Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)

Transcript (PDF)

The 19th Century
Presentation 10 of 13

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)
Crime and Punishment. The Idiot.
The Brothers Karamazov. Views of the Dissolving Inferno.
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, February 7, 1984

Transcript:

We’re coming to the last month in this series and we’re able finally to begin to get some feel for the whole field of the 19th century. And I think for those few of you who have managed to come each time and survive all the way through you’re beginning to get an appreciation for the 19th century which is very difficult once you get the appreciation to understand why it has been so ignored. We have not looked at any of the overall views of 19th century thought. There are many multiple tomes and volumes. Main currents of thought in the 19th century, 19th century studies and so forth, all of them are worthless. There is hardly any epoch in human history within historical reach that is less known than the 19th century. We have consistently seen that every major individual that we have taken has been misrepresented and misunderstood. That if there is an overall view of the 19th century it is the pathetic triumphal expectation that somehow, by manipulating the material world, man may find fullness for himself. That the materialist view is that life can be better if we work at it. That conditions of life, if improved, will lead to better people, better experiences, and that this in turn will increasingly help along the quality of life. This was the liberal viewpoint and still survives until our own time.

The corollary to that and by now I should think it not unlikely that most of you are sophisticated enough psychologically to know that human attributes occur in pairs. That they always have a polar energy and that wherever there is a liberal viewpoint of the gradual betterment of man’s life, there is the corollary which is usually called conservative, but which in the 19th century became turned inside out and became communist. That is to say, the communist viewpoint is an ironical paradox. It is a conservative viewpoint turned inside out. Which is what has made most arguments against it, in our time, ineffective. But we have seen also that in the communist corollary viewpoint that occurs in sync in polarity with the liberal viewpoint that man must not just better his world but must change the structure of his world in order to better it. The liberal viewpoint being one that the given conditions are unalterable but can be bettered and finally perfected. The corollary to that is that the given conditions are inappropriate and if changed in structure then can be bettered. Now perhaps it’s less political to characterize this viewpoint as communal rather than communistic, and communalism was the essential emphasis of it in its first promulgation.

What turned the conservative viewpoint inside out and made of it communist, made of it communal was a religious perception. In the conservative view, the radical change must be in man’s religious nature. That what is wrong with the material world, what is wrong with man that can be structurally changed is that he is irreligious, and therefore if he is made religious and expresses this religiosity through his sense of community then the world can be better. The inside out of this, of the conservative religious viewpoint, is the communist irreligious viewpoint atheistic rather than theistic. That in fact it is the religious incapacity, the religious opacity of man, which has forbade him to change the world and thus better the world under new conditions.

So that in effect we have in the 19th century the generation of three ideas. One of them a close parallel, which is the Communist conservative viewpoint which are the same, and those two are polarities together of the liberal viewpoint.

We now come with Dostoevsky to the crunch where all three viewpoints are held simultaneously by an individual. And the temptation for him as an individual to sort these viewpoints out in terms of analysis, in terms of intellectual approach is viewed as the ultimate sin, the ultimate culpability, and that it is only when man is passionately consumed by the energy of all three viewpoints at the same time that he actually is real. And on that basis is capable of an affinity with reality and only thus can teach himself how to be.

So that in the extraordinary excess of passionate feeling where all three of the viewpoints are held in a simultaneous ambiguity par excellence can an individual come into contact with a universal harmony. This peculiar juxtaposition in viewpoint is elaborated in the life and in the writings of Dostoevsky. And because of this Dostoevsky is a major author, one of the world’s greatest. He is one of the few places where we may find the conundrum of modern man presented in all of its complications. So that in retrospect as an audience reading his books decades later, almost 100 years later now, in most cases, that we come to experience the situation in a more distant kind of an apperception. It is no longer so close to us that we are caught up with the intensity of it.

The life of Dostoevsky is a case in point. And I think probably at this point the best thing for us to do is to begin to take a look at his life and try and bring this issue out as clearly as can be. As you can see from the introduction it’s a complication and it’s one that is almost never addressed. That is to say if you are given Dostoevsky in a world literature course as literature, you will approach the man through the works and the filter of the works because of their complexity, because of the highly integrated ambiguity which is presented there, you are lost in the experience of the work and your critical acumen never is able to transcend the complications of the work to get an overall view. But on the other hand, if you look at Dostoevsky in terms of politics and you take any one of the three standpoints you get a bias which reads out Dostoevsky as if you had understood him completely, and you’ve missed the whole point.

Very few writers have ever addressed themselves to the question of Dostoevsky with honesty and with enough excellence to be able to perceive this dilemma. In actual fact Dostoevsky is one of the first individuals who we could style, if we were interested in styling people according to certain types (cultural types). Dostoevsky is the first existentialist because he is the first man to experience himself on the writing edge of reality on the point of the pen; because he himself lived the ambiguities to the fullest experienced them with such intensity that he often records in his writings that if he could have gone mad he would have. That if he could have broken he would have. And this tension expressed itself in his life in the physical ailment of epilepsy. And we will see that Dostoevsky acquires the safety valve of epilepsy when he is thrown in prison in Siberia, and that by the time he is able, finally, to view his dilemma with enough accuracy to be able to portray it in all of its intensity, all of its complexity. He also has come to understand his affliction as a divine gift. That just before the irrational uncontrollable experience of the physical madness there is a lightning-like flash of universal clarity which he said makes it all worthwhile.

So we have a peculiar individual and we also have him late in the presentation of people because Dostoevsky moves us ever closer to the end of the 19th century to the beginnings of the 20th century. Of his five great novels the least known is one called A Raw Youth. I’m sorry I don’t have my copy of the novel. I found a copy but it’s forty-five dollars and I didn’t have forty-five dollars. My copy was lost in a divorce but I do have the notebooks for A Raw Youth published by the University of Chicago Press. And in A Raw Youth there is a section called Christ and Hunger and I want to give you a little of this before I start on Dostoevsky’s life. He says:

“‘Be firm, man, don’t let anything disturb you.’ ‘...That things are changing for the worse. Though this may be true, and has been so prophesied for those last days, do not believe it in the least, [and] act as if things were going [to be] just fine. Preach Christ by your words, and even more by your deeds. Be firm, man, and calm, do not let anything trouble you. And your life shall be to the glory of God.’ ‘[But] Most of all, serve by your own works. There is nothing [nothing] stronger than the example of your own works; and don’t let it trouble you that you have not completed everything, or that you have done but little, for it will all contribute to the general good order of things.’”

And the reply is, “Will it really?” And the retort to that was, “Why won’t it? How does a man live but by good examples?” And then Makar, whose name is Makar Dolgoruky, remarks, “Sanctify yourself, and you will serve everybody: by being a light to the world.” Sanctify yourself and you will be a light to everybody in the world. “Why, I have been speaking of the godless all the time. What godless people are they, really? That’s asking too much of them.” And the conversation goes on. It goes over to fear of Satan and so forth.

The basic push of meaning here is summed up in a Russian curse word. The Russian curse word is bezbozhnyy, which means godless. Bezbozhnyy means without God. Godless is the worst profane curse that you could hurl at a human being. That they are godless is an ultimate condemnation of those persons. And the polarity of that is that someone who is totally God intoxicated is in fact a light to the entire world. Somewhere in that vast spectrum between those who are godless and those who are God-intoxicated lies the realm of human nature being pulled, not one direction or another, but being pulled in sort of a circular kind of an ambience by human concerns. And only when the human person individually awakens to the call of service for others does he begin then to experience this pushing away from the abyss of the godless – the bezbozhnyy – and the expected triumph of the God-intoxicated. At the top of this spectrum of humanity is the experience of Christ, who experienced God-intoxication to the point of being God Himself. And at the other end is the Satan, the devil, who is truly godless. And so between this heaven and hell, man’s life on earth has its turmoil and its pattern which is essentially meaningless until it acquires a direction in terms of this inner pole of experience. And the clue, the key to this inner pole of experience is the ability to lose one’s self, in particular, to lose one’s self in service for others.

When Dostoevsky was born in October of 1821 the overwhelming influence in Russia was German-Romantic thought. We haven’t yet got to that particular series. We’ll get to it at the Philosophical Research Society in April, May, and June. Not so much Goethe at this time but the dominant Romantic German voice was Schiller and the dominant Romantic English voice was Byron, Lord Byron. So that you found individuals in Russia who were affecting the Byronic look with the cape and the soft broad brimmed hat and the cane, whose mind was filled with ideas of the Schilleresque hero, opposing his intelligence and his capacity to the whole scheme of history to try and dominate it and bring it round to his own conception. We today hardly ever remember much about Schiller because we have forgotten all this. We have forgotten our own roots. We somehow remember that Schiller wrote William Tell and that it was about a father who placed an apple on the head and shot an arrow through it. We hardly ever remember anymore – the tremendous energy. And the fact that Schiller died young and the fact that it set a prototype – Byron died young, Shelley died young – of the youthful genius. And in Russia the Romantic hero was Pushkin. And I’ll do a lecture on Pushkin over at the Philosophical Research Society probably in May of this year.

Pushkin, who was of Afro-Russian heritage, was the great hero of Russian society. He was the the flamboyant genius who proved by his literature, his greatness with language, his ability to write in ways in which the Russian language was changed in its structure, led everyone to expect that Russia had come of age and that in fact the German idealism of the Romantic movement (Kant and Hegel and Schiller) had finally passed as a heritage to Russia and the feeling was beginning that Europe was– had had its heyday Western Europe had had its heyday. And now Russia was a young giant awakening. And Pushkin was the first beacon light, the first great Russian man of letters, who was showing the Russian people that they were coming of age. They were going to lead civilization to new heights.

So Dostoevsky was born into this condition in 1821 and he would have been an adolescent of about sixteen when Pushkin was killed in a duel. And all Moscow, all of Russia was talking about the tragic demise of this great voice in a duel. Now, Dostoevsky was unfortunately from a family that had many children. The poverty was enormous. He was extremely close to his brother Mikhail. He was also somewhat close to a brother named Andre. But for all intents and purposes, the youth of Dostoevsky was spent holed-up in the family apartment with his brothers and sisters until he was about ten years of age. Let me put it into a contemporary image so you can– you can get the impact of this.

He lived in a confinement that was like a monastery cell, or like the stateroom of submarine, for the first ten years of his life and about the only social intercourse that he had was with his own family: his brothers and sisters, his mother and father. So that alone of all the great major writers in the world Dostoevsky almost never mentions landscape or animal life. He never mentions plants. There’s one vision in Crime and Punishment, near the end, where Raskolnikov looks out across the Siberian waste and he sees the distant tents of a town looking like black soot specks on the white snowy vastness. It’s the most poetic landscape in all of Dostoevsky. It runs about two sentences. Dostoevsky could care less, knew less, about the external aspects of life. He knew nothing about plants, flowers, trees, landscapes. For him reality was human nature and the relationships between human beings and the incredible, complicated vicissitudes that went into trying to have your way.

In fact, he was so close to his brother Mikhail – and Mikhail would be alive until the 1860s, so really for the first forty some years of his life, except for the sentence to Siberia, we have to speak of the Brothers Dostoevsky – Mikhail and Fyodor. I won’t get a chance to mention it, but Mikhail was also a writer but gave up any kind of expectation that he might have had to become a great writer because he managed to find himself in the cigarette and cigar business. He was one of the first men to conceive of ad campaigns for cigarettes and cigars and did very well, except at this period in European history anyone who did well financially who was not of the nobility usually overspent and built up more debts.

Business in the 19th century was just a classic case of opening you up to more and more debts and bills. It occurs in the middle class, in our time, in the 20th century because the psychological roots of this particular conundrum are not understood. If you wish to explore, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is the poignant archetypal portrait of this psychological disease you would have to say, it’s a syndrome.

At any rate the only time that the Dostoevsky children ever got a break from the apartment in Moscow was when Fyodor was ten years old and the parents rented a farm outside of town for a couple of months and took the children out there. And it was for Dostoevsky, for Fyodor and all of his brothers and sisters, an incredible event, an experience of unbelievable uncanniness. It was like someone at the age of seven being taken to Disneyland for the first time. It infected Fyodor with a concern for what would be called the common people – the laboring farm people, the bread and butter of Russia, the peasants, the poor. None of these derisive terms in Russian. All of these came to have almost mystical significance. The term later on that would be used was pochva, which meant soil. Pochvennyye was “men of the soil,” and this was an epithet which one strived to have, it was dignity that one was of the soil.

So at the age of ten, this element entered into Dostoevsky’s life, into his character, but very quickly circumstances devolved – the mother died. It had been settled that before she died, that at least Mikhail and Fyodor would be sent to Saint Petersburg and would be entered into an engineering academy. So they were sent there, they were 16 years old at the time. Mikhail was unable to pass the entrance exams and had to go to another city nearby. But Fyodor passed and entered into a situation where he began studying engineering. It was a mechanical travail for Dostoevsky. He simply saw his way through it for five, almost six, years because this was his whole reason for being there. But Dostoevsky began to be infected with the idea that in Petersburg – which was the Russian imitation of Paris, the Russian imitation of London, the place where the– the myth of Pushkin had flowered most poignantly, and Pushkin died about the time that Dostoevsky entered into the engineering academy. He began to have aspirations towards literature. He began to associate himself with avant-garde individuals in Petersburg who wrote, or who associated themselves into cliques, circles. And most of these circles would contain one or more individuals who had written something, perhaps gotten something published, and Dostoevsky began to feel that this was his world. He liked the idea of entering into the world of– of young manhood, of great literary conversations to two or three in the morning.

He liked the idea of entertaining for himself a bohemian style of life. And so he wrote a novel, a short novel, called Poor Folk in 1846 – he was just twenty-four years old. 1844, 1845 – Published about that time. Poor Folk was extraordinary. It was– It was an incredible presage of Dostoevsky’s literary power. He would not write again for almost ten or fifteen years anything near its quality. It is not a great work but it is a stunning work. And in the Petersburg, following the death, the romantic death of Pushkin, when the Russians were looking for a new voice, Dostoevsky burst upon the scene with Poor Folk. It was a matter of days before he was dragged to the great critic Belinsky’s house and Belinsky holding up the published novel screamed wild eyed at Dostoevsky. Do you know what you have written? And Dostoevsky realized that he was becoming the lion of Russian Literary Society. He was visited by Turgenev who paid due homage to Dostoevsky’s incredible genius and at the same time all of this went rushing to Dostoevsky’s head because his basic temperament was one of total excess, commitment 100% to excess. And within weeks this tremendous lionising of Dostoevsky began to take on the edge of caricature.

The older more mature writers who had been to Paris who had been to Berlin who had been to London realised that this had been somewhat of a fluke and they began to characterise Dostoevsky to their friends as a ‘literary pimple’. This was the Russian phrase used. So that they would make fun of Dostoevsky by parading him at parties and getting him to make these incredible statements and he became finally disillusioned with the entire mess. He began to try and write more. Nothing that he was able to put out was of much value. They were not received very well but he had managed to associate himself with a literary clique that centered itself around a man named Petrashevsky – Petrashevsky. And Petrashevsky was on the verge of being literary or political. In fact, Petrashevsky had published a fantastic dictionary of foreign words incorporated in the Russian language and it was like Voltaire’s Philosophic Dictionary. It was witty, it was profound, it had a political dynamite in almost every definition. The censors – and you have to realize that Russian society has always had its censors, always. There has never been a Russia without its censors – but the censors had looked at the title, Dictionary of Foreign Words Incorporated in the Russian language, and had passed it by. So it was published and copies were circulating until the comments came into the government. Increasingly that this was the work of a radical group that were seeking to overthrow the government. In fact all of this came to a head because this was happening in 1849, and the year before the French in 1848 had overthrown their government and several Eastern European governments and several German duchies had been overthrown by radical young men just like this group.

And so the Petrashevsky circle were singled out by Tsar Nicholas to be an object lesson to all the literary cliques in Russia. Twenty-three men were arrested including Dostoevsky and by mistake his younger brother Andrei was arrested and later released. And the older brother Mikhail was brought in. It was an incredible trial. The Russian government made it a cause celebre. They sentenced twenty-one of the twenty-three young men to death. They took them out on two or three days before Christmas and lined them up in front of firing squads. Dostoevsky among them. But the Tsar had already decided that he was not going to kill them but was going to send them to exile, but wanted to fill them with terror before he sent them off on exile. And so a minute before the guns were to fire a messenger arrived commuting the death sentence in reading the exile sentence. But of course none of the young men knew this. It was a harrowing experience. And Dostoevsky later on in many of his writings would recount that the worst form of murder is the murder by society of an individual. He would say that when a man commits murder often almost in every case it is a sudden outburst. But with governments, with social murder, it’s a concerted inevitable avalanche of revenge and it’s being forced to wait for the axe to fall knowing that surely it will fall. Not from anyone in particular, but just the vengeance of a society gone mad in the case of the individual and from that perspective.

So Dostoevsky and one of the other leaders of the group Dyukov and a third young man we’re bundled up publicly in sleighs as they were stood up and roped in. And on Christmas Eve they were paraded through the streets of Petersburg – one of the largest cities in Russia – and taken off to Siberia. They were packed into sleighs outside of town where they were inside, stuffed inside. And it took them many many weeks to traverse by sleigh the vast reaches of Russia. They were eventually taken over the Urals and into central Siberia. And Dostoevsky was put into prison in the town of Omsk.

If you can imagine in your mind the– imagine Afghanistan and above it huge vast stretches of Kazakhstan and up above that would be swampy marshes of Siberia and somewhere in between the deserts of Kazakhstan and the marshes of northern Siberia is a narrow habitable area of land. And one of the major cities there was Omsk on the Irkutsk River which flows north and empties into the Arctic Ocean. He was clapped into the prison in conditions that were almost inhumane. Dostoevsky records several times in his writings images which are so catastrophic that on reading them one time Turgenev compared the images he did not like Dostoevsky but he said these are images worthy of Dante.

Here’s one. This is a quotation. “Imagine to yourself an old tumbled down wooden building which it has long ago been decided to scrap and which is no longer fit for use. In summer intolerably stuffy, in winter unbearably cold. All the floors are rotten. An inch of filth on the floor on which you slip and fall. The little windows frosted up so that the whole day long it is impossible to read. On the panes, ice an inch thick drips from the ceiling. Draughts everywhere. We pack like herrings in a barrel. The stove is fed with six logs. No heat. The ice scarcely melts in the room and awful fumes. And so it goes on all the winter. Here in the barracks the convicts wash their clothes and the whole of the little barrack is splashed with water. No room to turn around. From dusk to dawn it is impossible to go out to satisfy one’s needs, the barracks being locked. A large tub is placed in the corridor and the stench is insufferable. All the convicts stink like swine and say that it is impossible not to behave like swine since we are living beings.”

He spent five years in these conditions. Later Dostoevsky would dredge them up. Like someone who had been filled to the brim with images that he could only vomit up – there was nothing else that he could do with them. And he placed a great deal of it in a short novel called Memories, or Memoirs from the House of the Dead, often translated just as House of the Dead. It is an incredible picture of human deprivation that anyone could survive such conditions is unbelievable.

When we read in our time Solzhenitsyn’s portrayal of the conditions in the Gulag prisons across Russia we have a picture of the conditions as they have been refined and somewhat better. But in Dostoevsky it is just simply a pigpen, a sty, where men are thrown in and forgotten about. They were allowed to take steam baths once a month and they crowded two hundred men into a room about thirty by ten feet so that there was no place to be. And Dostoevsky learned to take money in so that you could buy a space to stand and someone would squat down and you could sort of kneel on their back and have some place to be. Incredible conditions.

Dostoevsky in his letters to Mikhail reveals changes happening in him. The pressure of this intolerable psychological abuse torture on a massive scale began to change Dostoevsky’s carbon to diamond. He began to perceive human character in this great polarity of vision. That man is based beyond compare and that he is precious also beyond compare. That in one and the same being as a phenomenon man has the capacity to belong outside of nature on both ends of the moral scale. That he can just as well fall through the net of society as he can transcend the net of society. Man can become an angel or a devil. He has this capacity. That the pressure cooker of events in the modern world simply speeds up this process and that often what happens here is a self-selecting process. The man chooses, heaven or hell, in terms of his personality, in terms of his character and follows those ways.

He began to experience some strength in himself physically. The hard manual labor brought him round. Later, twenty years later, he could write about it as if it were– actually had some saving grace and that it had slapped him awake from the foolish student days in Petersburg. But another occurrence that came out of the prison was the onset of epilepsy. The intolerable psychological conditions which manifested themselves in epileptic fits which started about this time. Dostoevsky because he made friends with a few of the prison individuals, because he was somewhat known as an author, was reprieved after almost five years and given a chance to become a common soldier in the Russian army rather than a prisoner. He took the chance. Anything was better than that.

So he moved further to the east, further into Siberia. He moved to a place which was only about two hundred and fifty miles from China. And it was there that he experienced for the first time in his life some sense of his manliness. Semipalatinsk is the name of the little fortress. It is also on the Irtysh River following from Omsk. One would drop south by east probably on the order of about seven or eight hundred miles and Semipalatinsk, small fortress community. When Dostoevsky reached there he experienced the blessings of freedom after years and years of privation. He found two friends there. One was a man named Baron Wrangel who had been appointed as a diplomatic emissary there. This Baron Wrangel would actually live until 1906 and helped Dostoevsky many times during his life, and in fact his letters to and from Dostoevsky at this middle ground of his life are about the only reliable record that we have. We will see that Dostoevsky’s second wife destroyed almost every indication, and every evidence, that her husband had ever experienced a period of vacillation in his life. She was very protective of his literary greatness and his good character. The other friend was a woman. The first woman in Dostoevsky’s life other than prostitutes. We have to understand that Dostoevsky was about thirty-three years old before he had a decent relationship with a woman, any woman.

The– The poignant lack of appreciation for the feminine is a major flaw in the universe of Dostoevsky and it is a concomitant to his lack of appreciation for landscape for animal life and for plant life. This whole perspective is underdeveloped in Dostoevsky almost to the point of a neurotic syndrome. Excuse me for lapsing into psychoanalytic jargon-ese but I’m trying to condense it for you in rapid succession so you can hear it briefly – it’s complicated. The woman’s name was Maria. And Maria, was actually Maria Dmitrievna, was the wife of a man who was an alcoholic in Semipalatinsk. She had a young son about eight years old. This Isayeva would become Dostoevsky’s stepson. Dostoevsky fell in love with this woman. It is always said by one of Dostoevsky’s daughters that she was just an immoral woman totally. She is recounted in one of Baron Wrangel’s letters as being a pretty blonde and of about medium height. But for Dostoevsky it was the first time that he was ever able to experience a relationship with a woman that was somewhat satisfying to him as a man. He fell madly in love with her.

With Dostoevsky’s personality nothing happened by gentle increments. He began to see the relationship as one of soul salvation. Everything depended upon this relationship happening. And so he pursued her. Her husband got a position in a town about six hundred kilometers away. She moved there with him. Dostoevsky was just maddeningly trying to get free. He heard that her husband died and he found from a correspondence from her that some young school teacher from Tomsk was hanging around her place and he was beside himself with grief. He managed to go all the way to this small community and to win her to marry her. And she became Dostoevsky’s first wife and her son became his stepson. They came back to Semipalatinsk and for two years they remained there and Dostoevsky at this time began to write his memoirs from the House of the dead. He began to write the notes from the underground. He began to compose some of his observations and experiences onto paper. He applied to the Tsar in a personal letter of great obeisance for permission to move back to Moscow. He was given permission to move to a community about a hundred and fifty kilometers from Moscow named Tavar. It is now called Kalinin rather than Tavar. It’s on the rail line between Moscow and Saint Petersburg. But– Or Leningrad as it’s known today but about a hundred fifty miles outside of Moscow, much closer to Moscow than Saint Petersburg or Leningrad.

So he moved his wife Maria and their stepson who is now going to be twelve or thirteen to this town. He was extremely unhappy there. He finally would make it back to Petersburg but his wife began to contract tuberculosis, consumption, and her days were numbered. I don’t want to go into that relationship so terribly much but by the time they had moved back to European civilization his wife had ceased to count very much for him. Dostoevsky had literally exploded the image of her in pursuing her and once he had her the élan was gone, and the situation became one of just a regular family drudgery.

Dostoevsky began to try to bring back his literary contacts. It was now 1860, he was almost forty years of age. He had published just one item – Poor Folk – that had been of any note or any regard. It was at this time that Mikhail passed away and Dostoevsky (Fyodor) had to take over the duties of his family. Mikhail also had a mistress and an illegitimate son and Fyodor began to support all of these people and in order to support them he began writing for different journals and he began to turn out novels which are very curious. The Insulted and the Injured is probably the best known. These novels, it has been pointed out several times, resemble Charles Dickens rather than Dostoevsky. And it’s interesting of note, because Dickens is exactly the opposite of Dostoevsky. They’re polar opposites. Dickens and Dostoevsky together give you a very good barometer of the 19th century. Someone who is capable of bridging both Dickens and Dostoevsky is Herman Melville. Who incidentally is a much greater author than either of them. This is not to say that Dickens and Dostoevsky are not major it’s just to say that Melville is epochal. He’s on a par with Homer and Shakespeare and Cervantes. But this use of the Dickinson worldview to write shows that Dostoevsky was simmering inside and simply trying to work externally. And as he worked he found that he could churn out material at least enough to be able to get by.

He and his brother had started a periodical called Vremya which was named ‘Time’. And Vremya had been set up to publish Dostoevsky’s works. And in fact it was the first indication in Dostoevsky’s mind that the way to go was to for him to write and for his family to publish his works and later on his wife would do just that. His second wife Anna would manage the whole affair and in fact she would do this for about forty years, long after Dostoevsky was dead. Anna was still keeping control of Dostoevsky’s novels and the receipts and income. She was an extraordinary capable woman economically very very sound and we are to probably forgive her for destroying a lot of correspondence. She was trying to protect the man that she loved and also her life investment.

The– the development of Dostoevsky’s artistry came under the gun of financial distress. Whenever he had money in his pocket he could not write and whenever he got money he usually lent it right away to anybody that would ask him, spent it right away. So that he found himself on the death of his brother completely indebted – I think his brother left a debt something like about thirty-five thousand rubles. And Dostoevsky assumed these debts as well as his own and began to try and work his way out of this jam. In order to get a hedge on the world of creditors the world of relatives Dostoevsky went through several affairs and in 1862 took a long trip. He took a three or four month trip through Western Europe. It was the first time he ever saw Western Europe. He went to Berlin. He went to Paris. He went to London.

Interestingly enough, when he was in London he visited the Russian anarchist Alexander Herzen whose writings are tremendously famous in the Soviet Union. Herzen is looked upon as one of the precursors of Lenin, a writer of– of great significance in social thought. Dostoevsky did not realize but there were spies of the czar present at all these meetings and noting down the conditions. In fact Dostoevsky’s name appeared on many lists for a few months as an ex-prisoner from Siberia seen talking to Alexander Herzen in London. And where did he go from there? This net of espionage was developing in Europe. It was not just the Russian mentality, all of the European countries were spreading out this net of intrigue and espionage. The Inquisition was no longer religious but was political, and it was no longer conducted by one body but by dozens and dozens of different bodies and political bodies.

European thought in the 1860s was becoming increasingly complex in terms of innuendo. It’s extraordinary that Dostoevsky was unimpressed by the great cities of Europe. He would travel a couple of more times to Europe trying to make contacts with various women and various publishers. His life at this point was a complete turmoil. In fact, Dostoevsky was suffering more and more from epileptic fits and he found himself almost incapable of– of writing. It was at this point that he took on someone that we would call today, a stenographer. She was young. Her name was Anna Grigorievna – Grigorievna. Anna Grigorievna would become Dostoevsky’s second and final wife. Anna was about 20 years old; Dostoevsky about 45. He was somewhat of a famous writer. Extraordinarily clumsy and shy in his conversation. Longing to pour himself out, open up his soul as only a Russian could really understand. And she a very stable, even-tempered young woman. He proposed to her and she accepted.

During the courtship the influence of her evenness of temperament, her femininity, let’s put this deeper, her universal feminine– feminine tone began to penetrate into Dostoevsky’s psychology. He began to note in his writer’s diary, which we have, qualities of longing for domestic felicity that he hadn’t ever had really in his life. That had come to the fore once or twice when he was imagining his wild love for Maria. But now they began to occur to him in a more even tone more consistently.

With this quality in mind Dostoevsky’s writing changed. He began to, instead of grind out material just to get it out, he began to write from a more stable standpoint correcting what he had done and Dostoevsky began applying many images and characters which he had had in the past to a character that came to dominate his thoughts named Raskolnikov in the novel which was published the same year that he got married was Crime and Punishment and is one of the world’s great novels. It established in one fell swoop in 1866 Dostoevsky as one of the major European novelists. He was beyond dispute one of the greatest Russian writers of all time. By the time that Crime and Punishment came out in its final installments.

This– and I brought Crime and Punishment and I don’t know if I’ll have time to go through it. Probably not. I was going to give you some sort of a structural precis of the whole work. In the beginning Raskolnikov is a student. There’s a landlady pawnbroker who is rather vicious in her dealings. No one likes her. In chapter seven of the first part of Crime and Punishment this is how Dostoevsky describes an encounter between the two. He writes,

“The door was as before opened a tiny crack, and again two sharp and suspicious eyes stared at him out of the darkness.” Do you get the uncanny serpentine; the devil from the abyss. “Then Raskolnikov lost his head and nearly made a great mistake.” That is to say this image evoked in him this tremendous upheaval. Triggered off in him an almost uncontrollable response.

“Fearing the old woman would be frightened by their being alone, and not hoping that the sight of him would disarm her suspicions, he took hold of the door and drew it towards himself to prevent the old woman from attempting to shut it again. Seeing this she did not pull the door back, but she did not let go of the handle so that he almost dragged her out with it on to the stairs. Seeing that she was standing in the doorway not allowing him to pass he advanced straight upon her. She stepped back in alarm and tried to say something but seemed unable to speak and stared with open eyes at him.”

The eyes, the serpentine eyes fixing him, hypnotizing him, bringing out this devilish energy. This satanic energy which overcomes Raskolnikov. He can do nothing.

He picks up an axe and strikes the woman. She is killed. He writes, “He laid the axe on the ground near the dead body and felt at once in her pocket (trying to avoid the streaming [blood]) – the same right hand pocket from which she had taken the key on his last visit. He was in full possession of his faculties, free from confusion or giddiness, but his hands were still trembling.”

The vacillation between this incredible volcanic vertigo and sudden moments of clarity and then the penetration of the trembling guilt are a career which Raskolnikov experiences and assails him throughout Crime and Punishment again and again until he is roasted in his anxiety and realizes that the only expiation that he has, the only possibility that he has as a being is to confess his crime so that the beatitude is moved from the world of evil to the world of good.

It does not matter that he will be punished for his crime. He does not fear the punishment for his crime. He fears the infinite vertigos of evil to which he is subjected as long as his crime is unconfessed, and that confessing his crime will transpose that energy from the world of evil to the world of good. But Raskolnikov is intelligent. He’s a student. He’s very clever. He’s very very intelligent. He cannot bring himself to do this. He cannot bring himself to confess because his whole mind schemes and connives, uses his intelligence on the basis of the hate-fear relationship to that satanic energy to weave such a net of complications that he will never be caught not even implicated. And he finds that he is very good at this; that he is extraordinarily successful at this. And it is the increasing realization on Raskolnikov’s part that he’s intelligent enough to get away with the crime that scares him most of all; that leads him to the intolerable psychological impasse and he becomes the Faust of the 19th century in doing this. That man has achieved such a command of intelligence and mind that he can cover up his own guilt, his own murderous capacity and no one will know, except he himself knows. And like a possessed man he realizes that the only expiation that exists for him is on his own recognizance to confess.

I have to give you just a little bit here. There are two women to whom he confesses before he confesses to the individuals. That is to say, his love, named Sonia, and his sister, named Dounia. Before he can confess to society, before he can confess to his fellow man, he brings himself as a man to his woman to Sonia and she tells him that he has suffered from a condition of godlessness bezbozhnyy and that this condition of godlessness is what has created the entire situation and only by turning to God can he free himself from this. She tells him that the way to do this is to go to a major cross street and bow down and kiss the earth and ask the earth for forgiveness and then to tell everyone that he meets that he is guilty all the way to the police station so that when he arrives at the police station with his confession of guilt that he will have expiated himself to nature to Mother Earth and to everybody all the strangers all the way there and will be in a state of complete openness or complete possession by this God like intoxication. That he will have moved his compulsion from the world of evil to the world of good.

Then he tells his sister Dounia; and when he tells his sister Dounia he’s already trying to work his intelligence in trying to protect himself and he realizes that he is capable enough that he’s intelligent enough that he has become ruthless enough to even while he’s trying to free himself to make complications which will in enable him to escape. And this begins to work upon him and make him extraordinarily fearful. And so with Dostoevsky the first existentialist quandary becomes one of ultimate terror that he is guilty of a murder a double murder, as a matter of fact, there was another woman who had come in. And Raskolnikov had asked her to but that his intelligence at eluding all of the nets of the police all of the nets of the complications his intelligence had permitted him to escape. And now even when he has admitted this to Sonia his crime, by the time he admits it a second time to his sister Dounia, he says,

“‘Crime? What crime?’ he cried in sudden fury.” because the compulsive energy is free floating in him. He has no control over it. And this is what Sonia has been telling him that you must kiss the ground and confess to Mother earth and ground that compulsiveness because it isn’t yours to expiate. It has you, it has possessed you and you do not have it. And to tell everyone openly on the way there to keep that openness, that expiation, that groundedness of that evil energy clear so that you can make that confession. But he has not understood that in Raskolnikov, even at this point says,

“‘Crime? What crime?’ he cried in sudden fury. ‘That I killed a vile noxious insect, an old pawnbroker woman, of no use to anyone! … Killing her was an atonement for forty sins.’” And so Raskolnikov begins his incredible net of justification which has ever since been the disease of contemporary man his incredible capacity to rationalize and justify every brutality of which he is capable until it weaves itself into the net of his intelligence and the intelligence itself becomes rotten and infected with the lies promulgated by this wild card. Energy from the abyss.

But Dostoevsky relentless brings Raskolnikov in his exceeding pride to the police station and there he has a conversation with the very policeman, the very detective who would like to have put him away which he the man that he feared the most. And he comes into the police station. He has this long conversation with him. And in this conversation Raskolnikov comes very close to pulling off the greatest triumphal coup of his life. Because he walks out of the police station he has not confessed and when he comes down to the street he looks across and he sees Sonia. And he realizes that Sonia has been following him all this time, has been watching him and he realizes that he is at a juncture. He has come to her as his only contact with reality. His only possible way of transmuting this energy from the infinitely evil to the infinitely good; from becoming satanically intoxicated to becoming God intoxicated. And Sonia is the only thread left for him. And seeing her he suddenly has this rush. Dostoevsky writes it like this.

“He went out; he reeled, he was overtaken with giddiness and did not know what he was doing. He began going down the stairs, supporting himself with his right hand against the wall. He fancied that a porter pushed past him on his way upstairs to the police [office], that a dog in the lower storey kept up a shrill barking and that a woman flung a rolling-pin at it and shouted. He went down and out into the yard. There, not far from the entrance, stood Sonia, pale and horror-stricken. She looked wildly at him. He stood still before her. There was a look of poignant agony, of despair, in her face.”

And you see at this point Dostoevsky is bringing all the power of the icon of the Virgin Mary embodied into the face of Sonia. And Raskolnikov realizes that God himself has presented his last chance at expiation. And Raskolnikov seeing this in, not the loving forgiveness of the face of the eternal feminine, but the horror stricken capacity that man has freed himself to be eternally evil. And Raskolnikov:

“He stood still before her.” Suspended in that moment. “There was a look of poignant agony, of despair, in her face. She clasped her hands. His lips worked in an ugly, meaningless smile. He stood still a minute, grinned and went back to the police office. Ilya Petrovitch had sat down and was rummaging among some papers. Before him stood the same peasant who had pushed by on the stairs. ‘Hulloa! Back again? have you left something behind? What’s the matter? Raskolnikov, with white lips and staring eyes, came slowly nearer.”

A man garroted by his own satanic infinite capacity for deception. White lips and staring eyes. The mask of sheer terror. And approaching a moment of reality.

“He walked right to the table, leaned his hand on it, [and] tried to say something, but could not; only incoherent sounds were audible. ‘You are feeling ill, a chair! Here, sit down! Some water!’ Raskolnikov dropped on to a chair, but he kept his eyes fixed on the face of Ilya Petrovitch which expressed unpleasant surprise. Both looked at one another for a minute and waited. Water was brought. ‘It was I…’ began Raskolnikov. ‘Drink some water.’ Raskolnikov refused the water with his hand, and softly and brokenly, but distinctly said: ‘It was I killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them.’ Ilya Petrovitch opened his mouth. People ran up on all sides. Raskolnikov repeated his statement.”

So Dostoevsky begins the epilogue in Crime and Punishment after this with a single word: “Siberia.” Like a rush of visionary culmination – Siberia. That the– the bound up energy that was in the horrific hypnotic magnetism of the crime associated with the darkness and the evil eyes of the pawnbroker looking from that darkness, through his confession had been expiated to Siberia. It was not a punishment. It was an infinite vastness of renewal. It was not a prison of suffering for the crime. It was a transmutation of the man from the realm where crime could exist and punishment be feared to a realm where expiation would make a new man different from the old. Different from the old. And he ends it by saying– Because Sonia moves to Siberia and is there to wait for him. He’s going to be there for seven years, but they don’t mind, they don’t mind.

“She had been greatly agitated that day, and at night she was taken ill again.” She’s become drawn. She’s been there for a while. Raskolnikov has been given a day to go and see her and he throws himself at her feet and grasps her knees and begins just sobbing uncontrollably until she understanding that he is not in an epileptic fit but has come clean. And her hands, which were raised in horror that he might have gone into madness, realizes that he has gone into this God-intoxication. He’s become a holy fool for God and her hands come to his head and a blessing comes to him from her.

“Seven years, only seven years! At the beginning of their happiness at some moments they were both ready to look on those seven years as though they were seven days.” What are the seven days? The seven days of creation. “He did not know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering. But that is the beginning of a new story – the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.”

So in 1866, with the marriage to Anna and the publication of Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky began to emerge conclusively at the stature at which we value him today. And as he did, the pall of relatives began to sense that there was more money in the man. The creditors, who had long given up on notes, began to hound Dostoevsky. So Anna, realizing that her life, her marriage, the whole capacity of this man who could produce Crime and Punishment was at stake, engineered a coup de gras, a palace revolution, in small. She sold all of the furniture, the piano, all of her dowry goods. They paid off all the relatives and all the creditors and they moved away.

They went traveling into Europe and Dostoevsky was freed in the matter of four and a half years with the continuity of his experiences with Anna in his daily life, away from the turmoil of the creditors and the family and the complications away from his own condition of indecisiveness Dostoevsky began to write in a regular fashion. And he produced in those four and a half years in rapid succession The Idiot, which is one of the world’s greatest novels about Prince Myshkin who has a fool for God, a holy Hero – ranks with Don Quixote. In fact Dostoevsky said many times in his writings, in his writer’s diary, that Cervantes’s Don Quixote ranks as the great Christian hero of all time and that he had hoped that Prince Myshkin would stand in that company. He wrote also the tremendous novel which in Russian is called The Devil but often is translated as The Possessed here. He wrote the– the tremendous complications that would come out in A Raw Youth, which I started the lecture with today. And when he returned, in 1871, to Russia, it was as the great man of letters. He was called upon to do public readings, to give lectures. His family life had become quite stable. Anna had managed in fact economically to bring Dostoevsky’s fortune around. She used the technique of keeping all the copies of his books in their apartment. For instance when A Raw Youth was published, she had hundreds and hundreds of copies put into the apartment and the news leaked out that the great writer had just written the best work of his entire life. And within hours even before Dostoevsky had woken up she had sold three or four hundred copies of this at cash, no credit, and had managed to put this money away. And so with the guidance of Anna, financially, Dostoevsky came into his own.

The pressure of curiosity about him as a prodigy, the incredible vicissitudes of such a man such a human being urged him to publish the Journal of an Author, or it’s called, in English, The Diary of a Writer, in two large volumes – one of the most remarkable diaries of all time. And towards the end of his life, the final years, Dostoevsky began to plan one last great work. His– his life had become clearer and clearer to him. The poignancy of this transmutation of energy through the individual, of saving society through the individual, of going back to the soil of people of the soil, of the Russian peasant, of using that as a basis of reality wherein the individual could find his qualities of worth where the natural expression of the individual and his family would become the linking of the individual to the people of the soil. So that the family became an existential instrument of social transmutation and also a medium whereby the satanic energies that had infused man and permeated his intelligence, making of it just a simple cleverness, could be transformed into a religious ritual approaching the ecstatic.

So that in The Brothers Karamazov, at the end of Dostoevsky’s career, we find Dostoevsky at the height of his greatness. He finished The Brothers Karamazov in the autumn and announced that the Journal of an Author would once more appear regularly in 1881. Meanwhile his services were more than ever in demand for readings in aid of charitable institutions. And after one of them he was presented to the future Tsaritsa Maria Feodorovna. At such readings the prophet always appeared by request in the program. It had become more than any of his own works, more even than The Brothers Karamazov, the symbol of his greatness.

And he suffered from an artery hemorrhage. He passed very quickly into a terrible condition physically. Anna was admitted to the sick room and a few of his friends, and he died at half past eight in the evening.

At the end of The Brothers Karamazov the triumph of the Dostoevskian transmutation is presented at a funeral. Little Ilyusha’s funeral, and I’ll give you that and end the lecture with it.

“‘Oh, how I loved him!’ exclaimed Kolya. ‘Oh, my dear children, my dear friends, do not be afraid of life! How good life is when you do something that is good and just!’ ‘Yes, yes,’ the boys repeated enthusiastically. ‘Karamazov, we love you!’ a voice, probably Kartashov’s, cried impulsively. ‘We love you, we love you,’ the other boys echoed. There were tears in the eyes of many of them. ‘Hurrah for Karamazov!’ Kolya shouted enthusiastically. ‘And may the dead boy’s memory live for ever.’ Alyosha added again with feeling. ‘May it live for ever!’ the boys echoed again.”

The boys are like a chorus. Only instead of a Greek tragedy the chorus now is a Christian triumph of the family vision.

“‘Karamazov,’ cried Kolya, ‘is it really true that, as our religion tells us, we shall all rise from the dead and come to life to see one another again, all, and Ilyusha?’ ‘Certainly we will rise again, certainly we will see one another and shall tell one another gladly and joyfully all that has been,’ Alyosha replied, half laughing, half rapturously. ‘Oh, how wonderful it will be!’ Kolya cried. ‘Well, now let’s make an end of talking and go to his wake. Don’t let it worry you that we shall be eating pancakes. It’s been a very old custom and there’s something nice about that,’ Alyosha laughed. ‘Well, come along! And now we do go hand in hand.’ ‘And always so, all our life hand in hand! Hurrah for Karamazov!’ Kolya cried again with enthusiasm, and once more all the boys cheered.