Dostoevsky's Secrets: Reading Against the Grain

Introduction

3 Introduction Every great art must be supplemented by leisurely discussion, by stargazing, if you will, about the nature of things. —Plato He who utters falsehood is only uttering what is natural to him, what is his alone. —Saint Augustine THIS BOOK is only part of a dialogue that began when Dostoevsky ’s friend Dmitry Grigorovich settled down to read the newly completed manuscript of his first novel, Poor Folk, one evening in May 1845. He finished it in one uninterrupted sitting, then rushed out in the middle of the night to proclaim to the world the advent of a new Gogol.1 In spite of the time and distance that separate us, we are members of that same community of readers. If Dostoevsky’s works did not convey something enduring and true about the human condition, we would not be reading them today. What is it in them that still reaches us? Dostoevsky’s writing records a struggle to express in words a truth that lies beyond the feeble powers of human reason to grasp, and of human language to convey. His most memorable characters—Raskolnikov, the Underground Man, Ivan Karamazov—are intellectual creatures whose minds cannot make sense of the world. Every attempt to rationalize leads to confusion and paradox; every attempt to act according to reason leads to violence and pain. The most memorable scenes in the novels are dialogues between bearers of opposing ideas, and yet no amount of argument will yield the truth. The truth must be felt, at the moment the words leave the page and reenter the world. The message, then, is not something that Grigorovich learned by reading Poor Folk; it is rather that mysterious power that propelled him from his easy chair in the middle of the night to share what he had read. Dostoevsky’s works, and in fact the example of his own life, illustrate the drama of accepting on faith a truth that cannot be proven. This presents an obvious challenge to criticism. After all, our material is facts (the text); Introduction 4 our medium is words; and our task is to explain things. Can analysis lead to any real understanding? Why begin, if the enterprise seems doomed at the outset? And yet this book exists. Why? I do not pretend here to provide the answers to the questions Dostoevsky raises in his great novels. This is simply a report of one person’s encounter with a powerful body of work, and an attempt to keep the conversation alive. Critical bias in favor of explicit expression and argumentation can lead to a too easy acceptance of surfaces. Borrowing a term from grammar, we can identify this level of explicit meaning in narrative as the “indicative.” Criticism must begin here, addressing “what is written rather than what it is written about.”2 But the indicative addresses only facts, and Dostoevsky’s art is about a greater, symbolic truth, one that cannot be stated directly. We access this truth through the “subjunctive,” the language of dreams, desires, and nonmaterial reality. Readers always have a choice as to which approach to take; the surface of the language is the same, whether we are seeking facts or truth. But access to deeper meaning requires a leap of faith, a trust that there is more to the text, and to life, than mere facts and the words that bear them. In order to appreciate Dostoevsky’s art, readers must loosen their trust in the surface and in the power of the indicative. Dostoevsky ’s intellectually fixated characters face a similar challenge in their blind quest for understanding. In his analysis of the workings of Euclidean and non-Euclidean reason in Dostoevsky, Grigory Pomerants describes this quest in terms of a Zen koan: Zen Buddhism aims to achieve a unique state of enlightenment—an “awakening ” (in Japanese, satori)—through a kind of shock. There are various “shock” methods in use, but the most important among them is intellectual. The disciple is given a problem that is obviously impossible to solve, called a “koan.” The problem has an answer, which the teacher knows. The problem is insoluble and absurd from the point of view of “Euclidean” reason, but at a higher level of reason it can be solved. [. . .] Ultimately the disciple is seized by a “great doubt.” In despair, as though indeed over a real abyss, he finally tears himself away, falls—and at the most terrifying moment realizes that reason and the question he...