The Icon and the Axe

Dostoevsky moves beneath the surface in the first remarkable literary creation of his period of post-exilic prophecy: Notes from the Underground of 1864. Then, having presented the dark recesses of malice in human nature, he plunges on from the real to the more real: to the deeper reality of human nature as a divided complex of feeling and intellect.

The problem of division within man had fascinated Dostoevsky since the time he wrote his Double in 1846 and called his divided hero "the greatest and most important type which I was the first to discover and proclaim."20 In Crime and Punishment of 1866, the first of his great novels, he presents us with a hero, Raskolnikov, whose very name has the word for "schism" within it. Already in this work we see the beginning of his more grandiose conception of bringing the divided inner impulses of men into open confrontation and attempting to overcome the sense of separation and division in modern man. In this as in his other great novels he presents ordinary Russians not in any epic, descriptive sense but in a dynamic state of development. His characters become actors in a broader human drama

where all are involved in the fate of each. The scene is the city, primarily St. Petersburg: "the most abstract and contrived city on the entire earthly sphere."21 There are no happy pastorales to relieve the tension. The stage is filled with the babel of intellectualized chatter and a sense of continued expectation and suspense. The scenario is that of the detective stories and melodramas that were currently popular all over Europe. But all of these ingredients are lifted to the level of a modern passion play, for the drama is, in truth, played out on a stage which has salvation at one end and damnation at the other. Through Dostoevsky, the novel form became invested with the dimensions of religious drama; and the ideas of salon thinkers were developed to their extreme and brought into conflict before the largest single audience available in Russia: the subscribers to Katkov's Russian Herald.

The unique importance of Dostoevsky for Russian cultural history- as distinct from the world-wide development of psychology, literature, and religious thought-lay in his attempt to uncover some new positive answer for humanity in the depths of Russian popular experience. At about the same time in the late sixties that Musorgsky was beginning the first of his epochal "popular music dramas," Dostoevsky turned his attention toward the composition of a novel that would deal not with underground men, crime and punishment, but with redemption and renewal. Like Gogol, he turned to his Russian "divine comedy" after going abroad; and his first effort, The Idiot, of 1867-8, reveals some of the incipient madness of the late Gogol in its agonizing incapacity to create a credible image of pure goodness. Dostoevsky brought with him the faith of the pochvenniki that ultimately all men were in harmony and that there were no unbridgeable barriers between one man and another, or between the world of men and that of the insects below and the angels above. The division between the actual and the ideal-the real and the more real-is ultimately artificial; but it can be overcome only by penetrating deeply into the entire problem of division.

Schism had been a deep and abiding theme of Russian history in the Romanov period. The seventeenth century saw the separation of the government from the people; the eighteenth, the aristocracy from the peasantry; the early nineteenth, the intellectual from the non-intellectual aristocracy; and the mid-century, the "sons" from the "fathers" within the thinking elite. In writing The Idiot Dostoevsky proved that the mere injection of a Christ-figure into this situation is not enough. Dostoevsky's would-be redeemer is incomplete in the novel without his alter ego, the sensualist Rogozhin, with whose life and fate that of "the Prince-Christ" Myshkin is completely intertwined. The helpless idiocy of Dostoevsky's holy fool at the end of the novel

is in many ways reminiscent of the final cries of anguish by the fool at the end of Musorgsky's Boris Godunov.

To overcome the separation in Russian life, it is necessary to fathom that separation which lies at the base of all others: the separation from God. Thus, while still in the last stages of writing The Idiot, Dostoevsky first conceived of a new novel to be called "The Atheist" or "The Life of a Great Sinner." In it a man was to lose his faith and embark on a search fcr positive answers that would lead him eventually to a Russian monastery and the recovery of faith at a higher level. It was to be "a gigantic novel," after the writing of which "I shall be ready to die, for I shall have uttered therein my whole heart's burden."22