Reading Dostoevsky: Hermeneutics of Humility

At a glance, this interpretation seems to run afoul of Mikhail Bakhtin’s famous assertion in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics that all characters in Dostoevsky’s works are conferred equally valid voices, which resound in independent registers and advocate for opposing points of view.

A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels. What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event.[1]

He calls this literary polyphony, an artistic element that originates from Dostoevsky’s novelistic creations.

But the heterogeneity of voices, and Dostoevsky’s tolerance for their interwoven, overlapping co-existence, does not reflect his failure to advocate for a unified ethical position. Due to the author’s privileged epistemic vantage, he can set the moral terms of his literary world according to which the plot develops, and consequences unfold. There is no positive indictment of Ivan Karamazov’s eloquent critique in The Grand Inquisitor, but given the aims of Dostoevsky’s moral-aesthetic project, there was never the need to provide one. The laws of his moral universe gain their legitimacy from within,  the world of the story itself, rather than an arbitrary imposition from without.

Dostoevsky achieves this by grafting a dramatis personae onto each character, where participants in his narrative are treated as subjects in their own right. As subjects, they become individual principles of action, signifying their distinct ideologies beyond the reach of any presupposed system of values. This lends credibility to their interpersonal clashing of conviction, praxis, and belief, which drive the plot ahead and propel the narrative towards its terminus.

But to imply that the author had thereby detached himself from his work, participating only dialectically insofar as his voice becomes “one amongst others”, neglects the basic moral backdrop behind Dostoevsky’s entire literary project, which is dominated by principles that are “basic to Christian philosophy, deepened by Christian mysticism.”[2] There is no need here for Dostoevsky to explicate his personal semantic authority, for it is suggested throughout the narrative in richly varied depictions of his characters’ religious experiences. And if his novels lack the overt presence of a Doctor T J Eckleburg, whose physical gaze penetrates and exposes all, it is because each character’s reckoning with the divine takes place directly and intimately in his deeper, innermost self.

Nietzsche famously described Dostoevsky as the only psychologist from whom he had anything to learn. It was his ability to conjure verisimilar portrayals of man’s psychological struggles, inherent contradictions, and engagement with suffering that won the Russian such high praise. For Dostoevsky, the site of encounter with God is within the heart of each subject, the locus of their sovereignty and capacity to exercise free choice. And so God is the primary psychologist and loudest voice in all of Dostoevsky’s fiction, for it is he that each character encounters when they lapse into protracted existential reflection. As Bakhtin himself noted:

In Dostoevsky’s artistic thinking, the genuine life of the personality takes place at the point of non-coincidence between a man and himself, at his point of departure beyond the limits of all that he is as a material being, a being that can be spied on, defined, predicted apart from its own will, “at second hand.” The genuine life of the personality is made available only through a dialogic penetration of that personality, during which it freely and reciprocally reveals itself.[3]

The distinct personality of man, his identity, can only truly become itself when it is pulled into conversation with the Other. And when man is isolated from society, either physically, emotionally, or psychologically, the only being that can really be dialogically present is God himself.

It is worth noting that despite the intense spiritual themes throughout his writings, Dostoevsky, a devoted member of the Orthodox Church, makes scant reference to Eucharistic or liturgical motifs in his major works. I don’t think this is a coincidence; Dostoevsky prefers to dramatise psychological experience over sacramental reception, notwithstanding that in Orthodox belief the Divine Liturgy is indeed a privileged form of sacred encounter, and the Eucharist considered Christ’s true flesh and blood. In the author’s imagination, there is no need for the divine presence to be mediated by corporeal and ritual signs, for he addresses himself directly to the heart of the individual.

Bakhtin correctly noted that Dostoevsky’s moral vision is not confined to a set of ready-made interpretive parameters that guide or explain the actions of his heroes and villains. It is only thrown into relief dialogically, when warring ideologies are drawn into confrontation, and through the ruinous or noble consequences of convictions played out to the full. But it would be mistaken to conclude from here that Dostoevsky’s authorial impulse is simply drowned out by the vitality of his creation. It is the presence of the divine in its multivariate forms – whether as a source of hope, voice of conscience, or the pure psychosomatic weight of guilt – that shapes the narrative’s direction and links its series of causes and effects within. Dostoevsky can afford to soften his own authorial voice through the novel’s stylistics and formal choices, because the world he envisions naturally magnifies the voice of God. [4]

In a way, this is an aesthetic implementation of the words of St John the Baptist: He must increase, but I must decrease (Jn 3:30). Yet through a theological extrapolation of the data, we can conjecture even further: if Dostoevsky’s characters are elevated to the level of self-conscious subjects, this is only possible precisely because they occupy a narrative universe where God exists to make them as such. In Christian terms, we can say that each character receives his sovereign personality – in Bakhtin’s words, his validity – because he is known (and loved) by God, a God whose existence also determines the moral content and grammar of Dostoevsky’s world. A theory of polyphony that reckons deeply with its anthropology must depend on this connection. The genius of Dostoevsky’s literary conceit did not spring from a vacuum; it is intimately linked to his Christian faith and should not be considered apart from it.

What then forms the unity of Dostoevsky’s moral vision? Can the narrative complexity of his works, and delicacy with which he treats his characters, really be summed up in the familiar language of maxim?

Our previous analysis hints to a path forward. Dostoevsky realises his poetics by quietening his authorial voice and allowing the words of his characters to be independently heard. There is no triumphant “shootdown” of alternate perspectives, even those that run plainly against the grain of Dostoevsky’s personal convictions. In a sense, Dostoevsky permits himself to undergo verbal persecution at the hands/words of his own literary creations, forgoing the monopoly on rhetorical violence typically held within an author’s grasp. As such, he adopts a posture of humility that makes space for an encounter with others, which abandons the unilateral claim of the “I” and subordinates its demands to the world around him.

It is therefore fitting that Dostoevsky’s novels are preoccupied with the cataclysmic consequences of the opposite: a perverse strain of metaphysical self-reliance where man seeks liberation through the uncompromising force of his will and reason alone.

Throughout his novels, Dostoevsky is engaged in a campaign against the allure of radical self-dependence. Part of this allure is the promise that our scientific, philosophical, and sociopolitical progress is enough to lift humanity out of suffering into a perfectly harmonious state of affairs. By placing supreme (and exclusive) confidence in his reason and intellectual achievements, man eschews recourse to any form of divine authority in order to satisfy his existential demands. The long march of rationalism leaves the death of God in its wake.

But Dostoevsky denounces such claims by exposing the void which persists when objective moral ideals are indelicately displaced as a result (and for Dostoevsky, such a displacement is synonymous with the abandonment of Christian faith). This is exhibited clearly through characters like Kirillov, Stavrogin, Ivan Karamazov, and Svidrigailov, who each metabolise their loss of religious faith into distinct elaborations of egoism, relativism, and the will to power.

The antidote to this genre of hubris can only be humility and self-sacrifice, which can be said to constitute the central virtues of the fully-formed Dostoevskyian hero. The epigraph from St John’s Gospel to his magnum opus The Brothers Karamazov presents this emphatically: Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit (Jn 12:24).

This affirmation of self-effacement and suffering before others, and for the sake of others, has great motive force for the development of Dostoevsky’s protagonists. Raskolnikov must fall from grace and recognise the folly of his theory of the “great man” before his heart opens to conversion and new life. Of the three Karamazov brothers, only Alyosha is willing to set aside both the primitive, sensuous aspect of the ego, as well as its calculating, coldly rational and self-interested counterpart, to humble himself before others and be enjoined in charity to their grief, depravity, and misfortune. And Prince Lev Myshkin – Dostoevsky’s quintessential “Holy Fool” – raises the ridiculous possibility of an existence based on indefatigable innocence and goodwill, who before all criticism and appeals to better judgement, embraces suffering in accordance with the absolute kenosis of Christ. It is this fundamental act of self-emptying, a movement that emanates from Christ Crucified to take root in man’s interior life, that embodies the Dostoevskyian hero.

In the final analysis, the greatness of Dostoevsky’s ethical project lies in his refusal to simply assert it. For the sake of his art, he surrenders control over the story, receding into the background to allow dialogue between the characters, reader, and divine to occur on their own terms.

By this emptying of authorial personality, Dostoevsky makes space for subjects to encounter firsthand the sacred, which in its highest possibility leads to an interior transformation in emulation of Christ’s example: a metanoia that entails one dying to himself out of love for others. It is the same spirit of detachment that St John of the Cross preached, becoming nada, nada, nada, to leave room for God to enter into our lives. In doing so, Dostoevsky’s efforts have made for a mesmerising concordance of form and message that few, if any, manage to achieve.

What then does this mean for the Dostoevsky reader? Perhaps the problems of his poetics were never meant to be solved. The multitude of voices will retain their collective secret. But by beholding them in mystery, and approaching them with the dependence and humility of a child, we can join this cast of actors as fellow subjects on his stage. Only then do we receive an impression of his vision, and hear the voice of little Kolya Krasotkin rise above the others, “oh, if I, too, could sacrifice myself some day for truth!”

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[1] Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics. U of Minnesota Press.

[2] Strem, George G. “The Moral World of Dostoevsky.” The Russian Review 16 (1957): 15.

[3] Bakhtin, 1984.

[4] Bakhtin does not think Dostoevsky’s religious principles are a valid tool of interpretation for the literary scholar. Dostoevsky’s artistic visualisation of the world can only be legitimately scrutinised based on “empirical material from concrete literary works.” (Bakhtin, 1984). But here we do not appeal to knowledge of Dostoevsky’s faith from external sources, history, and context; the spiritual elements arise from the closed text and experiences of the characters themselves.