I haven’t, as yet, bitten off the writing of a post on my oldest and strongest influence, Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Influence? Even now, in my novella Waste Flowers, his novels are all over it. Why not? Waste Flowers, too, deals with revolution, violence, and experiences of evil. The next novella: even more so, and still steeped in Dostoyevsky. When Oliver pinned me to the wall to articulate a thematic statement or thematic conflict to go with my outline, I flailed around and mouthed ‘kind of Dostoyevsky?’; and for an explanation first sent him to an article by novelist Laurie Sheck on Dostoyevsky’s ‘Radical Empathy’. My final thematic statement, which I am reluctant to air in public, pulled in the old Terence quote that has had my heart since my favourite teacher conveyed his love for it: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.

Oh what do I have to lose? here’s the thematic conflict (ongoing — he wanted one I can continue to hash out in future novellas), as submitted to Oliver:

A thematic conflict that puts two things I passionately believe in at loggerheads (in other words, I can milk this forever):
It’s worthwhile to make unlikely friends, to reach out to dangerous people. ‘I am human, and think nothing human alien to me’ ― Terence
Counter: Punch Nazis.

I do have a few reviews of his novels up, that talk about my encounter with them:  Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, others.

I’m going to post an essay I wrote for a history unit, about the trio of Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, and their relationship to radical politics. It’s a bit of a screed, I admit. That’s because I was set off by a particular piece, and aim at one person’s bad take.

Still, several years later that same scholar turned up in the literary newspapers, with his same bad take, and a social media mutual of mine — with whom I shared interests in Mongol history as well as Russian history — named one of these his article of the year (circa 2016), that shed light on the politics of today. My mutual was of a more conservative bent than me, but of course I too apply the novels to today. It’s not distant literary history, it’s close to the bone.

This is a shaggy beast of an essay. But if the bad take person can get into the NYRB etc, and be a public intellectual on these matters, I won’t be shy to post my take.

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Against schemes: the great writers versus the radicals in nineteenth-century Russia

There has been a tendency in the historiography to line up the great novelists of the Russian nineteenth century and range them against the revolutionaries. The latter are seen as dogmatists, dangerous in their commitment to ideas; in contrast, the practitioners of fiction, particularly the great three, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, are seen as humanists, ideology-free. A recent survey of Russian intellectual history puts this view strongly, and is useful to take as a set of typical arguments in support of this understanding. Such an opposition is too simple and too schematic, for the novelists differ greatly from one another and do not agree in their stance towards radical ideas. The radical camp itself had more room in it for difference than this oppositional scheme often acknowledges. Battle-lines were not as straightforward as writers against radicals. Two directly political novels, Turgenev’s Fathers and Children and Dostoyevsky’s Demons, exhibit the discrepancy between their authors. These novels cannot be taken at face value as history, of course, or as objective observation; they were engagement in the politics of the day by authors who were not positionless. The three great novelists had divergent views which tend to be erased by historiography that treats them as if they were above politics, even as they comment on it; or as if they were anti-political in response to the more urgent of the intelligentsia who pressed for change.

In a major recent survey of Russian intellectual history, the topic of nineteenth century novelists and their entanglement with politics is covered by Gary Saul Morson with a contribution titled ‘Tradition and Counter-Tradition: The Radical Intelligentsia and Classical Russian Literature’.[1] Here the ‘tradition’ is that of the intelligenty, a word Morson uses in its narrowest possible sense to mean a radical thinker, one with an ideology of revolution; this tradition begins in the 1860s and continues unbroken up to the Bolsheviks and the achievement of revolution in 1917.[2] The ‘counter-tradition’ is that of the ‘great writers’ of fiction: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov. Lesser writers who espoused radical ideas in their work such as Chernyshevsky belong to the tradition, not the counter-tradition; Morson calls this committed literature ‘propaganda’.[3] By his scheme, these are two camps in conflict. The great writers saw the ‘danger’ of radical thought and made their intellectual attacks in the field of fiction; they also offered a ‘set of alternatives’ to counter the proposals of radicals.[4] This set of alternatives is presented in the singular; that is, Morson does not draw distinctions between the four main writers whom he enlists; he concentrates on commonalities that pit them as one against the radical camp. Again, among the radicals, he does not mention distinct strands of thought or changes in prevalent ideology in the course of these sixty years; the intelligenty are grouped and seen to agree, whichever decade they are from. He tries to extract what is essential from tradition and counter-tradition, ‘characters’ for them that need not be strongly historicised.

The problem with Morson’s schematic treatment is this lack of distinctions. On both sides, significant differences in philosophy are elided to produce a war of ideas where the writers are set against the radicals. Even for a survey that has to give the situation in brief, serious distortions enter in as each side is made to fit the scheme. The three novelists whose careers overlap, Turgenev (1818-83), Dostoyevsky (1821-81) and Tolstoy (1828-1910), cannot be aligned together in this way, as if their fundamental lessons were the same; while Morson’s portrait of the intelligenty ignores the contrast between Nihilism and Populism, two schools with which Turgenev and Dostoyevsky engaged. Morson’s oppositional scheme is not new: Aileen Kelly, an acute critic of Western historiography on Russia, observes that a pattern of ‘writers versus radicals’ is an old one; historians who slip into this pattern do so to take the side of the writers and with them to expose the radicals.[5] Kelly writes as if this dichotomy is outdated, but a decade after her book Morson perpetuates the model of hostile camps; and he is certainly on the side of the writers, whose truths indisputably win out over the intelligenty. In fact, Morson presents the intelligenty case unfairly. The novelists themselves made much more complex judgments on their radical contemporaries.

There is a similarity between what Kelly criticises in historians as ‘psychohistory’ and a method Morson describes for the novelists, that of biographical explanation.[6] ‘Psychohistory’, once often practiced when liberal historians (so termed by Kelly) wrote of revolutionaries, means the ascription of psychological motivation to political activists; at its worst this amounted to ‘pathologising’ radical tendencies as a mental or emotional deficiency, even an illness.[7] Clearly, these were historians antipathetic to radical causes, who refused to grant that a healthy mind might espouse them. In the Russian novelists, Morson points out a biographical tactic: to explain a radical person in terms of ‘psychic need’, so that an ‘irony of origins’ exposes, again, the personal deficiency or frustration that underlies the political commitment.[8] More caution is needed on this subject. In a statement about revolutionaries of his acquaintance, Turgenev explicitly clears them from this sort of motive:

All the real negators I have known, without exception (Belinsky, Bakunin, Herzen, Dobrolyubov, Speshnev, etc.), came from comparatively good and honest parents. A great idea is contained therein: it removes from the men of action, the negators, every suspicion of personal dissatisfaction, personal irritation. They go their way only because they are more sensitive to the demands of national life.[9]

Psychohistory, which Turgenev stands against in this quote, is now rarely practiced by historians of Russia, Kelly reports.[10] But novelists must come under scrutiny for their similar strategy. Since novelists are permitted the right to use personal arguments and psychological speculation, their truth value has to be questioned just as when a historian enters into conjectural mentalities. Psychohistorians gave away as much about themselves as about their subjects; so too may novelists. Morson fails to interrogate the great writers, whom he assumes to be objective, rather like an ideal historian. They are never presented as wrong through his chapter, and he never allows that the radicals might have a legitimate grievance against them, although of course their portrayals of radicals were highly contested at the time.[11]

Turgenev is better known for his dissection of ‘superfluous persons’ and their psychological ills than he is for psychoanalysis of radicals.[12]  He was one of the main practitioners of the ‘superfluous’ type: liberal-minded people who in the circumstances of Russia found no outlet for their energies, no work to satisfy their social conscience. With these he self-identifies; Kelly says that ‘Turgenev, who immortalised this type in his novels, was himself one of its most striking representatives’.[13] His first superfluous person, Rudin in the novel of that name (1857), was presumed to be a portrait of the anarchist Bakunin, but Alexander Herzen, a friend of both, said the portrait was much more of the author himself. Rudin has extravagant failings, but then Turgenev once remarked that critics are unaware of how much an author can enjoy exhibiting his own faults in an invented character.[14] Arguably, Turgenev was not nearly as given to subjecting his ‘men of action’ to a critical psychological scrutiny. Insarov in On the Eve (1860) is a man of action, a Bulgarian committed to the struggle for his country’s liberty; other characters in the novel mock his dedication to his cause, but he gets the girl, Yelena, who is thirsty for an active life (Richard Freeborn says that the character of Yelena captures young Russians’ hunger for ‘revolutionary change’ more closely than had been seen in fiction at that stage). Turgenev’s most famous fictional ‘negator’ is Bazarov in Fathers and Children (1862), a novel that put the term Nihilist into circulation in Russia. As per Turgenev’s quote on revolutionaries he has known in real life, Bazarov is given a biography that begins with a very loving family home; he has no grudges against his background or his poverty. He is introduced into the novel as a picture of rude mental health, without discernible ‘psychic needs’ to be fulfilled through activism. Nihilism in the 1860s was succeeded by Populism in the 70s; with Virgin Soil (1877) Turgenev wrote about the Populists as misguided idealists; he says in a letter, ‘they must feel my sympathy… if not for their goals, at least for their personalities’.[15] It cannot be said that Turgenev’s men and women ‘of action’ are portrayed as sick or needy; his speciality is more the malaise of the idle ‘superfluous person’.

Morson outlines a ‘masterplot’ held in common by the Russian novel of ideas, or the ‘anti-ideological’ novel, in a description he thinks more apt. This is plot deployed as a weapon against the radicals. Plot uncovers an ‘irony of origins’ in the subject’s psychology, then in an ‘irony of unwelcome outcomes’, brings his radical ideas to a bad end.[16] However, in Turgenev’s case, the author seems more likely to bring his action heroes to a bad end that in no way dismisses their ideas. Both Insarov and Bazarov are struck down by disease before they achieve a greatness that is foreseen of them by other characters. If plot is a weapon in the novelist’s hands, certainly the story seems to attack Bazarov. Not on the level of ideas; Morson notes the anti-ideological novel did not proceed by ‘logical critique’. Instead of attack the argument, it aimed at the man. The strangest thing that happens to Bazarov is that he is reduced to the status of a superfluous person. Odintsova tells him he is superseded, not the ‘new people’ any more; his rude health, inner and outer, is lost in the course of the novel; in a prelude to his fatal illness, he succumbs to aimlessness, the inability to work; his failed love affair seems to set him on the same course as that of Pavel Petrovich, his ‘superfluous’ adversary whose excuse for a blighted life was a failure in love in his youth. This attack by the story seems more to serve the author’s ‘psychic need’. Turgenev was inclined to the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer; Herzen warned him that pessimism, which sees a necessarily bleak end, was in danger of dragging him to the illiberal. If effort is futile, change by human intervention is impossible; and that did not suit the liberal gradualist Turgenev thought he was.[17] About Bazarov, Turgenev was not only conflicted in his feelings but confessed to a lack of self-awareness (‘I don’t know whether I love him or hate him’, one of his several letters on the matter has).[18] The controversy Fathers and Children met with went beyond the author’s expectations, and he was disturbed to find responses almost opposite to his intentions, or to the positions he understood he took; in a published apologia for the novel he writes, ‘I noted the coldness, practically indignation, of many people close and sympathetic to me; I was congratulated, almost embraced by people belonging to a camp repugnant to me, by enemies’.[19] Here is an ‘irony of outcome’ that turns back on the author. He did not take issue with Bazarov’s ideas, but he let the story attack him, to defuse him before he killed him off. Isaiah Berlin, in his influential classic Russian Thinkers, expatiates on Turgenev as the model and the first great portraitist in fiction of the universal liberal in a troubled world, valiantly balanced between fanaticisms of the left and right.[20] His description of Turgenev’s stance becomes a hymn to the liberal in other times and places, with an undisguised identification by the writer. As a ‘prototype liberal’ Turgenev has remained a favourite of ‘liberal Western’ historians and literary critics, to use again the typology of Kelly. Such ownership of Turgenev, however, neglects his pessimism, which led him to preach a futility of effort at the end of most of his novels. In particular, he cannot let a ‘man of action’ live.

‘Positive heroes’ is a phrase used about fiction from the radical camp, but it is not irrelevant to the great writers, even where they are anti-radical. For the intelligenty, says Morson, literature ought to be propaganda. They had a utilitarian view of art, and practised an ‘internal censorship’ whereby revolutionary protagonists were required to be portrayed in a positive light.[21] This was the ‘positive hero’, who was meant to inspire with his or her commitment and who was given altruistic not ulterior motives. There are several observations to be made. The prime example of a ‘positive hero’ novel was Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done?; and this was written in response to Turgenev’s Fathers and Children – as a rebuttal and a correction.[22] In certain areas Chernyshevsky has a clear case against Turgenev and reason to rebut him. Turgenev gives a lampoon of an emancipated woman in Kukshina; furthermore he makes his Nihilist Bazarov contemptuous of women in general, with no comradeship displayed towards his fellow freethinker Kukshina. The only novels in which emancipated women were not satirised issued from the radical camp; Chernyshevsky’s novel centres on one, for women’s emancipation was a radical cause.[23] This fact earns the radical novel no points whatsoever with Morson, although it is hard to see why a ‘positive hero’ like Chernyshevsky’s Vera is more propagandist than a lampoon like Turgenev’s Kukshina, whom Morson calls ‘repulsive’.[24] The historian himself descends into caricature of radicals and their ‘rigid code’, a straitjacket of style; ‘one simply had to have dirty fingernails, dress badly, flaunt one’s inability to understand art and, in the case of women, call attention to one’s promiscuity’. In this characterisation of intelligenty (right the way from the 60s to the Bolsheviks), noblemen who joined them learned bad manners, these being de rigueur. But here the historian has decided what good and bad manners are; there is no suggestion that noblemen’s manners might be legitimately faulted, although Dostoyevsky, whenever he met Turgenev, complained in letters of his ‘aristocratic mannerisms’ which he found arrogant and offensive; he includes these mannerisms in his satirical portrait of Turgenev in Demons.[25] Chernyshevsky had reason to accuse Turgenev of a low blow when he made his radical figure disparage women, since most radicals were champions of emancipation. Bazarov is ungentlemanly towards them; at one point Odintsova is afraid of a violent sexual assault by him, whose passion in this scene is described with animal imagery.[26] By way of contrast, Dostoyevsky peoples his novels with sexual exploiters who belong to the gentlemanly class. These choices, to make either radicals or nobles notable for disrespect towards women and sexual coercion, came of different standpoints and had political implications. Novelists chose to assign positivity or negativity, in accord with their convictions; it is not sufficient to say that Chernyshevsky, but not Turgenev or Dostoyevsky, practised ‘propaganda’.

Chernyshevsky wrote contra Turgenev, and felt driven to simplify his own side into a caricature; the ‘positive hero’ is a defensive position, existing because of an unfair hearing elsewhere. The front he put on can then be satirised in turn by historians as the real revolutionary (who subscribed to a catechism ‘without hesitation, doubt or scepticism’[27]), if they do not consider the circumstances and if they do not look behind the pages. Behind the published pages now and then exist diaries which tell a different tale. Aileen Kelly has investigated private writings by committed revolutionaries that give expression to a self-doubt not allowed in print, due to the ‘internal censor’, guardian of the image of revolutionaries.[28] In the troubled atmosphere post-1905, she finds, these private voices tried erupt into print; there was a brief spate of publishing of fiction about (and by) ‘doubt-ridden revolutionaries’, in rebellion against that necessary positivity.[29] The past ‘internal censor’ for radical writings in Russia meant that they did not have a model to offset What Is To Be Done?, the highly influential model for writing the positive hero. But they might have done had Dostoyevsky lived to write a novel he told a friend about in his last year, a sequel to The Brothers Karamazov where Alyosha would abandon the religious life and convert to revolution: ‘He would commit a political crime. He would be executed. He would have searched for truth, and in these searches, naturally, he would have become a revolutionary’.[30] In the course of this conversation, Dostoyevsky and his friend discussed recent assassination attempts upon the tsar; they admitted neither one of them, nor anybody they knew, would turn in a terrorist to the police if they had the chance, even to stop a bomb in the Winter Palace; and Dostoyevsky said he would like to write about ‘the strange relation of society to these crimes’, except ‘one can’t do so. In our society one is not allowed to speak about the most important things’.[31] Extraordinarily, Dostoyevsky urged upon the tsar himself a sympathetic understanding of these would-be assassins; their ‘young Russian energies’ had been led astray, but Dostoyevsky stressed they were ‘sincere’ and did not condemn their motives.[32] Alyosha is a saintly boy in The Brothers Karamazov, a nearly ideal character for Dostoyevsky; with him the author is as far as can be from the harsh satire of Demons. With him as the convert to revolution, a tragic story must be expected, with a focus on difficult moral choices as in The Brothers Karamazov, and written with the inner complexity of a Raskolnikov instead of from the outside as are the revolutionaries in Demons. He would be neither a positive nor a negative hero, since it is inconceivable for Dostoyevsky to continue his beloved character of Alyosha in either vein. Revolutionaries in fiction had not enjoyed the full humanising treatment of a major novelist. Bazarov does not make impossible a stereotype of revolutionaries; he is blusteringly positive and then he is undercut in every way by the story; Bazarov is not written from the inside, either, and his internal workings remain obscure. Dostoyevsky was positioned to write of the revolutionary as he or she had not been seen, and simplifications would have been more difficult thereafter. Not only literary history would be different, but historians’ stereotypes such as Morson’s would have been better evidenced against.

Dostoyevsky made a start in Demons, but this book was written at the height of his disaffection from the left. Morson writes a character for intelligenty that has no room for self-doubt, reflecting the ‘positive hero’ projected by them – the ideal, not the real. He is content to use as evidence of the views of revolutionaries the fictional Shigaylov from Demons with his conclusion, ‘from unlimited freedom I end up at unlimited despotism’.[33] However, Morson does not mention Shigaylov’s own dismay to find his logic leads to this conclusion; nor does Morson’s sketch of the typical intelligenty admit of emotions such as nearly every member of the secret circle in Dostoyevsky’s novel displays when they are led to murder. Shigaylov walks away before the act; another tries to stop it; a third has a strange physiological response of an unending shriek. Verkhovensky, the organiser, says of himself ‘I’m a scoundrel, not a socialist’; which leaves only one member so given over to ideology that he does not feel for the victim, and lives easily afterwards with the act.[34] In her discussion of the post-1905 rebellion against the ‘positive hero’, Kelly tells of an attempt by Maksim Gorky in 1913 to remove from the Moscow Art Theatre’s repertoire a stage play of Demons.[35] Different feelings about the ‘internal censor’ came to a head in the controversy that followed; Gorky, for the censorship camp, lost the argument to a spirit of self-criticism. In spite of its strong satire, Demons was not rejected. Had Dostoyevsky, who still commanded this much respect on the radical left, been allowed by the tsar’s censors to write an updated work on revolutionaries as proposed, the voice of the ‘doubt-ridden revolutionary’ would have been strengthened, the case for its suppression more difficult to argue. Those few fiction writers who did express ethical perplexities such as are found in the diaries would have had encouragement and justification to publish. With overt evidence, historians’ portraits of revolutionaries as people with concreted values and a lack of self-question would not have taken hold. The unwritten book has consequences.

Morson says the novelists are anti-ideological in that they advocate an approach to ethical questions that proceeds ‘case by case’ and eschews a search for ‘common principles’; the lesson being, ‘life is too complex for any ethical theory’.[36] His examples are drawn from Tolstoy. A main one is Anna Karenina’s Levin on Russian engagement in the current war in the Balkans, a war Levin does not support. He is asked a hypothetical question: what about the atrocities going on? Would he take up arms and kill if a Turk were to commit an atrocity upon a Bulgarian in front of him? Levin refuses to speculate; he would decide on the instant. Implicit in this conversation is Tolstoy’s ‘ideas about the relation of distance to ethical action’; in Morson’s words,

Kant notwithstanding, we do not owe the same moral debt and concern to people we have never met on the other side of the world as to our immediate family. Tolstoy here revives the Stoic idea that morality works by something resembling concentric circles. The further we get from our family, our neighbours and our community, the less moral obligation we actually have. Indeed, it is a moral error to assume that the same principles apply in near and distant cases.[37]

It becomes hard to distinguish here whether Morson is making such assertions in his own person or explaining Tolstoy; either way, his agreement with Tolstoy is palpable. The problem lies again in his scheme, whereby he assimilates Dostoyevsky to Tolstoy. Indisputably, this is Tolstoy’s lesson, but it goes against much in Dostoyevsky’s thought. In fact, Dostoyevsky picked out this very passage in Anna Karenina for an entry in his Writer’s Diary.[38] Morson comments that Levin’s ‘answer might seem intellectually unsatisfying’; but for Dostoyevsky, intellect has little to do with it; emotionally and ethically, he is appalled that Levin does not know whether he would save a Bulgarian baby. It is not merely that Dostoyevsky is upset because he supports this war. He finds the point about distance both psychologically and philosophically unsatisfying; for the first, he relates an anecdote about a person greatly affected by the stories of atrocities, as if they happened before his eyes; for the second he asks, ‘If distance really does have such an influence on humaneness, then a new question arises of itself: at what distance does love of humanity end?’ For Dostoyevsky, to circumscribe that love and emotional engagement is monstrous; he cannot understand how Levin, portrayed as a ‘sensitive’ person, can maintain he feels nothing for distant strangers. This question is as crucial for Dostoyevsky’s view of life as it is for Tolstoy’s, but they certainly do not see eye to eye. The great writers do not offer a ‘set of alternatives’ in unanimity against the radicals, as Morson has them.

Tolstoy’s conclusions about the family circle run counter to the religious understanding of Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov. Zosima teaches that everybody is responsible for everybody else; we even have to answer for each other’s crimes.[39] This is one of the lessons of Russian Christianity that Dostoyevsky took very much to heart.[40] Zosima’s sermon in his novel expresses most of what Dostoyevsky valued in Orthodoxy, and it is a sensibility alien to Levin’s, who spoke for Tolstoy. This takes Dostoyevsky out of Morson’s scheme whereby the great writers teach us to value what lies near at hand, the ordinary and everyday, as a cure for revolutionaries’ large-scale dreams.[41] At the end of his Writer’s Diary entry Dostoyevsky impersonates Levin’s domestic complacency: as he reads the newspapers with reports of atrocities he thinks, ‘Kitty is in fine spirits and had a good appetite today… What do I care about what goes on over there in another hemisphere?’ Dostoyevsky finishes in his own voice:  ‘Is this how Levin ends his epic?… So what is it, then, that they are teaching us?’[42] By ‘they’ he means ‘novelists today’, standing outside that category himself. Certainly, Tolstoy is not teaching what Dostoyevsky is teaching. Morson only mentions their artistic appreciation of each other, never ideological difference. The ending of War and Peace is conservative in its marriages and settling-down on estates, and in its final conversation of the characters where the women agree with everything their new husbands say, against opinions that they held before. Turgenev’s Yelena would find these family circles suffocating, let alone Chernyshevsky’s Vera. Morson suggests Anna Karenina’s Dolly is the real hero of that book, even above Levin; but her domesticity, of course, is a poor offer for women who wished to be active in the world like Yelena or fully emancipated like Vera. When Turgenev ends a novel in domesticity he is more ambivalent; whether the ‘jackdaws’ (homebody birds, used as a jeer by Bazarov) who marry at the end of Fathers and Children have sunk into complacency or found the rightful sphere for human activity is left much more open to question than in Tolstoy’s two novels. For Dostoyevsky, both Turgenev and Tolstoy were ‘landowner-gentry writers’[43] and he noticed the effects of this in their plots, not only in their circumstances which made the quiet life and incremental improvement in management of an estate an option for them and a natural end for a novel. War and Peace, for Dostoyevsky, was a beautiful evocation of a world that had always been illusory, because based on slavery (serfdom).[44] Anna Karenina frustrated him with its class interests, that ignored current pressing concerns in wider society; he is not convinced by Levin’s pretensions to be ‘one of the people’.[45] Dostoyevsky does not do the domestic ending, and certainly not on a landowner’s estate.[46] He asks in his Writer’s Diary why Tolstoy does not instead address the ‘accidental families’, dysfunctional families that Dostoyevsky sees on the rise in Russia, with ad hoc parents; as Anna Karenina comes out, he is plotting his last novels on an ‘accidental family’ and on the terrible family of The Brothers Karamazov.[47] The family question is not apolitical; ending in domesticity can advocate quiescence, settling for things as they are; to refuse to end a novel this way bespeaks an urge for change. To brush out the difference between Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy is to ignore that Tolstoy retained aristocratic values while Dostoyevsky probably thought like a radical. Neither of them is classless or non-political or in Kelly’s word, liberal, which is the default position of Morson, who is too keen to bring the novelists to it. Tolstoy’s essential conservatism, in his two major novels, should not go unnoticed, nor should Dostoyevsky’s ongoing passion for social justice and for change.

Demons was outdated even as its last instalments were published in 1871-2; a ‘sea-change’ on the Russian radical left saw a great shift away from almost everything Dostoyevsky was most hostile to.[48] The Populists of the 70s had much in common with the Utopian Socialists of Dostoyevsky’s youth, when he himself had joined a secret revolutionary circle.[49] Like the Utopians, the Populists were Christ-inspired in their ethics, even when they remained atheists (his persistent point of difference with them).[50] They rejected the materialist, scientific-determinist basis of the Nihilists before them, seen at its harshest in Bazarov and those one or two radicals who defended Bazarov and identified their cause with him.[51] By this shift Fathers and Children with its 60s style of radical was outdated too. Morson puts ‘intelligentsia “science”’ in inverted commas, to say that ideology came above science, as it came above everything; though they thought themselves science-based, the natural sciences existed for them in order to prove social and political doctrines already held.[52] This does not do justice to what the intelligenty thought their project was. Science-based radicals had begun with the axiom that ‘only natural science was free of ideological contamination’ and therefore was ‘the only reliable source for social values’.[53] The Bazarovs believed this axiom, which makes them rather anti-ideological, in their own eyes, than ideologues. Social orders were bad because ‘human life is constructed… upon the basis of abstract ideas’;[54] that is, the Bazarovs rejected abstractions, which is the contrary of what Morson says of radicals as a whole. For him, they were addicted to ‘theoretism’, defined as the state when theory becomes a universal prescription, a perfect application, with particulars, the contingent, the circumstantial forgotten. Trust in science instead of human-made social orders, such as exhibited by Bazarov, did not last. In 1879 one hold-out for the old ‘positive knowledge’ ceded reluctantly and wrote, ‘let us agree that we were mistaken to think that the frog would save the world’ – a reference to Bazarov’s dissection of frogs.[55] Daniel Todes in his history of evolutionary science in Russia reports that Bazarov’s ‘plain scientism was soon overturned’,[56] although the novel, in immortalising this type, may contribute to an impression of more longevity. A ‘populist critique of scientism’ ensued in the 70s.[57] Bazarov was not a socialist; he explicitly refuses to be content to work for those less well off or for people in the future; he is concerned with good for himself and does not have cooperative values.[58] However, the Russian natural sciences found cooperation within and even between species more prevalent than that ‘struggle for survival’ which evolutionary science in Europe concentrated on. There was a general rejection in Russia of the ‘struggle’ trope and its justification of selfishness, in favour of cooperation as an evolutionary driver, and therefore the right way for human society.[59] It is against the background of this distinctly Russian science that the Populist ‘movement to the people’ emerged, which believed in a proto-socialism among the peasants.

Populism was anti-intellectual. Morson does not seem to include this brand of radical in his intelligenty group, for he gives intelligenty the criteria that ‘they never doubted the leading role of the intelligentsia itself’; they presumed their own ‘entitlement to rule’.[60] But the Populists, from the educated classes, turned against the idea that the intelligentsia knew better than the people. Their ‘going to the people’ movement had as its aim to ‘understand their lives, so that the society of the future would be based on their needs and aspirations and not on the theories of an intellectual elite.’[61] In part because radical Russia had been overwhelmingly horrified by Nechaev with his dictatorship by secret circle and his murder of a member of it, post-Nechaev Populism was against authoritarian socialism or deception of the people.[62] Populist thinkers taught that ‘whenever ‘consciousness’ had been imposed on the masses, a new breed of exploiters had come to power’.[63] Change must be ‘not from above but from below.’[64] The nightmares of Demons, the novel inspired by Nechaev, were in recession: ‘to make the revolution for the people would be to go against the antiauthoritarian ethos of populism and to perpetuate the rule of coercive elites’.[65] Their anti-intellectualism struck a chord with Dostoyevsky, who had come to just the same conclusions in his forced encounter with the people in prison in Siberia. Never again, after prison, did Dostoyevsky think intellectual prescriptions were of help in Russia; the way forward lay in the people, and in what they believed.[66] Populism reconciled Dostoyevsky to the left.[67]

Distinctions between ideas and ideology, belief and commitment, can be hard to make; but it is fair to say Dostoyevsky was no enemy to ideas or to belief. He was less ‘anti-ideological’ than Turgenev, who had a ‘mistrust of systems’ but also a temperamental propensity to preach futility of effort.[68] Dostoyevsky can be seen as an optimist in contradistinction to Turgenev’s pessimist; he liked to end novels on an inspirational note whenever he found this feasible (Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, as against the prose-poem on futility that winds up Turgenev’s Smoke). He has a strong conviction that few persons are beyond salvation in a moral sense, and he often depicts a total change of life, from Raskolnikov to Zosima – in other words, conversion. Religious conversions such as Zosima’s are not greatly differentiated from ideological conversions (Raskolnikov) or moral-spiritual ones with neither overt religion or ideology (Dmitri and Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov). Even his quiescent characters – Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, Alyosha, both with a Christ-like meekness – are agents of transformation in other people. To be passive but transformative is a very different thing than to live the quiet life and be self-involved, which is Dostoyevsky’s verdict on Levin. They live for other people – whoever calls on them, known or unknown, family or stranger. Theirs is not an ethic of ‘do good near at hand’, and ‘to make the world anew’ is a notion that attracts them, not repels them. These three authors’ ideal characters are not in the least the same types. Morson claims the novelists mistrust ‘suddenness’ and teach gradualism; a love for ‘suddenness’ seems to be a psychological trait, and in the political sphere leans one to revolution. However, Dostoyevsky was never immune to the possibilities of suddenness, while he became convinced revolution was entirely a European concept, irrelevant to Russian circumstances.[69] Although he invested his hope in reforms from the tsar-liberator, he was subject himself to wild ‘eschatological’ visions for the world, the collapse of Europe and a renewal that would spring from Russia.[70] Morson cites the author’s use of his own experience of epilepsy in The Idiot, and equates the sense of spiritual harmony before fits which he describes for Prince Myshkin with other false dreams of sudden or violent solutions. But Dostoyevsky always clung to the hope that his experiences of a universal harmony in the moments before fits were not simply due to illness but had a true element of insight into those scriptures he has Prince Myshkin quote: ‘There shall be no more time’.[71] For Morson to say that these raptures ‘led inevitably to insanity’ the way revolution led to a social psychosis is too condemnatory even within the precincts of the novel, to leave aside the author’s own prognosis. Prince Myshkin does end insane, but this does not necessarily devalue his glimpses of harmony, and Dostoyevsky’s own investment in that scriptural text is clear.

One of Dostoyevsky’s main lessons is that people have swinging personalities, open to conversion or moral change; Russians in particular swung from one extreme to the other, as characters say several times in Brothers Karamazov. This is why he can project a sequel where the Christ-imitating Alyosha becomes a revolutionary. Dostoyevsky’s vision of a swinging personality is not hostile to ideas. Key is a scriptural verse he uses in Demons: ‘I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth’.[72] In his Writer’s Diary he says it is a trait of Russians to take ideas over-seriously, to pursue them to ends undreamt of where they began, in Europe.

Can a Russian youth remain indifferent to the influence of these leaders of progressive European thought, and in particular to the Russian aspect of their teachings? Please allow me this funny phrase “the Russian aspect of their teachings” because a Russian aspect of their teachings really does exist. It consists of those conclusions drawn from their teachings that take on the form of an invincible axiom, conclusions that are drawn only in Russia; in Europe, as people say, the possibility of these conclusions is not even suspected.[73]

This Russianness he accepts; he presents it over and over in his novels, and certainly he sees it in himself. Dostoyevsky’s biographical journey from revolutionary to reactionary and part the way back again is not that of a person who looks to the middle ground like Isaiah Berlin’s liberal, based on Turgenev. Neither are his novels. Even Demons, written at a time when he felt most estranged from the left, prefers a believer to an uncommitted person, and finds the potential for salvation in those most mad with ‘atheism, revolutionism’ and the rest of Morson’s list.[74] Kirillov, maddened with atheism, gives a moving tribute to Christ; and if he swung, as the character Shatov tells him, he would have the dedication of a saint, instead of his self-sacrifice by pistol to prove there is no God. Kirillov may be ‘demented’ or similar words that critics call him; nevertheless he is presented with warm sympathy, and his last night on earth, shared with Shatov whose last night it is also, reveals the human values of both, in the novel’s warmest pages. Shatov, the victim of the secret circle which he has tried to exit, has not renounced revolution because he has acquired a sceptical attitude for great ideas, but because he has converted to other ideas, every bit as fervid and similar to Dostoyevsky’s own. Whether or not people are ‘believers’ by temperament is important in the book, and if they are there is hope for them, no matter what their current ideas. It is Stavrogin’s tragedy that he can seed ideas in other people (both Kirillov and Shatov) but never commit to them himself.[75] It is he who is the ‘lukewarm’ in the verse of scripture, empty, who commits crimes trivial or terrible from boredom. The Nechaev-figure Dostoyevsky has turned into ‘a scoundrel, not a socialist’, for no reason discovered by his intellectual biographer Joseph Frank. Not after his own secret circle, whose ethics he defends in the Writer’s Diary: ‘There was not a single “monster” or “scoundrel” among the Petrashevsky Circle’.[76] But Verkhovensky’s utter vacancy of principles, beliefs or other moral content answers to Dostoyevsky’s idea of true villainy, which is an inability to dedicate the self to any cause. To have a heartfelt socialist at the centre of this conspiracy would have aligned more easily with the ‘anti-ideological novel’, but less so with Dostoyevsky’s understanding of evil.

A certain disgust with radical politics lies not far beneath the surface of this chapter by Gary Saul Morson; a one-sidedness typical of those who wish to range the great novelists of the Russian nineteenth century against the revolutionaries. It seems to be too easy for such historians to position the novelists in an ideal liberal centre space that is free from ideology. No such space existed, but is the blind spot of historians who do not recognise that their own work too has a tendency, much as Morson openly despises works with tendency. Dostoyevsky in particular is an ill fit in schemes of writers versus radicals, for he did not change his spots in Siberia so far as to leave behind the traits and the concerns that led him to revolutionary activity in youth. Morson makes him and his lessons more or less equivalent to Tolstoy’s, but Dostoyevsky’s own writings testify against this. Turgenev had a strong pessimism that led him not so much to uphold the status quo as to preach the futility of effort, a propensity that makes him anti-change. These great novelists did not sing from one hymn-book, contra revolution and its works on behalf of liberal humanism. The revolutionaries themselves were a more diverse set than Morson grants: authoritarian or anti-authoritarian, materialist or idealist, inspired by science or by a religious ethic. It is of the utmost importance to distinguish, to admit the plural worlds of both the writers and the radicals. Neither should be put into the singular.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Chernyshevsky, Nikolai What Is To Be Done?, trans. Michael R. Katz, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1989.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor The Brothers Karamazov, trans. David McDuff, London, Penguin, 2003.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Crime and Punishment, trans. David McDuff, London, Penguin, 2003.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, New York, Vintage Classics, 1994.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor The Idiot, trans. David McDuff, London, Penguin, 2004.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor A Writer’s Diary, trans. Kenneth Lantz, abridged edn, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2009.

Katz, Michael R. (trans. and ed.) Fathers and Children: A Norton Critical Edition, 2^nd edn, New York, W.W. Norton, 2009.

Turgenev, Ivan Fathers and Sons, trans. Richard Freeborn, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991.

Turgenev, Ivan Rudin and On the Eve, trans. David McDuff, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999.

Turgenev, Ivan Virgin Soil, trans. Michael Pursglove, Richmond, Alma Classics, 2014.

Secondary works

Berlin, Isaiah Russian Thinkers, 2^nd edn, London, Penguin, 2008.

Frank, Joseph Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1995.

Frank, Joseph Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2002.

Freeborn, Richard The Russian Revolutionary Novel: Turgenev to Pasternak, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Hamburg, G.M. ‘Russian Intelligentsias’ in A History of Russian Thought, eds. William Leatherbarrow and Derek Offord, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 44-69.

Kelly, Aileen M. Towards Another Shore: Russian Thinkers Between Necessity and Chance, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1998.

Morson, Gary Saul ‘Tradition and Counter-Tradition: The Radical Intelligentsia and Classical Russian Literature’ in A History of Russian Thought, eds. William Leatherbarrow and Derek Offord, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 141-168.

Offord, Derek Nineteenth-Century Russia: Opposition to Autocracy, Harlow, Longman, 1999.

Peace, Richard ‘Nihilism’ in A History of Russian Thought, eds. William Leatherbarrow and Derek Offord, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 116-140.

Todes, Daniel P. Darwin Without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989.

Venturi, Franco Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia, trans. Francis Haskell, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1960.

Footnotes

[1] Gary Saul Morson, ‘Tradition and Counter-Tradition: The Radical Intelligentsia and Classical Russian Literature’ in A History of Russian Thought, eds. William Leatherbarrow and Derek Offord, Cambridge, 2010, pp. 141-168.

[2] For different definitions of ‘intelligentsia’ in the Russian context, see G.M. Hamburg, ‘Russian Intelligentsias’ in A History of Russian Thought, pp. 44-69.

[3] Morson, ‘Tradition and Counter-Tradition’, p. 143.

[4] Ibid., p. 141.

[5] Aileen M. Kelly, Towards Another Shore: Russian Thinkers Between Necessity and Chance, New Haven and London, 1998, p. 20.

[6] Morson, ‘Tradition and Counter-Tradition’, p. 149.

[7] Kelly, Towards Another Shore, pp. 119-21. She uses historian Adam Ulum as representative.

[8] Morson, ‘Tradition and Counter-Tradition’, p. 149.

[9] Letter to K.K. Sluchevsky, in Michael R. Katz (ed.), Fathers and Children: A Norton Critical Edition, 2^nd edn, New York, 2009, p. 182.

[10] Kelly, Towards Another Shore, p. 26.

[11] For contemporary responses to Fathers and Children, see Katz (ed.), Fathers and Children: A Norton Critical Edition; for responses to Dostoyevsky’s Demons, see Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871, Princeton, 1995, pp. 396-413.

[12] For the ‘superfluous person’ in Russian fiction, see Derek Offord, Nineteenth-Century Russia: Opposition to Autocracy, Harlow, 1999, pp. 19-22; in Turgenev, see Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, 2^nd edn, London, 2008, pp. 299-350.

[13] Kelly, Towards Another Shore, p. 124.

[14] Ivan Turgenev, ‘Apropos of Fathers and Sons’, in Katz (ed.) Fathers and Children: A Norton Critical Edition, p. 169.

[15] Letter to M.M. Stasyulevich, quoted in Berlin, Russian Thinkers, p. 335.

[16] Morson, ‘Tradition and Counter-Tradition’, p. 149.

[17] Kelly, Towards Another Shore, pp. 102-6.

[18] Letter to A.A. Fet, in Katz (ed.) Fathers and Children: A Norton Critical Edition, p. 181.

[19] Turgenev, ‘Apropos’, in Katz (ed.) Fathers and Children: A Norton Critical Edition, p. 168.

[20] Berlin, Russian Thinkers, pp. 342-50.

[21] For the ‘positive hero’, see Offord, Opposition to Autocracy, pp. 59-62.

[22] Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is To Be Done?, trans. Michael R. Katz, Ithaca and London, 1989; Richard Freeborn, The Russian Revolutionary Novel: Turgenev to Pasternak, Cambridge, 1982, p. 21.

[23] Freeborn, The Russian Revolutionary Novel, pp. 24-7.

[24] Morson, ‘Tradition and Counter-Tradition’, p. 145.

[25] Frank, Miraculous Years, pp. 204-22.

[26] Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, trans. Richard Freeborn, Oxford, 1991, pp. 103-4.

[27] Morson, ‘Tradition and Counter-Tradition’, p. 143.

[28] Kelly, Towards Another Shore, pp. 134-54.

[29] Ibid., pp. 144-7.

[30] Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881, Princeton, 2002, p. 484; conversation recorded by Aleksey Suvorin.

[31] Ibid. p. 483; see also the discussion of this quote in Kelly, Towards Another Shore, p. 75.

[32] Frank, Mantle of the Prophet, p. 481.

[33] Morson, ‘Tradition and Counter-Tradition’, p. 145.

[34] This is Erkel; see Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, New York, 1994, pp. 597-629.

[35] Kelly, Towards Another Shore, pp. 147-154.

[36] Morson, ‘Tradition and Counter-Tradition’, pp. 151-2.

[37] Ibid., p. 152.

[38] Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, trans. Kenneth Lantz, abridged edn, Evanston, 2009, pp. 436-42.

[39] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. David McDuff, London, 2003, pp. 372-404.

[40] Frank, Mantle of the Prophet, pp. 621-35.

[41] Morson, ‘Tradition and Counter-Tradition’, pp. 158-60.

[42] Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, p. 442.

[43] Frank, Miraculous Years, p. 424; Frank, Mantle of the Prophet, pp. 167-8.

[44] Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, p. 342.

[45] Ibid., pp. 438-40.

[46] There is an exception: his light comic novel The Village of Stephanchikovo (1859).

[47] Frank, Mantle of the Prophet, p. 170.

[48] Frank, Mantle of the Prophet, pp. 65-86; Kelly, Towards Another Shore, pp. 55-79.

[49] Frank, Mantle of the Prophet, p. 76.

[50] Ibid., p. 80.

[51] Katz (ed.) Fathers and Children: A Norton Critical Edition, p. 193.

[52] Morson, ‘Tradition and Counter-Tradition’, p. 144.

[53] Daniel P. Todes, Darwin Without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought, Oxford, 1989, pp. 24-44.

[54] Ibid., p. 29.

[55] N.V. Shelgunov quoted in Todes, Darwin Without Malthus, p. 35.

[56] Todes, Darwin Without Malthus, pp. 31-2.

[57] Ibid., p. 32.

[58] Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, pp. 126-30.

[59] Todes, Darwin Without Malthus; the book as a whole is a study of this.

[60] Morson, ‘Tradition and Counter-Tradition’, pp. 145-6.

[61] Kelly, Towards Another Shore, p. 128.

[62] Ibid., p. 126; Offord, Opposition to Autocracy, pp. 66-81.

[63] Offord, Opposition to Autocracy, p. 69.

[64] Ibid., p. 71.

[65] Kelly, Towards Another Shore, p. 125.

[66] Frank, Mantle of the Prophet, pp. 65-86.

[67] Ibid., p. 85.

[68] Kelly, Towards Another Shore, pp. 91-118.

[69] Frank, Miraculous Years, pp. 435-72.

[70] As noted by Morson, ‘Tradition and Counter-Tradition’, p. 147.

[71] Frank, Miraculous Years, pp. 365-8.

[72] Dostoevsky, Demons, p. 689.

[73] Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, p. 69.

[74] Morson, ‘Tradition and Counter-Tradition’, p. 143.

[75] Frank, Miraculous Years, pp. 477-80.

[76] Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, p. 65.