Dostoevsky Reads WAR AND PEACE

 

Dostoevsky Reads War and Peace

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment was serialized in Katkov’s journal The Russian Messenger, beginning in the January and February issues of 1866. At times early chapters of War and Peace were running in that same journal concurrently with C and P. By the time first chapters of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot ran there as well (January, 1868), Dostoevsky had read half of War and Peace and was eager to read the rest. As he wrote to his friend, Apollon Maikov, “I should so much like to read the whole thing . . . It seems to me quite a major work, although unfortunately it has too many psychological details. I wish there were fewer of them. On the other hand, though, perhaps just because of these details it has so many good things.”

Aware that he was in competition with a genuine writer, Dostoevsky often tempered his admiration for Tolstoy with criticism. He could not conceal a certain envy. He was offended by remarks made by the critic Nikolai Strakhov, a long-time friend who was in ecstasy over Tolstoy’s War and Peace. In a critical article Strakhov once wrote that “Count Tolstoy did not attempt to entice the reader with any complicated and mysterious adventures, or the description of any scabrous and horrifying scenes, or the depiction of terrible spiritual agony, or, finally, any sort of daring, new tendencies that stimulate in an unhealthy way the imagination of the reader.” Dostoevsky saw such remarks as aimed at himself, and he was probably right.

Although for a long time Strakhov dined regularly with the Dostoevsky family in St. Petersburg, he and Dostoevsky never much liked each other. Strakhov paid the writer back tenfold for any personal slights, when, in 1883—after Dostoevsky’s death—he wrote a letter to Tolstoy, repeating vicious gossip that painted Dostoevsky as a pedophile. This canard, which came to light only after Strakhov himself was dead, has taken on a life of its own, as people, unfortunately, delight in believing the worst about great men.

Back to War and Peace. Shortly before the birth of Dostoevsky’s second child, Lyubov—she was born in Dresden on September 26, 1869—Strakhov had sent him the book publication of War and Peace. Dostoevsky, however, pretended that one of the volumes had been misplaced. Since in 1868 they had lost their first baby born abroad, Sofya, and since his wife Anna Grigorievna was fearful about giving birth again, he wanted to shield from her the passage describing the death in childbirth of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky’s wife in the novel. [Information above is from Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871, p. 278-79, 350-51, 368.]

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Dostoevsky’s great dream was to write a novel substantial enough to vie with the novels of his two great rivals, Turgenev and Tolstoy. He felt a sense of inferiority to both of them, and part of that had its origins in his low social status. Turgenev and Tolstoy were both of the high nobility. They never had to live hand to mouth, as did Dostoevsky almost the whole of his life, and one can understand his bitter complaints that he—had he not been oppressed perpetually by financial constraints, had he not had to rush his works into print because he needed money—would have had the time and leisure to perfect his style.

Comparing him to Turgenev today seems ludicrous, as his fictional works—their psychological and philosophical content—is so much more profound than that of Turgenev. Late in his career he hoped to complete his Life of a Great Sinner, a work that would rival War and Peace in scope and profundity. He completed only the first volume, The Brothers Karamazov, but if you take into account the aggregate of his novelistic production: five big novels, beginning with the prelude novella, Notes from the Underground, and ending with The Brothers Karamazov, he did manage a literary oeuvre inferior perhaps only to Tolstoy in Russian literature.