Toward An Inner Dostoyesky

Good to be reminded of the relevance of Dostoyevsky during the holiday season.  NYTimes.com piece, The Freedom of Faith:  A Christmas Sermon, by Simon Critchely, discusses the meaning of "The Grand Inquisitor" passage of The Brothers Karamazov.  In creating religious structure, custom, hierarchy (as Roman Catholicism embraced) have we not picked up the very same sins by which Satan tempted Christ--power, miracle, authority--after forty days in the desert, as the article explicates?

Then there is the theme of The Idiot, in Russia perhaps the most popular of Dostoyevsky's, of whether the saintly ego-free largely sinless as-you-can-get person can find a place in society without mucking everything up, better belonging to the asylum where lunatics and other people are kept, creatures of the self-fulfilling prophecies of human habit and custom and signals.

The man himself, Dostoyevsky, with his history, is as interesting as, and instantly, a part of his work.  We cannot divorce his experience and life events as the material of his books and his themes.  Which makes the later works all the more interesting, as they are more as parables, without the direct comparison, from actual life and events, of Notes from the House of the Dead.  (As Crime and Punishment is made up, extreme, so is the world of Alyosha Karamazov semi-fantastic and ideal, and yet, both are real to us, a capture of human realities.)  Does he, do any of us, achieve any kind of salvation, any kind of lasting dignity in and of belief?  Or, we ask critically, is it all a well-told story, but ultimately a crock, the result of some addiction to strange righteousness that anyway would evaporate as soon as one walks out the door into the real world?  And was it not rather unoriginal of him to rely so heavily on his own story tucked under the cover of fiction, or for him to take his own life events and assume a gravitas that allows him to draw such fine points as there lurks in Ivan's poetic fantasy of "The Grand Inquisitor"?  Is he ultimately like a kind of AA story, having stumbled, finding salvation, one that works for him, maybe not the rest of us?

This is where we must be readers.  This is where we must ask ourselves, does this Dostoyevsky stuff hold up for me?  And maybe, what can I draw out of it for my own life?  You will probably have your own version of it.  Mine, maybe largely imaginative, a bit fanciful, but perhaps it goes something like this:  we are, because of offenses, cast sometimes into prisons, prisons of various forms, and there we rub elbows closely with the human condition;  at a certain time, we are released, to an extent, perhaps figuratively, that release allowed to us for the dawning of realizations that come from reflecting on human nature and one's own;  that this then allows us to sketch out a better path, a better path for your own self, a better path for humanity in general.  Insights come, let's say, from having to work with people who are, let's say, repeatedly hungover on Monday mornings, seeing the effect this has (unhappily) on work, an egotistical revolving loop of stress and false release that leads back to the same stress, which irritates its victims so that they get a little stressed.  And so you come to see the point, that a tavern that takes in the wandering traveler and provides sustenance, warmth and relaxation, is not about the juvenile 'stress relief,' but points to the spiritual experience, the reality, the proper information within the general experience, that which is lasting.

It was probably sad, being in Siberian prison, for Fyodor Dostoyevsky.  Less so, the life of a barman (what else would I do with my time?) who is sentenced to be around drinkers, publicans and sinners too, people acting liberated for a time, as if they had pulled off some perfect crime.  For him the way out was being released, at which point it seems he went into the military, or back into it.  But the whole experience had reinforced, perhaps oddly, what he had started out to be, the writer, the writer that led him to flirtations with Christian Socialism that then got him into hot water in the first place, and now a grander and deeper writer, one capable of Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, The Brothers Karamazov.

So, what are the visions that come to you, after your own years in prison?  What is it for you that can make you feel serious again, able to buckle down and go back to work after the distraction?  What is your spiritual vision, and how do you populate it in the absence of role models handy as Father Zossima, and how do you keep yourself on your own right track in the meanwhile?  "Yay, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death..."  (All this without getting sick of your developing wisdom, as is the former cynical habit.)  Does it mean one has to abandon his social life and friends, all of whom strike him in some way as being prisoners of various types?  Does it mean one must abhor his own self and his own choices over the years, but not so much so that he will undercut his own capacity for change?  It probably takes a good deal of courage.  And this seems to be something Dostoyevsky had, though of course he too had his own very human problems with addiction that caused no small amount of woe in his life (gambling), about which it might be argued that brought him deeper insight after he kicked the habit.

Amongst the sets of choices we have, maybe it is possible to see in strangers, in friends, and even in one's own self, a kind of Dostoyevksy, a personal one, individualized, born into human form, the spirit, to observe life, live it, suffer it, enjoy it, cast down, set free, on one's own recognizance, a deeply smart being capable of reassembling from the randomness fragmented of life a kind of way to make a certain sense, or take a certain meaning.  Something to reinforce, that is reinforcing.  (Eliot's 'infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.')  A vision.  A glimpsed understanding of spiritual meaning and spiritual realities, that goes beyond the known, somehow deeply satisfying, and worth all the trouble.  And in a new year, with what might seem like, and indeed be, a fresh beginning, let that being happen.

Dostoyevsky tells a story that is meaningful and relevant to this day.  One of the first moderns, rightly a part of classics.  Once a thick mystery on parent's book shelves looked up at, worth the read.