Consider the Lobster (45 page)

²⁰
Another bonus: Frank’s volumes are replete with marvelous and/or funny tongue-rolling names — Snitkin, Dubolyobov, Strakhov, Golubov, von Voght, Katkov, Nekrasov, Pisarev. One can see why Russian writers like Gogol and FMD made a fine art of epithetic names.
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²¹
Random example from her journal: “‘Poor Feodor, he does suffer so much, and is always so irritable, and liable to fly out about trifles.… It’s of no consequence, because the other days are good, when he is so sweet and gentle. Besides, I can see that when he screams at me it is from illness, not from bad temper.’” Frank quotes and comments on long passages of this kind of stuff, but he shows little awareness that the Dostoevskys’ marriage was in certain ways quite sick, at least by 1990s standards — see e.g. “Anna’s forbearance, whatever prodigies of self-command it may have cost her, was amply compensated for (at least in her eyes) by Dostoevsky’s immense gratitude and growing sense of attachment.”
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²²
Q.v. also, for instance, Dostoevsky’s disastrous passion for the bitch-goddess Appolinari Suslova, or the mental torsions he performed to justify his casino binges… or the fact, amply documented by Frank, that FMD really was an active part of the Petrashevsky Circle and as a matter of fact probably did deserve to be arrested under the laws of the time, this
pace
a lot of other biographers who’ve tried to claim that Dostoevsky just happened to be dragged by friends to the wrong radical meeting at the wrong time.
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²³
In case it’s not obvious, “ideology” is being used here in its strict, unloaded sense to mean any organized, deeply held system of beliefs and values. Granted, by this sort of definition, Tolstoy and Hugo and Zola and most of the other nineteenth-century titans were also ideological writers. But the big thing about Dostoevsky’s gift for character and for rendering the deep conflicts within (not just between) people is that it enables him to dramatize extremely heavy, serious themes without ever being preachy or reductive, i.e., without ever blinking the difficulty of moral/spiritual conflicts or making “goodness” or “redemption” seem simpler than they really are. You need only compare the protagonists’ final conversions in Tolstoy’s
The Death of Ivan Ilych
and FMD’s
Crime and Punishment
in order to appreciate Dostoevsky’s ability to be moral without being moralistic.
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²⁴
Here is another subject that Frank treats brilliantly, especially in Vol. III’s chapter on
House of the Dead.
Part of the reason FMD abandoned the fashionable socialism of his twenties was his years of imprisonment with the absolute dregs of Russian society. In Siberia, he came to understand that the peasants and urban poor of Russia actually loathed the comfortable upper-class intellectuals who wanted to “liberate” them, and that this loathing was in fact quite justified. (If you want to get some idea of how this Dostoevskyan political irony might translate into modern US culture, try reading
House of the Dead
and Tom Wolfe’s “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” at the same time.)
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²⁵
The political situation is one reason why Bakhtin’s famous
Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics,
published under Stalin, had to seriously downplay FMD’s ideological involvement with his own characters. A lot of Bakhtin’s praise for Dostoevsky’s “polyphonic” characterizations, and for the “dialogic imagination” that supposedly allowed him to refrain from injecting his own values into his novels, is the natural result of a Soviet critic’s trying to discuss an author whose “reactionary” views the State wanted forgotten. Frank, who takes out after Bakhtin at a number of points, doesn’t really make clear the constraints that Bakhtin was operating under.
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²⁶
Not surprisingly, FMD’s exact beliefs are idiosyncratic and complicated, and Joseph Frank is thorough and clear and detailed in explaining their evolution through the novels’ thematics (as in, e.g., the toxic effects of egoistic atheism on the Russian character in
Notes
and
C&P;
the deformation of Russian passion by worldly Europe in
The Gambler;
and, in
The Idiot’
s Myshkin and
The Brothers Karamazov’
s Zossima, the implications of a human Christ subjected literally to nature’s physical forces, an idea central to all the fiction Dostoevsky wrote after seeing Holbein the Younger’s “Dead Christ” at the Basel Museum in 1867).

But what Frank has done really phenomenally well here is to distill the enormous amounts of archival material generated by and about FMD, making it comprehensive instead of just using selected bits of it to bolster a particular critical thesis. At one point, somewhere near the end of Vol. III, Frank even manages to find and gloss some obscure author-notes for “Socialism and Christianity,” an essay Dostoevsky never finished, that help clarify why he is treated by some critics as a forerunner of existentialism:

“Christ’s incarnation… provided a new ideal for mankind, one that has retained its validity ever since. N.B. Not one atheist who has disputed the divine origin of Christ has denied the fact that He is the ideal of humanity. The latest on this — Renan. This is very remarkable.” And the law of this new ideal, according to Dostoevsky, consists of “the return to spontaneity, to the masses, but freely.… Not forcibly, but on the contrary, in the highest degree willfully and consciously. It is clear that this higher willfulness is at the same time a higher renunciation of the will.”
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²⁷
The mature, postconversion Dostoevsky’s particular foes were the Nihilists, the radical progeny of the 1840s’ yuppie socialists, whose name (i.e., the Nihilists’ name) comes from the same all-negating speech in Turgenev’s
Fathers and Sons
that got quoted at the outset. But the real battle was wider, and much deeper. It is no accident that Joseph Frank’s big epigraph for Vol. IV is from Kolakowski’s classic
Modernity on Endless Trial,
for Dostoevsky’s abandonment of utilitarian socialism for an idiosyncratic moral conservatism can be seen in the same basic light as Kant’s awakening from “dogmatic slumber” into a radical Pietist deontology nearly a century earlier: “By turning against the popular utilitarianism of the Enlightenment, [Kant] also knew exactly that what was at stake was not any particular moral code, but rather a question of the existence or nonexistence of the distinction between good and evil and, consequently, a question of the fate of mankind.”
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²⁸
(maybe under our own type of Nihilist spell)
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²⁹
(whatever exactly that is)
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³⁰
(which, given this review’s venue, means basically us)
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³¹
We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies — but this is very different.
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^*
N.B. Of those friends and intimates of your correspondents who happen to dislike porn, a large majority of them report disliking it not so much for moral or religious or political reasons but because they find it boring, and a lot of them seem to use robotic/mechanical/industrial metaphors to try to characterize the boredom, e.g.: “[Hard-core sex is usually] just organs going in and out of other organs, in and out, like watching an oil rig go up and down all day.”
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^*
N.B. here in advance that Mr. Rob Black will win Best Director/Video at Saturday night’s Awards gala.
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^†
 (Max’s response to this crew member’s analysis, accompanied by a thumbs-up: “God bless America, kid.”)
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^*
[ = a PEN American Center event concerning a big new translation of
The Castle
by a man from I think Princeton. In case it’s not obvious, that’s what this whole document is — the text of a very quick speech.]
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^*
(Do you think it’s a coincidence that college is when many Americans do their most serious fucking and falling-down drinking and generally ecstatic Dionysian-type reveling? It’s not. College students are adolescents, and they’re terrified, and they’re dealing with their terror in a distinctively US way. Those naked boys hanging upside-down out of their frat house’s windows on Friday night are simply trying to buy a few hours’ escape from the grim adult stuff that any decent school has forced them to think about all week.)
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^*
(Since this’ll almost surely get cut, I’ll admit that, yes, I, as a kid, was in fact the author of this song. But by this time I’d been thoroughly brainwashed. It was sort of our family’s version of “100 Bottles… Wall.” My mother was the one responsible for the “wid’ning gyre” line in the refrain, which after much debate was finally substituted for a supposedly “forced” rhyme for
fire
in my own original lyrics — and again, years later, when I actually understood the apocalyptic thrust of that Yeats line I was, retrospectively, a bit chilled.)
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^*
(In case it’s not totally obvious, be advised that this article is using the word
rhetoric
in its strict traditional sense, something like “the persuasive use of language to influence the thoughts and actions of an audience.”)
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^*
(
Sic
— should obviously be “eagerly awaited.”
Nemo mortalium omnibus horis sapit
.)
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^*
(Your SNOOT reviewer cannot help observing, w/r/t this ad, that the opening
r
in its
Refer
shouldn’t be capitalized after a dependent clause + ellipsis.
Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.
)
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^*
Because
The Investigations’
prose is extremely gnomic and opaque and consists largely of Wittgenstein having weird little imaginary dialogues with himself, the quotations here are actually from Norman Malcolm’s definitive paraphrase of L.W.’s argument, in which paraphrase Dr. Malcolm uses single quotation marks for tone quotes and double quotation marks for when he’s actually quoting Wittgenstein — which, when I myself am quoting Malcolm quoting Wittgenstein’s tone quotes, makes for a rather irksome surfeit of quotation marks, admittedly; but using Malcolm’s exegesis allows this interpolative demonstration to be about 60 percent shorter than it would be if we were to grapple with Wittgenstein directly.
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^*
  There’s a whole argument for this, but intuitively you can see that it makes sense: if the rules can’t be subjective, and if they’re not actually “out there” floating around in some kind of metaphysical hyperreality (a floating hyperreality that you can believe in if you wish, but you should know that people with beliefs like this usually get forced to take medication), then community consensus is really the only plausible option left.
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^*
(The above, while true, is an obvious attempt to preempt readerly sneers/winces at the term’s continued deployment in this article.)
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^*
(Plus, because the teacher-Them are tall humorless punishers/rewarders, they come to stand for all adults and — in a shadowy, inchoate way — for the Parents, whose gradual shift from composing Us to defining Them is probably the biggest ideological adjustment of childhood.)
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^*
(That is, the teacher-/parent-Them becomes the Establishment, Society — Them becomes THEM.)
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