Seven Articles from Time and Epoch (1860-1862)*

Writing involves the whole person.  Commitment to the literary endeavor must involve a denial of self-promotion.  Dostoevsky believes that fiction at its best is concerned with Living Truth, that is, something higher than the writer.  The more an author elevates self over this Living Truth, the more doomed that author will be to write nonsense.

Here are some of the the clamors of grandiosity that Dostoevsky mentions as inhibiters of the progress of art:

1.  Fear of the condemnation of established writers and publishers.  This arises from a craving for success in the literary world.  In other words, I can’t write truthfully if I’m over-focused on having a successful career.

2.  The desire for making money.  Turning writing soley into a commercial enterprise will naturally shove aims concerning the Living Truth to the background.

3.  Skepticism.  “A skeptical view,” Dostoevsky says, “kill[s] everything, even the view itself, and in the end lapse[s] into complete apathy and the sleep of death.”  If I write only from a place of criticism and not from hope and love, I will deflate the tires of my literary vehicle.  Building is  more difficult than tearing down, but more important.

Dostoevsky believes in writing about current social issues, but here too, an egotistical tendency to dominate others can get in the way of progress.  This can happen when a zeal for reform can lead to a superior tone.  Rather than persuading, this writing tends to make readers even more resistant, even over issues that hadn’t previously cared that much about until they felt told what to do.  Readers can smell out an agenda.  

My writing at times can drift this way, but Dostoevsky offers some helpful ways to get back on track:

1.  Prefer truth to victory.  Denial of destructive egotism must take the form of praising my opponents when they’re right.  Dostoevsky’s journalism is remarkable in how tenaciously he seeks out and clings to common ground with his bitterest rivals.  He believes that progress can only be found not in forcing one group’s interests over another’s, but in pursuing common interest.

2.  Admit mistakes.  Key to recovery is awareness of illness.  Key to writerly growth is a willingness to examine where I am wrong.

Dostoevsky also believes that too firm an insistence on understanding truth gets in the way of the Living Truth.  The egotism here is demanding that the universe be small enough to fit inside my head.  Dostoevsky’s favorite word for his opponents is “theoreticians” and his greatest critique is that they are out of touch with real people.  He disclaims theorizing as merciless, impatient, and too consistent.  He dislikes blanket application of universal ideas because it overlooks the unique humanity of the individual. 

Dostoevsky seems to think that this drift towards dehumanizing theory can be checked in fiction by the use of specificity.  He praises Edgar Allan Poe for the power of his details.  Poe’s fiction lives through the vividness if its particulars.  In his art, life triumphs over blurred generalizations.

But Dostoevsky also believes E.T.A. Hoffmann to be a superior artist to Poe.  Poe’s grasp of the world has no sense of a higher reality, like Hoffmann’s does.  Poe’s universe has a lower ceiling.  The progress of literature will still be hindered if an author merely wants to render the world in its more superficial aspects.  While the theorist demands the universe be no bigger than my head, the materialist demands that the universe be no bigger than my five senses.  But art can reach deeper than the material.  

This might be part of what makes reading Dostoevsky such a full experience.  He is concerned with what is good and what is evil.  “Much on earth is concealed from us,” Dostoevsky will later write in The Brothers Karamazov, 

“But in place of it we have been granted a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world . . . [Earth] lives and grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds . . .”

This “mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world” seems to be one of Dostoevsky’s great guiding lights as an artist.  He says that his existence truly began when he was walking along the Neva river and had a vision where 

“columns of smoke rose like giants from all the roofs on both embankments and rushed upward through the cold sky, twining and untwining along the way, making it seem as if new buildings were rising above the old ones and a new city was forming in the air . . . It was as if my eyes were opened to something new, to a completely new world, unfamiliar to me and known only from obscure rumors and some mysterious signs.”  

It was for this world that he became willing to sacrifice his cravings for wealth, for accolade, for domination, and commit to art.

*Articles referenced: “Petersburg Visions in Verse and Prose,” “Two Camps of Theoreticians,” “Introduction to Three Tales of Edgar Poe,” and “Four Manifestoes from Time and Epoch.”