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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