The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

An equivalently famous episode in Crime and Punishment - when the hero and heroine realize their love and commit to each other - might help to focus, albeit in extreme form, the difference between a Dostoevskian dependence on the Book as mediator, and a Tolstoyan striving to reach the realm of the authentic without having to rely on words. That “love story” comes about in three installments, Raskolnikov’s three visits to Sonya Marmeladova in Parts IV (ch. 4), V (ch. 4), and VI (ch. 8) of the novel. The grounds for this love are laid in their first meeting. Raskolnikov seeks out Sonya in her quarters. Bewildered at her faith in God amid such moral filth, he concludes she is a holy fool (and fears that in her company he will become one too). He demands that she read to him the account of the Rising of Lazarus, but rummaging around in the Gospels he can’t find the passage. Sonya sternly reprimands him, takes the Bible, locates the page, but does not need to read it: she need only recite. She has become its narrative. After the Lazarus story is over Sonya closes the book, at which moment Raskolnikov promises to come to her the next day and tell her who killed Lizaveta. Of this pivotal scene Dostoevsky writes that the candle was flickering out, “casting a dim light in this destitute room upon the murderer and the harlot strangely come together over the reading of the eternal book” (IV, ch. 4, p. 328). Everything about this scene speaks of a Dostoevskian epiphany. In Dostoevsky, knowledge is communal and symbolic.

In Tolstoy, as in Pushkin, “understanding what one needs to know” depends not on accessing or citing a verbal narrative, but on proper maturation. Lay down the right habits or structures in the individual, and wisdom will come at the right time - even without words. This knowledge cannot be forced by merely “talking it out,” with oneself or another person. The most terrible example of that hopeless strategy is Anna Karenina’s lengthy “monologue” to herself before her suicide (Part VII, chs. 26-31). By this point in the novel, Anna’s heightened consciousness rivals the Underground Man’s in its alertness to its own perversity. She makes impossible demands on Vronsky and impossibly

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contradictory demands on herself (unwilling to give up society, son, or lover, she is aware that no structure exists capable of containing them all). She will punish Vronsky for that fact, not for the infidelity of which she accuses him even as she knows her suspicions are unfounded. Everyone she sees on that fatal ride to the train station is reduced to mean-spirited caricature. She is not in delirium – that is the terror of the passage – but she understands her needy self with absolute clarity and does not wish to entertain any other opinion about it: “my love grows ever more passionate and self-centered, and his keeps fading and fading . . .” (p. 763). Only at the final moment of her life does the candle flare up “by which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief, and evil” (p. 768). In addition to lies and grief, that book might have contained truth – but Tolstoy, here as with the dying Ivan Ilyich, gives his questing heroes access to it only at the final irreversible moment, after the wretched pattern of their lives has claimed its due.

Anna’s awful death prompts one additional contrast between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy: how best to come to terms with one’s guilt. In a Tolstoyan world, which is intensely concerned that each autonomous “I” improve its behavior, the worst possible habit I can acquire is to insist on my helplessness and inability to initiate, on my own, some small betterment in my life. In a Dostoevskian world, relying on oneself is no special virtue – but the “I” does have obligations. Here, the worst habit for any character is to say that someone else is guilty. Best always is to insist that “I am guilty,” I am responsible to all. The guilty Dostoevskian “I” is not Tolstoy’s, however, and herein lies the meat of the comparison. Even if technically you are innocent – as Dmitry Karamazov is innocent of parricide, and as his brother Ivan is innocent – admit your guilt anyway, take responsibility. Let someone else say (as Alyosha says to his brothers): “It wasn’t you.” For Dostoevsky, it is the task of others to absolve you of your worst suspicions; it is not for you to reason it out and absolve yourself. The more wary, stubborn, guilt-ridden Tolstoyan personality does not invite others inside to share the burden or negotiate the terms. In this difference we see the core of Tolstoy’s radical and brave individualism, and Dostoevsky’s radical and brave dialogism.

Poets and novelists (Dostoevsky and Nekrasov)