Dostoevsky: Russian Wizard

How Love and Prison Changed a Writer

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Really, you don’t need to read anyone other than Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky to become a serious writer, or, basically, to understand The Human Condition.

Joseph Frank, author of “Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time” (2009) said, in his introduction to “Crime and Punishment” (1866) that the 19th century Russian master nailed “something permanent about the human condition.” Another way of saying this would be: He struck at something Universal to the human experience. Or, again, to go in a more Kierkegaardian direction: He located something eternal. This is what great literature is and does.

I’ve been obsessed with Dostoevsky for a long time. I remember walking into a random bookstore when I was in my early twenties (I don’t recall what city anymore; Manhattan?) and seeing a dozen of his thick masterpieces on the shelf (Crime and Punishment; The Brothers Karamazov; The Idiot; The Double; etc). Back then—17 or 18 years ago now—I felt both drawn to and overwhelmed by the author. Intimidated, certainly. For one thing: Most of his books were gigantic. Door-stopper books. I recalled a book which was a “fictional memoir” about his years in a Siberian hard-labor prison.

But back then I opted for thinner, easier reads, such as the Jack Kerouac classics, “On the Road” and “Dharma Bums.” As most early twenties American male writers are, I was “into the Beats.” Of course. How could I not be? And as I’ve said many times I actually lived that life in real-time, between 23 and 28 hitchhiking around and across the country, hopping trains, going into the mountains for days at a time. And reading, of course; always reading.

In my early thirties I rediscovered Old Dost, as I affectionately refer to the Old Modern Bard who’s been dead for 142 years now. He truly was the Homer of the 19th century, not just for Russia but for Europe, America, the globe. He wrote tragedies reminiscent of Homer, yes, but also Shakespeare, Virgil, Dante. He captured something so visceral, so real, so maddeningly profound about the lurid details of the human comedy we call life, that he is still, even now, in 2023, The Man.

Recently I started reading “The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece,” by Kevin Birmingham (2021). The main theme is about “Crime and Punishment,” but much of the book is a biography of the author himself. (Which you need to grasp in order to understand the masterpiece he wrote.) Simultaneously, I bought eight books from “Paperback Alley” in Goleta the other day using a $100 certificate my mom got me for my 40th birthday. Eight books, and I still have $40 left! One of these books was “Crime and Punishment.”

I should tell you about my first time reading “Crime and Punishment.” Or should I say: Listening. It was quite a magical experience. It was spring of 2016, early April. I’d been traveling around Europe for six weeks. And, somehow, I’d found myself (long story) unexpectedly walking 500 miles across El Camino de Santiago, the “Walk of St. James,” a well-trod spiritual path which leads to St. James’s remains and runs east-west across the entire northern tip of Spain. I hadn’t prepared for this trip. But here I was. I wanted to get away from the big, bustling cities I’d been in (New York City, Berlin, Naples) and go deeply within myself. Having been a backpacker all my life, and having always been someone who loves long, rigorous walks, I decided to walk El Camino.

About halfway through my month-long walk I decided to start listening to books through my ear buds a la Audible. I plowed through about four books (Including a reread of several Kerouac classics) before landing on “Crime and Punishment.” It was a long bastard; something like 40 hours in length, if I remember correctly. But once I started, I couldn’t stop. It took me about five days to finish the book. I was walking roughly 10-18 miles every day. I walked, listening, through wide open green fields, along mountains, through tiny Spanish villages with stone steps and stone buildings, past bars and restaurants, and for about two days through brutal, relentless, pouring rain and mud so thick each time I lifted a leg an inch of wet mud stuck to my boot.

I remember finishing the book vividly. I’d been tromping for almost three weeks straight. I was alone, lonely, exhausted and thrilled. I decided to stay the night in a tiny village. No one else was around. I was literally the only person that night at the pension. (Little backpacker’s motel.) I got a room for $25 Euros, rested, showered, and went out to get some food. I entered a small, hidden bar by a fast-moving, rumbling creek. Watching the water rush out the window, sipping hot chocolate and eating Paella, I listened to the final hours of the book. It was breathtaking.

The main character—Raskolnikov—an early twenties ex-student in St. Petersburg, Russia, had murdered two women, a pawnbroker and her sister. Throughout the novel he’d tried his absolute best to rationalize his actions, trying to prove to himself that, since he’d done it “for his sister and mother,” it was somehow OK. (The protagonist’s mother and sister were sacrificing a happy life so that he could pay off his debt.) But of course the rancid, turgid guilt assaulted him non-stop. It simply would not let him rest. And eventually he gives up the ghost. He is arrested and sent to prison. The woman he loves, Sonia (a prostitute) sees him in prison and he is “raised up like Lazarus.” He achieves inner redemption, in other words. It was beautiful.

After finishing the book I left the bar and wandered around the little village. It was empty and stone-cold quiet. Down a ways and across another bend in the creek I saw an old medieval-looking cathedral. Slowly, I approached. It was dark outside now, around seven, and the stars were brilliant and pulsating in the black sky. I felt alive and tender and spiritual. Something had been knocked loose inside of me. Dostoevsky had rattled both my intellectual and my emotional cages. It wasn’t just the style of his writing, or the fact that he created a master murder-mystery (not for the reader, but for the detective) and could weave a plot like an author from 2021, but, much deeper, that he could (and did) force you to get up close and personal; to really SEE and FEEL what it is to be alive on this Earth. He understood the gritty nuance of life. Of pain. Of struggle. Of compassion. Of love. Of forgiveness. Of redemption.

As I got closer to the church I saw a set of a dozen ancient stone steps. And I heard something. Voices. Voices singing as one. It was mild. Quiet. Beautiful. Reminiscent of a choir. I moved towards the steps.

As I climbed I thought of Dostoevsky the man. A few posts ago I wrote a lengthy exposé of Paul Gauguin, the 19th century French post-Impressionist painter. I discussed in that piece how Gauguin was (in my humble opinion) a genius artist but a questionable, tempestuous, amoral human being. Well, Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was just as much of a (literary) genius—more of one, actually—but without the rancorous humanity. Not to say that Old Dost was a great or perfect man. Far from it. He was an artist, after all, and, as I think the record shows quite clearly, historically artists have often been…well…madmen.

Dostoevsky was born in Moscow. He came from “noble” origins but his father (a military doctor) worked hard to climb only a few rungs on the ladder. They were of noble bearing…but barely. As a teenager he lost his mother to Tuberculosis, and then, after four years of military engineering school, he lost his father to murder…by alcoholism. Almost literally.

Reportedly, his dad—a notorious drunk—who had abused his serfs badly and shorn them from their economic necessities, had been killed one night by the method of many serfs forcing Vodka down his throat until he choked.

This was around 1839/1840, when Dostoevsky was 18 or 19 years old. He’d always been taken with writing. Even during his years at engineering school (in which he only attended due to his father’s demand, and in which he did not do well) he read and wrote constantly and secretly, sometimes late at night. He was a loner, moody and brooding. He wanted to escape into his own universe.

After his father died, he decided to become a writer fulltime. This reminds me of Gauguin quitting the stock exchange to pursue only his Art. (Except Gauguin was in his late twenties when he did it and he had a wife and five kids to support.) Dostoevsky’s extended family were confused and furious. The young, determined writer didn’t care. He broke from his family after giving all his inheritance away except for $1,000 rubles. (About one years’ worth of wages.) This was the dividing line for Dostoevsky. The point of no return.

He stayed in St. Petersburg and wrote. He made literary connections. (Most importantly, Vissarion Belinsky, a massively famous and respected literary critic.) He had some short pieces published in little magazines. His first book, Poor Folk, was published in 1846. Belinksy cherished his newfound little genius and paraded him around the literary salons and took him to social gatherings. He was The Man. Young; ambitious; talented; strong.

Eventually Dostoevsky became interested in back-door secret Socialist gatherings. The Petrashevsky Circle being the most crucial. Here men gathered and discussed Socialism, revolution, the takedown of Tsar Nicholas I, a Utopia where serfdom was abolished and all men lived equally and from a place of love and compassion. (Remind you of anything, 1960s?) He even joined a smaller inner group called the Speshnev Circle; they purchased a printing press, disseminated propaganda, and planned a revolution. (Censorship in 1840s Russia was fierce.) But, of course, he and 200 of those in the Petrashevsky Circle were spied on and caught and Dostoesvky ended up being forced to leave for a decade: Four years in a hard labor prison camp (fortress, actually); four years forced into the military; two years of being unable to live again in St. Petersburg.

When he came back to the city he was 38. He’d been arrested at 28. Inside prison he’d been educated more than all four years of engineering school. It was in prison that he grasped the psychology of Russia, of man generally, of inmates specifically, of himself most of all. He grasped, through direct experience, class-warfare. (Nobles were rejected by the muzhiks [peasants] inside, despite everyone being physically “equal” there.) Almost everything he learned about being a writer—ultimately, about being a master novelist—he learned in prison. They didn’t have MFA programs in the 19th century, but if they did, Dostoevsky would probably have been a worse writer for having attended. Add most of the big 19th and 20th century writers to that list (Hemingway; Fitzgerald; Kerouac; Ray Bradbury; Truman Capote; Maya Angelou; Mark Twain; etc).

All he needed was life experience. That’s all any serious, talented writer needs.

After prison and the military and being banished, when he returned to the city, he kept writing. His life was chaotic. He suffered (ever since prison) epileptic attacks. He’d suddenly drop and writhe nastily on the ground. He had a grotesque gambling problem. He was badly in debt. He’d borrow money to pay one creditor, and then have to borrow more to pay the first back. In his late thirties his wife and brother both died. Four people very close to him, dead. He knew death intimately. He knew loneliness. He knew solitude. He knew psychology. He knew writing.

In Wiesbaden, Germany, in a random hotel room (which he realized at one point he couldn’t pay the bill for) he started working on “Crime and Punishment” in 1865, the year the Civil War ended in the United States. The book was endlessly revised and rewritten, changed and altered, edited and tampered with, restarted and changed back again. Finally it was finished and published in 1866, in the beginning as a serial in sections. He made some money but not a lot. Even back then literature generally didn’t make a ton of money, unless you were say Charles Dickens. Old Dost wasn’t writing fun humorous anecdotes; he was writing a serious masterpiece, a work of tragicomic Art that was about a young man who murdered two women…and told from the murderer’s point of view. This, for the mid-1860s, was not usual.

Dostoevsky went on, of course, to write many more books. He died in 1881, at almost 60. He is considered by some the First Modern Psychologist; the Grandfather of Existentialism (of course this is also said of Kierkegaard, who was eight years older). He was a perfectly imperfect man, just as he was a perfectly imperfect writer. But that was what likely made him so genius. Dostoevsky learned in prison that no human being is either this or that, good or bad, evil or the opposite. No. People are grossly, absurdly complex. Nuanced. Their emotions are a tangled, spiderweb-like mass of uncertainties, desires, fears, drives, self-perceptions, motivations.

Life is not fair. It never has been. Never will be. That is largely what makes it so beautiful, sad, bittersweet, touching, human. Dostoevsky saw this first-hand in prison. The peasants stuck with their own; the noble-birthed with theirs. The peasants mocked the noblemen, yes, but over time Dostoevsky saw great, revelatory displays of depth, love, compassion, intelligence from many of these peasant men, and the opposite from many of the wealthy educated nobles. Dostoevsky—the quintessential writer aka witness aka observer aka seer aka cultural anthropologist—watched it all. And, later, he brilliantly wrote it down.

There is some good in the worst of us and some bad in the best of us. We should remember that especially now, in our tortured, polarized time where teams have been picked, mud slung, rage hurled, binary machinations decided on. The engine of fear and division is upon us; we live in a stark Manichean moment.

Dostoevsky, even then, was reaching out to the younger generation of his time, the kids of the 1860s (when he was in his forties) who were listening to Max Stirner and being swallowed by the anti-ethics of “Nihilism.” Old Dost—after prison a non-Socialist and a fervent Christian—wanted to warn these young people. He wanted to remind them that morality, compassion, love, respect, honor still meant something. They meant everything, in fact. And even now, almost a century and half after The Great Man’s death, I feel Dostoevsky’s sage words reaching out to us, to Millennials and Gen Z and beyond, saying something like, Don’t fall into the trap of hatred. Don’t reject compassion. Don’t strike a fatal blow against love, against understanding, against forgiveness, against redemption. I don’t know if a 21st century Dostoevsky could ever exist, or even if one should. But maybe we don’t need one. He left us his books. Volumes and volumes of books.

*

After climbing the dozen stone steps and walking along the uneven stone landing I heard the voices growing louder. Ahead of me there was a massive, 12-foot high brown curved cathedral door. Swallowing, slightly nervous, I stepped to the door. Very carefully I opened the creaking heavy wood. I stepped into near darkness. The heavy door thudded shut behind me. Red light pulsed. There was a thick, bright red curtain. I entered, pushing the curtain aside. I saw holy water in an urn, and red plush carpet as well as a small room with six rows of old chapel benches. It smelled musty.

And there, across the room, were about ten monks, in full brown robes, singing something, low-volume, gorgeous. With Dostoevsky in my heart still—and the ending of “Crime and Punishment” I stood there near the back wall and watched the monks sing. A few scattered people sat on the benches. It reminded me of my K-8 Episcopalian school days, or my Catholic high school. I’d been in churches all my life, on and off.

When they stopped singing I felt tears in my eyes. I turned and left, out the same massive door, down the stone steps, into the darkness of night.

Dostoevsky seemed to follow me, in my mind, as if some precious ghost.

He is still following me. 

Michael Mohr writes Sincere American Writing