The Land Lady is one of Dostoevsky's first short stories, written after Poor Folk (his first novel) and The Double (his longest of the pre-exile literature). The main character, Ordynov, is a 'dreamer' of sorts typical in most late romantic novellas--a character who's searching for meaning in life, isolated from society, with a profound sense that he is singled out for some great achievement in life. Upon gaining possession of an inheritance, Ordynov decides to throw himself into book learning and artistic self discovery...
He is in the process of searching for an apartment when he encounters a couple in a back alley church that captures his attention. Ordynov notices something "strange and unusual" about the couple immediately after seeing their dynamic, saying Katerina seemed to possess a "childlike horror and mysterious fear" in the presence of her male companion. Ordynov's curiosity overcomes him and he follows the couple from the church through St Petersburg. Driven by a deep, unconscious fascination and attraction to Katerina, Ordynov seeks out a room close to the couple's flat in order to gain access to Katerina. Dostoevsky uses Ordynov's subsequent interaction with the couple, Murin and Katerina, to frame the remainder of the story.
Ordynov secures a room and has a few short conversations with Katerina but then falls ill and slips into an altered consciousness, with fitful dreams and convulsions. After Ordynov breaks from delirium, brought on both by sickness and sensual ecstasy, Katerina confides her situation to him. As the story progresses, you learn that Murin is Katerina's father and after killing her mother has taken her captive by exerting "a mysterious and irresistible power" over her. Katerina's story becomes a confession, how she cannot escape Murin's influence and control, not for lack of ability but because she "is his degraded slave...and her shame and degradation are sweet to her." The final and tense dialogue between Murin, Ordynov and Katerina sees the situation reach a climax of sorts, with Ordynov contemplating the murder of Murin and Katerina sinking back into her masochistic relationship with Murin. A few days later, Ordynov encounters the couple again while he's packing his things in preparation for yet another move. Murin justifies his actions toward Katerina to Ordynov once again and Ordynov pensively leaves the apartment.
The central theme in The Land Lady, as I see it, is the troubled relationship between Murin and Katerina. Dostoevsky seeks to explore this relationship to make a broader point about the nature of oppression and bondage on the human psyche. Although in the story Dostoevsky seeks only to display Murin's dominion over Katerina, I suspect he's also making a more general argument about the distorting effects of despotism and subordination on humans, both reminiscent of the political realities of the time and also making a point about the virtue of human freedom as a principle.
The form this sort of oppression takes is particularly pernicious. This is apparent in how Katerina confesses to Ordynov her realization that she's enslaved but that she lacks the will to change her situation. Indeed, she's even grown to enjoy Murin's abusive control. Murin is completely aware of what he's doing to Katerina and he generalizes his theory for Ordynov by claiming that "a weak man cannot stand alone. Give him everything, he will come of himself and return it all...give a weak man his freedom--he will bind it himself and give it back to you. To a foolish heart, freedom is no use." Thus, Dostoevsky attempts to portray both the dubious arguments for subordination and also the enjoyment that's derived in such a relationship.
The end of the novella has Ordynov pondering Murin and Katerina's relationship and puzzling to himself about what he's witnessed in a few short days. Especially in these few lines from Ordynov one can see the broadening of Dostoevsky's themes from the personal to the political, depicting a relationship who's dynamic implicated an entire political system built on fear, distortion, and tyranny.
"It seemed to him that Katerina was of perfectly sound mind, but that in his own way Murin had been right when he had called her a 'weak heart'. It seemed to him that some mystery bound her to the old man, and that she, though ignorant of any crime and as pure as a dove, had somehow fallen in his power. In his mind's eye he kept envisaging a deep, desperate tyranny over a poor, defenseless creature; and his heart grew troubled...It seemed to him that the frightened eyes of her suddenly awakened soul had been insidiously presented with the notion of its downfall; her poor, weak heart subjected to insidious torture, the truth gratuitously distorted to her...and that little by little the wings of her free, untrammeled soul had been clipped, until finally it was incapable either of rebellion or of an unconstrained breakthrough into real life..."
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Review of Frank's Recent Biography
As I mentioned in my last post, I recently reviewed Frank's magisterial volume on Dostoevsky for 'Politics and Culture'. I was planning on linking my few blog readers to the published version online but it's not quite ready yet. So, I've decided just to post it here as a foundational text, as both biography and literary critique, that will substantiate my journey through Dostoevsky's work. And, in case you somehow miss it, I highly recommend the book :)
Reviewed: Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010.
In the 1960s, when Joseph Frank submitted his first manuscript for a volume on Dostoevsky’s fiction to Oxford University Press one reader summarized its negative reception bluntly: “I don’t see how Mr. Frank can write so many pages about Dostoevsky without saying anything of his life.” With the publication of Dostoevsky: A Writer In His Time earlier this year, a massive abridgement of five volumes written over three decades, Frank breaks once and for all with his early critic’s stilted categories in portraying the human subject. His innovative method of biography, influenced heavily by literary criticism, starts with artistic expression and moves backward, seeking to carefully situate his subject within ideological context. The conventional biographical point of view, Frank clarifies early on in his preface, does not do justice to the complexities of Dostoevsky’s creations (xiii). Thus, a precise account of an era’s ideological doctrines reflected and refracted in literary achievement is the best way to fully grasp that era’s most dominating figures.
Frank’s objective in the abridged version is unwavering: to furnish readers with the context—social, cultural, literary, and philosophic—that will help forward a better understanding of the work (xiv). Whether or not Frank’s biographical approach ought to be generalized as a model is debatable but such an approach, few would contest, is uniquely useful for Dostoevsky; the Russian literary giant was so shaped and consumed by the intellectual debates in the second half of the 19th century that his writing emanates almost naturally in capturing and defining the era’s ideological—and Western literature’s eternal—strivings.
There is nearly unanimous consent that Frank is a paragon of his form, with words such as ‘magisterial,’ ‘authoritative’ and ‘monumental’ being the cliché in describing his analysis of Dostoevsky’s life and times. Often is Frank’s work called one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century and the best of Dostoevsky in any language. So, the question insists: how ought one evaluate this distilled version? Mary Petrusewicz’s abridgement of the original five volumes and Joseph Frank’s stamp of approval on her work provides a chance to re-consider both Frank’s form and analysis in its newly calibrated and accessible style. On a more substantial level and mirroring Dostoevsky’s accumulation of literary ability through time, Frank’s most recent Dostoevsky is one brought forth with increased complexity and perception coming with age and experience; in short, Frank’s own Brothers Karamazov as a preeminent biographer.
Without a doubt, the genius of Frank’s form is in combining three modalities in crafting his narrative: literary criticism, social and intellectual history, and biography. Centering on Dostoevsky as his subject to pioneer this form, whose literature and epoch are not highly accessible or self-explanatory, is fortuitous if not unique to this particular venture. Perhaps for this reason, Frank’s comprehensive treatment reads like a novel by Dostoevsky himself: meticulous, idea-driven, and patiently insistent on unearthing layer after layer of the human condition in all its beautiful and terrible complexity. Frank’s form yields telling results. For instance, one simply cannot estimate the satirical impact and historical rootedness of Stavrogin and Verkhovensky in Demons without understanding the rise of the Russian nihilists, influenced as they were by Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, one of Dostoevsky’s several ideological nemeses. Revolutionary fervor sweeping Europe was highly susceptible to misappropriation, Frank intimates, and in Demons Dostoevsky sought unabashedly to expose the false pretense and ideological buffoonery of a well-intentioned movement without a moral fixedness in religious faith (656). In fact, Dostoevsky captured the ideological fanaticism of the nihilists in Demons so well that Albert Camus would remark years later that he and not Karl Marx was the greatest prophet for the twentieth century.
Given his form, it is not surprising that Frank’s narrative shifts considerably among the several forces swirling around the author’s life, but, it also connects very well—from his upbringing in a lowly family obsessed with status and recognition to his literary maneuverings and early ideological compromises in the Petrashevsky circle. A benefit of Frank’s style is in positioning and scrutinizing Dostoevsky’s stories as a rich panorama of enfleshed ideas—ideas that move through time to gain precision without losing their consequential significance. For instance, Dostoevsky’s trial, mock execution and exile in Omsk are probed to relate a time of deep introspection and significant ideological formation for the young writer. The full impact of nearly ten years of forced labor and military conscription tempered Dostoevsky’s views on the goodness of humanity and his early, almost perfunctory sympathy toward the Utopian Socialist cause (399). Under dire conditions in Omsk, one could say, the literary giant was born, formulating ideas about the necessity of human freedom and the deforming effects of oppression on the human psyche that would enrich his character construction vastly.
In multiple ways Dostoevsky’s exile would serve to greatly inform his literary license and his later mantle as a prophet for the Russian people. “It is the great teacher,” Nietzsche conjectured, “that shows us how to bear steadfastly the reverses of fortune, by reminding us of what others have suffered.” Dostoevsky assuredly suffered alongside criminals—mostly peasants—and Frank leverages the insight he methodically gained as a psychologist-prisoner to elucidate an intriguing perspective on the class structure at the center of the Russia’s ideological struggles.
The revolutionary debate among the educated class centered ostensibly on the value and worth of the peasantry in the ushering in a new socio-political arrangement. All of these ideas Dostoevsky insisted, gave little or no credit to the peasant class or to the traditional moral fabric of the Russian obshchina (peasant community). Literature served an overt purpose and the revolutionary ideas as well as the literary establishment reflected only a small stratum of society. Frank quotes Dostoevsky reflecting on this theme in Tolstoy’s novels: “There has not yet been a new word to replace that of the gentry-landowners,” (612). Clearly, Dostoevsky regarded himself as uniquely capable of supplying such a new word and the early burden of representing and defending the peasants to the revolutionaries really masked the larger debate on the content of human nature.
Later on, the tension between the nihilists’ complete rejection of established ideas and social institutions and Dostoevsky’s affirmation of the inexorable values in the Russian peasantry reveals his incessant desire to seek out the source and landscape of human nature: what’s inherent to the human condition and what is not? what is morally worth retaining and what is not?—a debate that is no doubt still pivotal to the political and social systems today.
Frank’s interlocking method also enriches common motifs in Dostoevsky’s literature. Nearly omnipresent in all novels is a scathing critique of liberalism in its several manifestations—atheism, rationalism, utilitarian morality, and egoism—unraveling beautifully under Frank’s illustrative lens, deeply passionate but comprehensive enough not to render it too quickly in vogue. A specific example of this is in disinterring a fresh perspective on Notes from the Underground, a sneering polemic against rational egoism. The social conditions surrounding the resentful and self-loathing Underground Man remain consistent in Frank’s analysis while the depth of Dostoevsky’s satirical wit is flipped on its head.
The established interpretation posits the Underground Man as a tormented irrationalist in a world saturated with Chernyshevsky’s ideology of rational egoism (315). But Frank credits Dostoevsky with a much more subtle usage of satire, claiming that the Underground Man is actually living in a self contradiction—accepting the precepts of rationalism in his head all the while fully rejecting it in his heart or emotively and intuitively (421). This dialectic of self-contradiction seems eminently plausible if only because of the breadth of Frank’s scope in relating Dostoevsky’s ultimate moral-spiritual project; his ardent belief that rational egoism necessarily implied a utilitarian morality (doing right by numbers) to the exclusion of any other moral frame. In the end, the depth of cunning and subtlety in Notes from the Underground is retained as a severe critique of a foolhardy idea, according to Dostoevsky, that was too simplistic to be grasped to its logical and soul-stifling conclusion.
In digesting his work, Frank highlights what many have considered Dostoevsky’s unequaled technique of following ideas through to their ultimate end. This usage of what Dostoevsky himself referred to as “fantastic realism” stretches the interpretive scope of his work between being strictly a writer in his time and a socio-cultural prophet for an entire people. As Frank claims early on, Dostoevsky had a special talent for “feeling ideas” so perceptibly that his characters’ personalities are more pathological than normal. The literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin claims that in Dostoevsky’s work one sees not who a character is but rather how a character is conscious of him or herself—an agonizing self consciousness that pervades his work, especially Crime and Punishment.
Hoping to achieve the same penetrating insight into Dostoevsky’s personality and psychology does not seem to be Frank’s primary concern here if only to withhold speculation that would overanalyze his subject. What Frank does offer however is a perceptive reading of Dostoevsky that gains considerable traction with his analysis of ideological and historical context. This is done in a nimble and judicious fashion, offering an interpretation without foreclosing on alternate ones; detailing the facts without overplaying their presence and meaning in his artistic expression. In this manner, Frank does well in capturing the genius of Dostoevsky as a decidedly nuanced commentator of Russian history and an adroit navigator of the insistent philosophical questions his turbulent era brought to the fore. In an era when ideas held such consequential weight, ranging from censorship to exile, Dostoevsky sought unfailingly to reconcile the ideological frenzy with monumental aspects of Russia’s historical experience.
Culminating Frank’s analysis is a straightforward, eighty page hermeneutic on Dostoevsky’s last and most well received novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Even in the abridged format Frank’s interpretation of Brothers could read as a stand alone literary achievement; although, much like the novel’s own stand alone chapter “The Grand Inquisitor,” Frank’s best work is in setting up the story. His interpretation connotes a novel fraught with the usual tensions, all interlinked and profoundly relevant to Russia’s “place” in the world: reason and faith, Slavophile and Western, nihilism and moral responsibility, good and evil, certainty and doubt. Reason and faith however form the primary lens by which Frank proceeds to view the unfolding drama that ranks in the Western canon on par with Milton, Shakespeare, and Dante. This lens, argues Frank, assumes something of a nexus between Dostoevsky’s artistic accomplishments and his occasionally discordant religious and ideological impulses. Thus, its characters and plot accurately captures both the eternal greatness and the eternal mystery of the author himself.
Toward the end of his life most Russians regarded Dostoevsky as perfectly emblematic of their plight and place. In the final sections of the book, Frank’s otherwise cerebral analysis capably expresses Russia’s love and admiration for their “prophet”. As a reader and speaker during the country’s celebrated Pushkin Festival, Dostoevsky seals his memory (813). A letter to his wife during the festivities implies a rather clumsy incredulity at his last novel’s reception. “A horde of people, young people, gray-haired people and ladies, rushed up to me and said, ‘You are our prophet. You have made us better since The Karamazovs’” (821).
After Dostoevsky’s final appearance during the festival that featured a laudatory and messianic interpretation of Pushkin’s work and its accursed characters set against the Western reforms of Peter the Great, the crowd literally shouted that he had solved the question of the tormented “Russian soul” so brooding in all of Pushkin’s work. Such a reception must have been immensely gratifying after a life spent dramatizing and combating the moral and spiritual confusion of late 19th century. In a poem many years later, Anna Akhmatova reflects on Dostoevsky’s legacy as prophet whose perception of his country’s ideological struggle was a uniquely sacred one:
The Country shivers, and the convict from Omsk
Understood everything, and made the sign of the cross over it all.
Reviewed: Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010.
In the 1960s, when Joseph Frank submitted his first manuscript for a volume on Dostoevsky’s fiction to Oxford University Press one reader summarized its negative reception bluntly: “I don’t see how Mr. Frank can write so many pages about Dostoevsky without saying anything of his life.” With the publication of Dostoevsky: A Writer In His Time earlier this year, a massive abridgement of five volumes written over three decades, Frank breaks once and for all with his early critic’s stilted categories in portraying the human subject. His innovative method of biography, influenced heavily by literary criticism, starts with artistic expression and moves backward, seeking to carefully situate his subject within ideological context. The conventional biographical point of view, Frank clarifies early on in his preface, does not do justice to the complexities of Dostoevsky’s creations (xiii). Thus, a precise account of an era’s ideological doctrines reflected and refracted in literary achievement is the best way to fully grasp that era’s most dominating figures.
Frank’s objective in the abridged version is unwavering: to furnish readers with the context—social, cultural, literary, and philosophic—that will help forward a better understanding of the work (xiv). Whether or not Frank’s biographical approach ought to be generalized as a model is debatable but such an approach, few would contest, is uniquely useful for Dostoevsky; the Russian literary giant was so shaped and consumed by the intellectual debates in the second half of the 19th century that his writing emanates almost naturally in capturing and defining the era’s ideological—and Western literature’s eternal—strivings.
There is nearly unanimous consent that Frank is a paragon of his form, with words such as ‘magisterial,’ ‘authoritative’ and ‘monumental’ being the cliché in describing his analysis of Dostoevsky’s life and times. Often is Frank’s work called one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century and the best of Dostoevsky in any language. So, the question insists: how ought one evaluate this distilled version? Mary Petrusewicz’s abridgement of the original five volumes and Joseph Frank’s stamp of approval on her work provides a chance to re-consider both Frank’s form and analysis in its newly calibrated and accessible style. On a more substantial level and mirroring Dostoevsky’s accumulation of literary ability through time, Frank’s most recent Dostoevsky is one brought forth with increased complexity and perception coming with age and experience; in short, Frank’s own Brothers Karamazov as a preeminent biographer.
Without a doubt, the genius of Frank’s form is in combining three modalities in crafting his narrative: literary criticism, social and intellectual history, and biography. Centering on Dostoevsky as his subject to pioneer this form, whose literature and epoch are not highly accessible or self-explanatory, is fortuitous if not unique to this particular venture. Perhaps for this reason, Frank’s comprehensive treatment reads like a novel by Dostoevsky himself: meticulous, idea-driven, and patiently insistent on unearthing layer after layer of the human condition in all its beautiful and terrible complexity. Frank’s form yields telling results. For instance, one simply cannot estimate the satirical impact and historical rootedness of Stavrogin and Verkhovensky in Demons without understanding the rise of the Russian nihilists, influenced as they were by Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, one of Dostoevsky’s several ideological nemeses. Revolutionary fervor sweeping Europe was highly susceptible to misappropriation, Frank intimates, and in Demons Dostoevsky sought unabashedly to expose the false pretense and ideological buffoonery of a well-intentioned movement without a moral fixedness in religious faith (656). In fact, Dostoevsky captured the ideological fanaticism of the nihilists in Demons so well that Albert Camus would remark years later that he and not Karl Marx was the greatest prophet for the twentieth century.
Given his form, it is not surprising that Frank’s narrative shifts considerably among the several forces swirling around the author’s life, but, it also connects very well—from his upbringing in a lowly family obsessed with status and recognition to his literary maneuverings and early ideological compromises in the Petrashevsky circle. A benefit of Frank’s style is in positioning and scrutinizing Dostoevsky’s stories as a rich panorama of enfleshed ideas—ideas that move through time to gain precision without losing their consequential significance. For instance, Dostoevsky’s trial, mock execution and exile in Omsk are probed to relate a time of deep introspection and significant ideological formation for the young writer. The full impact of nearly ten years of forced labor and military conscription tempered Dostoevsky’s views on the goodness of humanity and his early, almost perfunctory sympathy toward the Utopian Socialist cause (399). Under dire conditions in Omsk, one could say, the literary giant was born, formulating ideas about the necessity of human freedom and the deforming effects of oppression on the human psyche that would enrich his character construction vastly.
In multiple ways Dostoevsky’s exile would serve to greatly inform his literary license and his later mantle as a prophet for the Russian people. “It is the great teacher,” Nietzsche conjectured, “that shows us how to bear steadfastly the reverses of fortune, by reminding us of what others have suffered.” Dostoevsky assuredly suffered alongside criminals—mostly peasants—and Frank leverages the insight he methodically gained as a psychologist-prisoner to elucidate an intriguing perspective on the class structure at the center of the Russia’s ideological struggles.
The revolutionary debate among the educated class centered ostensibly on the value and worth of the peasantry in the ushering in a new socio-political arrangement. All of these ideas Dostoevsky insisted, gave little or no credit to the peasant class or to the traditional moral fabric of the Russian obshchina (peasant community). Literature served an overt purpose and the revolutionary ideas as well as the literary establishment reflected only a small stratum of society. Frank quotes Dostoevsky reflecting on this theme in Tolstoy’s novels: “There has not yet been a new word to replace that of the gentry-landowners,” (612). Clearly, Dostoevsky regarded himself as uniquely capable of supplying such a new word and the early burden of representing and defending the peasants to the revolutionaries really masked the larger debate on the content of human nature.
Later on, the tension between the nihilists’ complete rejection of established ideas and social institutions and Dostoevsky’s affirmation of the inexorable values in the Russian peasantry reveals his incessant desire to seek out the source and landscape of human nature: what’s inherent to the human condition and what is not? what is morally worth retaining and what is not?—a debate that is no doubt still pivotal to the political and social systems today.
Frank’s interlocking method also enriches common motifs in Dostoevsky’s literature. Nearly omnipresent in all novels is a scathing critique of liberalism in its several manifestations—atheism, rationalism, utilitarian morality, and egoism—unraveling beautifully under Frank’s illustrative lens, deeply passionate but comprehensive enough not to render it too quickly in vogue. A specific example of this is in disinterring a fresh perspective on Notes from the Underground, a sneering polemic against rational egoism. The social conditions surrounding the resentful and self-loathing Underground Man remain consistent in Frank’s analysis while the depth of Dostoevsky’s satirical wit is flipped on its head.
The established interpretation posits the Underground Man as a tormented irrationalist in a world saturated with Chernyshevsky’s ideology of rational egoism (315). But Frank credits Dostoevsky with a much more subtle usage of satire, claiming that the Underground Man is actually living in a self contradiction—accepting the precepts of rationalism in his head all the while fully rejecting it in his heart or emotively and intuitively (421). This dialectic of self-contradiction seems eminently plausible if only because of the breadth of Frank’s scope in relating Dostoevsky’s ultimate moral-spiritual project; his ardent belief that rational egoism necessarily implied a utilitarian morality (doing right by numbers) to the exclusion of any other moral frame. In the end, the depth of cunning and subtlety in Notes from the Underground is retained as a severe critique of a foolhardy idea, according to Dostoevsky, that was too simplistic to be grasped to its logical and soul-stifling conclusion.
In digesting his work, Frank highlights what many have considered Dostoevsky’s unequaled technique of following ideas through to their ultimate end. This usage of what Dostoevsky himself referred to as “fantastic realism” stretches the interpretive scope of his work between being strictly a writer in his time and a socio-cultural prophet for an entire people. As Frank claims early on, Dostoevsky had a special talent for “feeling ideas” so perceptibly that his characters’ personalities are more pathological than normal. The literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin claims that in Dostoevsky’s work one sees not who a character is but rather how a character is conscious of him or herself—an agonizing self consciousness that pervades his work, especially Crime and Punishment.
Hoping to achieve the same penetrating insight into Dostoevsky’s personality and psychology does not seem to be Frank’s primary concern here if only to withhold speculation that would overanalyze his subject. What Frank does offer however is a perceptive reading of Dostoevsky that gains considerable traction with his analysis of ideological and historical context. This is done in a nimble and judicious fashion, offering an interpretation without foreclosing on alternate ones; detailing the facts without overplaying their presence and meaning in his artistic expression. In this manner, Frank does well in capturing the genius of Dostoevsky as a decidedly nuanced commentator of Russian history and an adroit navigator of the insistent philosophical questions his turbulent era brought to the fore. In an era when ideas held such consequential weight, ranging from censorship to exile, Dostoevsky sought unfailingly to reconcile the ideological frenzy with monumental aspects of Russia’s historical experience.
Culminating Frank’s analysis is a straightforward, eighty page hermeneutic on Dostoevsky’s last and most well received novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Even in the abridged format Frank’s interpretation of Brothers could read as a stand alone literary achievement; although, much like the novel’s own stand alone chapter “The Grand Inquisitor,” Frank’s best work is in setting up the story. His interpretation connotes a novel fraught with the usual tensions, all interlinked and profoundly relevant to Russia’s “place” in the world: reason and faith, Slavophile and Western, nihilism and moral responsibility, good and evil, certainty and doubt. Reason and faith however form the primary lens by which Frank proceeds to view the unfolding drama that ranks in the Western canon on par with Milton, Shakespeare, and Dante. This lens, argues Frank, assumes something of a nexus between Dostoevsky’s artistic accomplishments and his occasionally discordant religious and ideological impulses. Thus, its characters and plot accurately captures both the eternal greatness and the eternal mystery of the author himself.
Toward the end of his life most Russians regarded Dostoevsky as perfectly emblematic of their plight and place. In the final sections of the book, Frank’s otherwise cerebral analysis capably expresses Russia’s love and admiration for their “prophet”. As a reader and speaker during the country’s celebrated Pushkin Festival, Dostoevsky seals his memory (813). A letter to his wife during the festivities implies a rather clumsy incredulity at his last novel’s reception. “A horde of people, young people, gray-haired people and ladies, rushed up to me and said, ‘You are our prophet. You have made us better since The Karamazovs’” (821).
After Dostoevsky’s final appearance during the festival that featured a laudatory and messianic interpretation of Pushkin’s work and its accursed characters set against the Western reforms of Peter the Great, the crowd literally shouted that he had solved the question of the tormented “Russian soul” so brooding in all of Pushkin’s work. Such a reception must have been immensely gratifying after a life spent dramatizing and combating the moral and spiritual confusion of late 19th century. In a poem many years later, Anna Akhmatova reflects on Dostoevsky’s legacy as prophet whose perception of his country’s ideological struggle was a uniquely sacred one:
The Country shivers, and the convict from Omsk
Understood everything, and made the sign of the cross over it all.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
The New Dostoevsky Biography
Hello my six followers (that sounds cult-like). After intending to jump into Dostoevsky's work with an analysis of a handful of his early short stories, I've hit a somewhat serendipitous snag. I was asked by a friend to write a review of Joseph Frank's new biography of Dostoevsky for "Politics and Culture". To be precise, it's not entirely "new" but rather an abridgment of Frank's existing work on Dostoevsky, which include a modest five volume biographical study (!) written over the course of several decades. I had never encountered any of these five volumes before (confirming my amateur status as a Dostoevsky enthusiast) but have held a certain curiosity about the forces that beget such a towering literary figure since I picked up Crime and Punishment in high school. This being the case, I am putting aside Dostoevsky's writing for now and focusing on Frank's biography. In a few weeks I will copy a draft of my final review here and then pick back up with reading and blogging. In the meantime, a little about Frank's biography so far...
If one can presumptuously say anything about Frank's work (200 pages in) it is that he appears to have turned Dostoevsky's famously meticulous and painstakingly thorough lens on the author himself. If Dostoevsky's impassionate and eternally conflicted characters convey the great moral complexity of the time, then Frank's careful placement of Dostoevsky in an era's ideological milieu adds a rich and at times sobering substratum to his literature. It is this ideological milieu that Frank intentionally focuses on from the beginning of the biography on, claiming that his work is best interpreted and understood by the torrent of ideas and social tensions in 19th century Russia. So far, this is understandable if not a bit overstated. For instance, Frank focuses almost conspicuously, and perhaps rightly so, on the notion that Dostoevsky's characters are always enfleshed ideas, simply stated. And, that those ideas are usually gotten at second hand or in pursuit of social standing and recognition. Now admittedly, I've only just started the 1,000 page tome but I am anxious to see how Frank treats the more mature Dostoevsky vis a vis his social and ideological context.
The literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, commenting on the theme of 'agonizing' self consciousness, claims that in Dostoevsky's work one sees not who a character is but rather how a character is conscious of him or herself. Hoping to achieve the same penetrating insight into Dostoevsky's personality and psychology doesn't seem to be Frank's primary concern here if only to retain an air of objectivity in his analysis early. Frank does however set a grand historical stage of ideas and forces that naturally connect to the author and his subsequent work.
I only expect this stage to get grander as the next 800 pages bear down. More on that later...
If one can presumptuously say anything about Frank's work (200 pages in) it is that he appears to have turned Dostoevsky's famously meticulous and painstakingly thorough lens on the author himself. If Dostoevsky's impassionate and eternally conflicted characters convey the great moral complexity of the time, then Frank's careful placement of Dostoevsky in an era's ideological milieu adds a rich and at times sobering substratum to his literature. It is this ideological milieu that Frank intentionally focuses on from the beginning of the biography on, claiming that his work is best interpreted and understood by the torrent of ideas and social tensions in 19th century Russia. So far, this is understandable if not a bit overstated. For instance, Frank focuses almost conspicuously, and perhaps rightly so, on the notion that Dostoevsky's characters are always enfleshed ideas, simply stated. And, that those ideas are usually gotten at second hand or in pursuit of social standing and recognition. Now admittedly, I've only just started the 1,000 page tome but I am anxious to see how Frank treats the more mature Dostoevsky vis a vis his social and ideological context.
The literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, commenting on the theme of 'agonizing' self consciousness, claims that in Dostoevsky's work one sees not who a character is but rather how a character is conscious of him or herself. Hoping to achieve the same penetrating insight into Dostoevsky's personality and psychology doesn't seem to be Frank's primary concern here if only to retain an air of objectivity in his analysis early. Frank does however set a grand historical stage of ideas and forces that naturally connect to the author and his subsequent work.
I only expect this stage to get grander as the next 800 pages bear down. More on that later...
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Introduction and Reading Plan
As I acquaint myself with more of Dostoevsky's background, I am noticing a distinction that's commonly drawn between his work prior to his exile and after. Given that he was sentenced to forced labor and military service for a total of 10 years it's not difficult to imagine his perspective changing as a writer.
From a literary standpoint, Dostoevsky's earlier stories indicate a more ambitious social conscience and commentary but his characters are a bit vague and themes underdeveloped. His later work however, seems to turn some of these larger questions inward, focusing on the individual's soul and mind while leaving the reader to extrapolate to the social and political level. The philosophical depth, richness of characters, and inward turmoil that's captured in his later work is aptly done through much longer and more complex novels. Conversely, prior to his exile Dostoevsky preferred the short story or vignette that dealt rather obliquely with one larger topic.
Politically, Dostoevsky forsook much of his interest in European social theory and Western thought after his exile and incarceration, preferring to develop subjects and stories that focused on Russian identity opposite the influence of the West (Slavophile). Although his religious conversion doesn't resemble the abruptness of Tolstoy, who simply forsook the large novel and focused mainly on religious writings, Dostoevsky did become markedly more religious (Russian Orthodox) after his exile.
All this to say that although I am not beholden to reading Dostoevsky in perfect chronological order I will make an effort to deal with his pre-exile work first in order to explore how his exile and conscription affected his later writing. Once I've engaged his pre-exile work I'll reflect a bit on those novels and short stories as a whole and then delve into the remainder of his work. A few simple ground rules:
I'll make an attempt to deal with main themes and questions I have of the text during the course of reading BUT I ALSO hope to make connections, reflect on, and commentate on the relevancy of Dostoevsky's work today. So, I intend to ask questions such as: Why read Dostoevsky today? How does his work relate to the perennial questions of politics and philosophy? What insight does he have for the 21st century? In this manner, I want to deal with Dostoevsky as (arguably) the first "Modern" writer--that is, a writer who grapples with themes at the heart of Modernity (the self, free will and moral responsibility, spiritual convictions and ethics, personal beliefs and political ideology, science and rationalism, etc.)
Here's the tentative schedule for the next few weeks: The Landlady, Poor Folk, The Double, Mr. Prokharchin, and Polzunkov. After these I'll have to hunt down a collection of his last remaining pre-exile short stories to read...
From a literary standpoint, Dostoevsky's earlier stories indicate a more ambitious social conscience and commentary but his characters are a bit vague and themes underdeveloped. His later work however, seems to turn some of these larger questions inward, focusing on the individual's soul and mind while leaving the reader to extrapolate to the social and political level. The philosophical depth, richness of characters, and inward turmoil that's captured in his later work is aptly done through much longer and more complex novels. Conversely, prior to his exile Dostoevsky preferred the short story or vignette that dealt rather obliquely with one larger topic.
Politically, Dostoevsky forsook much of his interest in European social theory and Western thought after his exile and incarceration, preferring to develop subjects and stories that focused on Russian identity opposite the influence of the West (Slavophile). Although his religious conversion doesn't resemble the abruptness of Tolstoy, who simply forsook the large novel and focused mainly on religious writings, Dostoevsky did become markedly more religious (Russian Orthodox) after his exile.
All this to say that although I am not beholden to reading Dostoevsky in perfect chronological order I will make an effort to deal with his pre-exile work first in order to explore how his exile and conscription affected his later writing. Once I've engaged his pre-exile work I'll reflect a bit on those novels and short stories as a whole and then delve into the remainder of his work. A few simple ground rules:
I'll make an attempt to deal with main themes and questions I have of the text during the course of reading BUT I ALSO hope to make connections, reflect on, and commentate on the relevancy of Dostoevsky's work today. So, I intend to ask questions such as: Why read Dostoevsky today? How does his work relate to the perennial questions of politics and philosophy? What insight does he have for the 21st century? In this manner, I want to deal with Dostoevsky as (arguably) the first "Modern" writer--that is, a writer who grapples with themes at the heart of Modernity (the self, free will and moral responsibility, spiritual convictions and ethics, personal beliefs and political ideology, science and rationalism, etc.)
Here's the tentative schedule for the next few weeks: The Landlady, Poor Folk, The Double, Mr. Prokharchin, and Polzunkov. After these I'll have to hunt down a collection of his last remaining pre-exile short stories to read...
Sunday, November 29, 2009
The Plan
Dear Hapless Reader:
I've claimed Dostoevsky as "my favorite author" for a few years now. In fact, his stoic portrait hangs above my desk, purchased in Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery a few years ago. Recently, through circumstances not entirely of my doing, I've been completely embarrassed that I've only read maybe half of his short stories and novels. This is simply unacceptable. Either I am a phony, thinking I can get by with only a layman's understanding of his life and work OR he's not the great author he's cracked up to be...and I am none the wiser.
All that said, I've decided to blog my way through all his short stories and novels. I hope blogging will inspire me to read Dostoevsky's work with a greater depth and force me to gain a communicable appreciation for his work. I know Russian literature well enough to know that it cannot be read briefly or lightly, being replete with the big, philosophical questions that have defined human existence for millennia. So, first and foremost, I blog to engage, grapple, and learn from a lifetime of literary achievement. Thanks for following!
I've claimed Dostoevsky as "my favorite author" for a few years now. In fact, his stoic portrait hangs above my desk, purchased in Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery a few years ago. Recently, through circumstances not entirely of my doing, I've been completely embarrassed that I've only read maybe half of his short stories and novels. This is simply unacceptable. Either I am a phony, thinking I can get by with only a layman's understanding of his life and work OR he's not the great author he's cracked up to be...and I am none the wiser.
All that said, I've decided to blog my way through all his short stories and novels. I hope blogging will inspire me to read Dostoevsky's work with a greater depth and force me to gain a communicable appreciation for his work. I know Russian literature well enough to know that it cannot be read briefly or lightly, being replete with the big, philosophical questions that have defined human existence for millennia. So, first and foremost, I blog to engage, grapple, and learn from a lifetime of literary achievement. Thanks for following!
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