Free Dostoevsky by Joseph Frank

slave a freeman, the freeman a saint or a martyr.” 31 Dostoevsky no doubt toiled over such pages with reverence, but having almost completed the job, he discovered to his dismay that the work had already appeared in Russian.
    Dostoevsky read widely in the numerous novels of George Sand and, as with the entire generation of the 1840s, such works greatly enriched his acquaintance with progressive and revolutionary ideas. In the moving obituary that he wrote forty years later, George Sand, he says, was more important in Russia than Dickens or Balzac because her readers “managed to extract even from novels everything against which [they] were being guarded.” 32 The great satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin is even more explicit. “From the France of Saint-Simon, Cabet, Fourier, and Louis Blanc and, in particular, George Sand . . . flowed to us [in the 1840s] a faith in mankind; from there gleamed for us the certainty that the Golden Age was to be found not in the past but in the future.” 33 George Sand had helped toinspire such a faith in Belinsky, and the novelist whom Renan once called an Aeolian harp, resounding to all the ideological currents blowing in the tempestuous 1840s, also performed the same signal service for Dostoevky.
    There are intriguing resemblances between Sand’s remarkable novel
Spiridion
(a combination of Gothic mystery story and spiritual autobiography) and certain features of
The Brothers Karamazov
. 34 Both are set in a monastery; both involve the transmission of an ancient and semiheretical religious tradition; both stress that true religion should depend only on free moral choice, not on the tyranny of dogma or institutions; both contain as central characters an old and dying monk—the inheritor of this tradition, who is hated by his fellow monks—and an ardent young disciple inspired by his doctrine and his example; both dramatize the struggle between skeptical reason and true faith. In both novels, the struggle is resolved through a mystical vision that restores a selfless love for all of God’s creation and revives belief in the existence of conscience and the immortality of the soul; in each, the dying guardian of the tradition sends his young follower into the world to apply the doctrine of Christian love to the ills of social life. 35 In 1876, Dostoevsky was certain that George Sand had “died a Deist with a firm belief in God and immortal life,” and he pointed out that her Socialism, based as it was “upon the spiritual thirst of mankind for perfection and purity,” coincides with Christianity in its view of human personality as morally responsible. 36 Whether or not such comments were directly inspired by recollections of
Spiridion
, they well illustrate the sort of moral-religious Christian Socialism that George Sand helped to instill in Dostoevsky himself in the early 1840s.
    With the collapse of his hopes for
La dernière Aldini
, all of Dostoevsky’s plans for obtaining extra funds by translation went glimmering. Nor was he any more successful with another project that seemed promising—a complete Russian version of Schiller’s plays, with Mikhail as translator and himself as editor and publisher. Mikhail did put
The Robbers
and
Don Carlos
into Russian, and both were published in periodicals, but the expectation of a complete edition, with substantial profits, once again proved a will-o’-the-wisp. The only enterprise of Dostoevsky’s that succeeded was a translation of
Eugénie Grandet
, prompted by Balzac’s triumphal presence in Petersburg in the winter of 1843. Translated over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, it was published in the
Repertoire and Pantheon
in 1844, and this was the manner in which Dostoevsky’s name, prophetically linked to that of Balzac, first appeared in print. By this time he wasalready sharing a flat with Grigorovich, who, through his acquaintance with Nekrasov, had begun to gravitate toward the orbit of the Belinsky Circle.

    The idea