DOSTOEVSKY'S SOCIALISM
411
Marxist) movement. The task of clarifying the exact relation between
Dostoevsky and Belinsky thus still remains to be done, and in the
following pages I shall try to show how a more precise grasp of this
relation can give us a new insight into the complexities of Dostoevsky's
spiritual formation.
I
Two differing images of Belinsky appear in the pages of Dostoev–
sky's reminiscences. One is that of the critic who consecrated Dostoev–
sky's vocation as a writer; and whatever the venomous hatred that
Dostoevsky later displayed towards Belinsky's influence on Russian
culture, he never forgot the debt he owed to the powerful voice who
had first declared his genius. Among all the numerous tributes paid
to the memory of Belinsky in the annals of Russian letters, none is
more ardent and moving th"an Dostoev ky's re-creation of what Belin–
sky had meant to him in the
first
flush of their meeting. "I left his
horne in an ecstasy," Dostoevsky wrote in 1877. " I stopped at the
corner, I looked at the sky, the sunny day, the pa sers-by, and I felt
with my whole being that I had just lived through a portentous
moment, that my life had been transformed forever, that something
entirely new had just begun-something I had not foreseen even in
my most passionate dreams. (And I was then a passionate dreamer.)"
This was, Dostoevsky adds, "the most glorious moment of my life."
Along with
this
image of Belinsky, however, we also find another
in Dostoevsky's autobiographical pages and in his letters-the image
of a naive, overpowering, tempestuous and morally pure evil genius,
whose influence was responsible for leading Dostoevsky (and not
Dostoevsky alone) along the path to perdition. "I do not exaggerate
at all," Dostoevsky wrote in 1873, "when I refer to the ardent
inclination he [Belinsky] had for me, at least in the first months of
our friendship." Everything we know from other sources confirms
Dostoevsky's account; and our knowledge of Belinsky's character also
gives credence to the further assertion that the latter "immediately
threw himself, with the most ingenuous eagerness, into the task of
converting me to his faith. . . . I found him a convinced Socialist,
and he promptly began with me on atheism."
In another essay written the same year (1873), Dostoevsky paints
much the same picture and adds more specific details about Belinsky's
