Letters (1872-1877)

Dostoevsky criticizes the literary world of his time for being conventional, ambiguous, phony, dull—in short, lacking in sincerity and directness.

Why?  He thinks that this is what happens to writers who are too afraid of appearing ridiculous.  Sometimes the truth of one’s experience is laughable, and if one becomes too preoccupied with avoiding mockery, one could back oneself further and further away from the truth of experience.

Separation between writing and experience is dangerous.  Dostoevsky calls a literary event a social fact.  He believes that a prominant literarary critic’s ideas in the 1840s contributed to a horrific political murder in the 1870s.

To combat this, Dostoevsky is strikingly committed to candor, even in his letters.  “Artlessness is the only thing I can boast of,” Dostoevsky writes, “even though it makes people laugh.”  His letters during this period are characterized with abrupt frankness, from criticizing a stranger’s handwriting to praising a teenager’s love of her parents.  Even the way he writes to his wife, Anna, seems to change during this time and become more openly affectionate.  He’s interested, even in his most unliterary communications, to do away with the white lies of form and etiquette, to only say what he means.

Though he isn’t afraid to tell correspondents what he thinks, he’s also honest enough to recognize that he doesn’t know everything.  These letters are characterized by a depth of interest in and a desire to learn from even the most random-seeming strangers.  He’s rarely content to rely solely on his imagination and experience to create his characters.  He goes out of his way to research personalities, especially at criminal trials.  He also studies his fan mail carefully, attending their words with a desire to learn from them, even (or perhaps especially) the young.  Dostoevsky is invested in staying in touch with his time.  He complains that Goncharov, who he considers to be a towering talent and intellect, has crippled his writing by not actively trying to understand the rising generation.

One issue in particular Dostoevsky feels that many of his contemporaries are getting wrong: something he calls “Pure Beauty.”  He thinks of this Beauty in terms of generosity.  There was a popular idea at the time that all bad behavior stemmed from poverty, and so if a society eradicated poverty, there would be no more crime.  

Dostoevsky disagrees with this idea.  He compares it to the devil’s first temptation of Christ to turn stones into bread.  He cites Christ as revealing something key about human nature: “Man does not live on bread alone.”  Dostoevsky interprets this as meaning that people’s need to show generosity is deeper than their need for material security.  He sees the generous impulse as the only way a human being can experience personality and freedom because without it, we would be mere instincts demanding satisfaction, like animals.  To be reduced to this state of being for a human is to despair.  He claims that the difference between saying “I must share with you” and “you must share with me” is the difference between life and death.  The first recognizes one’s need to show generosity, and the second is fixated on money, and fixating on money leads to greed.  

If we merely focus on eradicating poverty, Dostoevsky says, we will still not eradicate crime because we will be ignoring the deeper need.  His novels show again and again that people can be cruel out of boredom.  But if we focus in what he calls the Ideal of Beauty, then we will work for each other, and poverty will diminish as a result.

In one letter, Dostoevsky councils a young girl who desires to go to medical school so she can help people, but her father is against it.  Don’t sacrifice your convictions, Dostoevsky advises, but “be tolerant and compassionate toward [your parents] . . . Therein is a real feat of philanthropy, and there’s no point in longing to go somewhere far away for a feat of philanthropy when most often of all it is right in our own home, right before our eyes.”  

Dostoevsky’s commitment to honesty always comes back to this same principle: don’t love an abstract cause at the expense of loving your neighbor.