Quarrel and Quandary E-Book

Cynthia Ozick

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 383

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

In this collection of essays, Cynthia Ozick, everywhere acclaimed as a critic, novelist, and storyteller, examines some of the world's most illustrious writers and their work, tackles compelling contemporary literary and moral issues, and looks into the wellsprings of her own lifelong engagement with literature. She writes - quarrelsomely - about Crime and Punishment, about William Styron's Sophie's Choice, about the Book of Job. She inquires into the subterranean dispositions and quandaries of Kafka and Henry James. She discusses the difficulties inherent in the translation of great books, whether into film or into another language.

Leseprobe

Acclaim forCYNTHIA OZICK’s

Quarrel & Quandary

“A must-read. . . . [Ozick’s] prose is playful and tart, free in its gusto and flawless in its power and economy. The critic and polemicist take a back seat to the reveler in memory, and the delightful results need not be analyzed, only savored.”

—The Seattle Times

“A volume of essays by Cynthia Ozick is always cause for celebration. . . . [Ozick] is the one contemporary practitioner of the essay form who harmoniously blends what the essayist Thomas De Quincey called ‘the literature of knowledge’ with the literature of power. . . . Her bold formulations come to us with epigrammatic force and measured cadences that are music to the inward ear.”

—Jerusalem Post

“I urge all lovers of American prose to read it. . . . [Ozick’s] pieces have genuine durability. They are great essays.”

—John Sutherland, The New York Times Book Review

“A welcome relief from the onslaught of mass popular culture. . . . Tightly reasoned and closely argued. . . . Ozick writes about ideas, and about abstract concepts, without bothering to dumb them down. She is an intellectual. . . . She writes as an unabashedly educated person, bringing her erudition to bear on analyses of Kafka and Dostoyevsky, the Book of Job and the diary of Anne Frank, the writing process and the workings of memory.”

—The Oregonian

“The nineteen essays in Quarrel & Quandary give ample evidence that [Ozick] is as engaged with cultural politics as she ever was— and, moreover, that her skills as a take-no-prisoners polemicist can still give her antagonists fits. Ozick, in short, writes provocative essays that sharpen the debate about what culture means, or should mean, at the beginning of our new century.”

—The Miami Herald

“Ozick’s prose is at its symphonic best, and her eye for detail is thrilling. . . . [Her] breadth of reference, her wit, incisiveness and classic prose . . . turn every page into a literary feast. . . . A delicious, passionate, and thoroughly engagé book.”

—San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

“Lively. . . . A champ of American letters, the erudite Ozick writes sentences that snap with the brisk rhythms of her thoughts. . . . This collection offers [essays] that stir, unnerve, and challenge in ways both political and artistic.”

—The Boston Phoenix

“Ozick here is doing what she does best, and, frankly, doing what very few writers do anymore: treating literature as criticism of life, and making literature of critical writing. . . . She tugs and pushes at our language, defending its precision, vitality, and nuance. . . . An Ozick essay is resounding, distinctive, pungent. . . . The importance of literature, intelligence, reflection, opinion, and expression is never at question in Ozick’s domain—nor is her sense of obligation to them. . . . She demonstrates how the imagination in the service of language, pluck, and chance delivers art.”

—Bookforum

“[Ozick is] one of America’s foremost intellectuals. . . . The essays in her new collection,Quarrel & Quandary,justify her reputation for originality and brilliance.”

—The Plain Dealer

“In nineteen exquisitely wrought pieces, [Ozick] guides readers on an intellectual journey. . . . Like her beloved literary ‘Master,’ Henry James . . . Ozick’s luminous if sometimes prickly prose delights, even as it confronts and contends. . . . In this engaging collection . . . illuminations abound.”

—The Record (Bergen County, NJ)

“A series of eloquent meditations. . . . [Ozick’s] delicately modulated prose can surprise with its deft description and evocation, as well as its power to concisely hit the mark, sometimes devastatingly, without cliche or triteness.”

—The Advocate (Stamford, CT)

“Ozick is an intellectual warrior and a mighty essayist. In her fourth collection, the fiercest yet, she grasps the texts that claim her attention, turns them upside down, and shakes them for all she’s worth until they’re emptied of their secrets. . . . [A] potent and necessary volume.”

—Booklist

Cynthia Ozick is the author of numerous acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction. She is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Man Booker International Prize. Her stories have won four O. Henry first prizes and, in 2012, her novel Foreign Bodies was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She was born in 1928 and currently lives in New York.

Novels

Trust (1966)

The Cannibal Galaxy (1983)

The Messiah of Stockholm (1987)

The Puttermesser Papers (1997)

Heir to the Glimmering World (2004)(published in the United Kingdom in 2005 as The Bear Boy)

Foreign Bodies (2010)

Shorter fiction

The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971)

Bloodshed and Three Novellas (1976)

Levitation: Five Fictions (1982)

Envy; or, Yiddish in America (1969)

The Shawl (1989)

Collected Stories (2007)

Dictation: A Quartet (2008)

Essay collections

All the World Wants the Jews Dead (1974)

Art and Ardor (1983)

Metaphor & Memory (1989)

What Henry James Knew and Other Essays on Writers (1993)

Fame & Folly: Essays (1996)

Quarrel & Quandary (2000)

The Din in the Head: Essays (2006)

Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays (2016)

Letters of Intent (2016)

Drama

Blue Light (1994)

Miscellaneous

A Cynthia Ozick Reader (1996)

The Complete Works of Isaac Babel (introduction 2001)

Fistfuls of Masterpieces (1982)

Quarrel & Quandary

First published in the United States in 2001 by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Published in e-book in Great Britain in 2017 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Cynthia Ozick, 2017

The moral right of Cynthia Ozick to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

The essays in this collection originally appeared, in whole or in part, in the following publications: American Scholar, Atlantic Monthly, Borders, Commentary, Expressen (Stockholm), House & Garden, Los Angeles Times Book Review, the New Republic, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, and the Yale Review.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Random House, Inc.: Four lines from “The More Loving One” from W. H. Auden: Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. Copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith, and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. Charles Wright: Eight lines from poem by Charles Wright. Reprinted by permission of the author.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book isavailable from the British Library.

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 112 1

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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26–27 Boswell Street

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WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

To

Martin Baron

Contents

Forethoughts

Dostoyevsky’s Unabomber

The Posthumous Sublime

The Impossibility of Being Kafka

The Impious Impatience of Job

Who Owns Anne Frank?

The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination

Public Intellectuals

The Selfishness of Art

Cinematic James

A Prophet of Modernism

Imaginary People

The Ladle

What Is Poetry About?

A Swedish Novel

She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body

A Drug Store Eden

Lovesickness

How I Got Fired from My Summer Job

The Synthetic Sublime

Forethoughts

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

—W. B. Yeats

“But you are engagé,” the famous and energetic man who four years ago directed my play remarked the other day. I say “my play,” and not “a play of mine,” which may suggest more than one, because it is the only work for the theater I have ever written; I feel certain I will never write another. I had not seen the director since the play closed, and his comment—that once-faddish, Sartre-sounding word—startled me. My one play had, in fact, been political, even polemical; it was about Holocaust denial. And though I had always longed to try my hand at drama, I had supposed it would find its shape, if the time ever came, in something literary or satiric, or both; my secret mnemonic model was Simon Gray’s frivolously melancholic The Common Pursuit, which had, decades ago, enthralled me. So I was surprised when a congeries of circumstances, not all of my own manufacture, resulted in a play that was indisputably “engagé.” I had been driven to it like a wheel the spokes of which were being nailed into place, even while it ran, by mechanics in unfamiliar uniform.

I mean by all this that I resist the political, and am reluctant to take on its spots and stripes: the focus and deliberateness of political engagement, its judgments and its zeal, are so much the opposite of loafing and inviting one’s soul. This collection, for instance, includes an essay on essays, wherein the form of the essay is defined, and defended, as follows: “If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion in it, you need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay has no educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use.” This was only the latest in a string of similar formulations—or call them wardings-off; what was being warded off was any tincture of the topical or the tendentious. In 1983, in a foreword to my first non-fiction collection, I wrote, comparing essays to stories, “Sometimes even an essay can invent, burn, guess, try out, hurtle forward, succumb to that flood of sign and nuance that adds up to intuition, disclosure, discovery. The only non-fiction worth writing—at least for me—lacks the summarizing gift, is heir to nothing, and sets out with empty pockets from scratch.” In a 1988 preface, this time dubbed a “forewarning,” I continued along the same line, or tightrope: “Nearly every essay, like every story, is an experiment, not a credo. What I am repudiating,” I persisted, “is the inference that a handful of essays is equal to a Weltanschauung; that an essay is generally anything more than simply another fiction—a short story told in the form of an argument, or a history, or even (once in a very great while) an illumination. But never a tenet.”

Can I make that stick here? Or, rather, can I claim that I have stuck to this credo-contra-credos? Or have I, despite these defensive and sometimes slippery declarations of resistance, fallen, after all, into the distinctly educational, polemical, and sociopolitical? How can I deny that I have willfully entered the lists of tenet and exigency in writing here on Anne Frank; or, contemplating the rights of history, on so-called Holocaust fiction; or on the responsibility of public intellectuals; or on Dostoyevsky’s Unabomber; or on Central European politics and policies, ancient and modern, as a framework for Kafka’s familial and personal history?

George Orwell, in “Why I Write,” asserts that “the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.” There are times when one is tempted to agree with him, and in my discussion of E. M. Forster’s views on art in the terrible year of 1941, I do mainly agree—or, in Forster’s own formula (“Two Cheers for Democracy” is one of his celebrated phrases), I am willing to give the idea two cheers at least. Yet inserting politics into literature has, as we have seen, led to the extremist (or absurdist) notion that Jane Austen, for instance, is tainted with colonialism and slave-holding because Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park owns plantations in eighteenth-century Antigua. This kind of thinking fits nicely with James Thurber’s tale of the bear who leaned so far backward that he fell on his face. It asks a novel of country-house manners to become a tract on British imperialism. Then must the soldiers and sailors in Jane Austen’s fiction supply the occasion for a discourse on the Napoleonic Wars, or may they be left to their romantic employments in the minds of Austen’s marriageable young ladies? (It is politics, of course, that accounts for the presence of those soldiers and sailors.) “No book is genuinely free from political bias,” Orwell plausibly remarks—which is different from saying that every book ought to be politically acceptable to contemporary sensibilities. If that were our objective, then scores of European classics, beginning with Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale”—the theme of which is responsible for centuries of calumny and bloodshed—would have to be thrown out with the bath water. (Which is what some readers of “Who Owns Anne Frank?” concluded I was seriously recommending for the Diary in the closing paragraph of that essay; these same readers may possibly believe that Dean Swift meant it when he suggested, as a way of ameliorating famine in Ireland, that the Irish babies be eaten.) The writer’s subject matter, Orwell goes on, “will be determined by the age he lives in—at least that is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own.” If Orwell is completely right, then both Jane Austen and E. M. Forster in 1941 (he was speaking at a writers’ conference) are completely wrong. She declined to engage with colonialism, slavery, and the Napoleonic upheavals; he declined to engage with Hitler, anti-Semitism, and the German upheavals. Both were determined to be undetermined by the politics of the age they lived in. (And yet Forster, in 1924, had already published A Passage to India, arguing against Britain as a colonial power.) If I feel less critical of Austen than of Forster (and I do), it is not only because there is a difference between a novel and a speech, but also because undoubtedly I am, as Orwell insists, determined by my own tumultuous age. Never mind that we are launched now into the twenty-first century; as my essay on the contentions of history and imagination may signify, the twentieth is not yet done with us, nor we with it.

The central question, perhaps, is this: is politics a distraction from art, or is it how we pay attention to the life that gives rise to art? And might not the answer be: both, depending on the issues and the times? A reflection on a ladle in a kitchen drawer can outweigh what the President is up to when what the President is up to is too trivial to bear serious contemplation. The essential point has to do with the idea of the ephemeral. History is and is not ephemeral; situations and events evaporate, but their moral and intellectual residue does not. A century afterward, contemporary incarnations of Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards are plainly recognizable. In a post-theological era, a romantic paganism (sometimes labeled “spirituality”) freely roams. What Saul Bellow calls “the oceanic proliferating complexity of things” sweeps the mind away from concentration. Concentration on what? On the non-transient. And it is on that negative ground that I set my purpose.

In a recent issue of one of those Internet magazines (I read it in the paper version), a pair of reviewers in e-mail dialogue faulted an esteemed young critic of earned authority for writing about the old moderns—Chekhov, Flaubert, Mann, Woolf—as if to say that ripeness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. (They were this-generation reviewers, and appeared to regard the critic as a traitor to his cohort.) What was clearly in play was the journalistic conviction—a kind of noose—that there is only so much space on a page (even on a cybernetic page), so it had better be filled up with Now: Now being the politics of the current literary marketplace. Generations, yours and mine, are broader and roomier and more flexible than that. Commenting on the beautiful heads of unschooled TV anchormen, Bellow notes, “These crowns of hair contribute charm and dignity but perhaps also oppress the brain with their weight.” Journalism is a necessity, but it is not a permanence. When I hear someone (seventy-plus or twenty-something) utter “my generation,” I know I am in the vicinity of a light mind. This is not what Orwell intended when he spoke of being determined by the turbulence of one’s own time. When we allude to “our age,” either we include our predecessors and their travail (and also their bold genius) or we show ourselves to be minor in brain and intuition.

Two cheers, then—when there is no choice—for being engagé; but three cheers and more for that other bravery, the literary essay, and for memory’s mooning and maundering, and for losing one’s way in the bliss of American prose, and finding one’s way, too, when politics is slumbering, in the surprising atlas of all that is not benign, yet (somehow, sometimes) stirring.

June 1999

Quarrel & Quandary

Dostoyevsky’s Unabomber

1.

Soon after dawn on a very cold winter morning in 1849, fifteen Russian criminals, in groups of three, were led before a firing squad. They were all insurgents against the despotism of Czar Nicholas I. They were mostly educated men, idealists in pursuit of a just society. They felt no remorse. Several were professed atheists. All were radicals. A priest carrying a cross and a Bible accompanied them. The first three were handed white gowns and shapeless caps and ordered to put these on; then they were tied to posts. The rest waited their turn. Each man in his own way prepared to die. The sun was beginning to brighten; the firing squad took aim. At just that moment there was a signal—a roll of drums—and the rifles were lowered. A galloping horseman announced a reprieve. Although the condemned were unaware of it, the execution was staged, and the reprieve was designed to demonstrate the merciful heart of the Czar. Instead of being shot, the criminals were to be transported in shackles to a Siberian penal colony.

One of the men went permanently mad. Another, fifteen years afterward, wrote Crime and Punishment, an impassioned assault on exactly the kind of radical faith that had brought its author to face the Czar’s riflemen that day. It was a work almost in the nature of double jeopardy: as if Fyodor Dostoyevsky in middle age—a defender of the Czar, the enemy of revolutionary socialism—were convicting and punishing his younger self yet again for the theories the mature novelist had come to abhor.

2.

A new type of crime is on the American mind—foreign, remote, metaphysical, even literary; and radically different from what we are used to. Street crime, drunken crime, drug-inspired crime, crimes of passion, greed, revenge, crimes against children, gangster crime, white-collar crime, break-ins, car thefts, holdups, shootings—these are familiar, and to a degree nearly expected. They shake us up without disorienting us. They belong to our civilization; they are the darker signals of home. “Our” crime has usually been local—the stalker, the burglar, the mugger lurking in a doorway. Even Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal sadist who kept boys’ body parts in his kitchen refrigerator, is not so very anomalous in the context of what can happen in ordinary neighborhoods—a little girl imprisoned in an underground cage; children tormented, starved, beaten to death; newborns bludgeoned; battered women, slain wives, mutilated husbands. Domesticity gone awry.

All that is recognizable and homespun. What feels alien to America is the philosophical criminal of exceptional intelligence and humanitarian purpose who is driven to commit murder out of an uncompromising idealism. Such a type has always seemed a literary construct of a particular European political coloration (The Secret Agent, The Princess Casamassima), or else has hinted at ideologies so removed from tame Republicans and Democrats as to be literally outlandish. Then came the mysterious depredations of the Unabomber. Until the melodramatic publication of his manifesto in major newspapers, the Unabomber remained an unpredictable riddle, unfathomable, sans name or habitation. In garrulous print his credo revealed him to be a visionary. His dream was of a green and pleasant land liberated from the curse of technological proliferation. The technical élites were his targets: computer wizards like Professor David Gelernter of Yale, a thinker in pursuit of artificial intelligence. Maimed by a package bomb, Gelernter escaped death; others did not.

In the storm of interpretation that followed the Unabomber’s public declaration of principles, he was often mistaken for a kind of contemporary Luddite. This was a serious misnomer. The nineteenth-century Luddites were hand weavers who rioted against the introduction of mechanical looms in England’s textile industry; they smashed the machines to protect their livelihoods. They were not out to kill, nor did they promulgate romantic theories about the wholesome superiority of hand looms. They were selfish, ruthlessly pragmatic, and societally unreasonable. By contrast, Theodore Kaczynski—the Unabomber—is above all a calculating social reasoner and messianic utopian. His crimes, for which he was found guilty as charged, were intended to restore us to cities and landscapes clear of digital complexities;he meant to clean the American slate of its accumulated techno-structural smudges. At the same time, we can acknowledge him to have been selfless and pure, loyal and empathic, the sort of man who befriends, without condescension, an uneducated and impoverished Mexican laborer. It is easy to think of the Unabomber, living out his principles in his pollution-free mountain cabin, as a Thoreauvian philosopher of advanced environmentalism. The philosopher is one with the murderer. The Napoleonic world-improver is one with the humble hermit of the wilderness.

In the Unabomber, America has at last brought forth its own Raskolnikov—the appealing, appalling, and disturbingly visionary murderer of Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky’s masterwork of 1866. But the Unabomber is not the only ideological criminal (though he may be the most intellectual) to burst out of remoteness and fantasy onto unsuspecting native grounds. It was a political conviction rooted in anti-government ideas of liberty suppressed that fueled the deadly bombing of a Federal building in Oklahoma City. God’s will directed the bombing of the World Trade Center, and the Muslim zealots who devised the means are world-improvers obedient to the highest good; so are the bombers of abortion clinics. The Weathermen of the sixties, who bombed banks and shot police in order to release “Amerika” from the tyranny of a democratic polity, are close ideological cousins of the Russian nihilists who agitated against Alexander II, the liberalizing Czar of a century before. That celebrated nineteen-sixties mantra—to make an omelet you need to break eggs—had its origin not in an affinity for violence, but in the mouth-watering lure of the humanitarian omelet. It was only the gastronomic image that was novel. In the Russian sixties, one hundred years earlier—in 1861, the very year Alexander II freed the serfs—a radical young critic named Dimitry Pisarev called for striking “right and left” and announced, “What resists the blow is worth keeping; what flies to pieces is rubbish.” Here was the altruistic bomber’s dogma, proclaimed in the pages of a literary journal—and long before The New York Review of Books published on its front cover a diagram of how to construct a Molotov cocktail.

Like the Unabomber, Raskolnikov is an intellectual who publishes a notorious essay expounding his ideas about men and society. Both are obscure loners. Both are alienated from a concerned and affectionate family. Both are tender toward outcasts and the needy. Both are élitists. Both are idealists. Both are murderers. Contemporary America, it seems, has finally caught up with czarist Russia’s most argumentative novelist.

And in Crime and Punishment Dostoyevsky was feverishly pursuing an argument. It was an argument against the radicals who were dominant among Russian intellectuals in the eighteen-sixties, many of them espousing nihilist views. In the universities especially, revolutionary commotion was on the rise. Yet there was an incongruity in the timing of all these calls for violent subversion. St. Petersburg was no longer the seat of the old Czar of the repressive eighteen-forties, the tyrannical Nicholas I, against whose cruelties convulsive outrage might be justly presumed. Paradoxically, under that grim reign even the most fiery radicals were at heart gradualists who modeled their hopes on Western reformist ideas. By the incendiary sixties, the throne was held by Nicholas’s moderate son and successor, whose numerous democratic initiatives looked to be nudging Russia toward something that might eventually resemble a constitutional monarchy. The younger revolutionary theorists would have none of it. It was incomplete; it was too slow. Liberalism, they roared, was the enemy of revolution, and would impede a more definitive razing of evil.

The first installments of Crime and Punishment had just begun to appear in The Russian Messenger, a Slavophile periodical, when a student revolutionary made an attempt on the life of the Czar as he was leaving the gardens of the Winter Palace to enter his carriage. The government responded with a draconian crackdown on the radicals. “You know,” Dostoyevsky wrote cuttingly to his publisher in the wake of these events, “they are completely convinced that on a tabula rasa they will immediately construct a paradise.” But he went on to sympathize with “our poor little defenseless boys and girls” and “their enthusiasm for the good and their purity of heart.” So many “have become nihilists so purely, so unselfishly, in the name of honor, truth, and genuine usefulness! You know they are helpless against these stupidities, and take them for perfection.” And though in the same letter he spoke of “the powerful, extraordinary, sacred union of the Czar with the people,” he objected to the increase in repression. “But how can nihilism be fought without freedom of speech?” he asked.

This mixture of contempt for the radicals and solicitude for their misguided, perplexed, and perplexing humanity led to the fashioning of Raskolnikov. Pisarev striking right and left was one ingredient. Another was the appeal of self-sacrificial idealism. And a third was the literary mode through which Dostoyevsky combined and refined the tangled elements of passion, brutishness, monomaniacal principle, mental chaos, candor, mockery, fury, compassion, generosity—and two brutal ax-murders. All these contradictory elements course through Raskolnikov with nearly a Joycean effect; but if stream of consciousness flows mutely and uninterruptedly, assimilating the outer world into the inner, Raskolnikov’s mind—and Dostoyevsky’s method—is zigzag and bumpy, given to rebellious and unaccountable alterations of purpose. Raskolnikov is without restraint—not only as an angry character in a novel, but as a reflection of Dostoyevsky himself, who was out to expose the entire spectrum of radical thought engulfing the writers and thinkers of St. Petersburg.

This may be why Raskolnikov is made to rush dizzyingly from impulse to impulse, from kindliness to withdrawal to lashing out, and from one underlying motive to another—a disorderliness at war with his half-buried and equivocal conscience. Only at the start is he seen, briefly, to be deliberate and in control. Detached, reasoning it out, Raskolnikov robs and murders a pawnbroker whom he has come to loathe, an unpleasant and predatory old woman alone and helpless in her flat. He hammers her repeatedly with the heavy handle of an ax:

Her thin hair, pale and streaked with gray, was thickly greased as usual, plaited into a ratty braid and tucked under a piece of horn comb that stuck up at the back of her head . . . he struck her again and yet again with all his strength, both times with the butt-end, both times on the crown of the head. Blood poured out as from an overturned glass.

Unexpectedly, the old woman’s simple-minded sister just then enters the flat; she is disposed of even more horribly: “The blow landed directly on the skull, with the sharp edge, and immediately split the whole upper part of the forehead, almost to the crown.”

The second slaying is an unforeseen by-product of the first. The first is the rational consequence of forethought. What is the nature—the thesis—of this forethought? Shortly before the murder, Raskolnikov overhears a student in a tavern speculating about the pawnbroker: she is “rich as a Jew,” and has willed all her money to the Church. “A hundred, a thousand good deeds and undertakings . . . could be arranged and set going by the money that old woman has doomed to the monastery!” exclaims the student.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of lives put right; dozens of families saved from destitution, from decay, from ruin, from depravity, from the venereal hospitals—all on her money. Kill her and take her money, so that afterwards with its help you can devote yourself to the service of all mankind and the common cause. . . . One death for hundreds of lives—it’s simple arithmetic! And what does the life of this stupid, consumptive, and wicked old crone mean in the general balance? No more than the life of a louse, a cockroach.

Startled by this polemic, Raskolnikov admits to himself that “exactly the same thoughts had just been conceived in his own head”—though not as harmless theoretical bombast.

The theory in Raskolnikov’s head—Benthamite utilitarianism, the greatest good for the greatest number, with its calibrated notions of what is useful and what is expendable—had been current for at least a decade among the Westernizing majority of the Russian intelligentsia, especially the literati of the capital. In supplying Bentham with an ax, Dostoyevsky thought to carry out the intoxications of the utilitarian doctrine as far as its principles would go: brutality and bloodletting would reveal the poisonous fruit of a political philosophy based on reason alone.

A fiercely sardonic repudiation of that philosophy—some of it in the vocabulary of contemporary American controversy— is entrusted to Raskolnikov’s affectionate and loyal comrade, Razumikhin:

It started with the views of the socialists. . . . Crime is a protest against the abnormality of the social set-up—that alone and nothing more, no other causes are admitted— but nothing! . . . With them one is always a “victim of the environment”—and nothing else! . . . If society itself is normally set up, all crimes will at once disappear, because there will be no reason for protesting. . . . Nature isn’t taken into account, nature is driven out, nature is not supposed to be! . . . On the contrary, a social system, coming out of some mathematical head, will at once organize the whole of mankind and instantly make it righteous and sinless. . . . And it turns out in the end that they’ve reduced everything to mere brickwork and the layout of corridors and rooms in a phalanstery!

The phalanstery, a cooperative commune, was the brainchild of Charles Fourier, who, along with the political theorist Saint-Simon (and well before Marx), was an enduring influence on the Francophile Russian radical intelligentsia. But Razumikhin’s outcry against the utopian socialists who idealize the life of the commune and fantasize universal harmony is no more than a satiric rap on the knuckles. Dostoyevsky is after a bloodier and more threatening vision—nihilism in its hideously perfected form. This is the ideological cloak he next throws over Raskolnikov; it is Raskolnikov’s manifesto as it appears in his article. The “extraordinary man,” Raskolnikov declaims, has the right to “step over certain obstacles” in order to fulfill a mission that is “salutary for the whole of mankind.”

In my opinion, if, as the result of certain combinations, Kepler’s or Newton’s discoveries could become known to people in no other way than by sacrificing the lives of one, or ten, or a hundred or more people who were hindering the discovery, or standing as an obstacle in its path, then Newton would have the right, and it would even be his duty . . . to remove those ten or a hundred people, in order to make his discoveries known to all mankind.

Every lawgiver or founder of a new idea, he goes on, has always been a criminal—“all of them to a man . . . from the fact alone that in giving a new law they thereby violated the old one . . . and they certainly did not stop at shedding blood either, if it happened that blood . . . could help them.” Such extraordinary men—Lycurgus, Solon, Napoleon—call for “the destruction of the present in the name of the better,” and will lead the world toward a new Jerusalem.

To which Razumikhin, recoiling, responds: “You do finally permit bloodshed in all conscience.” And just here, in the turbulence of Razumikhin’s revelation—and prefiguring Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, and Sharansky—Dostoyevsky makes his case for the dismantling of the Soviet state half a century before the revolutionary convulsion that brought it into being.

3.

Yet the mammoth irony of Dostoyevsky’s life remains: the writer who excoriated the radical theorists, who despised the nihilist revolutionaries, who wrote novel after novel to defy them, once belonged to their company.

It is easy to dislike him, and not because the spectacle of a self-accusing apostate shocks. He ended as a Slavophile religious believer; but in his twenties he was what he bitterly came to scorn—a Westernizing Russian liberal. Nevertheless a certain nasty consistency ruled. At all times he was bigoted and xenophobic: he had an irrational hatred of Germans and Poles, and his novels are speckled with anti-Semitism. He attacked Roman Catholicism as the temporal legacy of a pagan empire, while extolling Russian Orthodoxy. He was an obsessive and deluded gambler scheming to strike it rich at the snap of a finger: he played madly at the roulette tables of Europe, and repeatedly reduced himself and his pregnant young second wife to actual privation. Escaping debtors’ prison in Russia, he was compelled for years to wander homelessly and wretchedly through Germany and Switzerland. In Wiesbaden he borrowed fifty thalers from Turgenev and took ten years to repay him. He held the rigidly exclusionary blood-and-soil tenet that the future of civilization lay with Russia alone. He was seriously superstitious and had a silly trust in omens and dreams. He was irritable, sometimes volcanically so, and inordinately vain. And if all these self-inflicted debilities of character were not ugly enough, he suffered from a catastrophic innate debility: he was subject, without warning, to horrifying epileptic seizures in a period when there were no medical controls.

Though not quite without warning. Dostoyevsky’s fits were heralded by a curious surge of ecstasy—an “aura” indistinguishable from religious exaltation. He underwent his first seizure, he reported, on Easter morning in 1865, when he was forty-four years old: “Heaven had come down to earth and swallowed me. I really grasped God and was penetrated by Him.” But there may have been unidentified earlier attacks, different in kind. At the age of ten he experienced an auditory hallucination; he thought he heard a voice cry “A wolf is on the loose!” and was comforted by a kindly serf who belonged to his father.

Later fits uniformly triggered the divine penumbra. He was well prepared for it. From childhood he had been saturated in a narrow household piety not unlike the unquestioning devoutness of the illiterate Russian peasant. Prayers were recited before icons; a clergyman came to give lessons. The Gospels were read, and the Acta Martyrum—the lives of the saints—with their peculiarly Russian emphasis on passive suffering. No Sunday or religious holiday went unobserved, on the day itself and at vespers the evening before. Rituals were punctiliously kept up. Dostoyevsky’s father, a former army doctor on the staff of a hospital for the poor outside Moscow, frequently led his family on excursions to the great onion-domed Kremlin cathedrals, where religion and nationalism were inseparable. Every spring, Dostoyevsky’s mother took the children on a pilgrimage to the Monastery of St. Sergey, sixty miles from Moscow, where they kneeled among mobs of the faithful before an imposing silver reliquary said to contain the saint’s miraculous remains. None of this was typical of the Russian gentry of the time. Neither Tolstoy nor Turgenev had such an upbringing. Joseph Frank, Dostoyevsky’s superb and exhaustive biographer, explains why. “Most upper-class Russians,” he recounts, “would have shared the attitude exemplified in Herzen’s anecdote about his host at a dinner party who, when asked whether he was serving Lenten dishes out of personal conviction, replied that it was ‘simply and solely for the sake of the servants.’”

There is speculation that Dostoyevsky’s father may himself have had a mild form of epilepsy: he was gloomy, moody, and unpredictably explosive, a martinet who drank too much and imposed his will on everyone around him. In his youth he had completed his studies at a seminary for non-monastic clergy, a low caste, but went on instead to pursue medicine, and eventually elevated himself to the status of the minor nobility. His salary was insufficient and the family was not well off, despite the doctor’s inheritance of a small and scrubby estate, along with its “baptized property”—the serfs attached to the land. When Dostoyevsky was sixteen, his father dispatched him and his older brother Mikhail, both of whom had literary ambitions, to the Academy of Military Engineers in St. Petersburg, in preparation for government careers. But the doctor’s plan for his sons came to nothing. Less than two years later, in a season of drought, bad crops, and peasant resentment, Dostoyevsky was informed that his father had been found dead on the estate, presumably strangled by his serfs. Killings of this kind were not uncommon. In a famous letter to Gogol (the very letter that would ultimately send Dostoyevsky before the firing squad), the radical critic Vissarion Belinsky wrote that the Czar was “well aware of what landowners do with their peasants and how many throats of the former are cut every year by the latter.”

Freed from engineering (and from a despotic father), Dostoyevsky went flying into the heart of St. Petersburg’s literary life. It was the hugely influential Belinsky who catapulted him there. Dostoyevsky’s first novel, Poor Folk—inspired by the social realism of Balzac,Victor Hugo, and George Sand, and published in 1846—was just the sort of fiction Belinsky was eager to promote. “Think of it,” he cried, “it’s the first attempt at a social novel we’ve had.” Belinsky was a volatile man of movements— movements he usually set off himself. He was also quickly excitable: he had leaped from art-for-art’s-sake to a kind of messianic socialism (with Jesus as chief socialist) to blatant atheism. In literature he espoused an ardent naturalism, and saw Dostoyevsky as its avatar. He instantly proclaimed the new writer to be a genius, made him famous overnight, and admitted him, at twenty-four, into St. Petersburg’s most coveted intellectual circle, Belinsky’s own “pléiade.” Turgenev was already a member. The talk was socialist and fervent, touching on truth and justice, science and atheism, and, most heatedly, on the freeing of the serfs. Here Christianity was not much more than a historical metaphor, a view Dostoyevsky only briefly entered into; but he was fiery on the issue of human chattel.

Success went to his head. “Everywhere an unbelievable esteem, a passionate curiosity about me,” he bragged to his brother. “Everyone considers me some sort of prodigy. . . . I am now almost drunk with my own glory.” The pléiade responded to this posturing at first with annoyance and then with rough ribbing. Belinsky kept out of it, but Turgenev took off after the young prodigy with a scathing parody. Dostoyevsky walked out, humiliated and enraged, and never returned. “They are all scoundrels and eaten up with envy,” he fumed. He soon gravitated to another socialist discussion group, which met on Friday nights at the home of Mikhail Petrashevsky, a twenty-six-year-old aristocrat. Petrashevsky had accumulated a massive library of political works forbidden by the censors, and was even less tolerant of Christianity than the pléiade: for him Jesus was “the well-known demagogue.” To improve the miserable living conditions of the peasants on his land, Petrashevsky had a commodious communal dormitory built for them, with every amenity provided. They all moved in, and the next day burned down the master’s paternalistic utopia. Undaunted, Petrashevsky continued to propagandize for his ideas: the end of serfdom and censorship, and the reform of the courts. His commitment was to gradualism, but certain more impatient members of the Petrashevsky circle quietly formed a secret society dedicated to an immediate and deeply perilous activism.

It was with these that Dostoyevsky aligned himself; he joined a scheme to print and disseminate the explosive manifesto in the form of the letter to Gogol, which Belinsky had composed a year or so earlier, protesting the enslavement of the peasants. Russia, Belinsky wrote, “presents the dire spectacle of a country where men traffic in men, without ever having the excuse so insidiously exploited by the American plantation owners who claim that the Negro is not a man.” Dostoyevsky gave an impressive reading of this document at one of Petrashevsky’s Friday nights. His audience erupted into an uproar; there were yells of “That’s it! That’s it!” A government spy, unrecognized, took notes, and at four in the morning Dostoyevsky’s bedroom was invaded by the Czar’s secret police. He was arrested as a revolutionary conspirator; he was twenty-seven years old.

Nicholas I took a malicious interest in the punishment for this crime against the state—the Czar was the state—and personally ordered the mock execution, the last-minute reprieve, the transport to Siberia. Dostoyevsky’s sentence was originally eight years; he served four at forced labor in a prison camp at Omsk and the rest in an army regiment. In Siberia, after his release from the camp, he married for the first time—a tumultuous widow with worsening tuberculosis. His own affliction worsened; seizure followed on seizure. For the remainder of his life he would not be free of the anguish of fits. He feared he would die while in their grip.

The moment of cataclysmic terror before the firing squad never left him. He was not so much altered as strangely—almost mystically—restored: restored to what he had felt as a child, kneeling with his mother at the reliquary of St. Sergey. He spoke circumspectly of “the regeneration of my convictions.” The only constant was his hatred of the institution of serfdom—but to hate serfdom was not to love peasants, and when he began to live among peasant convicts (political prisoners were not separated from the others), he found them degraded and savage, with a malignant hostility toward the gentry thrown into their midst. The agonies of hard labor, the filth, the chains, the enmity, the illicit drunkenness, his own nervous disorders—all these assailed him, and he suffered in captivity from a despondency nearly beyond endurance.

And then—in a metamorphosis akin to the Ancient Mariner’s sudden love for the repulsive creatures of the sea—he was struck by what can only be called a conversion experience. In the twisted and branded faces of the peasant convicts—men much like those who may have murdered his father—he saw a divine illumination; he saw the true Russia; he saw beauty; he saw the kind-hearted serf who had consoled him when the imaginary wolf pursued. Their instinctive piety was his. Their soil-rootedness became a precept. He struggled to distinguish between one criminal motive and another: from the viewpoint of a serf, was a crime against a hardened master really a crime? Under the tatters of barbarism, he perceived the image of God.

The collective routine of the stockade drove him further and further from the socialist dream of communal living. “To be alone is a normal need,” he railed. “Otherwise, in this enforced communism one turns into a hater of mankind.” And at the same time he began to discover in the despised and brutalized lives of the peasant convicts a shadow of the redemptive suffering that is the Christian paradigm. More and more he inclined toward the traditional Orthodoxy of his upbringing. He fought doubt with passionate unreason: “If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, then I should prefer to remain with Christ than with the truth.” This set him against his old associates, both radicals and liberals. It set him against Petrashevsky and Belinsky, whose highest aspiration had been a constitutional republic in league with a visionary ethical socialism. It set him against illustrious literary moderates and Westernizers like Turgenev and Alexander Herzen. Emerging from his Siberian ordeal, he thundered against “the scurvy Russian liberalism propagated by good-for-nothings.” Years later, when Belinsky was dead, Dostoyevsky was still sneering at “shitheads like the dung-beetle Belinsky,” whom he would not forgive because “that man reviled Christ to me in the foulest language.”

The culmination of these renunciations was a white-hot abomination of radicalism in all its forms—from the Western-influenced gentry-theorists of the eighteen-forties to the renegade raskolniki (dissenters) who burst into nihilism in the sixties, when student revolutionaries radicalized the universities. With his brother Mikhail, Dostoyevsky founded Vremya (Time), a literary-political periodical intended to combat the socialist radicals. Their immediate target was The Contemporary, an opposing polemical journal; it was in the arena of the monthlies that the ideological fires, under literary cover to distract the censors, smoldered. Though Vremya was a success, a misunderstanding led the censorship to close it down. Soon afterward, Dostoyevsky’s wife died of consumption; then Mikhail collapsed and died. The grieving Dostoyevsky attempted to revive the magazine under another name, but in the absence of his brother’s business management he fell into serious debt, went bankrupt, and in 1867 fled to the hated West to escape his creditors.

With him went Anna, the worshipful young stenographer to whom he had begun to dictate his work, and whom he shortly married. Four enforced years abroad took on the half-mad, hallucinatory frenzy of scenes in his own novels: he gambled and lost, gambled and wrote, pawned his wife’s rings and gambled and lost and wrote. His work was appearing regularly in the reactionary Russian Messenger. Dostoyevsky had now altogether gone over to the other side. “All those trashy little liberals and progressives,” he mocked, “find their greatest pleasure and satisfaction in criticizing Russia . . . everything of the slightest originality in Russia [is] hateful to them.” It was on this issue that he broke with Turgenev, to whom words like “folk” and “glory” smelled of blood. Turgenev, for his part, thought Dostoyevsky insane. And yet it was Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, with its ambiguous portrait of a scoffing nihilist, that was Raskolnikov’s sensational precursor.