Orthodox virtue of “emptying
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out” (kenosis). Tolstoy could never empty himself out enough, however; his critics did not forgive him his high birth, title, and wealth, and he never forgave himself for failing to divest wholly of this birthright. The more he tried to shed those privileges, the more he was accused of hypocrisy. His acquisitive and media-driven era could only be unkind to a man of his inclinations. An earlier Greek precedent for Tolstoy might be the ancient Cynics (fourth century BCE), who did not perceive self-limitation to be perverse self-denial or sacrifice, but simply the means to happiness.25 Cynics ignored public opinion, disdained politics, rejected private property and commercial networks, denied the validity of the polis or state – positions that Tolstoy adapted, and blended with primitive Christianity. Cynics also considered “schools” bogus and quoting earlier books as an authority useless, even harmful. Individual reason or intuition should be able to arrive at all necessary truths on its own. In any event, the sole necessary knowledge for Tolstoy (and for the Cynics) was “how to live.”
Dostoevsky and books
Dostoevsky was devoted to the printed word, and so are his fictional characters. Several strategies exist for “replaying the words of a book.” Dostoevsky was adept at them all. The author can take an earlier literary character and re-run his plot, but only after endowing the character with more consciousness and thus with more intricate conflicts. Such is Dostoevsky’s technique in The Double (1846), which portrays a madman not according to the usual author–reader contract – that is, with the madness present as a written trace – but in a far less stable form. The model for Dostoevsky’s tale, Gogol’s Diary [or Notes] of a Madman (1835), had chosen for its strategy the externalized written trace, accessible as a document from the outside, which establishes a reassuring distance between reader and madman. Dostoevsky replays the slide into insanity from the inside, before any transcript of it could be made. With schizophrenia, this is not an easy task. We watch, or hear, the consciousness of Golyadkin break in two, as one side of his humiliated persona tries to assure the other side that everything he does is “normal, quite all right” (visiting his doctor, forcing his way into a party uninvited, or simply waiting on the trash-filled landing for the right moment to enter, knowing it will cause a scandal and in denial about that knowledge). Finally, one side of this persona actually materializes, breaks off into a body, and evolves from Golyadkin’s companion into his rival and betrayer.
Hoveringoverthesesplit,frightened,defensivevoicesis anarratorwithaccess to all three perspectives – but only erratically. That access might be an illusion
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as well. The reader cannot know, just as Golyadkin’s mind cannot know, the reliability of any source. Although the beginning and end of the story remain Gogol’s, the madman’s experience in between is thicker and scarier. The reader no longer merely observes a single disintegrating consciousness but participates in it, and must work hard to ascertain who is speaking, and from where. This technique, which grew out of an apprenticeship to Gogol, became Dostoevsky’s signature narrative style.
Another strategy for replaying a book occurs in Dostoevsky’s maiden work, Poor Folk. The poor clerk of this epistolary novel, Makar Devushkin, receives from Varenka, his female correspondent and platonic love interest, two stories to read: Pushkin’s “Stationmaster” (one of the Belkin Tales) and Gogol’s “Overcoat.” He misreads both – which is Dostoevsky’s device for deepening our understanding of the hero. Devushkin, an aspiring writer in the Age of Realism, has no concept of fiction. He loves the Pushkin story because he identifies with (and sympathizes with) Dunya’s father, the embittered old man who takes to drink after losing his daughter to the dashing Minsky. But Devushkin is scandalized by “The Overcoat.” Clearly it had been written by someone who had spied on him, in all his poverty and misery. “I can no longer live in peace in my little corner,” Devushkin complains. Who knows what other people will “worm their way into my nest, to spy out how I’m living . . . whether I have boots and how they’ve been soled, what I eat, what I drink, what I copy out.”26 As their exchange of letters proceeds, however, this untalented reader Devushkin, who eventually loses his Varenka to her earlier seducer, actually learns how to see and to write. His literary tastes, initially appalling (trashy steamy potboilers and parodies of Gogol’s Ukrainian tales), improve dramatically. His final letters to Varenka describe the lives and deaths in his tenement house with discreet compassion. Then she departs. His real life lost out to their epistolary novel.
The darkness of this theme expands as Dostoevsky’s talent matures. Both White Nights and Notes from Underground feature a hero – or anti-hero – of contemporary consciousness cobbled together out of literary bits and pieces. In the longer novels, this “underground” tension between “writing down an event in order to be honest to it” and “writing down an event so that others can read it as a piece of literature” produces the false confession. These documents are intended by their confessing authors to lend dignity to their lives, over which they have lost control. Most of them fail. Midway through The Idiot, at Prince Myshkin’s birthday party at Pavlovsk, the eighteen-year-old Ippolit, in and out of hysteria and dying of consumption, reads out loud to a reluctant gathering his just-authored “Essential Explanation” that is to preface his suicide at dawn (Part III, chs. 4–7). The document crams into one breathless sequence all his convictions, experiences, personal outrage, dreams – the final testament by
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which he wished to be remembered. And everything is a fiasco: the audience guffawsat it, the pistol misfires, and Ippolit dieswithout fanfare,in the margins, almost unnoticed further on in the novel.
The Demons [mistranslated as The Possessed] contains an equivalently “false” and failed document, a chapter censored from the first publication of the novel: “Stavrogin’s Confession.” In it the blighted hero confesses, among other ugly incidents, his violation of a fourteen-year-old girl and her subsequent suicide by hanging. As Stavrogin informs his confessor, Bishop Tikhon, this statement is to be printed up in 300 copies and distributed. Tikhon, something of a holy fool, begs his visitor not to broadcast his sins but to atone in some other less boastful way. Stung to the quick, Stavrogin accuses him – as the fictional Devushkin had accused the Gogol who authored “The Overcoat” – of spying on him, prying into his soul. This contradictory gesture of desiring publicity and yet resenting it as an abuse of privacy is part of Russian literature’s rich assimilation of Rousseau’s Confessions. Dostoevsky understood it as the book writer’s permanent lure. “Writing something up” and “making my own what another has written” were for him always primal acts, demonically attractive.
A poor clerk like Devushkin fretting over his look-alike in “The Stationmas-ter” or “The Overcoat” is a form of affectionate parody. Other sorts of Dos-toevskian interventions, not in secular books but in the Book – the Christian Bible – were closer to blasphemy. One such is the Grand Inquisitor’s recasting of the Three Temptations of Christ in the Wilderness (Matthew 4:1–11) in The Brothers Karamazov, where the Catholic Church is shown to be serving Satan. Dostoevsky embeds that extraordinary monologue in several layers of “relativizing” text. In the inner narrative frame, Christ receives the Inquisitor’s tirade silently and bestows upon the old man a kiss (the kiss of forgiveness? the kiss of Judas?). Alyosha bestows an equivalent kiss on his brother in the outer frame. And Ivan, who recites the tale, dismisses the entire literary effort as an “absurd thing” – even though, he insists, every author should have at least one listener. But the force and eloquence of this blasphemous replay of the Gospels was such that Dostoevsky himself despaired of creating an image of the Elder Zosima that could compete with the rhetoric of the Grand Inquisitor.
Such embeddings and re-accentings of prior literary texts were not of special urgency to Leo Tolstoy. He distrusted equally both the original and its subsequent wrappings.
Tolstoy and doing without words
Tolstoy hoped that the media revolution would not only advertise his own moral message, but also make all
