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PARTISAN REVIEW
historical context from which they can be only partially detached. Ideas
first hinted at in the quasi-journalistic
Winter Notes
gather momentum
throughout Dostoevsky's post-exile writings, from
Time
up through the
Brothers Karamazov;
the Russian reader would have appreciated the
complex polyphonic effects Dostoevsky composed across genres and
years .
The conviction that active love, born of Russian Orthodox faith,
offers the only antidote to the self-destruction threatening Russians
from the West echoes through all of Dostoevsky's post-exile writings.
It
flares up painfully in Liza's embrace of the Underground Man, and
reaches a joyful conclusion in the life of Father Zossima. This idea, cru–
cial for an understanding of Dostoevsky's fiction, emerges as a response
to the agonizing death throes of the West as Dostoevsky imagines them
in
Winter Notes.
Dostoevsky dwells so insistently on the promise of life
through Russian Orthodoxy in his novels because of the threat of death
he invokes in
Winter Notes:
in this brief but seminal work, we accom–
pany Dostoevsky as he travels through the lands whose ideas would
infect the world in Raskolnikov's final nightmare, drive [van Karama–
zov to madness, and lead to the symbolic self-destruction of the Russian
elite in Stavrogin's suicide.
The first step in Dostoevsky's campaign to purge Russia of Western
materialism was for him to discover examples of spiritual vitality, proof
of Russian moral freedom that could be the basis of the national char–
acter. Many of the common criminals he lived among in the Siberian
prison camp impressed Dostoevsky with their ability to transcend their
miserable circumstances. Seemingly unbearable physical suffering and
mental abuse could not extinguish the spark of self-determination he
witnessed in many of the prisoners. "A high and most characteristic
trait of our common people is their feeling for justice and their thirst for
it," the narrator of the
Memoirs
tells his elite, Westernized readers, for
whom the Russian people were simply an unconscious mass waiting to
be liberated from "mysticism."
After establishing the existence of moral free will among the Russian
people, which he ascribed to their preservation of Orthodoxy, Dosto–
evsky sought a confrontation with materialism at its European sources.
He left Petersburg on June
7, I862,
for a ten-week tour. The semi–
autobiographical account of his epiphanic encounter with the Russian
people in
Memoirs from the House of the Dead
was followed by
Winter Notes on Summer Impressions,
the report of his experiences in
Paris and London published in
Time
in
I863.
If
Siberia provided an
unexpected miracle of rebirth, where interaction with common crimi-
