Fyodor Dostoyevsky: EIE-Ni? or IEE-Fi? or EII?

“Dostoevsky as Rorschach Test” (1971) by Simon Karlinsky:

The plain fact of it is that Fyodor Dostoevsky was a novelist, a literary artist who wrote works of imaginative fiction. To say this is not to belabor the obvious: much of what one gets to read and to hear on the subject of Dostoevsky could very easily lead one to believe, if one didn’t know better, that he was a theologian, a political analyst, an existentialist philosopher or some sort of revolutionary. Back in 1940, Ernest J. Simmons, in one of the earliest American books on this writer, had to remind his readers that whatever other dimensions Dostoevsky’s books may possess, they are, after all, novels. That reminder is still as timely as ever.

No other novelist’s work has been so widely drawn upon by fields and disciplines that do not normally draw on fiction for their sources. Cesare Lombroso and other turn-of-the-century criminologists used Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov as textbooks in courses on the role of heredity in criminal behavior. The idealistic philosopher Vladimir Soloviov based his theological concept of Godmanhood on these same novels, while Sigmund Freud saw in them the key to explaining the impulse to parricide.

The impact Dostoevsky produces on some readers at times verges on the apocalyptic. I knew a young Yugoslav Catholic who gave up his intention of entering holy orders when he decided that The Brothers Karamazov was written, as he put it, “by a greater prophet of Christ than any of the four Evangelists.” “It has often been said that it is lucky his Karamazovs were not finished,” wrote Herman Hesse in all apparent seriousness, “otherwise not merely Russian literature, but all Russia and all mankind might explode and vanish into the air.”

All accepted standards of literary criticism and textual analysis tend to break down, to fade or to mutate when applied to Dostoevsky. His prose has always been a magnet for the kind of reader (and commentator) who does not give a hoot about the art of literature, who mistrusts sober observation of reality, and who primarily looks for a reflection of his own self and for a possible vehicle of self-expression in every book he reads.

While there exists a considerable body of meaningful and admirable Dostoevsky criticism in the West, many Western commentators are attracted to him mainly as a pretext for airing their own views, prejudices, concepts or moods. The Hermann Hesse essay on The Brothers Karamazov quoted above is a good example. Ostensibly analyzing the novel, Hesse actually describes the spiritual climate of German intellectual life at the end of World War I. Hesse does this quite honestly and openly: “One should not believe that all the thoughts and ideas which I express about this book were uttered consciously by Dostoevsky. On the contrary: no great prophet and poet has the power fully to interpret his own vision.”

The numerous French admirers of Dostoevsky, who have been twisting and distorting his thought in recent decades in order to turn him into a Kierkegaard or a Sartre, on the other hand are not nearly so honest. The notion that Dostoevsky has not fully succeeded in expressing his own ideas in his novels and that somebody else had better bring them out and dot all the i’s is exemplified by John Middleton Murray’s book of 1916. Since that time, a number of other critics have constructed their own systems of supposedly Dostoevskian thought (often unwarranted by the texts of the novels or the known views of the novelist) and then proceeded, as Hugh McLean put it, to bend the knee before their own creations in worshipful wonder.

Dostoevsky is universally venerated, but just how much he is read or understood remains a puzzle. The author of the recent Broadway adaptation of The Idiot changed the heroine’s name from Nastasya (a colloquial form of Anastasia) to Natasha (an endearment for Natalie and quite impossible with the patronymic Philippovna), but not a single drama critic who wrote of this widely reviewed production noticed the change.

An article on Leningrad in the New York Times travel section casually mentions the old prisons—“dark cells where Dostoevsky and others who criticized the czarist regime were confined.” Such a simplistic image of Dostoevsky as a leading dissident of his time and a revolutionary martyr can be frequently encountered in the American press, both Establishment and underground, and this can only mean that neither his biography nor his general views are familiar to those who modishly bandy his name about. Someone ought to translate the set of disgustingly chauvinistic, jingoist and anti-Semitic poems (yes, poems) which Dostoevsky wrote in the late 1850’s, urging that Russia conquer other countries, calling down God’s blessings on Russian conquests and denouncing the Jews as leeches who torture Russia; copies of these poems should be handed out to all the starry-eyed champions of the progressive, revolutionary Dostoevsky. Of course, a simple reading of The Possessed and of The Diary of a Writer might also help.

Those who wish to enhance their grasp and understanding of Dostoevsky (as opposed to “relating to him” or “getting high on him”) have at their service a whole little library of biographical and critical studies in English, some of which, in their informed and balanced presentation of the material, are superior to anything published on Dostoevsky in other languages, including Russian. The three excellent surveys of the writer’s life and work are those by Ernest J. Simmons (in my opinion, the finest achievement of this veteran American Slavicist), Edward Wasiolek’s Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction and the book by the émigré scholar Konstantin Mochulsky, now available in translation. Mochulsky’s book is particularly important for its numerous quotations from the many as yet untranslated Russian studies of Dostoevsky. Donald Fanger’s Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism is an absorbing demonstration of the origins of Dostoevsky’s literary art and of his debt to his immediate predecessors Gogol, Dickens and Balzac. And of course those who would like to get deeper into Dostoevsky criticism can turn to the books and articles by Robert Louis Jackson, Joseph Frank, R. P. Blackmur, George Gibian, Ralph E. Matlaw, Vladimir Seduro, Philip Rahv (his essay on The Possessed is more timely today than it was 20 years ago) and many, many others.

Crowning all these riches, we now have the English translations of Dostoevsky’s sketches and notebooks for his last five novels, very ably edited by Edward Wasiolek. It should be endlessly fascinating for the Dostoevsky buff who knows the novels thoroughly but cannot read Russian to be able to enter Dostoevsky’s laboratory and to follow the various transformations the character of Stavrogin went through or to observe the gradual emergence of the father in A Raw Youth as the central and most important figure in the book. The translation and the presentation of these notebooks are quite admirable, particularly impressive are Edward Wasiolek’s highly intelligent and sensible introductory essays, especially the one to the notebooks for The Brothers Karamazov.

A possible effect of the publication of these notebooks might be an increase of objectivity in American Dostoevsky criticism, the appearance of a more level-headed, matter-of-fact approach. All too often, the only acceptable tone is that of hushed reverence. A few polite kicks at the awesome pedestal might be healthy. There somehow has to be room for a more balanced appraisal that takes into full cognizance Dostoevsky’s obscurantist, reactionary ideology, the excessively nagging and hysterical tone of his narrators, the cheap and flashy effects with which he stages some of his dramatic confrontations and the occasional but undeniable sloppiness of his plots and of his Russian style (translators almost inevitably find it expedient to tidy Dostoevsky up and to tone down some of his stylistic extravagances). Dostoevsky’s stature is much too secure to be endangered by any of these facts; but their open recognition could lead to a deeper, more genuine understanding of his art.

One of the best kept secrets in Western criticism is that Dostoevsky does not happen to be everyone’s cup of tea. Many intelligent, compassionate, sensitive people find his overheated universe of stormy passions, gratuitous cruelty, tormented children and hysterical women definitely uncongenial. The strangeness of the Dostoevskian universe, so well conveyed by Virginia Woolf (“We open the door and find ourselves in a room full of Russian generals, the tutors of Russian generals, their stepdaughters and cousins and crowds of miscellaneous people who are all talking at the tops of their voices about their most private affairs”), which foreigners tend to ascribe to some peculiarities of the Russian national character, is just as strongly felt and often resented by Russians themselves.

Russian dictionaries list a common noun, derived from the writer’s name, dostoevshchina, which is a derogatory term describing an undesirable mode of behavior. A person guilty of dostoevshchina is being deliberately difficult, hysterical or perverse. Another possible meaning of this word is excessive and morbid preoccupation with one’s own psychological processes. The word is a part of the normal Russian vocabulary, incidentally.

Thus, while no Western critic or literate person would dare to admit publicly that he dislikes certain aspects of Dostoevsky or is bored by them, Russians themselves have never felt any such compunctions. In fact some of the most important Russian literary figures who came after Dostoevsky’s time have shown themselves wholly unreceptive to his magic.

Leo Tolstoy, the greatest of Dostoevsky’s contemporaries, made no attempt to meet him while he was alive. He bitterly regretted the omission after Dostoevsky died, although a meeting could have easily been arranged through numerous mutual friends, had either side been really interested. Of all the novels by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy valued only Notes From the House of the Dead for the universal accessibility of its condemnation of inhumanity, which he compared to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and George Eliot’s Adam Bede. The Insulted and the Injured is known to have touched Tolstoy—but there is no reason to think that he saw any worth in Dostoevsky’s other novels. Tolstoy tried to reread The Brothers Karamazov in 1910, the year of his death. “I’ve started reading it,” he wrote to one of his correspondents, “but I cannot conquer my revulsion for its lack of artistic quality, its frivolity, posturings and wrong-headed attitude toward important matters.”

Anton Chekhov was 29 years old and a recognized writer when he first sat down to read his way through Dostoevsky. “I’ve purchased Dostoevsky in your store and now I am reading him,” he wrote to the publisher Suvorin. “It’s all right, but much too long and lacking in modesty. Too pretentious.” In Chekhov’s stories and personal letters, the name of Dostoevsky usually occurs in passages condemning some high-strung or hysterical or hypocritical female. Since Chekhov, with his gentle humanity, relativistic moral outlook and reliance on precise and unbiased observation of everyday life, is Dostoevsky’s exact antipode in the Russian literary tradition (and for this reason is usually disliked by ardent Dostoevskians), the lack of affinity is both expected and understandable.

Maxim Gorky, who valued Dostoevsky’s literary achievement very highly, nevertheless considered popularization of Dostoevsky’s work detrimental to the cause of progress and revolution in Russia. On the eve of World War I, Gorky became embroiled in a major controversy when he made vehement protests against the stagings of dramatized versions of Crime and Punishment and The Possessed by the Moscow Art Theater and several other Russian theaters on the grounds that these productions would further the cause of political reaction. A number of prominent writers and intellectuals of the day wrote letters to editors, condemning Gorky’s attack on Dostoevsky, but he received strong support from Lenin (whose most memorable comment on the subject of Dostoevsky came when he referred to a mediocre writer as “the ultra-bad imitator of the ultra-bad Dostoevsky”).

While Gorky was careful to qualify his ideologically motivated denunciations of Dostoevsky with admiring statements about Dostoevsky’s enormous literary talent, Gorky’s one-time close associate (and later, after the Revolution, his sworn enemy) the Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin, refused to grant Dostoevsky any literary talent or stature whatsoever. The published diaries of Galina Kuznetsova, who was a member of Bunin’s household during his residence in the south of France in the 1920’s and 1930’s, contain a wonderfully vivid description of a clash on the subject, complete with screaming and slamming of doors, between Bunin, who tried rereading The Possessed and found it totally worthless, and his wife, secretary and other members of his staff, all of whom were warm admirers of Dostoevsky. Bunin’s conclusion was that the universal admiration for this, in his opinion, irritatingly inept writer must be the result of mass hypnosis.

Then there is Marina Tsvetaeva, one of the most important Russian poets of the 20th century, for whom Dostoevsky was a totally unnecessary writer. In a letter to a friend, Tsvetaeva compared Dostoevsky to her favorite Russian novelist, Leskov, and to the novels by Sigrid Undset and confessed that she could love their books the way she could not possibly love Dostoevsky. For Tsvetaeva, the world of Dostoevsky was “a dream-world, without colors, untinted, all in the even, artificial light of a photographic film that shows only the contours.” A character in a novel by Nabokov, we might note, compared Dostoevsky’s world to a room in which an electric bulb is gratuitously burning in broad daylight.

This is not to suggest for a moment that the majority of Russian writers were indifferent to Dostoevsky or rejected his influence. Almost all of Russian Symbolist poetry, all of Russian non-Marxist philosophy and much of the best in the Soviet prose of the 1920’s can testify to the pervasiveness and the depth of Dostoevsky’s impact on Russian culture.

The constant presence of Dostoevsky in the writings of Vladimir Mayakovsky (in his powerful, if flawed, masterpiece of autobiographical poetry About This as well as in his plays and many of his shorter lyrics) is as evident as it is unexpected. Paradoxically, it is to the theological aspects of Dostoevsky—the concepts of Redemption and the Redeemer, the dream of the Golden Age, the heavy reliance on Old and New Testament imagery—that the militant atheist Mayakovsky responded most frequently and profoundly. Only the schizophrenic attitude of the Soviet literary Establishment toward Dostoevsky and their insistence on a simplistically dogmatic treatment of Mayakovsky have prevented this fascinating and important problem in literary scholarship from getting the extensive treatment it deserves in the vast area of Soviet Mayakovsky studies.

The negative views of Dostoevsky held by the important Russian writers cited above might help Western readers to place in their proper perspective the numerous and well-publicized potshots that Vladimir Nabokov has been aiming at his illustrious compatriot. Reactions to Nabokov’s qualifications of Dostoevsky as “a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar,” “a prophet, a claptrap journalist, and a slapdash comedian” or “a much overrated sentimental and Gothic novelist” have ranged from puzzlement and stupefaction to rage. However, Nabokov’s attitude to Dostoevsky, motivated in all probability by the same set of factors as the attitudes of Chekhov and Bunin, must have acquired its additional polemical bite from the author’s decades of residence in the West, where the blind adulation of Dostoevsky can be as irritating as it is universal.

Nabokov, observing American motels and colleges and then reproducing their very fabric and climate in Lolita, and Dostoevsky, traveling through Paris and London and then reducing these cities to the private nightmares of his own anti-Western, sexually obsessed subconscious in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions; Nabokov, reading Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and then trying to reconstruct to the best of his ability every nuance of Pushkin’s meaning in his voluminous commentary to his translation of that novel, and Dostoevsky, savagely distorting the characters, the plot and the very text of Pushkin’s masterpiece in order to make it all conform to his nationalistic, Slavophile ideology in his famous Pushkin speech of 1880—these are only two of the many contrasts that illustrate the irreconcilable differences in the two writers’ view of life and in their conception of the art of literature.

Yet, for all this repulsion, there remains the unanswered question of Nabokov’s repeated utilization of themes and subjects that had earlier been treated by Dostoevsky. A character that functions as the hero’s double (a topic that admittedly bores Nabokov) recurrently appears in various novels by these two writers. Some of the basic themes of Crime and Punishment are present, possibly parodistically, in Nabokov’s Despair, while the narrators of both The Eye and Pale Fire are in many ways comparable to the narrator of Notes From the Underground. And it was none other than Nabokov who in Lolita gave the world a full-scale treatment of a subject around which Dostoevsky circled like a cat around a saucer of hot milk in novel after novel only to recoil from it in horror. But while these parallels are certainly present, the uses to which the two writers have put these similar themes are of course vastly different—as different, say, as a setting of the same melody by Moussorgsky and by Stravinsky would be.

Dostoevsky’s prophetic gifts, which even Nabokov seems to admit grudgingly, are considerable. Notes From the Underground (the more correct translation of the Russian title would be Diary Written in a Basement) remains, whatever else it might be, a great prophecy of 20th-century irrationality and anti-intellectualism. A recent radio broadcast of a discussion between Herbert Marcuse and some black and white militants about the ways and means of making the contented American working classes dissatisfied with their lot and ready for revolution sounded uncannily like a replay of one of the key scenes in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed.

When later on, during the same broadcast, Professor Marcuse, who had insisted that he loved and understood America, was pressed to specify which aspects of American life he found particularly attractive, he fumbled for an answer, said he loved the hippies, with their long hair, and after some more fumbling, mentioned the beautiful American scenery, threatened by pollution. Despite an obvious effort, he could think of no other items. It was a quintessentially Dostoevskian spectacle of a man brilliantly at home in the world of abstractions, generalizations and political theories, but hopelessly blind to the actual details of human existence, to the texture of life as it is experienced on this planet at this juncture of history.

In a novel by Richard Brautigan an incidental character compiles a book called The Culinary Dostoevsky. He claims that he eats quite well by reproducing various recipes he has found in Dostoevsky’s novels. Brautigan’s fancy is delightful, but in actual fact his character would end up very poorly nourished. Gogol, Tolstoy and Chekhov, among Russian writers, have written lovingly and at length about various foods eaten by their characters. But Dostoevsky, who can be so magnificant in his own realm of irrational passions and spiritual insights, had very little interest in the physical basis of human life or in man’s natural surroundings. The only kinds of food that it would occur to him to use for literary purposes are a crust of dry bread someone denies to a starving little boy or a pineapple compote that a neurotic young girl dreams she would eat if she were witnessing the crucifixion of a child.

For the flavor and the feel of actual life as it was lived in Russia, reproduced with all the fidelity and subtlety that literary art is capable of, we have to turn to writers who were interested in such things: to the Turgenevs, the Pisemskys, the Chekhovs and the Bunins.




from The Karamazov Brothers by Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Ignat Avsey); pages 322-327 (‘The Grand Inquisitor’):

‘ “. . . And if there is a mystery, then we too were right to preach mystery and to teach them that what is important is not the free choice of the heart, nor love, but mystery, to which they must submit blindly, even against the dictates of their conscience. That is what we have done. We have improved upon Your creation and founded it instead on miracle, mystery, and authority. And men were delighted that once more they were led like sheep, and that that terrible gift which had brought them so much suffering was lifted from their hearts at last.

Tell us, were we right to teach thus and to act thus? Have we not really loved man when we have so humbly recognized his weakness, have lightened his burden out of love, and out of consideration for his feeble nature have even allowed him to sin, so long as it is with our permission? So why then have You come to interfere now? And why do You look at me so silently with your humble, piercing eyes? Why are You not angry?

I do not want Your love, because I do not love You. Why should I conceal anything from You? I know who I am talking to you, don’t I? Everything I have to tell You, You already know, I can read it in Your eyes. How can I keep our secret from You? Perhaps that is precisely what You want, to hear it from my lips—listen then: we are not with You but with him [the devil]—that is our secret! We ceased to be with You and went over to him a long time ago, already eight centuries ago [circa 756 AD].

Exactly eight centuries ago we accepted from him [the devil] what You had rejected with indignation, that last gift that he offered You, showing You all the kingdoms of the earth: we accepted Rome and the sword of Caesar from him, and we proclaimed ourselves the only kings on earth, the only true kings, although we have not yet been able to complete our work. But who is to blame? Oh, this work is still in its infancy, but it has begun. We shall have to wait a long time for its completion, and the world will have to endure much suffering, but we shall achieve it and we shall be the Caesars, and then we shall think about universal human happiness. And meanwhile, You could still have accepted the sword of Caesar.

Why did You refuse that last gift? Had You accepted that third suggestion of the mighty spirit [the devil], You could have provided all that man seeks on earth—that is to say, someone to worship, someone to take charge of his conscience, and finally, a way to be united unequivocally in a communal and harmonious antheap, for the need for universal unity is mankind’s third and last torment. Mankind as a whole has always striven towards universal organization above all. There have been many great peoples, each with an illustrious history, but the more elevated the nations the unhappier they were, because they were more conscious than others of the need for universal unity of mankind. The great conquerors, the Tamerlanes and the Genghis Khans, rampaged over the earth like whirlwinds, seeking to conquer the world, but they too, even if unconsciously, were giving expression to that selfsame overriding need of mankind for a universal and general unity. By accepting the world and Caesar’s purple, You would have founded a universal kingdom and brought universal peace. For to whom is it given to rule over men, if not to those who rule over their conscience and in whose hands is their bread? And so we took Caesar’s sword and, having taken it, of course we renounced You and followed him [the devil]. Oh, there are still centuries of excess to come, excess of spiritual freedom, of science and anthropophagy, because having started to erect their Tower of Babel without us they will end in anthropophagy. But that is when the beast will come crawling to us, lick our feet, and spatter us with bloody tears from its eyes. And we shall mount the beast and raise up the cup, and on it will be written ‘Mystery’. And only then will the kingdom of peace and happiness for mankind begin.

You pride Yourself on Your chosen ones, but You have only the chosen ones, whereas we shall bring peace to all. Besides, that’s not all: how many of those chosen ones, of those mighty ones who could have become the chosen ones, have grown weary of waiting for You and have taken and will continue to take their strength of spirit and their passionate hearts to another altar, and will end by raising their banner of freedom against You Yourself? But it is You Yourself who will have raised the banner. With us, on the other hand, everyone will be happy and will not rebel any more or exterminate one another, as they did everywhere under Your freedom. Oh, we shall convince them that only in surrendering their freedom to us and submitting to us can they be free. Well, shall we be right or shall we be lying? They will see for themselves that we are right, for they will remember to what horrors of slavery and confusion Your freedom led them. Freedom, science, and independence of spirit will lead them into such a labyrinth and confront them with such miracles and such insoluble mysteries that some of them, intractable and savage, will destroy themselves, while others, intractable but less strong, will destroy one another; and those who remain, feeble and unhappy, will crawl up to our feet and will cry out to us, ‘Yes, you were right, you alone held his secret, and we are returning to you: save us from ourselves.’ When they receive bread from us they will understand, of course, that we take their own bread from them, made by their own hands, in order to redistribute it without any miracle; they will see that we have not turned stones into bread, and they will truly rejoice not so much over the bread itself, but over the fact that they receive it from our hands! Because they will remember only too well that without us the very bread that they made turned to stones in their hands, but that when they returned to us the very stones turned to bread in their hands.

They will appreciate, they will appreciate only too well what it means to subjugate themselves for ever! And as long as men do not understand this, they will be unhappy. Who has contributed most of all to this incomprehension, tell me? Who divided the flock and dispersed the sheep into unknown ways? But the flock will reassemble and will submit again once and for all. Then we shall endow them with a quiet, humble happiness, a happiness suited to feeble creatures such as they were created. Oh, we shall persuade them in the end not to be proud, for You elevated them and taught them pride; we shall show them that they are feeble, that they are only pitiful children, but that childish happiness is the sweetest of all. They will become scared and will begin to look to us and to huddle up to us in fear, as chickens huddle up to the broody hen. They will wonder at us and fear us, and be proud that we are powerful and clever enough to subdue such a turbulent flock, a thousand million strong. They will tremble mightily before our anger, their spirit will be rendered submissive, their eyes tearful like those of children and women, but at a sign from us they will readily give themselves to gaiety and laughter, shining joy and happy, childlike singing. Yes, we shall require them to work, but in their free time we shall devise for them a life such as a child’s game, with children’s songs in chorus and innocent dances.

Oh, we shall even allow them to sin, for they are weak and feeble, and for having been allowed to sin they will love us in the way that children do. We shall tell them that every sin will be expiated if it is committed with our permission; we shall allow them to sin because we love them, and the punishment for those sins—so be it, we shall take that upon ourselves. We shall take it upon ourselves, and they will worship us as benefactors who have taken on the burden of their sins before God.

And they shall have no secrets from us. We shall permit or forbid them to live with their wives and mistresses, to have children or not to have them—subject to their obedience—and they will submit to us cheerfully and willingly. They will bring us their most tormenting problems of conscience—everything, they will bring everything to us and we shall resolve everything, and they will accept our judgement with joy, because it will spare them the great burden and terrible torment of personal and free choice that they suffer today. And everyone will be happy, all the millions of beings, except the hundred thousand who govern them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, only we shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy children, and a hundred thousand martyrs who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil. They will die in peace, depart peacefully in Your name, and beyond the grave will encounter only death. But we shall withhold the secret and, to keep them happy, we shall opiate them with promises of eternal reward in heaven. Because even if there really were anything in the hereafter, it certainly would not be for such as them.

It is said and prophesied that You will return triumphant, that You will come with Your chosen ones, Your proud and mighty ones, but we shall tell them that they saved only themselves, whereas we have saved everyone. It is said that the whore riding the beast and holding her mystery in her hands shall be disgraced, that the weak shall rise up again, that they shall tear her finery and lay bare her impure body. But then I shall arise and show You thousands of millions of happy children who have not known sin. And we who have, for their own happiness, taken upon ourselves their sins, we shall stand before You and say, ‘Judge us if You can and if You dare.’ Know that I do not fear You. Know that I too was in the desert, that I too fed upon locusts and roots, that I too have blessed the freedom with which You have blessed mankind, and that I was ready to join Your chosen ones, to unite with the strong and the mighty ones who yearn ‘to make up their number’. But I came to my senses and did not wish to serve insanity. I have turned back and joined the legions of those who have improved upon Your creation. I have left the proud and have turned back to the humble, for the sake of the happiness of those humble ones. What I have said shall be, and our kingdom will be created. I tell you again, tomorrow You shall see that obedient flock, at a sign from me, rush to stoke with hot coals the pyre on which I shall burn You for having come to interfere with us. For if anyone deserves our pyre more than all others, it is You. Tomorrow I shall burn You. Dixi [I have spoken].” ’


Ivan stopped. While speaking, his speech had become more and more impassioned; when he finished, he smiled suddenly.

Alyosha, who had listened in silence, but towards the end had many times in extreme agitation wanted to interrupt his brother but had clearly been restraining himself, suddenly began to speak as if electrified.

‘But… this is absurd!’ he exclaimed, reddening. ‘Your story is in praise of Jesus, not in disparagement… as you claim. And who will believe what you say about freedom? Is that really how freedom should be understood? Is that how the Orthodox Church understands it?... It is Rome, but not all of Rome, it isn’t true—it is the worst of the Catholics, the inquisitors, the Jesuits!... And then, such a fantastic character as your Inquisitor couldn’t exist. What are these sins of men that they have taken upon themselves? Who are these guardians of a mystery who have taken upon themselves some curse for the good of mankind? When have they been seen? We all know about the Jesuits, who are greatly maligned, but are they like your characters? They are nothing of the sort, absolutely not… They are simply the Roman Church’s army for a future world state, with an emperor—the Roman pontiff—at its head… that’s their goal, but with no mystery and no false sentimentality… Just normal desire for power, for sordid worldly gain, for the enslavement of others… a kind of future serfdom where they’ll become the landowners… that’s all it is they want. Perhaps they don’t even believe in God. Your suffering Inquisitor is just a fantasy…’



- from A New Word on The Brothers Karamazov; p. 210-226 [“The Jewish Question and The Brothers Karamazov” by Maxim Shrayer]:

Both yes and no. Yes!—if one assumes that the human spirit, like a geometrical figure with all its sides and angles, lies in an open hand, fits entirely on a flat surface; no!—because we realize that a human heart possesses a fathomless depth, is a mysterious and self contained world full of unelucidated hints and insurmountable contradictions. – Aron Shteinberg, “Dostoevskii I evreistvo” (“Dostoevskii and Jewry”), 1928

[T]hat this man should not have come up with even a single word in the defense or justification of a people persecuted over several thousands of years—could he have been so blind?—or was he perhaps blinded by hatred?—and he did not even refer to the Jews as a people, but as a tribe as though they were a group of natives from the Polynesian islands or somewhere—and to this tribe I belonged and the many friends and acquaintances of mine with whom I had discussed the subtlest problems of Russian literature, and to this tribe also belonged Leonid Grossman and Dolinin, Zi’bershtein and Rozenblyum, Kirpotin and Kogan, Fridlender and Bregova, Borshchevsky and Gosenpud, Mil’kina and Hus, Zundelovich and Shklovsky, Belkin, Bergman and Dvosya L’vovna Sorkina and the many other Jewish literary critics who have gained what amounts to a monopoly in the study of Dostoevsky. – Leonid Tsypkin, Summer in Baden-Baden


What place would be assigned to the Jews in Dostoevsky’s theocracy? Would they be allowed to exist as a Judaic community within a larger Christian one? That would certainly depend on who the theocrat is: Father Zosima or the Grand Inquisitor. If the church state is structured in keeping with Father Zosima’s teachings, the Jews would probably be expected to merge with the Christians when the conditions for this merger have been created. If the theocrat is the Grand Inquisitor, some of the Jews would be forcefully converted, some probably becoming Marranos, while the rest would be expelled, if not exterminated. Somewhere between these two poles lie Dostoevsky’s own attitudes toward the Jews and Judaism, ranging from moments of idealistic universalism and open-mindedness to long streaks of enmity and intolerance.

Let me state from the outset that I think the Jewish question in Dostoevsky is primarily a religious one rather than a social or ethnic one. Religious considerations permeate and supersede the other aspects of Dostoevsky’s writings on the Jewish question, and in fact “the Judaic question” might be a more adequate representation of what Dostoevsky grappled with when writing of the Jews. Of course there are Dostoevsky’s socioeconomic and political anxieties and phobias, but his dominant concern is this: What is one to do with the Jews in view of the obvious fact that they have refused to recognize Christ and will not convert even as they face persecution? This is the crux of Dostoevsky’s disagreements with, fears of, claims against, animosity toward, and even inspired flights of admiration and compassion for the People of the Book.

Of course, there are Dostoevsky’s more or less crude versions of economic Judeophobia—look at his penchant for such terms as Jewish “usury” and Jewish “gold trade”; look at his quasi-Marxist (and quasi-Marxian) and populist explanations of and arguments about Jewish involvement in trade and banking. And there is Dostoevsky’s anti-Jewish social rhetoric of the “Yid is coming” variety: the menacing Jewish upward mobility (and hence the numerus clausus should be kept in place); the mysterious kahal; the status in statu; the individualism and exclusiveness of the Jews. Once removed from their respective discursive, epistolary, or fictional contexts and summarized, Dostoevsky’s socioeconomic and political statements on the Jewish question argue for the existence of an alleged international Jewish conspiracy and already anticipate the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion that were a concoction of the czarist secret police. Dostoevsky’s arguments strike historians of Jewry as both familiar and predictable. There is no need to debunk them here: they are the stale bread of the chroniclers of the Jewish question, and only the students of Dostoevsky’s art stare forlornly at those pages where the word “Yid” gapes like a black hole amid other black letters. Still, one should not forget that at the Beilis trial in 1913, Chief Prosecutor O. Iu. Vipper invoked Dostoevsky’s moral authority when speaking, in the name of the people, about “the Yids” who would “destroy Russia.” One might also find it noteworthy that in 1995, sections 1 to 3 of chapter 2 of Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer for March 1877 were reprinted by an ultrapatriotic Russian publisher in the same series as Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Henry Ford’s nefarious treatise, International Jewry. This brochure, The Jewish Question, which features Dostoevsky’s name on the cover and takes its title from the first section of his essay about the Jews, also contains Adolf ******’s “My Political Testament.” Ronald Hingley’s incensed comment comes to mind in this connection: “The idealization of war, the mumbo-jumbo about a great people’s destiny, the assertion of grandiose territorial designs combined with peace loving professions, and above all the exalted, hysterical and sometimes unharmonious prose style—all these are features uniting [Dostoevsky’s] The Diary of a Writer with ******’s Mein Kampf.” I will not grace with comments the cohort of Russian ultranationalist litterateurs who have claimed Dostoevsky as their spiritual ancestor.

By the middle 1870s, toward the end of his career, Dostoevsky commanded a larger-than-life authority over the Russian reading public. The trouble with his discursive writings about the Jews, culminating in the March chapters of The Diary of a Writer for 1877, lies not in their novelty or profundity but rather in the fact that through these writings, Judeophobic thinking was given national legitimacy. Indeed, Arkadii Gornfel’d is quite right that Dostoevsky’s indictments of the Jews contain no “serious evidence, nor particularly striking ideas.”* In fact, on a number of occasions, Dostoevsky plainly lies, as in his irresponsible remarks about the suffering of the Jews in the imperial army: “Ask if the Jew is abused in the barracks as a Jew, as a Yid, for his faith, for his tradition?”. If only once Dostoevsky had spoken of the plight of the kantonisty, the young Jewish recruits who often starved themselves to the point of inanition, refusing to violate the dietary laws of koshrut and continuing to serve Russia and her czars! Or consider Dostoevsky’s ill-advised remark about the Jews in the postbellum United States: “But let them, let them be morally purer than all the nations in the world, and certainly of the Russian nation, and in the meantime I have just read in the March issue of Vestnik Evropy [European Messenger] a report that in America, in the southern states, the Jews have already attacked with all their power the multimillion masses of the freed Negros and have already taken them under their control, through their known and centuries-old ‘gold trade’, and are taking advantage of the inexperience and human flaws of this exploited tribe”.

Let me also draw attention to the linguistic side of Dostoevsky’s writing about the Jews. In his essay “The Jewish Question,” Dostoevsky offers a justification for using the term zhid (“Yid” or “kike”): “Could it be that they accuse me of ‘hatred’ because I sometimes call the Jew ‘Yid’? But, first, I did not think that it was so offensive, and, second, the word Yid, as far as I can recall, I have always used to connote a certain idea: ‘Yid, Yiddism, Yids’ kingdom’, etc. Here a certain notion, a direction, a characteristic of the century was being fleshed out”. Suggestions have been made that Dostoevsky draws a distinction between evrei (the biblical Hebrews) and zhidy (his contemporary Jews, the “Yids” or “kikes”). Such explanations of these opprobrious word choices are problematic, for the linguistic aspect of Dostoevsky’s attitudes toward the Jews entails too many variables to be packaged into a neat (and apologetic) formula: epoch and milieu, background, authorial intent, verisimilitude, speaker, usage, and speech context. [It is, for instance, difficult to “make sense” of Dostoevsky’s flippant use of the noun zhid in his essay “On the Occasion of an Exhibition”, from The Diary of a Writer for 1873.] Whatever his intent may have been, when readers hear the words “Yid” or “kike” from Dostoevsky, the sheer linguistic power of these derogatory terms is tremendous—and obviously much greater than when such terms come from the mouths of street thugs.

And yet, to brand Dostoevsky’s rhetoric about the Jews “banal,” as Gornfel’d did, or to ignore the presence of the Jewish question in Dostoevsky’s life and works (as most Soviet scholars were forced to do), is to commit an injustice both to Dostoevsky and to the history of Jews and Judaism. Scholars and critics have approached this problem in a number of ways, and I would like to assess the variety of judgments that have been made to date.

First, there are the apologists, of whom the finest and most sensitive is Joseph Frank, who famously called Dostoevsky “a guilty anti-Semite.” Then there are the proponents of psychoanalytic criticism, headed by the Freudian Felix Dreizin, who referred to Dostoevsky as a “compulsive anti-Semite”; the psychoanalysts have sought explanations for Dostoevsky’s hateful remarks in his childhood and his relationships with his parents, as well as through his mental health. Other scholars have focused on various aspects of the poetics of the Jewish question in Dostoevsky, generating compelling readings of his fictional works: Felix Philipp Ingold, Gary Rosenshield, and Michael Katz. Another approach to Dostoevsky’s morbid fascination with Jews and Judaism has been to apply the idea of a Dostoevskian double to his writings on the Jewish question. Most recently this idea was formulated by Peeter Torop, who spoke of the Jew as Dostoevsky’s double in whom Dostoevsky is reflected: “he neither loves nor hates himself, but loves or hates himself in this other.” Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, David Zaslavskii, Felix Dreizin, and others have argued for the idea of “two Dostoevskys.” Refuting this position, Katz remarked that “of course there is only one Dostoevsky, a very complex one.”

Three scholars stand out as the authors of the most provocative works about Dostoevsky and the Jews: Leonid Grossman, David I. Goldstein, and Gary Saul Morson. Grossman zoomed in on a single case study, Dostoevsky’s correspondence with Avraam-Uria Kovner, the “Jewish Pisarev.” Published in 1924, Grossman’s captivating microhistory, Confession of a Jew, was much ahead of its time in its methods and in the conclusions it offered.* Its protagonist, Kovner, was, one might say, himself a Dostoevskian character, a Jew and an atheist who converted to Christianity fourteen days prior to his marriage to a non-Jewish woman, a political radical and utilitarian critic, an idealistic embezzler who stole exactly 3 percent of the annual profit of Russia’s richest bank. Kovner made a powerful impression upon Dostoevsky, compelling him to speak of the Jewish question in a polemical essay. In modern Dostoevsky scholarship, Grossman was the first to place religious, and specifically messianic, questions at the center of Dostoevsky’s thinking about the Jews. Grossman brilliantly argued that a Jewish person, Jesus Christ, and a Jewish book, the Old Testament, preoccupied Dostoevsky’s artistic imagination.


David I. Goldstein’s Dostoyevski and the Jews still puzzles many of the writer’s students. Although Goldstein’s book is very useful and reliable, its denunciatory thrust is misplaced. Assessing the book, Gary Saul Morson pointed to Goldstein’s refusal to allow the possibility that passages and even whole works by geniuses may “convey inhumane, fanatic, and morally unacceptable views.” Morson further suggested that the success and outcome of one’s reading of Dostoevsky’s writings about the Jews depended on one’s individual background, position, moral beliefs, and aesthetic predilections: “One reason many critics find Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitic passages disturbing is that the critics are, unlike Dostoevsky, themselves hostile to anti-Semitism. . . . It is hazardous to deduce facts about an author’s process of creation directly from a value judgment, or from any report of a reader’s response, because the circumstances, constraints, and concerns that shaped the making of a work need not coincide with those that shaped its reception.” It may thus follow that one’s thinking and writing about Dostoevsky’s thinking and writing about the Jews becomes thinking and writing about one’s individual act of reading Dostoevsky on the subject. This is a sobering and cautionary idea. What choices does one have in reading and interpreting Dostoevsky on the Jewish question? Is one’s refusal to read Dostoevsky the only truly moral response to his objectionable, Judeophobic attitudes? And, finally, must one make a distinction between the statements that Dostoevsky made about the Jews in his fiction and in his discursive writings?

Of all Dostoevsky’s readers past and present, Vladimir Solov’ev has come the closest to understanding Dostoevsky’s divided and yet hauntingly integral views. Solov’ev argued that Dostoevsky realized his own formula of the Russian ideal—a formula Dostoevsky articulated in his Pushkin speech of 1880—“more as a sage and artist than as a thinker.”

As I prepared to write this essay, I reread both Solov’ev’s essay “The Russian National Ideal” (1891) and Dostoevsky’s Pushkin speech (1880). In the New York Times Magazine, I came across an interview with an elderly lady, Maude McLeod, whose ancestors were black Jews. The interview struck me as Dostoevskian in spirit and relevant to the subject of this essay. I quote from McLeod’s account of her “return” to Judaism:

I grew up on the island of Montserrat, and my parents were supposed to be Christian. But in the years that I was home I always wondered why my people were so particular about what they did. We did not eat pork. My uncles were all circumcised. We ate challah bread on Friday night. . . . All of that we did, and we did not know why we were doing it—because they told us that we were Christians. But I knew something was wrong, see? My grandfather told my mother we came from West Africa. And many years later I heard that the people on Montserrat were Hebrews that were taken as slaves from Ghana and carried to the island. . . . I came to New York in 1923 when I was 19 years old. . . . It was 1927 when I first met Rabbi Matthew on Lenox Avenue. He was standing on a ladder with a yarmulke on, and . . . he was preaching that we were not Christians as they had told us, but that we were the lost house of Israel. I heard the call. . . . I did not join the Hebrew faith—I returned. I simply was on the wrong road and found my way back. . . . When I go to synagogue, and the shemah sounds, I sing, “Shemah yisroel adonai elohanu adonai echad,” and my voice is solid. [Maude McLeod and David Isay, “ ‘I Did Not Join the Hebrew Faith—I Returned,’” New York Times Magazine, 29 September 1999, 116].

What would Dostoevsky say about this “individual case” of a Christian reclaiming her Judaic roots? The prospect of a Judeoized Orthodox Christianity seems anything but unlikely to Dostoevsky. In The Diary of a Writer, he asks a sinister question and gives an even more sinister answer: “And in the meanwhile a fantasy has sometimes entered my head: well, what if there were 3 million Russians, and not Jews, in Russia; and there were 80 million Jews—well, what would become of the Russians under them and how would they abuse them? Would they give them a chance to have the same rights? Would they allow them to pray among them freely? Would they not turn [the Russians] straight into slaves? Worse yet, would they not rip our skins off?” I wonder how Dostoevsky would react to an account of Russian villages where the bearded and straw-haired Russian peasants—the followers of the Judeoizers—followed Mosaic law, kept kosher, and fasted on Yom Kippur. [Small Judaic communities of Russian peasants had survived into the post-World War II Soviet period and were persecuted by the Soviet authorities.]

Vladimir Solov’ev was absolutely right to emphasize that religious aspects are central to Dostoevsky’s rhetoric on the Jewish question. Scholars have suggested that Solov’ev started his own campaign for the reconciliation and unification of Orthodoxy with both western Christianity and Judaism in his third Dostoevsky speech of 1883. Almost a decade later, in his essay “The Russian National Ideal,” Solov’ev recognized that Dostoevsky’s intolerance went against the very grain of the writer’s proclaimed Christian universalism: “If we agree with Dostoevsky, that the true essence of the Russian national spirit, its great merit and advantage, is in its being able to grasp all strange elements, to love them, to be transformed into them, and if, along with Dostoevsky, we accept that the Russian people is capable and destined to realize in a brotherly union with other nations the ideal of all-humanity [vsechelovechestvo]—then we could never be sympathetic to Dostoevsky’s own wild attacks against the ‘Yids,’ the Poles, the French, the Germans, against all Europe, against all foreign faiths.”


In Jewry and the Christian Question, written in 1884, three years after Dostoevsky’s death, Solov’ev posited three main questions about Russian Orthodoxy and Judaism: “1. Why was Christ a Jew, why is the stepping-stone of the universal church taken from the House of Israel? 2. Why did the majority of Israel not recognize its Messiah, why did the Old Testament church not dissolve into the New Testament church, and why do the majority of the Jews prefer to be completely without a temple, rather than join the Christian temple? 3. Why, finally, and for what purpose was the most solid (in the religious aspect) part of Jewry moved to Russia and Poland, placed at the boundary of the Graeco-Slavic and Latin-Slavic worlds?” I would suggest that these same questions haunted Dostoevsky, shaping his struggling vision of the Jews and unifying his divided sympathies. I would further point out that Solov’ev downplayed Dostoevsky’s fear and jealousy of the Jews and his paranoid view of a rivalry between the old Israel (the Jews) and the Russians (the New Israel) in Dostoevsky’s thinking. Writing in 1928 in a Russian émigré journal and stressing—after Grossman—the centrality of the Jewish Bible in Dostoevsky’s literary imagination, Aron Shteinberg observed astutely that for Shatov-Dostoevsky “the God-chosen Russian people are in essence a present reincarnation of Israel” (Shatov is one of the principal characters of Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed). In The Possessed, Shatov explains to Stavrogin his idea of a national religious consciousness: “A people is the body of God. Every people only remains a people so long as it possesses its own God and excludes all other gods without any reconciliation; so long as it believes that, with its God, it will vanquish and expel all the other gods from the world. . . . The Jews lived only in order to await a true God, and they have left the world a true God”. Keys to Dostoevsky’s most problematic statements about the Jews lie in his desire and inability to reconcile a universalist, all-embracing vision with his parochial, xenophobic urges. Dmitrii Merezhkovskii may have said it best in “The Prophet of the Russian Revolution,” a tribute written for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Dostoevsky’s death: “When the Christians call Jews ‘Yids,’ they blaspheme Christ through the womb of his Mother, in the mystery of his birth, in holy Israel. The real ‘Yids’ are not the Jews but those Christians who return from the New Testament to the Old, from the universal Christ to one people’s Messiah.” In the same pages, Merezhkovskii also spoke of the “nationally exclusive, preordained, ‘circumcised,’ Yideoizing Orthodoxy of Dostoevsky himself.” I wonder, however, whether Merezhkovskii was not giving expression to what the first part of his argument seemed to rally against.

In his Pushkin speech, Dostoevsky set for himself an almost unattainable ideal: “Show me at least one of these great geniuses who would possess the same capacity for universal responsiveness as did our Pushkin. . . . And what is the strength of the spirit of the Russian people if not its striving in its end goals toward universalism and all-encompassing humanity?” Did Dostoevsky possess the kind of universal gift that he himself glorified in the Pushkin speech?

My goal is not to accuse or denounce. I do not wish to reopen the case against Dostoevsky on the grounds of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. In fact, I confess that as a Diasporic Jew, a post-Shoah Jew, and an ex-Soviet one at that, I have been conditioned to expect Judeophobic behavior. I sometimes get tired of defining my identity by negation, through blaming and self-defending and fighting every Jewish battle that comes my way. I want to be able to face my students without feeling utterly bewildered by the discussion of the blood libel in The Brothers Karamazov, bewildered by Dostoevsky and by my own inability to interpret this scene in the text’s own terms. I would like to unearth in Dostoevsky’s treatment of the Jews—in The Brothers Karamazov and other works of fiction—that which Grossman once described so lovingly: “But in the depths and at the heights of his creative work, there, where all the minutiae disappeared and the absolute was exposed, he parted with his magazine manifestos and publicistic tendencies. Dostoevsky as the artist and thinker, in the flashing scraps of his pages, would suddenly reveal a profound attraction to the complex essence of the biblical spirit.”

Let me turn to the text of Dostoevsky’s last novel. First of all, small-scale references to the Jews are more numerous here than in Dostoevsky’s earlier works (I have counted ten separate instances in the text of The Brothers Karamazov. Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, referring to his early years in Odessa, speaks of having met “a lot of Yids, Yidkins, Yidels, and Yidelkins” and later being received not only by Yids but “also by Jews”. Grushenka is at one point likened to a Jewish woman because of her financial savvy. To raise money to get to Chermashnia, Dmitri sells his watch to a Jewish watchmaker; a Jewish band plays in Mokroe; Dmitri links his enemies to the Jews by suggesting that Grushenka’s Polish suitor would use lawyers, “Pollacks and Yidkins”.

The discussion of the blood libel occurs in part 4, book 11, chapter 3, and was written right after Dostoevsky’s trip to Moscow in May 1880. How paradoxical that upon his return from Moscow, where he articulated in the Pushkin speech his innermost aesthetic, ethical, and metaphysical ideals, Dostoevsky writes the blood libel scene. Petr Berlin called this juxtaposition “a pendulum’s swinging from proclaiming great Christian ideas to practical considerations that have nothing to do with such ideas.” The day described in book 11 is a big day for Alyosha Karamazov; he zigzags through the town of Skotoprigonevsk making visits: from Captain Snegiryov and Ilyusha to Grushenka to the Khokhlakovs. The chapter where he talks with Liza is called “A Little Demon”; let us also recall that in chapter 4 of book 5 Ivan calls Alyosha a “little demon” after Alyosha has recommended that a sadistic general be executed for sending a pack of hounds after a little boy. The conversation about the blood libel is set in motion when Liza asks Alyosha the controversial question:

“Alyosya, is it true that at Easter [in Russian the same word, pashka, is used for both Easter and Passover], Yids [zhidy] steal children and kill them?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s a book here in which I read about some trial, and a Yid who took a four-year-old child and cut off the fingers from both his little hands, and then crucified him on the wall, hammered nails into him, and crucified him, and afterwards at the trial he said that the child died quickly, within four hours. That was ‘quickly’! He said the child moaned, kept on moaning and he stood admiring it. That’s nice!”

“Nice?”

“Nice. I sometimes imagine that it was I who crucified him. He would hang there moaning and I would sit opposite him eating pineapple compote. I am awfully fond of pineapple compote. Do you like it?”

Alyosha looked at her in silence. Her pale, sallow face was suddenly contorted, her eyes burned.

“You know, when I read about that child, all night I was shaking with tears. I kept thinking of how the little thing cried and moaned (a child of four understands, you know) and all the while the thought of pineapple compote haunted me. In the morning I wrote a letter to a certain person, begging him to come and see me. He came and I told him all about the child and the pineapple compote, all about it, all, and said, ‘it was nice.’ Then he got up and went away. He was only here five minutes. Did he despise me? Did he despise me? Tell me, tell me, Alyosha, did he despise me or not?” She sat up on the sofa, her eyes sparkling.

The “certain” person to whom Liza refers is of course Ivan Karamazov, the same Ivan who would refuse the Kingdom of God if it had to come at the price of one child’s suffering. Alyosha leaves soon thereafter, carrying Liza’s letter to his brother Ivan.


https://v-filatov.jimdo.com/%D1%84%D...of-dostoevsky/

“The Nihilism of Dostoevsky” by Vadim Filatov

‘ . . . It is well known that the first Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin hated Dostoevsky's creativity. "I have no free time for this rubbish ", "This is a kind of moralizing vomiting", "Re-read his book and threw aside", - thus the revolutionary leader characterized Dostoevsky's works. On the other hand, Lev Tolstoy was called by Lenin as "a block" and "experienced man", and even as "a mirror of the Russian revolution".’

‘Dostoevsky anticipated Lev Tolstoy’s tragic and comic flight from his estate and his death, when he…wrote about the hero of his novel "The Demons" Stephen Verkhovensky, who also left his house, saw a lot of simple people and immediately died. His son, the leader of gang of the district demons Peter Verkhovensky (according to Dostoevsky's plan), was urged to serve as a caricature on the well-known nihilist, the follower of Tkachev, Sergey Nechaev, who, in his "Catechism of the Revolutionary" admitted honestly that "any revolutionary is a washed-up person". As a result Peter Verkhovensky had to become the most banal and belittled double of philosophizing nihilist Stavrogin in "The Demons". And liberal Stephen Verkhovensky, [whether he wanted] this or not, brought up unscrupulous and cruel nihilist Peter, just as in 1917 the Provisional Government created conditions for coming to power of Bolsheviks. Actually it is possible to confirm that political nihilism in Dostoevsky's image has became [a] more or less banal and belittled continuation of [philosophical nihilism].’


- From The Karamazov Brothers; page 856 (Bk. 12, Ch. 4):

[Grushenka] entered the courtroom dressed all in black, her exquisite black shawl draped around her shoulders. Smoothly and noiselessly, with the slightly swaying gait that buxom women sometimes have, she approached the barrier with her eyes firmly fixed on the president and looking neither to the right nor to the left. I thought she looked very beautiful at that moment, and not at all pale, as some ladies subsequently asserted. They said, too, that she wore a hard and malicious expression. What I believe is that she was merely agitated and felt deeply uncomfortable under the contemptuously curious stare of our prurient public. Hers was a proud nature which could not tolerate disdain, one of those natures which, the moment they suspect they are being regarded with contempt, immediately flare up in anger and adopt an aggressive stance. There was at the same time, of course, an element of timidity as well as an inner shame at this timidity, so that it was hardly surprising that her delivery was uneven—now angry, now contemptuous, now deliberately offensive, followed suddenly by a sincere, heartfelt note of self-reproach, self-castigation. Occasionally, she spoke as though she were falling headlong into an abyss: ‘Come what may, whatever happens, I’ll have my say all the same…’ As regards her relationship with the late Fyodor Pavlovich, she commented brusquely: ‘It’s all a load of nonsense. It’s hardly my fault if he wouldn’t leave me alone!’ And a minute later she added: ‘I’m to blame for everything, I was leading them both on—the old boy, and him—and it went too far. It was all because of me that it happened.’