A year before he died of emphysema in 1881, Fyodor Dostoevsky was invited to speak at a festival in Moscow, held to celebrate the unveiling of a statue of Alexander Pushkin-then, as now, considered by Russians to be their first great writer. Uniquely among authors, Dostoevsky said, Pushkin had a prophet's ability to "infuse his spirit into the spirit of other nations." Russia herself also had this ability, he said, to usher in a "universal brotherhood of peoples." Dostoevsky continued: "Our land may be impoverished, but Christ himself in slavish garb traversed this impoverished land and gave his blessing."
Dostoevsky's audience was overwhelmed. A voice from the back shrieked that he had "solved it;" people rushed forward to embrace him; women wept; the applause shook the building. "Prophet! Prophet!" people in the crowd shouted. Not Pushkin, but Dostoevsky himself.
More than 120 years have passed, but Dostoevsky's voice continues to be described as "prophetic." Behind his attacks on rationalism and his defence of human free will-expressed most clearly in Notes from Underground and in his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov-lay the ideological battles of 19th-century Russia. But 21st-century readers continue to feel that Dostoevsky and the arguments of his characters "speak to modernity." His works continue to be re-translated, reissued and adapted for television. Hollywood has its Dostoevsky references-from Martin Scorsese's 1976 film Taxi Driver (a loose interpretation of Notes from Underground) to the Dostoevsky-lite of David Fincher's Fight Club (1999). A 20th-century literary theory-Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of polyphony-was invented to describe Dostoevsky's novels alone; and his themes of the "underground" and the "double" have rarely been out of vogue. A recent poll of writers conducted by the Nobel committee found that four Dostoevsky novels-Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Devils and The Brothers Karamazov-were among the 100 most influential, more than any other writer on the list.
In Russia, the fall of communism triggered a revival of interest in Dostoevsky. His novels were always read during the Soviet period, but they were officially considered suspect. Lenin hated the caricature of early revolutionaries in Devils. No doubt, officials particularly objected to passages in which the long-eared Shigalyov proposes a totalitarian system: "One tenth is granted freedom of person and unlimited rights over the remaining nine tenths. These must lose their person and turn into something like a herd... though, by the way, they will have to work."
Since the collapse of the USSR, Dostoevsky's depiction of self-destructive, atheistic nihilism and the mystical content of novels such as The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot, have coincided with a revival of Orthodox Christianity and a comprehensive rethink of Russia's 20th century.
Now, with the publication of The Mantle of the Prophet: 1871-1881, the final volume of Joseph Frank's magnificent five-part study of the writer (the first appeared in 1979), we have the definitive account of his life and times. More than a critical study of the novels, or a narrative of his life, the work is a cultural history of Russia during the life of Dostoevsky (1821-1881). Frank carefully explains the political allegiances and rivalries of literary Petersburg. He traces the rise of radical thought and its impact both on the politics and literature of the period. The historical context of the philosophical debates explored by Dostoevsky in each of his major novels has never before been so extensively recreated.
For Frank, Dostoevsky's genius was to perceive a universality in these debates. "Somehow, he remains contemporary all the time," Frank said to me. "He was able to sense all sorts of things about the crisis of western culture, which were not really visible in his own time, and he intuited this on the basis of what was going on in Russia, which was itself in crisis."
Notes from Underground, in particular, has echoed down the decades. The short monologue of the nameless underground man, paralysed by his own self-consciousness and holed up in his cellar for 20 years, was Dostoevsky's first direct critique of rationalism and utilitarianism. The underground man defends free will at any cost, deliberately acting against his self-interest in order to proclaim his personal autonomy. Even if it means he is absurd, he is free. "I agree that two times two is four is an excellent thing," says the underground man, "but if we're going to start praising everything, then two times two is five is sometimes also a most charming little thing."
French existentialists considered Notes from Underground a seminal text. Camus was fascinated by Dostoevsky and the line from the underground man to Meursault, hero of L'Etranger, has often been drawn. Andr? Gide wrote a biography of Dostoevsky and was heavily influenced by him. Frank's own interest in Dostoevsky developed from his research into French existentialism and Notes from Underground.
The question of free will, of human resistance to the attempts to arrange society on a rational, utilitarian system, is a theme in each of the great novels. It makes his characters feel modern in a way that the protagonists of other 19th-century novels do not. Raskolnikov, the anti-hero of Crime and Punishment, obsesses his way through a hot, dusty, St Petersburg summer, the novel's passages of stream of consciousness taking the reader into the mind of a murderer. "The Russian intelligentsia he was writing for did not yet exist in the west," says Frank. "People elsewhere weren't as radical as the Russians."
Nietzsche claimed that Dostoevsky was the only psychologist from whom he had learned anything. Freud wrote a case study of Dostoevsky, analysing the theme of parricide, in relation to the murder of Dostoevsky's own father and the first appearance of his epilepsy. Guilt, cruelty, suicide, suffering and egoism: each are examined in the novels. But it is the way ideas affect Dostoevsky's characters that makes them so compelling. Raskolnikov murders because of theory. Smerdyakov and Ivan Karamazov are destroyed by the implications of Ivan's notion that in a godless universe everything is permitted. Kirillov in Devils develops the principle of his suicide as a form of salvation for humanity. "Dostoevsky had a wonderful intuition about the way ideas could affect and interact with human personality," says Frank.
Yet it was this psychological complexity that was a common complaint against Dostoevsky among critics of his time, who often argued that there was too much psychopathology in his novels for his characters to be "real." Vladimir Nabokov noted that Dostoevsky's characters were "not quite sane," his plots were badly structured ("something second-rate French"), and his prose prosaic. The Brothers Karamazov, he said, was a "riotous whodunit-in slow motion." As if trying posthumously to goad the great Slavophile, he claimed Dostoevsky to have been the most European of Russia's writers. (Nabokov's great-great uncle, it is interesting to note, was commandant of the Peter-and-Paul fortress, in Petersburg, where Dostoevsky faced a firing squad for revolutionary activity in 1849, only to be reprieved at the last minute.)
The psychological sickness of his characters led many critics to conclude that Dostoevsky himself was ill. His life and work share extreme themes: epilepsy and the ecstatic moment before a fit; the last moments of a man condemned to death; the compulsions of a gambler. The theme of a sin against a child-which appears in all four of the major novels-led some to suggest that he was guilty of such a crime. (The source of the rumour may have been Turgenev).
Correcting this image of the pathological Dostoevsky is among the achievements of this biography. Each myth is weighed for truth. In an earlier volume, Freud's conclusion that epilepsy struck him first when he learned of his father's murder is destroyed. Dostoevsky's father, we learn, may not even have been murdered, (although that changes nothing psychologically, says Frank, as Dostoevsky believed he was). The notion that Dostoevsky had a mania for gambling is also rejected: his compulsion was severe, for a period, but he conquered it. The notion that Dostoevsky rushed through his novels, careless of style or structure, is also corrected, even if he did complain that he had not been born into the luxury of Tolstoy or Turgenev, and so had to write to deadlines (which he often missed).
The Mantle of the Prophet covers the last ten years of Dostoevsky's life, from his return to Russia from western Europe, where he had written The Idiot while escaping creditors in his homeland, to the composition of the now little-read The Adolescent and Diary of a Writer. It culminates with The Brothers Karamazov, its triumphant reception and the death of Dostoevsky.
Frank is often best when he looks backwards, to the influences on Dostoevsky. As Nabokov suspected, he was an avid reader of second-rate French crime fiction; also of German romantic, English (Dickens was a favourite) and Spanish literature (Cervantes). Also important were religious writings, among them Orthodox hagiographies, the Bible and texts of the Old Believers (the raskolniki-schismatic religious dissenters).
Frank devotes almost 150 pages to pure literary criticism of Dostoevsky's final masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov-the "book of wonders," as Arthur Miller described it. Built on the plot of a parricide, the novel contains the seminal rebellion against God of Ivan Karamazov, who willingly "returns the ticket" of entry into paradise, if membership means accepting also the existence of suffering. To Frank, the whole novel is an attempt to respond to Ivan's moral challenge, itself central to the "furnace of doubt" Dostoevsky sought to overcome in his own theology. His representation of Ivan's argument is so strong that many critics say Dostoevsky was unable to overcome it convincingly. His answer is to be found in the words of the character Father Zosima-everyone must accept the guilt for all; salvation extends to all creation; humanity is not alone. A life of reading the New Testament was never so evident as in the composition of The Brothers Karamazov.
Yet the beauty of The Brothers Karamazov's message sits uneasily next to Dostoevsky's anti-semitism, the subject of a thoughtful and even-handed chapter in this volume. Frank shows that it became more severe as the political situation in Russia, and his own health, worsened. The all-embracing love advocated by Father Zosima seems tarnished by Dostoevsky's ambiguity as to whether this included the Jews. His use of the word "Aryan" in the Pushkin speech suggests that Dostoevsky's Messianic mission had become exclusive. Frank recounts a touching exchange between Dostoevsky and a Jewish reader, who wrote to ask, in effect, how the author of The Insulted and Injured, the man who had created the Marmeladov family of Crime and Punishment, could also ignore the persecution of Jews in Russia and Europe and even add his talent to the popular hostility against them.
Dostoevsky rejected the claim that he was anti-semitic and however implausible this was, given the language of Diary of a Writer, Frank is fair to his subject. He is also honest about his personal failings. When the wealthy Turgenev lent Dostoevsky money to cover debts while he was in Germany, it was Dostoevsky who took offence. Such personal tension added to the ideological divide between the westerniser Turgenev and the Slavophile Dostoevsky. The resentment did not, however, stop both men from appearing at readings together later on.
As for Tolstoy, Dostoevsky both admired his talent and envied his status. On the one occasion when they were in the same room together, they did not speak. Legend has it that Tolstoy was reading The Brothers Karamazov in the last days of his life, although of Dostoevsky's novels he claimed to have liked best the semi-autobiographical account of life in the Siberian katorga, Notes from the House of the Dead.
After publication of The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky believed he had fulfilled himself. As a former radical, imprisoned for his beliefs, he retained an ability to speak to a younger generations of radicals. Yet the conservatives also considered him one of their own, and he made close friendships with senior tsarist officials. It was from this position, with a foot in each camp, that Dostoevsky believed he could influence the future of his country, and proclaim its mission for the rest of the world. How he would like the way things have turned out is anyone's guess.
The Mantle of the Prophet
Joseph Frank
(Robson Books, ?18)
Robson Books, ?18
