Paying Attention To The Sky

 You will see scattered about Paying Attention To The Sky numerous references to Dostoevsky. Fr. Neuhaus recommended Victor Terras’  seminal work “Reading Dostoevsky”  and we used reading selections from it and Henri de Lubac in a previous post on  the Grand Inquisitor legend in the Brothers Karamazov. This is another selection that takes Dostoevsky’s critics as the point of departure to offer an comprehensive view of his writings.

No Time For “Stylistic Niceties?”
In his lifetime, Dostoevsky was not blessed with laudatory reviews. With time, he became defensive about the artistic quality of his work and made the excuse that he had had to write hurriedly, with no time to pay attention to stylistic niceties. Anybody familiar with Dostoevsky’s notebooks, drafts, and galley proofs knows that this was hardly true. But generations of critics have used Dostoevsky’s remarks to corroborate their negative assessment of his art.

Negative Opinions About Dostoevsky’s Work

1. Most negative opinions about Dostoevsky’s art boil down to an assertion that, while his works are of some interest psychologically or philosophically, their artistic quality is low. Thus, N. A. Dobroliubov, in an otherwise positive review of Dostoevsky’s novel The Insulted and Injured, “Downtrodden People” (Zabitye liudi, 1861), said in fact that it was “artistically below criticism.” Some more recent critics, such as Ivan Bunin and Vladimir Nabokov, concur. To be sure, much negative criticism was and still is caused by the critics’ disagreement with Dostoevsky’s ideological positions or his general ethos (“good, but pretentious,” said Chekhov).
2. As regards novelistic structure, some critics have seen Dostoevsky’s plots as chaotic and disorganized, while others have found them “Gothic” and aimed at cheap effects. Still others have charged Dostoevsky with excessive psychologizing (his rival Turgenev found it intolerable) and with overly pronounced naturalism (“copying court records”).’ Many critics have found Dostoevsky’s characters unrealistic, schematic, and contrived. The observation that they all talk alike — like the author — is heard often.
3. Even more intense is the criticism leveled at Dostoevsky’s stylistic craftsmanship. From the very beginning, critics found his style prolix, repetitious, and lacking in polish. Often enough Dostoevsky was also found to be obscure, artificial, and sentimental, Finally, he has been found to lack balance, restraint, and good taste. In a word, whatever the merits of his oeuvre as a whole, its aesthetic value was found to be slight or nonexistent.
4. Great moral flaws have also been found in Dostoevsky’s works. The charge heard most often is that of pessimism. Almost as often, the outré, hysterical, and morbid nature of Dostoevsky’s works is held up to censure, The label of a “cruel talent” has stuck to him ever since N. K. Mikhailovsky’s essay of that title (Zhestokii talant) appeared in 1882, Dostoevsky’s fascination with the extremes of the human condition is condemned by many critics. Less common are charges of insincerity, unctuousness, and “rosy Christianity.”
5. The truth content of Dostoevsky’s works has been often challenged as well. In particular, he is said to have pursued the exceptional instead of the typical. Tendentious distortion of reality is a common charge. In an age of realism, Dostoevsky’s penchant for the fantastic, the paradoxical, and the mystical met with much disapproval.

Analysis Of Structure
These opinions, each voiced by critics of note, maybe assumed to be representative of a substantial body of readers and deserve attention not only as a record of Rezeptionsgeschichte, but also as an avenue to an analysis of Dostoevsky’s works.

As regards the structure of Dostoevsky’s novels, the critics’ dissatisfaction is well founded. If the ideal is a well-spaced and economically developed linear plot, a Dostoevskian novel with its multitude of minor characters and subplots, inserted anecdotes, philosophical dialogues, and the narra tor’s essayistic and other digressions is hardly “well structured.” It must be considered, though, that this linear — or syntagmatic — view ignores the wealth of paradigmatic structures that may do quite as much to integrate the text as an elegant linear plot would: leitmotifs, situation rhyme, recurrent imagery, mirroring and doubling, symbolic foreshadowing, parallelism, literary echoes and outright quotations, and other such devices are all plentiful in Dostoevsky’s novels. Their effect tends to be subliminal, and their presence has been demonstrated only through the efforts of generations of literary scholars.

His Greatness As A Novelist
Claims for Dostoevsky’s greatness as a novelist must be staked in connection with the Bakhtinian sense of the novel as an all-inclusive, wide-open expression of the fullness of life in a world in flux. The pattern of a tightly structured tragic plot may be discerned within this loose texture. Isaiah Berlin was, I believe, deeply wrong when he called Dostoevsky a monist “hedgehog” whose art is all about a single issue, rather than a “fox” with a bagful of tricks. A great novelist in this Bakhtinian sense must be a pluralist. Dostoevsky is a pluralist in a variety of ways. He has been aptly called a “romantic realist.” He has been thought, certainly in the West, to be the most Russian of novelists; yet his greatest impact has been on Western readers. Dobroliubov considered Dostoevsky a champion of the “downtrodden;’ and his art is decidedly demotic, yet it came to be appreciated by the intellectual elite of the twentieth century, the Prousts, Gides, and Hermann Hesses.

All these contradictions are enhanced by what Bakhtin called the polyphonic quality of Dostoevsky’s art: the presence in his texts of a persistent “other voice,” generated by devices such as an ironic narrator, often himself the unwary butt of the implied author’s irony, frequent “inner dialogue,” multiple ambiguities, and an incessant stream of literary and journalistic quotations, echoes, and allusions. Dostoevsky’s texts contain many semantic levels. Their narrative level, itself many-faceted, is synchronized with a moral or political argument, such as the antinomy of human and divine justice in The Brothers Karamazov; an allegorical message, say, the prophetic anticipation of the Russian Revolution in The Possessed; and metaphysical symbolism, such as the theme of resurrection in Crime and Punishment.

Dostoevsky’s Skill As “Devil’s Advocate.”
Dostoevsky’s novels encompass antagonistic philosophies and value systems. He is an excellent “devil’s advocate.” Sophisticated readers have mistaken for his own ideas what Dostoevsky was in fact trying to refute. Dostoevsky’s negative characters, his losers, scoundrels, and villains, are presented with as much empathy as his tragic heroes. Bakhtin drew attention to the carnivalistic strain in Dostoevsky’s novels, where a tragic plot may develop from what was initially a scandalous incident or a bad joke. Burlesque comedy is interspersed with tragic action. Serious ideas are advanced by disreputable types, buffoons, or characters who are clearly wrong about things that are dear to the writer’s heart. Often Dostoevsky’s most cherished thoughts appear in travesty: Lebedev, a disreputable character, praying for the soul of the Countess Du Barry is in fact living up to Father Zosima’s principle of universal guilt and responsibility.

Dostoevsky’s Skill As A Master of Detail
Dostoevsky’s novels have been called ideological.” His heroes may be perceived as ideas incarnate and his plots as conflicts of ideas. But then, too, Dostoevsky “aimed at concreteness all his life,” as Viktor Shklovsky put it. A wealth of concrete detail, both incidental and significant, is to be found in his novels. Mundane concerns appear throughout in the most concrete terms. Dostoevsky is a master of the realistic detail évocateur. Sonia’s plaid shawl, Stavrogin’s little red spider, Arkady’s white-and-blue checkered handkerchief, Iliusha’s toy cannon, Aliosha’s sausage sandwich, and hundreds of such details are remembered by the reader.

Ambiguity
Dostoevsky’s novels are ambiguous even structurally. On the one hand, they leave openings to “real life” in a variety of ways (including allusions to contemporary events and concerns, and especially to contemporary literature). On the other, they are structured artifacts by virtue of the presence in them of abstract ideas that are brought home through various artful devices. A tragic plot in which ancient mythical themes have been detected may be embedded in what is recognizably an old-fashioned family novel with many feuilletonistic digressions, as is the case in The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov.

Featuring Exceptional Human Beings In Extreme Situations
The charge that Dostoevsky’s novels have Gothic traits and feature high or perverse passions, intrigue, murder, and suicide is of course valid. Dostoevsky’s main characters are exceptional human beings in extreme situations. Yet it must be understood that they live in a world populated by crowds of ordinary people leading ordinary lives. The saints, fanatics, murderers, and tragic sufferers of Dostoevsky’s novels live among men and women who pursue their mundane concerns in familiar ways. This does not invalidate the charge, however, and Dostoevsky’s answer to it was that extreme types and situations were more revealing of the human condition than the so-called “average?”³ This is a fundamental question on which Dostoevsky disagreed with most of his contemporaries. Maximilian Braun has wisely suggested that the crises, rare but still real, of human life were precisely Dostoevsky’s forte, while he had less of an eye and ear for every-day life: courtship and marriage, making a living, raising a family, and such. Which area one considers more important depends on one’s Weltanschauwig.

Dostoevsky’s Naturalism
The charge of “naturalism” is also justified. This goes both for Dostoevsky’s use of topics and details of current journalistic interest and for his frequent depictions of the seamy side of life and distasteful aspects of personal appearance and behavior. Dostoevsky offended not only Victorian sensibilities in this respect. As for Dostoevsky’s characters, it is true that many of them are based on identifiable real-life prototypes. It is also true that these, as well as some other, apparently imaginary characters, are readily perceived as “types,” which was Dostoevsky’s intent. The portraits of, say, Turgenev in The Possessed or of G. Z. Eliseev in The Brothers Karamazov are indiscreetly recognizable and quite cruel. They are also drawn satirically, as social types. But this can hardly be considered an aesthetic blemish, unless one clings to a narrow conception of realist art that excludes satire on the grounds that it distorts reality.

Dostoevsky’s Idealist Belief In The Freedom Of The Human Spirit
More serious is M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s charge that The Idiot contains, “on the one side, characters full of life and truth, but on the other, some mysterious puppets whirling madly as though in a dream, made by hands trembling with rage.” Similar impressions come from other reputable critics who were at odds with Dostoevsky’s political views. They tended to find Dostoevsky’s characters contrived and carelessly executed. For instance, Mikhailovsky calls the nihilist figures in The Possessed, including Stavrogin, Piotr Verkhovensky, Shatov, and Kirillov, “puppets” and “pale, pretentious, and artificial.” Tolstoi’s identical charge refers to The Brothers Karamazov as a whole. These opinions are to be explained by the fact that the characters perceived as artificial and contrived were in fact created as ideas incarnate. They owe their existence to the ideas that possess them. Their social and psychological Gestalt is a function of these ideas. The disagreement between Dostoevsky and critics who would rather see ideas as a function of a character’s social identity is of a basic nature. It is a disagreement between a positivist social determinism and Dostoevsky’s idealist belief in the freedom of the human spirit.

Another violation of strict realism may be seen in Dostoevsky’s tendency to give many of his characters the gift of imaginative expression. Too many of them talk and think well, or at least interestingly, to be altogether believable. Homer, Dante, and, Shakespeare, to name only the greatest, take the same risk. The gain is in expressiveness. It is this form of poetic license that energizes Dostoevsky’s texts and makes them so memorable.

Dostoevsky’s Characters Talk Like The Author
The most damaging of the charges, that all Dostoevsky’s characters talk like the author, has been heard often since V. G. Belinsky first leveled it, and from as authoritative a reader as Tolstoi. It clashes with Bakhtin’s polyphonic conception of the Dostoevskian novel. How is this patent contradiction to be resolved? It is a fact that Dostoevsky, never a writer “from the notebook” (in the literal sense, that is), is not a very careful stylist when it comes to creating a social, regional, or occupational idiolect for his characters. He also lets some of his characters express thoughts which appear to be “over their heads” and which may be a part of the author’s ideological argument. Furthermore, more than most novelists, Dostoevsky likes to introduce a literary subtext into his dialogue, a trait that runs the danger of deconstructing its realism, as the reader’s mind is directed to the text quoted or alluded to and away from the situation at hand. The justification for this practice is that Dostoevsky’s novels are not primarily novels of manners, or even realistic social novels, but are rather in many ways close to the tradition that began with the Platonic dialogue. They are novels about ideas as much as about people.

Dostoevsky’s texts are alive, rather than lucid, well written, or elegant. They present the narrator’s and the characters’ speech in living flux, rather than as a finished product. An undercurrent of emotion or thought-in-progress is constantly present. The text is energized by an ever-active “inner form,” by which I mean any kind of verbal content beyond direct routine communication, or, in other words, any active ingredient added to the message by its medium. Metaphoric expression, such as podpol’e, “underground,” nadryv, “rupture,” or besy, “demons;’ is the most obvious example. “Inner form” may be generated also by rhythm, dialogic expression (as in irony, ambiguity, allusion, innuendo), over- and understatement, poignancy, solemnity, strangeness (through quirkiness, buffoonery, slang, idiolect, catachresis), challenging the reader by open partisanship, provocation, suspense, or novelty, and the narrator’s and everybody else’s unflagging personal interest in the action. “Inner form” makes the reader see things by making them concrete. For instance, the first chapter subtitle in The Brothers Karamazov might have been “The Story of a Family:’ which would have been routine communication without inner form. Instead, it is Istoriia Odnoi Semeiki– “The (Hi)Story of One Nice Little Family.”

A Reputation As A Poor Stylist
A reputation as a poor stylist has accompanied Dostoevsky since the publication of his first works. The critics’ opinion is the result of a misunderstanding that has been removed by Bakhtin’s insights. Bakhtin showed that Dostoevsky’s text creates a polyphonic concert of living voices, one of which is the narrator’s (which itself may well be dialogic!), rather than a homophonic narrative dominated by the narrator’s voice, Hence a controlled, economical, and well-integrated narrative style is not what Dostoevsky pursues. He will write elegantly only when the voice in question demands it. If one disregards the “polyphony” argument, Dostoevsky’s highly uneven narrative style, often distinctly colloquial, often journalistic, sometimes chatty, then again lyrical, solemn, or pathetic, places his work with the roman-feuilleton and may be legitimately seen as an aesthetic flaw. Today it is commonly seen as an innovative trait, adopted by Céline, Faulkner, Grass, and other leading novelists of the twentieth century.

Dostoevsky’s Religious Thought
The alleged moral flaws of Dostoevsky’s works are a function of the critic’s Weltanschauung. I believe that a Christian view close to Dostoevsky’s lets these flaws disappear. This is also true of Dostoevsky’s alleged pessimism. Thus, it is often said of The Idiot that the Good, personified in Prince Myshkin, is wholly ineffectual, and the ideal that the Prince stands for quite incompatible with life. Such criticism is invalid from Dostoevsky’s Christian viewpoint, for a Christian’s hope and joy are nurtured not by any earthly “and they lived happily ever after:’ but by faith in resurrection. A similar defense may be advanced against the charge that the atmosphere Dostoevsky created is sickly, hysterical, or outré (as he said himself). Nietzsche once called the evangelic world a mixture of the sickly, the childlike, and the sublime. The fervent excitement that permeates Dostoevsky’s world is shared with every ambience of religious or political ferment.

Ways In Which Men Live And Die With Or Without God
Dostoevsky’s religious thought is concerned with the ways in which men live and die with or without God. The solipsist antihero of Notes from Underground, the would-be Nietzschean Ubermensch Raskolnikov, l’homme revolte Kirillov of The Possessed, burnt-out Byronic heroes like Svidrigailov and Stavrogin, sensualists like Fiodor Pavlovich Karamazov, crude cynics like Smerdiakov, and even god-builders like Ivan Karamazov or Versilov of A Raw Youth – they are all humanists who believe that man can stand alone, without God — or against God. Dostoevsky’s peculiar approach to existence without God made him a forerunner of Existentialism. He asked not whether or not there is a God, but what living with or without God means for the existence of modern man. Despite his efforts to discredit atheist humanism, Dostoevsky became a prophet of the “death of God.” He certainly defined the condition of man without God with great power, though this achievement may have lost some of its provocative edge in our godless age.

Those of Dostoevsky’s characters who are with God, holy men like Tikhon, Makar Dolgoruky, or Zosima, simple souls like Sonia Marmeladov, Prince Myshkin, or Aliosha Karamazov, humble sinners like Marmeladov or Dmitry Karamazov, are no less memorable. Their state of grace is not determined by good deeds, or even by the fruits of their striving, but entirely by their unquestioning acceptance of God’s fatherhood. This position is complemented by a doctrine, stated most clearly by Father Zosima, of human solidarity in sonhood, which lets every human bear guilt and responsibility for every sin of humanity.

Dostoevsky’s Beliefs
Dostoevsky believed that a Christian’s progress is a struggle against human nature. Man is sustained in this struggle by epiphanies of divine grace, Father Zosima’s “contacts with other worlds,” which intrude upon man’s mundane existence. This position, and Dostoevsky’s rejection of ethical rationalism, are in accord not only with Orthodox doctrine, but also with some strains of romantic idealism. Dostoevsky’s religious philosophy is generally in tune with Russian Slavophile thought. Important as Dostoevsky’s religious ideas and Kulturkritik may be, to see his greatness mainly in these terms may divert us from an appreciation of his genius, simply because today, as in the writer’s lifetime, many readers will reject these ideas out of hand.

Nabokov’s Criticism
As for the cruelty of Dostoevsky’s talent, a charge raised by V. P. Burenin even before Mikhailovsky’s celebrated article, and reiterated by Nabokov, who speaks of Dostoevsky’s “wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity,” this too depends on the critic’s point of view. A remark by Saltykov-Shchedrin, rather to the same effect, may put this trait in the right context. Speaking of Notes from Underground, Saltykov-Shchedrin suggests that the point of this work is to show that every man is trash; nor will he ever become a good man until he is convinced that he is indeed trash. He then adds: “In the end, he moves on to the real subject of his musings. He draws his proofs mostly from St. Thomas Aquinas, but since he fails to reveal this, his readers may think that these thoughts are the narrator’s own.” The meaning of this Aesopian comment is that Dostoevsky has taken his hero to the depths of abjection only in order to lead him thereafter to faith and salvation. From a Christian viewpoint there is nothing wrong with this. But it is difficult for a reader who does not share Dostoevsky’s Christian convictions to see it this way, or, for another example, to see Marmeladov, that image of abjection and degradation, as an edifying example and perhaps the most positive character of Crime and Punishment, discounting Sonia, who is a saint.

A Rosy Christianity?
Other charges related to the moral aspect of Dostoevsky’s works are also a matter of ideology. Such are the charges of unctuousness and “rosy Christianity.” The former is a matter of faith: a nonbeliever like Nabokov will find the reading of the Gospel that brings together “the murderer and the harlot” to be simply in bad taste. The believer will find it moving and edifying. Leontiev’s charge of “rosy Christianity,” shared with some conservative Orthodox churchmen, may well be valid for some of Dostoevsky’s writings, though not for his total oeuvre.

The Truth Content Of Dostoevsky’s Works
Turning now to the truth content of Dostoevsky’s works, the foremost charge is that he deals with the exceptional, rather than with the typical: a serious charge, considering Dostoevsky’s insistence that he was a realist, albeit “in a higher sense.” V. G. Belinsky said that madmen — Dostoevsky’s Goliadkin, hero of The Double (1846), is the case in point — being atypical, “belong in lunatic asylums, not in novels.” Dostoevsky, in commenting on his novel years later, said that he had heralded, precisely in this character, a new social type of importance. So Goliadkin’s madness was typical after all. Analogous disagreements between author and critics were repeated in connection with almost every work. Dostoevsky was confident that the future would prove him right: his “exceptional” characters would one day be recognized as prophetic of Russia’s future, while those of Goncharov, Turgenev, and Tolstoi would appear as what they were, even at their appearance: representations of Russia’s past. The last word may not yet have been said about Dostoevsky the prophet and religious thinker. His analysis of the mentality that caused the Russian Revolution was profoundly correct, yet he was wrong, judging from the present point in history, in assuming that Russian spirituality would prevail over the demons of godless humanism and nthilism.

The charges of outright distortion of reality relate mostly to Dostoevsky’s understanding of the mood and moral attitude of the young generation of the Russian intelligentsia. It would seem that he was overly optimistic when he hoped that Kolia Krasotkin would follow the example of Aliosha Karamazov, rather than that of Rakitin.

Dostoevsky As A Keen Psychologist
Since the 1840s, Dostoevsky has had a reputation as a keen psychologist. Even then some critics found his psychologism excessive. In the 1860s and 1870s, such charges were heard frequently, and it was suggested that Dostoevsky’s morbidly self-conscious and self-lacerating characters were unrepresentative of Russian society, but were, rather, projections of the author’s own diseased mind. Unquestionably, Dostoevsky had a deep understanding of humans under conditions of great stress caused by want, suffering, frustration, rejection, and despair. He understood the psychology of poverty, humiliation, resentment, jealousy, cynicism, and cruelty better than most. Whether he had a balanced view of the Russian men and women of his age is a different question. Excellence as a psychologist is hardly the measure of his greatness, however, especially because Dostoevsky himself often spoke disparagingly of “scientific” psychology.

As for the charge that Dostoevsky developed his psychological dramas in a vacuum, neglecting to give them a natural and social background, I believe that it is unfounded. A careful reader will find that each scene of a Dostoevskian novel is provided with ample and aptly chosen detail that acts as a proper setting for the scene. Some critics have said that mundane details, such as food and drink, clothing and land- or city-scape, are missing from Dostoevsky’s novels. This is simply not true. There is ample material for an article on “Food and Drink in The Brothers Karamazov,” for example, or on “The Topography of St. Petersburg in Crime and Punishment.”