SUSAN MCREYNOLDS
95
years to their journal and to his fiction, essays, and polemics that
appeared in its pages.
The connection between Russian Orthodoxy and individual and
national vitality, and between Western philosophy and death, both for
individuals and cultures, is one of the most important themes of Dosto–
evsky's novels.
It
began to take shape when Dostoevsky encountered the
intellectual climate of early 1860s Petersburg, dominated by what con–
temporary lexicographer Vladimir Dahl called "an ugly and immoral
doctrine which rejects everything that cannot be palpated." Ideas about
the primacy of the body and the physical environment that had
attracted Dostoevsky'S interest in the 1840S were now used ever more
stridently to deny the existence of God, moral freedom, and art. These
were now the primary obstacles to Russia's progress in the eyes of a rad–
ical movement that looked to Western materialism for justification, a
movement that declared, in the words of one critic writing in 1864, that
"there is no floor-sweeper, no toilet-cleaner, who is not infinitely more
useful than Shakespeare."
The defense of God, moral free will, and the autonomy of art against
the secularizing influence of money and materialism became intertwined
for Dostoevsky during this period. "Man accepts beauty without con–
ditions," he wrote in
Time,
"not asking why it is useful and what one
can buy with it." The heroes of his later fiction are those who show oth–
ers how to accept life-the beauty of God's creation-without stipulat–
ing any conditions, as Sonia teaches Raskolnikov and Father Zossima
teaches Alyosha Karamazov. The final regeneration of Stepan Trofi–
movich, the Westernized intellectual, is prefigured by his unwavering
faith in art. Even when trying to ingratiate himself with the Petersburg
intellectuals who place toilet-cleaners above Shakespeare, Stepan Trofi–
movich "loudly and firmly declared that boots are lower than Pushkin."
The texts that belong to the immediate post-exile period-especially
Memoirs from the House of the Dead
(1861-62),
Winter Notes on Sum–
mer Impressions
(1863), and
Notes from Underground
(1864)-are
part of the defense of Shakespeare, Pushkin, and Russian religion that
Dostoevsky undertook on his return from exile.
Winter Notes
has not
fared well with Western readers, probably because its deceptively
breezy, essayistic form seems to align with Dostoevsky's journalistic
writings . Such a strict distinction between his fiction and journalism
would have seemed strange to Dostoevsky and his contemporaries,
however. The characters of Dostoevsky's novels are what Mikhail
Bakhtin calls "idea-heroes," embodiments of socio-philosophical ideas;
the psychological dramas valued by Western readers are embedded in a
