This past week has been more about reading than writing for me. I have just finished Joseph Frank’s five volume biography of Dostoevsky. So! Here’s an introduction to some thoughts to be elaborated on later and not much more.

I want to follow up on the christly figure of Richard in Shakespeare’s Richard II, who attains holiness by virtue of suffering. Joseph Frank’s biography of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, presents a picture of the Russian novelist that parallels the religious-political figure of the suffering Richard. Dostoevsky’s parents both died before he reached adulthood (rumors spread that his father may have been murdered by his serfs [peasant bond-slaves]); because of activities in a socialist circle, Dostoevsky was put to a mock execution on the orders of the Czar and was subsequently sentenced to a Siberian prison camp for five years followed by four years of Siberian military service; and he suffered from severe epileptic fits, but what really connects him with Richard is the lifelong attempt to realize a Christian-based social morality.

The pinnacles of Dostoevsky’s career, the serialized publication of The Brothers Karamazov and the speech Dostoevsky made about Russian poet Alexander Pushkin in 1880, each gravitate around a thematic core regarding the mission of the Russian people, Christianity, and morality. In the Pushkin speech, Dostoevsky associates a tradition of Russian nationalism (a Russian “spirit”) that Pushkin tapped into as the core of his power as a writer; something which could equally be said of Dostoevsky himself:

“Pushkin is an extraordinary and, perhaps, unique manifestation of the Russian spirit,” said Gogol. I would add that he is a prophetic one as well. Indeed, for all us Russians there is something unquestionably prophetic in his appearing. Pushkin arrived just as we were beginning to be truly conscious of ourselves, a self-consciousness that had barely begun and that developed in our society after the whole century that followed the reforms of Peter the Great, and his appearance did so much to cast a guiding light along the shadowy path we traveled (Writer’s Diary, 1281).

Joseph Frank, in the fifth and last volume of his biography of Dostoevsky, writes that conflict between reason and the Christian faith became a major thematic aim for Dostoevsky in his novels between Notes from Underground (in 1864) to The Brothers Karamazov (in 1879-1880) (see Frank (V: 567)). Dostoevsky’s Underground Man asks his imagined readers to:

Allow me to indulge my fancy a bit. You see: reason, gentlemen, is a fine thing, that is unquestionable, but reason is only reason and satisfies only man’s reasoning capacity, while wanting is a manifestation of the whole of life—that is, the whole of human life, including reason and various little itches. […] I, for example, quite naturally want to live so as to satisfy my whole capacity for living. What does reason know? Reason knows only what it has managed to learn (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is no consolation, but why not say it anyway?), while human nature acts as an entire whole, with everything that is in it, consciously and unconsciously, and though it lies, still it lives (Notes from Underground 28).

Frank makes a very convincing case that Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov follow upon the path started with Notes from Underground by centering the dramatic conflict around the loss of faith in Christ and direct moral results (Frank V: 570). The Christian ethics of love preached by Father Zosima in Karamazov and responded to by each of the brothers, Alyosha, Ivan, and Dimitry, is a thematic response to the separation of Russian social practices from religious life.

But this must wait for another post.

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Works Cited:

Fyodor Dostoevsky. Notes From Underground. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Fyodor Dostoevsky. A Writer’s Diary, Volume 2. Translated by Kenneth Lantz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1994.

Joseph Frank. Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

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This post’s supporting works:
Mahler’s 3rd Symphony, Mvmt 1; Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Bartók: String Quartet No. 5; Takács Quartet
Béla Fleck and the Flecktones: Jingle All the Way