Utterly at odds with the chapters in A Writer’s Diary in which Dostoevsky writes with tenderness and compassion about children and miscarriages of justice, are those in which he talks, equally passionately, about politics. A new theme in the Diary appeared in June 1876 as war broke out in the Balkans. An upsurge of Pan-Slavist feeling led to advocacies of the unification of all Slavic peoples under Russian stewardship. This was Dostoevsky’s vision of Russia’s historic destiny. In a series of increasingly shrill and dogmatic articles published during the course of, first the Serbo-Turkish War from 1876 to 1878, and then the Russo-Turkish War from 1877 to 1878, he began to predict the displacement of the ‘official Christianity’ of the West by ‘a true exaltation of the truth of Christ, which has been preserved in the East, a true, new exaltation of the cross of Christ and the ultimate word of Orthodoxy, at whose head Russia has long been standing’.
Dostoevsky conceived Russia’s involvement in the conflict in apocalyptic terms, defining it as a cataclysm like the French Revolution, from which a new world order would emerge. He not only took for granted Russia’s claim to Constantinople, as undisputed leader of the Slav nations and protector of all Christians. His religious messianism also inspired megalomaniac dreams in which Russia’s unique and superior Christian virtues would enable it to heal the rift between all the European nations at loggerheads over the longstanding ‘Eastern Question’. This was the debate about how to react to the slowly collapsing Ottoman Empire, which threatened to undermine the ever-more fragile balance of power in Europe.
A corollary of Dostoevsky’s chauvinism was a deeply unpleasant xenophobia in which his greatest hostility was reserved for Russia’s beleaguered Jewish population, most of whom were still confined to the reprehensible Pale of Settlement. This was the area established by Catherine the Great in 1791 while adding large swathes of territory to Imperial Russia’s western borders during the Polish Partitions; the Empress forbade her new Jewish subjects from living outside the Pale, and even from residing in certain cities within it. The right to settle anywhere which was granted to Russia’s wealthiest Jewish merchants in 1859 as part of Alexander II’s reforms led to a policy of selective integration. The anti-Semitic theme began to surface in Dostoevsky’s Writer’s Diary in June 1876, along with the spectre of politics, and was soon keeping pace with his utopian nationalism, as expressed in his piece ‘My Paradox’. Dostoevsky’s vociferous tirades against Jewish people, whom he accused of profiteering from Russia’s post-reform industrialisation boom, fill by far the most rebarbative pages in A Writer’s Diary. They are all the more chilling for being expressions of his deeply held personal beliefs.
A few dissenting readers raised their heads over the parapet, but for the most part Dostoevsky’s Writer’s Diary was rapturously received and immediately became a best-seller, giving even the most popular journals of the time a run for their money. Some issues even had to be reprinted, and sales certainly far out-stripped those for Dostoevsky’s novels. He became a household name in Russia, even at the Imperial Court – an effusive letter was penned to the future Alexander III, who became a reader at the suggestion of Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod. The success of A Writer’s Diary in its new incarnation marked a new and significant stage in Dostoevsky’s career, in which he now assumed the role of moral teacher and prophet. If previously he wrote for and had been read by the small circles of the St Petersburg and Moscow intelligentsia, he was read now nationwide, by readers both young and old, representing all shades of the political spectrum.
Feeling that he was the first writer to pay attention to ordinary Russians and was speaking directly to them, increasing numbers of readers also started sending Dostoevsky passionate letters from the furthest reaches of the provinces. Thus was his dream of entering into conversation with his readers about the issues he raised fulfilled. Correspondents who sought to take issue with his tendentious views ran the risk of their letters being picked apart in future issues of A Writer’s Diary, but the majority responded warmly to his sincere and straightforward manner, if not with adulation and devotion. This kind of public engagement may not seem remarkable in an era in which readers are able to respond to articles online, but it was unprecedented in the history of Russian letters, and foreshadows the kinds of conversations which now take place on the internet. As such, Dostoevsky appears, in effect, as a blogger avant la lettre.
While Dostoevsky’s verbose political harangues make for uncomfortable reading in his Writer’s Diary, the many chapters in which he enters into a dialogue with fellow writers, past and present, or inserts his own pieces of short fiction, make the opposite impression, and remind us why we continue to regard him as one of the greatest literary figures of his age. In June 1876, shortly before launching into his reasons for distinguishing Russia from other European nations, he wrote a glowing obituary of George Sand, and about her supreme importance to his idealistic generation in the 1840s. In the subsequent, typically subjective piece he wrote about Sand, however, in which he assessed her legacy, it is interesting to note that he ascribed her socialist impulse to her innate moral sense. It had been Sand’s 1837 novel Mauprat, set before the French Revolution, which had converted the influential Belinsky to French Utopian Socialism, from whose political ideology Dostoevsky clearly wished to disassociate himself now.
Of all the contemporary literary works with which Dostoevsky engaged on the pages of his Writer’s Diary, Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina was the most significant. The two great novelists had met on the page (War and Peace and Crime and Punishment were published simultaneously in the same journal, The Russian Messenger), but never in person. Supremely different beings in nearly every respect, they had hitherto been outwardly respectful, but wary of each other. When instalments of Anna Karenina started appearing in 1875, however, Dostoevsky could hardly ignore it in his Writer’s Diary. To begin with, he was generous with his praise, particularly of Levin as a literary character, and devoted several pages to the novel in the February 1877 issue of his Writer’s Diary. But when he read its conclusion later in the year, he was incensed, and in the July – August issue he lambasted Levin for being egocentric, unpatriotic and out of touch with the Russian people. Dostoevsky naturally took issue with Levin’s claim that the Russian people shared his lack of concern for the predicament of the Balkan Slavs, and he also took exception to his declared unwillingness to kill, even if it resulted in the prevention of atrocities. People like Tolstoy were supposed to be our teachers, Dostoevsky thundered, but what exactly were they teaching us? Unlike Dostoevsky, of course, Tolstoy had seen active service. But Dostoevsky had lived in far greater proximity to the Russian people whom both writers revered.
Between Dostoevsky’s two verdicts in the Diary on Anna Karenina, he published ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’, his last piece of short fiction. This tightly-wrought short story presents Dostoevsky’s major themes in microcosm, directly anticipating their amplification in The Brothers Karamazov, his last and most complex masterpiece. The trajectory of its deceptively simple plot is a perfect distillation of the writer’s art. As usual, Dostoevsky felt no need to alert his reader to the transition from one register to another, or make any distinction between journalism and fiction. Russia had just declared war on Turkey, and the story appeared as a chapter in the April 1877 issue of the Writer’s Diary, sandwiched between enthusiastic warmongering and an announcement of Ekaterina Kornilova’s acquittal. ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ could thus be construed as an oblique attempt to suggest a solution to the underlying problems which had led to these events, but the story is complex, and can be interpreted in many different ways, some of which completely contradict each other. Readers of Dostoevsky’s novels are familiar with the idea of the ‘double’.
It is the name of his early novella, and also refers to his practice of thematically linking characters in his fiction. In this case there is a direct link to ‘The Meek One’, another short story in A Writer’s Diary with a theme of suicide, which was published earlier in November 1876. Both works bear the sub-title ‘A Fantastic Story’. ‘The Meek One’ is a parable of the perils of
