Dostoevsky's Democracy

Abstract

If you pick up a book on the concept of democracy in nineteenth-century Russia, you will need to know that the words democracy and democrat mean something rather different from what we might expect in the United States. When Turgenev, in a letter to a friend, described the hero of Fathers and Sons as a “democrat to the fingertips,” he was not referring to Bazarov's embrace of Enlightenment-era social contract theory. He had in mind his hero's ability to treat other people with respect, regardless of their social class. Nancy Ruttenburg has devoted a full-length study to the concepts of democracy and democrat in Dostoevsky. The term democrat, she says, suggested to Dostoevsky the core qualities he gave to Prince Myshkin in The Idiot: “the surfeit of compassion; the inability to consider rank or class; the ability to elicit the trust of the common people” (p. 21). Dostoevsky's Democracy, however, is about the actual man Dostoevsky as much as it is about his fictional characters. Ruttenburg advances two essential biographical claims about the author's attitude toward democracy: (1) it emerged during the years Dostoevsky spent in prison camp in the early 1850s and (2) it arose from events that allowed him to experience a kind of “unmediated” communion between his “noble self” (the Dostoevsky family was technically of aristocratic origin) and the “common other,” meaning the peasant convicts who constituted the majority of his fellow inmates. Dostoevsky dramatized the birth of his inner democrat in House of the Dead (1860–61), a partially fictionalized account of his own years in the camp.