The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

This Dostoevskian point of faith is illustrated well in one scene from the greatest twentieth-century product of the Gogol–Dostoevsky line in Russian literature, Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita. Satan, here in the guise of a professor of black magic called Woland, has turned up in Moscow during the 1930s and is hosting his annual ball. Among the summoned guests is the severed head of one unfortunate materialist-atheist, former chairman of the Soviet Writers’ Union, who was decapitated by a streetcar in the novel’s opening pages. Woland assures this poor torsoless creature, whose eyes blink in terror, that the theory he had postulated – that when a head is severed, life ceases – is both “incisive and sound,” but that

“one theory is as good as another. There is even a theory that says that to each man it will be given according to his beliefs. May it be so! You are departing into nonbeing, and from the goblet into which you are being transformed, I will have the pleasure of drinking a toast to life

everlasting!”21

In the Dostoevsky line, there is simply no single vantage point from which, as Tolstoy put it with such lapidary assurance, “we shall all soon learn.” In the radical freedom that Dostoevsky will not relinquish, each of us might become our own belief. Not only is the end unknown, so is the path – and these paths are decidedly plural. Even that, however, cannot be known. We are not all in the same doubt. Very possibly this suspicion that dispersal and heterogeneity are natural, not freakish, led Dostoevsky to value above all things the striving for human communion. The self is not saved by a reformed splinter of its own self; it needs a genuine other consciousness.

Tolstoy was never wholly convinced of this need. In fact, in his writings on the far side of his “break,” noticeably in “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (1886), the opposite appears to be the case: growing into one’s own courage and wisdom

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means precisely outgrowing the need for another person, who will sooner distract or seduce you from your path than help you to pursue it honorably. The fact that Ivan Ilyich’s wife, daughter or son might have needed him during his lengthy and painful dying, that he might owe them some gratitude or sympathy and might even benefit from reaching out to them, seems not to have occurred to this terminally sick, self-pitying man (with the exception of several seconds whenhe notices that his son has been weeping). Thehorror of this dying is made clear, but Tolstoy nowhere suggests that his isolation is avoidable or his egocen-trism abnormal. The only dialogue that matters is between Ivan Ilyich and his own death, which becomes his private enlightenment. The validating mark is always the hero’s own solitary “I.” Bakhtin noted this trait early in his 1924–25 lectures on Tolstoy, long before he had worked out the dialogic–monologic distinction, remarking that all of Tolstoy’s work could be distributed between two categories, “how I am for others” (which for Tolstoy was the fraudulent realm of culture) and “how I am for myself” (which was always lonely and alone).22 Bakhtin found such a binary, with the “I” its automatic point of reference, uncongenial and unnecessarily desperate. Many who prefer Dostoevsky to Tolstoy – and it is routine to prefer one or the other – consider this solipsistic relation that Tolstoy appears to foster a far more serious ethical flaw than the exclusionary intimacy Dostoevsky sets up between a person and his idea.