The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Dostoevsky’s novels are immediate, talking texts: how something is told, and by whom, are key. As with Gogol, one senses a narrator who, out of ineptitude, caprice, or malice, can willingly distort or withhold the story. This is not the playfulness of Pushkin’s digressions and plot-suspensions in the Belkin Tales, which are simply and honorably erotic (designed to prolong pleasure), nor is it Gogol’s focus on humiliation and embarrassment. In Dostoevsky there is a darker envelope: a keen knowledge of the criminal mind, with its pride that combines boastfulness, indifference to repentance, acceptance of one’s sinfulness, and taboo. Lying and liars are everywhere very important.13 Many of Dostoevsky’s exuberant concealments mix buffoonery with more than a little meanness, for his narrators want to be storytellers themselves and know the power it brings. A narrator can begin embodied, as a neighbor or onlooker reporting (unreliably) on what he sees or hears, and then fade out or evolve into something else as soon as the reader’s trust has been won.14 We find ourselves thrown into a world of ideas and rumors that demands our direct participation and judgment, since information is not being filtered through a single omniscient consciousness.

This is Bakhtin’s main point about Dostoevsky as novelist. Dostoevsky endows his heroes – including his negative ones – with so much independence, mobility of perspective, uncertainty of motive, and potent storytelling skill that readers, wishing to know what is going on, bypass the author/narrator and respond directly to the heroes. This ability to sustain the illusion of autonomous consciousnesses inside a fictional world both qualifies that fiction as “Realism” (for it replicates the way real people live, each on their own, into an open future) and represents an ideal far beyond the ambitions of most “Realistic” authors. For the autonomy of fictive characters is an illusion. Their lines are fixed; they were created toward an end. Dostoevsky, a teacher and a prophet no less than Tolstoy, had a point of view on the world and a passionate value system that he desired us to take seriously. He wanted us to admire the meekness and loyalty of Sonya Marmeladova and despise that calculating blackmailer, vulgar capitalist and poshlyak, Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin. He wanted us to reject the Grand Inquisitor’s rationale for a paternalistic socialism based on “miracle, mystery, and authority” and embrace instead the free inequality promised by Christ and spelled out in the teachings of the elder Zosima. Dostoevsky was no relativist. But he was a radical pluralist and personalist, fastidious in presenting the fullest possible case for every option directly out of the mouth of the protagonist who believes in it.

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This strategy, we should note, does no one any favors. Being so aware of oneself can be painful and paralyzing. The Underground Man is the first to realize that he is crippled, made ridiculous, and encouraged in his cruelty by his “hyper-consciousness,” which anticipates responses to himself and refutes them in advance. But such is the logical paradox. In that most terrible of satires on the abuse of our freedom to construct a self, Dostoevsky’s trapped underground voice reasons thus:

The final end, gentlemen: better to do nothing! Better conscious inertia! And so, long live the underground! Though I did say I envy the normal man to the point of uttermost bile, still I do not want to be him on those conditions in which I see him (though, all the same, I shall not stop envying him . . .) But here too, I’m lying . . .

(Notes from Underground, Part One, XI)

The inevitable “uttermost bile” that results from such radical indeterminacy fueled Maksim Gorky’s lifelong resistance to Dostoevsky, both on his own behalf and in the name of the new Soviet state. One could not build anything durable in the presence of that dialectic. What is more, the dialectic admits of no anchoring of the self in a supra-personal framework. “The time has come to attack Dostoevskyism all along the line,” Gorky wrote in 1933. “I should prefer that the civilized world were unified not by Dostoevsky, but by Pushkin.”15 Gorky’s juxtaposition of these two writers is intriguing. If freedom for Pushkin is the right to stand one’s ground and act as a man of public honor, then freedom for Dostoevsky is an individual’s right to choose, capriciously or soberly, in the presence of partial knowledge. This principle will not unify the world. Since freedom is the goal and since Dostoevsky allows truths to be multiple, a high priority in his prose is always to increase the number of available perspectives and to complicate all possible resonances of the spoken word. Then truths can test one another at their points of intersection.