Letters (1878-1881)

In the midst of serially publishing his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky delivered a speech about Alexander Pushkin that became a national phenomenon.  He wrote to his wife, Anna, about the response: 

A group of ladies improvised a wreath for him because they were so moved by how he spoke about women.  Even Ivan Turgenev, Dostoevky’s most formidable ideological opponent, embraced him with tears.  

In the weeks following, Turgenev remained opposed to Dostoevsky’s beliefs, and literary Russia largely went back to how it had been before, but the overwhelming response of this speech was an indicator of the powerful effect Dostoevsky’s work was having on people.  Many came up to him and told him that “you have made us better since we read The Karamazovs.”  Nor was this a passing trend; this book has had a similar effect on me, half a world and more than a century away.  

The force of Dostoevsky’s late work is perhaps impossible to summarize, but I’d like to examine one theme that seemed particularly present in the response to his Pushkin Speech—that of reconciliation and universal love.  Russia at this time was a place of deep cultural polarization, and, at least for a moment, Dostoevsky gave a glimmer of hope to hearts long wearied from strife.  

On the surface, it’s surprising that 1880s-Dostoevsky would be the author to do so.  In the 1860s, Dostoevsky was passionate about trying to establish common ground between the polarized parties, but as he aged, his journalism became more and more committed to a single side of the debate.  In fact, his cultural beliefs became so extreme that he developed some horrific prejudices, including anti-semitism.  How could such an opinionated, flawed, perhaps even bigoted person become such a rallying point for reconciliation and universal love?

The question is an urgent one for the contemporary American writer.  It’s no secret that 2020s U.S.A. is polarized.  Culture has clustered into little pods of like-minded people, and from pod to pod, the political assumptions, the common body of reading, the jokes, and even the language are all untransmittable to another pod.  The goal of the contemporary author is to find your pod.

I suppose it’s always been this way to a certain extent (we all have differing tastes and beliefs), and perhaps this tendency isn’t inherently bad, but I can’t help but think that simply writing to one’s private group of like-minded friends is a far cry from the beauty of The Brothers Karamazov.  Readers within a pod tend to find anything foreign to the tenets of their pod morally repulsive, and so pod-finding discourages independent thought and fresh forms of discovery.  Pod-finding also makes the genres of satire and protest pointless.  What’s the use of protesting something if none of the holders of that idea will read your protest, or, if they do, they find it incomprehensible?  Writers must know their audience; they must know what stories and what tellings will sing between them.  What’s marvelous about Karamazov is that Dostoevsky somehow manages to find what sings across seemingly impossible gaps of culture and ideology.

How, with all of his shortcomings, was Dostoevsky able to do this?  Fully answering this question might not be possible, but here are four things about his writing process that could’ve helped:

1.  Dostoevsky was radically committed to honesty.

He believed, even in child-rearing, that the best way to help people was to never lie.  When writing, he regularly checked with doctors about psychological possibility and with lawyers about the legal process.  He even got on his knees and prayed before he wrote, asking “for a pure heart and for a pure, sinless, calm, dispassionate style.”

2.  Dostoevsky sought awareness of his own ignorance.

Commitment to honesty can’t go far without discovering how little one really knows.  When a friend asked him for advice, he qualified his response with: “. . . No matter how much you wrote to me about [your situation], there will still be a whole ocean of things unsaid and which you yourself aren’t capable of saying, nor I am of understanding.”  This awareness of the ocean of mystery that separates one human being from another tempers how he communicates.

3.  Dostoevsky was insatiably curious about the mystery.

He wasn’t content to simply be aware of his ignorance—his ignorance made him curious.  Even on his death bed, on his last day on earth, he was urgently concerned with finding someone to help him interpret a dream he had.  One can’t read his letters without feeling his thirst for deeper insight into the human enigma.  This side of him keeps his writing from sinking beneath pedantic, ready-made ideas.  Didacticism is divisive, curiosity is unifying.

4.  Dostoevsky respects the reader’s ability to draw their own conclusions.

In The Brothers Karamazov, one of the characters, Ivan, has a conversation with a demon.  Dostoevsky knew what some of his readers would believe this possible and some of them would not, and so he wrote the chapter in a way that the conversation could be adequately explained by a psychologically-realistic hallucination, but it could be equally explained by a spiritual encounter.  He knew that he would do his own position no good to simply assume it because this would only push his ideological opponents into further opposition.  This is probably why he considered it dangerous to require teachers to refute socialism—it only leads to squabbling with students.  “Don’t send a fool,” he says, “to defend a just cause.”

This doesn’t mean that Dostoevsky has no driving idea behind his novel.  On the contrary, he believed that a novel couldn’t be great without a profound idea at its core, and he saw The Brothers Karamazov as having a civic task: to rout ideas that he believed toxic to society.  But it does mean that he must approach this task honestly.  He knows his readers won’t believe something simply because he’s saying its so.  He must show them the honest facts and let them decide for themselves.  He does this by eloquently presenting the ideas he finds toxic.  His goal was to present them so convincingly that the espousers of those ideas will find that he stated their case even better than they did.  He does this in the chapters “Rebellion” and “The Grand Inquisitor.”  

He responds to these ideas, not by eloquent counterarguments, but by the life of one of his characters, Zossima, in the section called “The Russian Munk.”  He then leaves it up to the reader to decide which case is stronger.  Dostoevsky knows that his readers will be the final judges of the veracity of his novel.  That was why he writes to a friend about “The Russian Munk” that he “tremble[s] for it in the sense of whether it will be a sufficient reply.”

It’s rare to encounter in a novel such a high respect for the reader.  No tricks, no stacking the deck, just an effort at complete honesty, and space to let the reader form their own conclusions.

I’d like to add one caveat, however, for practicing this technique.  Leaving interpretation up to the reader can be misconstrued (I know this because I’ve done it).  If characters and their experiences are too ambiguous, the reader won’t feel respected, only confused.  If a writer simply presents the facts of the case, without any consideration about what the reader might be going through and without giving the reader enough information to interpret the novel’s world, the result will probably not be a well-told story.  The best writers (Dostoevsky included) are keenly aware of the effect they are having on the reader.  Writers need to have this awareness in order to invite the reader into the experience.  If the reader is too confused, they won’t have any emotional experience at all (besides frustration or boredom).  The writer’s job is to eliminate ambiguity so that the reader can have a clear experience in the world of the novel.  In a great novel, the experience itself usually isn’t ambiguous, only the interpretation of it.

What Dostoevsky acheived with The Brothers Karamazov is larger than what a publisher might call a “broad appeal.”  What’s beautiful about the book isn’t that it avoided saying anything in particular in order to reach a mass audience, but that it’s honesty became a deep calling to deep, a reaching out to the universal better nature, to bring out the best in all of us.