Dostoevsky and Schiller: National Renewal Through Aesthetic Education

McReynolds, Susan.
Philosophy and Literature, Volume 28, Number 2, October 2004, pp. 353-366 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/phl.2004.0032

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Symposium: Dostoevsky Recontextualized

Susan McReynolds

DOSTOEVSKY AND SCHILLER: NATIONAL RENEWAL THROUGH AESTHETIC EDUCATION

ostoevskys novels pivot upon scenes of spiritual transformation, moments of revelation that resolve dilemmas for which no logical solution can be found. Raskolnikov, for example, analyzes his crime from philosophical and sociological angles until he almost dies; he is saved by his dream of the plague and by the image of Sonias face. When insight and progress come to Dostoevskys ctional characters, they come as dream, memory, and rapture before images of beauty and suffering. The choice between spiritual and logical solutions confronting Dostoevskys characters is also a choice between Russia and the West. The rationalism and corollary doctrine of egoism that drives characters like Svidrigailov, Stavrogin, and Ivan Karamazov to madness and death are clearly associated in Dostoevskys novels with Western philosophy. The ability to surrender to the benecial power of images is associated with characters like Dmitry Karamazov, who is able to accept the primacy of spiritual truththe truth of his need for expiation over the fact of his legal innocence of his fathers murder. The breadth of spirit that renders Dmitry receptive to the truth revealed in his dream image of the suffering child is clearly identied in The Brothers Karamazov as a distinctively Russian national trait. The contrast between reason, death, and the West, on the one hand, and receptiveness to imagistic truth, salvation, and Russia, on the other,

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drives the plots of Dostoevskys novels. This familiar feature of Dostoevskys art is rst articulated in texts unfamiliar to most readers; the historical essays of the early 1860s that were among his rst published works after his return from exile. In 1849, Dostoevsky was arrested as a member of the Petrashevsky Circle, an association dedicated to disseminating the tenets of Western socialism in Russia. For his participation in the Circle, Dostoevsky was initially condemned to death; the sentence was commuted to four years of hard labor in Siberian prison camp, to be followed by an indenite period of military service in Siberian exile. When Dostoevsky returned to St. Petersburg and public life in 1860, he and his older brother Mikhail launched the journal Time. Mikhail served as editor. Dostoevsky would publish The Insulted and Injured and Notes from the House of the Dead in its pages, in addition to numerous essays dedicated to contemporary literature and events. The essays on Russia and Europe published in Time were a creative workshop in which some basic features of his later novelsmost notably the contrast between Western positivism and Russian spirituality, conceived as the capacity to embrace imagistic revelations of the truthwere rst developed. The pressure of Dostoevskys developing artistic craft is clearly apparent in these non-ctional texts from the early 1860s, which narrate modern Russian and European history as a story structured by a dual plot of death and redemption. Before Dostoevsky wrote novels structured around the contrast between characters like Dmitry and Ivan Karamazov, he wrote essays structured around the contrast between Russia and Western nations like France and England. Before Crime and Punishment portrayed Raskolnikovs resurrection as the surrender to images offering glimpses of something that eludes rational analysis, Dostoevskys essays in Time predicted national renewal for Russia through her embrace of the truths conveyed by the images of ne art. Some essays in Time compose a plot of national rebirth through the effects of artistic images for Russia, but others admonish readers with what Dostoevsky believed would be the terrible consequences of positivism for the West. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, published in Time in 1863, casts France and England as mortally ill victims of a materialist worldview that can only grasp the challenges of modernity as scientic and political problems. The spiritual solutions that will be revealed to Russia through images of beauty, Dostoevsky warns, will elude nations ensnared in rational approaches to their problems.

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Throughout his post-exile life, Dostoevsky believed that political improvement results from changes in the moral condition of individuals, inner changes that are catalyzed by images, not reached through rational deliberation. In 1861, he writes of the Imperial edict emancipating the Russian peasantry from hereditary bondage as a measure that has gone half way towards creating national unity: the government . . . has closed half of the gap dividing us from the people.1 The new era of general peace, calm, brotherly love and prosperity will dawn for Russia, Dostoevsky writes in another 1861 article in Time, when this legal change is complemented by spiritual progressprogress that will occur, he writes, when his contemporaries open themselves to the beauty of the Iliad and the Apollo Belvedere (18: 57). Dostoevskys hopes for national regeneration through aesthetic education were partly inspired by Schillers Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. All improvement in the political sphere is to proceed from the ennobling of character, Schiller asserts, cautioning his contemporaries against the illusion that political and spiritual progress could be independent of each other: there seems to be a physical possibility of honoring man as an end in himself, and making freedom the basis of political association. Vain hope! The moral possibility is lacking, and a moment so prodigal of opportunity nds a generation unprepared to receive it.2 The February 1877 issue of Dostoevskys Diary of a Writer echoes Schillers admonishment: thinkers proclaim general laws, meaning rules that will suddenly make everyone happy, without any need for them to shaped and formed: its simply a matter of letting these rules come into general force, Dostoevsky observes; but even if this ideal were attainable, no rules, not even the most obvious ones, could be implemented with people who have not been re-formed.3 Juxtaposing Schillers Letters with the essays from Time reveals that Dostoevsky appropriates Schillers aesthetic philosophical discourse for use in contemporary domestic debates about national reform and the role of art in social progress. He re-enlivens Schillers philosophical treatise as one source of a concrete social vision, translating Schillers Idealist aesthetics into a specic program of social action that advocates the production and dissemination of autonomous art as the key to national reform. Like Schiller, Dostoevsky believes that cultivating the individuals capacity for moral freedom through the experience of beauty is the surest means to progress. All Russians, Dostoevsky writes in Time, must be initiated into the freedom manifested by ne art, an initiation that entails the need for universal literacy and access to a

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certain kind of education. By advocating popular access to high cultureliterature for the mastersas the surest means to national progress, Dostoevsky stakes a unique position in contemporary Russian social and aesthetic debates, a position with a clearly Schillerian inspiration (19: 56). Nineteenth century Russians integrated Schiller into their social and artistic debates so extensively that he ceased to be a foreign inuence and became a dynamic element of Russian culture, as voices from all points on the aesthetic and political spectrums attest. Schiller truly entered the esh and blood of Russian society, Dostoevsky writes in Time in 1861 (19: 17). Nikolai Chernyshevskyleader of the radicals, grandfather of the Revolution, and author of What is to be Done? (1863), the novel that became Lenins favorite book and inspired Dostoevsky to compose Notes from the Underground as a rebuttal, writes in 1857: Schillers poetry seems native to us . . . we considered Schiller our own poet, a participant in our intellectual development.4 Inuence and inner afnity coincide in the version of Schillerian aesthetic education Dostoevsky envisions for Russia in Time.5 He and Schiller found themselves in similar positions during the composition of the Letters and the essays. The common starting point for their reections on history in these texts is the belief that signicant political obstacles to freedom and community have been removed, but their removal has not resulted in satisfactory progress. Two artists passionately engaged in the most controversial national debates of their times as publishers and essayists, they were committed to persuading their contemporaries that all other means to social progress besides what Schiller calls the living springs of ne art had been exhausted or discredited (IX: 55). Schillers initial enthusiasm for the French Revolution, like Dostoevskys for the Western socialism he studied in the Petrashevsky Circle, had given way to disillusionsment with the violence, rationalism, and self-interested utilitarianism they perceived at the basis of revolutionary conceptions of history. Is the conict of blind forces to endure forever in the political world, and the law of sociality never to triumph over hostile self-interest? Schiller implores (VIII: 49). Reason, he answers, will not be the source of the desired non-violent solution, for reason has accomplished all that she can accomplish by discovering the law and establishing it (VIII: 49). Like Schiller, who laments that utility is the great idol of our age, Dostoevsky emphasizes the limitations of violence and self-interest (II: 7). There are some things you will never

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take with force, he advises his radical contemporaries in Time in 1861; and in the February 1877 issue of Diary of a Writer, he argues that utility and self-preservation alone are never enough to engender complete and voluntary unity (18: 67, Lanz 880). Mr. bov and the Question of Art, published in Time in 1861, is perhaps Dostoevskys most signicant statement on art and his most important non-ctional text of the 1860s. In this article, Dostoevsky asserts that art is the key to national progress: artistry is the best, most persuasive, most unquestionable and comprehensible means of presenting to the masses images of precisely that which you seek, he assures his contemporaries; it is necessary to place artistry rst, ahead of all other demands (18: 93). Like Mr. bov and the Question of Art, Schillers inquiry concerning art and beauty argues that if man is ever going to solve the problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom (I: 3; II: 9).6 The essays in Time were composed immediately before and after one of the greatest turning points in Russian history, the Emanicpation of the serfs on February 19, 1861. During this period, the Russian elite was preoccupied with the fate of the largely illiterate peasants, a question that divided educated society into distinct camps. A few voices warned against the dangers of a literate populace. In 1857 the famous lexicographer V. I. Dal published an article On Literacy in Saint Petersburg News, in which he points to crimes committed by literate peasants as evidence that reading is a dangerous tool in the hands of the people. Dostoevsky had little patience with such arguments. Is this logical? A knife can cut, so there musnt be a knife he rejoins (18: 63). We cant seriously imagine that you would intentionally want to keep the people in darkness, vice, and ignorance, in a wordkill and pervert their soul? Dostoevsky challenges conservatives like Dal (18: 65). It would be better for you gentlemen, Dostoevsky continues addressing Dal, to direct your attention to the harmful conditions surrounding the spread of literacy among the people and correct those conditions, and not deprive the whole people of spiritual bread (18: 63). Dostoevsky voices this opinion in Time in 1861; the narrator of Notes from the House of the Dead expresses the same sentiment in the rst installment of that work, published in the journal Russian World in September 1860.7 Were educated folks, the narrator recalls the prisoners boasting.8 Noting that more than half of them could read and write, a much higher proportion than in the general population, the narrator

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reects: I have since heard the deduction from facts of this kind that literacy ruins the common people. This is a mistake; the causes are quite other, although it is impossible not to agree that literacy does develop their self-sufciency. But this is certainly not a fault (pp. 11 12). Any problems that arise among literate peasants, Dostoevsky counters, are due to the fact that literacy should be universal but remains a rare privilege: destroy the exclusivity. Make it (literacy) accessible to all according to capabilitythe whole medicine is in this (18: 65). He trusts the power of literacy to correct social ills: literacy morally improves the people and gives them a sense of individual worth, which in turn destroys many abuses and disorders, destroys their very possibility (18: 65). Dostoevsky criticized attempts to restrict access to literacy and culture all his life. He advocated higher education for women, and in 1873 he wrote in Dairy of a Writer: I could never understand the notion that only one-tenth of people should get higher education while the other nine-tenths of people should only serve as their material and means while themselves remaining in darkness. I do not wish to think and live in any other way than with the belief that all our ninety-million Russians (or however many will subsequently be born) will all someday be educated, humanized, and happy (Lanz 332). Voices arguing against the spread of literacy were exceptions, however. Russian society of the early 1860s generally agreed that the people should be educated. But what the people should learn was a question that elicited very different answers from two of the most inuential camps of public opinion. Those designated as liberals in contemporary parlance believed that popular reading material should only include books capable of humanistically developing and directing the people, as N. F. Shcherbina wrote in his inuential 1861 article, Experimental Sketch of a Book for the People.9 Like most Russian liberals, Shcherbina believed that the elite should decide what constituted humanistic development and provide the people with reading material that fostered it. Russian radicals rejected Shcherbinas liberal vision of humanist education, and sought instead to educate the people in the scientic positivism they believed would create a revolutionary populace. There exists only one evil among mankindignorance, Dmitry Pisarev, a leading radical, wrote in his 1864 essay Realists; for this evil there is only one remedyscience.10 The goals they hoped to achieve through education differed, but Russian liberals and radicals of the 1860s

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believed that popular literature should be specially crafted to convey the values they deemed appropriate for the people. Both groups similarly argued that aesthetic quality would have to be sacriced to didactic ends in popular reading material. In his Experimental Sketch, Shcherbina demotes belles lettres to a medium for moral instruction. It will not be possible to accept an exclusively aesthetic goal for popular literature, he writes. Aesthetic form simply provides a vehicle for transmitting the values and information that must be imparted: beneath a more or less artistic shell, some type of historical, or other form of information, fact, or humanistic and spiritual-moral idea will always be enclosed, something especially needed by our people (19: 39). Dostoevsky deemed Shcherbinas disregard for aesthetic form so dangerous that he devoted extensive space in Time to reviewing the Sketch. What unbearably dry reading matter and erudition Dostoevsky exclaims; even cheerful songs are forbidden (19: 42). Such excessive concern for morally didactic content, Dostoevsky writes, imparts Shcherbinas planned book with ponderousness, reveals to the people a hidden agenda (19: 44). Their ponderous hidden agenda, Dostoevsky remarks, compels liberals to devise strange ways of getting people to read their books. He tells of one proposal that openly presented as the best means for spreading literacyforbid men to marry until they are literate (some liberals are capable of such despotism!) (19: 48). Shcherbina writes that landowners, factory owners, anyone in a position of authority over the people should buy readers and distribute them as a reward for literacy. Such behavior is entirely alien to the people, Dostoevsky objects: this is something monstrous and German. Wouldnt it be better to sew little bows of pink ribbon onto the peasants right shoulder as a reward for literacy! (19: 46). I would not run like that to the authorities to spread my book, Dostoevsky reects. From this its not very far to using the authorities to force out all the previous little improper books that the people read. And then, in fact, what do we see: collect them and burn them! (19: 46). The best book, he provokes his pedagocially minded contemporaries, whatever it may be and whatever it may be about, is an entertaining one (19: 51). Aesthetic quality and the peoples preferences occupied an equally humble station in the pedagogical plans of the radicals. The Russian left of the early 1860s drew its ideas about art from Chernyshevskys masters thesis, The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality (1855). Art,

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Chernyshevsky had proclaimed, has legitimacy only as a substitute for an absent reality: if a man is hungry, he will appreciate a painting of food. But the aesthetic representation is worth less than the thing portrayed; a man enjoying a good meal has no need for a still life with fruit. Like Shcherbina, who writes that the people, from one perspective, are a child, and therefore above all else, the publisher should note what specic knowledge is necessary under the conditions of the peoples way of life, Chernyshevsky and the radicals believed that pressing social needs dictated arts only appropriate themes: in their view, the injustices of the existing class system and representations of the absent, but desired, socialist future (19: 33, 38). In his review of Turgenevs story Asya (1858), Chernyshevsky writes: the devil with these love questionsof what interest are they for the contemporary reader, who is absorbed in problems bound up with the administrative and judiciary improvements, the nancial reforms, the liberation of the peasants?11 The writers the Dostoevsky brothers gathered at Time were known as postepenovtsy, or gradualists. Unlike conservatives such as Dal, they advocated gradual change; unlike the left, they advocated gradual change through the effects of aesthetic images instead of revolutionary leaps forward through the spread of scientic knowledge. In these essays, Dostoevsky espouses a faith in the cumulative effect of modest individual efforts that recalls Schillers Letters. Schiller writes: to the young friend of truth and beauty who would inquire of me how, despite all the opposition of his century, he is to satisfy the noble impulses of his heart, I would make answer: impart to the world you would inuence a direction toward the good, and the quiet rhythm of time will bring it to fulllment (IX: 59). Addressing radicals who complain that repressive conditions make any kind of useful action impossible in Russia, who moan we are perishing in inactivity and declaim we want to and can move mountains, Dostoevsky tells them to take one step instead of seven milesteach just one child to read; theres your activity (18: 68). Dostoevsky does not object to goals of popular enlightenment or the principle of elite leadership per se. He praises progressive society for opposing superstition, crude relations with women, bowing to idols, and so on and so on, agrees that the enlightened should teach the unenlightened, and supports the eradication of prejudice and banishing the darkness of ignorance (19: 29, 24, 25). But he perceives arrogance in contemporary liberal and radical plans for popular

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reading, and criticizes the inordinate self-assurance he sees behind the belief that the people will immediately open their mouths and gape listening to how were going to teach them. The people are not exactly a herd, after all (19: 28). Most importantly, Dostoevsky objects to the anti-aestheticism of liberal and radical agendas for popular reading, to the belief that people learn through instruction conceived as a form of punishment for ignorance and prejudice. It is necessary, he paraphrases the liberal and radical view, as they say, to punish . . . Teaching is necessary, it is most important to teach (19: 24). Dostoevsky reminds those who think of popular reading matter as instructional compendia rather than as art that talent is most crucial for approaching the people and appealing to them, nave and inborn talent (19: 52). Their eagerness to sacrice aesthetic quality to didacticism in popular literature, Dostoevsky argues, reveals his contemporaries utter misunderstanding of how people learn. They have different conceptions of what constitutes ignorance, he writes, but liberals and radicals both want to extirpate it with laughter and whistles, they persecute it with smirks, and in their noble displeasure, expectorate and spit on this prejudice (19: 29). Behind this passion for instruction Dostoevsky senses the belief that the people are stupid ; he nds this belief and the passion for anti-aesthetic didacticism it inspires to be nasty (19: 25, 24). It also dooms liberal and radical pedagogical efforts to failure. The people dont like such teachers, standing right in front of them as mentors and leader-enlighteners, Dostoevsky warns (19: 41). If I were a peasant, he writes, it would be terribly annoying to me that they considered me such a little boy that whole secret committees were troubling themselves over me (19: 34). Dostoevskys reections on the Russian people carried unique weight. Most participants in these discussions about popular literature had little if any direct contact with the people, but Dostoevsky spoke as someone who had lived among them for years as a prisoner in the labor camp and while serving as an enlisted man in the army. Recalling evenings in the barracks when he heard soldiers read to each other, he defends their choice of novels and stories over what Shcherbina and Chernyshevsky would consider pedagogically useful matter: the spiritual impressions carried away from reading, some ideas, some dreams these mean something, he asserts (19: 56). It is not possible to calculate the effects of art exactly, he concedes: to determine exactly what is and is not needed, on scales or with numbers, is difcult (18: 100). But the demand for precisely calculated ideological service from art is always

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mistaken and futile, for the rst law of art is freedom of inspiration and creativity (18: 100, 77). The ways of beauty are still unknown, he acknowledges, but the failure of works that sacrice aesthetic quality to didacticism is inevitable: an inartistic work will never under any circumstances achieve its goal; moreover: it will sooner harm the matter than bring any benet (18: 79). Dostoevsky counters demands for popular reading material that conveys precisely calculated values and information with his faith in the incalculably transformative power of beauty, a strategy pregured in Schillers Letters. Noting that the frontiers of art contract the more the boundaries of science expand, Schiller concedes that beauty, and the mood it induces in us is completely indifferent and unfruitful as regards either knowledge or character; it accomplishes no particular purpose, neither intellectual nor moral (II: 7; XXI: 147). But this failure to directly shape character, Schiller argues, is the source of beautys innite transformative power, for the aesthetic state is a disposition of the psyche which removes all limitations from the totality of human nature (XXII: 151). Precisely thereby something innite is achieved, Schiller claims; the freedom to be what he ought to be is completely restored to him in the encounter with beautyart bestows the highest of all bounties, the gift of humanity itself (XXII: 147, 151, 147). Schillers Letters resonate through these essays in Dostoevskys insistence that exposure to beauty is the most effective kind of education. In 1861 Dostoevsky writes in Time that he always believed in the power of the humanist, aesthetically expressed impression. Such impressions gradually accumulate, with development they pierce through the hearts crust, penetrate to the heart itself, to the very essence, and form the man (XIX: 109). The aesthetic impressions Dostoevsky recommends for the people correspond to what Schiller calls an art of the Ideal: this kind of art must abandon actuality, and soar with becoming boldness over our wants and needs; for art is a daughter of freedom, and takes her orders from the necessity inherent in minds, not from the exigencies of matter (II: 7). Nikolai Dobroliubov, a leading radical critic of the early 1860s, wrote a negative review of Nikitin, a contemporary poet from the merchant class, objecting to Nikitins neglect of social issues. Dostoevsky discusses the review in Time. He chastises Dobroliubov for treating Nikitin despotically,and paraphrases Dobroliubovs commands: write about your needs, describe the needs and requirements of your class,down

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with Pushkin, dont dare to delight in him, delight in and describe these other things (18: 102). Dostoevsky counters by calling for the peoples access to Pushkin, the national poet. Radicals condemned Pushkin as aristocratically elitist, aesthetically rened and useless; liberals insisted that Pushkin was too difcult for the people, who, in Shcherbinas words, needed judicial essays . . . for their moral elevation, and a medical essay of hygienic content instead of poetry (19: 39). Dostoevsky argues that Pushkin is exactly what the people need, precisely because the beauty of his poetry is the most accessible and transformative form of education. Pushkinhe is the banner, the point of contact among all who seek education and development; because he is the most artistic of all our poets, therefore he is the most captivating, the most comprehensible (18: 103). Pushkins works, Dostoevsky claims, hold the key to Russias progress: we arrived at contemporary questions through Pushkin (18: 103). He imagines an exchange between Dobroliubov and Nikitin, the merchant-poet, in which Nikitin pleads for the right to direct his gaze upwards, to the dignity of his calling and the Universal law, not downwards toward fortune and the needs of daily life, as Schiller writes (IX: 57). Pushkin was my banner, my lightouse, my development, Dostoevsky has Nikitin exclaim; I am a petty bourgeoishe (Pushkin) extended a hand to me from where there is light, where there is enlightenment, where shameful prejudices do not oppress, at least not as they do in my surroundings; he was my spiritual bread (18: 102). Just let me live a higher life now a little, Dostoevsky imagines Nikitin imploring (18: 103). Dostoevsky refuses to sacrice the peoples desire for the spiritual bread of beauty to any abstraction, whether the liberal abstraction of progress, or, in the case of radicals such as Dobroliubov, the goal of a socialist future. His defense of the individuals right to the freedom manifested by beauty has a precedent in Schillers Letters. The advance of civilization, Schiller writes, has demanded the separation of the rigorous bonds of logic from the free movement of the poetic faculty; but however much the world as a whole may benet through this fragmentary specialization of human powers, it cannot be denied that the individuals affected by it suffer under the curse of this cosmic purpose (VI: 43). An education to taste and beauty is a necessary antidote, for it has as its aim the development of the whole complex of our sensual and spiritual powers in the greatest possible harmony (XX: 143).

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Besides defending the peoples desire for aesthetic ideals, Dostoevsky champions their right to art that explores alternatives to reality, art that exercises skepticism and imagination rather than imposing facts and values on them. The common people, he observes, display a penchant, an attraction to doubt, to philosifying, to negation; they like books that show the possibility of facts directly opposed to vital reality and profoundly negating its immutability and oppressive order (19: 50). He respects their desire to take pleasure at least in some kind of skepticism and for books that show them the possibility of another world, completely unlike the one around them (19: 50). But instead of encouraging the peoples development of imagination and skepticism, Shcherbina would exclude fables and the fantastic and supernatural from popular reading; because such tales feature talking animals and trees, Shcherbina fears the people will reject them as false. Dostoevsky dryly assures him that the people will gure out that this is a form of art, dont worry (19: 37). Dostoevskys conviction that social progress is linked to aesthetic sensibility never faltered. In the December 1876 issue of Diary of a Writer he cites disrespect for Shakespeare and Rafael, and a noticeable weakening of the feeling for language, for metaphor and allegory, as signs of national debility (Lanz 730). He consistently opposes the belief that progress can be achieved by negative means: one of the most serious mistakes is that the denunciation of vice (or what liberal opinion accepts as vice) and the arousal of feelings of hatred and vengeance is considered the only possible way to achieve the purpose of social progress, he writes in the Diary in 1873 (Lanz 211). Lamenting the view that one ought to be out protesting and not feeling pleasure, he insists that any work of art without a preconceived tendency, a work created exclusively out of the demands of art and even on an entirely non-controversial subject which doesnt contain the least hint of anything tendentious, contributes far more to social progress than the tracts demanded by his contemporaries (Lanz 211). Over the course of his life, Dostoevky came to draw an ever stricter distinction between Russian culture, which he believed was based in appreciation for beauty and images, and European culture, in his opinion entrapped in a philosophical rationalism opposed to the lifesustaining power of beauty. But his life-long condence in beautys effectiveness in history and individual biography testies to the enduring inuence of his Western philosophical heritage. His reections about art and Russian national identity remain structured by Schillerian

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concepts and concerns throughout his life, even during the later period of his pronounced nationalism. Dostoevskys impassioned defense of the importance of art and artistic freedom in national life remained exceptional in his time; and the tragic fate of many books and artists attests to the power the views he so eloquently opposed exercised in subsequent Russian history. Northwestern University

1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Dostoevsky are my translations, taken from the thirty-volume edition of his collected works: F. M. Dostoevsky: Polnoe sobranie sochineniia v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad: Soviet Academy of Sciences, 197280), vol. 19, p. 8. 2. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), IX: 56, V: 25. 3. F. M. Dostoevsky, A Writers Diary, trans. and annotated by Kenneth Lanz (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1994), p. 863. A wide-ranging collection of his cultural and political essays and ction, the Diary began in 1873 as Dostoevskys regular column in The Citizen and was subsequently published as an independent monthly 187677 and 188081; Dostoevsky intended to republish the Diary as a book, as it is now available. For its profound inuence on Dostoevskys contemporaries and signicance within his life and works, see Joseph Frank, Approaches to the Diary of a Writer, in Through the Russian Prism: Essays on Literature and Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 18711881 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Gary Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevskys Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 4. Quoted in R. Iu. Danilevsky, Schiller in der russischen Literatur (Dresden: Dresden University Press, 1998), p. 305. My translation. 5. In addition to his well-known enthusiasm for Schillers poetry and plays, Dostoevsky was familiar with Schillers non-ction. The exact times and places of his exposure to Schillers philosophical texts are often difcult to establish, but they left identiable traces on Dostoevskys works. In the 1840s he dreamt of publishing a full edition of Schiller in Russian translation as a joint venture with his brother Mikhail. It never materialized, but with Fyodors encouragment and involvment, Mikhail translated and published On Nave and Sentimental Poetry, in addition to several Schiller plays. 6. Robert Louis Jackson writes that Mr. bov echoes the central themes of Schillers philosophical letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man: the aesthetic education of humanity through the renement of aesthetic sensibility. Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoevskys Quest for Form (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 198. For a different

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intepretation of Mr. bov and the Question of Art, see Joseph Frank, An Aesthetics of Transcendence, in Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 7694. Frank argues that Dostoevsky takes up a completely original position in Mr. bov and the Question of Art (p. 85). 7. Dostoevsky transferred serial publication of Notes from the House of the Dead to Time in 1861. 8. F. M. Dostoevsky, Memoirs from the House of the Dead, trans. Jessie Coulson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 11. 9. Quotations from Shcherbina are taken from Dostoevskys 1861 essay On Bookishness and Literacy (19: 42). 10. D. I. Pisarev, Sochineniia v chetyrekh tomakh (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 195556), vol. III, p. 122. 11. Quoted in Charles Moser, Antinihilism in the Russian Novel of the 1860s (The Hague: Mouton, 1964), p. 48.