Posts Tagged ‘Fyodor Dostoevsky’

Joseph Frank: a “co-creator” of Dostoevsky, with editor and wife Marguerite (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

Hoorah! A splendid Times Literary Supplement review for Joseph Frank‘s Lectures on Dostoevsky, published earlier this year by Princeton University Press. He was Stanford’s legendary Dostoevsky scholar – we’ve written about him here and here and here and here. The greatly loved scholar died in 2013. His lectures were edited by his widow, Marguerite Frank and Marina Brodskaya.  

Princeton’s Caryl Emerson praises Joe’s “gentle, wisdom-bearing lectures” and writes, “Frank does not co-opt Dostoevsky but cooperates with him, trusting his intentions, and in this sense Frank co-creates his biographical subject; he does not airbrush him out.”

“There is a patience and wholesomeness to Frank’s voice in these Lectures that has its analogue in his monumental biography, where obsession and perversity are contextualized so thoroughly that they can seem traits of Dostoevsky’s agitated era, not of his person.”

An excerpt or two:

Joseph Frank (1918–2013) is the greatest co-creator of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s life in our time, and his path to the top was thrillingly irregular. He was not a professional Slavist. True, in the late 1930s he attended university classes, but in 1942 he began working as an editor and literary journalist. An innovative essay on European modernism won him his first fame and a Fulbright scholarship to Paris in 1950. After earning a PhD at the University of Chicago (like the critic Mikhail Bakhtin, without a BA), he taught at Princeton from 1966 to 1985, and then at Stanford.

That’s the outside institutional envelope. The inside story, which stretched over a quarter-century (1976–2002), was his vast biography of Dostoevsky: five volumes totalling 2,500 pages. It grew out of his interest in the French Existentialists. Frank was vexed that their analyses of Dostoevsky were either personal and psychological, or else philosophical and theological. His task would be to fill in the middle space with the author’s daily stimuli, concrete provocations and constraints. He would do this without any relishing of private vices or pathological drives. Underneath his project was the old-fashioned and yet novel assumption that profound creativity is always a sign of profound mental health. Reviewing the fourth volume in 1995, A. S. Byatt wrote: “Frank is that increasingly rare being, an intellectual biographer, and his real concern is with the workings of Dostoevsky’s mind”.

***

Frank’s lecture on The Idiot takes up the perennial problem of its central hero Prince Myshkin – a would-be Christ figure who worsens everything he touches. That Myshkin fails doesn’t matter because he “is neither actor nor victim but a presence, a kind of moral illumination”. His purpose is not to save or punish but to stir up conscience, to precipitate in those around him a “conflict with their usual selves”. A final chapter on The Brothers Karamazov (tellingly, there is no lecture devoted to Demons) identifies Dostoevsky’s prerequisite for surviving inner conflict: “a faith that needs no support from the empirical and tangible”. Each brother (and the two major heroines as well) must confront the challenge of this necessity for faith, which demands an irrational Kierkegaardian leap. The loving resilience of the youngest brother Alyosha is proof that such a leap can be sensible, pragmatic, even bursting with health. What Dostoevsky, his characters and his contemporary readers share is something more modest than the eternal questions of Good and Evil: it is the “need to live in a meaningful world that does not make a mockery of one’s self-consciousness and the dignity of one’s personality”.

Read the whole thing at the TLS here. It’s wonderful. My 2009 interview with him below:

The great poet Anna Akhmatova wrote of Fyodor Dostoevsky, “The prisoner of Omsk understood everything and gave up on everything.” But did he see our future, too? In Crime and Punishment, René Girard notes: “Raskolnikov has a dream during a grave illness that occurs just before his final change of heart, at the end of the novel. He dreams of a worldwide plague that affects people’s relationship with each other. No specifically medical symptoms are mentioned. It is human interaction that breaks down, and the entire society gradually collapses.” 

From Crime and Punishment (trans. Constance Garnett):

He dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia. All were to be destroyed except a very few chosen. Some new sorts of microbes were attacking the bodies of men, but these microbes were endowed with intelligence and will. Men attacked by them became at once mad and furious. But never had men considered themselves so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible. Whole villages, whole towns and peoples went mad from the infection. All were excited and did not understand one another. Each thought that he alone had the truth and was wretched looking at the others, beat himself on the breast, wept, and wrung his hands. They did not know how to judge and could not agree what to consider evil and what good; they did not know whom to blame, whom to justify. Men killed each other in a sort of senseless spite. They gathered together in armies against one another, but even on the march the armies would begin attacking each other, the ranks would be broken and the soldiers would fall on each other, stabbing and cutting, biting and devouring each other. The alarm bell was ringing all day long in the towns; men rushed together, but why they were summoned and who was summoning them no one knew. The most ordinary trades were abandoned, because everyone proposed his own ideas, his own improvements, and they could not agree. The land too was abandoned. Men met in groups, agreed on something, swore to keep together, but at once began on something quite different from what they had proposed. They accused one another, fought and killed each other. There were conflagrations and famine. All men and all things were involved in destruction. The plague spread and moved further and further. Only a few men could be saved in the whole world. They were a pure chosen people, destined to found a new race and a new life, to renew and purify the earth, but no one had seen these men, no one had heard their words and their voices.

Henry Crawford leads Fanny Price to the dance.

Is  Mansfield Park  Jane Austen’s “most daring book”? Janet Todd thinks so, and argues in The Times Literary Supplement that the 1814 book “provokes the reader to address the difficult truth of stubborn integrity.” I, too, balked at the priggishness of Fanny Price. I, too, was repelled by her moralizing. On the other hand, I kind of wish I had listened. As for making “astonishingly foolish life-choices” under the influence of some those other great writers of the nineteenth century – oh, ’tis true, tis true. 

One of my earliest memories of literary embarrassment is being asked by a bookish neighbour if I’d read Jane Austen. I was eleven. “Yes”, I replied. But I was mistaken. I had in mind the fantastic Classic Comics version of Jane Eyre with its alluring panel of Mr Rochester.

By nineteen, at Cambridge in the 1960s, I’d uncoupled Jane Austen from Jane Eyre. I read the six novels which F. R. Leavis, the then guru, instructed us to find “great”. I couldn’t oblige. I was startled, then offended, by Fanny Price of Mansfield Park. Why would an author who’d made the robust, witty and self-assured Elizabeth Bennet then create so limp and teary a heroine as Fanny, a creeping killjoy who suffers sunstroke from cutting roses in temperate England and fears the “wilderness” of a tame country estate? Until the ending, I assumed her rival Mary Crawford would get the hero – if, bizarrely, she really wanted him.

Over the decades I became acutely aware that Elizabeth Bennet (in the later chapters) and Fanny Price were more appropriate, self-controlling, guides to life for a young girl than my chosen heroines from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the Grushenkas, and Natashas, under whose influence I made some astonishingly foolish life-choices. It wasn’t all the fault of the Russians, of course. It was also the exciting period of Second Wave Feminism, when the stress was on self-fulfilment and self-expression, on being authentic and free from constraining standards of “patriarchy”. Present-day Feminism – I’ve lost touch with what Wave we are now riding – has had half a century to grow more nuanced and diverse, but its emphasis on the individual self and authentic experience remains. So we still try to adjust Jane Austen to our way of thinking – unless we are in the cinema watching her novels as romance and costume drama.

Read the rest at the TLS here.

Joe is right, as always. The late great Dostoevsky scholar Joseph Frank and his wife, the French mathematician Marguerite Frank. (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

“Useful Idiots,” an essay by Frank Guan over at The Point starts with Elif Batuman‘s novel The Idiot and then goes everywhere, but the nearly 4,000-word journey makes some interesting roadside stops in its discussion of “autofiction,” fictionalized autobiography of the kind Batuman writes, and “ideological novels,” the kind the author refers to in the title of her own recent novel. Here’s a sort of sampler from the essay.

On Stendhal, Dostoevsky and “novels powered by direct engagement with ideology”:

More than pawnshops and samovars.

Through their idiot protagonists these novelists and their readers became more intimately acquainted with ideology x than any believer: the plot generated by their protagonists’ pursuit of x’s tenets exposed the implications of x to an extent that the political discourse surrounding x, constrained by polemic opposition and assertion, never could. The quantum facts of daily life, the pawnshops, manors, samovars, Thursday evenings and horse-driven cabs, were to this novel what the skin is to the body: a surface of mostly dead matter whose purpose was informing, concealing and protecting all the other vital systems. They were necessary, and they were most of what could be seen, but to reduce the novel to them would be false, incomplete—literally superficial. The “reality” of this ideological realism was not inert material to be quarried and crafted, but animate: a triple collision between the individual conscience, the society in which the idiot operates, and the ideology (conquistador chivalry, Promethean science, Gnostic materialism, Napoleonic romanticism, revolutionary communism, Gatsbian romanticism, revolutionary communism, white supremacy) that would shape conscience and society according to its own dictates.

Where we are today:

Riffing…

To be fair, the horizons of collective belief were particularly unpromising for Batuman and her generation, who came of age and made careers during a period where it was easy to conclude that there was nothing bigger than the self left to believe in. The Cold War’s end coincided with a prolonged devaluation of ideological content. Libertarian logic colonized the cultural sphere. Torrents of on-demand data eroded any vision of the longue durée. As far as government went, expert-guided liberal democracy was the order for the foreseeable future; having taken care of communism, it seemed more than capable of taking care of itself. In literature as in much else, the tenor of the Nineties was set by the New Republic, where James Wood’s reviews of classic novels consistently dampened their ideological charge even as his reviews of contemporary fiction condemned deviation from a pinched conception of realism.

Wood’s influence was hardly decisive, but given that a similar hostility to ideology in narrative had dominated program fiction since its CIA-funded genesis in the postwar years, there seemed as little alternative to literary fiction sealed purely within the personal and empirical as there was to the flat world dictated by the empire of free markets. In such a self-defined environment, it was no surprise that the era’s modes of entertainment should correspond to its novelistic subgenres: the tourism of historical and overseas fiction, the animated films of magical realism. (The marijuana of standard-issue MFA realism—all forgettable inaction and enhanced tactile sensation.) Autofiction, a sort of aesthetic edition of careerism, was the logical endpoint of realism’s exclusive valorization of individual experience: once all other recreations expose their artifice and exhaust their charm, what is left except to chart one’s own advancement through a world as fixed as it is real?

In conclusion:

Don’t forget the Frenchman!

These are unsettling times. Tensions and pressures formerly pacified by the prospect of endless growth now draw force from a state of permanent stagnation. Established institutions tremble with the resentful energies of dishonored promises; each crisis barely averted sows the seeds for more inevitable confrontation. Yet if literary history is any indication, an era of collapsing order offers fertile ground for novelists. Shaken by events out of inertia and conformity, they waken to a world teeming with open inquiries and untested solutions; whether facing the window, the mirror or the other, certainties dissolve. The pressing question is no longer how to fit in with the given, but how much must be changed. The temptation to wager one’s existence on an unrealized social ideal grows ever more alluring. So, too, grows the inclination to review one’s ideals and imagine their implications writ large. The unique quality of the novel catalyzed by ideology is its range, its capacity to simultaneously circumscribe the horizons of belief, exercise the full freedom to maneuver in society, and gauge its potential to foster individual maturity. It’s the best, if not the only, instrument left to us to understand what we are becoming.

“With an integrity that cannot be too highly praised,” Dostoevsky biographer and intellectual historian Joseph Frank concludes his chapter on The Idiot, “Dostoevsky thus fearlessly submits his own most hallowed convictions to the same test that he had used for the Nihilists—the test of what they would mean for human life if taken seriously and literally, and lived out to their full extent as guides to conduct.” It bears mentioning that the age of Dostoevsky was not an age of brilliant thinkers. The intellectual situation of Petersburg in the 1860s was jammed with third- and fourth-rate seminary dropouts butchering their recitations of second-rate Europeans. Given that the ideological matrix now is no more dismal than in the past; given that the universities, then as now, are turning out a new caste of intellectuals who, indebted and underemployed, have ample cause to rally around visions of a better world; and especially given that literate people today have access to 150 extra years of literary history beginning with Dostoevsky’s novels—given all this, is it really so inconceivable that some millennial author might arrive, like Dostoevsky, at a novel equal in magnitude to the disaster that helped give it form? And in the meantime, why shouldn’t the highly privileged writers of Batuman’s generation be able to afford the most basic, most essential luxury the novel can offer, that of critiquing their own articles of faith? Look closely and you’ll see: the only thing holding them back is their selves.

We miss you, Joe. As always. Read more about him here and here and here. Read the whole Frank Guan discussion here.

‘Take some cold coffee and I’ll pour a quarter of a glass of brandy into it, it’s delicious …”

A man after my own heart. Unfortunately, he’s a baddie. Fyodor Kamarazov is the father of The Brothers Karamazov – licentious, wheedling, self-exculpatory, self-indulgent. Nonetheless, he had the right idea about ice cold coffee. I have it every morning. It’s basic. No frills. Nothing to cook or bake. On a tense, nervous afternoon pounding out a rough draft, half-a-shot of brandy in very strong coffee works wonders.

He knew a thing or two about onions, too.

Ahhh… the simple life. Gluttony is thought to be on the way out – or is it?  Go into Whole Foods. See the pyramids of oranges and onions. Watch the worshippers crowding around the displays, conducting pilgrimages through the aisles. You tell me that’s not a temple? Food has become both the religion of our time and the object of worship.

No surprise. We live in perhaps the first era in history where food is not the biggest chunk of our budget – it’s dwarfed by our Wifi bills, car payments, rent and mortgage. We can get plenty of anything from the supermarket – from kimchi to kiwi fruit. So now  we want not quantity, but quality. A certain tiny fish from the mid-Atlantic, lightly sautéed in organic butter and sage leaves, served on patta sal. Then we take selfies with it and post them on Facebook.

Fyodor Dostoevsky‘s  The Brothers Karamazov is perhaps my all-time favorite novel. So I was intrigued to see Valerie Stivers latest entry in her “Eat Your Words” column in The Paris Review here.  This time she’s “Cooking with Dostoevsky.”  You can even make learn to make kvass from fermented Russian bread. The chef d’œuvre, however, is the onion vatrushki.

Her take on the Russian masterpiece is so-so, but she appreciates the virtues of a good onion:

“An Onion” is one of the most famous chapter headings in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and refers not to Russian cuisine, in which onions are a staple ingredient, but to a story the character Grushenka tells about a wicked old woman being pulled up from the fires of hell by holding onto an onion proffered by her guardian angel. The woman lived a bad life but once gave an onion to a beggar, and it’s this single good deed that might save her. The anecdote is meant to demonstrate the possibility of God’s forgiveness, and its teller, Grushenka, says of herself in one of the book’s climactic scenes, “Though I am bad, I did give away an onion,” indicating her readiness to be saved. (As for the old woman, the other dammed souls try to grab her feet and be pulled up too, and she selfishly starts kicking them away. The onion breaks, “and the woman fell into the lake and she is burning there to this day.”)

And that, of course, sent me to my bookshelves, for I remembered that the same story is retold, in a slightly different way, in another of my favorite books: Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. I didn’t find it, but I found this instead: “Kindness is powerful only while it is powerless. If Man tries to give it power, it dims, fades away, loses itself, vanishes.” Grossman was a reporter for the Red Army covering the defense of Moscow and the fall of the Berlin during World War II. He was also Jewish, and reported on the opening of Treblinka. He continues:

“Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.”

Meanwhile, enjoy Grushenka’s pear tarte – “Grushenka,” of course, means “little pear” in Dostoevsky’s Russian.

I had looked forward to meeting Judy Stone, The San Francisco Chronicle’s movie critic. She wasn’t solely a film buff. The passionate advocate for world cinema also published a number of stunning interviews with leading figures in literature and culture.

While going through old boxes of papers, I stumbled across a xerox I’d made of her excellent and insightful interview with Nobel poet laureate Czesław Miłosz, which was included in her 2006 Not Quite a Memoir: Of Films, Books, the World. I googled her, and learned she was still alive and living in the Bay Area … but not for long. The celebrated critic died in San Francisco on Friday, Oct. 6, of natural causes.

An excerpt from the interview:

In his Nobel address, Miłosz referred to the number of published books that have denied that the Holocaust ever took place, suggesting that it was invented by Jewish propagandists. “If such an insanity is possible,” he asked, “is a complete loss of memory as a permanent state of mind improbable? And would it not present a danger more grave than genetic engineering and/or poisoning of the natural environment?”

Such a loss of memory is probable, he reasons. Referring to the television miniseries Holocaust, he asks with a sense of horror: “Do people really have to see reality changed into melodrama to come a little closer to visualizing how it really was?”

Are we losing memory?

Miłosz has played a role in stimulating different levels of consciousness in Poland – for instance, through his 1958 translation into Polish of the writing of Simone Weil. …

“I have been influenced by Weil in a profound way,” Miłosz says. “Primarily because of her very deep concern with evil. That was her main preoccupation: suffering, pain, the evil of the world. This goes back to my preconceptions when I was a schoolboy. I was interested in heresies which were concerned with evil and with suffering, and Simone Weil is a slightly heretical writer.”

Miłosz’s preoccupation with Weil and Dostoevsky is linked to his meditations on the figure of Job, who dared to question God but whose faith withstood the test of all calamities.

“Job is at the center of Weil’s attention, and I quote at length from her in my introduction to the Book of Job. We are again close to the Book of Job with Dostoevsky. It plays a crucial part in the structure of The Brothers Karamazov. I have never taught other Russian writers. Only Dostoevsky. I laughingly tell my students that Dostoevsky, who hated Poles and Catholics, is taught by a man who is very far from Dostoevsky’s Russian Orthodox views. But I’m fascinated by those deeply felt contradictions in Dostoevsky and his sensitivity to the question of evil. So you see, we are always turning around the same problem.”

“Only Dostoevsky.”

I ask if he sees the world in terms of good and evil.

“Unfortunately, I guess I do,” Miłosz replies. “I have a very clear, very strong feeling of opposed forces of good or evil. It’s something which you acquire only through experience and very elemental. That’s precisely the gist of what Nadezhda Mandelstam says in her memoir. This is characteristic of her and of Solzhenitsyn and all who went through misfortune, affliction. In those extreme situations, good and evil acquire elemental force. Western civilization is losing that clear distinction: Everything can be explained away; everything is relative. In dramatic circumstances, you feel clearly the good forces and the demonic forces in action.”

***

I ask if his wartime experiences in Poland had influenced his decision to translate the Bible.

“To some extent, my memories elude my consciousness,” Miłosz replies. “I suspect it’s been operating on a much deeper level of horror, so translating the Bible is a quite logical way of coping with some subconscious things … like dreams.”