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While in prison and exile Dostoevsky had associated closely with people of lower-class origins--peasants and poor city

dwellers. He found that these common people identified the progressive intelligentsia (of which he himself had been a part before his arrest) with the land-owning, serf-holding classes. It was bitter for Dostoevsky to learn that those intellectuals, who worked for progress and improvement in the lives of the poor and disadvantaged, were considered by those whom they were trying to help to be not one whit better than those who were oppressing them. He was appalled at the convicts' deep and undiscriminating hatred for the upper classes. Dostoevsky began to feel that the only way to restore unity and harmony among Russians was for the educated upper classes to reject the imitation of European ways and ideas and to return to a uniquely Russian manner of life.

The specific characteristics of such a way of life would include the following: (1) a basis in family life, with patriarchal relations within families and democratic relations between families; (2) recognition of the primary importance of religion (that is, the Russian Orthodox church) and the religious way of life; (3) meek acknowledgement by all that their own faults are at the root of personal failure and social disorder--that is, that all are guilty; and (4) a striving for a life of mutual support, both moral and physical, and of brotherly love for all. The slogan for this program was "return to the soil," in the belief that the program gave a true representation of the uniquely Russian way of life and character. Hence the name of the group that formed around these ideas was the Pochvenniki (from pochva, the Russian word for soil). Dostoevsky's supporters included the critic and poet Apollon Grigoriev and the critic and philosopher N. N. Strakhov. In the politics of the time, the Pochvenniki were considered an anti-progressive group, conservative certainly, and perhaps even reactionary. Their program was publicized largely in the pages of the two magazines that Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail published in the early 1860s, Time (1861-63) and The Epoch (1864-65).

In 1862 Dostoevsky went abroad. He visited France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and England. In London he attended the 1862 World's Fair and had a first-hand look at the Crystal Palace, the architectural wonder of the age. The image of the Crystal Palace, which for progressive critics symbolized the dawning of a new age of reason and harmony, was to loom large in Dostoevsky's works to come, especially Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment. In 1863, leaving his ailing wife behind, he made a second trip to Europe. (Marya Isaeva, Dostoevsky's first wife, died in 1864.) Dostoevsky's Works, 1859-1863

The first of Dostoevsky's works to excite critical attention following his years of prison and exile was Notes from the House of the Dead (1860), an account of his experiences in prison, told in the form of a collection of biographical and psychological sketches of his fellow inmates. The book was especially welcomed by liberal critics because of its sympathetic approach to the subject and its realistic portrayal of the sufferings of the convicts. In 1861, Dostoevsky published his first long novel, The Insulted and the Injured, also to critical acclaim. It is the story of a young student of middle-class origins, a person of sensibility and talent, whose life is ruined by the ill will of a cynical aristocrat. The novel features a complicated plot with many separate lines and many characters. This book inspired the leftist critic N. A. Dobroliubov to epitomize Dostoevsky's leading quality as his "pain for man, his impassioned defense of the moral and human worth of downtrodden people."

In 1863 Dostoevsky promptly disillusioned his supporters in the liberal camp with his next work, "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions," an essay concerning his tour of Europe. In this essay, he attacked the west European dream of the triumph of reason. He resisted the idea that it was possible to achieve and ensure perfect human happiness and contentment on the basis of a rational ordering of society. Then, in a series of other essays, Dostoevsky began to attack the leading liberal critics outright, especially their views of art and the artist. Such are the articles "Mr. -bov [i.e., Dobroliubov] and the Question of Art" and "The Crocodile" (an attack on the views of N. G. Chernyshevsky). Notes from Underground Notes from Underground was first published in January and February of 1864 as the featured presentation in the first two issues of The Epoch, Dostoevsky's second journal of the 1860s. The novel was written at one of the lowest points of Dostoevsky's career. His first journal, Time, had recently failed, his new journal was threatened with failure, his wife was dying, his financial position was becoming ever more difficult and embarrassing, his conservatism was eroding his popularity with the liberal majority of the reading public, and he was increasingly the subject of attack in the liberal and radical press. On March 20, 1864, Dostoevsky wrote to his brother, Mikhail: "I sat down to work on my novel. I want to get it off my back as soon as possible, but I still want to do it as well as possible. It has been harder to write than I thought it would be. Still it is absolutely necessary that it be good: I personally want it to be good. The tone now seems too strange, sharp, and wild; perhaps it will not right itself; if not, the poetry will have to soften it and carry it off."

Many aspects of Notes from Underground--and especially, as Dostoevsky himself noticed, the tone--seem strange, sharp, and even bitter. To some extent, the bitterness of the novel is traceable to the many personal misfortunes Dostoevsky suffered while the novel was being written. Much more important, however, was the influence of his maturing world-view with its ever colder and more distant attitude toward the European liberalism, materialism, and utopianism of his younger years. Dostoevsky had begun his career as a writer in the 1840s as a romantic idealist, even a dreamer. (See his portrait of the young dreamer in his early story "White Nights.") At that time he had devoted a great deal of attention to utopian socialism and its vision of a perfectly satisfying, perfectly regulated life for humankind. This perfection of life was thought to be achievable solely through the application of the principles of reason and enlightened self-interest. In fact, it was maintained that given the dominance of the rational and the spread of enlightenment, perfection of life must necessarily follow.

While Dostoevsky was in prison and in exile, these ideas of utopian socialism were becoming stronger in Russia. They passed from the dreams of the 1840s to the basic revolutionary program of the late 1850s and 1860s. Dostoevsky, however, had concluded from his observations while in exile that there was more to "man" than reason and enlightenment. (Note that Dostoevsky, as did other writers of his time, used the term "man" or "men" to refer to all humankind.) He became convinced that men were capable of the irrational as well as the rational, and that, in fact, the irrational was in many ways man's essential element and the rational was often only a flimsy construction built upon it. More than any of his other fictional works, Notes from Underground clearly expresses this conclusion about the essential composition of the human mind.

In addition to expressing Dostoevsky's debate with the liberals and radicals of his time, Notes from Underground can also be seen as a specific and direct polemic with one of the most famous revolutionary novels of the 1860s, N. G. Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done. Chernyshevsky was the leader of the radicalist movement in Russia. In 1862 he was arrested, and during a solitary confinement lasting 678 days he wrote What Is To Be Done, which became his most famous work. This book has the general appearance of a novel but is really more a handbook of radicalism. The tenuous plot serves primarily to link one monologue or conversation on a point of radical policy with the next. The "revolutionary youth" of the time used What Is To Be Done as a guide to

behavior and ideology for the next twenty years. Rakhmetov, the hero of the novel, became the prototype of hard-headed materialism and pragmatism, of total dissatisfaction with the government, and of the self-sacrificing nobility of spirit that was the ideal of many of the radical intelligentsia. Critical Responses to Notes from Underground In general, critics have taken Notes from Underground as an ideological document rather than as a novel. Thus, criticism has been radically divided-on the one hand, warm praise for the novel from Dostoevsky's kindred spirits and admirers of his views on personality and ideology, and on the other, denunciation from the liberal, optimistic, common- sensical, and rationalist camp. The division in critical thought existed from the very beginning. M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826-1889), a journalist and novelist of liberal and even radical sympathies, was one of the first to attack Notes from Underground. His review of it appeared in the Contemporary in May of 1864. The review was a sharply satirical attack, focussed especially upon the portrayal of the main character. Saltykov-Shchedrin considered the underground man to be a totally fantastic character; he dismissed him as the product of a troubled mind, and as irrelevant to the human condition in general. At the same time, Apollon Grigorev (1822-1864), the most influential critic among Dostoevsky's friends and supporters, published a review in which he greatly praised the novel. First, he said, Notes from Underground offers an extremely perceptive and profound view of man. Second, the novel deserves high praise for its well-crafted construction (especially the relation between the two parts) and for its beautiful style. As had happened so often before, the opinion of the liberal critics prevailed. Dostoevsky's portrayal of the structure of the human mind and of human motivation was new and surprising to many people of his time. Most people found it hard to accept the idea that the "underground man" was in any way related to them. As a result, it was easy for them to dismiss the entire work as a fantasy or, at best, as an interesting study of a disturbed mind. (This was so often the fate of Dostoevsky's works! Even today, the name of people who regard the novel in this way is legion. In the Soviet Union, Notes from Underground was usually regarded as the darkest blot, with the possible exception of The Possessed, on Dostoevsky's record as an author. In the West, too, one often meets this view, though at present, very rarely in print. Yet one suspects the attitude is there, slumbering until fashions in criticism again allow it to appear.)

For N. K. Mikhaylovsky (1842-1904) Notes from Underground was the prime example of that "menagerie of beasts of prey" of which he maintained Dostoevsky was the cruel and heartless trainer. Further, in his essay "A Cruel Talent," Mikhaylovsky wrote: Dostoevsky purposely teases his animals, shows

them a sheep or a piece of bloody meat, beats them with a whip and a redhot iron, in order to observe one detail or another of their anger and cruelty-to look for himself and, of course, to show it to the public. Of "that section of the menagerie which is called Notes from Underground" Mikhaylovsky wrote that ...the hero tortures because he wants to, he likes to torture. There is neither reason nor purpose here, and, in the opinion of Dostoevsky, they are not at all necessary, for absolute cruelty an und fr sich is interesting.

V. V. Rozanov (1856-1919) approached Dostoevsky's work as a student of philosophic and religious thought. He had already rejected positivism, materialism and rationalism, and the approach to Dostoevsky advocated by rationalists like Mikhaylovsky and Dobrolyubov. Rozanov found in Dostoevsky a spiritual teacher and leader and valued him as a great prophet. He was one of the first to point out that in many respects Notes from Underground was the intellectual key to understanding the novels that followed it. He understood Notes from Underground as a sort of textbook to the mature work of Dostoevsky. Rozanov found that Notes from Underground concerned itself with the following major points: (1) criticism of the idea that it is possible for humankind, by means of reason, to create a perfect society and to abolish suffering. (2) the idea that human imperfection is a law of nature and the cause of human suffering; by this reasoning suffering is, if not justified, at least made acceptable. (3) the idea that humans are essentially irrational and incomprehensible beings, capable of the most noble and at the same time the most base actions.

Before the 1917 revolution, Maksim Gorky (1869-1936) was a major writer of the liberal, progressive, and protesting camp. After the revolution he became an important figure in the Communist government and the opinion-setter for much of Soviet criticism, especially after 1932. This was especially true of the attitude toward Dostoevsky Soviet critics usually adopted. Between 1906 and 1913, Gorky worked on a history of Russian literature but left it unfinished. Some fragments were published in 1939. Of Notes from Underground Gorky wrote that it was the perfect example of Dostoevsky's "very tormenting and barren" writing. Moreover, he said: Notes from Underground clarifies nothing, does not exalt the positive in life, but, dwelling on the negative aspects only, fixes them in the mind of man, always depicts him as helpless amid a chaos of dark forces, and can lead him to pessimism, mysticism, etc. He summarized the ideas present in Notes from Underground as the "anarchistic ideology of the defeated."

Many Soviet critics accepted Gorky's disparaging comments on Dostoevsky as substantially correct. But they tried to save as much of Dostoevsky's work as possible from oblivion. Their main stratagem was to interpret Dostoevsky's works as criticism of his time rather than as universal and timeless portraits of humankind. This approach is fruitful to a certain extent with a few of the novels, notably some of the early works and Crime and Punishment. It fails almost completely with Notes from Underground. The best that the timid apologists for Notes from Underground were able to do was to paint a sympathetic picture of the author's personal wretchedness at the time the novel was written and to suggest that the strangeness and bitterness of the work are the result of Dostoevsky's personal unhappiness. In short, they seem to suggest, it is Dostoevsky's personal misery that speaks in Notes from Underground, not Dostoevsky himself. And in fact it is possible to list several causes for Dostoevsky to have been miserable: his recent exile; the illnesses and resultant deaths of his wife and his brother; a guilty love affair; the suspension of his journal, and the danger faced by its successor; his own debts, and the huge debts of his brother for which he had assumed responsibility; and his steadily worsening epilepsy. Leonid Grossman, a very able Soviet critic, at one time sought to picture Notes from Underground as a somewhat out-of-focus version of what he regarded as one of Dostoevsky's most important themes--the inviolability of the human personality. In Notes from Underground, Grossman said, this theme is distorted from defense of the inviolability of the personality to advocacy of an "arrogantly defiant self will." Thus, he suggested that it was possible to read even Notes from Underground if one read it in a certain way--making mental allowance for Dostoevsky's unfortunate perversion of what he meant to say. Grossman published this notion in the 1920s. Later on he was forced to recant, to withdraw even this partial attempt at reclaiming Notes from Underground for the Soviet reader. A recent statement adequately summarizes the prevailing attitude of Soviet critics until quite recently. Notes from Underground is said to be a counter-revolutionary slander; the characters in it are "marionettes, mere semblances of people. They move in a void, and no efforts of the genius could conceal the white strings with which he set them in motion." No doubt the coming of "glasnost" and the fall of the Soviet state will mean many new voices in Russian Dostoevsky criticism.

Notes from Underground has met with far greater success in the West than in the Russia. Unlike Soviet scholars, Western critics do not compile lengthy lists of personal calamities to account for the tone and ideas of the novel. They have, in general, worked from the notion that Dostoevsky wrote Notes from Underground as he did not because his wife was dying, his epilepsy was worsening, or his financial position was bad, but simply because the way he

did it was the way he wanted to do it. Notes from Underground is assigned a most prominent place within Dostoevsky's works by existentialist critics. JeanPaul Sartre, especially, has found in the underground man a forerunner and spokesperson for existential philosophy. To Sartre, the book and the character are especially important in the clear acknowledgement they make of man's essentially irrational nature.

Perhaps the most balanced work on Notes from Underground is the section devoted to it in Edward Wasiolek's book, Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction. Wasiolek works with the novel, mainly from the philosophical rather than aesthetic viewpoint. He understands its value in much the same way as Rozanov did, as a key to understanding the longer novels. Wasiolek outlines the major themes touched upon by Dostoevsky through the underground man: (1) attack on rationalism (2) attack on social utopianism and materialism (3) the vision of man as a being who is capable of the most incredible generosity and nobility and, at the same time, also of the greatest baseness. (4) the portrayal of man's motives as stemming ultimately from man's slavish desire to gratify his own self-will. Furthermore, Wasiolek points out the ambiguity of Dostoevsky's portrayal of the underground man. In the novel, the underground man is both a thoroughly despicable and petty person and a "hero," a typical man. Dostoevsky's ambiguous relation to the underground man is typical of his apparent relation to the strong-willed heroes of his later novels-- Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, Ivan Karamazov. Kant's Aesthetics in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground

David A. Goldfarb

Mid-Atlantic Slavic Conference, Columbia University, 18 March 1995

When we consider Dostoevsky, we tend to think first of a literature of existential despair, alienation, and a resulting amoralism. Nothing seems further from Dostoevsky than either the Idealistic aesthetics or the strict ethics of Immanuel Kant, who is the direct object of the narrator's contempt in Dostoevsky's Zapiski is podpol'ia. Critics have tended to read the Underground Man's rant as a direct expression of the author's view, though it contains so many contradictions that it cannot be said to express any view, directly. I would like to step back from the text, set aside the problem of the

author's intention,1 and read the text anew as fiction, to ask, despite the Underground Man's frequent jibes at Kant's theory of "the sublime and the beautiful" in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (14),2 is there a more profound sense in which Dostoevsky affirms Kant's theory? Dostoevsky and Kant seem strange bedfellows, because Dostoevsky's supreme man of ressentiment, who admits of chance as a motive for action, and acts out of "spite" rather than adherence to a rigid moral imperative, appears to be the antithesis of the follower of Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. The fundamental principle of the categorical imperative, recall, is this: "Act on that maxim which can at the same time have for its object itself as a universal law of nature" (Kant, Groundwork 105 [81]).3 While Kant has traditionally been criticized for the rigidity of this standard of universality, particularly in cases where seemingly universalizable beliefs come into conflict, we should note that Kant's placement of adherence to law as the highest principle embodies a regard for others that is not entailed by moral skepticism. The skeptic allows no adjudication of conflicting moral principles, because they are rooted in private sentiment, and not facts that could be subject to reason. Kant's test demands that moral principles be universalizable in form.

There seem to be two motivational principles for action suggested in the Notes from Underground. The one that leads us to the familiar existentialist reading is the moral skepticism of the principle, declared by the narrator to Liza in part II, that "the world can go to hell, as long as I can always have my tea" (83).4 The underlying tenet here is the Humean claim that there is no rational argument against such a view, because morals are matters of sentiment rather than of fact. This is precisely the sort of ethical claim to which Kant was responding, when he proposed the test that one must "Act always on that maxim whose universality as a law you can at the same time will" (Kant, Groundwork 104 [81]). If the belief that "the world can go to hell, so long as I can always have my tea" were universal, no one would get any tea.

We cannot take this principle as stated at face value, if we want to come up with a consistent reading of the Underground Man's beliefs. If the Underground Man actually believed that "the world can go to hell, so long as I can always have my tea," he would, after all, really be Chernyshevsky's egoistic man, always directed by the motive of vygoda, "advantage," "comfort" or "pleasure." It is clear that Dostoevsky's polemic toward the end of Part I is directed against Chernyshevsky's view, so we would have to take

this declaration of utilitarian egoism as a case of the narrator "lying," something he admits to having done frequently, "out of spite" (4),5 or as what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the "loophole" that allows the Underground Man to contradict himself, turning his monologue into dialogue (Bakhtin 233).6 The narrator is taking up Chernyshevsky's position, here, for the purpose of beating it down elsewhere. This fact does not yet entail an acceptance of Kantian ethics, but we can certainly see that Kant and Dostoevsky have a common enemy in utilitarianism.

The Underground Man is also motivated by an aesthetic principle. If morality were the only motivation for action, after all, we would not need to worry about it. The masochistic idea that the Underground Man would break out of Chernyshevsky's "crystal palace" merely for the sake of doing so, is highly consistent with Kant's aesthetic notion that the feeling of the sublime is produced by violating the boundaries of the elegant and the useful, and that the pleasure of the sublime is one wholly unto itself, serving no other function. As Kant states it in the Critique of Judgement:

The beautiful in nature is connected with the form of The object, which consists in having [definite] boundaries. The sublime, on the other hand, is to be found in a formless object, so far as in it or by occasion of it boundlessness is represented, and yet its totality is also present to thought. Thus the beautiful seems to be regarded as the presentation of an indefinite concept of understanding, the sublime as that of a like concept of reason. Therefore the satisfaction in the one case is bound up with the representation of quality, in the other with that of quantity (Kant, Judgement 82-83). The aesthetic principle of the sublime in the context of Dostoevsky has clear ethical consequences, we shall see, blurring the distinction between ethics and aesthetics. The narrator seems to launch a direct attack against the "sublime and the beautiful," but the reader will again have to gauge whether he is "lying out of spite." In the narrator's most protracted lampoon involving Kant's aesthetic, he imagines himself having become a sentimental critic, "drinking to everything beautiful and sublime." "I would have sought out the beautiful and sublime in the nastiest, most indisputable trash," he says.

I would have become as tearful as a wet sponge. An artist, for example, has painted a portrait of Ge. At once I drink to the artist who painted that portrait

of Ge because I love everything beautiful and sublime.... I'd demand respect for myself in doing this, I'd persecute anyone who didn't pay me any respect. I'd live peacefully and die triumphantly--why, it's charming, per fectly charming! And what a belly I'd have grown by then, what a triple chin I'd have acquired, what a red nose I'd have developed (14).7 The object of satire here is hardly Kant's theory, but the imperiousness of certain critics and their insipid appropriation of German Romantic aesthetics as a marker of unrelated social status. Notice that the expression "beautiful and sublime" in these satiric references (e.g. 32) appears always as hendiadys, "i prekrasnoe i vysokoe" (4:171) where the items do not describe an opposition of quality and quantity, but a single sublimely beautiful thing. It seems as if, for the moment, the narrator does not even understand that there is a difference. The narrator must be "lying," adopting a pose here, however, because his strongest argument is saved for the very Kantian notion of a "pleasure of despair" (7),8 or a masochistic, sublime pleasure in pain. For Kant,

The feeling of the sublime is . . . a feeling of pain arising from the want of accordance between the aesthetical estimation of magnitude formed by the imagination and the estimation of the same formed by reason. There is at the same time a pleasure thus excited, arising from the correspondence with rational ideas of this very judgment of the inadequacy of our greatest faculty of the sense, in so far as it is a law for us to strive after these ideas (Kant, Judgement 96, my emphasis). This feeling is once removed from the objects in question. The pain does not result from the immensity of nature itself, but the inconsistency of the imagination and reason. The pleasure results from our sense of our potential to comprehend that inconsistency. It is a feeling in the mind that results from a representation in the mind removed from reality, like Dostoevsky's dialogue itself, which Bakhtin describes as "a word about a word addressed to a word" (Bakhtin 237). The difficulty that the comparison of Dostoevsky to Kant reveals is not between these two thinkers, but between Kant's ethics and Kant's aesthetics themselves: It seems that the pursuit of sublimity somehow sets aside morality. The sublime is a purely subjective feeling, while morality demands universalization in Kant. Kant compares the sublime and the beautiful, thus:

We must seek a ground external to ourselves for the beautiful of nature, but

seek it for the sublime merely in ourselves and in our attitude of thought (Kant, Judgement 84). The feeling of the sublime is entirely internal, the painful pleasure of the apprehension (within the mind) of inconsistency between reason and imagination (within the mind). Kantian morality entails the application of will beyond the self, and the imagination of others inflicting that will onto the self in turn, externally. Dostoevsky posits painful pleasure as a response to nature in the opposition to "consciousness" or reason. The moans of a toothache, for instance, "express the sufferer's enjoyment,"9 the narrator says. Particularly they "express all the aimlessness of the pain which consciousness finds so humiliating, the whole system of natural laws about which you really don't give a damn, but as a result of which you're suffering nonetheless, while nature isn't" (10-11).10 The humiliation of consciousness in the face of nature's limitlessness is exactly Kant's description of the feeling of the sublime. The sublime is the pain resulting from the failure of reason to comprehend the immensity of quantity in nature.11

This feature of the sublime might in turn explain Dostoevsky's idea of the conflict between free will and "arithmetic." On the one hand, the Underground Man is making a straightforward argument that the relation of human desires to interests cannot be understood mechanistically when he states:

You'll shout at me (if you still choose to favor me with your shouts) that no one's really depriving me of my will [in Chernyshevsky's Crystal Palace]; that they're merely attempting to arrange things so that my will, by its own free choice, will coincide with my normal interests, with the laws of nature, and with arithmetic (22).12 But having anticipated the question, he asks in response to his imagined interlocutors, "But gentlemen, what sort of free choice will there be when it comes down to tables and arithmetic, when all that's left is two times two makes four? Two times two makes four even without my will. Is that what you call free choice?" (22).13 The narrator's observation that , "Two times two makes four even without my will" really has nothing to do with the belief that desires could be rationalized. Either the Underground Man is reading Chernyshevsky too literally and becoming incoherent, or "arithmetic," here, is no longer a metaphor for the mechanistic understanding of desire, but rather the expression of an opposition between human quantities and the infinite.

"Even if man turned out to be a piano key, even if this could be demonstrated to him by natural science and pure mathematics," the narrator claims, "even then he still won't become reasonable; he'll intentionally do something to the contrary, simply out of ingratitude, merely to have his own way" (22).14 That is to say, if human desires could be reduced to small rational numbers and simple ratios, the desire for sublimity would impel us to reach beyond the bounds of the known for a glimpse of the infinite. How could the rational even have meaning if we could not imagine the irrational?

Though a detailed analysis of the second part of the Notes from Underground is beyond the scope of this paper, we might observe that we can read it as a demonstration of the Kantian pursuit of the sublime. Each event in succession--the attempt to get thrown out of a bar, the clash with the officer on the Nevsky Prospekt, the confrontation building to the challenge of Zverkov to a duel, the abuse of Apollon, the servant, and finally the sentimental seduction of Liza that results in a treacherous rape--pushes the limits of violence and humiliation further and further. In each case the the object of the Underground Man's offense is increasingly helpless, while his psychological relation to his object is closer, increasing the depth of possible shame. He has constructed a sequence of events in which, as he states earlier, "each thing will be more repugnant than the last" (40).15

This sequential and additive violation of the moral boundaries might be taken as the moral enactment of dialogue. Each scene entails a boundary to be violated through its loophole. The state of continuous violation is a way of remaining suspended in the sublime, and in the end, the Underground Man indicates that he really does know the difference between the "beautiful and sublime," when he asks, "Which is better: cheap happiness or sublime suffering?" (88).16

Taking this problem into consideration, the Underground Man might be seen as acting not out of "spite" as he claims, but from a maxim that one ought assert the freedom of the will for its own sake, even doing harm to oneself (see 20) in a world where good action would be universally regulated by appeal to Chernyshevsky's "advantage" or "self-interest." Stated this way, the problem suggests the solution that perhaps the feeling of the sublime is the source of judgement in the assessment of maxims that might serve as "universal laws" in the way Kant suggests, and ironically, that the Underground Man exemplifies Kant's aesthetic-moral principle that "[I]t is just

this freedom from dependence on interested motives which constitutes the sublimity of a maxim and the worthiness of every rational subject to be a lawmaking member in the kingdom of ends; for otherwise he would have to be regarded as subject only to the law of nature--the law of his own needs" (Kant, Groundwork 106 [85]). The Underground man's ironic "individualism" is not about satisfying his own needs, but fulfilling the maxim of individuality for its own sake, even when his own material needs are contradicted. It is individualism without egoism.

Dostoevsky's Detractors

Victor Terras, Brown University

In his lifetime, Dostoevsky was not blessed with laudatory reviews. (1) So much so that, with time, he became defensive about the artistic quality of his work and excused himself by having had to write hurriedly, without a chance to pay attention to stylistic niceties. Anybody familiar with Dostoevsky's notebooks, drafts, and galley proofs knows that this was not true. But generations of critics have used these remarks of Dostoevsky's to corroborate their negative assessment of his art.

Most negative opinions about Dostoevsky's art boil down to an assertion that, while his works are of some interest psychologically or otherwise, their artistic quality is low. (2) Dobroljubov said in fact that it was "below criticism." (3) Some more recent critics, such as Bunin and Nabokov, concur. Some negative criticism was and still is caused by the critics' disagreement with Dostoevsky's ideological positions. I shall discuss here only criticism directed at Dostoevsky's art. (I do realize that it is often difficult to keep "art" and "ideology" apart).

As regards novelistic structure, some critics have seen Dostoevsky's plots as chaotic and disorganized (in particular, those of The Idiot and The Possessed), (4) others have found them "Gothic" and aimed at cheap effects; (5) still others have charged Dostoevsky with excessive naturalism ("copying court records"). (6) Many critics have found Dostoevsky's characters unnatural, schematic, and contrived. (7) The observation that they all talk alike - like the author - is heard often. (8)

Even more intense is the criticism levelled at Dostoevsky's stylistic craftsmanship. From the very beginning, critics found his style prolix, repetitious, and lacking in polish. (9) Often enough Dostoevsky was also found to be obscure, pretentious, 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 small.

Great moral flaws have also been found in Dostoevsky's works. The charge heard most often is that of pessimism. (10) Almost as often, the outr, 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 Mikhailovsky's essay of that title appeared in 1882. (11) Dostoevsky's fascination with the extremes of the human condition is condemned by many critics. Less common are charges of insincerity, unctuousness, (12), and "rosy Christianity." (13)

The truth content of Dostoevsky's works has also been challenged.

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In particular, he is said to have pursued the exceptional instead of the typical. Tendentious distortion of reality is a common charge, (14) as is that of faulty psychology. In an age of realism, Dostoevsky's penchant for the fantastic, the paradoxic, and the mystical met with much disapproval. A criticism heard somewhat less frequently is that Dostoevsky develops his psychological dramas in the abstract, without a natural background. Also, some critics claim that Dostoevsky's psychological analysis keeps him from presenting credible whole characters. (15)

These opinions, each voiced by more than one critic, may be assumed to be representative of a substantial body of readers and deserve attention not only in terms 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. In terms of a well spaced and economically developed linear plot, a Dostoevskian novel with its multitude of minor characters and subplots, inserted anecdotes, philosophic dialogues, the narrator's essayistic and other digressions is hardly "well structured." But this linear or syntagmatic view ignores the wealth of paradigmatic structures which do quite as much to integrate the text to form an organic whole as an elegant linear plot would: leitmotifs, recurrent imagery, mirroring, doubling, symbolic foreshadowing, parallelism, situation rhyme, and other such devices.

The charge that Dostoevsky's novels have Gothic traits, featuring high or perverse passion, intrigue, murder, suicide, etc. is of course valid. Dostoevsky's answer to such criticism was that extremes were more revealing of the essence of the human condition than the so-called "average." This is a fundamental question on which Dostoevsky disagreed with most of his contemporaries. (16) Maximilian Braun has wisely suggested that Dostoevsky's forte were precisely the crises, rare but still real, of human life, while he had less of an eye and ear for everyday life: courtship and marriage, making a living, raising a family, etc. It depends on one's Weltanschauung which one considers more important. (17)

The charges of "naturalism" are also justified. This goes both for Dostoevsky's use of topics and details of current journalistic interest, as well as for his frequent depictions of the seamy side of life and of distasteful traits of personal behavior, the latter noted with disapproval by Leont'ev. (18)

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 Eliseev in The Brothers Karamazov are indiscreetly recognizable and quite cruel. They are also drawn satirically, as social types. But all this can hardly be considered an aesthetic blemish, no more than Aristophanes' lampoons of Euripides and Socrates, unless one clings to a narrow conception of the realist novel, excluding satire from it on the grounds that it distorts reality. More serious is Saltykov's charge that in Dostoevsky's

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Idiot there appear, "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." (19) Similar impressions come from Mikhailovsky, Tolstoy, and others, who all found Dostoevsky's characters artificial, contrived, and carelessly executed. This includes Kirillov, Stavrogin, Shatov, and Pjotr Verkhovensky, called "pale, pretentious, and artificial" by Mikhailovsky, (20) while Tolstoy's identical charge refers to The Brothers Karamazov as a whole. (21) These opinions may be explained by the fact that the characters perceived as artificial and contrived were in fact created as ideas incarnate. They owe their life to the ideas which possess them. Their social and psychological Gestalt is a function of these ideas. The disagreement between Dostoevsky and those of his critics who would rather see ideas as a function of a character's social and psychological identity is of a basic nature. It is, broadly speaking, the disagreement between idealism and positivism.

The most damaging of the charges levelled at Dostoevsky's characters is that "they all talk alike" - like the author. It has been heard often, ever since Belinsky, (22) and from as authoritative a reader as Tolstoy. (23) It clashes with the opinion, held by many critics, that Dostoevsky is a master of individualization, and most of all, with Bakhtin's polyphonic theory of the Dostoevskian novel. (24) How can this contradiction be resolved? It is a fact that Dostoevsky, never a writer "from his notebook," 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 are of course a part of the author's ideological argument. (25) Furthermore, more than most writers, Dostoevsky tends to introduce a literary subtext into his dialogue, a trait which deconstructs its authenticity. The justification for all this is that Dostoevsky's novels are not primarily novels of manners, of even realistic social novels, but are rather in many ways close to the tradition which began with the Platonic dialogue. They are novels about ideas as much as about people.

The reputation of a poor stylist has accompanied Dostoevsky ever since the publication of his first work. In this instance, the critics' negative opinion is

the result of a misunderstanding which 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, rather than a homophonic narrative dominated by the narrator's voice. Hence a controlled, economic, and well integrated narrative style is not what Dostoevsky pursues. He will write elegantly only when the voice in question demands it. (26) If one disregards the "polyphony" argument, Dostoevsky's distinctively popular, half colloquial, half journalistic manner, which places his works with the romanfeuilleton and with Trivialliteratur at large, may be legitimately seen as an aesthetic flaw - or as an innovative trait.

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 true of Dostoevsky's alleged pessimism. Thus, an often heard criti-

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cism of The Idiot is that the Good, personified in Prince Myshkin, seems wholly ineffectual and the Ideal which the Prince pursues quite incompatible with life. (27) Such criticism is invalid from Dostoevsky's Christian viewpoint, as the Swiss theologian Walter Nigg has eloquently demonstrated. (28) On this Earth, says Nigg, "a Christian must fail." 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 with regard to the charge that the atmosphere created by Dostoevsky is sickly, hysterical, outr (as he said himself). Nietzsche once called the evangelic world a mixture of the sickly, the childlike, and the sublime. The fervent excitement which permeates Dostoevsky's world is a trait which it shares with every ambience of religious or political ferment, that of the Pauline epistles, for example.

As for the "cruelty" of Dostoevsky's talent, a charge raised by V. P. Burenin (29) even before Mikhailovsky's celebrated article, and reiterated by Nabokov, who speaks of Dostoevsky's "wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity," (30) this is yet another matter that depends on the critic's point of view. A remark by Saltykov, rather to the same effect, may put this

trait in the right context. Speaking of Notes from Underground, Saltykov suggests that the point of this work is to show that every man is trash, nor would he ever become a good man until he will become convinced that he is indeed trash. Saltykov 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." (31) The meaning of Saltykov's Aesopian comment is, of course, that Dostoevsky has taken his hero to the depths of abjection and degradation only in order to then lead him on to faith and salvation. From a Christian viewpoint, there is nothing wrong with this. It is difficult for a reader who does not share Dostoevsky's Christian convictions to see Marmeladov, that image of abjection and degradation, as the most positive character of Crime and Punishment (discounting Sonja, who is a saint), but from Dostoevsky's Christian viewpoint he is just that.

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 non-believer, such as Nabokov, will find the reading of the Gospel which brings together "the murderer and the harlot" quite intolerable; (32) the believer will find it edifying. Leont'ev's charge of "rosy Christianity" is apparently correct with regard to some of Dostoevsky's writings, though not with regard to the spirit of his total oeuvre.

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. (33) Belinsky said that madmen (Dostoevsky's Goljadkin, in this case), being atypical, "belong in lunatic asylums, not in novels." (34) Dostoevsky, in commenting on his novel years later, said that he had heralded, in this character precisely, an important new social type. (35) Analogous disagreements between Dostoevsky and his critics were repeated in connection with almost every work of his. Dostoevsky

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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 Tolstoy would appear as what they were, representations of Russia's past. (36)

The charges of outright distortion of reality relate mainly to Dostoevsky's understanding of the mood and moral attitude of the young generation of the Russian intelligentsia. These charges were - and still are - politically motivated. (37) Significantly, Dostoevsky's image of the simple Russian people is not challenged.

Ever since the 1840s, Dostoevsky had the reputation of a keen psychologist. Even then there were some critics who found his psychologism excessive. In the 1860s and 1870s, charges of excessive psychologizing were made frequently. (38) Occasionally, a critic, Dobroljubov, for example, (39) would also claim that Dostoevsky's psychology was faulty or schematic, but most of all it would be suggested that Dostoevsky's morbidly self-conscious and selflacerating characters were unrepresentative of the actual condition of Russian society, but were, rather, projections of Dostoevsky's own diseased mind. (40) The answer to this particular charge is the same as that to the charge of the exceptional or fantastic quality of Dostoevsky's plots and characters: Dostoevsky's "underground man" has continued to exist as a living type for a whole century after his first appearance.

As for the charge that Dostoevsky developed his psychological dramas in a vacuum, without a natural background, (41) I believe that it is unfounded. A careful reader will find that each scene in a Dostoevskian novel is provided with more aptly chosen genre detail than most novels of his age. Some critics have said that external details, such as food and drink, clothing and land- or cityscape, are missing in Dostoevsky. This is simply not true. There is ample material for an article "On Food and Drink in The Brothers Karamazov;" for example. Each of the major novels contains a great deal of topographic detail, specifics of byt, and many personalized and perfectly "normal" minor characters. The many critics who have emphasized the dramatic quality of Dostoevsky's novels, Nabokov in particular, (42) are often blind to the profusion of purely novelistic traits in Dostoevsky's works. Hungarian Structuralists on Dostoevsky: A Review-Article

Kirly Gyula. Dosztojevszkij s az orosz prza. (Dostoevsky and Russian Prose). Budapest: Akadmiai Kiad, 1983.

Arpd Kovcs. Roman Dostoevskogo: Opyt poetiki zhanra. Budapest: Tanknyvkiad, 1985.

Gyula Kirly, Arpd Kovcs et. al., editors. Orosz irodalmi dikkr: Dolgozatok, 1969-1979. (Student's Studies in Russian Literature). Budapest, 1981. (Mimeographed manuscript)

During the last fifteen years a whole new generation of Dostoevsky scholars appeared in Hungary, who, following the example of George Lukcs and Bakhtin, set out to investigate both the structuralist principles of the novel and their applicability to the novels of Dostoevsky. The two concerns have not appeared as separate areas of study, but rather, as Kirly points out in his very impressive study, the solution to Dostoevsky's novels has appeared to him as a precondition to the solution of the theoretical questions of the genre itself. In other words, this very ambitious undertaking reevaluated critically the entire heritage of word-oriented criticism of Dostoevsky, and the novel in general, beginning with Dostoevsky's contemporaries, such as Strakhov, and continuing through the 1920's, with Tynianov, Shklovskii, Bakhtin, Skaftymov, Grossman, Dolinin, and on to our contemporaries, such as Komarovich, Askol'dov, Fridlender and others.

The basic notion is that studying the poetics of the novel, i.e., the structural principles of the genre, one arrives at "scientifically" mesurable solid results, in contradistinction to the ideological, sociological, i.e., ideational, analysis of the novels. The word "poetics" is thus taken in the same broad sense as the theoretical studies of the poetical forms understand it, in applying it to their own area of study. Chronologically, the manuscript volume, "The Students' Studies on Dostoevsky" shows the earliest published results of this school of thinking. Of fifteen different studies, six are devoted to Dostoevsky (four deal with Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, while the rest treat more traditional topics: Pushkin, Goncharov, and, interestingly enough, also Bunin!). In the fifteen years since the first of these studies was written, quite a few of these young scholars have become professors in the field; for instance, Lszl Haller (specialist on Bulgakov) and Arpd Kovcs (a prolific scholar dealing mainly with nineteenth-century literature, especially Dostoevsky). Looking at

these essays, one is struck by the high quality of scholarship in them: most of them are well versed in critical literature (especially Russian and Soviet sources), 153

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and they show a general tendency of trying to be "scholarly" (nauchny in the Russian term), that is, moving away from "ideological", "sociological" interpretations, and approaching their subject matter from the point of view of formalistic, structuralistic or related theoretical backgrounds. They do seem to know Western literary criticism, too (Mochulsky, E. Wasiolek, Berdyaev), but they do not seem to be unduly impressed by them; the Western critics are perceived as "old-fashioned" - in need of a critical reevaluation. Bakhtin appears to be a central point of reference, even though, quite interestingly, he too comes in for criticism: his merits are treated almost in a matter-of-fact way, while the limits of his insight receive more attention. The discovery of Soviet Dostoevsky scholarship of the 1920's, e.g., A. Skaftymov, Tynianov, Tseitlin, etc., is a definite innovation in this respect,- an indication that Bakhtin is thought of not as an exclusive single giant, with no predecessors, but rather as the continuation of a certain historical trend in Soviet research on Dostoevsky.

The above statements could be applied to practically all of the abovementioned essays, and they are relevant also to the monograph published by one of these former students, now professor at the Budapest University, Arpd Kovcs. His Roman Dostoevskogo, published by a Hungarian publishing house specializing in pedagogical texts, is regarded as a sort of textbook on the structuralist, semiotic approach both to Dostoevsky's novels and to the theory of the novel in general. In very clearly organized chapters Kovcs presents the problem, the methodology, and the limitations of the poetical approach to Dostoevsky's novels, dealing first with the main concepts of the theory itself: "Predmet, metody i zadachi issledovaniia", "Roman Dostoevskogo v issledovaniiakh poetiki, svoistva struktury krupnykh romanov i printsipy interpretatsii"; "Roman 'prozrenie' kak predmet poetiki zhanra"; and finally a chapter on the Gogolian tradition: "0 evoliutsii zhanrovykh printsipov: Gogol' i Dostoyevsky"). The novels Crime and Punishment, the Idiot and the Possessed are analyzed in the main body of the work, while Gogol's Overcoat, and Dostoevsky's Poor People and Notes from the

Underground serve as the concluding chapter in order to point out the development of the tradition and the possibility of its interpretation with the author's method.

For this reviewer the most interesting chapters were the historical overviews of the critical heritage because they convincingly argue for the need of a coherent point of view in Dostoevsky literary scholarship. Obviously a formal, structuralist, or semiotic interpretation of Dostoevsky certainly has an important point to make in any attempt to interpret Dostoevsky's works consistently. As convincing as these chapters are, the chapters dealing with application of the theory raise, at least for this reviewer, more questions than answers. Can you, indeed, explain Dostoevsky's essence by this method? It appears that the effort (especially the very difficult, and to my mind stilted language, which is supposed to indicate the seriousness of the theoretical undertaking) isn't worth the results. Kovcs himself seems to be aware of this when he writes:

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, , ; , . , , . (. 349-350) This sort of humility - frequently missing from many "scholarly" investigations appears to us as a saving grace in Kovcs' study. (Or, to use an analogy, the use of the genetive singular may be a fascinating linguistic inquiry into Pushkin's use of language, but to present the results of such a study as the "essence" of Pushkin's poetry, obviously would be stretching the limits of credulity). If any criticism should be raised against Kovcs' book, it would be in the sphere of the language of presentation. I'm not talking about his having written the book in Russian (an interesting phenomenon, incidentally; a Hungarian scholar, writing in Hungary, and the book published by a Hungarian textbook publisher - in Russian! - which may, perhaps, be a way of breaking through the much-lamented "language barrier" of the Hungarians,

when it comes to a lack of international recognition of Hungarian literature and literary scholarship in general), - but rather the tendency to use an "internationalized" vocabulary in Russian which gives the text the flavor of a machine-translated technical manual. So, for example, words appearing in the Russian text, mentioned here at random: dominant, detalizirovat', eksplitsirovat', modelirovat', ignorirovanie, eveliutsionirovat', denotat, etc. The reader is reminded of the language of A Clockwork Orange with such constructions as: "My drugi and I in the moloko bar..." This tendency to make the Russian more "international" does not come from any deficiency in knowing the proper use of the language, but rather, I think, from a theoretical inclination to present one's findings in a "scientific" terminology; in that way one competes with "hard" sciences both for prestige and, perhaps unconsciously, for resources of the state agencies, who clearly give preference to "scientific" investigations.

Compared with Kovcs' book, Kirly's is rather more voluminous; it was published two years earlier. Kirly appears to be the founding father (he is a former professor of Kovcs) of the current school of Hungarian Dostoevsky criticism. This volume under review is Kirly's definitive presentation of his method, which, according to the very impressive and long list of his publications in this area, is the result of more than two decades of preoccupation with the problem. Kirly's investigation of the problem is fueled by the same basic concern that Kovcs' was: to solve the theoretical issues of the novel as a genre, as a form of literary thinking, and to do it by investigating the development of the "Russian novel," especially Dostoevsky's novels. The assumption is that Dostoevsky has given something basically new to this particular genre, which had been developing over a considerable period. It is not difficult to detect here the notion, based perhaps upon Lukcs and other Marxists, that literary forms.

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just as "social structures", are subject to some sort of Hegelian dialectics, i.e., they develop and achieve "higher and higher" forms of development. Studying both this process and the principles of the process should give to researchers the same sort of security that Marxist economists, sociologists, etc., enjoy in structuring and restructuring human societies. Kirly, of course, never says these things; as a matter of fact, his entire method is really anti-

ideological, or one could say "value-free". He is scornful of those who seek ideological values in Dostoevsky's works: "The basic problem of the Idiot, in comparison with the review written by Saltykov-Shchedrin about the novel by Omulevskii, could not really be solved by any of the critical schools, including the Marxist. The reason for this is that everything written since the naively realistic narodnik approach of Mikhailovskii - The Cruel Talent - has been written one way or other under the influence of Mikhailovsky's suggestive ideas... The positivistic, academic literary historians, the aestheticians, as well as the religious critics of the turn of the century, all fell into the same pitfall insofar as they all have identified Dostoevsky with his heroes, or with his narrator. There's no way to count all the critics - even in our own time who are completely convinced that in talking about the ideational content of Dostoevsky's heroes, they have grasped the very ideas of the writer, the very ideas of his works. The most extreme positions are taken in this respect by the religious critics, the psychoanalysts and the representatives of the sociological schools. But the Marxists themselves have not remained behind in this race for false interpretations. .. The literary and aesthetic tradition, not evaluated from a historical point of view, forced one to simple alternatives: either to accept certain things from the past which one wanted to see continue or reject the past." (p.375.)

The above statement shows that Kirly's intentions are rather ambitious: his is not simply another form of Marxist literary criticism of Dostoevsky, but a completely new, "scientifically" verifiable, "value-free" theory.

Seeking the results of Kirly's theoretical investigations, (or of Kovcs'), one expects some strikingly new revelations about Dostoevsky. To the disappointment of this reviewer, he found none. This does not mean, however, that Kirly's book is an exercise in theoretical hair-splitting. I do believe that Kirly, along with the Hungarian Dostoevsky school, has undertaken an important work: the clarification of some of the formal aspects of the novel as a literary way of expression. And they do go about it in a very conscientious way: Kirly's book is a goldmine of critical commentaries on the Dostoevsky scholarship of the last 100 years (especially in Russia). But Kirly's language is very difficult, full of technical, confusing vocabulary, and a truly horrible sentence structure. Reading more than 500 pages of this difficult text does not reward the reader with a sufficient number of revealing insights.

Still, in another review, I have suggested the need for a translation into English of some other West European languages of this volume, because I believe that Kirly and his

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talented pupils are doing something worthwhile in international Dostoevsky scholarship.

Laszlo M. Tikos

University of Massachusetts

V. IA. Kirpotin. Mir Dostoevskogo. Statii. Issledovaniia. Vtoroe, dopolnennoe izdanie. Moskva: Sovetskii pisatel', 471 pp. Cloth, 2r.

This second edition of Kirpotin's Mir Dostoevskogo includes many of the same essays as the first edition of 1980, such as the title article, "Dostoevsky's World", as well as "Lebedev and Rameau's Nephew", "Dostoevsky, Strakhov and Evgenii Pavlovich Radomskii", "The Story 'The Eternal Husband' and Dostoevsky's Poetics", "A Raw Youth", "The Unique Genre of A Raw youth", "The Refuted Version" (on the death of Dostoevsky's father), and "The Pushkin Speech of Dostoevsky". The most substantial of these essays are the ones on "The Eternal Husband"(79pp.), "Lebedev and Rameau's Nephew"(55pp.), and "Dostoevsky, Strakhov, and Evgenii Pavlovich Radomskii" (49pp.).

The new material in the second edition comprises an additional one hundred thirty-two pages and was originally written over a period of twenty years from 1962 to 1982. Some of these essays are "Utopia in the Novel The Brothers Karamazov" (58pp.), "Philosophy and Art in the Works of Dostoevsky"(8pp.) "Dostoevsky's Alternative" (29pp.), "Dostoevsky on Pushkin's 'Egyptian Nights'" (13pp.), and "Dostoevsky on the Fate of European Civilization" (24pp.).

Missing from the revised edition is an interesting section on the representation of Dostoevsky's works in the theatre and in films, which includes reviews of the Moscow Art Theatre performance of "Selo Stepanchikova" (1970), the Gorky Theatre production of "The Idiot" (1966), the film of The Brothers Karamazov directed by I. Pyr'ev (1969), and the film version of Crime and Punishment directed by Lev Kulidzhanov (1970).

An introductory note states that some of the new material in the revised edition was written for the Dostoevsky Year, the 100th anniversary of Dostoevsky's death in 1981, and was published in journals of that time. Professor Kirpotin's latest research is represented by the article "Utopia in the Novel The Brothers Karamazov", which is published here for the first time. In this article Kirpotin notes that as an artist Dostoevsky was constantly changing - none of his works is similar to any other - and so did his vision of Utopia change over time. In the 186Os he was influenced initially by George Sand's utopianism and by the Slavophilism of Khomiakov and Danilevskii. Dostoevsky's view was a synthesis of Christian socialism and utopianism, "not very clear", according to Kirpotin. By the 1870s Dostoevsky was writing about Russia's unique historical role in an article called "The

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Utopian Understanding of History" published in the June 1876 issue of the Diary of a Writer, which extolls the messianic role of Russia and Orthodoxy in the unification of the Slavs and justifies Russian ambitions with respect to the acquisition of Constantinople. Kirpotin proceeds to discuss Versilov's dream of a Golden Age and the landscape of Claude Lorain in A Raw Youth and the portrayal of Zosima in the Brothers Karamazov as yet other versions of Dostoevsky's vision of utopia. Zosima's ascetic quietism is viewed by Kirpotin as a flaw in the formulation of the novel, a flaw only outweighed by Dostoevsky's masterly characterizations.

The article "Philosophy and Art in the Works of Dostoevsky" attempts to refute Berdyaev's interpretation of Dostoevsky's philosophical point of view by mustering arguments from Hegel and Lenin. His position is that Dostoevsky was primarily an artist whose works conformed to the demands

of his art and not to a systematic philosophical position. "Dostoevsky was contradictory; false social positions frequently restricted or even distorted the strength of his artistic vision, but nevertheless Dostoevsky never ceased being an artist concerned with objective reality." (p.382)

"Dostoevsky's Alternative" is in part a response to Mochulsky's interpretation of Dostoevsky as a great proponent of Christian thought. Noting how frequently Dostoevsky's letter to Fonvizina has been quoted - "'If someone demonstrates to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if truly the truth excludes Christ, I would rather remain with Christ than with the truth.'" (p.393) - Kirpotin counterposes a quotation from the writer's notebooks: "'If I believe in God for fifteen years, and then it occurs to me that it is a lie because he doesn't exist - No, it is better that I remain unhappy but with the truth than happy with the lie.'" (p.393) Among the writers influenced by Dostoevsky's contradictions Kirpotin discusses Kafka, Camus, and Gabriel Garcia Marques. "Despite the ideologues of reaction, Dostoevsky remained a humanist." (p.410)

Valerii Iakovlevich Kirpotin, born in 1898, professor and scholar at the M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, has published a number of other works about Dostoevsky, including Molodoi Dostoevskii (1947), F. M. Dostoevskii: Tvorcheskii put', 1821-59 (1947,1960), Dostoevskii i Belinskii (1960), Dostoevskii khudozhnik (1972), and Razocharovanie Rodiona Raskol'nikova (1970). He has been a member of the editorial board for the Polnoe sobranie sochinenii F. M. Dostoevskogo, and he has also edited the collected works of Saltykov-Shchedrin, Nekrasov, and Chernyshevskii. He is a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

Frances Isley Hardie

Vanderbilt University

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Lev Matveevich Reinus. Tri adresa F. M. Dostoevskogo. L: Lenizdat, 1985. 80 pp. Paper, 35k.

In his brief monograph L. M. Reinus offers an amazing amount of new information concerning Dostoevsky's frequent sojourns in Staraia Russa during the last eight years of his life. He shows how the settings and certain characters in Besy, Podrostok and Brat'ia Karamazovy, especially the latter, owe a great deal to Dostoevsky's impressions of Staraia Russa (a city, incidentally, that has existed, despite its modest size, since the Kievan period). In my opinion Reinus's conclusions are so convincing as to constitute proof of the precise influence of the city, its environs and its inhabitants on Dostoevsky as artist.

Reinus has been doing research in this area for at least twenty years, probably longer. It should rightly be called a labor of love. Though his sources include such standard materials as the letters and memoirs of Dostoevsky's wife, children and other relatives, he has also interviewed (already long ago) a good number of the oldest inhabitants of Staraia Russa - children of Dostoevsky's landlords and the like - finding a number who saw the place as Dostoevsky had. From these persons and their relatives Reinus obtained important recollected details, drawings and photographs. (The book has about thirty illustrations covering a period of one hundred years.) The only criticism I have of Reinus's work is that he does not give sufficient information about his sources. For instance, he quotes from letters without giving place of publication and page number, or he may fail to give the date of an interview. However, most of his sources seem to be verifiable, though perhaps with difficulty.

Reinus's title refers to the fact that Dostoevsky lived in three houses in Staraia Russa. The first he rented from Ivan Ivanovich Rumiantsev in the summer of 1872. The second he rented from Aleksandr Karlovich Gribbe in 1873 and shortly thereafter purchased, living in it every summer with his family through 1880. The third he rented without his family just for the winter of 1874-75 from Evtikhii Ivanovich Leont'ev, a retired major-general. In these houses he wrote part of Besy, almost all of Podrostok, and the greater part of Brat'ia Karamazovy, as well as several issues of Dnevnik pisatelia and the Pushkin speech. Only the house that he owned has survived to the present time. In 1898 it was rebuilt by Dostoevsky's former landlord, Rumiantsev. It was badly damaged by the Germans during World War II (a photo taken of it in 1944 is reproduced), and it was not restored until 1961. In 1969 an exposition of Dostoevsky's life and work, planned by G. I. Smirnov, was held in the downstairs portion of the house. Finally in 1981 a Dostoevsky Memorial

Museum was established in the author's former home.

Reinus provides a wealth of fascinating data about Dostoevsky's life in Staraia Russa. Not all of this is new, but Reinus does the reader a service by gathering it all into one volume. He also tells a great deal of what went on in Staraia Russa for a number of years after the death of Dostoevs- ky. Of greatest significance is Reinus's discovery of the

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degree to which Dostoevsky made use of Staraia Russa in writing Brat'i? Karamazovy. There is no doubt in my mind, after reading Reinus's book, that Skotoprigonevsk is Staraia Russa (a city, by the way, housing a stockyard; cattle were driven there from the south). Of course, there was some minor rearrangement of details. For instance, the house of Fedor Pavlovien has the outside appearance of Rumiantsev's place, but it is located on the site of the Gribbe house. The green gazebo was not "next door" in Staraia Russa, but actually in Dostoevsky's own garden (behind the Gribbe house). Stinking creek had its source in the streamlet Malashka, flowing behind that same house. The "Stolichnyi gorod" tavern frequented by Dmitrii and where Ivan and Alesha "get acquainted", is none other than the "Ermitazh" of Staraia Russa, situated next door to the stockyard and owned by I. D. Zemskov. Likewise identified are Iliusha's poor church, the mahogany furniture in Grushen'ka's house, Grushen'ka's actual dwelling (located near the cathedral), and Grushen'ka herself. The woman living in the house in Staraia Russa that was like Grushen'ka's house in the novel was also named Grushen'ka - Agrippina Ivanovna Menshova. She had an unhappy love affair with a young officer before finally marrying. (We learn something about her personality from Reinus.) Similarly, we find outlines of Dmitrii Karamazov in a certain Dmitrii Il'inskii of Staraia Russa. And the sources of various other characters are brought to light: Grigorii, Samsonov, M. M. Makarov, and so on.

This sort of information is by no means trivial - especially as there is so much of it, so well tied together. It complements nicely Dostoevsky's many other sources that we know about. Naturally we realize that the source is nothing next to the final artistic transformation, but Dostoevsky is a great writer and

we wish to know everything about him. Reinus has provided us with excellent new information in a commendably succinct monograph.

Donald M. Fiene University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Georges A. Panichas. The Burden of Vision: Dostoevsky's Spiritual Art. (Gateway Editions) Chicago: Regnery Gateway, Inc., 1985. 216 pp. Paper, $8.95. (Originally published: Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmanns Pub. Co., 1977)

A new paper edition of George Panichas's Burden of Vision is very welcome. This study concentrates on Dostoevsky's five great novels; it shows how these works express Dostoevsky's prophecy, his "burden of vision", which includes both hope and the despair of spiritual death. The need for spirituality in order to be human in modern secular society is a recurring theme.

The author insists on the necessity for spiritual criticism

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with a moral and judgmental basis for spiritual art. The "responsible" critic must practice "moderation" and "boldness" in his work, making moral distinctions and facing the "fact" of evil and a "real Satan", in opposition to modern tendencies to reject religious, moral, and humanistic standards. Panichas succeeds as a moral critic in examining the spirituality of some of the major characters of these novels, although he often seems to be more bold than moderate in his analysis. The reader must accept his religious premises, as well as his perception of Dostoevsky's "radical" and "apocalyptic" Christianity, to be able to fully concur with some of his strong conclusions. However this study does include many references to various theologians and philosophers (notably Simone Weil) as well as to literary scholars of Dostoevsky, which contribute to a more well-rounded analysis.

In the first chapter, "Schism", analyzing Crime and Punishment, the author discusses two important features of Dostoevsky's artistic powers: the skillful use of details without reflection, as shown in the description of the murders, and the sense of drama, which is "translated" into prose fiction. The fantastic and exceptional, integral elements of spiritual art and "the very essence of reality" to Dostoevsky, are "rendered as drama and revealed as prophecy." (p.46) By asserting his will Raskol'nikov, as a prophetic depiction of modern man, achieves only "an external freedom without depth and hence without an abiding and inner substance." (pp.35-36) His sensitivity and humane feelings, expressed when he falls to Sonja's feet, prevent him from being a superman "above grace and humility" and allow him to transcend his adherence to theory. Thus, with his "breakthrough" in the epilogue, hope joins despair as part of Dostoevsky's prophecy.

The Idiot, described in the second chapter "Terror", may be seen as "not only Dostoevsky's most personal but, in some ways, his most profound novel." (p.47) Terror, an important spiritual and religious element, results from contact with the inaccessible goodness of Myshkin, the solitariness of existence without divine assistance, and the constant nearness of death, showing the full significance of the terror of suffering. Terror is especially noted in the references to Holbein's picture of the dead Christ, as well as in the great apocalyptic scene of Myshkin and Rogozhin with the dead Nastasja Filippovna. Yet Myshkin is neither a spiritual hero preoccupied with saving the world, nor a guide, or a judge. Rather he is a witness to his surroundings, who is of real help only to the children in Marie's village. His helplessness makes this the "bleakest of Dostoevsky's religious statements." (p.60) With the darkness of Myshkin's final breakdown, all the fragments of this, Dostoevsky's "most fragmented novel", are united, (p.77) Yet even in the despair of this terrifying conclusion there is hope since "holy terror" (Berdiaev's term) is "part of the pain of affirmation" (p.87), a "spiritual and purifying form of revelation." (p.54)

In "Satanism", his analysis of The Devils, Panichas emphasizes the necessity for moral commitment in criticism in his

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study of Stavrogin. He explains his understanding of Dostoevsky's perception of evil and of a very real Satan to whom Stavrogin has surrendered. "Such evil cannot be explained as only what is inexplicable in life for this abrogates religious faith itself and moral responsibility." (p.94) He believes that other critics have been "consistently and overwhelmingly timid and irresolute" in their analysis of him. (p.91) Stavrogin must not be seen as a "romantic archetype of Satan", someone searching for values, with whom one should sympathize, for this prevents one from perceiving the dimension of the evil he represents. This absolute evil shows through his disguises, such as the self-deception of his false confession with Ikon, and is evident in his complete lack of positive development. Stavrogin surrenders to the very real Satan within him. (Dostoevsky's idea of Satanism is completed with the devil being with Ivan Karamazov. (p.1OO) The author believes that we also must face the "reality" of Satan. "It is grievous, too that modern man refuses to acknowledge the real Satan till he must feel him at his own throat." (p.111) He argues that such evil must be challenged and not faced with Tolstoy nonresistance. By recognizing absolute evil and Satan, Dostoevsky showed himself as a "visionary artist who ... clearly recognized that God suffers the devil to wrestle with men that they who conquer him may be crowned." (p.112)

Dostoevsky's next novel, A Raw youth, is discussed in "Purgation." This, his "most overtly didactic novel" (p.129), is concerned with personality. Panichas defines this search for one's self as a spiritual quest, for personality must have a spiritual substance to have validity. (p.120) The suffering involved in the transfiguration of personality leads to the purgation which helps one discover Infinity, for "the Absolute is the personality's deepest center." (p.123) Disorder, the original title for the work, reflects the difficult process of self discovery. Thus the author maintains that autobiography is an appropriate form here, since "confession is preparation for communion." (p.151) The complicated plot, full of coincidences, illustrates the disorder and has been unjustly criticized, for disorder also represents the "fragmentation of Value." (p. 144) "What some critics take to be incoherence... is in reality mystery. ... Personality is the celebration of mystery." (p.127) The search for personality is more difficult because of the social disintegration, noted in the breakdown of the family. Especially important is Versilov. "The major characters attain their significance either in direct or indirect relation" to this "Christian Hamlet." (pp.133, 134) Since he is continually falling, but not fallen like Stavrogin (a redeeming difference), Dostoevsky shows some sympathy for him, Sonja accentuates his more humane tendencies. His ambivalence towards Katerina Nikolaevna, however, demonstrates the disorder of passion, which to Dostoevsky is "the most brutalizing, all embracing symbol." (p.144)

Arkady needs not only Versilov, but also Makar, as a spiritual father. Together Makar and Sonja show Dostoevsky's "idea of spiritual synthesis" which starkly contrasts with the disorder of Versilov's "secular humanism." (p.149) In this picture of disorder our prophet speaks not only of doom but also

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of hope, for Arkady has slowly realized a spiritual trans- formation and rebirth.

The analysis of "Saintliness" in The Brothers Karamazov concentrates on the often misunderstood figure of Father Zosima. It has been said that he "lacks convincing reality and offers unrealistic solutions to spiritual problems", that he is lacking vitality, and that he doesn't provide a "clear, moral guide." (pp.166, 167, 18O) However, Panichas maintains that the failure to understand Zosima indicates the crisis of faith of modern society and its distance from God. (pp.166, 187) Zosima's answer of love, along with his humility and patience, may contribute to the criticism of his "abstract quality" and negative "pastoral work" which "does not provide clearly defined and estimable advantages or remedies." (p.182) Yet Zosima was meant to have a "revolutionary religious significance", a "new saintliness" for the modern world created from Dostoevsky's "universalized vision" which overcame his own religious prejudices and limitations. (pp.183, 155) This is clearly a controversial view of the author's spirituality. Zosima shows a new Christianity reached through "de-creation", "Dostoevsky's radical and existential answer to the inert Christianity that Ivan castigates and refuses." (p.189) His silence of waiting in the midst of affliction, silence being the word of God according to Simone Weil, allows him to break through the affliction around him. Understanding sin and affliction helps the new Christianity to meet the world of the Karamazovs.

The author fulfills his goal of making a meditative moral criticism of Dostoevsky's greatest novels. Although some of his conclusions may be challenged, his work overall has been stimulating to Dostoevsky scholarship.

Molly Molloy San Francisco Public Library

N.N. Shneidman. Dostoevsky and Suicide. Oakville: Mosaic, 1984. 124 pp. Cloth, $19.95; paper, $9.95.

The stated purpose of this monograph on Dostoevsky and suicide is to "analyze the artistic relevance of suicide in Dostoevsky's novels within the context of the works discussed as well as within the broader spectrum of the psychological and social sciences in order that we may understand better the subconscious motives which often guide man in his actions... and to make an attempt to draw certain conclusions which help determine the function and general significance of suicide in the works of Dostoevsky" (7). Rather than being a study of suicide, however, Shneidman's book is little more than a series of loosely connected character sketches of "actual", attempted, and contemplated suicides in Dostoevsky's fiction and journalism. Little light is shed on the meaning of suicide in literature in general or in Dostoevsky in particular.

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The task that Shneidman undertakes is, to be sure, no easy one. The reasons for and meanings of the suicides in Dostoevsky's novels are so various that it would seem virtually impossible effectively to bring all, or even most of them, together. How, in fact, does one link the attempted suicide of the buffoon Liamshin in The Possessed and the contemplated suicide of Raskol'nikov in Crime and Punishment, the actual suicides of the young wife in "The Meek One" and of Smerdiakov in The Brothers Karamazov, or the suicide of the girl allegedly raped by Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment with the ideological suicide of Kirillov in The Possessed? Shneidman's few attempts to establish links prove less than revelatory. Suicide, for example, turns out to be "a literary device serving to remove a character from the scene" (surely Dostoevsky had at his disposal less drastic means for accomplishing this end), "a method to attach ideological meaning to the actions of a character", "a vehicle for the expression of the author's views", and "a symbol of deep philosophical, ethical, or religious significance" (101) - conclusions (if one can call them that) that fit other authors as well as Dostoevsky and could have

easily been arrived at without having studied the texts in question.

Although it may be hard to imagine that Shneidman, or anyone tackling this subject, would come to brilliant new conclusions about suicide in Dostoevsky's work, a study of this sort could, because of its special focus, yield important insights into some of Dostoevsky's most prominent characters. But here Shneidman's study proves even more disappointing than in its general conclusions. The study proper begins with Dostoevsky's work before Crime and Punishment. But since there is only one suicide - a rather uninteresting one in "Uncle's Dream" - in all of this early work, Shneidman is compelled, in lieu of passing over this whole period entirely, to substitute "self-destructive behavior" for suicide, and then link the self-destructive behavior in the earlier works to suicide in the later works. Armed with such a definition, one could easily, of course, argue that almost all of Dostoevsky's characters are suicidal. Thus, Devushkin's alcoholism, for example, becomes "a means of spiritual suicide" (21) and the guilt of Emel'ian Il'ich, the hero of "The Honest Thief", results "in his total physical annihilation" (24). We also learn that suffering despite its usual regenerative powers in Dostoevsky can have the very opposite effect, presumably when it is self-inflicted: "... In The Insulted and the Injured the suffering of many heroes leads to their total bodily annihilation, leaving no room for spiritually enlightened life." Indeed, this sounds like a fate far worse than suicide itself.

The major part of the monograph is devoted to the novels of the 1860s and 1870s. Most readers will find little, if anything, new in Shneidman's short analyses of Dostoevsky's major suicides, and invariably the most interesting comments are those quoted from other critics. To argue that Svidrigailov commits suicide from despair, and that the despair issues directly from his spiritual bankruptcy, is to restate the obvious. Nor does reducing the question of suicide in Crime and Punishment to the loss of roots (the debauched Svidrigai-

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lov having lost them and the humanitarian Raskol'nikov having I retained them) really add much to our understanding of these characters or the novel.

In fact, these are precisely the kinds of commonplaces of Dostoevsky criticism that need not to be restated as facts, but to be tested, or at least demonstrated in more convincing detail.

There are also frequent inconsistencies. Shneidman justifies Dostoevsky's dispatch of Svidrigailov by saying that "after all there is no room in this world for a superman who does not put his strength to good use" (44); but given his view of Svidrigailov (putting aside his mistaken idea that Svidrigailov and Raskol'nikov are supermen), should not Dostoevsky have gotten rid of Raskol'nikov in the same way as Svidrigailov? Or is axing people to death a better use of one's strength than poisoning them, assuming again that Svidrigailov actually poisoned his wife? Furthermore, there is no attempt made to assess the significance of Svidrigailov's suicide for Raskol'nikov. The received opinions on this matter are not entirely satisfactory and a book which treats Raskolnikov's contemplated suicides should have at least broached the subject. And why is Marmeladov, who throws himself under the wheels of an oncoming carriage, not even considered as a possible suicide? After all, as Shneidman notes, Marmeladov was a suicide in one of the notebook plans, and although he is probably not a conscious suicide, Dostoevsky provides as much unconscious motivation for his suicide as Turgenev provides for the possible suicide of Bazarov in Fathers and Sons or Chekhov provides for the possible suicide of Dymov in "The Grasshopper." Marmeladov does not even contemplate suicide, Shneidman argues, because he does not have the guts. "Indeed, the weak Marmeladov has no 'guts.' In the final version of the novel he needs the strength to fight his addiction rather than to kill himself. As it is, life for him is hell, and therefore, as a believing Christian, he can be saved from suffering by death. Suicide, for Dostoevsky, is the prerogative of nihilists and unbelievers, and Marmeladov is not one of them" (46). It is difficult to understand what exactly is meant here - partly, but only partly, because Shneidman later explicitly discusses suicides of believers ("The Meek One") and suicides committed out of weakness (Olia in A Raw Youth). As he says himself: "Religious belief and faith in immortality can help man to live a useful life, but it is not always able to prevent him from inflicting death upon himself" (93).

I have chosen Crime and Punishment as an example, but readers of the monograph will encounter similar problems with the treatment, among others, of Kirillov, Stavrogin, and Smerdiakov. Of Kirillov, Shneidman writes: "By killing himself Kirillov exposes the logical implications of total freedom with terrible clarity..." (62). Is it all really that logical and clear? Must Kirillov's suicide be interpreted as an example of total freedom? One also does not

know exactly what to make of Shneidman's Interpretation of Stavrogin's suicide: "He does not shoot himself, for that act requires positive action often identified with the romantic, noble notion of self-sacrifice." (Svidrigailov seems temporarily to have

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been forgotten). "Stavrogin is passive and indifferent to the very end. He lets the silk cord do the job. He submits passively to his fate, doing nothing to save himself, just as he does nothing to save all those who look up to him for guidance and support" (64). One wonders who - or what - slipped the noose around Stavrogin's neck.

Scholars and students of Dostoevsky will probably find most interesting the two appendices and the chapter on A Diary of a Writer. Appendix One gives a list of all the "actual", attempted, and contemplated suicides in Dostoevsky's work, indicating the sex and age of the characters involved and their "mode" of putting an end to themselves. Appendix Two quotes in full the suicide notes of fifteen of the thirty-one characters listed in Appendix One. The chapter on The Diary of a Writer has the virtue of putting together most of the important references to suicide in Dostoevsky's late journalism. It is useful to have all this material in one place.

Gary Rosenshield

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Louis Allain. Dostoevski et l'Autre. (Bibliothque russe de l'Institut d'Etudes Slaves, Tome 70) Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1984. 202 pp. Paper, 85 FF. , , , . , (La personnalit de Dostoevski. Paris-Sorbonne, 1979), Dostoevski et Dieu. La morsure du divin (Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1982). , , - , (. 1974)

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, , , - , "" , . , " " (. , . 18 - 19). , , , , , , , . , , , , . " ". THE THESES OF THE PhD DISSERTATION GERGELY SOLTI DOSTOEVSKY: THE IDIOT THE CHARACTER OF MYSHKIN IN LIGHT OF THE LITERARY NARRATION BUDAPEST 2008 Research Topics and Preceding Scientific Results

Our fundamental examination in the dissertation focuses on the main character of The Idiot, on Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, on the hero with whom Dostoevsky intended to formulate the positive beauty. The contemporary critics explained the ambivalence of the literary character as a conflict between the society and the idea described by the writer, while the following critical interpretations perceived it from different points of view, most primarily as an instrument of Dostoevskys poetical intention. In the dissertation we review the classical critical lines of the interpretation of The Idiot (M. M. Bakhtin, A. P. Skaftymov, G. M. Fridlender); based on the notes of the complete edition of Dostoevskys works we follow those scientific topics raised, which were appropriately continued in the present day examination of the novel. We present the current tendencies of The Idiots interpretations through the written scientific forums which facilitated the Dostoevsky research to initiate a systematic and international dialogue within the framework of the research of Russian literature and literary science, see publications such as . and its modern continuation, the periodical a. . On the one hand we review the further modern tendencies of the research history based on an international essay collection published in 2001, exploring the actual research fields and placing the traditional research topics in new perspectives (edited by T. A. Kasatkina). On the other hand, following the scholarly activities of The International

Dostoevsky Society, we cover the lectures of its 13th international symposium, organized in the summer of 2007 under the title of F. M. Dostoevsky in the Context of Cultural Dialogues, and we present how the old, classical research topics can be put in new perspectives by enforcing different aspects. Our objective is to establish such a new perspective in our research, hence we make an attempt to construe the heros poetical character definitely in the process of the formation of meaning in the literary text, and at the same time examine him in the context of literature. Consequently, we examine Myshkin not in connection with the genre of the novel or Dostoevskys hero type in general, we do not approach him on the basis of his psychological motivation, and we do not compile the history of his genesis. The main hero of the novel is the primary mediator of the poetic meaning, thus the different poetical lines organized in the thematic representation and the metaphorical exposition can be integrated into a system through his character. Approach and Methodology We connect the problem of creating the heros character to the question of narration, and we try to show this connection at several levels of the shaping story. In order to achieve this, we refer to and build on the relevant results of theoretical works which, within the framework of the poetic approach of the work of art, offer a point of reference to consider the poetic mobilization of the literary character in the explanation of events and in a wider semantic space. In case of connecting the literary

character with the question of narration at several levels (relying on the approaches of B. V. Tomashevsky, V. Y . Propp, O. M. Freidenberg and Y . M. Lotman), we consider the poetic phenomenon of the hero in a broader sense than the mere definition of the character and his function defined at the level of events. This extension can be produced as a result of specifying the concept of the story and differentiating its levels. We regard the story as a chain of events which can relate to the specifically represented plot line; at the level of the presentation of the events Myshkin several times becomes a story teller. In this way, the character of the hero can be interpreted in connection with not only the story, but also its telling, thus the story itself will be combined with the category of story telling also at the level of the plot. However, the story can also be identified as a story connected to a mythological, symbolical or intertextual figure which is projected on Myshkins character, thus it will be embedded in the interpretation of his plot story. These stories which are not introduced or not completely presented at the level of events are formulated in different poetical methods. This embedding into the plot results in the fact that the semantic boundaries of the story substantially exceed the range of meaning perceivable by the presentation of the events. In this context intermediality (in particular visuality in the novel) can also be examined. Connecting the symbolic level of the story (Cf. a shift in the story) to the intertextual or intermedial levels (applying the primary meaning of the event to other levels of

meaning) and examining the relationship between them, we can consider the forms of the narration of the novels text. On each level mentioned above we have to locate Myshkins figure, the indicated literary character, consequently the interpretation reveals a metaphorical story behind the hero of the plot, and all this is deeply embedded in the history of literature. In the dissertation we separately examine the development of the plot level of the events, where the heroes are also given a role in detailing the plot, see the different stories about their earlier lives, Myshkins figurative narrative style leading to the great ideas of the novel, or the thematic representation of narration on Nastasia Filippovnas evening. Narration can be realized from a special point of view which is not connected to the text of the heroes or the narrator. The figure of Jesus is systematically mobilized by the novels text: the Holbein painting Christ in the Tomb is depicted twice in the plot; Nastasia Filippovna also imagines a painting about him. Holbeins painting can be inserted in the elements of the events since in some way it reflects upon Myshkins ideas and his relationship with the heroes. Moreover, this insertion has its own history which can be specifically revealed through the poetical connection of the visual works of art with the story. We can declare the same about the possibility to interpret Myshkin as a knight figure offered at some points in the plot. Although this knightly quality cannot always be judged clearly at the level of the events, nevertheless it links to important elements of Myshkins story, and Pushkins poem entitled

refers to the way the hero becomes a knight figure in the sphere of the textual poetics. Consequently, in the textual world of The Idiot the different ways of narration can be identified as follows: the detailing of the events represents the line of the heros acts, while becoming the medium of presenting the idea it shifts the interpreter to the level of the metaphorical story. In the presentation of the metaphorical story visuality proves to be a crucial point, and it is presented at the same time as a borrowed story from other works of art (intertext). This level of narration is not only realized in the interpretation of the specific detail of the event but also in the exposition of a metaphorical story shaping in the world of the textual poetics and embedded in the history of literature, moreover, in the history of art. The role of the heroes narration can be described in a narratological examination which at the same time goes beyond the problem of the plot. Myshkins narration within the framework of the poetical narration is a representation of the heros destiny which becomes metaphorical, a demonstration of a universal human experience that can be transformed into a story. Considering the poetical mode of the intertextual narration we complete the interpretation of Myshkin as a knight figure on the basis of Pushkins poem recited by Aglaia. We examine the possibilities of intertextual narration with the help of Pushkins Egyptian Nights. In this intertextual context the narration focuses on the different characters of the love triangle. The idea of the essence of love revealed in the triangle of Myshkin, Rogozhin and Nastasia Fillippovna, is

one of the references that calls the Pushkin intertext based on the poem . Deploying the figure of Jesus on Myshkins story we examine how narration is realized in the poetical context of visuality. On the one hand, the main hero thinks in pictures, on the other hand, Jesus becomes an object of visual representations in the novel. The ability of Holbeins painting that it can fill in the gaps in the presentation of the events becomes a part of Dostoevskys narration realized also through visual products. The reflection of the Jesus figure on Myshkin similarly to the knight figure can be comprehended as a mode of intertextual narration. In order to achieve this we consider in three groups the monographs and essays not only establishing but also supplementing the theoretical and interpretative questions in the dissertation. First we briefly introduce references discussing the main general narratological interpretations formulated within Russian poetics. Scholars interpreting Russian literary works (W. Schmid and M. Drozda) create their concept primarily relying on Pushkins prose. This seems particularly important from our point of view because the whole problem of the narration of Dostoevskys prose is obviously connected to specific features of Pushkins poetics. After discussing the narratological questions concerning The Idiot interpreting the narratological aspects of Bakhtins concept as well as the theoretical viewpoints of R. Feuer Miller and rpd Kovcs, in the second part of our literary survey we have a closer look on the problem of intertextual narration. At this point

we differentiate between the intertexts relating to a cultural paradigm and those linked to specific textual traditions referring to the Jesus and the knight figure. In the third part of the survey we give an overview on essays discussing the relationship of visual and narrative discourses. We also refer to essays examining the works of art appearing in the novel and acquiring a special meaning in the visual context of The Idiot. Analyses In the chapter Myshkin and The Poor Knight at first we examine the original context of Pushkins poem ..., the text of the drama , which recalls the age of chivalry. In our opinion, the main hero, Franz at the end of the drama creates the chivalrous mode of existence. Consequently, the semantic history of the hero in Pushkins drama can be described as the evolution of the meaning of act, service, as their articulation in his personal genre. Hence we examine in detail the situation at the end of the drama appointing the context and revealing the sense of poetic service. Franzs song points out the end of a semantic transformation in the poetics of Pushkins text: the hero removes the shame from himself with this artistic act, and deserves his own glory. Reinterpreting L. Dllenbachs theory of myse en abyme from our perspective, we discuss the question of the possibilities of a characters interpretation through another literary character, and we try to clarify the elaboration in the text of the semantic status of the myse en abyme. Franzs song functions as a myse en abyme in The Idiot, and on the basis of the service it gives a semantic

motivation for the following connection: Myshkin voluntarily removes the shame from Nastasia, which can be regarded as Myshkins glory. The Covetous Knight as an intertext is primarily linked to Rogozhins character, however, this other knightly intertext does not appear as a myse en abyme in the novel. Thus Dostoevskys work can play an interpreting function. Rogozhin, however, as a covetous knight has the chance to become a poor knight, to gain the glory, but still he can not be interpreted as a poor knight figure. The poor knight intertext is exclusively linked to Myshkin. During the evolution of this intertext the possibility of not being able to remove the shame is present though it is not realized extensively in the plot. A reason for this, among others, is that it is not the comical modality of the characters role, pointed out by the Don Quixote intertext that turns into a story. In the chapter Egyptian Nights the question of fragmentary structure is connected to the examination of the completeness of poetic meaning in Pushkins texts. The Cleopatra feature of Nastasia Filippovna takes part in the evolution of the semantic story. On the one hand it indicates the heroine as a victim, while on the other hand her character connects the problem of the experience of love with its re-composition. Nastasia Filipovna is the catalyst of situations in which the textual world reveals again that Myshkin and Rogozhin are one: their figures represent two components, the two ways towards the same completeness. The poetics of the text links the idea of completeness to fragmentariness on different levels.

Contemplation about such a moment of life frequently appears in Mishkins thoughts which can reflect its completeness. The narrators text about him also becomes fragmentary after the Prince leaves for Moscow for half a year. When Nastasia Filippovna is interpreted through the intertextual figure of Pushkins Cleopatra character, we can interpret Myshkins story from a new, therefore a more complete point of view. The Princes love for this woman, which is the service of the poor knight, can also be regarded as compassion (compare: ). On the birthday evening referring to the symbolic meaning of a Cleopatrian feast, Nastasia Filippovna similarly to Cleopatra lets her love for sale naming the price for it. On the basis of the intertextual relationship Myshkins character can also be connected to the problem of completenessfragmentariness. In the case of the heroine it is Myshkin who helps her out transforming the semantic content of a situation (equivalently to that: a characters role) so as she could complete her part in the destiny through his compassion. In the chapter The Holbein painting. The role of The Dead Christ in The Idiot we focus on the question of how the process of semantic evolution is realised in the poetical context of intermediality (particularly: the visual forms of representation). The interpretation of the Holbein-painting puts an emphasis on the concept of beauty, which correlates with Dostoevskys basic concept (compare: the presentation of beauty through the character of Christ) that can be realised with the experience of nonbeauty (doubt, temptation). The Dostoevsky text loses the concept of beauty from time to time and

remarks it again, therefore there is no static concept of beauty in the text. We can also interpret the method of this concepts formation as fragmentary considering that the novels text has to repeat (to reconstruct) the motif, shedding light on the sense of its earlier presentations, too. In this context the reconstructions take part in the creation of the semantic history of the evolution of the poetic meaning. The poetic line of the representation of fragmentary situations can be identified as a chain transforming Myskins ideas expressed in the stories into visual images (compare: expositions linked to the semantic sphere of beauty, compassion, service). Holbeins painting and Nastasia Filippovnas picture connected to it becomes the stressed mediator of these motifs in the novel. The presentation of beauty in a non-canonical way is connected with the noncanonical reception through the character of the main hero. We can approach Myshkins storytelling in such a way that the main hero gives the other characters a share in those experiences which are not given to them by their own destiny. Consequently, the examples of the poetic narration of the novels text examined by us in connection with the plot serve as facilitators giving the recipients a share in destinies through stories which they otherwise would not be able to experience. The acquisition of an unknown destiny is also an interpretative act since it can be linked to a story, or leads to narration based on visual experience, and simultaneously, it places Myshkins character in the frame of the metaphorical story of the masterfollowers relationship developing on the basis of the destiny of

Jesus and the ekphrasis of Ippolit. This is the common context of the problem of beautyvisuality narration in our interpretation. In the chapter Narration Interpretation of the Story revealing the relationship between the roles of Myshkins character we fix how the novel The Idiot interprets its own main hero, namely through what kind of comprehensive, integrative story it points out for him. We examine the creation of unity in the novel as such a story. In the development of this metaphorical story we can also consider Pushkins figure Poor Knight appearing through the novels knightly intertext. The idea of unity linked to Myshkins character includes the aspect of meaning that the service of the main hero (on the other level of representation: knightly) connects with the poetic representation of taking part in others destiny: the main heros desire to create unity (compare: completeness) should be interpreted in the sphere of motifs service and compassiontaking part. Thus the role of the Jesus character turns into a story in a way that preserves Myshkins independence from the symbolic figure the character of Myshkins personage will be separated from Prince Christ of the notes, i. e. from the positively beautiful man. The idea of Christs unity (compare: redemption) is interpreted by Myshkins motif completeness also in Dostoevskys poetics. Examining the plot situation of the love triangle between Myshkin, Rogozhin and Nastasia Filippovna on the conceptual basis unity / completeness, we can reveal the interpretation of the novels

text in connection with the characters. The substitution of the three heroes in the plot and through this the transmission of motifs one into another is emphasized by the love triangle. Through the split motifs linked to characters (compare: sacrificial role, service, doubt) the heroes become the doubles of one another, thus at the end of the novel the characters (according to M. M. Bakhtin) reach their other selves, they become one, they come into unity. The vertexes of the triangle outlined on the symbolic level are constituted by Jesus, the Devil and the object of temptation (the hero). Consequently, the act of the hero reveals who and where is on the way to salvation / to the demonic. The characters roles become interchangeable, the heroes become the projections of each other not only by the brokenness of the motifs but also depending on that (cf. P. Torops theory) on whom the Jesus figure is projected at the given moment in The Idiot already depending on whether the hero with his act steps closer to salvation or the demonic. Jesus appearing as an element of this triangle is not an incarnation: he is a representation which cannot be identified with Myshkins character, nor with the Jesus of the Holbein-painting. In light of the connection between Y . M. Lotmans text theory and the representation of the literary hero, we link to Myshkins character such an invariant meaning which we connect with the presentation of various stories relating to the literary character (i. e. with the variants). In the projection of the figures on each other appearing on the symbolic and mythological levels of the story, a specific meaning of the character develops which is offered by the novels

text to the reader. The static figure (see the invariant essence of meaning, by which the archetypical interpretation can be provided) is in connection with simultaneously appearing stories mobilized by the novels text. Hence the textual world interpreting its main hero becomes a dynamic sphere where Myshkins figure is continually being re-composed thus making any previous representation fragmentary. Summary of Research Results The dissertation presents the poetic formations of the main hero of The Idiot in the process of the constitution of the poetic meaning in the literary text; it connects the structuring of characters with the problem of narration on different levels. The thesis provides an overview on the criticism and references on Dostoevskys novel regarding the problem of narration, thus placing the questions of narratology, the problem of intertextuality and the theoretical literature on the visual storytelling into a common interpretation domain. The scholarly work offering the simultaneous reading of the stories linked to Myshkin in the context of the novels poetic narration connects storytelling to story interpretation. In the chapters containing analyses the dissertation presents Pushkins poem from a new point of view, analysing the interchangeability of the characters roles; through Nastasia Filippovnas Cleopatra features it defines Myshkins compassion for the heroine as a transformation of the semantic content of the characters role making it complete; it interprets

Holbeins painting as an element of the narration in the poetic context of visuality, and connects it with the possibility to present the metaphorical story of the destiny of Jesus. Formerly issued publications on the topic 1. Dosztojevszkij: A flkegyelm. Miskin alakjnak rtelmezshez. In: Kro Katalin (szerk.) Els Szzad. Budapest, 2002, 171196. 2. A kicsinyt tkr jelentsforml szerepe Dosztojevszkij A flkegyelm cm regnyben. A miskini szolglat rtelmezshez. In: Kro Katalin (szerk.). Prbeszdktetek 1. svnyek Turgenyev s Dosztojevszkij mvszi vilghoz. Budapest, 2004, 217250. 3. . . In: Han AnnaHetnyi Zsuzsa (szerk.). Studia Russica XXI., Budapest, 2004, 4248. 4. Jelrendszerek jraformlsa F. M. Dosztojevszkij alkotsaiban (matematika). In: Balzs GzaH. Varga GyulaVeszelszki gnes (szerk.). Semiotica Agriensis 1. A magyar szemiotika negyedfl vszzad utn. BudapestEger, 2005, 5661. (A tanulmny msodik rsze: Szekeres Adrienn, Folklrelemek megjelense a Bn s bnhdsben, 6170.) 5. Puskin Szegny lovagja Dosztojevszkij A flkegyelm cm regnyben. In: Kro Katalin (alkot szerk.). Bevezets a XIX. Szzadi orosz irodalom trtnetbe III. Budapest, 2006, 473478. 6. A flkegyelm Kleoptrja. In: www.gyulakiraly.hu honlap. 15. (2008). Hermann Zoltn

Kalavszky Zsfia (szerk.). Tanulmnyok Kirly Gyula 80. szletsnapjra. Vrhat megjelens: 2008. sz. 7. Ivo Pospil (ed.) A. S. Pukin v evropskch kulturnch souvislostech. Litteraria Humanitas VII, Brno: Masarykova univerzita, 2000, 322 c. (Recenzi.) Studia Slavica Hung. 2002, 47/ 1 2, 183188. (Trsszerz: Szekeres Adrienn, Trombits Judit.)

Dostoevsky in Soviet Russia -- post the third

Hello fellow Dostoevskyists. As I mentioned I was working on a paper on Dostoevsky in Soviet Russia. I finished it this afternoon (kind of had to; it was due). It is far from being perfect (written mostly over the course of one night, not proofread, and ends unfortunately abruptly), but I nevertheless thought members of this community would be interested in it. It's basically just a chronicle of some of the different ways Dostoevsky was received in the Soviet Union, focusing mostly on critical interpretations but also touching on the publication, film adaptation, and teaching of his works and mostly on preperestroika USSR.

Dostoevsky in Soviet Russia: Criticism, Censorship, and Adaptation

Though widely regarded as one of the greatest Russian authors, Dostoevskys religious, philosophical, and ideological views were problematic during the Soviet era in their total opposition to Marxism. In a 1983 interview with Czeslaw Milosz, Carl Proffer described the problem somewhat simplistically but aptly: Now [the Soviets] are doing a complete set of Dostoevskys works, which began in 1972. In other words, eleven years have gone by and they still have not finished it. There have been all kinds of interruptions due to political and editorial problems[Dostoevsky] says it quite clearly. When a man writes, The Communists are fools and idiots and will end in disaster, its very difficult to explain that he meant something else (Haven 2006).

This problem was not entirely new to the Soviet era. The leftist intelligentsia of Dostoevskys time, against whom many of Dostoevskys later novels (for example, Devils and Notes from the Underground) were undisguised polemics, had a troublingly ambivalent relationship with the writer as well (Pachmuss 1962; Slonim 1951). In January of 1875, the largely narodnik journal Notes of the Fatherland began serial publication of The Adolescent. Feeling a need to explain how the author of the reactionary Devils had found his way into such a journal, Nikolai Mikhailovsky gave the following preface: Dostoevsky is one of our most talented novelists; our monthly is impelled to publish works of fiction primarily on the grounds of their authors talent; The Adolescent is unlike Devils, in which Dostoevsky revealed his strange and melancholy obsession for utilizing current political cases as the themes for his novels (Slonim 1951). Later, in 1882, Mikhailovsky would publish his own polemic against Dostoevsky condemning the writers work on ideological and psychological grounds as being the fruits of Zhestokii Talant (A Cruel Talent) (Seduro 1957). Despite this principled criticism, however, one cannot ignore the apologetic introduction he had written just seven years prior justifying the publication of The Adolescent in Notes of the Fatherland.

This willingness and sometimes even eagerness to overlook problematic ideology in favor of the authors talent continued well after Dostoevskys death in 1881. Despite ideologically based critique from the likes of Shchedrin and Mikhailovsky (Pachmuss 1962), Dostoevskys novels were widely read and even adapted for the stage, with the first stage readings occurring in the 1880s (Seduro 1977). Not all members of the radical intelligentsia were willing to accept this duality of opinions on Dostoevsky. In 1913, after attending a staging of Devils at the Moscow State Theater, Gorky criticized Dostoevsky and those who staged his works as playing the hand of governmental reaction. On being subsequently rebuked for criticizing Dostoevskys ideology without paying proper regard to the writers talent, Gorky gave a damning description of his peers attitude towards Dostoevsky:

This is the opinion of the literati, as I understand them: although Dostoevsky is a reactionary, and one of the founders of the zoological nationalism which is strangling us today, although he denigrated Granovsky and Belinsky and is an enemy of that very West by whose works and ideas we live, although he is a rabid chauvinist, an anti-Semite, a preacher of submission and patience despite all this his artistic genius is so great that it outweighs all his sins against the concepts of justice which the best leaders of mankind have tried to work out. And, therefore, society has no right to protest against Dostoevskys tendencies and, in general, against any artist, whatever his

preachment may be (Slonim, 1951).

Gorkys critique caused some controversy at the time and set the tone Lenins opinions on Dostoevsky. Lenins published correspondence reveals that he followed the controversy surrounding staging Devils in 1913 and wrote Gorky a letter supporting his view on the matter (Seduro 1975). Similarly, a third-hand account of Lenins opinion, given in Meetings with Lenin, relates that Lenin said of Devils [it is] a nasty, thoroughly reactionary workand I have absolutely no inclination to waste my time on it (ibid). The philosophical opposition of Lenin and Dostoevsky is also revealed in their two very different responses to the philosophy of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, revolutionary democrat, materialist, and utopian socialist. Lenin was influenced heavily by Chernyshevskys philosophy. The title of Lenins political tract What is to be Done is an homage to Chernyshevskys utopian socialist novel of the same name. Dostoevsky on the other hand wrote Notes from the Underground as a reaction against Chernyshevskys philosophy, and particularly against a passage from What is to be Done, in which the revolutionary hero of the novel states, Yes, I will always do what I want. I will never sacrifice anything, not even a whim, for the sake of something I do not desire. What I want, with all my heart, is to make people happy. In this lies my happiness. Mine! Can you hear that, you, in your underground hole? Dostoevskys famous Underground Man came into being in response to Chernyshevskys challenge (Dostoevsky 1993).

But despite Lenins personal views on Dostoevsky, and despite the clear clash between Dostoevskian and Leninist philosophy, early Soviet policy did not censor Dostoevsky or condemn him as a counter-revolutionary. Between 1926 and 1930, Tomahevski and Khalabayev published a thirteen-volume Soviet edition of Dostoevskys complete works (Seduro 1957). Furthermore, on August 2, 1918, Izvestia published a list of people to whom monuments were proposed. Among the writers named, Dostoevsky was second only to Tolstoy. The monument itself was built and unveiled in November of that year, accompanied by speeches from the official representative of the Moscow Soviet (Vladimirski) and symbolist Vyacheslav Ivanov. In their speeches, Vladimirski and Ivanov represented Dostoevsky as a prophet of the Revolution and a voice of rebellion against the complacency and compromises of the bourgeoisie (Seduro 1975). According to Czeslaw Milosz, after the Revolution even the Communists praised The Possessed [Devils] as a prophecy not realizing that they were the devils Dostoevsky was trying to exorcize (Haven 2006).

One must wonder, however, whether the Party was truly unaware of this, or if this was in fact a self-conscious attempt to rework Dostoevsky into a national hero in spite of the obvious philosophical problems, a process Fuelloep-Miller describes as turning Dostoevsky into a museum piece (Fuelloep-Miller 1951). Many prominent Soviet literary critics and political figures, including Lenin himself, were very much aware of Dostoevskys grim view of revolutionary ideologies. Indeed, even the critics who made this argument did it with some equivocation; Pereverzev, the primary critic proposing Dostoevsky as a revolutionary prophet, wrote that Dostoevsky was a revolutionary and a reactionary at one and the same time; in him both revolutionary and reactionary strains sounded with equal verveIn [Dostoevsky] revolution is always fraught with reaction, and reaction fraught with revolution (Seduro 1957). This is perhaps not an entirely honest reading of Devils, which featured unarguably vitriolic fictional caricatures of the likes of Nechayev (Pyotr Verkhovensky) and Granovsky (Stepan Verkhovensky) and has little redeeming to say about revolutionaries in general (Dostoevsky 1992). Nevertheless, Pereverzevs is by no means an argument made in ignorance of the novels reactionary elements. Nor was it accepted uncritically by other Soviet Dostoevsky scholars of his time; Gorbachov and Tseitlin were particularly critical. Tseitlin rejected Pereverzevs statement that Dostoevsky was simultaneously reactionary and revolutionary, writing in 1931 that Dostoevsky was always an ideologist of the second group [the reactionary bourgeoisie], never for a moment in the ranks of the first [the raznochi] (Seduro 1957).

In addition to Marxist-Leninist critique from critics such as Gorky and Tseitlin and revolutionary reinterpretation by the likes of Pereverzev, Dostoevsky was also subject to extensive formalist critique during the time of Lenin and the early Stalin years. This produced arguably the greatest piece of Dostoevsky scholarship to come out of the USSR: Bakhtins Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics. Bakhtin argued that dialog and polyphony are central to Dostoevskys novels, which each character representing a variety of ideas rather than a single personality (Bakhtin 1984). Bakhtins criticism was unpopular with many Marxist thinkers such as I Grossman-Roshchin, who saw the work as ignoring the important ideological implications of Dostoevskys work and leading Dostoevsky studies down a false idealistic and anti-class path (Seduro 1957). Shortly after publication of this work, Bakhtin was exiled to Kazakhstan, officially because of alleged involvement in the underground Vosskressenie movement. Several others continued in his vein of formalist criticism, but this type of critique was less popular than the Marxist-informed ideology criticism and was eventually all but eradicated from Soviet thought

due to its anti-class tendencies during the era of Socialist Realism.

In 1931, the first film adaptation of Dostoevsky was attempted, based off of Dostoevskys House of the Dead. The novel, written in 1861, is a semiautobiographical work that describes the prison experiences of a young gentleman in Siberia, culminating in his spiritual re-awakening. The filmmaker, Shklovsky, wrote an experimental script, based off of what he saw as the themes of the novel rather than as a straight adaptation of the novel. However, in the end the ideological conflicts involved in making the film, particularly with regards to Gorkys earlier reception of the stage adaptation of Devils, became problematic. Rather than the experimental film Shklovsky intended, it ended up being a warning on the dangers of turning ones back on revolution. Dostoevskys presence throughout the film, intended by Shklovsky as a commentary of the role of the writer in the work, became a means of showing and condemning the shameful way Dostoevsky had abandoned his early leftist beliefs. Furthermore, a preface was tacked on to the beginning of the film informing the viewer that Dostoevsky, in turning his back on the Petrashevsky circle and revolutionary thought in general, had destroyed himself as a writer (Lary 1986). The failure of this adaptation proved to be an omen of the impending era of Socialist Realism, which Shklovsky and others would heavily criticize as unartistic (ibid). This era proved to be disastrous for Dostoevsky studies; after all, his work was the polar opposite of the Socialist Realism being promulgated by the party. At the 1934 Writers Congress, at which the era of Socialist Realism was officially begun, none other than Gorky gave a critical speech on the danger of Dostoevskys ideology, remarking that I have given so much attention to Dostoevsky because without the influence of his ideas it is almost impossible to understand the sudden turn of Russian literature and of a large part of the intelligentsia after 1906 from radicalism and democratism towards the preservation and defense of the bourgeois order (Seduro 1957). In saying this, Gorky gave what would be the official Party line on Dostoevsky for most of the Stalin era. The Pereverzev school was censured and dissolved, and critics focused exclusively on Dostoevskys problematic ideology. By the end of the 1930s, both schools of Dostoevsky criticism were centered around Gorkys evaluation of Dostoevsky given at the 1934 Congress; one group criticized Dostoevsky extensively on his ideology and compared it unfavorably to Socialist Realism, whereas the other group justified itself by Gorkys continued praise for Dostoevskys artistry and sought to reinstate him into Soviet favor.

From the first group, Ermilov wrote Gorky and Dostoevsky, a quasi-official Party statement unfavorably comparing the ideological writings of the latter to the former. Ermilov also dismissed Bakhtins theory of polyphony in Dostoevsky, arguing that Dostoevskys entire writing was rather a monologue in the form of dialogue (ibid). While Ermilovs was the prevailing view, others, such as Chulkov, attempted to defend Dostoevskys presence as one of the giants of Russian literary history, citing Gorkys own admission that Dostoevskys genius is indisputable (ibid). In 1939, in the somewhat more relaxed political environment that came with the fall of Yezhov, he published How Dostoevsky Worked, which emphasized Dostoevskys early years in the Petrashevsky circle and argued that Dostoevsky was an unwitting revolutionary: Dostoevsky, like Columbus, did not know himself what he had discovered. He sailed for India and caught sight of the New Worldhis creations had already radically changed the face of this world,he had initiated a tremendous cultural revolution (ibid). Despite the attempts of the likes of Chulkov, however, Dostoevsky was held in fairly low regard for most of the thirties in light of Gorkys comments and the eras high regard for Socialist Realism. As a consequence, the fourth and final volume of Dostoevskys letters, which were in the midst of publication at the time, never appeared. A separate publication of Devils, announced in 1934, was also never released (ibid). Only one film adaptation of Dostoevsky was made between 1934 and 1958, Roshals Petersburg Nights. It was loosely based off of two of Dostoevskys early (and therefore less reactionary) works, White Nights and the unfinished Netochka Nezvanova. and though he did not remark on it (probably for fear of censure), Roshal also cautiously borrowed from Devils. However, the elements from these works are reworked in such a way as to conform to the standards of socialist realism and are thus divorced almost entirely from their original contexts. Eisenstein put it succinctly Why use Dostoevsky?...He is specific; he is real. Bits of him from different decades are incompatible. The main failing of Roshal as a filmmaker is that the literature he wants to rethink and struggle with remains out of frame, and before us appears an ordinary film, made fairly grammatically and with some life (Lary 1986).

World War II saw another shift in attitudes towards Dostoevsky. In an effort to arouse patriotic nationalism, Dostoevsky was again made a national hero and was enumerated with the likes of Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Chernyshevski, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gorky as one of Russias great patriotic writers (ibid). Ermilov himself, in a great reversal of his previous damning opinion on Dostoevsky, wrote an article entitled The Great Russian Writer F. M. Dostoevsky describing Devils as a brilliant prophetic portrayal of modern Fascism (Seduro 1975). He justified this in light of his previous criticism of

Dostoevsky by saying that It is said that nothing is given free; fate requires sacrifices in repayment. Dostoevskys delusions, which brought so much harm, were a sacrifice a heavy sacrifice! But Dostoevskys truth this is our truth, Russian truth. Critics and Party members such as D I Zaslavski and Y M Yaroslavski, a high functionary of the Agitation and Propaganda Section, emphasized Dostoevskys early involvement in the Petrashevski circle and association with thinkers such as Belinski and Neksarov. Contrasting Dostoevsky with the Nazis, Yaroslavski wrote, Dostoevsky loved the Russian people and dreamed of their happiness in his own way, although he went toward this happiness by false paths, although his voice was often false Dostoevsky is full of compassion, full of love for the people, while the Hitlerites are enemies of people, enemies of mankind (Seduro 1957). Yaroslavski also cited Dostoevskys anti-German sentiments, expressed in some of his correspondence, as evidence of the authors low regard for fascism (ibid).

This high regard for Dostoevsky persisted into late 1947. In November of 1947, the authors 125th birthday was widely celebrated at universities, theaters, and clubhouses with speeches, stage adaptations, and readings from his works. Dolinin and Kirpotin published important works on Dostoevskys life and creative process, and new editions of Poor Folk, The Insulted and Injured, The Adolescent, and The Boys were published. Critics such as Desnitski, Yuzovski, and Yemelyanov argued that Dostoevsky had been treated unfairly by the likes of Gorky, noting stylistic and thematic similarities between their works. It was something of a return to the freer atmosphere of Dostoevsky scholarship enjoyed before the dawn of Socialist Realism.

However, it was not to last very long; with the beginning of Zhdanovism, Dostoevsky was one of many Russian writers to come under attack. This was instigated by Zaslavski, one of the critics who had just one year before been a staunch advocate of Dostoevsky, in an article entitled Against Idealization of the Reactionary Views of Dostoevsky. Critics who had previously written works in admiration of Dostoevsky were forced by Party pressure to acknowledge their mistakes in public confession; in his public self-criticism, Dolinin said, I must confess that in my long-lasting attraction to this theme [Dostoevsky] I in fact took an incorrect position; I in fact spoke of his reactionary ideology in tones that were too mildA chronic disease is not cured so quicklyThe consciousness of ones own mistakes puts one under great obligation. Recently I have been concentrating my scholarly interests on the theme of the revolutionary democrats, especially the works of Belinski

and Herzen (ibid). This is reflected in the USSR Ministry of Cultures 1953 Outline for the Study of Dostoevsky in Soviet Universities, which instructs universities to teach:

Dostoevskys works as an expression of reactionary bourgeois individualistic ideology. V. I. Lenin on Dostoevsky. Dostoevskys literary career from the Forties to the Eighties as a journey away from progressive, democratic ideas of the Natural School and towards reactionary, religious, protective ideas Dostoevskys split with Belinsky.The struggle of Dostoevsky with the revolutionary democratic ideas of Chernyshevsky and Shchedrin under the conditions of the revolutionary situation in the Sixties. The reactionary criticism of materialism, Utopian Socliasm, and revolutionary enlightenment in the Notes from the UndergroundThe antihumanistic nature of Ivan Karamazovs rebellion. The reactionary political program of Dostoevsky embodied in the images of Alyosha and the Elder ZosimaThe negative opinion of Dostoevsky in Russian democratic criticism. The struggle of Gorky against Dostoevskyism, in Russian and foreign literature. The political meaning of the cult of Dostoevsky in reactionary circles of Western Europe and the USA. The unmasking by Soviet literary scholarship of the reactionary philosophical and political essence of Dostoevskys views (Dostoevsky 1975).

Despite the censorship in Dostoevsky scholarship which effectively silenced all pre-Zhdanovism critics who found something redeeming in Dostoevsky, and propagated the erroneous statement that Soviet literary scholarship was the responsible agent for unmasking Dostoevskys reactionary views (in fact, this had been fairly obvious to pre-Soviet literary critics and members of the intelligentsia [Pachmuss 1962]), Zhdanov took some pains to assure the West that Dostoevsky himself was not being censored: [Dostoevskys] works are published and republished. But for this very reason the ideological and artistic outlook of Dostoevsky must be clear to the Soviet reader and to Soviet youth, without any embellishments (Seduro 1957). This was perhaps a more effective strategy than outright censorship; one could not claim that he was not permitted to read Dostoevsky, but the limitations on what one was permitted to think about it were very clear.

This de facto censorship of Dostoevsky persisted through the era of Zhdanovism. Things began to change somewhat when Kruschev took power. The change is evident already in 1955, at which point the USSR Ministry of

Culture revised its Outline for the Study of Dostoevsky to include such material as Dostoevskys series of problematically-psychological novels containing on the one hand deeply realistic exposure of antisocial, individualistic tendencies in the life of the bourgeois-raznochinet, aristocratic, and bourgeois strata of Russian society, and of the dissolution of their ideology and way of life, and on the other hand, the reactionary and tendentious proclaiming of the ideals of religious meekness and love for ones neighbors, ideas intended to conceal and bypass the deepest contradictions of the existing systemThe growing hostility of the writer on the one hand to ideas of materialism and socialism and the revolutionary movement (Devils), and on the other hand to the decaying aristocratic class (satirical images of Svidrigaylov, Stavrogin; the novel The Brothers Karmazov) (Dostoevsky 1975). While this was by no means an ideologically uncritical view of Dostoevsky, it was nevertheless a dramatic change from the Outline published just two years before under the influence of Zhdanovism.

This tendency continued the following year, when a 75th anniversary movement to rehabilitate Dostoevsky began. Similarly to the 125th birthday celebrations, 1956 featured stage performances, museum exhibits, works of art (for example, a statue by S Konenkov called F. M. Dostoevsky The Thinker), and the beginning of publication of a new 10-volume collection of his works that would be published in its entirety by 1958. The Party naturally felt a need to justify this sudden change in attitude towards Dostoevsky, which was somewhat difficulty given how explicitly Lenin had condemned Dostoevsky; to this end, Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich published an article Lenin on Books and Authors. The article related accounts of Lenin praising Dostoevskys genius and showing an awareness of the circumstances of Dostoevskys times: But by the same token Vladimir Ilich said on more than one occasion that Dostoevsky was a writer of true genius who had examined the sore spots of the society of his time, and that while one can find much that is contradictory and spiritually disjointed in Dostoevsky, his works also contain vivid pictures of real lifeon the whole Vladimir Ilich had a high regard for Dostoevskys talent (Seduro 1975). He goes on to relate Lenins alleged critical opinion of Devils and House of the Dead, which are suspiciously similar to the opinions being espoused by Party critics in 1956. Whether these anecdotes are true or not is impossible to confirm but very questionable given Lenins previously expressed opinion of Dostoevsky as the ultra-repulsive Dostoevsky. More interesting than the dubious propaganda contained within the article, however, is the several paragraphs leading up to Lenins defense of Dostoevsky, which do confirm previous accounts: Lenin supported Gorky when the latter spoke out against the bourgeois song and dance in connection with the proposed stage production

of F. M. Dostoevskys novel The Devils. Vladimir Ilich was an unsparing critic of the reactionary tendencies in Dostoevskys work (Seduro, 1975). Even in a piece of Party propaganda intended to rehabilitate Dostoevsky, the author was unable to escape mentioning Lenins previously expressed views on Dostoevsky. Indeed, this uncomfortable duality well characterized in the 1955 Outline for the Study of Dostoevsky was typical of the post-Zhdanov era attitude towards Dostoevsky, which continued through the Brezhnev era and produced a large body of critical work on the writer (Seduro 1975, Schneidmann 1975).

Dostoevskys artistic skills were particularly lauded and a popular topic for study, probably because one could do so without dealing too heavily with his problematic ideology. Typical essays included Evnins The Pictorial in Dostoevsky, Grossmans Dostoevsky the Artist, and Chicherins The Poetic Structure of Language in Dostoevskys Novels. There was also a resurgence in film adaptations of Dostoevsky, starting in 1958 with the first part of Ivan Pyrievs adaptation of The Idiot. He had written the script in 1947 but had been unable to produce it during the period of Zhdanovism. He later worked on two more Dostoevsky film projects (without ever having finished the second part of The Idiot): White Nights in 1959 and The Brothers Karamazov in 1968 (Lary 1986). Other Dostoevsky film projects directed during this period were The Meek One (1960), Nasty Story (1965), and Uncles Dream (1966) (ibid). Certainly the most ideologically challenging of these projects was The Brothers Karamazov. While there was obviously no way to take the anti-Socialist philosophy and the profoundly religious ideas out of the story, philosophical debates are minimized, and the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor is dropped completely (ibid). In 1970, Crime and Punishment received a similar treatment, with the entire spiritually redemptive epilog being dropped (ibid).

In his 1975 book Dostoevskis Image in Russia Today, Seduro wrote, the new familiarity which Soviet readers are acquiring with the artistic creations of this Christian-humanist is furthering the process of a freer way of thought in the USSR[recent events] tend to confirm our predictions that the time will come one day when this great genius of world literature will be rehabilitated in full in his own homeland (Seduro 1975). Whether the increase in availability of Dostoevskys work was in fact responsible for the beginning of the period of glasnost is dubious, but certainly the increased intellectual freedoms enjoyed during that era brought more freedom to Dostoevsky scholars, and the effective end of the era of stifling Socialist Realism allowed new venues for critique.

Georg Lukacs 1949

Dostoevsky

Written: 1949; Translator: Rene Wellek; Source: Marxism and Human Liberation: Essays on History, Culture and Revolution by Georg Lukacs Dell Publishing Co., 1973; Transcribed: Harrison Fluss for marxists.org, February 2008.

I go to prove my soul! ROBERT BROWNING

It is a strange, but often repeated fact that the literary embodiment of a new human type with all its problems comes to the civilized world from a young nation. Thus in the eighteenth century Werther came from Germany and prevailed in England and France: thus in the second half of the nineteenth century Raskolnikov came from far-off, unknown, almost legendary Russia to speak for the whole civilized West.

There is nothing unusual in the fact that a backward country produces powerful works. The historical sense developed in the nineteenth century has accustomed us to enjoy the literature and art of the whole globe and the whole past. Works of art that have influenced the entire world originated in the remotest countries and ages: from Negro sculpture to Chinese woodcuts, from the Kalevala to Rabindranath Tagore.

But the cases of Werther and Raskolnikov are very different. Their effect is not touched in the slightest by a craving for the exotic, Suddenly there

appeared from an underdeveloped country, where the troubles and conflicts of contemporary civilization could not yet have been fully unfolded, works that stated imaginatively all the problems of human culture at its highest point, stirred up ultimate depths, and presented a totality hitherto never achieved and never since surpassed, embracing the spiritual, moral, and philosophical questions of that age.

The word question must be underscored and must be supplemented by the assertion that it is a poetic, creative question and not a question put in philosophical terms. For this was and is the mission of poetry and fiction: to put questions, to raise problems in the form of new men and new fates of men. The concrete answers that naturally are given by poetic works frequently have seen from this distance an arbitrary character in bourgeois literature. They may even throw the actual poetic problem into confusion. Goethe very soon saw this himself with Werther. Only a few years later he made Werther exhort the reader in a poem: Be a man and dont follow me.

Ibsen quite deliberately considered questioning the task of the poet and declined, on principle, any obligation to answer his questions. Chekhov made a definitive statement about this whole matter when he drew a sharp distinction between the solution of a question and the correct putting of the question. Only the last is required of the artist. In Anna Karenina and Onegin not a single question is solved yet these works satisfy us fully only because all questions are put in them correctly. [1]

This insight is particularly important for a judgment of Dostoevsky for many even most of his political and social answers are false, have nothing to do with present-day reality or with the strivings of the best today. They were obsolete, even reactionary, when they were pronounced.

Still, Dostoevsky is a writer of world eminence. For he knew how during a crisis of his country and the whole human race, to put questions in an imaginatively decisive sense. He created men whose destiny and inner life, whose conflicts and interrelations with other characters, whose attraction and rejection of men and ideas illuminated all the deepest questions of that age, sooner, more deeply, and more widely than in average life itself. This imaginative anticipation of the spiritual and moral development of the

civilized world assured the powerful and lasting effect of Dostoevskys works. These works have become even more topical and more fresh as time goes on.

Raskolnikov is the Rastignac of the second half of the nineteenth century. Dostoevsky admired Balzac, had translated Eugenie Grandet, and surely quite consciously resumed the theme of his predecessor. The very nature of this connection shows his originality: his poetic grasp of the change of the times, of men, of their psychology and worldview.

Emerson saw the reason for the deep and general effect of Napoleon on the whole intellectual life of Europe in the fact that the people whom he sways are little Napoleons. He put his finger on one side of this influence: Napoleon represented all the virtues and vices possessed by the great mass of men in his time and partly also in later times. Balzac and Stendhal turned the question round and made the necessary additions. Napoleon appeared to them as the great example for the saying that since the French Revolution every gifted man carries a marshals baton in his knapsack, as the great example of the unimpeded rise of talents in a democratic society. Hence as the gauge for the democratic character of a society: Is a Napoleon-like rise possible or not? From this question followed the pessimistic criticism of Balzac and Stendhal: a recognition and admission that the heroic period of bourgeois society and of the rise of individuals was over and belonged to the past.

When Dostoevsky appeared, the heroic period had receded even further. The bourgeois society of Western Europe had consolidated itself. Against Napoleonic dreams had been erected inner and outer barriers different and more firm than those erected in the time of Balzac and Stendhal. The Russia of Dostoevsky was barely beginning a social transformation that is why the Napoleonic dreams of Russian youth were more violent, more passionate than those of their Western European contemporaries. But the transformation encountered at first insuperable obstacles in the existing firm skeleton of the old society (however dead it may seem in the perspective of history). Russia was during this period a contemporary of the Europe after 1848, with its disillusionment with the ideals of the eighteenth century and its dreams of a renovation and reformation of bourgeois society. This contemporaneity with

Europe arose, however, in a prerevolutionary period when the Russian ancien regime still ruled unchecked, when the Russian 1789 was still in the distant future.

Even Rastignac saw Napoleon less as the concrete historical heir of the French Revolution than as a professeur denergie. The fascinating figure of Napoleon set an example less by his ultimate aims than by his method, by the kinds and techniques of his action, by his way of overcoming obstacles. Still, in spite of all the psychological and moral attenuations and sublimations of the ideal, the peculiar aims of the generation of the Rastignacs remained clear and socially concrete.

The situation of Raskolnikov is even more decidedly reversed. The moral and psychological problem was for him almost exclusively concrete: the ability of Napoleon to step over men for the sake of great aims an ability which Napoleon has, for instance, in common with Mohammed.

From such a psychological perspective the concrete action becomes fortuitous an occasion rather than a real aim or means. The psychological and moral dialectic of the pro and con of the action becomes the crux of the matter: the test whether Raskolnikov has the moral capacity to become a Napoleon. Concrete action becomes a psychological experiment which, however, risks the whole physical and moral existence of the experimenter: an experiment whose fortuitous occasion and fortuitous subject is, after all, another human being.

In Balzacs Fere Goriot, Rastignac and his friend Bianchon discuss briefly the moral problem whether one would have the right to press a button in order to kill an unknown Chinese mandarin if one received a million francs for it. In Balzac the conversations are episodes, witty byplay, moral illustrations for the concrete main problems of the novel. In Dostoevsky it becomes the central question: with great and deliberate art it is made the focus. The practical and concrete side of the act is pushed aside with equal deliberation. For example, Raskolnikov does not even know how much he has robbed from the pawnbroker, his murder is carefully planned but he forgets to shut the door, and so on. All these details emphasize the main point: can Raskolnikov morally endure the overstepping of the boundaries? And principally: what are the motives which work in him for and against the crime? what moral forces

come into play? what psychological inhibitions affect his decision before and after the crime? what psychic forces is he able to mobilize for this decision and for his perseverance afterwards?

The mental experiment with himself assumes its own dynamism; it continues even when it has lost all practical significance. Thus the day after the murder Raskolnikov goes to the flat of the pawnbroker in order to listen again to the sound of the doorbell which had terrified and upset him so much after the killing and to test again its psychic effects on

himself. The purer the experiment as such, the less can it give a concrete answer to concrete questions. Raskolnikovs fundamental problem has become an event in world literature precisely in connection and in contrast to his great predecessor. Just as the rise and effect of Werther would have been impossible without Richardson and Rousseau, so Raskolnikov is unthinkable without Balzac. But the putting of the central question in Crime and Punishment is just as original, stimulating and prophetic as in Werther.

The experiment with oneself, the execution of an action not so much for the sake of the contents and effects of the action, but in order to know oneself once for all, in depth, to the very bottom, is one of the main human problems of the bourgeois and intellectual world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Goethe took a very skeptical attitude toward the slogan Know thyself, toward self-knowledge by self-analysis. For him action as a way to selfknowledge was still taken for granted. He possessed a stable system of ideals, though it may not have been expressly formulated. In striving for these ideals, actions which were significant for their contents, for their intimate relations to the ideals, were accomplished of necessity. Selfknowledge thus becomes a by-product of the actions. Man, by acting concretely in society, learns to know himself.

Even when these ideals change, even when whether realized or not they lose their weight and become relative, new ideals take the place of the lost ones. Faust, Wilhelm Meister (and of course Goethe himself) have their problems; but they have not become problems to themselves.

The same is true of the great egoists in Balzac. Looked at objectively, the turning inward,

the making subjective of the ideals of individualism, appears very questionable when egoism the exaltation at any price of the individual becomes the central issue as it does so constantly in Balzac. But these objective problems lead only very rarely in Balzac to the self-dissolution of the subject. Individualism displays here its tragic (or comic) problems very early; but the individual itself has not yet become problematical.

Only when this individualism turns inward when it fails to find an Archimedean point either in current social aims or in the spontaneous urge of an egotistical ambition does the problem of Dostoevskys experiments arise. Stavrogin, the hero of The Possessed, gives a summary of these problems in his farewell letter to Dasha Shatov immediately before his suicide:

I tried my strength everywhere. You advised me to do this so as to learn to know myself. ... But what to apply my strength to thats what I have never seen and dont see now. ... I can still wish to do something good, as I always could, and that gives me a feeling of pleasure. At the same time I wish to do something evil and that gives me pleasure, too. ... My desires are not strong enough, they cannot guide me. You can cross a river on a log but not on a chip of wood.[2]

Admittedly the case of Stavrogin is very special, very different from that of Raskolnikov and particularly different from these experiments in which the striving for self-knowledge appeals to the soul of other men: as, for instance, when the hero of Notes from the Underground, who lives almost exclusively by such experiments, speaks compassionately to the prostitute Liza in order to test his power over her feelings; or when, in The Idiot, Nastasya Filipovna throws the one hundred thousand rubles brought by Rogozhin into the fire in order fully to know and enjoy the meanness of Ganya Ivolgin, who would get

the money if he could pull it from the fire, and so on.

All these cases, however diverse, have something important in common. First of all, they are without exception the actions of lonely men men who are completely dependent on themselves as they understand life and their environment, who live so deeply and intensely in themselves that the soul of others remains to them forever an unknown country. The other man is to them only a strange and menacing power which either subjugates them or becomes subject to them. When young Dolgoruky in A Raw Youth expounds his idea of becoming a Rothschild and describes the experiments to realize his idea, which are psychologically very similar to those of Raskolnikov, he defines their nature as solitude and power. Isolation, separation, loneliness reduces the relations among men to a struggle for superiority or inferiority. The experiment is a sublimated spiritual form, a psychological turning inward of naked struggles for power.

But by this solitude, by this immersion of the subject in itself, the self becomes bottomless. There arises either the anarchy of Stavrogin, a loss of direction in all instincts, or the obsession of a Raskolnikov by an idea. A feeling, an aim, an ideal acquires absolute sovereignty over the soul of a man: I, you, all men disappear, turn into shadows, exist only subsumed under the idea. This monomania appears in a low form in Pyotr Verkhovensky (The Possessed), who takes men to be what he wishes them to be; in a higher form in the women who were hurt by life. Katerina Ivanovna (The Brothers Karamazov) loves only her own virtue, Nastasya Filipovna (The Idiot), her own humiliation: both imagine that they will find support and satisfaction in this love. We find the highest level of this psychic organization in the men of ideas such as Raskolnikov and Ivan Karamazov. A horrifying, caricaturing contrast to these is Smerdyakov (The Brothers Karamazov), the ideological and moral effect of the doctrine that everything is permitted.

But precisely on the highest level does the overstrained subjectivity most obviously turn into its opposite: the rigid monomania of the idea becomes absolute emptiness. The raw youth, Dolgoruky, very graphically describes the psychological consequences of his obsession by the idea of becoming a Rothschild:

... having something fixed, permanent and overpowering in ones mind in

which one is terribly absorbed, one is, as it were, removed by it from the whole world, and everything that happens (except the one great thing) slips by one. Even ones impressions are hardly formed correctly. ... Oh, I have my idea, nothing else matters, was what I said to myself. ... The idea comforted me in disgrace and insignificance. But all the nasty things I did took refuge, as it were, under the idea. So to speak, it smoothed over everything, but also put a mist before my eyes.[3]

Hence comes the complete incongruity between action and soul in these people. Hence comes their panic fear of being ridiculous because they are constantly aware of this incongruity. The more extreme this individualism becomes, the more the self turns inward, the stronger it even becomes outwardly and the more it shuts itself off from objective reality with a Chinese wall, the more it loses itself in an inner void. The self which submerges itself in itself, cannot find any more firm ground; what seemed firm ground for a time turns out to be mere surface; everything that temporarily appeared with the claim of giving direction turns into its opposite. The ideal becomes completely subjective, an alluring but always deceptive fata morgana.

Thus the experiment is the desperate attempt to find firm ground within oneself, to know who one is a desperate attempt to pull down the Chinese wall between the I and the You, between the self and the world a desperate attempt and always a futile attempt. The tragedy or the tragicomedy of the lonely man finds its purest expression in the experiment.

A minor figure in Dostoevsky describes the atmosphere of these novels briefly and pointedly. She says of its characters: They are all as if at a railroad station. And this is the essential point.

First of all, for these people every situation is provisional. One stands at a railroad station, waiting for the departure of the train. The railroad station naturally is not home, the train is necessarily a transition. This image expresses a pervasive feeling about life in Dostoevskys world. In The House of the Dead, Dostoevsky remarks that even prisoners condemned to twenty years of penal servitude regard their life in prison as something transitory

and consider it provisional. In a letter to the critic, Strakhov, Dostoevsky compares his story The Gambler, which he was then planning, with The House of the Dead. He wanted to achieve an effect similar to the one he had achieved in The House of the Dead. The life of a gambler (also a symbolic figure for Dostoevsky and his world) is never life proper but rather only a preparation for the life to come, for real life. These men do not properly live in the present, but only in a constant tense expectation of the decisive turn in their fortune. But even when such a turn occurs usually as a result of the experiment nothing essential is changed in the organization of their inner world.

One dream is punctured by the touch of reality: it collapses and there arises a new dream of a new turn around the corner. One train has left the station, one waits for the next on e- but a railroad station nevertheless remains a railroad station, a place of transit.

Dostoevsky is acutely aware that an adequate expression of such a world places him in complete opposition to the art of the past and the present. At the end of A Rate Youth he expresses this conviction in the form of a critical letter on the memoirs of the hero. He sees clearly that such a world could not possibly be dominated by the beauty of Anna Karenina. But then he justifies his own form, he does not do so by raising a question of pure aesthetics. On the contrary, he thinks that the beauty of Tolstoys novels (Dostoevsky does not name them but the allusion is unmistakable) belongs really to the past and not to the present and that these works have, in their essence, already become historical novels. The social criticism concealed behind the aesthetic conflict is made concrete by describing the family whose fate is related in Dolgorukys memoirs as not a normal but an accidental family. According to the writer of the letter, the contrast of beauty and the new realism is due to a change in the structure of society. On the one hand, the arbitrariness, the abnormality of the family appears in the minds of the individuals the better people of the present age are almost all mentally ill, says a figure of that novel; and on the other hand, all the distortions within the family are only the most conspicuous expression of a deep crisis in the whole society.

In seeing and presenting this, Dostoevsky becomes the first and greatest poet of the modern capitalist metropolis. There were of course poetic treatments of city life long before Dostoevsky: as early as the eighteenth century Defoes Moll Flanders emerged as a masterpiece of the city. Dickens,

in particular, gave poetic expression to the peculiar solitude of the great city. (Dostoevsky loves and praises Dickens most enthusiastically for this very reason.) And Balzac had sketched the Dantesque circles of a new, contemporary Hell in his picture of Paris.

All this is true and one could add much more. But Dostoevsky was the first and is still unsurpassed in drawing the mental deformations that are brought about as a social necessity by life in a modern city. The genius of Dostoevsky consists precisely in his power of recognizing and representing the dynamics of a future social, moral and psychological evolution from germs of something barely beginning.

We must add that Dostoevsky does not confine himself to description and analysis to mere morphology, to use a fashionable term of present-day agnosticism but offers also a genesis, a dialectic and a perspective.

The problem of genesis is decisive. Dostoevsky sees the starting point of the specific nature of his characters psychological organization in the particular form of urban misery. Take the great novels and stories of Dostoevskys mature period: Notes from the Underground, The Insulted and the Injured, Crime and Punishment. In each one of them we are shown how the problems that we discussed from the point of view of their psychic consequences, how the psychic organization of Dostoevskys characters, how the deformations of their moral ideals grow out of the social misery of the modern metropolis. The insulting and injuring of men in the city is the basis of their morbid individualism, their morbid desire for power over themselves and their neighbors.

In general, Dostoevsky does not like descriptions of external reality: he is not a paysagiste, as Turgenev and Tolstoy are, each in his own manner. But because he grasps with the visionary power of a poet the unity of the inner and the outer the social and the psychic organization here in the misery of the city, unsurpassed pictures of Petersburg emerge, particularly in Crime and Punishment, pictures of the new metropolis from the coffinlike furnished room of the hero through the stifling narrowness of the police station to the center of the slum district, the Haymarket, and the nocturnal streets and bridges.

Yet Dostoevsky is never a specialist in milieu. His work embraces the whole of society, from the highest to the lowest, from Petersburg to a remote provincial village. But the primary phenomenon and this artistic trait throws a strong light on the social genesis of the books remains always the same: the misery of Petersburg. What is experienced in Petersburg is generalized by Dostoevsky as valid for the whole of society. Just as in the provincial tragedies, The Possessed and Tlie Brothers Karamazov, Petersburg characters (Stavrogin and Ivan) set the tone, so in the depiction of the whole society the pattern is set by what has grown out from down there in misery.

Balzac recognized and represented the deep psychological parallelism between the upper and the lower and saw clearly that the forms of expression of the socially lower would have great advantages over those of the upper stratum.

But Dostoevsky is concerned with much more than a problem of artistic expression. The Petersburg misery, particularly that of intellectual youth, is for him the purest classical symptom of his primary phenomenon: the alienation of the individual from the broad stream of the life of the people, which to Dostoevsky is the last and decisive social reason for all the mental and moral deformations we have sketched above. One can observe the same deformations also in the upper strata. But here one sees rather the psychological results, while in the former the social and psychological process of their genesis comes out much more clearly. Up there the historical connection of this psychic organization with the past can be discerned. Gorky very acutely sees in Ivan Karamazov a psychic descendant of the passive nobleman Oblomov. Down there, however, the rebellious element gains the upper hand and points to the future.

This divorce between the lonely individual and the life of the people is the prevailing theme of bourgeois literature in the second half of the nineteenth century. This type dominates the bourgeois literature of the West during this period whether it is accepted or rejected, lyrically idealized or satirically caricatured. But even in the greatest writers, in Flaubert and Ibsen, the psychological and moral consequences appear more prominently than their social basis. Only in Russia, in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, is the problem raised in all its breadth and depth.

Tolstoy contrasts his heroes who have lost contact with the people and hence have lost the objectivity of their ideals, their moral standards and their psychological support with the peasant class, which was then apparently quite immobile, but was actually going through a process of complete transformation. Its slow and often contradictory transition to social action became important for the fate of the democratic renewal of Russia only much later.

Dostoevsky investigates the same process of the dissolution of old Russia and the germs of its rebirth primarily in the misery of the cities among the insulted and injured of Petersburg. Their involuntary alienation from the old life of the people which only later became an ideology, a will and activity, their provisional inability to connect with the popular movement which was still groping for an aim and direction, was Dostoevskys primary social phenomenon.

Only this point of view illuminates the alienation of the upper strata from the people in Dostoevsky. With a different emphasis, but essentially as in Tolstoy, it is idleness, life without work the complete isolation of the soul which comes from idleness which may be tragic or grotesque or, most frequently, tragicomic but always deforming. Whether it is Svidrigailov, Stavrogin, Versilov, Liza Khokhlakov, Aglaya Yepanchin or Nastasya Filipovna: for Dostoevsky their idle or, at most, aimlessly active lives are always the foundation of their hopeless solitude.

This plebeian trait sharply distinguishes Dostoevsky from parallel Western literary movements which, in part, arose simultaneously with him and, in part, arose at a later stage under his influence from the diverse trends of literary psychologism.

In the West this literary trend which in France Edmond de Goncourt helped to prepare and Bourget, Huysmans and others helped to realize was primarily a reaction against the plebeian tendencies of naturalism, which

were not particularly strong anyway. Goncourt considered the change an artistic conquest of the upper strata of society, while naturalism had concerned itself largely with the lower classes. In the later representatives of this tendency up to Proust the aristocratic and mondain trait of literary psychologism comes out even more forcefully.

The cult of the inner life appears as a privilege of the upper classes of society, in contrast to the brutal earthy conflicts of the lower classes that naturalism tried to comprehend artistically by heredity and environment. The cult therefore takes on a double aspect. On the one hand, it is coquettish, vain, highly self-conscious even in cases where it led individually to tragic destinies. On the other hand, it is decidedly conservative, because most Western authors cannot oppose the mental and moral instability of lonely city

individualists here described with anything more than the old spiritual forces primarily the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, as something that might offer refuge to erring souls.

Dostoevskys answers in his journalistic writings and also in his novels parallel these tendencies of bourgeois literature in his appeal to the Russian Orthodox Church. But the correctness and depth of his poetic questionings lead him far beyond his narrow horizon and push him into sharp opposition to parallel phenomena in the West.

In particular the world of Dostoevsky lacks any trace of worldly skeptical coquetry, of vain self-consciousness, or of toying with his own loneliness and despair. We always play, and who knows this, is wise, says Arthur Schnitzler and thereby expresses the most extreme contrast to the world of Dostoevskys characters. For their despair is not the spice of life, which is otherwise bored and idle, but despair in the most genuine, most literal sense. Their despair is an actual banging at closed doors, an embittered, futile struggle for the meaning of life which is lost or in danger of being lost.

Because this despair is genuine, it is a principle of excess, again in sharp contrast to the worldly polished forms of most of the Western skeptics. Dostoevsky shatters all forms beautiful and ugly, genuine and false because the desperate man can no longer consider them an adequate

expression for what he is seeking for his soul. All the barriers that social convention has erected between men are pulled down in order that nothing but spontaneous sincerity, to the most extreme limits, to the utter lack of shame, may prevail among men. The horror at the loneliness of men erupts here with irresistible power precisely because all these pitiless destructions are still unable to remove the solitude.

The journalist Dostoevsky could speak consolingly in a conservative sense, but the human content, the poetic tempo and the poetic rhythm of his speech, have a rebellious tone and thus find themselves constantly in opposition to his highest political and social intentions.

The struggle of these two tendencies in Dostoevskys mind yields very diverse results. Sometimes, rather frequently, the political journalist wins out over the poet: the natural dynamics of his characters, dictated by his vision independently of his conscious aims and not by his will are violated and distorted to fit his political opinions. The sharp criticism made by Gorky that Dostoevsky slanders his own characters applies to such cases.

But very frequently the result is rather the opposite. The characters emancipate themselves and lead their own lives to the very end, to the most extreme consequences of their inborn nature. The dialectics of their evolution, their ideological struggle, takes a completely different direction than the consciously envisaged goals of the journalist Dostoevsky. The poetic question, correctly put, triumphs over the political intentions, the social answer of the writer.

Only there does the depth and correctness of Dostoevskys questioning assert itself fully. It is a revolt against that moral and psychic deformation of man which is caused by the evolution of capitalism. Dostoevskys characters go to the end of the socially necessary self-distortion unafraid, and their selfdissolution, their self-execution, is the most violent protest that could have been made against the organization of life in that time. The experimentation of Dostoevskys character is thus put into a new light: it is a desperate attempt to break through the barriers which deform the soul and maim, distort and dismember life. The creator Dostoevsky does not know the correct direction of the breakthrough, and could not know it. The journalist and philosopher pointed in the wrong direction. But that this problem of the

breakthrough occurs with every genuine upsurge of the mind points to the future and demonstrates the unbreakable power of humanity which will never be satisfied with half measures and false solutions.

Every genuine man in Dostoevsky breaks through this barrier, even though he perishes in the attempt. The fatal attraction of Raskolnikov and Sonya is only superficially one of extreme opposites. Quite rightly Raskolnikov tells Sonya that by her boundless spirit of self-sacrifice, by the selfless goodness which made her a prostitute in order to save her family, she herself had broken the barrier and transcended the limits just as he had done by murdering the pawnbroker. For Dostoevsky this transcendence was in Sonya more genuine, more human, more immediate, more plebeian than in Raskolnikov.

Here the light shines in the darkness and not where the journalist Dostoevsky fancied he saw it. Modern solitude is that darkness. They say, says a desperate character in Dostoevsky, that the well-fed cannot understand the hungry, but I would add that the hungry do not always understand the hungry."[4] There is apparently not a ray of light in this darkness. What Dostoevsky thought to be such a ray was only a will-o-the-wisp.

The ways that Dostoevsky points out for his characters are impassable. As a creator he himself feels these problems deeply. He preaches faith, but in reality as a creator of men he does not himself believe that the man of his age can have faith in his sense. It is his atheists who have genuine depth of thought, a genuine fervor for the quest.

He preaches the way of Christian sacrifice. But his first positive hero, Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, is fundamentally atypical and pathological because he is unable, largely due to his illness, to overcome inwardly his egoism even in love. The problem of victory over egoism, to which Prince Myshkin was supposed to find the answer creatively, cannot be put concretely, creatively, because of this pathological foundation. It may be said in passing that the limitless compassion of Myshkin causes at least as much tragic suffering as the darkly individualistic pathos of Raskolnikov.

When, at the end of his career, Dostoevsky wanted to create a healthy

positive figure in Alyosha Karamazov, he vacillated constantly between two extremes. In the extant novel Alyosha actually seems to be a healthy counterpart of Prince Myshkin, a Dostoevskean saint. But the novel as we know it just from the point of view of the main hero is only a beginning, only the story of his youth. We also know something of Dostoevskys plans for a continuation. In a letter to the poet Maikov he writes: The hero in the course of his life is for a while an atheist, then a believer, then again a zealot and sectarian, and at the end he becomes again an atheist. This letter fully confirms what Suvorin reports of a conversation with Dostoevsky, which may sound startling at first. Suvorin tells us that the hero is to commit a political crime at the proper moment and is to be executed; he is a man thirsting for truth who in his quest has quite naturally become a revolutionary. We cannot know of course whether and how far Dostoevsky would have carried the character of Alyosha in this direction. Still, it is more than characteristic that the inner dynamics of his favorite hero had to take this direction.

Thus the world of Dostoevskys characters dissolves his political ideals into chaos. But this chaos itself is great in Dostoevsky: his powerful protest against everything false and distorting in modern bourgeois society. It is no chance that the memory of a picture by Claude Lorrain, Acis and Galathea, recurs several times in his novels. It is always called The Golden Age by his heroes and is described as the most powerful symbol of their deepest yearning.

The golden age: genuine and harmonious relations between genuine and harmonious men. Dostoevskys characters know that this is a dream in the present age but they cannot and will not abandon the dream. They cannot abandon the dream even when most of their feelings sharply contradict it. This dream is the truly genuine core, the real gold of Dostoevskys Utopias; a state of the world in which men may know and love each other, in which culture and civilization will not be an obstacle to the development of men.

The spontaneous, wild and blind revolt of Dostoevskys characters occurs in the name of the golden age, whatever the contents of the mental experiment may be. This revolt is poetically great and historically progressive in Dostoevsky: here really shines a light in the darkness of Petersburg misery, a light that illuminates the road to the future of mankind.

1. A letter to A. Suvorin, October 27, 1888. (Translators note.)

2. The Possessed. Constance Garnett translation, modified.

3. A Raw Youth. Translated by Constance Garnett.

4. The old Ichmenyev in The Insulted and the Injured. Translated by Constance Garnett. (Translators note.)

Dostoevsky and Freud: Exploring the Relationship Between Psyche and Civilization

Few novels delve as deeply into the twists and turns of the human psyche as Fyodor Dostoevskys Crime and Punishment. The novel explicitly describes the protagonist Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikovs fluctuating mental state as he commits a brutal crime, becomes tortured by guilt, and finally turns himself in. This detailed description of Raskolnikovs psyche gives readers a clear picture of his character within the context of the events that take place in the novel. Yet we know little of Raskolnikov outside of this context. How, for instance, does Raskolnikov come to develop those beliefs and characteristics that impel him to commit his crime? We know only that he embodies these beliefs and characteristics from the outset of the novel. In order to fully comprehend the whys and hows of Raskolnikov as a character, then, we must examine him outside the framework of this novel.

But how, we might ask, are we to move beyond the narrative context in which Raskolnikov exists? The answer is simple: we must place Raskolnikov within a different context and analyze him in light of this new context. How do we know which context to choose? It depends on what we hope to discover by such an analysis. In this case, we want to expand our knowledge of Raskolnikovs characteristics and psyche. From Dostoevskys explicit narration, we already know Raskolnikov is a neurotic character who exhibits a

number of neurotic tendencies throughout the novel. We must therefore locate a context that will help us discover the meaning behind these neurotic tendencies. The logical backdrop to choose is a Freudian context, since Freud deals extensively with human psychology and neurosis.

How exactly will Freuds writings help us? For an answer, let us compare what an ordinary reader would conclude about Raskolnikov with what Freud would conclude. Let us begin with a short summary of the novel:

Raskolnikov is a twenty-three-year-old student living in mid-19th century St. Petersburg. His extreme poverty has recently caused him to drop out of the university; moreover, he has ceased working or attending to practical matters. He is a proud, contemptuous, bitter, and irritable character, often remaining alone in his box-like room for days at a time. It is during these periods of isolation that he devises a theory that divides humankind into two categories: those ordinary and those extraordinary. Extraordinary individuals, he believes, have an inner right to transgress the law in order to make their great ideas and/or discoveries known to humanity. Believing himself to be an extraordinary individual, he decides to test his theory by deliberately murdering an old woman pawnbroker. Upon committing this crime, however, he is immediately tormented by guilt and the constant fear of being found out. This torment drives him to confess his crime, and he begins serving eight years of penal servitude in Siberia as punishment.

In part I of the novel, Dostoevsky describes Raskolnikov as "having been in an overstrained irritable condition, verging on hypochondria" for some time past (1). When out in public, he is almost always preoccupied with his own agitated thoughts or muttering to himself in a state of feverish confusion. These irregular characteristics indicate Raskolnikovs nervous anticipation of the murder that he plans to commit. The guilt that he experiences after carrying out the murder further amplifies his irritable condition, thus plunging him into a period of illness and delirium. A reader would conclude, therefore, that Raskolnikovs mental state is directly linked to the guilt about the crime.

Although Freud would most likely agree with this conclusion, it would constitute only a small point in his analysis if he were to explore Raskolnikovs psychic condition. The psychoanalyst has much loftier goals, namely to discover "what [a neurotic patients] symptoms mean, what

instinctual impulses are concealed behind them and are satisfied by them, and what course was followed by the mysterious path that has led from the instinctual wishes to the symptoms" ("Character Types" 151). This description indicates that neurotic characteristics are deeply rooted in the human psyche, and a complete Freudian analysis of Raskolnikovs neurotic characteristics would therefore have to extend far beyond the context of his crime.

In order to engage in such an analysis, it is necessary to bring in Freuds Civilization and Its Discontents, a text that lends itself well to an exploration of Raskolnikovs character. By systematically analyzing Raskolnikov against Freuds arguments in this text, we can fully answer all of Freuds psychoanalytic questions (as listed in the previous paragraph). Moreover, we can gain a deeper and more critical understanding of Raskolnikovs character, while examining to what extent the constructs of civilization influence his behavior and actions.

Let us begin by examining Raskolnikov within the context of Freuds theory of the two-sided pleasure principle. Freud maintains that all human beings live under the auspices of this principle, which is perpetually "at loggerheads with the whole world" (729). In order to cope with this incompatibility, humans engage in three primary palliative measuresdeflections, substitutive satisfactions, and intoxicationwhich aid us in either avoiding displeasure or achieving a moderate sense of pleasure from other sources. Raskolnikov, however, is unable to make proper use of these palliative measures. Although he makes use of deflections and substitutive satisfaction, he never experiences the pleasure that these techniques are supposed to produce.

In order to determine the reasons behind Raskolnikovs faulty employment of these palliative measures, we must first understand the connection between our palliative measures and our instincts. "Just as a satisfaction of instinct spells happiness for us," Freud writes, "so severe suffering is caused us if the external world lets us starve, if it refuses to sate our needs. One may therefore hope to be freed from a part of ones sufferings by influencing the instinctual impulses" (731). In other words, deflections, substitutive satisfactions, and intoxication are actually control mechanisms that serve to limit the force of our instincts. We can draw the conclusion that these palliative measures are only effective insofar as ones instincts are suppressed.

It is in this relationship that Raskolnikovs problems lie. As a neurotic, Raskolnikov is unable to suppress his instincts as effectively as a regular person. He engages in these palliative measures for the same reasons as everybody else does, yet is unable to achieve the same results due to the abnormal strength of his instincts. When the instincts of regular people come into contact with their palliative measures, they are instantly subdued. But when Raskolnikovs powerful instincts come into contact with his palliative measures, they combine with the palliative measures, thus turning them into extreme and distorted mental obsessions.

Raskolnikovs deflections and substitutive satisfactions start out normally, but soon expand beyond the realm of normal mental preoccupation. His primary deflection, for example, is to engage in long periods of solitary thought. He uses these thinking sessions to develop his theory of extraordinary and ordinary individuals. We can assume that he begins with innocent enough intentionsas a student, the development of an insightful new theory would help him gain distinction in intellectual circles. Before long, however, his theory begins to take hold of him completely and consumes more and more of his time. As he recounts, "I sat in my room like a spider. [. . .] I ought to have studied, but I sold my books; and the dust lies an inch thick on the notebooks on my table. I preferred lying still and thinking. And I kept thinking. . ." (359). His preoccupation with his theory eventually leads him to his most distorted and dangerous deflection: the plan to murder the old woman in order to prove himself an extraordinary individual.

Raskolnikovs substitutive satisfactions, taking the form of fantasies, are closely related to his deflections. As his deflections expand in size, his fantasies follow suit. In the days immediately preceding his crime, Raskolnikov spends almost all of his time imagining the murder in vivid detail. Tied up with this fantasy is his view of himself as a larger-than-life heroic individual. "Ive learned to chatter this last month, lying for days together in my den thinking. . .of Jack the Giant-killer," he tells himself (1). Raskolnikovs preoccupation with this fairy tale character shows that his desires and instincts have overwhelmed him completely. Instead of his palliative measures controlling his instincts, his instincts have joined forces with and amplified the palliative measures.

Obviously, Raskolnikovs stronger-than-normal instincts are a key component

of his neurotic character. But which instincts are influencing him the most and how did they become so powerful? Freuds Civilization text once again provides us with the key to finding an explanation. In tackling the question of why it is difficult for human beings to be happy, Freud identifies three sources of human suffering: the human body, nature, and social relationships. While we cannot change the first two sources, he says, it seems that we should be able to influence the third. "And yet," he answers himself, "when we consider how unsuccessful we have been in precisely this field of prevention of suffering, a suspicion dawns on us that here, too, a piece of unconquerable nature may lie behindthis time a piece of our own psychical constitution" (735). This "piece of psychical constitution" refers to the perpetual struggle between our two primary instincts: the libidinal instinct and the aggressive instinct.

It is the existencenot the conflictof these two instincts that is important for our purposes here. And in this context, the aggressive instinct plays the larger role in Raskolnikovs life (even though his libidinal instinct is no doubt present). This is the instinct that most frequently takes hold of Raskolnikov and directs his thoughts and actions, as evidenced by his development of a theory that advocates crime and his actual perpetration of murder. Since Raskolnikov is still quite young, we can assume that the unusual ferocity of his aggressive instinct stems from a traumatic childhood event or a difficult passage through a childhood phase of development.

At this point, a problem arises. How is it that Raskolnikovs aggression still exists, when the conditions of civilization are supposed to repress such instincts? Freud maintains that civilization "is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression, or some other means?) of powerful instincts" (742). In order to answer our question, we must again remind ourselves that Raskolnikov is a neurotic character with instincts that cannot be repressed as readily as those of normal people. He maintains his aggressions, therefore, while others find their aggressions limited by civilization.

Does this mean that Raskolnikov doesnt have the "strange attitude of hostility to civilization" that Freud says most people do? (735). No, because his powerful instincts render him much more aware of the repressive nature of civilization. Unlike the general public, his instincts give him more sensitivity to what is going on around him. He thus experiences a higher level of hostility

toward civilization because he can sense (albeit still on an unconscious level) more fully how civilization works to limit key aspects of human nature.

This hyper-awareness enables Raskolnikov to identify and directly counter some of the ways in which civilization causes us unhappiness. Freud claims, for instance, that civilization requires that the powerful individual sacrifice his/her power to the larger group. Raskolnikovs idea of the "extraordinary" man who is a law unto himself constitutes his counter-response. As he explains in the novel, "an extraordinary man has the right. . .that is not an official right, but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep. . .certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical fulfillment of an idea (sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole of humanity)" (211). The fact that the extraordinary man transgresses the law in order to implement a better way of living points to Raskolnikovs desire to change this current law of civilization and put power back into the hands of the powerfulor extraordinaryindividual.

Raskolnikov also protests the fact that civilization limits the liberty and freedom of human beings. According to Freud: "The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. [. . .] The development of civilization imposes restrictions on it, and justice demands that no one shall escape those restrictions" (741). Crippled by poverty and angry at the fact that he must engage in specific institutions (such as work and school) in order to move ahead in life, Raskolnikov completely withdraws from civilization for a period of time. "I didnt go out for days together, and I wouldnt work," he says, "I wouldnt even eat, I just lay there doing nothing" (339). Raskolnikovs withdrawal from society indicates his annoyance at the fact that human existence is chained to these institutions of civilization.

At this point, let us turn our attention back to Raskolnikovs theory and crime. We have now established that his employment of palliative measures and his hostility toward the repressions of civilization each contribute to the development of his theory and his decision to commit his crime. If we take into account Freuds theory of the super-ego as well, we can gain an even more complete understanding of Raskolnikovs reasons for originating both theory and crime. According to Freuds definition, the super-ego is a severe and exacting master which "troubles itself little too little about the happiness of the ego" (770). It is an unwelcome presence for normal people and even more unpleasant for a neurotic like Raskolnikov, whose hyper-awareness

causes him to experience his super-ego more intensely. For this reason, Raskolnikov wants to escape from the relentless eye of the super-ego.

In light of this information, we could look at Raskolnikovs theory as an attempt to divest himself of his super-ego, or, better yet, prove his mastery over his super-ego. The extraordinary category of humans that Raskolnikov so admires, represented by men such as Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, and Napoleon, all appear to have been unhampered by their super-egos (Dostoevsky 211). These men, explains Raskolnikov, "were all without exception criminals, from the very fact that, making a new law, they transgressed the ancient one, [. . .] and they did not stop short at bloodshed, either, if that bloodshed [. . .] were of use to their cause" (211). Therefore, Raskolnikovs conception of his crime as an "experiment" to see if he is truly one of these extraordinary individuals could also be seen as an experiment to see if he is really affected by his super-ego or not. Unfortunately for Raskolnikov, both his experiment and theory fail: the excruciating remorse that he experiences after the crime proves that his super-ego does indeed dominate him and that it is impossible to completely transcend the superego.

The failure of Raskolnikovs theory serves to affirm Freuds belief that tension and disappointment go hand-in-hand with human civilization. Our Freudian analysis of Raskolnikov, moreover, indicates that complex connections exist between civilization and the human psycheconnections which are impossible to completely sever. The presence of these connections make it impossible for us to try to oppose the structure of civilization without ending up in the same plight as Raskolnikov. Thus, both Freud and Dostoevsky seem to suggest that it is necessary for us to adapt ourselves as best we can to the pre-existing constructs of civilization and learn to accept its less pleasant aspects.

Works Cited

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Trans. Constance Garnett. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1994.

Freud, Sigmund. "Civilizations and Its Discontents." The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1989.

Freud, Sigmund. "Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-analytic Work." Writings On Art and Literature. Ed. James Strachey. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.

Jostein Brtnes Dostoevskys Idiot or the Poetics of Emptiness1 They call me a psychologist: untrue, I am only a realist in the highest sense ( : , ) Dostoevsky wrote in his notebook towards the end of his life. The purpose of his art was: By undiminished realism to discover man in man ( )(Dostoevsky 1984:65). What is a realist in the highest sense, and what is man in man? Dostoevsky scholars have discussed the meaning of these two statements eversince they were first published, in the Biography, Letters and Notes that were published two years afterthe writer's death, in 1883. Dostoevsky himself was well aware of his idiosyncratic use of the term realism. In a letter to hisfriend Maykov of 11 December 1868 we find the following heartfelt cry in connection with his plan for a giant novel called The

Atheist, in which the hero in the end finds Christ and the Russian soil, a Russian Christ and aRussianGod ( , ): O, my friend! my conceptions of reality and realism are completely different from ourrealists and critics. My idealism is more real than theirs. My God! If you only were to relate all that we Russians have experienced in our spiritual development during the last ten years, wouldnt our realists cry that thisis all fantasy, whereas in actual fact this is primordial, genuine realism! Thisis real realism, only deeper, whereas they are sailing in shallow waters. [...] With theirrealism you cant explain a hundredth part of the factsthat have actually occurred, whereas we with our idealism have even predicted facts. (Dostoevsky 1985:329) 1 Paper presented at the Eighth International Dostoevsky Symposium, Oslo, 29 July - 2 August 1992. Published in Scando-Slavica 40 (1994), 5-14.2 In the lastsentence, Dostoevsky is thinking of the student Danilov, accused of having murdered a Moscow pawnbroker and his maidservant, whose trial coincided with the publication ofCrime and Punishment(Dostoevsky 1985:498 n. 18). Crime and Punishment is the first of Dostoevskys novels in which his artistic purpose of finding man in man by undiminished realism has been developed into a coherent poetic system. The basic device of thissystem consistsin the juxtaposition of the narrative with a text of a higher order: Raskolnikovsstory is brought together with the New Testament story about the raising of Lazarus in a way that transforms

Dostoevskys hero into a new Lazarus, a representation of the biblical prototype or Urbild, which is Christ himself, whose death and resurrection were prefigured in Lazarus, according to Orthodox tradition. In literary criticism this device is referred to as figural interpretation, a term introduced by Erich Auerbach in his book, Mimesis (1946). In theology it is called biblical typology. In broaderterms, Dostoevskys poetic system in Crime and Punishment is a kind of symbolism in the sense that the content of the Raskolnikov story acquires an additional meaning as the expression level for a content of a higher, sacred order, which in itsturn serves as a symbol ofthe Urbild, or generative model ofChrist. Asymbol in thissense always hassomething archaic about it, and every culture needs a body of texts which serves the function of archaism, according to Jury Lotman (1990:103). Symbols like the one activated by Dostoevskij in Crime and Punishment belong to our Christian cultures nucleus of symbols. They are archaic and go back to pre-literate times, when certain signs functioned as condensed mnemonic programmes for texts and stories preserved in the community's oral memory: Symbols have preserved this ability to store up extremely long and important textsin condensed form. But even more interesting is anotherfeature, also an

archaic one: a symbol, being a finalized text, does not have to be included in a3 syntagmatic chain, and if it is included in one, it preserves its own semantic and structural independence [...] a symbol never belongs only to one synchronic section of a culture, it always cuts across that section vertically, coming from the past and passing on into the future. A symbols memory is always more ancient than the memory of its non-symbolic text-context. (Lotman 1990:103) Lotmans emphasis on the archaic character of a symbol could help usto understand Dostoevskys characterisation of his realism as primordial , .As an artist he had an intuitive grasp of the symbol as defined by Lotman in the passage quoted above, and in Crime and Punishment this conception of man as a symbol enabled him to see in the story about the murderer Raskolnikov a variant of the ancient idea of mans ability to die away from his old self and be spiritually reborn as a new person. Through this idea Dostoevskys realism becomes realism in the highestsense. In hislast novel, The Brothers Karamazov, this archetypal pattern is actualised in a different symbolic representation, again from the Gospel of St. John, in the parable ofthe corn ofwheat: Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.(St.John 12:24) The same archetypal pattern of new life through death and rebirth symbolised in

these lines that serve as epigraph to The Brothers Karamazov - determines the structure of the novel, turning its heroes into symbolic representations of the same invariant Urbild as the one underlying Raskolnikovs story. That this is so, has convincingly been demonstrated by Diane Thompson in her detailed study (Thompson 1991). I should like to have a look at The Idiot, in order to see if we can find a similar Urbild-Abbild-structure here.4 From the moment Dostoevskys preliminary notes to The Idiot were first published by Sakulin and Belchikov in 1931, the study of the novel has drawn heavily on this material. It has often taken the form of a kind of shuttle traffic between notebooks and finished text in an attempt to solve the enigmas of the latter by statementsfound in the former. The prevailing idea of Prince Myshkin as an imitator of Christ has been well summarised by TheodoreZiolkovski(1972:104): Prince Myshkin is a truly Christlike man in his manuscript notes Dostoevskij once refers to him as Prince Christ of great moral beauty. But to make him plausible as a human being Dostoevskij found it necessary to mar his moral beauty with certain flaws. [...] Dostoevskij drew his Christlike man as a severe epileptic who eventually, at the end of the book, isreduced to babbling idiocy the savior asidiot! In representing Prince Myshkin in thisway, Dostoevsky was, according to Ziolkovski (1972:104), exploiting the ancient toposthat associates divine truthwith

madness: in the eyes ofsociety the savior orredeemer appears as a fool. The only critic to my knowledge who has contested this interpretation of Prince Myshkin, is J. P. Stern. In an acute analysis of Dostoevsky's hero he observes that even though neither the novel nor the notebooks contain a single word in affirmation of a divine origin of Myshkin'sillness, there can be no doubt that histotal person isintended assomething like an imitatioChristi."Yet,what Dostoevsky shows, "isthe defective nature of Myshkin'simitatio."(Stern 1973:16f.): in the end the world proves to be too much for him. Its sins and sorrows lie too heavily on it too heavily for him to redeem them. His imitatio is defective, not because it is merely human given the limits of the convention Dostoevskij has chosen, the re-enacting of Christ could not be anything else.5 The imitatio is defective, because at the crucial moment Myshkin's meekness is unsupported by an equalspiritualstrength: it would have been the strength required for the acknowledgement of love, for the choices implied in that acknowledgement, and for the responsibility it involves. And his weakness is all the more terrible in its consequencessince they all the men and women whose life he shares looked up to him, since for a while he held them all under the spell of his as yet untested strength. For a while: before more was asked of him than forgiveness.(Stern 1973:18f.) Against the background of Peter Stern's analysis, the idea of Myshkin as a truly Christlike man becomes highly questionable. In the following I shall highlight three examples in trying to show how

problematic the relationship between notes and novel really is: the idea of Prince Myshkin as a holy fool, as a poor knight, and as an imitator ofChrist. In one of the earliest plans, written down 22 October 1867, the central character, who is here called simply the Idiot, is referred to as a a word often rendered into English as holy fool: What a strange fellow he is. The Son: Yes, but to me he didn't at all look stupid. But strange, thatstrue. Just like a jurodivyj ( . : , . , . .(Dostoevsky 1974:163) We recognize here the meeting of Myshkinwith Rogozhin in the train, according to Mochulsky. The hero main trait has been found: he is a holy-fool (Mochulsky 1967:339). For Konrad Onasch, too, the hagiographic type of the "fool in Christ", the , plays a decisive role in the development of the figure of Prince Myshkin. The significance of thistype and itstopicsforthe poetics and the ideology6 of the novel can hardly be exaggerated (Onasch 1976:132). And at exactly the time when he was writing The Idiot, Dostoevskya was exploring what Onasch calls the poetische Nutzbarmachung - the poetic usability - of this hagiographic genre in connection with three other projects: the novel referred to as The Emperor, the unfinished Story of Captain Kartuzov, and the sketch called The Holy Fool. (Er hat

sich gerade whrend der Beschftigung mit dem Roman DerIdiot"sehrintensiv mit der poetischen Nutzbarmachung dieser hagiographischen Gattung befasst (Onasch 1976:133). Even in the opening chapter of The Idiot Rogozhin concludes that Prince Myshkin is a , the reason being that the prince, according to his own words, has no experience ofwomen: , , ? ! , ! ... , , , . , , , , , , , !(Dostoevsky 1973:14) The fact that the prince is sexually inexperienced because of his inborn handicap is hardly sufficient to make him a in the hagiographic meaning of the word. In orthodox hagiography, a is the Russian equivalent of Greek salos: a person who serves God under the guise of foolishness. In principle, the disguise is not discovered until the fool is dead. Then he or she becomes a saint. If the holy fool happens to be recognised earlier, he runs away, or else commits an act that is so foolish that the rent in his disguise is repaired" (Rydn 1981:106).7 It is quite clear that Myshkin is not a in the sense of representing a

particular type of saint. Rogozhin uses the word in a more popular sense,which we might translate as an "innocent fool". To him, the stranger appearsto be one of those imbeciles whom the Russians in the last century still deemed to be inspired by God and under divine protection. But it is characteristic of Dostoevskys poetics in The Idiot that the relationship between the prince and the prototypical of popular belief is "made strange" to the extent that Myshkin fails to come out as a symbolic expression even of this Urbild, a living symbol of which isthe of Pushkins Boris Godunov. In The Idiot, the representation of the prince as a seems more like a process of de-symbolisation, until at the end of the story he he has finally become what he once was, a helpless idiot. This process of de-symbolisation is, as we shall see, typical of the whole structure of the novel. In hisletterto S.A.Ivanova of 1 January 1868, in which he definesthe main idea of the novel asrepresenting a positively beautiful man a Don Quixote is referred to asthe most complete beautiful characterin Christian literature: (Dostoevsky

1985:251).A few monthslater, 21 March, he returnsto Don Quixote in his notebook, observing that like Mr. Pickwick, Don Quixote is successful as a positive character because he is comic, in contrastto the prince,who is not comic, butinnocent: - , , . , : !! (Dostoevsky 1974:239) In the novel, the comic figure of Don Quixote is brought together with the poor knight of Pushkins ballad.In him,Aglaya seesthe serious counterpart of Cervantes8 hero: - The poor knight is also a Don Quixote, only serious, not comic (Dostoevsky 1973:207). And in her agitated reading of Pushkins poem, she goes a step further,replacing theA. M. D., theAve Mater Dei of the "poor knight" with a N. F. B., Nastasya Filippovnas initials, idealising Myshkins relationship with her rival and seeing in his figure another incarnation of the Urbild represented in Pushkins hero. To her, the ballad describes a man capable of having an ideal, and, secondly, having once set the ideal before him, of believing in it, and having believed in it, of devoting hiswhole life to it. The poetwanted, in her words, to unite in one striking image thewhole grand conception of medieval chivalrous and platonic love: , , -

; , [...] , , . (Dostoevsky 1973207) But, aswe know,Aglayas attempt at turning Prince Myshkin into a symbolic figure is rejected by the story line of the novel. Myshkins relationship with Nastasya Filippovna developsinto something quite different from the platonic love of medieval chivalry. Once more, the reader is faced with an Urbild-Abbild-relationship that is twarted, deformed. One of the strongest claims about Prince Myshkin is that his story follows the pattern ofChristslife story,turning hisfigure into an imitator ofChrist. The claimsfind ample support in the notebooks,where the strongest formulation isto be found in a summary of parts 3 and 4 from April 1868. Here Dostoevskijwrites thatthe prince isChrist: . (Dostoevsky 1974:246). In the novel, however, the relationship between Prince Myshkin and Christ has become much more complex. But there is one scene, in particular, thatseemsto me to represent Myshkins relationship with Nastasya Filippovna in a way that suggests9 Christs encounterswithwomen in the Gospels.Above all,we think of the appearance of the risen Christ before Mary Magalene in the garden. Especially ifwe recall that the prince on the day before hasinvited Rogozhin to celebratewith him the beginning of his newlife: ,

(Dostoevsky 1973:304): , , . , , . , , , . , . ; . , ! , ; - , ; . , . , , ; o , , , , , . , ! , , ! (Dostoevsky 1973: 381f.) To those familiar with the painter A. A. Ivanovs rendering of the garden scene, painted in the mid-1830s, it is difficult not to see in this passage a verbal variation of the same biblical prototype. But the analogies between the figure of Christ and that of Prince Myshkin are not developed into a typological structure in which the

former is symbolically expressed through the latter. On the contrary, towards the end of the story the points of similarity between Christ and the prince are superseded by a10 marked emphasis on the differences between them. In his confrontation with the prince in one of the last chapters, Radomsky explicitly rejects the analogy between Nastasya Filippovna and the woman taken in adultery, thereby also implicitly rejecting the parallel between Jesus and the prince: What do you think: the woman taken in adultery, the same kind of woman, but she was not told that she was doing well and that she was deserving all kinds of honour and respect, was she? ( : , , , ?)(Dostoevsky 1973:482) Instead of being a fulfilment of a biblical pattern, ortypos, Myshkins attempt to save Nastasya Filippovna is here shown to represent the content of the Gospel story in a highly distorted, deconstructed fashion. We observe the same process as in the juxtaposition of the prince with Don Quixote and the poor knight. Neither in his relationship to Nastasya Filippovna norin his connectionwithAglaya doesthe prince come out as a fully-fledged symbol, in which the cultural content of the prototypes finds a new expression. On the contrary, the bringing together of the idiot with the

Urbild of Christ as well as with the poor knight and his comic counterpart, Don Quixote, the most complete of all the beautiful characters of Christian literature, has a de-symbolising effect in the novel. Aglaya, who, according to her own words, has read a great many books the last year (Dostoevsky 1973:358), and Nastasya Filippovna, who, in Radomskys view, has read too much poetry , , [...] (Dostoevsky 1973:472), project their literary reminiscences onto Myshkin in much the same way as Tatyana projects hers into the figure of Evgeny in Pushkins novel. In a kind of Bovaryism, like Emma in Flauberts novel, 11 they both see in the male protagonist an embodiment of their heroic ideals, a role for which he istotally unfit. This de-symbolising purport of The Idiot anticipates the representation of Stavrogin in The Devils, where a number of different people project their ideologies onto Stavrogin,seeing in him,this empty figure, an incarnation of alltheir dreams. There is, however, also a symbolising process at work in The Idiot, a process originating in the Holbein picture of the dead Saviour when he has just been taken down from the cross. The painting represents one of the leitmotifs of the

novel. It is already alluded to when in his first encounter with the Epanchin ladies, Myshkin refersto a picture he once saw at Basel. In Rogozhins house there is a copy of it that the prince identifies on hisfirst visit there, observing thatsome people may lose their faith by looking at it (Dostoevsky 1973:182). Rogozhin, on his part, confesses that he loves to look at the picture. Later, the thought of the painting comes back to Myshkin during his quest for Nastasya Filippovna just before Rogozhin tries to kill him with his knife and he has hisfirst fit of epilepsy. However, the theme of the dead Christ is only fully developed in Ippolits speech, where it is expanded into a genuine ecphrasis and interpreted as an expression of the idea of a dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power, to which everything issubordinated, and thisidea issuggested to you unconsciously: Here one cannot help being struck by the idea that if death isso horrible and the laws of nature so powerful, then howcan they be overcome? Howcan they be overcome when even He did not conquer them, He who overcame nature during his lifetime and whom nature obeyed, who said Talitha cumi! and the young girl arose, who cried, Lazarus come forth! and the dead man came forth?(Dostoevsky 1973:339) The dead Christ as he is described and explained by Ippolit, is the central symbol of The Idiot. In his interpretation, the painting is turned into a symbol of the

new,12 nineteenth-century idea of a humanised Jesus, not the Christ of the Church, "fully divine and fully human", who rose from the dead, "conquering death by death" ( ), but a wholly human figure, perfect but mortal. In The Idiot, the dead body in Holbeins painting has become an empty signifier, its very emptiness signifying that the sacrifice of Christ has lost its meaning, thereby depriving the whole of Christian culture of its meaning, too. In this postChristian world the pre-Christian, archaic idea of human sacrifice is revived. Nastasya Filippovna is put to death by Rogozhins knife in the alcove of hisstudy thatserves as his bedroom. Forthe occasion, the alcove has been turned into a bridal chamber by a green damask curtain dividing the study form the alcove. By this arrangement, Rogozhins study reminds the reader of a church, the curtain having a function similar to the iconostasis by which the chancel is hidden from the rest of the interior (Onasch 1976:152). But in contrast to the "terrible liturgy" - the of the Church, when Christssacrificial death on Golgotha isritually reenacted in the bloodless sacrifice of the divine service, Nastasya Filippovnas lifeless body gives expression to exactly the feeling of terrible anguish and dismay that according to Ippolit overwhelmed those surrounding the

dead man depicted in Holbeins picture on that evening which had shattered all their hopes and almost all their beliefs at one fell blow (Dostoevsky 1973:339). REFERENCES , . . . . . , - 1883. ( .., . 1.)13 , . ., , 30- , . 8, 1973. : , 30- , . 9, 1974. [...] 1880-1881 ., 30- , . 27, . 1860-1868, 30-,, . 28, 2. Lotman,Jurij M., Universe of the Mind: a Semiotic Theory ofCulture, London 1990. Mochulsky, Konstantin, Dostoevskij: His Life and Work, transl. with an introd. by M. A.Minihan, Princeton 1976. Onasch,Konrad, Der verschwiegene Christus,Berlin 1976. Rydn, Lennart, The Holy Fool, The Byzantine Saint, ed. by S. Hackel. (= Studies

Supplementary to Sobornost 5), A Special Number of Sobornost incorporating Eastern ChurchesReview, pp. 106-16. Stern,J. Peter, On Realism, London 1973. Thompson, Diane, The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory, Cambridge 1991. Ziolkovski,Theodore, Fictional Transformations of Jesus, Princeton/NewJersey 1972.

Abstract Show/Hide This project examines the role of the Left Hegelian school of philosophy in Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Special attention is given to Georg Hegel's section on World Historical Individuals from Philosophy of History and Rodion Raskolnikov's philosophy from Crime and Punishment. The text argues that Raskolnikov is largely an agent of Left Hegelianism created by Dostoevsky to illustrate a philosophy that the author opposed. That philosophy, Left Hegelianism, held that ultimately all reality is subjectable to rational categorization, an idea that grew into a movement that was partially responsible for rampant atheism, anarchism, and terrorism in 19th century Russia. Although scholars have explored many of the themes in Crime and Punishment, almost all have overlooked Hegelianism as a major source of inspiration for Dostoevsky. This research is important because one of the essential sources of inspiration for an incredibly influential author is mostly absent from analytical texts. This project illuminates one largely unexplored area of thought from a major source of our modern culture.

In Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky relates the story of Rodion Raskolnikov, a man who murders a pawnbroker in St. Petersburg, and the mental anguish that tortures Raskolnikov as he comes to terms with his crime. Scholars have shown notable variety with categorizing the book,

sometimes classifying it pragmatically as a thriller or more philosophically as a comedy of mistaken identity.1 Yet regardless of its classification, the sophisticated tale evokes the mystique of a murder mystery: even though the reader knows the identity of the killer from the beginning, Raskolnikov tries to discover his true motivation and Dostoevsky reveals key pieces of Raskolnikov's psyche and history as the plot unfolds. Like most of Dostoevsky's work, this novel includes an underlying moral message and reveals facets of the author's own psyche and history. This paper explores one of those facets: Georg Hegel's influence on Dostoevsky's thought. Dostoevsky first began exploring Hegelianism in association with his intense interest in German Romanticism. After publishing his short novel Poor Folk in 1846 to critical acclaim, Dostoevsky was invited to numerous meetings of Left Hegelians, those who interpreted Hegel's philosophy as advocating atheism and liberal democracy in politics. Shortly thereafter, in 1849, the Russian government strictly enforced its stance on potential terrorist groups and Dostoevsky was exiled to a Siberian prison. Ultimately, as a result of association with these groups and his experiences both during and directly following his incarceration, Dostoevsky came to sympathize less with leftist progressivism and to rely more on a Christian moral foundation. Crime and Punishment was both Dostoevsky's response to Hegelian sentiments of the 1840s and warning to the radicals of the 1860s about the possible negative influences of their ethics. Raskolnikov is largely an agent of Left Hegelianism, constructed especially from Hegel's section on World Historical Individuals from Philosophy of History, utilized by Dostoevsky to illustrate a philosophy that the author opposed. This paper will begin with the historical context of Dostoevsky's work in connection with Hegelian philosophy, so that the reason for Dostoevsky's critique may be more fully understood. It will continue with a juxtaposition between Hegel's philosophy and the key sections of Crime and Punishment that parallel Hegelianism, so that the reader may clearly see the correlations. Finally, it will end with an examination of those views opposing the idea that Crime and Punishment represents a reaction to Hegelianism, offering a case for why these views, while understandable, are inaccurate.

Dostoevsky's encounters with Hegelian social groups early in his career allowed him to explore his fascination with German Romanticism, but he later found Christianity more engaging following his incarceration in Siberia. One of the first and most influential philosophical leaders with whom Dostoevsky engaged was Vissarion Belinsky, a well-known critic of Russian literature at that time. Before Dostoevsky joined Belinsky's social circle in 1846, the author entertained an acute interest in German Romanticism and [exhibited] a horrified fascination with the theme of man's sacrilegious aspiration to dethrone God and substitute himself in God's place.2 So Belinsky gave

Dostoevsky the opportunity to examine those ideas that intrigued and disconcerted the author. However, during this time Belinsky was swiftly adopting the very values of German Romanticism that discomforted Dostoevsky: Left Hegelianism.

Although Dostoevsky wrote that he viewed Belinsky as an impassioned philosophical guide who effectively indoctrinated him into new Socialist thought, the author soon found Belinsky's ethics troubling. Whereas Socialism was potentially compatible with Christian morals, Left Hegelianism encouraged anti-Christian sentiments, which Dostoevsky opposed. In fact, notable Dostoevsky scholar Joseph Frank wrote that, Dostoevsky had been deeply disturbed - indeed, on the point of tears - when, during a conversation in 1847, Belinsky had attacked and denigrated Christ with the new Left Hegelian arguments.3 It is worth noting that Belinsky explored many different philosophical ideas throughout his life, but Belinskys enthusiastic Left Hegelian stage most greatly affected the author. Dostoevsky disliked Belinsky's philosophy; however, he disliked Mikhail Petrashevsky's form of Left Hegelian atheism even more.

Belinsky impressed Dostoevsky, who viewed the critic's negative outbursts as genuine concern for Russian people, but Petrashevsky's cold sarcasm and scorn contributed to Dostoevsky's further move away from ideologies such as Hegelianism to an aggressively Christian moral code. Initially, Dostoevsky held several reasons to shift from Belinsky's social circle to Petrashevsky's. The stifling egoism from Belinsky's circle, Belinskys lack of endorsement for Dostoevskys works following Poor Folk, and Dostoevsky's desire for a group with more open communication of ideas inspired Dostoevsky's decision to distance himself from Belinsky in 1847.

Neither the Petrashevsky circle nor Petrashevsky himself satisfied Dostoevsky's intellectual or ethical appetites. One historian reported that, after Dostoevsky's exposure to the intimacy of the Belinsky group, the author condemned the Petrashevsky meetings as a haphazard conglomeration and the author reputedly [attributed] their popularity both to the free refreshments and to a desire to 'play at liberalism'.4 Moreover, the leader, Mikhail Petrashevsky, was a devout Left Hegelian atheist who believed that religion was not only an error but positively harmful.5 During this time, Dostoevsky became more familiar with the arguments of Left Hegelianism, but there is no evidence . . . that he ever gave way to [the sentiments]

entirely.6 Further, Petrashevsky's mocking irreverence toward religion and scorn for literature discomfited Dostoevsky even more than Belinsky's occasional anti-Christian outbursts. But Dostoevsky's experience with the Petrashevsky circle ultimately facilitated his decision to oppose Russian progressivism, especially in association with Left Hegelianism, for another reason. Association with the Petrashevsky group resulted in his Siberian incarceration two years later, after the government executed a raid versus radical groups in 1849. It was during Dostoevsky's time in Siberia, from 1849 to 1854, that the author rejuvenated and empowered himself with Christianity.

Dostoevsky strengthened his Christian faith while he was imprisoned in Siberia and, soon after his release, the author began to systematically examine philosophical texts. Many of Dostoevsky's experiences in Siberia may be gleaned from House of the Dead, but one may also discover how Siberia influenced Dostoevsky from his other books. Because of the environment and events in prison, Dostoevsky's relationship with Christianity evolved tremendously. Essentially he came to believe that a Christian conscience served as a necessary inner barrier against a . . . deadening of the moral sensibility.7 Joseph Frank argued that, before Siberia, Dostoevsky had viewed Christ as the bearer of a general canon of social change, but that later Christ became a deeply intertwined agent who soothed the authors intellectual and ethical angst.8 Dostoevsky became an enemy of the radicals of the 1860s because he feared that their ethics would destroy this idea of defense. After reinforcing his Christian foundation in a Siberia prison, Dostoevsky began a philosophical survey while staying in a town named Omsk.

During the early 1850s, Dostoevsky embarked on an intellectual journey to examine some specific earlier philosophical movements, especially Hegelianism. Dostoevsky contacted his brother about acquiring some philosophical texts. With regard to the type of philosophy, Joseph Frank noted that Dostoevsky seemed anxious to plunge back into the past in a very serious and systematic fashion . . . [Dostoevsky wrote,] 'slip Hegel in without fail, especially Hegel's History of Philosophy. My entire future is tied up with that'.9 Although the author clearly requested Hegel's text in order to reexamine the philosopher's doctrine, historical sources have failed to show whether or not Dostoevsky actually secured History of Philosophy. On the contrary, Malcolm Jones, the former President of the International Dostoevsky Society, argued that the deficit of evidence to the contrary indicates that Dostoevsky did not achieve thorough comprehension of Hegelianism solely

during association with Young Hegelian groups of the 1840s.10 However, one may glean echoes of Hegel in Dostoevsky's negative heroes from later works, such as Rodion Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment, which the author could not have constructed without an intimate knowledge of Hegelianism. So Dostoevsky must have studied Hegelianism later in his life, and historical documents indicate that the most likely time for research would have been directly following his incarceration since he deliberately requested the texts of Georg Hegel while living in Omsk.

Dostoevsky's experiences with Hegelianism during the 1850s supported the substantial parallelism between the vision of his negative heroes and Left Hegelian views. On this matter, Frank commented that, if Dostoevsky had no effective answer to Belinsky in 1845, he amply made up for it later by the creation of his negative heroes.11 These subjects engage in the impossible and self-destructive attempt to transcend the human condition, and to incarcerate the Left Hegelian dream of replacing the God-man by the Mangod.12 Crime and Punishment illuminated the problems Dostoevsky perceived in Left Hegelianism. Raskolnikov attempts to transcend humanity based upon his theory of extraordinary individuals and by arguing that these gods or supermen among ordinary citizens were capable of righteously committing negative acts. Deluded by his perception of righteousness, Raskolnikov murders a pawn broker, leading him down a self-destructive path that lasts mere days before its conclusion. Shadowing Dostoevsky's experiences, Raskolnikov later finds redemption in suffering and Christianity while incarcerated, according to Dostoevsky's own ethos. Echoing the Hegelian sentiments of men like Belinsky, Raskolnikov is an effective negative hero, but not a Hero in the Hegelian sense. Georg Hegel wrote in Philosophy of History that Heroes are great people who naturally further the teleological, or progressive, world by contributing an idea that is simultaneously uniquely their own and the best of their time. He called these figures both Heroes and World Historical Individuals, and included men such as Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Alexander the Great in their ranks.13 By defining these people, Hegel classified and categorized two groups of historical agents with different roles. Essentially, there are notable cases of Heroes and there are unremarkable cases of mundane individuals, everyone else in society. Hegel wrote about several differences between Heroes and mundane people. A mundane group of people seeks to establish and secure a community in order to facilitate its own ends, which usually includes a focus on comfort. Furthermore, these people work toward building harmony, establishing permanency, and generally upholding the rules given to them by their

predecessors. This is not the role of Heroes. According to Hegel, Heroes inspire and fulfill a radical shift in society during the period with which they are associated.14 Often largely unaware of their impact on society, they act for their own benefit, like mundane people, but toward different ends. Heroes are passionate agents who derive their vocation from themselves and gather enough power to shape the world in the image of their own interests. Ultimately, these individuals produce significant, changing conditions that reflect their personal concerns.15 According to Hegel, they are thoughtful people whose enterprises subconsciously originate from an abstract source about a requirement of their age, which specifically parallels that Hero's personal concern. Once they glean this characteristic, all further aims are intended toward nothing else.16 This is one of the central points of Hegel's argument because it contains both the reason why Heroes achieve greatness and the unique property through which they succeed. Although Heroes are interested in private gain, they derive their larger success from an unconscious impulse that Hegel called geist, or Spirit. Unfortunately, this central characteristic of Hegel's argument is also fairly elusive. One may define geist as an Idea, or historical medium, transmitted through the process of Nature to the Spirit within a Hero that interprets the message.17 Essentially, Spirit is the term used to describe the impetus for historical events. But to understand how this idea connects with Crime and Punishment, one must understand the relationship between Hegel's terms: Idea, Nature, and Spirit. Chenxi Tang, a scholar of German Romanticism, explained this relationship by articulating that the process is treated first as a structure of thought.18 This structure of thought is the Idea, or historical medium, which originates from an abstract force. The historical medium, Tang wrote, informs nature and comes to realize itself through nature.19 Nature, for Hegel, was the inevitable or teleological progression from one stage of existence to another.

In a historical context, the ultimate goal of Nature is the progression of Spirit, which results in civilization, laws, and modernity. But Nature does not evolve naturally; it progresses through the foundation of Idea, and eventually [comes] to the fore in subjective consciousness.20 This consciousness may take several forms, according to Romanticism, but Hegel notably argued that Heroes realize the Idea subconsciously through an agent within themselves: Spirit. In essence, it is from this that Heroes derive their master passion, which leads them to will and accomplish great things.21 Spirit signifies that connection between Heroes and the will of the historical medium. Using Spirit, Hegel justified how Heroes may commit monstrous acts, such as mass murder. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov closely echoes this theory of World Historical Individuals.

In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov writes an essay that describes the status of ordinary and extraordinary people in the world. Magistrate Porfiry Petrovitch is the first character to reveal this theory in the novel, albeit condescendingly, declaring that, Ordinary men have to live in submission, have no right to transgress the law, because, dont you see, they are ordinary. But extraordinary men have a right to commit any crime and to transgress the law in any way just because they are extraordinary.22 Porfiry Petrovitch immediately takes the theory to an extreme level, for which Raskolnikov corrects him by replying that extraordinary people are not always bound to commit breaches of morals.23 Raskolnikov argues that an extraordinary person has the right to commit certain crimes, based upon his own conscience, when fulfilling his or her idea, theory, or, as Hegel would term it, Spirit. He continues this thought by stating, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty bound . . . to eliminate a dozen or a hundred men for the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity.24 He furthers this reasoning in a manner similar to Hegel, commenting that Newton would not have had a right to murder people whenever and if he desired or to regularly steal; it was only for the sake of fulfilling his Spirit that Newton had the right. Raskolnikov further commits himself to the position as a Hegelian agent by the way in which he illustrates his example of Napoleon.

Raskolnikov comments that extraordinary people may commit some criminal acts justly. He begins by commenting that all world leaders are criminals because they depose old, sometimes sacred laws for their new ones and, in some cases, even commit bloodshed. Raskolnikov argues that Heroes such as Napoleon must from their very nature be criminals . . . otherwise its hard for them to get out of the common rut; and to remain in the common rut is what they cant submit to . . . and to my mind they ought not, indeed, to submit to it.25 Parallel with Hegel's argument, Raskolnikov argues for a position of individuals who transcend common moral actions based upon the greater quality of their actions, which Hegel addressed in Philosophy of History.

Hegel argued from the position of good will, which holds that criminal acts may or may not be justifiable. Hegel wrote that nothing can inform an individual about what is right except for one's own conscience.26 It is one's responsibility to examine the conscience and determine what is right or good. Therefore, murdering for the sake of murder, for personal gain, or for sadistic pleasure are wrong actions because they are not intended to be good. But

murder for the purpose of relieving or preventing suffering, or to save an innocent life can be good if the conscience deems that it is so.27 Stephen Houlgate in his book on Hegel stated this simply, What ultimately makes me a moral individual, for Hegel, is the knowledge that I cannot go wrong as long as I will what my conscience tells me is good.28 This position allows Heroes like Napoleon to murder freely and openly. Since they are Heroes, they are driven by the Spirit, and so their acts are justified by the conscience, which understands the acts to be good and inviolable. This particular theory served as a strong base from which the character of Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment was created. However, Raskolnikov argues that a crime is still punishable regardless of what class of individual committed the act.

Raskolnikov states that an individual who commits a crime is subject to punishment. He reveals this position during the initial conversation regarding his theory. Raskolnikov says that everyone who commits criminal acts suffers, even those who have the right to do so. He argues that, if they are an ordinary individual then, they castigate themselves, for they are very conscientious . . . They will impose various public acts of penitence upon themselves with a beautiful and edifying effect.29 However, even if the person is in the extraordinary class, Raskolnikov is confident about their suffering. He comments that, pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.30 Ultimately, regardless of whether the act was just or not, committing a crime will result in suffering. This theory is very telling about Raskolnikov's own state of mind during both the stages leading up to the murder and his illness and rage following the act. But the idea of a criminal demanding his own punishment is not a unique idea; Hegel made the same argument in Philosophy of Right.

Hegel wrote a very strong parallel argument to Raskolnikov's position in Crime and Punishment. He argued:

"Beccarria's requirement that men should give their consent to being punished is right enough, but the criminal gives his consent already by his very act. The nature of the crime, no less than the private will of the criminal, requires that the injury initiated by the criminal should be annulled."31

According to Hegel, just as Raskolnikov, there exists an inherent quality in a

criminal act that inspires the perpetrator to seek punishment. This might be part of the reason why Hegel argued that it is unnatural for Heroes to be happy. Hegel wrote that, [Heroes] attained no calm enjoyment; their whole life was labor and trouble; their whole nature was nought else but their master-passion.32 Guided by the invisible force of Spirit, individuals are moved to obtain their passion, even when it leads them to act in monstrous ways. This anxiety leads to another state Raskolnikov suffered in Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov feels unhappy and anxious as he is moved by what he perceives to be an invisible power to kill the pawnbroker. Leading up to the murder, he feels that the desire was both stronger than him and somehow natural. But the state was simultaneously stressful and filled Raskolnikov with despair, as if approaching his doom. During this time, Raskolnikov undergoes similar trials and negative life experiences as Heroes from Hegel's History of Philosophy. Furthermore, the force that Raskolnikov believes guided him to commit the crime resembles that sense of Spirit that Hegel argued moved men to act. Lastly, Raskolnikov admits that the categories utilized to divide people into ordinary and extraordinary are fairly arbitrary. He states that the important structure is that they are based on laws of nature, which either imparts one with the gift or talent to utter a new word or does not.33 He finishes his description by mentioning that Heroes could find in their consciences a sanction for wading through blood, if it meant fulfilling their missions. Raskolnikov's essay is the clearest Hegelian argument from Crime and Punishment, but it is not the only one in the text. Toward the beginning of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov overhears two gentlemen discussing the moral properties of killing the pawnbroker who Raskolnikov later murders. A student and an officer discuss several characteristics of the pawnbroker, especially her negative qualities, including how coldly she treats late payments, the interest she charges, and the abuse of her sister. Without provocation, the student mentions that he could kill the pawnbroker and make off with her money without the faintest conscienceprick.34 The officer laughs but the student continues by describing the pawnbroker as an old, spiteful woman who basically throws money away instead of helping the poor and sickly. As the student grows more heated, the officer interrupts him by asking if the student could actually kill the pawnbroker. The student corrects himself by replying that he was arguing whether or not the act was just, but that he could not kill her.35 With this statement, he illuminates that facet of Hegelian philosophy that examines the value of normally immoral acts, such as murder, for moral intentions by utilizing the guidance of conscience. The student's conscience signals that it was not a just act, so he answered that he would not commit murder. This

conversation also alludes to Raskolnikov's later ethical issues following the murder. From these examples, the parallels between Hegel and Dostoevsky are fairly clear. But some scholars have argued that one can make no distinctive connection between the two authors.

Malcolm Jones succinctly summarized multiple critics' objections when he wrote the article, Some Echoes of Hegel in Dostoevsky, which contends that Hegelian philosophy does not appear in Dostoevsky's writing. He held that many of Dostoevskys contemporaries prior to the author's incarceration were fascinated by Hegelian ethics, but that there is no written record of Dostoevsky ever having read Hegel during the 1840s.36 Additionally, Jones argued that, while Dostoevsky requested Hegels History of Philosophy during his stay in Omsk, there is no historical evidence of Dostoevsky having read the book. Furthermore, Jones argued that many of those examples in Crime and Punishment cited as Hegelian ideas were different enough that they fail to substantiate the claim.

A more in-depth reading of both Hegels History of Philosophy and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment reveals that not only do Jones' claims fail to refute the connection, but that they actually aid his opponents' arguments. Jones cites three specific differences between the two texts, including the role and ideas of Heroes. First, Jones argues that Hegel's World Historical Figures achieve and collect the best deeds and words of their age, while implying that the ideas do not originate with the Hero. In contrast, Raskolnikov specifically argues that the extraordinary man bears the new idea.37 However, after his original introduction of Heroes, Hegel continued the description, writing that they draw the impulse of life from themselves . . . [World Historical Figures] know this nascent principle.38 Hegel clearly stated that Heroes took the ideas from themselves. If it is a nascent principle, then it is a principle having come into existence from the Hero, not simply the best collected views of the Hero's time.

Jones' second criticism compares the perspective of Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov and the Hegelian idea. Jones argues that, Raskolnikov does not see himself . . . as participating in the unfolding of the Idea.39 However, Jones' position actually undermines his own argument. According to Hegel, Heroes are unaware of their position. They act according to their own impulses and the drive of Spirit, but without knowledge of their overall historical position.40 Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment does not utilize Hegel's argument,

Dostoevsky does; Raskolnikov is the agent through which Dostoevsky portrays the Hegelian idea. Therefore, if Raskolnikov does not view himself as a participant of the Idea, then he is portrayed as an even stronger Hegelian figure, as constructed by Dostoevsky.

Jones argues that Raskolnikov does not ultimately become a Hero, and that the epilogue of Crime and Punishment does not portray Raskolnikov within the framework of Hegelian philosophy. This claim is entirely true, but the points raised are central to Dostoevsky's entire argument. Jones wrote that, Raskolnikov's story is not that of a superman, of a world-historical individual.41 Raskolnikov was a man who tried to become a superman and failed either to achieve or arguably even wholly define his goals. But Dostoevsky did not agree with Hegelian ethics; he designed Raskolnikov as a portrayal of the Hegelian idea that fails and quickly, considering that Raskolnikov's crime and self-inflicted punishment take place within about two weeks. Dostoevsky scholar Philip Rahv wrote that, in devising Raskolnikov, Dostoevsky converted Hegel's theory of men as subjects and objects of history into a theory of human nature.42 By doing so, Dostoevsky deliberately contrived a parody of Hegel's World Historical Individuals who, in brief lucid moments, even mocks himself for the very theory that Dostoevsky extracted from Philosophy of History.

Although Raskolnikov enacts his, and therefore Hegel's, portrayal of a Hero, Raskolnikov fails because ultimately the theory was flawed, according to Dostoevsky. In the epilogue following Raskolnikov's failure, he realizes serenity solely through the acceptance of Christianity and the acknowledgment of his crime by way of suffering in Siberia for atonement. Dostoevsky constructed Raskolnikov explicitly to illustrate how he perceived Hegelianism performing outside of the abstract realm within which Hegel constructed his theory. Raskolnikov fails in the portrayed setting of St. Petersburg because, in Dostoevsky's view, Hegelianism would fail in a realworld application. After Raskolnikov's inner turmoil breaks him, Dostoevsky's moral-religious code restores him. That restoration signifies the conclusion of Dostoevsky's Hegelian parody and the message embodied therein.

Lastly, Malcolm Jones held that there is not enough contextual evidence to suggest that Crime and Punishment was influenced predominately by Hegel, as opposed to the more general, popular philosophy existent during that time. However, other experts have proven that Hegel's philosophy was a

unique vision. Raskolnikov was not an agent of general Romanticism; he was largely a unique Hegelian construction, and there are some notable ways in which Hegel separated himself from contemporary thinkers. Chenxi Tang wrote that Hegel moved beyond, the Romantic Spinozism that explains nature and spirit in terms of monist metaphysics. It does not provide a naturalistic account of spirit in the sense that spirit emerges from the development of nature.43 Unlike other Romanticists, Hegel argued that Nature could not communicate directly with the human sphere; social communication through the Spirit was the only way Nature could connect with humans. Furthermore, Hegel argued that, the geographic conditions of a particular people's habitat help to define the role it plays in world history.44 During that time, popular Romanticism did not connect natural forces and particular ideas in the same way as Hegel, especially not through his World Historical Individuals theory. These very differences between Hegel and Romanticism help to define Raskolnikov's position and philosophy in Crime and Punishment because they illustrate that Romanticism, in general, did not inspire Dostoevsky to create Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov was a uniquely Hegelian concept.

Utilizing Crime and Punishment to illustrate the potentially harmful impact of Left Hegelian ethics, Fyodor Dostoevsky sought to warn radicals against progressive ideas that could end in calamity. Although Dostoevsky had personally experienced the negative effects of revolutionary socialist thought, he did not endeavor to vilify the Left Hegelian persona in order to realize some vendetta against Hegelian groups. Dostoevsky believed it was imperative that he inform the curious public about the possible dangers of their inquiries in order to help them. In The Miraculous Years, Joseph Frank effectively defined Dostoevsky's ambition:

"In Crime and Punishment, [Dostoevsky] would take the sporadic questionings to such impoverished representatives of the educated youth, struggling desperately to keep their heads above water amid the imperial splendors of Petersburg, and raise them to the level of a tragic confrontation between man's ambition to change the world for the better and the age-old moral imperatives of the Christian faith."45 Dostoevsky sensed a great need for Russian youth to critically analyze their liberal actions and ideas, and he wrote Crime and Punishment largely as a tool to further his conservative campaign toward tempering their progressive views. In order to support his ideas, Dostoevsky used Hegelian philosophy to create a character who fails in the ways that Dostoevsky feared that the

Russian radicals could fail. Furthermore, Raskolnikov illustrates Dostoevsky's fear of a people whose ambitions were not balanced by the moral foundation of Christianity. Raskolnikov is Dostoevsky's agent of Left Hegelianism, created to intimate how an individual with a strong moral purpose can make the wrong decisions without the right ethical structure. Dostoevsky utilized the philosophy of Georg Hegel for historical and contextual reasons, which was a clear decision due to Dostoevsky's history and clearly ascertained in the context of Crime and Punishment.

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