If using any of Russia Beyond's content, partly or in full, always provide an active hyperlink to the original material. This website uses cookies. Click here to find out more. Jan 14 Russia Beyond. We won't rest until this matter is resolved once and for all. And for that, your expert help is required. Main arguments for: Dostoevsky. Main arguments against: Dostoevsky. Drama to collective audience. But novel, one-to-one private anarchy Novels used to be historic, took Jane Austen, Balzac, Dickens, George Eliot to show how everyday experience could be grounds for artistic and moral preoccupation Dangers of excessive verissimilitude: Goethe thought art ran risk of becoming journalism.
Impressionism made men see physical space with fresh eyes, vibrancy. Huge impact of Napoleon: all ambition became huge. Universal kingship. Balzac for instance. No war. European literature reflected period of remarkable stability. Major catastrophes were private. All predict the coming apocalypse for Russia.
Is Tolstoy epic? Epics have element of mythic, stylistic grandeur. Immensity, seriousness, temporal spaciousness. Madam Bovary and Anna Karenina occupied same space. But Flaubert relied on vocabulary to bring objects to life so perfectly that reader could picture it perfectly. Tolstoy instead used magic, like impressionism, not realism. In Tolstoy, like in Iliad, physical objects described only in human context of being used C. Prelude to self-knowledge. Like Homer letting old men exalt Helen.
Lesser writers stitch things together. Poetry focuses us on the metric form, on particular metaphor, but prose needs to be gleaned from its whole. Russian literature specifically, therefore resistant to usual close study. But not exactly, they just seem natural because thick mesh of interwoven plots so numerous that you feel 1 in a million events have a chance of occurring given million events Minor characters get rich backstory even in a single appearance.
Integrity of a human person not reduce to plot element. Proust, in contrast, has minor characters left anonymous. On Shakespeare: children, by nature truthful and not corrupted by society, find theater ridiculous and implausible. Natasha shown to be taken in by the theater as inability to distinguish between reality and artifice, as beginning of seduction by Kuragin.
Difference between epic and dramatic temper, Homer and Shakespeare. Tolstoy wrote many dramas, but kept them strictly away from novels. Dostoevsky learned tremendously from drama but wrote no plays.
Dosto based murder not on history but contemporary. What Tolstoy was to art of historian, Dosto was to the journalist. Biggest complaint was unavailability of newspapers. Days after Crime and Punishment published, a Moscow student murdered an usurer in spookily similar circumstances Murder of Nastasia in The Idiot based on true events.
Then in Possessed, he works out connection between nihilism and murder, calls character Nechaiev, a real-life nihilistic leader who orders killing of a student.
Notes for various murder trials informs Karamazov, Possessed. Like Tolstoy, he saw the essential Russian issue of parricide metaphorically between liberal s generation and radical heirs.
Parricide - czar assassination. Dialogue culminate in gesture. Epic poetry sounds like it spans a long time, but not really. Divine Comedy a week. But they suspend relentless forward motion of plot by delving deeper into history etc to give impression of sweeping time. Remembrance and prophecy. Opposite true for drama, boiled down to essentials.
Idiot 24hrs. Possessed 48hrs. Karamazov 5 days. His writing speed was just as hurtling as the rhythm of plot. First part of Idiot in 23 days. Tolstoy archaic and irrelevant. Dosto extreme revelation of Russian crisis and chaos. Terribleness of city: Munch. Balzac, Dickens, Gogol, Hoffman. Tolstoy devoid of gothic terror. Filled with clear hard light. Rejected melodrama. Pastoral simplicity. Letters From The Underworld: I solemnly declare to you that I have often wished to become an insect, but could never attain my desire: contains germ for Metamorphosis.
Consistent dehumanization of Industrial revolution. Metaphors for worms and vermin and flies. From epic man as half-god, to loathsome half-man, odious and vile.
Not so with Dostoevsky. Camus The Fall. By close of 19th century, treatment of religion became either romantic or sociopolitical. Is it coincidence that it is the depressive pessimism of Dostoevsky that is more instructive and revelatory about the rot of nihilism in society? Kill yourself, return to same situation that must be fulfilled. The intellect sends forth an unending flow of words.
How can God be all good and all powerful, yet allow suffering in the world? If God exists, then how can he allow ME to walk the earth, sick, sniveling, spiteful creature that I am, scrawny spawn of the most abstract and premeditated city on the earth? If God does not exist, though, how can I be a captain? Should I return my ticket? Read on! They give us the bread that we ourselves have made, and we accept it back from them in exchange for our freedom: cheap sorcery in place of miracle.
I love mankind, but how can you expect me to love the stinking, jabbering drunk across the table, the loser who sold his own daughter into prostitution so he could sit here and drink? Prove that you exist, then!
Move this mountain, and I will believe! His protagonist is the head, but his hero is the heart. Logic and words will get you nowhere: the more talk, the less truth. Twice two is four, but twice two is five is a charming little thing too. A hug, now, a kiss, a fall to the earth, a leg over the iron railing of a cold St.
Petersburg bridge, a pouring forth of tears, a pouring forth of blood, a turning pale, a fainting dead away, an issuing forth of the spirit of decay, a slamming of your own finger in the door, the plaintive sounds of a pipe-organ on the street, ragged orphans begging, the dying gasps of the overworked, bludgeoned horse, the barely detectable breathing of the doomed old woman on the other side of the closed door — you, YOU are the murderer — the clink of coins in the cup, the dizzying whirl of the roulette wheel, brain fever, a silhouette in the doorway, the noble young lady bowing down to the earth before you, YOU, you lustful worm!
Shrieks, a rope, a gun, a slap on the cheek, and suddenly…. Suddenly an image appears in the darkness: a thin, timid girl in a green shawl, her face pale and drawn from illness. She smiles joyfully and stretches out her hand to me. I must go, for if I do not, I will keep on talking and will never stop…. The question, in my mind, is meaningless. One of the worrisome tendencies of contemporary society is its impulse to rank.
Who is better? Who is Number One? Why does everything have to be a race? Why does everything have to be competitive? This implies that there is a winner and a loser. Which is the greater food, blueberries or strawberries? Which is better, the sky or the grass, night or day? To me, both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are equally great writers. Tolstoy, through his character, Levin, in Anna Karenina , asked what the meaning of life is.
Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy asserted that the essence of life cannot be found by relying on the intellect alone. Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy understood that being true to the authentic rhythms of life means respecting the non-linear nature of life. Each of the two offers profound insights about psychology. Tolstoy emphasizes the ways in which people relate to one another in a societal context.
Dostoevsky digs deeply into the individual human psyche. Tolstoy paints a world in which extreme things happen to ordinary people. Dostoevsky shows us the extremes of which people are capable. Each of the two writers describes crises in faith. Each describes the journey to a life of spiritual values. Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy write in a way that conveys the energy of life.
Tolstoy shows a love of life of this world — the smell of the earth, the beauty of a flower. He speaks about living a life of authenticity.
Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy make me think about what is important in life. Both urge the reader to appreciate those things that money or competition cannot bestow — love, and life itself…. It is likely that these words express more about me than about Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. I have long ago given up on the idea of objective appraisal of literature: reading is a much more mediated process than we would like to admit. All sorts of ghosts crawl into the pages, a prehistory of tastes and experiences and prejudices and fears.
So if I say Dostoevsky is a greater writer than Tolstoy, I only mean he has been greater to me. My first encounter with Russian literature was as random as can be expected for a twelve-year-old girl growing up in suburban Costa Rica. Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky emerged like potatoes out of a giant plastic bag containing several books of ranging worth. I was lucky enough to be, at the time, very young, very curious and seriously uninformed.
Crime and Punishment followed shortly after, with the same scandalous lack of veneration. I loved them both: Tolstoy, for the story he told, and Dostoevsky, for the thoughts he provoked. Many years and many books later, the two authors continue to inhabit different places in my mind and in my memory.
Tolstoy conjures up images of endless steppes and elegant Petersburg homes, where great and complex characters go about the business of living. His books are showcases of literary craftsmanship, epic tales told with impeccable skill. I experience his books as a ceaseless battle of demons that never rest — not even as you turn the page, as you end a chapter, as you finish the novel and read it again.
A Dostoevsky novel sitting on a shelf is a bowl of anxiety and confusion, a bundle of frustrations marked by a desperate need for redemption. His protagonists are shown in extreme situations, where not only their personality but their very nature is put to the test. What I find mesmerizing in Dostoevsky is not just the details of the story, the particular twists and turns of the lives of Rodion Raskolnikov or Dmitri Karamazov; it is the mere possibility of their existence.
It is, in the end, the mind-bending notion that we could be just like them — that any of us, any ordinary, simple human being, carries around the highest plane and the lowest point of moral capabilities.
If that is not writing of the ultimate importance, I do not know what is. Reading Tolstoy transports me to another world; reading Dostoevsky makes me feel alive in this one. So many beautiful horses! A loyal dog! Women like Kitty and Anna Karenina! It feels like my life again. On the other hand, many times someone will frustrate me at work, and I hear these words from The Brothers Karamazov thundering in my head:. As I lead my every day life so unlike ice-skating in Moscow or cutting grain on my estates , just imagining that I resemble beautiful Levin is to invite self-ridicule.
I like him more than he would like me. We suffer identically. We demonstrate things differently. I can be innocent and guilty both. Borges , I believe, said there was something adolescent about a love of Dostoevsky — that maturity demanded other writers.
All I know is, when I first read Crime and Punishment , that book represented a lot of work for me. What did I have to feel so guilty about, at eighteen? I was frantic with potential energy. I would have been better off with War and Peace — because I had the temperament of Prince Andrei, ready to go to war.
I was angry with myself and frustrated, but I had no major regrets. That kind of bond would only come later for me, when I understood what it was like to tie myself to someone for life- when I understood what mutual forgiveness was.
When I was in my early twenties, one of my friends drunkenly stabbed another. Instead, I married her. Later on, I lost her. I chased her in the snow, like Dmitri. I understand Dostoevsky now. What adolescent understands these things? No one really has to choose one or the other.
I simply prefer Dostoevsky. For my last argument, I will simply cite an expert far older and wiser than me:. Just recently I was feeling unwell and read House of the Dead. I had forgotten a good bit, read it over again, and I do not know a better book in all our new literature, including Pushkin. A splendid, instructive book. I enjoyed myself the whole day as I have not done for a long time. If you see Dostoevsky, tell him that I love him.
All mediocre novelists are alike; every great novelist is great in his own way. My own sympathies are with Tolstoy, and even my criteria for judging a work of fiction, I admit, are relentlessly Tolstoyan. True, Dostoevsky saw and felt modern experience in all of its isolating, tragic depth. He showed the obsessive power of ideas and the psychological crises, cracks, and explosions of the soul that have become familiar in our modern world.
In fact, when he tries to do so, he reveals his deficiencies. At the end of Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov flings himself at the feet of Sonya, who has followed him to Siberia where he is serving his sentence for double homicide.
Sonya jumps up, looks at him and trembles. The author of Anna Karenina teaches us how to seek meaning not through grandiose romantic strivings, like Anna and Vronsky, but within the limits of imperfect social and family structures, like Kitty and Levin. Life is always on the verge of imploding on itself. Tragedy is just around the corner, or in your living room.
But Tolstoy was a realist in the total sense. And that truth is one every generation recognizes as its own, not just those in a state of social crisis or existential despair. If Dostoevsky urges us to reach for the heavens, then Tolstoy teaches us by artistic example how we may touch the transcendent here and now in our messy, fleeting world.
A Soviet anecdote has it that Stalin once asked the Central Committee: which deviation is worse, the right or the left? Dostoevsky spoke to the twentieth century. He was unique in foreseeing that it would not be an era of sweetness and light, but the bloodiest on record.
With uncanny accuracy, The Demons predicted, in detail, what totalitarianism would be. Neither heredity nor environment, singly or together, fully accounts for a human being. True, some people, and all social sciences aspiring to resemble physics, deny the surplus.
But they apply their theories only to others. No matter what he professes, nobody experiences himself as a mere play of external forces. Everyone feels regret or guilt, and there is no escaping the agony of choice. We behave as if we believed that each moment allows for more than one possible outcome and that our freedom that makes us in principle unpredictable. Without that unpredictability we would lack humanness. We would be zombies, and no one has ethical responsibility to zombies.
Hence ethics demands: always treat another person as capable of surprise, as someone who cannot be explained entirely at second hand. Dostoevsky despised both capitalism and socialism because each treats people as the mere product of economic or other laws. If socialism is worse, it is because it also presumes that experts know how to organize life for the best and socialism not only denies but actively removes choice for a supposedly higher good.
At best, this view leads to the Grand Inquisitor, at worst to the nightmarish plans of Pyotr Stepanovich. Tolstoy speaks more to the 21st century. At every moment, however small and ordinary, something happens that cannot entirely be accounted for by previous moments.
If we once acknowledge that we will never have a social science, then we will, like General Kutuzov, learn to make decisions differently. We intellectuals would be more cautious, more modest, and ready to correct our errors by constant tinkering. I inclined first to Tolstoy. The two authors have much in common, and yet diverge in ways that make comparison irresistible.
Both associate the self with moral agency; for both therefore, the individual is the ultimate source of good and evil. For both, goodness, which consists in overcoming selfishness, is natural but weak.
For both feelings trump reason in the soul, though Tolstoy is closer to the Greeks and the Enlightenment in his association of virtue with reason. For Dostoevsky, reason is always tainted by egotism, and therefore he relies on love to spur moral impulses.
Dostoevsky concentrates more on evil; for this reason his writings anticipate the horrors of the twentieth and the nascent twenty-first centuries. Tolstoy depicts crimes, such as the lynching of Vereshchagin War and Peace or uxoricide in Kreutzer Sonata , but not the pure malice embodied in such Dostoevskian characters as Stavrogin Demons or Smerdyakov Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoevsky also portrays pure goodness. Both authors are wicked satirists. No one has described childhood, family life, farming, hunting, and war any better. This reflects his affinity for the physical and the body. From the first pages of Crime , Raskolnikov is planning. As the events unfold, his plan is revealed as the murder of a lowly pawnbroker. But it will be no ordinary murder; it will be a philosophical murder.
The haggard, hoarding pawnbroker had no utility, no value. Thus, Raskolnikov is justified to destroy her and benefit from her hoarded rubles. A violent inner battle ensues. His young memories of Christian hope clash with the utilitarian impulse of his Russian adulthood.
This battle mirrors a broader dilemma facing the 21st-century West. Like Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy also worried about the disintegration of spiritual convictions in 19 th century Russia.
Against this spiritual torpidity, Tolstoy discovers individuals enduring real spiritual crises. He finds Anna Karenina who, while returning by train from counseling her sister against divorce, exchanges glances with the man who will later help unravel her own marriage. Levin and Kitty play a word-game on a card table. Using word-blocks, Kitty apologizes to Levin using initials: t, y, c, f, a, f, w, h. Her doom is near. It is rumored that Tolstoy began writing a novel against divorce, but discovered such sympathy for Anna that he shifted his critique to Russian society.
Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were deeply shaped by the Christian scriptures.
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