Monk

Here is another fascinating idea by Pushkin. Unfortunately, we don’t have the poem itself, “Egyptian Nights,” nor could I readily find it online, but Joseph Frank describes it thus:

The poem, one of [Dostoevsky’s] old favorites, describes Cleopatra offering to spend a night with any male who will agree to forfeit his life at dawn in return. Pushkin paints her challenge in voluptuous detail as she dwells on the delights awaiting the man who accepts her fatal invitation.

As I wearily tread to an early elderliness, like a condemned man to his hanging, I can see myself jumping on that offer as though it were the winning lottery ticket, the last chance to know man’s greatest pleasure. I might even be willing to go by way of snakebite.

As far as Frank’s biography is concerned, “Egyptian Nights” became the focus of literary debate among Russia’s critical communities regarding the role and nature of art. One group held that art should be strictly utilitarian, promoting a particular and concrete social good, and that Pushkin’s poem could only serve the base interests of pornography and ought to be banned outright. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, gives art an unbridled reign, to glory in the transcendent and the universal, and although he might not care himself for unabashed pornography, he draws out a deeper and more profound meaning from the poem, seeing it as a damning indictment on atheistic materialism:

Far from being immoral, Dostoevsky interprets the poem as an expression of “frightful terror… the illustration of a perversion of human nature reaching such a degree of horror… that the impression left by it is no longer scabrous but frightening.” The poem vividly embodies the moral-psychic disorder induced by satiation - by the absence of any spiritual ideal. Cleopatra’s world is one in which “all faith has been lost,” and since “the future offers nothing… life must be nourished only by what exists.”…

Cleopatra is “the representative of this type of society,” and the poet depicts her in a moment of boredom when only a “violent sensation” can relieve her tedium. She has already exhausted all the byways of eroticism; now something extra is needed, and what stirs in her soul is “a fierce and ferocious” irony - spiced with the dreadful joy of anticipation as she mingles sensuality with the cruelty of an executioner. Never had she known anything so savagely exciting and her soul gloats with the repulsive delight of the female spider “who, it is said, devours the male at the instant of sexual union.” “You understand much more clearly now,” Dostoevsky explains to his readers, “what sort of people it was to which our divine redeemer descended. And you understand much more clearly the meaning of the word: redeemer.”

One can discount Dostoevsky’s Christian conclusion - his own particular handle on his sense of the divine mysteries - while still appreciating his critical power and his condemnation of materialist philosophy. Personally, I like to imagine a gloriously transcendent realm, but I would probably still jump into the executioner bed, and if there is more to life than this and it should be prudishly moral, I can only plead for forgiveness, as the good Lord must know how lonely this life has been. Maybe I could get off with just a little purgatory.

How did I almost miss that? I guess I was too eager to get into the thick of the book. A poem by Alexander Pushkin. He was a major influence on Dostoevsky as well as on Russian literature in general. I had never read anything by him, and I am stunned to see something so good. I’m wondering if he’s sort of a Russian Shakespeare. Joseph Frank opens his magnum opus with this piece titled “The Prophet.”

_ _ _

Pushed with the spirit’s thirst, I crossed
An endless desert sunk in gloom,
And a six-winged seraph came
Where the tracks met and I stood lost.
Fingers light as dream he laid
Upon my lids; I opened wide
My eagle eyes, and gazed around.
He laid his fingers on my ears
And they were filled with roaring sound;
I heard the music of the spheres,
The flight of angels through the skies,
The beasts that crept beneath the sea,
The heady uprush of the vine;
And, like a lover kissing me,
He rooted out this tongue of mine
Fluent in lies and vanity;
He tore my fainting lips apart
And, with his right hand steeped in blood,
He armed me with a serpent’s dart;
With his bright sword he split my breast;
My heart leapt to him with a bound;
A glowing living coal he pressed
Into the hollow of the wound.
There in the desert I lay dead.
And God called out to me and said:
"Rise, prophet, rise, and hear, and see,
And let my words be seen and heard
By all who turn aside from me.
And burn them with my fiery word.”

-- Alexander S. Pushkin, “The Prophet” (translated by D. M. Thomas)

Riddle me this: whether morality and justice require that life be immortal?

I remember when I first read “Crime and Punishment,” my first real taste of Dostoevsky, when I was but a wee undergraduate, oh, my achy-breaky heart!

I was actually put off by the ending. I had no idea that Dostoevsky was such a Christian writer. I was not even a hardcore materialist yet, and earnestly considered the God question to be even more open than I do now after my recent, serious flirtation with Christian philosophy, but my first reaction to the ending in “Crime and Punishment,” in which the protagonist finds God while serving hard time in the frozen wasteland of Siberia, was to find it a rather cheap ending, making the novel religious instead of realistic.

However, deep into middle-age, my emotional life is no longer so hard and unyielding to divine notions. When it comes to understanding how the world works, I am safely back in the materialist camp, but my heart is vulnerably open to the dreamy idea of a world and a life beyond this hard, earthly realm, seeing how the life I know is a barren wasteland in its own right. Today, I actually love Dostoevsky because he is a Christian writer. It’s a kind of romantic vision, this Christianity of mine.

_ _ _

The influence of Karamzin’s “Letters” on Dostoevsky was profound. Early in the book, Karamzin drops in to pay a call on Kant, the sage of Konigsberg, who expounds for his young Russian visitor’s benefit the two main ideas of the “Critique of Practical Reason” (published just the year before). Kant explained that the consciousness of good and evil is innate to mankind, written indelibly into the human heart. Earthly life, however, reveals a glaring contradiction: the virtuous in this world, those who choose to live by the good and obey the moral law, are not always the ones who prosper and receive their just reward. But if, as we must assume, the Eternal Creative Mind is rational and beneficent, then we must also assume that this contradiction will not be left unresolved. Hence we postulate the existence of an immortal life after physical death in which the good receive their reward, even though this postulate can never be proven by human reason. “Here,” Karamzin reports Kant as saying, “reason extinguishes her lamp and we are left in darkness. Only fancy can wander in this darkness and create fictions.” Dostoevsky thus first came across these two ideas, both defying a strictly rational explanation - that moral consciousness (conscience) is an ineradicable part of human nature, and that immortality is a necessary condition of any world order claiming to make moral sense - when he read Karamzin as a boy. What he acquired subsequently only built on this foundation.

…

Not to believe in God and immortality, for the later Dostoevsky, is to be condemned to live in an ultimately senseless universe, and the characters in his great novels who reach this level of self-awareness inevitably destroy themselves because, refusing to endure the torment of living without hope, they have become monsters in their misery.

-- Joseph Frank, “Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time”

_ _ _

I suppose that the existentialist philosophy of today is more comfortable with the idea of virtuous people not enjoying worldly favor. We accept that life is not fair, and we therefore more highly esteem goodness and selfless love wherever we find it. The individual of integrity is moral not because he expects to attain some reward either here or beyond the gossamer clouds, but because morality and love is an end in itself. Love is love.

On the other hand, the golden aureole of a sublime mythos doesn’t necessarily hurt. Indeed, even for those of us who are not especially virtuous in the first place, perhaps especially for us, a little hope can go a long way. One just wants to be happy, and if one cannot be happy in this world, then one might find some solace in the hope of being happy in some other life, some other time, some otherwhere.

“You see this manuscript?… I haven’t been able to tear myself away from it for almost two days now. It’s a novel by a beginner, a new talent… his novel reveals such secrets of life and characters in Russia as no one before him even dreamed of. Just think of it - it’s the first attempt at a social novel we’ve had. … The matter in it is simple: it concerns some good-hearted simpletons who assume that to love the whole world is an extraordinary pleasure and duty for every one. They cannot comprehend a thing when the wheel of life with all its rules and regulations runs over them and fractures their limbs and bones without a word. That’s all there is - but what drama, what types? I forgot to tell you, the artist’s name is Dostoevsky.”

-- Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky

On my day as Juror #0, not only did I get an unabridged lunch hour, I got a two-hour lunch break; I felt like a banker or a lawyer or some kind of suit. It would seem that in the ten years since I last carried out this civic duty, they have gone to some trouble to make the day more cushy for we put-upon citizens.

I took advantage of this unexpected opportunity and walked the extra few blocks to the library, feeling additionally grateful that my jury day did not fall in the scorching summer. I was hoping that I might be able to get in a free read before the climate heats up and there can be no thought about taking a library trip. I need to save some money for that Hamlet book.

And talk about hitting the jackpot! Sitting fat on the shelf was Joseph Frank’s monumental biography “Dostoevsky.” This is the one-volume abridgement that I had read about some months ago. I had been familiar with Frank’s five-volume spectacular, and my affection for Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” “Demons,” “The Brothers Karamazov,” as well as “Notes from the Underground” is such that I felt some urge to give it a go, but I was always intimidated at the idea of spending so much time on a biography, and so I held off. Accordingly, I understand the pressure to come out with the single volume to entice more readers to sink their teeth into this royal banquet of a Dostoevsky biography, itself a literary masterpiece. Indeed, judging by my first hundred pages, if I have a good number of years left in my reading life, I will have to come back and read the whole unabridged thing one of these days. Fantastic!