St Petersburg полностью

Later that same day, early in the morning, Nekrasov appeared on Belinsky’s doorstep, exclaiming “A new Gogol has appeared!” The critic remarked dryly, “You have Gogols growing like mushrooms.” But once he had read the manuscript, Belinsky had to see Dostoyevsky immediately. “Bring him here, bring him quickly!”

Once he met the sickly, pale, freckled, blond, and very nervous Dostoyevsky, the critic was even more touched. Indicating a space about two feet from the floor, he kept telling his friends, “He’s little, just this tall.” When they later met Dostoyevsky, they were very surprised: the young writer was taller than Belinsky.

Dostoyevsky admitted once to his brother, “I have a horrible flaw: unlimited pride and ambition.” The raves from Belinsky, Nekrasov, and their friends convinced him he was a genius. Wanting to be distinguished in some way from the other participants in the Petersburg Anthology, he approached Nekrasov and demanded that every page of Poor Folk be outlined with a special black border.

Poor Folk was published without any borders. But that did not interfere with the sensational and unprecedented reception given Dostoyevsky’s novel and the whole anthology. Several hundred copies were sold in the first few days. Nekrasov’s edition became one of the three great best-sellers of Russian literature of that period, the other two being Gogol’s Dead Souls and Count Vladimir Sollogub’s satirical travelogue, Tarantas.

Count Sollogub, a fashionable writer close to court circles, ran around Petersburg and pestered the other writers in the anthology. “Who is this Dostoyevsky? For God’s sake, show him to me, introduce us!”22 Terrified of the competition, the cynical Bulgarin attacked the anthology in his newspaper, Severnaya pchela. He accused the authors of slavish imitation of Gogol and called the movement the “natural school” for its attention to the darker side of life. In his reports to the secret police, he went much further: “Nekrasov is the most abandoned communist: you need only to read his poetry and prose to be assured of that. He keeps singing the praises of revolution.”23

We all know that attacks can help a book’s popularity. Belinsky immediately expropriated the derogatory label, which has so often happened—from ancient Gothic to later impressionism—in world culture. In his next article, Belinsky announced that the “natural school” was a good name for new voices in literature: all the old ones were not natural, that is, artificial and false. And the term “natural” remained for Russian literature of the Gogol era.

The young Dostoyevsky, though he gave Gogol his due in allusion and associations in his later writings, was actually moving further away from his idol. His bold new novella, The Double (subtitled “A Petersburg Poem”), irritated Belinsky, who was ever changeable in his moods and opinions.

A Petersburg clerk who is losing his mind and is pursued by his double seems a typical Gogolian subject. But Dostoyevsky, who was suffering from as yet undiagnosed epilepsy, described his hero’s madness with clinical precision. This was the beginning of Dostoyevsky’s fearless immersion into the depths of the subconscious.

Belinsky justly saw this as a betrayal of the idea of the social novel, which was so close to the critic’s heart. Dostoyevsky’s “sentimental novel” White Nights made Belinsky no happier, for it was a touching fantasy that grew out of the writer’s wanderings through the suburbs and back alleys of Petersburg. In a letter to a friend, the critic complained, “Each new work of his is a new fall…. We were tricked, my friend, by ‘the genius’ Dostoyevsky!”

Breaking with Belinsky, Dostoyevsky began attending meetings of young people in the home of the nobleman Mikhail Petrashevsky, one of the first Russian socialists, who resembled a stage villain and behaved with great impudence. For instance, one day Petrashevsky came to the Kazan Cathedral on Nevsky Prospect dressed as a woman. He stood on the women’s side of the church and prayed loudly. His thick black beard, which he did not bother to shave or even cover up, upset the women. They summoned a policeman, who addressed the disturber of the peace with the words, “Kind lady, I believe you are a man in disguise.” To which Petrashevsky replied without hesitation, “Kind sir, I believe that you are a woman in disguise.” The policeman was stunned; Petrashevsky slipped out of the church, leaped into his carriage, and rushed home.