Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? (P1)
“One has to be so terribly religious, to be an artist!”
I took my first Russian literature class in my second year of university knowing nothing more than it was in good taste to revere Tolstoy and despise Dostoevsky. I’m not sure, really, where I first picked this up, though I’d assume now it was some watered down idea of Nabokov’s, who said of Dostoevsky that he is “not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one—with flashes of excellent humour, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between.” Nabokov disliked Dostoevsky’s heavy handedness and low melodrama: the murders, spies, betrayals, whores, the winding existential-type poemas. Nabokov found Dostoevsky un-artistic (“a writer of mystery stories”) but I was drawn to him as if by some gravitational force.
Recently, my writer friend Misha told me that when you're young you read Dostoevsky with a sense of urgency and moral intensity, but when you’re old you just want to tell him to chill out. I think this is true—probably—and I expect the situation is different with Tolstoy, who is a much stronger writer on a sentence level. Yet, the experience I had of reading the two authors and feeling compelled to choose one side felt much larger and more significant than a matter of differing prose styles. I felt there was more at stake, and in a certain sense, this essay is about that feeling more than it is about rehashing the whole T vs D debate (although I do sort of rehash the whole T vs D debate). Anywhoo…in 1959 American critic George Steiner published a little book called “Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism” (which he would later describe as “a young man’s book”… “written…out of sheer compulsion”), which included the following passage:
“The choice between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky foreshadows what existentialists would call un engagement; it commits the imagination to one or the other of two radically opposed interpretations of man’s fate, of the historical future, and of the mystery of God. To quote Berdiaev again: Tolstoy and Dostoevsky exemplify an ‘insoluble controversy in which two sets of assumptions, two fundamental conceptions of existence, confront each other.’”
‘Yes!’ I thought. The urgency I felt had to do with living, with existence, with faith. I had never understood why one had to pick between truth and fiction, between life and literature, when the two felt intrinsically connected. In college I found the distinction especially difficult to accept, because the whole reason I wanted to read books was because I wanted to learn how to live. For this purpose, I felt it was necessary to study both the artwork and the life of its creator—not to judge one against the other, but to acknowledge the connectedness of living and creating, the proliferation of form and structure and other kinds of ‘literary artifice’ in the way we understand and proceed through life, and, on the other hand, to recognize the way some fictions seem ablaze with truth and meaning. Nabokov, writing of Tolstoy’s lifelong obsession with Truth, remarks that “old Russian Truth was never a comfortable companion; it had a violent temper and a heavy tread. It was not simply truth, not merely everyday pravda but immortal istina—not truth but the inner light of Truth.”
Yet, Nabokov also had this to say about Tolstoy’s ‘extraliterary’ fixations (which, of course, include his Christian faith, the ‘preacher’ in him):
“Many people approach Tolstoy with mixed feelings. They love the artist in him and are intensely bored by the preacher; [...] What one would like to do, would be to kick the glorified soapbox from under his sandaled feet and then lock him up in a stone house on a desert island with gallons of ink and reams of paper—far away from the things, ethical and pedagogical, that diverted his attention from observing the way the dark hair curled above Anna’s white neck.”
Although I enjoy this passage of Nabokov’s, I don’t agree. Both the preacher and the writer in Tolstoy interest me. In this essay, I mainly go into Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’s diverging perspectives on Christianity (relying heavily on Steiner’s text) and in a second (forthcoming) essay I will attend to the works themselves and do some close reading. Yum..
In the most general terms, what distinguished the 19th-century Russian (and to some extent American) novel from its European counterpart was the former’s religious and existential key. For Steiner this difference arose partially out of the absence, in Russia and America, of that rich literary legacy from which a European writer might have usefully drawn. Henry James remarked that “it takes such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist.” Without it, he expresses, an artist is committed to “a rather chilly and isolated sense of moral responsibility.” For George Steiner this “isolated sense of moral responsibility,” mirroring Nietzche’s revaluation of all values, is what took Russian and American novels “beyond the dwindling resources of European realism into the world of the Pequod and the Karamazovs.” Steiner quotes D.H. Lawrence, who notes that “there is a ‘different’ feeling in the old American classics. It is the shifting from the old psyche to something new, a displacement.” Steiner elaborates:
“In the American case, the displacement was spatial and cultural; the migration of the mind from Europe to the new world. In Russia it was historical and revolutionary. In both instances there were pain and unreason, but also the possibility of experiment and the exhilarating conviction that there was at stake more than a portrayal of existing society or the provision of romantic entertainment.”
While much of 19th century European fiction was produced in a period of relative peace* following the Napoleonic wars and preceding WW11, the American and Russian contexts were more turbulent, filled with drama and war, and resulting in what Lawrence calls a “pitch of extreme consciousness.” In Steiner’s words, “the instability of American social life, the mythology of violence inherent in the frontier situation, and the centrality of the war crisis were reflected in the temper of American art.” The Russian context was even more extreme and fantastical, involving: “an affrighted despotism; a Church preyed upon by apocalyptic expectations; [...] raging debates between Slavophiles and Westernizers, Populists and utilitarians, reactionaries and nihilists, atheists and believers; and weighing on all spirits, like one of those oncoming summer storms which Turgenev evokes so beautifully, the premonition of catastrophe.”
Out of these extremities there resulted a literary output of an entirely different key to that of the European novel. Where the European novel was, for the most part, “secular in outlook, rational in method, and social in context” (as seen in the work of Dickens, Balzac, Proust, Zola, and others), the Russian novel in particular emerged from an atmosphere absorbed by and penetrated with religious experience. (Hence Nikolai Beridaev’s remark on the defining characteristic of Russian creative writers, that “they seek salvation…they suffer for our world.”). The Russian mind was, in Steiner’s words, “God-Haunted,” resulting in a literature that is epic rather than prosaic, religious rather than secular, existential rather than social.
For Steiner, the writings of Trollope, Dickens, Balzac or Proust are like “first cousins of history.” Given their relative realism and generally prosaic cast, “neither Milton’s Satan winging through the immensities of chaos nor the Weird sisters from Macbeth, sailing to Aleppo in their sieve, are really at home” in their works. Steiner expresses a similar sentiment in reference to the (very ominous and ambiguous) Pauline epigraph of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay’—which, he observes, one cannot hope to find in the likes of Flaubert:
“Passages from scripture are rarely interwoven into the fabric of nineteenth-century European fiction; they tend to destroy the substance of the surrounding prose by their sheer radiance and force of association. [...] in Madame Bovary a Biblical text would ring false and might bring the whole deliberately prosaic structure tumbling down. With Tolstoy (and with Dostoevsky) matters are altogether different. Long citations from the Gospel are woven into Resurrection, for example, and into The Possessed. We are dealing now with a religious conception of art and a final order of seriousness. So much is at stake beyond the virtues of technical performance that the language of the Apostle seems wonderfully in place and heralds the work like a dark clarion.”
Given its central and consuming role in the psyches of both writers, it is useful to understand the diverging and deeply idiosyncratic ways in which Tolstoy and Dostoevsky understood the Christian faith—which, in Steiner’s words, “had seized upon them with blinding, constraining force.” This difference is well distilled in this opposition: where Dostoevsky swore to remain with Christ even if “someone had proved that Christ is outside the truth,” Tolstoy professed: “I love truth more than anything in the world.”
Dostoevsky’s Theology:
For all his life, the question of God’s existence was at the center of Dostoevsky’s thought and vision; in the architecture of his world, writes Steiner, “the plane of man’s experience [ran] narrowly between heaven and hell, between Christ and Antichrist.” Unlike Tolstoy, for whom Truth was paramount, “Christ was infinitely more precious to [Dostoevsky] than either truth or reason.” As for mankind, Dostoevsky believed we exist in a condition of absolute freedom, and that this freedom (which is itself a kind of vulnerability, a kind of suffering) provides the only access to God, for it is only when the possibility of the wrong choice (the denial of God) is at hand, that the free decision to follow Him gains religious meaning.
Near the end of his life, Dostoevsky admits that his faith was hard-earned, and if he had come to believe that Christ is indeed the Son of God, he came to this belief through “the hell-fire of doubt,” or as Steiner puts it, following “a long evolution of spirit and a lacerating exposure to every species of disbelief.” Accordingly, Dostoevsky’s novels and characters span over both extremes of belief and disbelief. Dostoevsky’s vision of the Christian faith, human freedom, and human salvation, are most eloquently expressed in that famous chapter of The Brothers Karamazov, ‘The Grand Inquisitor’—one of several rebellious inventions of Ivan Karamazov, which he recites to his younger brother Alyosha.
Ivan’s legend is set in sixteenth-century Seville, at the height of the Spanish Inquisition, when vast numbers of people were being persecuted as heretics and opponents of the Catholic Church. In Ivan’s legend Jesus Christ appears “quietly, unostentatiously,” in Seville, in human form, and walks among men with “a quiet smile of infinite compassion.” As He does so, He is recognized by an old man in a monkish cassock—the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor—whose eyes “flash with an ominous fire.” The Inquisitor orders his guards to seize Christ and imprison Him. That night, the Inquisitor goes to visit Christ in His cell. Facing Christ's hunched and silent form, the Inquisitor explains that out of love for Mankind, the Catholic Church has elected to rule over humankind—usurping the role of Christ and of His ministry and declaring themselves the kings on Earth. The Inquisitor declares that Christ’s great, unforgivable error was granting mankind freedom (“nothing has ever been more unendurable to man and human society than freedom”), and in the ensuing monologue gives his strange, demonic evaluation of the Three Temptations of Christ as provided in the synoptic gospels.
In the first temptation, the Grand Inquisitor recounts, the devil said to Christ “If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.” Christ rejected this temptation and said: “It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” In rejecting this offer Christ restored to mankind the choice to enter freely into faith, as the Grand Inquisitor notes: “you did not want to deprive man of freedom and rejected the offer, for what kind of freedom is it, you reasoned, if obedience is purchased by loaves?” In rejecting the banner of earthly bread “in the name of freedom and the bread of heaven,” the Inquisitor insists that Christ thereby rejected “the only absolute banner that was offered to [Him] and that would have compelled everyone to bow down before [Him] without dispute.”
“Henceforth,” says the Inquisitor: “in the place of the old, firm law, man was himself to decide with a free heart what is good and what is evil, with only Your image before him to guide him.” Without the evidence of miracle, mankind must suffer those “most terrible fundamental and tormenting spiritual questions” which, in the final account, we lack the strength to endure. This is the Inquisitor’s central justification—that most people simply lack the strength to accommodate the “terrible gift” that is freedom: “You promised them the bread of heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare in the eyes of a weak, eternally depraved and eternally dishonorable human race with the Earthly sort?”
In the second temptation, the devil takes Christ to the pinnacle of a high temple and says “If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up,” and Jesus answers: “It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” For Christ, man’s faith in God should not be sustained by miraculous proof but a free decision of the heart. Yet, the Inquisitor insists that man is by nature weak and mutinous and cannot, in the end, withstand this freedom, which will invariably inspire “restlessness, confusion, and unhappiness” in him. Mankind, who according to the Inquisitor, “does not seek God so much as miracles,” longs to be enchanted by the transubstantiation of stone into bread, by angels come to bear up the son of God as He casts himself from the edge of a cliff. A miracle—a manifest sign and confirmation of God’s omnipotence—would make men finally subservient to God, transfixed, as by the “servile ecstasies of the slave before the might that has inspired him with dread.” Yet God, who “thirsted for a faith that was free, not miraculous,” chose to withhold miracle from us so we may enter into faith unenslaved by it.
In the final temptation the devil takes Christ to a high mountain, and showing Him the kingdoms of the world, says to Him: “All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.” To this Christ responds: “it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.” In rejecting this third and final offer of authority over all the Earth, Christ has spurned the only three powers on Earth that are capable of eternally ensnaring the conscience of man: the powers of miracle, mystery, and authority. Instead, God elects to grant us freedom: “and behold,” says the Inquisitor, “instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at rest forever, Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague and enigmatic.…”
Although a few men are strong enough to withstand freedom and follow God, “what,” asks the Inquisitor, “will become of the millions and tens of thousand millions of creatures who are not strong enough to disdain the Earthly bread for the heavenly sort?” And if it is only a chosen few who can endure it, then “there is a mystery there and it is not for us to comprehend it.” Yet, if there is a mystery underlying the chosen-ness of the few who can withstand this freedom, then, the Inquisitor argues, “it is within our right to propagate that mystery and teach them that it was not the free decision of their hearts and not love that mattered, but the mystery, which they must obey blindly, even in opposition to their consciences.”
It is therefore the Grand Inquisitor’s plan to establish a kingdom on Earth founded upon the powers of miracle, mystery, and authority. The ‘mystery’ which mankind will henceforth blindly obey is that of the Inquisitor’s authority over man, which is premised on the lie that the institution of the Church rules in God’s name:
“[Mankind] will marvel at us and consider us gods because we, in standing at their head, have consented to endure freedom and rule over them—so terrible will being free appear to them at last! But we shall say that we are obedient to you and that we rule in your name. We shall deceive them again, for we shall not let you near us anymore. In that deception will be our suffering, for we shall be compelled to lie.”
Having delivered this lengthy tirade to Christ, his prisoner, the Grand Inquisitor asks Christ why He has come down and to meddle with their plan, which they devised out of love and concern over mankind’s happiness: “why have you come to get in our way now?” asks the Inquisitor, And why do you gaze at me so silently and sincerely with those meek eyes of yours? Why do you not get angry? I do not want your love, because I myself do not love you.” To this, Christ provides no spoken response but “suddenly draws near to the old man and kisses him on his bloodless, ninety-year-old lips.” Likewise, when Ivan Karamazov has finished reciting the poem, Alyosha Karamazov rises, goes to Ivan, and “softly kisse[s] him on his lips.” The gesture of the silent kiss contains the powerful positive significance of the infinite mercy of God, disclosed eloquently through silence once language has reached its limits.
Couched in this chapter of Dostoevsky’s novel is his distaste for the institution of the Church and, more generally, any ‘humanitarian’ institution and any project of social reform. For Dostoevsky the Grand Inquisitor’s plan to found a Utopia on Earth is abhorrent not only because of its stated aim (to usurp the Kingdom of God) but because it lulls mankind’s soul into a state of passivity with regards to our radical freedom, curtailing our own sense of the tragedy of life. Without suffering, there is nothing to compel man to “face unequivocally the dilemma of God.” Dostoevsky did not believe, as Tolstoy did, in the perfectibility of man and human society, nor did he believe in the possibility of an enlightened, generalized love among men—hence his lifelong polemic against socialism and all notions of a collective, utilitarian enlightenment. As Steiner puts it: “Tolstoy was a ‘servant of Humanity.’ Dostoevsky bitterly distrusted the humanitarian creed and preferred to remain with the anguished, infirm, and at times criminally deranged ‘servants of God.’ Between these two servitudes great hatreds may prevail.”
Steiner illustrates the difference between the two men quite evocatively through an image of St. Jerome’s: Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’s encounter with each other would be as if “Athens (the city of reason, of skepticism, and of pleasure in the free play of secular energies) had confronted the transcendent eschatology of Jerusalem.”
Tolstoy’s Paganism:
Leo Tolstoy’s first and primary obsession was with death; the mystery of mortality was the nucleus around which his faith took its shape and character. Somewhat incongruously, Tolstoy the man was well known for his vitality: for Thomas Mann he was like “an Olympian graced with inexhaustible health,” and for Chekov he was “not a human being but a superman, a Jupiter.” He was both physically and intellectually robust, and into old age, writes Steiner, “life burned hotter and more mutinous” in him. Yet this sense of Tolstoy’s personal liveliness did not steer him away from the question of death, but magnified its hold on him: “Tolstoy’s experience of physical and intellectual life was on so heroic a scale that his whole being rebelled against the paradox of mortality.” Death haunted him more deeply for all the life that was in him.
Because he could not accept death, that “dark sack,” Tolstoy refused to concede that God’s Kingdom could be anywhere other than on this Earth, in this life. The central tenet of his faith therefore emerged as a desire to realize God’s Kingdom tangibly on Earth, as he believed God intended. Steiner writes:
“The Tolstoyan version of the second coming is an Earthly millennium in which men will have awoken to the dictates of rational morality. Is it not written in the Gospel according to John that the work of God ‘consists in believing in the life He has given you’? With a somber instinct Tolstoy felt that He would give no other. The one we have must be rendered as sane and perfect as possible.”
Out of this conviction, Tolstoy developed a “rational” Christianity—one which was persuaded of the perfectibility of man, which believed in The Republic, in Earthly justice and social reform. Christ, for Tolstoy, was identical with “the whole rational consciousness of humanity.” Elsewhere he wrote that “the desire for universal welfare…is that which we call God.” Accordingly, he was averse to (and often flatly denied) the mystifying and obscure possibilities inherent in Biblical interpretation, which admitted the possibility of misinterpretation and chaos on Earth. For Tolstoy, writes Steiner, it was as though “Christ had infinitely complicated the task of those who would establish His kingdom by placing the enigma of His silence across the straight path of reason.” This is the essence of Tolstoy’s startling confession in What I Believe, that “it is terrible to say, but sometimes I believe that if Christ’s teaching, with the Church teaching that has grown out of it, had not existed at all, those who now call themselves Christians would have been nearer to the truth of Christ.”
There is, as Steiner points out, a tempting connection to be made between Tolstoy and the figure of the Grand Inquisitor. The latter condemns Christ, who “instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at rest for ever, [...] didst choose all that is exceptional, vague and enigmatic.…”. (That is, by giving us the freedom to choose between good and evil, God allows us to be plagued by metaphysical anguish and all kinds of existential uncertainties.) So does Tolstoy disapprove of Biblical obscurities and mystifications, which, according to Gorky, he cancels out through brute logic and common sense, “in order that we might forget the contradictions in Christ.” Similarly, Tolstoy’s ‘rational’ Christianity, as well as his desire to realize God’s Kingdom tangibly on Earth, mirrors the project of the Grand Inquisitor, who is likewise an adherent of some version of Utopia on Earth, in which God plays a minor role. Both of these notions are, for Dostoevsky, entirely antithetical to Christian morality.
For Dostoevsky, the suffering entailed by human freedom and Biblical paradox is a necessary precondition to faith, and the material comfort offered us in an Earthly utopia would alienate us from our suffering, and in doing so, cancel out our desire for salvation in Christ. W. J. Leatherbarrow’s commentary on ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ illuminates this belief of Dostoevsky’s, which manifests particularly in a strong suspicion against the Catholic Church:
“The Inquisitor's account of this third temptation discloses his true nature: he and his church are the products of a pagan civilization, demanding unity without freedom and sacrificing the ideal of a divine order based on God's love, to the lower but more tangible order created through political force. He makes it clear that he and those with him have transferred their allegiances from Christ to the Devil:
And shall I hide our secret from you? Perhaps you actually want to hear it from my lips? Listen then: we are not with you but with him [the devil] and that's our secret! We have been with him and not with you for a long time, for eight centuries. Exactly eight centuries ago we took from him what you rejected with indignation, that last gift he offered you having shown you all the kingdoms of earth. We took from him Rome and the sword of Caesar and proclaimed ourselves the kings of the earth.
The Inquisitor's reference to eight centuries is precise and significant. He dates the process of man's salvation not from Christ's ministry, but from the Catholic Church's emergence as a political force. Ivan's 'poem' is set in the sixteenth century, and it was eight centuries earlier, in 756, that Rome proclaimed itself a theocratic state and assumed temporal authority…”
Leaving aside this comparison with the Grand Inquisitor, it is no stretch to note that Tolstoy’s version of faith bordered on heresy on several other accounts. The Russian critic Dimitri Merezhkovsky, for instance, wrote that Tolstoy’s soul was that of “a born Pagan,” and Nikolai Berdiaev likewise observed that “all his life long Tolstoy sought God as a pagan seeks Him.” Indeed, Tolstoy’s denial of an entirely Transcendant Kingdom reflects his difficulty in accepting an entirely Transcendent God. God is instead a projection of human perfectibility, of perfect order and rationality, of perfect love among men. This is a God created in the image of man, a God enclosed in man, as he often gestured to in his diaries, once writing: “Help Father. Come and dwell within me. You already dwell within me. You already are ‘me’.” In his book Steiner points to a passage of Maxim Gorky’s where the latter recounts this strange scene with Tolstoy:
In [Tolstoy’s] diary which he gave me to read, I was struck by a strange aphorism: ‘God is my desire.’
Then on returning him the book, I asked him what it meant.
‘An unfinished thought,’ he said, glancing at the page and screwing up his eyes. ‘I must have wanted to say: God is my desire to know him…No, not that…’ He began to laugh, and rolling up the book into a tube, he put it in the big pocket of his blouse. With God he has very suspicious relations; they sometimes remind me of the relations of two bears in one den.’
In this light, the many descriptions of Tolstoy as an Olympian figure reflect a peculiar, rebellious cast to his theology, and to his own image of himself—both of which reflect elements of the Dostoevskian archetype of the “man-God.” As Steiner notes: “Where he did not envisage God as a metaphoric equivalent for a social and rational utopia, Tolstoy saw Him, through some covert blasphemy of solitude or love, as being rather similar to himself.” Gorky, for his part, described Tolstoy variously as “a kind of Russian god who sits on a maple throne,” and as “great and holy because he is a man, a madly and tormentingly beautiful man, a man of the whole of mankind,” who at the same time “hovered over Russia at too great a height.” Tolstoy’s inner struggle with God recalls the Homeric world, where “men and gods meet in equal commerce and well-matched antagonism,” and where “between gods and men we find the gradations of ultra-heroism and semi-divinity.” Evidently, that passage in which Gorky describes Tolstoy’s “suspicious relations” with God through the evocative image of two bears in one den has echoes of a pagan rather than Christian cosmology.
To conclude, I can’t do better than these pages of Steiner’s, which speak both to the difference in personal and religious sensibility between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, as well as to the differences in how they have been remembered:
Watch out for part 2!
w/ some notable interruptions, including the Crimean War in 1854 and the Franco-Prussian War in 1870