The writer’s pen had turned the spectral city of his imagination into “Dostoyevsky’s Petersburg,” something solid and familiar to all of us. It happened thanks to his virtuoso manipulation of exact details and the unity and power of the book’s mood. When
The leading radical critic, Dmitri Pisarev, defending Dostoyevsky against accusations of slandering “the whole body of Russian students,” used this very point: how can one speak of slander if the action takes place in a mysterious and strange city; according to the perceptive Pisarev, the reader of
The hypnotic effect of Dostoyevsky’s vision is incomparable. His impulsive narrative, sometimes almost incoherent but always masterfully organized, is so overwhelming that it sweeps away even the fiercely resisting reader. Therefore, Dostoyevsky’s Petersburg is a reality that will exist as long as there is Russian literature. For decades Dostoyevsky’s interpretation of the city was the only possible one for a great majority of people in Russia and the West.
Typical of that is the confession of the writer Vladimir Korolenko, no great fan of Dostoyevsky’s. When Korolenko graduated from a provincial high school in 1871 and arrived in Petersburg, he saw it through Dostoyevsky’s eyes: “I liked everything here—even the Petersburg sky, because I had known it already from descriptions, even the boring brick walls blocking that sky, because I knew them from Dostoyevsky.”38
Dostoyevsky’s landscape of the city is a markedly prosaic one—the suburbs where the “poor folk” live, “the insulted and the injured.” His identification with the new “plebeian” population of the capital was so strong that he rejected all the Petersburg architecture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, that is, the buildings that were considered masterpieces before and after him.
Dostoyevsky was convinced that those buildings were pathetic imitations of European styles. The writer’s gaze slid scornfully along the panorama of Petersburg: “Here’s the characterless church architecture of the last century, there’s a pathetic copy in the Romanesque style of the turn of the century, and there’s the Renaissance.”
Dostoyevsky’s aesthetic judgments arose from his political and social viewpoints, primarily his total rejection of Peter the Great and his reforms. According to Dostoyevsky, Peter struck a blow against the Russian Orthodox Church—the main support of the national spirit; attacked Russian traditions; and dug a chasm between the people and the educated class. Dostoyevsky considered Peter the first Russian nihilist. His wife recalled that the writer spoke passionately of Peter as if he were his worst personal enemy.
Therefore, Dostoyevsky considered Peter’s founding of Petersburg a criminal act: a nihilistic gesture, a meaningless challenge to nature, traditions, and the people’s spirit and well-being. In his notebook, the writer quotes Pushkin’s line from
This anti-Petrine position—and all of Dostoyevsky’s so-called pessimistic, perverted work, alien to socialism—was condemned in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The dictator did not like Petersburg, but he respected Peter the Great, even though he considered him insufficiently cruel.*
This rejection of Dostoyevsky lingered for decades after Stalin’s death. The Soviet Union reluctantly published Dostoyevsky, included him stingily in school curricula, and continued to scold him for “ideological mistakes,” as if he were a contemporary dissident.
The Soviet authorities’ suspicion of Dostoyevsky was manifest in trifles. For instance, I merely quoted Dostoyevsky’s words on Peter’s despotism and his “anti-people attitude in the highest degree” in an article published in the Moscow journal
