Dostoevsky and the Diamond Sutra: Jack Kerouac's Karamazov Religion

Incidentally, everyone in Dostoevsky says "H'm" all the time, interiorly . . . that is the key to his vision of man—"H'm." (what mysteries?) (What's he mean by that?)—I wonder if my own "sound" . . . [is] "Hah?" The key to my vision—"Hah?" As though to say, "I know perfectly what's going on, but I'll pretend I don't even hear." To which Dostoevsky replies, "H'm."¹

—Jack Kerouac, Windblown World

Introduction

Kerouac invites the voices of many texts into his personal mythology, but a special place is reserved for Dostoevsky, with whom he holds an ongoing dialogue throughout his collected works. The overwhelming number of Dostoevskian references in Kerouac's writing might lead us to think that the two authors were contemporaries or even friends—despite the fact that they obviously belonged to separate centuries and vastly different cultures. However, this link remains largely unexplored—aside from some scattered comments in criticism that deals with Kerouac and the Beats.

The bigger questions about Kerouac's reading of Dostoevsky remain to be asked—for example, what does this connection with Dostoevsky tell us about Kerouac's perception of the world and himself? It is my contention that Kerouac's emphasis on the interconnectedness and circularity of all phenomena owes much to an understanding of life informed by his reading of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov. In discussing this reading of Dostoevsky, I feel justified in referring to Kerouac's "Karamazov religion," since his reverential treatment of Dostoevsky practically lifts the latter's fiction to the status of a religious tract.

Scholars generally focus on how Kerouac appropriated Dostoevsky as his political "mascot."² Admittedly, Kerouac's choice to identify himself with the Russian author Dostoevsky in the context of Cold War America is politically marked, but the fictional worlds of these two authors also merge on a purely apolitical level. Dostoevsky's ideas about transcendence left a special imprint on Kerouac's imagination and served as a model for Kerouac's representation of life's interconnected nature in his own works.

When Maria Bloshteyn discusses Kerouac's reading of Dostoevsky, she laments that Eastern sources of inspiration like Buddhism have received lavish attention from Beat scholars, whereas influences like Dostoevsky tend to receive short shrift.³ However, there is another way of describing Kerouac's creative process without categorically favoring one influence over another. The importance of synthesis in Kerouac's mythmaking approach to narrative should not be overlooked. Rather than just viewing the influences of Dostoevsky and Buddhism in mutually exclusive terms, it makes sense to consider the complementary manner in which Dostoevskian motifs and Buddhist concepts merge in his work.

Kerouac's identification with Dostoevsky on a purely spiritual basis emerges most clearly in Visions of Gerard. In this work, Kerouac synthesizes Buddhist concepts from The Diamond Sutra and Dostoevskian motifs from The Brothers Karamazov to articulate his own vision of universal compassion and brotherhood. Kerouac inserts distant childhood memories about his deceased brother Gerard into this collage of religious concepts, and, in doing so, he raises his own personal experiences to a plane of mythological significance. Before dealing with this particular text in depth, however, I first want to take a step back to get a broader perspective of Kerouac's reading of Dostoevsky in the context of his life and his cultural milieu.

Jack Kerouac and the Beats Read Dostoevsky

Deciding what Dostoevsky represents for Kerouac isn't a simple task since Dostoevsky's name appears so frequently in Kerouac's writing. Kerouac briefly reminisces about some misadventures with his friends in a jocular tone, and he decides: "What a mess of events. It IS a Dostoyevskyan [sic] world."⁴ We also hear Kerouac mentioning Dostoevsky during more serious moments—such as when he asks himself probing, potentially devastating questions in his journals: "[My wife] has to love me . . . Can I do anything but adore Dostoevsky? . . . Can she but love me?"⁵ His heartfelt connections with Dostoevsky verge on the whimsical at times: "I'm serious about this . . . I want to communicate with Dostoevsky in heaven . . ."⁶ Kerouac...