Brodsky on Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky made the most of Russian’s irregular grammar. His sentences have a feverish, hysterical, idiosyncratic pace and their lexical content is an all but maddening fusion of belles-lettres, colloquialisms, and bureaucratese. His digressions were prompted more by the language than by the requirements of a plot. Reading him simply makes one realise that stream of consciousness springs not from consciousness but from a word, which alters or redirects one’s consciousness.

Murr on human beings

I know that they make a great deal of something that is supposed to sit in their heads, which they call reason. I am not altogether sure of what exactly they mean by that. But this much is certain: if I am correct in concluding from certain discourses of my master and patron that reason is nothing other than the capacity to act with consciousness, and not to play any dumb tricks, then I would not change places with any human being.

"Notes from the House of the Dead" Dostoevsky

The impression made by reality is always more powerful than that made by a mere story.

Here was a peculiar world, not like anything else; here were its own peculiar laws, its own dress, its own manners and customs, and a living house of death, a life as nowhere else and a people set apart.

Even though I looked at everything with keen and avid attention, I could not discern much of what lay under my very nose.

Between January 1850 and February 1854 Dostoevsky was a political prisoner in a penal colony in the Siberian town of Omsk. This remarkable book appears to be his record of his experience. However, all is not what it seems. The book is not a simple record of Dostoevsky’s experiences, but something much more subtle and finely wrought.

Published in 1860 during a brief thaw in the strict censorship of the time, the book at first positions itself as a novel, with an elaborate editorial framing device designed to mollify the censor and other critics. The work is presented as a manuscript left among the papers of a former prisoner. Behind the ‘I’ of Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, imprisoned for 10 years for murdering his wife, hides the ‘I’ of Dostoevsky, imprisoned for 4 years for a political crime. This initial narrative masking sets up a certain freedom, allowing Dostoevsky to describe objectively and in detail the life of the prison without making it appear as a political act, or an overt attack on the system itself. The novelistic mask soon slips, however, as it emerges that, unlike a novel, there is no plot, no ‘setting’ and no ‘characters’.

The autobiographical and documentary now come to the fore. The writing is characterised by a clinical objectivity. Phrases such as It is a fact that…. abound. We are given detailed descriptions of the social structure of the prison, the economics of the prison, the squalid living conditions, the daily routine, the excessive brutality of the punishments, the gruelling labour, the utterly relentless and crushing boredom, the lice-ridden latrine-stinking overcrowding. Like modern oral historiography, we are given some of the convict’s stories, from their own mouths, with little or no ‘authorial’ interference or comment. The emphasis is on facts. The (melo)drama and theatricality of Dostoevsky’s previous work is entirely absent, even in the stories told by the convicts of their crimes, and in the descriptions of the punishments meted out to them for infractions of prison regulations, and the outbreaks of sudden violence that characterise prison life: all potential sites for ‘writing-up’. Everything is understated and downplayed, and left to speak for itself. There is none of the angry hectoring of Dickens, for example, or the biting sarcasm of Hugo, those other great reforming zealots of the 19th century who were such huge influences on early Dostoevsky.

At the same time, the book addresses a number of philosophical problems:
1. the inequality of punishment for the same crime
2. the gap between appearance and reality and how to interpret reality
3. the effect on the character of judicial brutality, both on those who administer it, and those who suffer under it
4. the nature of freedom
5. the nature of philanthropy
6. the importance of hope

These themes run like threads throughout the narrative but appear with more frequency and intensity towards the end of the second half, where we can understand them more because we have, like the narrator, spent more time in the prison, and are able to understand it better.

The book therefore shifts constantly between different genres: novelistic, documentary, philosophical meditation, factual, social tract, autobiography. The ‘I’ of the autobiographical episodes is not the same as the I of the philosophical sections, although it appears so. These have been arrived at later, upon reflection of his memories of his experiences. Dostoevsky made extensive use of notebooks during his prison stay, jotting down phrases heard in prison, his impressions and so on. He could simply have published these as his record of prison life. But he chose to work them into something more complex and subtle. So that what appears to be objective and documentary is in fact highly subjective and personal, highly artistic, highly political, but minimising the political risk. Dostoevsky attempts to alert us to the fact that all is not what it seems in the book, by calling the first three chapters (after the introduction): ‘First Impressions 1, 2 and 3’ and by meditating frequently on the gap between appearance and reality.

From a sociological perspective, one of the most interesting things about the book is Dostoevsky’s description of the homosexual. Of course, in an all male environment such as a prison, homosexual activity is a given. This extremely taboo subject (in the context of the 1860s) is handled with an enormous amount of subtlety and skill, and can be easily missed by a naïve or unknowing reader. The topic is dealt with through the character of Sirotkin who is introduced into the narrative immediately after a discussion of how the prisoners are able to pay for sexual relations with women from outside the prison with the collusion of the guards and the exchange of money; and who is described thus: My curiosity was particularly aroused (aroused?) by a certain young convict […] In some respects he was a rather mysterious creature. I was struck above all by his beautiful face…quiet and unassuming…his eyes were blue, his features regular, his face soft and clear complexioned…Change the gender of the pronouns and the description could be of one of Dostoevsky’s heroines. Sirotkin has no trade (the narrator has been very keen to stress early on that everyone in the prison has some sort of trade), but is given gifts by the other prisoners for reasons which are glaringly unspecified. He and his companions are often made fun of, again for glaringly unspecified reasons. Sirotkin is a former soldier who hated the army because ‘Everyone was so heartless and there was nowhere to have a decent cry.’ The narrator finishes his description with this enigmatic comment: Among his companions, Sirotkin was the only good looking one. As for the others like him, of whom there were perhaps as many as fifteen in our prison, it was a strange experience to watch them… Later, one of the other prisoners is described as being friendly with Sirotkin only when he needed to obtain the latter’s services… Even in the house of the marginal dead, there are even more marginal ghosts. It seems to me that the presence of this taboo subject, and the highly oblique way it is presented, enacts in microcosm the method of the whole book. Unpalatable truths are compellingly presented, nothing is left out, the gaze is unflinching, the details unsparingly selective. And yet, nothing is what it seems.

Reality is infinitely various when compared to the deductions of abstract thought, even those that are most cunning, and it will not tolerate rigid, hard-and-fast distinctions. Reality strives for diversification.

Tyranny is a habit; it is able to and does develop finally into a disease. I submit that habit may coarsen and stupefy the very best of men to the level of brutes

There is in the Russian character so much down to earth sobriety, so much inner mockery primarily directed at the self…

It is time we stopped complaining apathetically about our milieu, claiming that it has devoured us. It is admittedly true that it does indeed devour a great many things in us, but not everything.

Nothing in Dostoevsky’s previous career even hints at the kind of subject matter and tone he was to achieve in this book, and for this reader it stands as one of the most personal and one of the greatest achievements in his cannon.

Dostoevsky on judicial torture

The right given to one man to administer corporal punishment to another is one of society's running sores, one of the most effective means of destroying in it every attempt at, every embryo of civic consciousness, and a basic factor in its certain and inexorable dissolution.

"Mr Palomar" Italo Calvino

The first two paragraphs. The context is contemplation or meditation. Mr P is attempting not to contemplate ‘the waves’ but to look at a wave. This is a crucial difference.

Contemplating ‘the waves’ implies a Platonic world view, in which a wave becomes ‘the waves’ or ‘the sea’ through a process of metonomy; and then in which ‘the waves’ become ‘the world’ or ‘time’ through a process of metaphor. Contemplation implies a searching for something eternal, symbolic, meaningful within the ephemera of the world.

Looking at a wave, on the other hand, implies a Buddhist world view, in which the properties of a specific wave are objectively observed by the senses.

Consider this sentence: In his desire to avoid vague sensations, (the higher truths arrived at through contemplation) he established for his every action (that is, every act of observation of the wave) a limited and precise object (that is, a conscious awareness of the separateness and completeness of each wave and a conscious awareness of one’s self looking at it).

Buddha says: Those religious authorities (philosophers, priests, literally Brahmin, the highest caste) versed in tradition (teaching, learning) say: that path which we neither know nor have seen (the ineffable truths arrived at through contemplation of ‘the waves’) we declare to be the path to union: this is the direct, this is the straight path that leads to salvation, and leads one who follows it to communion with God. And then he declares this approach to be ‘ridiculous’ (sic). (Dighanikaya 13). Instead of following a religious path, Buddha teaches a focus on the moment: live observing the body in and as the body, live observing feelings in and as feelings, live observing mind in and as mind, and live observing mental qualities and phenomena in and as mental qualities and phenomena. (Samyuttanikaya 5.47.6)

Buddhist thought rejects contemplation of the eternal and instead aims to arrive at an unbinding of the self through a disciplined awareness of the present moment contained in the realm of the senses ('looking at a wave'). It is vitally important to remember at all times that in Buddhism, thought is a physical sense, the organ of thinking being the mind: there is no mind/body dichotomy.

The problem and difficulty in arriving at a precise observation of the present moment, is how to separate the present moment from the one which preceded it, and the one which follows it, a problem which Buddha warns us about, and of which Mr P becomes aware through his and the text’s submission to the temptation of metaphor: But it is very difficult to isolate one wave…

Fragment 152

Notes on Dostoevsky 4

Narrative provenance may defined as the answer to three questions: Who is the narrator? How does the narrator come to be in possession of the narrative? How does the narrator mediate the narrative to the reader?
In the early work of Dostoevsky, there are two kinds of narrative provenance. The first kind is an unselfconscious omniscient narration. The second is a self-conscious omniscience, one whose provenance is registered in two ways.

1. Unselfconscious omniscient narration is when questions of narrative provenance are evaded or suppressed, or ignored. It occurs in the following works: The Honest Thief, Polzunkov, The Landlady, The Double and Mr Prokharchin. The first two of these have a first person narrator who simply and unselfconsciously tells the story. We don’t know who the narrator is, the events are presented uncomplicatedly as falling within the experience of the narrator as it happens to him/her, and we take this on assumption. The Landlady, The Double and Mr Prokharchin have third person narrators, whose omniscience is also taken for granted. This is the most traditional, uncomplicated kind of narrative, one which demands an unsophisticated (or extremely sophisticated) suspension of disbelief in the reader, a momentary putting aside of questions of narrative provenance. We take the narrator as given, see through him to the events he describes.

2. Self-conscious omniscience in Dostoevsky is present in two ways. In the first way, the narrator foregrounds the fact that the events fell within his experience or have been related to him/her by someone else. In White Nights, the narrator tells us: this is how it happened […] Suddenly I became involved in a most unexpected adventure. In The Christmas Tree and the Wedding the narrator says: The other day I saw a wedding. But no, I better tell you about the Christmas tree, in a radical disruption of narrative smoothness. In Netochka Nezvanova, the same disruption and foregrounding occurs: In order to make my story more comprehensible, I must first give an account of [my stpefather’s] life, the details of which I only learnt later….In The Village of Stepanchikovo, the events are also foregrounded as having happened a long time ago to the narrator: …this I can only begin to explain to the reader by giving some preliminary account of the character of Foma Fomich Opiskin as I later came to understand it. All of the above works are self-consciously presented as acts of memory or story telling, a presentation which goes at least some way to providing answers to the questions about narrative provenance.

3. The second way narrative provenance is self-consciously foregrounded is present in three works only: Notes from The House of the Dead, Notes from Underground, and Poor Folk. This last is a very special case, so we will return to it later. In the first two however, narrative provenance is foregrounded by an editorial framing device. Notes from the House of the Dead is presented to us as a manuscript discovered in papers left behind after the death of one Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, a former convict and murderer. Notes from Underground begins with a footnote signed by one Fydor Dostoevsky who asserts that: Both the author of the notes and the Notes themselves are, of course, fictional… in the subsequent fragment will come this person’s “actual” notes about certain events in his life. These two are the only works in early Dostoevsky in which questions of narrative provenance are raised and partially answered by a framing device, and which are presented as acts of writing. I think it is significant that both these works are the most personal of Dostoevsky’s oevre, the ones which have a mood of lived experience about them, rather than a mood of invention. They are also the ones in which Dostoevsky radically breaks with previous literary traditions and offers something controversially new and original.

Poor Folk appears to answer questions of narrative provenance by virtue of its conspicuous lack of any editorial framing of the letters: these are presented simply as the letters of Makar Devushkin and Varvara Dobroselova. The letters themselves answer questions about their provenance as acts of writing: All your letters are at Fedora’s in the top drawer of the chest-of-drawers Varvara writes in her last letter. However, as Leatherbarrow points out, the mysterious presence of an epigraph complicates questions of narrative provenance.

"The Village of Stepanchikovo" Dostoevsky

There are in it two vast typical characters which I have been creating for and noting down for five years, which have been formed perfectly, characters that are completely Russian and until now poorly portrayed in Russian Literature.

Dostoevsky to his brother May 3rd 1859


This is the work with which Dostoevsky returned to literature, after his four years in prison. It is also one of the strangest and in many ways the least characteristic of his works. All traces of his terrible experiences in the gulag are absent; all traces of his conversion to a highly individualised version of Christianity are absent; all traces of the loneliness and frustration of the Siberian exile in which he wrote it are absent. Instead, he presents us with a Gogolian comedy of manners, a rural retreat, an intricately wrought invention, a summer farce. Or at least this is how it seems. But there are nonetheless, carefully buried indications of what Dostoevesky had been through, and where he was going.

The narrator is summoned to visit his uncle in a village in the country, where he has come under the sway of a former servant, Foma Fomich Opiskin, a nasty, hypocritical manipulator of other people’s good natures. There follows a convoluted plot spanning forty eight hours, involving a host of minor characters, wild chases in carriages, a Pickwickian elopement, moonlight trysts and a climactic thunderstorm. It’s very Gogolian, both in its setting and its plot, and full of a kind of manic comic energy, with some very funny scenes.

Foma Fomich is a Pecksniffian study in hypocrisy, a truly vile character, and the reader longs to throw him through a window. In his backstory, Dostoevsky still shows his awareness of how slighted amour propre in marginal people can fester and turn to evil: Foma Fomich Opiskin was the embodiment of the most boundless vanity, but vanity of a most peculiar sort to be found only in complete non-entities….. His discourse is laced with sentences from Gogol’s Selected Passages, showing at once how awfully smug and surprisingly humourless Gogol had become in that book, and how bitterly the writers of Dostoevsky’s circle reacted to it. Opiskin is not intended as a portrait of Gogol, but is a satirical attack on the aspect of Gogol that Dostoevsky and his contemporaries found abhorrently displayed in the Selected Passages. This is Dostoevsky’s way of finally, and perhaps vengefully, expunging the influence of Gogol in his work.

The second ‘vast character’ mentioned by Dostoevsky in his letter is the uncle, Rostanev, a man who is just as egoistic in his own way, as the vile Opiskin. Rostanev’s inability to say ‘no’, his overwhelming desire to make everyone happy, his unwillingness to criticise anyone and his constant maneuvering to avoid confrontation are a form of egoism. His egoism creates difficulties for the other characters and robs them of chances for their own development. Rostanev is the first in the long line of Dostoevskyan saint figures, characters who embody nothing but goodness, saintliness. At the centre of the novel these two characters confront each other: Opiskin, the vile man, Rostanev, the virtuous one, setting up a confrontation between two modes of being that forms the heart of Dostoevsky’s great novels to come.

This is the first of Dostoevsky’s works to leave the city and go into the country. The lovingly painted (and wholly artificial) pastoral scenes of Gogol are transformed here into a place of dull poverty that seems much more realistic than the idealised settings of Gogol’s Ukranian tales. The village was small and poor and lay in a kind of hollow about three versts off the main road. Six or seven smoke-blackened huts, leaning crazily and barely covered with grimy thatching greeted all arrivals with sullen enmity…Most of the action, however, is restricted to drawing rooms and summer houses, interior settings, where the emphasis is on the interactions between people, on their motivations and characters, rather than on the landscape. The novel is constructed as a series of confrontations in rooms; it’s highly theatrical and highly dramatic, and dialogue not description is placed to the fore. This is not only a trace of the origins of the piece - Dostoevsky originally conceived this as a drama, but changed it to a novel when he realised the great difficulties of getting a drama past the censors - but also shows Dostoevsky’s main concern: he is always more interested in what is happening within and between his characters, rather than in their setting. This also forms the central focus of the great novels to come.

One of the defining experiences of Dostoevsky’s imprisonment, was his encounter with the Russian peasant. What a wonderful people, he wrote to his brother from prison, I have come to know not Russia, but the Russian people, well, and so well as perhaps not many know them. Stepanchikovo is the first of Dostoevsky’s novels to feature the rural peasant. In fact, the old peasant Gavrilla, and the strange androgynous simpleton Falaley are the only truly sympathetic characters in the book, and the only ones to offer any real resistance to the despotic regime of Opiskin. Foma Fomich forces Gavrilla to learn French, and bans Falaley from dancing the kamarinsky. In Opiskin’s interactions with the peasants, Dostoevsky satirises Gogol’s advice in Selected Passages on how to address peasants (Gogol’s suggestion goes like this “You unwashed mug! Look at you covered in soot to your eyeballs, and still refusing to pay homage!”). At the same time, he prefigures some of the debates of the Populists of the 1870s, and the reactions of the peasants to attempts to educate them: If you desire any service –I’ll always do it with the greatest of pleasure. But having me yap in some outlandish tongue in my old age and be laughed at by others!

Upon his release from prison, where intellectual stimulation was minimal, Dostoevsky was teeming with ideas, burning with a passion for literature, itching to return to his vocation as a writer, penniless, and anxious to re-enter the intellectual community. Stepanchikovo is exceptionally well-crafted, evenly written, and the kind of work most well suited to please the censor, and therefore pave the way for Dostoevsky’s return to literary life. Although it passed the censor, it was largely ignored by the public, treated with hostility by the critics, and sank largely into oblivion, overshadowed by the great works to come.

As a Christian, I forgive and even love you: but as a man, a man of honour, I’ve no alternative but to despise you. I’m obliged to despise you, I must in the name of decency because you have –I repeat- you have disgraced yourself, whereas I have acted in the noblest way possible.