Belinsky on religion

In the words God and Religion I see only black darkness, chains, and the knout.

Fragment 0128

Notes on Dostoevsky 3

The dialogue between Gogol and Dostoevsky was not only restricted to literature, but also ironically extended to the sphere of history and biography.
In 1846 Gogol published Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, a strange mix of sermons, passages from letters to friends, essays on literature, social and religious topics, violently reactionary and stridently conservative. Gogol himself saw it as the summation of his life’s work, and his masterpiece. The work caused a storm of controversy, and increased the divide between the Slavophiles, who saw Russia’s destiny as a separation from Europe, and the Westernizers, who saw Russia’s way forward as adopting European modernity. The foremost critic of the day, Belinsky, wrote a stinging attack on Gogol’s book, taking the opportunity to lambast the autocratic Russian state and the monolithic Orthodox Church, and Belinsky’s review was promptly banned by the Tsar.
It was for reading this banned letter aloud at the meeting of the Petrashevsky circle that Dostoevsky was arrested and imprisoned.

Dostoevsky on his reading

You perhaps would like to know how I occupy myself when I am not writing? I read. I read an awful lot, and reading has a strange effect on me. I will read through something I read a long time ago and it is as though I am wound up with new powers. I pay attention to everything, understand everything clearly, and draw from it the ability to create for myself.

"Netochka Nezvanova" Dostoevsky

Russian prose fiction has three main forms: the rasskaz (story, short story), the povest (tale, novelette, novella), and the roman, (novel). I am told that the looseness of the English terms does not quite do justice to the rather more clearly demarcated boundaries of the Russian. A rasskaz depicts one event in the life of a character, illuminating the character and his life by a relationship of metonymy. A povest depicts a series of events illuminating a character and a period of his life. A roman also depicts a series of events, but the range of characters and events is greater and more complex than in the povest.
In his work of the 1840s, Dostoevsky, apart from the epistolary Poor Folk, mainly wrote rasskaz and povest. Netochka Nezvanova was his first attempt in the longer more complex form of the roman, and it is not altogether very successful.
The story consists of three episodes in the life of Netochka, with a prologue detailing the life of her stepfather. The first episode details her grim childhood, the death of her parents and her subsequent adoption by the philanthropic Prince X. The second describes her intense friendship and infatuation with the Prince’s daughter, a girl roughly the same age. In the third episode Netochka is adopted by a relative of the Prince, a married woman with a secret past, which Netochka finds out about by accident. It depicts a strange love triangle between Netochka, her patroness, and her patroness’s husband. Notwithstanding the fact that all three tales are narrated by the eponymous Netochka, the narrative does not really succeed in uniting these four units into a coherent and novelistically complex whole. The work remains rather obviously three separate povests linked by a common narrator.

However the novel is interesting for two connected reasons: the development of Dostoevsky’s prose style, linked to his growing interiority, and the theme of the awakening consciousness.

The prologue and first episode are Hoffmanesque tales of starving artists and miserable childhoods, freezing in garrets, consumption and so on. There is a distance between the narrator and the events she describes, a distance compounded of memory and vision. The narrator holds the events at arms length, describes them from the outside, with a kind of briskness. This kind of writing is a characteristic of the 18th/early 19th century, in particular Hoffman, Pushkin, and Gogol, all of whom write prose that reads with a brevity, a clarity and a swiftness, with a clear distance between narrator and reader on the one hand, and the events being described on the other.
The second episode is quite different. The events are much closer, both to the narrator and the reader. While we read we have the impression that the events are being created in front of our eyes. We enter into the mind of the narrator/character: we become her as we read. It’s less an act of memory on the part of the narrator, than an act of creation between writer and reader. It’s a much closer focus, much more interior, and very much slower to read, crammed full of internal details and descriptions of subtle and elusive mental and emotional states. It’s in this episode that Dostoevsky really creates the psychological novel.
The third episode tries to project this same kind of psychological intensity into a more social realm. In place of the intensity of the one-on-one relationship of the second episode, the third episode brings in more characters and focuses on the interaction between larger groups of people. The writing in this episode is marred by heavy use of melodrama and a prose style reminiscent of De Kock and Sue, often unintentionally ludicrous: She gave a shriek, turned pale and leaned against her chair for support, hardly able to stand on her feet. There’s an awful lot of shrieking and fainting.

The second interesting feature of the novel is the birth of consciousness depicted in it. In his masterpiece The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, Hoffman writes: Our first awakening to clear consciousness remains for ever impenetrable to us. If it were possible for that awakening to occur suddenly, I believe the shock of it would kill us. It seems Dostoevsky has taken this to heart and describes this awakening of consciousness in the psychological close-up of the second episode. Netochka herself describes this as an awakening from childhood sleep, my first engagement with life: and gives it a great deal of space and attention in her narrative. From the time when I was eight and a half I began to remember everything very clearly…from that moment when I suddenly became aware of myself I developed remarkably quickly, and was more than capable of contending with many unchildlike impressions… The awakening to consciousness happens too suddenly: … my development began with incomprehensible and exhausting rapidity…I was no longer satisfied with external impressions alone, and I began to think, to reason, to observe. and the psyche takes refuge in fantasy: my mind could not really interpret things properly, and I found myself living in a world of my own… a fairy tale…

This kind of writing is totally alien to the 18th century way of seeing and describing. It’s at once much more 19th century, and astonishingly prescient of modern psychological and cognitive theories. After the serial publication of the first part of Netochka Nezvanova, early in the morning of the 23rd of April 1849 Dostoevsky was arrested. He spent the next 5 years in prison and never returned to the novel. It remains unfinished, and marks the transition between the works of his apprenticeship, and his maturity.

James Billington on Pasternak

Man's power to sing spontaneously and implausibly may well provide his only path to dignity and self-respect in an age of calculation, deception, and spiritual isolation.

Fragment 0119

Notes on Dostoevsky 2

It is possible to conjecture that during the 1840’s the young Dostoevsky went through an identity crisis, precipitated by the sudden reversal in his reputation. His first novel, Poor Folk, had been lavishly praised by the foremost critic of the day, Belinsky, and Dostoevsky had been heralded by influential voices as a great new presence in Russian literature. This praise had gone to the young author’s head, and he had allowed himself injudiciously to flaunt his talent and reputation. His next two works, however, The Double and The Landlady had been misunderstood and slated by Belinsky, and his reputation crashed. His enemies crowed, and he was ejected from the circle of writers around the leading journal The Contemporary which had published Poor Folk and supported him; a circle of writers who included Turgenev, and Herzen. It is reasonable to suppose that this effected his confidence in himself and in his identity as a writer.

Another factor that may have contributed to this identity crisis was the extremely repressive political atmosphere during the reign of Nicholas 1st. Petersburg was flooded with spies, disinformation was everywhere, and the dissemination of real information fraught with danger. Do you know, gentlemen, he writes in one of the Petersburg Chronicle feuillitons, the value of a man in our vast capital city who always has in reserve some piece of news no one as yet knows, and in addition, possesses the gift of telling it in a pleasant manner? Dostoesvky himself was a member of two revolutionary circles, the Petrashevsky group, and the much more politically dangerous Durov group. His political affiliations necessitated some degree of masking and counterfeiting identities.

During this period his work explores questions of self and identity, together formulating a conception of self that is absolutely unlike anything else in 19th century literature. The salient features of the self presented in the various works of this decade may be summarised as follows:

1. We experience ourselves in two areas: society and solitude.
2. The self we experience in society is not necessarily coterminous with the self we experience in solitude.
3. Both forms of self are more or less oppressive.
4. The shifting disconnect between social self and solitary self is experienced as anxiety about identity.
5. Both forms of self, but more especially the solitary self, are equated with narrative, with the ability to tell/imagine stories, in the forms of dreams or fantasies: the dreamer.
6. The way other people perceive us is often at odds with the way we see ourselves.
7. Our social self is fragmented or refracted through circles, with each different circle getting a different self. The possibility of it being discovered that different circles are getting different selves is a source of anxiety.
8. Happiness is usually absent or at any rate extremely fleeting and usually connected to moments where the anxieties surrounding the perception of self are stilled.
9. The self is perceived and expressed through language: monologues, dialogues, letters. It is usually at one remove from the narrator (layered narrators) and relayed to the narrator, who passes it on to the reader, through language.
10. The Gogolian conception of character becomes a Dsotoevskyan conception of self.
11. The self and its attendant problems are exacerbated by poverty, low social position and extreme loneliness.
12. When in the social self, the solitary self is sought as (illusory) refuge, and vice versa.
13. There is an implicit warning on the part of ‘Dostoevsky’ (a ghostly figure sensed but not glimpsed among the composite of narrators and characters) that the solitary self will become ill if it divorces itself completely from the social self, becoming wrapped in isolation and fantasy; and a warning also, that the social self will become decadent, unseemly and meaningless if it ignores the needs of the solitary self in its determination to achieve wealth, social position and security.
14. The Ideal Connection between selves is Brotherhood.

This conception of self was by no means stable, and was to change subtly throughout his career, but in this decade the territory was mapped that was to exercise a huge influence on existentialism, the modernists and modern psychology. It is Dostoevsky writing in the 1840s who charted the terrain between the 19th century's conception of self and character, and the modernists'. At the same time, Dostoevsky is the poet of isolation and loneliness, the chronicler of the foregrounded consciousness, the voice from within which never ceases.

Spurious Quotation # 18

Large amounts of vodka on an empty stomach are not conducive to sustained consciousness.
Dostoevsky

Fragment 0109

Harold Bloom writes about the anxiety of influence, about the writerly anxiety in situating what is being written into what has been written. But there is also a reader’s anxiety.

I settle down to read an essay about Russian literature…

“The Russian realist novel, like the realist novel in the west grew out of existing genres while often using them as foil. Gogol’s Dead Souls is formally a picaresque novel. Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk uses the sentimentalist form of the epistolary novel. His The Double is a ‘realised’ version of a gothic novel. Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time and Tolostoy’s Cossacks ‘realise’ the exotic novel made popular by Aleksander Bestushev-Marlinsky in the 1830s. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina came from the tradition of the family novel…”

…and get no further. I am beset by an impulse to (re)read immediately all of the works cited to ascertain whether the statement is true, or whether at least I agree with it. This impulse manifests itself as a kind of omnivorous desire: I haven’t read enough, I must read more, I must read everything, in fact, preferably simultaneously, and preferably now. The impossibility of this creates a readerly anxiety. I read Dead Souls, and while I read, I am conscious of all the other Gogol I have not read. These unread works jostle around my reading self, clamouring for attention: I’m next they cry. My desire to do them all justice creates a further anxiety in the attempt to situate what is being read, into what has been read, what has been remembered, and what has not.

Dickens on laughter

It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour.

Correspondence #9

Among Soviet people the thirst for reading is really unimaginable. Newspapers, journals, books, all this is absorbed without quenching the thirst to the tiniest degree. Reading is one of the main activities of daily life. But for the reader in the Soviet Union there are, as it were, no clear divisions between the reality in which he lives, and the world he reads about in books. The reader treats the heroes of his books as if they are actual people. He argues with them, denounces them, and he even reads realities into the events of the story and its characters.

Leon Feuchtwanger
Moscow

If we made ethical choices, they were based not so much on immediate reality as on moral standards derived from fiction. We were avid readers and we fell into a dependence on what we read. Books, perhaps because of their formal element of finality, held us in their absolute power. Dickens was more real than Stalin or Beria…Books became the first and only reality, whereas reality was regarded as either nonsense or nuisance.

Joseph Brodsky
Less than one

Oh literature is a wonderful thing, Varenka, a very wonderful thing: I discovered that from being with those people the day before yesterday. It is a profound thing. It strengthens people’s hearts and instructs them,… Literature is a picture, or rather in a certain sense both a picture and a mirror; it is an expression of emotion, a subtle form of criticism, a didactic lesson and a document…

Dostoevsky
Poor Folk