The New Russian Dostoevsky: Readings for the Twenty-First Century

Euclidian and Non-Euclidian Reason

Euclidian and Non-Euclidian Reason Grigorii Pomerants "Evklidovskii i neevklidovskii razum," chapter 2 in Otkrytost' bezdne: Opyty 0 Dostoevskom (Openness to the Abyss: Studies on Dostoevsky) (New York: Liberty, 1989). Over thirty years ago I read a short work by Dostoevsky and felt tha t I couldn't put it aside. This was Notes from Underground. I wrote down my thoughts about the work at the time, but they were burned. Now circumstances have brought me back to this first experience; fragments of old thoughts rise to the surface together with new ones, and what emerges is something that I would not have written before. I have returned to myoId topic in a roundabout way, after a long engagement with the East, and what I was trying to understand in Dostoevsky back then now appears in a new light. The opportunity to explain Russia through the East and the East through Russia came to me for the first time thirty years ago. Now I would like to resume that East-West discussion, moving in circles, first around Notes from Underground, and then around something paradoxical that Dostoevsky once said in his "credo."1 Before Notes from Underground Dostoevsky wrote works that, though interesting , were relevant only in the Russian context; with the Notes, he instantaneously became a classic of world literature. Every novel that he wrote after 1864 is a masterpiece. It would be easy to attribute this to pure chance. But it should be noted, first, that the ideas expressed in "Underground" (the first, philosophical part of the Notes from Underground), are repeated in all the later novels. The intonation may differ, but the thought is the same2 Second, the Underground Man's thoughts inspired dozens of philosophers. The collection of basic readings in existentialism, for example, that Walter Kaufman published in New York (Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre) begins with "Underground." It is natural to assume that Dostoevsky himself valued this text, which was to become so important for the development of world philosophy . One can presume (and I shall attempt to prove this) that Dostoevsky understood the paradoxes of "Underground" differently from many of his 1 From the famous 1854 letter to Fonvizina. See below, 10l. 2 In Crime and Punishment, for example the ideas of the "Underground" are set forth with endearing, drunken geniality by Razumikhin (part 3, chaps. 1 and 5). -G.P. Caro l Apollonio, ed., The New Russian Dostoevsky: Readings for the Twenty-First Century, Bloomington, IN: Siavica Publishers, 2010, 65-92. 66 GRIGORII POMERANTS admirers both in Russia, beginning with Vasily Rozanov and Lev Shestov, and in the West; he had a deeper and broader understanding of his own work. And Dostoevsky cannot be understood apart from "Underground." It is often said that this or that artist is great in spite of a reactionary world view. This may be justified (at least in part) when applied to a soloist in the ballet: while dancing, she pays no attention to politics. But a writer is always to some degree a thinker. His world view and his works might not coincide , but one cannot be separated from the other. If you consider political reaction to be a moral evil, and agree with Belinsky that a person who gives himself over entirely to evil loses his mind and talent-and we often think that way- then Dostoevsky's tum to reactionary views ought to have led to a decline in his talent (it's something like the way Gogol is spoken of ad majorem progressus gloriam)3 But Crime and Punishment shows no evidence of this. In the thirties I was a student of M. A. Lifshits and shared his views, which were somewhat more subtle than those in circulation at the time, to wit: Balzac was such a master at exposing bourgeois society because of his reactionary views. Aristocratic and catholic sympathies liberated him from bourgeois illusions and kept him independent from bourgeois ideology. In this way, a retrograde ideology, without being excused politically, could be deemed fruitful in theory (at least within certain limits) as a vantage point providing a good perspective. At the time I felt that this model could be applied in a reading of Notes from Undergrou nd. The point was to show how the truth of the Notes (albeit expressed in a "retrograde" form) served as a stimulus for the artist's development, how it enabled him to make "a step forward in the artistic development of humanity." I...