A Mystic Looks at Swedenborg

In James F. Lawrence's "Testimony to the Invisible: Essays on Swedenborg," Czeslaw Milosz' essay, "Dostoevsky and Swedenborg," points out that when Leonid Grossman published the catalogue of Dostoevsky's library in 1922, no fewer than three books by A.N. Aksakov (1817-1860) on Swedenborg's religious experiences were listed. Swedenborg (1688-1772) was a Swedish industrialist who experienced a sudden conversion at the age of fifty-six. He claimed to have visited Heaven and Hell, and to converse with angels. His religious writing was influential across a wide array of writers: Emerson, Baudelaire, Blake (whose "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" was modeled on Swedenborg's account), Goethe, Jung, Poe, Yeats - a diverse list including, of course, Dostoevsky. Russian artists and painters were also influenced by Swedenborg's etherial views of nature and the cosmos. Father Zosima's dying words, as "transcribed" by Alyosha, reveal some acquaintance with Swedenborgian cosmology. Dear Superaddressee, Natasha does not pretend to know a great deal about Swedenborg, indeed, it is difficult to find anyone who does. With a sinking heart, one reads Milosz' descriptions of Swedenborgian beliefs, and throws up one's hands, and is forced to launch out on one's own, unsupported by such scholarship! Swedenborg believed in the "correspondances" between worlds, the world of angels and spirits, and the present world. Dostoevsky was interested in spiritualism, as well, but was, like William James, unable to make the final commitment (Frank, "Mantle" 214). Swedenborg's system is more or less laid out in this passage, from "Talks and Homilies" of Zosima: "Much on earth is concealed from us, but in place of it we have been granted a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here, but in other worlds. . . . God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this earth, and raised up his garden; and everything that could sprout sprouted, but it lives and grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened or destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies. Then you become indifferent to life, and even come to hate it. I think so" (320). The concept of the animal world as spirit messenger is also throughout the novel: Zosima's bee on its way, the dog and its slavish devotion, the meek-eyed horse who submits to whipping, the innocent green leaves turning their silver undersides to the wind, all sacred. This is a Swedenborgian notion. Dostoevsky also borrowed from Swedenborg the use of color symbolism (see Joel Hunt).

There are other notions of Dostoevsky's, ones that I'd say were Mormon in character, but again, I am no theologian. In Dostoevsky's time, there were a people called "Russian Mormons, " but their origins indicate they are not likely associated with American Latter-day Saints. Missions representing the American Saints, for their part, arguably did not tackle the great expanse of Russia, although Dostoevsky might well have run into a few in Europe during his gambling days. Waves of missionaries were sent to Europe for recruiting purposes beginning in 1837, however, mainly to the British Isles and Scandanavia. In any event, the Book of Mormon was not translated into Russian until 1980, but French and German versions were available in 1852, when Dostoevsky was still in Semipalatinsk. One would like to think that if such material came across his path, he would be interested in it, too, as he was very curious, reading the Koran along with Kant. He also had an interest in America - he loved Poe, he cites Fenimore Cooper in the closing pages of "Brothers." However, that is a Mormon trail that's hard to follow. What, then, is Mormon about "The Brothers Karamazov"? In the opening passages to "The Grand Inquisitor," Ivan talks about the days when the Madonna, saints, Christ and God himself were brought to earth in poetry and play, and even quotes Tyutchev, the poet: "Bent under the burden of the Cross; The King of Heaven in the form of a slave/Walked the length and breadth of you,/blessing you, my native land" (248). Then Ivan's story of Jesus visiting Spain during the Inquisition begins. As anyone knows, the Book of Mormon's biggest message is that Jesus came to America and walked among men after he rose from the dead. This small, revolutionary, proposal is why most Christians call Mormons heretics. Mormon theology also allows for a spiritual progression from man to god. To Christians in the west, this sound heretical. But to an Orthodox believer, perhaps not so. (Click here for Natasha's theological cheat sheet.)

With relief, I turn to Lee D. Johnson's essay, "Struggle for Theosis: Smerdyakov as Would-Be Saint" in Jackson's fine anthology of essays. Theosis is "central to Orthodox theology and crucial to the religious thematics of 'The Brothers Karamazov' on the whole. This concept . . . the Orthodox belief that human beings are capable of partaking in the very divinity of God, that such participation is, in fact, the end goal of all Christians. As the fourth-century saint Athanasius summarizes, 'For He was made man that we might be made God.' Originally, the doctrine of theosis, or deification, was sternly distinguished by Eastern church fathers from the seemingly similar but originally pagan concept of apotheosis, whereby a human being does not so much share God's divinity as become god himself. Indeed, the doctrinal battles that gave birth to the Seven Ecumenical Councils (the councils that form the backbone of the Eastern Orthodox Church) were primarily concerned with achieving precise Trinitarian and christological formulas, carefully balanced definitions that would, on the one hand, preserve the possibility of theosis without, on the other, opening the door for any heretical tendancy . . . that resembled the pagan concept of apotheosis. Dostoevsky, well read in patristic literature, incorporates these religious conceptual battles into the thematic structure of his novel . . ." (75). The Eastern Orthodox church's struggle over man's potential for divinity also finds expression in historical and contemporary Mormon thought, as evidenced by this article originally published in "Dialogue, A Journal of Mormon Thought."

The 1840s, when Dostoevsky himself was toying most dangerously with utopianism, were the seedbed for Fourierism, Icarianism, and American utopian communities, such as Robert Owen's, Anna Lee's, and Joseph Smith's. Of the many forms of utopias that sprang up then, only one has survived as a religious force. In his novels and travel writings, Dostoevsky refers to Fourier, and Cabet, related utopian idealists. Cabet, the founder of Icarianism, a French sect, moved his followers to America, indeed, he actually purchased the deserted Mormon mecca, Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1849, and made it his new utopia, after the Mormon Prophet's execution and the Mormon's exodus to Salt Lake City in 1848. Utopian ideas never wholly left Dostoevsky, and not surprisingly, utopians today find in him a rich resource for discussions about theology, theodicy, and apotheosis.

Photo credit: 1) William Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" frontispiece, 1790-1793, from kaliope.com. 2) Paul Kline, Montgomery County Mormon Temple at Dusk, from Montgomery County, MD 13th annual photo contest on the county website.

An Anthill, A Beehive

I have been thinking of Smerdyakov and of Alyosha, the two characters that move around a lot, in counterpoise with Father Ferapont, a character I think is a counterweight to the goodness and palavering all around him, who does never stray from his little hut full of flaming icons. Smerdyakov is seen here, then there, cropping up here or there without there being any apparent movement on his part: he just manifests, like a bad dream, in his patent leather or calfskin or other kinds of fancy boots. As we see in the last, or next, post, depending in which direction you are reading, Smerdyakov is liable to "do anything," on the basis of his illusion that he is party to everything, knowing even what people (that is, everyone except himself) are going to do before they do it. Alyosha, on the other hand, tries to "do everything," running breathlessly from task to task, but he knows nothing, barely remembering where he is going, or what he is to do when he gets there. Ferapont by contrast moves not at all; is simply mad. He lives "beyond the hermitage apiary" and is tended to by an anti-social beekeeping monk (166). Throughout the book, insects are referred to. Dostoevsky's name for the faithless, rational world is "anthill." Through the power of concordances (see link to your right) one can look for the words "insect" and "ant" and "bee" as much as one likes, but that strikes me as an insect-like activity; so no, I prefer to direct you to Father Zosima's conversation with the comely birdcatcher (a Mozartian figure, to be sure), wherein Zosima praises the "golden bee" and other insects: "For each blade of grass, each little bug, ant, golden bee, knows its way amazingly; being without reason, they witness the divine mystery, they ceaselessly enact it" (294-295).
We see here Smerdyakov as a fore-knower, a necromancer of sorts. As an ant-man, he makes his little pile of facts, he tunnels through them looking for good things. He is up in the attic, he is down in the cellar, he is in the dining room, the kitchen, the bedroom, the neighbor's yard with his guitar, he is waiting at the gate of Fyodor's house when Ivan comes home from the tavern, on the perilous and sinister threshold. In contrast to these spooky manifestations of Smerdyakov, we see Alyosha moving like a bee, slightly behind time, wavering and bumbling, bringing up the rear, all abuzz, but somehow time waits for him: he breathlessly arrives at Father Zosima's in the evening, full of reproaches for himself for having spent the entire day running around in his extraordinarily disorganized way (where does he go? "First to his father's" (172), then an encounter with the schoolboys, then to the Khokhlakov's, to the miserable cottage on Lake Street, then back to the Khokhlakov's, then over the wall to Dmitri's gazebo, and over the wall again out to the tavern to intercept Ivan, who is hanging out the window (no thresholds for these boys), then finally back to Father Zosima's, never finding Dmitri, at all, who was as he set out his first and principle goal), and then he is astonished to find Zosima, not dying, but cheerfully conversing. Alyosha is just is all over, panting and dizzy with the effort. Had he found Dmitri, there would have been an alibi, perhaps. And where was Dimitri?

Photo credits: 1) 14th c. manuscript illustration to Ibn Butlan's popular health manual, "Taccuinum Sanitatis." Image from Wikipedia Commons, on beekeeping. 2) Poster for performance of Mozart's "Magic Flute," the story of a comely birdcatcher, at Algoma Conservatory of Music, Sault Ste Marie, Ontario.

Kramskoy's Contemplation

Here is a link to a site about Ivan Kramskoy, the Russian painter Dostoevsky mentions that resemles Smerdyakov unique combination of perspacity and distraction, at page 126: http://www.asopa.com/publications/2002december/kramskoy.htm. The painting that many assume is "The Contemplator" is also sometimes called "The Mediator." It may be seen at this link: http://www013.upp.so-net.ne.jp/hongirai-san/yomou/meisou.htmll. Dostoevsky's describes the painting as of "a stray little peasant in a ragged caftan and bast shoes; he stands as if lost in thought, but he is not thinking, he is 'contemplating' something. . . . If you nudged him, he would give a start and look at you as if you had just woken him up . . . he would most likely keep hidden away in himself the impression he had been under while contemplating. These impressions are dear to him, and he is most likely storing them up imperceptibly . . . why and what for, of course, he does not know either; perhaps suddenly, having stored up his impressions over many years, he will drop everything and wander off to Jerusalem to save his soul, or perhaps he will suddenly burn down his native village, or perhaps he will do both . . . Most likely Smerdyakov, too, was such a contemplator, and most likely he, too, was greedily storing up his impressions, almost without knowing why himself" (127). But this is an interlude post, for visual refreshment, and the Kramskoy painting was lousy, I would even say a fake dumbed up to please the Dostoevskians (see how much better Kramskoy's portraits are on the other site), so instead I found this one, which is quite lovely. Imagine that this is Grushenka, in a more relaxed moment, without her black wig, and old Maximov, the charity case, and Fenya the maid's grandmother, having a cup of tea. The tablecloth, obviously, also ends up in Smerdyakov's room along with Grushenka's sofa, for some reason. ["The walls were adorned with blue wallpaper . . . the furniture was negligible: two benches along the walls and and two chairs by the table. But the table, though it was a simple wooden one, was nevertheless covered by a tablecloth with random pink designs. There was also a pot of geraniums in each of the two windows. In the corner stood was an icon stand with icons. On the table stood a small, badly dented, copper samovar and a tray with two cups" (612)].

Photo credit: Detail of a 19th c. painting, "The Prose of Life," by Vasily Baksheev, (1862-1958), found at Rollins College's Russian Art website. Baksheev studied in Moscow in the 1880s, and exhibited in Moscow in the 1930s and 40s. It is exciting to contemplate that the artist's work, perhaps even this picture, may have been seen by both Dostoevsky (1821-1889) and Bakhtin (1895-1975).

A Schiller for Your Thoughts

Dostoevsky has, in "Brothers Karamazov," mirrored the plot elements of Schiller’s "The Robbers." Dostoevsky first saw “The Robbers” performed when he was ten, and it left a deep impression upon him. Kjetsaa writes of him later reading it aloud his own little children by reading it aloud of an evening, despite their tendency to fall asleep (Kjetsaa, 314). A classic Gothic tale, even Schiller repudiated the overblown and sanctimonious “Robbers” in his mature years, but it was a tale that remained green for many a year, cropping up in the writing of writers as diverse as Walt Whitman (“Captain, O My Captain!” from "The Robbers") and Henry James (who used the last line of Schiller's "Ode to Joy" as the title for “The Golden Bowl”). Karl, the hero of “The Robbers,” is a Robin Hood-like robber chief, heroic, misunderstood, hunted,“a man of the woods.” Exiled for his debts and wild living, he has been falsely persuaded by his evil brother Francis, who aspires to the role of first-born, that their father, Old Moor, cannot forgive him. Thus Karl stays in exile and becomes (what else?) a robber, since a nobleman apparently cannot find honest work. Francis arranges the murder of Old Moor, and takes over Karl’s rightful inheritance of title, castle, fortune and fiance. Francis has no redeeming qualities, but he is an intellectual, like Ivan. Karl, by contrast, is all passion and action, like Dmitri. There is also a third illegitimate half-brother, a Smerdyakov figure, Herman. Herman also serves as a lackey in the family castle, and it is he who is assigned to murder Old Moor. He cannot for reasons of loyalty and pity, but instead locks him up in a ruin in the forest, and there clandestinely keeps him alive. All three brothers love the fair Amelia, who is their father’s ward and niece, a somewhat incestuous arrangement. Finally, there are Old Moor’s faithful old servants, Daniel and Susan, replicating Grigory and Marfa. There is no character that is actively good, so Alyosha is a “sport” of Dostoevsky’s. Also, the only clergyman in “The Robbers” is a craven and self-serving poltroon, so Zosima is again Dostoevsky’s own creature.

The robbers ultimately discover Herman sneaking food into Old Moor. They rescue the old man, and enraged, Karl sends his gang off to kill Francis, but Karl himself stays behind with the old man. Francis' faithful old servants see the robber gang approaching and send out an alarm, but Francis kills himself in fear. Amelia takes advantage of the melee to run off to the forest to meet Karl. She ingenuously calls him Karl - poor Old Moor has not until this point figured out the Robber King is his long-lost son. The shock kills him. Amelia then declares she wants Karl to marry her, to return to the castle and claim his inheritance. Karl's robbers say, "no, you must stay with us! think of all we've been through!" So Karl (and this is where it gets nasty) slits the throat of the fair Amelia, and marches off to turn himself in to the authorities.

Although Schiller wrote several alternative endings (Amelia always dies), Herman never makes it to the final curtain, he just vanishes. Somehow, Karl manages to stay the "good guy" throughout this blood bath - although he did kill both his father and his fiance, along with assorted others, including women and children. It's a wierd tale to read to children at bedtime. By the way, it is IVAN that Fyodor calls "Karl Von Moor" (BK 91).

Wheels of Chance

Dostoevsky in Omsk placed his bet on faith. Unlike Primo Levi, he was not tortured by the specter of dying as a fraud. Rather, in prison he exercised his curiosity about faith, befriending an Arab and asking for a copy of the Koran to read (the very fact of his asking for a book shows how differently he experienced prison in Omsk, as compared to Levi's dehumanizing time in Auschwitz). However, it is my contention that he did not fully engage in his faith until much later, in the Swiss boarding house where his cries of grief upon the death of his firstborn child annoyed the purse-lipped neighbors. Dostoevsky's faith conversion in Omsk was that "opportunistic" one described by Levi. Throughout his life, this decision to move towards God became more of a natural habit, however, it remained a lottery to him for a very long time. Gambling was his god until the roulette tables of Germany were closed: a perfect metaphor for a man who is madly aspin, with his money on red, then black, almost never succeeding at making that wheel stop in a position advantageous to himself, not content until he has ruined himself over and over again. His relationship with god, as we understand from the Karamazov Brothers, is much like his relationship to the wheel of chance.

After reading Levi about forced conversions in Auschwitz, Smerdyakov's argument about a forced conversion comes vividly to mind. He describes a believer captured by infidels and tormented to renounce Christ: "But if precisely at that moment I tried all that, and deliberately cried to the mountain: "crush my tormentors" -- and it didn't crush them, then how, tell me, should I not doubt then, in such a terrible hour of great mortal fear? I'd know even without that that I wasn't going to reach the fullness of the Kingdom of Heaven . . . so why, on top of that, should I let myself be flayed to no purpose?" This Christian's prayer is to chance, and the house wins. This is how Dostoevsky bargains with god, until he loses a child. To see a little child suffer, that is to know faith. It is a true faith that wants to save not oneself, but another. We see Alyosha's superior faith when he is out-of-the-blue pelted with stones by a little child, and wonders, "what did I do?" and, recognizing that those stones have flown directly, like heavenly arrows, from the source of the child's suffering, "what can I do?"

Photo credit: 19th European roulette wheel from a Creede, Colorado historic museum-saloon once operated by Jesse James' assassin. Original source off-line.

Primo's Lament

Having accepted the division between those who might live, and those who would surely die, in The Drowned and the Saved Levi writes about God, His place in Auschwitz. He speaks of a fellow prisoner, Hans Mayer, alias Jean Amery, an educated man, a philosopher, who entered Auschwitz as an agnostic, and who left a believer. Primo Levi, on the other hand, retains his view that no God can exist in such a charnel-house. He describes one time when he was moved to pray, but stops himself because "otherwise, were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it" (146), commenting, "a prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety." He and Amery did observe that in extraordinary circumstances and "in the everyday grind" of survival, "believers did better . . . Their universe was vaster than ours, more extended in space and time, above all more comprehensible: they had a key point of leverage, a millennial tomorrow so that there might be a sense of sacrificing themselves, a place in heaven or on earth where justice and compassion had won, or would win,in a perhaps remote but certain future: Moscow, or the celestial or terrestrial Jerusalem. Their hunger was different than ours. It was a divine punishment or expiation, or votive offering . . . Sorrow, in them or around them, was decipherable and therefore did not overflow into despair. They looked at us (unbelievers) with commiseration, at times with contempt; some of them, in the intervals of our labor, tried to evangelize us. But how can you, a nonbeliever, fabricate for yourself or accept on the spot an "opportune" faith only because it is opportune?"

Time and Meaning

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.