The populace, horrified at the sight, panicked. Dostoyevsky too shared these feelings. In the extremely tense atmosphere of such substantial reforms, where opposition to the emancipation arose on both right and left, even the fires became political events.
In late 1861 Petersburg was shaken by the first serious student unrest in the country’s history. According to a hostile observer, the students, in demanding more autonomy, “very artfully achieved the greatest scandal possible. The authorities were forced to arrest them two or three times a day, in the streets, in huge crowds. To the students’ great delight, they were detained in the Peter and Paul Fortress.”32
The reaction of Petersburg society was sharply divided along political lines, as had become habitual: some, primarily the intellectuals, supported the rebellious students; the rest attacked them fiercely. The term “nihilist,” first used by Turgenev, became commonplace. The author had used it to describe Bazarov, the hero of his novel
All this situation needed to explode was a lit match. First it happened figuratively: on May 14, 1862, a radical proclamation spread throughout Petersburg. “Young Russia,” as it was titled, called on the people to kill the tsar and destroy the ruling classes. If that were not enough, it also mocked religion, family, and marriage. Like “a thunderclap over the capital,”33 the leaflets taught the stunned and outraged residents that revolutions go hand in hand with national disasters. The mysterious and threatening Young Russia (nihilists?) advocated mass arson to provoke a not-so-natural disaster of their own.
Two days later, mass fires did break out in Petersburg. Was it coincidence or accident? Was it really arson, and if so, by whom? A desperate act by nihilists or a coldly calculated provocation by the authorities, attempting to discredit the young revolutionaries?
Even today, historians still cannot answer these questions. It is important that back then, in stifling, charred, smoke-blanketed Petersburg, public opinion, aided by official newspapers, blamed the long-haired, bespectacled student “nihilists” and Poles rebelling against Russia’s suppression of their homeland’s independence.
A rumor that the city was being torched on all sides by three hundred villains spread among the masses. Witnesses were found who had seen “nihilists” smearing fences and walls with special flammable mixtures. Students were afraid to walk around in the streets in uniform because of the many attempts at mob justice. Even in educated circles people said that Petrashevsky and his group were behind the fires. As one politically engaged woman wrote to another, “all the exiles in that case have been pardoned; and perhaps this is how they are expressing their gratitude. I don’t know how one can be merciful anymore.”34
Clearly Dostoyevsky, as one of the pardoned Petrashevsky circle, had reason to feel uncomfortable during that period. He desperately begged Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the idol and mouthpiece of young radicals, to keep his followers from committing arson.
The calm and ironic Chernyshevsky later described with cold mockery Dostoyevsky’s arrival as a visit from a madman: “Seeing that the mental state of the poor patient was one in which doctors forbid any disagreement with the sufferer, I replied, ‘All right, Fyodor Mikhailovich, I will obey your wishes!’”
Almost in total panic, Dostoyevsky rapidly scribbled a magazine article demanding “the widest openness
Petersburg was no longer the same. Surrounded by a ring of grim, sooty factories, littered with hovels and ugly tenements, the great city was threatening to become a nightmare, far worse than the most horrible fantasies of Gogol or Apollon Grigoryev.
This new, lugubrious Petersburg—new not only to Dostoyevsky but also to the unsettled native Petersburgers—gave the writer a powerful inspiration for the most famous murderer in Russian literature—the former student Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of the novel
