Chapter 8 third lecture

All we've done so far is clear the way.Before dealing with Dostoevsky's thought, I would like to warn you against falling into fallacies.Dostoevsky spent the last fifteen years of his life editing a magazine.The articles he wrote for this magazine were collected into a volume and named "Writer's Diary".Dostoevsky expounded his ideas in this work.So it seems natural and easy to keep referring to the book, but, let me tell you right off the bat, it's a huge disappointment.We read expositions of social theories, vague and ill-articulated; we read political prophecies, none of which come true.Dostoyevsky tried to predict the future of Europe and was almost always wrong.

Not long ago, Mr. Su Dai set up a column for Dostoevsky in his "Time", and he couldn't help but pick out Dostoyevsky's faults.He agrees that Doris's articles are nothing more than the usual journalistic work, which I fully agree with, but I disagree with him that these articles provide us with the best information for understanding Doris's thinking.To be honest, the issues that Dostoevsky discusses in "The Writer's Diary" are not the most interesting to him. It must be admitted that political issues are not as important to him as social issues, and social issues are not as important as moral issues. and individual issues matter.The deepest and rarest insights we can get from him belong to the field of psychology, and I will add that in this field, his ideas often remain at the stage of questions and doubts.He does not seek answers, but states, only those problems that are usually in disarray precisely because they are so complex, criss-crossed, and chaotic.In a word, strictly speaking Dostoevsky is not a thinker, but only a novelist.We should look for his most precious, keenest and original thoughts in the speeches of his characters, and not always in the speeches of the main characters, but often the most important and boldest thoughts, the author lets the secondary characters speak out.Dostoevsky was always clumsy when he spoke in his own name.We can think of him saying what he wanted to say through the mouth of Versilov in "The Boy":

"Exercise? No, I'd rather not. Strange: whenever an idea of ​​my deep conviction is attempted, my faith is almost always shaken before the presentation is over." We can even say that it is rare to see Dostoevsky not immediately denying his thoughts after stating them.It seemed to him that a thought, as soon as it is stated, immediately stinks of a dead body, like the stench of Zosima's corpse, which is precisely what miracles are expected, and which at the time made his disciple Alyosha Kalla Mazov's night vigil became unbearable. It goes without saying that for a "thinker" such and such is pretty bad.His thoughts are almost never incomplete, and are almost always expressed by the characters concerned, so far as to relate not only to the characters of the novel but to a definite moment in their lives.It can be said that a thought is acquired by a particular and temporary situation of its character, and is therefore relative, that is, directly related to the action or action which the thought leads to, or whether the action or action necessarily leads to the thought.Dostoevsky disappoints us when he talks about theory.Take, for example, his essays on lying, how seamlessly he makes the typical character of the lie (very different from the typical character of Corneille) move in the scene of the novel.He is good at making us understand through typical characters what compels a liar to lie, but once the author tries to explain to us and theorize his characters, it is flat and uninteresting.

This "Diary of a Writer" shows us how far Dostoevsky has come as a novelist.If he writes theory and criticism rather mediocre, he is brilliant when he introduces a character into a scene.It is in the "Diary of a Writer" that we find the wonderful account of "The Peasant Krochkaya", a masterpiece of Doshi, which is sort of a novel, exactly a long monologue, much like the The monologue in "Underground Talent" that I wrote. Even better, and I would say more revealing, is that twice in "The Writer's Diary" Dostoevsky asks us to observe the arrangement of the novel's plot, almost involuntarily, almost unconsciously.

He tells us of the pleasure he had in watching people on the street, and sometimes following them, and then, with a twist of the pen, he seized on a passer-by he met: "I noticed a worker who had no wife on his arm, but a child, a little boy. Both of them looked sad like lonely people. The worker was about thirty years old, with a haggard face and a sick look. He wore a festive Dress, but the seams of the coat are frayed and the button covering is all coming off; the collar is greasy, the trousers are well washed but look like they just came from a thrift store; the top hat is in tatters. The expression on the face was sullen, cold, almost ferocious. The worker looked to me like a typesetter. He was holding the child by the hand, and the little boy couldn't keep up. The little guy was two years old, not much older than he was, very pale, very Weak, wearing a short jacket, red high-top boots, and a hat with a peacock feather. He was tired. His father murmured something to him, perhaps laughing at his lack of leg strength. The child did not argue, and five steps later, the father I bent down, lifted him up, and held him in my arms. The boy seemed very happy, and put his arms around his father's neck. As soon as he raised his body, he caught a glimpse of me, looked at me with surprise and curiosity, and nodded slightly to him, but he frowned. Frowning, he clasped his father's neck even tighter. The father and son are probably good friends.

"On the street, I like to observe pedestrians, look at unfamiliar faces, study who they might be, imagine how they live, and what they might be interested in in life. That day, I paid special attention to this father and son. I imagined, The worker's wife, the child's mother, had just died. The widower worked in the workshop during the week and left the child in the care of some old woman. They must live in the basement, and the man rented a small room, perhaps only A corner of the rented room. Today, Sunday, the father took the child to visit relatives, and it is likely to go to the sister's house of the deceased wife. I hope the child's aunt does not appear often in the novel. She married a junior officer and lived in the large barracks on the basement floor , but in a room alone. She wept over her dead sister, but not for long. The widower didn't appear to be devastated, at least during the interview. He was, however, worried and reticent, only talking about interests After speaking, he was silent. After that, he waited for the samovar and tea. The little boy stayed on the bench in the corner, pouted and frowned innocently, and finally fell asleep His aunt and father paid him little attention, and left him alone with a piece of bread and a glass of milk. The officer said nothing at first, and at a certain moment he burst out with a wild joke about the little rascal whose father was reprimanding him. The child Eager to leave, his helpless father took him back to Vyborgskaya's home in Lityenia.

"The next day my father went to work in the factory as usual, and the little guy still followed the old woman." ("Writer's Diary" pages 99-100) Elsewhere in the same book we read the account of his encounter with a centenarian woman.He went out into the street and saw an old woman sitting on a bench, accosted her and walked away.But in the evening "after finishing work", I thought of the old woman again, and imagined her going back to her family and what they said to her.He narrated the death of the old woman. "I like to imagine the end of the story. After all, I'm a novelist. I like to tell stories."

Besides, Dostoevsky never made things up.In one of the essays in this book, he reassembles and arranges the story in his own way when referring to the lawsuit of the widow of Kornilov.When the judicial investigation was over and the crime was revealed, he wrote: "I was almost right in my guesses," and explained, "A chance meeting with the widow Kornilov surprised me with the truthfulness of my guesses. .Of course, some details are wrong, for example, although Kornilov is indeed a peasant, he is dressed in European style, etc.." Dostoevsky concluded, "In short, my mistakes are insignificant. , the substance of the guess is correct.” (pages 294 and 450-451 of "The Writer's Diary", subtitled "A Simple and Complicated Matter")

With the gift of observation, the gift of fiction, the gift of reorganizing the real, combined with a remarkable sensitivity, you can produce a Gogol, a Dickens (perhaps you remember the beginning of "The Old Curiosity Shop" Dickens said that he was busy tailing Pedestrians observe pedestrians and go on imagining their lives after leaving).But these gifts, however miraculous, were not enough to produce a Balzac, a Thomas Hardy and a Dostoevsky; and certainly not enough to prompt Nietzsche to write: "Discovering Dostoevsky is more important to me than discovering Stendhal. Only he taught me a little psychology."

I made an excerpt from Nietzsche a long time ago, and I miss it for you.When Nietzsche wrote this passage, he may not have thought of pointing out the most unique value of the great Russian novelist. He originally used it to criticize many modern novelists, for example, alluding to the Goncourt brothers: "Admonitions to psychologists: Do not create vendor psychology! Never observe for the sake of observing! To do so will produce a false view, a certain 'vice', a certain far-fetched thing. Trying to experience something And to experience, will never succeed. When it happens, there is no self-examination. Any glimpse will be deformed. A born psychologist is instinctively wary of seeing for the sake of seeing, and so is a born painter. He never imitates nature, And rely on his own inspiration and his own "black box" to filter and express "case facts", "temperament", "experience"... He is only aware of summary conclusions and results, and is not familiar with arbitrary inferences about individual cases. If he makes another What would be the result of one set! For example, according to the method of the Parisian novelists, wouldn’t they be doing a lot of peddler psychology? They can be said to be spying on reality, reporting a bunch of news every night for curiosity. But look at the result... ("Mercury", August 1898, page 371)

Dostoevsky never observes for the sake of observing.For him, the work does not arise from the observation of reality, or at least not only from this, but also from inherent ideas.Therefore, Doshi's works do not start from theoretical conception, but are immersed in reality, resulting from the meeting of thought and reality, from the mixing of the two (blending, British language), thought and reality are integrated, simply It is hard to say which one has the upper hand, so that the most realistic scenes in Dorothy's novels are also the chapters with the most psychological and ethical significance.To be precise, every work of Tuoshi is the product of thought through practice. “The idea of ​​this novel has been in me for three years,” Dostoevsky wrote in 1870, referring to The Brothers Karamazov, which was written nine years later.In another letter he said: "The key question that runs through every part of the book is the one that I've struggled with, consciously or unconsciously, all my life: God exists!" The thought lingered in his mind for a long time until it encountered the news of society, in which case it was always fertilized by such trifles as a well-known lawsuit or a criminal case.Only then can the work be said to be conceived. “What I have written is a tendentious thing,” he wrote in the same letter, noting at the time that the book was coming of age at the same time as The Brothers Karamazov. The novel "The Brothers Karamazov" is also a tendentious work.It is true that Dostoevsky's work is not unmotivated, and "amotive" is used in the current sense of the word.Each of Doshi's novels is a factual argument, a sort of apology, or rather a sermon, so to speak.If we dare to blame this great artist, it may be said that he was too obsessed with verification.Let us speak first, and Dostoevsky never tried to influence our opinion.He sought to shed some light, to bring to light certain hidden truths which he was dazzled with, and which he regarded as vital, and which we will soon regard as vital: probably as far as the human mind can go, and not The abstract truth is not the truth beyond human beings, but the private truth, the hidden truth.On the other hand, it is only in this way that his work is free from all kinds of tendentious distortions. This kind of truth, these thoughts of Dostoevsky, always obey the facts and are deeply rooted in reality.In the face of human reality, he maintains a humble attitude, a submissive attitude.He, never twists events, never distorts them; it seems that he attributes to his own thought the admonition of the Gospel: "Whoever wants to save must lose, and whoever wants to abandon must help." Before attempting to trace some of Dostoevsky's ideas through his writings, I would like to tell you something about Dostoevsky's method of work.Strakhov tells us that Dostoyevsky worked almost exclusively at night, saying: "It is near midnight, and all is still, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky Ji alone guards the samovar, sipping not too strong herbal tea while working until five or six o'clock in the morning. He gets up at two or three o'clock in the afternoon, and later receives guests, takes a walk or visits friends." Duo Situ Evsky wasn't always satisfied with "not too strong herbal tea", and some say he indulged in alcoholism in his later years.I was also told that one day Dostoevsky was working in his studio in a state of high intellectual excitement, more or less artificially approaching it.Madame Dostoevsky was receiving guests that day.Fyodor Mikhailovich suddenly appeared suspiciously in the drawing-room, where a number of ladies had gathered, and one of them was trying to be courteous with a cup of tea, when he shouted: "Bring your stinky tea! To hell with everything!" You must remember that terse sentence of Saint-Real, which might have seemed absurd if Stendhal had not forced it to cover his own aesthetics: "The novel is a mirror in which to reflect." It is true that the French and English Many novels belong to this formula, such as those of Le Sage and Voltaire, those of Fielding and Smollett .Tolstoy's novel is as different from the novels I have listed above, or even from Tolstoy himself or Stendhal, as the difference between a painting and a panorama.When Dostoevsky "painted", he first paid attention to the distribution of light, which came from only one source of radiation... In the novels of Stendhal and Tolstoy, the light is constant, uniform, and diffuse: All objects are brightly colored in the same way, visible from all sides, there are no dark parts at all.And Dolce's works are just like Rembrandt's paintings, and it is the dark part that is particularly important.Dostoevsky gathers characters and events together, casts strong light, makes them stand out from only one side, and each character is immersed in the dark part.We also discover Dostoevsky's peculiar need to gather together, to create as many connections and interrelationships as possible among the members of the novel.In him, the flow of events is not as slow and even as in Stendhal or Tolstoy. There is always a moment in the flow, vortex, event crisscross, intertwined; , psychic, external - sinking and reappearing, lost and regained.There is no simplicity in him, he loves to make complicated, never gets tired of it, and is old at it.Emotions, thoughts, passions do not appear purely.He does not describe anything in isolation.I am finally about to comment on the layout of Dostoyevsky's novel, on his conception of character, but allow me to read a few passages from Jacques Rivière on this subject first: "When a novelist conceives a character in his mind, he has two completely different methods: he either blindly complicates the character, or highlights the rigor of its structure; the creature he wants to shape can either be left to be complicated and confusing, or he can see it clearly and vividly. Describe it clearly to the readers; or hide it for the time, ambush it for use, or tell it all in detail." ("New France Review", February 1, 1922) You can see what Jacques Rivière had in mind, that is, the French school of novelists explores the mystery and sees the light, while some foreign writers, especially Dostoevsky, respect and protect the hidden meaning of their characters. In dense fog and thick clouds.Riviere went on to write: "In any case, Dostoevsky is most concerned with the depth of the characters, like deep streams and caves, carefully planning the twists and turns, making people feel unfathomable. "... "We, on the contrary, are often faced with the inner complexity of characters, and as we try to reproduce its complexity, we instinctively arrange it." (ibid.) That's pretty serious already, but he added: "When necessary, we lend a helping hand, erasing ramifications and describing a few obscure details whose meaning is most conducive to forming a psychological unity. "... "In short, blocking all the intersections leading to deep streams and caves is our current tendency." (Ibid.) I am not so sure that there are not a few deep creeks, cliffs and incredible abysses in Balzac's works, nor do I fully believe that Dostoevsky's abyss is as deep as people imagined at first. That was unbelievable.Let me introduce to you an example of deep streams and caves in Balzac's works. What do you think?I found it in The Absolute Quest.In his search for the philosopher's stone, Balthazar Craeus apparently forgot all the religious education of his childhood.In his quest, he casts aside his pious wife, Josephine, who fears her husband's free-thinking.One day, she suddenly broke into the laboratory.After the door was opened, the draft caused the explosion.Madame Claer fainted... What did Balthazar's yell mean?This cry suddenly reappeared his childhood beliefs, breaking through layers of accumulation of thoughts: "Thank God, you are still alive! The Holy Spirit spares you from death!" Balzac stopped and did not make any progress.If twenty people read this book, surely nineteen would not even notice Balthazar's gaffe, the depth of which this fault line allows us to glimpse rather unexplained than unexplained.Actually, Balzac wasn't interested in that.In him it is important to make his characters consistent.At this point, the sentiments of Balzac and the French race are closely related.Because it is logic that we French cannot do without for a moment. I can also say that not only the characters of Balzac's "Comedy Humane" but also our living comic characters show that all of us French, as long as we are French, always draw ourselves, according to one of Balzac's The ideal outlines itself.The inconsistency of our temperament, no matter how much it may be, embarrasses us, makes us laugh.So they simply refused to admit it, tried every means to ignore it, and made the big thing small.Each of us is conscious of our own singularity, of our own continuity; what remains in us ascetic, unconscious, is like the emotion we see suddenly reappearing in Klae.The reason why we can't make it disappear, at least shows that we are constantly paying attention to it.We have been doing things as we conceived to do as human beings as people of faith.What governs most of our actions is not our liking, but our need to imitate ourselves, our need to project our past onto our future.We sacrifice authenticity, that is, sincerity, for the continuity and purity of our lineage. What does Dostoevsky describe for us in this regard?The characters he describes don't care about consistency at all, are happy to contradict themselves, don't care about contradictions, and have a temperament that can withstand all kinds of negation.It is inconsistency that seems to interest Dostoevsky most.Instead of hiding or hiding, he keeps highlighting, pointing out and guiding the contradictions of the characters. There is certainly a great deal unexplained in Dorothy's writings, but I don't think there is much inconceivable.Once we accept Dostoyevsky's enlightenment, that is, there are conflicting emotions in people.In Doshi's works, this kind of coexistence often seems particularly unreasonable, so that the characters' emotions are pushed to extremes, even to the point of absurdity. I think it is best to emphasize here again, because you may think: we are not unfamiliar with this, is it not the confrontation between passion and duty, which has been shown in Corneille's works.That's not the case.The French hero in Corneille's works casts himself in an ideal model, makes himself consistent with the model, hopes to become such a model, forces himself to be such a model, does not become a model naturally, does not become a model by naivete .The inner confrontation that Corneille describes for us is between the ideal man, the exemplary man, and the natural man, whom the hero strives to reject.All in all, I think we are not far from what Jules Gaultier called Bovaryism: a theory he created based on Flaubert's heroine, Madame Bovary, that some people tend to use The imaginary life doubles one's own life, tends to suspend one's own real person and become the person one imagines one expects. Every hero, every human being, who stays in isolation, always strives towards an ideal, and submits to it, becomes a model of duality, a model of Bovaryism. The characters we see in Dostoevsky's novels, the type of double personality he presents to us, are very different from the Bovary type; and have little or nothing to do with the pathological type: Morbid typicals are quite common, one character enters another, the former alternates with the latter, the union of two sets of sensations, the union of two sets of memories is formed without mutual ventilation, and soon we find that the same body contains two Two different personalities, two boarding guests.The two give way to each other, one first and the other behind, taking turns to sit in the manor, and they don't know each other.Stevenson gives us an excellent example in his wonderful magical story "Dr. Jekyll". In Dostoevsky, however, what is puzzling is the fact that the dual personalities go hand in hand, that each character is aware of his inconsistency, of his duality. Occasionally, when a protagonist of Doshi was tormented by extremely strong emotions, he suddenly became suspicious, whether it was because of hatred or love.The two opposite emotions are intertwined and inseparable. "Suddenly, Raskolnikov felt that he hated Sonia, and yet, amazed, even horrified, by such a strange new discovery, he suddenly looked up and fixed his eyes on the girl. The hatred disappeared from him at once. Not so Something. He was mistaken about the nature of the emotion he was experiencing." (Vol. II, p. 152) We also find several examples of such misinterpretations by individuals of the emotions they feel in the work of Marivaux and Racine. Sometimes, a certain emotion is exhausted after being overly exaggerated, as if the expression of this emotion makes the expresser himself embarrassed, so there is no duality of emotion.But there is a different world in Tuo's works.Listen to what father Versilov said in "The Boy": "What do you say that I'm soft-spoken and I'm so sad about it... Isn't that right. I know I'm incredibly strong. Where, you ask, is my strength? It's precisely in being uncommonly attuned to everyone and everything. The wise men of my generation The Russians are highly endowed with this ability. I am immobile, rock-solid, undisturbed. I have the tenacious vitality of a watchdog. I am at ease with two opposing emotions, which exist at the same time, without compulsion, without compulsion." ( "Youth", page 232, see Appendix 1) The narrator specifically emphasized: "I am not responsible for explaining the coexistence of opposite emotions", so let's listen to Versilov's words again: "I have a lot to say, but I just can't say it. I feel like I'm split in two," he surveyed us all, with a very serious face and a sincere, convincing tone. Divided in two, I was really scared because of it. It felt like your double was standing next to you. You were smart and reasonable, but the other you insisted on doing ridiculous things. Suddenly, you found that it was You want to do something ridiculous yourself. You resist it with all your strength, but you can't help it. I once knew a doctor who couldn't help whistling at his father's funeral, in church. The reason why I didn't come to the funeral today, Just because I'm sure I'll whistle or laugh like that doctor, and that unfortunate doctor ended up pretty badly." (The Boy, p. 552) ... "Versilov was not thinking of any fixed object at the time. Suddenly, a gale of opposite emotions roiled his mind. I don't think it was an episode of madness in this case, especially today, he is not mad at all. But I tentatively assume it was his 'substitution syndrome.' A new book by an expert confirms my claim...'substitution syndrome' marks the first stage of a severe neurological derangement that can lead to rather tragic results.” (ibid., page 607) Stavrogin, the queer protagonist, declares: "I can, and have always done, desire to do good, and feel pleasure in doing it. But at the same time, I want to do evil, and feel equally satisfied in doing it." (Second vol., p. 47) we also read in Baudelaire's book: "everyone has at any time two petitions at the same time, one to God and the other to Satan". (Baudelaire's "Private Diary" page 57) I would like to try to clarify these apparent contradictions with the aid of a few words from William Blake, especially concerning Stavrogin's above-mentioned curious statement.But I save this attempt at explanation for a later time.