he asserted a strong sense of self to break the automatic perception of him as a Petrashevets, a lesser scion of the famous Decembrists. Thus identified in the annals of Russian revolutionary history with Peter the Great’s legacy through Petrashevsky, Dostoevsky realized in Siberia that he had been labeled a Westernizer by those opposed to tsarist autocracy. Herzen’s 1851 study Du développement des idées révolutionnaires en Russie, naming Dostoevsky among those Petrashevtsy whose death sentences were commuted, furthered the impression that the novelist belonged to a contemporary revolutionary movement uniting Russia to Europe, particularly through the cause of Polish liberation. Herzen’s published letter to Jules Michelet, “Le peuple russe et le socialisme” (1851), describes shared Polish and Russian animus for the tsar with references to the Petrashevtsy, who conspired “à deux pas du Palais d’hiver,” and to Bakunin, the victim of an international criminal conspiracy of governments that transferred him from Saxony through Habsburg Austria into the hands of Nicholas I (Ss, 7:304, 305).1 Yet, Polish and Russian remembrances from his Siberian period depict Dostoevsky’s resistance to this progressive label, as he challenged attempts to Polonize him and maintained a degree of separation from his fellow Petrashevtsy.2 Having been reduced to a political type himself, Dostoevsky does not hesitate to discuss his opponents in terms of similar types, for example, “Hamletiks,” “Utins,” and “Nechaevs.” At the same time, he identifies increas- Conclusion 199 ingly in his writings with native literary types such as the “Russian chronicler in Boris Godunov” who is indicative “of the independent monks-chroniclers” who sought “truth” rather than courtly privileges under the Muscovite tsars (Pss, 19:9). Dostoevsky admires such an “invented” personage, because he believes in Pimen’s potential to embody a popular national spirit through which “poetic truth” may be revealed (Pss, 19:9). Since Dostoevsky similarly numbers Achilles (whose helmet makes its way into Crime and Punishment) among the “invented” Greek types in the “national ancient Greek poem,” The Iliad, he does not appropriate for Russia alone the expression of a collective national spirit through prominent literary works (Pss, 19:9). However, as his Polish fellow prisoners perceived, Dostoevsky imparts to Russia the ability to integrate foreign literary manifestations of nationhood into a Russian consciousness . Hence, a saint from Rome during the patristic era, Saint Alexis (Alexei, the Man of God), whose popular vita is extant in such languages as Greek, Latin, Old French, and Russian, can nevertheless represent “the ideal of the people [narod]” and inspire them with “hope” (Pss, 27:55; 24:285).3 In Pushkin, Dostoevsky can discern the presence of the “spirit of the Koran” and “the soul of Northern Protestantism” so that Pushkin in his Russianness reflects a world soul rather than a strictly Russian worldview (Pss, 26:146). Still, that which Dostoevsky praises as an attribute of Russian expansiveness those opposed to its imperialism may understand as Russian expansionism under the guise of literary analysis. THE RUSSIAN IDEA IN A POST-FEUDAL AGE Since his nationalism is motivated by the Russian idea, Dostoevsky does not recognize the adverse political consequences of such Russocentrism, from which subjected peoples in the eastern and western edges of the empire had already suffered owing to Russification policies enforced by Nicholas I and Alexander II with the cooperation of the Russian Orthodox Church.4 This suggests that, in a certain respect, Dostoevsky agrees with Raskolnikov that great men with foundational ideas drive history, but Dostoevsky discounts Napoleon’s idea, the Jesuits’ “one idea,” as well as the coercive “Roman idea” (Pss, 24:311; 25:162; 21:184). Apposed to these ideas of Western and Catholic origin is the Russian idea, which Dostoevsky presents at a conceptual level that allows him to deceptively avoid scrutinizing from multiple perspectives the conflict arising from competing national ideas on...