Steve Evans's Blog: The written world - Posts Tagged "berdyaev"
William S
Ah, blog number six! It's mostly about writing, just like the other ones, and this time is about my favourite writer: the Bard himself, William Shakespeare.
It grieves me to admit it, but Shakespeare is not for everyone, even if, as Jonson said in his piece in the first folio, he is for all time. There are people I have tried really hard to interest in Shakespeare - talked to them, taken them to plays, given them authoritative and easy-read editions, done everything I can think of except pass them a Classics Illustrated, and they just don't care. Maybe it's me.
To me, Shakespeare is the greatest writer ever, in any language and in any genre - fiction, drama, poetry, non-fiction...that is, even in the types of literature he never tried, he outshone those who did and do. "Greatness" is a funny word, and by it I mean (in writing) that the work will be just as Jonson said, for all time; so far, that has been true of Shakespeare. Successive generations have discovered and rediscovered him, and I don't see any reasons why future ones shouldn't.
Being lucky and writing in English, a language of incredible adaptability that has now become the er lingua franca of the world, can't have hurt the Bard. And it is also true that at the time he was writing, the language was changing fast, incorporating an explosion of new words that were appearing to describe new things and places that the rising British Empire was meeting and greeting. But there was more to Shakespeare than being in the right place at the right time; others were also. Some of them were very gifted, and we remember them: Marlowe, Donne, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Tourneur, and others. But even in his own time, Shakespeare stood out. Jonson was not alone in seeing this factor in his talent. He was better than the others simply because he was better. Ha! A genius.
When I read Shakespeare, I am aware that I am in the presence of this genius, even when it lets its bearer down. Two Gentlemen of Verona, for example, is a nasty, misogynist play, whose anti-woman attitudes generations have tried to explain away. The Merchant of Venice, despite its deeply moving portrayal of Shylock, is nonetheless, as the Arden edition I own makes plain, anti-Semitic. That it is not so anti-Semitic as Marlowe's Jew of Malta is beside the point.
The point is that Shakespeare's genius rose even above his own limitations, so that Shylock remains a great creation despite the Jew-baiting. Not all the plays are perfect in other ways - structurally, thematically, historically...it doesn't matter: the deep penetration into the reality of the human condition remains, and re-reading and re-seeing the work can bring new insights, fresh understanding.
What with all that you'd think I'd have pumped the Shakespeare references through my own work, no opportunity lost. Sadly, this has not proven to be the case. One of my novels, Savonarola's Bones, has a big Shakespeare component, but I don't regard it as anything like my best book, though the Shakespeare aspect seems fine to me. Another that involves a man searching for a lost Shakespeare play is to me unpublishable. The one I'm working on now has a major bit "pencilled in", but I haven't got to it yet and may change my mind.
Well, it does puzzle me. Giordano Bruno, Savonarola, Celine, Berdyaev, Dostoevsky - they all get there, no problem. And the writers among them stand tall for emulation. But not William S. Sometimes I think that the reason Shakespeare is harder to make work into one of my books is that he is too big to handle, and there might be something in that. Then I think that it's because he was primarily a playwright, if a poetic one, and I write novels. There might be something in that too, but...
My plan now is to make good with the Bard this time. The book I'm writing now owes a lot to Dostoevsky, but not in the sense of discussing him as it was with The Russian Idea, which features a very large helping of the great man.
There is a let-off too, that I do incorporate Shakespeare into my books in my thinking and what interests me and how I express myself and so on. A pale version, without doubt, but a version even so. But I'm not going to flatter myself like that. It's probably not even true.
Whatever, Shakespeare is worth another visit another time. Hope you have enjoyed this one.
This one is another five star effort, but if you don't like Shakespeare and have reached this point, have another two or three. They're free to a good home.
It grieves me to admit it, but Shakespeare is not for everyone, even if, as Jonson said in his piece in the first folio, he is for all time. There are people I have tried really hard to interest in Shakespeare - talked to them, taken them to plays, given them authoritative and easy-read editions, done everything I can think of except pass them a Classics Illustrated, and they just don't care. Maybe it's me.
To me, Shakespeare is the greatest writer ever, in any language and in any genre - fiction, drama, poetry, non-fiction...that is, even in the types of literature he never tried, he outshone those who did and do. "Greatness" is a funny word, and by it I mean (in writing) that the work will be just as Jonson said, for all time; so far, that has been true of Shakespeare. Successive generations have discovered and rediscovered him, and I don't see any reasons why future ones shouldn't.
Being lucky and writing in English, a language of incredible adaptability that has now become the er lingua franca of the world, can't have hurt the Bard. And it is also true that at the time he was writing, the language was changing fast, incorporating an explosion of new words that were appearing to describe new things and places that the rising British Empire was meeting and greeting. But there was more to Shakespeare than being in the right place at the right time; others were also. Some of them were very gifted, and we remember them: Marlowe, Donne, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Tourneur, and others. But even in his own time, Shakespeare stood out. Jonson was not alone in seeing this factor in his talent. He was better than the others simply because he was better. Ha! A genius.
When I read Shakespeare, I am aware that I am in the presence of this genius, even when it lets its bearer down. Two Gentlemen of Verona, for example, is a nasty, misogynist play, whose anti-woman attitudes generations have tried to explain away. The Merchant of Venice, despite its deeply moving portrayal of Shylock, is nonetheless, as the Arden edition I own makes plain, anti-Semitic. That it is not so anti-Semitic as Marlowe's Jew of Malta is beside the point.
The point is that Shakespeare's genius rose even above his own limitations, so that Shylock remains a great creation despite the Jew-baiting. Not all the plays are perfect in other ways - structurally, thematically, historically...it doesn't matter: the deep penetration into the reality of the human condition remains, and re-reading and re-seeing the work can bring new insights, fresh understanding.
What with all that you'd think I'd have pumped the Shakespeare references through my own work, no opportunity lost. Sadly, this has not proven to be the case. One of my novels, Savonarola's Bones, has a big Shakespeare component, but I don't regard it as anything like my best book, though the Shakespeare aspect seems fine to me. Another that involves a man searching for a lost Shakespeare play is to me unpublishable. The one I'm working on now has a major bit "pencilled in", but I haven't got to it yet and may change my mind.
Well, it does puzzle me. Giordano Bruno, Savonarola, Celine, Berdyaev, Dostoevsky - they all get there, no problem. And the writers among them stand tall for emulation. But not William S. Sometimes I think that the reason Shakespeare is harder to make work into one of my books is that he is too big to handle, and there might be something in that. Then I think that it's because he was primarily a playwright, if a poetic one, and I write novels. There might be something in that too, but...
My plan now is to make good with the Bard this time. The book I'm writing now owes a lot to Dostoevsky, but not in the sense of discussing him as it was with The Russian Idea, which features a very large helping of the great man.
There is a let-off too, that I do incorporate Shakespeare into my books in my thinking and what interests me and how I express myself and so on. A pale version, without doubt, but a version even so. But I'm not going to flatter myself like that. It's probably not even true.
Whatever, Shakespeare is worth another visit another time. Hope you have enjoyed this one.
This one is another five star effort, but if you don't like Shakespeare and have reached this point, have another two or three. They're free to a good home.
Something even more completely different
This blog is about writing, and for the most part it's been about the writers and thinkers who have influenced me as I've gone along. There are more of these than I've written about so far, but rehashing the past, while interesting to me and I would hope to those who drop in to read these slim offerings, is not going forward really.
And my thinking has been zapping along in different directions lately prompted by all these posts about the past.
My new book, which is just shy of 50,000 words, has the working title of Kaos. Its theme came to me while I was working on my previous book, The Russian Idea, which dealt a lot with Russian religious philosophy, in particular the thinking and beliefs of Dostoevsky and Nikolai Berdyaev. Berdyaev wrote a book with the same title as my novel.
Over about a year before and while writing The Russian Idea I read a lot of Dostoevsky and Berdyaev that I had not read for a long time, or had never read: Berdyaev was a very prolific writer and I read or reread at least ten of his books, and many of his articles, while reintroducing myself to Dostoevsky through several of his masterpieces and newly through his journalism, and some biographical accounts. Sinking into a writer or thinker in this way can give the feeling for the mind of the person in a way that reading a single book, or reading a book now and again, can not do. My immersion therapies in writers and thinkers tell me that you can come to feel you really do understand what was going on in the mind of the person...and when you don't, when you are troubled, prompts you to keep going. There is a nagging feeling that something eludes me about Shakespeare, and that adds to the mystery of the man, and encourages me to keep reading him, and about him, and his time, and the intellectual movements associated with him, or even alleged to be associated with him. Ditto "secretive" writers like B Traven and Celine.
There is a lot to this: questions of language, its "grammar" and history, of translation, of attitude, of cultural nuance and perceptions, and the more you go into it, the deeper you go, the more amazing it turns out to be. Take one example of this: "a" v "he":
In the Arden edition of Hamlet edited by Harold Jenkins, there are numerous examples of "a" when "he" or "it" is meant. In a note, Jenkins says the "a" is a colloquial rendering of "ha" for "he" that was common in Elizabethan drama. To get this, both the "a" and the "ha", to bring it into oneself, to live with it, so that one reads or hears it spoken in performance as natural and "correct" (because it is), is to bring the Elizabethan age, in this intimate if tiny aspect, into one's heart through imaginative understanding. As I have written in an earlier post, it means not only that Shakespeare reaches out across the centuries to communicate with us, but that through this kind of understanding, we are able to "talk back", to respond creatively. It's teriffic! It's thrilling! We are taken out of our time, delving deeply in another, only to find, when we surface, that we are in our own place but with an enriched understanding that spans the centuries while telling us something about "now" and about ourselves. That's what being "universal" - "for all time" as Jonson had it about Shakespeare - means, sez me.
This is a long way around to get into the aura of Dostoevsky and Berdyaev that I was living in while writing The Russian Idea but may help explain how while writing that book, I was prompted to want to write another one by my feeling for the moral universe of this pair, in particular Dostoevsky, and to want to write a book something like he might want to write today (so say I) - not in terms of his genius, which of course I do not share, but in terms of his concerns, which I do, even if I find some of his urges unpalatable.
This is not the first time one of my books has been prompted by a previous one. The Kleiber Monster led me to write another book, Tobi's Gift (unpublished) because I felt I had not dealt with something frontally enough. And that led me into new places that prompted Savonarola's Bones.
Demented, however, the book that followed Savonarola's Bones, was not prompted by its predecessor, but sprang out of another set of concerns and experiences. What this says to me is that each successive novel is not, or not necessarily, the "sum" of an author's life to that point - in style, in theme or focus or what have you, it may not only not be an advance, but may even be worse than earlier work, and often a "sideways shift" into something new and different, but not necessarily better. Second novels are said to be the most difficult books for fiction writers, as the first one may all but leap from the mind to the page, and many second efforts are disappointing to the public as well as to the writer. Evilheart, my second novel (the first is unpublished), was very hard to write, and despite many revisions over a decade, is far from perfect. Though I think in some aspects it is an excellent book, in others it remains very disappointing to me.
But even later works can be poor. Raymond Chandler's last book for example must have been an embarrassment to him, and is certainly so to his memory. Any writer would - or at least should - find that worrying. Certainly Kaos is worrying me in that sense: much of the first draft seems quite shockingly written, and I know that later drafts are going to be pretty hard work if the thing is going to be worth reading, and hence worth bringing into public view.
So I am not sure about this one. The premise is good, and as with my other books, has something to say about the world around us and how we might navigate our way through the sometimes tortuous moral maze that can be any individual's life: the choices that confront us, the temptations we are asked to avoid, or invited to sink ourselves into, never to emerge...as I write, I am not sure if the anti-hero becomes a hero, or if he is a hero who becomes an anti-hero: this delicate balance is something that ultimately is going to define the book, and understanding how to express both of these elements of the human personality warring within an individual, so that one emerges at the end to vanquish the other, is the greatest challenge in writing I have ever faced: words that, as it were, "face both ways". Is that Dostoevsky peering over my shoulder, shaking his head in vigorous disapproval, wagging his finger at my poor offerings? Perhaps. I am trying my best, Fyodor! What's that you say?
If you are reading this, you can award as many stars to yourself as you wish, provided that none of them is purple.
And my thinking has been zapping along in different directions lately prompted by all these posts about the past.
My new book, which is just shy of 50,000 words, has the working title of Kaos. Its theme came to me while I was working on my previous book, The Russian Idea, which dealt a lot with Russian religious philosophy, in particular the thinking and beliefs of Dostoevsky and Nikolai Berdyaev. Berdyaev wrote a book with the same title as my novel.
Over about a year before and while writing The Russian Idea I read a lot of Dostoevsky and Berdyaev that I had not read for a long time, or had never read: Berdyaev was a very prolific writer and I read or reread at least ten of his books, and many of his articles, while reintroducing myself to Dostoevsky through several of his masterpieces and newly through his journalism, and some biographical accounts. Sinking into a writer or thinker in this way can give the feeling for the mind of the person in a way that reading a single book, or reading a book now and again, can not do. My immersion therapies in writers and thinkers tell me that you can come to feel you really do understand what was going on in the mind of the person...and when you don't, when you are troubled, prompts you to keep going. There is a nagging feeling that something eludes me about Shakespeare, and that adds to the mystery of the man, and encourages me to keep reading him, and about him, and his time, and the intellectual movements associated with him, or even alleged to be associated with him. Ditto "secretive" writers like B Traven and Celine.
There is a lot to this: questions of language, its "grammar" and history, of translation, of attitude, of cultural nuance and perceptions, and the more you go into it, the deeper you go, the more amazing it turns out to be. Take one example of this: "a" v "he":
In the Arden edition of Hamlet edited by Harold Jenkins, there are numerous examples of "a" when "he" or "it" is meant. In a note, Jenkins says the "a" is a colloquial rendering of "ha" for "he" that was common in Elizabethan drama. To get this, both the "a" and the "ha", to bring it into oneself, to live with it, so that one reads or hears it spoken in performance as natural and "correct" (because it is), is to bring the Elizabethan age, in this intimate if tiny aspect, into one's heart through imaginative understanding. As I have written in an earlier post, it means not only that Shakespeare reaches out across the centuries to communicate with us, but that through this kind of understanding, we are able to "talk back", to respond creatively. It's teriffic! It's thrilling! We are taken out of our time, delving deeply in another, only to find, when we surface, that we are in our own place but with an enriched understanding that spans the centuries while telling us something about "now" and about ourselves. That's what being "universal" - "for all time" as Jonson had it about Shakespeare - means, sez me.
This is a long way around to get into the aura of Dostoevsky and Berdyaev that I was living in while writing The Russian Idea but may help explain how while writing that book, I was prompted to want to write another one by my feeling for the moral universe of this pair, in particular Dostoevsky, and to want to write a book something like he might want to write today (so say I) - not in terms of his genius, which of course I do not share, but in terms of his concerns, which I do, even if I find some of his urges unpalatable.
This is not the first time one of my books has been prompted by a previous one. The Kleiber Monster led me to write another book, Tobi's Gift (unpublished) because I felt I had not dealt with something frontally enough. And that led me into new places that prompted Savonarola's Bones.
Demented, however, the book that followed Savonarola's Bones, was not prompted by its predecessor, but sprang out of another set of concerns and experiences. What this says to me is that each successive novel is not, or not necessarily, the "sum" of an author's life to that point - in style, in theme or focus or what have you, it may not only not be an advance, but may even be worse than earlier work, and often a "sideways shift" into something new and different, but not necessarily better. Second novels are said to be the most difficult books for fiction writers, as the first one may all but leap from the mind to the page, and many second efforts are disappointing to the public as well as to the writer. Evilheart, my second novel (the first is unpublished), was very hard to write, and despite many revisions over a decade, is far from perfect. Though I think in some aspects it is an excellent book, in others it remains very disappointing to me.
But even later works can be poor. Raymond Chandler's last book for example must have been an embarrassment to him, and is certainly so to his memory. Any writer would - or at least should - find that worrying. Certainly Kaos is worrying me in that sense: much of the first draft seems quite shockingly written, and I know that later drafts are going to be pretty hard work if the thing is going to be worth reading, and hence worth bringing into public view.
So I am not sure about this one. The premise is good, and as with my other books, has something to say about the world around us and how we might navigate our way through the sometimes tortuous moral maze that can be any individual's life: the choices that confront us, the temptations we are asked to avoid, or invited to sink ourselves into, never to emerge...as I write, I am not sure if the anti-hero becomes a hero, or if he is a hero who becomes an anti-hero: this delicate balance is something that ultimately is going to define the book, and understanding how to express both of these elements of the human personality warring within an individual, so that one emerges at the end to vanquish the other, is the greatest challenge in writing I have ever faced: words that, as it were, "face both ways". Is that Dostoevsky peering over my shoulder, shaking his head in vigorous disapproval, wagging his finger at my poor offerings? Perhaps. I am trying my best, Fyodor! What's that you say?
If you are reading this, you can award as many stars to yourself as you wish, provided that none of them is purple.
Mr Theodore D
One of my least favourite books by Dostoevsky is Notes from Underground.* Serious literary people, who know a lot more than I do about everything, have a very high regard for this book, and it is easy to see why. There are purely literary techniques at work in Notes that are admirable and characteristic of this amazing writer. One of these could even be called his chief technique: the use of a narrator/amanuensis. House of the Dead, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov also all use this technique of an observer who is if not remote from the action, not really significant to it except as observer or editor/scribe, yet whose existence puts the "facts" open to dispute. Notes and House of the Dead use a kind of transcriber rather than observer, and in Notes he tires of his task so that the outpourings of the "author", while continuing, will no longer be published....a very exact form of censorship!
Notes is highly regarded as a turning point in Dostoevsky's career and has been hailed as an "existential" novel, even the first existential novel. It does have some Kierkegaardian overtones (undertones perhaps would be better), to the degree that it is certainly possible that Dostoevsky was influenced by Kierkegaard in writing it. Yet for me, Notes is a bore, especially the first part, where the "author" takes the prevailing liberal politics to pieces. The ideas he attacks are so plainly false that it is hard, at this distance in time at least, not to think Dostoevsky was destroying ideas no one actually held, till some background reading reveals that indeed some very peculiar notions were all the rage among the "intelligentsia" in Russia in the 1860s and 70s (and beyond!). Marxism and materialism in general were swallowed then without chewing, with added spices untasted by any others anywhere. That's not the yawn of it, though - threaded through the text he drones on and on essentially (existentially?) about his right to be unpleasant, and the resentment that has provoked his unpleasantness. It is undeniable that this right exists, but hardly needs saying, and the resentment he describes as all too universal is more childish than that. What seems to strike people as praiseworthy is the honesty, especially of its second part. Perhaps.
In any case a bad book by this great writer may be better than a good book by many another.
Dostoevsky grabbed me about the time Celine did, in the 1970s, and possibly for similar reasons; the author seemed to get under the skin of society and of the individual person at the same time, and seemed even more in Dostoevsky's case to understand what it is that drives people to extremes. Dostoevsky had an uncanny ability to sympathetically portray edgy personalities even as he disapproved of them, of their motives, and of their actions. And he could be, like Celine, very funny. He also had a wonderful way of mocking his own beliefs - beliefs he wanted readers to accept and use in their own lives - while giving eloquent support to ideas he found repellent. As a result just what Dostoevsky really thought is not always clear. Digging for these nuggets may not be rewarded with gold: like Celine, Dostoevsky was an anti-
semite, though his dislike of Jews was tempered by the Christian spirit. Many of his views on a wide range of subjects seem quaint when not bizarre to 21st century eyes...and yet...
Yes, "and yet"...What Dostoevsky saw clearly shone crystalline. Demons, inspired by the revolutionary nihilist Sergei Nechaev's murder of a student, was an eerie, indeed frightening and all too prophetic look at what the revolutionaries Russia was producing in abundance in the 1870s would get up to once they had power.** Karamazov, though it is technically incomplete in the sense that Dostoevsky planned to continue the saga of the Karamazov family in at least an additional volume, is even more incredible: like all great writing, it not merely repays re-reading, but demands it of those who wish to try at least to drink full measure from this writer's bountiful fountain of insight.
While I was writing my last novel, The Russian Idea, I read and re-read a heap of Dostoevsky - not just most of the novels and stories but the "post-modern" journal he published before leaving off to write Karamazov, A Writer's Diary.*** What started for me as homage to the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev^ ended a composite with Dostoevsky. While I was writing it, the storyline came to me for my present book, Kaos.
Kaos has not been an easy write, and I've dropped it in order to think things through - and this post is an expression of that. One of the elements of Dostoevsky's writing that I have more or less ignored, now seems essential to me: the labyrinthine network of interrelationships that characterise what I regard as his finest work: The Idiot, Demons, The Brothers Karamazov. All these feature an enormous cast.
In Dostoevsky's day, when novels were first published as serials in magazines, such vast tapestries were not merely possible but all but expected. Today, following the notion of telegraphy via Celine, they are harder to muster and sustain. All the same, today I reckon it's the key to my present difficulties. Stop the chatter, Steve, and get on with it. Your underground man awaits his day.
* When I read Notes, it was in an old Everyman edition that treated Dostoevsky as if he was a new chum on the English-language literary block, and referred to him as "Theodore", the English version of Fyodor. Hence the title to this post.
** There is my own take on this at work in my novel The Russian Idea.
*** Roughly half of this interesting journal has been translated. It gives, among other things, the real flavour of Dostoevsky's thinking, and shows his anti-semitism in full flower. Indeed, in more than one way, it is similar to Celine's pamphleteering.
^Berdyaev regarded himself as a follower - he called himself a sprout - of Dostoevsky. For more on this you will just have to read The Russian Idea, whether my own or Berdyaev's, or Berdyaev's book Dostoevsky. Berdyaev's Russian Idea and Dostoevsky are in print. I have not written a post on Berdyaev, but will one day. For an interesting account of Dostoevsky as a religious prophet and the tradition he fits in, see Nicholas Zernov's Three Russian Prophets.
Notes is highly regarded as a turning point in Dostoevsky's career and has been hailed as an "existential" novel, even the first existential novel. It does have some Kierkegaardian overtones (undertones perhaps would be better), to the degree that it is certainly possible that Dostoevsky was influenced by Kierkegaard in writing it. Yet for me, Notes is a bore, especially the first part, where the "author" takes the prevailing liberal politics to pieces. The ideas he attacks are so plainly false that it is hard, at this distance in time at least, not to think Dostoevsky was destroying ideas no one actually held, till some background reading reveals that indeed some very peculiar notions were all the rage among the "intelligentsia" in Russia in the 1860s and 70s (and beyond!). Marxism and materialism in general were swallowed then without chewing, with added spices untasted by any others anywhere. That's not the yawn of it, though - threaded through the text he drones on and on essentially (existentially?) about his right to be unpleasant, and the resentment that has provoked his unpleasantness. It is undeniable that this right exists, but hardly needs saying, and the resentment he describes as all too universal is more childish than that. What seems to strike people as praiseworthy is the honesty, especially of its second part. Perhaps.
In any case a bad book by this great writer may be better than a good book by many another.
Dostoevsky grabbed me about the time Celine did, in the 1970s, and possibly for similar reasons; the author seemed to get under the skin of society and of the individual person at the same time, and seemed even more in Dostoevsky's case to understand what it is that drives people to extremes. Dostoevsky had an uncanny ability to sympathetically portray edgy personalities even as he disapproved of them, of their motives, and of their actions. And he could be, like Celine, very funny. He also had a wonderful way of mocking his own beliefs - beliefs he wanted readers to accept and use in their own lives - while giving eloquent support to ideas he found repellent. As a result just what Dostoevsky really thought is not always clear. Digging for these nuggets may not be rewarded with gold: like Celine, Dostoevsky was an anti-
semite, though his dislike of Jews was tempered by the Christian spirit. Many of his views on a wide range of subjects seem quaint when not bizarre to 21st century eyes...and yet...
Yes, "and yet"...What Dostoevsky saw clearly shone crystalline. Demons, inspired by the revolutionary nihilist Sergei Nechaev's murder of a student, was an eerie, indeed frightening and all too prophetic look at what the revolutionaries Russia was producing in abundance in the 1870s would get up to once they had power.** Karamazov, though it is technically incomplete in the sense that Dostoevsky planned to continue the saga of the Karamazov family in at least an additional volume, is even more incredible: like all great writing, it not merely repays re-reading, but demands it of those who wish to try at least to drink full measure from this writer's bountiful fountain of insight.
While I was writing my last novel, The Russian Idea, I read and re-read a heap of Dostoevsky - not just most of the novels and stories but the "post-modern" journal he published before leaving off to write Karamazov, A Writer's Diary.*** What started for me as homage to the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev^ ended a composite with Dostoevsky. While I was writing it, the storyline came to me for my present book, Kaos.
Kaos has not been an easy write, and I've dropped it in order to think things through - and this post is an expression of that. One of the elements of Dostoevsky's writing that I have more or less ignored, now seems essential to me: the labyrinthine network of interrelationships that characterise what I regard as his finest work: The Idiot, Demons, The Brothers Karamazov. All these feature an enormous cast.
In Dostoevsky's day, when novels were first published as serials in magazines, such vast tapestries were not merely possible but all but expected. Today, following the notion of telegraphy via Celine, they are harder to muster and sustain. All the same, today I reckon it's the key to my present difficulties. Stop the chatter, Steve, and get on with it. Your underground man awaits his day.
* When I read Notes, it was in an old Everyman edition that treated Dostoevsky as if he was a new chum on the English-language literary block, and referred to him as "Theodore", the English version of Fyodor. Hence the title to this post.
** There is my own take on this at work in my novel The Russian Idea.
*** Roughly half of this interesting journal has been translated. It gives, among other things, the real flavour of Dostoevsky's thinking, and shows his anti-semitism in full flower. Indeed, in more than one way, it is similar to Celine's pamphleteering.
^Berdyaev regarded himself as a follower - he called himself a sprout - of Dostoevsky. For more on this you will just have to read The Russian Idea, whether my own or Berdyaev's, or Berdyaev's book Dostoevsky. Berdyaev's Russian Idea and Dostoevsky are in print. I have not written a post on Berdyaev, but will one day. For an interesting account of Dostoevsky as a religious prophet and the tradition he fits in, see Nicholas Zernov's Three Russian Prophets.
New! Improved! Added enzymes!
Recently I changed the title of this blog. It's the same blog, with all the same posts. The original title was given to me by a friend, but I never really liked it, not because it was "bad" but because it "wasn't me". The new one - I'm not sure and will let it sink in for a while before I decide that it's "really me". And if it isn't, I'll change it again. The blog isn't actually about me, but about writing and my attitudes towards writing, so the difference is how I feel about how close to what I'm on about the title manages to be. The new one is meant to suggest that the world of writing is not the world, that when we write, we create a world unlike the world as it really is - even though we are hoping, I think, to penetrate the real world, to reflect it perhaps, to read our written work into it and even to change it, through the creations of our imaginations.This is as true of non-fiction as fiction; in terms of me, of this blog as of my novels.
Nikolai Berdyaev, whose thinking led to my novel The Russian Idea, might have approved of this. One of his books was called The Meaning of the Creative Act, but he emphasised this point in a lot of his writings, in different ways.
Cynics might say that this is all too typical of the fantasist masquerading as a writer, and there is more truth in this than many writers might like to admit. Writers are by definition intellectuals, even if they are undisciplined and incoherent - they are after all living the life of the mind. Perhaps intellectuals in general as well as writers hold dear the illusion that their mental gymnastics can somehow change the world for the better. Certainly writers are often found in this territory. Norman Mailer, for example, tried for many years to bring his stature as a writer to bear on a more general public life. He announced his willingness to be President of the United States and campaigned as I recall for other public offices, though with how much seriousness is perhaps open to dispute.
But Mailer was far from alone. Upton Sinclair, an earlier American writer who wrote social realist novels (one, Oil, was made into the film There will be blood, but an earlier and very successful novel The Jungle was about meat packing, and he could claim to have changed the law relating to food hygiene), ran for office over and over, and once gained nearly 900,000 votes in a California election for governor.
Dostoevsky had what in his time was the equivalent of a blog, A writer's diary, meant to be a monthly excursion for readers through the mind of this amazing man. It ran on and off during the 1870s, and he gave it up to write The Brothers Karamazov. Like most people, he wasn't planning to die, and aimed to return to it, just as he aimed to carry the Karamazov family into further adventures.
The English-language edition - an abridgement with about half the total content - makes more than great claims for the Writer's diary, crediting Dostoevsky with looking so far ahead in intellectual trends that he could discern, a century ahead of his own life, the emergence of post-modernism. The diary was a "project" as the posties say these days, and it had intellectual pretensions in this line that may very well have astonished the writer.
Shorn of its poseur baggage, however, the editor has some very good points to make, and any English-speaking person interested in Dostoevsky who is not a Russian language expert can only be grateful that this edition exists. Dostoevsky becomes, through its pages, a much more rounded, more intelligible, and more intelligent human being than he would otherwise be.
Dostoevsky was engaged with the world, and the "diary" shows it. A woman threw her stepdaughter out of a window and Dostoevsky had some idea that he understood this in a way that should see the woman freed. He went to see her, intervened and in the end she was reunited with her husband though the stepdaughter, who had survived the incident, did not live with the family.
More significantly, Dostoevsky used the platform of his magazine for political aims. He saw his writing, as Mailer and Sinclair saw theirs, as a platform for politics. That's not all he saw it as, but the same idea remains: that a writer through writing reaches from the life of her or his mind to the minds of others, and through that to meaningful action to change the world in a larger, grander, more social and political sense.
Dostoevsky had some pretty strange notions in this regard and it is fascinating to discern in the diary some of the threads that he could not be open about: he was a Christian socialist, and sought to marry two very antagonistic schools of thought about the future of Russia: the materialist, quasi-Marxian industrial-development and internationalist movement and the mystical, religious, Orthodox and inward movement. He consorted with the Russian royal family (this is not made clear in the diary) as he urged his readers to talk across the dividing lines of their political precepts.
Today we might call this foolish. It may have even actually been foolish at the time. But there is certainly something noble in Dostoevsky's wishing his profound insight into the human condition to spread outward to transform our relations with one another that might enrich us all materially as well as spiritually.
Noble or not, the writer's conceit that the mere fact of having a public face through one's writing earns a purchase on a wider public interest, as Mailer, Sinclair and their ilk insisted, is not necessarily a pretty one. Dostoevsky purchased his right to his views the hard way: long years in prison, opprobrium for other aspects of his life, and a willingness to be "out there" rather than "up there". He didn't demand respect. He earned it, even or especially in his craziest moments.
This week I finished the first draft of the bulk of my new book, Kaos. It will be a long time before it appears in print, as I am far from happy about a lot of it, and in addition have a tail-piece and perhaps a prologue to write too. It's not especially long - 63,000 words, a short novel as it stands. It will grow, but hopefully remain short.
Is it political in the broad, Dostoevskian sense? Do I hope to reach across the divide between reader and writer and spur some personal transformations that will in the end lead to larger, more generalised changes? Of course.
Thanks for reading.
Nikolai Berdyaev, whose thinking led to my novel The Russian Idea, might have approved of this. One of his books was called The Meaning of the Creative Act, but he emphasised this point in a lot of his writings, in different ways.
Cynics might say that this is all too typical of the fantasist masquerading as a writer, and there is more truth in this than many writers might like to admit. Writers are by definition intellectuals, even if they are undisciplined and incoherent - they are after all living the life of the mind. Perhaps intellectuals in general as well as writers hold dear the illusion that their mental gymnastics can somehow change the world for the better. Certainly writers are often found in this territory. Norman Mailer, for example, tried for many years to bring his stature as a writer to bear on a more general public life. He announced his willingness to be President of the United States and campaigned as I recall for other public offices, though with how much seriousness is perhaps open to dispute.
But Mailer was far from alone. Upton Sinclair, an earlier American writer who wrote social realist novels (one, Oil, was made into the film There will be blood, but an earlier and very successful novel The Jungle was about meat packing, and he could claim to have changed the law relating to food hygiene), ran for office over and over, and once gained nearly 900,000 votes in a California election for governor.
Dostoevsky had what in his time was the equivalent of a blog, A writer's diary, meant to be a monthly excursion for readers through the mind of this amazing man. It ran on and off during the 1870s, and he gave it up to write The Brothers Karamazov. Like most people, he wasn't planning to die, and aimed to return to it, just as he aimed to carry the Karamazov family into further adventures.
The English-language edition - an abridgement with about half the total content - makes more than great claims for the Writer's diary, crediting Dostoevsky with looking so far ahead in intellectual trends that he could discern, a century ahead of his own life, the emergence of post-modernism. The diary was a "project" as the posties say these days, and it had intellectual pretensions in this line that may very well have astonished the writer.
Shorn of its poseur baggage, however, the editor has some very good points to make, and any English-speaking person interested in Dostoevsky who is not a Russian language expert can only be grateful that this edition exists. Dostoevsky becomes, through its pages, a much more rounded, more intelligible, and more intelligent human being than he would otherwise be.
Dostoevsky was engaged with the world, and the "diary" shows it. A woman threw her stepdaughter out of a window and Dostoevsky had some idea that he understood this in a way that should see the woman freed. He went to see her, intervened and in the end she was reunited with her husband though the stepdaughter, who had survived the incident, did not live with the family.
More significantly, Dostoevsky used the platform of his magazine for political aims. He saw his writing, as Mailer and Sinclair saw theirs, as a platform for politics. That's not all he saw it as, but the same idea remains: that a writer through writing reaches from the life of her or his mind to the minds of others, and through that to meaningful action to change the world in a larger, grander, more social and political sense.
Dostoevsky had some pretty strange notions in this regard and it is fascinating to discern in the diary some of the threads that he could not be open about: he was a Christian socialist, and sought to marry two very antagonistic schools of thought about the future of Russia: the materialist, quasi-Marxian industrial-development and internationalist movement and the mystical, religious, Orthodox and inward movement. He consorted with the Russian royal family (this is not made clear in the diary) as he urged his readers to talk across the dividing lines of their political precepts.
Today we might call this foolish. It may have even actually been foolish at the time. But there is certainly something noble in Dostoevsky's wishing his profound insight into the human condition to spread outward to transform our relations with one another that might enrich us all materially as well as spiritually.
Noble or not, the writer's conceit that the mere fact of having a public face through one's writing earns a purchase on a wider public interest, as Mailer, Sinclair and their ilk insisted, is not necessarily a pretty one. Dostoevsky purchased his right to his views the hard way: long years in prison, opprobrium for other aspects of his life, and a willingness to be "out there" rather than "up there". He didn't demand respect. He earned it, even or especially in his craziest moments.
This week I finished the first draft of the bulk of my new book, Kaos. It will be a long time before it appears in print, as I am far from happy about a lot of it, and in addition have a tail-piece and perhaps a prologue to write too. It's not especially long - 63,000 words, a short novel as it stands. It will grow, but hopefully remain short.
Is it political in the broad, Dostoevskian sense? Do I hope to reach across the divide between reader and writer and spur some personal transformations that will in the end lead to larger, more generalised changes? Of course.
Thanks for reading.
Writing Kaos
Kaos is the ninth novel I’ve written and the seventh I’ve “e-published”. Two others remain in the bottom drawer so to speak. As I wrote, it kept occurring to me that other writers, and those curious about writing, might be interested in the process as one writer has done it. It’s not really my idea that people will go on to read the book though of course more readers are always welcome. There will not be any “spoilers” but this is about writing, not marketing – “telling not selling”.
The novel I wrote before Kaos was The Russian Idea. It had been in my mind for a long time to do a novel revolving around the thinking of the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev*, and circumstances allowed me the time and ideas to work up a plot and write it.
The Russian Idea is not nearly so good a novel as I would have liked it to be. For one thing, it is too “intellectual” or more woundingly, “pseudo-intellectual”. All my novels from the first have been so-called novels of ideas cloaked in the garb of thrillers, but this one had too many ideas not well-clothed enough – or perhaps, given the genre, not ill-clothed enough. To me it is still not a bad book, but it is not my best by any means.
Even so it had something in its structure and in its basic theme that I rather liked. Moreover, Berdyaev was heavily influenced. as I am, by the 19th century Russian novelist and wild man Fyodor Dostoevsky, and in the course of research on Berdyaev, I ended up rereading a lot of Dostoevsky as well as Berdyaev’s book on him.
Something like a revolution has gone on in Dostoevsky studies since I first read his great novels longer ago than I really want to admit. New translations** have piled onto each other as new generations bid to make the Russian accessible as he meant to be in his own time. His strange “feuilleton” A Writer’s Diary*** has been half-translated with claims that if true make it far in advance of its time. As I reread the great novels, read a volume of a five part biography, some specialised religious material**** and read the Diary my appreciation of Dostoevsky was more than renewed; it was broadened and deepened. Much better translations revealed aspects to Dostoevsky’s writing that had previously been poorly shown, if at all. Berdyaev became – as he himself said – a follower of the novelist, in a prophetic Christian tradition few non-Russians would have imagined him to inhabit.
The Russian Idea turned into a homage to Dostoevsky as well as Berdyaev.
One of the things I admire about Dostoevsky was that he wrote thrillers. Like Shakespeare he explored great themes with great writing in a popular genre. As Shakespeare took the popular forms of writing in his time and made them something more than his peers, Dostoevsky took a popular form of fiction and made it more than his contemporaries.
The Idiot, Brothers Karamazov, Demons…three of his last four novels are enduring masterpieces all the more compelling for their dark themes. While I was writing The Russian Idea I had them in the back of my mind.
Unsatisfied with The Russian Idea, I nonetheless kept the basic approach of that book for Kaos, with Demons my guide. I wanted to write a book that began one way, and turned inside out, as Demons does: the first section of Demons is often hilarious, with a gentle mockery that makes it seem a comedy of manners. By the end, as one of the editors writes in the Penguin edition, “this is a scary book”.
Well, I have my own things to say. I’m not Dostoevsky either in outlook or talent, but as I was writing Kaos I kept that transitional approach in mind, that things should turn “inside out”. They do, if in a different way, and I am much happier with the result.
Yet the impulse for writing Kaos lay as much in Shakespeare as in Doestoevsky, in the Bard’s strange play Troilus and Cressida^. In one sense “T & C” has a walk-on part in Kaos, but in another its underlying theme is the larger theme of Kaos, which is – ahem! Pay attention now! – a study in gender politics whose multiple foci shift as the novel shifts. Oh, dear!
Of course the stuff of writing – plot, characterisation, dialogue, description, and so on, the meat if you like, may look far removed from this. There are heaps of “how-to” writing guides that will sell you the hows and tos, and lately a number of blogs I follow have patiently explained various aspects of the technical facets of writing. Each is worthy in its own right, but all are and can be no more than elaborations of Raymond Chandler’s three word short course: “Analyse, and emulate”. My aim, of having a serious purpose in a frivolous genre, comes from reading on both levels. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Len Deighton, Ross Macdonald^^, Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie…and the greats, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Euripides etc as you can find in the earlier posts of this blog. There are others, and I’ll perhaps approach them in time.
The idea has always been to offer a “good read” with some food for thought for anyone who wants it, and for me Kaos manages that. The more successful I am, the less the reader will notice.
Well, there you go. Hopefully you found this interesting, dear reader. If you didn’t – my apologies, with thanks for getting through it.
* Most of this unusual man’s works are in print in hard copy and his shorter works are on the net. A book about the Catholic Worker movement, which he strongly influenced, was published in the 1970s: William D Miller’s A harsh and dreadful love.
** Every Dostoevsky lover is likely to have her or his favourite. My preference has been the Penguins – for Demons, the Maguire translation put out by Penguin.
*** The editor of the English translation keeps calling the diary a “project”. See an online dictionary for a definition of feuilleton.
**** The rare book by Nicholas Zernov, Three Russian prophets, is still in print. Dostoevsky is the middle prophet, sandwiched in between Khomiakov and Soloviev. The chapter on Dostoevsky is extremely good.
^ As in an earlier post, my plan is to treat Troilus and Cressida separately.
^^ These are the so-called hard boiled school. Hammett is the master, Chandler his pupil who added some qualities of dialogue. Len Deighton’s early novels took these and made them a part of espionage fiction; Macdonald added nothing but was a success. Allingham and Christie worked in the earlier “puzzle” style for the most part but added something for me.
The novel I wrote before Kaos was The Russian Idea. It had been in my mind for a long time to do a novel revolving around the thinking of the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev*, and circumstances allowed me the time and ideas to work up a plot and write it.
The Russian Idea is not nearly so good a novel as I would have liked it to be. For one thing, it is too “intellectual” or more woundingly, “pseudo-intellectual”. All my novels from the first have been so-called novels of ideas cloaked in the garb of thrillers, but this one had too many ideas not well-clothed enough – or perhaps, given the genre, not ill-clothed enough. To me it is still not a bad book, but it is not my best by any means.
Even so it had something in its structure and in its basic theme that I rather liked. Moreover, Berdyaev was heavily influenced. as I am, by the 19th century Russian novelist and wild man Fyodor Dostoevsky, and in the course of research on Berdyaev, I ended up rereading a lot of Dostoevsky as well as Berdyaev’s book on him.
Something like a revolution has gone on in Dostoevsky studies since I first read his great novels longer ago than I really want to admit. New translations** have piled onto each other as new generations bid to make the Russian accessible as he meant to be in his own time. His strange “feuilleton” A Writer’s Diary*** has been half-translated with claims that if true make it far in advance of its time. As I reread the great novels, read a volume of a five part biography, some specialised religious material**** and read the Diary my appreciation of Dostoevsky was more than renewed; it was broadened and deepened. Much better translations revealed aspects to Dostoevsky’s writing that had previously been poorly shown, if at all. Berdyaev became – as he himself said – a follower of the novelist, in a prophetic Christian tradition few non-Russians would have imagined him to inhabit.
The Russian Idea turned into a homage to Dostoevsky as well as Berdyaev.
One of the things I admire about Dostoevsky was that he wrote thrillers. Like Shakespeare he explored great themes with great writing in a popular genre. As Shakespeare took the popular forms of writing in his time and made them something more than his peers, Dostoevsky took a popular form of fiction and made it more than his contemporaries.
The Idiot, Brothers Karamazov, Demons…three of his last four novels are enduring masterpieces all the more compelling for their dark themes. While I was writing The Russian Idea I had them in the back of my mind.
Unsatisfied with The Russian Idea, I nonetheless kept the basic approach of that book for Kaos, with Demons my guide. I wanted to write a book that began one way, and turned inside out, as Demons does: the first section of Demons is often hilarious, with a gentle mockery that makes it seem a comedy of manners. By the end, as one of the editors writes in the Penguin edition, “this is a scary book”.
Well, I have my own things to say. I’m not Dostoevsky either in outlook or talent, but as I was writing Kaos I kept that transitional approach in mind, that things should turn “inside out”. They do, if in a different way, and I am much happier with the result.
Yet the impulse for writing Kaos lay as much in Shakespeare as in Doestoevsky, in the Bard’s strange play Troilus and Cressida^. In one sense “T & C” has a walk-on part in Kaos, but in another its underlying theme is the larger theme of Kaos, which is – ahem! Pay attention now! – a study in gender politics whose multiple foci shift as the novel shifts. Oh, dear!
Of course the stuff of writing – plot, characterisation, dialogue, description, and so on, the meat if you like, may look far removed from this. There are heaps of “how-to” writing guides that will sell you the hows and tos, and lately a number of blogs I follow have patiently explained various aspects of the technical facets of writing. Each is worthy in its own right, but all are and can be no more than elaborations of Raymond Chandler’s three word short course: “Analyse, and emulate”. My aim, of having a serious purpose in a frivolous genre, comes from reading on both levels. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Len Deighton, Ross Macdonald^^, Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie…and the greats, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Euripides etc as you can find in the earlier posts of this blog. There are others, and I’ll perhaps approach them in time.
The idea has always been to offer a “good read” with some food for thought for anyone who wants it, and for me Kaos manages that. The more successful I am, the less the reader will notice.
Well, there you go. Hopefully you found this interesting, dear reader. If you didn’t – my apologies, with thanks for getting through it.
* Most of this unusual man’s works are in print in hard copy and his shorter works are on the net. A book about the Catholic Worker movement, which he strongly influenced, was published in the 1970s: William D Miller’s A harsh and dreadful love.
** Every Dostoevsky lover is likely to have her or his favourite. My preference has been the Penguins – for Demons, the Maguire translation put out by Penguin.
*** The editor of the English translation keeps calling the diary a “project”. See an online dictionary for a definition of feuilleton.
**** The rare book by Nicholas Zernov, Three Russian prophets, is still in print. Dostoevsky is the middle prophet, sandwiched in between Khomiakov and Soloviev. The chapter on Dostoevsky is extremely good.
^ As in an earlier post, my plan is to treat Troilus and Cressida separately.
^^ These are the so-called hard boiled school. Hammett is the master, Chandler his pupil who added some qualities of dialogue. Len Deighton’s early novels took these and made them a part of espionage fiction; Macdonald added nothing but was a success. Allingham and Christie worked in the earlier “puzzle” style for the most part but added something for me.
First they came for the potty-mouthed...
Actually, they didn’t. If we take “potty-mouthed” as a marker for art and in particular avant-garde art, “they” came after they had dealt with many of their other perceived enemies. The Soviet style of repression left artists and writers pretty much alone till well into the 1920s. The change can be gauged by the life of the writer and artist Vladimir Mayakovsky, who was an enthusiastic supporter of the revolution at first, but who shot himself in 1930.
Now Vladimir Putin’s Russia is at it again with a new law against swearing in literature and the arts alongside a “swearingbot” computer programme to intercept online profanity before it reaches the delicate, so easily wounded eyes of Russian citizens. Of course any programme that can intercept four-letter words can intercept longer ones, for example “freedom”, or “corruption”.
A few years ago I wrote a thriller, The Russian Idea, set in Moscow and Berlin. Its main purpose was to draw attention to the work of Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev. So far as I am aware, after being forgotten for a while, Berdyaev has enjoyed posthumous popularity of a sort, with all his books in print in English and a large number of articles by him available free online. Even so, most people have never heard of him, or if they have, read his work.
The book I wrote concerns an oligarch’s plan to set up a global network of Russian cultural centres – like the Alliance Francaise and the Goethe Institut – independent of the Russian government. The oligarch’s professed aim was to bring the pressure of enlightened Russian culture as typified and symbolised by Berdyaev to bear on the all too unenlightened power brokers inside Russia itself.*
I am not entirely happy with my book and wish it was better than it is. It is not terrible – just not great. I wish more people would read it, and go on to read and find out about Berdyaev and his own inspiration, Fyodor Dostoevsky.**
But what is happening in Russia now also makes me wish some one with pots of dosh would decide to take up the idea of “Berdyaevian” non-governmental Russian cultural centres that could show that Russian culture is not simply the property of those who believe in censorship, in thought control and its many correlatives, especially propaganda, who intimidate as they expropriate their fellow citizens and others, and who harass, imprison, exile and murder their opponents. It would be, after all, very easy to conclude from what is happening now, that not much has changed from the Tsarism that seemed to flow so naturally into Sovietism, and that has gone on to corrupt and all but end the democratic transformation of Russian society that began so hopefully with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Berdyaev’s book The Russian Idea, whose title I “borrowed”, was a history of Russian religious thought from the early 19th century to the Bolshevik Revolution. It is a serious and striking book. Berdyaev believed strongly in a Russian concept that is untranslatable as a word, “sobornost”, but which might be rendered, “unity in diversity”: that differences can strengthen rather than enfeeble society. As a Christian, he was suspicious of the organised Christian church anywhere but especially in Russia, and pointed out that few if any serious religious thinkers in Russia were functionaries – for example priests – in the Russian Orthodox church. For a religious philosophical tradition as remarkable as the one charted by Berdyaev, this can hardly be an accident.
Of course, it takes moral fibre to stand up for “sobornost” and the open society it is about. Some artists and writers and thinkers can go out of their way to insult those who disagree with them, and to express themselves vulgarly out of rage or frustration or ignorant silliness. Yet the famous dictum attributed to Voltaire of disagreeing with a view someone may hold but defending (to the death!) their right to hold and express it, is an important plank of humane culture that when missing self-evidently leads to awful crimes, and Russia’s history has shown just how horrible these can be.
One can never quite tell for certain what the aims and motivations of Russia’s leaders really are. In Soviet times the Machiavellian manoeuvrings of Stalin and his henchmen (always men) were astonishingly opaque. The worst “excesses”, costing the lives of millions of people, could be put down to “mistakes”. The henchmen themselves could find themselves in front of a firing squad (one, according to Anne Applebaum, swearing to die with Stalin’s name on his lips).*** The line between “mere” censorship and more severe punishment today similarly weaves and wavers according to the whim of some autocrat or other.
The title of this post comes from a famous saying by German theologian Martin Niemoller and relates to the Nazis’ means of repression, not the Soviets’, much less today’s Russian techniques. These last are however more sophisticated than those of the 20th century’s most notorious monsters. Bizarrely, Putin instructed Russia’s regional governors to read a work by Berdyaev, The philosophy of inequality, as if the ideas of this great exponent of freedom and creativity could somehow be reconciled with the twisted rationales of the present regime. They can’t.
*Non-spoiler alert. **Berdyaev called himself a “sprout” of Dostoevsky and wrote a book about his relationship to his hero. For those who consider Dostoevsky as a novelist only, see the treatment of him as one of Three Russian prophets by Nicolas Zernov. ***See her Gulag, a history.
Now Vladimir Putin’s Russia is at it again with a new law against swearing in literature and the arts alongside a “swearingbot” computer programme to intercept online profanity before it reaches the delicate, so easily wounded eyes of Russian citizens. Of course any programme that can intercept four-letter words can intercept longer ones, for example “freedom”, or “corruption”.
A few years ago I wrote a thriller, The Russian Idea, set in Moscow and Berlin. Its main purpose was to draw attention to the work of Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev. So far as I am aware, after being forgotten for a while, Berdyaev has enjoyed posthumous popularity of a sort, with all his books in print in English and a large number of articles by him available free online. Even so, most people have never heard of him, or if they have, read his work.
The book I wrote concerns an oligarch’s plan to set up a global network of Russian cultural centres – like the Alliance Francaise and the Goethe Institut – independent of the Russian government. The oligarch’s professed aim was to bring the pressure of enlightened Russian culture as typified and symbolised by Berdyaev to bear on the all too unenlightened power brokers inside Russia itself.*
I am not entirely happy with my book and wish it was better than it is. It is not terrible – just not great. I wish more people would read it, and go on to read and find out about Berdyaev and his own inspiration, Fyodor Dostoevsky.**
But what is happening in Russia now also makes me wish some one with pots of dosh would decide to take up the idea of “Berdyaevian” non-governmental Russian cultural centres that could show that Russian culture is not simply the property of those who believe in censorship, in thought control and its many correlatives, especially propaganda, who intimidate as they expropriate their fellow citizens and others, and who harass, imprison, exile and murder their opponents. It would be, after all, very easy to conclude from what is happening now, that not much has changed from the Tsarism that seemed to flow so naturally into Sovietism, and that has gone on to corrupt and all but end the democratic transformation of Russian society that began so hopefully with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Berdyaev’s book The Russian Idea, whose title I “borrowed”, was a history of Russian religious thought from the early 19th century to the Bolshevik Revolution. It is a serious and striking book. Berdyaev believed strongly in a Russian concept that is untranslatable as a word, “sobornost”, but which might be rendered, “unity in diversity”: that differences can strengthen rather than enfeeble society. As a Christian, he was suspicious of the organised Christian church anywhere but especially in Russia, and pointed out that few if any serious religious thinkers in Russia were functionaries – for example priests – in the Russian Orthodox church. For a religious philosophical tradition as remarkable as the one charted by Berdyaev, this can hardly be an accident.
Of course, it takes moral fibre to stand up for “sobornost” and the open society it is about. Some artists and writers and thinkers can go out of their way to insult those who disagree with them, and to express themselves vulgarly out of rage or frustration or ignorant silliness. Yet the famous dictum attributed to Voltaire of disagreeing with a view someone may hold but defending (to the death!) their right to hold and express it, is an important plank of humane culture that when missing self-evidently leads to awful crimes, and Russia’s history has shown just how horrible these can be.
One can never quite tell for certain what the aims and motivations of Russia’s leaders really are. In Soviet times the Machiavellian manoeuvrings of Stalin and his henchmen (always men) were astonishingly opaque. The worst “excesses”, costing the lives of millions of people, could be put down to “mistakes”. The henchmen themselves could find themselves in front of a firing squad (one, according to Anne Applebaum, swearing to die with Stalin’s name on his lips).*** The line between “mere” censorship and more severe punishment today similarly weaves and wavers according to the whim of some autocrat or other.
The title of this post comes from a famous saying by German theologian Martin Niemoller and relates to the Nazis’ means of repression, not the Soviets’, much less today’s Russian techniques. These last are however more sophisticated than those of the 20th century’s most notorious monsters. Bizarrely, Putin instructed Russia’s regional governors to read a work by Berdyaev, The philosophy of inequality, as if the ideas of this great exponent of freedom and creativity could somehow be reconciled with the twisted rationales of the present regime. They can’t.
*Non-spoiler alert. **Berdyaev called himself a “sprout” of Dostoevsky and wrote a book about his relationship to his hero. For those who consider Dostoevsky as a novelist only, see the treatment of him as one of Three Russian prophets by Nicolas Zernov. ***See her Gulag, a history.
Truth that leads to eternal life!
When I was a lot younger I fobbed off a couple of young Korean women who kept urging me to become a Jehovah’s Witness. They were nice, really decent people and I felt a bit guilty taking their Watchtower and Awake magazines and newspapers when I was 99 and 44/100ths per cent sure I was not going to be Jehovah’s Witness. Actually, I may have been well over 100 per cent and have had some fantasy of persuading them to atheism and beyond. Whatever, they kept coming and it began to be difficult for them, and for me.
Eventually I hit on a wheeze – that I would take their special course, entitled “The truth that leads to eternal life” if they would promise that if I decided not to join they would leave me be.
It was a deal and the pair turned up every week and we discussed a chapter of the book the course was based on.
Over the few months this took, I gained a certain appreciation of this strange religion, a millennialist movement whose earnest practitioners are found just about everywhere on earth, door-knocking their message to anyone who will take the time to listen.
The JWs (said “Jaydubs” in New Zealand where I now live) have some surprising beliefs. For one, they don’t believe in Hell. Nor do they believe that when you die, you go to heaven – some do but the numbers are strictly limited to 144,000 and those places are pretty much full.*
The remainder of us, including all those who have lived before, are going to get tested by God at some stage, shown how to live the way God wants, and then – if we pass muster - granted eternal life right here on Earth. JW literature often features artwork depicting children petting lions and the like.
While we are waiting for this, JWs do believe in the devil, who God has given the opportunity to ruin the world, and who is doing a very good job of it – as indeed we all know. Eventually God will first banish this unworthy fellow to “a dark and dismal place” and after the final reckoning with we humans, will vaporise that tosser.
Because the devil is ruling the world that means JWs don’t take part in government, vote, or serve in the military, attitudes that have led to persecution and occasionally death in many countries, apparently on the grounds that while they themselves are harmless, their example is not. Quakers may nod in appreciation of this.**
I didn’t mind the absurd reasoning or the bizarre promise if the action – or lack of action – helped make this a better and more peaceful world.
Other things about the JWs were a bit tougher to take, in particular the idea that blood transfusions are wrong – to the point where parents refuse to allow their children to have them for life-saving operations. The rationale for this now escapes me though I can remember vividly the young woman who visited me speaking up for the appalling doctrine with verve and conviction.
The course ended, with it our meetings and after my visit to a JW “Kingdom Hall” one Sunday, our relationship. The Koreans stopped coming after a tearful farewell. They had been so hopeful…I felt a bit guilty, but only a bit.
It is easy to mock JWs and in some respects, I guess they deserve it. No one asks them to come knocking and their views, to put it mildly, are certainly unusual. Their religion isn’t for me, but I’ll respect them all the same for their missionary zeal, their patience in the face of hostility and persecution, and for some of their tenets.
They are not alone in believing in eternal life on earth come Judgment Day. Nikolai Fedorov, a 19th century Russian theologian, not only thought that, but believed that science would enable all previously dead people to be revived. Fedorov, a librarian at what became the State Library in Moscow occupied much of his adult life on this singular idea, but did not think this a religious belief but a scientific certainty and obligation, though he was a keen Orthodox Christian. While immortality for those living was possible, Fedorov argued, it was immoral to achieve that without going back over the millennia and reviving those who had come before.***
Fedorov’s desire may have sprung out of his millennial (Orthodox) Christianity, but his claim and his aim was scientific – his God gave humans the ability to think, to create, to devise and expected them to do it, and he saw the ability to bring the dead back to life and to achieve immortality, as a scientific problem. Nowadays other people think that too.
The JWs are still around, of course, and poor Nikolai is not – he is waiting to return maybe, when he will be able to have lecture tours to tell us all how he told us so, way back when.
Nowadays the tendency is to invert this process and to leave God completely out of it. Science predicts the end, apparently. Jehovah’s Witnesses are presumably rubbing their hands in anxious anticipation as they read apocalyptic predictions of the horrors that await as our feckless species overheats the planet. It is in their Bible, somewhere…Those young Korean women told me in 1970 or so what it would be like – earthquakes, tidal waves, climate disasters…they dismissed as ignorant raving the idea that God would appear in the sky – nature would give the signs. They claimed not scientific but Biblical authority and in those days the scientific doomsayers weren’t on about global warming but ice ages, and some of them are the same people! They just want to be in a band, on a wagon, waving at the crowd…
This really is heading somewhere: the subject of my new book. It’s not spoiling things to say it may not mention the JWs or Nikolai Fedorov. But it’s definitely going to mention the end of the human race, which some people predict is scientifically certain to come along sometime probably in this century. We are finished. It’s too late to do anything about it.
And I”m going to write it up. There is a question to be asked here, about why I would bother…and why anyone would want to do anything but party on down from this moment onward…you’ll have to read the result to find that out, and it’s not written yet.
Thanks for getting through this one.
*The JWs have their own translation of the Bible which has been disputed in some respects but this comes from The Book of Revelations and the curious can find this number in any translation I’ve ever seen. It’s probably worth pointing out that there are some things in common between the JWs and Islam as well as other millennial religions, though the Koran (or Qu’ran) definitely has heaven and hell on offer or warning.
**A read of the autobiography of George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, is revealing.
***Fedorov’s writings were not published until after his death in 1903 but manuscript copies were circulating and Dostoevsky – no mean Christian – admired him. Tolstoy was a friend until the librarian refused to see him because of ideological differences. Wikipedia is good on him, and so is Nikolai Berdyaev’s The Russian Idea, a book I used partly for my novel of the same title.
Eventually I hit on a wheeze – that I would take their special course, entitled “The truth that leads to eternal life” if they would promise that if I decided not to join they would leave me be.
It was a deal and the pair turned up every week and we discussed a chapter of the book the course was based on.
Over the few months this took, I gained a certain appreciation of this strange religion, a millennialist movement whose earnest practitioners are found just about everywhere on earth, door-knocking their message to anyone who will take the time to listen.
The JWs (said “Jaydubs” in New Zealand where I now live) have some surprising beliefs. For one, they don’t believe in Hell. Nor do they believe that when you die, you go to heaven – some do but the numbers are strictly limited to 144,000 and those places are pretty much full.*
The remainder of us, including all those who have lived before, are going to get tested by God at some stage, shown how to live the way God wants, and then – if we pass muster - granted eternal life right here on Earth. JW literature often features artwork depicting children petting lions and the like.
While we are waiting for this, JWs do believe in the devil, who God has given the opportunity to ruin the world, and who is doing a very good job of it – as indeed we all know. Eventually God will first banish this unworthy fellow to “a dark and dismal place” and after the final reckoning with we humans, will vaporise that tosser.
Because the devil is ruling the world that means JWs don’t take part in government, vote, or serve in the military, attitudes that have led to persecution and occasionally death in many countries, apparently on the grounds that while they themselves are harmless, their example is not. Quakers may nod in appreciation of this.**
I didn’t mind the absurd reasoning or the bizarre promise if the action – or lack of action – helped make this a better and more peaceful world.
Other things about the JWs were a bit tougher to take, in particular the idea that blood transfusions are wrong – to the point where parents refuse to allow their children to have them for life-saving operations. The rationale for this now escapes me though I can remember vividly the young woman who visited me speaking up for the appalling doctrine with verve and conviction.
The course ended, with it our meetings and after my visit to a JW “Kingdom Hall” one Sunday, our relationship. The Koreans stopped coming after a tearful farewell. They had been so hopeful…I felt a bit guilty, but only a bit.
It is easy to mock JWs and in some respects, I guess they deserve it. No one asks them to come knocking and their views, to put it mildly, are certainly unusual. Their religion isn’t for me, but I’ll respect them all the same for their missionary zeal, their patience in the face of hostility and persecution, and for some of their tenets.
They are not alone in believing in eternal life on earth come Judgment Day. Nikolai Fedorov, a 19th century Russian theologian, not only thought that, but believed that science would enable all previously dead people to be revived. Fedorov, a librarian at what became the State Library in Moscow occupied much of his adult life on this singular idea, but did not think this a religious belief but a scientific certainty and obligation, though he was a keen Orthodox Christian. While immortality for those living was possible, Fedorov argued, it was immoral to achieve that without going back over the millennia and reviving those who had come before.***
Fedorov’s desire may have sprung out of his millennial (Orthodox) Christianity, but his claim and his aim was scientific – his God gave humans the ability to think, to create, to devise and expected them to do it, and he saw the ability to bring the dead back to life and to achieve immortality, as a scientific problem. Nowadays other people think that too.
The JWs are still around, of course, and poor Nikolai is not – he is waiting to return maybe, when he will be able to have lecture tours to tell us all how he told us so, way back when.
Nowadays the tendency is to invert this process and to leave God completely out of it. Science predicts the end, apparently. Jehovah’s Witnesses are presumably rubbing their hands in anxious anticipation as they read apocalyptic predictions of the horrors that await as our feckless species overheats the planet. It is in their Bible, somewhere…Those young Korean women told me in 1970 or so what it would be like – earthquakes, tidal waves, climate disasters…they dismissed as ignorant raving the idea that God would appear in the sky – nature would give the signs. They claimed not scientific but Biblical authority and in those days the scientific doomsayers weren’t on about global warming but ice ages, and some of them are the same people! They just want to be in a band, on a wagon, waving at the crowd…
This really is heading somewhere: the subject of my new book. It’s not spoiling things to say it may not mention the JWs or Nikolai Fedorov. But it’s definitely going to mention the end of the human race, which some people predict is scientifically certain to come along sometime probably in this century. We are finished. It’s too late to do anything about it.
And I”m going to write it up. There is a question to be asked here, about why I would bother…and why anyone would want to do anything but party on down from this moment onward…you’ll have to read the result to find that out, and it’s not written yet.
Thanks for getting through this one.
*The JWs have their own translation of the Bible which has been disputed in some respects but this comes from The Book of Revelations and the curious can find this number in any translation I’ve ever seen. It’s probably worth pointing out that there are some things in common between the JWs and Islam as well as other millennial religions, though the Koran (or Qu’ran) definitely has heaven and hell on offer or warning.
**A read of the autobiography of George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, is revealing.
***Fedorov’s writings were not published until after his death in 1903 but manuscript copies were circulating and Dostoevsky – no mean Christian – admired him. Tolstoy was a friend until the librarian refused to see him because of ideological differences. Wikipedia is good on him, and so is Nikolai Berdyaev’s The Russian Idea, a book I used partly for my novel of the same title.
The Idiot 2: Convincing lies
Dostoevsky had his own way of doing things. No writer before or since has really followed his method, insofar as he had one. Other writers kept notebooks but it is hard to imagine anyone today at least filling hundreds if not thousands of very messy pages before getting down to business.
When it came to "point of view" the great man also had his quirks. He had a fondness for a narrator or editor, typically anonymous, who told the story, or made someone else's manuscript ready. Version 2 (editor) was his approach in House of the Dead and Notes from Underground and Version 1 in Demons and Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoevsky may have been attracted to these styles of writing because they allowed him to portray events as they may not have happened, but it could get him in writerly trouble. For example, Demons, narrated by an observer of the events described, has a scene between two characters whose content the narrator could not possibly have known. Before he could have found out one hanged himself while the other slipped out of the country. Obviously, Dostoevsky expected readers to drop the fiction of a narrator and allow the real novelist authorial omnipotence, the more usual way writers go about things.
Does this kind of contradiction weaken the impact or enjoyment of Demons? Well, I was glued to the scene described above and a modern editor's remark that "this is a scary book" remained true for me well beyond the last page: the terror of this novel sticks, even through repeat readings.
The Idiot by contrast is mostly a straight narrative account using conventional authorial omnipotence. Occasionally the writer adopts another, almost experimental approach and addresses the reader directly, offering some lessons in how writers write while - miraculously! - simultaneously both drawing readers' attention to the fact that The Idiot is a made up story and maintaining an illusion of reality.* It's done very well and helps him keep the comic air breezy.
There is however another element of this great writer's intent and style. Unlike most writers, who if anything underscore the points they are trying to make, "laying it on with a trowel", Dostoevsky wanted to convince despite everything. He gave those who opposed his views the very best arguments possible in his novels, and he often put his own views in the mouths of the most absurd and comic characters. A devout Christian, his account of the Grand Inquisitor in Karamazov, perhaps his most famous fictional episode, is a compelling attack on Catholicism - Dostoevsky was a vigorous anti-Catholic - but from an atheist. So persuasive was it that when the book was first serialised Dostoevsky's admirers urged him to demolish the argument quickly, and the writer promised just the thing later on. When it came, it was hardly noticed.
The Idiot's fulcrum scene is cut from this cloth; Prince Myshkin, "introduced" to society as the preferred suitor of the daughter of a well to do family, gets overly excited at conversation, makes a fool of himself, smashes the matron's favourite vase, and has an epileptic fit. The prince, not long returned to Russia from years in a Swiss sanatorium, displays total naivte yet expresses Dostoevsky's often prescient views as well as his virulent hatred of Catholicism, not merely to a skeptical but a disbelieving audience. The implication that the chattering classes were chattering their way to oblivion courtesy of a tsunami of revolution washing toward their summer dachas could hardly have been overlooked even at the time. Couched in the remarks of an apparent fool, the insensible was made sensible. Modern readers know what they are reading in another and genuinely tragic way: a prophet dismissed.
Dostoevsky's desire to persuade despite everything is not completely unheard of otherwise. Pierre Maurin, co-founder with Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement, sought to persuade in a similar manner, consciously presenting himself in what might be politely termed an off-putting manner: he wanted, he explained to a well-wisher, to reach doubters over their prejudices.
Maurin was spreading the views of the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, a man who termed himself a "sprout" of Dostoevsky and who wrote a book about him.
In four of my books I have tried Dostoevsky's way more seriously than with others - Tobi's Game, The Russian Idea, Kaos and my most recent, Attila's Angels. I can't say I really managed. It certainly has been a very stern discipline to give unpalatable people ideas I share, or unpalatable ideas the best case possible. Yet Dostoevsky did these if not with ease definitely with panache. He has carried an undeserved reputation of being difficult and worse into our time; on the contrary, for writer and reader, these "quirks" make him as a writer and as a human being humbling and inspiring.
*The only other notable example I am aware of is John Fowles' French Lieutenant's Woman. Fowles was a clever and talented writer but his arrogance got in the way.
When it came to "point of view" the great man also had his quirks. He had a fondness for a narrator or editor, typically anonymous, who told the story, or made someone else's manuscript ready. Version 2 (editor) was his approach in House of the Dead and Notes from Underground and Version 1 in Demons and Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoevsky may have been attracted to these styles of writing because they allowed him to portray events as they may not have happened, but it could get him in writerly trouble. For example, Demons, narrated by an observer of the events described, has a scene between two characters whose content the narrator could not possibly have known. Before he could have found out one hanged himself while the other slipped out of the country. Obviously, Dostoevsky expected readers to drop the fiction of a narrator and allow the real novelist authorial omnipotence, the more usual way writers go about things.
Does this kind of contradiction weaken the impact or enjoyment of Demons? Well, I was glued to the scene described above and a modern editor's remark that "this is a scary book" remained true for me well beyond the last page: the terror of this novel sticks, even through repeat readings.
The Idiot by contrast is mostly a straight narrative account using conventional authorial omnipotence. Occasionally the writer adopts another, almost experimental approach and addresses the reader directly, offering some lessons in how writers write while - miraculously! - simultaneously both drawing readers' attention to the fact that The Idiot is a made up story and maintaining an illusion of reality.* It's done very well and helps him keep the comic air breezy.
There is however another element of this great writer's intent and style. Unlike most writers, who if anything underscore the points they are trying to make, "laying it on with a trowel", Dostoevsky wanted to convince despite everything. He gave those who opposed his views the very best arguments possible in his novels, and he often put his own views in the mouths of the most absurd and comic characters. A devout Christian, his account of the Grand Inquisitor in Karamazov, perhaps his most famous fictional episode, is a compelling attack on Catholicism - Dostoevsky was a vigorous anti-Catholic - but from an atheist. So persuasive was it that when the book was first serialised Dostoevsky's admirers urged him to demolish the argument quickly, and the writer promised just the thing later on. When it came, it was hardly noticed.
The Idiot's fulcrum scene is cut from this cloth; Prince Myshkin, "introduced" to society as the preferred suitor of the daughter of a well to do family, gets overly excited at conversation, makes a fool of himself, smashes the matron's favourite vase, and has an epileptic fit. The prince, not long returned to Russia from years in a Swiss sanatorium, displays total naivte yet expresses Dostoevsky's often prescient views as well as his virulent hatred of Catholicism, not merely to a skeptical but a disbelieving audience. The implication that the chattering classes were chattering their way to oblivion courtesy of a tsunami of revolution washing toward their summer dachas could hardly have been overlooked even at the time. Couched in the remarks of an apparent fool, the insensible was made sensible. Modern readers know what they are reading in another and genuinely tragic way: a prophet dismissed.
Dostoevsky's desire to persuade despite everything is not completely unheard of otherwise. Pierre Maurin, co-founder with Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement, sought to persuade in a similar manner, consciously presenting himself in what might be politely termed an off-putting manner: he wanted, he explained to a well-wisher, to reach doubters over their prejudices.
Maurin was spreading the views of the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, a man who termed himself a "sprout" of Dostoevsky and who wrote a book about him.
In four of my books I have tried Dostoevsky's way more seriously than with others - Tobi's Game, The Russian Idea, Kaos and my most recent, Attila's Angels. I can't say I really managed. It certainly has been a very stern discipline to give unpalatable people ideas I share, or unpalatable ideas the best case possible. Yet Dostoevsky did these if not with ease definitely with panache. He has carried an undeserved reputation of being difficult and worse into our time; on the contrary, for writer and reader, these "quirks" make him as a writer and as a human being humbling and inspiring.
*The only other notable example I am aware of is John Fowles' French Lieutenant's Woman. Fowles was a clever and talented writer but his arrogance got in the way.
The written world
This blog was originally started "just because" but as I've gone along I've realised how valuable it is to be able to think about writing, about the writers who matter to me, and to help clarify my th
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