The Dostoevsky Bicentennial

Born 200 years ago today, Russian novelist Fydor Dostoevsky (1821-1881).

For my 18th Christmas, when my parents asked me what I might like under the tree I replied that I was interested in books by either Goethe or Dostoevsky because I had heard that they were the greatest authors of their respective nations, but were not ones I had been assigned in school. The inscription on the paperback volume they got me tattles on my age, but as Beckett put it, “Rien a faire.”

I can’t recall if I was disappointed because it turned out to be a book of short stories and novellas and not one of the famous novels, but if I was, I oughtn’t to have been, and surely lost that feeling once I cracked it open. The works in this collection were things like “The Double”, “The Gambler”, “Notes from the Underground”, “White Nights”, et al, all excursions into the minds of awkward, troubled, alienated, angry, unhinged individuals, and what better time to live in that headspace than one’s late teens and young adulthood? Mind, I’m not recommending those mental states, as they’ve been known to lead to awful outcomes. But if they cause you to relate to the writer (as opposed to the antihero) it’s a potentially good thing.

“Writer” is an inadequate word for some who have pursued that calling. The best of them are also philosophers, and thus it is that Dostoevsky influenced not just the art of succeeding era, but the thinking as well. Dostoevsky’s reflective writings influenced Nietzsche, and paved the way for Kafka, the Existentialists, and the Absurdists. Bleak as he was, and drawn to socialism, he never gave way to Atheism. His was the Russian character — life is a bleak ordeal, but you deal with it as Jesus did, by bearing the weight of your cross.

The Roman crucifix had been an instrument of capital punishment, of course. (As Lenny Bruce quipped if his martyrdom had occurred in the 20th century, nuns would be wearing electric chairs around their necks). Dostoevsky knew a little about being condemned by the state. Arrested for taking part in a socialist discussion group, he was sentenced to death by Russian authorities and literally placed in front of a firing squad. Then, at the last second, he was reprieved. This will mess up your psyche — for good. The man had the experience of living his last moments, or so he thought. Everything after that was so much gravy. After that, you try to make every minute count, and when you don’t, you feel guilty. After this, you want your art to be about the most important topics. You push beyond politics into ethics and metaphysics.

The flip side of that? Well, you’re going to die. At the level of Id, you are desperate to live. With Dostoevsky, it came out in a characteristically symbolic way. He was a problem gambler. On a huge scale. He racked up enormous debts. There were occasions when he had to flee the country to escape creditors and authorities. I’m not a gambler but I can easily imagine the rush and release of throwing off your armor of self-protection and exposing yourself to the caprices of God and the universe. These always have all the power anyway, which is easy to forget when we are living out our illusory lives. But then when you lose at the tables…there’s a huge new burden of guilt to add the existing store.

On top of this, there were other miseries to weigh him down. He was afflicted with epilepsy, which made his life hell for weeks and months at a time. He grew up on the grounds of a charity hospital for the poor (his father was a doctor), where he witnessed the general suffering of Poor Folk up close: starvation, disease, violence. His own father was drunken and abusive. Both of his parents died when he was a teenager. Some suspect that his father was killed by his own serfs as revenge for his cruelty.

Dostoevsky had been trained as an engineer, but had been a compulsive readers since early childhood. His pathway to creating his own literature came from a side job translating foreign authors like Balzac, Schiller, and Georges Sand into Russian. Poor Folk (1846), inspired by Gogol and Pushkin, put him on the map literarily.

I was in my early 20s when I first tackled Crime and Punishment (1866), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880).

The former may well be Dostoevsky’s most influential book, cutting right to the quick of the universal human predicament, by asking the inconvenient question “Why Be Good?” It reminds me a lot of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”. An arrogant loner commits murder, telling himself it’s kind of an intellectual experiment, though the act also very conveniently happens to solve most of his personal problems. As it plays out, his own paranoia and feelings of guilt doom him from the start. It’s comforting to know that most of us are hard wired this way. And terrifying to know about the few who are not. We’re basically our own jailers. Nietzsche would prefer that it not be so, which is why we later got Leopold and Loeb. A more positive acorn off the tree would be something like Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989).

There have also been some direct screen adaptations. Josef von Sternberg’s 1935 Hollywood version was a little unfortunate in casting Peter Lorre as Raskalnikov. Lorre is already a paranoid sweating creep — he’s the guy from M, for crissake! So in true Hollywood production code fashion it absolves the human race of being complicit in any way, destroying the entire point of the book, which is that the criminal is not an other, but potentially lives inside everyone. Same goes for the 2002 version, which cast the part with — ha, ha, ha! — Crispin Glover!

As for Dostoevsky’s last novel, The Flying Karamazov Brothers, I had the good fortune to discover it around the same time a certain eclectic juggling team came onto the scene, no doubt hastening my impulse to check it out. It too probes the question of good and evil, though in this case, the question of guilt is spread out over several individuals, which raises questions more social than metaphysical. As I myself have three older brothers (of very diverse personalities, interests, and temperaments) I couldn’t help superimposing my own familial relations onto the book. The cruel murdered father in the book is surely based on the author’s own.

Hollywood also made a crappy movie out of this novel. Directed by Richard Brooks in 1958 it stars Yul Brynner, Lee J. Cobb, Richard Basehart, Albert Salmi, and William Shatner! (For a much better American adaptation of a Dostoevsky work see James Gray’s Two Lovers (2008), based on the story “White Nights”.)

For the past several years my preferred Dostoevsky book has been The Idiot (1869), on account of its explication of the concept of the Holy Fool, which I have written about on this blog a few times. Its hero Prince Mishkin gets namedropped in Woody Allen’s Love and Death (1974). The most notable screen adaptation of this book was by Sergei Eisenstein, but Stalin pulled the plug on it.

There is something timely about The Idiot in particular right now I feel. It was Dostoevsky’s friend, peer, and benefactor Turgenev who coined the term “Nihilism”, very much the word for a fatal sickness abroad at the moment. Naturally it was a Russian who identified this soul destroying quality of cynicism and chaos-making that has held such sway over America’s Russia loving right wing over the past several years. Dostoevsky’s “Idiot” is so called because his Christlike simplicity is seen as a weakness, and a kind of hilarious defect. When goodness is equated with foolishness, dystopia will not be far behind.

Now, I’m no Russian hater. I learned to say the Russian alphabet before I was six years old, and still know it by heart, even if I only know about a dozen words of the language. And how I do love their writers, even if their political leadership has been for the birds (vultures, to be specific) ever since the time of Rurik. In fact, two great works of Dostoevsky appreciation I would recommend this autodidact would recommend to you are Russian (Soviet, in fact, both manage to transcend the restrictions of their times). They are Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics by my man Mikhail Bakhtin, and the pioneering (if probably a little out-of-date) Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, by Konstantin Mochulsky.