F.M. Dostoevsky's Ideas and Soviet Reality: Mikhail Prishvin's View

Podoksenov Aleksandr Modestovich ORCID: 0000-0001-6405-6140 Doctor of Philosophy Professor, the department of Philosophy and Social Sciences, Bunin Yelets State University 399770, Russia, Lipetskaya oblast', g. Elets, ul. Razina, 21a podoksenov2006@rambler.ru Other publications by this author

Telkova Valentina Alekseevna ORCID: 0000-0001-5738-3143 PhD in Philology Associate Professor, Department of the Department of Russian Language, Methods of Teaching and Documentation, I. A. Bunin Yelets State University 399770, Russia, Lipetsk region, Yelets, Razin str., 21a telkova.2014@bk.ru

In the history of Russian culture, the work of Mikhail Mikhailovich Prishvin (1873-1954) is one of the most complex and multifaceted phenomena, and although the traditions of philological and literary analysis prevail in its study, the publication in the post-Soviet period of journalism of the pre-revolutionary and first post-October years, artistic works "The World Cup", "The Color and the Cross", "We are with you. The Diary of Love" and especially the 18-volume Diary hidden for many decades (1905-1954) shows us the appearance of a new and unknown writer, which causes the need to understand his true meaning not only as an artist of words, but also as a patriot who lived with the problems and troubles of Russia. At the same time, a special role in the formation of Prishvin's philosophical and ideological views belongs to Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821-1881), whose work he turned to all his life.

It should be noted that in the "Bibliographic index" ^[12] on the life and work of Prishvin, containing a description of more than 2000 sources, there are still no articles devoted to the problems that make up the subject of our article. Although the question of Dostoevsky's influence on Prishvin's worldview and creativity has already attracted the attention of scientists. So, in 2011, the comprehension of Dostoevsky's ideas in Prishvin's diary entries was undertaken by Z. Ya. Kholodova ^[24]. A. N. Varlamov writes about Dostoevsky's influence on Prishvin's work in the book "Prishvin" from the series "ZhZL" ^[1]. The chapter "M. M. Prishvin and F. M. Dostoevsky" from the book by T. M. Rudashevskaya "M. M. Prishvin and the Russian Classics" ^{[22, pp. 133-185]} attracts attention, which repeats with some changes a magazine article of the 1970s ^{[23, pp. 59-75]}. However, the influence of Dostoevsky's views on Prishvin's worldview and creativity in the context of the revolutionary transformations of twentieth-century Russia is not considered in the works of these authors.

It is known that if Prishvin accepted the fall of the monarchy in February 1917 with optimism as the beginning of a new era in the history of Russia, then the seizure of state power by the Bolsheviks met very negatively, and the first Soviet years became a difficult period of ideological self-determination for him. "The Karamazovs have begun, and this is how I find out when reading Dostoevsky – what kind of Russia remains after the demons" ^{[15, p. 18]}, he notes in early 1920, speaking about the atmosphere of general hostility, immoralism and lawlessness of Bolshevism. "When you think about Dostoevsky, nothing remains unexpected in modernity ("without a miracle") and it's as if you live on the sidelines and there was no revolution" ^{[15, p. 24]}.

As once the author of "Demons", who was looking with all his might for ways to resist the evil of revolutionary violence, Prishvin, already in the new historical conditions, sought to understand how and how the ideas of godlessness and class hostility, which became the basis of the policy of the new government, could be defeated. The task was also complicated by the fact that Bolshevism, in addition to the obvious evil of totalitarian ideology, had undoubted advantages – the very brutality of state violence served to strengthen the economic and military power of the country, the development of education, science and medicine. "Strange as it may seem," Prishvin noted in this connection, "and Bolshevism is a state element of socialism" ^{[15, p. 40]}.

In the early 1920s, Prishvin came to the conclusion that, for all the fantastic ideological aspirations, the Leninist Party became the only real force for the country's development, which took "power from Smerdyakov's hands" ^{[15, p. 276]}, thereby taking upon itself all the sins of violence and murder of the revolution. In his diary notes, the writer uses Dostoevsky's artistic images to emphasize the initially criminal nature of the coup d'etat, when the Bolsheviks not only illegally overthrew the existing government, but also plunged the country into a fratricidal civil war. "Revolution is like a crime. Russian russians need to know the history of the Russian crime, and you will understand the Russian Revolution. It is not for nothing that at the end of the Empire state criminals mixed up with criminal criminals" ^{[14, p. 264]}, he writes, interpreting Dostoevsky's thought about the criminality of any anti–state activity in his own way to reveal the nature and driving forces of the October revolution.

Finding a line of conduct in the conditions of Soviet reality seemed incredibly difficult: in the new government, Prishvin was repelled primarily by the rejection of Christian morality, the education of class hatred towards people and nihilism in relation to the traditions of Russian culture. Thus, in his life experience, the writer was convinced of the correctness of the words of V. Solovyov, which he wrote out in his Diary in 1919, that "the complete separation between morality and politics is one of the prevailing misconceptions and evils of our century" ^{[14, p. 276]}. Nevertheless, Prishvin tried not only to understand the historiosophical logic of the activities of the Bolshevik Party to settle the country, but also saw in the strengthening of Soviet power the only way out of the revolutionary turmoil. "Here is a lesson: the Bolsheviks, raising an uprising, did not think that they would take and hold power, they only wanted to design a future social movement with their uprising, and suddenly it turned out that they had to arrange everything: the novel quickly ended with fertilization, reproduction and caring for a hungry family" ^{[15, p. 133]}.

Striving to understand and accept the radiant ideals of socialism proclaimed by the Bolsheviks against the background of the hardships of real life, Prishvin reflects on the tragic contrasts of the life of a Soviet person, full of everyday adversities, social grievances and political pressure of the state, which are intertwined with hopes for the realization of a bright and harmonious future world. At the beginning of 1920, once again rereading Dostoevsky, he writes in his Diary the words about Prince Myshkin from the novel "The Idiot", which fully corresponded to his current position as a man at a spiritual crossroads: "Childishly dreaming sometimes about himself to make ends meet and reconcile all opposites" ^{[15, p. 7]}.

Perceiving his mission as serving the people in a Word, the writer is looking for a way to reconcile social contradictions in order to make relations between people in Soviet society at least a little more humane. This is evidenced by another diary entry: ""Idiot" Dostoevsky: he can repel (Prince Myshkin) from himself when you imagine a complete person: a woman, a child, and even just a “philistine” carry the mission of this full-life person of the future against the solitary culture of modern man's self-esteem. If we approach socialism from this point of view, then there is a lot of truth: they call this complete person a "public person"" ^{[15, p. 12]}.

It would seem that the ideals of socialism with its slogans of freedom, equality and fraternity were supposed to reconcile the warring forces and unite the various estates into a single people, so that, as Prishvin writes, a "complete" or "public person" would turn out. However, having become the rulers of Russia, the Marxist revolutionaries did not begin with an attempt to reconcile social forces, but began a total equalization of society by eliminating private property and turning a person into a faceless unit of the commune, with the establishment of political censorship and the destruction of any individual opinion. Nevertheless, Prishvin is aware that, despite all the misconceptions, shortcomings and vices of Bolshevism, a significant part of the population sees it primarily as an attempt to realize the eternal dream of people to achieve social justice and universal equality. This is what Dostoevsky explained in the 1870s the popularity of the European revolutionary socialist idea, which many Russian people perceived "in the most rosy and paradisiacal light. <...> The nascent socialism was then compared, even by some of its leaders, with Christianity and was taken only for the correction and improvement of the latter, in accordance with the age and civilization" ^{[6, p. 130]}.

Sincerely wishing to take part in the construction of a new life, Prishvin gets involved in the study of local lore, organizes the activities of libraries and museums, teaches at school, while continuing to actively engage in creativity: he writes the story "The World Cup" (1922), the books "The Springs of Berendei" (1925) and "Crane Homeland" (1929), publishes essays and short stories in Soviet newspapers and magazines, begins an autobiographical novel "Kashcheeva Chain". In short, he behaves like a citizen loyal to the state. Accustomed to looking for a positive meaning in everything, he hopes that the inherent vitality of the people, which has repeatedly saved Russia in difficult historical times, will now help the country to get out of the revolutionary abyss.

After a brief lull during the NEP period, when the life of Soviet society seemed to be getting better, the top of the ruling Bolshevik party in the late 1920s again began to unwind the flywheel of repression, and again, writes Prishvin, "you hear everywhere, so-and-so is arrested. <...> They say that Florensky was completely tortured by exile and searches" ^{[17, p. 57, 290]}. At one time Dostoevsky wrote sagaciously in "Demons" that socialism would be unthinkable without secret spies, false accusations and denunciations of people against each other. It is no coincidence that in the novel almost all those involved in the circle of conspirators are somehow involved in the network of denunciation. Someone like Liputin – more than once a beaten city gossip and a buffoon, was already a "born spy. He knew at every moment all the latest news and all the ins and outs of our city, mainly in terms of abominations" ^{[4, p. 68]}. Other members of the circle, Pyotr Verkhovensky admits in a conversation with Stavrogin, voluntarily "spy on each other in secret and transfer me. The people are trustworthy. <...> However, you wrote the Charter yourself, you have nothing to explain" ^{[4, p. 298]}. The fact that informing among revolutionaries is not a spontaneous process, but a well–thought-out one, is evidenced by the sincere admiration of the main "demon" of the novel for Shigalev's theory of socialism: "Shigalev is a brilliant man! Pyotr Verkhovensky exclaims. – Do you know that this is a genius like Fourier; but bolder than Fourier <...> he has espionage. He has every member of the society watching one after the other and is obliged to denounce. Everyone belongs to everyone, and everything belongs to everyone. All slaves are equal in slavery. In extreme cases, slander and murder, and most importantly – equality" ^{[4, p. 322]}.

Dostoevsky's foresight largely came true, and denunciations became a characteristic sign of the spiritual atmosphere of the whole period of the Soviet era. Under the slogans of revolutionary vigilance and the struggle against class enemies that surround the world's first workers' and peasants' state, Bolshevism, after seizing power, immediately began to inculcate in the country the ideology of universal suspicion and denunciation. Already in the early 1920s, Prishvin testifies, "denunciations of employees against each other" became commonplace and "such a situation in society was created that it was impossible to rely on anyone as a person" ^{[16, pp. 120, 123]}. To protect himself from accusations of political unreliability, Prishvin even tries to develop the habit of "talking to strangers in such a way that you talk and at the same time imagine that a secret employee (secret) is listening to you hidden here. This dual state never leaves, and sometimes the position of an acrobat walking on a tightrope is interesting" ^{[19, p. 761]}.

At the end of the twenties, it became clear to Prishvin that his hopes for a democratic transformation of Soviet power were unlikely to come true. In April 1929, the year of the great turning point of the centuries-old traditional existence of peasant Russia, he notices signs of an impending thunderstorm: "The political atmosphere is thickening to the extreme. <...> In public life, we are preparing for a serious post. <...> The “respite” is over Lenin. The Stalinist offensive begins" ^{[17, pp. 389, 390]}. His historical instinct and intellectual foresight tell him that a period of reaction is coming, which always accompanies a change of political course, and very soon "our tears about the destruction of cultural monuments may seem ridiculous. There are few monuments in the world! Enough! And really, tomorrow millions of people may be left without a piece of bread, is it worth grieving seriously about the death of monuments? <...> True, it's scary to the point of horror" ^{[18, p. 11, 28]}.

The policy of the ruling party, writes Prishvin, began to resemble "a real inquisition, which is called a "purge". The life of some state farm consists in constant cleaning, denunciations, intrigues and a continuous change of persons" ^{[18, p. 580]}. A side result was the fall of public morality, because denunciations became not only a means of fighting for power, but were also often committed based on base passions – revenge, envy or mercantile interests, when the conspiracy was aimed at seizing the property of the accused. "There was a man, and he was "taken" from us, like tigers in the jungle, sometimes they will take a man: they took him without explaining the reason, and we don't know where he is. Tomorrow, perhaps, they will take me, if not these, then those who will take everyone living sooner or later" ^{[20, p. 87]}, he writes about the atmosphere of irrational fear that has reigned in the country.

As for the creative intelligentsia, Bolshevism exerted pressure on it through the support of those public associations that openly declared their commitment to the ideology of the ruling party. In these politicized organizations, the theory of the conditionality of creativity by the class affiliation of the artist prevailed, and the construction of the culture of the new world was considered as a narrow class proletarian movement, which the state controls through supervisory and punitive institutions. For Prishvin, such a policy regarding art was completely unacceptable: "One cannot live by these cruel and senseless principles of communism. <...> The class approach to a living person is the most terrible torture for people and the destruction of all creativity: it's like shooting at Pushkin or Lermontov" ^{[17, p. 415]}.

One example of this approach was the attitude of Soviet literary criticism to Dostoevsky. As is known, in 1913 Lenin fully supported Gorky's protest against the theatrical production of Dostoevsky's novel "Demons" as discrediting the ideas of revolution and socialism ^{[7, pp. 226-229]}. In addition, in 1914, in a letter to Inessa Armand, commenting on the novel by V. K. Vinnichenko "The Precepts of the Fathers", he made an even sharper criticism: "This is nonsense and stupidity! To combine together more of all sorts of "horrors", to bring together both "vice" and "syphilis", and romantic villainy with extortion of money for a secret <...> An arch-evil imitation of the arch-evil Dostoevsky" ^{[8, p. 294]}.

It is clear that such an assessment of Lenin, whose every word in the Soviet era was perceived as the ultimate truth, became a guiding instruction for everyone who happened to write about Dostoevsky. Echoing the attitudes of Lenin and Gorky in a negative assessment of the work of the author of "Demons", A.V. Lunacharsky (People's Commissar of Education of the RSFSR in 1917-1929) wrote in one of the articles of the early 1930s that Dostoevsky, as a representative of the reactionary petty-bourgeois petty-bourgeois masses, sought "the moral extermination of the revolution", setting himself only one task – to serve counter-revolution, "a thing for the proletarian not only harmful, but also shameful" ^{[10, stb. 339, 345]}. Lunacharsky's article, published in the XXIII volume of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1931), was not only an official state assessment, but also the criterion with which the authorities demanded to treat the work of the author of "Demons" and "Brothers Karamazov". Moreover, Lunacharsky, who wrote about Dostoevsky as one of the "great prophets" of Russia and "perhaps the most charming and beautiful figure" of our literature back in 1921 ^{[9, pp. 234-242]}, ten years later quite shamelessly began to assert that he entered Russian literature exclusively as a spiritual "conquistador and a sadist", and therefore a Soviet person "cannot learn from Dostoevsky. It is impossible to sympathize with his experiences, it is impossible to imitate his manner <...> it is shameful and, so to speak, socially unhygienic to fall under his influence" ^{[11, pp. 298, 311]}.

Maxim Gorky played a special role in instilling an atmosphere of social hostility in the early 1930s. Wanting to ideologically debunk the classic writers who supported the moral traditions of the people's life with their creativity, in the mid-1930s, Gorky bitterly branded Dostoevsky in a report at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers: "Dostoevsky is credited with the role of a seeker of truth. If he was looking for it, he found it in the animal, animal nature of man, and found it not to refute, but to justify. <...> As a person, as a "judge of the world and people," it is very easy to imagine him in the role of a medieval inquisitor" ^{[13, p. 11]}. A staunch supporter of the communist idea, the "petrel" of the revolution believed that if the former intelligentsia served the interests of capital and "for the most part was engaged in diligently darning the philosophical and ecclesiastical vestments of the bourgeoisie stained with the blood of the working people" ^{[2, p. 248]}, then the Soviet intelligentsia would create a new culture in which the dominant position "the literature of the proletariat is one of the manifestations of its vital activity, its striving for self–education on the basis of the political-revolutionary ideology that was created by the scientific socialism of Marx–Lenin" ^{[3, p. 335]}.

Reflecting on the reasons for the aggravation of the political struggle and the historiosophical goals of the ruling party, Prishvin notes: "A bee state is being created in which love, motherhood, etc., nurseries of individuality interfere with communist labor. One has only to take this point of view, and then all these "fanaticisms" of the party become expedient necessary actions" ^{[18, pp. 146-147]}. The expediency of Bolshevik socialism, in his opinion, lies in the desire to make every person an obedient executor of the plans of the party that seized state power. Subordination to class ideology for "the human personality is probably the beginning of all evil," Prishvin wrote in January 1930. – <...> While they still say “grain factory”, soon they will say “human factory” (Fabchel) <...> And, of course, if we give full will to the state, it will certainly return us to the state of bees or ants, i.e. we will all work in the state conveyor, each individually, without understanding anything in general" ^{[18, p. 13]}. In these words of the writer, an allusion is clearly expressed as to the view of Shigalev from Dostoevsky's "Demons" on socialism, where the majority "must lose their personality and turn like a herd and, with boundless obedience, achieve a number of rebirths of primitive innocence, like a primitive paradise, although, however, they will work" ^{[4, p. 312]}, and on the topic of the Grand Inquisitor's statements about the quiet and serene happiness of people who dutifully gave up their freedom in the "common and consonant anthill" of future socialism ^{[5, p. 235]}.

However, despite his principled rejection of Bolshevism with its ideology of class violence and political dictatorship, Prishvin remains a convinced statesman for whom the Soviet world order is still better than the madness of revolutionary anarchy that destroyed the former state. An attentive observer of his era and an astute thinker, Prishvin sees how in the 1930s, on the eve of the inevitable world war, the need for reform of the country's governance for the fastest possible economic development is growing. The course of history itself brought to the forefront of public consciousness the idea of serving the Fatherland, and not the world revolution. It is quite natural that the main opponents turned out to be the revolutionary fanatics themselves, who have been dreaming of a world revolution since October and are ready to throw the Soviet state itself into the furnace of the world fire. And the turn of the political and ideological course, which assumed the need for a broad replacement of the leading party cadres, was carried out with revolutionary ruthlessness.

Indeed, not only the internal need for accelerated economic development, but also the international pre-war situation demanded the most stringent methods to strengthen the state. Enemies of the state, Prishvin writes in his Diary with all frankness, should be executed by thousands, just to avoid a new destructive turmoil. What Nicholas II did not do at the time, at least to justify the nickname "bloody" imposed on him, Stalin has now done without the slightest hesitation. Prishvin understands that the punitive actions of the authorities are determined primarily by historical necessity and only then affect the character and personal interests of the rulers. This is how the writer makes his final life choice, ideologically taking the side of the state, on the side of the "must" that dictates the course of historical development to society. The peculiarity of Prishvin as a writer and thinker lies in the fact that in his work not only the realities of life and the atmosphere of those epochal fractures are recreated, which he witnessed and participated in, the peculiarity is also that it is difficult to find in the history of Russian and Soviet literature a creator whose works are equally conditioned by ideologicalphilosophical, socio-political and cultural context.

Summing up, it should be noted: just as Dostoevsky moved from the revolutionary socialist hobbies of his youth to unconditional support of the enlightened monarchy - the guarantor of Russian statehood, so Prishvin went through an equally complex ideological evolution from complete rejection of Bolshevism to the position of a statesman and patriot, for whom the interests of strengthening the Fatherland are above ideological and political differences. "I looked and look at communism as a military-field system of organization of state power, it was not communism that acted, but the need for a central government that was defeated by the revolution. The Germans do not understand that the Bolsheviks are replacing the tsar in our country and it is now impossible to replace the Bolsheviks with the tsar" ^{[21, p. 530]}, he writes literally a month after the start of the Great Patriotic War.

Another of the most important similarities between Prishvin and Dostoevsky is that both thinkers strive to comprehend the hidden laws of their era, to reveal the meaning and main trends in the development of social being and consciousness. That is why it is so important to understand how the spirit of the times is reflected in the views of writers, how the ideological, political, aesthetic and moral judgments of society are refracted in their work, determining the specifics of the artistic existence of the heroes and characters of their works, moreover, how ideological concepts and philosophical ideas move from the XIX century to the XX century, influencing artists of different generations, thereby forming the continuity of development and spiritual integrity of the historical epochs of the life of our Fatherland. It is obvious that intellectual dialogue with Dostoevsky and reflections on the enduring relevance of his ideas and artistic images greatly helped Prishvin in comprehending the new reality that emerged after the October revolution.