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Dialogues with Dostoevsky The Overwhelming Questions Dialogues vûith Dostoevsky The Overwhelming Questions ROBERT LOUIS JACKSON STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Stanford, California 1993 Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1993 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America cip data appear at the end of the book To Leslie Contents Introduction: Dostoevsky in Movement 1 i The Ethics of Vision I: Turgenev’s “Execution of Tropmann” and Dostoevsky’s View of the Matter 29 2 The Ethics of Vision II: The Tolstoyan Synthesis 55 3 The Ethics of Vision III: The Punishment of the Tramp Prokhorov in Chekhov’s The Island ofSakhalin 7$ 4 Dostoevsky in Chekhov’s Garden of Eden: “Because of Litde Apples” 83 5 A View from the Underground: On Nikolai Nikolaevich Strakhov’s Letter About His Good Friend Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky and on Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy’s Cautious Response to It 104 6 In the Interests of Social Pedagogy: Gorky’s Polemic Against the Staging of The Devils in 1913 and the Aftermath in 1917 121 7 Chateaubriand and Dostoevsky: Elective Affinities 134 8 Dostoevsky and the Marquis de Sade: The Final Encounter 144 9 The Root and the Flower: Dostoevsky and Turgenev, a Comparative Aesthetic 162 10 Unbearable Questions: Two Views of Gogol and the Critical Synthesis 188 11 In the Darkness of the Night: Tolstoys Kreutzer Sonata and Dostoevsky’s Notesfrom the Underground 208 12 States of Ambiguity: Early Shakespeare and Late Dostoevsky, the Two Ivans 228 13 Counterpoint: Nietzsche and Dostoevsky 14 Vision in His Soul: Vyacheslav I. Ivanovs Dostoevsky 251 15 Bakhtins Poetics of Dostoevsky and Dostoevsky’s “Declaration of Religious Faith” 269 16 Last Stop: Virtue and Immortality in The Brothers Karamazov 293 Notes 303 Index 332 237 In every serious philosophical question uncertainty extends to the very roots of the problem. We must always be prepared to learn something totally new. —Ludwig Wittgenstein Introduction Dostoevsky in Movement It is a game of chess; neither side can move without consulting the other. Allen Tate “Dostoevsky has not yet become Dostoevsky, he is becom ing one,” the Russian critic and philosopher M. M. Bakhtin his notes “Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book” in 1961. It is doubtful whether there is another writer in the past one hundred years who has “grown” more dramatically than did Dostoev sky. His becoming is, of course, our own growth; the release of his potential—our own. Dostoevsky has become an icon—in some respects a cliché—for twentieth-century self-consciousness: to know him has been to know ourselves and our century. Indeed, the nineteenth century ended with an awareness of a special relationship with Dostoevsky. “The anxiety and doubts that flood his works are our anxieties and doubts, and they will remain such for all times,” the Russian critic and thinker V. V. Rozanov wrote in his classic study of Dostoevsky’s "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” in 1894. “In those epochs when life flows along par ticularly smoothly or when people are not conscious of its difficulties, this writer may even be quite forgotten and not read. But whenever anything on the path of human history arouses a sense of confoundment, when the peoples moving along these paths shall be shaken or thrown into confusion—then the name and image of the writer who thought so much about these paths of life will awaken with full