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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
In 1861, in the second issue of his new journal Vremia, Dostoevsky published an article entitled “Mr. bov and the Question of Art.“ In it he attacks the utilitarian aesthetics of the radical literary critic N. A. Dobroliubov (1836-61); at the same time he sets forth the fundamentals of his own idealist aesthetic. Dostoevsky's article is his first major critique of the utilitarian and materialist outlook of the radical democrats led by N. G. Chernyshevsky (1828-89) and Dobroliubov. It anticipates his later polemic with the radicals in Notes from theUnderground (1864). The problem of freedom, significantly, is in the foreground of both works. The insistence on freedom in artistic creation is the central motif of “Mr. Dobroliubov and the Question of Art.” It is to this problem that we wish to direct principal attention.
1 (
) (Moscow and Leningrad, 1926-30). All citations from Dostoevsky's belles-lettres and critical writings refer to this edition of Dostoevsky's works.
2 Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov, as is well known, were strongly influenced in their philosophy by Ludwig Feuerbach and in their social criticism by the French Utopian socialists. While the two Russian thinkers could be considered rationalists in the eighteenth-century sense of a complete faith in reason, they bear a strong affinity in their manner of thinking to the nineteenth-century popularizers of science such as Vogt, Moleschott, and Buchner, as well as to the English utilitarians. In his aesthetics and literary criticism Dobroliubov based himself on Chernyshevsky's “Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality” (1855); this work is essentially an application of Feuerbach's materialism to aesthetics.
3 (
) (Moscow, 1936), p. 85.
4 Ibid., p. 86.
5 Ibid., pp. 124-25. In a note to his testimony at this point Dostoevsky adds: “With which Petrashevsky completely agreed. It turned out that the quarrel resulted from a misunderstanding. All the guests of Petrashevsky were witnesses.“
6 Dostoevsky wrote in 1873 that he had parted ways with Belinsky “for a variety of reasons, quite unimportant ones in any case” ((
) …, XI, 8). He maintains that although he had ceased to visit Belinsky in the last year of his life, he “passionately had accepted at that time all his teachings” (p. 10). Yet in the same reminiscences Dostoevsky observed that he and Belinsky were at opposite poles on the question of religion; in this sphere Belinsky regarded Dostoevsky as a “naive man” (p. 9). It seems quite probable that at this time Dostoevsky succeeded in harmonizing quite contradictory philosophical, literary, and political views.
7 The secret agent P. D. Antonelli, who spied on the Petrashevsky gatherings, corroborates in part Dostoevsky's testimony. He notes that Petrashevsky used to quarrel with the Dostoevsky brothers, “reproaching them for their manner of writing which allegedly did not lead to any development of ideas in society” ((
), op. cit., p. 197).
8 (
) XI, 139.
9 (
) (MOSCOW and Leningrad, 1928-34), I, 183-84.
10 Ibid., II, 570.
11 Ibid., p. 593.
12 The deep Platonism of Doestoevsky's higher aesthetic is obvious in “Mr. Dobroliubov and the Question of Art.” The notion—essentially Platonic—of the medieval Christian aesthetic that all beauty is a theophany is central to Dostoevsky's aesthetic outlook. It should be noted in this connection that many features of Dostoevsky's aesthetic resemble Chateaubriand's Christian aesthetic in Genie du Christianisme (1802). Dostoevsky mentions this work in a letter to his brother in 1838. The conception of Christianity not only as truth but as beauty—the chief idea of Genie du Christianisme—is at the core of Dostoev - sky's higher aesthetic. In his aesthetic thought Dostoevsky is clearly indebted to various German idealist thinkers. Possibly the single most important German influence was Schiller with his central conception of moral education through the refinement of aesthetic sensibility (a basic conception with Chateaubriand though in a strictly Christian context). Dostoevsky, like Schiller, certainly was marked by the Winckelmann cult of Hellenism. Very important in any consideration of direct influences would be Apollon Grigoriev's “organic” theory of art; Grigoriev, a collaborator of Dostoevsky on Vremia, was deeply influenced by Schelling.
13 (
)…, XIII, 512.
14 (
) ibid., p. 551.
15 (
) p. 69.
16 (
) I, 143.
17 A. (
) (St. Petersburg, 1876), p. 615.
18 H. A.(
) (MOSCOW, 1948), pp. 103-4.
19 (
) ibid., p. 26.
20 (
) ibid., p. 242.
21 (
) (St. Petersburg, 1908), III, 272.
22 Ibid., p. 276.
23 (
) p- 422.
24 ibid., p. 240.
25 () p. 95.
26 Ibid., p. 94.
27 (
) p- 426.
28 (
) ibid., p. 25.
29 ibid., p. 24.
30 (
) ibid., p. 426.
31 () p. 86.
32 “And thus man strives on earth for an ideal which is contrary to his nature,” Dostoevsky wrote in some notes in 1864. “When man has not fulfilled the law of striving for the ideal, i.e., has not brought love to people or to another being through a sacrifice of his / … he experiences suffering and has called this condition sin. And so man ceaselessly must experience suffering, which is balanced by a heavenly pleasure in fulfilling the law, i.e., by sacrificing himself. Precisely here is earthly equilibrium. Otherwise, the earth would be senseless.” Quoted by (
) (Moscow, 1956), p. 213.
33 () pp. 86-87.
34 (
)…, XIII, 31.
35 (
) p. 24.
36 () ibid., p. 422.
37 () pp. 94, 88.
38 (
) XIII, 191. Dostoevsky here gives expression to the central idea in Schiller's Briefe iiber die asthetische Erziehung des Menschen. Schiller speaks out against “Utility… the great idol of the age,” declaring that “in these clumsy scales the spiritual service of art has no weight” (Second Letter). He cautions the “young friend of Truth and Beauty” against plunging into the present with the hope of rapidly “transforming the formless substance of the moral world.” “The pure moral impulse is directed at the Absolute; time does not exist for it “ Schiller's advice to the artist is to “give the world on which you are acting the direction toward the good” (Ninth Letter). “Beauty must be exhibited as the necessary condition for humanity” (Tenth Letter). In his critique of utilitarian aesthetics Dostoevsky, like Schiller, affirms the timelessness of the moral impulse in art, that is, the contemporaneity of all beauty (art).
39 () p. 94.
40 () I, 58.
41 Ibid., p. 59.
42 (
) p. 267.
43 () p. 88.
44 (
) XIII, 506.
45 (
) ibid., p. 240.
46 (), » p. 92.
47 ibid., p. 95.
48 ibid., p. 90.
49 bid., pp. 90-91.
50 (
), XIII, 532. \
51 (
) p. 244.
52 ibid., p. 279.
53 () p. 72.
54 (
) XIII, 553.
55 () p. 84.
56 Ibid., p. 85
57 ibid., p. 66.
58 Ibid., p. 67. 59 Ibid., p. 68.
60 Ibid.
61 (
) XII, 361.
62 () p. 66.
63 (
), IV, 116.
64 () pp. 65-66.
65 Ibid., p. 93.
66 (
) (St. Petersburg, 1883), p. 275.
67 () p. 90.