Dostoevsky The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881 by Joseph Frank Princeton University Press, 812 pp., $35 FOR MORE THAN twenty-five years, Joseph Frank has been writing the biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky. In 1976, he published “Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849,” followed by “The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859,” “The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865,” and “The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871.” Now, at last, we have the fifth and final volume–“The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881”–and it is the richest of Frank’s monumental work, its 812 pages covering the last decade of Dostoevsky’s life. All of Frank’s volumes contain analyses of Dostoevsky’s novels original enough to interest the knowledgeable, yet lucid enough to help those unable to distinguish, say, Alexander Ivanovich from Ivan Alexandrovich. But it is, above all, the profound social and personal history that makes Frank’s volumes stand above other studies of the great Russian novelist. Because of Dostoevsky’s increase in fame before his death–indeed, because of his prestige with both the revolutionary youth and the imperial court–the story of the novelist’s life in these years expands into a social, cultural, and even political history of Russia at a crucial point in the disintegration of the old tsarist order. In “The Mantle of the Prophet,” as in “The Miraculous Years,” Dostoevsky’s second wife, Anna Grigoryevna, plays a central role. She is our main source of knowledge for the last twenty years of the novelist’s life and the most important person in that life. Her role has often been minimized by scholars. The problem is that she seems to have been sensible and efficient enough to make her husband happy in an almost bourgeois sense of the word–which is, naturally, horrifying to those committed to a vision of Dostoevsky as “the mad Russian mystic.” The story of Anna Grigoryevna is a remarkable one. Against her family’s advice, she decided, at age twenty-two, to marry a forty-two-year-old convict who was also an epileptic, a pathological gambler, and the odd man of Russian literature. She entered his life as an efficient stenographer, and she continued in this role until his death, quickly becoming his financial manager and protector against his greedy relatives. She never reproached him about his gambling, it seems, but, within a few years, he suddenly ceased to gamble. She certainly brought about that change, but not even Joseph Frank seems to know how. Above all, Anna was a mother and a wife. She was as solid and real as Dostoevsky’s first wife was fragile and fake. She was the greatest blessing in his life, even when, at the beginning of their marriage, her husband lost their last, painfully borrowed ruble at the roulette table. (The lender of last resort was Anna’s own mother, who was far from rich.) Joseph Frank is too conscientious a biographer to lapse into hagiography. He does not hide, for example, Anna’s tendency to make both her husband and herself look better than they were. But Frank’s uncompromising honesty ends up making Anna seem almost heroic. There was great suffering in her marriage, no doubt, especially the death of children, but there was more happiness. THE MOST STUBBORN MYTH about Dostoevsky is his “sexual abnormality,” a thesis countersigned by Sigmund Freud himself. In the course of his five-volume biography, however, Joseph Frank quietly demolishes it. This myth has two origins. The first is the famous Stavrogin confession about the rape of a little girl in “Demons” (the 1872 novel sometimes translated under the title “The Devils” or “The Possessed”), which readers who dislike Dostoevsky tend to regard as his vicarious confession. And the second is Freud’s essay “Dostoevsky and Parricide,” which is more against its subject than about him. What horrifies Freud is Dostoevsky’s political ideas and, above all, his apparent anti-Semitism. One can share Freud’s sentiments without sharing Freud’s certainty that bad political ideas mean a bad sex life. Building upon the dubious Freudian foundation of Dostoevsky’s “latent homosexuality,” many critics have assumed that he was not really interested in his wife. The sole reason he married Anna, so the story goes, was his need for the “sister of charity” that he shrewdly detected in her, and he cynically exploited the poor girl in his own selfish interest. She is thus, in most studies of Dostoevsky, mainly an object of rather distant commiseration: “the obviously sexually unfulfilled Anna Grigoryevna.” No one, it seems, bothered with the original sources before Joseph Frank–who has come up with a letter to Anna mailed from Germany, where his physician had sent the novelist “to take the waters.” Dostoevsky does more than politely insist he misses his wife; he mentions an erotic dream he had about her and refers to a prior letter from Anna in which she mentioned “some indecent thoughts” that she had about her husband. Sexy letters between the Dostoevskys, seven years after their marriage! Who could have imagined it? Frank quotes this precious correspondence without even alluding to the myths crashing to the ground all around him. But it is a massive joke on the postmodern sex police and their hostile profiling of the novelist whose understanding of human motivation in such books as “Notes from Underground,” “The Gambler,” “Demons,” and “The Eternal Husband”–to say nothing of “Crime and Punishment,” “The Idiot,” and “The Brothers Karamazov”–is almost incomprehensibly far beyond their simple and easy explanations. So what is it that Dostoevsky saw? The novel most immediately relevant to our contemporary scene may be “Demons,” in which he captures the essence of nihilistic eruptions. The Dostoevsky who wrote “Demons” was very different from the young novelist whose first novel, “Poor Folk,” had been praised thirty years before by the famous critic V.G. Belinsky as a model of politically engaged fiction. Belinsky was a romantic liberal, of course, and so was his protege Dostoevsky: Like most educated Russians, they were ashamed of their country’s backwardness, and they looked to Europe for models of westernization, especially England and France. It’s fascinating to observe that in nineteenth-century Russia–just as in France before the Revolution–the aristocrats and the intellectual classes were fashionably estranged from their own religious and cultural traditions (in Russia, this included the Russian language, which was replaced with French even inside the family). In his eagerness to demonstrate that he was a sincere liberal, the young Dostoevsky did so well that he had himself arrested and sentenced to what turned out to be a mock execution, although he didn’t know that until the last second. He was sent to Siberia where he spent four years in a penal colony and then four more years in the Russian army. The experience changed Dostoevsky, and he rejected all radical chic to espouse the religious, social, and political attitudes of the so-called slavophiles, the generally despised defenders of Russian tradition. In this Dostoevskian conservatism, however, the influence of the French socialists and their utopian Christianity remains visible. AT FIRST, this great political and spiritual revolution had no noticeable effect on the novelist’s fiction, which remained maudlin and sentimental until, in 1864, he published his first masterpiece, “Notes from Underground.” In this short novel, an abominably wretched character–who is also a thoroughly “modern” and “liberated” individual, the prototype of the twentieth-century anti-hero–recounts his grotesque adventures. The underground man spends most of his time alone in his apartment, getting drunk on the idea of his freedom; he sees limitless possibilities ahead and his ambition soars vertiginously. When he rejoins his fellow men, however, his exaltation turns to ashes and he becomes “an acutely conscious mouse” incapable of the great deeds contemplated in his solitary dreams. This story gives concrete content to Dostoevsky’s belief that the abandonment of Christianity drives modern man into a hell of his own making. Instead of the heavenly self-worship he anticipates, the anti-hero becomes full of self-doubt when he rejoins the world. His uncertainty compels him to enslave himself to those who seem to embody the mastery to which he aspires. The underground man compulsively bows to all those who offend, disdain, and ignore him. The modern attempt at self-worship generates its opposite, self-enslavement. The underground man forgets his timidity only with people manifestly weaker: a poor prostitute, for instance, who is ready to love him in a disinterested fashion. Instead of joining with her, he sordidly avenges on her pathetic weakness the rebuffs and humiliations suffered at the hands of more intimidating others. The famous “love-hate relationship” in Dostoevsky is the foremost underground passion, a form of envy so extreme that it turns to idolatry. The social and political significance of the story is underlined by its setting in St. Petersburg, the new city built by Peter the Great, the tsar who tried to westernize Russia. The anti-hero is one of his thousands of civil servants who compete for insignificant rewards, fantastically magnified by the rivalrous equality of all. In “Notes from Underground,” the word “underground” refers to the hero’s need to hide his own shame and return to his solitary dreams when his morbid fascination with others becomes too grotesque. In later writing, the word acquired for the novelist a quasi-technical significance. It refers to all modalities of the compulsive idolatry that Dostoevsky kept portraying–in his attempt to dissuade Russia from listening to the siren songs of modernization and westernization. The two main idols of that modern, godless universe are money and sex. After “Notes from Underground,” Dostoevsky dealt with money in “The Gambler” (1866) and sex in “The Eternal Husband” (1870), perhaps his most profound book. It is the story of a man driven underground by the infidelity of his wife. The rather ordinary fellow who has cuckolded him turns into an object of hatred and worship combined. Freud was correct in noticing the attraction the wife’s lover exerts on the eternal husband, but Freud went on to decide that the author’s own unconscious desire was expressing itself in the story–and hence Dostoevsky was a latent homosexual. The simpler reading is that what the eternal husband wants to learn from his wife’s seducer is the secret of seduction. What he desires is not his rival’s body–a ridiculous idea, really–but that rival’s expertise as a lover. He would like to become an eternal lover himself, rather than an eternal husband and an eternal cuckold. Like all underground people, the eternal husband is modern and liberated, especially in regard to sex. Far from solving his problem, however, this makes it worse. The idolatry of sex is destructive not merely of the old structure of the family but of sex itself. The eternal husband is a victim not of superstition but of obsessive rationality. He sees the seducer of his wife as a sexual expert whose services he tries to enlist. IN DOSTOEVSKY’S VIEW, political radicalism is one of many manifestations of the underground–and the worst of them. The radicals suffer from underground symptoms; they perpetually enslave themselves to people whom they would not hate if they did not idolize them, and instead of blaming themselves for this weakness, they project it onto society as a whole. They confuse their own personal underground with a repressive social and political order which may or may not exist objectively. When underground discontent is on the rise, it powerfully influences the community in the direction of laxity. The religious, cultural, ethical, and educational underpinnings of social life weaken and begin to disintegrate. As more and more traditions are discarded, permissiveness increases. Instead of gratefully acknowledging the trend, the politicized underground denies it and sees the opposite trend: more and more oppression and repression that must be countered by more and more violence. Dostoevsky’s “Demons” illustrates this historical process, and the best part of it is the satiric treatment of what Dostoevsky himself was in the 1840s, an idealistic liberal. The character who embodies the type, Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, may be his creator’s greatest achievement as a novelist. He is a charming but ineffectual and ultimately superficial old man, full of elegant but totally disembodied French. He’s been made pass by brutal events, and he’s completely disregarded by the nihilists–so much so that when the police are stupid enough to search his rooms, he feels briefly rejuvenated and proclaims himself “a living reproach” to the motherland. Dostoevsky’s satire does not prevent him from feeling some secret affection for his pathetic character. In the end, the novelist makes him the only symbol of redemption in the book. Coming back to his senses on his deathbed, Stepan Trofimovich reproaches himself for helping unleash the plague of nihilism upon Russia, and he converts to his ancestral Christian faith. Far from proving the inferiority of Russia, the underground propensities of the Russians are a sign that spiritual life, even though imperiled, is not yet extinct among them. The Dostoevskian underground is a powerful notion for understanding our current situation, far more powerful than simply a tool for comprehending the Russians. It is thus a disappointment to see–as Joseph Frank’s volume makes clear–that Dostoevsky himself tends to fall into underground symptoms when he moves beyond Russia to examine the simultaneously despised and idolized West. His tremendous mastery of human relations and their significance collapses into a kind of underground chauvinism as soon as he shifts from the national to the international plane. Still, Dostoevsky was above all the prophet who, half a century before the Bolshevik revolution, warned about the forthcoming catastrophe. And if he embraced some of the narrow nationalism and other prejudices of the slavophiles, it may be in part because the slavophiles were the only Russians who seemed actively sympathetic to him at the time. In spite of his greatness, Dostoevsky was not quite great enough to go it completely alone, intellectually and spiritually. He died on January 28, 1881, in St. Petersburg, not long after the publication of “The Brothers Karamazov.” It’s there we find–in the passage in which Ivan Karamazov tells the legend of Jesus Christ’s returning to the world, only to encounter the Grand Inquisitor–Dostoevsky’s most famous analysis of modern culture’s repudiation of its religious inheritance in favor of Enlightenment philosophy’s narcissistic individualism. And it’s there in “The Brothers Karamazov” as well that we find–in the unconditional love the dying Zossima wills–Dostoevsky’s answer. Rene Girard is the author of such books as “Deceit, Desire, & the Novel,” “Violence and the Sacred,” “The Scapegoat,” and, most recently, “I See Satan Fall like Lightning.”
