Consider the Lobster (35 page)

The thing about Dostoevsky’s characters is that they are
alive
. By which I don’t just mean that they’re successfully realized or developed or “rounded.” The best of them live inside us, forever, once we’ve met them. Recall the proud and pathetic Raskolnikov, the naive Devushkin, the beautiful and damned Nastasya of
The Idiot,
¹⁴
the fawning Lebyedev and spiderish Ippolit of the same novel;
C
&
P’
s ingenious maverick detective Porfiry Petrovich (without whom there would probably be no commercial crime fiction w/ eccentrically brilliant cops); Marmeladov, the hideous and pitiful sot; or the vain and noble roulette addict Aleksey Ivanovich of
The Gambler;
the gold-hearted prostitutes Sonya and Liza; the cynically innocent Aglaia; or the unbelievably repellent Smerdyakov, that living engine of slimy resentment in whom I personally see parts of myself I can barely stand to look at; or the idealized and all-too-human Myshkin and Alyosha, the doomed human Christ and triumphant child-pilgrim, respectively. These and so many other FMD creatures are alive—retain what Frank calls their “immense vitality”—not because they’re just skillfully drawn types or facets of human beings but because, acting within plausible and morally compelling plots, they dramatize the profoundest parts of all humans, the parts most conflicted, most serious—the ones with the most at stake. Plus, without ever ceasing to be 3-D individuals, Dostoevsky’s characters manage to embody whole ideologies and philosophies of life: Raskolnikov the rational egoism of the 1860s’ intelligentsia, Myshkin mystical Christian love, the Underground Man the influence of European positivism on the Russian character, Ippolit the individual will raging against death’s inevitability, Aleksey the perversion of Slavophilic pride in the face of European decadence, and so on and so forth… .

The thrust here is that Dostoevsky wrote fiction about the stuff that’s really important. He wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did it without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts. His concern was always what it is to be a human being—that is, how to be an actual
person,
someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal.

** Is it possible really to love other people? If I’m lonely and in pain, everyone outside me is potential relief—I need them. But can you really love what you need so badly? Isn’t a big part of love caring more about what the other person needs? How am I supposed to subordinate my own overwhelming need to somebody else’s needs that I can’t even feel directly? And yet if I can’t do this, I’m damned to loneliness, which I definitely don’t want … so I’m back at trying to overcome my selfishness for self-interested reasons. Is there any way out of this bind? **

It’s a well-known irony that Dostoevsky, whose work is famous for its compassion and moral rigor, was in many ways a prick in real life—vain, arrogant, spiteful, selfish. A compulsive gambler, he was usually broke, and whined constantly about his poverty, and was always badgering his friends and colleagues for emergency loans that he seldom repaid, and held petty and long-standing grudges over money, and did things like pawn his delicate wife’s winter coat so he could gamble, etc.
¹⁵

But it’s just as well known that Dostoevsky’s own life was full of incredible suffering and drama and tragedy and heroism. His Moscow childhood was evidently so miserable that in his books Dostoevsky never once sets or even mentions any action in Moscow.
¹⁶
His remote and neurasthenic father was murdered by his own serfs when FMD was seventeen. Seven years later, the publication of his first novel,
¹⁷
and its endorsement by critics like Belinsky and Herzen, made Dostoevsky a literary star at the same time he was starting to get involved with the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of revolutionary intellectuals who plotted to incite a peasant uprising against the tsar. In 1849, Dostoevsky was arrested as a conspirator, convicted, sentenced to death, and subjected to the famous “mock execution of the Petrashevtsy,” in which the conspirators were blindfolded and tied to stakes and taken all the way to the
“Aim!”
stage of the firing-squad process before an imperial messenger galloped in with a supposed “last-minute” reprieve from the merciful tsar. His sentence commuted to imprisonment, the epileptic Dostoevsky ended up spending a decade in balmy Siberia, returning to St. Petersburg in 1859 to find that the Russian literary world had all but forgotten him. Then his wife died, slowly and horribly; then his devoted brother died; then their journal
Epoch
went under; then his epilepsy started getting so bad that he was constantly terrified that he’d die or go insane from the seizures.
¹⁸
Hiring a twenty-two-year-old stenographer to help him complete
The Gambler
in time to satisfy a publisher with whom he’d signed an insane deliver-by-a-certain-date-or-forfeit-all-royalties-for-everything-you-ever-wrote contract, Dostoevsky married this lady six months later, just in time to flee
Epoch’
s creditors with her, wander unhappily through a Europe whose influence on Russia he despised,
¹⁹
have a beloved daughter who died of pneumonia almost right away, writing constantly, penniless, often clinically depressed in the aftermath of tooth-rattling grand mal seizures, going through cycles of manic roulette binges and then crushing self-hatred. Frank’s Volume IV relates a lot of Dostoevsky’s European tribulations via the journals of his new young wife, Anna Snitkin,
²⁰
whose patience and charity as a spouse might well qualify her as a patron saint of today’s codependency groups.
²¹

** What is “an American”? Do we have something important in common, as Americans, or is it just that we all happen to live inside the same boundaries and so have to obey the same laws? How exactly is America different from other countries? Is there really something unique about it? What does that uniqueness entail? We talk a lot about our special rights and freedoms, but are there also special responsibilities that come with being an American? If so, responsibilities to whom? **

Frank’s bio does cover all this personal stuff, in detail, and he doesn’t try to downplay or whitewash the icky parts.
²²
But his project requires that Frank strive at all times to relate Dostoevsky’s personal and psychological life to his books and to the ideologies behind them. The fact that Dostoevsky is first and last an ideological writer
²³
makes him an especially congenial subject for Joseph Frank’s contextual approach to biography. And the four extant volumes of
Dostoevsky
make it clear that the crucial, catalyzing event in FMD’s life, ideologically speaking, was the mock execution of 22 December 1849—a five- or ten-minute interval during which this weak, neurotic, self-involved young writer believed that he was about to die. What resulted inside Dostoevsky was a type of conversion experience, though it gets complicated, because the Christian convictions that inform his writing thereafter are not those of any one church or tradition, and they’re also bound up with a kind of mystical Russian nationalism and a political conservatism
²⁴
that led the next century’s Soviets to suppress or distort much of Dostoevsky’s work.
²⁵

** Does this guy Jesus Christ’s life have something to teach me even if I don’t, or can’t, believe he was divine? What am I supposed to make of the claim that someone who was God’s relative, and so could have turned the cross into a planter or something with just a word, still voluntarily let them nail him up there, and died? Even if we suppose he was divine—did he
know?
Did he know he could have broken the cross with just a word? Did he know in advance that death would just be temporary (because I bet I could climb up there, too, if I knew that an eternity of right-hand bliss lay on the other side of six hours of pain)? But does any of that even really matter? Can I still believe in JC or Mohammed or Whoever even if I don’t believe they were actual relatives of God? Except what would that mean: “believe in”?**

What seems most important is that Dostoevsky’s near-death experience changed a typically vain and trendy young writer—a very talented writer, true, but still one whose basic concerns were for his own literary glory—into a person who believed deeply in moral/ spiritual values
²⁶
… more, into someone who believed that a life lived without moral/spiritual values was not just incomplete but depraved.
²⁷

The big thing that makes Dostoevsky invaluable for American readers and writers is that he appears to possess degrees of passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we—here, today
²⁸
—cannot or do not permit ourselves. Joseph Frank does an admirable job of tracing out the interplay of factors that made this engagement possible—FMD’s own beliefs and talents, the ideological and aesthetic climates of his day, etc. Upon his finishing Frank’s books, though, I think that any serious American reader/writer will find himself driven to think hard about what exactly it is that makes many of the novelists of our own place and time look so thematically shallow and lightweight, so morally impoverished, in comparison to Gogol or Dostoevsky (or even to lesser lights like Lermontov and Turgenev). Frank’s bio prompts us to ask ourselves why we seem to require of our art an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions, so that contemporary writers have to either make jokes of them or else try to work them in under cover of some formal trick like intertextual quotation or incongruous juxtaposition, sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks as part of some multivalent defamiliarization-flourish or some such shit.

Part of the explanation for our own lit’s thematic poverty obviously includes our century and situation. The good old modernists, among their other accomplishments, elevated aesthetics to the level of ethics—maybe even metaphysics—and Serious Novels after Joyce tend to be valued and studied mainly for their formal ingenuity. Such is the modernist legacy that we now presume as a matter of course that “serious” literature will be aesthetically distanced from real lived life. Add to this the requirement of textual self-consciousness imposed by postmodernism
²⁹
and literary theory, and it’s probably fair to say that Dostoevsky et al. were free of certain cultural expectations that severely constrain our own novelists’ ability to be “serious.”

But it’s just as fair to observe, with Frank, that Dostoevsky operated under cultural constraints of his own: a repressive government, state censorship, and especially the popularity of post-Enlightenment European thought, much of which went directly against beliefs he held dear and wanted to write about. For me, the really striking, inspiring thing about Dostoevsky isn’t just that he was a genius; he was also brave. He never stopped worrying about his literary reputation, but he also never stopped promulgating unfashionable stuff in which he believed. And he did this not by ignoring (now a.k.a. “transcending” or “subverting”) the unfriendly cultural circumstances in which he was writing, but by confronting them, engaging them, specifically and by name.

It’s actually not true that our literary culture is nihilistic, at least not in the radical sense of Turgenev’s Bazarov. For there are certain tendencies we believe are bad, qualities we hate and fear. Among these are sentimentality, naïveté, archaism, fanaticism. It would probably be better to call our own art’s culture now one of congenital skepticism. Our intelligentsia
³⁰
distrust strong belief, open conviction. Material passion is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level. We believe that ideology is now the province of the rival SIGs and PACs all trying to get their slice of the big green pie … and, looking around us, we see that indeed it is so. But Frank’s Dostoevsky would point out (or more like hop up and down and shake his fist and fly at us and shout) that if this is so, it’s at least partly because we have abandoned the field. That we’ve abandoned it to fundamentalists whose pitiless rigidity and eagerness to judge show that they’re clueless about the “Christian values” they would impose on others. To rightist militias and conspiracy theorists whose paranoia about the government supposes the government to be just way more organized and efficient than it really is. And, in academia and the arts, to the increasingly absurd and dogmatic Political Correctness movement, whose obsession with the mere forms of utterance and discourse show too well how effete and aestheticized our best liberal instincts have become, how removed from what’s really important—motive, feeling, belief.

Have a culminative look at just one snippet from Ippolit’s famous “Necessary Explanation” in
The Idiot:

“Anyone who attacks individual charity,” I began, “attacks human nature and casts contempt on personal dignity. But the organization of ‘public charity’ and the problem of individual freedom are two distinct questions, and not mutually exclusive. Individual kindness will always remain, because it is an individual impulse, the living impulse of one personality to exert a direct influence upon another… . How can you tell, Bahmutov, what significance such an association of one personality with another may have on the destiny of those associated?”

Can you imagine any of our own major novelists allowing a character to say stuff like this (not, mind you, just as hypocritical bombast so that some ironic hero can stick a pin in it, but as part of a ten-page monologue by somebody trying to decide whether to commit suicide)? The reason you can’t is the reason he wouldn’t: such a novelist would be, by our lights, pretentious and overwrought and silly. The straight presentation of such a speech in a Serious Novel today would provoke not outrage or invective, but worse—one raised eyebrow and a very cool smile. Maybe, if the novelist was really major, a dry bit of mockery in
The New Yorker
. The novelist would be (and this is our own age’s truest vision of hell) laughed out of town.