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.

Unpublished Notebooks (1860-1865)

I’m no philosopher, but I couldn’t help but notice that the world seems to have problems.  So how do we solve them?

Some problems can be solved through logic.  Diagnosing where a pipe is leaking, for example, can be solved in this way.  Because such rational thinking can be so successful in solving some problems, I can easily assume that I can use it to solve any problem.  Say a school is having problems with the students fighting one another.  Couldn’t I use the same faculty of logic that I used with the pipe to formulate a systemic solution?

Dostoevsky doesn’t think so.  “The West will perish from formulas,” he writes.  Mere ideas have a tendency to remain only theory, and the deeper one delves into them, the more distanced one becomes from the problems of real life.  “Great is the distance,” he says, “between humanity in theory to practice.”

Dostoevsky believes that with these larger, more crucial questions, progress can only be made through Christ, “the idea of man incarnate,” entering into humanity.  Because of this, he looks for solutions in the personal and relational rather than the merely rational.  With the issue of school discipline, he believes “humane influence more important than ‘humane rules’ despotically enforced.”

This belief can be seen in the way he writes.  Imitating Christ as “the idea of man incarnate,” Dostoevsky seeks to shape concepts into bodies.  “Man from the very earliest times,” he writes, “has explained himself in images.”  To do otherwise he believes to be akin to cutting off one’s nose.

This is seen in his approach to brainstorming.  If he is batting around a concept in his notebooks, he often prefers to use an imagistic shorthand.  For example, he often refers to socialism simply as “twigs.”  Scholars guess that this image is a reference to the proverb that says that many twigs together are strong, but when seperate and disunited they break easily.  As editor Carl Proffer puts it, Dostoevsky sees “socialism as essentially composed of separate individuals—unlike a Christian community bound together by the indestructable idea of God.”  By compressing his language in this way, his thought process seems to take on a more tangible quality.  

Even when debating over ideas, Dostoevsky seems to prefer to focus on concrete gestures.  He writes to N.A. Dobrolyubov that “you . . . grabbed for your pen in order to justify yourself . . . to chastise your enemies.  One way or the other, you still in all grabbed for your pen.”  Dostoevsky captures his point with a visual and then repeats it until it becomes symbolic.  

What’s interesting here is that by imagining what Dobrolyubov looks like while he’s writing, Dostoevsky’s focus is more on Dobrolyubov himself than on his ideas.  Indeed, Dostoevsky is less concerned with Dobrolyubov’s ideas than with the spirit in which he expresses them.  Dostoevsky is disturbed by the enthusiasm with which Dobrolyubov points out another’s mistakes, and Dostoevsky encapulates this attitude through the visual of Dobrolyubov grabbing his pen.

But all this isn’t to say that Dostoevsky isn’t interested in concepts.  If that were the case, he wouldn’t bother grappling with ideas at all.  He’s equally articulate in decrying an over-fixation on the material world.  Personalities, as such, offer nothing more than what he refers to as a “belly,” that is, a mere bundle of instincts.  In such a view, Dostoevsky says, humanity loses its dymanism; it becomes something fixed, trapped.  And love becomes impossible.  

So, Dostoevsky’s eye, like the poet’s in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, glances “from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven.”  His concepts descend into flesh, and his descriptions ascend into symbol.  This ever-shifting focus from the physical details of as-is reality to the dream of what is hoped for may be part of what gives Dostoevsky’s writing its power.

Letters 1860-1867

Someone once asked Flannery O’Connor why she wrote, and she answered, “Because I’m good at it.”  

A great quote—an inspiring quote, really—but for every inspiring quote there’s a time.  And that time is not at two in the morning after reading a limp draft eleven.  The quote somehow fails to hit the inspirational note.  It will more likely evoke the following internal monologue:

Am I good at writing?  Am I good at writing?  Am I good at writing?  Well, how do I know?  I guess I’ll reread draft eleven.  Nope, still not good.  I guess that means I’m not good at writing.  I guess that means I should stop writing.

I was surprised to find that Dostoevsky had rough days too: “My writing was going poorly . . . I suddenly began to dislike the story . . . The whole story is junk.”

“Junk” is the word he often uses to describe the novel he was writing at this time.  He is so adamant that I start to believe him . . . until I find out what novel he was writing.

He was writing Notes from Underground, which is not only one of the greatest novels ever written, but it marked the major turning point in Dostoevsky’s writing career.  With it, he went from being merely an interesting writer to one of the greatest.  And what did this document of unfathomable acceleration of talent feel like to write?  Junk.

Dostoevsky regularly says that “after writing something, I completely lose the ability of regarding what I’ve written critically, for a while at least.”  He even would defer decisions of quality control to his editor.  In other words, while writing, Dostoevsky lost the capacity to determine if the writing was any good.

Reading this shifted my perspective.  I often approach writing thinking, yes, I love to do this, more than anything, but I might not be good at it.  In that case, I should stop doing it and find something I’m good at.  The phrase “natural talent” can be particularly insidious in moments like these.

But even Dostoevsky, the greatest writer of us all, had no ability to evaluate the worth of his work in process.  And if the Big D can’t, why am I putting that expectation on myself?

This is a load off.  On a day-to-day level (and what other level is there?) result-management isn’t the business of a writer.  The only business is the task at hand.

If I have to be good, any sort of hardship dissuades me from continuing.  If I were good at writing, I think, it would be hard, sure, but not this hard.  But if the day’s path is simply where I’m to go, I can accept hardship with the spirit of adventure.

The Literary Endeavor is bigger and more and important than any one writer’s ego, and it is better served by commitment than by comparison.

Am I good at writing?  None of my business.  Not even Dostoevsky could concern himself with that.  But I can content myself to keep plodding in the direction I’ve been given.

This is what that looks like for my writing practice: 

1.  Log the hours

2.  Do what’s in front of me

3.  Trust the process