25 The political situation is one reason why Bakhtin’s famous Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, published under Stalin, had to seriously downplay FMD’s ideological involvement with his own characters. A lot of Bakhtin’s praise for Dostoevsky’s “polyphonic” characterizations, and for the “dialogic imagination” that supposedly allowed him to refrain from injecting his own values into his novels, is the natural result of a Soviet critic’s trying to discuss an author whose “reactionary” views the State wanted forgotten. Frank, who takes out after Bakhtin at a number of points, doesn’t really make clear the constraints that Bakhtin was operating under. (back to text)
26 Not surprisingly, FMD’s exact beliefs are idiosyncratic and complicated, and Joseph Frank is thorough and clear and detailed in explaining their evolution through the novels’ thematics (as in, e.g., the toxic effects of egoistic atheism on the Russian character in Notes and C&P; the deformation of Russian passion by worldly Europe in The Gambler; and, in The Idiot’s Myshkin and The Brothers Karamazov’s Zossima, the implications of a human Christ subjected literally to nature’s physical forces, an idea central to all the fiction Dostoevsky wrote after seeing Holbein the Younger’s “Dead Christ” at the Basel Museum in 1867).
But what Frank has done really phenomenally well here is to distill the enormous amounts of archival material generated by and about FMD, making it comprehensive instead of just using selected bits of it to bolster a particular critical thesis. At one point, somewhere near the end of Vol. III, Frank even manages to find and gloss some obscure author-notes for “Socialism and Christianity,” an essay Dostoevsky never finished, that help clarify why he is treated by some critics as a forerunner of existentialism:“Christ’s incarnation… provided a new ideal for mankind, one that has retained its validity ever since. N.B. Not one atheist who has disputed the divine origin of Christ has denied the fact that He is the ideal of humanity. The latest on this — Renan. This is very remarkable.” And the law of this new ideal, according to Dostoevsky, consists of “the return to spontaneity, to the masses, but freely.… Not forcibly, but on the contrary, in the highest degree willfully and consciously. It is clear that this higher willfulness is at the same time a higher renunciation of the will.” (back to text)
27 The mature, postconversion Dostoevsky’s particular foes were the Nihilists, the radical progeny of the 1840s’ yuppie socialists, whose name (i.e., the Nihilists’ name) comes from the same all-negating speech in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons that got quoted at the outset. But the real battle was wider, and much deeper. It is no accident that Joseph Frank’s big epigraph for Vol. IV is from Kolakowski’s classic Modernity on Endless Trial, for Dostoevsky’s abandonment of utilitarian socialism for an idiosyncratic moral conservatism can be seen in the same basic light as Kant’s awakening from “dogmatic slumber” into a radical Pietist deontology nearly a century earlier: “By turning against the popular utilitarianism of the Enlightenment, [Kant] also knew exactly that what was at stake was not any particular moral code, but rather a question of the existence or nonexistence of the distinction between good and evil and, consequently, a question of the fate of mankind.” (back to text)
28 (maybe under our own type of Nihilist spell) (back to text)
29 (whatever exactly that is) (back to text)
30 (which, given this review’s venue, means basically us) (back to text)
31 We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies — but this is very different. (back to text)
* N.B. Of those friends and intimates of your correspondents who happen to dislike porn, a large majority of them report disliking it not so much for moral or religious or political reasons but because they find it boring, and a lot of them seem to use robotic/mechanical/industrial metaphors to try to characterize the boredom, e.g.: “[Hard-core sex is usually] just organs going in and out of other organs, in and out, like watching an oil rig go up and down all day.” (back to text)
* N.B. here in advance that Mr. Rob Black will win Best Director/Video at Saturday night’s Awards gala. (back to text)
† (Max’s response to this crew member’s analysis, accompanied by a thumbs-up: “God bless America, kid.”) (back to text)
* [= a PEN American Center event concerning a big new translation of The Castle by a man from I think Princeton. In case it’s not obvious, that’s what this whole document is — the text of a very quick speech.] (back to text)
* (Do you think it’s a coincidence that college is when many Americans do their most serious fucking and falling-down drinking and generally ecstatic Dionysian-type reveling? It’s not. College students are adolescents, and they’re terrified, and they’re dealing with their terror in a distinctively US way. Those naked boys hanging upside-down out of their frat house’s windows on Friday night are simply trying to buy a few hours’ escape from the grim adult stuff that any decent school has forced them to think about all week.) (back to text)
* (Since this’ll almost surely get cut, I’ll admit that, yes, I, as a kid, was in fact the author of this song. But by this time I’d been thoroughly brainwashed. It was sort of our family’s version of “100 Bottles… Wall.” My mother was the one responsible for the “wid’ning gyre” line in the refrain, which after much debate was finally substituted for a supposedly “forced” rhyme for fire in my own original lyrics — and again, years later, when I actually understood the apocalyptic thrust of that Yeats line I was, retrospectively, a bit chilled.) (back to text)
* (In case it’s not totally obvious, be advised that this article is using the word rhetoric in its strict traditional sense, something like “the persuasive use of language to influence the thoughts and actions of an audience.”) (back to text)
* (Sic— should obviously be “eagerly awaited.” Nemo mortalium omnibus horis sapit.) (back to text)
* (Your SNOOT reviewer cannot help observing, w/r/t this ad, that the opening r in its Refer shouldn’t be capitalized after a dependent clause + ellipsis. Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.) (back to text)