The Uses of Journalism
MULHOLLAND, D.
The Uses of Journalism DOSTOEVSKY'S OCCASIONAL WRITINGS Translated by David Magarshack Random House. 334 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by D. MULHOLLAND Russian Research Center, Harvard...
...But the selection of most of the eight other letters is mysterious...
...How was this possible...
...The pochvenniki claimed to accept Russia's Europeanization as a necessary step to the future...
...Reviewed by D. MULHOLLAND Russian Research Center, Harvard University David Magarshack continues his efforts to free the Englishspeaking world of those misconceptions about Russian literature which Constance Garnett imposed on it long ago...
...The conversion to Panslavism, however, followed the transformation of Dostoevsky from an important writer into a great one...
...When they are presented as exposition, however, their nonsense is palpable...
...Altogether, the book is a grabbag of items, leaving the impression that the desire to find new works of Dostoevsky's to translate was only partially warranted by the results...
...and nuts and cranks, such as Gogol and Tolstoy...
...The Slavophiles, according to Dostoevsky, were wrong because they defended serfdom and looked to the parochial past for their ideal instead of the future realization of the Russian soul, which would use Western achievements to reach new heights for humanity...
...The same Slavophiles with the same bitter hatred of everything that is not theirs and with the same intolerance and pettiness, and completely unRussian formal approach to things...
...Its members tried to strike a balance between the Westerners and the Slavophiles, feeling that the two should be reconciled...
...We foresee, with a sense of veneration, that the character of our future activity must be to the highest degree universal, that the Russian idea will perhaps be the synthesis of all those ideas that Europe is developing with such stubbornness and with such courage within its separate nationalities...
...In an article devoted to Konstantin Aksakov's new organ, Day, he charged that: "It is the same Slavophiles, the same pure, ideal Slavophilism, not a whit changed, whose ideals and reality are so strangely mixed up: for whom there are neither events nor lessons...
...Magarshack also includes two stories which show some characteristic features of Dostoevsky's humor...
...Arguing in 1861 against Nikolai Dobrolyubov and the Russian version of utilitarianism, he carefully separated himself from those who defended "art for art's sake...
...Had he died in the middle 1860s his Poor Folk and Notes from the Underground would remain literary curiosities of the period, though his main claim to recognition would have been Notes from the House of the Dead (to which certain enthusiasts last year compared Solzhenytsin's novelette...
...In contrast, "The Westerners bravely put the final question to themselves, solved it with a feeling of pain and, having achieved selfconsciousness, returned to the national soil and recognized the importance of a union with their national sources and that salvation lay in a return to the soil...
...At the same time, his famous quarrel with Turgenev turned his doubts about the Westerners into that screaming denunciation of liberalism which imbues his novels and his Diary of a Writer...
...The high artistic quality of, let us say, a novelist is his ability to express the idea of his novel in the characters and images of his novel so that after reading it the reader understands the writer's idea as well as the novelist has understood it himself when creating his work...
...More interesting as a key to Dostoevsky's development were his pronouncements of the early 1860s written for the journals he himself edited, Time and Epoch...
...And it is for this freedom that they should be fighting...
...As a Westerner himself, though reconstructed, Dostoevsky was sympathetic to the pochvenniki's aims but felt they had gone far enough and should return to the fold to renew their contact with the "people...
...But one of the more remarkable things about Dostoevsky is that he constantly felt obliged to discuss theoretical or, at any rate, abstract matters, despite his alarmingly inadequate equipment to do so...
...Art has always been contemporary and real, it has never been different and, above all, it never can be different...
...His latest contribution to that worthwhile endeavor is this book made up of odd pieces by Dostoevsky...
...Magarshack claims that none has been translated before...
...This reluctance was the result of a continued defense of his own youth, when he was a Westerner, albeit a grievously mistaken one, and even more because the essence of Slavophilism was its delight in a Utopian patriarchal past which Dostoevsky knew to be counterfeit...
...The answer lies as much in the change in the content of Slavophilism as in Dostoevsky...
...They denied the permissibility of any concern with immediate issues, he felt, and thus restricted artists in their choice of theme...
...This is pretty vague for a statement of esthetic theory...
...It was to the credit of neither...
...Although "soil" was a metaphorical concept, an urge to find roots and to accept once more the popular ideals, Dostoevsky also contributed an element of literalness: one thinks of Alyosha Karamazov falling to the ground and kissing it...
...In short, everything in his social background made it impossible for him to join the Slavophiles...
...And yet in the 1870s he had become friends with Pobedonostsev, and he and Aksakov were preaching the same sort of chauvinistic nationalism...
...In this transformation the Slavophiles played little or no role, for they were hypnotized by the ancient past and rejected the preceding 150 years of history...
...Magarshack has chosen to translate the least typical of them, that on the trial of Marshal Bazaine, and to claim for Dostoevsky an insight into French politics which he did not really possess...
...A primary stimulus to his writing were his disagreements with the Radicals of the 1860s...
...But since their message sounded so Slavophile, Dostoevsky took special pains to show where they differed...
...In simple words, then, it means that the artistic quality of a writer is his ability to write well...
...His city was Petersburg rather than the landlords' Moscow, where he was out of place and awkward...
...Dostoevsky maintained that nothing prevented a writer from using topical themes, but it ought not to be demanded of him, for then he would lose that essential freedom of inspiration which was the basis of every artistic production...
...The utilitarians, Dostoevsky believed, erred by their neglect of esthetic criteria, since a bad representation works against an idea one wishes to develop...
...The Petrine reform, having had its day, had introduced into our country the great element of universal humanity, forced us to comprehend it and put it before us as our chief purpose in the future, as the law of our nature, as the most important aim of all the aspiration of Russian power and Russian spirit...
...Of course, his great novels also were written to satisfy pressing financial obligations...
...Civilization would not be opposed to the people but adapted for it, and by it...
...Instead, all that was necessary was a Schilleresque ideal of beauty as harmony...
...The Slavophiles, he went on, had "the rare ability of being unable to recognize their own and to understand anything of contemporary reality...
...These were manifestoes of the pochvennik movement, an elusive group to define...
...In one sense, the most lasting result of his adventures in journalism in the 1860s was that they left him up to his ears in debts...
...Dostoevsky definitely belongs to the second group...
...The advocates of pure art . . . are spoiling their own chances, are against their own principles . . . they are destroying freedom of choice of one's inspiration...
...The Slavophiles and Dostoevsky discovered a common ground in imperialism, in expansionism free of any specific connection with the landlords" dream of Arcadia...
...His earlier essays, from 1847, were written more to earn a living than to express a view...
...If it is a paradox that some novels with the thesis that theses should not be imposed on art turn out themselves to be great art, Dostoevsky had explained before hand how it could happen...
...Its basic slogan was "return to the soil...
...that perhaps everything that is hostile in those ideas will find reconciliation and further development in the Russian nationality...
...These were thoughts to which Dostoevsky always remained true, though with the important proviso that the "perhaps" was dropped and all this was asserted as fact...
...But because his crankish notions—of Catholicism, for instance—are integrated elements of his novels and essential to their tensions, one does not stop and question their validity...
...In 1873, besides starting the Diary, Dostoevsky wrote a series of articles on foreign politics in which he gave vent to some of his notions...
...And from that esthetic quality would come action...
...For too many of them the reason is understandable...
...it was to pay off these debts that he wrote Crime and Punishment...
...The more freely it develops, the more normal the development of its true and useful path will be and the more quickly it will find it...
...The Russians had already absorbed all they needed from Europe, they had gone beyond it, returned to their soil and were developing that "universal humanity" which was their distinguishing mark...
...It is by now a rather trite observation that the great Russian authors of the 19th century can be roughly divided into two groups: the sweetly reasonable, which includes Pushkin, Turgenev and Chekhov...
...What had to be done to attain such a splendid purpose was to reconcile the fruits of civilization with the basic ideas, the morality of the Russian common people...
...The doctrine as a whole was, once more, hopelessly vague, but one may summarize it as a call to use Western methods for Slavophile goals...
...Some of the essays, however, are of more than passing interest...
...Although these essays do have some marginal interest in showing the continuity of his attitudes before and after his arrest in 1849, they serve mostly to fill space and read like it...
...In Russian the word for soil is pochva, hence the name...
...The book closes with nine of Dostoevsky's letters, one of which is interesting because of its avowal of Dostoevsky's belief in the corporal resurrection of the fathers by the sons, an idea which is important for The Brothers Karamazov...
...But, of course, he wrote four or five great novels, and thus achieved a major place in world literature rather than a secondary one in Russian...
...Slavophilism had to make as abrupt a switch to become Panslavism as did the repentant Wcsternism of the pochvenniki...
...Had Dostoevsky lived on and devoted himself solely to journalism, he would probably have a place in his nation's literature similar to that of Konstantin Aksakov...
...Whatever the Radicals function in the evolution of Russian society, we must be grateful to them for inspiring Dostoevsky to write Crime and Punishment, The Devils and The Brothers Karamazov...
...It might also be added that the translation is frequently clumsy and occasionally inaccurate...
...In the early 1860s, when he wrote these editorials, Dostoevsky could not join the Slavophiles because they stuck to their older ideas...
Vol. 47 • January 1964 • No. 2
