After all that, you might be prepared for his books to be a letdown. Ha ha. One of the ironies of Dostoevsky is that he was regarded as reactionary, unfashionably devout and politically conservative by a bunch of cookie-cutter, would-be-anarchist intellectuals, most of whom have never been heard of again. He tackles — again and again — huge human questions: good, evil, compassion, belief, destruction, redemption.
You see him try and steer clear of the roulette table of existence, only to be sucked back into its orbit to put himself through the mill once again. All deal, in different ways, with the same fundamental question: how can man be good when surrounded and impelled by evil? This is a real thing for Dostoevsky, and his books thrash about under the strain of trying to deal with it. At the time, critics were confused by what they saw as his unevenness, his randomness, his jolting language and sudden bursts of violence and comedy.
Now, you can see that that is his greatness. Everything stinks: the markets, the pubs, the river, the people. A student is tempted into a desperate action to try and pay off his debts in a classic set-up. Although the anti-hero Raskolnikov is pursued by detectives, the real investigation is into what drives him as human being to kill another human being, and what happens to a man after committing a murder. His work is training in seeing this truth.
And this is why his readers get caught: Truth is, after all, seductive. But he also experienced a more personal kind of anguish: the panic of the loser, incapable to shed his addictions, unworthy of his own vision and dreams. Dostoevsky was thus an expert in chaos. No one has ever shown better how far our acts transcend our little conscious lives, how vital it is to live them lucidly, with clear eyes.
No one is better than he at tracing the typical lies we use to escape our own Truth or at exposing our refusal to accept the responsibility to become our real selves. It is astonishing that a book published in , and intended to be intensely contemporary, can seem so real a century later. But the fact is The Brothers Karamazov responds to challenges we experience today with terrible intensity.
In painstaking exploration of Mitya, the seductive wild brother, who like Dostoevsky, is a poet, attempting to hide his shame behind his songs, we recognize clues through which we betray to others and to ourselves the ugliness of our inner response to the world. All the brothers, but also all their mates, must eventually recognize their incapacity to love. We learn from the brothers that we will have to transmute the program inscribed in our genes into the material of a radiant, fully human life, or fail pathetically.
Shaken to the Core Dostoevsky is more than a perspicacious psychologist, however. He tackles sociological challenges equally powerfully, and those challenges, too, are still ours. Dostoevsky had to face a frighteningly decadent nation. Facing a firing squad for his participation in a self-styled intellectual revolutionary group, his sentence suddenly was commuted to slave labor in Siberia. There, he was shaken to the core by the fact that the violent criminals who shared his fate shunned him and him alone, because he did not believe in God.
Meanwhile I have been reminded of Dostoevsky's dramatic life story: his father's murder; his mock execution and exile; his gambling madness; and his calamitous debut on the St Petersburg literary scene.
This was nonsense: Poor Folk is a mawkish tale that would have been forgotten had the same author not also written Crime and Punishment et al. Still, the year-old Fedya D was suddenly feted everywhere as the new literary genius of St Petersburg. It went to his head and he soon became insufferable, alienating all his new literary "friends", who revenged themselves when he published his second novel, The Double.
Not merely trashed, the book was denounced. Dostoevsky became a bad joke. What I didn't know until now was the length of time between his moment of glory and terrible downfall. Authors then wrote much more quickly than they do today, and some of those impossibly fat 19th-century mega-books were composed in a quarter of the time it takes Milan Kundera to crank out a boring late novella. Bearing that in mind, take a guess: how long did Fedya D last as a cause celebre? A year? Nine months? The correct answer is: 15 days.
That's right. Cue the reputation apocalypse. Now that has to be some kind of record. Thirteen years later he did emerge from exile to score a comeback with his novel-memoir House of the Dead, but according to Mochulsky, Dostoevsky never recovered his confidence. Even as he was writing some of the greatest books in world literature he remained consumed with anxiety that he had not yet "established his reputation".
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