\u201cHow have Russian boys handled things up to now… Take, for instance, some stinking tavern. . . . They\u2019ve never seen each other before in their whole lives, and when they walk out of the tavern, they won\u2019t see each other again for forty years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well, then, what are they going to argue about, seizing this moment in the tavern? About none other than the universal questions: is there a God, is there immortality? And those who do not believe in God, well, they will talk about socialism and anarchism, about transforming the whole of mankind according to a new order, but it\u2019s the same damned thing, the questions are all the same, only from the other end.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2014Ivan Karamazov to his brother Alyosha, in Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is no accident that this book begins with the Russians. Walter Kaufmann\u2019s classic anthology, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, claimed Notes from Underground as the founding text of existentialism. And the Russians always had a thing or two to tell the French about being worried about existence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After all, it was Russia (according to Freud) that exported the \u201cdeath instinct\u201d to the West, along with caviar and ballet. To be Russian is to fret about being\u2014about being Russian or about not being Russian enough, about being human or about not being human enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Emmanuel Levinas, a Jewish \u201cRussian boy\u201d who journeyed into the world of Continental thought, described the \u201cphilosophical problem . . . as the meaning of the human, as the search for the famous \u2018meaning of life\u2019\u2014about which the Russian novelists ceaselessly wonder.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To situate existentialism\u2019s birth amidst the lay philosophy of Russian novelists reveals something basic about \u201cthe anxiety about being.\u201d This anxiety is not just what remains after the death of God and the rise of scientific functionalism, as Nietzsche or Heidegger might have it, but is also the outcry of the modern isolated individual who needs answers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the egoism that makes possible the solipsism of the underground man, that permits Ivan\u2019s rebellion against God in The Brothers Karamazov, and that informs Levin\u2019s provisional \u201cconversion\u201d at the end of Anna Karenina.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Accordingly, by beginning with Russian existentialism, we can recover a heritage that begins with the ancient problem of theodicy\u2014of how to account for evil in a world created by a good, omniscient, and all-powerful deity\u2014as it reemerges in its modern inflections within the individual struggling to reconcile private authenticity and public ethics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here we examine key moments from Dostoevsky\u2019s Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov, as well as from Tolstoy\u2019s Anna Karenina, in order to evoke a \u201cRussian existentialism,\u201d avant la lettre, that avoids the tendency to focus exclusively on Russian literary angst and instead attends to the range and complexity of the human \u201cabout which the Russian novelists ceaselessly wonder.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Along the way, we will revisit such \u201creligious\u201d Russian proto-existentialists and literary commentators as Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov and also locate Levinas within this broader tradition. I will engage throughout in a peculiar two-step, for my goal is to show both what may be specifically Russian about this approach and how this Russianness plumbs the depths of the human condition more broadly. This is the tension between Russian existentialism and existential \u201cRussianism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky depicted what happens to the modern self when it embraces secular freedom: it discovers that it is split, that it does not identify with itself, and that its freedom is thereby a curse. Indeed, Sartre\u2019s concepts of vertigo and anguish owe much to Dostoevsky\u2019s idea of free consciousness as a doubling and a \u201csickness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the agony of Sartre\u2019s gambler\u2014culled from the \u201cletters of Dostoevsky\u201d\u2014when confronted with a roulette table after having resolved not to gamble. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre wrote: I am not the self which I will be . . . because time separates me from it . . . [and] no actual existent can determine strictly what I am going to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet as I am already what I will be . . . , I am the self which I will be, in the mode of not being it. . . . Anguish is precisely my consciousness of being my own future, in the mode of not-being. . . . Vertigo appears as the apprehension of this dependence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I approach the precipice, and my scrutiny is searching for myself in my very depths. . . . I play with my possibilities. . . . Indecision in its turn calls for decision. I abruptly put myself at a distance from the edge of the precipice and resume my way. [This is] \u201canguish in the face of the future.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There exists another: anguish in the face of the past. . . . What the gambler apprehends . . . is the permanent rupture in determinism; it is nothingness which separates him from himself; I should have liked so much not to gamble anymore; yesterday I even had a synthetic apprehension of the situation (threatening ruin, disappointment of my relatives) as forbidding me to play. . . . And now I suddenly perceive that my former understanding of the situation is no more than a memory of an idea, a memory of a feeling. . . . I am alone and naked before temptation as I was the day before. . . . Nothing prevents me from gambling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gambling, of course, is itself a metaphor for the anguish and vertigo of indecision and decision, and it is absorbing for this very reason: gambling transfers the location of my possible choices and outcomes to a throw of the dice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The vertigo of arbitrary freedom\u2014which Sartre elsewhere calls the \u201cpoisoned\u201d freedom in Dostoevsky\u2019s novels \u2014is resolved by the fall into obsession (unfreedom). As Nicholas Berdyaev noted, a \u201cman obsessed is no longer free.\u201d Beyond Dostoevsky\u2019s gambling, one sees d\u00e9doublement and splitting in nearly every atom of his literary universe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Beginning with Golyadkin, the Petersburg petty clerk of his early second novel The Double, his heroes often seem little more than bundles of anguish and vertigo, forever arriving at Yogi Berra\u2019s fork in the road and taking it. Golyadkin\u2019s tendency to exhibit decisive indecision results in his fantastical cleavage into Golyadkin Senior and Golyadkin Junior, the latter an incarnation of a desired self that, unlike the original, knows how to fawn, ingratiate, connive, undermine, and manipulate (the necessary two-faced modes of late capitalist life).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But it is in Notes from Underground that we find Dostoevsky\u2019s first mature exposition of this theme without recourse to the fantastic\u2014an exposition that relies on architectural metaphors to situate consciousness in its murky and physical landscape. In Notes we will see that the architecture of the self is entangled in the architecture that surrounds it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The nearly two decades between The Double (1846) and Notes from Underground (1864) were eventful ones for Dostoevsky, to put it mildly. In 1859 he returned from a decade of hard labor and exile in Siberia, after a mock execution and last-minute commutation of an 1849 death sentence (by firing squad) for subversion\u2014because of his membership in a liberal reading circle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The authorities were not aware that he also belonged to a radical splinter group of Petrashevsky\u2019s Circle, led by Nikolai Speshnev, which had considered the use of violence. In Siberia, forced to live among the peasant \u201cmasses\u201d that the liberal Petersburg milieu wished to rescue with Western ideas, Dostoevsky came to doubt the secular Romantic idealism of his youth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the soul of the Russian convict, he saw an innate propensity for evil and an abiding contempt for the nobility (represented by political prisoners like himself), alongside a mysterious and profound capacity for human dignity. According to Shestov, when Dostoevsky returned to the capital:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He soon began to notice that the life of freedom came more and more to resemble the life in the convict settlement, and that \u201cthe vast dome of the sky\u201d which had seemed to him limitless when he was in prison now began to crush and to press on him as much as the barrack vaults had used to do;<\/p>\n\n\n\n
that the ideals which had sustained his fainting soul when he lived amongst the lowest dregs of humanity and shared their fate had not made a better man of him, nor liberated him, but on the contrary weighed him down and humiliated him as grievously as the chains of his prison. . . . Dostoevsky suddenly \u201csaw\u201d that the sky and the prison walls, ideals and chains are not contradictory to one another, as he had wished and thought formerly, when he still wished and thought like normal men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In other words, prison convinced Dostoevsky that the human condition itself is prisonlike. The period during which Notes was composed also marked the deaths of his brother and first wife, the closing by the authorities of two journals that he had founded, and the onset of a terrible gambling addiction and financial difficulties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although this biographical context has inclined many, including Shestov, to identify the narrator of the Notes with Dostoevsky himself, one should point out the absurdity of suggesting an equivalence not only between any author and narrator but especially between the author and this narrator, who is unable to identify even with himself!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Furthermore, to treat Dostoevsky\u2019s biography as the final \u201cexplanation\u201d for this work would be to render the novel a mere idiosyncratic confession worthy only of being shelved in a cabinet of curiosities. It is typical to offer Tolstoy as a more \u201cuniversal\u201d antidote to Dostoevsky\u2019s \u201ctwisted\u201d portrayal of consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were really chasing the same prey, one by tail and the other by snout: subjectivity, consciousness, and the architecture of the self. Perhaps Tolstoy finally confessed his love for Dostoevsky because he realized that, as the underground man puts it, \u201cnot only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To be a self is to be sick of oneself\u2014even though we may enjoy this sickness, as the underground man claims to do in his \u201cpleasure of despair\u201d: \u201cIt\u2019s their sicknesses that everyone takes pride in, and I, perhaps, more than anyone.\u201d I more than anyone: we will revisit the urgency of that boastful little coda. From Dostoevsky\u2019s perspective in 1860s Petersburg, the splendid isolation of pleasant despair seemed more sensible than the disoriented progress of what Levinas would later call the \u201cheroic conception of human destiny,\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
according to which the undivided self (and its \u201cinterests\u201d) stakes its freedom against \u201cbeing,\u201d against the \u201cobstacle\u201d or \u201cwall\u201d of the world as it is given. In its dialectical heroism, however, the self is oblivious to its selfdivision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This oblivion characterizes what the underground man calls the \u201cingenuous man that I regard as the real, normal man, the way his tender mother\u2014nature\u2014herself wished to see him when she so kindly conceived him on earth\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Such a gentleman just lunges straight for his goal like an enraged bull, horns lowered, and maybe only a wall can stop him. Incidentally: before a wall, these gentlemen\u2014that is, ingenuous people and active figures\u2014quite sincerely fold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For them, a wall is not a deflection, as it is, for example, for us, people who think and consequently do nothing; it is not a pretext for turning back, a pretext which our sort usually doesn\u2019t believe in but is always very glad to have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No, they fold in all sincerity. For them a wall possesses something soothing, morally resolving and final, perhaps even something mystical.) I envy such a man to the point of extreme bile. He is stupid . . . but perhaps a normal man ought to be stupid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the first of a series of architectural metaphors, Dostoevsky\u2019s antihero posits the \u201cwall\u201d as the point at which the world says \u201cNo!\u201d to my free choice. The normal person \u201csincerely folds\u201d before this wall because he experiences it as the temporary limit of a world that is always in the process of being made in his image.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In contrast, the \u201cman of heightened consciousness\u201d (or \u201cour sort\u201d), \u201cwho came . . . not from the bosom of nature but from a retort,\u201d responds to this wall not like a man but like a \u201chighly conscious mouse. . . . And, above all, it is he, he himself, who regards himself as a mouse; no one asks him to; and that is an important point.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The practical nature of the \u201cwall\u201d is very different for the mouse-man. Because the man of heightened consciousness is too neurotic to interact \u201cnormally\u201d with \u201cnormal\u201d people, for him the wall looms everywhere: the wall is a barrel-chested officer who bumps into him on Nevsky Prospect without acknowledging his existence;<\/p>\n\n\n\n
the wall is an insincere dinner invitation that he is supposed to turn down but accepts out of pride and sheer perversity; the wall is the fact that his rented room is so filthy he is embarrassed to receive a prostitute who had responded to his experimental love letter. And his mouse-like response to this ever reappearing wall is to burrow under it and to peak with envy and contempt through a crack in the baseboard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This passive, underground freedom arises because the mouse-man is merely externalizing the wall that is in him. Indeed, the underground man\u2019s farcical adventures are all largely the spastic, hyperaware externalizations of an inward awkwardness that normal people deny or seek to circumvent by mastering social forms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To those who would object that the underground man is an exception to the human condition, he responds at the end of his confession with the following claim, which is central to Dostoevsky\u2019s description of his fiction as a form of \u201chigher\u201d realism: I know you\u2019ll probably get angry . . . , shout, stamp your feet: \u201cSpeak just for yourself and your miseries in the underground, and don\u2019t go saying \u2018we all.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Excuse me, gentlemen, but I am not justifying myself with this allishness. As far as I am concerned, I have merely carried to an extreme in my life what you have not dared carry even halfway, and, what\u2019s more, you\u2019ve taken your cowardice for good sense, and found comfort in thus deceiving yourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This internal revolt is what Levinas refers to as \u201cthe escape\u201d: \u201cEscape . . . puts in question precisely this alleged peace-with-self, since it aspires to break the chains of the I to the self.\u201d The agitation of Dostoevsky\u2019s antihero precisely reflects the inability of idealism to escape being. This is why he is always lapsing from philosophical abstraction into increasingly concrete architectural metaphors: the wall, the Crystal Palace, the chicken coop, the underground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For if the specificity of a given place does not remind the idealist of the heaviness of being, then being there long enough surely will. By converting ideas into architecture, the underground man suggests that Western idealism and the idea of human progress are mere prejudices, European refinements that perhaps do not promise happiness and dignity to all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In his sardonic fashion the underground man asks: What if the Universal won\u2019t have me? And let\u2019s say it will, what then? What if I won\u2019t have the Universal? The narrator expresses this paradox in an imaginary dialogue with a \u201creasonable\u201d interlocutor, who introduces another key architectural metaphor:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
New economic relations will come, quite ready-made, and also calculated with mathematical precision, so that all possible questions will vanish in an instant, essentially because they will have been given all possible answers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then the Crystal Palace will be built. . . . Of course, there\u2019s no guaranteeing (this is me speaking now) that it won\u2019t, for example, be terribly boring then (because what is there to do if everything\u2019s calculated according to some little table?) . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I . . . would not be the least bit surprised if suddenly, out of the blue, some gentleman of ignoble, or better, of retrograde and jeering physiognomy, should emerge, set his arms akimbo, and say to us all: \u201cWell, gentlemen, why don\u2019t we reduce all this reasonableness to dust with one good kick, for the sole purpose of sending all these logarithms to the devil and living once more according to our stupid will!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Western idealism and rationalism, with their reduction of human motives to various kinds of interests and \u201cprofit,\u201d leave out what the underground man calls \u201cone\u2019s own caprice, however wild, . . . the most profitable profit, the omitted one, which does not fit into any classification, and because of which all systems and theories are constantly blown to the devil.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Such is sheer perversity, the pure hell of it. Dostoevsky builds an elaborate metaphor from the Crystal Palace, a vast structure of glass and cast iron that was built in London to house the Great Exhibition of 1851.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The exhibition glorified the Industrial Revolution, and the palace was an aesthetic, commercial, political, and technical achievement\u2014a secular paradise enclosing full-grown, living trees alongside the world\u2019s first public restrooms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Like any escape artist, the narrator\u2019s rejection of the Crystal Palace, to savor instead his \u201cown caprice\u201d underground, is by nature unstable. As an escape from being, it is nowhere. The underground man does not make the Crystal Palace disappear, and does not make it any less palatial, because such capricious negation is no substitute for the affirmative and collective dream that the Palace represents: Well, and perhaps I\u2019m afraid of this edifice precisely because it is crystal and forever indestructible, and it will be impossible to put out one\u2019s tongue at it even on the sly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now look: if instead of a palace there is instead a chicken coop, and it starts to rain, I will perhaps get into the chicken coop to avoid a wetting, but all the same I will not take a chicken coop for a palace out of gratitude for its having kept me from the rain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You laugh, you even say that in that case it makes no difference\u2014chicken coop or mansion. Yes, say I, if one were to live only so as not to get wet. But what\u2019s to be done if I\u2019ve taken it into my head that one does not live only for that, and that if one is to live, it had better be in a mansion?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Crystal Palace embodies the target of the underground man\u2019s radical questions: bourgeois liberal progress and practicality, the entire mid-Victorian ethos. But that doesn\u2019t mean he will accept something less. That is, even if the Universal is just some Western superstition, once he knows about it there is no substitute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The underground man resembles Milton\u2019s Satan, who would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven but still dreams of climbing back to his native firmament. A dry chicken coop won\u2019t replace a leaky palace. In the same way that William Blake and the Romantics sought to recast Milton\u2019s Satan as an existential rebel, Shestov claims that Dostoevsky \u201crehabilitates the rights of the underground man,\u201d which is to say the rights of tragic heroes, who are \u201call . . . egoists.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe philosophy of tragedy is, in principle, hostile to the philosophy of commonplaceness. In those instances when commonplaceness says \u2018the end\u2019 and turns away, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche see the beginning and start to seek.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The underground man is not a tragic hero in the classical, Aristotelian sense; instead, his self-defeating paradoxicalism confers upon him a kind of dignity, a perverse and contrary individualism. But Shestov alludes to the redemptive irony at work here: \u201cPerhaps the underground man was unjust to the \u2018laws of nature\u2019 when he said they offended him more than anything else!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After all, those laws gave him\u2014an insignificant, despised creature whom everyone had rejected\u2014a proud sense of his human dignity and led him to the conviction that the entire world is worth no more than one underground man!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The wall of nature is really a canvas, a perfect surface for graffiti. If you \u201cdon\u2019t believe\u201d that the wall can stop you, you are nonetheless \u201cglad to have\u201d it, because it lets you hold forth, underground, in a purely discursive threshold realm beyond which infinite freedom is reduced to banal and finite action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Underground, a toothache is a source of pleasure because it is a pretext for moaning. I Am Not I, and This Is Not My World: Theodicy and the Meaning of Life in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy Having considered how Dostoevsky portrays split consciousness and its ramifications in his Notes from Underground, let us now turn to the outside world as depicted by Russian existentialists; we take as examples The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is perhaps not surprising that the cloven underground self cleaves the world into an all-or-nothing proposition. Dostoevsky\u2019s antiheroes, in their naked freedom and their sickness (the fruits of consciousness), challenge the world entire as if to say: Reveal yourself or disappear! Right now! Nothing short of an absolute and immediate answer to the human condition will do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Berdyaev\u2019s classic typology of the bipolar Russian soul reflects this Dostoevskian tendency: Russians classify themselves as \u201capocalypsists\u201d or \u201cnihilists,\u201d showing thereby that they are not comfortable in a temperate psychical climate. . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From the opposed sides whence they are come, excess of religion as well as of atheism, apocalypsism and nihilism are equally destructive of culture and history that occupy a middle way. . . . \u201cNihilism has appeared among us because we are all nihilists,\u201d wrote Dostoevsky in his diary, and it is this nihilism that he probed to the bottom, a nihilism . . . that is only an inverted apocalypsism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nihilism is an \u201cinverted apocalypsism\u201d because the former is merely a despondent version of the latter: this compromised world, full of evil, must end one way or another\u2014if not by the kingdom of God, then by human negation (passive or active). Such bipolar maximalism arises not from an irrational soul, as Shestov might suggest, but rather from an excess of reason, a desire for radical individual clarity at the expense of collective \u201creasonableness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dostoevsky\u2019s Ivan Karamazov calls this unreasonable starkness \u201cRussianism.\u201d As he explains: \u201cRussian conversations on these subjects are all conducted as stupidly as possible. . . . The stupider, the more to the point. The stupider, the clearer. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while reason hedges and hides. Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As we see in the epigraph to this chapter (from the same famous dialogue), it is Russianism that accounts for his blunt haste in this, his first real adult conversation with his younger brother Alyosha, who has been living in the local monastery as Father Zosima\u2019s acolyte: \u201cMy task is to explain to you as quickly as possible my essence. . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And therefore I declare that I accept God pure and simple . . . , but moreover I also accept his wisdom and his purpose, which are completely unknown to us; I believe in order, in the meaning of life, I believe in eternal harmony, in which we are all supposed to merge, I believe in the Word for whom the universe is yearning, and who himself was \u2018with God,\u2019 who himself is God, and so on, and so on and so forth to infinity. . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And now imagine that in the final outcome I do not accept this world of God\u2019s, I do not admit it at all, though it exists. It\u2019s not God that I do not accept, it is this world of God\u2019s, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept. . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have a childlike conviction that all sufferings will be healed and smoothed over, that the whole offensive comedy of human contradictions will disappear like a pitiful mirage, a vile concoction of man\u2019s Euclidean mind, feeble and puny as an atom . . . let all of this come true and be revealed, but I do not accept it and do not want to accept it! Let the parallel lines even meet before my own eyes: I shall look and say, yes, they meet, and still I will not accept it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dostoevsky completed The Brothers Karamazov in 1880, a year before his death. He wrote it during a period of marital and financial stability, at the height of his esteem as an author and public figure welcome at the court of Alexander II and at Petersburg\u2019s aristocratic salons (thirty thousand people would accompany his funeral procession in 1881).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
None of these favorable circumstances stopped him from writing yet another novel about murder (parricide this time), madness, faith, and nihilism that featured an underground voice (Ivan\u2019s) even more compelling than the narrator\u2019s in Notes. In my view, this is because (as before) these extremes, these violent questions, underscore a broader existential condition and not simply Dostoevsky\u2019s special neuroses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ivan admits that his existential Russianism is stupid. It would, after all, seem \u201cstupid\u201d to do as he does and orient one\u2019s \u201cessence\u201d around the kinds of sensational limit cases with which he torments Alyosha: the torture and deaths of innocent children by Turkish soldiers, the Russian landowner who let his dogs loose on his serf\u2019s little boy\u2014lurid tales culled from the popular press. But logic will not abide exceptions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ivan\u2019s \u201cEuclidean mind\u201d rejects a world in which such things happen and even more vehemently rejects any future harmony or theodicy that could excuse or explain such a world or that would promise future harmony in a world to come: \u201c\u2018I don\u2019t understand anything,\u2019 Ivan went on as if in delirium, \u2018and I no longer want to understand anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I want to stick to the fact. I made up my mind long ago not to understand. If I wanted to understand something, I would immediately have to betray the fact.\u2019\u201d If the stubborn fact of innocent suffering children cannot be understood or accepted, then there is nothing else to understand or accept.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhy do [children] get thrown on the pile, to manure someone\u2019s future harmony with themselves? I understand solidarity in sin among men; solidarity in retribution I also understand; but what solidarity in sin do little children have? . . . Some joker will say, perhaps, that in any case the child will grow up and have time enough to sin, but there\u2019s this boy who didn\u2019t grow up but was torn apart by dogs at the age of eight. . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The mother . . . has no right to forgive the suffering of her child who was torn to pieces . . . even if the child himself were to forgive! . . . I don\u2019t want harmony. . . . I\u2019d rather remain with my unrequited suffering and my unrequited indignation, even if I am wrong. Besides, they have put too high a price on harmony; we can\u2019t afford to pay so much for admission. . . . It\u2019s not that I don\u2019t accept God, Alyosha, I just most respectfully return him the ticket.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of course, Ivan won\u2019t do anything about this except vow to \u201csmash the cup\u201d at the age of thirty, so as not to endure the pointlessness of a life lived too long or to become a debauched buffoon like his father Fyodor. Another of Dostoevsky\u2019s characters (Kirillov in Demons) lives in the shadow of this doctrine of \u201clogical suicide,\u201d although, unlike Ivan, he views the free act of suicide as a heroic affirmation of human godhood and not simply rebellion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But just as Kirillov\u2019s godlessness is deeply theological, so too does Ivan retain a sliver of apocalyptic hope in the midst of his nihilist rebellion before Alyosha. \u201cRussian boys\u201d will be boys, Ivan suggests, not only in their rebellion but also in their need for a hug\u2014that childish belief that help will come just because you need it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The full implications of Ivan\u2019s \u201creturning the ticket\u201d are left in the shadow realm of his notorious Cardinal Grand Inquisitor, his unwritten, paraphrased \u201cpoem\u201d of sixteenth-century Seville, delivered gleefully with footnotes and flourishes to Alyosha in the tavern right after his \u201cRussianist\u201d confession.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In conjuring this figure of a theocrat who resolves to \u201ccorrect\u201d Christ\u2019s refusal of the three temptations in the wilderness by relieving human beings from the burden of God-given freedom, Ivan suggests one of the logical outcomes of his rebellion against any kind of theodicy: the secular fanaticism of the totalitarian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For if the evil in God\u2019s world cannot be justified or accepted, then it falls to human authority to remake the world in man\u2019s image. As Alyosha understands his brother\u2019s relationship to his parable, the tragic ego must account for the whole world and become an Inquisitor (or its modern variant, a violent revolutionary) or die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, Ivan wants neither to become a self-righteous tyrant nor to kill himself just yet, and he attributes his willingness to drag on until his thirtieth year to \u201cthe Karamazov force.\u201d \u201cKaramazovism\u201d is typically characterized in the novel as baseness and depravity, an undifferentiating and teeming life force by which Fyodor Karamazov declares that he has never met an ugly woman, not even Stinking Lizaveta (mother of his bastard, Smerdyakov, who later murders him).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But it is also the force that keeps Ivan alive, the force of and for the time being, which, in the absence of Berdyaev\u2019s cultural middle, wends a path between \u201cnihilism and apocalypsism.\u201d I would even argue that Karamazovism is the force by which the Grand Inquisitor releases the returning Christ from the auto-da-f\u00e9 after the latter responds to his accusations with a gentle kiss on his \u201cbloodless, ninety-year-old lips.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When Alyosha offers Ivan the same kiss in response to his brother\u2019s provocations, the latter rapturously cries, \u201cLiterary theft!\u201d and concludes: \u201cif, indeed, I hold out for the sticky little leaves, I shall love them only remembering you. It\u2019s enough for me that you are here somewhere, and I shall not stop wanting to live. . . . I will also make you a promise: when I\u2019m thirty and want \u2018to smash the cup on the floor,\u2019 then, wherever you may be, I will still come to talk things over with you once more.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The commonness of this plagiarized smooch is precisely what disrupts both the Inquisitor and Ivan\u2019s binary \u201cRussianism.\u201d The gesture\u2014gratuitous, forgiving, silly\u2014deflates the urgency of the problem of theodicy, making light of the Inquisitor\u2019s bloody earnestness and Ivan\u2019s rebellion against God\u2019s world. The kiss reminds one that not everything must be resolved and decided today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tolstoy\u2019s Anna Karenina, published when Dostoevsky began work on The Brothers Karamazov, explores a similar theme. Although the parallel plots of Tolstoy\u2019s novel, which Dostoevsky deemed \u201cflawless as a work of art,\u201d trace how the sin of adultery distinguishes a \u201chappy\u201d family (Levin\u2019s) from an \u201cunhappy\u201d one (Anna Karenina\u2019s), ultimately both fictional strands warn against something similar to Ivan\u2019s \u201cRussianism\u201d\u2014against the kind of absolute rationalism one finds in the stream of consciousness that leads to Anna\u2019s suicide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unlike Ivan, whose fate is uncertain by the end of The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina succeeds in \u201creturning the ticket\u201d before Tolstoy\u2019s novel ends. Anna\u2019s Euclidean formula about the purpose of human reason first appears in a conversation she has with her sister-in-law, Dolly (Darya Alexandrovna\u2014 wife of Anna\u2019s brother, the philandering Stiva Oblonsky), to clarify why she doesn\u2019t want any more children with her lover, Vronsky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anna explains: \u201cWhy have I been given reason, if I don\u2019t use it so as not to bring unfortunate children into the world? . . . I would always feel guilty before these unfortunate children. . . . If they don\u2019t exist, at least they won\u2019t be unfortunate, and if they\u2019re unfortunate, I alone am to blame.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These were the same arguments Darya Alexandrovna had produced for herself, but now she listened to them and could not understand them. \u201cHow can she be guilty before beings who don\u2019t exist?\u201d she wondered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And suddenly a thought came to her: could it be better in any possible case for her favorite, Grisha, if he had never existed? And it seemed so wild to her, so strange, that she shook her head to scatter this whirling confusion of mad thoughts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Indeed, Dolly did produce the \u201csame arguments\u201d for herself in the carriage on the way to Anna and Vronsky\u2019s estate, when she recalled the cheerful response of a beautiful young peasant woman to the question of whether she had children: \u201cI had one girl, but God freed me, I buried her during Lent. . . . Why be sorry? The old man has lots of grandchildren.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nothing but trouble. No work, no nothing. Just bondage.\u201d This answer had seemed repulsive to Darya Alexandrovna, . . . but now she inadvertently recalled those words. Cynical as they were, there was some truth in them. . . . \u201cLabour, suffering, ugly suffering, that last moment . . . then nursing, the sleepless nights. . . . Then the children\u2019s illnesses, this eternal fear; then their upbringing, vile inclinations. . . . And on top of it all, the death of these same children.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After Dolly arrives at Anna and Vronsky\u2019s and hears the same argument in Anna\u2019s mouth, its logic seems incomprehensible in all of its Cartesian hubris. For how can one judge whether \u201cbeings who don\u2019t exist\u201d are better off for not existing and whether beings who do exist would be better off not having existed?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In these characters\u2019 deliberations about child rearing, with its travails monumental and banal, Tolstoy (much like Ivan Karamazov) raises the question of whether being or nothingness, frail hope or inevitable tragedy, best defines what it means to be human\u2014and whether one has a choice in the matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What Ivan, Anna, and Dolly reveal in the preceding passages is an intellectual rebellion against the very terms of the question, a rebellion that presumes one can reject a world that offers such an absurd choice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These characters straddle what Sartre calls the \u201cdivide\u201d in each consciousness, which \u201cincludes in itself the consciousness both of being responsible for itself and of not being the cause of it\u2019s own being.\u201d In Ivan, Anna, and Dolly, the Cartesian consciousness responsible for itself is frustrated by the gratuitousness of consciousness and responds by assuming a negative responsibility for the entire world, revoking the rights of everything that exists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is Mephisto\u2019s \u201cEternal Emptiness,\u201d which Goethe\u2019s devil invokes when a chorus proclaims that Faust\u2019s life is \u201cover.\u201d \u201cOver!?\u201d Mephisto retorts, \u201cOver and pure nothing, it is all the same. Why have eternally creation, when all is subject to annihilation?\u201d Why have children if they are to suffer and die? Why have anything if children are to suffer and die?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These are the pressing questions of Tolstoy\u2019s discussions about child rearing in Anna Karenina. The logic returns us to Ivan Karamazov\u2019s rebellion against any harmony grown on the \u201cmanure\u201d of dead children. Of course, Ivan\u2019s rebellion is itself grown on the manure of dead children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But here it is crucial to note both the connection and the key difference between Ivan\u2019s \u201csuffering children\u201d and those of Zosima and Alyosha\u2014 and indeed of Dostoevsky himself, who in 1878 lost his three-year-old son Alexei (Alyosha) to epilepsy, a condition the boy inherited from his father. In both cases, dead children signal the monstrousness of any theodicy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But in Ivan\u2019s examples, children suffer because of human evil that God passively allows, while Zosima and Alyosha (and Dostoevsky) use the loss of children to confront the natural order that God supposedly sustains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As perplexing philosophical quandaries go, it may be easier to respond to the latter than the former. As Berdyaev argues, the \u201cproblem of evil and of wrongdoing is part and parcel of the problem of freedom. . . . If there were no freedom then God alone could be responsible for evil.\u201d However, this only explains human evil\u2014Ivan\u2019s Turkish soldiers or Russian landowners torturing babies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of course, Ivan would say (as his Grand Inquisitor does) that only a nasty God would burden us with such freedom. Berdyaev responds to such a conception of God by insisting that compulsory goodness is not goodness but slavery. This argument is taken to a level deeper, however, because neither Berdyaev nor Ivan contends\u2014as Zosima and Alyosha do\u2014with natural evil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ivan\u2019s limit cases inspire an easy and infectious fury: What should we do with the landowner who lets his hounds hunt down a child before his mother\u2019s eyes? \u201cShoot him!\u201d even the angelic Alyosha bursts out darkly.45 But even though you can shoot the landowner; you can\u2019t shoot God\u2014especially if God doesn\u2019t exist, as Ivan\u2019s rejection of theodicy suggests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Still, even if God gave the landowner the freedom with which to sin, wouldn\u2019t it be more understandable to fault God (or \u201cGod\u2019s world\u201d) for the unmediated suffering of a child who dies of \u201cnatural\u201d causes? Although Ivan is often pegged as an atheist, he is deliberately avoiding the label in his tavern talk with Alyosha because to reject God directly is already to accept the world as your own, which is to accept the futility and limits of a prolonged anger at the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Confronted with such limits, you are less angry than simply bereft. You can only feel bereft over the death of a child you knew\u2014not Ivan\u2019s newspaper children but rather Ilyusha Snegiryov and Alexei, the fourth baby buried by Nastasia, the peasant woman who comes to Zosima for comfort. The way that Alyosha responds to Ilyusha Snegiryov\u2019s death and Zosima to Alexei\u2019s is the definitive response to Ivan\u2019s rebellion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I would like to linger on these two exemplary episodes because the novel itself lingers on them, paradoxically, not to reject the world (as Ivan does) but instead to affirm it on a deeper basis. Here is the exchange between the pilgrim Nastasia and Father Zosima: \u201cI grieve for my little [three-year-old] son, father, for my little son.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was the last little son left to us, we had four, Nikitushka and I, but our children didn\u2019t stay, they didn\u2019t stay. When I buried the first three, I wasn\u2019t too sorry about them, but this last one I buried and I can\u2019t forget him. . . . My soul is wasted over him. I look at his clothes, at his little shirt or his little boots, and start howling. . . . I\u2019m through with [my husband], through, I\u2019m through with everybody. And I don\u2019t even want to see my house now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When Zosima attempts to comfort her with platitudes about her son being in the ranks of the angels, she objects powerfully: \u201cThe same way my Nikitushka was comforting me, word for word. . . . I\u2019d say, \u2018where else can he be if not with the Lord God, only he isn\u2019t here with us . . . he isn\u2019t sitting here with us like before!\u2019 . . . But he\u2019s gone, dear father, he\u2019s gone, and I\u2019ll never hear him again!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His little belt is here, but he\u2019s gone, and I\u2019ll never hear him again!\u201d She took her boy\u2019s little goldbraided belt from her bosom and, at the sight of it, began shaking with sobs. . . . \u201cThis,\u201d said the elder, \u201cis Rachel of old \u2018weeping for her children, and she would not be comforted, because they are not\u2019 [Jer. 31:15, Matt. 2:18]. . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And do not be comforted, you should not be comforted, but weep. . . . And you will be filled with this great mother\u2019s weeping for a long time, but in the end it will turn into quiet joy for you, and your bitter tears will become tears of quiet tenderness and the heart\u2019s purification. . . . Only it is a sin for you to desert [your husband].<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Go to your husband and take care of him. Your little boy will look down and see that you\u2019ve abandoned his father, and will weep for both of you. . . . You see him now in your dreams and are tormented, but at home he will send you quiet dreams.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nastasia vows to return to her husband, telling Zosima: \u201cYou\u2019ve touched my heart.\u201d The elder finally reaches her not with theodicy or images of heaven (the stuff that repels Ivan) but rather with an acknowledgment of her inconsolability, an irreconcilability that must be allowed to evolve into something else\u2014for example, into an urgent need to honor the dead by reestablishing a connection to the living (even to the world that allowed a child to die).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is, however, the life and death of Ilyusha (Ilyushechka) Snegiryov that constitute a Dostoevskian tour de force of mingled bathos and pathos, all of which Zosima\u2019s \u201cheir\u201d Alyosha Karamazov must shape into an act of memory. Ilyusha is at the heart of the novel\u2019s microcosmic subplot about the schoolboys that Alyosha befriends and mentors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alyosha first encounters the boys as they are throwing stones at Ilyusha, who viciously bites Alyosha\u2019s finger after he comes to his rescue. Alyosha soon learns that the boys had been teasing Ilyusha because Dmitry Karamazov (Ivan and Alyosha\u2019s half-brother) had dragged his father Captain Snegiryov by his \u201cwhiskbroom\u201d beard in the public square.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By the end of the novel, Alyosha helps orchestrate a moving reconciliation between the boy and his friends as well as assistance for the boy\u2019s family, but Ilyusha\u2019s health worsens and he dies two days after Dmitry is sentenced (unjustly) for the murder of Fyodor Karamazov.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ilyushechka\u2019s funeral and Alyosha\u2019s impromptu eulogy, the \u201cSpeech at the Stone,\u201d constitute the last chapter of the novel. The funeral itself is described in several pages of nearly unbearable naturalistic detail: When it came time to take leave of the dead and cover the coffin, [Captain Snegiryov] threw his arms around it as if to keep them from covering Ilyushechka, and began quickly, greedily, repeatedly kissing his dead boy on the mouth. . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cFlowers for mama, flowers for mama! Mama\u2019s feelings have been hurt!\u201d he suddenly started exclaiming. . . . All the boys were crying . . . and though Smurov . . . was also crying terribly, he still managed, while almost running, to snatch up a piece of brick lying red on the snow-covered path and fling it at a flock of sparrows flying quickly by.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He missed, of course, and went on running, crying. . . . [Captain Snegiryov] fell on the snow, struggling, screaming, sobbing, and began crying out: \u201cIlyushechka, dear fellow, dear old fellow!\u201d Alyosha and Kolya set about lifting him up, pleading with him, persuading him. \u201cEnough, captain, a brave man must endure,\u201d Kolya mumbled. \u201cAnd you\u2019ll ruin the flowers,\u201d Alyosha added, \u201cand \u2018mama\u2019 is waiting for them, she\u2019s sitting there crying because you didn\u2019t give her any flowers from Ilyushechka this morning.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this scene, Alyosha turns the captain, as Zosima had turned Nastasia, back toward ethical attention to his spouse as an appropriate response to grief. It is striking that intense grief is essentially infantile, as Dostoevsky paints the scene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Indeed, Dostoevsky\u2019s comic-pathetic tone in this chapter and the banal details he includes\u2014Smurov throwing stones at sparrows while running and crying, the Snegiryovs squabbling over flowers\u2014is what some readers have ascribed to Dostoevsky\u2019s \u201ccruel talent,\u201d his dramatic emphasis on the painful comedy of scandal and travesty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But Dostoevsky also believed in a \u201cwit that comes from deep feeling,\u201d a compassionate laughter that could rescue the soul by loosening it from an intolerable present. After all, hysterical grief is infantile precisely because it is a feeling of being trapped in time, in a present experienced as pure loss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As such, Dostoevsky presents scene after scene of parents who see the traces of their child, like Snegiryoy who finds his dead child\u2019s boots, wailing in inexhaustible and unassuageable sorrow. Once again, Alyosha actively manages this grief: \u201cLet them cry it through,\u201d [Alyosha] said to Kolya, \u201cof course there\u2019s no use trying to comfort them now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let\u2019s wait a minute and then go back. . . . He may get drunk. Just you and I will come, and that will be enough . . .; if we all come at once, we\u2019ll remind them of everything again,\u201d Alyosha advised. [Kolya replied,] \u201cThe landlady is setting the table for them now\u2014for this memorial dinner or whatever. . . . It\u2019s all so strange, Karamazov, such grief, and then pancakes all of a sudden\u2014 how unnatural it all is in our religion!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is interesting that, at the end of Demons, Stepan Trofimovich\u2019s \u201cconversion\u201d is also prefigured by a sudden eruption of pancakes at the tavern where he soon breathes his last. In each case, the sensual-mundane triggers an act of memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In both cases, pancakes represent an end run around the intellectual thicket of theodicy precisely through their evocation of a happy part of childhood. Egoist rebellion against unacceptable suffering (like Ilyushechka\u2019s death) is quickly exhausted and turns into a more complicated agony over how to honor the departed: what to do with the palpable loss and its traces, what to forget and what to remember and how to do so. Rejecting the world is easy: even God \u201cregretted\u201d (Gen. 6:6) his creation before destroying it by flood (which he will also regret).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Far more difficult is the craft of selective memory, as ephemeral as the rainbow God devises to remind himself (not Noah) of his promise that he will never again annihilate the world in response to the evil that is innate to human freedom (Gen. 9:16). Alyosha invokes the power and fragility of such memory in his impromptu eulogy, delivered not by the grave in the churchyard but instead near the \u201cheathenish stone\u201d where Snegiryov had actually wanted to bury his son.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the \u201cSpeech at the Stone\u201d that follows and concludes the novel, Alyosha accomplishes several rather subtle things. First, he includes himself and the boys in a shared responsibility for Ilyushechka\u2019s fate. Second, he invokes a corollary responsibility: the obligation to aspire actively to one\u2019s better memory, to the better \u201cfacts\u201d of human nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201c\u2018Let us never forget how good we once felt here, all together, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, for the time that we loved the poor boy, perhaps better than we actually are, . . . that alone may serve some day for our salvation.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The third thing the eulogy performs occurs as part of a dialogue with the boys: \u201cAh, dear children, dear friends, do not be afraid of life! How good life is when you do something good and rightful!\u201d . . . \u201cKaramazov!\u201d cried Kolya, \u201ccan it really be true as religion says, that all shall rise from the dead, and come to life, and see one another again, and everyone, and Ilyushechka?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cCertainly we shall rise, certainly we shall see and gladly, joyfully tell one another all that has been,\u201d Alyosha replied, half laughing, half in ecstasy. . . . \u201cWell, and now let\u2019s end our speeches and go to his memorial dinner. Don\u2019t be disturbed that we\u2019ll be eating pancakes. It\u2019s an ancient, eternal thing, and there\u2019s good in that too,\u201d laughed Alyosha.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Where Ivan Karamazov would find the arrival of the Kingdom of God an inadequate theodicy, pancakes suffice for Alyosha. It seems that, at least for that moment, Dostoevsky defeats Ivan and the underground man with comfort food. Camus\u2019s ruminations on Dostoevsky conveyed how existentialists understood the Russian novelist, in his treatment of consciousness and theodicy, as a precursor to some of their own key themes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For Camus, Ivan was a tsar in indifference . . . by refusing to surrender the royal powers of the mind. To those, like his brother [Alyosha], who prove by their lives that it is essential to humiliate oneself in order to believe, he might reply that the condition is shameful. His key word is: \u201cEverything is permitted,\u201d with the appropriate shade of melancholy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of course, like Nietzsche, the most famous of God\u2019s assassins, he ends in madness. But this is a risk worth running, and, faced with such tragic ends, the essential impulse of the absurd mind is to ask: \u201cWhat does that prove?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Indeed, what do madness or suicide \u201cprove\u201d in Dostoevsky\u2019s case studies? The absurdist (or Shestov\u2019s tragic egoist) would respond: all it proves is that there is an unbridgeable chasm between human truth and human need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Accordingly, even though Camus called Alyosha\u2019s invocation of the immortality of the soul an example of Dostoevsky\u2019s \u201cstirring acquiescence, riddled with doubts, uncertain and ardent,\u201d he described it also as man exchanging \u201chis divinity for happiness\u201d and declared that this ultimately makes Dostoevsky not an \u201cabsurdist . . . but [rather] an existentialist novelist.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By this Camus meant that Dostoevsky\u2014unlike the absurdist, who lives (or dies) without offering a solution to the human problem of meaning\u2014ends up accommodating necessity by responding to Kirillov and Ivan as Alyosha responds to Kolya: \u201cexistence is illusory and it is eternal.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Camus\u2019s reading, it is illusory because God is dead and it is eternal because, apparently, we cannot live without God. As Blaise Pascal famously quipped: \u201cIt is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.\u201d \u201cWhich is better\u2014cheap happiness, or lofty suffering?\u201d asked the underground man as he reflected on his excuses for letting his prospective love interest, the prostitute Liza, flee from his rented room after he deliberately insulted her by trying to pay\u2014for she did not come to sleep with him for money but because he had tried to persuade her to leave her trade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He implies that setting up house with Liza would be cheap happiness, presumably for both of them, while his cruel insult will instill a lofty (and, he claims, true and thus \u201cuseful\u201d) suffering\u2014again, presumably in both of them. The question begs the insight that happiness is in fact always cheap, that is, prosaic. In Levinas\u2019s phrase, \u201clife is love of life\u201d\u2014fulfillment of the needs that life comprises is life\u2019s joy. On the other hand, a suffering that is chosen (or useful) is always lofty in that it assumes that my suffering challenges some sort of universal meaning, which of course presupposes that universal meaning is possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alyosha peddles cheap happiness (the pancakes) precisely because it comes so dearly. Father Zosima, in his homily on memorable Biblical moments, expresses this paradox most clearly and painfully in a discussion of the unsatisfying, even monstrous, epilogue to the Book of Job: \u201cGod restores Job again, once more many years pass, and he has new children, different ones, and he loves them\u2014Oh Lord, one thinks, \u2018but how could he so love these new ones, when his former children are no more, when he has lost them?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Remembering them, was it possible for him to be fully happy?\u2019 . . . But it is possible, it is possible: the old grief, by a great mystery of human life, gradually passes into quiet tender joy; instead of young, ebullient blood comes a mild, serene old age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ivan Karamazov\u2019s \u201cebullient blood\u201d would have simmered over the loss of the first family, just as it probably simmers over his own sorry childhood spent as a ward in the homes of others. But just as the deaths of the beloved former children are a stubborn, unjustifiable fact, so too are the beloved new children: a reality as weird and common as the rising and setting of the sun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is what Philip Hallie called the \u201clucid mystery\u201d of goodness. What is to be done with this other kind of fact, the kind that probably would not appear in Ivan\u2019s newspapers? Zosima\u2019s \u201cmild, serene old age\u201d does not weigh one stubborn fact against the other (for that would be a crass sort of theodicy indeed) and remembering, acknowledging both evil and the banality of goodness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Camus discounted too quickly the possibility that such an affirmation partakes of the absurd. Alyosha\u2019s invocation of eternity is split into the ridiculous (eating pancakes!) and the ethically transcendent (the memory of Ilyushechka as a unifying bond).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Indeed, for French existentialists to ignore, rue, or misunderstand the religious (\u201chumiliated\u201d) end of the Russian equation, while drawing inspiration from the atheist (\u201cintelligent\u201d) end, was to fall into a false equilibrium. Kirillov\u2019s \u201cpistol rang out somewhere in Russia,\u201d Camus wrote, \u201cbut the world continued to cherish its blind hopes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If M. Kiriloff\u2019s \u201clogical suicide\u201d was toasted with anisette in a Left Bank caf\u00e9, then it too easily sloughs off the horns of Dostoevsky\u2019s dilemma. For at least in the Russian context, God is less dead than constantly and necessarily forgotten. In such a context, \u201cGod\u201d is basically a mnemonic device for responsibility and for the suspension of the all-negating rational ego.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a peasant explains to Levin near the end of Anna Karenina: \u201cOne man just lives for his own needs . . . , just to stuff his own belly, but Fokanych\u2014he\u2019s an upright old man. He lives for the soul. He remembers God.\u201d And to remember God, one needs to have forgotten him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As Bernard Martin noted in his account of Shestov: \u201cLater he was to make clear, in a great comment on the Psalmist\u2019s cry, \u2018Out of the depths, I called unto thee, O Lord\u2019 [Ps. 130], the connection between the tragedies of existence and God: \u2018What relationship is there between \u201cthe depths\u201d and \u201cLord\u201d? When there is neither depth, nor horror, nor despair, man does not see God and does not call to Him.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The clich\u00e9 about no atheists in foxholes signals the irrelevance of \u201cbelief\u201d: sometimes it feels like there is no God, and other times it feels like there is. The power of the lucid mystery\u2014whereby a person (believer or not) doesn\u2019t live simply to stuff his belly\u2014relies on our absurd tendency to forget and then suddenly remember this power and call on it in moments of horror and despair, even when this call is not heard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Indeed, the lucid mystery finds its proof not just in kindness but also in grief, as mysterious as kindness. Grief feels fresh each time it is invoked, drawing its power from the shoddiness of our emotional memory. After all, if we remembered that we already grieved for something, why would we ever want to grieve for it again?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet this is exactly what we do. This sort of sensitivity\u2014the naive freshness of such forgetfulness\u2014also permits us to relive simple ethical revelations again and again and to be hopeful for others when they do so. The Ivan Karamazov inside all of us bristles at such loose ends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Or, as explained by the shabby devil who visits Ivan shortly before his descent into brain fever: \u201cI\u2019m leading you alternately between belief and disbelief, and I have my own purpose in doing so. A new method, sir: when you\u2019ve completely lost faith in me, then you\u2019ll immediately start convincing me to my face that I am not a dream but a reality\u2014I know you now; and then my goal will be achieved. And it is a noble goal. I will sow just a tiny seed of faith in you, and from it an oak will grow.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ivan\u2019s devil is a self-professed demon of uncertainty\u2014uncertainty over whether one must engage the world materially or spiritually. Philip Hallie describes a similar Faustian struggle between two souls in the breast: one soul that sees evil as resulting from an imbalance of power that can be corrected only by an opposed power; another soul that responds to evil not with power but with hope and generosity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first soul is nourished by truth\u2014and the more impersonal, lucid, and objective the better. The second soul is fed by hope, which is intimate, personal, and based on the ability of each of us to shape a narrative that comforts. In the dialogue between Russian boys in the stinking tavern, the first soul is represented by Ivan and the second by Aloysha.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hallie refuses to reconcile these two incompatible souls: \u201cWe live off the bodies of others. This is the system we are part of, whether we like it or not. If we cannot learn to live and love in such a bloody, ambiguous world as this, we starve to death emotionally and cognitively, for we live with truth as necessarily as we live with high hopes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The mess of both is needed. It is no accident that Hallie ultimately relies on storytelling\u2014on a highly aestheticized truth seeking. Indeed, the open-endedness of literary art can be an honest and humane way of acknowledging our animal cruelty (living off the bodies of others) even as we cultivate and live out shared hopes for salvation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thus the challenge for the second, hopeful soul is to stand firm in the bloody instability witnessed by the truth-seeking soul. Aesthetic activity (including critical dialogue) is a realm where it is possible to stand firm on shaky ground, and here again the Russian novels are often the right place to start looking\u2014and perhaps a good place to return to after our journey into philosophy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nietzsche, with his own brand of stark \u201cRussianism,\u201d proposed the following: What if . . . a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you: \u201cThis life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you. . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!\u201d Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: \u201cYou are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.\u201d . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? Nietzsche\u2019s demon of eternal recurrence represents the idea that there is no other world or hereafter and that this world is just one cycle of an endless, tortured pattern of existence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But Nietzsche also suggested that this demon can be transformed by a \u201ctremendous moment,\u201d or by (in Alyosha\u2019s words) \u201csome good memory,\u201d into an ethical impetus. I submit that this \u201ctremendous moment\u201d might simply be the ability to forget, even if only momentarily, that the world remains the world even after you have experienced the lucid mystery of goodness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What this suggests is that the philosophy of tragedy leads not to metaphysical transcendence or negation\u2014both of which are still slaves to the being they hope to defeat\u2014but instead to ethical transcendence. And because ethical transcendence has meaning and expression only as mundane justice and care, we return to the world of face-to-face relations so deliberately depicted by the Russian novelists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Existential Russianism thus leaves us between two limit cases: the dark and violent freedom characterized by the individual\u2019s perverse need to escape the other-in-myself and an \u201cinsatiable compassion\u201d toward the other-as-other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One experiences each case\u2014be it self-nausea or infinite responsibility\u2014\u201cmore than anyone.\u201d From the underground man\u2019s assertion that everyone takes pride in their sicknesses, \u201cand I more than anyone,\u201d Dostoevsky eventually arrived at the idea in The Brothers Karamazov\u2014an idea Levinas later embraced as his own: \u201cEach of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I more than anyone.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In each case it is the \u201cI more than anyone\u201d\u2014the literary, antiphilosophical coda\u2014that reflects what it is like to have a self, a subjectivity irreducible and irreplaceable, whether it wallows in the mire or takes responsibility for the world as it exists and as it ought to be. This is the Russians\u2019 gift to existentialism: recovery of the self amidst the collective mobilizations of modernity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is a radical subjectivity, expressed well by Levin\u2019s thoughts at the end of Anna Karenina: \u201cIt\u2019s a secret that\u2019s necessary and important for me alone and inexpressible in words. This new feeling hasn\u2019t changed me, hasn\u2019t made me happy or suddenly enlightened. . . . Nor was there any surprise. And faith or not faith\u2014I don\u2019t know what it is\u2014but this new feeling has entered into me just as imperceptibly through suffering and has firmly lodged itself in my soul.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul\u2019s holy of holies and other people, even my wife, I\u2019ll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I\u2019ll fail in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray\u2014but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As an epiphany, this is all so provisional and so hedged with caveats that Levin\u2019s exclamation point seems farcical. But perhaps the caveats are the epiphany. Levin, whose \u201clife was good but [whose] thinking was bad,\u201d accepts that his world will forever exceed his thinking. And, somewhat paradoxically, this is really an acceptance of human freedom in all of its heady responsibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whether cogito ergo sum or Es denkt, it is always up to me to think well\u2014up to me \u201cmore than anyone.\u201d To think well, for Dostoevsky and Tolstoy alike, is to realize that even though pure consciousness is the royal realm of human freedom, it can also be a tyrant\u2014a \u201csickness,\u201d as the underground man calls it\u2014when it is unmoored from the compromises demanded by everything else that calls the individual into question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ivan Karamazov and the underground man are utterly enslaved by their boundless consciousness. To think well is to keep in mind that pure thought tends toward a limitlessness that is blind to any experience that would humiliate it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As Berdyaev reminds us, Russians did not have full recourse to the bourgeois culture of the West, where it seemed for a time the sovereign realms of the mind and the world could coexist in a historically evolving middle. During the twentieth century, it became clear that the West did not really have recourse to this middle, either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is what existentialist readers of the Russian novel sensed in the stark and schismatic \u201cRussianism\u201d of a dialogue like the one between Ivan and Alyosha: that the torn subject\u2014 wrenched apart in utter loss or impossible decision, slipping on insupportable ground\u2014can, absurdly, find support not in an impersonal idealism but in this very schism between rebellion and hope.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cHow have Russian boys handled things up to now… Take, for instance, some stinking tavern. . . . They\u2019ve never seen each other before in their whole lives, and when they walk out of the tavern, they won\u2019t see each other again for forty years. Well, then, what are they going to argue about, seizing … <\/p>\n