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Sonia, who epitomizes the moral freedom Dostoevsky projects onto the
Orthodox Russian people. She is portrayed as a living contradiction of
"the latest fashionable theory" according to which "poverty and help–
lessness" inevitably lead to crime, and thus she remains spiritually
untouched by her destitution. Again and again in his novels, Dostoevsky
emphasizes the connection between Western ideas and death. From
sophisticated intellectuals like Ivan Karamazov and Nikolai Stavrogin
to petty Petersburg officials like the Underground Man, contact with
Western ideas condemns Dostoevsky's Russians to self-destruction.
Less familiar to Western readers is the period of Dostoevsky's life
before his incarceration in Siberia, years when he dreamt of transform–
ing the abysmal material conditions of the Russian people according to
just those "fashionable theories" he later repudiated in his novels. After
his return from exile, Dostoevsky vehemently opposed the Russian
Left's desire to create a society that would satisfy physical needs at the
expense of spiritual values; this opposition expresses itself most
famously as his condemnation of the Grand Inquisitor'S arguments in
favor of substituting bread for freedom . But as a young man, Dosto–
evsky'S views of the competing claims of body and spirit were far from
fixed. "In the words
God
and
religion
I see darkness, obscurity, chains,
and the knout" he wrote in
1845.
The leader of Russian socialism,
Vissarion Belinsky, caused a furor by declaring in a widely-circulated
letter of
1847
that the Russians are "a profoundly atheistic people" in
need of the "achievements of civilization"-the material benefits of
Western science-rather than Russian "mysticism"; it was Dostoevsky
who read a copy of this letter aloud before the assembled associates of
the Petrashevsky circle in
1848.
Dostoevsky's experiences in Siberia have unjustly overshadowed the
years of his reintegration into Petersburg society in shaping our under–
standing of the crucial changes between his arrest and his emergence as
rna ture novelist. One reason for the neglect of the early
18
60S maybe
the form his writing took during this phase. When he returned to Peters–
burg in December
1859,
Dostoevsky plunged back into the debates
about human nature and society that preoccupied the Russian intelli–
gentsia. He founded the journal
Time
with his brother Mikhail, who
served as editor; beca use he was a former convict, Fyodor Dostoevsky's
name could not appear on the journal's masthead.
It
was a courageous
move for a man whose political commitments had cost him years of his
life in Siberia, "a time when [he] was
buried alive and closed in a
coffin."
Dostoevsky dedicated most of his energy over the next few
