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Conclusion
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166 Conclusion The euclidian mind may be able by coercive means to build up an essentially rationalized society, but there is nothing in common between that spirit and the meaning of the divine world: it is closed to it, shut up in three-dimensional space. To grasp the world’s divine meaning it is necessary to penetrate into a fourth dimension: freedom is the truth of the fourth dimension, not to be had within the limits of the third, and the euclidian mind is quite incapable of resolving this problem. —Nicholas Berdyaev D O S T O E V S K Y ’ S N O V E L S challenge the lawyer, the scientist, and the judge. Caught up in the fictional world, we ask the obvious questions: Why is there poverty and crime? Why do people injure one another? Why do the innocent suffer? The answers, based as they are on a faith in the power of logic and human critical discourse, are never adequate, and the dialogue continues. It is the unanswerability of the questions that Dostoevsky asks that ensures the continued life of his art and refutes the chillingly symmetrical, dead logic of twice two is four. For all his dramatism, Dostoevsky wrote narratives. His works are always about the relationship between the teller and the tale. Talk is action, with real consequences. Storytellers lie; the more they talk, the more they distance themselves from the truth. Criticism faces a daunting challenge: to divine the moral tensions underlying the story and to discover the essence under the lies. In this book I have applied a critical skepticism to what is said and reported in Dostoevsky’s novels. A general principle has emerged: the closer to the action, the more reliable the language; the more dramatic and immediate the depiction, the more inclined we are to believe in its veracity. When characters begin to tell stories about each other, to quote secondary sources, and to spread rumors, the truth thins and dissipates. Dostoevsky strives to transcend the limits of his genre, which requires 166 Conclusion 167 telling rather than showing. The result is a profound tension between, as Caryl Emerson puts it, word and image. The two work together; the image can bear meaning only in a profoundly human silence, molchanie, that great release that comes when the struggle with words finally subsides. Apophatic reading requires that we read backward, against the grain of the struggle, seeking the silent image that will complete, and transcend, the story. Dostoevsky begins exposing the pretensions and delusions of language with Makar ’s and Varenka’s secret dramas in Poor Folk, and with the astonishing implosion of verbal modes at the end of White Nights. He then discovers the icon, and places it at the center of his mature novels, employing both overt ekphrasis and coded visual images: the innocent prostitute at the center of Crime and Punishment; the Holbein Christ in The Idiot (and its narrative reflection in the dying Ippolit); the Golden Age painting, the Sistine Madonna, and the coded icon of the Shatov mother, father, and child in Demons; the icon of starving infant and mother in Dmitry Karamazov’s dream, and the distorted, doubled mother and child icon of his brother Alyosha’s traumatic memory in The Brothers Karamazov. In each case, the author poses a riddle whose answer is obvious and immanent, yet veiled in layers of disguise. Dostoevsky poses the problem of faith in a secular world, a world dominated by the impossible human quest for proof and justice. It is a problem well suited for narrative, which seduces readers into believing what is, after all, an obvious fiction. Fedor Pavlovich Karamazov, Stavrogin, the Katerina Ivanovnas, and all the rest, none of them existed; they are moral forces, idea-people, shed skins of neurological activity, literary characters. But we do believe in them, and in the reality of their acts. On the surface, this appears to be a simplistic, reductionist approach to reading. Yet it goes to the heart of the matter. Having made the necessary commitment of faith, readers accept the obvious truths: Bykov, Svidrigailov, and Stavrogin are abusers of innocence and Varenka, Dunia, and Matriosha are their innocent victims; winning at the casino is good and losing is bad; romantic love is safer than the carnal kind. Coming to these easy, indicative judgments, we define, trap, and contain the sinfulness somewhere outside ourselves. In doing so, we reduce ourselves to the level of the...