The Icon and the Axe

Similar to Musorgsky in many respects is the figure of Fedor Dostoev-sky: another epileptic artistic genius who died just a few weeks before the musician early in 1881 and was laid to rest near him in the graveyard of the Alexander Nevsky monastery. Like Musorgsky, Dostoevsky illustrates the agony of art in the populist age: the tension between relentless realism and the search for a positive message in the people. Like Musorgsky's operas, Dostoevsky's novels offer a tragic depth and dramatic power that was not present in the fashionable plays of the time, let alone the newly

popular operettas of Offenbach and Strauss. Like Musorgsky, Dostoevsky had a special reverence for Gogol and considered himself a child of the sixties. The epilepsy that affected Dostoevsky was more intense but less debilitating than the creeping madness of Gogol and Musorgsky. Dostoevsky was able to bring his work to a greater measure of fruition than either of these two figures.

His cosmology of characters and ideas belongs, in many ways, more to the twentieth than to the nineteenth century. One Soviet writer at the end of the Russian Civil War was hardly exaggerating when he said that "all contemporary literature is following in Dostoevsky's footsteps … to talk of Dostoevsky still means to talk of the most painful, profound issues of our current life."15 Ilya Ehrenburg, writing during the period of forced industrialization in the thirties, called Dostoevsky's novels "not books, but letters from someone close" which alone tell "the whole truth" about human nature.

It is a truth which is undeniable and deadly. One cannot live with it. It can be given to the dying as formerly they gave last rites. If one is to sit down at a table and eat, one must forget about it. If one is to raise a child, one must first of all remove [it] from the house. … If one is to build a state, one must forbid even the mention of that name.16

The Soviet Union came close to such a prohibition during the era of high Stalinism; for truth was to Dostoevsky both Christian and anti-authoritarian. Dostoevsky fused, if he did not altogether harmonize, Gogol's search for religious faith with Belinsky's passionate anti-authoritarian mor-alism to provide a new type of positive answer designed for those who had experienced the iconoclasm of the sixties.

Dostoevsky's positive answer did not bypass or even transcend the real world but rather penetrated into it. From the time of his first bleak novel of urban life, Poor People in 1845-6, Dostoevsky was unwilling to gloss over unpleasant facts or offer romantic flights to far-off lands or distant history-even Russian history. He is relatively indifferent to scenery or even beauty of language; his subject matter is prosaic and contemporary- much of it taken directly from the newspapers. His focus is on people, and on the most real thing about them: their inner drives, desires, and aspirations. Amidst all the crime and sensualism of his novels the focus is always on psychological development, never on physiological details. He was a "realist in the higher sense of the word." As he wrote at the end of the sixties:

If one could but tell categorically all that we Russians have gone through during the last ten years in the way of spiritual development, all

the realists would shriek that it was pure fantasy! And yet it would be pure realism! It is the one true, deep realism; theirs is altogether too superficial.17

Thus Dostoevsky takes us "from the real to the more real."18 A veteran of the Petrashevsky circle-the first expressly devoted to "social thought"- of arrest, mock execution, and Siberian exile, Dostoevsky resolved in the late sixties to find that which was most real in the confused experience of the intelligentsia. His method is that of "deep penetration," proniknovenie, a term of which he was particularly fond. He was prompted to fathom these depths not only by his own traumatic experience in prison but also by his association upon return with the so-called pochvenniki, or "men of the soil." This group, led by the remarkable Muscovite critic Apollon Grigor'ev, sought to oppose both the romantic idealism of the older generation and the materialism of the younger generation with a kind of Christian naturalism, which they felt could be the basis of an original and independent Russian culture. They sought to penetrate through life's artificial exterior for a "restoration in the soul of a new, or rather a renewed, faith in the foundation [grunt], the soil [pochvd], the people-a restoration in the mind and heart of everything immediate [neposredstvenny]."19 Criticism, Grigor'ev felt, must be "organic"-taking account of the historical, social, and spiritual forces as well as the physiological forms of life and art. Ostrovsky's dramatic portrayal of Muscovite and provincial life was thought to have prepared the way for a new popular literature by moving back into the soil and away from aristocratic convention.