Some Books by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Returning to Fyodor Dostoevsky
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| My small Dostoevsky Library |
Dostoevsky had a deep affection
for people as well as a strong desire to represent in words and in moving
stories their attempt to come to terms with and make sense of their often harsh
lives. In other words, his literary
preoccupation was no mere superficial depiction of what contemporary life was
for him, but rather, it was an in-depth exploration of the human person’s
highest aspirations and hopes as well as his deepest and most disturbing pains
and fears. This is essentially, then,
what makes Dostoevsky one of the first great Christian existential writers.
Another important thing for me
as a young man encountering Russian literature for the first time was getting
my tongue around the Russian names and customs as well as becoming acquainted with
their use of patronymic surnames, that is surnames deriving from the given name
of their father. I was well aware that different cultures had different ways of
producing patronymic surnames – quite common in the Gaeltacht areas
of Ireland where the Irish language is spoken and also in Wales in Welsh
speaking areas. I soon learnt that Ivan Ivanovich is Ivan Son-of-Ivan and that
his sister Nataliya would be called Nataliya Ivanovna. This part was easy: – Male
patronymics end in “–ovich” or “–evich”
while the female patronymics end in –ovna or –evna. I also learned that Dostoevskii is the
Russian form of Dostoevsky while his wife would be referred to as
Dostoevskaia. For me these were little
things but ever so interesting as I fell to reading this great writer’s books.
One of my favourite
philosophers and critics, Walter Kaufman (1921 – 1980) perspicaciously and
judiciously noted of Dostoyevsky’s use of words or style in his wonderful short
novel Notes from Underground, a
verdict that could be applied to his literary output in general: “The pitch is
new, the strained protest, the self-preoccupation.... What we perceive is an unheard of song-of-songs on individuality: not
classical, not Biblical, and not at all romantic. No, individuality is not re-touched,
idealized, or holy; it is wretched and revolting, and yet, for all its misery,
the highest good.” [Walter Kaufmann (2004) - originally published 1956) Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, New
York: Plume/Penguin, p. 12. The Italics in the quotation are mine to highlight
my point here.]
In other words, what Kaufmann
is getting at above was precisely the thing that hooked me with respect to the
novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, namely, this new stress on and preoccupation with
the individual voice in all its highs
and in all its lows. This very new turn towards the subject highlighted individuality in all its wretchedness and
misery mostly, as paradoxically the avenue to its highest good was part of
a more general turn away from the exotic subject matter and exaggerated
emotionalism and drama associated with the Romantic Movement, and it represented a deliberate turn towards
a more realistic depiction of life.
It, therefore, sought to portray real contemporary people and situations
with truth and accuracy, and in doing so not to avoid any unpleasant or sordid
aspects of life. Realist authors, like Dostoevsky, chose to depict
everyday life with its many banal activities and experiences — ordinary things
and ordinary occurrences, extraordinary in their ordinariness — instead of
creating a highly romanticised presentation of them. It is instructive also to note that the
popularity of such “realistic” works grew with the introduction of photography —
a new burgeoning visual source that created a desire for people to produce and
reproduce representations which looked objectively real. The Realists
consequently depicted everyday subjects and situations in contemporary
settings, and, therefore, attempted to show individuals of all social classes
in a similar realistic manner.
What makes
Dostoyevsky’s books so intriguingly alluring is that at once he is both “an
explorer of ideas” as well as a master depicter of life in all its existential
torment. What establishes him as one of
the present writer’s favourite authors is his deep personal involvement in the
very structure and style of his texts, allied to his deep understanding of and
insights into both psychology and religious and spiritual preoccupations. As
well as that, the reader can delight in Dostoevsky’s penchant for satire or
“satiric parody” as the emeritus Yale professor and critic Harold Bloom calls
it. Moreover, throughout it all, we hear
the voice of a tormented soul and that voice traces those universal and
trans-temporal torments human flesh is heir to in all of his riveting novels
and writings. I will review my favourite
books by Dostoevsky here.
1 The Double
(1846, written when FD was 24)
The influences in this very early novella, The Double are without doubt the Gothic literature that this nineteenth century Russian author would have read as well as his own insights into the psychology of the human mind as he experienced it throughout his life. It is a fact worth noting that this was Dostoyevsky’s second novel and he was only 24 when he wrote it. (His first novel was Poor Folk, written the previous year). This novella I loved as it is a gripping read and it was as alluring for me as the novella by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, published in 1886, some forty years later. I recommend the reader to engage with this book in tandem with Notes from Underground, and possibly read it first as it will serve as a wonderful door into the second one.
Firstly, let me say a little
about the background. The Double is a
novella that was first published on January 30, 1846 in a contemporary Russian
journal called Fatherland Notes, though it was subsequently revised and republished by Dostoevsky
in 1866. It tells the story of the eventual mental breakdown of a minor
government official. Having just re-read
it in more or less one sitting one can only conclude that this is a well-paced
and gripping novella. It simply captures the reader’s imagination from the very
beginning. Jessie Coulson, the
translator of my edition of the book puts it wonderfully succinctly:
“The style may be modelled, not
entirely successfully on Gogol’s, but it flows as swiftly as a river in flood,
and conveys a feeling of urgent excitement and apprehension. The ‘Gothic’ subject of a man haunted or
possessed by his exact double must have seen conventional enough at the
time. It might have cropped up in the
work of Gogol as one of the tales of the still popular Hoffmann....” [Jennie Coulson
in “Translator’s Introduction” to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Double, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1976, pp. 7 – 8.]
In short, then, what I contend
here is that there is a first level of meaning that is certainly the Gothic
tale aspect of the story. That story is briefly as follows: The Double revolves
around a government clerk named Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin who is of a very
nervous disposition, exceedingly hesitant and almost unable to make decisions
until finally forced to do so by pure necessity at the moment of crisis. This
man is a total misfit who is obsessed with doing the right thing if only he
knew in the first place what the socially acceptable thing to do was. In the
course of the novella, while attempting to assert himself so ineffectually, he
repeatedly encounters someone who is his exact double in appearance but who is
more confident, aggressive, and extroverted - all characteristics that are the
polar opposites to those of the nervous, highly strung, laughable and hesitant
"pushover" hero who is really more an anti-hero. In the novella
Dostoevsky names Golyadkin Senior as the original anti-hero, whom he
ironically calls “our hero” again and again while Golyadkin Junior is his
doppelganger or double but, in the mind of Golyadkin Senior, this second man is
the real hero or protagonist he really wants to be, and this second character
always seems to provoke him because he outshines him in every way.
However, there is also, I
believe, a second level of meaning to this wonderfully gripping short novella. Having experienced myself
what’s generally referred to as a “nervous breakdown” when I was forty years of
age, I can only say that Dostoevsky must have had some first-hand experience of
depression because he writes so convincingly about mental illness here in this
novella. In one sense, then,
Dostoyevsky’s second novel may be superficially derivative as the nightmarish
story of a man possessed by his exact double – even at one stage in the novel
hallucinating about many other doubles.
However, the further question can be asked, I contend, as to whether the
double really is a double or is he simply another more disturbed aspect of his
own nature? In short, I believe, that it
is this uncertainty, highlighted by this most apt question, that gives the
ultimate horror to this tale as our “hero” or “anti-hero” is eventually carried
off, accompanied by his Doctor, to the local asylum. In that regard, it could be stated that this
novella presents us with one of the first classic studies of mental breakdown
in novel form. Some commentators maintain that Mr. Golyadkin is suffering from
schizophrenia, but the exact diagnosis need not detain us here as, for the
purpose of these brief reflections, the more common and general terms “mental
illness” and “mental breakdown” will suffice. Another effective way of stating
the above is to say that Dostoyevsky’s novella The Double portrays the failure of its protagonist in achieving a
stable identity, or to put it more simply still, it manifests in the clearest
possible way the disintegration of “our hero’s” self.
2 Notes From Underground (1864, FD was 42/3)
As I have already said, and I repeat it for emphasis here, Dostoevsky introduced into both Russian and world literature a new sense of heightened inner awareness or a new preoccupation of the writer with a deepened sense of self-consciousness, and he expressed this most essentially and powerfully in another short novel or novella Notes from Underground (1864). This book is essentially the study of a single character who is, in effect, an anti-hero and who remains nameless throughout. Jessie Coulson, translator of my edition of the novella, describes this central character wonderfully succinctly thus:
“... a man turned in upon
himself, a man of heightened awareness, whose sensitivities to slights drives
him alternately to retreat into his corner, his underground, and to revenge
himself for his humiliations by humiliating others. Dostoevsky declared in his notebooks that he
prided himself on having been the first to portray the “real man of the Russian
majority” and lay bare his ugly and tragic aspect. [Jessie Coulson, in her
introduction to Notes from Underground (1976),
p. 9.]
The whole of the first part of
this novella is in the form of a long monologue that is the philosophical
manifesto of the man from “the underground”, or essentially Dostoevsky’s own
philosophical credo by way of sarcastic parody according to some commentators.
Written in the form of a diary, it is a fascinating portrait of a miserable man
filled with conflicting urges. This underground man is a former civil servant
who embraces a nihilistic view of society, leading him to become irrational and very paranoid. The main issue for the “underground man” is that he
has reached a point of “ennui” and “inactivity” that are central planks in
later existentialist writings. Coupled
with “angst” or anxiety, these two feelings would surely prevent anyone from
doing anything worthwhile – hence this man’s inability to act.
In short, Notes from Underground is a powerful sarcastic attack on the utopian and
socialist ideas of Dostoevsky’s time as well as an examination of the
artificiality and superficiality of society. The “underground,” in both the
title of the book and in the description of the unnamed narrator, refers to
this creature’s complete separation from society, his complete
alienation. Here, in other words, we have the first alienated man in world
literature.
The chief target of this
novella, or of Dostoevsky’s ennui or annoyance, was the Russian novelist
Nickolay Chernyshevsky’s book What is to
be Done? (1863) that postulated the eventual attainment by humankind of perfect
virtue, success and happiness by the pursuit of enlightened
self-interest. Chernyshevsky saw his
novel as more than a mere story, but rather a “textbook of life” for
the author’s young contemporaries. In all of this, Dostoevsky could see the
superficial naive optimism of the rationalism that was at the very heart of the
Enlightenment, and his novella was
his well-wrought reply, in the form of parody, some argue. For the underground man, consciousness, not progress or
rationality, was what life is all about: “Suffering - after all, that
is the sole cause of consciousness.
Although I declared to begin with that in my opinion consciousness is
man’s supreme misfortune. I know that
man loves it and would not change it for any gratification. Consciousness is infinitely greater than, for
example, two and two make four...” (Notes
from Underground, (1976, p. 41)
In other words, the philosophy of the then Social Utopians was nothing short of
a shallow arithmetic calculation as simple as two plus two equalling four. The ‘underground man’ realised all too well
that human life was far more complex than either the calculations or the
prognostications of Social Utopians like Chernyshevsky and his colleagues would
allow.
The “Underground Man” opposes
such a rationalist view also because he believes that it underestimates the
human desire for free will (another major theme in Dostoyevsky’s oeuvre), and
the exercise of that free will is essentially what this wonderful little
novella is about. He argues that we
humans value the ability to exert our own will — even if that runs contrary to
our best interests. Indeed, he argues
that we value it even more than our powers to reason. The “Underground Man’s”
masochistic tendencies illustrate this theory. Rather than submit to the “law
of reason” that dictates that only doctors and dentists can cure liver disease
and toothaches respectively, this alienated man from the underground world
prefers to suffer his ailments alone and in silence, even though this decision
only brings him more pain. That pain is
worth suffering in itself because it is an exercise of his free will against
all constraints, physical or otherwise. That medical example, given by Dostoevsky
in this novella, is obviously absurd, almost of the dimensions of parody, but
it emphasizes the “Underground Man’s” point about human nature. It is here that
literary critics like Gary Adelman argues that the whole point of this novella
is the parodying of the materialism and positivism promulgated by the
Enlightenment beginning with such luminaries as Auguste Comte (1798 – 1857):
Notes
From Underground
(1864) demolishes Chernyshevsky with mockery and parody and shows the moral
anarchy that will result from a materialistic and deterministic
philosophy. I am what you really get in
Chernyshevsky’s scheme, says the Underground Man, my dreadful subterranean activity is what you
get – that is, my whole being in revolt against your golden path. [Gary
Adelman(2001) retelling Dostoevsky:
Literary Responses and Other Observations, p. 39.]
After the ‘Underground Man’
shares his views on the nature of pain, suffering, logic, and other
intellectual theories, the narrator shifts to an actual narrative consisting of
three parts beginning appropriately with a chapter suitably entitled “A Story
of the falling Sleet.” The first part deals with the man’s encounter and
subsequent obsession with an army officer, who he thought had insulted him, and
whom he follows through the streets for several days wondering if he could
summon up the courage to challenge him to a duel even though that man never
even notices the almost invisible man from the underground. The second part
recounts his disastrous experience at a dinner party with some old friends
where he feels he has failed utterly in projecting himself as an authentic
human being and that he has merely shown the others that he is totally
self-conscious and infinitely awkward.
Finally, the third part
portrays his complicated experiences with a prostitute. When he wakes up,
after having slept with this young woman of the night, he hears a clock
wheezing, and he takes in the details of the dirty, narrow room where he has
been sleeping. He remembers the events of the previous day as if they had
happened a long time ago, and slowly he begins to feel anguished. Next to him,
the prostitute opens her eyes and looks at him with indifferent curiosity. The
“Underground Man” realizes that he has never spoken to her, and he suddenly
feels disgusted with the idea of sex without any kind of love. Such an experience has been thoroughly
inauthentic and unworthy of a person like himself who has been struggling to be
as human as possible. They stare at each other, and he becomes very
uncomfortable. I mention this scene here
to underscore the complexity of mind, depths of soul and the sheer existential
struggles of the man from that hole that is the underground. What is agreed upon
by most commentators on this novella is that the narrator believes that human
beings can just as easily be irrational, or non-rational at least, as they can
be rational. And this antihero narrator
argues that, perhaps, irrationality might be the more valid state than naive
rationalism. Moreover, the sheer complexity of the “Underground Man” outdoes
the simplicity or machine-like prognostications or prescriptions suggested by
the positivist philosophy of the Social Utopians.
3. House of the Dead (also called Notes From the House of
the Dead, 1862, when FD was 41/42 ).
It is no wonder the Dostoevsky put off writing this novel for several years after his return to St Petersburg in European Russia after his imprisonment and exile in Siberia. It would take years to get over such a traumatic experience and come to terms with it. Writing it down in the shape of a novel was Dostoevsky’s door to sanity. Everyman and Everywoman would want to exorcise the ghosts of such a hellish experience. This is what makes this book a wonderful read as we are brought right into the mind of the narrator who suffered that dreadful punishment of exile, imprisonment and abandonment in Siberia in mid-nineteenth century Russia. Within its covers, we encounter the very extremities of human behaviour.
While Dostoevsky loved the
novels of Dickens, he was in no way won over by many of Dickens’s happy endings
or jolly outcomes. After all Oliver
Twist was in the end adopted by Mr. Brownlow, David Copperfield was to marry
his beloved Agnes and Pip was to end up with his one true love Estella.
However, in Dostoevsky’s world what seizes his all too realistic and grim mind
is the propensity for excess and brutality that obviously thrives in many
people that populate the real world of experience. No one could have come through the hell of
incarceration in Siberia without learning about the extremities of human
behaviour. For me, that’s what’s
important, indeed very important, about this, the novel he wrote to cope with
his hellish experiences in prison.
Fyodor Dostoevsky was
imprisoned in Omsk for his association with writers who belonged to a
revolutionary circle called the Petrashevsky Circle, though all he had done was
attend the meetings and listen to pieces of literature being read. As well as
the harsh experiences he encountered in prison he also began to develop
symptoms of an illness that would strike him low many times throughout his
later life, namely, epilepsy.
Notes
from the House of the Dead is
deeply autobiographical and is replete with every form of misery, suffering and
cruelty imaginable. It is no wonder that
he died in his sixtieth year, having transcribed all his suffering into his
books. In actuality, Dostoevsky arrived in the Dead House on the 23 January
1850 (when he was barely 29 years of age). It was a freezing day – it was 40
degrees C below – on which he arrived by sledge. The prison was hellish and ruled over
despotically by a drunken and crazy major.
That major meted out random and fierce corporal punishments – thousands of
beatings from sticks to random offending prisoners. However, it was the chasm
that existed between Dostoevsky as a nobleman or a man from the upper classes
and the ordinary inmates who were peasants for the most part that led to much
mental suffering for the author. Those
prisoners seemed to loathe each other as well as all humanity. He described them in a letter to his brother
Mikhail as “rough, angry and embittered men” (ibid., p. xvii) who despised the
higher classes, and to make matters worse they had to share all their days and
nights with these convicts, sleeping on shared palate beds.
In summer, their living
conditions were unbearably hot and unbearably cold in the winter and their barrack-room
was squalid, with filth an inch thick on the floor. Rats, mice and fleas
abounded. The food was horrific with
cockroaches found in the soup and the men had to wear shackles at all
times. Further, they all lived in constant
fear of random beatings and floggings. Worse again, for a sensitive soul like
Fyodor Dostoevsky there was, of course, no chance of ever being alone and absolutely
nothing to read. Dostoevsky was to describe his experience of the Omsk prison
to another of his brothers as being equivalent to being coffined and buried
alive.
However, there is not one note
of bitterness to be encountered in the pages of this wonderful little book as
Dostoevsky brings all the wisdom of his accumulated experiences to bear on his
account. To survive, he would have had
to develop a thick skin and a philosophy that would have allowed him to
navigate his prison experiences in a less stressful way if at all possible. Even
through the worst suffering he tries to sound a fairly hopeful note. In that sense, the critic, E.H. Carr is
surely correct where he asserts that this book is “the least Dostoevskian of
all Dostoevsky’s work.”
One of the most endearing
aspects of the book for me is the description of the multifarious characters (“those
lost creatures” p. 7) that crowd this book. We are introduced to many dozens of
interesting and colourful characters: from Alexander Petrovitch Goryanchikov, a
gentleman who had murdered his wife, to the violent major in charge of the
prison, to Petrov, a prisoner who bore his flogging with bravery, further, to an
upper class parricide (p. 17), to an old Jew, called Isay Bumshtein, to a
slop-pail man, to Akim Akimitch, a former lieutenant in the Caucasus,
imprisoned for killing a local chieftain and so on and so forth. This book simply abounds with such colourful
characters, each inimitably described and psychologically analysed by the
author.
All through this book, I was
also enthralled by Dostoevsky’s calm description of floggings and beatings and
by his ability to see the funny side of even the worst suffering. Indeed, he noticed that practically all the
inmates never ever complained about their lot and certainly not about their
beatings which they accepted stoically as part of their lot in life. This novel brings up many horrific things
like parricide and murder, cruelty and guilt, all types of crimes and all types
of punishments, that is, many themes that he will return to in his more famous
and later novels. However, I will finish with one big existential question he
raises in The House of the Dead: “But
I remember what absorbed me more than anything was one thought, which haunted
me persistently all the time in prison, a difficulty that cannot be fully
solved – I cannot solve it even now: the inequality of punishment for the same
crime... one man will pine, waste away (from guilt for his crime)....while
another has never once all the time he has been in prison thought of the murder
he has committed. He positively considers he has done right.... But why trouble
oneself with unanswerable questions?” (pp. 51 – 53)
4. Crime and Punishment
(1866, when FD was 44/5)
Murder is a crime that appears in many of Dostoyevsky’s main novels. Crime and Punishment (1866), centres on the idea of whether the murder of an evil old woman, an uncouth and ruthless moneylender, can be justified if it allows the murderer to progress in life. I would like to begin the review of this book with a quotation from the Russian philosopher Nickolai Berdyaev:
No one ever had such an
exclusive preoccupation with the theme of man. And no one had such a genius for
revealing the mystery of human nature. Dostoevsky was, first of all, a great
anthropologist, an investigator of human nature, its depth and its mystery. All
his creativity --- is of anthropological experiences and experiments.
Dostoevsky is not a realist as an artist, he is an experimenter, a creator of
an experimental metaphysics of human nature. All the artistry of Dostoevsky is
but a method of anthropological searchings and disclosings. [See paper, “The Revelation about Man in the
Creativity of Dostoevsky” by Berdyaev available here:
http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1918_294.html,
accessed 01/03/2016]
In this particular essay,
Berdyaev is preoccupied with the question of Dostoevsky’s creativity as a
writer, and creativity was one of this particular philosopher’s major
concerns. The translation is by a
Russian Orthodox priest, a Fr. S. Janos, and it is somewhat amateurish, yet it
captures the philosopher’s meaning well enough for our purposes. It is especially the phrases “anthropological
experiences and experiments” and “experimenter, a creator of an experimental
metaphysics of human nature” that catches this writer’s attention here.
I wish to draw the reader’s
attention to the tormenting duality of guilt and redemption as they present
themselves to the human subject in existential terms. Quite obviously, then, this means that we
will have to offer a short exposition of how this duality is presented in Crime and Punishment (1866). This great
novel again analyses a serious theme, the mind and motivations of a murderer,
his mental preparations for the crime and his later guilt and preoccupations stemming
from that awful act. Indeed, Dostoevsky
takes some one hundred pages to prepare us for the dastardly crime.
In short, then, we may say this
novel traces the vagaries of the criminal mind, but in more tragedic terms
reminds us that any of us, given the right circumstances, could be in this
protagonist’s position – a frightful and indeed terrifying thought of
nightmarish proportions. In this novel, we are brought with consummate ease
into the culprit, Raskolnikov’s mind, one which is continually tormented by his
crime until he finally confesses it. This Raskolnikov is a poor ex-student who
decides to murder a despised old woman who is a disreputable pawnbroker. In the
process, he is also forced to murder the pawnbroker’s weaker, more likable
sister by means of the same hatchet or axe as he cannot afford to leave
witnesses to his dastardly crime alive.
In coming to his decision to
murder the pawnbroker, Raskolnikov has convinced himself that his desperate
sister, Dunya, and equally perturbed mother really deserve the stolen money
more than this "louse" of a pawnbroker, the greedy old Alyona
Ivanovna. Also, it is worth remembering
that prior to the murder he has also written an article dividing the world into
ordinary people and more gifted heroes (like Napoleon) who are above the
ordinary laws. Indeed, Raskolnikov
considers himself one of these gifted heroes of humanity. We feel immediately
that he must be an egomaniac, obsessively preoccupied with himself and
possessed of delusions of grandeur.
Using this rationalisation, he can now execute his crime under the guise
of his victim’s classification as a member of the less worthy group of people
in society – she is, after all, only a mere “louse.”
From the very first page, we
find ourselves inside the head of our hero or anti-hero, sharing all his thoughts
with a mixture of fascination and indeed revulsion. Our murderer lives in a
rented room in a tenement in the seediest district of St Petersburg. He informs us that although he has once been
a promising student that he is now a dropout. The reason is not quite clear,
but it’s probably a combination of both poverty and depression. Once again, taking our cue from Berdyaev, we
feel as readers that we are literally in the inner world of Rodyon Raskolnikov
and are along with Dostoevsky “an investigator of human nature, its depth and
its mystery,” and we might add, indeed, to this statement the clause “investigators
of human nature in its misery.” In other
words, we find ourselves in the midst of an existential quandary. Here is the way John Salinsky describes the
effect on him of reading about old louse Alyona’s and her half-sister Lisaveta
Ivanovna’s murder:
We readers have no choice but
to go along with him and we feel like guilty accomplices. Then he brings the axe
down on the old lady’s head. We are still in shock (My God! He’s really done
it!) when the old lady’s innocent younger sister appears and he has to split
her skull open as well. It’s nightmarish, sickening and horribly well written.
I shall leave you to experience the details for yourselves. In his haste, he
only manages to collect a few articles of jewellery and other trinkets and
misses the money entirely. When a workman comes to the door and rings the bell
he bolts the door and stands there quaking over the bodies of his two victims,
hoping the man will go away. Eventually he escapes, buries his loot under a
stone and returns to his own flat. [John Salinsky in Education for Primary Care (2004), p. 667]
Here, I would like to return to
Raskolnikov’s abiding sense of guilt that overwhelms him to the point of
psychological and somatic illness. Indeed, our hero is on the verge of
divulging his crime at least on three occasions soon after his commission of
these dreadful murders: (i) He draws attention to himself by fainting at the
police station, (ii) In a pub, he almost confesses to the crime and then tells the
incredulous police officer, who is in the company, that he was only teasing and
(iii) He stupidly returns to the scene of the crime. That’s why all along we are enabled to feel
the weight of his remorse. Like the
protagonist, Dorian Gray of the eponymous and only novel written by Oscar
Wilde, we increasingly feel that Rodyon Raskolnikov wishes to scream his crime
aloud to the world and run along the roof tops so that he might expiate his
great sin. It is no wonder, then, that for most of part two of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov
suffers from some kind of feverish illness with delirium that we all feel sure
is psychosomatic, that is, a consequence of his great and terrible crime. He
hardly knows whether he is asleep or awake.
Fortunately, he has a loyal student friend called Razumikhin to look
after him. People keep coming and going and everyone is talking about the
murder and speculating about who might have done it, and our poor ill student
has to listen to all this in a tormented state.
In sum, he is driven to distraction. In all of this, we may say with
Berdyaev, that Dostoevsky is at his “anthropological” and psychological
best. It is here, also, that we may say
that he is at his existential best, too.
And then the question arises
about the possibility or impossibility of redemption, a theme central to
Dostoyevsky’s religious beliefs.
Raskolnikov, tormented by his crime, is also punished by the fact that
he is beyond redemption. He says on one
occasion that he believes in God but that he has no belief in the
afterlife. He is a broken creature and
lives in a world of virtual desolation.
It is onto this stage that Dostoevsky, in line with a Russian tradition,
introduces Raskolnikov’s "saviour," a young woman, Sonya, driven to
prostitution by her alcoholic father’s inability to provide for his impoverished
family. One of the classic scenes in this novel is the reading of the story of
the raising of Lazarus to Raskolnikov the murderer by Sonya the humble
prostitute. (This is a sure hint, if one were needed, that Raskolnikov will be
redeemed, or at least brought to repentance.)
He is also informed by his “redeeming” lover that the New Testament she
has been reading is one given to her by the poor murdered Lisaveta who used
come to Sonya’s house to read it with her: “Lisaveta was good. She used to come here – occasionally. She
couldn’t come very often. We used to
read together and – talk. She will
behold the Lord.” [p. 340] And so begins Raskolnikov’s road to repentance and redemption
- sparked by this ironic occurrence - with Sonya as his confessor. He tells her,
sometime later, how he murdered the two women with a hatchet and that the
reason he has done so is that he wished to exercise his “courage to dare.” (p. 431)
“But how did I kill? Is that
the way men kill? Do men go to kill as I went there that day? ... Was it the
old hag that I killed? No, I killed myself and not the old hag. I did away with myself with one blow and for
good. It was the devil that killed the
old hag, not I. But enough, Sonia,
enough! Leave me alone!” he immediately shouted in a spasm of black
despair. “Leave me alone!” [p. 433]
Sonya’s reply to the man
drowning in black despair at this self-murder and feeling the torments of the
impossibility of redemption is that her beloved Raskolnikov must “accept
suffering and be redeemed by it – that’s what you must do.” [p. 434] Again,
this writer is reminded of Dorian Gray’s remorse and his desiring to tell the
world of his sins:
He suddenly remembered Sonya’s
words: “go to the cross-roads, bow down to the people, kiss the earth, for you
have sinned against it, and proclaim in a loud voice to the whole world: I am a
murderer!” [p. 536]
Through the persistent pecking
away of the seemingly bumbling but clever detective Porphyry (on whom possibly
Lieutenant Columbo of the American T.V. series was based?) and the gentle
persuasion of Sonya, Raskolnikov eventually confesses his guilt publicly and is
sentenced to penal servitude in Siberia, where he is faithfully accompanied by
Sonya. That our protagonist is repentant
and is redeemed through the ministrations of the prostitute is beyond
doubt. The ending, with our protagonist
going to bed each night in Siberia with the copy of Lisaveta’s old battered
copy of the New Testament under his pillow, is perhaps somewhat didactic and
evangelical. However, we are happy to go along with it, having experienced
Raskolnikov’s torments of mind and spirit and his cathartic regeneration over
the expanse of nearly six hundred pages. We instinctively feel he has paid his
dues to society and to God:
But that is the beginning of a
new story, the story of the gradual rebirth of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration,
of his gradual passing from one world to another, of his acquaintance with a
new and hitherto unknown reality. That
might be the subject of a new story – our present story is ended. [p. 559]
5. The Devils (also called Demons,
The Possessed, 1871, when FD was 49/50)
My copy of this book is called The Devils. This novel remains one of the most controversial of all Dostoevsky’s novels. He had at the time of writing been living abroad with his second wife Anna. He had left Russia in a hurry in February 1867 because his creditors had threatened to put him in prison for defaulting on the payments of his debts. Indeed, his life with his wife Anna in Dresden was far from idyllic. On May 4 of that year he abandoned her there and went off to Homburg where he spent twelve days in the casino gambling. Needless to say, he lost every dime he had. Anna had to send him money for the return journey. Indeed, the gambling persisted and at one stage he was reduced to the humiliation of crawling on his knees in front of his wife so that she might lend him a few coins. Finally in Florence, downcast and depressed he came up with a project of writing a great novel about the life of an atheist that would eventually turn out to be his wonderful The Brothers Karamazov. However, in the meantime, he had to write something quickly to earn him some badly needed income, something he called “a tendentious thing” that he could passionately write and do so in a hurry. As a result we have quite a structurally unsound novel, but one rich in passionate insight and in-depth psychological wisdom nonetheless. That book turned out to be the novel called The Devils.
He wrote this novel in serial
form for the literary magazine called The
Russian Messenger in the years 1871 – 1872. The Devils is an allegory of
the potentially catastrophic consequences of the political and moral
nihilism that were becoming prevalent in Russia in the 1860s. A fictional
town descends into chaos as it becomes the focal point of an attempted
revolution, orchestrated by master conspirator Pyotr Verkhovensky. The
mysterious aristocratic figure of Nikolai Stavrogin — Verkhovensky's
counterpart in the moral sphere — dominates the book, exercising an
extraordinary influence over the hearts and minds of almost all the other characters.
The idealistic, western-influenced generation of the 1840s, epitomized in the
character of Stepan Verkhovensky (who is both Pyotr Verkhovensky's father and
Nikolai Stavrogin's childhood teacher), are presented as the unconscious
progenitors and helpless accomplices of the 'demonic' forces that take
possession of the town. This is what Dostoevsky said about The Devils: “I feel like saying
everything as passionately as possible. (Let the Nihilists and the Westerners
scream that I am a reactionary!) To hell with them. I shall say everything to the last word.”
(David Magarshack in “The Translator’s Introduction” to my edition, p. viii).
It is important to point out
that “The Devils” refer not to individuals who act in various immoral or
criminal ways, but rather to the ideas
that possess them: non-material but living forces that subordinate the
individual (and collective) consciousness, distorting it and impelling it
toward catastrophe. These devils include that legion of “-isms”
overwhelmed Russia from the West, namely, idealism, rationalism, empiricism,
materialism, utilitarianism, positivism, socialism, anarchism, nihilism, and,
underlying them all, one “-ism” that Dostoevsky feared, namely, atheism. The
counter-ideal to the devils (expressed in the novel through the character of
Ivan Shatov) is that of an authentically Russian culture growing out of the
people's inherent spirituality and faith. The Russian Orthodox
Church and the Tsar through the divine right of kings would be the salvation
for Russia for Dostoevsky as well as the simple faith shown in the lives of the
Russian serfs.
In a letter to his friend Apollon
Maykov, Dostoevsky alludes to the episode of the Exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac in the Gospel of Luke as
the inspiration for the title: "Exactly the same thing happened in our
country: the devils went out of the Russian man and entered into a herd of
swine... These are drowned or will be drowned, and the healed man, from whom
the devils have departed, sits at the feet of Jesus." Part of the
passage is used as an epigraph, and Dostoyevsky's thoughts on its
relevance to Russia are given voice by Stepan Verkhovensky on his deathbed near
the end of the novel.
Nikolai
Vsevolodovich Stavrogin is
the central character of the novel and he is a deeply repellent and immoral
landowner, a man who has lost the
distinction between good and evil. According to Shatov, Stavrogin is driven by
"a passion for inflicting torment", not merely for the pleasure of
harming others, but to torment his own conscience and wallow in the sensation
of "moral carnality." Another important character is one Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, who is
a refined and high-minded intellectual who unintentionally contributes to the
development of nihilistic forces, centring on his son Pyotr Stepanovich and
former pupil Nikolai Stavrogin, that ultimately bring local society to the
brink of collapse. The character is Dostoevsky's rendering of an archetypal
liberal idealist of the 1840s Russian intelligentsia, and is apparently based
partly on Timofey Granovsky and Alexander Herzen from that
period of time. Finally we must mention Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky who is the son of Stepan
Trofimovich and the principal driving force of the mayhem that ultimately
engulfs the town. The father and son are a representation of the aetiological
connection Dostoevsky perceived between the liberal idealists of the 1840s and
the nihilistic revolutionaries of the 1860s. The character of Pyotr
Stepanovich was apparently inspired by the revolutionary Sergey Nechayev.
However, one has to agree
profoundly with the translator, David Magarshack that Dostoevsky’s spite and
hatred for these various characters of certain political, religious or
non-religious allegiances, for his opponents, and indeed, for all the imaginary
enemies of Russia that obsessed his mind really marred this novel to some
extent. But, he goes on to stress that despite this major flaw the novel is a
great one because it “possesses a tremendous vitality, as well as moments of
great tenderness.” He goes on further to
underscore the point that it would be simply “absurd to take Dostoyevsky’s
political views seriously; but it would be no less absurd to overlook his
moments of great inspiration, his amazing insight into the human heart, and his
shattering criticism of those aspects of man’s character which profoundly
affect human thought and behaviour.” (Introduction, p. xvii.)
6. A Gentle Spirit (also called A Gentle Creature, The
Meek One Short Story, 1876, when FD was 54/5)
We will have read of Smerdyakov’s suicide subsequent to his murder of his father in The Brothers Karamazov. This issue is a recurring theme in Dostoyevsky’s oeuvre. A Gentle Creature, sometimes also translated as The Meek One, is a short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky that he wrote in 1876. The piece comes with the subtitle of "A Fantastic Story", and it chronicles the relationship between a pawnbroker and a girl who frequents his shop – a relationship that results in their marriage. The suicide in question throws herself out of a window in this story which was inspired by a news report that Dostoevsky read in April 1876 about the death of a seamstress. He referred to it as a "meek suicide" that "keeps haunting you for a long time" - The interesting thing about this story is that it explores the complete and utter torment of the pawnbroker in the wake of his wife’s suicide:
Why, for what reason did this woman die? .... The question
persists. The question hammers, hammers
away in my brain.... I pace, I keep pacing.
I know, I know, don’t try to put words in my mouth: you think it is ridiculous
that I complain about chance and the five minutes [during which he might have
saved her]? Consider one thing: she
didn’t even leave a note saying, “Don’t blame anyone for my death,” like
everyone does.... No, this was all a moment, just one inexplicable moment. Suddenness and fantasy! So what if she was
praying before the icon? .... The thought flew into her head, her head started
spinning and – and she couldn’t withstand it. [Dostoevsky, F. (2015), The
Meek One: A Fantastic Story, London: Penguin Books, pp. 53 – 55]
In this piece quoted here, Dostoevsky shows the
depths or heights of his understanding of human psychology. He instinctively or intuitively accepts that
no one can fully understand the motives of a suicide – especially in a case
like the one given. The husband, the
pawnbroker feels himself responsible for having driven his wife to it. In this short story the husband is tormented
by the questions to which there are no satisfactory answers. Here as elsewhere
in his oeuvre, Dostoevsky distils the feelings of the lonely heart in the vain
search of meaning that lies at the very core of existentialism.
Pridmore & Pridmore, Department of Psychiatry, University of
Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia in a recent article in a psychiatric
journal conclude that “Dostoyevsky’s novels suggest that in mid-19th Century
Russia, suicide was not uncommon and the main methods were similar to those of
the current time. The triggers were depicted as mainly social/economic factors
(rather than mental disorder). Attempted suicide has changed much. Suicidal
thoughts appear common in both time periods, and frequently appear in the
absence of mental disorder.” [See the following article:
http://www.aseanjournalofpsychiatry.org/index.php/aseanjournalofpsychiatry/article/viewFile/237/187
accessed 20/03/2015]
Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869) and The
Brothers Karamazov (1880) contain (i) completed suicide, (ii) suicide
attempts and (3) suicidal thoughts. In Crime and Punishment Philip ends his
life by hanging while Svidrigoylov ends his by shooting. Likewise in The Idiot Alexeyevich finishes his life
by shooting while in The Brothers
Karamazov Sofya ends her life in hanging as does Smerdyakov. Outside these definite suicides there are
also many accounts of attempted suicides and mentions of suicidal thoughts and
references to the act itself in many of Dostoyevsky’s novels. The triggers are many and the motivations of the actors varied: mostly outside
factors like mistreatment or cruelty by others, alcohol abuse, pressures from
society that adversely affected the psychological or mental disposition of the
suicide. We take account of these facts here to bolster our argument that
psychological torments of the human mind engendered many of Dostoyevsky’s
themes which were existential to a fault.
7. The Brothers Karamazov
(1879, FD’s last novel, when he was 58/9. He died in his sixtieth year.)
The problem of evil rears its ugly head in much literature, especially in nineteenth century Russian literature. Some philosophers and theologians have, since the time of Dostoevsky, distinguished between the concept of problem and that of mystery, and they argue that the question of evil impacts upon us doubly. Firstly, a problem, they argue, is one that confronts us on a cerebral and intellectual level alone, while a mystery is one that involves us at the very core of our being. One such philosopher was the twentieth century French Catholic Gabriel Marcel. According to Marcel, we are part of, and thus cannot be objective about, our own existence. Existence transcends objective enquiry, and is thus a mystery. Scientific questions may be objectively answerable, and may be considered as problems for which there may be solutions. Sometimes evil may be a cerebral problem on one level – say, that of a philosophy lesson; at other times it may be a mystery, one from which we ourselves cannot stand apart as we may be so involved in it at a personal level, that is, because we ourselves are in pain or suffering. From what I have written above, there is no doubt whatsoever but that Dostoevsky had suffered much and when he describes its reality either through story or philosophical debate he has dealt with the question of evil as both a problem and as a mystery.
With this in mind I will turn to his treatment
of the question of evil in his masterpiece The
Brothers Karamazov (1880) by way of reviewing this book. Dostoevsky had begun writing this, his last
and greatest novel, in June 1878 and had just finished it in October 1880,
barely three months before his death. In
this well-written and many times revised book, Dostoevsky explores the mystery
of evil as it plays itself out through the lives and interactions of the three
brothers Dmitri, Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov and their half-brother Smerdyakov. From a very early age, the narrator
tells us, things weren't quite right with Smerdyakov. It may have been all
those rumours that he was the product of Fyodor Karamazov's rape of Stinking
Lizaveta, the village idiot. Surely that would have given anyone a complex. But
as a young boy, Smerdyakov seemed to be naturally evil. It's not clear how
someone can grow up with a "sidelong look in his eye," as the
narrator describes him, but we naturally picture a shifty enough looking boy
hanging cats and solemnly burying them.
In short, we see the young Smerdyakov as creepy and somewhat sick.
There is no doubt that the eldest brother Dmitri (Mitya) Karamazov
is a tormented soul for whom the question of evil (through prodigality in all
its excesses: alcohol, licentiousness and gambling) added greatly to his own
personal suffering. Early in the novel,
Dmitry (speaking to his younger brother, the monk Alyosha, at times the epitome
of saccharine holiness, but always compassionate and open to listening to his
tormented brothers) laments the ‘broadness’ of man and his simultaneous attraction
to the ‘ideal of the Madonna’ (good or truth) and the ‘ideal of Sodom,’ (evil
or falsehood) and that somewhere between these extremes dangles humankind in a
veritable purgatory of continual frustration, fear and anxiety:
Yes, man is wide, too wide, indeed. I would narrow him. I’m hanged if I know what he really is! What
appears shameful to the mind is sheer beauty to the heart. Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, for the
great majority of people it is in Sodom
and nowhere else – did you know that secret or not? The awful thing is that beauty is not only a
terrible, but also a mysterious, thing.
There God and the devil are fighting for mastery, and the battlefield is
the heart of man. Still, one can only
talk of one’s own pain... [pp.123 – 124]
This conception of the coexistence of radical opposites within man
forms the foundation for Dostoevsky's dramatisation of all the ‘accursed
questions’ like those of the existence
of evil versus good in the world, the rise of atheism versus theism, sheer materialism
versus spirituality and wanton greed and lust versus generosity and love, and
also those of doubt versus faith in a large œuvre of short
stories and sprawling novels (as well as a significant body of journalistic
writing), which eschews the ‘normal’ in favour of the extremes of human
experience and behaviour, and develops an experimental style that contrasts
sharply with the realism of his contemporaries Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev.
One of the conclusions I have come to, having read this novel at
least three times in my life thus far, is that the three brothers Alyosha,
Dmitri and Ivan are all the different aspects of Dostoyevsky’s complex
personality because as an author he gets so intimately, authentically and
really into the heart or head or instincts of each of these characters who are
totally convincing. This, to my mind,
gives the lie to those critics who pillory Dostoevsky for his
“tendentiousness” or deliberate sympathy for the Russian Orthodox Church. [See Bloom, H. (2005) (Ed.) Fyodor Dostoevsky, Langhorne: Chelsea
House Publishers, passim].
In this book, the arguments of the three brothers from their
varying viewpoints are cleverly worked out, eloquently presented and completely
convincing. In this regard the critical
analysis of Professor Richard Peace is equally eloquent and convincing:
The claim that Alesha [Alyosha] is at the centre of the novel is
fully justified; yet the novel is not dominated by him; its hero is not one
man; it is a brotherhood. It is as
though the central figure so typical of Dostoyevsky’s previous writing is
ultimately unable to withstand its own dichotomous inner tensions and has here
broken apart into separate and distinct facets; in Alesha we have the soul; in Dmitri the emotions; in Ivan the
intellect; but behind them all lurks Smerdyakov – the devious unlit
recesses of man’s psyche. [Peace,
R. (1992) Dostoevsky: An Examination of
the Major Novels, p. 229.]
One might add here that Smerdyakov represents
and prefigures the murky pits of the unconscious in Freudian terms. However, as regards the existence of evil in
the world, it is Ivan’s famous debate with Alyosha, the happy, open, spiritual
and spirited monk, the sounding board of equanimity for Dmitri and Ivan, in the chapter fittingly entitled “Rebellion”
that will be recalled by the general reader.
One may argue that this is portraying, or indeed arguing the cerebral
side of the question, namely the problem side: how can a good God possibly be
squared with the existence of evil in the world?
I wanted to discuss the suffering of humanity in general, but
perhaps we’d better confine ourselves to the sufferings of children.... This
poor five-year-old girl was subjected to every possible torture by those
educated parents. They beat her, birched
her, kicked her, without themselves knowing why, till her body was covered with
bruises; at last they reached the point of refinement: they shut her up all
night, in the cold and frost, in the privy.... they smeared her face with
excrement.... Do you realise what it means when a little creature like that,
who is quite unable to understand what is happening to her.... weeps searing,
unresentful and gentle tears to “dear kind God” to protect her? [Dostoevsky, F. (1978), The Brothers Karamazov 1, Translated by
David Magarshack, Harmonsworth: Penguin., Book 5, Chapter 4, pp. 277 – 283].
Of course, there are many other
themes in this wonderful novel besides that of the polar opposites of good and
evil like wisdom and knowledge, organised religion, fate and free will, judgement
and justice, guilt and blame, isolation, family relationships, meaning of life
and so on and so forth. In my humble opinion, this great novel must surely rank
in the top ten of all the novels ever written. If you are yet to read it you
have one great treat in store for you. Buy it or rush to the library and order
it.
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