In the Company of Dostoyevsky
I bought a Dostoyevsky collection that runs for 266 hours and four minutes.
The four minutes feel especially good. Wouldn’t want to leave anything out.
It’s called The Fyodor Dostoyevsky Complete Collection, and the listing promises major novels, novellas, short stories, essays, and letters. I’m looking forward to fitting it in, which is a fairly casual way to describe making room for more than eleven uninterrupted days of Russian literature.
McCarthy comes first. That remains the arrangement. But, I want to give Dostoyevsky more sustained attention, and I want to write about what happens when I do.
The approach will borrow something from “In the Shadow of McCarthy”: spend time with a body of work, listen carefully, and write toward what the encounter reveals. I want enough history to understand the circumstances, enough structure to notice development, and enough freedom to follow whatever refuses to leave e alone.
Why Dostoyevsky?
In “Eight Writers at the Desk”, I described Dostoyevsky as chaos with a conscience.
That still gets at something I want to pursue. His people can be intelligent, ridiculous, wounded, perceptive, cruel, and desperate to be loved, sometimes within the same conversation. They argue about freedom and God while also trying to preserve their pride or secure another person’s attention.
Intelligence doesn’t make them transparent to themselves. Conviction doesn’t make them consistent.
I’m interested in that distance between what someone believes and what the belief is doing for them. A person may be making a serious argument and protecting a humiliation at the same time. Someone can understand a moral obligation with extraordinary clarity and still fail to meet it.
Fiction gives those contradictions time to become uncomfortable.
That interests me as a reader. As a writer, I want to understand how a character can carry an idea without becoming its designated spokesperson. How an argument can change because of who is speaking, who is listening, and what neither person can admit.
And, as someone who spends plenty of time thinking about determinism, responsibility, consciousness, and suffering, I suspect Dostoyevsky will give me a great deal to argue with.
The Life Behind the Work
Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow in 1821. He trained as a military engineer in St. Petersburg before leaving the service to pursue literature. His first novel, Poor Folk, appeared in 1846 and brought him early acclaim.
Then his life was violently interrupted.
In 1849, he was arrested for his involvement with the Petrashevsky circle, a discussion group associated with socialist and reformist ideas. He and other prisoners were taken through the preparations for execution before the announcement that their sentences had been commuted.
He spent four years at hard labor in Omsk, followed by compulsory military service in Semipalatinsk. He returned to St. Petersburg in 1859.
I have trouble making those facts remain merely biographical. A person stood there expecting to die. Then he had to live through what came next.
I don’t want to reduce the novels to consequences of that experience, as though an execution ground and a prison explain a writer. But, they belong in the background when I listen to his questions about punishment, dignity, freedom, and what remains of a person under conditions designed to diminish him.
The later life was crowded with other pressures: epilepsy, debt, compulsive gambling, bereavement, and demanding publication schedules. His first wife, Maria, and his brother Mikhail both died in 1864. In 1866, Anna Snitkina worked with him as a stenographer on The Gambler; they married the following year.
The books emerged within that ongoing life. I want to remember the practical circumstances alongside the enormous reputation: the work of composing, dictating, revising, and getting something finished.
His religious and political convictions changed substantially over time. The young man involved with socialist circles became a writer deeply committed to Orthodox Christianity and increasingly suspicious of Western political answers. I don’t share his religious commitments, but that is part of the reason to listen closely. I want to understand what he believed was at stake.
He died in 1881, shortly after completing The Brothers Karamazov. Between the early promise and the final novel lies a body of work I want to encounter in more than its most familiar outline.
The Shape of the Reading
I’m drawn to a roughly chronological approach because it lets me hear a writer becoming himself. But, I’m not going to pretend I’ve already settled the order or committed to an essay on every item in the collection.
This is the territory I want to explore.
The Early Work
Poor Folk offers a beginning in poverty, correspondence, and the effort to preserve dignity while being treated as insignificant. The Double, also published in 1846, takes a minor official’s insecurity into something stranger: a double who threatens his place in the world.
That already gives me two directions worth following. The person who barely counts in other people’s eyes, and the person whose sense of himself becomes unstable.
White Nights brings loneliness, romantic imagination, and the longing for connection into a smaller space. I want to make room for that Dostoyevsky too. The reputation for towering arguments can obscure the appeal of a brief, intimate encounter.
There are other early and transitional works, including the unfinished Netochka Nezvanova, Uncle’s Dream, and The Village of Stepanchikovo. I’m curious about what their company might reveal that a tour of the famous novels would miss, especially the comedy.
Prison, Return, and the Underground
The House of the Dead draws on his imprisonment through a fictional narrator. The conditions matter, but so do the individual people: their resentments, habits, acts of kindness, and efforts to retain something of themselves.
I want to pay attention to how he looks at them. That question matters to me in McCarthy too: what does it mean to describe someone’s degradation without reducing the person to it?
Humiliated and Insulted belongs to this period of return as well, before Notes from Underground arrives in 1864.
The Underground Man, a withdrawn former official, seems particularly suited to making a reader uncomfortable about the uses of intelligence. His voice is argumentative, self-conscious, and capable of turning an insight into another means of tormenting himself or someone else.
I want to listen for the point at which self-examination becomes self-protection. I also want to resist the easy satisfaction of diagnosing him from a comfortable distance.
A character who can explain himself at length may still be hiding something in the explanation. That feels like a useful problem to carry into my own writing.
The Major Novels
Crime and Punishment, published in 1866, brings questions of justification and responsibility into Raskolnikov, a young former student whose thinking cannot be separated from the life he is living. I’m interested in what happens when an idea meant to authorize an action has to coexist with the experience of having acted.
The Gambler, from the same year, approaches compulsion, risk, money, and desire more directly. It seems likely to complicate any easy distinction between choosing something and being caught in it.
The Idiot, published in 1868–1869, gives me a different question through Prince Myshkin, a compassionate young man entering a society practiced in suspicion and manipulation. What happens when goodness becomes socially inconvenient? How do people respond to someone whose motives don’t fit the motives they expect?
Demons, published in 1871–1872 and also translated under titles including The Possessed, turns toward political ideas, manipulation, and destructive certainty. I want to watch how conviction travels through a group, and how personal need becomes entangled with a supposedly impersonal cause.
The Adolescent, from 1875, deserves room too. Its young narrator, Arkady, is caught between ambition, resentment, and a desire for his father’s love. That combination interests me: the wish to become independent of someone whose recognition you still badly want.
Then there is The Brothers Karamazov, published in 1879–1880. Family, faith, doubt, responsibility, and suffering gather there on a scale that makes it an obvious place to spend serious time.
I’m especially interested in hearing its arguments as encounters between people. An idea about suffering changes when a particular person has to answer for it. An account of love changes when someone actually needs to be loved.
That is already one reason The Sunset Limited matters so much to me. I want to see what happens when I carry that attention into Dostoyevsky.
Beyond the Famous Novels
The shorter fiction, letters, and nonfiction matter to the shape of this too.
The Eternal Husband, “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” and pieces from A Writer’s Diary offer other forms and other kinds of access. The letters may help me hear the working person behind the books. The journalism may make it harder to keep the novelist comfortably separate from his explicit convictions.
I don’t know yet how much of this I’ll cover. I do know that I want curiosity to extend beyond the titles I could have named before buying the collection.
What I’ll Be Listening For
I’m not planning to listen to every translation.
Translation matters, and the narrator adds another interpreting presence. If a choice catches my attention, I may compare it. But, I want to give the books serious attention while still letting myself read them. Buying 266 hours of literature does not oblige me to multiply it by every available edition.
As with McCarthy, I want to take notes close to the encounter. A conversation that changes direction. A joke that interrupts something painful. A character I understand less easily than I expected. A passage that sounds excessive until I realize the excess is doing the work.
The essays can grow from those moments.
I’ll also listen for the other writers. Gogol may be nearby when the absurd starts to expose something ordinary. Wallace may come to mind when thinking becomes difficult to distinguish from evasion. Carver and Chekhov may help me notice what a small gesture reveals after someone has finished speaking.
Those connections will be personal and provisional. I want Dostoyevsky to complicate my understanding of the others, and I want the others to help me hear him.
What I Want From the Company
I don’t need to emerge from this with a final position on Dostoyevsky.
I want a fuller sense of the writer than the familiar handful of subjects: guilt, God, freedom, suffering. I want the humor, the awkwardness, the tenderness, the moments when a person becomes difficult to dismiss. I want to understand more about how those things coexist.
And, I want the experience to leave traces in my own work. Perhaps a little more patience with contradiction. A sharper ear for what a speaker is trying to secure. A better sense of when an idea needs to become a scene.
McCarthy remains first. Dostoyevsky has plenty of room.
I’ve already invited these people to the desk. Now I’ve given one of them 266 hours to talk.
This is just absurd
A man who pushed through the murk
Exraordinary
