New Year resolutions usually involve some form of abstinence. You could, instead, try some indulgence this year that will give you the hangover of humanity — let your life brim with Dostoevsky. In this conversation, Professor Tatyana Kovalevskaya suggests that the works of literary titans such as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy “always stood in for philosophy as well”. Indeed, Russian masterworks reflect on the extremities that our desires and feelings can reach if we let go of the leash of self-deceit. Kovalevskaya, PhD, Doctor of Sciences in philosophy, is the author of — among other books — Dostoevsky and Social and Metaphysical Freedom (as Tatyana Buzina). She is professor, foreign languages department, School for Foreign Relations and Regional Studies, Institute for History and Archives, the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow.

 

Question:   In Ivan Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons”, Bazarov rejects established truths, pretense, and love. But love seems to breach his defences and in the end hurts him. His death produces one of the most heartbreaking moments in literature. His parents show grief that is powerful in its unvarnished irrationality: his father reprimands the heavens. Do you think Turgenev is telling the reader through Bazarov’s death that the old order cannot be toppled without tragedies?

Tatyana Kovalevskaya: I think Bazarov’s death is a largely symbolic event, and it gives readers many ways of interpreting it, from a mundane one, something Bazarov himself would probably approve of, as a cautionary message along the lines of “be careful when using sharp objects” and “always carry a disinfectant with you if you intend to do a post-mortem,” to the symbolic interpretation you propose and that would most likely agree with Turgenev’s own intention.

On the other hand, I believe Turgenev was very much on the fence about toppling the old order and installing a new one, especially since it involved trampling not only the political dimension, but also the purely human dimension of life, and his doubts translate into a very ambiguous novel that Fathers and Sons, with all its outward transparency, is.

Dostoevsky parodied Turgenev, rather unkindly, in the character of Karmazinov in Devils, and as cruel as the parody is, I believe that Dostoevsky did latch onto Turgenev’s desire both to walk in step with the revolutionary future and his profound affinity with the traditional past and present, their culture and lifestyle, and these two impulses are in essence contradictory. Maybe, Bazarov’s death is also a temporary way out of the contradiction, which removes the “irritant” and allows the old life to go on.

 Question:   “Has anyone ever written a truer analysis of the climate in which a Russian revolution was made possible than Dostoevsky in “The Possessed”?” Those are A N Wilson’s words in “Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her”. Indeed, “The Possessed” — or, “The Devils and Demons” in some translations — is as daunting as it is rewarding. What place do you think the book should occupy on the shelves of today’s readers?

Tatyana Kovalevskaya: The more prominent, the better. I am very fond of this novel for many reasons. It was the novel which really made me appreciate Dostoevsky. I read it in high school, and thus began my study of Dostoevsky which I still carry on. It is also hilariously funny at times, even though it is one of Dostoevsky’s darkest novels.

I don’t like the translation The Possessed for the title. It switches the novel’s focus from active evil to the almost passive subjects of evil’s actions. Demons is not a great translation either; it makes evil grand, while Dostoevsky used the word Besy which rather applies to low-ranking devils devoid of any Romantic, Byronic-type grandeur. As to possession, we learn towards the end of the novel that the only entity that could be called “possessed” here is Russia herself, but the novel’s focus is on the actively evil devils that do the possessing. Although they are not devils, they are humans, and therein hangs the tale.

Dostoevsky is acutely interested in understanding what prompts human beings into evil actions. For him, all these aspects of human life are derivatives of humans’ metaphysical stance. In Devils, humans attempt to put themselves in the place of God. It starts with Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, who writes a poem about people completing the tower of Babel and taking over Mount Olympus with gods fleeing. And it continues with his biological son Petr and his ideological son Nikolay Stavrogin (Verkhovensky Sr. was his tutor).

Stavrogin is the source of all of the novel’s destructive and ultimately theomachistic [resistance to god or divine will] ideological constructs, and Petr is the one who intends to usurp political power by using Stavrogin as his figurehead, whom Petr intends to present as both a supreme political leader and a new deity. In essence, that means that in order to comprehend the revolution in Dostoevsky’s view, one has to go beyond the economic, social, and political conditions, and to grapple with the idea of humans’ eternal desire to transcend their finite nature and become deified — either with God, or without God, and in the latter case, Dostoevsky says, we have a problem.

Humans’ thirst for power is the driving engine behind the revolutionary movement, but the power they seek is truly cosmic, power over body and soul both. Revolution is not a search for a better life. Revolution, very cynically, is a quest for power on the part of those who set it up and in motion. Others may believe in whatever they like, as the members of the circle organized by Petr Verkhovensky do, but those who start it are after one thing only, their personal aggrandizement to the point of divinity. This is why Dostoevsky’s revolutionaries are so keen on sacrificing others, but not themselves. Devils is a very cautionary tale, as the standard phrase today goes, about the human nature, about what humans want, and about where their wishes can take them and, unfortunately, others.

Question:   Which brings me to the question I should have asked first — what preparations must a reader make to start the first expedition into the world of Russian classics?

Tatyana Kovalevskaya: I am not sure it would take any special preparations. No more than reading a work of literature from any other culture that is not the reader’s. Even when we read something that we think of as belonging to our culture, but that was created in a fairly distant past, we will encounter certain difficulties, because mindsets and ways of thinking change over time, just as they differ from country to country.

So I believe that with any work of art from another time and place, the readers should be prepared to make a bit more of an effort, to be a little more curious. We should be prepared to meet with something that will be different from what we are used to, sometimes radically so.

And sometimes, there is even no need to move beyond our own culture or beyond our own time. From Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead, we can surmise that he experienced a culture shock when he encountered Russian peasants at close quarters in prison. His narrator, Goryanchikov, who is part Dostoevsky’s alter ego, suddenly discovers that peasants and nobles are separated “by the deepest of chasms, and it can be noted only when a member of the nobility … is stripped of his rights and becomes a commoner. Otherwise, you may deal with peasants for forty years, for instance, as a civil servant … or in a friendly manner, as a benefactor … you will never learn their essence.”

So here are people who live in the same country, at the same time, speak the same language, and still do not understand each other, or at least do not understand each other very well. So we should always be prepared to face something unusual, unexpected, challenging.

Russian literature has a reputation of being all “doom and gloom,” and this reputation is certainly not unfounded, but there are also some wonderfully light-hearted works that could alleviate any darkness.

Chekhov’s early stories, for instance; even Nikolay Nekrasov, mostly known for his socially-oriented works, wrote some entertaining pieces. In the 20th century, there was a wonderful playwright, Evgeny Shvarts, who wrote fairy-tale plays, some based on Hans Christian Andersen’s stories, some original, which, for all their fun and happiness, are no less profound and philosophical than the best examples of Russian classics. It is also hard to give people recommendations because I strongly believe that our impressions of works of art very much depend on our state of mind and psyche when approaching those works. I would say, start on them with your eyes and your mind open, and hopefully, they will pull you in.

Question:   Turgenev is my favourite. He has not achieved the monumentality that popular culture assumes about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. How do you assess Turgenev?

Tatyana Kovalevskaya: I believe that he is, indeed, underrated. Partly it is due to the nature of his art, which is rather different from the three pillars of 19th century Russian literature, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov (yes, Tolstoy died in 1910, and Chekhov in 1904, but still).

While Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are intensely metaphysical and philosophical, which makes them also more accessible for reading in translation, and Chekhov’s deliberate absence of metaphysics is metaphysics in and of itself, Turgenev is outwardly less concerned with similar issues. He is also famous for the beauty of his writing style, which automatically makes him heavily dependent on the original Russian and a challenge for translation, as is true in regard to, say, such Russian poetry classics of Pushkin and Lermontov, or 20th century poets who are very hard to translate into other languages.

Besides, Turgenev is very much concerned with the current events of the 19th century, and it also affects the universality of his appeal. He is less monumental than Tolstoy, and less dramatic than Dostoevsky, but in his quiet way, he offers some very deep insights into human nature. His story “The Inn” is among my particular favorites in this respect, although in this case, comprehending it might require some preliminary research into cultural and historical anthropology. I believe that he is also unsurpassed for the lyrical beauty of his prose, which is marvelously evocative and powerful in its lyricism.

 Question:   Now, may I request your brief observations on tackling the Big 4: “War and Peace”; “Anna Karenina”; “Crime and Punishment”; and “The Idiot”.

Tatyana Kovalevskaya: I think that Tolstoy is in a way an easier writer to read. He always makes his point clear, usually abundantly so, and the events that happen in his books are much easier to interpret on a purely human scale than those of Dostoevsky’s novels, although Tolstoy was also immersed in deeply spiritual issues. War and Peace is, indeed, monumental, and it offers a sweeping and overwhelmingly detailed picture of the era of Napoleonic wars in Russia. I also think it’s a great testimony to Tolstoy’s talent as a writer that readers of War and Peace come to treat its characters as real people. Tolstoy has very clear notions of the fates he intends for characters, and he follows through on his intentions, and many readers disagree with his choices.

Such are the cases of Natasha Rostova and of Sonya, a secondary character in the novel. When people claim that they dislike Tolstoy for what he did to Sonya it demonstrates the power of his writing as he created a character that fully came alive for his readers and became almost independent of her creator.

Anna Karenina is much less expansive in scope, but it contains some of Tolstoy’s most cherished ideas on the proper way of life. The story of Anna and Vronsky is sometimes puzzling in the way Tolstoy presents it, and it is offset by the story of Oblonsky and Dolly and balanced by the story of Kitty and Levin, whose marriage we should view not as ideal in a rather naïve romantic sense, but as perfect as real human beings with all their imperfections could achieve. It is the kind of imperfect perfection that constantly needs to be maintained. There may be an end to the story told in the novel, but there is never an end to the story of human life.

Crime and Punishment is a novel that has been a fixture of school curricula in Russia, and the focus of much debate as to whether it is suitable for high school students. Personally, when in high school, I found Devils more emotionally accessible than Crime and Punishment, probably due to Devils’ dark humor, but now that I think about it, I believe that Crime and Punishment is one of the most accessible of Dostoevsky’s novels in terms of understanding the exact message of the novel, with things pretty much spelled out for the readers. And it also is not devoid of its own darkly humorous moments. Crime and Punishment is, indeed, a good introduction to Dostoevsky as it touches upon his crucial questions, such as human freedom, humans’ desire to step beyond their limits, to over-reach, to become the masters of their own and other people’s lives, and the danger of such ambitions both to others and to those who harbor those ambitions.

The Idiot is one of the most daunting novels for readers. It’s easy to comprehend tragedies that befall tragically flawed characters, and most of Dostoevsky’s books are full precisely of such tragically flawed people. However, in The Idiot, Dostoevsky, according to his own letters, set himself the task of describing a “positively beautiful human being,” and the novel’s outcome appears all the more mysterious. This is a novel that, to be understood, requires taking a step back from the purely human, everyday life and problems.

In the phrase I quoted above, the emphasis was usually put on the word “beautiful,” while, I believe, the stress should be on “human.” Dostoevsky was a devout Christian, and that is important for him as a writer and a thinker. He was certainly fully aware of the powerful atheistic and theomachistic drives in the European culture and was proud, for instance, that he was able to express a powerful atheistic message in The Brothers Karamazov since he valued faith that passed through trials, temptations, and disbelief and still emerged victorious.

The Idiot is an attempt to see whether Christ could have been, as some popular 19th century books claimed, simply a human being. The answer is a resounding negative. Humans are, by nature, limited and enclosed within their selves. It is tragic, but entirely natural, and it also means that salvation could be effected only by a Being that is both God and Man. The idea of God-man is very important for Russian religious philosophy, and Dostoevsky explored it by, among other things, introducing the idea of man-god. In Devils, one of the characters claims it is possible to become man-god by killing oneself without fear. This is a clearly negative, rebellious man-god. In The Idiot, Dostoevsky attempts to see whether a man could, indeed, act as a savior for his fellow humans without actually trying to supplant God. The answer is, again, no, and the results are tragic.

 Question:   Finally, I want to turn to Isaiah Berlin. In “Russian Thinkers”, in the essay ‘The birth of the Russian intelligentsia’, he notes: “The works of Turgenev, Tolstoy, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, and of minor novelists too, are penetrated with a sense of their own time, of this or that particular social and historical milieu and its ideological content, to an even higher degree than the ‘social’ novels of the West.” Forgive this naïve question which Berlin’s passage raises for me: how can something so local become universal?

Tatyana Kovalevskaya: I believe that all great literature, no matter when or where it was written, combines both traits: the sense of its own time and place and the sense of transcending the here-and-now and achieving a universal appeal because great literature aims to tackle universal questions of human nature.

It is particularly true about Russian literature. Russia was late in developing its own formal philosophy, and Russian literature always stood in for philosophy as well.

In the 20th century, the poet Evgeny Evtushenko aptly summed it up in a famous line “A poet in Russia is more than a poet,” and it is true when applied to any writer. A poet in Russia is a prophet, as Alexander Pushkin claimed, and poets and writers attempt to address both the temporary, social and local, truth of the human condition, and the great timeless truth of the human condition from which the current social state springs, and not the other way round.

Russian writers start with the human nature and arrive at the humans’ current situation. I think this is what assures their universal accessibility. I think Devils discussed above illustrates this idea. This novel is a scathing portrayal of Russian liberals of the 1840s and Russian revolutionaries of the 1860s, based on some very real people from Russia’s history.

But even if you don’t know the full background, you can still comprehend the story as a narrative of people’s metaphysical aspirations. The characters’ metaphysical “pursuits,” stemming from their nature as Dostoevsky sees it, come first, and they are the foundation for their actions in the local, recognizably 19th-Century-Russia world. And I believe that the same trend may be discerned even in the most social, the most local, the most “here-and-now” works of Russian literature.

And while Dostoevsky’s explicitly Christian agenda might not be something that is shared by everybody, the notions of ambition, of over-reaching, are something that could be transposed into any culture. And Dostoevsky’s answer to those problems is equally comprehensible for all and extremely pertinent to our today’s culture of division and discord. His answer is seeking active, unconditional love for other human beings.

The beauty of Dostoevsky’s lofty metaphysics is that it always translates into very human situations and the very human solution of recognizing everyone’s humanity and loving that humanity in everyone.

I think it is a message that could come in very handy in today’s world when people tend to cluster in groups and view their opponents as somehow deficient at best and as not equally human at worst. In The Brothers Karamazov, his last novel that became a focal point for many of his ideas, Dostoevsky shows the perils of dividing humankind into any kinds of groups, since we are all human, and we are all interconnected. Recognizing everyone’s humanity that is the same in everybody is Dostoevsky’s key to the possibility of a harmonious human existence. “The golden age is in our pocket,” Dostoevsky says, if only we allowed ourselves to see it and act accordingly.

 

 

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Views expressed above are the author's own.

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