A Christmas Tree and a Wedding (1848)

The basic outline of “A Christmas Tree and a Wedding” is quite conventional.  The affinity between a boy and girl is threatened by the girl’s grotesque suitor, whose social position enamors the girl’s parents.  I’ve heard variations on this theme many times.  But Dostoevsky’s version has some odd tweaks.  Here are three:

1.  In a typical version of this plot, the boy and girl are adults.  In Dostoevsky’s take, they are children, yet the powerful suitor is middle-aged.  

2.  Conventionally, the narrator reports and comments on the situation but has no power to get involved.  ‘A Christmas Tree’s narrator, however, is on the scene.  He has the ability to engage, but he doesn’t.  Instead, he only laughs.

3.  This type of plot normally ends emphatically.  Either the boy and the girl get together or they don’t.  ‘A Christmas Tree,’ however, ends ambiguously.  An end may be implied, but the central tension remains unresolved.

Why did Dostoevsky make these alterations?  The answer may have to do with Dostoevsky’s commitment to a certain kind of honesty.  French philosopher Simone Weil claims that literature shines brightest when the author is laboring under the sort of honesty that admits that any of us, at any moment, could lose everything.  This is the honesty of Job, of Oedipus, of Lear.  It’s this honesty that allows one to stand stripped naked of all of one’s illusions of control.  

Whenever I read a story about evil, I naturally want to distance myself from it.  My mind crowds with rationalizations to soothe me.  That couldn’t happen to me, I tell myself.  I want to be somehow immune to such pain.  Like Oedipus, I can’t give ear to a prophet who says “You are the murderer of the king whose murderer you seek.”  The question then becomes how can I move from King Oedipus to King David, who, when the prophet says, “You are the man!” David listens.  

Each of Dostoevsky’s three tweaks bring me closer to David by confronting three of my biggest rationalizations:

1.  “The problem isn’t that bad.”  

Dostoevsky’s decision to make the protagonists children ups the stakes; their vulnerability is too stark for cloudy justification; to be profit-oriented with them is to be sinister.  I like to tell myself that acting on my own interest while ignoring the interests of others isn’t a big deal, but Dostoevsky forces me to take my actions more seriously by showing how they can effect children.  What I thought was reasonable indulgence, when brought into the light of childhood innocence, looks more like cruelty.

2.  “The problem belongs to someone else.”  

That the narrator could watch this scene unfold and do nothing but laugh implicates the narrator.  This brings to mind the fact that I too, am watching, and that I too, do nothing.  Without the narrator’s callous laugh, I could too easily read this story blaming no one but the monstrous suitor.  But the story is told in a way that implicates me in it—I have no way of separating myself from the suitor’s stink. 

3.  “I can fix the problem.”  

The first line of the story presents me with a contradiction: “The other day I saw a wedding . . . but no, I had better tell you about the Christmas tree.”  Here Dostoevsky employs metanoia (one of his favorite rhetorical devices), where he has the narrator correct himself.  The narrator says he’s going to tell us about a wedding, but then he changes his mind.  The wedding is even promised in the title.  But this is the last I overtly hear of the wedding.  This creates a tension in the story.  I’m waiting to see who gets married.  I assume that the girl either must marry the suitor or the boy; the text seems to imply that the girl marries the suitor, but it never says explicitly.  I begin with the tension of the wedding, and I am left with it, which is unsettling.  I want to hear that justice triumphed, but I don’t even find out what happened.  I am left with urgent questions but with no answers.  In short, I am left in an impossible situation.

Dostoevsky often ends his stories this way.  He leaves me between the horns of a dilemma that is so urgent that it doesn’t even leave room for a despairing cop-out.  What is my responsibility to those suffering around me?  Well, what is it?  To ignore the question is cruel.  To do nothing is oppressive.  But what can I do?  Positive actions often feel more symbolic than satisfactory, and the proffered answers often seem to just point the cruelty in another direction.  I feel as though I have been brought to the point that I must act, but I am paralyzed.  

And this is where Dostoevsky leaves me.  Why?  I can’t answer for him, but one reason I keep coming back to these stories is because I find this impossible state one of spiritual fertility.  When I come to the end of my answers, I finally become willing to cry out for help.