Dostoevsky & Poor

Every culture has its own unique qualities. The culture of the United States is largely a blend of many different cultures since we are a nation of immigrants. With the exception of Brazil, most countries in South America were very heavily influence by Spanish culture.  Brazil was heavily influenced by Portuguese culture.  The nations of the former Soviet Union are strongly influenced by Orthodox culture and their connection to the Orthodox Church.  This is quite obvious in the novels of the classic Russian authors.  

While these various nations have their own uniqueness, the one thing that all of them have in common is that each nation has poor people.  The poor are often not even notice by those who have more money.  They are “invisible” people.  This was true in the late 19th century and is still true today.  

In 1845, Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky (1821-1881) wrote his first novel entitled Poor Folk.  This novel was written prior to his imprisonment. It was while he was in prison that he underwent a major conversion experience. He became a supporter of the czar and developed a great respect for the peasantry. This also seemed to be the beginning of his involvement in the Slavophile movement. 

The novel was originally published in A Petersburg Collection published. One anecdote states that the journal’s editor, Nikolai Nekrasov, declared “A new [Nikolai] Gogol has arisen!” Many literary critics, including Vissarion Belinsky, also gave this work much acclaim rocketing Fyodor Dostoevsky to literary fame.1 

It is put together in the form of a set of letters written between two people, Makar Devushkin and Varvara Dobroselova. Makar and Varvara are second cousins twice-removed and live across from each other on the same street in terrible apartments. Makar’s, for example, is merely a portioned-off section of the kitchen, and he lives with several other tenants, such as the Gorshkovs, whose son dies and who groans in agonizing hunger almost the entire story, gently crying at night. Makar and Varvara exchange letters back and forth attesting to their terrible living conditions and the former frequently squanders his money on gifts for the latter.

The reader progressively learns about their history throughout the story. Varvara used to live in the country until her father lost his job, and then she moved into St. Petersburg, which she hates. Her father was very violent after losing his job and her mother became severely depressed. He dies and they move in with Anna Fyodorovna, a landlady who was previously cruel to them but at least pretends to feel badly for their situation. There Varvara is tutored by a poor student named Pokrovsky, whose drunken father occasionally visits. She eventually falls in love with him. She struggles to save a measly amount of money to purchase Pokrovsky the complete works of Pushkin at the market for his birthday present, and then allows his father to give the books to him, claiming that just his receipt of the books will be enough for her happiness. Povrovsky falls ill soon after, and his last dying wish is to see the sun and the world outside, which Varvara obliges by opening the blinds to grey clouds and dirty rain. In response he only shakes his head and then passes away. His father runs after the coffin during the procession, with some of his son’s books falling in the mud as he goes along alone in the rain.

Varvara's mother dies soon after, and she is left in the care of Anna for a time, but eventually goes out on her own because of the abuse to live with Fedora across the street. Makar works as a lowly copyist, frequently belittled at his job and picked on. His clothing is worn and dirty, and his living conditions are perhaps worse than Varvara's. He considers himself a rat in society. As he and Varvara exchange letters (and occasional visits that are never detailed), they begin to exchange books. Makar becomes offended when she sends him a copy of The Overcoat, because he finds the main character to be living the life he now lives.

Varvara considers leaving to another part of the city where she can work as a governess, but in a spot of luck, when Makar is completely out of money and may possibly be thrown out by his landlady, he comes upon 100 rubles. It happens that he miscopies a document and is brought to the head at his office, who tells him he can still copy it again and after looking at his terrible condition gives him the money so he can buy himself new clothes. He pays off his debts and sends some to Varvara, who sends him 25 rubles back because she doesn’t need all of it, and the future looks bright for the both of them because he can now start to save up money and they can possibly move in together.

Suddenly, all of the rumors about Varvara marrying a drunk become meaningless in the face of money. Makar finds himself liked by even the writer Ratazyayev, who was using him as a figure in one of his stories because of his sad condition. Even the Gorhkovs come across money because the father’s case is won in court. With the considerable sum they seem perfectly happy, but he dies soon after anyway, leaving his family in shambles despite the money. Soon after this Varvara announces that a Mr. Bykov, who had dealings with Anna Fyodorovna and Pokrovsky’s father, has proposed to her. She decides to leave with him and the last few letters attest to her slowly becoming used to her new money.

She has Makar find linen for her and begins to talk about various luxuries, leaving him alone in the end despite the fact that he was coming on to better times. The story ends with a final letter from him written in a desperate plea for her to come back to him or at least write from her new life. 2

Poor Folk is an epistolary novel -- that is, a tale told as a series of letters between the characters. And oh, what characters these are Makar Dievushkin Alexievitch is a copy writer, barely squeaking by; Barbara Dobroselova Alexievna works as a seamstress, and both face the sort of everyday humiliation society puts upon the poor. These are people respected by no one, not even by themselves. These are folks too poor, in their circumstances, to marry; the love between them is a chaste and proper thing, a love that brings some readers to tears. But it isn't maudlin, either; Fyodor Dostoevsky has something profound to say about these people and this circumstance. And he says it very well. When the book was first published a leading Russian literary critic of the day -- Vissarion Belinsky (1811-1848) -- prophesied that Dostoevsky would become a literary giant. It isn't hard to see how he came to that conclusion, and in hindsight, he was surely was correct.  

The male protagonist is the first in a long line of Dostoevskyian anti-heroes, undergound men, figures of such extreme marginality that even they are not sure whether they exist: He’s a man with a reputation what am I? Compared to him, I simply don’t exist…, an ontological uncertainty which Dostoevsky picked up from his reading of Hoffman, and which he was to develop more fully in the later taleThe Double. Makar Devushkin lives behind a screen in the kitchen and works as a copyist: he has no space or original contribution of his own. His character comes to life only in and through his letters; he writes himself, creates himself through writing, and exists only in the dialogue with Varvara: when I got to know you, I began for a start to know myself better…before you came along, I was as good as asleep, I wasn’t really living in the world at all… when you came my way, you lit up the whole of my dark life so that my mind and soul were illuminated …When she leaves Petersburg to marry Bykov, the dialogue stops, Devushkin disappears, and the book ends.

He also displays the irrational behavior which was Dostoevsky’s contribution to the philosophical picture of man. When he retrieves his button from under the feet of his boss, to his own horror, he acts against his own best interest: had I not been such a fool I would have stood to attention and kept still. But oh, no: I began pressing the button against the torn off threads, as though that would make it stay on and what’s more, I smiled and smiled again. The drunken episodes, the getting into debt for Varvara’s sake are also forms of irrational behaviour. His Dostoevskyan irascibility; however, is mediated by a tenderness towards Varvara and towards the world, a tenderness which is not present in the later loners of the Dostoevsky canon.

The novel is as much about literature as about the urban poor. Much of the plot revolves around the acquisition of books, there are constant references to other literature: grammars, style manuals, Pushkin, excerpts from the (terrible) writings of Devushkin’s friend and hero, Mr Ratazyayev. The whole tale can be read as Dostoevsky’s dialogue with the overwhelming power of Gogol. The characters lend each other books and comment on them. Devushkin lives in fear of being lampooned in a feuilleton (Dostoevsky himself lampoons another one of his marginal folk in the darkly hilarious tale Mr. Prokharchin, where even the narrator calls the eponymous hero a fool). Although Devushkin knows he is a marginal being, he nonetheless has a fully developed sense of amour propre and is quick to take umbrage. The epistolary nature of this novel is a kind of tact on Dostoevsky’s part, in allowing these marginal characters to speak for themselves with their own voices, without the presence of a narrator to describe them, to falsify them or to mock them.

Devushkin is struck by a quote from a style manual which is a kind of manifesto for the group around Ratazyayev: Literature is a picture, or, rather, in a certain sense, both a picture and a mirror: it is an expression of emotion, a subtle form of criticism, a didactic lesson and a document. This may also stand as a manifesto, not only for the method and subject of Poor Folk, but indeed for Dostoevsky’s entire career: the Christian didacticism of his later novels, the expressionism of his confessional stance, his picture of underground and marginal types, his criticisms of society, nihilism and other forms of philosophy, and the mirror he holds up to the modern soul. 

The characters which Dostoevsky introduces us to are not unique and can be placed in almost any culture; however, how the individuals deal with their situation is directly related to their culture.  These people are Russian and are quite familiar with daily sufferings.  Their connection to the Orthodox Church helps many Russians, both ancient and modern, to find hope in their suffering and united these sufferings to those of Jesus Christ.

In my article “The Beauty of the Russian Soul”5 I spoke about the influence of Orthodox culture has on the Russian soul.  The Russian soul is not simply limited to those who live in Russia, but to people from Ukraine, Belarus, and various other nations where Orthodox Christianity is the predominant religion. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s genius can be found in all of his novels. On a personal level, he felt very connected to the poor even though his father was a medical doctor.  He spent much of his life impoverished, which is not uncommon among most artists, so he understood the experiences of the poor.  

End Notes

1) “Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Biography” http://www.egs.edu/library/fyodor-dostoevsky/biography/ (accessed 5/12/12)

2) “Poor Folk”  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_Folk (accessed 5/12/12)

3) “Poor Folk” http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/67326.Poor_Folk(accessed 5/12/12)

4) “Poor Folk: Dostoevsky” http://thelectern.blogspot.com/2008/12/poor-folk-dostoevsky.html (accessed 5/13/12)

5) “Beauty of the Russian Soul” http://heideggerm1.blogspot.com/2011/10/beauty-of-russian-soul.html

Dostoevsky: Life

Fyodor Dostoevsky, was a Russian novelist. He was born November 11, 1821 and died on February 9, 1881. Although Fyodor Dostoevsky was of Russian descent and his works primarily examine the lives of Russians in the nineteenth century, his works have left an indelible mark over Western literature and world literature. In addition to writing novels, Fyodor Dostoevsky also wrote essays and short stories. His most famous novels include The Idiot, The Brother Karamozov, and Crime and Punishment. Fyodor Dostoevsky examined the metal interior of his characters. This psychological approach examined how social, spiritual and political forces might interact in the psyche of an individual. For Fyodor Dostoevsky, the important mover of his characters was ideologies and concepts whether they were meek Christians, destructive nihilists, dissipated libertines, or intense Pyrrhic rebels. Many see these characters as acting as signs of concepts as opposed to fully realistic characters. For this reason, many see the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky as the precursor to Russian Symbolism. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s forward looking approach to characterization and perception is seen by many as anticipating and influencing the development of existentialism in the twentieth century.

Although many embrace Fyodor Dostoevsky as an important voice in literature, he had his detractors. Most famously, Vladimir Nabokov attacked Fyodor Dostoevsky for being a writer of middling talent. Nabokov continues to trash his literary predecessor by declaring the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky to be a desert of platitudes. Nabokov also detested some of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s themes. Fyodor Dostoevsky kept the teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church in mind as he composed his work. This has led some critics including Vladimir Nabokov to accuse Fyodor Dostoevsky of producing devices for proselytizing and not literature of the finest quality. Perhaps the least surprising criticism came from Leo Tolstoy who claimed that he knew the ending of Crime and Punishment after only a few chapters. However, the two great authors had a deep respect for each other. Leo Tolstoy reportedly wept when he learned of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s death.

Despite his virulent detractors, most recognize Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s rightful place in the pantheon of great novelists. His works have influenced James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woof. Mikhail Bakhtin claims that Dostoyevsky’s work has a polyphonic quality that examines the novel from multiple angles. The conflict between the various points of views clash and build into a precarious climax.

On November 11, 1821, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow. His parents Mikhail and Maria Dostoevsky had seven children of whom Fyodor Dostoyevsky was the second. Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor employed Dostoyevsky’s father. Until Fyodor Dostoevsky was sixteen, he lived with his family in an apartment located on the property of Mariinksy Hospital. Fyodor Dostoevsky grew up amid an orphanage, an insane asylum, and a cemetery for criminals. The stark confrontation with those individuals Russian society had abandoned shaped the aesthetic and social outlook of the young Fyodor Dostoevsky. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s observations these social phenomena was tempered by his father’s devout Christianity. His parents forbade Fyodor Dostoevsky from interacting with the patients. He often disobeyed and went to the hospital gardens to talk with the ill.

At the age of nine, Fyodor Dostoevsky experienced his first epileptic seizure. He would use his experience of this condition in his later work.

When Fyodor Dostoevsky was sixteen he enrolled in the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute. Fyodor Dostoevsky and his brothers were required to move to Saint Petersburg to attend classes. This event followed the death of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s mother in 1837. His mother had suffered from tuberculosis. Two years later his father would also die. Some have suggested that his father’s serfs murdered him by restricting his movement and drowning him by pouring vodka down his throat. Some critics see a similarity between this death and a story related in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground.In 1928, Sigmund Freud claimed that Fyodor Dostoevsky’s character the dissipated patriarch Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov from The Brothers Karamazovhad arisen from the authors Mikhail Dostoevsky’s experience with his father.

While at school, Fyodor Dostoevsky studied the works of William Shakespeare, E. T. A. Hoffman, Victor Hugo, Blaise Pascal. and Friedrich Schiller. Fyodor Dostoevsky was particularly influenced by Friedrich Schiller as a young man. As he matured as an artist, Fyodor Dostoevsky would come to ridicule Schiller. Although Fyodor Dostoevsky detested the mathematics requirements, he successfully completed his exams in 1841. Due to his successful scores on the exams, Fyodor Dostoevsky was award a commission.

In 1842, Fyodor Dostoevsky was elevated to the rank of lieutenant. The following year, Fyodor Dostoevsky created a Russian translation of Honore de Balzc’s novel Eugenie Grandet. This translation was largely ignored by the reading public. In 1844 Fyodor Dostoevsky left military service and he began to craft his own works of fiction. In 1846, the publication A Petersburg Collection published Fyodor Dostoevsky’s first novel Poor Folk. One anecdote states that the journal’s editor, Nikolai Nekrasov, declared “A new [Nikolai] Gogol has arisen!” Many literary critics, including Vissarion Belinsky, also gave this work much acclaim rocketing Fyodor Dostoevsky to literary fame.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s reputation was shaken with the publication of his novelThe Double in 1846. The work was poorly received, and many began to doubt the young author’s potential to rising to the status of a great Russian writer.

In 1848, Tsar Nicholas I became increasingly distrustful of organizations that he felt might undermine the autocracy. The government became increasingly paranoid about the spread of the revolutions in Western Europe. In 1849, Fyodor Dostoevsky was arrested and imprisoned for his participation in the Petrashevsky Circle. In the November of 1849, Fyodor Dostoevsky and the other members of Pertashevsky Circle were condemned to death. The government forces held a mock execution after which Fyodor Dostoevsky was re-sentenced to a four-year exile of hard labor in Omsk Siberia. His confinement became physically and psychologically crushing.

The imprisonment and exile of Fyodor Dostoevsky would lead to the composition of The House of the Dead in 1854. After his release, the government required Fyodor Dostoevsky to submit to service in the Siberian Regiment. He spent five more years in the military. While in Siberia, Fyodor Dostoevsky started a romantic relationship with a wife of an acquaintance, Maria Dmitrievna Isayeva. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s acquaintance died leaving the way open for the increase of romantic activities. In 1857, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Maria Isayeva were married.

The incarceration and renewed service shifted Fyodor Dostoevsky’s spiritual and political ideologies. He rejected the Western ideals of his youth. Fyodor Dostoevsky embraced the Slavophile cultural movement. He would become even more devoted to his Russian Orthodox faith. Fyodor Dostoevsky now advocated for the Christian ideals of suffering and submission. Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s later literature reflected this new conservative worldview. He abandoned the Western dramas of his youth for darker stories lines that revealed a greater complexity. In some of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work The Possessed and The Diary of a Writer ridiculed the Socialism and Nihilism he had explored as a young man.

At the end of 1859, Fyodor Dostoevsky came back to the Russian capital of Saint Petersburg. He and his older brother Mikhail started the literary publicationsTime and Epoch. The imperial government closed Time for its coverage of the 1863 Polish Uprising. During this time, Fyodor Dostoevsky began traveling to casinos throughout Europe.

By 1864, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s wife was dead and he was struggling financially. Fyodor Dostoevsky was consumed by depression and obsessive gambling. This gambling and other family debts became increasingly crippling. Fyodor Dostoevsky sped through the composition of Crime and Punishment in order get an advance from the publisher. In order to evade his creditors, Fyodor Dostoevsky traveled to Western Europe. In 1867, Fyodor Dostoevsky married the twenty-year-old Anna Grigorevna Snitkina. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote the Writer’s Diary, a series of current event articles and short fiction between 1873 and 1881. This endeavor was incredibly successful.

On February 9, 1891, Fyodor Dostoevsky died of a hemorrhage of the lung.

Dostoevsky, Beckett: Problem of Freedom

What did we see as we moved from museum to museum? One key issue that we were tracing was an historic evolution in thought about the role of the individual in relation to the community. In the Louvre, if we consider the period from the Renaissance until the Enlightenment (roughly the 1400s-1700s), we saw A LOT of Christian-oriented paintings and sculptures and most of these depicted biblical scenes. The works that weren’t specifically Christian, such as the Mona Lisa, depicted scenes in which the character or setting was clearly defined and usually arranged in a harmonious, balanced manner. The scene might have been violent or grotesque, but the depiction was “classical.” In other words, there was always a clear narrative or point of view.

If you think of the Pompidou, however, which includes mostly 20th Century art, then you get an entirely different and even opposite picture. In the Pompidou, you often had to ask yourself, “What is it?” or “What does it mean?” The works there often seemed out of balance, dissonant, and lacking a clear narrative or point of view. If there were any works that referred to Christianity, they did so ironically. Characters and settings were sometimes so wholly contorted or fragmented that they made little sense in any “real world” way.

I would argue that the Rodin museum and the Orsay lie somewhere in between the Louvre and the Pompidou and represent the transition between the two.

Why? What does this change signal? One thing at least that it tells us about is the problem (and rewards) of freedom. You know that in France, in 1789, the Revolution brought about the end of the monarchy and the introduction of democracy. Even though this was a turbulent and uneven transition, the idea that the individual (you and I) deserve the right to exist as independent agents of our own destiny – outside of the demands and strictures of the church or the state – represented a fundamental shift in the way people thought of themselves.  This revolution in thought was taking place in England and America as well. Of course this revolution in thought, the movement toward a conception of the “Rights of Man,” was incomplete. Only white men laid claim to their rights originally, denying them to others, but the die was cast, to use a cliche. Once the church and the state fell as external arbiters of control, then it was only a matter of time before “everyone” felt empowered to assert their basic human rights. (We are still dealing with this revolution in America, as gays and lesbians are struggling to obtain their basic human rights.)

So why is freedom a problem, in this context? Freedom is a problem because it forces the individual to take responsibility for their actions and to confront the world on their own terms. And this is scary as hell. It’s much easier to drink cheap beer and watch reruns of The Office than to confront the emptiness of your own life and seriously consider your place in the cosmos.

Besides that problem, an argument could be made (and has been made) that the relative elevation of the individual and devaluation of the institutions of church and state have actually destabilized society. If you have no church to believe in and no monarchy to pay allegiance to, then you’re more or less on your own. Into this breach, some have argued, stepped various authoritarian movements – Fascism, Nazism, Communism/Stalinism – that provided at least some semblance of order and meaning. Of course, such movements also provided World War. This is a simplification, but the English critic Isaiah Berlin has argued, I think convincingly, that the cult of individuality that has evolved in the West since the time of the Enlightenment has engendered totalitarian movements, movements that have harnessed the “collective power” of individuals against those who seemed less than “human.” The artwork in the Pompidou reflects the sense of fragmentation, chaos, and violence that has been unleashed since Voltaire wrote Candide.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” poses a question. Is it better to choose “freedom,” especially since freedom results in inevitable conflict, or is it better to choose “safety,” even if in order to achieve that safety we must give up our freedom. This is a question that we have to deal with every day.

As we move out of discussing works that arise of the Enlightenment, we are faced with the crises created by Enlightenment ideas – individual liberty, scientific discovery and exploration, Protestantism. Voltaire’s response to the old order, the old narrative – the aristocracy, the church – is primarily satirical, at least in Candide, but his solution is arguably conservative, or at least not revolutionary: tend your garden. This solution places the nexus of the argument squarely on the shoulders of the individual, but this individual is not a revolutionary in the Marxian sense. Candide is no revolutionary.

The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor,” (1880) which is a chapter out of his novel The Brothers Karamazov, while specifically concerning the Roman Catholic Church, is  about this problem of freedom. If we are all essentially equal, if there is no authority over us determining how we are to live and providing us with basic necessities, then how are we to satisfy our needs without killing each other, without anarchy? The English writer Thomas Hobbes, in the 17th Century, argued that we cannot. Such lives of freedom are “nasty, brutish, and short,” he wrote in Leviathan; consequently, we require a ruler (a monarch) endowed with absolute power who can maintain order and provide for the well-being of the masses. Hobbes believed that we must even give our freedom of conscience over to the monarch, who will then decide what “we” are to believe. Is it possible to “love” the monarch in such a system?

The Inquisitor argues that Christ offered freedom of belief to all humanity, essentially viewing all people as equal before God. The Inquisitor argues that by refusing the devil’s temptations, Christ was asserting that one’s love of God cannot arise out of fear or manipulation, but out of free choice. After all, is it love if one is forced to it? The problem, the Inquisitor argues, is that given freedom, humanity will revert to Hobbes’ chaotic state. We will destroy each other. The Inquisitor’s solution, then, is to provide the “millions” with the things they crave – bread, moral certitude, and universality. The church will demand absolute obedience, but in return it will provide the “millions” with peace, the peace of innocent children. In this way, the Inquisitor argues, the church is actually more benevolent than Christ himself, who misjudged human nature and assumed that we are essentially “good” when in fact we are essentially “bad.”

This solution, however, is not simply to be dismissed as the solution of a corrupt church. Rather, it is the solution offered by every narrative – political, economic, and religious – that seeks to tell the “millions” how to live. Karl Marx’s narrative in The Communist Manifesto (1848)  is another example of a narrative that seeks to justify a certain “will to power.” And in this sense, it is the same narrative as that developed by one of the “Founding Fathers” of liberal democracy, John Locke. Locke argued that we are all naturally free, but he further asserted that capitalism and competition were right and natural. Marx would agree with the first part of this argument, but he would argue that capitalism and competition are finally barriers to real freedom, the freedom of the proletariat – the “millions” – from the oppression of the bourgeoisie. Such freedom, however, became a kind of oppression of its own, at least as practiced in the former Soviet Union. But in relation to the “lies” offered by the Inquisitor, the narrative offered by Marx seems almost refreshing.

In any case, what is clear is that in the 19th Century, Western and Russian literature were trying to deal with the problem of the proper relationship between the individual and society. Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) is also about the problem of the individual who is free to make choices. In the case of Krapp, the play’s protagonist, he realizes that he has made the wrong choices. (You can also view the complete play on Youtube. It’s really strange and worth viewing.

Krapp has made audio recordings of himself every year for many years on the anniversary of his birthday. The play takes place on a night when he is about to make a new recording. First, however, he listens to recordings of himself from previous years. What this means is that you have narratives within narratives. You have Krapp in the “present” day listening to, fast-forwarding, and commenting upon the Krapp of the “old” day. The old Krapp often makes predictions and decisions about the future that the present-day Krapp no long believes in or knows are untrue. This predicament sums up the conflict at the heart of much of modern World literature: In a world in which all the narratives (of family, of church, of state, of everything) have been challenged or fractured, then how do we answer the big three questions: Who am I? What is my purpose? How do I know?

Once you have read the “Grand Inquisitor,” and Krapp’s Last Tape, please Reply three separate times. First, answer the question, “What do you think of the Inquisitor’s reasoning?” Quote from the text in your answer. Second, answer the question, “What does Krapp regret the most and why?” Quote from the text in your answer. You can answer these questions by simply replying to this Post. Third, reply to another of your peer’s comments with a substantive, thorough, respectful, reasoned argument. You may agree or disagree with the other student, but explain your reasoning.

Crime and Punishment: Dostoevsky

The candle-end had long since burned low in the twisted candlestick, dimly lighting the poverty-stricken room and the murderer and the harlot who had come together so strangely to read the eternal book.

Dostoevsky’s dark tale of murder and guilt has assumed for many readers the status of a religious parable, describing how a sinner finds redemption through faith in Christ. Crime and Punishment is the first of Dostoevsky’s novels to have an explicitly Christian message. However, if we place its Christian message within the context of the debates happening in the Russia of the time, in the context of Dostoevsky’s position in those debates, and in the context of Dostoevsky’s own Christianity, the book reveals itself as far more complex in its attitude to Christianity than a mere parable.

Dostoevsky’s Christianity

The first mention of Christianity in Dostoevsky’s writing comes in a famous letter written in 1854 to Fonvizina, a wife of one of the Decembrists. The letter was written when Dostoevsky had been just newly released from his four years in prison. The letter is a key document for understanding the development and style of Dostoevsky’s Christianity:

I have formulated my creed, wherein all is clear and holy to me. This creed is extremely simple; here is it is: I believe that there is nothing lovelier, deeper and more sympathetic, more rational, more manly and more perfect than the Saviour. I say to myself with jealous love that not only is there no one else like him, but that there could be no one. I would even say more. If anyone could prove to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth did really exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ, and not with truth.

However, just before this statement of his creed, Dostoevsky writes:

I want to say this to you about myself, that I am a child of this age, a child of unfaith and scepticism, and probably (indeed I know it) shall remain so to the end of my life. How dreadfully it has tormented me (and torments me even now) this longing for faith which is all the stronger for the proofs I have against it….

Faith for Dostoevsky –at this time- was only intermittent, and the search for these intermittent moments of faith was tormenting, because they were against the grain and did not come easily. They were borne of suffering:

In such moments one does, like dry grass, thirst after faith, and that one finds it in the end solely and simply because one sees the truth more clearly when one is unhappy.

So we see a highly ambivalent attitude. On the one hand, rational scepticism, even atheism, and on the other a burning love for the person of Christ as a Saviour borne out of the need for solace in great suffering. This ambivalence is reflected all the way through Crime and Punishment. Christianity makes its appearance in the novel in eight different episodes. Each episode reflects the same tension between faith and unfaith as revealed in the letter to Fonvizina.

Christianity in Crime and Punishment I

First, is Marmeladov’s outburst in the pub, when he jumps to his feet in drunken ecstasy and begins to prosyletize, a garbled message covering the themes of affliction, mercy and forgiveness. There is a stunned silence, then raucous laughter and curses from the other drinkers: “There spoke the great intellect!” “What a load of rubbish!” “There’s a civil servant for you”, and so on. The second appearance is in Raskolnikov’s mother’s letter, in which she reveals herself as a devoutly religious woman. Her letter is full of the standard phrases of religiosity, and an admonishment to her son to pray. I fear that you too have become affected by the fashionable modern unbelief. If that is so, I will pray for you. Third, Raskolnikov on his way to commit the murder vacillates between doing it and not doing it. He prays to God to give him strength: “Lord, show me the way, that I may renounce this accursed fantasy of mine.". Later, he remembers, with superstitious awe, the moment as a conflation of circumstances which leads him irrevocably to the murder – the hand of God?

The fourth episode is the scene where Raskolnikov and Sonya read the gospel. Sonya is the first to broach the subject of God in their conversation, and Raskolnikov meets it with atheistic cruelty. “Perhaps God does not exist”, answered Raskolnikov with malicious enjoyment. He decides that it is her faith that sustains Sonya through her suffering. It is Raskolnikov who first suggests that Sonya read to him from the gospel, and he himself chooses the story of the raising of Lazarus. This choice is highly significant. First, it stands as sign for Raskolnikov’s remorse and regret at killing the innocent Lizaveta, whom he had not planned or intended to kill. He wishes she could walk again. Second, Lazarus’s return from the dead signifies Raskolnikov’s longing to return to human society. He has been existing in a kind of self-imposed isolation ever since the murder, separate from the rest of humanity, crushed by his loneliness, incapable of responding to the kindness shown to him by those who love him. Thirdly, the raising of Lazarus stands for the rebirth of Russia, or more specifically, for the rebirth of the Russian intelligentsia. Let’s pause here and look at this aspect of the symbol of Lazarus in more detail.

Interlude: Crime and Punishment and the debates of the 1860s

During the early 1860s Dostoevsky was engaged in a polemic between the Slavophile conservatives on the one hand, and the radical, rationalistic, nihilism of the Westernisers on the other. He was trying to steer a third way between them. He had spent the early part of the decade arguing for ‘a return to the soil’, an ambiguous term that covered a range of meanings, from the urgent call to land reform to a kind of mystical nationalism based on the values of the peasant and peasant religion, a call to unity for Russians of all classes and all political persuasions. As the decade wore on, he moved steadily to the right of the political spectrum, and to a belief that only the traditional values of Russian Orthodoxy could save Russia. This transition can be mapped out in the three published works of the early 1860s: Winter Notes on Summer Impression (1862), Notes from Underground (1864), and Crime and Punishment (1866).

Dostoevsky’s original intention for Notes from Underground, the novel immediately prior to Crime and Punishment, was to introduce Christianity into it, as an antidote to the poisonous dialectic between the underground man’s nihilism and the Westernisers’ rationalism, both of which Dostoevsky saw as dangerous for the Russian soul. However, his design was scuppered by the censor, who removed large chunks of part 1 chapter 10 in which Dostoevsky had hoped to cause the reader to deduce the need for faith and Christ, as he put it in a letter to his brother. These excisions on the part of the censor were never corrected by Dostoevsky in subsequent editions of his works, and this leaves Notes From Underground the last major work in the early part of Dostoevsky’s career where Christianity is absent.

In Crime and Punishment written two years later, Dostoevsky was much more upfront in his aim. The need for faith and Christ is not to be ‘deduced’, but is to be clearly understood, indeed is asserted at the levels of ideas, psychology, and plot. Crime and Punishment includes many of the same contemporary debates as Notes From Underground, and shares many of its same images and concerns.

➢ The debate about socialism, symbolised by the crystal palace, an image that appears also in Winter Notes, and in Notes from Underground. Here, it is (mockingly?) transformed into the name of the pub where Raskolnikov taunts the policeman. In a key scene where Raskolnikov, his friend Razhumikin, and the Examining Magistrate Porfiry discuss various topics, Razhumikin summarizes the socialists’ views on crime: crime is a protest against the unnatural structure of society… ‘the deleterious effect of the environment’. He criticises their hostility to history and their denial of nature: they do not like the living process of life, they have no use for the living soul. Dostoevsky, through the actions of the murderer Raskolnikov, and through the mouth of Razhumikin, is criticising the socialism of Chernyshevsky, and at the same time repudiating his own youthful enthusiasm for Western socialism.

➢ The motivations for Raskolnikov’s murder provide the occasion for many of the same arguments against the rational utilitarianism of the Westernisers that appear in Notes from Underground. Raskolnikov is a man motivated by a theory, largely of his own devising, but clearly an extension of the Westernisers notions of rational self- interest and utilitarianism. His theory consists of three elements. First: that a great man stands outside social norms, that he should not hesitate to grasp his destiny, even if it means killing someone who might stand in his way. Second: the greater good the great man will eventually accomplish will outweigh the lesser evils committed along the way. Third: that humanity is divided into two groups, those who are useful, and those who are not. From the first group, come the great men, while the second group provides the disposable and unimportant raw material on which great men may work. In the same scene, Porfiry, with ironically exaggerated politeness, raises the following objections to this theory: how do you distinguish the extraordinary people from the ordinary? Do signs and portents appear when they are born? I mean to say… couldn’t there be, for example, some special clothing, couldn’t they carry some kind of brand or something? Another objection Porfiry raises is, of course, that a person from the second group might mistakenly imagine himself to be a person from the first group and use this delusion as a justification for murder, which is exactly Raskolnikov’s story. (The cat and mouse games the all-knowing Porfiry plays with Raskolnikov in this scene is one of the great highpoints of suspense in the novel). Dostoevsky is keen to show in this debate the spiritual paucity and danger of such rational theories, and what they might mean if implemented.

➢ The planning and implementation of the murder allows Dostoevsky to examine the relationship between free will and chance, also one of the contemporary issues raised in Notes from Underground. In spite of his rehearsal and detailed planning, Raskolnikov makes several errors during the murder, and has to deal with several chance happenings – not least the sudden and unexpected appearance of Lizaveta. These are designed to show that the ‘ineluctable’ laws of nature are undone by the presence of both human error (irrationality) and coincidence. The novel abounds with coincidences. Raskolnikov’s encounter with Svidrigaliov just when he is thinking about him, the coincidental fact that most of the visitors to St. Petersburg are lodging in the same building. The city throws up other strange coincidences, such as the suicidal woman, and the mysterious apparition of the old man who hisses Murderer! at Raskolnikov in the street, one of the most truly terrifying episodes in 19th century Russian literature. Of course, these coincidences are part and parcel of any 19th century plot, but they are also perhaps traces of Gogolian magic.

It is the Examining Magistrate who, again, voices Dostoevsky’s concern that an exclusive reliance on Western rationalism may lead to the kind of actions that Raskolnikov commits.

This is an obscure and fantastic case, a contemporary case, something that could only happen in our day, when the heart of man has grown so troubled, when people quote sayings about ‘blood refreshing’; when the whole of life is dedicated to comfort. There are bookish dreams here, a heart troubled by theory…

On the level of action and ideas, then, the novel engages with the debates of the 1860s and acts as vehicle for Dostoevsky’s criticism of them, showing their ultimate unworkability as solutions for Russia, and for humanity in general. Now, let’s return to how the novel puts forward Christianity- Christ’s interference in the spiritual fate of Lazarus- as a solution to these various contemporary philosophical problems aired in the text.

Christianity in Crime and Punishment II

The next key appearance of Christianity in the novel is the scene where Raskolnikov confesses his crime to Sonya, and explains his motivation to her. The rational purity and logical coherence of his theory melts away like sand in the wind in the face of Sonya’s appalled, human reaction to it –“A human being a louse?” leaving Raskolnikov rather shamefaced at the fact that he had not previously seen its nullity. What strikes Sonya about it is the fact that it causes Raskolnikov himself suffering. When Raskolnikov asks for her advice her reaction is very significant. ‘Go at once this instant, stand at the crossroads, first bow down and kiss the earth you have desecrated, then bow to the whole world, to the four corners of the earth and say aloud to all the world: “I have done murder.”’ In other words, she enjoins him to reconnect with the soil of Russia, the soil from which his theories had divorced him, and to re-establish his sense of brotherhood with his fellow man. She gives him her cross to wear, an act laden with meanings symbolic of brotherhood for a Russian Orthodox (Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin also exchange crosses in the name of brotherhood in The Idiot), but Raskolnikov refuses it: he is not ready for it yet. “Better give it to me afterwards.” “Yes, yes, that will be better, much better. When you accept your suffering, you shall put it on.” Like Dostoevsky himself, Raskolnikov is slowly moving away from Western rationalism towards faith through an acceptance of suffering.

Earlier in the novel, the death of Katerina Ivanovna has provided an example through contrast of someone who rejects Christianity as a solace for suffering. On her deathbed, she rejects the suggestion of a priest. “I don’t want him. I have no sins. God ought to pardon me without the priest’s help. He knows how much I have suffered. And if he doesn’t pardon me, so much the worse!...Enough. The time has come. Goodbye poor wretch! This poor beast has been driven to death! I am finished”, she cried full of despair and hatred and her head fell heavily back on the pillow. By rejecting Christianity and by refusing to accept her own suffering in the way that Sonya has accepted hers, Katerina Ivanovna dies in anger, bitterness and hatred, a fate that awaits Raskolnikov.

The seventh appearance of Christianity in the novel is in the episode of the house painter who steps forward and ‘confesses’ to the crime. This painter is an Old Believer and belongs to one of the obscure fundamentalist sects that Russian Orthodoxy is full of, and has been instructed by his spiritual father to take on the burden of this crime that he has not committed, to undergo punishment for it so as to learn the meaning of suffering, and thereby come closer to God. Again, it is the Examining Magistrate who explains the significance of this to Raskolnikov (and us): “Do you know what some of these people mean by ‘suffering’? It is not suffering for somebody’s sake, but simply ‘suffering is necessary’ – the acceptance of suffering that means, and if it is at the hands of the authorities, so much the better.” Now, the Russian word for such an Old Believer is raskolniki. Through example and through the name of his main character, Dostoevsky makes the meaning of Christianity in the novel clear.

Finally, in prison, Raskolnikov is haunted by the persistent remnants of his rationalist fantasy. It distressed Raskolnikov that this ridiculous fantasy (is this ‘ridiculous’ Dostoevsky’s or Raskolnikov’s?) lingered so painfully and sadly in his memory. Sonya, who has voluntarily joined him in his exile, provides his final and most powerful example of someone who has accepted suffering, both her own and another’s, and found faith. Couldn’t her beliefs become my beliefs now? The closing paragraph of the novel makes it clear that Raskolnikov will accept Christianity, and by doing so show how, for all Russian intellectuals, Christianity will heal and atone for the damage done by an over-reliance on Western rationalism.

But that is the beginning of a new story, the story of the gradual renewal of a man, of his gradual regeneration, of his slow progress from one world to another, of how he learned to know a hitherto undreamed of reality.

I like people to talk nonsense. It is man’s unique privilege, among all other organisms. By pursuing falsehood you will arrive at truth. The fact that I am in error shows that I am human. …but we can’t even produce our errors out of our own heads. You can talk the most mistaken rubbish to me, and if it’s your own, I will embrace you! It is almost better to tell your own lies than someone else’s truth. In the first case you are a man, in the second, you are no better than a parrot. Truth remains, but life can be choked up, there have been instances…

People only love God when no one else will love them.

W.H. Auden.

The Idiot: Dostoevsky

Beauty will save the world. Once upon a time, there was a rich boyar who had three lovely daughters. The youngest was as radiant as the sun and as lovely as the moon. Many suitors vied for her favours, but she rejected them all. One day, a Prince from a foreign land came to seek her hand. To test his worth and the strength of his love, she put him through all manner of tests…

Nastasya Filipovna was orphaned at a tender age, and given into the care of her neighbour, an unscrupulous rogue, who set her up in a secluded dacha, far from the eyes of the world, where he groomed her for himself. When at last she came of age, she became his mistress. He brought her to St Petersburg, where her beauty astonished all who saw it. At last, tiring of her, and wishing to settle down and marry, her master sought to rid himself of her by marrying her off to the highest bidder…

Prince Myshkin returns to Russia after many years abroad in a sanatorium, where he has been treated for epilepsy and idiocy. Naïve, and socially inept, but with a freshness and humility that sees through social conventions, he tries to integrate himself into Petersburg society. He falls in love with two different women and struggles to choose between the two of them...

The Idiot weaves all these plot strands together in what may be the most diffuse, the most problematic, the most elusive of Dostoevsky’s novels. The writer himself regarded the novel as a failure, not perhaps of intention, but of execution. His notebooks reveal his struggle to choose from many ideas, and his stuttering attempts to develop them. There are several false starts and different conceptions before he hit on the final version of the story. His letters are full of his anxieties about the difficulties in the writing of it, the cancelled and destroyed drafts, the postponed and delayed deadlines and the way they effected his finances. He was tormented by worries about money, overjoyed by the birth and then devastated by the sudden death of his first child; he was suffering frequent, debilitating fits; he was battling his terrible addiction to roulette and at the same time recklessly attempting to use it as a means of financing his family; and he was in Europe and homesick for Russia.

Part of the difficulty was in the aim he had set himself. In a letter to his friend Maikov he described his aim to portray a wholly beautiful individual; then the next day, in a letter to his niece he described his aim thus: the basic idea is the representation of a truly perfect and noble man. For Dostoevsky, beauty was equated with moral nobility and perfection, or goodness. Myshkin returns to Russia, not as a miracle worker, or a social reformer or a doer of charity and good works, not as a saviour, but as a kind of savant. His chief goodness appears to lie in the way he establishes a completely genuine and authentic relationship with those he meets, a relationship that has nothing to do with conventions, polite behaviour or social mores: He was almost the only one who spoke that evening, telling many stories, he answered questions clearly gladly and in detail. However, nothing resembling polite conversation showed in his words.

The thoughts were all quite serious, even quite abstruse…He has a strange effect on all who meet him, bringing forth their most genuine responses and allowing them to see their true natures. ‘You can’t be the way you pretended to be just now. It’s not possible’, the Prince suddenly cried out in deeply felt reproach… ‘He guessed right, in fact, I’m not like that,’ whispered… Nastasya Filipovna…Everyone he encounters is disconcerted by his naivety and apparent authenticity: If you are indeed the way you seem to be, it might very well be pleasant to become acquainted with you General Epanchin exclaims at their first meeting... He establishes himself on equal footing with everyone, from the servants to the most exalted personages of Petersburg society, and puts forward his views and describes his experiences with disarming candour and with complete disregard for the social proprieties: I’m going on twenty-seven, but I know I’m like a child. I don’t have the right to express my thoughts…I have no sense of measure….. His goodness works on the sphere of human relationships and on the psychological level.

The literary models for the Prince were Don Quixote and Pickwick, both, according to Dostoevsky, beautiful characters, whose beauty is derided by others who remain blind to it. However, whereas both Don Quixote and Pickwick make the reader laugh, the Prince does not. He makes others laugh, and he laughs heartily with them, and we are told that he can be witty and amusing as well as earnest and profound, but he does not make the reader laugh. Which is not to say that there is no comedy in the novel. The book abounds with a plethora of excellently drawn comic situations and characters: Mrs Epanchin, General Ivolgin and Lebedev, for example, are masterpieces of comic invention and genuinely hilarious. While the Prince himself is not funny, his presence among the other characters of the book, however, does allow the reader to see the beauty of those characters, when those around them cannot.

The book is structured around a series of static social scenes set in drawing rooms. There is very little incident, and much talking. These social scenes are masterpieces of dramatic psychology, as all the characters interact with conflicting motivations, hiding behind social masks and only intermittently revealing hints of their real intentions. The Prince is a calm centre around which the other characters dance. The greatest of these scenes is the birthday party of Nastasya Filipovna, where the guests play a version of spin-the-bottle, confessing an action that they are most ashamed of. Present is Nastasya Filipovna’s seducer; and the tension as he begins to tell his story is masterfully projected onto the reader. The novel unfolds among the summer dachas and outdoor concerts of the resort suburb of Pavolvsk, but its emphasis on interior dramatic social scenes means that descriptions of urban life are minimal; the recreation of the city and the crowd as a participant in the narrative which was such a salient feature of Crime and Punishment is absent. In this sense the novel harks back to an earlier work of Dostoevsky’s The Village of Stepanchikovo, which uses the same essentially static structuring devices, and has a similar type of character as the Prince as one of its twin centres.

This effects the way incident is dealt with. Plenty happens, but it all happens off stage, and is then reported by other characters as gossip or rumour. Incident is presented as conversation. The text is studded with newspaper reports of crimes, but these are also just more examples of hearsay. Even the Prince’s (and Dostoevsky’s) most famous dictum: Beauty will save the world is problematised by being reported at second or even third hand. The dictum nowhere appears directly in the novel, but is reported. Ippolit says: “Is it true, Prince, that you once declared that 'beauty would save the world'? Great Heaven! The Prince says that beauty saves the world!” But Ippolit himself is unsure whether the Prince has in fact said it: he heard that the Prince said it from someone else, and the Prince neither confirms nor contradicts him. Another character is also reported as having said something similar: I know that once when your sister Adelaida saw my portrait she said that such beauty could overthrow the world, Nastasya Filipovna writes to Aglaya. This casts doubt on the role of beauty: will beauty save the world, or overthrow it? Is the difference important? These are all questions that the narrative does little to answer.

The Idiot represents a new departure for Dostoevsky, a break with his previous method and concerns. Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment, the two major works which preceded The Idiot both grow out of the writer’s ongoing polemic with the nihilists, and when they are placed next to the journalism of this time, many of the same themes and methods can be discerned. The Idiot, however, is different from his previous work in a number of important ways.

First, is the lack of a clear philosophical target against which Dostoevsky can argue. Dostoevsky’s art relies on a dialectic for its effect: his most powerful work always takes its power from the presence of two (or more) conflicting ideas, both presented with such utter cogency and commitment, that often the writer’s true point of view is difficult to discern. Dostoevsky’s gift is for negative argumentation: he puts forward his most effective arguments by trying to negate or refute a different argument. Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment achieve their effect of underlying unity by a clear refutation of a central idea: Western utilitarian rationalism. All the elements of these two books work to refute this idea. This kind of unified and focussed negative argumentation plays a much smaller role in The Idiot. Dostoevsky employs a more positive style of argumentation, presenting his ideas more positively. True, there are attacks against the Russian liberals, a refutation of the notion of ‘the right of force’, attacks on atheism and socialism, and a marvellously rancid and bitter rant against the Roman Catholic Church, but these are dispersed among different characters.

The closest the novel comes to a focussed dialectic is in the long document that Ippolit reads out at the prince’s birthday party. In this scene, it is as if the underground man has somehow escaped from his own book and gatecrashed this one. Entitled ‘My Necessary Explanation’, in it the consumptive Ippolit, who has only been given two weeks left to live, expresses all the anguish, rage and sense of futility of the conscious human being faced with the ineluctability of death. In Notes from Underground this fatum was represented by the symbol of the wall. In The Idiot, this becomes the wall of his neighbour’s house, the only view that Ippolit can see through his window: Yes, that wall of Meyer’s can tell a lot! I have written a lot on it! There is not a spot on that cursed wall that I have not learned by heart. That cursed wall! In the face of imminent death, all endeavour becomes pointless: I saw clearly that I was forbidden to study Greek grammar- “I won’t get as far as the syntax before I die” I thought at the first page, and threw the book under the table. In the face of death, everything is negated: If it had been in my power not to be born, I probably would not have accepted existence on such derisive conditions. And yet, in spite of that the human being longs for life: I did not deceive myself and understood the matter clearly. But the more clearly I understood it, the more convulsively I clung to life and wanted to live whatever the cost. Ippolit asserts that the point of life is in life itself, in discovering it constantly and eternally, and not in the discovery itself.

In ‘My Necessary Explanation’ Dostoevsky gives some of the strongest arguments for atheism in his work. Ippolit describes the painting he has seen in Rogozhin’s house, a reproduction of Holbein’s Body of the Dead Christ. He says this of it: Looking at that picture, you get the impression of nature as some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or, to put it more correctly, much more correctly, though it may seem strange, as some huge engine of the latest design which has senselessly seized, cut to pieces, and swallowed up–impassively and unfeelingly–a great and priceless Being, a Being worth the whole of nature and all its laws, worth the entire earth, which was perhaps created solely for the coming of that Being! … In the face of the terrible ineluctability of natural forces, represented in the picture by the cadaver of Christ, any idea of God or salvation or resurrection becomes highly doubtful. Ippolit conceives of God as a huge tarantula devouring the world. Religion demands that we worship this tarantula, and this Ippolit rejects: Let consciousness be lit up by the will of a higher power, let it look at the world and say: ‘I am!’ and let the higher power suddenly decree its annihilation, because for some reason… that is needed: let it be so, I admit all that, but then again comes the eternal question: why is my humility needed here? Isn’t it possible to simply eat me without demanding that I praise that which has eaten me? Human dignity will not allow itself simply to be subsumed with such meekness: I am unable to submit to a dark power that assumes the shape of a tarantula. As always, Dostoevsky presents his own religious doubts with huge cogency and power, and for this modern, secular reader, his atheistic arguments have more force than his religious ones.

The novel is permeated by the sense of Dostoevsky’s distance from contemporary debates due to his self-enforced exile from Russia. In another letter to his niece, he wrote: I have been so alienated from Russian life that I find it difficult, lacking fresh Russian impressions as I do, to write anything at all… In a meeting with his rival and enemy Turgenev at the time, he sarcastically remarked to him that he should get a telescope, the better to see what was happening in Russia, a suggestion that perhaps reflected his own nagging sense of alienation from the wellsprings of his art. The Idiot was written in Europe, and in many ways this is the most European of his novels, notwithstanding the presence of elements from Russian fairy tales. At times it reads like Jane Austen, Flaubert, George Sand or Balzac, especially in its examination of human relationships, social manners and mores, family relations, sexuality, and the importance of money.

Another important difference of the book from its predecessors is the absence of a controlling consciousness through which the events of the novel are perceived. Crime and Punishment and The Gambler both foreground an individual consciousness, through which the reader perceives the story, in the former case, the criminal student Raskolnikov’s, in the second, the tutor Alexei Ivanovich’s. These foregrounded consciousnesses give those two works an intensity of emotion and a concentration of vision, resulting in a single-minded narrative drive that carries the reader and the story recklessly forward. This is lacking in The Idiot, whose impersonal narrator is not a character in the story, but outside it and unknown to the reader or the characters. This lack of a consistently foregrounded controlling vision results in a slower book, differently and less hurriedly paced.

Perhaps the most significant departure in the book, however, is the conflation of the Prince with Dostoevsky himself, a conflation of author and protagonist that hitherto in his career Dostoevsky had been utterly scrupulous to avoid. Like Dostoevsky, the Prince suffers from epilepsy, and the two fits the Prince suffers in the course of the novel are described with great detail borne of personal experience. Almost upon his very first entrance into St Petersburg society, the Prince describes his conversation with a condemned man, and relates (more secondhand reporting, note) how the man experienced his last minutes in front of the scaffold before his unexpected reprieve and pardon. This description echoes almost word for word the description of Dostoevsky’s own similar experience and thoughts in the letter he wrote to his brother the morning after his own mock execution. This is the very first public discussion of his experience; nowhere in his writing, even in Notes from the House of the Dead, the book about his imprisonment, does it appear until now. The views regarding Christianity that the Prince voices in the novel are known to be the same views Dostoevsky himself held at this time, and the same arguments and views crop up in his letters. While Christianity as a solution to the character’s dilemma is only foreshadowed in Crime and Punishment, in The Idiot it is vigorously asserted by the prince as the only solution to Russia’s problems. Only Russians’ know the true meaning of Christianity: the woman said that to me,… it was such a deep, such a subtle and truly religious thought that all at once expressed the whole essence of Christianity, that is, the whole idea of God as our own father, and that God rejoices over man as father over his own child- the main thought of Christ. Only Russian Orthodoxy is the correct version of Christianity, and Russia must vigorously bring her version to the West: Our Christ, whom we have preserved, and they have never known, must shine forth as a response to the West! Not by being slavishly caught on the Jesuit’s hook, but by bringing them our Russian civilisation, we must now confront them…

This conflation of protagonist and author gives rise to the unpleasantly tempting suggestion that the Prince/Dostoevsky is symbolic of the Christ figure. In the same letter to his niece quoted above, Dostoevsky writes of the beautiful individual: There is in the world only one figure of absolute beauty: Christ, and there are subtle suggestions throughout the book that Myshkin is symbolic of Christ: No one here is worth your little finger, or your intelligence or your heart! You’re more honest that all of them, nobler than all of them, better than all of the, kinder than all of them, more intelligent than all of them! There are people here who aren’t worthy of bending down to pick up your handkerchief you’ve just dropped… exclaims Aglaya Epanchin to the Prince. (Bulgakov describes the devil’s visit to Moscow; in much the same way Dostoevsky describes Christ’s visit to St Petersburg.) Dostoevsky knows that one day, like the prince, he will return from abroad to Russia, asserting positively the supremacy of Russian Orthodoxy and confounding his detractors. At the same time, on a symbolic level, Dostoevsky is recreating his own return from Omsk with his new awareness of the religion and ways of the peasants, and the reassertion of his position after his exile. It’s this suggestion that perhaps forms the basis for Dostoevsky’s subsequent mythical status as a prophet of Russia and Orthodoxy.

In any ingenious or new human thoughts, or even simply in any serious human thought born in someone’s head, there always remains something which it is quite impossible to convey to other people - though you may fill whole volumes with writing and spend thirty-five years trying to explain your thought; there always remains something that absolutely refuses to leave your skull and will stay with you forever, you will die with it…

Compassion is the chief, perhaps the only law of being for all mankind.

Beauty is a riddle.

I’m dissatisfied with the book, for I haven’t said a tenth part of what I wanted to say. Nevertheless, I don’t repudiate it, and to this day, I love the plan that miscarried.

Letter to his niece

February 1869

Demons: Dostoevsky

As a chronicler, I limit myself to presenting events in an exact way, exactly as they occurred, and it is not my fault if they appear incredible.

The last word of this novel is ‘insanity’ and like insanity, it is the most terrifying and at the same time the most wildly hilarious of Dostoevsky’s novels, and the most satirical. The inhabitants of a small provincial town gradually become aware that a revolutionary cell is operating in their midst. The cell operates by spreading civil disobedience at a fete and a ball organised by the wife of the Governor of the Province, by fomenting disorder among the workers of a factory located in the town, inciting riot, by setting fire to a large portion of the town itself, and then ultimately in murder.

Set against this plot is the story of 20 year friendship between the widow Varvara Stavrogina, the richest landowner in the district; and the former professor and private tutor to her ward, Stepan Verkhovensky. Her son, Nikolai Stavrogin, and his son, Pyotr Verkhovensky, have both grown up apart from their parents and return to the town at around the same time. Stavrogina tries to persuade her old friend to marry her ward, to cover up for the fact that her ward has been seduced by her son. At the same time she is trying to marry off her son to the daughter of her neighbour, a wealthy heiress.

The title and epigraphs from Pushkin and Luke 8.32-36 point to the fact that the novel is to be read as a kind of parable of contemporary concerns. Russian youth has become possessed by the three demons of European rationalism: nihilism, atheism and socialism. The small town stands for the whole of Russia. The key characters exist as a kind of double signification in which the character represents a barely disguised real person, and at the same time stands for some key trend in contemporary thought.

Part 1: Characters In whicb is revealed who they are and what they represent

First, the elder Stepan Verkhovensky is a caricature of Granovsky, the famous professor of history at Moscow university, one of the key Westernisers of the 1840s, and at the same time represents the whole generation of ‘the men of the Forties’. One of the most lovable and amusing of Dostoevsky’s creations, Stepan Verkhovensky is also strongly influenced by Dickens, a kind of Russian Dorritt.

“Je suis un mere sponger, et rien de plus!” He sprinkles his discourse with French phrases, pours out his heart in daily letters to his friend (even though they live in the same house), is inordinately fond of passionate weeping, and nurtures the fond illusion that he is still an object of observation to the authorities due to his radical youth.

The narrator comments: but after all, gentlemen, even now, do we not at times hear all around us the same “dear”, “intelligent”, “liberal” old Russian nonsense? which can be read as Dostoevsky’s comment on the ‘superfluous’ generation of the 1840s. (Some contemporary literary gossip: Maikov told Dostoevsky in a letter that Stepan Verkhovensky was like a Turgenev hero in his old age, a remark which thoroughly delighted Dostoevsky in its accuracy.)

His son, the creepy revolutionary Pyotr Verkhovensky, is modelled on the real revolutionary Nachaev, and is at the same time a general symbol of the nihilist.

His relationship with his father – mocking indifference on both sides- is a portrait of the relationship between the ‘fathers’ and the ‘sons’, the generations of the ‘40s and the ‘60s, portrayed also in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.

Nachaev was one of the most radical of the revolutionaries who sprang up in Russia during the late 1860s. Possibly the lover of Bakunin, he was the author of the still enduringly notorious Catechism of a Revolutionary, which had such a huge impact on subsequent revolutionary activity in Russia. Nachaev was the founder of a small revolutionary cell of 5 students at the Petrine Academy of Agriculture. He and three others turned on the fifth, a student named Ivanov, who had threatened to break away from the group, and murdered him, throwing his body into a lake on the grounds of the Academy.

This incident is almost exactly reproduced as the central episode of Demons, when Pyotr Verkhovensky and his companions murder the Slavophile Shatov. The real Nachaev had written: Our business is terrible, complete universal and merciless destruction. In the novel, Pyotr Verkhovensky expresses no ideology of his own except the ultimate strategy of destruction and destabilisation achieved through tactical realpolitik.

Through crafty manipulation, he engineers the social downfall of the Governor and his wife by insinuating himself into the wife’s circle and feeding her social and political ambitions. The splendid debacle of the fete is the result. He tries to enrol Stavrogin in the cell, seeing him as a potentially charismatic figure around whom a revolutionary impulse can crystallize, a false Tsarevitch.

He engineers the murder of Shatov, not to silence him as he tells his group, but to cement them together, to bind them through bloodshed. Pyotr Verkhovensky is always bustling about arranging things, seems to have his fingers in all sorts of pies and straddles the line between being a comic character, and being monstrously terrifying.

The writer Karmazinov is based on Turgenev, and at the same time stands for the aristocratic, land-owning liberals, who organise literary quadrilles and balls, who remove all their capital and take refuge abroad, and have no awareness of the real crisis facing Russia and their class.

This is another hilarious portrait, but very savage, and one from which it is difficult to rescue poor old Turgenev. Karmazinov, with the bearing of five court chamberlains, reads his farewell to literature (one of many) entitled Merci at the fete, in the same way that Turgenev read his own farewell to literature (one of many) entitled Enough.

Dostoevsky stitches together a marvellous parody of several articles by Turgenev, as well as lampooning mercilessly Turgenev’s limpid style: a tear rolled from your eye as we sat beneath the emerald tree, and you exclaimed joyfully: ‘There is no crime!’ ‘Yes,’ I said through my tears, ‘But if so, there are no righteous men.’ We wept and parted forever….. The reading is interrupted by a lonely but loud voice (that of Dostoevsky’s himself?) from the back row of the audience: “Lord what rubbish!” Karmazinov retires from the heckling that follows looking all red as if he had been boiled.

Through the character of Shigalyov, Dostoevsky lampoons socialism. Shigalyov has studied the question of how to organise the future society and written a document about it. He wants to read his document at the meeting of the revolutionaries, in one of the funniest episodes of the book. “I announce ahead of time that my system is not finished. … I got entangled in my own data, and my conclusion directly contradicts the original idea from which I start.” (academic political scientists and sociologists are surely squirming here) “Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism…”

He acknowledges that this has caused him some despair. “I suggest we vote on whether Shigalyov’s despair concerns the common cause or not”, comments one of the members of the meeting.

Another member, who has read the document, explains that Shigalyov has divided humanity into two parts: “One tenth is granted freedom of person and unlimited rights over the remaining nine tenths. These must lose their person and turn into something like a herd…” “Are you really serious?” interjects one of the other members: “This man, not knowing what to do about the people, turns nine tenths of them into slavery? I’ve long suspected him….” One of the other members declares that the best solution for dealing with the rest of the nine tenths is to “blow them up sky high, leaving just a bunch of learned people”.

Dostoevsky parodies Raskolnikov’s arguments in Crime and Punishment here, and unwittingly prophecies the kind of discussions that later took place under the Bolsheviks, the Nazis, and the Maoists, and are now taking place among religious fundamentalists and other varieties of social engineers.

Part 2: Atheism versus Orthodoxy In which we describe the philosophical debate in the novel, reveal the existence of a missing chapter! and explain why Dostoevskyists get worked up about it

In the early stages of composing the novel Dostoevsky wrote to Maikov: The fundamental idea that has tormented me, consciously and unconsciously, all my life long …is the question of the existence of God.

In Demons, the dialectic between faith and atheism takes place in conversations between Stavrogin and Kirilov, and between Stavrogin and Shatov.

Kirilov the suicidalist puts forward the argument for atheism with great cogency and force. Shatov, the Slavophile puts forward the argument for faith in Orthodoxy, expressing many of Dostoevsky’s known views. Stavrogin, the mysterious ‘strong personality’ acts as a conduit for both sides in the debate; his own position is highly enigmatic, as we shall see.

Kirilov plans to commit suicide, and thereby aid the revolutionaries by taking on himself all their crimes, admitting to them in a suicide letter. He is only waiting for a signal from Pyotr Verkhovensky.

His reasons for suicide are related to his atheism: “I can't understand how an atheist could know that there is no God and not kill himself on the spot. To recognise that there is no God and not to recognise at the same instant that one is God oneself is an absurdity, else one would certainly kill oneself. If you recognise it you are sovereign, and then you won't kill yourself but will live in the greatest glory. But one, the first, must kill himself, for else who will begin and prove it? So I must certainly kill myself, to begin and prove it.”

He then gives the strongest argument for atheism perhaps Dostoevsky had so far penned: “Listen to a great idea: there was a day on earth, and in the midst of the earth there stood three crosses. One on the Cross had such faith that he said to another, 'To-day thou shalt be with me in Paradise.' The day ended; both died and passed away and found neither Paradise nor resurrection. His words did not come true. Listen: that Man was the loftiest of all on earth, He was that which gave meaning to life. The whole planet, with everything on it, is mere madness without that Man. There has never been any like Him before or since, never, up to a miracle. For that is the miracle, that there never was or never will be another like Him. And if that is so, if the laws of nature did not spare even Him, have not spared even their miracle and made even Him live in a lie and die for a lie, then all the planet is a lie and rests on a lie and on mockery. So then, the very laws of the planet are a lie and the vaudeville of devils. What is there to live for?”

For Kirilov, suicide is the only freedom one has left: “I am killing myself to prove my independence and my new terrible freedom”.

Kirilov develops the same ideas expressed in Ippolit Ivolgin’s ‘Necessary Explanation’ in The Idiot, and like Ippolit, he seeks death as the price for his atheism.

Shatov asserts a belief in the Russian Christ, making explicit the link between Christianity and nationalism for the first time in Dostoevsky’s published works. “He who is not Orthodox, cannot be Russian.”

Stavrogin accuses him of reducing God to a mere “attribute of nationality”. “On the contrary”, exclaims Shatov, “I raise the nation up to God. … the nation is the body of God….If a great nation does not believe that it alone is able and called to resurrect and save everyone with its truth, then it at once ceases to be a great nation and becomes just ethnographic material.”

It is Russia’s mission to save the world: “The only god-bearing nation is the Russian nation.”

Shatov attacks Roman Catholicism in much the same terms that Prince Myshkin had in The Idiot: “Atheism is after all healthier than Catholicism”. According to Shatov, the Roman Christ succumbed to the third temptation of the devil, and was granted an earthly kingdom, “proclaimed the antichrist, and ruined the whole Western world.”

Shatov expresses his belief that a new generation will spring forth from Russia, one that renounces Western rationalism, and that embraces the Russian God through peasant labour- anticipating the ‘movement to the people’ of the summer of 1874, at the height of the Popularist movement, when young intellectuals did precisely that.

Now, we enter the realm of controversy when we try to disentangle Shatov’s ‘literary’ arguments as the novel’s representative Slavophile from the actual ‘philosophical’ arguments that Dostoevsky himself held. This is very problematic; and Dostoevskyists have thrown caution (and theoretical rigour) to the wind in their attempts to claim the character’s religious views for those of the author’s.

The text indeed warns against this, when Shatov says: Do you really regard me as such a fool who cannot even tell, whether his words now are old, decrepit rubbish, ground up in all the Slavophile mills of Moscow, or a completely new word, the last word, the word of renewal and resurrection. Many of Shatov’s ideas are standard Slavophile stuff.

Moreover, the situation is further complicated by the fact that in this conversation, Shatov is reporting a letter that he had written much earlier to Stavrogin, which Stavrogin had not bothered to read. In this letter, Shatov had attempted to remind Stavrogin of conversations they had had many years previously in Europe, and which Shatov had never forgotten. In other words, Shatov is actually quoting back at him views expressed originally by Stavrogin himself, which the latter man has come to repudiate, but which Shatov himself has come to believe in.

It is never adequately clarified in the conversation which views are actually Stavrogin’s and which are Shatov’s; it is never very clear which views either man now holds, and which views he now rejects: like real conversations, things are never tidied up, but left hanging while the dialogue digresses and circulates, while emotional storms come and go, and while each character tries to achieve a different outcome from the interview.

Shatov reminds Stavrogin of his previous view: “But wasn’t it you who told me that if someone proved to you mathematically that the truth is outside Christ, you would better agree to stay with Christ than with the truth. Did you say that?” Stavrogin neither confirms nor denies this, but raises a different point.

This view is one that Dostoevsky himself held – in fact Shatov quotes verbatim from Dostoevsky’s famous letter of 1854 to Fonvizina here. However, Stavrogin says in this conversation, that he now no longer believes in any of the things he did formerly: “If I had belief, I would no doubt repeat it now as well, I wasn’t lying, speaking as a believer.”

Stavrogin has lost his faith, while Shatov remains uncertain about his: “I believe in Russia, I believe in Orthodoxy, I believe in the body of Christ…” Shatov babbled frenziedly. Stavrogin persists in this line of questioning: “But in God? In God?” “I… I will believe in God,” Shatov equivocates. Not a muscle moved in Shatov’s face. Shatov looked at him defiantly, as if he wanted to burn him with his eyes. “But I didn’t tell you I don’t believe at all,” he hedges.

This is likely to be the position closest to Dostoevsky’s own at this time.

In 1922 a missing chapter to the novel was (re)discovered: the original Chapter 9 of Part Two, entitled At Tikhon’s.

In this chapter, Stavrogin, on the advice of Shatov, goes to see a holy man – Tikhon- in the local monastery. While there, he reads to the monk a document he has composed. This document, Stavrogin’s Confession, describes Stavrogin’s loss of faith, his youthful addiction to masturbation, his monstrous seduction of a 14- (or 10- the text is not clear on this) year-old girl, her subsequent suicide, his marriage to an unfortunate lame and mad woman of a greatly inferior social class as a kind of experimental self-inflicted punishment, his terminal boredom, and fear of insanity.

He intends to publish this document, in order to endure universal hatred from all who read it as a form of penance.

Tikhon suggests that the universal hatred might be easy for Stavrogin to endure but not the universal laughter that will resound when people read it. “Even the form of this truly great repentance has something ridiculous in it”.

Stavrogin looks for absolution, and the ability to forgive himself. Tikhon assures him that Christ will forgive him: “He will forgive you for your intention and for your great suffering.”

In spite of Dostoevsky’s ardent pleadings and frenzied reworkings of the material, the editor of the Russian Messenger, the journal in which the novel appeared, categorically refused (understandably, given the mores of the time and place) to publish this chapter; and Dostoevsky, in later years and in later editions, never took the opportunity to reinstall it.

The relationship of this chapter to the final completed work remains controversial because it significantly alters the thrust of the dialectic between atheism and faith. With it, the book seems to assert faith; without it, it doesn’t.

Part 3: The Pleasure of the Text In which we celebrate the many marvels of the work, and meditate on the role of the narrative voice

In spite of what sounds like a dry philosophical debate, only really enjoyable with prior knowledge of contemporary issues and the development of Dostoevsky’s own views on faith and atheism, the novel is utterly compelling to read.

The characters are splendidly drawn, the dialogue blazes, there are some unforgettable, iconic images that lodge firmly in the memory, the pace never lags, the tension is masterfully handled, and the comedy is rich, subtle and cuttingly sardonic.

The description of the fete in the centre of the work is one of the most brilliant set-pieces in the whole of Russian literature.

Indeed, it is the most technically accomplished of Dostoevsky’s novels. The reason for this is mainly due to the narrative voice, which is where most of the huge pleasure of reading the book resides.

The story is narrated by one of the townsfolk, a friend and intimate of Verkhovensky pere, and a member of the town club, but formally unnamed – we are only given his name and patronymic in passing.

In the whole of the first part the narrator describes the backstory of the main characters, and this is handled in such a way that the reader can sense that things might not be what they seem, even if the narrator doesn’t. Moreover, the reader can tell that the narrator himself is not seeing things clearly at that point in his chronicle.

This is not to say that the narrator is dense. On the contrary, the narrator is perceptive, and has a great deal of insight into the characteristics of the people he knows well, and the motivations behind their complex relationships and describes this all to us with gripping relish. It’s just that the narrator is focussing on something different from what’s really going on.

This is, of course, part and parcel of the parable nature of the book: no-one in Russia understands what is really happening because they are all focussing on something else.

Through this gossipy, loquacious narrator we become completely involved in the lives of the characters of this small provincial town, so that when terrorist activity erupts amongst them, we react to it with the same indrawn breath of shock that they do.

This double vision is especially well handled in the depiction of the revolutionary organiser Pyotr Verkhovensky.

The reader understands that the image of this character as bustling, harmless, foolish, has been deliberately created by the character himself as a mask for his real revolutionary intentions; and at the same time we understand that the narrator and his friends have not seen this until much too late.

Of course, the narrator ultimately knows the truth of everything, but he withholds it, releasing it to us only slowly, recreating the gradual change in perception that he and his circle experienced at the time. Now, when everything is past, and I am writing my chronicle, we know what it was all about; but then we still knew nothing, and naturally, various things seemed strange to us.

I cannot believe in God without a God to believe in.