ERH & FD: ERH as he pertaineth unto the reading of Dostoevsky

I am here sharing some cultural background information from the history of Russia that bears upon the writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky.

This passage here quoted is from Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy's "Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man" and deals with what was going on among the intelligentsia preceding Dostoevsky and influencing him and other writers. This was written in 1938:

"The history of Russian literature is of more importance for the evolution of Russia that the history of any other literature for its own nation. This has been valid at least since the days of Peter the Great. In the other countries of Europe, civilization is, so to speak, the result of all the social and political struggles, of corporations and estates. In Russia the reverse was true. There, political life began by detour via culture. In Europe the parties are founded by corporative and social interests. These groups elect and found their organs. In Russia it was the press and the organs of literature which called new parties into life and enabled them to exist. Whilst in Europe every efficient individual represented a profession or a corporation, and was supported by his group or the privileges of the group, in Russia 'the individual could succeed only as an individual, never as a representative of his kind.

Through the importing of Western erudition, the individual found ways of social activity. The exchange of literary reflections might make him influential. It was for that reason that poets and literati exercised such a great influence in Czarist Russia. Only a few of the leading spirits could end their days without being troubled by exile or administrative discipline. The rulers themselves propagated their reforms by literary productions. Peter the Great introduced plays which were meant to make people laugh at the foes of his reform. Catherine II founded satirical journals, and herself wrote plays and essays. The sense of political satire is so fierce that even today the normal Soviet newspaper has its daily page of caricatures.

In Russia literature brought men into groups and excited them to political activity. You could mingle with a circle for years without divining whether or not this or that member were a nobleman. The only question was which line of literature he preferred. There was an astounding number of reviews. There were, monthlies, often two or three hundred pages thick, and around the magazines political parties were formed. Belles-lettres were the battlefield of politics; aesthetic appreciation was impossible.

The existence of censorship had led to a real art of reading and writing between the lines. Sometimes books passed the censorship but the authors were disciplined for the secret sense of the writing.

The violence of Peter's reforms, and the formation of a staff by sending young men to foreign countries, or by having them educated by foreigners, had this odd result that the literature of Russia began with satires, with the criticism of existing society. It had an eye that was detached, like a foreigner's, and a pen that took a negative and didactic line.

The very first poet, Prince Cantemir (1708-1744). was educated in Paris, and his Parisian education made him think how queer society was at home. He became a satirist. Later, Karamzin began an epoch (1765-1826). He was sent to the West for his instruction and published immediately afterwards (1791-1792) his famous Letters of a Russian Traveller. Up to that time Europe and her great men in art and science had been known from translations only. Now Karamzin introduced the nature and society of Europe by faithful and lively descriptions. His readers seemed to meet the leaders of European literature and scholarship personally. Karamzin founded the review, The European Courier (Vestnik Evropy). St. Petersburg's aim to be the window towards Europe-is well illustrated by this title of the leading national review.
The Napoleonic Wars had a great effect on the national conscience. The army, which marched as far as Paris, contained a mass of educated Russians. On April 15. 1814, the Te Deum of the Allies on the Place de la Concorde was celebrated by six Orthodox priests. Everyone could now verify for himself the reports of Karamzin. Young men came home with Western ideas, and again they went into Literature. No field for practice seemed open to them. The neologists fought despite censorship, exile and jail. In 1825, the martyrdom of this specific intelligence, conjured up by Czarism, began. This year marks the final estrangement between the government and the youth of the leading classes, because the government tried to make undone its own work. The Czars owed all their success after 1697 to the introduction of Western techniques. And they knew it. Catherine II (1763-1796) corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot; she anxiously awaited what Professor Schloezer of Goettingen had to say in his magazine about her policy. Now, in 1825, this cornerstone of Czarist expansion broke. Freedom of thought, the very instrument that had founded St. Petersburg, the bureaucracy and the army, was thrown away. 1825 was the point of departure for the Russian drama.

The facts are very simple. Alexander I, 'the monarch who, in his own kingdom, had worked so much into the hands of the Revolutionists, succumbed mentally and bodily in the fight. Seeing himself deceived in all his calculations, under the necessity of himself striking at a class of his own subjects who had been led astray and instigated by men and principles whom he himself had long supported, his heart broke.'{Clemens Metternich, Memoirs, Vol. I, p. 332, New York, Scribner. 1880.}

A conspiracy broke out against the succession of Alexander.{Compare also Anatole G. Mazour, The First Russian Revolution, 1825: The Decembrist Movement, Its Origin, Development, and Significance, Berkeley, Univ. of Calif., 1937.} The soldiers understood little of the French ideas of the young officers. They cried: 'Hail, Grand Duke Constantine, and hail his wife, the Constitution!' There was no nation behind the innovators. But these idealists themselves paid a terrible price. The leader of his generation, the poet Ryleev, was hanged in 1826. Bestuzhev, the Prince Odoevski, Polejaieff, ended their lives in exile in the mines of Siberia, or were degraded into private soldiers in the Caucasus. Alexander Pushkin escaped banishment to Siberia only by a miracle, and had to live on his estate under the supervision of the police.

The women of these Dekabrists accompanied their husbands as volunteers. They shared the sufferings of the men and were ennobled by this rare companionship in permanent misfortune. Russian women were emancipated and exalted by their rare quality of being fellow-sufferers. This makes for an equality with man which surpasses all the legal or moral equality in Western society.

Pushkin was the first to speak poetically, in the character of Tatiana in Eugen Onegin, of this new type of Russian woman. The state of mind after 1825 is well shown in the comedy, The Misfortunes of Being Clever (Gore ot uma). [Does this title not remind you of "Notes from Underground"?--Jim]
Anybody who did not bow before bureaucracy and the army was taken to be a politically dangerous man, and was finally declared mad. The malformation of Russian society, its hunched back, so to speak, was permanent after 1825.

The Intellectuals were all preoccupied with Western problems, even though they divided themselves into Westerners (Zapadniki) and Slavophils. It was a period of heavy oppression. In the textbooks the history of the French Revolution was cancelled. A period of despondent literature opened. Lermontov's Hero of Our Times torments himself and others with fruitless grief and seems to be destroying himself because he can be of no use in Russia. Nicholas Gogol opened the procession of novelists who wished to unveil social wrongs. Alexander Herzen drew the consequences of the situation. He published, in 1843, his Who Is Responsible? The hero of this book, who aims in vain at greater activity in Russia, leaves the country and wallows in distinguished slothfulness. [sounds like the narrator in "Notes..." doesn't it?--Jim]

The defeat in the Crimean War and the death of Nicholas I opened the sluices. For the first time the fruits of suffering seemed to ripen. Alexander Herzen rang The Bell, his London journal. Though an exile, he gave audiences like a future Regent. The highest dignitaries visited "the criminal" with great reverence. The revaluation of values affected all the "pillars" of Church and State in Russia; nowhere could jail and banishment so little degrade a man as in the best circles of St. Petersburg.

The new era was announced in Turgenev's Eve, and the hero of his novel Fathers and Sons (1861) chooses for himself the name of Nihilist. The innovators had found their shibboleth. Nihil, i.e., nothing, of the old loyalties was to be kept. A complete break was the only condition for a new future. [years down the road, it might be instructive to read Turgenev--Jim]

But this future was still far off. Turgenev, in 1867, full of despair, wrote Smoke. Nothing had come of the emancipation of the serfs, and he declared the absolute bankruptcy of "Fathers and Sons," parties and groups of the better classes of society. He was right. The "Gebildete Gesellschaft," the upper classes, were rotten. Intellectually and mentally, everything had been thought through and fought through."(ERH, OoR, p.81-84)

[this is now the time that Dostoevsky is writing the works that we are and perhaps shall be reading--Jim]

In another post I will show more of ERH on Dostoevsky.