p. 59, Mikhailovsky Theatre: The reference is to the annual season of French plays given by visiting French actors in the Mikhailovsky Theatre in St Petersburg. (translator’s note)
p. 59, Grandison… Alcibiades… Montmorency: “Grandison” and “Montmorency” are titles. The name “Alcibiades” was given to the Margrave of Brandenburg-Kulmbach.
p. 61, faire fortune: “Make your fortune” (French).
p. 62, Abbé Sieyès… famous pamphlet: Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (1748–1836) was a statesman and constitutional theorist. His influential 1789 pamphlet Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? (“What is the Third Estate?”) was a significant contribution to the thinking behind the French Revolution.
p. 67, Cabet: Etienne Cabet (1788–1856) was a French utopian socialist.
p. 68, liberté… mort: Based on the slogan proclaimed by Graccus Babeuf (1760–95). Some of the “decrees” he published for the benefit of his future communist republic bore the words: “Liberté, Egalité, Bonheur Commun ou la Mort.” (translator’s note)
p. 68, Louis-Philippe: Louis-Philippe (1773–1850) was King of France from 1830 to 1848.
p. 69, Napoleon III: Charles-Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (1808–73) was President of the Second Republic of France from 1850 to 1852, and Emperor of the French from 1852 to 1870.
p. 70, Barbier’s iambics: Henry Auguste Barbier (1805–82) was a French poet who, inspired by the French Revolution of 1830, condemned the evils of his time.
p. 72, Garibaldi… Aspromonte: Guiseppe Garibaldi (1807–82), the Italian political leader, was wounded and taken prisoner at the Battle of Aspromonte, which arose out of the presence of Napoleon III’s French troops in Rome.
p. 74, Après moi le déluge: “After me, the deluge” (French). The phrase is commonly attributed to Louis XV (1710–74).
p. 75, Louis XIV: Louis XIV (1638–1715) was King of France from 1643 until his death. p. 76, l’état c’est moi: “I am the State” (French).
p. 76, Thiers, Guizot, Odilon Barrot: Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877), François Guizot (1787–1874) and Odilon Barrot (1791–1873) were French politicians.
p. 77, suffrage universel: “Universal suffrage” (French).
p. 79, salle des pas perdus: “Room of lost footsteps” (French).
p. 81, Jules Favre: Jules Favre (1809–80) was a French statesman. p. 81, Ci-gît: “Here lies” (French).
p. 81, Voltaire: Voltaire was the pseudonym of François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), the world-renowned French writer.
p. 81, Corneille: Pierre Corneille (1606–84) was a French poet and dramatist, and is considered the founder of French tragedy.
p. 82, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), the highly influential philosopher, writer and political thinker.
p. 82, l’homme de la nature et de la vérité: “The man of nature and truth” (French).
p. 82, Marshal Lannes: Jean Lannes (1769–1809), Duke of Montebello, a French general who rose from humble beginnings to his eventual prominence.
p. 83, C’est fini, monsieur: “It’s finished, sir” (French). p. 83, quelques sénateurs: “These senators” (French).
p. 86, en flagrant délit: “In the act of wrongdoing” (French).
p. 89, Le russe est sceptique et moqueur: “The Russians are sceptical and mocking” (French). p. 89, grandes eaux: “Great waters” (French).
p. 89, 96, Le Sage’s Devil: Alain René Le Sage (1668–1747), a French novelist and playwright, whose works include Asmodeus, or The Devil on Two Sticks.
p. 90, Mon mari n’a pas encore vu la mer: “My husband still hasn’t seen the sea” (French). p. 90, se rouler dans l’herbe: “To roll in the grass” (French).
p. 90, avec la nature: “With nature” (French).
p. 91, mon arbre, mon mur: “My tree, my wall” (French). p. 94, bonnet de cotton: “Cotton cap” (French).
p. 96, l’épée de mon père: “My father’s sword” (French).
Preface
1
IT IS USUAL to divide Dostoevsky’s literary activity into two distinct periods. The first opens with the publication in 1844 of a somewhat sentimental novel, Poor Folk, which brought him immediate literary renown and popular esteem; it closes with what in effect are his reminiscences of life as a political convict (House of the Dead), serialized in 1861–62 in his newly-founded periodical Vremya (Time). The second period, we are invariably told, is ushered in with that oddly strident confession of personal guilt and inadequacy, in 1864, entitled Notes from the Underground, and finishes with the Pushkin Commemoration Address delivered a few months before his death.
To state that Dostoevsky’s writings fall into two fairly definite periods is, of course, to state the obvious: the author’s attitude to the world, his choice of subject matter and his treatment of plot undergo in the 1860s a sudden and radical change.
His earlier novels aim mainly at the entertainment of the reader; undeterred by considerations of verisimilitude or psychological probability, they glide over the surface of life without stopping to take soundings of what goes on underneath; they shun deep analysis and they lack the later Dostoevskian eagerness to reconcile the actions of men with their consciences, conceived in terms of spiritual anguish.
It is odd, however, that the opening of the second and more characteristic phase of Dostoevsky’s literary activity should up till now have been so unanimously ascribed by all critics to Notes from the Underground. For about a year earlier, Dostoevsky, fresh from his first contact with Western Europe (which included a week in London and three in Paris), published in his periodical his impressions of that new and alien world, using them as a peg on which to hang most of the ideas which henceforth entered in varying degrees into everything he wrote, often expressed in phrases lifted from Summer Impressions. Never again did he write anything which contained so many of his thoughts on so many subjects in so few pages.
It was as if, on the threshold of an entirely new epoch in his writing, he had decided to present his readers with a profession of faith and a synopsis of his ideas. In fact, Summer Impressions, far from deserving their Cinderella-like treatment, ought to be regarded as a chrysalis out of which developed such masterpieces as The Devils, Crime and Punishment and The Karamazov Brothers, as well as the Diary of a Writer and the figures of Father Zosima and the Grand Inquisitor. Even the Pushkin Commemoration Address, which was probably received with greater immediate acclamation than anything Dostoevsky had ever written, contains little that is not adumbrated in Summer Impressions.
The neglect from which Summer Impressions has so far suffered at the hands of literary critics is due to a variety of reasons of which style is not the least. Dostoevsky, never a good stylist, had at that time only a very slender experience as a journalist and he was obviously trying to evolve a way of writing that would enable him to put his ideas across in the most digestible form he could think of.
Unfortunately the most digestible form he could think of was one which retained all his most glaring faults of style – repetitiveness, excessive colloquialism, discursiveness, slipshod grammar – and added two of its own: forced breeziness and waggish humour. The reader must make up his mind to disregard them. If he does, he will be amply repaid.
2
THE CENTRE OF DOSTOEVSKY’S IDEAS harbours a vision of the world as a moral and spiritual unity, a “brotherly fellowship”, which must “exist in nature”, but cannot be artificially created (as both Summer Impressions and Father Zosima phrase it) and which expects, but most definitely does not demand, of its members a total responsibility for each other and for the community as a whole.
It is a unity which makes each one of us into a link in the infinite chain of causation and which, though it may relieve each individual member of the human race of total responsibility and therefore total guilt, yet thrusts upon each of us the burden of a world conscience. It is this theme which Dostoevsky later expanded into an analytical novel (Crime and Punishment) and which later still he made both his Grand Inquisitor and Father Zosima (The Karamazov Brothers) develop each in his own way.
The fundamental tragedy of men, according to Dostoevsky, comes from two kinds of actions: actions that shatter world unity (and every crime committed against one’s fellow men is an attempt to shatter it, as Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment finds out to his cost) and actions which attempt to attain a synthetic unity by artificial means. This last he considers particularly dangerous, for men, consciously or subconsciously aware of the dangers of “isolation”, all clamour for unity and, in default of genuine brotherhood, are all too eager to accept a counterfeit model in the shape of socialism or the Catholic Church, which can offer nothing but the brotherhood of an “ant hill”.
But, says Dostoevsky, both in Summer Impressions and in his capacity of Grand Inquisitor, even these men will gladly accept, for the alternative to an ant hill is a struggle of all against all, ending in “cannibalism”, when men will devour each other. Catholicism and socialism Dostoevsky regarded as being basically the same, both of them ultimately emanations of the Roman Imperial idea, which insisted on a purely mechanical, external unification of men, in the hope (at least on the part of the Catholic Church) that such a unification would in time give birth to true spiritual fellowship. This, thought Dostoevsky, was putting the cart before the horse, a mistake never committed by the Orthodox Church.
In his interpretation, the Orthodox Church expected unity to come of itself, spontaneously and with no assistance from external human agencies; and when it came, true brotherhood would be established with no need for any rules or constitutions.
In essence, of course, this is merely the Slavophile version of Russian anarchism, which was conceived as a blend of freedom and love, the former without the latter leading to anarchy, as distinct from anarchism, or “isolation” in the Dostoevskian sense, the latter without the former not, in fact, being able to exist. From Dostoevsky’s point of view,
