Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self (Studies in Russian Literature and Theory) - Softcover

Yuri Corrigan (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810135698 ISBN 13: 9780810135697

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2018

Synopsis

Dostoevsky was hostile to the notion of individual autonomy, and yet, throughout his life and work, he vigorously advocated the freedom and inviolability of the self. This ambivalence has animated his diverse and often self-contradictory legacy: as precursor of psychoanalysis, forefather of existentialism, postmodernist avant la lettre, religious traditionalist, and Romantic mystic.

Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self charts a unifying path through Dostoevsky's artistic journey to solve the “mystery” of the human being. Starting from the unusual forms of intimacy shown by characters seeking to lose themselves within larger collective selves, Yuri Corrigan approaches the fictional works as a continuous experimental canvas on which Dostoevsky explored the problem of selfhood through recurring symbolic and narrative paradigms. Presenting new readings of such works as The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov, Corrigan tells the story of Dostoevsky’s career-long journey to overcome the pathology of collectivism by discovering a passage into the wounded, embattled, forbidding, revelatory landscape of the psyche.

Corrigan’s argument offers a fundamental shift in theories about Dostoevsky's work and will be of great interest to scholars of Russian literature, as well as to readers interested in the prehistory of psychoanalysis and trauma studies and in theories of selfhood and their cultural sources.

About this title

About the Author

Yuri Corrigan is an assistant professor of Russian and comparative literature at Boston University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self

By Yuri Corrigan

Northwestern University Press

Copyright © 2017 Northwestern University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8101-3569-7

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
Chapter One On the Dangers of Intimacy (The Vasia Shumkov Paradigm), 
Chapter Two Amnesia and the Collective Personality in the Early Works, 
Chapter Three Transparency and Trauma in The Insulted and Injured, 
Chapter Four Beyond the Dispersed Self in The Idiot, 
Chapter Five On the Education of Demons and Unfinished Selves, 
Chapter Six The Hiding Places of the Self in The Adolescent, 
Chapter Seven The Apprenticeship of the Self in The Brothers Karamazov, 
Conclusion, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

On the Dangers of Intimacy (The Vasia Shumkov Paradigm)

And it happened [...] that Jonathan's very self became bound up with David's, and Jonathan loved him as himself. [...] And Jonathan, and David with him, sealed a pact because he loved him like himself. And Jonathan took off the cloak that was on him and gave it to David, and his battle garb, and even his sword and his bow and his belt.

— 1 Samuel 18:1–4

People receive nourishment from one another [...] through the soul, through sensing and imagining one another; otherwise, what can they think about, where can they spend the tender, trusting strength of life, where can they scatter their sorrow and find comfort, where can they die an unnoted death? With only the imagination of his own self to nourish him, a man soon consumes his soul, exhausting himself in the worst of poverties and dying in mindless gloom.

— Platonov, Soul

We like subsisting on someone's else mind ... that's what we like!

— Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Indwelling Self / Relational Self

Among studies of Dostoevsky's conception of personality, two largely incompatible and equally influential schools of thought can be discerned. On the one hand, Dostoevsky has been read as a neoromantic "expressivist" who situated the roots of the personality, and of the world itself, in the inexhaustible depths of the "human soul." The elder Zosima's teaching in The Brothers Karamazov on the organic nature of the personality whose roots "touch other worlds" provides an illustration of this view: Zosima describes our "secret innermost sensation" of a "connection with [...] a celestial and higher world," and the sense that "the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here, but in those other worlds" (14:291). It was in this mystical romantic vein that Vladimir Solovyov spoke of Dostoevsky's belief in "the divine power in the soul" and in its "divine origin." The personality, understood in this way, becomes not only a repository for divinity but also an "all-encompassing," "microcosmic" universe within itself. Various traditions of selfhood stand behind this notion of personality, among them, the Neoplatonic Augustinian self that turns inward to discover the presence of the divine in its depths, and the German romantic self that reaches, in its dark inscrutable basis, into the very sources of nature and of the universe.

In observing the radically social, relational nature of Dostoevsky's characters, however, readers have questioned whether this apparent belief in the infinite inward capaciousness of the self extends to his active psychological portraits. Thus, a second school of thought finds its center in what can be described as Bakhtin's Dostoevsky: a remarkably contemporary, potentially postmodern, writer who reconceived traditional notions of self in intersubjective space. This is the Dostoevsky who, according to Tzvetan Todorov, "rejects an essentialist conception of man," and for whom "the human being has no existence prior to the other or independent of him." Bakhtin called attention to the absence of a psychologized and naturalized sense of self in Dostoevsky's characters, who lack the detailed interiority or personal biography of realist literature, and whose radical inner formlessness abates only in the activity of interpersonal dialogue. These characters, Bakhtin observed, are always on the "threshold," looking outward, existing fully in the "living present," never determined or limited by unconscious lives or biographical pasts. Bakhtin's perspective helps to illuminate the relational nature of personhood in Dostoevsky whose characters apprehend their depths outside of themselves, "in the souls of others." From this perspective, if the self is rooted in other worlds, as Zosima espouses, then those other worlds are not transcendent essences but rather the worlds of other consciousnesses.

Thus, the personality in Dostoevsky is thought of, on the one hand, as an essence, a bottomless depth, encompassing and expressing the entire universe, and on the other, as an activity,event, or point of view that constitutes itself outwardly through relationships. The present chapter engages this duality in commentary by examining the tension between interiority and intersubjectivity already distinctly evident in one of Dostoevsky's early stories, "A Weak Heart" ("Slaboe serdtse"), published in 1848. Both the indwelling and relational models of selfhood are evoked in the story's depiction of how two personalities of significant interior complexity become merged into one extended self.

Intimate Friendship and the Collective Self

"A Weak Heart" depicts the anxious travails and gradual descent into madness of one Vasia Shumkov, a humble, ardent, slightly disfigured clerk who has been entrusted with a large amount of copying work by his superior and benefactor, Yulian Mastakovich. Because of a newly formed engagement with his beloved Liza, whom he has fervently pursued for weeks, Vasia has egregiously neglected his work. His roommate and best friend, Arkady Nefedevich, tries to help him finish the copying, attempting at all costs to shore up his friend's sanity, but Vasia is ultimately beyond saving, overwhelmed as he is by the emotions of his newfound happiness, and tormented by his own professional negligence and apparent "ingratitude" before his benefactor. Vasia undergoes a pitiful public collapse, is removed to an asylum, and Arkady is left alone without his friend in the cold and ghostlike city of St. Petersburg.

The work has been consistently read, for good reason, as "a story of social protest" in its illustration of how a lowly civil servant is crushed by the hierarchical rank and file nature of imperial Russia. According to this traditional reading, the meek Vasia Shumkov, in his wrenching psychological collapse, is a representative of Dostoevsky's "downtrodden" (the focus of his early, socially oriented writing), and the hero's breakdown is the result of his having utterly internalized his subordinate social status. Vasia, it follows, is so terrified of his superiors that he loses his mind as he suffers convulsive and devastating bouts of gratitude and anxiety before them.

When read in the context of Dostoevsky's extended inquiry into the notion of relational personhood, however, the passionate, intimate attachment between Vasia and his roommate, Arkady, seems less a facet of Dostoevsky's social commentary and more the emerging kernel of a larger philosophical and psychological project. The destructive consequences of the pair's loving friendship vividly express the dangers of intimacy in Dostoevsky's world, as the friends' closeness leads directly to the replacement of aspects of the self with the activities of the other. In this sense, the friends' interdependence provides a depiction of intersubjective selfhood notably different from, and considerably more pathological than, the dialogical model espoused by Bakhtin: in Vasia and Arkady we see an overwhelming need for the other as a completion of one's own unfinished personality, a personality that degenerates as it becomes gradually subsumed and supplanted by its loving but overpowering counterpart. As we shall see, the images surrounding Vasia's escape from assimilation by Arkady's personality directly prefigure scenes and paradigms from the later works in which characters struggle to be released from their imprisonment within collective personalities, while encountering within themselves only atrophied potentialities which have been replaced and supplemented by the tireless activity of another person.

The friendship between Arkady and Vasia enacts a complementary distribution of faculties between adjacent personalities, of a vigilant administrative mind (Arkady) which binds itself to a subordinate, largely irrational, intensely emotional, obedient nature, or "weak heart" (Vasia). Arkady plays the role of the friends' collective superego, having "loved [Vasia] so, watched over him, instructed him at every step with saving advices" (2:28). As Vasia's external conscience, he takes on full responsibility for his friend's work deadline, beseeching Vasia to look to him for guidance: "Just make sure you hold onto me, [...] and I will stand over you with a stick today and tomorrow, and all night, and I will torment you in your work: finish up! Finish up faster, brother!" (2:29). Arkady's zealous solicitude at times resembles an invasion, or annexation, of his friend's agency. He consistently bemoans the fact that he cannot take over for Vasia entirely, that he cannot save his friend by simply occupying his place: "How annoying that I cannot help you," he exclaims to Vasia, "or else I would have taken it and would have written it all for you ... Why don't you and I have the same handwriting?" (2:29). In his urgent desire to substitute himself for Vasia, Arkady emphasizes his ability, for example, to sign Vasia's name: "I sign your name terribly similarly and make the same curl [...] Who would notice!" (2:31). Vasia, in turn, repeatedly conceives of his own existence as directly dependent on Arkady's: "Really, Arkasha, I love you so that, if it were not for you, it seems to me, I wouldn't even be living in this world altogether" (2:18, 2:26). The weaker of the two men, Vasia is generally inclined to accept Arkady's administration, looking at his friend "ever so timidly [...] as if his decision [...] depended on him" (2:22), his pathetic "feeble" (2:17) physicality repeatedly overwhelmed by Arkady's "leonine," (2:22) "powerful greedy [...] embraces" (2:33) and "strong arms" (2:17).

As co-joined personalities, Arkady and Vasia exhibit an extreme degree of intimacy. They constantly throw themselves into each other's passionate embraces (2:17, 18, 36, 42, 44, 47), which often evoke a parent-child bond. Early in the story, Arkady lifts Vasia up and carries him around the room like a child, "pretending that he was lulling him to sleep" (2:17). Later on, "Arkady throws himself upon [Vasia], like a mother whose kindred child is being taken away" (2:44). At times, the friends are so intimately connected that they appear to share a nervous system, as when Vasia "held Arkady by the shoulders, looked into his eyes and moved his lips as if he himself wanted to say the words for him" (2:22). Their intimacy extends equally beyond the physical. Arkady claims to have special insight into Vasia's inner processes ("I understand you; I know what is happening within you" [2:37]), and Vasia wonders at his friend's uncanny powers of perception: "for a long time now I've wanted to ask you: how is it that you know me so well?" (2:39).

Like Ivan with Smerdiakov in the (much later) Brothers Karamazov, Arkady sees Vasia's actions as realizations of his own private intentions. At first surprised by Vasia's decision to get married, he then recalls the impulse in himself: "'I myself, brother, thought about getting married; and now suddenly you're getting married, so it's all the same'" (2:19). He then quite suddenly discovers in himself the same passionate love for the same woman (he "was in love, fatally in love with Liza"): "just as she looks after you, let her look after me too. Yes, friendship for you and friendship for her; you are indivisible now; only I will have two beings like you instead of one" (2:29); to which Vasia, "terribly pleased" with Arkady's plan to invade his marriage, "pointed out that this was just how it should be and that now they will be even greater friends" (2:28–9). For her part, Vasia's fiancée intuitively understands the bizarre fluidity between the friends' identities when she cries out, "in the most naïve rapture," her hope for the future: "'We will be the three of us like one person!'" (2:28).

In this portrait of intimate friendship, we encounter another curious detail: the two heroes, utterly preoccupied with their shared concerns over Vasia's predicament, have no tangible pasts, except for some intentionally obscured details — for example, Arkady and Vasia are both orphans, and Vasia, unlike Arkady, is initially presented without patronymic, a detail the author promises to explain but then never does. Concerning Arkady's past, the narrator promises to recount an episode ("once it even happened that ... But this can wait until later" [2:26]), and again conspicuously fails to deliver on his promise. These references to the past, appearing as obvious ellipses in the text, emphasize a lack within these characters, a blank space where memory or personal biography fails to reside, and we begin to suspect that this interior absence is somehow connected to the peculiar intensity of their intimacy.

This intimate extension into the other recalls elements of the doppelgänger tradition (to be discussed in chapter 2), and in fact replays many of the scenes from Dostoevsky's The Double, which was published two years earlier: we think of Goliadkin Senior when Arkady rushes through the streets of Petersburg, trying to anticipate and to reverse preemptively the self-destructive behavior of his emancipated counterpart; or when he suddenly runs into the guilty Vasia, "nose to nose," like Goliadkin with his double on the street, and Vasia stops "like one caught in a crime" (2:35); or especially in the public scandal at the end, when Vasia appears before his superiors in a deluded, incoherent, and trembling state and, like Goliadkin, is removed to an asylum. "A Weak Heart," however, represents a distinct departure from The Double, in that, unlike Goliadkin, who encounters a perfect replica of himself, Arkady and Vasia are unmistakably two separate individuals. In reincorporating the events and images of The Double, Dostoevsky indicates his growing interest in the psychology of two, discrete, sovereign individuals who come to enact the behavior of a single self.

Pretending to Sleep: Escape from the Other

As mentioned above, the story dramatizes a crisis in the friendship, in which Vasia, as the result of some nascent and concealed inner anguish, begins to refuse Arkady's administrative instructions. We discover that Vasia, by the time the story begins, has recently begun nurturing a sense of privacy. Just as he keeps the shameful secret of his neglected, unfinished work ("five of the thickest notebooks" [2:37]) hidden from Arkady in a box, he has told Arkady nothing of his engagement to Liza, and when Arkady teasingly holds his friend down, trying to force the confession out of him, Vasia insists on the dignity of his personal interior space, exclaiming that "if you had gone to ask me 'what's her name?' I swear I would have killed myself before answering you" (2:18). Vasia's secrecy is symptomatic of a larger transformation in his character, a change that he himself does not understand. He tries to explain his newfound inner complexity to Arkady, vaguely describing a growing consciousness of the division between self and other, with an attendant longing for personal dignity and responsibility:

It seems to me that I didn't know myself before [...] and I only discovered others yesterday too. I [...] didn't feel, didn't value fully. The heart ... in me was callous. ... Listen, how did it happen that I hadn't done any good to anyone on the earth, because I was incapable, [...] And so many have done good to me! Take you first: do you think I don't see. I was [...] only keeping quiet! (2:39)

The experience of being loved and recognized by his fiancée has evidently shaken Vasia, forcing him to evaluate himself as a discrete personality. "I am undeserving of this happiness!" he protests to Arkady, "what have I done that was special, tell me! [...] And I! Such a woman loves me, me ... [...] She came to love me as I am" (2:25). A distinct moral ambiguity, therefore, attends the emergence of the interior life, since it is connected, on the one hand, with the discovery of self-worth at being loved and, on the other, with vague but intense feelings of guilt and criminal secrecy.

Arkady perceives grave danger in his friend's emergent complexity. He beseeches Vasia to "reveal [his concealed] torments," so that he can take responsibility upon himself. He repeatedly offers to act as intermediary between Vasia and his "benefactor," Vasia's section head, Yulian Mastakovich, who is, to Vasia, a divine, omnipotent being. "I'll save you!" he offers Vasia, "I'll go to Yulian Mastakovich ... don't shake your head, no, listen! ... I'll explain [...] how you're destroyed, how you're tormenting yourself. [...] I'll sacrifice myself for you [...] don't contradict me!" (2:38). Vasia, however, determined to free himself from Arkady's government, "cries out, turns white as a wall," and protests vehemently: "Do you know that you're killing me right now?" (2:37). He is especially anxious about Arkady's helpful plan to sign Yulian Mastakovich's visitors' books for him (in other words, to subsume his identity), afraid that his benefactor will notice "that it's a different hand" (2:31). In Arkady's presence, he appears to accept his friend's orders docilely and agrees to stay home to copy the neglected work. When Arkady leaves, however, Vasia's agency awakens. As Arkady rushes to the benefactor's residence to sign, he notices that Vasia has secretly escaped to sign his own name ("imagine his surprise when before him appeared Vasia Shumkov's very own signature!" [2:35]); Vasia thus insists upon the inviolability of his own un-annexable personality. The awakening of the self is portrayed in Vasia through these irrepressible desires: to sign one's own name, to atone for one's crimes, to feel the full weight of one's "guilt" before "God," to repent and to pray for divine mercy, to "tell him myself," to "go myself": "I'll explain everything myself [...] he'll see my tears, he'll be moved by them" (2:38–40).

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self by Yuri Corrigan. Copyright © 2017 Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810135698
• ISBN 13: 9780810135697
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336