JOSEPH FRANK
minable outpouring of biographical literature on Dostoevsky, and there
is
no need once again to do badly, and at great length, what Dostoev–
sky did superbly with the incisive genius of the great novelist.
But if the essential facts of this meeting are well established and
unambiguous in import, the same cannot be said for Dostoevsky's
account of Belinsky's influence on his intellectual and spiritual develop–
ment. Dostoevsky always attributed the greatest importance to
this
influence, and returned to it again and again in his
Diary of a Writer;
but the more his accounts are studied, the more uncertain and un–
reliable they become. Dostoevsky attributes ideas and opinions to
Belinsky, at the period of their encounter, which the latter did not
hold at the time or never held at all (such, for example, as a belief
in
"the suppression of nationalities"). And while in one article Dostoev–
sky stresses the connection between atheism and Socialism driven home
to him by Belinsky, in another he explains that for the vast majority
of the liberal and radical intelligentsia of the forties, Utopian Socialism
was considered an "improvement" rather than a substitute for Chris–
tianity. Most important of all, Dostoevsky leaves the reader totally
in the dark about what
he
was when he met Belinsky, except for the
tenderly idyllic portrait of himself as a "dreamer"-though it is
dif–
ficult to see why a "dreamer" should have written what Belinsky
accurately called the first Russian "social" novel in
Poor Folk.
Despite the numerous inconsistencies in Dostoevsky's account,
which have been noted here and there in Russian scholarship, little or
no attempt has been made to explore Dostoevsky's relations
with
Belinsky in detail and with a full utilization of everything we know
about the cultural background of the period. To be sure, Soviet
scholars have devoted a good deal of attention to this crucial episode
in their literary history; but they are more concerned with glorifying
Belinsky, who has become one of the major gods in the Russian
revolutionary pantheon, than with understanding Dostoevsky. For the
most part, these scholars content themselves with amplifying the
"beneficial" effects of Belinsky'S Socialism on Dostoevsky, and tracing
the "valuable" elements in Dostoevsky'S later, reactionary novels to
the lingering vestiges of this salutary tutelage. Moreover, these critics
deliberately blur the nuances of ideological differentiation between
various members of the Russian intelligentsia of the forties so as
to
create the impression of a monolithic revolutionary (even if pre-
