DOSTOYEVSKY AND THE “IDEALS OF MANKIND”

1 D O S T O Y E V S K Y A N D T H E ‘‘I D E A L S O F M A N K I N D’’ J O S E P H F R A N K Since Dostoyevsky was primarily a novelist and not a philosopher, to focus on his relationship to ‘‘the ideals of mankind’’ may seem to be approaching his work from an extremely skewed angle. But in fact, he is one of the few novelists for whom such an angle is quite appropriate. As a genre, the novel, when in the eighteenth century it ceased to be a form read largely for entertainment and amusement , dealt primarily with the immediate issues of social life; and while the behavior of its characters was guided by certain norms of conduct that had larger moral implications, these norms were not its primary concern. Of course there were exceptions, such as the very early novel Don Quixote and, among Dostoyevsky’s contemporaries , the works of perhaps Victor Hugo, George Sand, and George Eliot, that endeavored to make readers aware of the moralphilosophical significance of their narratives. But the nineteenthcentury Russian novel stands out from both its English and its French counterparts by the manner in which the ideological and philosophical ideas of the period were intimately interwoven with the lives of its characters; and this is true not only of Dostoyevsky but of Turgenev and Tolstoy as well. The issues agitating the Russians not only were private, per- 2 F R A N K Y sonal, and sentimental; they also involved the fate of their own society in relation to the whole development of European civilization . There are a number of reasons for this, perhaps the most important being that Russian culture developed under the religious influence of the Byzantine Empire, and it was only in the reign of Peter the Great in the eighteenth century that Russia entered the modern cultural world. Peter’s tyrannical insistence that the Russian upper class receive a European education and adopt European manners and dress brought home in the most aggressive manner the gap between the drastically di√ering cultural worlds of Russia and Europe. No Russian nineteenth-century writer could portray his own society in any depth without including within his purview, in one form or another, the results arising from modern Russia’s origins in this cultural clash; and that clash inevitably involved questions in which ideas concerning the ideals of at least European mankind played an important part. Whatever Dostoyevsky thought or felt about the ‘‘ideals of mankind ’’ was obviously conditioned by his personal life, and this was far from being an ordinary one. He was, for one thing, the only Russian writer of his stature to have lived through four years in a Siberian prison camp. But these personal experiences were always brought into relation with, and assimilated to, the moral-social problems of Russian society as he conceived them. These problems changed and evolved during his lifetime, and the young Dostoyevsky , who in the 1840s was a member of a secret society dedicated to stirring up a revolution against serfdom, was not the same as the Dostoyevsky who returned from Siberia in 1859 to resume his literary career. The intervening period had been marked by a year of imprisonment in solitary confinement in the infamous Peterand -Paul Fortress, the mock execution during which he believed he would be shot, and finally the prison camp years depicted in his House of the Dead – a work as sensational in its own time as Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago has been in our own. Dostoyevsky’s education had been unusual for a member of the small upper class of his day, which, as a result of the European influence already mentioned, had more or less lost touch with its own religious roots in Russian Orthodoxy. Both Turgenev and Tolstoy, for example, received no religious education as children. Dostoyevsky’s father was an army doctor, but his own ancestors D O S T O Y E V S K Y A N D T H E ‘‘I D E A L...