Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1862)

Winter Notes on Summer Impressions is a collection of essays about Dostoevsky’s tour of Western Europe.  In it, he outlines the themes that usher in his masterpiece period.

With this work, Dostoevsky’s scope widens dramatically.  Much of his earlier writing focuses on individual psychology or isolated cultural issues.  These essays take his previous observations and expand them to explore their implications on a national-political level.  It’s clear from his references that his reading has grown to encompass not only literary history, but a wider view of history as a whole.  

In his studying of French history, he notices a tension in political ideas that will occupy his thoughts in later masterpieces like Notes from Underground and “The Grand Inquisitor.”  The tension is between desire for freedom and the desire for harmony.  Freedom by itself, Dostoevsky reasons, is problematic:

“What freedom?  Equal freedom for all to do anything one wants within the limits of the law.  When can a man do anything he wants?  When he has a million.  Does freedom give everyone a million?  No.  What is a man without a million?  A man without a million is not a man who does anything he wants, but a man with whom anything is done that anyone wants.”

A free society with no sense of brotherhood is a place where cruel exploitation abounds.  Socialists, Dostoevsky claims, are aware of this.  They desire to systematize harmony.  They realize that such a system can’t operate if forced, but since harmony is so obviously preferable, people can be reasoned into accepting this system if they are armed with all the facts and are educated enough to understand them.

Dostoevsky believes that such an acceptance is impossible in the West as it stands.  Many Western individuals, Dostoevsky claims, would rather suffer exploitation than feel their freedom restricted by such a system.

Why?  Dostoevsky believes that this has to do with the West’s spiritual state.  Freedom in the West is thought of in terms of the individual claiming rights.  But no real harmony can be achieved without the laying down individual rights for the sake of the collective.  As long as the individuals in a society are focused on clamoring for personal rights, there can be no harmony.  This attitudinal climate is inevitably one of endless bickering over pie-slice sizes.  

Harmony, Dostoevsky argues, can only be achieved by a society of individuals who voluntarily sacrifice themselves for the sake of others.  He calls self-sacrifice “the highest development of the individual personality, its highest power, highest self-possession and highest freedom of individual will.”  Dostoevsky claims that there can be no reconciliation between freedom and harmony until an attitude shift arises voluntarily on the individual level.

Dostoevsky’s political ideas have implications for his novelistic technique.  The final essay of the book pivots to speak about problems in French storytelling.  And the problems look familiar.

On the one hand, Dostoevsky shows disgust for what he calls “eloquence for the sake of eloquence.”  Such a superficial approach to literature tends to gum up the machinery and let glaring problems of subject matter float through while all stand and admire the beauty of phrasemongering.  

On the other hand, Dostoevsky shows equal distaste for “moral preaching.”  All it amounts to is a pandering to the audience’s desire to pat themselves on the back for believing the right things.

This problem between artistic freedom (art for art’s sake) and the using of art for a vehicle for the promotion of goodness seems a mirror of the political problem stated earlier.  Eloquence tends to focus on the individual artist and that artist’s desire for great-writer status.  Moral preaching reflects a desire to make one’s writing part of a worthy cause bigger than oneself, but untruthfully, thus ineffectually.

Perhaps the solution to this artistic dilemma is similar to the one Dostoevsky proposes for the social dilemma.  Great literature can’t flourish unless there is a spiritual shift in the attitude of the writer.  Dostoevsky himself conveys this fertile attitude though his approach to life and art inherent in Winter Notes.  He clearly cares about something bigger than becoming a great novelist.  The world’s problems grab his attention, and his writing is an attempt at an honest delving into those problems.  In this project, eloquence becomes a tool that allows him to dig more effectively.