Greeting, literature-loving Kossacks! Last week we took a close reading of portions of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology and talked about its relationship to progressive philosophy. This week we drop back a century to wrestle with one of the great titans of Western literature, the novelist and essay-writer Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Though it seems like these two couldn't be any less similar, I'm going to argue that Dostoevsky has a lot to say to progressives today in a way not entirely different from Masters... Heck, despite his very right-wing leanings, Dostoevsky lent a heavy influence to the development of left-leaning philosophy in the twentieth century.
How did a fiercely reactionary, tsar-loving, nationalistic propogandist become beloved of atheistic, socialistic French philosophers (among others)? Follow me below to find out!
What is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?
Though that might serve well as a sarcastic description of blogging, the author was only half sarcastic. As human beings we may define ourselves through our actions, but we express ourselves through words, and the key to understanding ourselves as thinking beings lies in the stream of words we produce to describe our experiences.
So it's no accident that the characters in Dostoevsky's novels are incessant babblers: they're otherwise ordinary people trying to find themselves and their place in the universe. The melodrama may be excessive, the plot twists strain belief, and the resolutions ring false, but there's always comfort and a strange sort of commiseration in the words of his characters, who give expression to the kinds of questions that keep some of us up late at night.
I. The Author
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (that's duh-stah-YEV-sky, for those of you who want to get it just right) was born in 1821 into a difficult, tumultuous life - and his circumstances did not much improve throughout his 60 years. Certain aspects of his early years would have important implications in his literary works: most notably the unsolved murder of his father when the author was 18.
Dostoevsky's early interest in social fiction met with wide success when he published his first novel, Poor Folk. But the disappointing reception of his next works crushed his pride, and since he was never exactly a humble man, his self-important attitude made him no shortage of enemies. In the meantime he'd gotten involved with radical (leftist) political groups, a pastime that lead to his arrest and conviction in the face of a panicked autocracy (keep in mind this was the age of revolutions).
In what was probably a staged event, Dostoevsky was sentenced to death, with a commutation appearing just as the first victims were being led to their doom. And it apparently worked: when Dostoevsky returned from Siberian prison (an experience he chronicled in the well-received House of the Dead), he had switched sides completely. The once radical was now a proud defender of the Tsar.
Many aspects of Dostoevsky's life have interesting implications as far as interpreting his literature, but I'd like to foreground one: Dostoevsky was the first Russian writer who made a living off literature. Even more, he was the first who had to continue writing in order to sustain itself. While his literary rivals Turgenev and Tolstoy lived on wealthy estates and published whenever they felt like it, Dostoevsky had to meet deadlines in order to make rent. The panic of "publish or perish" can sometimes be felt in his prose, but it also pushes issues of social and economic class to the front of his novels.
But that's enough background. Let's talk about his major works:
II. Going Underground
I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man.
These words, perhaps the most famous Dostoevsky ever wrote, open his novella Notes from Underground (text) (a somewhat unfortunate translation: "underground" has strong connotations in the English language, especially when connected to literature. The actual Russian title is more literal: Notes from Under the Floor, i.e. that small crawlspace where you're likely to find rats and insects). The opening is so direct and forceful that Ralph Ellison would later mimic it in the opening lines of his classic Invisible Man: "I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance..."
Dostoevsky's nameless Underground Man is a babbling, contradictory narrator who spends the first half of the novella outlining his philosophy, and the second half illustrating it in practice. There's no doubt what the true subject of the work is:
But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure?
Answer: Of himself.
Well, so I will talk about myself.
In Notes, Dostoevsky took aim at science and logic, specifically those people who feel that science and logic alone hold the answers for humanity's future happiness. A century and a half later, most of us may consider this an obvious point, but Dostoevsky was engaging in a polemic against 19th century positivism and utilitarianism. Positivists believed that science and logic could explain everything; utilitarians believed that the "good" is best defined as "whatever brings the most happiness for the most people". Combine the two, and you get the pseudo-scientific notion that human beings can be reduced to scientific formulae, and if you find the right formula, you make humans happy. Take this idea to its natural ends, and you find yourself not only with a depersonalized society, but with deterministic "science" like eugenics.
For Dostoevsky, the most loathsome argument of positivists was this notion that human beings are mere "piano-keys": hit the right key, get the right note. In fact, human beings are not simply rational creatures. They will do everything to prove that they are free, even if that means self-destruction:
What man wants is simply INDEPENDENT choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead...
Even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point.
(Part I, Ch. 7-8)
As if to illustrate this point, Dostoevsky's Underground Man spends the second part of the novella describing an old adventure of his, in which he had the chance for happiness, but crushed it out of spite. Why?
Well, to prove that he could. There's an empty defiance to the Underground Man's gesture at the end of the story, but that very emptiness challenges us as readers: can we rationalize it away? Can we explain his self-destruction in purely logical terms? Possibly: but the narrator's constant flips and digressions make it difficult to pin anything down. The text itself feels, for lack of a better term, irrational.
This irrational instinct - the instinct that sometimes leads us to commit acts of selflessness (or of degradation) - pulses throughout Dostoevsky's work as a symbol of freedom, both in the social and religious sense (i.e. free will). Keep that in mind as we move on.
III. The Novels
Though he wrote other novellas, short stories, and an extensive public diary, Dostoevsky is mostly known for his four great novels, two of which haven't quite achieved the same level of success in this country:
- Demons (sometimes translated - inaccurately - as The Possessed) charts the rapid disintegration of a small town infected with nihilism. It's the most violent of Dostoevsky's novels, enjoys a mean-spirited but hilarious parody of his rival Turgenev, and contained a chapter so shocking that Dostoevsky was unable to publish it during his lifetime.
- The Idiot follows the ineffectiveness of an innocent "idiot", the aptly-named Lev Myshkin (lev = lion, mysh = mouse), as he tries to negotiate the complex world of big-city social intrigue, love triangles, and inheritances. The Idiot bears the distinction of inspiring the only (somewhat) successful film adaptation of Dostoevsky's work: a bizarre but awesome transposition by Akira Kurosawa, with the incomparable Toshiro Mifune as Myshkin's explosive rival, Rogozhin.
That leaves his other two novels, which I'll discuss at a bit more length.
By far his most popular work is the tense psychological detective novel Crime and Punishment (text). It's not only the shortest of his big four - it's also the most efficiently plotted and tightly wound.
The plot, like that of many of his works, is pulled directly from the kind of pulpy potboilers that were popular with the reading public. An idealistic young man named Raskolnikov kills an old woman (actually, two), and finds himself playing cat-and-mouse with the detective investigating the crime. A major complication arises: just as the murderer needs to be at his most alert, his mental health starts disintegrating. Has he covered his tracks well enough? Will he get away with it in the end? Does he want to get away with it in the end?
As always, Dostoevsky's particular genius (although some have called it bad taste) lies in his marriage of "low" melodrama with "high" philosophy (long before postmodernism exploded those categories). Raskolnikov is not a two-dimensional murderer, but a former college student driven to test his theories about the human race:
I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred, or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty bound... to eliminate the dozen or the hundred men for the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity.
(Part III, Ch. 5)
The philosophy is pretty specious on the face of it, but like an eager adolescent devouring Ayn Rand (who came much later), Raskolnikov makes the fatal mistake of shifting from a belief that "special" people exist to the belief that he must be one of those special people. What if he tested his theory by eliminating someone not-so-special... in fact, why not find someone useless and, frankly, loathsome? If we calculate her real value, wouldn't the world be better off without her?
Of course it doesn't go as planned, and the chase is on. While Raskolnikov dodges the detective and descends into madness, other subplots weave around him: his sister battles off a lascivious old acquaintance, a widow struggles to support her children in poverty, and Raskolnikov discovers a lonely prostitute (with a heart of gold, naturally). The latter is a bit too sentimental for my taste, but Dostoevsky loved using stock characters in newly-charged contexts.
There's a lot more to Crime and Punishment than this - pay attention to the recurring metaphor of the Biblical Lazarus, and that trippy apocalyptic vision in the epilogue! - but I need space to talk about Dostoevsky's magnum opus, which deserves so much more than a simple blog post.
IV. The Eternal Questions
Everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov, by Feodor Dostoevsky
- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
(Okay, so that's a little out of context. Vonnegut doesn't say it directly, but through one of his characters. And the next line is, "but that isn't enough anymore," which is less a statement about Dostoevsky's novel than about the strange new world of moral uncertainty faced by a post-War community.)
But if cynical, world-weary Vonnegut was bowled over by a novel whose ultimate message is that redemption comes through humble faith in the Orthodox Church... Well, you know we've got something special here.
On the surface, The Brothers Karamazov (text) is a novel about broken families, and Dostoevsky returned to murder as the central plot device. Somewhat creepily, he chose the unsolved murder of his own father as a model, a point that Sigmund Freud found too good to pass up.
The murder and its investigation are only a framework to keep together this gigantic novel, which, like Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, is also about a nation struggling to define itself in the modern era. The Russia of Karamazov is coming just years off the Great Reforms, which not only ended serfdom (slavery), but created the system of peer-jury courts and ceded power to local governments. When Dostoevsky set a large portion of the novel in the courtroom, he was concerned as much with the process of justice as with the result.
As usual, these issues are all woven into a plot rich with love intrigues, family secrets, missing money, murder most foul, and a very funny visit from an infernal demon. At the center stands Fyodor Karamazov, a disgusting boor of a man who delights in denigrating the people around him, and who's given half the town a motive for knocking him off. The titular brothers are Dmitri, the noble but weak-for-women sensualist, Ivan, the cold and distant intellectual, and Alyosha, the naive young man who expects a life of pious monasticism. When a murder does occur, the novel balances itself on a contradiction: while the courtroom pores over the evidence to discover the truth, the novel wonders whether the real truth is simply beyond their grasp. Is it possible that evidence cannot lead to the truth at all?
The melodrama and philosophy were never fused better. Dmitri locates his anguish - and one of the novel's main themes - in beauty, and in the inexplicable way that we are capable of nobility and degradation all at once. Furthermore, we somehow desire both simultaneously! This double-sided nature of beauty is the mystery of existence, and he is equally terrified by both sides:
Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles... Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, that for the immense mass of mankind beauty is found in Sodom. Did you know that secret? The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.
(Book III, Ch. 3)
So far so good, but how did this book gain its stature as one of the great works of Western literature? And how is this remotely connected with progressive ideals?
As I discussed last time, the displacement of Authority from the text - even if that displacement is only an illusion - is vital for the creation of literature that we could call truly "progressive". Progressivism requires a certain amount of subjectivity, or at the very least a recognition that many different people can bring their own "truths" to a discussion.
On one hand, Dostoevsky's political and social sympathies couldn't lie farther from that of the modern leftist. Dostoevsky was a reactionary in his own time, which meant he worshipped the holy trinity of Tsar, Orthodoxy, and Russianness, a tendency that sometimes led him to disgusting bouts of xenophobia and intolerance.
However, Dostoevsky had a unique tendency among didactic writers: his antagonists are not strawmen, and at their best they leap off the page as vibrantly as his protagonists. Even more, his special gift as a writer lay in the creation of characters whose voices sound independent of each other (the theorist Mikhail Bakhtin called this aspect of Dostoevsky's writing "polyphony") Put those two together, and we end up with novels whose Authority is displaced simply by having dynamic, passionate characters on all sides of the argument.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the character of Ivan Karamazov, whose philosophy couldn't lie further from Dostoevsky's. Ivan acts like a cynical Greek chorus standing outside the central drama, believing himself independent of the slowly-brewing disaster. Shortly before the murder, he takes his very Christian brother Alyosha aside for a chat about life, faith, and religion.
For Ivan, it is inconceivable that any divine being could create a world as cruel and pointless as ours and still claim to love His creation. Even worse, the notion of an eternal happiness seems almost condescending when viewed against the brutal torture of children, who have not "eaten the apple" and who cannot be expected to suffer for humanity's future paradise. Ivan recites anecdote after anecdote about suffering children, swelling into a passionate rejection not of God, but of all creation:
It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to 'dear, kind God'! It's not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them? Is it possible? By their being avenged? But what do I care for avenging them? What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured? And what becomes of harmony, if there is hell? I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don't want more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price... I don't want harmony. From love for humanity I don't want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong.
(Book V, Ch. 4)
And so Ivan "returns his ticket", unwilling to accept the terms of eternal paradise. Furthermore, he challenges his brother Alyosha with the novel's central question: if you were in charge of creating a universe, but you had to found its eventual success on the pointless suffering of a child, would you do it? Could you do it? Alyosha is unable to answer yes, but that question (and its implicit answer) will hover over the rest of the novel.
But like many of Dostoevsky's chatterboxes (everyone talks a lot in his novels, so be prepared), Ivan is hardly finished. He recites a poem in prose that deals superficially with the role of religion in society, but on a deeper level with human nature, freedom, and responsibility. He entitles it "The Grand Inquisitor" (text), and it ranks among the most influential passages ever written. The central thesis is this:
So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.
(Book V, Ch. 5)
This was a shocking notion for Dostoevsky's audience. In the 19th century - heck, even today - most people would consider freedom a high value, and something worth striving for. Dostoevsky would agree, but he recognized that freedom comes with a heavy price: responsibility. For many people, the agony of being responsible for oneself is too much to handle, and a typically "weak" (the Inquisitor's word) human being would gladly give up that freedom than suffer with it.
From this, the fictional Inquisitor sculpts a scathing indictment of Jesus, who could have come down from the cross and shot lightning bolts out of his eyes if he'd wanted to, but preferred not to enslave humanity with miracles. The Church, however, felt differently: they stressed miracles, they preached fire and brimstone, and in the course of 15 centuries (the time the story is set), they've slowly dismantled the freedom that the son of God left his people.
Of course, this is all Ivan Karamazov talking, not Dostoevsky. But surprisingly enough, it's connected to the murder, and to who is really "guilty" in the face of it. Dostoevsky is savvy enough a fiction writer to keep these connections just under the surface, which is actually part of the point - the author had written himself into two corners:
- One of the novel's central theses is, as in the previous works we discussed, the inability of logic and the rational mind to account for the human experience. Ivan's argument is complex and (for the novel's terms) almost flawless, but if Dostoevsky is going to respond, it can't be via a logical, reasoned argument. So maybe the plot itself holds clues, but...
- Another central thesis, as we've discussed, is the necessity of freedom. If Dostoevsky wants the reader to emulate this freedom, he cannot give us a tidy ending in which the forces of humble faithfulness win out over the world: that would be miraculous, and we're supposed to choose to be faithful despite whatever may happen.
I'll leave it to you to decide whether Dostoevsky succeeds (I think he does), but given the enormous difficulty he created for himself, it should be no surprise that the novel's reception has been far, far different than what he intended.
In creating a novel which purposefully avoids giving an authoritative conclusion to the argument, Dostoevsky ended up as the spiritual godfather of some decidedly unspiritual movements. Check out this list of writers who've claimed descent from Dostoevsky, and notice how few (if any) of them seem to the same religious affinity as their progenitor. Charles Bukowski? Ayn Rand? Joseph Heller?
Furthermore, Notes from Underground and "The Grand Inquisitor" became, in many respects, the founding documents of the Existentialist movement: among others, Jean-Paul Sartre integrated "The Grand Inquisitor" into the central act of his play, The Flies, and Albert Camus adapted Demons for the stage. The philosophical backbone of Existentialism is freedom (and the responsibility that comes with it): human beings create themselves by their choices, and there is no external moral universe to guide or determine us. There were certainly Christian existentialists as well, but Dostoevsky's appeal was no less powerful for the atheists. Heck, even Nietzsche considered him "the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn" (though Nietzsche hated hated hated Dostoevsky's religiosity).
Few writers inspire so much hyperbole, both positive and negative. His works are bloated, passionate, self-important, pathetic (in both senses of the word), realistic (in some senses of the word), violent, exhausting, riddled with imperfections, and - if you buy into them - impossible to forget. Vladimir Nabokov once dismissed Dostoevsky entirely, saying that not a single page of his works was worthy of inclusion in any history of Russian literature. The great Argentine Jorge Luis Borges responded, perhaps because Dostoevsky requires us taking him as a whole, rather than as individual pages. I'm inclined to agree with Borges.
Links:
Dkos diaries:
If I've missed anything, let me know and I'll add to the list.
(copyright note: all pictures from wikimedia commons. links here and here.)