How to Start Reading Dostoevsky

Perov painted him in 1872 for Pavel Tretyakov: hands locked, the forehead already a landscape. It is the face people mean when they say Dostoevsky — not the young engineer, not the prisoner, but the man who had come back from Siberia and learned to make novels out of arguments that can kill. Britannica’s life follows a writer for whom an idea was never only an idea. In Crime and Punishment a student gambles on a theory and discovers that a murdered pawnbroker does not stay inside a theory. That is the whole path, if a path can be a room: take a thought that sounds clean in a pamphlet, put it in a hungry body, and watch the body refuse to stay clean.

Fyodor Mikhailovich was born in Moscow on 11 November 1821, 30 October Old Style, the son of a doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor. He trained as a military engineer, then left the service for literature. Poor Folk (1846) made him, briefly, the new hope of the natural school. The next years were harsher. He joined the Petrashevsky circle, a group that read forbidden socialist texts. In 1849 he was arrested. After months in the Peter and Paul Fortress he was taken, with others, to Semyonovsky Square and made to face a firing squad. The reprieve from Nicholas I arrived at the last minute. It had been part of the punishment. He was sent to Omsk, to four years of hard labour, then to army service in Semipalatinsk. The biography is famous because it is theatrical. The books are famous because they found a form for what the square had done to a mind: a voice that knows it might stop, and cannot stop.

The 1863 photograph is the face after that. He had returned to writing, founded a journal with his brother Mikhail, watched it die, and begun the books in which a mind argues with itself until the room feels too small. The House of the Dead (1860–62), drawn from the prison years, had already shown that he could write suffering without making it picturesque. A prison is not a metaphor. A flogging is not a symbol of the soul. Men live there, and some of them laugh, and the narrator has to learn that his own education is not a moral rank. The later novels keep that refusal. A fallen woman is not a symbol of the people. A child at a funeral is not a proof. They are people in rooms. The difference from Tolstoy is often put too neatly — one the estate, the other the city — but it is fair to say Dostoevsky rarely lets landscape do the moral work. The pressure is indoor, vocal, sleepless.

Notes from Underground (1864) is the hinge. A bitter clerk refuses the crystal palace of rational happiness and insists on his right to be spiteful. The underground man is not a hero. He is a method: let the speaker talk until the theory cracks. He will not be improved. He will not be grateful. He will not enter the palace of reason even if the palace is kind. From here the great novels come in a rush that looks, from outside, like disaster — epilepsy, gambling, debt, the death of his first wife — and from inside like a workshop that never closed. The underground is not a basement in Petersburg only. It is the place in a novel where a voice is allowed to be wrong at length, so that the wrongness can be heard as thought and not as a label.

I am a sick man. . . . I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.

Garnett’s three sentences are a door, not a diagnosis. The dots are part of the music: a man who cannot finish even his first claim about himself. What follows is a quarrel with the nineteenth century’s hope that if you show people their advantage they will take it. The underground man will take the opposite, on purpose, to prove he is not a piano key. The cruelty of the book is that his freedom looks like spite, and his spite looks like a wound. Dostoevsky does not ask you to like him. He asks you to notice that a utopia which cannot house this voice is not a house. Later novels will put other voices in other rooms. They will not return to the comfort of a narrator who knows better than the speaker. The fever is the form.

Crime and Punishment (1866) was written in the same season as The Gambler, which he dictated to Anna Snitkina to meet a publisher’s trap; she became his second wife. Raskolnikov, a former student in a Petersburg garret, decides that extraordinary men — Napoleon is the example — may step over blood. Utilitarian arithmetic says the old pawnbroker’s money could serve many. Another voice says there is no good and evil, only prejudice. A third, which he will not admit, hates her because she is cruel to the weak. He kills her, and kills her sister who walks in. The rest of the book is the city walking through him: the detective Porfiry, the sex worker Sonya, the sister, the heat. Britannica is exact: contradictory motives all draw him to the crime. The novel does not pick one. It makes him live with all of them.

That is why the book will not stay a detective story, though it begins like one. The puzzle is not who did it. The puzzle is what a murder does to the air in a rented room. Raskolnikov’s cupboard is too small for the theory and the body. He walks the Haymarket. He rehearses confessions he will not make. Porfiry talks in circles that are also a kindness, or a trap, or both. Sonya reads the raising of Lazarus to a murderer, and the scene works because both of them are ashamed. If you want a thesis, you can extract one: that a human being cannot live as an exception. The novel is larger than the thesis. It is the weather of a city in summer, a family in debt, a man who thought an axe could simplify the world.

Sonya is easy to misread as a saint pasted onto a crime story. The book does not paste. She is poor, she is ashamed, she reads because reading is what she has. Raskolnikov bows to her and says he is bowing to suffering; the gesture is too large and she knows it. The confession, when it comes, is not a legal victory for Porfiry. It is a man who can no longer bear the air in his own chest. Siberia, at the end, is not a moral cartoon. It is a climate in which a new feeling might begin, and the novel is honest enough not to make that feeling pretty. Petersburg is not a backdrop in any of this. It is a climate: stairwells, mud, a heat that will not cool. The fever is the city’s and the student’s at once.

Nikolai Doss photographed him seated in 1876, in the years of A Writer’s Diary, the periodical in which he spoke as a citizen and a prophet and was not always wise. Between Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov he wrote The Idiot (1868–69) and Demons (1871–72). Prince Myshkin, in The Idiot, is a good man who cannot live in the world he enters. Other characters remember him saying that beauty will save the world. He does not quite say it that way. He says beauty is a riddle. The phrase stuck because the book is a long looking at faces — Nastasya Filippovna’s, the prince’s — as if a face could be a moral fact. Myshkin’s goodness is not a programme. It is a helplessness that the drawing-rooms cannot use. They talk him into their plots. He cannot plot. The catastrophe is not that goodness loses. It is that goodness, without a language the world shares, becomes another kind of damage.

In Basel in 1867 Dostoevsky stood before Holbein’s Dead Christ, the body laid out without a hint of resurrection. In the novel Myshkin says that a man could lose his faith looking at such a picture. Ippolit, dying and furious, cannot leave it alone. The painting is not a Russian image. Dostoevsky puts it in a Petersburg room because his subject is what happens to belief when the corpse is only a corpse. That is the creative path in another form: take the European picture, the socialist pamphlet, the courtroom, the monastery, and force them to share a house. The Idiot is the book of that house. It will not let faith remain a comfort, and it will not let unbelief remain a pose. The body on the panel is a fact the conversations have to walk around. Some of them walk into it.

Demons watches a provincial town catch fire from a circle of radicals; it is among his most political books and should be read as a novel, not as a tract. A cell, a murder, a fire, a suicide: the plot is sensational because the ideas are. Nikolai Stavrogin walks through the book like a hole other people fall into. Pyotr Verkhovensky talks revolution as if talk were already a knife. Stepan Trofimovich, the older liberal, is comic and then suddenly not. Dostoevsky had seen circles. He had been punished as if a reading group were a conspiracy. The novel does not therefore become a police file. It becomes a study of how a phrase can occupy a person until the person is only the phrase. If you want politics, Demons will not flatter you. If you want a warning pamphlet, you will miss the jokes, the shame, and the provincial weather that make the warning a book.

The Adolescent (1875) is the uneven middle child, a young man’s hunger for a “random family” and for a father who will not stay still. Then The Brothers Karamazov, published serially from 1879: the father murdered, the three sons — sensual Mitya, intellectual Ivan, the novice Alyosha — each a way of being in the world, none sufficient alone. Smerdyakov, the servant who may be a fourth son, is the plot’s dark hinge: a person other people use as a theory until the theory kills. The murder mystery is a bait. The book’s real machinery is a set of conversations that will not end when the chapter ends.

Ivan will not accept a world in which children are tortured, even if harmony comes later. He tells the parable of the Grand Inquisitor, who would correct Christ’s freedom with bread and miracle. Dostoevsky does not refute Ivan with a pamphlet. He sets Zosima, Alyosha, and the death of a boy named Ilyusha beside the argument, and lets the reader feel the weight. Scholars still dispute whether that is an answer. The novel knows it is a risk.

Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.

The Inquisitor’s sentence is the underground man’s argument raised to a civilization. Freedom hurts; bread is kinder; miracle and authority will do the rest. Ivan’s poem is not Dostoevsky’s sermon. It is Ivan’s mind at full pressure, and the book is large enough to let that mind speak until it is almost convincing. Almost is the point. Beside it Zosima talks of hell as the suffering of being unable to love. Alyosha kisses the earth. A child is carried to a funeral and the boys shout a hurrah that would be cheap in another novel and here is almost unbearable. The form is the argument: not a verdict, a household of voices. You can leave the book with Ivan. You can leave it with the hurrah. The honest reading is to notice that the novel will not let you leave with only one.

The trial of Mitya is the same household in public. Lawyers speak well. Evidence is arranged. The crowd enjoys a spectacle. The man in the dock is guilty of much and not of the murder as charged. Dostoevsky had sat in a courtroom as a prisoner; he knew how a room can decide a life without quite seeing it. The scene is not a pamphlet against juries. It is a novel’s joke at the expense of any voice that thinks it has the last word — including, perhaps, the novelist’s. Smerdyakov’s confession to Ivan happens off the official stage, in a room that the trial will never enter. That is the book’s cruelty and its justice: the truth and the verdict do not share a table.

Fathers and teachers, I ponder, “What is hell?” I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

The sentence belongs to a monk in the last novel. It is not a slogan against crime. It is the other pole of Dostoevsky’s path: after the underground, after the axe, a voice that treats love as the only action that is still possible. Love, here, is not a feeling that improves a character. It is work, and a failure to do it is a kind of death while the body is still moving. That is why the underground man, who will not love, is in hell already, and why Raskolnikov’s confession is not a legal scene only. The novels keep putting that demand in rooms too small for it. Readers either cannot stop or cannot start. Both reactions are honest. A book that asks a thought to become a life will always feel like an invasion to someone who wanted only a story.

He is often called a philosopher in spite of himself. The better description is a dramatist of thought. Ivan does not “represent” atheism; he cannot sleep. Zosima does not “represent” faith; he tells a life. Myshkin does not “represent” goodness; he has a face people cannot look away from, and a helplessness they cannot use. If you want a detective story, Crime and Punishment will start like one and then refuse to stay that shape. If you want a saint’s life, The Idiot will give you a saint who wrecks a drawing-room. If you want a political warning, Demons will give you a town and a hole in the shape of a man. The creative path is this refusal: every genre he touches becomes a confession.

Shapiro’s 1879 photograph is the last famous still: the beard, the stare, The Brothers Karamazov still coming out in parts. He died in St Petersburg on 9 February 1881, 28 January Old Style, before he could write the life of Alyosha he is said to have planned next. The funeral drew crowds. The books have not stopped drawing them. A first reader need not begin with the largest room. Begin with Crime and Punishment if you can stand a murder that will not stay in chapter one. Begin with Notes from Underground if you want the method in a hundred pages. The Idiot is the book of the face and the Holbein. The Brothers Karamazov is the book in which a joke, a sermon, a trial, and a child’s funeral are asked to share a soul. Pushkin had made Russian flexible. Dostoevsky made it feverish. He is not a guide to what you should think about God or crime. He is a writer who will not let a thought remain merely interesting.