This is a good book, and the interesting question about it is not whether the criticism holds up — it does — but what the author could not say and how far he got by saying something else.
Re-reading Dostoyevsky is a single-author monograph by Yuri Karyakin, translated by S. Chulaki, issued by Progress Publishers in Moscow and marked, on its title page, "To Commemorate the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of Dostoyevsky." That is the commission. Dostoyevsky was born in November 1821; the Soviet state marked the jubilee with editions, conferences and export titles, and this is one of them. The Russian original, Perechityvaya Dostoevskogo, sold at 48 kopecks.
The structure is worth describing because it is unusual for the series. There are thirty-odd short chapters, each titled with a phrase lifted from the novel or from Dostoyevsky's working notebooks — "There Appeared a New Strain of Trichinae...", "I Am an Aesthetic Louse!", "Remember That He Is Twenty-Three". The book is centred almost entirely on Crime and Punishment and, crucially, on the notebooks and rejected drafts for it. Karyakin says so at the outset: "The purpose of this book is to consider how Dostoyevsky as an artist interprets the motives behind man's actions. The discussion is centred around Crime and Punishment and Dostoyevsky's notes for the novel." This is genetic criticism — reading a novel against its own discarded versions — and it is done with real skill. The finest sustained passage in the book reconstructs why Dostoyevsky abandoned three separate endings: a suicide, a rescue-from-a-fire followed by repentance, and an explicitly religious close whose planned last line survives in the notes as "Inscrutable are the ways in which God comes to man." Karyakin's comment on the rejection is the sentence a Marxist critic ought to be able to write and mostly cannot: "Here we have an excellent example of how an artist can win over his own preconceived notions."
That is the register throughout. The prose is not committee prose. Read the tally: across some 63,000 words, the word "Soviet" appears twice, "Party" twice, "class" twice; "socialist realism" does not appear at all. This is not a book assembled by an institute. Karyakin (1930–2011) belonged to the reform-communist intelligentsia formed around the Prague journal Problems of Peace and Socialism in the early 1960s, and in 1968 he made a public speech in Moscow, at an evening for Andrei Platonov, that got him into serious party trouble. Readers should hold that fact in mind when they reach his closing pages on Dostoyevsky and the censor: "'The censors will not let anything through?' That is only your excuse for having nothing to say." Karyakin is quoting Dostoyevsky. He is also, unmistakably, talking about himself.
Bakhtin is named. On the analysis of the crowd's laughter at Raskolnikov kneeling on Sennaya Square, Karyakin writes: "The Soviet literary critic M. Bakhtin has noted that Raskolnikov's dream is 'an image of public ridicule poured on an impostor-king.'" It is a single citation in a long book, and Karyakin does not take up polyphony or dialogism as such — the debt is to the carnival material Bakhtin added in the 1963 second edition of Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics, not to the theory of the novel that has since made him famous. But in 1971, with Bakhtin alive and only recently recovered from decades of obscurity, naming him plainly and calling him a Soviet critic was the correct thing to do, and Karyakin did it.
Now the harder test. Does the book engage The Possessed?
It does, and directly, which is more than the frame required of it. Karyakin quotes an extended stretch of Pyotr Verkhovensky's programme — "We shall nip genius in the bud... Everything will be reduced to one common denominator... Everyone will be a slave and in their slavery they will be equal... Our Ciceros shall have their tongues cut out, any new Copernicus shall be blinded, any future Shakespeare stoned" — and he states the historical basis without evasion: "His Pyotr Verkhovensky (The Possessed) was based on Nechayev." He gives Nechayev's own formula, "Poison, the dagger, the noose — the revolution sanctifies them all." He concedes the point Dostoyevsky was entitled to: the novelist "was quite right in exposing those among them whom Marx called 'drill-ground' socialists." He then names the falsification he thinks Dostoyevsky committed — "Dostoyevsky was grossly mistaken when he ascribed to all revolutionaries the views and motives, the aims and tactics of these quasi-socialists, when he identified social protest with crime" — and, tellingly, calls Saltykov-Shchedrin as a contemporary witness against him: "Mr. Dostoyevsky, without the slightest qualms, is hacking away at his own cause."
Karyakin's answer to The Possessed is not a refutation but a counterfactual, and it is the best thing in the book. Dostoyevsky died planning a sequel in which Alyosha Karamazov would leave the monastery for politics and revolution. "Alyosha and Verkhovensky are incompatible. This means that there can be a socialism without the Verkhovenskys, in fact a socialism opposed to them. This is what Dostoyevsky wanted, but feared to believe."
Which raises the question this edition exists to raise. In Moscow in 1971, who were the Verkhovenskys?
Karyakin answers explicitly, and the answer is where the book breaks. The closing chapter turns from Dostoyevsky to contemporary politics and identifies the danger as, first, Mao's China — "The works of both have been banned, condemned as 'bourgeois' and 'reactionary'" — and second, the Western New Left: "certain French (and other Western) students today seek inspiration in present-day China, and in left extremism in general." He warns of leaders "flirting with the youth, flattering the latter out of selfish motives," of a courage that "blunts and kills the desire for truth." He then declares his purpose without embarrassment: "the author of this book cannot conceal, nor does he wish to conceal, the fact that in writing it he was pursuing a definite ideological and political aim."
This is 1971, the Sino-Soviet split at full volume, and the target had been set for him. Progress was running an entire line on it — Maoism Through the Eyes of Communists (1970), A Critique of Mao Tse-Tung's Theoretical Conceptions (1972), The Cultural Revolution: A Close-Up (1975) — with a parallel line aimed at the students of 1968: Boris Leibson's Petty-Bourgeois Revolutionism (1970), E. Batalov's The Philosophy of Revolt (1975). Karyakin's last chapter slots into that shelf exactly. The gain is that it licensed him to discuss Verkhovensky at all. The cost is stated by the analysis itself. A Soviet reader in 1971 who had followed Karyakin through "Everyone will be a slave and in their slavery they will be equal," through "The Inquisitor who acts in the name of Christ has long stopped believing in Christ," through "To call a crime by its real name is unbearable, but calling it something else is a tempting and even inspiring proposition" — that reader did not need to be pointed at Peking. Karyakin is careful to remain unspecific at the one moment it matters: "one cannot but wonder what Dostoyevsky would say about the crimes committed in our time, crimes which have surpassed in cruelty the worst of his forebodings." He does not say whose crimes. He could not.
So the frame does the damage, and it does it by displacement rather than by lying. Only twice does the book itself fall short of what it knows. First, Karyakin invokes Lenin's late warnings — Lenin copying out Marx on Nechayev, Lenin "shortly before his death" urging the selection of cadres who would not "take the word for the deed" — as though the problem had been noticed and closed. He does not say what happened between that warning and 1971, and the silence is the finding. Second, the book is wholly silent on Dostoyevsky's antisemitism. The words "Jew" and "Jewish" do not occur in it. That is not a small omission in a study of a writer whose Diary of a Writer Karyakin cites elsewhere, and it is the one place where his handling of Dostoyevsky's reaction is simply incomplete. On the rest of the politics he is franker than expected: a long footnote sets out Dostoyevsky's defence of Russia's wars, quotes his 1854 patriotic ode and his 1856 verses on the coronation of Alexander II, and notes drily that "For this poem Dostoyevsky was given an officer's rank." On religion he neither apologises nor sneers, arguing from the manuscripts that the novel's construction defeated the Orthodox reading Dostoyevsky intended for it.
The tradition from which this series is introduced answered the underlying question long before, and on ground Karyakin would have recognised. Trotsky's essay on Tolstoy, written for the novelist's eightieth birthday in 1908 and reprinted in the American Fourth International in May–June 1951 (vol. XII, no. 3), treats Dostoyevsky in passing as "this voluptuous poet of cruelty and commiseration" — a judgement made without the slightest need to establish the writer's progressive credentials first, because the method assumed a great reactionary artist requires explanation, not permission. That is the freedom Karyakin lacked. He had to open by assuring the reader that "Marxism upholds all that is progressive in world culture, and is alien to all that is reactionary in it" before he could get to work. The work, once he gets to it, is the best Dostoyevsky criticism Progress ever exported, and readers should take it seriously as criticism. It is also a document of a man arguing for a socialism without Verkhovenskys inside a state that had already been remade by them, and forced to point at China while doing it.