The Italian neo-Marxist Guido Carpi tried to investigate the connection between the economic collapse of the noble system in Russia and the work of Dostoevsky. In many ways, the writer's neurotic literature was the fruit of his forced independence of existence.
The Falanster Publishing House has published a book by the Italian professor of the University of Pisa Guido Carpi “Dostoevsky the Economist. Essays on the Sociology of Literature”. Carpi has been interested in Russia for a long time, he is the author of "History of Russian Literature", the first such publication in Italian. And, unlike Russian literary critics, he does not hesitate to associate the work of writers with the socio-economic characteristics of the eras of their work.
Thus, Russian literature of the first half of the 19th century was mainly based on the parasitism of writers - only landowners, in fact, slave owners, could afford to write. Dostoevsky was the first major writer of that time, forced to make creativity a means of subsistence.
We publish the chapter "Russian grandchildren of Eugene Rastignac" from the book by Guido Carpi.
The illustrations for the text are hand drawings by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. The drawing above is the earliest known portrait drawing by Dostoevsky. Physiognomic interpretation of the "voluptuous insect" type. Subsequently, this image was captured in Totsky (The Idiot), Svidrigailov (Crime and Punishment), the senior prince Sokolsky (The Teenager), Fyodor Karamazov (The Brothers Karamazov). Around 1860.
“After Dostoevsky's return from exile in Siberia, the writer's economic problems acquire more complex and alarming features; and this is not surprising, given the characteristic features of Russian “modernization” after the abolition of serfdom (by the way, typical of peripheral capitalist systems, where the imposed modernization is layered on a complex of mostly archaic norms and relations): “catastrophic” economic development, which is shaken by waves of excitement and speculation and crises in November 1863, late 1869 and (most severe) in October 1875.
It is no coincidence that in The Gambler Dostoevsky draws an equal sign between the mechanisms that govern finances and the logic of gambling. In general, V. Benjamin wrote about the dialectical relations between capitalist financial-speculative accumulation and game mechanisms in connection with Baudelaire's poetics based on the aesthetics of sleep and the fantastic distortion of space and time, as well as about the “flourishing of speculation” in Orleanist France: “Playing on the exchange pushes aside the forms of gambling that have come from feudal society. The phantasmagorias of the spaces into which the flannere plunges correspond to the phantasmagorias of time that embrace the player. The game turns into a drug."
Image of the “ wax person ” Peter the Great. The drawing was made during the work of the writer on the novel “ Crime and Punishment ”, 1865
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However, here the German thinker only briefly summarizes the results of the study of a phenomenon that has long been noted by Marxist sociology - the speech about the psychological and behavioral effects caused by the transformation of industrial capitalism into financial. “All modern economic development tends, little by little, to transform capitalist society into a vast international gambling house, where capital gains and loses, thanks to events that they do not know, that elude all foresight, all calculation and which, it seems to them, depend on luck. by chance, - we read in an article from the beginning of the century, marked by Benjamin during the work on the essay "Paris, the capital of the XIX century" - The "unknowable" reigns in bourgeois society, as in a gambling house. The game, which is openly played on the stock exchange, has always been one of the conditions of trade and industry:the risk is so great and unforeseen that often the operations that are best conceived, calculated and tested fail, while others, undertaken at random and presented to their own course, succeed. This success and failure, owing to unexpected reasons, usually known and, it seems, depending only on chance, predispose the bourgeois to the mood of the player. " The apparent irrationality of the financial "game" gives rise to the phantasmagoric and "demonic" power of money:The apparent irrationality of the financial "game" gives rise to the phantasmagoric and "demonic" power of money:The apparent irrationality of the financial "game" gives rise to the phantasmagoric and "demonic" power of money:
But the player (…) is extremely superstitious, all the regulars of gambling houses have magical formulas for spells of fate; someone mumbles a prayer to St. Anthony of Padua or some other heavenly saint, others sit down only if a certain color falls out, others squeeze an animal's paw in their left hand, etc. The "unknowable" of the social order surrounds the bourgeois as the "unknowable" of the natural order surrounds the savage.
Graphical definition of the "face of an idea" the protagonist of the novel & quot; Idiot & quot; (first edition), 1867
This analysis is true for countries such as Orleanist France, and even more so for Russia, countries that did not have English experience in manufacturing development, in which the financialization of the economy led to devastating consequences not mitigated by the stabilizing role of the absent industrial sector. How all this was supposed to end, they understood and described - with a great deal of patriarchal nostalgia extremely alien to Dostoevsky - Pushkin in "The Queen of Spades" and Gogol in the dramatic fragment "The Players", where funny swindlers without hesitation compare the "team game" of swindlers for green table with the political economy concept of the division of labor.
Gogol hinted that if in Europe the fall of feudal relations as a result of the capitalist division of labor leads to industrial production and the accumulation of capital, then in Russia feudalism in the process of decay goes the same way in other forms of parasitic existence, such as gambling (cheating) games or speculative operations of various scales: according to Lotman, since the time of Catherine's favoritism "the bizarre movement of wealth involuntarily resembled the movement of gold and banknotes on a green cloth during a card game."
France during the July Monarchy was in many respects similar to Russia in the 1950s, but on the banks of the Neva, speculative capitalism acquired special, much rougher features that significantly influenced the degree of “phantasmagoricism” of the work of writers like Dostoevsky - in comparison with artistic and literary processes. analyzed by Benjamin. Among these socio-economic features, the incoherence and often contradictory elements that make up the social system stand out: some are bourgeois, others are feudal, and others are related to the communal-clan system. Hence the ease with which the traditionally parasitic feudal-agrarian class is transformed (albeit by no means in all of its representatives) into a parasitic financial elite:this situation is illustrated with the utmost clarity in the novel The Idiot by the images of “noble” businessmen (Totsky and Epanchin), who, however, are no longer imaginable without upstarts like Ptitsyn. To paraphrase the well-known statement of Marx about Germany, we can say that from that moment on, the Russian Empire began to experience simultaneously capitalism and its underdevelopment.
The image of the linden of the protagonist of the novel “ The Idiot ” (first edition), 1867
In 1854-1859, Dostoevsky, after being released from correctional labor, was serving in a distant steppe garrison, received quite encouraging news about what was happening in the metropolis. After the Crimean War and the change of the emperor, the despotic stagnation seemed to be a distant past: “(…) society strained all its forces to create a new independent position for itself and shift the center of gravity of social initiative onto itself. And the government (at least at first) did not see anything in this disagreeing with his desire "- this is how Nikolai Shchelgunov will speak about the atmosphere of 1856-1858 in his old age. Later, this era will be remembered mainly as a prelude to the abolition of serfdom, but its contemporaries often emphasized the dizzying spirit of profit, which, freeing the seemingly endless movement of capital,began to destroy state monopolies: “In a word,” Shchelgunov comments, listing the types of activities in which these capitals were easily used, “the reaction against the previous all-consuming state intervention and government leadership was not only universal, but also formed the basis of socio-economic reforms and all systems of the state economy of the past reign ".
Much more moderate politicians offer a similar analysis: “[The government] encourages private enterprise (…); it lowered the bank interest, - at the end of 1857, the future Minister of Finance Mikhail Reitern reported to the Grand Duke Konstantin Mikhailovich, the patron saint of those enlightened bureaucrats who were developing bourgeois reforms. “Thanks to God, the government realized that it was necessary to develop the sources of the people's wealth.” Reitern's hint of lowering interest rates (from 4% to 3% per annum) does not seem accidental: a powerful incentive to attract private capital to industry, the revaluation of rates was actually a forced measure. It was supposed to ease the burden of the state credit system, which was exhausted during the war. Nonetheless, investment in the private sector that followed the decline in interest rates was impressive:Thus, the post-war years were marked by a fleeting "golden time" in the economy, which was described in a hyperbolic form by the already mentioned adherent of liberalism Vladimir Bezobrazov: "And ordinary workers, and factory owners, and manufacturers, and merchants everywhere told us about this time:" We then became rich ". Factories did not have time to produce goods that were quickly snapped up; new factories were built and old ones expanded; the number of working hours doubled, worked at night; the prices of goods and wages were growing exorbitantly. "which quickly snapped up; new factories were built and old ones expanded; the number of working hours doubled, worked at night; the prices of goods and wages were growing exorbitantly. "which quickly snapped up; new factories were built and old ones expanded; the number of working hours doubled, worked at night; the prices of goods and wages were growing exorbitantly."
A portrait sketch of a Russian Orthodox peasant truth-seeker. He was embodied in Makar Ivanovich Dolgorukiy (“ Teenager ”), 1873-1874
The wave of financial speculation radically changes the existence and way of thinking of the population of the empire: if in 1830-1852 no more than two joint-stock companies appeared in Russia a year, then with the end of the Crimean War their number is exponentially growing (1856 - 6; 1857 - 14; 1858 - 39). “Before a new joint-stock company is formed, you see, all its shares are snapped up before the day of the official sale, and immediately they begin to go from hand to hand with a premium,” proclaimed the “Bulletin of Industry”, and there were also typical examples: those wishing to purchase shares the new company "waited the whole night at the office door, and when the doors were opened, only a very few received the coveted papers." There were so many speculators thirsty for profit that “crowding began, a crush, there were those who became ill, others were forced to climb out the window,because it was impossible to push back."
On his way from Siberia in August 1859, Dostoevsky stopped in Vladimir, where he met with Mikhail Khomentkovsky, the head of the provisioning commission (a Semipalatinsk headquarters officer and a good-natured drunkard, familiar to the writer from exile), who immediately explained to Dostoevsky, who wanted to settle in, where the wind was blowing: “(…) The best places are private. There are so many private companies, departments, societies that are needed for people who are honest and conscientious, the salaries are colossal."
Bourgeois swindling, which was widespread in large urban centers, rapidly destroyed feudal structures and had a colossal impact on the minds of people: “Ministers and other dignitaries, officials of all ranks rushed to gamble on the stock exchange,” they will recall decades later in one specialized publication, “landowners began to sell estates, homeowners - at home, merchants abandoned trade, many breeders and manufacturers converted their institutions into joint stock companies, depositors in government banks began to select their deposits from there - and all this threw itself into a gamble on the stock exchange.
Image & quot; wanderer & quot; and the 'face of an idea' the main character of the novel & quot; The Brothers Karamazov & quot; - Alyosha Karamazova, 1879
In this context, one immediately remembers Stolz from Oblomov, who participated in “some company sending goods abroad” and portrayed by Goncharov “incessantly on the move: if society needs to send an agent to Belgium or England, they will send him; you need to write a project or adapt a new idea to the case - they choose it. Meanwhile, he travels to the world and reads: when he has time - God knows”; or Luzhin from Crime and Punishment, psychologically more believable, just like the already familiar Neradov or Kalinovich from A Thousand Souls by Pisemsky: “I must say that the comfort in the mind of my hero has always been of great importance. And for whom, however, of the respectable, sensible young people of our time, does he not have this meaning? The author came to the firm conviction that for us, the children of this century, fame, love, world ideas,immortality is nothing before comfort. Russian grandchildren of Eugène Rastignac, these energetic young people did not stand on ceremony on the ruins of the old regime - both in literature and in reality.
Instead of simply decaying under the onslaught of capital owners, the old feudal-bureaucratic system immediately began to interact with them. For example, already at the end of 1859, Counts Shuvalov and Bobrinsky - representatives of the court elite and the future pillars of the "aristocratic party" - are engaged in a very profitable business: the construction of apartment buildings, and in the company of well-known liberal economists such as Alexander Abaza (future finance minister) and others entrepreneurs of not particularly noble family. In 1859, there was a significant increase in the number of ministerial commissions and subcommissions, which, according to the official version, were created with the aim of modernizing the banking system, but in reality they did not so much transform it.how many begin to carry out intermediary functions between the traditional court oligarchy and the new economic forces.
The last known portrait of the protagonist of The Idiot, 1867
A striking example of such machinations can be considered the founding of the Main Society of Russian Railways (GOCD), which owned 60% of the country's total investment capital: for decades it was a powerful economic organization and a cover for all kinds of abuse. By the time of its formation, among the members of the GOCD there were influential and experienced financiers (Baron Alexander Stieglitz), Moscow merchants and South Russian Greeks who made a fortune on wine farms (Vasily Kokorev, Dmitry Benardaki), influential courtiers (Alexey Orlov, Nikolai Yusupov, Eduard Baranov), members of the imperial family and … Alexander II himself, owner of 1200 shares. This, by the way, was the main reason why, despite the obvious crisis, the system of tsarist power survived in the 1960s. Immediately after the reforms, administrative and economic interests allowed society to unite: everyone benefited from the political regime, which, given its personalistic archaism and opacity, the oligarchs of that time rightly considered more pliable than any other. "Abominations have always come to us on the sly," remarked an observant contemporary. - So it came to us, crawling on your stomach, span by span and serfdom; so, perhaps, dependence on land capital will creep in. "span by span and serfdom; so, perhaps, dependence on land capital will creep in. "span by span and serfdom; so, perhaps, dependence on land capital will creep in."