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

Seven Articles from Time and Epoch (1860-1862)*

Writing involves the whole person.  Commitment to the literary endeavor must involve a denial of self-promotion.  Dostoevsky believes that fiction at its best is concerned with Living Truth, that is, something higher than the writer.  The more an author elevates self over this Living Truth, the more doomed that author will be to write nonsense.

Here are some of the the clamors of grandiosity that Dostoevsky mentions as inhibiters of the progress of art:

1.  Fear of the condemnation of established writers and publishers.  This arises from a craving for success in the literary world.  In other words, I can’t write truthfully if I’m over-focused on having a successful career.

2.  The desire for making money.  Turning writing soley into a commercial enterprise will naturally shove aims concerning the Living Truth to the background.

3.  Skepticism.  “A skeptical view,” Dostoevsky says, “kill[s] everything, even the view itself, and in the end lapse[s] into complete apathy and the sleep of death.”  If I write only from a place of criticism and not from hope and love, I will deflate the tires of my literary vehicle.  Building is  more difficult than tearing down, but more important.

Dostoevsky believes in writing about current social issues, but here too, an egotistical tendency to dominate others can get in the way of progress.  This can happen when a zeal for reform can lead to a superior tone.  Rather than persuading, this writing tends to make readers even more resistant, even over issues that hadn’t previously cared that much about until they felt told what to do.  Readers can smell out an agenda.  

My writing at times can drift this way, but Dostoevsky offers some helpful ways to get back on track:

1.  Prefer truth to victory.  Denial of destructive egotism must take the form of praising my opponents when they’re right.  Dostoevsky’s journalism is remarkable in how tenaciously he seeks out and clings to common ground with his bitterest rivals.  He believes that progress can only be found not in forcing one group’s interests over another’s, but in pursuing common interest.

2.  Admit mistakes.  Key to recovery is awareness of illness.  Key to writerly growth is a willingness to examine where I am wrong.

Dostoevsky also believes that too firm an insistence on understanding truth gets in the way of the Living Truth.  The egotism here is demanding that the universe be small enough to fit inside my head.  Dostoevsky’s favorite word for his opponents is “theoreticians” and his greatest critique is that they are out of touch with real people.  He disclaims theorizing as merciless, impatient, and too consistent.  He dislikes blanket application of universal ideas because it overlooks the unique humanity of the individual. 

Dostoevsky seems to think that this drift towards dehumanizing theory can be checked in fiction by the use of specificity.  He praises Edgar Allan Poe for the power of his details.  Poe’s fiction lives through the vividness if its particulars.  In his art, life triumphs over blurred generalizations.

But Dostoevsky also believes E.T.A. Hoffmann to be a superior artist to Poe.  Poe’s grasp of the world has no sense of a higher reality, like Hoffmann’s does.  Poe’s universe has a lower ceiling.  The progress of literature will still be hindered if an author merely wants to render the world in its more superficial aspects.  While the theorist demands the universe be no bigger than my head, the materialist demands that the universe be no bigger than my five senses.  But art can reach deeper than the material.  

This might be part of what makes reading Dostoevsky such a full experience.  He is concerned with what is good and what is evil.  “Much on earth is concealed from us,” Dostoevsky will later write in The Brothers Karamazov, 

“But in place of it we have been granted a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world . . . [Earth] lives and grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds . . .”

This “mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world” seems to be one of Dostoevsky’s great guiding lights as an artist.  He says that his existence truly began when he was walking along the Neva river and had a vision where 

“columns of smoke rose like giants from all the roofs on both embankments and rushed upward through the cold sky, twining and untwining along the way, making it seem as if new buildings were rising above the old ones and a new city was forming in the air . . . It was as if my eyes were opened to something new, to a completely new world, unfamiliar to me and known only from obscure rumors and some mysterious signs.”  

It was for this world that he became willing to sacrifice his cravings for wealth, for accolade, for domination, and commit to art.

*Articles referenced: “Petersburg Visions in Verse and Prose,” “Two Camps of Theoreticians,” “Introduction to Three Tales of Edgar Poe,” and “Four Manifestoes from Time and Epoch.”

Five Articles from Time (1861)

A chainsaw is great for felling trees.  It isn’t a great pillow.  Getting to know a chainsaw’s strengths and weaknesses can help me use it more effectively.  The same is true for fiction.  Dostoevsky explores what fiction does well in articles he wrote for his journal, Time.*  

What Fiction Does Well

1.  Creating an Impression

“Talent is given to a writer for the sole purpose of creating an impression.”

The impression the story leaves is what makes the story well written.  If it leaves the reader cold, the writing hasn’t been effective.  But the great storyteller brings dead facts to life—facts the reader may have encountered hundreds of times before but were transformed by the story’s telling.

2.  Arousing Sympathy

“The more sympathy a poet arouses in the masses, the more he justifies his appearance as a poet.”

In other words, the best fiction strikes a chord within its reader, addressing an intuitive need.  The reader may not even be aware of this need, but the fact that the story interests the reader signifies that it may be providing medication for an undiagnosed illness.  This is what Dostoevsky here means by “sympathy.”

3.  Entertaining

“The best book, whatever its subject, is always entertaining.”

Dostoevsky does not believe in separating art from entertainment.  Amusement is palatable to the reader partly because the reader feels respected by the writer, that the reader’s enjoyment is noticed.  Dostoevsky sees himself as the reader’s equal, wishing to render a service by giving the reader pleasure.  When he was in the military, he enjoyed reading adventure stories to the soldiers.  He sees the ideal writer as someone who craves to live among his readers and converse with them endlessly.

This is one of the reasons why Dostoevsky thought that stories often fail when their aim is to enlighten.  Readers hate to be looked down upon, and instruction embedded in storytelling often feels that way.  

4.  Providing an Approach to Reality

“Art is always true to reality to the highest degree.”

Dostoevsky sees fiction as an art that can explore reality, particularly the realties of human nature, in ways that philosophy and psychology can’t reach.  More rational disciplines have a tendency to distort reality in order to fit it into their systems, but fiction, unencumbered by constraints of theory, can feel out reality with all the versatility of experience.

5.  Evoking Beauty

“Beauty . . . is always useful.”

Fiction has this advantage over analytical writing: theories can be wrong.  And if they can be wrong, they can be harmful.  Mercury was once believed to cure yellow fever.  The theory was wrong, and many died from the treatment.

Great fiction, on the other hand, is always helpful.  Its guiding light is beauty, and people are regularly benefited by beauty in ways that theories can’t keep up with.  For example, I know that my life has benefited from reading The Brothers Karamazov, even though I can’t totally articulate how.

Dostoevsky sees art as having a life of its own, and for it to flourish, it can’t be dictated to, not even by the artists themselves.  He sees his creative spirit as existing separately from his own aims.  The greatest artists learn to ignore the demands of critics and the ridicule of fellow writers and learn to sacrifice even their own pre-made ideas in order to follow this spirit.  “Man’s creative ability,” he writes, “can have aspirations other than those to which the man himself aspires.”  

*Time Articles Referenced: “Introduction,” “Mr. —bov and the Question of Art,” “Pedantry and Literacy; First Article,” “Pedantry and Literacy; Second Article,” “The Latest Literary Controversies.”

The Village at Stepanchikovo (1859)

A quick glance out my window will tell me that the leaves beyond it are green.  But if I take the time to study those leaves, I will notice all sorts of shades within that green.  The same is true of any field.  What are just teeth to a layman are to my dentist and hygienist distinct varieties of incisors, canines, and molars.  They have them all numbered, and they have cryptic discussions over my bibbed, spotlit mouth about my “number twenty-four.”

To make progress in any field, I must have a way to move from the general to the specific and to apply the peculiarities of the specific to the general.  I must learn to see not just teeth, but number twenty-four, and yet to see number-twenty four not as a wholly unique entity, but as a tooth.

The same is true the field of the novelist—human nature.  So if Dostoevsky is to study his subject in depth, he must find ways to delineate differences.  In The Village of Stepanchikovo, the chracter of Foma is a good example of how Dostoevsky does this.  

Foma is gushing with vanity.  If the boy Falaley didn’t dream one night about the subjects Foma demanded, Foma felt affronted.  

Now, I go into this novel with assumptions about what vanity should look like.  The category of “vanity” is in my mind like a solid block much like the category of “teeth” to a non-dentist.  My understanding of this block of human experience can be summed up in words like spoiled, privileged, sheltered.  

Foma is none of these.  Foma spent his formative period as a downtrodden outcast.  For years he was forced to humiliate himself by impersonating different animals for his tyrannous employer.  And he’s vain not in spite of his background but because of it.  This means I can’t use my generality-block to understand Foma.  Dostoevsky forces me to cut a slice off of my “vanity” block and label it “Foma.”  I must take Foma as a highly specific individual, yet one who nonetheless falls into this larger category.

But specificity is meaningless in isolation.  I have no sense of gradations of green without comparison.  But it’s not enough to have some flashy blue come swaggering in.  I won’t see kelly green unless I compare it with lime green and seafoam green.

The same, of course, is true of human nature. My vanity-block is still a solid block if its only resident is Foma.

This is where Rostanev comes in.  Rostanev is the other main character of Stepanchikovo.  Rostanev’s vanity is the inverse of Foma’s.  Foma’s vanity is nurtured by a sense of victimhood.  He constantly imagines that everyone is insulting him, and his dignity rises with his martyrdom.  Rostanev, on the other hand, suffers from a displaced vanity.  He can’t bear for anyone one else to be insulted except for himself, and so he tries to assume blame for everything.  Foma’s mantra could be “everyone is against me,” while Rostanev’s is “it’s all my fault.”  

Once could hardly imagine two more drastically different men, yet they both seem primarily motivated by a similar characteristic, a block I’m calling “vanity.”  By the end of the novel, my understanding of the vanity-block of human nature has become more complex, containing as it does such a variety of slices as Foma and Rostanev.

But Dostoevsky doesn’t stop there.  To become a thorough student of a subject requires not only an in-depth examination, but a commitment to continued examining.  

My dentist has an expertise about my number twenty-four not only because he fiddled his little hook around it specifically, but because he continues to do so every six months for many years.  And not only has his little hook come back to my number twenty-four, but also to who knows how many others.  I can only imagine that it’s through this process that a dentist acquires rigorous teeth-knowledge.

Dostoevsky has a similar commitment across his novels.  He continues to rehash many of the same types.  One could draw a family tree of his characters across his novels because of how each generation of characters passes on traits to the next.  The examples are too many to write without risking tedium, but here’s one: Rostanev, an extreme parody of Sermon-on-the-Mount docility, has clear ancestors in the title character of “Polzunkov” and in Vasya from “A Weak Heart.”  He also is himself an ancestor of Prince Myshkin from The Idiot.  Each new generation of this personality is more complex, more profound, more lifelike than the last.  Dostoevsky spent decades rehashing many of the same characters, determined to render them truer with each pass.

Dostoevsky not only fixates on a similar cluster of characters, but also on nearly identical situations.  Seeking to marry someone with severe mental disabilities is a prominent situation in Uncle’s Dream, The Village to Stepanchikovo, The Idiot, and Demons.  Foma theatrically rejects a wad of cash, just like Nastasya Filipovna in The Idiot and Captain Snegiryov in The Brothers Karamazov.  The open-eyed abuse of an innocent child occurs in more of his works than it doesn’t.  Again, the examples are too numerous to list.  But what’s interesting is how certain situations won’t leave Dostoevsky alone.  He keeps wondering why someone would do certain actions, and he provides deeper explorations of motives in each subsequent book.

Uncle’s Dream (1859)

Nothing is as it appears in Dostoevsky’s novella, Uncle’s Dream.  Marya hides her Machiavellian viciousness under the guise of a gracious hostess.  She and her arch-nemesis act like besties.  Her husband looks imposing in his white cravat—until he opens his mouth and reveals he’s an adorably absurd man-child.  The Prince looks young but is really old, and he prefers his coachman, who grows a magnificent beard, to wear a false one because, as Mozglyakov (Zina’s false suitor) says, “Art is superior to nature.”  Even the snow covers the desolate steppe “like a dazzling shroud.”  

The town’s appearance is so unreliable because none of its inhabitants live in reality; each person is preoccupied with a daydream.  Marya is possessed with the idea of becoming rich and powerful, Zina with sacrificing herself for her dying lover, and so on.  As I read, I craved to find someone awake so that I could get a sense of truth beyond all these delusions.

Dostoevsky knows that he’s creating this craving, yet he postpones satisfying it until the end.  In the meantime, he shows that while everyone is dreaming, not everyone is having the same dream.  Marya’s dream is material and practical—she wants tangible prosperity.  Zina’s dream is romantic—that is to say, she implicitly trusts the impulses within herself that she deems noble and finds them infinitely more important than any practical or material considerations.  Marya’s and Zina’s dreams demonstrate opposite views of reality that are equally extreme and distorted.  This difference of delusion, while it doesn’t articulate reality, at least gives us a sense of the reality beyond their exaggerations.

I say that the two views are equally distorted, but in truth, the novella seems inclined to favor Zina’s view.  Zina is a more sympathetic character—of all the liars, she’s perhaps the most honest, and so she, as imperfect as her view is, becomes a sort of moral center, even though Marya is the main character.  In this story brimming with irony, all of the earnestness hovers around Zina.  

Because of this, I sense that Zina’s romantic view is dearer to Dostoevsky than the material one.  A lesser writer would simply have made Zina’s view correct and stacked the reality to reinforce this.  The fact that Dostoevsky doesn’t do this is one of the things that makes him great.

A remarkable trait of Dostoevsky is how much wiser his fiction is than his letters or his journalism.  His own voice and thoughts are less profound than what emerges from his characters.  As an artist, he cultivated a technique that allowed him to transcend his own prejudices.  It is simply this: when I find myself writing about something dear to me, I must get in touch with the shadow-part of me that doubts that dear idea and give it voice so that it can mercilessly attack the worldview I find sacred.  “Dostoevsky,” Rowan Williams writes, “could expose his own most passionate feeling to the acidity of his own irony.”

Dostoevsky does this by populating the scenes with a mocking crowd.  At the key scene, Marya’s parlor is bustling with people eager to laugh at anything sincere.  He also shows the absurdity of Zina’s view through her lover, Vasya, who kills himself out of an excess of romance.  Romance may be a pleasanter dream than pragmatism, but it’s still a dream.

Attacking my own better judgement is, of course, a dangerous thing to do.  To give free vent to the discordant voices in my head can easily lead to courting seductive delusions and moving even further from the truth.  It also involves the risk of harming readers.  If I present all sides of an issue too well, won’t readers be in greater peril of choosing incorrectly?

These dangers are serious, but I must pass through them if I want to write something that approaches honesty.  Dostoevsky had enough respect for his readers to let them choose what to believe without trying to force their hand.

Does this mean that great writing must be a cacophony of differing views in which none gets the upper hand, that is to say—where the author leads the reader only into greater confusion rather than greater truth?  No.  It only means that fiction must operate by the principle that what can be shaken must be shaken so that only that which is unshakable remains.  When worldviews are subjected to a fair fight, truth will out.  Rowan Williams puts it this way:

“What would make the words more than a cliché would be not that they command such veneration or carry such manifest authority that they are incapable of being ironized.  It would be that when subjected to this disrespectful treatment they do not disappear, they do not become contemptable or ineffectual.  And Dostoevsky can only find out whether this is so by subjecting them to the harsh light of irony.  Truthfulness . . . has to show that it can sustain itself against assault . . . But we shall discover this in narrative form only by letting [it] be assailed as relentlessly as can be.”

In this world of clashing daydreams, truth outs through the clash.  In the novella’s final catastrophe, the differences between the daydreams are brought to a head, so that characters are ripping off each other’s masks.  Dostoevsky sets his characters at odds, and puts them onto a course where they will most clash, and in the clash, each can’t help but have their own blindsides exposed.

Writing this way is painful.  That which I hold most precious I must barrage more persistently than any other elements in the story.  But this seems to be happening in Uncle’s Dream.  The narrator regularly takes Marya’s side even though Marya’s perspective is often morally repugnant.  This gives the story a moral coldness that fosters in me a deeper thirst for goodness.  But Dostoevsky never makes the story so ambiguous that I lose all sense of right and wrong.  “There is no abiguity at all,” Rowan Williams says, “about the destructive character of evildoing.”  Through the narrator’s contradictions or through the protestations of Zina, we always have some idea of how things really are.

It’s interesting to note that of all the characters, none seem to change, except one: Zina’s imposter-suitor, Mozglyakov.  That the story ends with him is surprising because he’s its most despicable character.  He isn’t a towering evil, just paltry and petty, which makes him even more annoying.  But in the final paragraph, he seems to pass from dreams to reality, which is what I had been longing to see the whole book.  This happens after the dream of his vanity—that he would be leaning, forlorn, on a column at a ball with Zina—comes true, yet Zina pays him no notice.  He comes face to face with his own foolishness.  That Dostoevsky chose the unlikeable Mozglyakov for the longed-for awakening is interesting.  Reality favors neither extreme of the idealogical dialectic of the story; instead it shines its dawn on the one most humiliated.  It’s exactly the sort of upside down triumph one finds beyond the confines of a daydream.

Letters 1849-1859

A few years ago, I read several craft books that left me with the impression that the best writing was improvised—that the real authors were like jazz musicians who could just jam with a natural flow.  I heard that Robert Frost quote: “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader,” and took from it: to plan is sin.

So I tried to improvise.  My results were often irrelevant wanderings from the story, or else just spattering sludge.

To my relief, I discovered that Dostoevsky spent much time planning.  He described to his publisher maps of whole novels he was only beginning.  He considered works written at once, in a fit of inspiration, immature.  He believed in revising over a long period of time in order to let the ideas take shape. “Believe me,” he says, “Work is necessary in everything, and an enormous amount of it.”

It would be easy to take from this: to not plan is sin.

But sometimes Dostoevsky would simply chuck all his plans and just blunder into the draft.  He often mentions ideas and even drafts of novels that never came to anything, and his projects were almost universally more ambitious in the planning stages than when published.  It’s clear that he never slavishly followed outlines and that he had an agile willingness to hop off his own tracks at the first hint of a better way forward.  An episode from a failed novel became a short story.  His imagination had a way of starting with his intention and twisting it until the story had a life of its own.

Witnessing his process from his letters, I get the impression that he had no consistent, efficient method, only an intuition for the next thing to try.  This is bad news and good news.  

Bad news because I want a neat system to control the process.  Fiction is scary because it’s such a gamble.  I have no idea if I’m headed toward a cliff.  But if I’m going to follow after my hero, I must be willing to stumble along in the dark.

But it’s also good news.  When all I can do is what seems to be the next right step—now outlining, now freewriting—I’m forced to let go of the results.  And when I do that, a morning of scribbling just might turn out to be fun.

“A Little Hero” (1857)

“A Little Hero” has a marvelous ability to render a breadth of situations and characters that give the story a lifelike quality, all the while unifying it all through a central theme, much like Netochka Nezvanova.  This theme of the dangers of the attention we can pay each other is well explored, yet “A Little Hero” isn’t as compelling as it could be because of its authorial dishonesty.

Fiction is a strange task.  In it, we are fabricating a reality, but not willy-nilly.  The best fiction invents in such a way that sheds light on The Great Reality.  My mind is full of stories, many of them toxically false.  The art of fiction writing has to do with uncovering the stories that ring true—stories that shed common delusions so that we can have a fresh experience of the real.  This kind of writing requires an abhorrence for delusion and a commitment to inner honesty as one enters the dark forest of the imagination.

“A Little Hero” sinks into authorial dishonesty when it fails to maintain the tension between the self and the other.  Ironically, the story describes its own pitfall well when describing Monsieur M.’s type: “All nature, the whole world for them is no more than a splendid mirror created for the little god to admire himself continually in it, and to see no one and nothing behind himself.”

When I become self-obsessed, I lose all sense of otherness.  All others become reduced to what they think about me.  A tell-tale attitude of this sort of delusional imagining is: “There’s the world and everyone in it.  And then there’s me.”  I view myself as separate from the human family, either seeing myself as superior to them all or else more pitiable.  In several places, “A Little Hero” falls into the latter.  The narrator regularly describes himself as an excluded outsider who is only met with ridicule from society, which he characterizes as a mocking crowd where only egoists can flourish.  

This problem often happens when I over-identify with one of my characters.  In other words, when I can’t distinguish the character from a fantasy I have about myself.  If I have a character in my story whose consciousness is more dominant than the others, I must cultivate some sense of seeing this character from the outside, otherwise that character’s consciousness will swamp the whole story, and the narrative will have no sense of reality but will be a slave to the delusions of the character (the most powerful of which is perhaps that sense of being flawlessly correct).  I will “see no one and nothing behind” myself.  A sense of reality requires at least two points of perspective.

The I’m-an-outsider-in-a-hostile-world attitude is textbook delusional thinking.  If a character is constantly giving off I’m-so-great-but-they-won’t-let-me-succeed vibes, that character will often fall into the author’s vicarious self-pity unless the author is able to establish some sort of distance from the character.  That isn’t to say that real groups never actually exclude people, or that I can’t write about this experience.  What I mean is that me-versus-the-world stories normally veer toward narcissist delusions unless the author can keep in mind that humanity doesn’t exist solely for the sake of either praising or excluding some special, central person.  If the author fails to do this, the other flattens into a mirror.

My mind is so keen to believe that I am an under-appreciated star that I must approach relatable outsider characters with an effort at objectivity.  Dostoevsky does this masterfully in Notes from Underground.  The Underground Man says, “I am one, and they are all,” but Dostoevsky, through use of irony, maintains enough distance from his creation to allow the reader to see the Underground Man as he really is—one of the other human beings.  And perhaps even more profoundly, the Underground Man allows me to see my own delusion.

The self-obsessed imagination not only over-identifies with protagonists, it also under-identifies with antagonists.  They, too, can’t be viewed as one of the other human beings but are reduced to their negative impact on the protagonist.  As an author, I have first-hand access to only one human experience: my own.  Thus the only way I have to bring life to characters is to find some aspect of myself within them.  When I refuse to find myself in a character, I suck the life out of them.  That doesn’t mean that I can’t write villains—it only means that if I am to write a villain well, I must find the villain in myself.  Ironically, if I can’t find myself in my darker characters, they end up like me anyway, only in less compelling forms—projections of my pet peeves, or even sloppy renderings of my problems that I’m unable to face.  

In a self-centered mindset, I must be constantly and universally adored, and when (inevitably) I’m not, the reason must be personal, and so I assume the world is hostile.  Thus hostility is characteristic of the narcissist’s world.  

Since the setting of “A Little Hero” is one of these hostile worlds, it’s not surprising that the Hero starts to romanticize deceit.  When Madame M. lies with such charming innocence to her husband about meeting another man in secret, the Hero suggests that innocence can’t do otherwise than lie when husbands are so pompous and society is so eager to condemn.  Thus the vicious world of “A Little Hero” naturally lends itself to valorizing deception, which is what riddles the action with nonsense.  A story that champions deceit cannot be honest.

I enjoy fiction that makes me feel like I’m getting somewhere, like I’m moving toward truth and not away from it.  This is a tall order, and to throw away honesty—the only compass I have—bodes poorly.  If I, as an author, can’t commit to being honest with myself, I can’t expect my stories to land anywhere other than in a tedious, distorted house of mirrored self-delusions.