What shall I talk about? About everything that strikes me and sets me to thinking. And if I should find a reader and, God forbid, an opponent, I realize that one must be able to carry on a conversation and know whom to address and how to address him. I shall try to master this skill because among us, that is to say, in literature, it is the most difficult one of all.
It was in his substantial and confident third column, entitled ‘Environment’, that Dostoevsky really began to get into his stride, polemicising with imaginary opponents, and presenting opposing views in a manner reminiscent of the great Socratic dialogues sustained in his novels. This was his method of hammering out his ideological stance, although in this particular case he had no real doubts, as the subject of ‘Environment’ was one that had been close to his heart ever since his time in Siberia when he had been a political prisoner shackled in irons. This was the problem of crime and punishment.
Amongst the sweeping judicial reforms introduced by Alexander II in the 1860s, the implementation of trial by jury was one of the most important, and Dostoevsky had spent long hours in the reading rooms of foreign libraries while he was abroad, avidly following court cases. Now that he had returned to St Petersburg, he could attend trials in person, and his Writer’s Diary provided him with the perfect forum in which to report and comment on their proceedings. He was particularly exercised by the prevalence of acquittals secured by artful lawyers drawing on fashionable utilitarian theories about social determinism. In ‘Environment’, he related the case of a man who had beaten and abused his wife for so long she had finally hanged herself, yet he was still granted clemency. In Dostoevsky’s hands, this was no dry narration of gruesome events, but a dramatic and heart-rending retelling in which he let his creative imagination off the leash. The notion that environment could be posited as a legitimate defence in court cases was reprehensible to Dostoevsky, because it was tantamount to the removal of free choice and criminal responsibility, and he was uniquely qualified to speak out. The convicts he had encountered in prison, he pointed out, never ceased to regard themselves as criminals. As we know from Dostoevsky’s major fiction, individual moral responsibility is one of his central themes. In The Brothers Karamazov he would extend it still further, arguing through his character of the Elder Zosima that no sin is in fact isolated, and that we are all responsible for everyone and everything.
Dostoevsky’s Writer’s Diary columns in 1873 were well received, but his duties at The Citizen, which included penning regular articles on foreign affairs, proved so onerous that he decided to relinquish his post as editor at the end of the year. Two years later, after the completion of his next novel, A Raw Youth, he was ready to devote himself again to his unusual journalistic project, and to take a gamble by publishing it himself, with the invaluable practical assistance of his wife. From 1876 until the end of 1877, the Diary appeared as an independent monthly journal, with each issue divided first into chapters, like a novel, and then into idiosyncratically titled sub-divisions. Every issue was continuously numbered, signed with Dostoevsky’s name, then bound into a book at the end of the year to be sold as a separate volume, thus reinforcing the Diary’s overarching unity. Nothing like it had ever been published before in the history of Russian journalism. Although Dostoevsky was now limited to sixteen pages per issue, which, as an ex-convict, he had first to submit to the censor, it is telling that he nevertheless chose a large typeface. It was not just that he wanted to communicate his message to a wide audience, but that he wanted to break down the traditional barriers between the writer and the reader, liberate the printed word from conventions, and make it as intimate and oral as possible. Igor Volgin, Russia’s leading Dostoevsky scholar, has gone so far to suggest that this quest to eradicate the modern disease of alienation amounted to a desire to restore human communication to a pre-Gutenberg state. Dostoevsky took pains now to write as if he was addressing a friend, using language that was simple and unaffected.
The contents of A Writer’s Diary also changed once Dostoevsky became his own editor and publisher. He continued with the same mixture of journalism, memoir and commentary, seasoned with the occasional short story, but was no longer merely impelled to reveal the incompatibility of Christianity and Socialism, or the gulf between the corrupt educated class and the people. Dostoevsky’s main focus now was to articulate and document the spiritual crisis he perceived in society. The collapse of moral and social foundations was attributable in his view to ‘dissociation’, which he understood biblically in terms of the original sin of separation from God, and whose most chilling expression was suicide. A Writer’s Diary is full of suicides, as in the second chapter of his diary entry from January 1877, ‘The Boy Celebrating his Saint’s Day’, for example.
Dostoevsky moves from recounting an incident from Tolstoy’s first piece of published fiction, Childhood, in which the young narrator dreams of killing himself after a minor misdemeanour, to discussion of a letter a reader had sent to him about the shocking real-life incident of a twelve-year-old boy who really had committed suicide. As a scion of the nobility, Tolstoy’s hero could safely dream, Dostoevsky points out, ‘while the other child dreamed it, and then he did it’. He was convinced there was not only something deeply wrong about the current epidemic of suicides, particularly those of children, but also about how little of Russian life had been properly observed by writers except that of the gentry, which he dismissed as insignificant and untypical. An element of missionary zeal can be detected in his rhetorical question as to who would be the ‘historian’ of all the other corners of Russian life, able to discern the essential principles surviving the ever-encroaching disintegration and chaos. This was Dostoevsky’s mission in A Writer’s Diary, also to predict the imminent arrival in Europe of a transcendent new era of Christian brotherly love and harmony inspired by the Russian people.
Since Dostoevsky was the devoted father of three young children in the 1870s, it is perhaps not surprising that broken-down, ‘accidental’ families emerge as a recurring leitmotif in his analysis of a society in crisis in A Writer’s Diary. The suffering of children was probably the topic he found the most agonising of all, because it was a sticking point in his relationship with the Orthodox Church. There is a connection here with ‘At Tikhon’s’, the controversial chapter of his recently completed novel The Devils that was considered too obscene to print in his lifetime. In it, the mysterious Nikolai Stavrogin presents Bishop Tikhon with his written confession of raping a twelve-year-old girl, and standing by passively when she subsequently hangs herself.
Are there some sins for which one cannot be redeemed? Can one subscribe to a faith which allows the suffering of children? These questions, which would take centre stage in The Brothers Karamazov, are asked sotto voce throughout A Writer’s Diary and are raised in the very first issue in its new imprint. Dostoevsky devotes part of the first chapter for January 1876 to describing the popular children’s party hosted by the Artists’ Club in St Petersburg where he had taken his daughter to see the Christmas tree. The first part of Chapter Two, ‘The Boy with his Hand Out’, contains Dostoevsky’s sombre meditation on the dismal fate of poverty-stricken children from ‘accidental families’. It was prompted by his repeated encounter in the days running up to Christmas with the same small, under-dressed boy begging on the streets in freezing conditions, and the discovery that there were ‘hordes’ of urchins like him enduring a similar existence. Dostoevsky then moves seamlessly in the second part of the chapter to ‘The Boy at Christ’s Christmas Party’, his own made-up story about a newly orphaned urchin, six years old or younger, who dreams of being taken to heaven just as he in fact is perishing from the cold, alone in a courtyard.
In February 1876, Dostoevsky published a very special story about a suffering child which exemplifies the unifying idea of A Writer’s Diary, and provides the missing link in the story of his religious conversion in Siberia. As he explains, he had invented a narrator for his Notes from the House of the Dead, and had hardly ever before spoken of his prison life in print. In ‘The Peasant Marey’, he recalls the disgust he had experienced in observing the drunken carousals of peasant convicts one Easter, and how it had led him to recall a moment in his own childhood when one of the family’s serfs showed him kindness. The memory was a transformative and ecstatic experience, causing Dostoevsky to see Christian virtues not only in his fellow convicts, albeit heavily obscured by years of oppression, but in the Russian people as a whole. For Dostoevsky, the Russian people preserved the Christian ideal at heart even while sinning, and therefore would play a pivotal role in the future salvation of Russia. Their supposed tendency towards extreme humility, need for suffering, and thirst for redemption are all ideas we meet in his fiction.
Children also
