Dostoevsky: Essays And Perspectives

DOSTOEVSKY Essays and Perspectives By the same Author * COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS McKay BORODIN (translated) (O.U.P.) DOSTOEVSKY Essays and Perspectives ROBERT LORD 1970 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES Published by University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles sbn 520-01639-4 lc no. 70-100018 © Robert Lord 1970 Printed in Great Britain CONTENTS Acknowledgements ï4zz Introduction i An English Point of View page vi vii i Charades 12 111 Descent from Reality 35 iv Roots 48 v Dostoevsky at Close Quarters 69 vi An Epileptic Mode of Being 81 11 vu Stavrogin’s Confession 102 vin Transmuted Dialectic 143 The Temptation of Philosophy 164 Resurrection and Applied Science 175 Stylistics and Personality 201 ix x xi Notes and References 235 Index 253 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is with the greatest of pleasure and gratitude that I acknowledge my indebtedness to numerous authors and scholars, many of them long since dead; especially to Konstantin Mochulsky, Leonid Grossman, M. M. Bakhtin, and Helen Muchnic, on all of whose labours I have patently drawn on more than one occasion. I would also like to thank my various friends and colleagues, and also Helen Rapp and Professor Hunter, for the encouragement and constructive criticism they were able to offer when it was most needed. My thanks also to Irene Wells who was such a great help during the time I was preparing the manuscript, and to Ates Orga who made numerous last-minute corrections. Thanks are due to David Magarshack for permission to quote from his translation of A Gentle Creature and Other Stories by Dostoevsky. R. L. AN INTRODUCTION ‘ The truth is not that we need the critics in order to enjoy the authors, but that we need the authors in order to enjoy the critics'1 (C. S. Lewis: An Experiment in Criticism) There is hardly a paragraph in Dostoevsky which does not contain some paradox. He is a maze of paradoxes. And even the most trivial of them needs no very powerful microscope to grow into bewildering proportions. The only way to enjoy the novels as novels, one supposes, is to let one’s curiosity flag de­ liberately, to read on regardless, and above all to shun every critic and commentator. The main drawback however with such an attitude is that, even ifyou succeed, others will very soon come along and undermine your complacency. There is no doubt at all that Dostoevsky’s novels are great literature as literature, but there is always the lurking suspicion that they reach over and beyond what they seem to be, not unlike the vague recollections of some disturbing dream. If only one could reach a little deeper, then one might bring up some­ thing truly worthwhile. This explains why the reader of Dostoevsky, even, or rather, especially after the impact of the first novel, is usually a trifle overenthusiastic, his higher faculties inebriated. It was not out of afFectation that Dostoevsky exercised his flair for paradox, but through sheer force of circumstances. The greater part of his work was composed in a state of mind compounded variously of harassment, anguish, bewilder­ ment, nervous and physical strain, and plain worry. Any suspicion that his novels were consciously planned may be promptly dispelled by a glance at the notebooks containing the rough drafts. They are more like log-books recording some interior exploration than serious plans. And yet, as we are all well aware, the finished products mai