Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time
By Joseph Frank
Princeton, 984 pages

Long before there were Bolsheviks, show trials, and five-year plans, there was one man who predicted, with an almost otherworldly foresight, the whole Soviet calamity. In his novels and journalism, he depicted the many horrors ahead: the violence, the thought control, the upending of ancient mores, and the resulting spiritual vacuum. In this new Russia, there would be no God, no soul, the young would banish the old, and science and calculation and progress would supplant all that was human and poetic.

Fyodor Dostoevsky embarked on his writing career in January 1846, with the publication of the novel Poor Folk. He was 24 and living in St. Petersburg, enveloped by the great literary-political cross-currents of Russia under Tsar Nicholas I. Gogol was the preeminent writer of his time, having transcended the romanticism of Pushkin and Lermontov; the literati, led by the critic V.G. Belinsky, had been captivated by Utopian Socialism, with its Christian-messianic overtones; and the great cause of the day, a cause shared by Dostoevsky, was the abolition of serfdom. But it would take another 20 years—during which time the writer would become enmeshed in radical politics, land himself in front of a mock firing squad, spend four years in a Siberian labor camp, marry his first wife, bury her, meet the woman who would become his second wife, and return to St. Petersburg a born-again tsarist—before he would complete Crime and Punishment and articulate, with unrivaled clarity, the nightmare that awaited just beyond the horizon.

This is the Dostoevsky we encounter in Joseph Frank’s superb Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, a one-volume, 984-page condensation of Frank’s five-volume biography of the author, written over the course of a long and distinguished career. Dostoevsky, in Frank’s telling, was not a likable man. Irritable, morbid, fickle, he was utterly unfit for Petersburg society. He cared little for banter or politics. It seems he cared little for most people. He was propelled by an intensity that was maddening and, not infrequently, terrifying. He suffered from all the stereotypical Russian stupidities and hatreds: xenophobia, nativism, and a trite and feeble-minded anti-Semitism. But he was a great man, and not just because he was a profound seer. His greatness stemmed from his unwillingness to align himself squarely with any camp or school—-socialists, Westernizers, Slavophiles, reactionaries. He saw things nakedly and was able to extrapolate, from these hitherto unseen things, a world that was unfathomable to his contemporaries. Not surprisingly, Frank notes, many a contemporary literary critic believed Dostoevsky to be a tad crazy.

The all-important question facing Dostoevsky, and most 19th-century Russian intellectuals, was that of reason. The Enlightenment had transformed reason, or “thought,” into an elixir that, it was assumed, would disentangle the world’s great mysteries and create Heaven on earth. It was thought to be but a matter of time before the metaphysicians and moral philosophers and architects of politics and sociology razed the old structures and belief systems and established (via civil war or revolution, if need be) a perfect and permanent order. The French Revolution’s failure to provide for this radical egalitarianism was not so much a sign of the limits of reason as of the inertia of common folk anchored to their faith in an invisible God and a benevolent monarch. What would be needed in the future was greater will—and, one imagined, more bloodshed. Understandably, all this had prompted a rethinking of what was meant by “reason” and “progress.” Romanticism and itscultural-philosophical offshoots represent a reappraisal of the wisdom of jettisoning the past in favor of an unknowable future.

Nowhere was the debate surrounding the new theology so fraught with urgency as it was in Russia. In question was Russia’s very idea of itself. True, there were revolutionaries plotting in Paris and nationalist movements coalescing in Italy and Germany; and across the Continent, radicals, utilitarians, Young Hegelians, and Old Hegelians were debating the nature of man, God, the state, and the numerous internal relations that held them all together. But one senses that the conversation outside Russia was essentially, and very broadly speaking, political; it was about sorting through the many options available to the newly empowered peoples of Western Europe and charting a particular course. In Russia, that was not the case. In Russia, the intelligentsia was not just concerned with deciding what Russia should do but with what Russia should be. The Russian Revolution would come several decades after the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Communards, and when it came, it would wreak infinitely more violence and dislocation than anything they had ever imagined on the Continent. That was because, simply put, there was more at stake.

More than any other novelist of Russia’s Golden Age of literature in the 19th century, it was Dostoevsky who sought to define what Russia should be. Russia, he would declare time and again, was the home of the only true faith, Orthodox Christianity, and it was therefore destined to play the role of spiritual axis upon which the rest of the world would revolve. The intellectuals, the liberals, and the Westernizers—by dint of their Westernness—could not be trusted with this sacred mission. It was, he believed, the great mass of peasants, bound together by their interminable suffering and their fealty to the tsar and their sobornost, or holy community, who would endow the country with their fortitude and Christian charity, which would emanate, like a bright and wondrous light, across the Russian steppe.

It is this Dostoevskian faith in the peasantry and the writer’s apparent rejection of all things Western—reason, commerce, and what he called the “Yiddism” of modern Europe—that situates him in the anti-rationalist camp. Indeed, Dostoevsky’s best-known villains and antiheroes—Ivan Karamazov and Raskolnikov top the list—are villainous to the extent that they have imbibed the well-known poisons leeching out of Europe: a godless individualism and materialism born of an all-powerful, unexamined reason. And to the extent that one of Dostoevsky’s fallen characters is redeemed—most notably, in the case of Raskolnikov—he finds redemption via a distinctly “Russian” character, such as Sonya, the prostitute who sells herself to save her family. Minor works such as The Gambler, in which the narrator Aleksey Ivanovich (like Dostoevsky) squanders a small fortune at the casino but (unlike Dostoevsky) wins over the girl of his dreams, and “The Peasant Marey,” one of the better-known stories to appear in his journal Diary of a Writer, reinforce this image of Dostoevsky qua anti-rationalist: that which is good entails emotional honesty and selflessness; the bad is strategic, planned, and logical.

Importantly, Frank’s discussion of Dostoevsky’s “underground man” suggests that this portrayal of the writer obscures a more thoughtful, less partisan ratiocination. It is here that Frank, moving beyond a simple-minded rationalist versus anti-rationalist bifurcation, outlines a critical, if vaguely delineated, middle ground. Like so many Russians, the underground man is alienated, not only from society but also from himself. He has natural, “Russian” emotional proclivities—he feels deeply for others—but he has been instructed that progress and reason are unemotional and “egoistic.” This leaves him trapped in a “dialectic of determinism. . .torn apart by an inner dissonance that prevents him from behaving in what might be considered a ‘normal’ fashion.”

So when the underground man, confined to this liminal space, finally rejects reason, he does so not simply to reject it; he does so because he cannot embrace it reflexively (à la N.G. Chernyshevsky and Nikolay Dobrolyubov, the leading Nihilists of the 1860s, who were convinced that reason leads ineluctably, and happily, to socialist dictatorship). To embrace reason reflexively, without any fight, would be to surrender his individuality—his protest against having been forced into this unfortunate middle ground. All this is important to bear in mind when trying to assess the underground man’s “irrationality.” When, in the opening passage of Notes from Underground, the unnamed narrator says he is seriously ill but will not see a doctor, he does this not because he is against doing what makes sense. He does this because, Frank says, what matters most to him (and to Dostoevsky) “is the preservation of his free will, which may or may not be exercised in harmony with reason but which always wishes to preserve the right to choose.”

With this more nuanced position in mind—which might be thought of as a deep skepticism of as opposed to an overt hostility to reason—we can now see much more clearly what Dostoevsky was after when he launched his frontal assault on “progress” in the 1860s. More generally, we now have a much richer, more three-dimensional understanding of who Dostoevsky was, how he created his literature, and how he conceived of himself and Russia and the Russians. For starters, there was hisanti-Semitism. The writer’s attitude toward reason indicates, among other things, that Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitism cannot be lumped together with the primal, nationalist, blood-and-soil hatreds that emerged in the 19th century and that anticipated the far more destructive Jew-hatred of the 20th century. That particular species of anti-Semitism was unquestionably anti-rational; it marked a mythical return to a barbarism that predated civilization, literature and art, and, of course, science, mathematics, and philosophy. Dostoevsky’s position vis-à-vis the Jews was more in keeping with a long-standing backwardness that was not explicitly anti-rational but irrational, peasant-like, and clannish. This is not meant to excuse Dostoevsky for his parochialism. But it is to say that his strain of anti-Semitism lacked the forcefulness of the more “modern” or (to use Daniel Goldhagen’s term) “eliminationist” anti-Semitism.

More important, Dostoevsky’s attitude toward reason, and his insistence on the primacy of free will, explains how he arrived at his “prophecy,” a prophecy, or series of starkly painted speculations on the coming disaster, that was detailed over the course of his four great novels, beginning with Crime and Punishment (1866), followed by The Idiot (1868), then Demons (1871), and culminating with The Brothers Karamazov (1879).

The many ideas, or “idea-feelings,” as Dostoevsky liked to say, that make up the four great novels can be traced to the author’s early memories: growing up in Moscow in the wake of the Decembrist uprising of 1825; his religious identity (“the texture of his everyday life was controlled by much the same supernatural forces that. . .also dominated the mentality of the Russian common people”); the death of his father, most likely at the hands of his serfs; and the “two romanticisms” of his early adulthood, in which his Christian roots comingled with his practical and political inclinations. These memories would be distilled, sharpened, shaped, and fused into a powerful, political-literary vision by Siberia and, later, his epilepsy. Poverty and desperation would infuse his writing with a profound humanity—Dostoevsky was the only great writer born in the first half of the 19th century who did not come from the nobility—and finally, and most painfully, the deaths of two of his children, an infant daughter and a three-year-old son, would leaven his greatest work with an immovable sense of the tragic.

Most important, the feeling that accompanies any reading of these four novels is that they had been residing in Dostoevsky his entire life. They had emerged out of a well of great pain and consternation and had no choice but to emerge in this order. When they had been completed and Dostoevsky had issued his disquisition on the nature of power in the form of the Grand Inquisitor and the nature of the good in the form of Father Zosima, there was nothing else to be said. Dostoevsky may have planned to write a sequel to Karamazov, but that would probably have been unnecessary. As Dostoevsky makes abundantly clear, the writer saw, and described, what lay ahead: the superman, the destruction of God, the rise of a grotesque and all-consuming Nihilism, the end of truth. Few biographers could muster the intelligence and imagination needed to capture all this in a single tome. We should be grateful for Joseph Frank.