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One aspect of Gogol’s storytelling remains constant for Dostoevsky’s art from start to finish, resurfacing in the Symbolist novel. This is the suspicion that authorship itself is the product of demonic pride – and thus a cunning, evasive, unreliable narrator is the most appropriate vehicle for it.2 When “doubles” appear to the tormented heroes in Dostoevsky’s mature work (most famously, Ivan Karamazov’s petty devil), they infuriate and terrorize their interlocutors not by threats of eternal fire and brimstone, but by reminding them of their earlier words, ideas, or creations, which – however wise or clever they seemed at the time – now embarrass them. The devil straps our old stories to our back and won’t let us outgrow them. “I forbid you to speak of ‘The Grand Inquisitor,’ Ivan exclaimed [to his apparition], blushing all over with
shame.”3
What about Tolstoy? Although also a great master at portraying social anguish and public shame, in his deepest concerns Tolstoy starts and ends elsewhere. Of more significance to him than exposure and censure by others (for Tolstoy always rushed to censure himself first) was honor. His definition of the term was not Pushkin’s – Tolstoy respected different codes, and he related “honor” more directly to “honesty” as he understood that quality – but it was well within the Pushkinian tradition. For Tolstoy too there was a violent component to honor, the obligation to face hostile fire and sudden death. But Tolstoy takes honor out of the duel and places it on the battlefield. War remained centrally important to him, even after his crisis and conversion of the early 1880s, when he began to advocate exclusively non-violent modes of resisting evil, including conscientious objection to military service. Near the end of his life, this committed pacifist was still working on his Chechen novel
In the death of this brave warrior we witness the creation of a Tolstoyan “double,” not by a psyche splitting in two (as in Dostoevsky), but by a body being severed from the spirit. The death of Hadji Murad is a lapidary Tolstoyan
moment. During this brief and narrow passage, two perspectives emerge in what had been one coordinated human being. But who precisely is the “he” / “him” referred to in the above passage? By the end of the dying, the kicked and hacked corpse has “nothing in common with him.” So “he” still exists. But where? Is Hadji Murad “dead”? Nowhere in his fictive or theoretical writings does Tolstoy insist on an afterlife, only on “light,” and he adamantly rejects taking any miracles in the Gospels literally, especially the Resurrection. Such delicate, God-like maneuverings by Tolstoy around the life–death boundary are not unique to his war scenes, of course. The culminating moments of “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and the flickering final seconds of Anna Karenina perishing under a train produce similar distancings and doubled perspectives. But for all that he excelled at sickness and suicide, Tolstoy returned again and again to the behavior of men under fire as a recurrent marker of courage and honorableness. One cannot imagine Dostoevsky doing war stories – even though the most formative moment of his own life was a scaffold experience, where certain death, he believed, was three minutes away.
Biographies of events, and biographies that are quests for the Word
As a framework for these and other paradoxes in the fiction of Russia’s two greatest novelists, it is helpful to keep in mind their biographies. These celebrated lives qualify as novels in their own right – and in the minds of some, as legend or saints’ lives. Both writers drew deeply on their own experience for their art. Both grew into the role of national prophet and participated in their own mythologization. Each had a “break” in his literary career.
For Dostoevsky (1821–81), the break was traumatic, geographical, and coerced from the outside. In 1849 he was arrested for illicit political activity and condemned to death by firing squad – a sentence that was commuted at the last minute to four years’ hard labor in Siberia followed by six years’ duty as a garrison soldier. Between 1850 and 1859, which coincided with the more general “break” in the Russian nineteenth century, Dostoevsky lived a life apart from his nation’s literature and society. In Siberia he experienced a re-conversion to Russian Orthodoxy as well as the onset of chronic epilepsy, so severe that he referred to his attacks as “little deaths.” In 1860 Dostoevsky returned, much changed, to a much changed homeland. Although he had written startlingly innovative works before his arrest, most notably
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This was not an easy task, and Dostoevsky had few means of support. In 1865, at age forty-four, Dostoevsky fled Russia to write and evade his creditors (he had taken on his deceased brother’s debts); he gambled everything away. After marrying his stenographer in 1867, he remained abroad for four more years, fleeing debtors’ prison. Of their four cherished children, two died: their first, Sonya, as an infant in 1868, and ten years later the youngest, Alyosha, of epilepsy at age three. Through all these evictions, migrations, compulsions, crises and tragedies of his post-prison life, Dostoevsky wrote constantly and with great discipline: every night, from eleven o’clock to five in the morning, by candlelight, sustained by tea and cigarettes. In Petersburg, Dresden, then the Russian provinces, he steadily produced and then serially published his four great novels:
concentrating.5
Dostoevsky’s whole external biography, in fact, can be seen as a series of unexpected “little deaths” followed by disciplined resurrections, from night to morning. These tribulations were imposed, by and large, by external agents and conditions: by a police state in 1849, by nagging poverty, and by his own dysfunctional body, which flung him down and required him to rise on his own. To tell the story of this life, it is enough to point to its events. Dostoevsky did this himself. Working as editor and journalist during the 1870s, he was known to display – like stigmata – the scars from his leg fetters and insist that they gave him the right to speak on behalf of the suffering Russian people. And yet for all the traces of victimization in his life, Dostoevsky never tolerated theories (or lawyers, or juries) that blame a crime on the environment. Criminals are free and make choices. Responsibility accrues and repentance is required. Among Dostoevsky’s many complaints against socialism, both the secular utopian sort and its demonic apotheosis in Ivan Karamazov’s “Grand Inquisitor,” was its promise to replace this radical freedom with material and mental security. Hence one of Dostoevsky’s great paradoxes: the healthy, free mind demands continual destabilization and doubt if it is to exercise acts of faith, but our deeds are stable, answerable, and belong to us alone. In his
