Winter Notes on Summer Impressions - Alma Classics

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winter notes on summer impressions many of his thoughts on so many subjects in so few pages. It was as if, on the threshold of an entirely new epoch in his writing, he had decided to present his readers with a profession of faith and a synopsis of his ideas. In fact, Summer Impressions, far from deserving their Cinderella-like treatment, ought to be regarded as a chrysalis out of which developed such masterpieces as The Devils, Crime and Punishment and The Karamazov Brothers, as well as the Diary of a Writer and the figures of Father Zosima and the Grand Inquisitor. Even the Pushkin Commemoration Address, which was probably received with greater immediate acclamation than anything Dostoevsky had ever written, contains little that is not adumbrated in Summer Impressions. The neglect from which Summer Impressions has so far suffered at the hands of literary critics is due to a variety of reasons of which style is not the least. Dostoevsky, never a good stylist, had at that time only a very slender experience as a journalist and he was obviously trying to evolve a way of writing that would enable him to put his ideas across in the most digestible form he could think of. Unfortunately the most digestible form he could think of was one which retained all his most glaring faults of style – repetitiveness, excessive colloquialism, discursiveness, slipshod grammar – and added two of its own: forced breeziness and waggish humour. The reader must make up his mind to disregard them. If he does, he will be amply repaid. 2 T he centre of dostoevsky’s ideas harbours a vision of the world as a moral and spiritual unity, a “brotherly fellowship”, which must “exist in nature”, but cannot be artificially created (as both Summer Impressions and Father Zosima phrase it) and which expects, but most definitely does not demand, of its members a total responsibility for each other and for the community as a whole. It is a unity which makes each one of us into a link in the infinite chain of causation and which, though it may relieve each individual member of the human race of total responsibility and therefore total guilt, yet thrusts upon each of us the burden of a world conscience. It is this theme which Dostoevsky later expanded into an analytical novel (Crime and Punishment) and which later still he made both his Grand viii
preface Inquisitor and Father Zosima (The Karamazov Brothers) develop each in his own way. The fundamental tragedy of men, according to Dostoevsky, comes from two kinds of actions: actions that shatter world unity (and every crime committed against one’s fellow men is an attempt to shatter it, as Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment finds out to his cost) and actions which attempt to attain a synthetic unity by artificial means. This last he considers particularly dangerous, for men, consciously or subconsciously aware of the dangers of “isolation”, all clamour for unity and, in default of genuine brotherhood, are all too eager to accept a counterfeit model in the shape of socialism or the Catholic Church, which can offer nothing but the brotherhood of an “ant hill”. But, says Dostoevsky, both in Summer Impressions and in his capacity of Grand Inquisitor, even these men will gladly accept, for the alternative to an ant hill is a struggle of all against all, ending in “cannibalism”, when men will devour each other. Catholicism and socialism Dostoevsky regarded as being basically the same, both of them ultimately emanations of the Roman Imperial idea, which insisted on a purely mechanical, external unification of men, in the hope (at least on the part of the Catholic Church) that such a unification would in time give birth to true spiritual fellowship. This, thought Dostoevsky, was putting the cart before the horse, a mistake never committed by the Orthodox Church. In his interpretation, the Orthodox Church expected unity to come of itself, spontaneously and with no assistance from external human agencies; and when it came, true brotherhood would be established with no need for any rules or constitutions. In essence, of course, this is merely the Slavophile version of Russian anarchism, which was conceived as a blend of freedom and love, the former without the latter leading to anarchy, as distinct from anarchism, or “isolation” in the Dostoevskian sense, the latter without the former not, in fact, being able to exist. From Dostoevsky’s point of view, the importance of this attitude on the part of the Orthodox Church was that the Church, by making the Russian people adopt it, made Russia for ever different from the West. And it is just because the West is regarded by him as the true abode of “individualist isolation” in contrast to Russia’s strivings after a spiritual synthesis of the community, that the theme of Europe and her civilization recurs so frequently in Dostoevsky’s writings after his return to Russia. ix
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Winter Notes on Summer Impressions - Alma Classics

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