His analysis of Western Europe, first outlined in the Summer Impressions and thereafter relentlessly pursued through the pages of most of his books and particularly of his Diary of a Writer, presents a strange amalgam of Slavophile prejudice and Fourierist ideals, of religious utopianism and historical materialism, and of traditionalist concepts expressed in terms of the Communist Manifesto.
His earlier enthusiasm for Fourier – the cause, indeed, of his sojourn in the “House of the Dead” – and his acute awareness of those social and economic forces that lie at the bottom of our cultural edifice, lead him to give certain historical events an interpretation rendered familiar to us by Marxist writings. Thus he regards the French Revolution as a mere sham, benefiting no one but the middle classes, the bourgeoisie, whom it enabled to obtain a firm grip on the proletariat in order to exploit it. The hollowness of the Revolution, he says significantly enough in his Diary of a Writer, was exposed by the execution of Babeuf, the apostle of early communism.
This attitude colours the whole of his approach to France, with which a large part of the book is concerned. Like Marx, he refuses to see in the Revolution’s, and later the Republic’s, slogan – Liberty, Equality, Fraternity – anything but a piece of bourgeois hypocrisy, a gigantic bluff; he considers, like Marx, that there can be no real freedom in Western Europe without economic power; like Marx, he believes that proletarians are bound to unite – “form their own heap” – in defence of their own interests without the fraudulent pretence of speaking for humanity as a whole; he has the true Marxist (and Slavophile) contempt for Western liberalism and for all forms of parliamentary government, and, like Marx again, sees in the whole network of European social policy and behaviour nothing but the bourgeoisie’s frantic attempt to retain the status quo. But the proletariat, he says, is knocking at the door and one day will force it open. Repudiated by the bourgeoisie and kept away from this world’s goods, it is ready to join in the class struggle and eager to repudiate the repudiators.
It is obviously a theme that haunted Dostoevsky, for, having dealt with it in some detail in his Summer Impressions, he returned to it and repeated it with exasperating frequency in his Diary of a Writer many years later. No doubt his insistence on the dire fate awaiting the Western capitalist world, though often expressed in quasi-Marxist terms, was due to highly un-Marxist causes. It was due, in fact, to the wishful thinking of a Russian nationalist obsessed by the fear of Western supremacy, and suffering, like so many Russians, from an acute inferiority complex vis-à-vis the West.
As a result Dostoevsky fails to apply his semi-Marxist analysis to his own country, but, on the contrary, claims that no proletarian revolution is possible in Russia for the simple reason that the Russian proletariat is not only contented, but is becoming increasingly so. He does, however, in his Summer Impressions and later in his other works, raise one point – one of the most interesting in the book, for the reason of touching upon perhaps the most fateful of all Russian nineteenth-century weaknesses: the loss of contact between the educated classes and the peasantry. It was this loss of contact which led to lack of understanding on both sides, to an attitude of supercilious superiority or guilty fawning on the part of the educated classes, and a half-sullen, half-contemptuous withdrawal into their own community by the peasants.
It resulted in the treatment of the latter by the former as if, to quote Dostoevsky, they were “enemy tribes”; it led to the rootlessness of the intelligentsia, and the Slavophile movement, which had Dostoevsky’s full and active sympathy, but whose ridiculous sides (like the wearing of bogus national dress to placate the “enemy tribes”) he was quick to perceive, and it led to the phenomenon of “Westernizing expatriates” – Russians who felt more at home in Western Europe than they did in their own country, where they found no congenial occupation for themselves, stayed out of Russia as much as they could and were a constant butt for Dostoevsky’s rather heavy-handed sarcasm. It also led eventually to the Russian Revolution.
3
THE MARQUIS DE CUSTINE, whose very brief stay in Russia preceded Dostoevsky’s visit to Paris by a whole generation and gave rise to a very long book, was shocked by the lack of freedom in Russia,
the ubiquity of police informers, the arbitrariness of government and the slavish adulation of the Emperor. He ascribed it all either expressly or by implication to national character as well as to the country’s remoteness from the civilizing influence of Western Europe in general and of France in particular. When, a quarter of a century later, in the summer of 1862, Dostoevsky came to Paris, he too was shocked, and what shocked him, so he confesses or implies in his Impressions, was lack of freedom in France, the ubiquity of police informers, the arbitrariness of government and the slavish adulation of the Emperor.
He ascribes it all to national character, which produced the French bourgeois with their servile mentality.
The impact made on Dostoevsky by England was strikingly different. For the moment (for he vacillated in this) he despised the French, and Paris, he wrote to a friend, bored him to death. But London overwhelmed him.
True, the picture he draws of it and of the British social scene is somehow reminiscent of Gustave Doré’s illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, and he is driven to describe it in apocalyptic terms, but at least there is no room in it for the meanness and pettiness which he found across the Channel. It is curious, too, that his judgement of the two countries completely reverses the more usual view, accepted as axiomatic by the world at large.
It is France, not England, in his estimation, that is a nation of shopkeepers, and it is France that is hypocritical when it comes to moral standards, for she tries to slur over and, if possible, hide certain distasteful facts of life such as, for instance, irregularity of sexual behaviour, commercial dishonesty and the presence of poverty in the midst of plenty. Dostoevsky’s England has her share of social vices, but they are there for everyone to see: no attempt is made to conceal them. In fact, if France’s outstanding trait is hypocrisy, England’s is pride.
It is clear, of course, that Dostoevsky did not form his impressions of England unaided. A week’s stay in London could not have either supplied him with the necessary material or given him a sufficient insight into the British character, particularly as he knew no English. (He admits to his ignorance of the language in one passage of the book, yet in another he claims to base certain of his conclusions on English newspaper reports.)
The only man Dostoevsky is known to have visited in England was Alexander Herzen, the exiled Russian revolutionary and journalist, a sparkling personality and a brilliant talker who could have had no difficulty in influencing Dostoevsky and imposing his views on him. It is Herzen’s views therefore that, more likely than not, form the basis of Dostoevsky’s analysis of the English character and of life in the country.
But quite apart from his influence on Dostoevsky’s views about England, Herzen is responsible for much of the contents of the Summer Impressions as well as for the form in which they were cast; the perusal of his Letters from France and Italy makes this abundantly clear. For these Letters suggested to Dostoevsky many of his reflections on Russia and his few remarks on Germany, and provided him with some of the more biting images which he used in order to illustrate his comments on the French contemporary social scene and the bourgeoisie’s mentality and habits.
In general, Dostoevsky was readily influenced by contemporary thinkers, and the game of tracing his ideas back to their original sources is not hard to play.
Thus Petrashevsky inspired him with his early enthusiasm for Fourier, which, for all his later scoffing, continued to colour his vision; his concept of universality as the most typical attribute of the Russian character was first suggested to him by Belinsky, who himself owed it to Odoevsky; his notion of true brotherhood, realizable through a spontaneous integration of society and the individual, is due to Konstantin Aksakov and to Khomyakov; Samarin is responsible for his view of the Orthodox Church as the synthesis of the Roman Catholic principle of unity and the Protestant principle of freedom; the two alternatives of “ant hill” and “cannibalism” are derived from Herzen; so is most of his “semi-Marxism” and much of the language he uses to express his social and political philosophy, though there Petrashevsky’s contribution looms large indeed; while, in so far as it differs from Herzen’s, his view of the West – its individualism, materialism and impending calamitous decline – and of Russia’s special place in the comity of nations and almost in the universe – her self-contained civilization and messianic destiny – can be found in all essentials in early
