Unpublished Diaries and Notebooks (1876-1881)

In the notebook jottings he hashed out toward the end of his life, Dostoevsky claims that one can’t honestly write satire without combining it with tragedy.  In satire, we laugh at someone absurd, and in tragedy, we pity someone suffering.  He calls satire and tragedy two sisters who walk side by side.  The reason for this is that satire has no inside.  It is pure negative.  It is merely reacting against something ugly.  Satire, on its own, has no ability to portray a character with positive qualities.  It can only exist in a state of dependance on what it satirizes—it contributes nothing wholly new. 

Thus, without the pity that tragedy evokes, satire becomes entirely divorced from reality, a mere quibbling over abstractions.  Because it has no positive character to build its goodness upon, its sense of goodness must be built upon a preconstructed formula, an assumption about what is right and useful.  But goodness without a face, without a body, is a mere word for thinkers to fight over.

Love is necessary for art.  Without love, we are not conscious of anything real.  But love can’t be worked out in theories.  Love is incomprehensible as an idea.  Logic can only get to utility, but not to love.  Utility misses the love-impulse entirely.  Love must be revealed to us as a feeling between people.  

This is why Dostoevsky saw Christianity as higher than political and philosophical systems, no matter how logical.  Systems are based on ideas, and ideas can’t love.  Christianity is based on a person, the most loving person the world has ever known. 

Satire without pity wants to expose what is bad, but to expose what is bad without any positive figure will not evoke love.  Dostoevsky showed this poignantly in his novel, Demons.  What can start as a desire to destroy corruption can easily turn into an enjoyment of destruction itself.

Thus art that merely describes a flower but with love of nature is more useful for readers than an exposé of bribe-takers.  Love of nature is a starting place.  It is something positive that can lead to loving the people around me.  If I love an apple, it becomes possible for me to love other people because I have established a connection with something good in the world, which, now that I have distinguished it, my capacity is increased to see goodness elsewhere.  

Until I love the objects of my criticism, I can have nothing real to say to them because until I love them, they are not real to me; they are only phantoms of lifeless ideas, projections of my own resentment.  

This is why Don Quixote is the greatest of all satires.  By the end of the novel, its author, Cervantes, clearly loves Don Quixote, whose very absurdity transmutes into something beautifully human.  We come to pity and even admire the man we’ve laughed at for so many pages.  Our love is richer for our laughter, and our laugher is richer for our love.