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27 Chapter One From Time to Demons: Genre, History, and Modernization, 1861–1871 IN THE MIDDLE OF DECEMBER 1859, Dostoevsky returned to St. Petersburg from his ten-year exile in Siberia. A new tsar, Alexander II, had been on the throne since 1855, and limited consultation regarding changes to the system of serfdom and censorship reform had already begun. A spirit of great optimism reigned among the intelligentsia and found voice in the plethora of new journals that opened following a relaxation of censorship policy after 1857. Even Nikolai Chernyshevsky, later to be imprisoned by Alexander in the Peter and Paul Fortress, shared in the hopeful mood, writing in 1858, “With the reign of Alexander II, there begins a new era for Russia, just as one had begun with Peter.”1 Almost immediately following his return to Petersburg, Dostoevsky began to make plans with his brother Mikhail to join the burgeoning journalistic scene by setting up a journal, to be called Time. The Dostoevskys’ collaborators on the journal were the literary critic Apollon Grigoriev and the philosopher Nikolai Strakhov.2 In September of the following year an announcement was circulated inviting subscriptions to the new journal. This announcement lays out Time’s general aims and provides a foretaste of the journal’s program. Seeking to justify Time’s presence in the already crowded marketplace of new journals, its editors underline the extreme importance of the present moment in the social life of the nation (18:35–40). Russia is on the threshold of a new historical epoch, which will be brought into being by the imminent resolution of “the great peasant problem, the solution of which has begun in our time,” that is, the emancipation of the serfs (18:35).3 Though the Emancipation Proclamation would not be signed into law by Tsar Alexander II until a few months later—on February 19, 1861, by the Julian calendar—the Time announcement is filled with heady excitement about the coming emancipation movement.4 The announcement refers to a “prodigious change which is about to take place peacefully and with the consent of our entire nation,” a change “equivalent to the most outstanding events in our history and even to the great reforms Context 28 of Peter the Great” (18:35). The journal envisioned this change as the reintegration of a nation whose educated classes and narod had split apart 170 years before, following the Petrine reforms. While the nobility and the educated classes had gone along with Peter’s efforts to impose Western European cultural and political models onto Russian life, embracing modernization and in the process becoming estranged from Russian national life or “soil,” the narod had recoiled from the effects of modernization and maintained their old beliefs and traditions, their connections to the Russian soil (18:36). Ever since, the two groups had lived separate and independent lives. Now, at last, they would come together again as a result of the coming emancipation , which would at last allow the narod to fully enter Russian life and contribute to Russian society, bringing new ideas and values to an intellectual discourse that had been too dependent on Western European models and structures for too long (18:36). This process of reconciliation would give rise to a new Russian national consciousness as the two groups shared the ideas and beliefs they had developed during the years of their separate evolution and growth. The ensuing knowledge and insight would allow Russia to rediscover her inner national strength and creativity, to create new indigenous forms and ideas, and ultimately to offer Europe a great new “Russian Idea,” an idea that would reconcile the disparate European nations, just as it had reconciled Russia’s own divided society (18:37). It is difficult to imagine a more enthusiastic response to the modernization about to take place under Russia’s new reforming tsar than this rousing announcement and its glorious vision of the nation’s future. According to Strakhov, the piece, written in the spirit of profound hopefulness about the future that marked the public discourse of the early 1860s, was written by Dostoevsky himself.5 It introduces the principles that will guide Time and its readership through the exciting and turbulent times ahead. Its central rallying cry, mission statement, and program is the idea of reconciliation . Whereas Dostoevsky recognizes that the Petrine reforms had brought the kinds of effects we usually associate with modernization (i.e., a sense of separation, social breakdown, and atomization), he asserts...

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