Morson starts out with the whole nine yards: time, narrative, meaning, life on earth. Darwin. It's demented how much he expects to find in Dostoevsky, and yet, I think his chances are good. Reading Morson simultaneously with Brothers Karamazov, Geir Kjetsaa's biography of Dostoevsky (Dostoevsky, A Writer's Life), Bakhtin and Leatherbarrow (and others) is an exhilarating - even hair-raising - experience. A perfect summer on the beach. I especially enjoyed the Bakhtin on the "carnivalesque" in Dostoevsky (in particular, 129-135). Bakhtin says that "this carnival sense of the world (a world turned upside down, where up is down, and in is out) possesses a mighty life-creating and transforming power, an indestructible vitality" (107). How true that is! And in Leatherbarrow. Faith Wigzell's essay on Folk Heritage in Russia, I am reminded of Chagall's luboks, many of which which were censored. Wigzell mentions luboks briefly (25), but the famous vanishing "lithograph" for which Dostoevsky was condemned would have been a lubok-type of publication - a broadsheet intended for the semi- or illiterate reader, a folkloric tradition that would also resonate with the illiterate.
Kjetsaa mentions in passing Dostoevsky's putting on a play in the prison yard, or ostrog, in Omsk (152). He later describes in greater detail Private Dostoevsky mounting a play together with a clerk in his Batallion, in the far eastern town (near the Chinese border) of Semipalatinsk, where the author was serving out his sentence as a common soldier following his release from prison, in 1854 (109). Although the play was a flop (the cast was drunk and disorderly), a drunken carnival, Dostoevsky is to be applauded for carrying on with the theatrical tradition in these dreadful circumstances. This is indeed an indomitable spirit. However, it is a comedic turn impossible to imagine in the cesspit of Auschwitz. For some reason, I throw down Kjetsaa's biography and take up Levi's "The Drowned and the Saved." Only later do I realize that Morson set out to co-write a book with his friend, Michael Andre Bernstein, and at one point the friends' path separated into two streams: Morson to write his book about Dostoevsky and time, and Bernstein to write about the holocaust, for which he uses the Hebrew word "Shoah," and so shall I. Foundational to the two efforts were Dostoevsky's musing about evil in the world. How can there be a living god in such a world?
I think of Primo Levi's writing about Auschwitz. How much less cruel prison in the 1850s is than prison in the 1940s! The two great wars had not hardened Europe and Russia's hearts entirely. Kjetsaa makes this clear: that while Dostoevsky's prison was insufferably difficult, and often fatal to those beaten, so agonizingly portrayed in "Memoirs of the House of the Dead," it was not the prison suffered by, say Levi, or Solzhenitsyn: those prisons were incomparably worse. (Kjetsaa remarks darkly that a good day for Solzenitzyn would have been a bad day for Dostoevsky). One thinks of the Grand Inquisitor, how his Rule had yet to be perfected to such a degree of horror (Auschwitz) in Dostoevsky's time. Dostoevsky's musings about good and evil, based on his experiences at the end of the nineteenth century, seem inadequate to the task of confronting the evil unleashed in the twentieth century. In "Brothers Karamazov" there is a rejection of social change - European courts, peasant education and equality, and economic justice - and an embracing of the old values - property, church and aristocracy - that was ill advised. Alas, he ended up in bed with the Devil, and there was the Devil to pay. About Dostoevsky, Levi says, "Among my dislikes, there's Dostoevsky . . .read out of duty, and late in life, with some struggle and little profit," adding vis a vis the idea that Socialism promotes the kind of cruelty Dostoevsky imagined, that Siberian prison camps were quite alive in Dostoevsky's pre-Socialist time, and while "it is possible to imagine Socialism without prison camps . . . a Nazism without concentration camps is, instead, unimaginable ("Voice"101, 146, 196). I see Morson, searching for a way to assimilate Dostoevsky's exploration of the nature of good and evil into a Jewish history of the twentieth century. Morson's gentle prosiacs suggest a daily, minute path through a decent life, where pain and suffering may be ameliorated, or even more ardently, describing a myriad of alternative chronotypes where inevitable outcomes, like the Final Solution, might be, even could have been, avoided by some more fortunate roulette of chance. By contrast, his friend Bernstein, author of "Foregone Conclusions," cannot avoid the fact of history, of six million dead: his work is no apology for God or plea for decency. It rings out, "never forget." Do not bargain with God.
Like Primo Levi, Dostoevsky divides his fellow prisoners in Omsk into categories. For Levi, there are only the saved and the damned. Levi's damned, the musselmen, or Muslims, are marked as walking dead. They have lost faith, dignity, and the will or interest in living. No one bothers with them anymore, they are not offered trades for food or favor, no one wakes them for roll call. They may as well be dead already. The precious spark left in life is reserved for the living. It is not unkindness; it's reality. By contrast, Dostoevsky's categories are "luxurious:" the good and happy, the evil and dark, and the despairing (Kjetsaa 97). There is still yet room for philosophizing, there is time enough for a play. Dostoevsky developed the kernel of his spiritual beliefs in Omsk, but this faith did not find full, felt, expression, I believe, until his marriage to Anna Spitkin and the death of his first-born child, the three-month old Sonya.
