Crime and Punishment

By Paul Gray

DOSTOEVSKY: THE YEARS OF ORDEAL, 1850-1859 by Joseph Frank; Princeton; 320 pages; $25 Nearly 30 years ago, Critic Joseph Frank was preparing a series of lectures on European postwar existentialism. He thought Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground might be a good place to begin his survey. The 19th century Russian author had, after all, practically invented the isolated, sometimes criminally antisocial hero whose type kept reappearing in the works of Camus and Sartre. The more Frank read Dostoevsky, though, the less interested he became in contemporary writers. Notes from Underground, not to mention the towering achievements of The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, raised hordes of questions that had nothing to do with existentialism. The largest of these: What, besides genius, went into the composition of Dostoevsky's fiction?

This book is the second installment of Frank's answer, which is scheduled to run to five volumes; the first, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849, was published in 1976.

Like its predecessor, Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859 brilliantly combines biography with intellectual history. The essential facts are presented, but not a day-by-day chronicle of trivialities. Those who want to know how many logs the author piled in a fireplace during a given night will have to look elsewhere. Readers curious about how Dostoevsky translated experience into ideas and then into art can wel come Frank as an indispensable guide.

The ten years covered here pummeled Dostoevsky into the figure the world now remembers. Before then, he had been a promising young writer, fashionable for a while but then sliding out of favor in the volatile literary world of St. Petersburg.

He had also heard and read enough about European socialism to become a parlor radical. He and approximately 60 other youthful idealists met regularly to discuss political matters, among them the emancipation of the serfs. Tsar Nicholas I learned of such seditious talk and decided to crack down. The suspected conspirators were arrested and, after a thorough investigation, roughly one-quarter of them, including Dostoevsky, were publicly sentenced to death. As orchestrated by Nicholas, the firing squad was called off at the last minute, with the first three vic tims already bound to their stakes. Dostoevsky learned that the Tsar had lightened his punishment to four years at hard labor and then an indefinite enlistment in the Russian army.

The sudden reprieve from certain death understandably pushed Dostoevsky toward mysticism. "Life is a gift," he wrote several hours after being spared, "life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness." Life in a Siberian prison compound dampened such enthusiasm. His fellow inmates were chiefly peasants, the very people he had hoped to emancipate from the crushing system that enslaved them, but they turned out to be murderous, thieving, brawling brutes who detested him. Dostoevsky notes: "Their hatred for the gentry knew no bounds, and therefore they received us, the gentlemen, with hostility and malicious joy in our troubles. They would have eaten us alive, given the chance."

Prison life meant bitterly cold winters, the loss of all written contact with relatives and friends, the abolition of privacy in the cramped sleeping quarters, and the constant threat of violence from both jailers and the jailed. This regimen did not break Dostoevsky; it inspired him to see himself and those around him in a strange new light. He had been the dupe of a foreign ideology, which had seduced him toward treason; the other convicts, beneath their horrid exteriors, manifested a beatific, instinctively Christian and compassionate Slavic soul. Writes Frank:

"It has often been said that Dostoevsky discovered the 'evil' of 'human nature' in the prison camp, and that this discovery frightened him into an acceptance of a supernatural faith as the sole bulwark of morality against the inherent corruption of mankind ... If any discovery was made, it was rather exactly the opposite: Dostoevsky found that most of the peasant-convicts were far better people than he could possibly have believed at first."

The author's hard-won discovery of "diamonds in this filth" has given rise to another assumption that Frank would like to refute: "One often reads that, after a certain point, the distinction between right and wrong began to blur for Dostoevsky himself, and that he came to admire criminals for their 'strength' (as Stendhal had done earlier and Nietzsche was to do later)." Frank's narrative and evidence prove that Dostoevsky's long exile made him a fierce patriot and moralist, insistent that individual acts incur inescapable responsibility. It is only selected Western eyes that have seen the experimenting murderer Raskolnikov as the hero of a novel simply called Crime.

The picture of Dostoevsky emerging in Frank's pages looks less and less like the avatar of existentialism; he was a sensitive, moody, deep intellect responding to tumultuous current events more than a century ago. And the best is yet to come.

When Dostoevsky returned to St. Petersburg, late in 1859, he was approaching 40, mired in an unhappy marriage and faced with the task of building his literary reputation all over again. His great works were still years away. Biographer Frank, 65, a professor of comparative literature at Princeton, promises that the "third volume is in the final stages of revision, and should not take too long to appear after the publication of the present one."

Given the fascinating story that has been spun so far, yesterday will not be soon enough. --By Paul Gray

Excerpt

" Almsgiving from the population reached a peak during the religious holidays; but it was continual all through the year, and sometimes took the form of money handed to the convicts as they shuffled through the streets of Omsk in a work convoy. The first time Dostoevsky received alms in this way was 'soon after my arrival in prison.' A ten-year-old girl--the daughter of a young soldier, who had seen Dostoevsky in the army hospital when she came to visit her dying father--passed him walking under escort and ran back to give him a coin.

' "There, poor unfortunate, take a kopek, for Christ's sake," she cried, overtaking me and thrusting the coin in my hand... I treasured that kopek for a long time.' This last assertion is literally true: Dostoevsky's second wife confirms that he kept it as a memento for many years and was very upset when it was lost.. "