Some Thoughts on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky

Having avoided the task for a long time, I finally and impulsively decided to read Anna Karenina. It took me a long time - too long - but I am done, and now it remains for me to reflect upon the novel and my impressions of it.

I avoided Tolstoy's longer work for a long time in part because I was devoted to Dostoevsky and I have too often seen the two writers placed in opposition, as if Tolstoy and Dostoevsky represented the extremes of some kind of aesthetic-ethical-metaphysical spectrum, where Tolstoy was expansive, powerful, life-affirming, didactic, heretical, and almost, kind-of worthy of membership in Western civilization, while Dostoevsky was feverish, morbid, monomaniacally preoccupied with the psychological consequences of modernity, reactionary, polemical, but somehow open-ended and unfinalized - the author of polyphonic novels, but wild-eyed and utterly Eastern.

This caricature does not do justice to what I liked - and still like - about Dostoevsky's work, but it does, I think, suggest what I understood to be the essence of the Tolstoian novel - that is, something firmly grounded both in Tolstoy's moral views and in the tradition of the realist novel. Dostoevsky produced extreme, archetypal characters who were more real than real - more internally intense, more preoccupied, more vividly drawn than real people, who do not have the advantages of compressed novelistic space and time in which to concentrate their passions - and Dostoevsky's works are as concentrated and compressed as they come. Unlike Raskolnikov, we have to go to the bathroom. Unlike Alyosha Karamazov, we get annoyed by lines at the DMV. Dostoevsky's characters are obsessed with ideas to such an extent that the ideas speak through them and leave little in the way of a human remainder. I love the dramatic intensity of Dostoevsky's novels - the monologues, the minimal scenery, the compressed, stage-like environments, the preeminence of dialogue in establishing characters and moving the plot. Dostoevsky's works engage with the isolated, metaphysically tormented victims of the modern urban world. As such, they distort the novelistic world in proportion with the modern preoccupations and neuroses of their characters.

The voice that appears in Dostoevsky's non-fiction, or the voice applied to Dostoevsky by conventional interpetations, posits reactionary Orthodox Christianity as the solution to his characters' inability to live. If Chirst and reason stand in contradiction, it is presumably necessary and desirable to chose Christ. But this decision is plainly impossible - for all the progeny of the Underground Man, for anyone capable of conceiving such characters, and for any modern human being generally. Dostoevsky's characters remain distinct from the author, their problems unresolved, their voices not fully integrated into the works they inhabit.

But one of the problems with these characters is that they, as personified ideas - as the long monolologues of preoccupied and isolated people - seem, by and large, to lack self-awareness. The Underground man mocks himself, but his mockery consists of the same corrosive reasoning as his initial train of thought. He cannot escape this mode of expression. He can turn on himself, but he cannot, having grown disgusted with the circularity of his thoughts, stand up and leave his room. He lacks the insight for such an act.

Tolstoy's Levin is, in that regard, a strikingly human character. He is wracked by the same metaphysical anxiety as Ivan Karamazov, but he does not exist to contemplate that anxiety. Not only does he have a life (and Tolstoy creates an enormous world in which that life can exist - which it cannot do in Dostoevsky's musty rooms and dingy haymarkets) which distracts him from his contemplation, but he is also too multi-faceted, too changeable, and too easily distracted for the idea, even though it torments him to the point of suicidal despair, to become coterminous with Levin, like Raskolnikov becomes the logical progression of his own idea.

Levin fascinates me. It is all too easy to integrate him into that old opposition - between the breadth of Tolstoy, the man who cannot choose between the wordly and the afterworldly and the depth of Dostoevsky, who has stared too long into the abyss and is now consumed by it. But the brilliant vividness with which Tolstoy portrays Levin's frustration - frustration to the point of tears - when he discovers that his hunting companions have eaten all the food while he was away and that he will have to go hungry, or the tenderness he experiences toward his newborn son - all this strikes me not so much because of the masterfully rendered verisimillitude, but because Levin escapes the tyrrany of the polemic in a way that Dostoevsky's characters - for all the power of their individual voices - do not. Levin lives. And for all the certainty of his conversion at the end, it is reasonable to expect that his questions are no more resovled than those of Dostoevsky's characters.

This is of course the smallest part of Anna Karenina. Levin stands in opposition to the eponymous heroine, and the simplest reading of the novel is a polemical comparision of spontaneous passion to tender familial love. Anna lets her passion consume her, and the end is only the logical consequence of such an act, while Levin tests his love against dispair and is, somehow, absurdely, rewarded with a gradually maturing happiness. But Anna is striking because there is no way out from her at any point, since Aleksei Aleksandrovich is a pompous hypocrite, if a relatively benign one, and Tolstoy is not prepared to suggest that Anna could have submitted to the degradation of an empty marriage in a society of fools for the sake of her son, or any such Dostoevskian solution. The son is necessary but not sufficient, and so is Vronsky, and since they are irreconcilable, Anna is doomed.

The reader is also denied any substantive insight into Anna's personality. We know her disgust, her frustration, her passionate feelings, but we know nothing of her origin, her doubts, or the banalities of her life - the banalities that make Levin so complex and so conflicted. This contrast between the two characters is no doubt important, but I'm not sure what to make of it. Why is the heroine of the novel so opaque?

I read a comment somewhere online that Tolstoy wanted to punish Anna, and that the novel is the fulfillment of this perverted desire, as if Tolstoy were bitter about Anna's courageous self-assertion. This does not seem to be an adequate or reasonable explanation. It is certainly easy enough to posit Anna as a modern woman, ahead of her time and condemned to languish in a repressive patriarchal society, but what kills her is not the hypocrisy of the society, which is duly explored in the novel, but the inevitable consequence of her obedience to her passions. The latter seems like a central Tolstoyan theme - that this sort of mindless adherence to whim is no better than the pursuit of an ordinary and terrible life. The difference between Anna and her philandering brother is not just that he easily gets away with his crimes, but that he doesn't care about them. Vronsky gets away with his and does care - and it almost kills him. His membership in the patriarchy may give him carte blanche to steal other men's wives, but that doesn't stop him from putting a bullet through his chest when he thinks Anna is dying or to go to the Balkans in search of a Byronic death when she throws herself under a train. There is a great deal of despair in Anna Karenina. It is not so much that society causes it as it is that society cannot accomodate or acknowledge it. A discussion of Anna Karenina as a novel about Russian upper-class society is what kept me away from the book for so long in the first place.

These fragmentary thoughts will have to do for now.

It goes without saying that Tolstoy's style is fascinating. Anna Karenina's last moments are conveyed in what has got to be one of the first instances of stream of consciousness in literature.

But one other thing: Dostoevsky offers Christianity as the solution as if in complete ignorance of the non-Christian world (except for a few moments of horrifying anti-Semitism). Levin is at least not so blind as to make Pascal's wager. He cannot believe that historical accident has given him access to the one true religion. His saving delusion is that historical accident has given him access to acceptable answers and answerable questions.