Dostoevsky Part 2: An Extremely Good & Surprisingly Hopeful Novelist
frankly makes everybody else seem kinda washed ngl
I first tried to read Crime and Punishment in May 2017, and lasted about four pages. I just didn’t get it. Everything I was reading at the time was flashy and stylish, humorous and hooky, and written in the last 40 years. Compared to that stuff—George Saunders, Dave Eggers, Lucia Berlin, Hunter S. Thompson—Crime and Punishment’s opening pages felt ancient, drab, and slow. I knew the general arc of the book, namely that (SpOiLER!!) the protagonist commits murder and spends the next 400 pages dealing with the psychological aftermath. It was difficult, somehow, to imagine that story making me happy. Summarized in a Goodreads blurb, it sounded lame and predictable and depressing.
Well, I was wrong. I finally read Crime and Punishment this year at the urging of my coworker & accomplished writer friend Kyungseo Min, and it might be, probably is, my favorite book ever. It definitely made me happy. (Something bigger than happy, as we’ll get into below. But happy was definitely part of it.) I also read The Idiot, which was amazing, and The Brothers Karamazov, which is on the same level as Crime and Punishment for me, an absolute life-changing masterpiece; suffice to say I understand the appeal now.
Dostoevsky is an incredible writer, and I’m going to take a stab at explaining why that is. But it’s predictable to say he’s one of the all-time greats, since everyone, including the encyclopedia, considers him to be. What surprised me is that his writing, at least in these three novels, is ultimately hopeful—and not, as I’d been led to believe, depressing, cynical, or nihilistic. In fact, refuting hopelessness, nihilism, and cynicism seems to be one of Dostoevsky’s foremost goals.
I think the misunderstanding comes from the heavy content of his books: he doesn’t shy away from the horror and suffering that humans inflict on each other. But I didn’t come away from reading Dostoevsky feeling that life was pointless and miserable. I came away with a reinforced conviction that life is fundamentally beautiful and miraculous. That there is always a chance for redemption, no matter how far we stray from the path of the good. That the purpose of a human life, as Vonnegut put it in The Sirens of Titan, is “to love whoever is around to be loved.”
1: Why Dostoevsky is an incredible writer
Dostoevsky’s greatest strength is getting inside a character’s head. People call him a psychological genius, and that’s true, but it’s one thing to understand what’s going on in a real person’s head, and another thing to generate an imaginary person and put real-feeling (and interesting!) stuff inside theirs. The former requires intelligence, empathy, and study; the latter adds a staggering feat of imagination. Crime and Punishment includes such detailed and compelling descriptions of how it feels to have committed a murder—psychologically and physiologically—that the reader winds up feeling the same things: head-pounding guilt, stomach-churning fear, tremors and sweats and fevers. It’s contagious writing. It infects you.
But it gets crazier still, because Dostoevsky doesn’t occupy his novels with one of these contagious simulacra at a time. It’s in the intricately crafted interactions between his (many) characters that something miraculous occurs. Each character is an instrument, played by a world-class musician; but interacting together, those instruments form an orchestra, and the effect of that orchestra is one of the highest-order artistic experiences I’ve ever had.
Perhaps it sounds like no big deal. Isn’t every writer expected to come up with realistic characters? Well, when you’re reading Dostoevsky, it does feel like a big deal. So maybe it’s more than that. Maybe what’s going on isn’t that Dostoevsky’s characters are realistic, but that they are more than realistic, distilled and intensified, emblematic of deep and important facts about the world that we feel to be true but cannot put into words.1
I have an example in mind to demonstrate the orchestra in action, although it unfolds over a scale that is difficult to include in a newsletter. It’s a scene that spans chapters 13 and 14 in The Idiot (you can read all of these books for free on Project Gutenberg, by the way).
Briefest summary I could manage, I swear:
There’s a character in The Idiot named Nastasia Philipovna who is considered a “fallen woman” because an aristocrat named Totski forced her to become a concubine at the age of 16. Now she is an adult and Totski is trying to unburden himself by paying a guy named Gania to marry her. Nastasia and Totski and Gania and a few others are at a social event just before the engagement is meant to go off. It’s understandably awkward. And then a weird guy named Ferdishenko, who is widely disliked for his tendency to say preposterous things, comes up with a suggestion that is signature “him”:
“Let’s play at some game!” suggested the actress.
“I know a new and most delightful game,” said Ferdishenko.
“What is it?” asked the actress.
“Well, when we tried it we were a party of people, like this, for instance; and somebody proposed that each of us, without leaving his place at the table, should relate something about himself. It had to be something that he really and honestly considered the very worst action he had ever committed in his life. But he was to be honest—that was the chief point! He wasn’t to be allowed to lie.”
“What an extraordinary idea!” said the general.
“That’s the beauty of it, general!”
“It’s a funny notion,” said Totski, “and yet quite natural—it’s only a new way of boasting.”
“Perhaps that is just what was so fascinating about it.”
“Why, it would be a game to cry over—not to laugh at!” said the actress.
“Did it succeed?” asked Nastasia Philipovna. “Come, let’s try it, let’s try it; we really are not quite so jolly as we might be—let’s try it! We may like it; it’s original, at all events!”
“Yes,” said Ferdishenko; “it’s a good idea—come along—the men begin. […] We must draw lots! […] It’s a very simple game; all you have to do is to tell the story of the worst action of your life. It’s as simple as anything. I’ll prompt anyone who forgets the rules!”
No one liked the idea much. Some smiled, some frowned; some objected, but faintly, not wishing to oppose Nastasia’s wishes; for this new idea seemed to be rather well received by her.
Everyone was bored, so Ferdishenko suggested this game, and normally it would have been passed over as a stupid idea, except that Nastasia latches onto it. Why? Because she wants Totski to own up to what he did to her.
Several stories follow. Ferdishenko tells a story about stealing a few roubles, a theft which was blamed on a maid who was fired as a result. It’s an earnest and honest story, though it obviously reflects very poorly on him, and it doesn’t go over well:
Ferdishenko was very angry and rapidly forgetting himself; his whole face was drawn with passion. Strange as it may appear, he had expected much better success for his story. These little errors of taste on Ferdishenko’s part occurred very frequently. Nastasia trembled with rage, and looked fixedly at him, whereupon he relapsed into alarmed silence. He realized that he had gone a little too far.
“Had we not better end this game?” asked Totski.
Having witnessed the negative reception to Ferdishenko’s story, which describes a much-less-heinous “greatest crime” than his own, Totski wants out. But the game continues. Next, General Epanchin tells a story which is designed to make himself look good, rather like an effective answer to that “What’s your biggest weakness?” question in job interviews. It’s a bigger hit than Ferdishenko’s story, even though it’s far more calculated, and probably less honest. And then it’s Totski’s turn. But he doesn’t tell the story Nastasia wants him to tell; the story that she and everybody else already knows is the worst act of his life. He’s a coward, so instead he tells a meaningless story like the general’s. This is the result:
Nastasia Philipovna’s eyes were flashing in a most unmistakable way, now; and her lips were all a-quiver by the time Totski finished his story.
All present watched both of them with curiosity.
“You were right, Totski,” said Nastasia, “it is a dull game and a stupid one. I’ll just tell my story, as I promised, and then we’ll play cards.”
“Yes, but let’s have the story first!” cried the general.
“Prince,” said Nastasia Philipovna, unexpectedly turning to Muishkin, “here are my old friends, Totski and General Epanchin, who wish to marry me off. Tell me what you think. Shall I marry or not? As you decide, so shall it be.”
Totski grew white as a sheet. The general was struck dumb. All present started and listened intently. Gania sat rooted to his chair.
“Marry whom?” asked the prince, faintly.
“Gavrila Ardalionovitch Ivolgin,” said Nastasia, firmly and evenly.
There were a few seconds of dead silence.
The prince tried to speak, but could not form his words; a great weight seemed to lie upon his breast and suffocate him.
“N-no! don’t marry him!” he whispered at last, drawing his breath with an effort.
“So be it, then. Gavrila Ardalionovitch,” she spoke solemnly and forcibly, “you hear the prince’s decision? Take it as my decision; and let that be the end of the matter for good and all.”
What I want to point out here is the chain of causality, the way the characters ping off of each other like molecules in a chemical reaction. The actress proposes a game because nobody wants to talk about what’s actually going on (Totski paying his way out of a shameful situation). Ferdishenko’s strange suggestion prevails, though it would normally have been shot down, because of the strange social power Nastasia wields only at this particular moment (since her consent to marry Gania is what everyone is waiting for). And when Totski takes the cowardly way out, refusing to tell the story of his dishonorable behavior toward Nastasia, this is what pushes her over the edge. She abandons the game and, as the ultimate “F*** You,” throws the all-important question of Gania’s proposal over to the Prince. (The protagonist of the book, by the way, who everybody else regards as an irrelevant, if lovable, idiot.)
The result is a sense, on the reader’s part, that all of this could have unfolded differently, if certain variables had been different, or if characters had made different choices along the way. Each step along the path feels lifelike and logical, but also important, and that’s what keeps you reading a story: the sense that every moment is going to influence what happens next.2
In Dostoevsky, every moment, every four-page soliloquy by one character or another, is important. Everything causes something else to happen. He planned it all out, or felt his way through it on instinct; the latter is probably even more impressive. His social scenes are elaborate Rube Goldberg machines, and all the components are people. That’s why he’s the G.O.A.T.
1.1: All That, And In Translation
I’ve heard that none of the translations of the Russian greats come close to the beauty of the original works, and I believe it. When I read great writers in English I feel awe at the melodies and rhythms of their language, the simple clean beauty of their sentences. I didn’t get much of this out of Dostoevsky, which makes me all the more astounded; the things I felt were precipitated entirely by content, and hardly at all by style.
That's a new phenomenon for me. The other transcendent reading experiences of my life3 have always had a major stylistic component—in addition to profound content, a way of using words that astounded me. But Dostoevsky got there in translation, on the strength of its substance alone. I was blown away, basically, by the things the author chose to have characters feel and say and want and do. (My other great reading experience this year was the Chekhov short story collection The Lady With the Dog and Other Stories. Same deal.)
2: Why Dostoevsky is a Hopeful Writer
People say Dostoevsky is depressing and I used to think this also. This thesis is based on the fact that a lot of sad things happen in his books. But ultimately I don’t agree that Dostoevsky’s works—at least the ones I’ve read—convey a depressing or cynical outlook on life.
Take the prince from The Idiot. This was one of Dostoevsky’s attempts to create a “realistic” “Christlike” character. The prince is honest, loving, and selfless to the utmost degree, and he cares for everyone around him, but (spoilers) he doesn’t save the people he wants to save, and his actions don’t earn him happiness in the end.
This might lead you to interpret the book as an argument that honesty and selflessness don’t work in the real world; that Christlike behavior only makes sense in theory, and not in practice. But there are a couple problems with this. First, everybody in the book loves the prince. They admire him, even if they think him an oddity. Second, when everybody’s lives go astray, it’s not because the prince led them there—it’s because they didn’t listen to him. He was trying to help, but they didn’t want his help; and the fact that they wind up unhappy, as does he, is the result of this “turning away.”
So I don’t think it makes sense to read The Idiot as a satire of the prince’s naïve worldview. I think Dostoevsky thinks the prince is right—that honesty, unconditional love, and compassion for the unfortunate are the correct pillars to build your life around, and that straying from that path—even if it’s to pursue your own self-interest—will only cause you pain.
Dostoevsky’s optimism also comes through very strongly at the end of Crime and Punishment, which (spoilers) I consider a happy ending, even though the murderous protagonist is in a Siberian labor camp and sentenced to remain there for many years. The book ends at the moment the protagonist repents, at the moment he sees the possibility, until then never imaginable, of redemption. The message is clear. No matter how far you stray, there is always a chance to redeem yourself, if you are brave enough to face the consequences of your actions.
The Brothers Karamazov includes similar sentiments, and has perhaps the most hopeful and “positive” ending among the three novels under discussion. It also contains long (and highly enjoyable) segments of preaching and parables from the good-hearted Father Zossima, who argues very convincingly in favor of optimism and universal love.
Dostoevsky was subjected to a mock execution early in his life, before he was sent off to a Siberian labor camp himself, and another place where his optimism reveals itself is in his books’ frequent references to the psychological experience of a man being led to his execution. Dostoevsky suggests that a person in this position will be grateful for every remaining moment of their life—every house and upturned face they pass. And even if there are only two streets remaining between them and the guillotine, it will feel like a generous eternity to the condemned. The message there seems clear to me also: life is a precious gift, and every moment of it should be treasured. Again, not a pessimistic view.
2.1: Historical Context and Caveats
In real life, Dostoevsky had some axes to grind, especially with the political radicals of his day, who were the forerunners of the Russian Revolution. Per the Encyclopedia Britannica:
Dostoyevsky began to attack the radicals, who virtually defined the Russian intelligentsia. Dostoyevsky was repulsed by their materialism, their utilitarian morality, their reduction of art to propaganda, and, above all, their denial of individual freedom and responsibility. For the remainder of his life, he maintained a deep sense of the danger of radical ideas, and so his post-Siberian works came to be resented by the Bolsheviks and held in suspicion by the Soviet regime.
[…]
[Crime and Punishment’s protagonist] Raskolnikov, despite his denial of morality, sympathizes with the unfortunate and so wants to kill the pawnbroker just because she is an oppressor of the weak. His most famous theory justifying murder divides the world into extraordinary people, such as Solon, Caesar, and Napoleon, and ordinary people, who simply serve to propagate the species. Extraordinary people, he theorizes, must have “the right to transgress,” or progress would be impossible. Nothing could be further from Dostoyevsky’s own morality, based on the infinite worth of each human soul, than this Napoleonic theory, which Dostoyevsky viewed as the real content of the intelligentsia’s belief in its superior wisdom.
Honestly the Britannica article expresses a lot of this stuff better than me. But suffice to say that in Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov respectively, the cynical radicals Raskolnikov and Ivan Karamazov attempt to argue that traditional morality can be supplanted by reason and intellect; the events in these books serve as Dostoevsky’s takedown of these beliefs, with both characters driven to madness and the ultimate realization that, yes, there is such a thing as “good” and “bad.”
Dostoevsky is considered conservative, and he opposed the radicals of his day; I think if you apply the current (American) definitions of “conservative” and “radical,” though, it can be a bit misleading. Dostoevsky, who grew up poor and—unlike Tolstoy, Turgenev, etc.—outside the landed gentry, believed that the subjugation of the poor and weak by the rich and powerful constituted a great moral catastrophe. This led him to join the intellectual group that got him near-executed and imprisoned (Britannica again):
In 1847 Dostoyevsky began to participate in the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of intellectuals who discussed utopian socialism. He eventually joined a related, secret group devoted to revolution and illegal propaganda. It appears that Dostoyevsky did not sympathize (as others did) with egalitarian communism and terrorism but was motivated by his strong disapproval of serfdom.
And it’s this point that leads me to believe he would be disgusted by the abject horror we inflict upon the poor, homeless, and hungry around the world today, and the ostentatious accumulation of wealth by an ever-smaller elite. He certainly wouldn’t side with the conservatives who have formed whole political platforms around insisting that these people—rich or poor—deserve what they get.
2.1.1: Moral Contradictions
Unfortunately, many of Dostoevsky’s other political beliefs do not hold up so well today. He shared many prejudices and xenophobias that were common among his contemporaries, including virulent anti-Semitism, and the moments where these tendencies are visible leave a distasteful mark on even his greatest works.
Though the literary Dostoevsky delves with great compassion and empathy into the miseries of the unfortunate, and the unfairness with which suffering is inflicted on those who are already suffering—Sonia and her family in Crime and Punishment, Ilusha and his family in The Brothers Karamazov, etc.—in real life, and especially in his later years, Dostoevsky’s political views ranged from reactionary to downright hateful (more Britannica):
Instead, he was drawn into expressing his political views, which, during these two years (1876-77), became increasingly extreme. Specifically, Dostoyevsky came to believe that western Europe was about to collapse, after which Russia and the Russian Orthodox church would create the kingdom of God on earth and so fulfill the promise of the Book of Revelation. In a series of anti-Catholic articles, he equated the Roman Catholic church with the socialists because both are concerned with earthly rule and maintain (Dostoyevsky believed) an essentially materialist view of human nature. He reached his moral nadir with a number of anti-Semitic articles.
When the anti-Semitism crops up in Dostoevsky’s books, which it does, it is extremely off-putting, and it makes one wonder why the guy couldn’t apply his tremendous regard for the “worth of each human soul” to this group of oft-persecuted human souls. It’s a prejudice that sometimes sorely undermines his artistic project, e.g. in The Brothers Karamazov, when it gives the supposedly Christlike figure Alyosha a very un-Christlike flaw—betraying a lack, on Dostoevsky’s part, of the very compassion and universal love that he seems to be advocating.
The contradiction of Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitism with the rest of his message stands out clearly to the modern reader. To refute hateful prejudices like anti-Semitism, you don’t have to look much further than Dostoevsky’s own teachings about empathy and universal love. But he never seems to have made that connection himself, and as a result this is something that a modern reader must “read around”/contextualize as they go. I certainly wouldn’t blame you for declining to try these books as a result.
3: Wrap-Up
Dostoevsky never stopped arguing against cynicism and hopelessness. He never stopped refuting the (then, as now, popular) view that life is a meaningless struggle, and morality an imaginary system that the intelligent and/or powerful have a right to overrule. He believed it was possible to reduce human suffering worldwide, even if his proposed solutions were, in real-life political treatises, pretty psychotic. In contrast to those cringy late-life op-eds, his novels suggest that fixing the world begins with love, selflessness, and honesty. The novels suggest that redemption is always possible, and hope is always logical, no matter how far from the light we stray.
For a 19th-century writer known to write about depressing stuff, I think that makes him pretty uplifting. It’s true that his personal prejudices lead to moments where he contradicts the rest of his message; but it’s also true that “rest of his message”—empathy and universal love—provides a very strong basis for rejecting those prejudices in the first place. In a way, then, Dostoevsky refutes his own worst tendencies, and provides the tools to identify where he strayed from his own beliefs.
I think it’s worth reading his books—at least the three I can vouch for—and I’m kicking myself for not reading them earlier. If they make an impact on you, it will be because they help you appreciate life for the miraculous gift it is—and because they help you see the good in the hearts of the people you share this planet with.
Part One of this essay, on conquering cynicism and self-reflexivity as a writer, is here.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, maybe the most-quoted 20th century philosopher, believed language could not be used to access higher truths about our existence—the meaning of life, the existence of God, etc.: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” But Wittgenstein loved Dostoevsky, and purportedly read The Brothers Karamazov many times; I wonder how close he thought the novelist got to certain of those unattainable facts, even if they had to be sketched out indirectly?
I started to think about causality this way when I read George Saunders’ craft book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. (More on that here.) Quote: “For most of us, the problem is not in making things happen, but in making one thing seem to cause the next. This is important, because causation is what creates the appearance of meaning… Causality is to the writer what melody is to the songwriter: a superpower that the audience feels as the crux of the matter; the thing the audience actually shows up for; the hardest thing to do; that which distinguishes the competent practitioner from the extraordinary one.”
E.g. Jesus’ Son (D. Johnson), Infinite Jest (D. F. Wallace), Song of Solomon (T. Morrison)
Really enjoyed this and learned a lot, Justin. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina has long been one of my favorite novels for similar reasons you outline, but I've never read Dostoevsky's work (Angie has), and this is a good push to finally dive in.
Insightful piece. Thanks!