“Novel About Children” by Dostoevsky: the Socialist Teacher and Its Prototypes

In the sketches of the “Novel about Children,” which was the starting point on the writer’s path to the novel “A Raw Youth,” there is an active character, a teacher named Fyodor Fyodorovich. He loves children selflessly, even those who have become criminals, and unites them in a kind of brotherhood. At the same time, he is devoted to the ideas of socialism. The article proves that one of the prototypes of this character (along with P. M. Zeidler) was Fyodor Fyodorovich Rezener, who established a colony for juvenile delinquents near St. Petersburg, which was repeatedly covered in “The Citizen” (“Grazhdanin”) edited by Dostoevsky. While conceiving the “A Writer’s Diary” in 1876, Dostoevsky visited this colony, which he had “long been striving to do.” The writer’s interest in Rezener could have been aroused by other facts of his biography: the public clash with Antonelli, the endured slap in the face, a new type of relationship with children at the primary school he headed on Vasilyevsky Island, the spirit of socialism in translation and journalism, which brought him closer to P. L. Lavrov and N. G. Chernyshevsky. Dostoevsky’s benevolent interest in the ascetic socialist teacher testified to a change in his strategy towards the “infected” generation compared to the “Demons.” It is no coincidence that the new novel “A Raw Youth” was published in Otechestvennye Zapiski, the “nihilists'” media outlet. The change in strategy is already noticeable in the “youth” policy of the weekly “The Citizen” run by the writer, as well as in the first drafts of the future novel. Dostoevsky calls Fyodor Fyodorovich a “direct” Christian because of his pedagogical experiments, and the idea of universal fatherhood. This is the objective meaning of real life-building, dictated by his vitalizing love for children. Fyodor Fyodorovich is absent from the final text of the novel, but the motives associated with him are preserved in the Raw Youth’s conversations with Makar Ivanovich about “atheists” and “communism,” as well as in Versilov’s vision of “the last day of humanity.” In it, Christ returned to the orphaned people, because God’s image did not die in the souls of those who retained the need to love the “other”. This “other,” according to Dostoevsky, is primarily a child, a “baby.” “Practical Christianity” makes the very existence of civilization contingent on the continued ability to love and understand the little ones. This understanding is demonstrated in the finale of the novel “A Raw Youth” by the “educator” Nikolai Semenovich, and in the next novel by Alexey Karamazov. In Dostoevsky’s eyes, P. M. Zeidler and F. F. Rezener spent their entire lives proving the actual feasibility of essentially Christian pedagogy.