The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Realisms 137

This strategy, we should note, does no one any favors. Being so aware of oneself can be painful and paralyzing. The Underground Man is the first to realize that he is crippled, made ridiculous, and encouraged in his cruelty by his “hyper-consciousness,” which anticipates responses to himself and refutes them in advance. But such is the logical paradox. In that most terrible of satires on the abuse of our freedom to construct a self, Dostoevsky’s trapped underground voice reasons thus:

The final end, gentlemen: better to do nothing! Better conscious inertia! And so, long live the underground! Though I did say I envy the normal man to the point of uttermost bile, still I do not want to be him on those conditions in which I see him (though, all the same, I shall not stop envying him . . .) But here too, I’m lying . . .

(Notes from Underground, Part One, XI)

The inevitable “uttermost bile” that results from such radical indeterminacy fueled Maksim Gorky’s lifelong resistance to Dostoevsky, both on his own behalf and in the name of the new Soviet state. One could not build anything durable in the presence of that dialectic. What is more, the dialectic admits of no anchoring of the self in a supra-personal framework. “The time has come to attack Dostoevskyism all along the line,” Gorky wrote in 1933. “I should prefer that the civilized world were unified not by Dostoevsky, but by Pushkin.”15 Gorky’s juxtaposition of these two writers is intriguing. If freedom for Pushkin is the right to stand one’s ground and act as a man of public honor, then freedom for Dostoevsky is an individual’s right to choose, capriciously or soberly, in the presence of partial knowledge. This principle will not unify the world. Since freedom is the goal and since Dostoevsky allows truths to be multiple, a high priority in his prose is always to increase the number of available perspectives and to complicate all possible resonances of the spoken word. Then truths can test one another at their points of intersection.

The time-space of Tolstoy’s novels differs from Dostoevsky’s in almost every way. Tolstoy, of course, is no stranger to tragedy and crisis, nor even to the most Dostoevsky-style crisis of all, murder. (Two famous Tolstoyan narratives from 1889, “The Kreutzer Sonata” and “The Devil,” both involve the killing of a woman out of jealousy.) But he handles the cause and aftermath of such crises differently. In his 1890 treatise, “Why Do People Stupefy Themselves?”, Tolstoy remarks in passing that Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov did not kill the old pawnbroker with an axe on the day of the murder but had been killing her for months, lying feverishly and resentfully on his couch in his garret, making the possibility of that murder a habit of his mind. Tolstoy sensed that with Dostoevsky, for all that he multiplies perspectives on events and filters them through gossipy untrustworthy narrators, a tragic act (when it finally comes to