From Death to Life

If I were a cat and had nine lives, I would spend one of those lives studying Dostoevsky’s corpus. In the past few years I have merely begun reading his monstrous corpus. The more I read the more I realize just how much there is to read - though I must confess in advance that I have never read his first novel, Poor Folk (I’ve tried three times but alas the few pages I’ve read were ghastly). And then at the end of the day when the reading is done, I realize my understanding has barely touched the surface. Touché, Dostoevsky. From House of the Dead and Notes From Underground to Demons and The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky touches on some of the most vital and sensitive areas of life. In fact, I actually know Raskolnikov, though mostly as just an acquaintance. What makes all these novels so good? To answer in Flannery O’Connor’s manner, I might say that Dostoevsky introduces us to people, and it’s a mystery what will happen next. Before we know it we’ve been swept away into disaster, comedy, and pining. From what I can tell, it’s rather impossible to indicate by bullet points or litany reasons why Dostoevsky is so good - in fact Kierkegaard asserted that if “you can list reasons why you love her, you do not love her; you only love those aspects about her.” So maybe it’s better not to list reasons why Dostoevsky is worth reading and perhaps studying extensively.

I wish I could say that my first encounter with Dostoevsky was sublime, but alas it’s not. On one of the many book shelves in my parents’ house sat a row of comic books. I was young then, perhaps six or seven years old. I liked pictures as much as stories, so naturally I frequented this shelf stocked with comic books. The comic books had neat pictures, but they were black and white - now those books are antiques, and my brother Philip would very much like to pinch them from me (I snuck them out of my parents’ house when I moved to California). I scanned the pictures not certain about the details of the stories but at least learning the generalities of the stories beginnings, middles, and endings. There was one particular book; it had a whale on the front, so I knew it was Moby Dick, a rather boring story about a guy who gets on a boat to stab whales with spears. I returned to this book often mostly because I thought the funny looking Indian, Queequeg, who smoked a funny looking pipe was interesting. There was also another book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I really liked this one, and in fact I read the actual full length story not long after because I like the pictures so much. Roving in caves and digging for buried treasure sounded like a lot of fun. There were numerous other such black and white comic books, too many to count at the time. It seemed like hundreds. Now I know it was more like twenty. The Invisible Man was another one of my favorites; I’m not certain why. And then there was another book I remember vividly, though I didn’t like it much. But it was so boring and irksome that I returned to it more than twice. It started with a guy walking and talking to himself. Then all of a sudden he pulled out an axe and killed an old lady for no apparent reason! Why would he do something like that? And then all he did was walk around and talk to people. For a six or seven year old boy, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, even as a comic book, was rather boring, but I remember it; something about it struck me even as a young boy who thought it was boring.
In college I rediscovered Dostoevsky. I heard someone mention “The Brothers Karamazov written by Dostoevsky,” and then in an instant childhood memories of that really boring comic book, Crime and Punishment, flooded my mind. Almost simultaneously I had the insatiable desire to read the Brothers Karamazov, and I did. Much to my surprise, it was not as boring as I remembered Crime and Punishment to be. The Karamazov brothers are a lot of things, but they are certainly not boring. The oldest brother Dmitri is in love with the same woman as his father. Ivan writes theological treatises to be ironic, for he is an atheist. And poor Alyosha, the youngest brother, is a monk in training; he is a beacon of purity. In the shadowy corners and cobwebs lurks Smerdyakov, the schemer, the illegitimate son. While reflecting on the Brothers Karamazov, it is sometimes difficult to think of these brothers, their relationships with each other and with others as something fictional. It’s all so vivid and vital.


Dostoevsky’s other novels, though not quite as masterful as The Brothers Karamazov, are nonetheless memorable. The twenty-six year old Prince Myshkin’s, Dostoevsky’s Christ figure (the idiot), relationship with the debauched world is startling and tragic. I am absent minded, and I forget a lot of things. But I will never forget Kirillov’s final scene with Stepanovich in Demons - I am reminded of O’Connor’s wisdom for fiction, “violence is not an end in itself but is an extreme situation that reveals what we are essentially.” There are many memorable people and events in Dostoevsky’s novels. Things happen that won’t soon be forgotten.

My junior year in college I hadn’t a clue what lay on a book shelf somewhere waiting to ambush me. Rediscovering Crime and Punishment in college was something analogous to meeting an old disliked acquaintance who turns out to be a rather formidable foe and indispensable friend. It didn’t take long for me to learn that the first page in the comic book and the first page in Volokhonsky’s translation are two different things. There is discontinuity between the pictures and the words. Perhaps, the pictures weren’t very good, but I think it’s because the world of the words can’t be copied with something other than words without adding and subtracting and thereby creating something different. Raskolnikov, Sonya, Svidrigailov, Porfiry, Razumikhin, and Marmeladov’s story can be told only, it seems, with words.

Unfortunately, I have never read any of Dostoevsky’s novels in Russian, perhaps one day. But even through translations, I think I know Dostoevsky had a way with words, introducing people, recounting tragedies as if they had happened, and drawing truth in crayon for anyone to see, even a young boy who only had the pictures.

Thus far, Dostoevsky has given me much. These are a few such reflections: a person strives to live in a coffin, in the chambers of death, in a prison, in addiction, underground, in rebellion. Trapped by self-imposed death the man underground can’t do anything; addicted to the “next time,” the gambler can’t let go and live; the rebel deceives himself into thinking death is better than life. And yet a person can truly live, only if he dies to death and rebellion. The murderer makes for himself a coffin and convinces himself that it's better to be in the coffin than outside of it. But a person must die to living in death. A person must relinquish death through confession in order to live, to resurrect into new life. The life after death to death is fraught with struggle, but it is truly life. Here is an ironic truth. We feeble humans strive to live according to our own deathly wishes, and yet life awaits to vitalize us if only we would die to death first.