What Made Dostoevsky's Work Immortal
How Dostoevsky’s Crafted Timeless Art
Along with air, earth, water, and fire, money is the fifth natural force a human being has to reckon with most often. This is one, if not the main, reason why today, one hundred years after Dostoevsky’s death, his novels preserve their relevance. – Joseph Brodsky.
Joseph Brodsky is a name I wasn’t familiar with until a few months ago. I read about him for the first time in one of the pieces in The New Yorker magazine. I enjoyed reading that piece. Whenever I like some writing that makes a good impression of another author, then often I do more research about the recommended author and if the appeal remains I go ahead and buy their books and either put them in the library to be read later or, if the urge is strong, I try to read as soon as I get my hands on them. So I went ahead and bought a book of essays, titled “Less than one”, by Joseph Brodsky.
I’m glad I did.
He didn’t write ordinary essays, some of his essays are profound. Just as a beautiful sunrise captures your gaze, some of his insightful prose holds your attention. Joseph Brodsky’s mastery of language isn’t surprising given his background as a poet, the mastery shines through in his prose. If you enjoy reading good prose, you’ll miss out on a real treat if you don’t read prose written by a skilled poet like him.
As an aside, I just discovered that he died at the age of 57 and, judging by the amount and quality of his wiring, it seems he lived quite a life (not to forget he also won a Nobel prize for literature).
Anyway, back to his essays. One of his essays is about Dostoevsky, one of the great Russian novelists, and it’s a profound one not just because it’s about a profound writer but because it offers some subtle insights about Dostoevsky’s work.
Immortality of Dostoevsky’s art is unquestionable; his art will likely continue to live on. One of the first questions that Brodsky tackles in his essay is why do Dostoevsky's works preserve their relevance? Brodsky notes (though the following is quoted at the top, but repeating here for convenience):
“Along with air, earth, water, and fire, money is the fifth natural force a human being has to reckon with most often. This is one, if not the main, reason why today, one hundred years after Dostoevsky’s death, his novels preserve their relevance.”
Money never followed Dostoevsky; he had to follow it. Just as sharks pursue their prey, debtors and deadlines pursued him. There is a story about him that gives chills. He once signed a contract with a publisher on perilous terms: if he missed the deadline, the publisher would gain the rights to all his current and future works. He had one year to complete the project, but he did nothing for eleven months. In the final month, he hired a stenographer and dictated the entire book to her and, remarkably, he finished the book just in time. (And a few days later, he married the stenographer, a fitting celebration perhaps.) It's somewhat comforting to know that even great minds procrastinated heavily! But yes, they also produced timeless art.
Near the start of the essay, Brodsky notes: “For the best way to avoid mistakes in dealing with the future is to perceive it through the prism of poverty or guilt.”
There is something to ponder here. The road from poverty to prosperity is never guaranteed, but poverty can drive people to prosperity if people develop the required discipline and relentless drive for excellence. The lives of many great men and women stand as a testament to this.
Brodsky then comes back to the part where he connects the dots about why money is the reason Dostoevsky's work preserves relevance. Brodsky shares an excerpt about Dostoevsky from the diary of Russian socialite Elizaveta Stackenschneider:
“. . . but he is a petit bourgeois, yes, a petit bourgeois. Not of the gentry, nor of the clergy, not a merchant, nor an odd ball, like an artist or scholar, but precisely a petit bourgeois. And yet this petit bourgeois is the most profound thinker and a writer of genius . . . Now he frequents the house of the aristocracy and even those of the high nobility, and of course he bears himself with dignity, and yet the petit bourgeois in him trickles through. It can be spotted in certain traits, surfacing in private conversation, but most of all, in his works . . . in his depiction of big capital he will always regard 6,000 rubles as a vast amount of money.”
And Brodsky comments:
“What Mme Stackenschneider, a product of her epoch’s social stratification, calls petit bourgeois is known today as middle class, as defined in terms of annual income and not social affiliation. In other words, the said amount means neither great riches nor screaming poverty, but a tolerable human condition: a condition that makes one human.”
And he continues:
“A writer who regards six thousand rubles as a vast amount of money operates, therefore, on the same physical and psychological plan as the majority of people; i.e., he deals with life on its own general terms, since, like every natural process, human life gravitates toward moderation. Conversely, a writer who belongs to the upper echelon of society or to its lower depths will invariably produce a somewhat distorted picture of existence, for, in either case, he would regard it at too sharp an angle. Criticism of society (which is a nickname for life) from either above or below may produce a great read; but it’s only an inside job that can supply you with moral imperatives.
Furthermore, a middle-class writer’s own position is precarious enough to make him view what goes on below with considerable keenness. Alternatively, the situation above, due to its physical proximity, lacks in celestial appeal. Numerically, to say the least, a middle-class writer deals with a greater variety of plights, increasing, by the same token, the size of his audience. In any case, this is one way to account for the wide readership enjoyed by Dostoevsky, as well as by Melville, Balzac, Hardy, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner. It looks as if the equivalent of six thousand rubles ensures great literature.”
This is an incisive observation. It’s not to say that the rich can’t write but, generally speaking, and as Brodsky hints above, a precarious financial condition is often a precondition for great literature, especially one with moral imperatives. There is something profound about the human condition which is not too rich and not too poor to have sensibilities required to produce great literature. Just enough suffering that fuels great literature.
Perhaps there is another reason, beyond the precarious position of the middle-class writer: a middle-class person must navigate every twist and turn of life on their own. And when you confront life at every turn, you can’t escape its realities. You inevitably notice nuances of human psychology and morality that a wealthy person might miss, as luxuries can keep them at a distance.
Life wasn’t easy for many great writers, and honestly, there would have been nothing remarkable about their lives if they had been easy. Many struggled financially. I randomly looked up the profiles of a few Nobel prize winners in literature. Though my data sample is small, none of them had a great financial situation when they were starting as a writer. Gabriel García Márquez, a Nobel Prize winner, while writing his magnum opus One Hundred Years of Solitude, “sold his car so his family would have money to live on while he wrote. Writing the novel took far longer than he expected; he wrote every day for 18 months. His wife had to ask for food on credit from their butcher and baker as well as nine months of rent on credit from their landlord.” [1] The road to greatness for him wasn’t built with riches. Those 18 months seemed far from a “tolerable human condition,” and you’ve got to give him credit for mustering all his talent and courage to not only produce, under such difficult circumstances, another book, but to create a remarkable work of fiction that brought South American literature into the spotlight. Most people lose their wits when they don't know how they'll put food on the table next month.
Another Nobel prize winner, William Faulkner, was born in poverty. He first attempted to join the army but later dropped out. “After dropping out, he took a series of odd jobs: at a New York City bookstore, as a carpenter in Oxford, and as the Ole Miss postmaster. He resigned from the post office with the declaration: ‘I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp.’“ [2] Definitely not great riches nor screaming poverty. He also had the courage of a genius because not many have the courage to put out the beck and call of their masters. “By 1932, Faulkner was in need of money. He asked Wasson to sell the serialization rights for his newly completed novel, Light in August, to a magazine for $5,000, but none accepted the offer.” [2] Life must have not been easy for Faulkner.
For another Nobel prize winner, Gabriela Mistral, “Poverty was a constant presence in her early life.” [3] Poverty was a stimulus for another winner, Albert Camus: “ His identity and poor background had a substantial effect on his later life.” [4]
One needs to further this analysis of evaluating financial well-being of great writers with a larger data pool, but none of the above writers had great riches. It seems that a certain kind of financial struggle often serves as a catalyst for writers to produce great works. That may not be true for all writers from all kinds of social and financial backgrounds, but some seem to thrive only under such circumstances.
Another question that often captures my attention, as a writer and a reader, is what makes Dostoevsky a great writer? His narratives? His writing style? Brodsky believes it’s neither. He observes:
“Almost without exception, all his novels are about people in narrow circumstances. This kind of material itself guarantees absorbing reading. However, what turned Dostoevsky into a great writer was neither the inevitable intricacy of his subject matter nor even the unique profundity of his mind and his capacity for compassion; it was the tool or, rather, the texture of the material he was using, i.e., the Russian language.”
He adds:
“Its polysyllabic nature (the average length of a Russian word is three to four syllables) reveals the elemental, primeval force of the phenomena covered by a word a lot better than any rationalization possibly could, and a writer sometimes, instead of developing his thought, stumbles and simply revels in the word’s euphonic contents, thereby sidetracking his issue in an unforeseen direction. And in Dostoevsky’s writing we witness an extraordinary friction, nearly sadistic in its intensity, between the metaphysics of the subject matter and that of the language.
He made the most of Russian’s irregular grammar. His sentences have a feverish, hysterical, idiosyncratic pace and their lexical content is an all but maddening fusion of belles lettres, colloquialisms, and bureaucratese. True, he never wrote at leisure. Much like his characters, he worked to make ends meet: there was always either creditors or a deadline. Still, for a man beset with deadlines, he was extraordinarily digressive, and those digressions, I venture to say, were prompted more by the language than by the requirements of a plot. Reading him simply makes one realize that stream of consciousness springs not from consciousness but from a word which alters or redirects one’s consciousness.”
I must admit, it takes some mastery of language to recognize the subtle role of language, as Brodsky did. After all, only a star can fully appreciate the beauty of another star.
I do wonder though if Dostoevsky’s digressions were only due to the nuances of Russian language? Did not his own suffering, of being a victim to epilepsy and then of Siberian exile, play any part in his narrative explorations? Was it not his intent to dig deeper into moral questions that play some part in his narrative explorations? I believe all this suffering must have played some role in shaping his thoughts and imaginations. A person who hasn’t endured hardship may struggle to capture the subtle complexities of human behavior when faced with adversity.
There is another insight about Dostoevsky that struck a chord with me. Brodsky notes near the end of the essay:
“From classicism, he took the principle that before you come forth with your argument, however right or righteous you may feel, you have to list all the arguments of the opposite side. And it is not that in the process of listing them one is being swayed by the opposite side; it is simply that the listing itself is a mightily absorbing process. One may not in the end drift away from one’s original stance, but after having exhausted all the arguments on behalf of evil, one utters the creed’s dictums with nostalgia rather with fervor. This, in its own way, also fosters the case of verisimilitude.”
This is beautifully expressed. Few can argue their opponent's case better than the opponents themselves. Rare, very rare is this skill, probably because it’s not easy to develop. But when someone possesses it and uses it masterfully, we must listen. Dostoevsky had this gift. Perhaps that’s why we still pay attention to his works. Life would be a little calmer if all were trained to adopt this approach whenever we found ourselves in disagreement.
Overall, the essay sparked some interesting thoughts on the life of a great writer. It’s enlightening to read a critique of Dostoevsky’s work by Joseph Brodsky—not just because his prose is above average, but also because his unique polyglot skills and extensive reading make his perspective stand out.
And it’s hard to refute Brodsky about the fact that being able to argue better can enrich fictional arcs; it can open up many pathways for the writer to follow in his narration that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible. Such an author can offer readers not just a richer reading experience but also a richer emotional experience. If fiction broadens our general awareness, then the writing of an author skilled in analyzing different viewpoints and adept at using language to probe the depths of the human experience also offers us a more profound emotional journey. A journey that stirs our souls.
Is there some correlation between an author's financial situation and the quality of their fiction writing? It's possible that the authors' financial conditions influence how they shape their characters, how their characters talk and act, or even how their characters transform over time. As Brodsky noted, you have to be in a certain kind of a financial situation to gather subtle insights about human psychology and morality. Although this poses an interesting dilemma for those that are financially well off and still want to write with incredible depth: how do they gather such subtle insights? Because though you can adapt the lifestyle of a financially struggling person, it's hard to replicate the state of mind of an impoverished individual. A wealthy person aiming to write great fiction might move into a middle-class neighborhood to experience the "tolerable human condition," but as long as their pockets remain full, they cannot truly capture the mental anguish of someone facing real financial hardship.This line of thought deserves an essay of its own though.
In the end, Brodky’s insightful insights about a great author makes his essay a special one.
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