'Les Chants de Maldoror' Comte de Lautreamont

 “All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,


And study of revenge, immortal hate,


And courage never to submit or yield:”

Satan in Paradise Lost Book 1, 106-8

Milton

These are the songs of Maldoror: prose poems in the style of Baudelaire’s Le Spleen De Paris, organized into six cantos of between 5 to 16 stanzas each, first published in 1868, to almost universal neglect and uninterest.

Who is Maldoror? The text tells us that he was born evil; that he never cuts his fingernails so that he can pierce the breast of a child more easily therewith to drink its blood; that his breath exhales poison; that his forehead is furrowed green; that his face is like the face of some hideous deep-sea fish; that he lives alone in a cave, shunned by and shunning humanity; that he prowls the city at night wrapped in black; that he hasn’t slept for thirty years; that he was born deaf but that he developed the ability to hear; that he likes to have sex with prepubescent boys; that he is permanently tumescent; that he changes his clothes twice a week so as to save mankind from dying of their stench; that he is a shape-changer wanted by an army of spies and agents throughout Europe; that he loves the cold purity of mathematics; that he has assisted at the revolutions of the globe and been a silent witness to cataclysms and disasters; that he only has one eye in the centre of his forehead; and finally, in the last canto, there is the suggestion that Maldoror is Lucifer himself, the devil with a myriad names, this particular one conjured up by Lautreamont himself, and compounded of (echoes of) the French words for sickness or evil (mal), gold (or), and  horror (horreur). We let these words, then, as defined by Littre’s Dictionary (first edition published 1863-72, coterminous with the publication of Maldoror) stand as symbols of various aspects of the text, and our responses to it.

1.) MAL: that which is contrary to virtue, probity and honour, that which wounds, which hurts. A symbol of transgression and pain.

Maldoror’s text transgresses not least in the shocking power of its images, to which we will return later, but in the general violation and blurring of traditional literary boundaries such as genre and structure, such as the relationships between author and protagonist, and between reader and text.

Genre and Structure

As prose poems, the writing violates the traditional distinctions between poetry and prose. To be sure, Lautreamont is taking Baudelaire as his model here, but he does so in a quite self-conscious way, in which the discourse is aware of its own ambiguous status as song, chant, lay, and text, and in which it proclaims a synesthesia between speaking and writing, reading and hearing: I propose to proclaim in a loud voice and without emotion the cold and grave chant that you are about to hear. 1.8 We are reading prose, but the spirit of poetry saturates language and protagonist: the fundamental accents of poetry preserve none the less their intrinsic sway over my intelligence. 5.1.

Although Maldoror present his texts to us as songs, he also highlights the process of writing: I find it stupid that it should be necessary…. to place before me an open ink stand and several sheets of uncrumpled paper. 6.2

In an ironic dig at the late 19^th century doctrine of art for art’s sake, he proclaims the ‘usefulness’ of his ‘poems’, calling them Dramatic Episodes of implacable utility! 6.2 blurring the distinction between the lower reading for pleasure (titivation) or the loftier reading for improvement (cultivation). If Maldoror is the devil, from his point of view, the utility of the verses must lie in their poisonous, damning effect upon the reader.

Baudelaire’s prose poems were written as sketches and published randomly in various journals over a period of time. Maldoror’s prose poems have the same appearance of being occasional pieces, but they are in fact carefully structured into a whole, as Maldoror himself tells us: Now the synthetic section of my work is complete and sufficiently paraphrased…Today I am about to invent a little novel of thirty pages 6.1

The first three cantos have a different character from cantos 4 and 5, and use various repeated lines or sentences within each stanza as a quasi poetic device, one used frequently in chants. Cantos 4 and 5 exchange this device for another one: a parody of French Academic prose, which –both parody and target- is often impenetrable. Maldoror here employs embedding, double negatives, parentheses and other rhetorical devices; he starts sentences that get longer and longer, and then he simply abandons them:

By that very fact, depriving myself of the light and skeptical mannerisms of ordinary conversations, and sufficiently prudent not to ask… I no longer recall what I was intending to say, for I do not remember the beginning of the sentence. 6.2

Canto 6 contains a story spread out over several stanzas – up till now, each stanza has been totally self contained with no reference to others around it. This ‘novel’ is supposed to embody the themes and images in the preceding part of the work. The work thus has certain similarities in structure with another contemporary work, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, which also foregrounds ‘metaphysical’ matter by placing it in front of a narrative. In its form, then, and by appearing to be something which it is not, the text transgresses notions of literary probity.

Relationship between author and protagonist

Throughout the text there is the disconcerting suggestion that Maldoror is a portrait of the author himself, but of course, one must always guard against such readerly naivete. The danger of identifying protagonist with author is not mitigated by the fact that almost nothing is known about the author. Lautreamont is a pseudonym which covers the real name of Isadore Lucien Ducasse, an indigent writer who was kicking around Paris in the late 1860s but who doesn’t seem to have made many friends, or made much of a mark on his times. His death certificate dated 24 November 1870 states that he was found dead in his lodgings, was a bachelor, and then contains these highly suggestive, emblematic words, so suitable for a writer who left virtually no other trace of his existence on earth except for this one vile, sublime masterpiece: no further information.

Matters are not helped by a deliberate inconsistency in the use of pronouns and point of view. In some stanzas, Maldoror is being observed/described by another party (pronoun ‘he’; mocking title ‘Our Hero’); in others he is presenting himself or events from his viewpoint (pronoun ‘I’). This blurring of boundaries between viewpoint and selves of protagonist and author can take place in the middle of a stanza, in the middle of a sentence, even, with no warning or explanation, and the reader has to be alert. Madmen, savants and children often refer to themselves in the third person. So the question stands: is Maldoror referring to himself in the third person, or is Lautreamont referring to his creation? It’s this slippage of pronouns and resulting ambiguity that does much to create the transgressive mood of the work on a rhetorical, structural level.

Relationship between reader and text

For a text to break frame and address the reader directly is of course not new in 19^th century literature, but Maldoror/Lautreamont’s handling of this device is quite original. Surely no reader in 19^th century fiction has been so abused or treated with such contempt, bile and venomous rancour by an author; and surely no reader has been so well understood by his author. This attitude can be seen in its most concentrated and brilliant form in stanza 5.1, a long meditation on the nature of the reader and our interaction with the work. Maldoror anticipates the disgust and confusion of the reader in our encounter with his text: since the instinctive repulsion that manifested itself during my first pages has noticeably diminished in depth in inverse ratio to your application to the reading,…we must hope that your recovery will soon have reached it final stages. And he suggests a remedy for those readers whose sensibility does not allow them to enjoy these rancid visions. This remedy involves first ripping off your mothers arms and eating them. After he has effectively called the reader’s sister a whore, he provides a recipe of a potion the reader must drink in order to fully enjoy the work:

A basin full of lumpy blennorrhagic pus in which was first dissolved a hairy ovarian cyst, a follicular chancre, an inflamed prepuce skinned back from the glans by paraphimosis, and three red slugs. 5.1

Once you have drunk this evil brew, he crows, you will appreciate my poetry!

Maldoror’s ideal reader is one who knows how to unite enthusiasm with an internal coldness, [an] observer with a concentrated disposition (an accurate and sensitive description of any careful reader, it seems to me), and Maldoror tells us that he finds us perfect, even though – or perhaps because- the reader refuses to understand him. Paradoxically, and as a supreme transgression of the normal relationship between reader and text, the text simply does not wish to be understood; it refuses this kind of assimilation.

But it’s really in the second meaning of our emblematic word mal that the work really transgresses, for Maldoror sings of his utter hatred for God and Man. My poetry will consist only in the attack by all means in my power upon Man, that wild beast, and the Creator, who should never have created such vermin. 2.4 Maldoror, we learn, has suffered pain, a wound from both God and Man, and he sings about his resulting anger, humiliation and despair. Not since Milton’s Satan has wickedness and lust for revenge sung itself so powerfully. In one sense, the work is a long dark paean to revenge, the revenge of a soul outraged that consciousness has been thrust upon him; that he has to endure life on such unequal terms in a body marred by atrocious ugliness; revenge for being outcast.

Maldoror begins his text by warning the reader that he will be negatively effected by the work to come: the deadly emanations from this book will imbibe his soul as sugar absorbs water 1.1, and this is no empty rhetorical boast. The sickening power of Maldoror’s images and the virulent hatred for everything under the sun (with some notable exceptions as we shall see) does indeed cast a spell on the reader, altering forever the way he sees the world. The reader is literally sickened, as we have seen in the extract quoted above. By singing his pain and hatred so lucidly, Maldoror transfers it to his reader. Maldoror, his Creator (Lautreamont) and Man (the reader) are locked into an inescapable and terrible trinity.

2.) HORREUR: a physical sensation which causes goose bumps on the skin and the hair to rise, something which causes a sense of dread mixed with admiration and respect A symbol of physical revulsion produced by a text for which one has admiration.

The text is full of images of horror straight out of Bosch or the images of war photographers. To be sure, Lautreamont is using conventions well established by the Gothic literature of Maturin and Radcliffe, but he lifts them to a whole new level of gratuitous cruelty.

In one canto a young man is hung from a tree by his hair while two women – his mother and his wife- tar him and whip him; in another we are treated to an image of God sitting on a throne made of human excrement and gold holding the corpse of a man which he is eating, his feet bathed in a pool of boiling blood in which other living men are swimming or drowning; the text abounds with lice, spiders, tapeworms, grubs, all eating each other or eating man or being eaten by him; there are countless cruel murders and swollen corpses, rapes of prepubescent boys and virgin girls, acts of bestiality; disembowelment, torture, and death by a thousand different inventive means. The text is a catalogue of cruelty, a handbook of techniques for the depraved. Metaphors and similes all involve acts of violent cruelty: [the Creator] would show much wisdom if, during the time strictly necessary to  smash a woman’s head with hammer blows, he would forget his sidereal majesty… 2.3 Maldoror’s horreur is intensely physical: the text abounds with descriptions of body parts and fluids. There is a stench arising from the pages. (Ironically, when composing this piece my automatic spell checker kept ‘correcting’ Maldoror to ‘malodor’.)  You who are now gazing upon me, stand back, for my breath exhales poison.1.8

Maldoror strips away the conventional pieties of culture and civilization and reveals the true basis of life: horror and cruelty, nature red in tooth and claw. (It’s this aspect of the work which had such a profound effect on Artaud’s thinking.) Perhaps the only other writer to approach this level of depravity is De Sade, but Lautreamont goes further than De Sade because the Marquis always stays firmly in the realm of the real: De Sade’s perversions are limited to the physical reality of the body and what it is capable of enduring or doing. Maldoror’s cruelties transcend human capabilities, however, and enter the realm of the surreal: his anus is colonized by a crab, his testicles have been emptied, dried and turned into a dwelling for two cute little hedgehogs; Maldoror fucks a talking shark, the only being, he says, that can match his own evil; God comes to visit earth and falls into a drunken sleep by the side of the road whereupon a passerby shits on his face for three days…Throughout, Maldoror accuses the Creator of having created this cruel world: Maldoror’s own evil is no match for the Creator’s (although, god knows, he tries hard enough).

Ironically, this is a profoundly religious work  because it is not atheist. Maldoror/Lautreamont knows for sure that God exists, and his belief is sustained not by love of God but by an absolute implacable hatred of God.

3.) OR: metal of brilliant yellow and great weight, which one makes the currency of the highest value. A symbol of imperishable beauty and weighty value.

The work is not all depravity and disgust, however, for such a work would be indeed be unreadable. Buried in the middle of the syllables that make up the name of Maldoror, like gold in the pile of excrement of God’s throne, is the syllable for gold. Among Maldoror’s chants of unremitting hatred and cruelty are three that celebrate something positive, something good that Maldoror loves. The first of these is the stanza in which Maldoror sings of the sea, which he loves because its brine has the same taste as gall, because men have not been able to plumb its profundities, and because, deep though it is, it is still not as deep as the human heart. I salute you, ancient ocean. 1.8

The second is the stanza  in which he celebrates friendship. Friendship, and the betrayal of it, is a recurring theme throughout the work. Maldoror has been betrayed by a friend - the Creator- and he retaliates by describing incidents where he befriends a being and then betrays it in the most savagely cruel way, in incidents of transgression. This is the main action of the ‘novel’ in the last canto, for example. But in stanza 3.1 he describes a friendship that is not betrayed, that is not perverted. He and his friend Mario are riding along the beach on two horses, inseparable, united. They light a fire and share a cloak, they become the angel of the land and the angel of the sea. The text has this to say about them:  What do two hearts that love say to each other? Nothing…. Each takes as much interest in the life of the other as in his own life. 3.1

The third stanza where Maldoror sings the good, is his astonishing hymn to the abstract power and beauty of mathematics, the luminous triangle of Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry 2.10. Math for Maldoror is something extremely cold, prudent and logical; it disperses the smoke in his mind and makes him more intelligent; it is unchanging, impersonal and eternal. The words he uses to describe math are the words used by other beings to describe God, but Maldoror cannot talk about God in this way because he is tied forever to God by the strength of his hatred for him. Math is Maldoror’s religion, cruelty and hatred his mode of being. It is with math that he was finally able to dethrone his Creator and unmask the evil that is the Creator’s true nature. Interestingly, in this stanza he mentions Descartes in passing, which seems to suggest that perhaps Maldoror’s Cruel Creator is Descartes’s demon, le dieu trompeur.

For the reader, then, what gives the text its beauty, its weight and value? First, is the power of Lautreamont’s language. Maldoror describes his depravities and cruelties in the most exquisite, limpid, purely nuanced French. The text is widely regarded as one of the great glories of the language, rendered impeccably into English by Guy Wernham in the NDP translation. Second, is the depiction of a kind of sensibility that is entirely modern, it seems to me, a psychology in which consciousness is foregrounded and which describes the dualism of mind and body as intrinsically problematic: I feel that my soul is padlocked in my body and cannot free itself to flee far from coasts beaten by the human sea 3.1. We can call this an ‘underground sensibility’, after Dostoevsky’s underground man, the character in 19^th century literature who bears the closest psychological resemblance to Maldoror. Lautreamont gives us strings of beautifully crafted epigrams and insights into the kind of sensibility that experiences life as a wound:

How long it has been since I ceased to resemble myself. 3.1 If I exist, I am not someone else. I will not admit any equivocal plurality within myself. I wish to dwell alone within my intimate reason. Autonomy! 5.3 I received life like a wound, and I have forbidden suicide to heal the gash. 3.1

Finally, the value of the work lies in its utter uniqueness. To be sure, Lautreamont has spawned a host of imitators, from Huysmans to Genet, from Burroughs to Bukowski, from the Decadents to the Surrealists; and his metaphysics opens the way for the existentialism of Kafka and Camus; but really, none of these can approach Lautreamont for sheer intensity of writing, technical brilliance and bravura originality of conception and performance. The only contemporary writer who comes close to Lautreamont in mood and matter is Dostoevsky. Some of the things Dostoevsky’s more jaundiced characters say would be well understood by Lautreamont’s Maldoror: When Ipolit Terentyev in The Idiot remarks: Isn’t it possible to simply eat me without demanding that I praise that which has eaten me? we hear also the mocking vengeful singing of Maldoror.

He who is singing now does not claim that his songs are new. On the contrary, he is proud in the knowledge that all the lofty and wicked thoughts of his hero reside within all men.

Oh if only instead of being a hell, the universe had been an immense anus! 5.5

Fragment 199

In The Lover’s Discourse Barthes writes about irrational behavior, especially that prompted by love. For Barthes, irrationality stems from the image and the uncontrollable force of language produced by the image- this is the lover’s discourse. Under the signifier D for demons:

A specific force impels my language toward the harm I may do to myself: the motor system of discourse is the wheel out of gear: language snowballs, without any tactical thought of reality. I seek to harm myself, I expel myself from my paradise, busily provoking within myself the images (of jealousy, abandonment, humiliation) which can injure me; and I keep the wound open, I feed it with other images, until another wound appears and produces a diversion.

For Dostoevsky, irrationality was always self-harming, but only if self- harm is considered from the point of view of rationalism itself, from the dictum of never knowingly acting against your best self interest. And for Dostoevsky, too, this irrationalism erupts as an uncontrollable impulse towards language. Raskolnikov, in the Crystal Palace, blurts out his murder, but his interlocutor doesn’t believe him mainly on the grounds that if he was the murderer, he wouldn’t confess so brazenly to it. Think of all those characters who blurt out the wrong thing at the wrong moment, impelled by the language instinct to lacerate themselves, to make the situation worse, to assert their right to a capricious rejection of Paradise, the caprice of language itself. And think of all the demons in Brothers Karamazov, how Liza blurts out her love for Alyosha, and then prompted by her little demon, says that to be despised is good, expelling herself from her paradise.

Suddenly there are demons everywhere… BK 11.3

"The Case of Comrade Tulayev" Victor Serge

Adorno's famous statement - that it is barbaric to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz –is an expression of a more general dilemma: how does art deal with the horrors of reality, and is it indeed appropriate to create an aesthetic experience based on horror? In the case of this novel, the horror is the Great Purge of 1934-8, or the Yezhovshchina, as it is called in Russian, and the novel stands on a par with Akhmatova's long poem Requiem as both an indictment and a testament to what occurred.

On December 1^st 1934, the Leningrad Party head, and member of the Central Committee Sergei Kirov was assassinated on his way to work. The circumstances of his murder were – and still are – shrouded in a web of conflicting conspiracy theories, but it marked the start of the Great Purge. Suspects were rounded up, interrogated, forced to sign confessions, put on trial during which evidence of more conspiracies came to light, and then they were shot or imprisoned. The purge effected all ranks of Soviet society, especially the Old Bolsheviks, as Stalin used the assassination and subsequent enquiry as a pretext to remove anyone whose loyalty to him personally was not to be trusted. Among the most prominent victims were Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin, all high level party members who had known Lenin personally, and who had played crucial roles in the Revolutions of 1917 and the subsequent Civil War, and who represented the main threat to Stalin's dictatorship. The chief implementer of the purge was the head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, who was effectively Stalin's puppet until he too was purged in 1938 and replaced by Beria. The country became infected with fear as the purge extended its tentacles. Family, friends, colleagues, chance acquaintances, old comrades of the accused were hauled in for questioning and never heard of again; those who were doing the investigating one day were themselves hauled in and liquidated the next.

These are the events the novel describes. Victor Serge's credentials as a revolutionary were impeccable. Before the Revolution he had been imprisoned many times for revolutionary and anarchist activity, and had spent 5 years in solitary confinement before the age of 27. He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1919, played an active role in the Civil War and was sent on foreign missions for the Commintern. He became associated with the Left Opposition to Stalin's rule in the late 1920s, and in 1933 was himself arrested as part of the purge and sentenced to internal exile. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1936 and died in exile in Mexico City in 1947. He produced major studies of the early days of the Revolution in addition to other non-fiction work and journalism, as well as seven novels. The Case of Comrade Tulayev was published in French in 1949.

ooOOOooo

One of the main themes of the book is the relation between reality and fiction; and concomitantly about the difference between journalism and literature. Tulayev is emphatically not journalism, but literature grounded in fact, a distinction that is important for Serge because he was a preeminent practitioner of both genres. Journalism is always restricted by its historical circumstance; literature always rises above it; journalism dates, literature - art in general- remains always relevant; and by a strange alchemy, the greatest art is that which is most firmly of its period and yet also eternally transcends it. This theme is signalled by the opening disclaimer, a subtle parody of the usual legal rider:

This novel belongs entirely to the domain of literary fiction. The truth created by the novelist cannot be confounded, in any degree whatever, with the truth of the historian or the chronicler.

Formally, what distinguishes journalism from literature is the presence of pattern, literally artifice. The novel proclaims itself as a work of literature through its structure, by the way it calls out to other works of literature, by the way it allegorises the facts of history, and by the presence of beauty.

Many readers and critics have seen the absence of a central protagonist as a weakness of the book, but this is to misread the novel entirely. For the first few chapters, the novel does indeed read like a collection of character-centred short stories connected only by their historical setting. Gradually the connections between these disparate characters become clear; they begin to appear on the periphery of each other's stories. What links them all is their connection to the case of Comrade Tulayev, the novel's name for Kirov. The novel thus highlights the way that the purge connected everyone in a kind of sinister six degrees of separation. The slightest connection with someone else could result in arrest for something you didn't know you had done. The novel – like the purge - is in effect a web, with the spider – the case of Comrade Tulayev – at the centre.

The first chapter is a wonderful imagining of how some of the most beloved characters in 19^th century Russian literature would have coped in the Soviet regime of the 20^th  century. The novel opens with Kostia longing for a pair of shoes he has seen in a thrift shop. Shades of Gogol's story The Overcoat are everywhere present. The descriptions of the communal apartment are freighted with echoes of the very early works of Dostoevsky: Poor Folk, Mr Prokharchin and The Double; the clerk Romachkin who lives on the other side of the wall from Kostia is in effect an amalgamation of Dostoevsky's Prokharchin and Golyadkin. Life in the 1930s, Victor Serge seems to be saying,  is not much different from life in the 1840s for those at the bottom of society: there is the same poverty, repression and fear.

Although the novel is recognisably of its historical circumstances, the essential facts of the purge have been scrupulously ambiguated. The action of the novel takes place in an unnamed year, and it is unclear exactly how long the action of the novel lasts. Some of the real events mentioned in narrative arc include the demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (1931), the show trials of Zinoviev and Kamenev (1936), the Battle of Madrid in the Spanish Civil War (1936), and the re-establishment of religion (1941), and it's through these events that a time frame for the action of the novel can be worked out. A similar ambiguation for characters is employed. Tulayev is obviously Kirov, but Kirov is also mentioned in the text, so perhaps Tulayev is not Kirov. Kostia both is and is not Leonid Nikolayev, the Lee Harvey Oswald-figure who was ostensibly Kirov's assassin. Candidates for Yezhov include Erchov, while the Prosecutor General Vyshinsky, who led the show trials, is represented by Rachevsky; Rublev in the novel could be both Zinoviev and Bukharin; and Kondratiev, the  Old Bolshevik, writer and Commintern activist, could be Serge himself. Stalin appears in the novel as the Chief, not as the Boss, which was how he was actually called by the Party rank and file. The novel employs the same device used by Dostoevsky in Demons in which a character represents both a real person and a type, in a kind of double signification. However, the opening disclaimer disingenuously warns against looking for these kind of connections:

Any attempt to establish a precise connection between characters or episodes in this book and known historical personages and events would therefore be without justification.

A recurring image throughout the novel is starlight, and stars; and it's in these passages – and in the passages describing nature generally -that Serge's writing is at its most beautiful. Amidst the terror and the squalor, the descriptions of starlight on snow, or cranes flying over a winter forest stab the heart with beauty:

Crystals full of a secret light flowered on stones, covered the house fronts, clothed monuments. You walked on powdered stars through a stellar city: myriads of crystals floated on the globes of light around the street lamps. Toward midnight the sky became incredibly clear. The smallest light shot skyward like a sword. It was a festival of frost. The silence seemed to scintillate...

oooOOOooo

Historians of the purges have exercised themselves over the question of why the purges happened. This is the wrong question: they happened because Stalin ordered them. What's more interesting, surely, are the questions of how those purged reacted, how they themselves perceived the way purges were effecting the progress of the Revolution, why the Old Bolsheviks allowed Stalin to get away with what he did, why no one inside the upper echelons of the party stopped him before it was too late, how they justified the purges to themselves, indeed, how they lived with themselves. What historians cannot answer, the novelist can; and one of the most interesting aspects of the novel is the way it examines these questions by imagining how key figures in the Party attempted to reconcile their commitment to the Revolution with their sense of revulsion of what Stalin was doing to it.  

In a hushed conversation in their bugged apartment between the intellectual Rublev and his wife Dora shortly before his arrest, Dora asks: "Don't they realize they are poisoning the soul of the proletariat? That they are poisoning the springs of the future?"  Rublev answers: "No, they are not cowards...they are true, that is still true to the Party, and there is no more Party, there are only inquisitors, executioners, criminals... They assure themselves that it is better to die dishonoured, murdered by the Chief, than to denounce him to the international bourgeoisie..." He almost screamed like a man crushed in an accident: "And in that they are right."

In another scene, the High Commissar, now under arrest himself, is brought face to face with an old comrade, Ricciotti, who tries to persuade him to sign the confession which has been prepared for him. "Better men than you and I have done it before us. Others will do it after us. No one can resist the machine. No one has the right, no one can resist the Party without going over to the enemy." As Erchov resists and protests his innocence, Ricciotti reminds him of all those Erchov himself has signed off for execution, of the terrible things the Bolsheviks did in the name of Revolution. Erchov's riposte is: "I was a soldier, I obeyed orders- that's all", the eternal refrain of the loyal functionary who has forgotten his humanity.

In another key scene where Kondratiev reports on his trip to Spain to the Chief, the Chief asks him: "Do you think I have many faults, Ivan?" Kondratiev answers him: "It is not for me to judge you. You are the Party."  The Chief muses: "I'll wipe out every one of them, tirelessly, mercilessly, down even to the least of the least. It is hard, but it must be. Every one of them. There is the country, the future. I do what must be done. Like a machine."

In addition to the all-pervasive fear of the times, Victor Serge movingly brings to life the sense of great ideals, sacrifices and hopes utterly crushed by the burden of petty expediences, violence and lies, and the resultant feeling of desolation and unspeakable regret; and in this, perhaps, lies the great achievement of the novel.

The stars of death stood over us.

And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed

Under the crunch of bloodstained boots

Under the wheels of Black Marias.

From Requiem

Anna Akhmatova

'Beware of Pity' Stefan Zweig

Here in the arena of the inner man the big tournaments take place.

Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky Stefan Zweig

From my very first dreams, that is, from my very childhood, I was unable to imagine myself otherwise than in the first place, always and in all turns of life.

The Adolescent Dostoevsky

Compassion is the chief, perhaps the only law of being for all mankind.

The Idiot Dostoevsky

Stefan Zweig is the early 20th century inheritor of Dostoevsky; or so he would have us think. Like the Russian master, his fictional territory is the human soul, or to put it in Freudian terms, the ego.  Zweig was the author of an influential and well-regarded study of Dostoevsky. This novel –the only full length novel published by Zweig in his lifetime -  may be read as dialogue with two ideas of Dostoevsky: the development of the self, and the centrality of pity or compassion in the human heart.  

The protagonist, a cavalry officer in the Austrian army, Lieutenant Hofmiller, a young man of 25 who has only known the army, inadvertently insults a young crippled girl at a dance. In order to make amends, he befriends her and her family, and her doctor, the enigmatic Dr Condor. He becomes ever more deeply embroiled in the affairs of the family until things reach a crisis of conflict between his duty to his regiment and his duty to his crippled friend, Edith, who has fallen in love with him. From this small incident, Zweig builds a large psychological edifice in much the same way that Dostoevsky does.

Zweig’s two main themes here are the development of the ego through the pity aroused by another human being’s suffering; and the consequent loss of freedom this entails.

Zweig’s dialogue with Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky charts the development of the ego in his penultimate novel, The Adolescent, in which Arkady achieves a fully socialised ego through the conflict aroused by insults. In Zweig’s novel, this development of ego awareness is occasioned not by insults, but through pity. By experiencing pity, Hofmiller becomes aware of his own individuality and the reality of another.  His growing friendship with the family, and his increasing centrality in the world of the cripple brings him to the realisation that he can be an important part of other people’s lives, that he is not just an insignificant cipher in a unit, as he had until now regarded himself.

Zweig’s second theme, that of compassion, is most clearly enunciated by Dr Condor: Pity is a confoundedly two-edged business. Anyone who doesn’t know how to deal with it should keep his hands and above all his heart off it. Dr Condor has married one of his patients, a woman whom he had been unable to cure of blindness, perhaps in an attempt to fulfil the Dostoevskyan maxim from The Adolescent: I would set it down as a commandment for any developed man to make at least one being happy in his life, unfailingly and in something, but to do it in practice, that is in reality. Dr Condor warns the young Hofmiller that pity is like a drug for the person who is the object of it. That person demands more and more, until pity becomes a terrible burden on both pitier and pitied. Pity has the power to corrode and infect all other emotions. Hofmiller is forced to ask himself does he really love Edith, or is it merely pity? Does Edith really love him, or is her love merely an addiction to the pity he gives her? Both pity and love become a burden, a loss of freedom. True sympathy cannot be switched on and off like an electric current…anyone who identifies himself with the fate of another is robbed to some extent of his own freedom.  

Zweig’s model of ego development

Having set himself a Dostoevskyan task, however, Zweig falls short of fulfilling it. The novel contains a number of weaknesses which ultimately undermine Zweig’s claim as the inheritor of the mantle of Dostoevsky in early 20^th century central European literature. These weaknesses stem from a rather constricted, perhaps one can say, timid approach to life and humanity,  a lack of a truly original  imagination, an Austrian Herrkoemmlichkiet that Zweig simply cannot escape from.

Dostoevsky’s model of the ego posited an initial, rampantly egoistical self, an untamed monster at the heart of its own world: Arkady in The Adolescent says: I was unable to imagine myself otherwise than in the first place, and gradually this ego becomes socialised through its awareness that others also have this experience, in other words, a simultaneous awareness of itself as subject and object marks the first step of ego awareness.

Dostoevsky’s work is full of examples of protagonists who do not become healthy socialised egos, but who remain locked in their immature solipsism. The narrator of the short story A Gentle Creature, for example, seeks to understand his wife’s suicide only in terms of his own impact on her, not in terms of her own problems, in terms of her own experience of her life: She was frightened by my love, asked herself the solemn question whether to accept it or not, found the question too much for her to bear and thought it better to die.

Hofmiller has the same moment of immaturity, when he visits the cripple for the first time after his inadvertent insult, his second meeting with her. She is seated in the same corner at the same table, with the same rug over her knees, hiding her deformity. Hofmiller remarks in parenthesis (Why repeat a situation so painful to me?) an insight into his solipsism. He shows no awareness that she also has feelings about the situation; he is locked into his own egoistic perception of it, projecting them onto the other, in much the same way the narrator of A Gentle Creature is. 

However, the insight of this Dostoevskyan psychology is undone by the revelation that Hofmiller has until now regarded himself as a nothing, as an insignificant nonentity. Packed off to the army at an early age by an uncaring family, he believes himself to be marginal, overlooked, insignificant, and only at the age of 25 does he realise that this might not be correct. This simply does not ring true.  Dostoevsky’s psychology, of an initial untrammelled egoism socialised through internal conflict is both more original artistically and more accurate psychologically than Zweig’s notion of an ego unaware of itself brought to awareness through an awakening of pity. One simply cannot have the kind of solipsism Hofmiller shows in the earlier stages of the book when he projects his fears onto Edith if one believes oneself to be a nonentity.

Zweig starts with an ego which is nothing and which becomes something; Dostoevsky starts with an ego which is everything and which becomes something, a vision which is both more radical and more insightful.

The Aphorism

Another main area of weakness in the novel occurs at what we may call the level of the aphorism. Any novel that aspires to enduring greatness includes in addition to plot, description and dialogue, aphorisms in which the ‘teaching’, or the ‘thinking’ of the author is revealed. These aphorisms interrupt the flow of the story, stand outside it, comment on it, and add to the multiplicity of voices in the novel in that they are not the voice of the narrator, but closer to that of the author. Hugo’s narratives, for example, or Eliot’s are full of these kind of aphorisms. They add depth and interest to the reading experience, Hugo’s through their sonority and portentousness, Eliot’s through their sheer originality of thought and expression. At the same time, they reveal, unwittingly, perhaps, the soul of the author. (It’s interesting that Dickens, who towers above everyone else, completely eschews these kind of aphorisms, while Dostoevsky’s aphorisms are never Dostoevsky’s, but always those of his characters or the narrator, who is always a character in the story.)

Zweig’s aphorisms are also given by the (first person) narrator, but here the difference between narrator and author is so indistinguishable as to be tantamount to the same thing. And the aphorisms reveal further the sheer conventionality of Zweig’s soul.

“It is always encouraging to a talker to find he is being a success.” “Any form of constraint fetters the true forces of the spirit.” “Our decisions are to a much greater extent dependent on our desire to conform to the standards of our class and environment than we are inclined to admit.” “ A man of limited vision is hard to bear with in any sphere in which he is invested with power, but in the army it is intolerable.” These are aphorisms of such banality that they are hardly worth the labour of reading or copying. They exist on about the same level of: “A carriage has wheels.” They do not challenge, they do not startle, they do not rattle the soul. They barely even interest.

In describing the tyranny of the Colonel of the regiment, a martinet before whom everyone trembles, officers and men together,  Zweig writes: A human being will accept the strictest disciplinary measures with a better grace if he knows that they will fall with equal severity on his neighbour. Justice in some mysterious way makes up for violence. Are we really to believe and accept that a deserter, for example, lined up with other deserters in front of a firing squad about to be shot as a disciplinary measure will feel much better about it because he knows he is not alone in his punishment? Are we really to accept that this is a form of justice? Does Zweig really expect us to accept this guff?

Where Zweig really reveals himself, though, is in the aphorisms about love and sexuality. He who is himself crossed in love is able from time to time to master his own passion, for he is not the creature, but the creator of his own misery; and if a lover is unable to control his passion, he at least knows that he is himself to blame for his sufferings. But he who is loved without reciprocating that love, is lost beyond redemption, for it is not in his power to set a limit to the other’s passions… So far so good, so far so general. However, when the aphorism switches from generalities about love to the specifics of love between men and women, Zweig really reveals his conventionality: When a women resists an unwelcome passion, she is obeying to the full the law of her sex, the initial gesture of refusal is a primordial instinct in every female, and even if she rejects the most ardent passion, she cannot be called inhuman. But how disastrous it is when Fate upsets the balance, when a woman so far overcomes her natural modesty as to disclose her passion to a man…and he, wooed, remains cold and on the defensive… not to return a woman’s love is to shatter her pride, to violate her modesty. The man who rejects a woman’s advances is bound to wound her in her noblest feelings.  So ladies, let me ask you, do you agree? Is the full and only law of your sex to resist unwelcome passion? Is the primordial instinct of the female to refuse? How do you feel about being designated as ‘inhuman’ on those occasions when you do not refuse, and when you break your ‘natural modesty’ and reveal you have the hots for a man? Are your impulses to make advances towards a man really your noblest feelings?

Zweig’s aphorisms do everything to confirm the prejudices and worldviews of his readers. They maintain the Gemutlichkeit of his world, rather than puncturing it.

oooOOOooo

The novel is not all bad. There are some redeeming features. Hofmiller’s internal predicament is shattered by the assassination of Ferdinand and Sophia in Sarajevo, and the public historical world finally impinges in the personal and psychological. The descriptions of the mobilisation and early days of the war that follow are very fine. The book gives an admirable portrait of a class and time long vanished, and in spite of its faults and narrowness of soul, is somehow compulsively readable.

Finally, I hate to cast cold water on NYRB for their excellent efforts to revive the forgotten books of the past, but they need a better editor. The translation appears to have been made by writers who do not know English let alone German (Ungeduld Des Herzens actually means The Heart’s Impatience); and the introduction, by some American journalist, is therefore, as one would expect,  a miracle of cultural ignorance and illiteracy.

Compassion is the chief, perhaps the only law of being for all mankind.

The Idiot

Fragment 0116

Dostoevsky wrote of Pushkin: He is one of the greatest of Russians who is still far from  being interpreted and understood properly. After Pushkin no one has said anything new.

Dostoevsky’s own project – his depiction of the burden of consciousness- has its seeds in this poem by Pushkin, composed on the occasion of the poet’s thirtieth birthday:

Gift haphazard, unavailing,

Life, why wert thou given to me?

Why art thou to death unfailing

Sentenced by dark destiny?

Who in harsh despotic fashion

Once from Nothing called me out,

Filled my soul with burning passion,

Vexed and shook my mind with doubt?

I can see no goal before me:

Empty heart and idle mind.

Life monotonously o'er me

Roars, and leaves a wound behind.

Perhaps only Dostoevsky could have found the real anguish in the lines Vexed and shook my mind with doubt? and used them as a springboard for his own depictions of enraged consciousness:

What right did this Nature have to bring me into the world as a result of some eternal law of hers? I was created with consciousness, and I was conscious of this Nature: what right did she have to produce me, a conscious being, without my willing it?...

From 'The Sentence'

DOW

October 1876

Notes towards a reading of 'Brothers Karamazov' 11.9

11. “My dear fellow, upon my word I don't know”

The devil appears to man, and man asks him whether God exists, and the devil replies that he doesn’t know. This is the essence of the whole chapter.

Can sarcasm get any more corrosive than this? Can irony get any more bitter than this? If the devil doesn’t know, who does? The ramifications of this little snippet of dialogue are endless and spinning.

Is the devil an atheist or an agnostic?

Is the existence of the devil necessary for the existence of God?

If I believe in the devil, do I believe in God?

What if the devil is lying?

Does the devil exist, or is he a projection of man’s?

Is it easier for an atheist to believe in the devil than in god?

If an atheist becomes convinced of the independent existence of the devil, does it then follow that an atheist might eventually come to believe in god?

In asking these questions, we operate on at least three levels: theological level, belief level, and literary level. What is the theological, doctrinal  point of view? What do I believe about this? What is the ideational, symbolic position of the character in the scene?

"Summer in Baden Baden" Leonid Tsypkin

There are some books that are so good, that are so in tune with the reader’s current obsessions, that they create a conflict in the reader, a conflict between awe for the achievement of the author, and a kind of burning jealousy and sullen disheartenment that the author had the idea and executed it first. This is the book that I should have written, dammit!

This slim novel has two intertwined narratives and worlds. In the first, the narrator ‘Tsypkin’ is on a train journey from Moscow to Leningrad at some point during the late Soviet period. Day is waning, and it is deep winter. He is reading on his journey the Diaries of Anna Grigoryevna Dostoevsky, the writer’s second wife. He arrives in Leningrad, stays with an old friend, and in the morning goes to visit the Dostoevsky museum in Kuznechny Street.  His impressions of his journey and his visit to Leningrad are interwoven with the impressions which arise in his mind engendered by the book he is reading, which form the second narrative.

In this narrative, the Dostoevskys are on their way to Baden Baden in the summer of 1867 to escape from  the writer’s creditors. They stay in the spa town for a few months, where Dostoevsky is consumed with his passion for gambling and plagued by terrible fits of epilepsy, Anna is pregnant with their first child, they are harassed by money worries and ill treated by the natives of the town, and continuously insulted and humiliated.

This brief synopsis does little to convey the great power of this book, however, which lies chiefly in its prose style, and in its method.

Tsypkin (or his translators) has invented a new kind of sentence, one that meanders for pages and pages, but is broken by dashes, a kind of stream of consciousness monologue compounded of impressions of the journey- impressions of the book he is reading on the journey- ideas that spin out from these impressions- memories of what he has read of Dostoevsky’ life- mini narratives that flesh out- as only fiction can- the known details of that life - the relationship between the writer and his wife- mini narratives that vivify the quotidian texture of Dostoevsky’s life as he experienced it- the sweat- the eternally patched and darned clothes – wearing the wrong kind of hat - the subtle grades of humiliation encountered on visits to pawnshops- memories of the novels and other Dostoevskyana- it’s a perfect representation of a mind thoroughly immersed in the work of another writer- a representation of the process of reading itself-  of a mind in the grip of a lifelong obsession.

Particularly powerful and subtle is Tsypkin’s method of incorporating details from Dostoevsky’s novels into the narratives about the Dostoevskys in Baden Baden. Dostoevsky is accused by his neighbour at the roulette wheel of having scooped up some of his neighbour’s chips after a particularly big win. Dostoevsky of course had no idea he had done this, he is so wrapped up in his obsession with winning, the inner sensations of it; but the other man is convinced he has done it on purpose. For a moment, the whole crowd around the table regards Dostoevsky with disdain; he is a thief in their eyes, a scoundrel, and he savours this humiliation, bracing himself against it with mad fantasies of revenge, just as the underground man does in his novel. This incident comes from The Adolescent, written in the mid 1870s, after D had already returned to Russia from his European exile. Tsypkin in this way uses material from the fiction to flesh out his imagined rendering of Dostoevsky life. At the same time this suggests how such fictional incidents may have had their roots in Dostoevsky’s biography, where they were to lie dormant for many years until mined by the writer.

This is a hugely successful way of circumventing the biographical fallacy, that bugbear of biographers, by incorporating it into the fabric of an artistic narrative, one that is personal, imaginative, sensitive and utterly convincing. Much of the strange essentials of Dostoevsky’s biography are here, through the power of art, made perfectly lucid and understandable, notably his fraught relationship with Turgenev; his humiliating fall from grace after the huge success of his first novel; his self-defeating loyalty towards his terrible, grasping relatives; his anti-Semitism, which is particularly worrying for Tsypkin, himself a jew; his imprisonment and exile.

Chief among these is the role played in the novel by Anna Grigorievna herself. She forms the chief focus of the second narrative; and indeed the novel is as much about Anna Grigorievna as it is about Dostoevsky and ‘Tsypkin’. The text is larded with incidents and observations from her Diary. This brings her inner life and relationship with the writer into focus in a much more powerful way than most standard biographies of Dostoevsky do, where she is more often than not relegated to the status of helpmeet. Here, her central  role in the novel reflects much more her central role in Dostoevsky’s life, and allows the reader to arrive at a more nuanced, more sympathetic, human understanding of Dostoevsky’s whole world. Through this, the reader comes to regard Dostoevsky as Anna herself does, with a mixture of awe, exasperation, pity and love.

An unforgettable book.

Fragment 1611

Paradoxes, Prophecies and Parodies, on the Difference Between Private and Public Writing, and the Benefits of Ambiguity

It was rather a curious incident. When he had just left the university and was preparing to go abroad upon his two thousand roubles, Ivan Fyodorovitch published in one of the more important journals a strange article, which attracted general notice,….What was most striking about the article was its tone, and its unexpected conclusion. Many of the Church party regarded him unquestioningly as on their side. And yet not only the secularists but even atheists joined them in their applause. Finally some sagacious persons opined that the article was nothing but an impudent satirical burlesque.

The Brothers Karamazov 1.1.3

Peter Ustinov called Dostoevsky ‘the prophet of paradoxes’, and this is true in two ways, in that Dostoevsky’s prophecies are often profoundly paradoxical, and in that he employs a paradoxical tone to sound his prophecies.

The Paradox

A paradox works by playing with an inversion of terms and thereby sustaining mutual incompatibilities. The greatest paradoxicalist in the world, Oscar Wilde, wrote: if one is going to go to the trouble of having parents, one must undertake to bring them up. This paradox works by substituting the term ‘parents’ for its opposite ‘children’, thus turning a profoundly banal statement that is really not worth the trouble of uttering, into something witty, possibly absurd, but on deeper reflection actually quite profound, in this case, hinting at the often painful process of growing individuation and the assertion of oneself in the face of parental or familial pressures.

In his public non-fiction writings Dostoevsky is addicted to this kind of paradoxical utterance, in which he inverts the normal terms for their opposites: War fosters brotherly love and unites nations. 1876. Apr.2.2, he writes, substituting ‘war’ for ‘peace’ in this case.

In one essay in the Dairy, called 'A Paradoxicalist', Dostoevsky reports a conversation with a man who utters a string of witty paradoxes:

Humanity loves war in order to be part of some noble idea. It is a human need.

A prolonged peace hardens people’s hearts. 1876. Apr.2.2

Science and the arts flourish particularly in the immediate postwar period. War renews and refreshes them…1876. Apr.2.2

It is specifically for the people that war has the finest and the most sublime consequences. 1876. Apr.2.2

We encounter the paradoxicalist again a few months later, when in a discussion about bon ton, he utters, among other things:

Every fashionable society is good in that it is in closer touch with nature than every other society, even agricultural ones, which mostly all still live in an unnatural fashion. 1876. Jul.4.1 

Dostoevsky seems to parodying by these means the war-mongerers of Europe, and Russia and perhaps those Westernisers who saw in European civilisation the best of all possible worlds. By the use of paradox, he is signalling that he doesn’t really believe these terrible things. We read, we smile, we say, how charmingly paradoxical, how outrageous, how witty.

The Prophecies

So it is a shock then to discover that the very same ideas expressed in public by the paradoxicalist are found in a private letter, written by Dostoevsky to his niece in 1870: With your views on war, I can’t possibly agree. Without war, people grow torpid in riches and comfort and lose the power of thinking and feeling nobly, they get brutal, and fall back into barbarism. Without pain, one comprehends not joy. Ideals are purified by suffering, as gold is by fire….You write: “People kill and wound and then nurse the wounded.” Do but think of the noblest words that ever yet were spoken: “I desire love and not sacrifice.”  Here, in private, Dostoevsky reveals that what appear to be paradoxes in his public writing, are actually straightforward expressions of opinion, passionately held convictions, Jeremiads, prophecies.

Leaving aside the whole problematics of the nature of the prophecies (Dostoevsky  passionately believes that war is an act of Christian love, that it is more enobling than peace…), what is profoundly disquieting about this addiction to a paradoxical tone in his public utterances is that it calls into question every belief or opinion that Dostoevsky voices in his fiction and in his journalism, both the religious and the atheistic.

Parody and Burlesque

We have already seen how, in Dostoevsky’s fiction, laughter from other characters often accompanies statements of the loftiest idealism as well as statements of the deepest depravity, and this laughter serves to place these statements in a field of ambiguity, where the statement has two simultaneously existing statuses: as a profundity, and as a parody of a profundity.

Dostoevsky employs laughter in certain places to foreground this double stance. But that doesn’t mean to say that where there is no laughter, there is no ambiguity; that this ambiguity exists only where there is laughter to highlight it.

The paradoxical tone has the potential to infect every utterance even without the presence of laughter from the characters, so that we can no longer take anything Dostoevsky says as having one, stable meaning: it means one thing, but it also means its opposite. As the narrator says in Brothers Karamazov, it’s a double edged sword.

Some Examples of the Double Edged Sword

How can I believe in God without a God to believe in?

Profundity or Parody? For an atheist, or for someone earnestly struggling with questions of belief, this is a profundity. But we have to acknowledge the fact that Dostoevsky possibly intended it as a parody of the kind of soul searching that atheists go in for; we have to face the fact, based on his private writings,  that Dostoevsky himself found this kind of statement ludicrously stupid, and that he is actually scorning this kind of soul searching.

I have seen the truth, and its living image has filled my soul for ever.

Profundity or parody? For an atheist, this is a parody of the kind of profundity that fundamentalists utter. We know Dostoevsky regarded this a profundity because his private writings are full of this kind of stuff, but the paradoxical tone of his public writing opens it up to the possibility that it can be read as a parody of the religious.

What makes Dostoevsky profoundly modern is that the paradoxical nature of his writing not only forces a conscious interpretative decision upon the reader -parody or profundity? – but it also allows both interpretative choices to exist simultaneously. (This is a characteristic of 19^th century Russian philosophy which is full of examples of thinkers who were able to simultaneously hold beliefs regarded by Western thinkers as opposites and therefore mutually exclusive.) This in part accounts for the fierceness with which atheists, nihilists, and Christian fundamentalists alike claim Dostoevsky as their prophet.

oooOOOooo

Dostoevsky was haunted by the fear of being misunderstood, and he complained many times in his public and private writing that his words had been misinterpreted as paradoxical, when he had intended them as prophecies, and vice versa. Let’s look at two examples, first from his letters, and second from the Diary. In the first he complains that what he had intended as straight talk had been interpreted as parody, and in the second, that what he had intended as parody had been interpreted as prophecy.

Example 1: Private

In July 1876 he wrote to his friend Solovyev complaining about the reception an essay from the Dairy had received: And then there happened precisely what I had expected: even those newspapers and magazines which are friendly to me raised an outcry, saying that my whole article was hopelessly paradoxical; while the others bestowed not the smallest attention on it – and here I am who believe that I have opened up the most important of all questions!

The essay in question, published in the June issue of the Diary consisted of four chapters, entitled, ‘My Paradox, ‘Deduction from My Paradox’, ‘The Eastern Question’, and ‘The Utopian Conception of History’. In them Dostoevsky rehearsed at length his view of Russia’s spiritual mission, with nasty sideswipes at the Jews and the Westernizers. In it we find utterances such as these:

We are revolutionaries out of some internal necessity, even out of conservatism. 1876. Jun.2.2

Russia’s whole power, her whole personality, so to say, and her whole future mission lie in her self-denying unselfishness. 1876. Jun.2.3

Conservative revolutionaries? Unselfishness as a form of power? These are classic paradoxes, in which terms are inverted and mutual incompatibilities are sustained.

What’s most interesting about Dostoevsky’s complaint to Solvyev, however, is that a) he precisely expected this response, and b) that he believed his audience would recognise his sincerity. It’s not surprising that his audience thought he was being paradoxical, given the titles he gave the chapters. On the other hand, it’s very surprising that, given these titles and the tone, Dostoevsky genuinely expected his audience would see his real intention, would see through the parody to the prophecy.

Example 2: Public

Our second example has Dostoevsky putting his complaint and his explanation entirely in the public sphere.

In the October 1876 issue of the Diary, Dostoevsky wrote about suicide, about the possible reasons for (what was perceived then as) an epidemic of suicides among the young. In one chapter, called ‘The Sentence’, Dostoevsky presented a suicide note from a materialist, of course, who committed suicide out of boredom. After accusing Nature for having created him against his will, having endowed him with the burden of consciousness only to extinguish it at death, the writer of the note passes sentence on Nature: Therefore, in my incontrovertible capacity as plaintiff and defendant judge and accused, I condemn this nature, which has so brazenly and unceremoniously inflicted this suffering… since I am unable to destroy Nature, I am destroying myself, solely out of weariness of having to endure a tyranny in which there is no guilty party. 1876. Oct.1.4.

The whole tone of the essay is once more steeped in paradox  but at the same time, is one of the most profound justifications of atheism in literature, an expression of pure absurdism that anticipates Camus, Becket, Keirkegaard and Sartre.

Dostoevsky was inundated with letters about this essay. He was accused of justifying suicide (a potentially dangerous accusation given the Orthodox stance on suicide and Dostoevsky’s past as a political prisoner), accused of putting dangerous ideas into the heads of the young and disillusioned. His words were taken seriously as prophecies.

Two months later, in the December issue of the Diary, he answered these accusations in an essay called ‘A Belated Moral’: Good lord! Do I have many readers like this? [Do people] seriously believe that I described this case to win him sympathy?

In this second essay, Dostoevsky describes how his friends had urged him to insert a moral into ‘The Sentence’ to make his intention clear. Dostoevsky remarks in this second essay: I myself while writing the article (The Sentence) felt that a moral was essential, yet somehow I felt embarrassed to add one. I felt ashamed to assume that even the most naïve of readers would be so simple minded as to miss the inner sense of the article, its intent and its moral. Its intent was so clear to me that I could not help but assume that it was equally clear to everyone. It seems that I was mistaken. 1876 Dec 1.2. 

In a further essay, he reveals that he had intended ‘The Sentence’ to be a parody of atheism, a burlesque of logical positivism, what he called ‘straightline thinking’.

The Benefits of Ambiguity

What’s significant in these two examples is that Dostoevsky reveals that he expected this kind of response, a response wildly different from his intention. If that is the case, what prompted him to employ this kind of style? What was the reason for couching his most heartfelt convictions and most strenuous oppositions, his prophecies, in a style that was so paradoxical that it opened up a huge gulf between the intention of the author and the reception by the reader, a style that rendered his utterances capable of being interpreted as prophecy and at the same time as a burlesque of prophecy?

Part of the answer can be found in the same letter to Solovyev we looked at earlier:

One can set up any paradox one likes, and so long as one doesn’t carry it to its ultimate conclusion, everyone will think it most subtle, witty, comme il faut; but once blurt out the last word, and quite frankly (not by implication) declare: “This is the Messiah!” why, nobody will believe in you any more – for it was so silly of you to push your idea to its ultimate conclusion.

He then goes on to mention Voltaire, a writer Dostoevsky intensely admired, and a famous master of paradox: If many a famous wit, such as Voltaire, had resolved for once to rout all hints, allusions, and esotericisms by force of his genuine beliefs, to show the real Himself, he would quite certainly not have had a tithe of the success he enjoyed. He would merely have been laughed at. For a man instinctively avoids saying his last word, he has a prejudice against ‘thoughts said’.

He then quotes a line from one of the most beautiful and famous poems of 19^th century Russian literature, Silentium, by Tchyutchev: A thought once uttered is untrue.

The Paradoxical Prophecy, and the Prophetic Paradox

For Dostoevsky, the paradoxical prophecy, the prophetic paradox, was a way of deliberately sustaining ambiguity because ambiguity was in itself a virtue that–most superficially perhaps- guaranteed success as a writer by allowing a wider range of responses from his audience. A self-conscious, deliberately maintained ambiguity of intention- which he learnt in the early part of his journalistic career as a way of cheating the censor - was a way of dealing with the slipperiness and unreliability of language, where many a slip happens between mind and lip, between author and reader. At the same time, it allowed the true self of the author to remain hidden from view within the work of art, and the final word on the matter to remain forever unspoken.

Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal

the way you dream, the things you feel.

Deep in your spirit let them rise

akin to stars in crystal skies

that set before the night is blurred:

delight in them and speak no word.

How can a heart expression find?

How should another know your mind?

Will he discern what quickens you?

A thought once uttered is untrue.

Dimmed is the fountainhead when stirred:

drink at the source and speak no word.

Live in your inner self alone

within your soul a world has grown,

the magic of veiled thoughts that might

be blinded by the outer light,

drowned in the noise of day, unheard...

take in their song and speak no word.

Tyutchev

Beauty’s an awesome terrible thing! It’s awesome because it’s indefinable; as indefinable and mysterious as everything in God’s creation! It’s where opposites converge, where contradictions rule!

BK 1.3.3.

Brother Ivan, never mind being an atheist, writes religious articles for a practical joke…

BKK 1.2.7.