Dostoevsky's reply to Chernyshevsky is both ideological and artistic, the implication being that the two are inseparable, and the further implication being that the indispensable unity of artistic form reflects a more primordial unity of the living person. Those who favored Chernyshevsky's ideas, however, were able to separate them from the form of their expression. Even the conscientious old radical Alexander Herzen, though he found Chernyshevsky's novel "vilely written" and could not help noting that it ends with "a phalanstery in a brothel," immediately added: "On the other hand there is much that is good and healthy." (An interesting pair of adjectives when one recalls the opening lines of Motes.) These remarks of Herzen's are passed on to us by Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, the narrator of Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift (1938), whose monograph on the life of Chernyshevsky makes up the fourth of the novel's five chapters. Godunov-Cherdyntsev notes a certain "fatal inner contradiction" in Chernyshevsky's own reflections on art, what he describes as the dualism of the monist Chernyshevsky's aesthetics - where "form" and "content" are distinct, with "content" pre-eminent - or, more exactly, with "form" playing the role of the soul and "content" the role of the body; and the muddle is augmented by the fact that this "soul" consists of mechanical components, since Chernyshevsky believed that the value of a work was not a qualitative but a quantitative concept, and that "if someone were to take some miserable, forgotten novel and carefully cull all its flashes of observation, he would collect a fair number of sentences that would not differ in worth from those constituting the pages of works we admire."
Indeed, there could hardly be a more thorough denial of artistic unity than this last quoted passage. The naive blithe-ness of its expression is characteristic of Chernyshevsky and thinkers like him (utilitarians, nihilists; then Lenin, Lunachar-sky, the theorists of "socialist realism"). It is defined by Nabokov's narrator in terms of a decomposition of the human person. The metaphor comes quite naturally; the aesthetic question immediately brings with it the human question - or, rather, they are the same.
As a writer and thinker, Chernyshevsky was the embodiment of what in Russian is called bezdarnost' - giftlessness - and was thus the perfect foil for that minutely observant, wondering, grateful, and form-revealing intelligence that Nabokov celebrates in The Gift. Giftlessness, as Dostoevsky feared and Nabokov knew, became the dominant style in Russia; it eventually seized power, and in the process of "making people happy" destroyed them by millions, leaving its vast motherland broken and desolate. "The triumph of materialism has abolished matter," the poet Andrei Bely said in the famine- ridden 1920s. Godunov-Cherdyntsev gives a more detailed formulation:
Our overall impression is that materialists of this type fell into a fatal error: neglecting the nature of the thing itself, they kept applying their most materialistic method merely to the relations between objects, to the void between objects and not to the objects themselves; i.e. they were the naivest metaphysicians precisely at that point where they most wanted to be standing on the ground.
A fatal error, a fatal contradiction. In this respect the greatest foresight was shown by long-eared Shigalyov, the radical theoretician in Dostoevsky's Demons: "I got entangled in my own data, and my conclusion directly contradicts the original idea I start from. Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that apart from my solution to the social formula, there is no other." A direct line leads from metaphysical naivety to murder; a direct line leads from the anti-unity of utilitarian aesthetics to the false unity of the crystal palace. Dostoevsky perceived these relations more clearly than anyone else of his time. The perception coincided with, and in fact constituted, the maturity of his genius. He recognized that his opposition to the "Chernyshev-skians" could not be a struggle for domination, that what was in question was the complex reality of the human being, the whole person, the "thing itself," and that a true articulation of that reality could only come as the final "gift" of an artistic image. Mikhail Bakhtin noted in his study of Dostoevsky's poetics: "Artistic form, correctly understood, does not shape already prepared and found content, but rather permits content to be found and seen for the first time."
Hence the formal inventiveness of Notes from Underground: its striking language, unlike any literary prose ever written; its multiple and conflicting tonalities; the oddity of its reversed structure, which seems random but all at once reveals its deeper coherence - "chatter… resolved by an unexpected catastrophe," as Dostoevsky described it to his brother. ("All Dostoevsky's novels were written for the sake of the catastrophe," the critic Konstantin Mochulsky observed. "This is the law of the new 'expressive art' that he created. Only upon arriving at the finale do we understand the composition's perfection and the inexhaustible depth of its design.") The catastrophe that resolves Notes from Underground, with its resoundingly symbolic slamming door, is at the same time the moment of its origin. There, in a sudden confusion of tenses, the narrator cries out from the past into the future: "and never, never will I recall this moment with indifference." It is a fleeting moment, but it has determined the narrator's life and gives the edge of passion to his attack, his outburst, after all his years "underground." Coming at the end of the book, it sends us back to the beginning; thus the round of the underground man's ruminations is given form, and this whole "image" Dostoevsky holds up to us as a sign.
There may, however, have been a more directly opposing idea in the book as Dostoevsky originally wrote it, a sort of ideological climax in Part One to match the narrative climax in Part Two. When the first part appeared in Epoch, Dostoevsky complained in a letter to his brother that the tenth chapter -"the most important one, where the essential thought is expressed" - had been drastically cut by the censors. "Where I mocked at everything and sometimes blasphemed for form's sake - that is let pass; but where from all this I deduced the need of faith and Christ - that is suppressed."
The published version of the chapter, according to its author, was left "full of self-contradictions." Indeed, the reader will notice that in the third paragraph the "crystal edifice" ceases all at once to represent the ideas of the narrator's opponents and becomes instead something that he himself has possibly invented "as a result of certain old nonrational habits of our generation," something, he says, that "exists in my desires, or, better, exists as long as my desires exist." Obviously there have been major cuts here, removing the transition from one crystal edifice to the other - the word "mansion" being left us as a clue to its nature. We must try to imagine what would have transformed the "chicken coop" into a mansion, what would have made it more than "a phalanstery in a brothel," what would have turned it from an embodiment of the "laws of nature" into a contradiction of those very laws, and how from all this "the need of faith and Christ" was deduced. Dostoevsky never restored the cuts, as he never restored similarly drastic cuts in Crime and Punishment and Demons. Various explanations have been offered for this circumstance, some practical (lack of time, reluctance to confront the censors), others aesthetic (a recognition that the cuts were improvements). We do not know. But if we look at Dostoevsky's outlines of his ideas for novels in his notebooks and letters and then at the novels themselves, we will realize at least that the scheme barely hints at the surprises of its development. However it was that Dostoevsky "deduced the need for faith and Christ" in this chapter, we may be sure that he did not add it on as an external "ideological" precept, but drew it from the materials of the work itself.