oppose both the romantic idealism of the older generation and the materialism of the younger generation with a kind of Christian naturalism, which they felt could be the basis of an original and independent Russian culture. They sought to penetrate through life's artificial exterior for a 'restoration in the soul of a new, or rather a renewed, faith in the foundation [grunt], the soil [pochvd], the people-a restoration in the mind and heart of everything immediate [neposredstvenny].'19 Criticism, Grigor'ev felt, must be 'organic'-taking account of the historical, social, and spiritual forces as well as the physiological forms of life and art. Ostrovsky's dramatic portrayal of Muscovite and provincial life was thought to have prepared the way for a new popular literature by moving back into the soil and away from aristocratic convention.
Dostoevsky moves beneath the surface in the first remarkable literary creation of his period of post-exilic prophecy: Notes from the Underground of 1864. Then, having presented the dark recesses of malice in human nature, he plunges on from the real to the more real: to the deeper reality of human nature as a divided complex of feeling and intellect.
The problem of division within man had fascinated Dostoevsky since the time he wrote his Double in 1846 and called his divided hero 'the greatest and most important type which I was the first to discover and proclaim.'20 In Crime and Punishment of 1866, the first of his great novels, he presents us with a hero, Raskolnikov, whose very name has the word for 'schism' within it. Already in this work we see the beginning of his more grandiose conception of bringing the divided inner impulses of men into open confrontation and attempting to overcome the sense of separation and division in modern man. In this as in his other great novels he presents ordinary Russians not in any epic, descriptive sense but in a dynamic state of development. His characters become actors in a broader human drama
where all are involved in the fate of each. The scene is the city, primarily St. Petersburg: 'the most abstract and contrived city on the entire earthly sphere.'21 There are no happy pastorales to relieve the tension. The stage is filled with the babel of intellectualized chatter and a sense of continued expectation and suspense. The scenario is that of the detective stories and melodramas that were currently popular all over Europe. But all of these ingredients are lifted to the level of a modern passion play, for the drama is, in truth, played out on a stage which has salvation at one end and damnation at the other. Through Dostoevsky, the novel form became invested with the dimensions of religious drama; and the ideas of salon thinkers were developed to their extreme and brought into conflict before the largest single audience available in Russia: the subscribers to Katkov's Russian Herald.
The unique importance of Dostoevsky for Russian cultural history- as distinct from the world-wide development of psychology, literature, and religious thought-lay in his attempt to uncover some new positive answer for humanity in the depths of Russian popular experience. At about the same time in the late sixties that Musorgsky was beginning the first of his epochal 'popular music dramas,' Dostoevsky turned his attention toward the composition of a novel that would deal not with underground men, crime and punishment, but with redemption and renewal. Like Gogol, he turned to his Russian 'divine comedy' after going abroad; and his first effort, The Idiot, of 1867-8, reveals some of the incipient madness of the late Gogol in its agonizing incapacity to create a credible image of pure goodness. Dostoevsky brought with him the faith of the pochvenniki that ultimately all men were in harmony and that there were no unbridgeable barriers between one man and another, or between the world of men and that of the insects below and the angels above. The division between the actual and the ideal-the real and the more real-is ultimately artificial; but it can be overcome only by penetrating deeply into the entire problem of division.
Schism had been a deep and abiding theme of Russian history in the Romanov period. The seventeenth century saw the separation of the government from the people; the eighteenth, the aristocracy from the peasantry; the early nineteenth, the intellectual from the non-intellectual aristocracy; and the mid-century, the 'sons' from the 'fathers' within the thinking elite. In writing The Idiot Dostoevsky proved that the mere injection of a Christ-figure into this situation is not enough. Dostoevsky's would-be redeemer is incomplete in the novel without his alter ego, the sensualist Rogozhin, with whose life and fate that of 'the Prince-Christ' Myshkin is completely intertwined. The helpless idiocy of Dostoevsky's holy fool at the end of the novel
is in many ways reminiscent of the final cries of anguish by the fool at the end of Musorgsky's Boris Godunov.
To overcome the separation in Russian life, it is necessary to fathom that separation which lies at the base of all others: the separation from God. Thus, while still in the last stages of writing The Idiot, Dostoevsky first conceived of a new novel to be called 'The Atheist' or 'The Life of a Great Sinner.' In it a man was to lose his faith and embark on a search fcr positive answers that would lead him eventually to a Russian monastery and the recovery of faith at a higher level. It was to be 'a gigantic novel,' after the writing of which 'I shall be ready to die, for I shall have uttered therein my whole heart's burden.'22
Thus, whereas Musorgsky in the Kromy scene of Boris ends his search for new answers with a cry of total despair, Dostoevsky's cry at the end of The Idiot is only the beginning of his search. But whereas Musorgsky was closer to the populists of the seventies in looking for sociopolitical leadership in the Kromy Forest, Dostoevsky was closer to the realists of the sixties in looking for metaphysical truth in the real St. Petersburg. Whereas Musorgsky looked to the Russian past, Dostoevsky looked to its present and future. The realism of historical lament in the one gives way to the realism of religious prophecy in the other.
In his first outline of 'The Atheist' late in 1868, Dostoevsky indicated his intention to spend at least two years in preparatory reading of 'a whole library of atheistic works by Catholic and Orthodox writers.' From atheism his hero is to move on to become a Slavophile, Westernizer, Catholic, flagellant sectarian, and 'finds at last salvation in the Russian soil, the Russian Saviour, and the Russian God.'23 He attaches repeated importance to the need he feels to be in Russia to write such a work. The two great novels which he wrote during his fascination with this never fully realized idea both take the problem of separation out of the individual into a broader and more distinctively Russian context. The Possessed of 1870-2 anatomizes the ideological divisions in Russian society as a whole. The Brothers Karamazov of 1878-80, which is the closest Dostoevsky came to giving finished form to 'The Atheist,' illustrates the separation within individuals, society, and the family itself. The Brothers focuses on the ultimate form of human separation: that which leads man to murder his own progenitor. If The Possessed depicts 'Turgenev's heroes in their old age,'24 the social denouement as it were of the philosophic nihilism of Fathers and Sons, The Brothers lifts the conflict of fathers and sons to the metaphysical plane, on which alone it could be overcome.
The scene of The Possessed is Skvoreshniki, the provincial estate which bears the name of an outdoor house for feeding starlings and migratory
birds. It is in truth a feeding place for the noisy black birds of revolution, a way station through which the unsettling ideas of the aristocracy are migrating out from St. Petersburg to the Russian countryside. All the characters are interconnected in a hallucinatory forty-eight hours of activity, most of which is a compressed and intensified version of real-life events. In a series of strange and only partially explained scenes we see the movement of Russian thought from the dilettantish aristocratic romanticism of Stepan Trofimovich, with whom the novel begins, to the activity of a host of young extremists. Conversation leads directly to murder and suicide; the 'literary quadrille' of intellectuals to a strange fire. 'It's all incendiarism,' cries out one perplexed local official, adding prophetically that 'the fire is in the minds of men and not in the roofs of houses.' But he and others not caught up in the hot stream of ideas are powerless to understand, let alone check, the conflagration of events. This is a novel of ideas in action, and those who are not intelligentnye (whether they be babbling bureaucrats or garrulous liberals) are foreigners to it.
