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 . . .
(
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.
The time-space of Tolstoy’s novels differs from Dostoevsky’s in almost every way. Tolstoy, of course, is no stranger to tragedy and crisis, nor even to the most Dostoevsky-style crisis of all, murder. (Two famous Tolstoyan narratives from 1889, “The Kreutzer Sonata” and “The Devil,” both involve the killing of a woman out of jealousy.) But he handles the cause and aftermath of such crises differently. In his 1890 treatise, “Why Do People Stupefy Themselves?”, Tolstoy remarks in passing that Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov did not kill the old pawnbroker with an axe on the day of the murder but had been killing her for months, lying feverishly and resentfully on his couch in his garret, making the possibility of that murder a habit of his mind. Tolstoy sensed that with Dostoevsky, for all that he multiplies perspectives on events and filters them through gossipy untrustworthy narrators, a tragic act (when it finally comes to
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pass) tests not a person but an
In the great Tolstoyan novels before 1880, the ability to assume and then to shed many different ideas while remaining open to a variety of life situations is the defining mark of a successful hero. A great deal of talk goes on in these novels too, but, unlike Dostoevsky’s astonishingly “casual” conversations on cosmic matters, much Tolstoyan talk is “small.” Tolstoy greatly values observation and practical skills – knowing how things work in a hands-on way – but he does not tolerate much abstract philosophy from his heroes. He mercilessly exposes academics and book-writing intellectuals (like Levin’s half-brother Koznyshev in
RecallingourChapter 2on heroes and plots,wemightsaythat Tolstoy doesn’t do “types,” just as he doesn’t do (and doesn’t believe in) formal institutions. The closest his ideal hero comes to one of our categories might be the Fool – not of the holy variety, to be sure, but the bumbling, well-meaning fool, honest where honesty has no place, awkward in society and continually ridiculed by society for his eccentric ways. Pierre Bezukhov and Konstantin Levin are both questing fools in this sense, continually surprised by themselves, and Tolstoy richly rewards them for it.
We might make a corollary observation. Tolstoy mistrusted “official authority”: policemen, military recruiters, tax collectors, the arm of the law, the word of the monarch. He felt that official power could
Petrovich, a police investigator, is a key instrument of Raskolnikov’s salvation, and by the end of the novel almost functions as his spiritual foster father and confessor. The police officers on the Petersburg streets of
Tolstoy’s reluctance to work with types is related to the high value he puts on gradual, minute-by-minute effort and change. Idleness, anger, “lying on the couch for months” not so much thinking about that specific pawnbroker as simply not taking oneself in hand to act in a positive way (as Raskolnikov’s best friend Razumikhin acts; he is, for Dostoevsky’s palette, a very Tolstoyan hero): these were the errors that led Raskolnikov to murder, and that will lead Pozdnyshev to murder his innocent wife in “The Kreutzer Sonata.” Tolstoy’s novels center squarely on the conviction that we act not out of our ideas but out of our bodies. And if ideas have logical consequences, then bodies have needs. Since these needs arise out of our most basic anxieties and hungers, we all recognize them and share them. We build structures to contain them so that our consciousness and energies can be freed up for other tasks. In Tolstoy’s patriarchal, work-oriented, hearth- and agrarian-centered worldview, marriage should be one such structure. Closely connected to marriage is habit. Indeed, for Tolstoy, the most satisfying type of love was not romantic-erotic or melodramatic – selfish states that were bound to collapse – but habitual kindness, attentive to the other’s tiny, ongoing idiosyncratic needs, what he called “active” love.
Tolstoy, perhaps unfairly, did not see enough of this stable, finely differentiated love in the Dostoevskian landscape, love that feared crises rather than flared up eagerly during them. In a related complaint, Tolstoy also professed surprise at Dostoevsky’s “careless,” and in his view often monotonous, narrative style. The charge might appear odd, given the brilliant diversity and manifest excitement of a Dostoevskian hero’s high-pitched life. But Tolstoy’s own fictive scenarios suggest that he considered crisis and hysteria in themselves monotonous, homogenizing behavioral states. For the duration of this unnatural condition, people tend to sound and act alike, regardless of what might have triggered the blow-up. For Tolstoy, only stable forms of living and
