ABSTRACT

This chapter shows that Dostoevsky's knowledge of Granovsky's life and works was extremely elementary and partial: It seems that Dostoevsky decided to advance to attack the nihilists and the Westernisers, and has somehow created a pastiche of Granovsky and Turgenev in the period shortly after Dostoevsky's crucial quarrel with Turgenev. Although Granovsky was indeed critical of the Orthodoxy of the Slavophiles, there is no evidence that he was condescending towards the religious beliefs of the Russian people. For Dostoevsky, Peter Verkhovensky has a metaphysical, demonic dimension. The real Nechaev was a fanatic, a jacobin who showed contempt for his followers and a very defective education. The fullest contemporary account of Nechaev's intellectual evolution is that of Cochrane, who has researched the testimony of Nechaev's contemporaries and the depositions of the Nechaevtsy. Nechaev's ability to create an organisation, to influence people and to carry out his timetable, remains one of his revolutionary achievements, and was praised even by Lenin.