The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

142 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

uncertainties, and entrapments. But with Tolstoy, sooner or later we sense that all the critics and doubters are, as it were, in the same doubt together. Consider the end of his late, great tale “Master and Man” (1895). A wealthy merchant freezes to death in a blizzard and saves the life of his workman Nikita with the warmth of his own dying body. We then learn that Nikita, “more sorry than glad to have survived,” lived another twenty years, forgave his wife her infidelity, was relieved to release his son from the burden of feeding him – and (here is the stirring final line) “whether he is better or worse off there where he awoke after his death, whether he was disappointed or found there what he expected, we shall all soon learn.”20 In Dostoevsky, there is no sense that we shall ever all learn the same thing, even after death. Nor is such assurance required.

This Dostoevskian point of faith is illustrated well in one scene from the greatest twentieth-century product of the Gogol–Dostoevsky line in Russian literature, Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita. Satan, here in the guise of a professor of black magic called Woland, has turned up in Moscow during the 1930s and is hosting his annual ball. Among the summoned guests is the severed head of one unfortunate materialist-atheist, former chairman of the Soviet Writers’ Union, who was decapitated by a streetcar in the novel’s opening pages. Woland assures this poor torsoless creature, whose eyes blink in terror, that the theory he had postulated – that when a head is severed, life ceases – is both “incisive and sound,” but that

“one theory is as good as another. There is even a theory that says that to each man it will be given according to his beliefs. May it be so! You are departing into nonbeing, and from the goblet into which you are being transformed, I will have the pleasure of drinking a toast to life

everlasting!”21

In the Dostoevsky line, there is simply no single vantage point from which, as Tolstoy put it with such lapidary assurance, “we shall all soon learn.” In the radical freedom that Dostoevsky will not relinquish, each of us might become our own belief. Not only is the end unknown, so is the path – and these paths are decidedly plural. Even that, however, cannot be known. We are not all in the same doubt. Very possibly this suspicion that dispersal and heterogeneity are natural, not freakish, led Dostoevsky to value above all things the striving for human communion. The self is not saved by a reformed splinter of its own self; it needs a genuine other consciousness.

Tolstoy was never wholly convinced of this need. In fact, in his writings on the far side of his “break,” noticeably in “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (1886), the opposite appears to be the case: growing into one’s own courage and wisdom