The Gift

came with loud complaints—about her health, about the Pypins, about the shortage of money, and then through her tears began to laugh at the little beard her husband had grown, finally getting even more upset and commencing to embrace him.

“That will do, my dear, that will do,” he kept saying quite calmly—using the tepid tone he invariably maintained in his relations with her: actually he loved her passionately, hopelessly. “Neither I nor anyone else can have any grounds for thinking I shall not be set free,” he told her in parting, with particular emphasis.

Another month passed. On March 23rd there was the confrontation with Kostomarov. Vladislav Dmitrievich glowered and obviously got tangled up in his own lies. Chernyshevski, with a slight smile of disgust, replied abruptly and contemptuously. His superiority was striking. “And to think,” exclaims Steklov, “that at this time he was writing the buoyant What to Do?”

Alas! To write What to Do? in the fortress was not so much surprising as reckless—even for the very reason that the authorities attached it to his case. In general the history of this novel’s appearance is extremely interesting. The censorship permitted it to be published in The Contemporary,” reckoning on the fact that a novel which was “something in the highest degree anti- artistic” would be certain to overthrow Chernyshevski’s authority, that he would simply be laughed at for it. And indeed, what worth, for example, are the “light” scenes in the novel? “Verochka was supposed to drink half a glass for her wedding, half a glass for her shop and half a glass for the health of Julie [a redeemed Parisian prostitute who is now the girl friend of one of the characters!] She and Julie started a romp, with screams and clamor…. They began to wrestle and both fell on the sofa… and they no longer wanted to get up, but only continued screaming and laughing and both fell asleep.” Sometimes the turn of phrase smacks of folksy barrack lore and sometimes of… Zoshchenko: “After tea… she went to her room and lay down. So there she is, reading in her comfy bed, but the book sinks away from her eyes and now Vera Pavlovna is thinking, Why is it that somehow I feel lately somewhat dull sometimes?” There are also many charming solecisms—here is a specimen: when one of the characters, a doctor, has pneumonia and calls in a colleague: “For a long time they palpated the sides of one of them.”

But nobody laughed. Not even the great Russian writers laughed. Even Herzen, who found it “vilely written,” immediately qualified this with: “On the other hand there is much that is good and healthy.” Still, he could not resist remarking that the novel ends not simply with a phalanstery but with “a phalanstery in a brothel.” For of course the inevitable happened: the eminently pure Chernyshevski (who had never been to a brothel), in his artless aspiration to equip communal love with especially beautiful trappings, involuntarily and unconsciously, out of the simplicity of his imagination, had worked his way through to those very ideals that had been evolved by tradition and routine in houses of ill repute; his gay “evening ball,” based on freedom and equality in relations between the sexes (first one and then another couple disappears and returns again), is extremely reminiscent of the concluding dances in Mme. Tellier’s Establishment.

And nevertheless it is impossible to handle this old magazine (March, 1863), containing the first installment of the novel, without a certain thrill; here also is Nekrasov’s poem “Green Noise” (“Endure while you can still endure …”), and the derisive dressing down of Aleksey Tolstoy’s romance Prince Serebryanyy…. Instead of the expected sneers, an atmosphere of general, pious worship was created around What to Do? It was read the way liturgical books are read—not a single work by Turgenev or Tolstoy produced such a mighty impression. The inspired Russian reader understood the good that the talentless novelist had vainly tried to express. It would seem that, having realized its miscalculation, the government should have interrupted the serialization of What to Do? It behaved much more cleverly.

Chernyshevski’s neighbor had now also done some writing. He had been receiving The Contemporary and on October 8th, he sent The Russian Word an article from the fortress, “Thoughts about Russian Novels,” at which the Senate informed the Governor-General that this was nothing else but an analysis of Chernyshevski’s novel, with praise for this work and a detailed exposition of the materialistic ideas in it. In order to characterize Pisarev it was indicated that he was subject to “dementia melancholica,” for which he had been treated: in 1859 he had spent four months in a lunatic asylum.

Just as, in his boyhood, he had arrayed all his notebooks in rainbow covers, so, as a grown man, Pisarev would suddenly abandon some urgent work in order to painstakingly color woodcuts in books, or when going off to the country, would order a red-and-blue summer suit of sarafan calico from his tailor. This professed utilitarian’s mental illness was distinguished by a kind of perverted aesthetic-ism. Once at a student gathering he suddenly stood up, gracefully raised his curved arm, as if requesting permission to speak, and in this sculpturesque pose fell down unconscious. Another time, to the alarm of his hostess and fellow guests, he began to undress, throwing off with gay alacrity his velvet jacket, motley vest, checkered trousers—At this point they overpowered him. Amusingly enough there are commentators who call Pisarev an “epicure,” referring, for example, to his letters to his mother— unbearable, bilious, teeth-clenching phrases about life being beautiful; or else: to illustrate his “sober realism” they quote his outwardly sensible and clear—but actually completely insane—letter from the fortress to an unknown maiden, with a proposal of marriage: “The woman who agrees to lighten and warm my life will receive from me all the love which was spurned by Raissa when she threw herself at the neck of her handsome eagle.”

Now, condemned to a four-year imprisonment for his small part in the general disturbances of the time (which were based in a way on a blind belief in the printed word, especially the secretly printed word), Pisarev wrote about What to Do?, reviewing it bit by bit for The Russian Word as the installments appeared in The Contemporary. Although in the beginning the Senate was puzzled by the novel’s being praised for its ideas instead of being ridiculed because of its style, and expressed the fear that the praises might have a deleterious effect on the younger generation, the authorities soon realized how important it was in the present case to obtain by this method a complete picture of Chernyshevski’s perniciousness, which Kostomarov had only outlined in the list of his “special devices.” “The government,” says Strannolyubski “on the one hand permitting Chernyshevski to produce a novel in the fortress and on the other permitting Pisarev, his fellow captive, to produce articles explaining the intentions of this novel, acted with complete awareness, waiting curiously for Chernyshevski to babble himself out and watching what would come of it—in connection with the abundant discharges of his incubator neighbor.”

The business went smoothly and promised a great deal, but it was necessary to put pressure on Kostomarov since one or two definite proofs of guilt were needed, while Chernyshevski continued to boil and jeer in great detail, branding the commission as “clowns” and “an incoherent quagmire which is completely stupid.” Therefore Kostomarov was taken to Moscow and there the citizen Yakovlev, his former copyist, a drunkard and a rowdy, gave important testimony (for this he received an overcoat which he drank away so noisily in Tver that he was put in a strait-jacket): while doing his copying “on account of the summer weather in a garden pavilion,” he allegedly heard Nikolay Gavrilovich and Vladislav Dmitrievich as they were strolling arm-in-arm (a not implausible detail), talking about greetings from well-wishers to the serfs (it is difficult to find one’s way in this mixture of truth and promptings). At a second interrogation in the presence of a replenished Kostomarov, Chernyshevski said somewhat unfortunately that he had visited him only once and not found him in; then he added forcefully: “I’ll go gray, I’ll die, but I will not change my testimony.” The testimony of his not being the author of the proclamation is written by him in a trembling hand—trembling with rage rather than fright.

However that may have been, the case was coming to an end. There followed the Senate’s “definition”: very nobly it found Chernyshevski’s unlawful dealings with Herzen unproved (for Herzen’s “definition” of the Senate see below, at the end of this paragraph). As for the appeal “To the Serfs of Landowners”… here the fruit had already ripened on the espaliers of forgery and bribes: the absolute moral conviction of the senators that Chernyshevski was the author thereof was transformed into judicial proof by the letter to “Aleksey Nikolaevich” (meaning, apparently, A. N. Pleshcheev, a peaceful poet, dubbed by Dostoevski “an all-round blond”—but for some reason no one insisted too much on Pleshcheev’s part, if any, in the matter). Thus in Chernyshevski’s person they condemned a phantasm closely resembling him; an invented guilt was wonderfully rigged up to look like the real one. The sentence was comparatively light—compared with what one is generally able to devise in this line: he was to be exiled for fourteen years of penal servitude and then to live in Siberia forever. The “definition” went from the “savage ignoramuses” of the Senate to the “gray villains” of the State Council, who completely subscribed to it, and then went on to the sovereign, who confirmed it but reduced the term of penal servitude by half. On May 4, 1864, the sentence was announced to Chernyshevski, and on the 19th, at 8 o’clock in the morning, on Mytninski Square, he was executed.

It was drizzling, umbrellas undulated, the square was beslushed, and everything was wet; gendarmes’