A Diary of a Writer (1880-1881)

The final issues of Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer were his last publications before his death.  They contain a transcript of his speech about Alexander Pushkin, a speech that, as I mentioned before, became a national event.  Pushkin, more than any other author, is Dostoevsky’s guiding light, and so I found his examination of Pushkin insightful.  In this speech, Dostoevsky shares his reading of Pushkin’s masterwork, Eugene Onegin.  

This reading demonstrates Dostoevsky’s approach to character.  He sees the two protagonists of the novel, Onegin and Tatiana, as types that existed in Russian society but that no author had yet perceived.  Dostoevsky believes that part of an author’s role is to notice these personalities which typify a time and place.  Onegin is certainly this.  He becomes the prototype for many of the most memorable characters in nineteenth century Russian literature. 

To see Tatiana’s significance requires deeper investigation.  Dostoevsky plumbs her character by looking at her key decision and noticing the paradox.  Tatiana loves Onegin and only Onegin.  Yet when he asks her to run away with him, she turns him down.  Why?  It’s easy when I come across a contradiction like this when reading to assume its some mistake on the author’s part.  Dostoevsky, however, knows that Pushkin has thought more about Tatiana than I have, and so questioning her motives will be rewarded.  This is just what Dostoevsky does, and through his questioning, Tatiana more brightly shines as one of the great creations of world literature.  

The most obvious observation to make is that Tatiana is married.  Because of her religious beliefs, she thinks that leaving her husband would be wrong, even if she’s leaving him for the only man that she ever loved.  But this doesn’t tell us much about Tatiana’s decision specifically.  We know that Tatiana doesn’t refuse Onegin out of a fear of scandal; we have just spent a novel with her and seen her bold dauntlessness.  Unsatisfied with surface explanations, Dostoevsky meditates on her commitment to her elderly husband whom she doesn’t love:

“. . . [B]etrayal would cast shame and disgrace upon [her husband] and would mean his death.  And can one person found his happiness on the unhappiness of another?  Happiness is found not only in the pleasures of love, but also in the higher harmony of the spirit.  How can one’s spirit be set at rest if in one’s past there is a dishonorable, merciless, inhumane act?  Is she to run off simply because the one who represents her happiness is here?  But what kind of happiness can it be if it is founded on the unhappiness of another?  Can you imagine that you are erecting the edifice of human destiny with the goal of making people happy in the end, of giving them peace and rest at last?  And now imagine as well that to do this it is essential and unavoidable to torture to death just one human creature; moreover, let that creature be not an entirely worthy one, a person some may find even ridiculous—not some Shakespeare, but simply an honorable old man, the husband of a young wife whose love he blindly believes in; even though he knows nothing of her heart, he respects her, and is at peace.  And so you need only to disgrace, dishonor, and torment him and built your edifice on the tears of this dishonored old man!  Will you consent on those terms to be the architect of such an edifice?  That is the question.  And can you admit, even for a moment, the idea that the people for whom you were building this edifice would themselves agree to accept such happiness from you if its foundations rested on the suffering of, say, even one insignificant creature, but one who had been mercilessly and unjustly tortured—and, having accepted this happiness, would they remain happy ever after?  Tell me, could Tatiana, with her noble soul and her heard that had suffered so much, have settled the matter in any other way?  No . . . ‘Let it be that I alone have no happiness; let my unhappiness be immeasurably greater than the unhappiness of this old man; finally, let no one, not even this old man, ever learn of my sacrifice and appreciate it; but I do not want to be happy after having destroyed another!’”

The deeper Dostoevsky questions Tatiana’s paradox, the more profundity he unearths.  In the above passage, not only am I astounded by Tatiana’s character, I am inspired to behave as bravely as she does.

This alone is an insightful reading of Tatiana, but Dostoevsky doesn’t stop here.  He takes the character of Tatiana so seriously that he moves into speculations based on what we know about her.  Say Tatiana wasn’t married.  Would she have gone with Onegin?  Dostoevsky walks us through a few key scenes in the novel to demonstrate that the answer is still no.  Tatiana had given Onegin a chance at the beginning of the novel, and he rejected her.  He couldn’t see her greatness.  And now, he wants her, though nothing but superficialities have changed.  She’s now rich and glamorous and the talk of society, but she’s still the same Tatiana.  This proves to her that Onegin still doesn’t see her, that if she were to go with him, once her novelty wore off, he would become bored with her.  Onegin doesn’t understand Tatiana, but Tatiana understands Onegin.  Onegin is capricious and inconstant, Tatiana is solid and rooted.  

Here Dostoevsky uses his own disciplined imagination to probe Tatiana’s character through speculation.  This helps us see even more of her solidity than just her sense of integrity shows.

Dostoevsky’s reading of Eugene Onegin demonstrates the whole process through which a great character is formed.  First, Pushkin was so in touch with his time and place that he synthesizes attitudes of his day into specific personalities.  Second, he fleshes out those personalities with such life that we can speculate and know what they would do even in situations that are not dramatized in the novel.  Third, he explores the implications of those personalities until they demonstrate a universal truth that applies to all of us.  This movement from the general to the specific and back to the general gives us a more profound understanding of our world and, at its best in characters like Tatiana, gives us a sense of awe that is the joy of reading fiction.

This is the final blog in my readerly apprenticeship through Dostoevsky’s complete works.  Thanks for sticking with me!