Dostoyevsky seems to be having a moment. It’s been reported that his 1848 novella White Nights was the fourth best-selling work of literature in translation in the UK last year. Improbably, it blew up on TikTok, on a subchannel normally wrapped up with young adult and romance. Of course, White Nights is a (short) heartbreaker, so maybe the young people who dominate #booktok have happened upon the easiest way in to the great novelist’s corpus. Apparently though purchases of the Penguin editions of The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment have also tripled in the last five years (‘tripled’ sounds impressive, but one wonders what the baseline sales figures looked like pre-COVID).
Meanwhile in the USA, divergent reactions are being bruited in the media over mounting data that Gen Z men who identify as religious and attending services regularly now outnumber Gen Z women in these two categories, and both men and women in the rising generation are becoming more – rather than less – likely to identify with a religion and practice it regularly. I am not saying Dostoyevsky has something directly to do with this, but like the Dane Søren Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky is the sort of writer who tends to speak to the heart as much as the head and wins devotees rather than dispassionate scholars. I have known more than one person who credits Kierkegaard with having salvaged their Christian faith and rebuilt it into a plausible form that can survive the rigours of the contemporary age and the infantilism of typical Sunday School piety. Dostoyevsky’s ability to do the same is at the centre of George Pattison’s new Conversations with Dostoyevsky.
The book is the product of many years of considered study of Dostoyevsky, as George Pattison has published extensive scholarly work on the greatest of the Russian writers alongside his many works on Kierkegaard (who also is referenced in Pattison’s book), for which he is arguably better known in philosophical and theological circles. Conversations with Dostoyevsky, however, is not an academic work but a creative series of imagined conversations between the narrator (who is definitely not Pattison himself) and a corresponding series of highly informative and readable explanatory essays, seven of each.
The conversations are with a Dostoyevsky who inexplicably visits the narrator without warning at times both opportune and not. The imagined version of Dostoyevsky is of course an interpretation of the man himself though one that again is much informed by long and careful study of his writings both fictional and nonfictional. The guiding thread is the question of how it is possible to have faith in the contemporary world, and when the conversations have come to an end, the narrator is if not a convert at least a little closer to seeing how a person might live in a deeper and more reflective way toward the mysteries with which Dostoyevsky himself grappled and that form the topics of the conversations: God, guilt, suffering, the Bible, suicide. The way in which these topics offend the sensibilities of the average modern person is a key aspect of the conversations. The narrator is by no means in crisis; he is comfortably installed in an academic position and has a happy marriage and friends. The conceit of the conversations is that Dostoyevsky in person is able to press the point of his challenges in a more personal and direct way by bringing the difficulties of his fiction to bear on the narrator’s middle-class secular sensibilities.
The ‘metaphysical’ rules that govern Dostoyevsky’s self-manifestation are not altogether clear, nor could they be, I suppose. His appearance and tone can change depending on the tenor of the conversation or in response to the narrator’s questions, which more than once seem to grate on Dostoyevsky’s nerves or disappoint him. While his appearance is malleable, Dostoyevsky is not entirely disembodied (he can drink a beer). He is somehow prohibited from speaking of events that postdate his own death, which means he has nothing to say about the invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin (in 2014: the conversations date between November 2018 and May 2019), whom the narrator acknowledges has tried to recruit Dostoyevsky to his imperialist cause. Such efforts are, of course, fraught with peril: One thinks of the shameless posthumous promotion of Nietzsche as the official philosopher of the Third Reich by his opportunistic sister Elisabeth Förster.
The conversations circle around the nature of fiction itself. How can something invented or even a ‘lie’ as Dostoyevsky himself baldly asserts of his own novels disclose the truth of the human condition? The shattering confession of Markel in The Brothers Karamazov that we are all guilty of everything before everyone, I, the most of all, vexes the narrator, for whom the thought that one is guilty without feeling guilty cannot but appear pathological rather than edifying. The provocation of Christ, and how one might follow him in today’s world, is another perennial concern.
Pattison doesn’t shy away from some of the more controversial aspects of Dostoyevsky’s writing: The conversations engage him on misogyny and anti-Semitism. In connection with the latter charge, Dostoyevsky’s friend and philosophical interlocutor Vladimir Solovyov makes a welcome appearance. Readers who know Solovyov will probably guess it is him based just on the narrator’s description of his physical features. His thoughts in pursuit of a more constructive and mutually respectful rapprochement between Christianity and Judaism are worth digging into and exploring further.
The more unrelenting critics of Dostoyevsky’s blind spots may find Pattison lets him off the hook a little too easily, but in my view, that may be because there is something in Pattison’s rendering of the writer that is a little too pale overall. It is gratifying to see that Prince Myshkin is not treated straightforwardly as a Christ figure. My own uninformed interpretation of him (and the Christ that Ivan Karamazov famously depicts mutely responding to the onslaught of the Grand Inquisitor) is that these characters are a little too anaemic to be the robust active Christ of Dostoyevsky’s devotion (and the Christ whom the earthy Zosima embodies so vividly; if there is an ‘answer’ to Ivan’s challenge it surely is the one that Zosima enacts, not one that can be provided by wan speculation).
On the menacing aspects of Dostoyevsky’s writing, one thinks of the final moments of Svidrigailov, who deliberately decides to shoot himself in the presence of a startled and helpless watchman. There is something sinister about Dostoyevsky that breaks out in carnivalesque fashion (to use the apt term of Bakhtin) in many of his scenes: the feeling that behind the restraint and decorum, someone is about to stride across a well-appointed drawing room and punch somebody else in the face in front of horrified spectators. The thing about Dostoyevsky is that he has looked grimly into the darkest recesses of the human soul without blinking, and like Svidrigailov with the pistol pressed to his temple in front of the watchman, he won’t let you look away either.
