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The distinguished Russian semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin perhaps came closest to the truth when he concluded that Dostoevsky was the master of the polyphonic novel.39 By this reckoning, Dostoevsky’s genius lay in his ability to present various and contradictory ideal types in literary form without resolution. This would explain the wildly different conclusions that scholars have reached regarding Dostoevsky’s literary intent. Bakhtin argues that one needs to find the truth of Dostoevsky within the dialectic; even if he is right, absolute certainty as to Dostoevsky’s intent will always remain elusive. So it is quite possible that we may best capture the writer’s heart by listening to the myriad voices he presents rather than any particular one. That said, our understanding of that polyphonic approach has changed dramatically over the past several years. Did Bakhtin adopt a polyphonic interpretation because he could not resolve Dostoevsky’s ultimate moral indeterminacy, as was long maintained, or was his polyphonic discourse a barely concealed attempt to portray a trinitarian (and therefore profoundly Christian) tri-unity at a time when Bakhtin himself was working under a Soviet regime that was hostile to religion?40 So it is that even the study of those who study Dostoevsky can become multilayered, and simple conclusions found wanting.
There is much to be said for the view that Dostoevsky’s prose will never be pinned down, that we will never grasp his ultimate intent. Scholars have long disagreed on almost all aspects of Dostoevsky’s worldview. How is it possible to know the mind of any writer with certainty, especially one who emerged from the nonlinear, almost mystical traditions of nineteenth-century Russian Orthodoxy? Bakhtin was correct to declare that Dostoevsky never intended his novels to be narrowly ideological. Rather, they always unfolded dialogically among a wide range of actors. Bakhtin’s greatest insight, though, may have been that many of Dostoevsky’s actors were “unfinalizable,” internally dialogic within their own persons. Even more boldly, he proposed that Dostoevsky himself entered into a dialogic relationship with his fictional creations, who became strangely independent of him. By this reckoning, Dostoevsky was their conversation partner more than their creator:
“In Dostoevsky’s subsequent works, the characters no longer carry on a literary polemic with finalizing secondhand definitions of man (although the author himself sometimes does this for them, in a very subtle ironic-parodic form), but they all do furious battle with such definitions of their personality in the mouths of other people. They all acutely sense their own inner unfinalizability, their capacity to outgrow, as it were, from within and to render untrue any externalizing and finalizing definition of them. As long as a person is alive he lives by the fact that he is not yet finalized, that he has not yet uttered his ultimate word.”
So we can conclude that no single character created by Dostoevsky was ever complete; all were constantly engaged, ever in formation, ever in dialogue, both with others around them and with themselves. Only the bravest or most foolish of commentators on Dostoevsky will disagree with this. But if that is the case, what can we conclude with any certainty regarding Dostoevsky’s intentions or moral voice?
The only possible answer here is “very little indeed,” especially if one considers that Dostoevsky may have deliberately obscured his views to evade tsarist censors. Edith Clowes has demonstrated how Russian literary trends were a necessarily ambiguous vehicle for philosophical discourse in the first half of the nineteenth century, when Russian philosophical inquiry was still in its infancy, especially given the Russian state’s stringent restrictions on such after the Decembrist revolt of 1825. State surveillance agents would have been especially sensitive to the literary outpourings of convicted criminals—a term that applied to Dostoevsky for much of his literary career.
Yet there may have been more profound reasons for Dostoevsky’s decision to write in a heavily layered manner. For one thing, almost all of his writings rail against inevitable outcomes and easily grasped equations. Already in Notes from Underground he had formulated this as humankind’s deep aversion to living within the constraints of mathematical certainty. Such an existence was, for him, the tyranny of two times two equals four, the tyranny associated with laws of nature deemed unassailable and with the idea that humans were compelled to see themselves within similarly rigid systems. Why, he wrote, cannot two times two sometimes be made to equal five? Such a writer, one imagines, did not want to be pigeonholed, and I hesitate to present his ideas in this study as if they were so many ordered principles.
It is clear that, for Dostoevsky, reality was as complex as it was dynamic—a view no doubt instilled in him by Orthodoxy. Thus, his dislike of much of Western art related directly to its artistic representation. True, there were noted exceptions, including the Sistine Madonna. But exceptions aside, he generally believed that Western art veiled much more than it revealed because of its stifling empiricism. In an 1873 entry in Diary of a Writer, he criticized the superficial reality of Nikolai Ge’s The Last Supper, which had clearly been painted in the Western style. Such a painting might be considered accurate in terms of three-dimensional realism, but Ge had failed to grasp the divine nature of Christ. The mathematically precise realism of his human-looking Christ masked more than it revealed. Yet another painting in the Western style, Holbein’s Dead Christ, convincingly portrayed only the humanity of Christ immediately after His death through crucifixion (as opposed to what Dostoevsky took to be Christ’s divinity, which eternally coexisted with His humanity).
(Excerpted from Chapter 1)
