Crime and Punishment (1866)

Crime and Punishment is one of the most powerful reading experiences I’ve ever had. It hits me in a deeper way than most novels do. Why? I can’t answer that fully, but I think a factor that may be contributing to this soul-level experience has to do with the novel’s sense of possibility.  

The Petersburg of Crime and Punishment is a place where heaven and hell stand side-by-side, demanding that a choice must be made between them.  In the world of this novel, heaven is connection, hell is separation.

After Raskolnikov, the novel’s hero, commits murder, Svidrigailov tells Sonya that “there are only two paths open” to him: suicide or surrender.  That this phrase is spoken between these two characters is fitting because they are the clearest representatives of each path.  Svidrigailov’s life is characterized by violence, deception, rape, and murder—all acts of separation.  He’s a man from whom children (who, in the novel, instinctively seek connection) flee in horror.  His story ends in suicide—the ultimate act of separation.

Sonya is characterized by a generous commitment to others.  She gives so freely that she even funds her father’s drinking, and she gives so completely that she even sells her body.  Raskolnikov seeks her out as his only confidant, which is a significant step for him toward connection, and she is so adamant that he give himself up to both civil and divine authority that by the end, going to her becomes for Raskolnikov the same as confessing to all.  Children gather around her, and her story ends with love and reconciliation.

Raskolnikov is desperate to prove that there are not only two paths open to him.  He wants to believe in a third option, which he describes as becoming like Napoleon. Raskolnikov can’t bear the thought of being merely like everyone else.  He must have some sort of superpower that separates him.  His mother also needs him to be exceptional.  When he gets an article published, she convinces herself that he’s the first scholar in Russia.  When she learns that he’s an ordinary criminal, she clamps down so hard onto denial that she has a psychotic break.  

At the heart of Raskolnikov’s Napoleonic idea is his desire to separate from others enough to be exceptional, but not so much that he can no longer live among them.  He wants, by strength of will, to forge for himself a life built on the contradiction of being both connected and separated.  

In the very first sentence of the book, I learn that Raskolnikov is “in two minds.”  These two minds drive the tension of the novel.  In Part One, a single question consumes both Raskolnikov and me: will he murder?  

Each event in this section pushes him either toward or away from the murder.  After he visits Alyona Ivanovna, his intended victim, he is so disgusted by the thought of murder that it drives him to seek out a human connection, which leads him to meet Marmeladov and to generously help his family.  But then he receives a letter from his mother intimating that Dunya is going to marry an unworthy man to help secure Raskolnikov’s career.  This letter humiliates him, which makes him want to prove himself capable at all costs.

He again moves toward the murder until he encounters a teenage girl who has been exploited and made drunk and who is being pursued by a predator.  This girl makes a deep, unconscious impression on Raskolnikov.  He soon falls asleep, and in a dream, recalls seeing, as a child, an old mare beaten to death.  He then prays and renounces the murder.  But when he overhears that Alyona Ivanovna, the woman he wishes to murder, will definitely be alone the next day, he’s compelled to go through with it because he attaches superstitious value to this coincidence, as if he wishes to be aided by demonic power.  

This section is characterized by a remarkable sense of possibility.  He might go through with the murder, he might not.  But this possibility is complicated by the murkiness of Raskolnikov’s agency.  Marmeladov, when describing his alcoholism to Raskolnikov, says, “Do you really understand what that means, to have nowhere left to go?”  In this statement, Marmeladov articulates his despair in the face of being at the mercy of forces larger than himself.  Raskolnikov seems to resonate with this experience.  He repeatedly describes himself on the way to the murder as one sentenced to death.  When he rings his victim’s doorbell, “he couldn’t resist,” and while waiting for her to answer, “there were moments when his mind seemed to go dark, and as for his body, he could barely feel it.”  When he swings the axe onto her head, he does it “almost effortlessly, almost mechanically . . . as if he were not even using his strength.”  In short, he describes the murder as a sort of compulsion.  Later on, he reveals that he knew ahead of time that the murder would not achieve what he wanted out of it, yet he bafflingly did it anyway.

This strange mix of possibility and compulsion contributes to the novel’s quality of soul-resonance.  Possibility isn’t meaningful without consequences.  A consequence is when something significant is lost irrevocably.  But irrevocable loss implies loss of possibility.  Thus, for a situation to have possibility, it must have a point of no return at which a level of possibility is lost.

Whenever I drive my car, I risk the possibility of crashing and losing my legs.  But if I lose my legs, then jump-roping, which was once possible for me, is no longer possible.  The adventure of living is characterized by an interplay of possibility and limitation.  Choice today is tomorrow’s fate.

When Raskolnikov murders, he makes a real choice, one with horrific consequences on every level of his being, consequences that cannot be undone.  But what his crucial choice is and when it’s made is unclear, which is one of the most disturbing parts about it.  The murder itself might not have been the crucial choice, but only a consequence of it.  Sonya, when she observes this, describes it as: “You walked away from God and God struck you and gave you away to the devil!”  

Parts Two through Six revolve around a different question: will Raskolnikov confess?  In other words, will he follow Svidrigailov to the end of his path, or Sonya to the end of hers?  After the murder, he has a strong impulse to confess.  When he’s summoned to the police station, he’s almost determined to surrender.  But when he overhears that the police are on his trail, he decides not to.  He overrides his impulse because the thought of being chased stokes his sense of competition and makes him want to outsmart them and to not seem a fool.  

But he still can’t manage to commit.  He walks distractedly on a bridge over the Neva river and almost gets run over by a coach.  Many deride him for it, but a sympathetic woman gives him a coin.  He turns and sees a beautiful panorama across the river.  He’d often admired this scene before he became obsessed with the murder.  Seeing the view again reminds him of what life had been like before.  This makes the consequences of his new path hit him harder.  He feels cut off from that old life when he was a part of the world.  He threw the woman’s coin into the river, and in so doing “felt as if he’d taken a pair of scissors and cut himself off from everyone and everything, there and then.”  Thus he moves away from confessing.  

But then, not long after, Marmeladov does get trampled by a coach and dies.  That they were both so mentally removed as to be in the way of coaches makes Raskolnikov identify with Marmeladov.  He, too, is a financial burden on his family.  He, too, has a family member that is selling herself to support him.  Raskolnikov gives all the money he has to the family for the funeral.  This gush of generosity has an interesting effect on him—he is “filled by a new, boundless sensation of life surging over him suddenly in all its strength.”  When afterward, the child Polenka follows him, kisses him, and says she loves him, he feels a sense of belonging.  He renounces suicide, which he had been seriously considering only a little while before.  But he still can’t admit that, in order to stay alive, he needs the connection that can only be achieved by confession.  Buoyed by his invigorating experience, he convinces himself that there still may yet be a third path for him.  

This resolution to be strong enough to carve a life out for himself while maintaining his murderous secret is soon challenged by his conference with his mother and his sister.  He can’t be at ease with them.  He loves them, but he can’t be sure they truly accept and love him because they don’t know about his secret.  He feels that the only way he can continue to live on this third path is to cut himself off from his family.  

Raskolnikov’s hope of having life while keeping his secret is further threatened by meeting Svidrigailov.  This man is someone who has gotten away with murder and has not yet killed himself, but he is in every way repulsive.  He’s also a serious threat to Raskolnikov’s sister, Dunya, whom Raskolnikov dearly loves.  Raskolnikov wants to find a way to live in the world with his secret without being a threat to Dunya and those like her.  Svidrigailov’s presence disturbs Raskolnikov—he seems to say, “This is what a life of overstepping morality leads to; if you continue to do so, what is going to prevent you from becoming as monstrous as me?”  

Raskolnikov can’t accept this.  He helps defend his sister against Luzhin, another threat to her, and again tries to cut himself off from his family.  

To further his willed third option, he goes to Sonya and tries to form a new family with her, to form a little circle of acceptance between themselves who have both overstepped morality (he through murder, she through prostitution).  He sees life with Sonya as a loving band of moral outsiders and as an alternative to becoming like Svidrigailov.  Sonya, too, has overstepped morality and has retained a sense of goodness.  But Sonya won’t have any of this project.  She makes clear that if she continues in prostitution, then becoming as depraved as Svidrigailov or committing suicide are real possibilities for her (again, that chilling sense of possible loss), and she reveals to Raskolnikov that the only way she has survived so far is through the hope of a miracle.  

Raskolnikov’s hope of surviving with his secret is further weakened by the presence of Lebezyatnikov, who believes that Sonya’s sexual deviance is a righteous protest against an unjust society.  This belief so absurdly jars with who Sonya is and what her actual sufferings are that it makes Raskolnikov’s parallel hope appear absurd by association.  After being around Lebezyatnikov, Raskolnikov starts to sense that his merry-band-of-outsiders plan is a fanciful sandcastle. 

Raskolnikov then confesses his crime to Sonya, at least half-hoping that he’ll be able to convince her that they can be exceptional together.  But her strange power has more and more ascendency over him—she takes an unshakable stance that he must give himself up.  

Svidrigailov overhears the confession, which he leverages to put Dunya in a situation where she could be raped.  Razumikhin tells Raskolnikov this, and Razumikhin threatens to give himself over to drink.  Again, the possibility of horrific consequence is gripping—I know that Razumikhin really could do this, which could cause great suffering for many people.  But key here is that Raskolnikov realizes that his plan to keep both his family and his secret safe by bequeathing his family to Razumikhin is crumbling.  He may now have to choose between Dunya’s safety and giving up his dream of being a moral exception.  

He decides to turn himself in, and in another moment of painful possibility, Dunya loves and accepts him as a murderer, while his mother can’t.  She loses her sanity trying to remain in denial.  

Raskolnikov’s surrender to the police is powerful because when he goes into the station to do it, he finds it too humiliating and goes to leave.  He almost doesn’t do it.  But he sees Sonya at the right moment and returns.

But even as Raskolnikov makes these choices, they still contain a compulsive element.  When he confesses to Sonya, he does so mechanically—a word that echoes the way he hit Alyona Ivanovna’s head.  When he was in his fever right after the murder, he also seems like he’s fighting against a compulsive need to confess.  And even when he does make his big decision to surrender, he does it, so to speak, off-camera.  The crucial moment of the novel is skipped over without narration.  Dostoevsky seems to recognize that such shifts are so mysterious that it would be wiser to not attempt to describe them.

This subtlety of experience blows the lid off the normal free-will versus determinism debate.  A fiction writer is different than a thinker.  A thinker’s medium is ideas, an artist’s, experiences.  Because of this, great fiction has the ability, according to George Pattison, “to articulate those complexities and obscurities of lived action and experience that reduce philosophy and theology to an embarrassed silence.”  

Ideas are dead things, they’re too rock-solid to breathe.  Art has the ability to reach toward a more living truth because it can cast a wider net than the linear, logical plod of propositions.  It speaks, as Joseph Conrad puts it, “to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives.”

Ideas, because of their monologic, linear nature, are also divisive.  Ideas can cause conflict and schism.  Because fiction does not appeal to, as Conrad says, “the changing wisdom of successive generations,” but speaks to the more universal aspects of ourselves like pity and wonder, pain and beauty.  Because of this, fiction can be a bridge of communication between peoples of radically different ideas.  Fiction at its best can bypass debate and resonate on a more primal level.

The Notebooks for Crime and Punishment (1866)

Whenever I read an amazing finished work like Crime and Punishment, I often imagine that the book, in all it’s brilliance, just plopped into Dostoevsky’s head, ready made.  I was reassured to find in his working notebooks that this was not the case.  He took many of the characters, situations, and stylistic choices through a halting, crooked path of trial and error before arriving at the masterpiece.  Only late in the process did some of the main characters emerge and did the ending take a clear direction.  Seeing this takes some pressure off my own writing—it gives me permission to struggle without feeling hopelessly inept.  If the Big D didn’t have to be a one-draft-wonder, neither do I.  

Yet with all the conundrums this novel presented him, he still did find a way, by the end, to make effective choices.  Reading the notebooks gave me a front-row seat to the development of those choices.

One of Dostoevsky’s most open struggles in the notebooks is with point of view.  Many of the plans in the notebooks are narrated by the main character, Raskolnikov, but the finished novel is by an semi-omniscient, invisible being who keeps always close to him.  This decision cost Dostoevsky much mental sweat.

It makes sense that Dostoevsky went into the project with I-form narration in mind.  He had recently written Notes from Underground in first person, to great success.  But he soon found that the needs of his new book were causing friction with this style.  In parsing this out, Dostoevsky gives insight into the advantages of each point of view.

Compared to Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment has lots of action.  By action, I mean people doing stuff that is integral to the story.  All of this action needs to be clearly communicated to the reader, and this is more easily done in third person.  If I’m questioning everything that the narrator is saying, and if the narrator is telling me a lot of bare facts about action, then I won’t be able to have much of a coherent experience.  

The third-person narrator is more easily assumed by the reader to be infallible.  In other words, if the narrator says something happened, I can trust that it happened.  This, obviously, wouldn’t be the case if Raskolnikov is narrating, because he spends much of the book in either self-deception or delirium.  

I wonder if this is not just the case with Raskolnikov, but if there is something inherent in I-narration that begs for irony.  The “I” is a subjective perspective, so when a story is written from that perspective, the reader naturally wants to question it.  It is, so to speak, only one person’s perspective.  The “I” suggests fallibility.  

Perhaps this is why Dostoevsky notes that for Crime and Punishment, the confessional I-form “in parts will not be chaste.”  I tend to think of unchaste thought as foggy and self-deceptive.  If Raskolnikov tells this story, the truth of the matter will be so obscured that the reader will be left confused and the effect of the novel will be more false than true.  A novel must always promote that which is true, and so for each story, a narrative technique must be found that helps communicate truth most profoundly.  A novel must find a way to capture subjective experience without swamping all sense of reality with it.  

This is the case even if by “unchaste” Dostoevsky only means plain old lewdness.  Lewdness has a tendency to swamp reality with the subjective.  For example, say Raskolnikov was having lewd thoughts about Sonia.  To capture these thoughts as he was having them would be to swamp the reality of Sonia with the way Raskolnikov’s lust was distorting her.  If the reader had no access to Sonia beyond Raskolnikov’s objectifying of her, any clear sense of a real Sonia would be lost to the reader.

This leads to another reason why Dostoevsky decided third person was best for this novel.  He tells himself to “narrate only what is necessary.”  In other words, he wishes to minimize narrator commentary.  This is a surprising choice in light of Dostoevsky’s previous success.  Notes from Underground is loaded with narrative commentary—it is a great strength of the book.  But here Dostoevsky has decided to intentionally minimize what he has previously shown to be his wheelhouse because it gets in the way of the goals of his current project.  This seems to go against the adage, “play to your strengths.”  

Why does he, then?  He spends a lot of time in the notebooks grappling with this issue.  He divides narration into two categories: “facts” and “reflections.”  I like to think of these two aspects of narration as they are heard on sports TV.  There are often two narrators: the play-by-play announcer and the color commentator.  The play-by-play announcer gives us the facts of what is physically happening in the game.  The advantage (from a story perspective) to play-by-play is that it is immersive.  It has a sense of immediacy that allows me to get lost in the game.  Getting lost in the game is key to any effective narrative.  This may be why sports fans can get annoyed with over-active color commentators—they disrupt the game.

The “game” in Crime and Punishment is drama.  Drama is most immersive when it has few intrusions from the more retrospective color commentator.  Perhaps this is why Dostoevsky keeps making notes to himself to minimize reflections.  He is trying to make space for his readers to experience the drama.

So if facts are more immersive than reflections, why have any reflections?  Why not write a book that’s only facts?  Crime and Punishment is not this.  In sports, color commentators serve a purpose—context.  This announcer can give us behind-the-scenes information that makes the play-by-play more meaningful.  For example, if a linebacker runs an interception, learning that player’s backstory—that he had spent is career as a benchwarmer—makes the interception more significant.  The color commentator is able to provide a wider vantage than the immediate.

Reflective narration gives us the context of thoughts.  Much of the significance of Crime and Punishment happens within Raskolnikov, so to be deprived of his thoughts would be to lose much of the story’s meaning.  Much of the art of narrative comes from deciding when to give facts and when reflections.  What makes Crime and Punishment meaningful is Raskolnikov’s subjective experience.

Dostoevsky also mentions another problem with using first person for this project: “It will be difficult to imagine why it was written.”  Why would Raskolnikov bother to write all this incriminating information down?  In the notes, Dostoevsky toys with Raskolnikov keeping a journal and hiding it in a window ledge, but this seems absurd in light of Raskolnikov’s extreme paranoia.  For what reason would he run such a risk?

When a story is written in first person, a reader naturally wonders: at what point did the guy communicate all these thoughts?  To report them as they’re happening, like a play-by-play announcer, often feels goofy (unless Faulkner’s doing it).  Who would narrate everything they’re doing?  “I go to the kitchen, and I make a sandwich” feels affectatious.  The I-form is inherently reflective.  So the question then becomes, reflective from which point?  This is problematic if the narrator changes significantly over the course of the story.  The more the story feels the property of an older, wiser “I,” the less sense of immediate, subjective experience the reader will be able to have.

To a certain extent, this is also true of third person narration.  Storytelling is perhaps inherently a retrospective act, yet the story will likely fail to engage the reader without immediacy.  This means there’s always a rift within the telling—some narration coming from the moment and some reflecting on the moment.  Artfully navigating this rift is one of the great challenges of novel writing.

Questions of how to narrate the novel weren’t the only issues Dostoevsky had to struggle through.  He was also often unsure of the identity of the characters.  Many of them morphed as the notes evolved.  This is particularly true of Sonya.  She started out as a typically Dostoevksian character—one full of contradictions.  She was both good and bad.  But as the notes progressed, her badness fell away.  Here is a particularly telling note: Sonya “answers him modestly and proudly.”  Dostoevsky had written that she answered “modestly and proudly,” but then crossed out “proudly.”  

This is a remarkable moment in Dostoevsky’s development as a writer.  Up until this time, he hasn’t really written any good characters (although, one could argue that Notes from Underground’s Liza and The Gambler’s Polina were forerunners to Sonya, but they haven’t her strength).  Most of his characters were full of paradoxes and normally veered toward being darker than not.  The main exceptions to this were children, whose personalities were still undeveloped.  Thus Sonya seems to represent a shift in Dostoevsky’s thought.  Telling of this shift is another note: 

“How disgusting people are!”

“But there are good ones, too!”

I get the impression that the first line was spoken by Raskolnikov and the second by Sonya.  Sonya emerges a voice for the goodness in people. 

The creation of a new character type opens up possibilities for Dostoevsky.  He notes that Raskolnikov would go to Sonya “as if to Providence.”  Sonya, in her goodness, starts functioning  to Raskolnikov as a sort of icon, a physical surrogate for God.  This is a breakthrough for Dostoevsky.  After experimenting with romanticism in his younger years, he committed himself to literary realism.  Perhaps he found that he could get closer to exploring the human enigma in this mode.  The problem with literary realism, though, is that it limits itself to the material world.  This is a hinderance to investigating the human enigma because it forbids exploration of the spiritual side of humanity.  Setting up a character as a spiritual surrogate solves this problem.  Sonya, while just another human character and not God, is able to interact with Raskolnikov on a spiritual level because of what she represents to him.  It’s not a coincidence that not only is Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky’s first novel with a character like this, it’s also his first novel that significantly and overtly deals with the spiritual. 

His first but not his last.  He goes on to develop this scene where a character goes to another “as if to Providence” in his later novels—with Tikhon in Demons and Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov.  

This is characteristic of Dostoevsky.  With each artistic breakthrough, he is never content to merely repeat it, but he keeps pressing forward.  This means that no matter how high he climbs, he’s always willing to struggle and risk failure.

The Gambler (1866)

Whenever I read, I hunger for goodness.  If I start to suspect that the book doesn’t have any, I lose interest.

But here’s the thing—goodness is difficult to write about.  Why?  It might be in the nature of how I taste goodness.  Take the goodness of pizza.  My experience of this goodness is more intense if I’m hungry.  This is even true if I’m not physically hungry but am stress-eating because stress is its own sort of hunger.  

The same holds true when reading.  I can’t taste goodness in a story until I hunger for it.  That’s why the most powerful experiences of goodness in a novel normally occur toward the end.  The work of the novel is to carve out a space for goodness to fill.  

If in chapter one, Dostoevsky were to say “Here’s my good character, isn’t she great?”  My response would probably be: “Get your prickly beard off my neck!  If I’m gonna make a big decision like that, I need some space, man!”

But (thankfully) Dostoevsky doesn’t do this in The Gambler.  The most powerful glimmer of goodness is the vulnerable love within Polina.  Instead of trotting this out when I first meet her, Dostoevsky introduces her to me through the eyes of Alexei, who thinks she’s a cold-hearted tyrant.  And so when she shows up in his hotel room, in pain, used and abandoned by her lover, des Greux, I get a sense of her preciousness not in spite of but because of how little goodness I’ve seen so far.  The selfishness, vanity, and greed with which I’d been bombarded for the last thirteen chapters made me hunger for it.

I feel similarly when Granny shows up.  Before then, the world of Roulettenberg is characterized by posturing, facade, deceit.  Half the characters are under false names with false titles and false family members.  Then in comes Granny, “carried in an armchair . . . brisk, perky, self-satisfied, straight-backed, shouting loudly and commandingly, scolding everybody.”  She’s extraordinarily blunt.  If I’d met her at the beginning, she would’ve registered a pretty small number on my goodness meter.  But since she glides in just as the novel sinks me neck-deep into a swamp of deception, her frankness refreshes. Dostoevsky has primed me to see her goodness.

That said, this is a challenging way to write because it means for the early and middle parts of the novel, the characters will often seem callously drawn, and cynicism will ooze out of the page.  This puts stress on the reader.  No more stress than barraging the reader with earnestness, but still, when trying to carve out space for goodness, I can easily go too far and dig such a black hole that the reader must, simply to cope, not give the book full attention.

Dostoevsky does not avoid plunging into the gloom, yet he manages to bring with him enough light for me to face my shadow without being swallowed by it.  

He does this by writing with discretion.  He doesn’t give details when details could abuse me.  My shadow-side is like a boy who bites his friend.  My dad could teach me the pain of violence by biting me and saying, “See how you like it!”  But Dad would do better to help me see myself and see the path toward goodness.  Dostoevsky is this sort of dad to the reader.  He exposes the ugliness of violence without violating.

He is also writing from a personal belief in goodness.  If while reading a book, I get the sense that the novelist is a despairing cynic with no sense of the sacredness of the soul, I do not feel safe exploring hell with this guide.  But I often find myself surprised by the depths of the abyss I’m willing to scope out with Dostoevsky, who never sugarcoats, but who has a sense of not being overcome.

“Mr. Schedrin” & “The Crocodile” (1865)

In Dostoevsky’s story, “The Crocodile,” Ivan is swallowed alive by a crocodile, but everyone is having a hard time caring about getting him out.  The narrator is running around trying to get people to care, but as he continues, it becomes clear that even he may not care all that much. 

Part of the reason many of the characters can’t care is that the novelty of the situation threatens the tidy way they have imagined reality.  For example, when the narrator tells Timofey that his friend has been swallowed by a crocodile, Timofey responds, “I always believed that this would be sure to happen to him.”  Timofey has long disliked Ivan’s progressivism, so now that something bad has happened to Ivan, Timofey is convinced it is because of Ivan’s progressivism.  Timofey is unable to comprehend the newness of the event—he can only twist the facts to confirm the closed loop of what he has believed all along.

Similarly, when newspapers report on the event, they too distort the facts so that their own pet agendas are confirmed.  In each case, heads are full of general principles built on a hope that these principles will contribute to a vague, generalized humanity, at the expense of the suffering of this specific human.  In result, everyone is swallowed by their own metaphoric crocodile.  Each is so insulated that they have lost the ability to have any meaningful interaction with anyone else.  If hell is to not love, as Dostoevsky’s character Zossima will later say in The Brothers Karamazov, than this state very much resembles hell.

In “Mr. Schedrin,” a satire Dostoevsky wrote the same year as “The Crocodile,” he accuses his opponents of lopping off life to fit their ideas, rather than studying life to gain ideas.  

This is very difficult to not do.  In fact, I shudder to think how many times I have done it in the above paragraphs.  But if I want to move away from the hell of not loving, I must try.

Dostoevsky’s fictional process may serve as a guide.  It’s telling that he does not aim all of his satire in “The Crocodile” at one political side.  Capitalists, socialists, conservatives, progressives all come out with bitemarks.  Indeed, in “Mr. Schedrin,” he mocks those who seek to shield any piece of writing that’s a representation of their own side, no matter how poorly written.  To satirize one side of an issue and not the other is to give the reader a twisted picture, and this lopping off of life leads to the self-enclosed loop, not to an affirmation of life as it actually exists.

Dostoevsky’s process also reveals his commitment to people over ideas.  In “Mr. Schedrin” and “The Crocodile,” I can feel that Dostoevsky is starting with an idea. “Mr. Schedrin” is a counterpunch to Schedrin’s attack on Notes from Underground, and “The Crocodile” is a satire against some of Dostoevsky’s other ideological opponents.  But as both pieces advance, the bottom seems to drop out.  I get the sense that after the big D has been writing for a while, his imagination gets whirring, and the characters take on a life of their own in a way that may not have all that much to do with his original idea.  In “Mr. Schedrin,” Schedrin the character becomes oddly sympathetic and starts taking on complexities that makes me feel as if the satire is breaking down, yet the story is becoming more interesting.  Similarly, when the narrator of “The Crocodile” is trying to convince Elena to stay true to her husband while his attraction to her mounts, the complexity of the character dynamics seems to have little to do with the original political satire, but has become something more—something living.  

Dostoevsky seems willing to let his parodies fail (at least, in a superficial reading) to let his characters live.  His artistic instinct is to follow that alive quality in his characters because he knows that if life is getting in the way of the idea, the idea may need some revising.

Notes from Underground (1864)

Part 2

When I first ingest the words of Notes from Underground’s narrator, the Underground Man, I think, “Wow, this guy is really eccentric.”  Then I keep reading, and I think, “Dostoevsky seems to be deliberately trying to make a personality that is as contradictory as possible—how can such a disjointed character even be believable?”  Then I keep reading . . . and I relate.  Not just to some occasional normal parts of the Underground Man—but I relate to him at his most bizarre.  Pretty soon I’m amazed by how bizarre I am.

Every person, the Underground Man informs me, “has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends.  He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret.  But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away.”

Notes from Underground is a book about the things about myself that I’m afraid to admit.  The experience of reading them is strange because I’m not used to reading books about them.  I’m not even used to hearing such things talked about.  So what at first seems mere affectatious weirdness turns out to be a level of honesty about what I’m like that I can’t even recognize until I take the Underground Man’s advice to “observe yourselves more carefully.”  

What makes this book so powerful is that it’s so unbookish.  It breaks the Catch 22 of writing.  In order to master the craft of fiction, I must immerse myself in books.  I must love words so much that I eat, breathe, and sleep them.  So difficult is this field that it requires an intense lifestyle of study.  Yet, in the midst of this lifestyle, I must not lose sight of the goal—a glimpse of real life—that elusive, living truth beyond mere books.  

What holds back most of my writing is bookishness.  My early drafts often contain little of real life—they’re mere regurgitations I’ve picked up second-hand through books, movies, conversations, etc.  What can be hard to face is that virtually every assumption I have about life I have because somebody at some point wrote a book about it, and those ideas have shaped how I view the world, perhaps especially if I’m unaware of the influence those ideas are having on me.

But the best books break through this bookish bond and help me contact something real.  Ironically, one of the greatest uses of books is to free us from the tyranny of books.  I think this is why Ezra Pound says:

“No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention, and cliché, and not from life, yet a man feeling the divorce of life and his art may naturally try to resurrect a forgotten mode if he finds in that mode leaven, or if he think he sees in it some element lacking in contemporary art which might unite that art again to its sustenance, life.”

Great books help give me the ability to see the people in my life not as bookish abstractions (conservative, progressive, evangelical, worldly, sponging, spoiled, or any fill-in-the-blank category of person that I’m ready to dismiss) but as real people—that is to say, beings very much like me.  

But bookish abstractions don’t only keep me from seeing other people, they keep me from seeing myself.  One of my favorite things about Dostoevsky is his ability to reveal to me, through his characters, things about myself that I’d been previously unable to see.  I’d like to track a few ways he does startles me with a new view of myself in Notes from Underground:

1.  He doesn’t use the usual words

I often miss truths about myself because I am familiar with the usual ways of talking about inner problems.  So as soon as I hear someone begin, I already think I’ve heard it all before and there’s nothing new for me there.  But the way the Underground Man talks about himself startles me with its freshness.  Here’s an example:

“I reached the point of feeling a sort of secret abnormal, despicable enjoyment in returning home to my corner on some disgusting Petersburg night, and being acutely conscious that that day I had again done something loathsome, that what was done could never be undone, and secretly, inwardly gnaw, gnaw at myself for it, nagging and consuming myself till at last the bitterness turned into a sort of shameful accursed sweetness, and finally into real positive enjoyment!  Yes, into enjoyment, into enjoyment!  I insist upon that.”

When I first read this, I think, “What a weirdo.”  But if I pause to reflect, I realize that I’ve done the same thing.  This just isn’t how it’s normally described.  I would be more likely to think myself a victim to such feelings of shame, and only voice the part of myself that would like those feelings to go away.  Or if I were to admit that I get any enjoyment out of such an attitude, I might try to neatly describe it as “self-pity,” which still seems sanitized compared to the Underground Man’s description.  He goes out of his way to emphasize how twisted and baffling such behavior is.  I would normally do the opposite.  From the inside, it feels natural, but by underlining the odd features of such an experience, he brings me to a new level of self-honesty.

2.  He uses bald, shocking statements

I’m so used to my twisted motives, that if I were only to look at the facts of a situation, I might miss what’s going on beneath the surface.  For example, when he is trying to convince Liza to leave prostitution, he admits that he does so both because he cares for her and because he enjoys the power of manipulating her emotions.  He then throws in this commentary: “Knavery goes so easily with feeling.”

This tendency to craft paradoxical aphorisms is powerful.  It’s such an odd thing to say that it makes me pause to see if I’ve had any experiences that could prove it’s truth.  And again and again in this book, I find that I do.  These crooked aphorisms end up leaving me a little shocked with myself.

3.  He operates in extremes

The Underground Man says “I am as vain as though I had been skinnned and the very air blowing on me hurt.”  I can identify with being thin-skinned, but the Underground Man’s manifestation of vanity is so extreme that it becomes much easier to see what vanity looks like in my life.  The Underground Man’s vanity is so large that it makes it easier to to spot the vanity in me, much how if I were to put up yellow curtains, they would bring out the yellow parts of my rug.  The Underground Man does for vainglory what Othello does for jealousy.

4.  His honesty contains dishonesty

“You indeed want to say something,” the Underground Man says to himself, “but you conceal your final word out of fear.”  He is an odd mix of frankness and mystification.  This combination actually makes the honesty of the work more powerful.  Pure frankness wouldn’t ring as true.  The Underground Man says, “Heine insists that faithful autobiographies are almost impossible, and that a man is sure to tell a pack of lies about himself . . . I am sure Heine is right.”  If the Underground Man were always sincere and entirely honest, I would learn less from him because I am not always sincere and entirely honest.  There is much in a human being that is contradictory and can only be expressed in contradictions.  Lev Shestov says, “How much the mere tone of Notes from Underground is worth!”  The Underground Man’s tone is so complex, so alive, so human, that it has a living truth apart from the facts he is presenting.


The Underground Man shows me that when I open myself up, I find a hunger for goodness so deep that its hole is more expansive than my ability to fill it.  His tragedy makes me long for change.  I think it no coincidence that Dostoevsky’s next major novel is Crime and Punishment, which concerns itself with the hope of transformation.

Notes from Underground (1864)

Part 1

The Underground Man claims that his reason for writing down episodes from his life twenty years earlier is because “I am particularly oppressed by a certain memory from the distant past.  It came back to my mind vividly a few days ago, and since then, has remained with me like an annoying tune that one cannot get rid of.  And yet I must get rid of it . . . For some reason I believe that if I write it down I will get rid of it.”  

This immediately makes me wonder—what is the memory that irritates him?  As I read on, I’m looking for it.  He eventually reveals that of all the events that disturb him throughout the novel, one moment in particular haunts him: 

“Of all that happened . . . I pictured one moment especially vividly: it was when I lighted up the room with a match and saw [Liza’s] pale, distorted face with its tormented eyes.  And how pathetic, how unnatural, how twisted her smile was a that moment!  But I did not know then that even after fifteen years I would still be picturing Liza precisely with the pathetic, twisted, needless smile she had at that moment.”

That was his next-day reflection on the moment.  Here’s how he described it at the time: 

“As soon as light shone in the room, Liza suddenly rose, sat up, and looked at me almost senselessly, with a somehow distorted face and a half-crazed smile.”  

She gave him this look right after he vividly painted for her the horrors of continuing to be commercially sexually exploited.  Her response was deeper than he had anticipated.  A grief, an anguish, a despair overtook her that broke her down completely.  She lost her defences and looked at him with complete vulnerability.  His immediate response to this look was to ask her forgiveness.

Why does this moment rankle him to such a degree that he writes a whole memoir to try to rid himself of it?  I’m reluctant to answer directly.  This is such a beautiful book that any explanations seem to only make it smaller.  I will only say this: that look touched the core of his being, the same part of him that tells Liza, “It’s good to live in the world,” and is moved by his own words.  The Underground Man has a longing to connect—this is partly why he chases his schoolmates who despise him right after he humiliated himself before them.  This is why he, without intending to, starts baring his soul to Liza right after he sexually exploited her.

But this longing to connect is extremely painful to him.  Connecting inevitably means facing the dissonance within him that he doesn’t treat people in the good way that he wants to. He can’t bear that pain, and so this desire is pitted against another—his urge to find relief from that pain through isolation and oblivion.  He calls this numb seclusion “the Underground.”  

This side of him doesn’t want to have a conscience.  This side of him doesn’t want to believe that there’s any such thing as wickedness.  He experiences conscience as a dissonance that he wants resolved.  He wants to be “a plus,” “a real positive,” by which he means that he wants to be all one desire without this inner conflict and doubt.  He searches for this relief in two forms of fantasy.

First, in revenge.  That is, the fantasy of imagining himself all good.  When he vengefully bumps into the officer, for a moment he suppresses his consciousness that the act is accomplishing nothing, and for that brief moment he inhabits his revenge as “a plus.” In that moment, he’s able to be like the people he envies, the people that “are overcome . . . by a vengeful feeling, then for the time there is simply nothing left in their whole being but this feeling.”  He longs for this blotting out of the swarm of all the elements in him that oppose revenge.  He sees irritation as a diversion from the pain of this swarm.  This is why he’s grateful for his rude servant, Apollon.  Apollon’s rudeness diverts the Underground Man by inciting vengeful irritation.  He thinks of this irritation as effecting him similarly to alcohol—a sort of mood-altering substance that can make him forget the needling memories for a time. 

He makes this connection clear when he is at dinner with his classmates.  He says he got irritated easily from lack of habit.  A few paragraphs later, he says he got drunk easily from lack of habit.  He sees a connection between the two.  They both function as numbing drugs.

Second, the Underground Man searches for relief from his conscience in lust and the feelings of shame associated with it.  That is, the fantasy of imagining himself all bad.  He refers to his intercourse with Liza as an “oblivion” in which he is actively trying to forget painful memories.  “People do drink from grief,” he tells her, “well, so I’m here—from grief.”  He connects soliciting a prostitute to drinking—it’s the same seeking for relief from emotional pain.  Such binges were common with him, and he always associates them with words like “debauchery,” “filth,” “loathsome,” and “shame.”  He is attracted to this behavior because the other part of him sees it as insect-like, and he wants to blot out that sensibility by reveling in it.  He describes his pleasure in johning in this way: 

“The pleasure here lay precisely in the too vivid consciousness of one’s own humiliation; in feeling that one had reached the ultimate wall; that, bad as it is, it cannot be otherwise; that here is no way out for you, that you will never change into a different person; that even if you had enough time and faith left to change yourself into something different, you probably would not wish to change; and even if you did wish it, you would still not do anything, because in fact there is perhaps nothing to change into.”

But when Liza’s face shows him her vulnerability, the Underground Man’s longing for connection gets the better of him and he gives her his address.  When she comes and sees him in his suffering, he is overwhelmed.  He ends up facedown on the sofa, sobbing in hysterics.

This image immediately brings to mind Liza’s despair.  She had been 

“lying prone, her face buried deep in her pillow, which she embraced with both arms.  Her breast was bursting.  Her whole young body was shuddering as in convusions.  Suppressed sobs were straining, tearing her breast, and would suddenly burst out in wails and cries.  Then she’d cling to her pillow even more: she did not want anyone there, not a living soul, to learn of her torment and tears.”

The Underground Man was “lying prone on the sofa, my face buried hard in the wretched leather cushion.”  The repetition of the image shows that he is now in the same place she was right before she looked up at him with such vulnerability.  This repetition makes me think—now it’s his turn to be vulnerable.  Will he take it?

He doesn’t.  He tries to bury his vulnerability with lust and revenge.  He throws away his chance to connect.

Two worlds exist for the Underground Man.  The first he calls “the Underground,” which is his life of isolation, fantasy, and seeking oblivion.  The second he calls “real life,” which consists of his efforts to connect with other people—most significantly, Liza.  The action of Part II begins with him emerging from the Underground, seeking admittance to the real world.  It ends with his return to the Underground.

To give us an experience of these two worlds, Dostoevsky has us hear them.  When the Underground Man returns to the real world, he is unused to its sounds, and so they often sound shrill and painful to him.  He hears his wall clock “hissing,” he hears the other diners at the restaurant as “nasty French squeals,” he hears Ferfichkin’s voice “yelping like a little mutt,” he hears Liza’s clock as “an unnaturally prolonged wheeze” followed by “a thin, vile, somehow unexpectedly rapid chiming.”  I can almost see him wincing every time he hears something.  He’s unaccustomed to the noise of social life, and so he hears it harshly.

But when he returns to the Underground, that is, when he forces Liza to leave him, the street was “still, and the snow was falling heavily, almost perpendicularly, laying a pillow over the sidewalk and the deserted roadway.  Not a single passer-by, not a sound to be heard.”  The Underground has a muffling silence.  Dostoevsky uses the image of the pillow here, which immediately makes me think of the pillows the Underground Man and Liza each sobbed into, trying to hide their despair.  The silent pillow carries with it those associations of hidden despair.  The sudden lack of shrill sounds is devastating, which we feel for the Underground Man as he gives up on real life and returns to the Underground.

Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1862)

Winter Notes on Summer Impressions is a collection of essays about Dostoevsky’s tour of Western Europe.  In it, he outlines the themes that usher in his masterpiece period.

With this work, Dostoevsky’s scope widens dramatically.  Much of his earlier writing focuses on individual psychology or isolated cultural issues.  These essays take his previous observations and expand them to explore their implications on a national-political level.  It’s clear from his references that his reading has grown to encompass not only literary history, but a wider view of history as a whole.  

In his studying of French history, he notices a tension in political ideas that will occupy his thoughts in later masterpieces like Notes from Underground and “The Grand Inquisitor.”  The tension is between desire for freedom and the desire for harmony.  Freedom by itself, Dostoevsky reasons, is problematic:

“What freedom?  Equal freedom for all to do anything one wants within the limits of the law.  When can a man do anything he wants?  When he has a million.  Does freedom give everyone a million?  No.  What is a man without a million?  A man without a million is not a man who does anything he wants, but a man with whom anything is done that anyone wants.”

A free society with no sense of brotherhood is a place where cruel exploitation abounds.  Socialists, Dostoevsky claims, are aware of this.  They desire to systematize harmony.  They realize that such a system can’t operate if forced, but since harmony is so obviously preferable, people can be reasoned into accepting this system if they are armed with all the facts and are educated enough to understand them.

Dostoevsky believes that such an acceptance is impossible in the West as it stands.  Many Western individuals, Dostoevsky claims, would rather suffer exploitation than feel their freedom restricted by such a system.

Why?  Dostoevsky believes that this has to do with the West’s spiritual state.  Freedom in the West is thought of in terms of the individual claiming rights.  But no real harmony can be achieved without the laying down individual rights for the sake of the collective.  As long as the individuals in a society are focused on clamoring for personal rights, there can be no harmony.  This attitudinal climate is inevitably one of endless bickering over pie-slice sizes.  

Harmony, Dostoevsky argues, can only be achieved by a society of individuals who voluntarily sacrifice themselves for the sake of others.  He calls self-sacrifice “the highest development of the individual personality, its highest power, highest self-possession and highest freedom of individual will.”  Dostoevsky claims that there can be no reconciliation between freedom and harmony until an attitude shift arises voluntarily on the individual level.

Dostoevsky’s political ideas have implications for his novelistic technique.  The final essay of the book pivots to speak about problems in French storytelling.  And the problems look familiar.

On the one hand, Dostoevsky shows disgust for what he calls “eloquence for the sake of eloquence.”  Such a superficial approach to literature tends to gum up the machinery and let glaring problems of subject matter float through while all stand and admire the beauty of phrasemongering.  

On the other hand, Dostoevsky shows equal distaste for “moral preaching.”  All it amounts to is a pandering to the audience’s desire to pat themselves on the back for believing the right things.

This problem between artistic freedom (art for art’s sake) and the using of art for a vehicle for the promotion of goodness seems a mirror of the political problem stated earlier.  Eloquence tends to focus on the individual artist and that artist’s desire for great-writer status.  Moral preaching reflects a desire to make one’s writing part of a worthy cause bigger than oneself, but untruthfully, thus ineffectually.

Perhaps the solution to this artistic dilemma is similar to the one Dostoevsky proposes for the social dilemma.  Great literature can’t flourish unless there is a spiritual shift in the attitude of the writer.  Dostoevsky himself conveys this fertile attitude though his approach to life and art inherent in Winter Notes.  He clearly cares about something bigger than becoming a great novelist.  The world’s problems grab his attention, and his writing is an attempt at an honest delving into those problems.  In this project, eloquence becomes a tool that allows him to dig more effectively.

“An Unpleasant Predicament” (1862)

The theme of “An Unpleasant Predicament” is similar to many of Dostoevsky’s other works: reality isn’t how I conceive it—it’s much more complex and paradoxical.  Ivan Ilyitch, a high ranking general, stumbles across the wedding of Pseldonimov, one of his petty clerks.  Ivan Ilyitch imagines what it would be like for him to go join the celebration.  When he does go, the reality is much different.

But not only are Ivan Ilyitch’s conceptions being challenged, the reader’s are, too.  This is perhaps a necessity for fiction.  If I was in no way challenged by a story, why would I read it?  When I open a book, I have a longing to be changed for the better.  This puts the author in a difficult place.  I want Dostoevsky to challenge me, but all the same, I find being challenged . . . well, challenging.  For fiction to challenge me, it necessarily confronts me with a side of reality that I have resistance to confronting.

Thus when Dostoevsky’s imagination unearth’s a challenging truth, his task then becomes to persuade the reader that it is, in fact, true.  Dostoevsky has several techniques for doing this that he relies on with some regularity.  

He makes use of the word translated “even.”  Here are two examples:

“[T]hree highly respectable gentleman were sitting in a comfortable and even luxuriously furnished room [ . . . ]”

“He [ . . . ] dreamed of a wealthy and even aristocratic bride.”

In both cases, the narrator seems to be correcting himself, supplanting a smaller adjective with a larger one, qualified with this word “even.”  Why?  Why not just use the larger adjective?  My guess is that this self-correcting style creates a sort of slope into the pool of the story that makes it easier to wade in than if he were suddenly to shove me into the deep end.  “Even” also contains the tone of surprise.  If the room had been merely luxurious, it would be a mere painted backdrop declaring without nuance that “THEY’RE RICH.”  The correction and the “even” makes me pause and wonder.  It captures a little better the subtlety of reality.

The word “even” is also subjective.  An objective camera doesn’t have any “even”s.  The “even” implies a personality behind the narration.  The adjectives are passing through a perception, and that perception is slightly uncertain.  The “even” seems to imply something like this: “My first take on the situation was this, but now that I say that out loud, it seems that the reality of the situation was actually more extreme.”  In both examples, the first round of adjectives seem to suggest a sort of rationalization:  “I just want to live comfortably,” or “I just want to marry well.”  The “even” reveals an almost slip of the tongue that admits, “Well, I seem to have done a bit more than make myself comfortable” or “It’s true, my dreams did at times take me further than just marrying well.”  

I tend to assume my thoughts are reasonable.  The notion that I might be rationalizing does not come naturally.  What’s bizarre about my day-to-day experience is that I often have quite outrageous thoughts without realizing it.  So when I am closely identifying with a protagonist, I naturally assume that his thoughts are reasonable, like mine.  Dostoevsky knows this.  If he were to barrage me with Ivan Ilyitch’s unreasonable thoughts, he’d lose me.  I’d probably think, “What a weirdo—thank heavens I’m not like that.”  But with his “even”s, Dostoevsky holds my hand and gently leads me to the mirror.

Another spoon he uses to help me swallow the unpalitable truth is his use of commentary.  Here’s an example:

“Stepan Nikiforovitch raised his eyebrows and remained mute, as a sign that he would not detain his visitors.”

If the narrator hadn’t explained this gesture, it would not have been near as vivid.  But the commentary brings the psychological motive for the image to light, which makes the character easier to picture.  For this story to live in my imagination, I don’t just need sense details, I need to know the spirit of what I’m seeing.

Dostoevsky also uses commentary as a courtesy to the reader.  I can get so used to clichés that I find fresh observations baffling.  Dostoevsky knows this.  So when he describes Ivan Ilyitch’s drunkenness in such a non-clichéd way, he gives me an explanation so that I don’t lose my belief in the reality of the story.  Here are two examples:

“It was so lovely that after walking some fifty paces Ivan Ilyitch almost forgot his troubles [ . . . ] People quickly change from one mood to another when they are drunk.”

“A minute later he got up, evidently meaning to go out, gave a lurch, stumbled against the leg of a chair, fell full length on the floor and snoored [ . . . ] This is what is apt to happen to men who don’t drink when they accidentally take a glass too much.  They preserve their consciousness to the last point, to the last minute, and then fall to the ground as though struck down.”

At first these commentaries seem odd.  They are bald statements about drunkenness without a shred of evidence to back them up.  Why include them?  Or, if Dostoevsky really does feel he’s straining my credulity, is simply stating that he’s right enough to put my doubts to rest?  

I have mixed feelings about this.  On the one hand, I think if Dostoevsky were to simply cut these commentaries, something would be lost.  It would be easier to assume that Dostoevsky’s imagination is getting sloppy.  But by telling us that he’s conciously making this decision based on his observations on drunkenness, I’m more likely to accept this new development.  And also, if Dostoevsky were to eliminate all commentary, we would lose the deepest layers of these characters.  I don’t have the insight into what’s really going on with people that Dostoevsky does—I want to hear his interpretation, even in bald statements like these.  And if commentary deepens characters, why on earth would he cut it?

But on the other hand, the “take my word for it” tone of this commentary is a bit hard to swallow.  Sure, it works for Dostoevsky, who proves his insight in other ways, but I’m hesitatant to employ such a tactic myself.  Nonetheless, I think there’s an important lesson in here for me.  Some corners of human experience simply can’t be shown.  They must be explained or the reader will miss them.  The adage “show, don’t tell” can be taken too far.

Dostoevsky’s commentary, at it’s best, make possible something rarely seen done so well in fiction.  He can use it to diliniate contradictions in a character’s inner world.  Look at this:

“[Ivan Ilyitch’s] drunken reflections could not rest long on one subject; there began to be apparent and unmistakably so, even to himself, two opposite sides.  On one side there was swaggering assurance, a desire to conquer, a disdain of obstacles and a desperate confidence that he would attain his object.  The other side showed itself in the aching of his heart, and a sort of gnawing in his soul.”

The only concrete descriptions in this passage are metaphorical.  What’s going on inside Ivan Ilyitch is too paradoxical to be shown through gesture.  But this brief commentary opens his experience to me.  I don’t read this passage and feel both of these feelings simultaneously like Ivan Ilyitch does (commentary can’t do that)—I can only feel the aching, gnawing side of the paradox.  But even though I can’t feel both sides, I’m glad Dostoevsky describes them—the description makes me recall times when I had similar conflicting feelings.  I read it and think, wow, yes, me too, only I’d never before seen it so clearly.


Memoirs from the House of the Dead (1862)

“Reality resists classification,” Dostoevsky writes in Memoirs from the House of the Dead, which recounts his time in prison.  This statement could almost be a slogan for all of his writing.  If ever he is presented with a person that appears to be all one thing, he immediately hunts for that person’s paradox.  

When you look at the specfics, Dostoevsky says, you often find that a convict who hasn’t murdered at all can be more terrible than a murderer of six.  In fact, the murderers are sometimes the most childlike.  And some of the most dour criminals enjoy gently caressing the prison’s horse.  In short, penal life is full of surprises.  “One need only remove the outer husk,” Dostoevsky says, “and scrutinize the grain within attentively, closely and without prejudice, to see things in the people of which he had never even dreamed.”

This ability of his to take convicts as they were, rather than how he assumed they would be, led to remarkable benefits.  When he first came to prison, he could only see their “repulsive crust,” and he felt surrounded by malice.  But as he became willing to look, he noticed “among all the wounding words . . . the kind and affectionate word.”  Sometimes after years of only seeing brutish inhumanity from someone, 

“Suddenly a chance moment would reveal his soul in an involuntary convulsion and you saw in it such wealth, such feeling and heart, so clear an understanding of its own and others’ suffering, that your eyes would be opened and in the first moment you would hardly be able to believe what you yourself had seen.”

When thoroughly schooled in the reality of the situation, Dostoevsky realizes that “there is no reason to be afraid of convicts.  A man does not so lightly and so hastily attack another with a knife.”  He goes on to say, in his characteristically paradoxical fashion, that the same can’t be said of a person awaiting sentence—they are often desperate.

Dostoevsky comes to such a sympathetic understanding of those around him that when his friend, Petrov, stole from him his dearest possession (his only book) simply to buy a glass of vodka, Dostoevsky couldn’t even get mad because he understood stealing for Petrov was compulsive and not personal.  “I am certain,” Dostoevsky says, “that even in the act of stealing from he was sorry for me.”  They went on being friends.  And after seeing so much reality of the prison hospital, he says, “I could not look at lunatics unmoved.”  

But if I am to follow Dostoevsky’s example, I must also address the other side of this paradox.  In order to reach the humanity of others, Dostoevsky has to dismantle his prejudicial classifications.  But the act of seeking to understand others also requires a new classification.  If I simply stay on data-input mode, I won’t achieve Dostoevsky’s level of sympathy. He is, in fact, in a regular state of seeking to reclassify.  He’s always looking for new “types”; he’s interested in seeing how his new observations can be formed into trends across different people.  He wants to open the husk and scrutinize the grain, but he can learn much about a grain by noticing what parts it has in common with other grains.  

Yet this new classification is different.  The old classification was built on an ignorance of reality.  The new is built on the paradoxes of experience.  It’s also more fluid.  It can adjust with new data, as well as hold its shape more loosely.

Dostoevsky’s new attitude toward classification shapes the way he writes.  Characteristic of this memoir is its tendency to digress.  At first I saw this as sloppy.  I thought that Dostoevsky lacked either the skill or the motivation to synthesize his work into a unified whole.  But now I think there is more to his digressions than that.  The unity of a narrative is a sort of classification system, sorting reality into a discernable structure.  Therefore reality resists narrative unity.  But to abandon any attempt at unity is to refuse to try to understand reality at all, which leaves the author in as much prejudice as a rigid classification would.  This is the paradox of writing.  As I’ve come to expect, Dostoevsky embraces this paradox by pursuing a unity, but by disrupting that unity with digressions.  His writing style straddles the tension between direction and digression.  This push and pull seems effective in making an approach toward reality.  When the system gets too tight, the digression cuts it loose.  When the digression wanders too meaninglessly, the system steers me back.  Thus, reading Dostoevsky, I can be open to reality surprising me while still striving to understand it.  

Digressions are risky.  They try the reader’s patience.  I can be so afraid of losing the reader to boredom that I grasp so tightly to an outline that I don’t leave room for the story’s reality to breathe.  It takes a certain amount of confidence to digress.  It takes faith in the reader’s willingness to hang with you.  But I have to remember the reader is on the same quest I am—to make sense of this strange world.

The Insulted and Injured (1861)

Prince Valkovsky, the villain in Dostoevsky’s novel, The Insulted and Injured, is a strange man.  He is at times so strange that he often pushes the limits of what a reader can believe.  He comes dangerously close to violating one of the best diagnostics of fiction, which is simply asking, “Would someone actually do that?”

But this isn’t unusual for Dostoevsky.  He seems to delight in strange characters.  In his later novel, The Idiot, he writes:

“Authors, as a rule, attempt to select and portray types rarely met with in their entirety, but these types are nevertheless more real than real life itself [ . . . ] In real life typical characters are “watered down,” so to speak; and all these [extreme characters] actually exist among us every day, but in a diluted form.”

Dostoevsky likes to distill personality traits to their purest strain so that we can study them undiluted.  This is a way of putting a magnifying glass on human nature so we can examine it with greater precision.  For example, I can learn much about my own tendency toward jealousy by encountering Othello.  

Extreme characters can make for good fiction, but they are also much harder to write.  A novelist must render the characters credible for the novel to work (though there are, of course, exceptions).  How does Dostoevsky render Prince Valkovsky creditably?

First of all, he wades us in.  He doesn’t reveal all of the Prince’s quirks on page one.  The first Prince we meet is understandable at a glance.  He’s simply someone who desires wealth and success.  That’s easy enough to accept.  But then cracks start appearing in this simple picture of him.  Vanya keeps getting an impression of insincerity, as if the Prince were putting on a show.  Then, when Vanya unexpectedly sees the Prince in a stairwell, the Prince is cursing violently with a look of anger and hatred.  When the Prince sees Vanya, his face immediately relaxes into “an affable, merry expression.”  At this point it becomes clear that the Prince is wearing a mask for them, that his real feelings are much darker.  The Prince then behaves with unexpected magnanimity.  Everyone is surprised.  People had gotten used to him acting out of self-interest, and then he is suddenly generous.  Natasha suspects he’s up to something.  I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Dostoevsky has now primed me to be acquainted with the true Prince.  When I learn what a sadist he is, while the degree is shocking, this quality about him now feels plausible because of Dostoevsky’s gradual unveiling.  Dostoevsky has trained me in my expectations to such a degree that I would probably find the Prince implausable if he didn’t turn out to be evil.

Second, Dostoevsky renders the Prince’s hidden motivations vivid through use of analogy.  For example, when Prince Valkovsky reveals to Vanya how depraved he is, Vanya says that the Prince “found a certain pleasure—and perhaps even a certain sensual gratification—in the shamelessness, in the insolence, in the cynicism with which at last he ripped off his mask before me.  He wanted to enjoy my astonishment, my horror.”  While this motivation is perhaps not wholly unknown to me, it isn’t one that I experience every day.  Dostoevsky is aware of this and knows he will have to do more work render credible such an extreme motivation.  He does this by having the Prince tell the story of a grotesque old man who took delight in flashing people on the street.  Valkovsky claims that his delight in exposing his soul to Vanya is similar.  Valkovsky renders this anecdote so vividly that it comes alive in the reader’s imagination, thus by way of analogy making his own motivations more vivid, thus more credible.  It’s easier to believe something if I can clearly picture it.

Third, Dostoevsky has the Prince articulate his philosophy for living.  Some actions seem unbelievable until you become acquainted with the actor’s beliefs.  For example, that someone would bomb innocent civilians in a town square may only baffle, but if I were to learn about the bomber’s goals for revolution, while I might not sympathize, I could still see that someone who believed so-and-so could do such-and-such.  The same works with the Prince.  When I learn the cynicism he harbors toward the possibility of idealistic morality, his ruthlessly hedonistic approach to life becomes more believable.

Fourth, the energy and coherent personality that comes out when he speaks has such life that I can’t help but accept him as a character.  Everything he says, I can’t help but find myself saying, “Oh, he would say that.”  It’s easy to believe in the Prince’s existance because I can hear his voice so clearly.  

Fifth, much of what is going on with the Prince is unstated.  Dostoevsky gives me clues, and I must make inferences.  The Prince lives in the shadows of subtlety and subtext.  This aspect of him makes him much easier to accept.  By, in a way, giving me space to participate in the creation of the Prince in my imagination, I then find it harder to reject the Prince as incredible.  The Prince is a liar.  It’s hard to believe anything he says.  Because of this, I am always having to construct the truth behind the Prince’s lies on my own—and I find it hard to reject the truth that I myself have constructed.  For example, I know that the Prince threatens to have Natasha thrown into jail.  How do I know this?  He never comes out and says it.  I know it by reading into hints he makes, and the tone in which he makes them.  He alludes to “a certain kind of unpleasantness I can arrange for her.”  This is how the Prince works.  He almost exists more in my imagination than in the exact words on the page.  By leaving so much off the page, he becomes so much more in my imagination.

Dostoevsky does this in smaller ways as well.  Some of his most vivid descriptions of the Prince contain almost no sense details at all.  For example, Vanya tells us that the Prince 

“looked at me sarcastically as I was finishing my sentence, as if enjoying my cowardice and challenging me with his eyes, as if saying, ‘I see you backed off: No guts, huh, my friend?’  This must have been so, because when I finished, he burst out laughing, and with patronizing friendliness slapped me on the knee.  ‘You amuse me, my friend!’ was what I read in his eyes.”

Here we get zero descriptions beyond the laugh, the slap, and a vague mention of the eyes, but instead Dostoevsky relies on my experience of seeing sarcasm to supply the face.  When I read this, the Prince’s face is remarkably vivid in my mind’s eye.  More than vivid—I see not only his physical face, but beyond it to something more essential.  Appearances can lie, yet descriptions like these push past appearances.

Sixth, I more readily believe the Prince’s eccentricities because I, in a way, want them to be true.  In a way, I don’t.  The Prince is evil and causes much misery for the characters I care most about.  But the Prince’s wickedness makes the novel more satisfying—it would feel lopsided without it.  All the other characters are so sincere that when the Prince’s irony bursts onto the scene, it’s almost refreshing.  Without the Prince laughing at them, all the main characters’ noble intentions could sink into melodrama.  When a novel is all earnestness, a voice inside me cries, “Yes, but it’s not that simple!”  Earnestness makes no room for doubt—it’s a sort of juggernaut that crushes nuance with its seriousness.  If the Prince doesn’t laugh at the main characters, I will.  I need the Prince to laugh at them so that I’m free to care about them.  The Prince’s personal actions may strain plausibility, but the presence of his cynicism in a world of such earnestness makes the novel more plausible.  The Prince is so well counterpointed to the other characters that his existence is necessary to the world of this story.

Seventh, Dostoevsky makes me believe in the Prince because he goes out of the way to help me find the Prince in myself.  

“I’m certain,” the Prince says, “you’re calling me a sinner, perhaps even a scoundrel, a monster of vice and corruption.  But I can tell you this: If it were only possible [. . . ] for every one of us to describe all his secret thoughts, without hesitating to disclose not only what he’s afraid to tell his best friends, but even what he’s sometimes afraid to confess to himself, the world would be filled with such a stench that we’d all suffocate.”  

The Prince claims that he’s not much different than me, that I too might find secret pleasure in sticking out my tongue at naive idealism.  By working to make this villain vivid in my imagination, Dostoevsky presses me to ask the question—can I see Prince Valkovsky in me?

In their book Understanding Fiction, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren claim that “it is the glory of fiction to render coherent many strange, apparently self-contradictory examples of human nature.”  Fiction allows me to find myself in more and more surprising places, thus finding more and more surprising traits within myself.  Fiction expands my ability to identify with others.