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LECTURES ON DOSTOYEVSKY
Joseph Frank
ISBN 978-0-691-17896-7
Wallace argues convincingly in his compelling review that
Dostoyevsky is an ideological writer; not in the sense that he
bashes the reader with his convictions, but the opposite: he is
willing to take on serious ideas and explore them in and through
fiction,even when that means putting his own convictions in
question. Wallace is right that today the cynical
publishing/reviewing industry would raise a cool eyebrow and crack
an ironic smile at such a thing. Our literature is vapid because we
are afraid to wrestle with the big questions as Dostoyevsky did. Our
ostensibly non-ideological literature is thoroughly ideological. It
accepts the status quo and looks at the sales figures. It is almost
completely without principle, and for the most part, not worth
reading.
Frank tends to focus on the ideology at the expense of the
aesthetics; understandable and justified, in a way, given the writer
Dostoyevsky was; but Wallace makes the important point: Dostoyevsky
was a supremely good novelist. His plots are terrific but it is in
his characterisation (that and tone are the difficult matters which
separate the real novelist from the phoney) he proves himself. You
can read Dostoyevsky and be carried away by it whether on not you
agree with anything of his ideology.
Dostoyevsky was confused. He belonged to a confused age and a
confused society. Ours may be no less so but we have some
advantages. He inherited a religious, philosophical, political
tradition and fought with it to try to work out his truth but the
traditions tended to set the limits of his thinking. Frank explains
very well Dostoyevsky’s essential positions: he rejected utopian
socialism because the collective denied individual freedom; he
rejected reason because faith requires no proof; he rejected
determinism because he believed god gave man free will; he believed
that reason was egotistical and truth is revealed through the heart,
through feeling; he believed in the liberating power of the
irrational; altruism can only be expressed through Christian
self-sacrifice; Christ is the model of the good person and even
atheists accept that; reason eliminates feeling and only feeling
offers us the truth.
The essential failure in Dostoyevsky’s thinking is absence of
paradox. For example, the individual is a social creation.
Individuality isn’t a thing but a relationship. If individuality
were inherent in the biological individual, then the Wild Boy of
Aveyron would have emerged from the woods a perfectly formed
individual. In fact, he came out on all fours howling like a wolf.
Darwin understood the essence of this in his comment that language
is “An instinct to acquire an art.” Language is our biological
inheritance but it needs a social trigger, which means the social
trigger is our biological inheritance too. Dostoyevsky rejected
determinism because he thought it denied free will, but the paradox
is, the determinism of nature has wired us for free will. We are
free to make moral choices because nature has made us that way. Yet
that’s slightly misleading: we are forced to make moral choices
because nature has made us that way. Try to eliminate language from
your mind. Try to stop thinking. The only way you can try is to
think about not thinking. We don’t choose to think, nature made us
thinking creatures and we think whether we like it or not. Nature
also made us moral. We don’t choose to be moral, that’s the way
nature made us, but the paradox is that because of that determinism,
we have choice. The choice of course, is not without limits, which
is what Milan Kundera is getting at in his idea of the
“anthropological scandal”: no one can be in two places at once or
leap a hundred yards in the air. These are limits set by nature, but
within the limits we have choice.
Dostoyevsky sees complements as oppositions. He thinks in
absolutes rather than paradoxes. Thus, individual freedom must be
absolute or not at all. Collectivism must be absolute or not at all.
Of course, in his time, more or less everyone was guilty of the same
intellectual errors and Dostoyevsky was therefore right in
recognising that if the idea of the rights of the collective was
pushed to an absolute limit, the result would be appalling tyranny,
as in the Soviet Union. He was wrong though in not recognising that
if collective solutions were combined with democracy and respect for
individual rights they could produce benefits like the British NHS,
a more liberating than oppressive collective enterprise and one
which points towards a social, rather than a State, health system (
and who would want to be thrown back on their mere individual
resources in the face of Covid 19?).
The question qui parle? arises. There is a kind of free
indirect style at work in some of the essays which makes it hard,
and at certain points, impossible, to tell whether Frank is
expressing Dostoyevsky’s views or his own. He seems to have a
Christian agenda which he tends to set against rationalism,
socialism, anarchism, social democracy. Inevitably, he falls into
Dostoyevsky’s mistakes: god wants people to choose Christ freely:
but if the choice is free they might not, and why is god granting
humanity free will any less a form of determinism than nature doing
so?
The emphasis on ideology detracts from discussion of Dostoyevsky’s qualities as a writer. In his characterisation for example, he is very astute about how his culture promotes power over love. They are sworn enemies for a reason he couldn’t have known: they spark up different parts of the brain and as the principle of attention means that when the neurons implicated in power are lit up, others shut down, love must take a back seat. Raskolnikov commits murder in pursuit of power, to be a “great man” but his egotism destroys him. What makes Dostoyevsky a great novelist is his ability to site the conflicts of his time in his characters. Their humanity attracts us, their abuse of it appals us. He was struggling to define what it meant to be good and how being good could be realised. He was right that his culture promoted a destructive egotism, a battle of each against all in which a meagre, compensatory sense of selfhood rose from the inability of people to satisfy their needs adequately, including and perhaps most importantly, their moral needs. His genius was his depiction of characters in which the conflicts this gave rise to were lived out, mostly tragically. These characters are still modern because our culture promotes the same nonsense. We are morally adrift, like the worst of Dostoyevsky’s characters, not because we have lost our faith in a deity, but because we are irrational. We pursue money at the cost of making the planet uninhabitable. We assert ourselves as superior because of the colour of our skin or because some dubious verses in the Bible say some deity we know nothing of gave land to a mythical figure. Reason is what saves us. It doesn’t deny our emotional nature but arises from it.
One of the reasons Dostoyevsky lost faith in social reform was the
very peasants he had sought to help by his involvement in the
Petrashevsky Circle, reviled him as an enemy because of his class
position when he was in prison with them. This is somewhat
characteristic of the naivety of paternalistic motivations: those
you seek to help are not certain to want to be helped or to thank
you. Dostoyevsky over-compensated. He was amongst very disaffected,
ignorant and more or less hopeless people. He needed to adjust his
thinking but not rush to an extreme. Thankfully, he chose art rather
than polemic and though Frank is right that there is a polemical
cast to his work, it is as an honest artist he stands as
extraordinary and memorable. If this book encourages people to read
or re-read him perhaps we could even see the emergence of
seriousness in our crippled and tawdry fiction.
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