by Orhan Pamuk
When he began the book, Dostoyevsky wrote to his editor brother, “I have no idea what will come of this; perhaps it will be bad art.” The great discoveries of literary history are (like style) rarely planned and hard to account for. They are shocking, liberating discoveries that occur only when creative writers use the full force of their imagination to penetrate the surface of their fictive worlds, to extract all that seems contradictory and impossible to reconcile.
When he first sits down to write, an author cannot know where his work will lead. But if we accept today that it might be possible to want to embrace our own smell, our filth, our defeat, and our pain—if we understand there is a logic to the love of degradation—we owe a debt to Notes from Underground. It is from Dostoyevsky’s gloomy, damning ambivalence—his familiarity with European thought and his anger against it, his equal and opposite desires to belong to Europe and to shun it—that the modern novel derives its originality; and how comforting it is to remember this is so.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Dostoyevsky’s Fearsome Demons
Demons is, in my view, the greatest political novel of all time. I first read it when I was twenty, and I can describe its impact only by saying I was stunned, awed, terrified, and utterly convinced. No other novel had affected me so deeply; no other story had given me such distressing knowledge of the human soul. Man’s will to power; his capacity for forgiveness; his ability to deceive himself and others; his love for, hatred of, and need for belief; his addictions, both sacred and profane—what shocked me was that Dostoyevsky saw all these qualities as existing together and rooted in a common tangled tale of politics, deception, and death. I admired the novel for the speed with which it conveyed its all-embracing wisdom. This may be literature’s primary virtue: Great novels draw us into their trance as fast as their heroes race into the thick of things; we believe in their worlds as deeply as we believe in their heroes. I believed in Dostoyevsky’s prophetic voice as ardently as I believed in his characters and in their addiction to confession.
What is harder to explain is why this book struck such fear in my heart. I was particularly affected by the excruciating suicide scene (the snuffing of the candle and the dark other, observing events from the next room) and by the violence of an ill-conceived murder born of terror. Perhaps what shook me was the speed with which the novel’s heroes switched back and forth between grand thoughts and their small provincial lives, a boldness Dostoyevsky saw not just in them but in himself. When we read this novel, it seems as if even the smallest details of ordinary life are tied to the characters’ grand thoughts, and it is by seeing such connections that we enter the fearful world of the paranoid, in which all thoughts and great ideals are linked to one another. So it is with the secret societies, intertwined cells, revolutionaries, and informers who inhabit this book. This fearsome world in which everyone is connected to everyone else serves both as a mask and a conduit to the great truth lurking behind all thoughts, for behind this world is another, and in this other world it is possible to question man’s freedom and God’s existence. In Demons, Dostoyevsky offers us a hero who commits suicide to confirm both these grand ideas—man’s freedom and God’s presence—and he does so in a way no reader is likely ever to forget. There are very few writers who can personify or dramatize beliefs, abstract thoughts, and philosophical contradictions as well as Dostoyevsky.
Dostoyevsky began work on Demons in 1869, at the age of forty-eight. He’d just written and published The Idiot; he’d written The Eternal Husband. He was living in Europe (Florence and Dresden), where he’d gone two years earlier to escape his creditors and work in relative peace. He had in mind a novel about faith and the lack of it, which he called Atheism, the Life of a Great Sinner. He was full of rancor for the Nihilists, whom we might define as half anarchist, half liberal, and he was writing a political novel that mocked their hatred of Russian traditions, their enthusiasm for the West, and their lack of faith. After working on this novel for some time, he began to lose interest in it and coincidentally became fired up (as only an exile can be) about a political murder that he read about in the Russian papers and also heard about from a friend of his wife’s. That same year a university student named Ivanov had been murdered by four friends who believed him to be a police informer. This revolutionary cell in which the youths were killing one another was headed by the brilliant, devious, devilish Nechayev. In Demons, it is Stefanovich Verhovensky who serves as the Nechayev figure, and as in real life, he and his friends (Tolchenko, Virginski, Shigalev, and Lamshin) kill the suspected informer Shatov in a park and throw his body into a lake.
The murder allowed Dostoyevsky to look behind the revolutionary and utopian dreams of Russian Nihilists and Westernizers and to discover there a powerful desire for power—over our spouses, our friends, our surroundings, our entire world. And so, when as a young leftist I read Demons, it seemed to me that the story was not about Russia a hundred years earlier but about Turkey, which had succumbed to a radical politics deeply rooted in violence. It was as if Dostoyevsky was whispering into my ear, teaching me the secret language of the soul, pulling me into a society of radicals who, though inflamed by dreams of changing the world, were also locked into secret organizations and taken with the pleasure of deceiving others in the name of the revolution, damning and degrading those who did not speak their language or share their vision. I remember asking myself at the time why no one talked about the revelations in this book. It had so much to tell us about our own times, yet in leftist circles it was ignored, and that may be why, when I read it, the book seemed to be whispering a secret to me.
There was also a personal reason for my fears. For at the time—in other words, about a hundred years after the Nechayev murder and the publication of Demons—a similar crime was perpetrated in Turkey, at Robert College. A revolutionary cell to which a number of my classmates belonged became convinced (with the encouragement of a clever and devilish “hero” who then vanished into the mist) that one of their number was a traitor; they killed him one night by smashing his head with a cudgel, stuffed the body into a trunk—and were caught while taking it across the Bosphorus in a rowboat. The idea that drove them, the idea that made them willing to go as far as murder, was that “the most dangerous enemy is the one closest to you, and that means the one who leaves first”—it was because I had read this first in Demons that I could feel it in my heart. Years later I asked a friend who’d been in this cell if he’d read Demons, whose plot they’d unwittingly imitated, but he had no interest in the novel whatsoever.
Though suffused with fear and violence, Demons is Dostoyevsky’s most amusing, most comic, novel. Dostoyevsky is a consummate satirist, especially on crowded sets. In Karmazinov, Dostoyevsky has created a biting caricature of Turgenev, for whom he felt both friendship and hatred in real life. Turgenev troubled Dostoyevsky by being a wealthy landowner who approved of the Nihilists and Westernizers and (in Dostoyevsky’s view) looked down on Russian culture. Demons is to some degree a novel he wrote as a way of arguing with Fathers and Sons.
But angry as he was at left-wing liberals and Westernizers, Dostoyevsky, knowing them from within, also could not help discussing them with affection from time to time. He writes of Stephan Trofimovich’s end—and of his meeting just the sort of Russian peasant he’d always dreamed of—with such heartfelt lyricism that the reader, who has been smirking at this man’s pretensions throughout the novel, cannot help but admire him. This could in some sense be seen as Dostoyevsky’s way of saying farewell to the Westernizing all-or-nothing revolutionary intellectual, dispatching him to indulge his passions, his mistakes, and his pretensions in peace.
I have always seen Demons as a book that proclaims the shameful secrets that radical intellectuals (who live far from the center, on the edge of Europe, at war with their Western dreams and racked by doubts about God) wish to hide from us.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The Brothers Karamazov
I have a vivid
memory of reading The Brothers Karamazov at the age of eighteen, alone in my room in a house that looked out on the Bosphorus. This was the first book of Dostoyevsky’s I’d ever read. In my father’s library there was, along with the famous English translation by Constance Garnett, a Turkish translation from the 1940s, and its title, which so powerfully evoked Russia’s strangeness—its difference and its power—had been calling me into its world for some time.
Like all great novels, The Brothers Karamazov had two instant and opposite effects on me: It made me feel as if I was not alone in the world, but it also made me feel helpless and cut off from all others. It was when I was engrossed in the visible world of the novel that I felt I was not alone; because (as is always the case with great novels) I felt as if its most shocking revelations were thoughts I’d entertained myself; the scenes and phantasmagoria that most affected me seemed to come from my own memories. But at the same time the book revealed to me the rules that govern the shadows, the things no one speaks about, so it also made me feel lonely. I felt as if I were the first person who had ever read this book. I felt as if Dostoyevsky were whispering arcane things about life and humanity, things no one knew, for my ears only—so much so that when I sat down with my parents for our evening meal, or when I tried to chatter about politics in the normal way in the crowded corridors with my friends at Istanbul Technical University, where I was studying architecture, I would feel the book quivering inside me and knew that, from here on, life would never be the same: Next to the book’s shocking world, my own life and troubles were small and unimportant. I felt like saying, I am reading a book that shocks me deeply and will change my entire life. As Borges says somewhere, “Discovering Dostoyevsky is like discovering love for the first time, or the sea—it marks an important moment in life’s journey.” My first reading of Dostoyevsky has always seemed to mark the moment when I lost my innocence.
What was the secret that Dostoyevsky whispered to me in The Brothers Karamazov and his other great novels? Was it that I would always feel a longing for God or faith, though we would never have it in us to believe in anything to the last? Was it the acceptance that there was a devil inside us, railing against our most deeply felt beliefs? Or was it that, as I imagined in those days, happiness would come not just from the colors of the deep passions, attachments, and great thoughts that made life what it was but also from the humility that was the exact opposite of those ostentatious concepts? Or was it that human beings are creatures who oscillate between the polar opposites of hope and hopelessness, love and hate, the real and the imagined, faster and more uncertainly than I had previously thought? Was it accepting that, as Dostoyevsky showed in his portrayal of Father Karamazov, people were not even sincere when they cried; even then a part of them was playing a game? If Dostoyevsky struck such terror in me, it was because he refused to offer up his wisdom in the abstract: Instead, he locates these truths inside characters that give every impression of being real. When we read The Brothers Karamazov, we find ourselves wondering whether people can really swing so fast between such extremes, and whether the all-or-nothing mood reflects Dostoyevsky’s own frame of mind—and perhaps that of Russia’s intellectuals—during the third quarter of the nineteenth century, when the country was in a social crisis. At the same time, however, we can feel aspects of the heroes’ spiritual malaise inside ourselves. To read Dostoyevsky, especially when young, is to make one awesome discovery after another. The Brothers Karamazov (like all his novels) is meticulously plotted, and once inside its web of finely woven events we discover, somewhat to our dismay, that it is set in a world still in the process of becoming.
For some writers, the world is a place that has fully matured, a finished state. Novelists like Flaubert and Nabokov are less interested in unearthing the fundamental rules and structures that govern the world than in displaying its colors, symmetries, shadows, and half-hidden jokes, less concerned with the rules of life and the world than with its surfaces and textures. The joys of reading Flaubert and Nabokov are not of discovering the great idea in the authors’ minds but of observing their attention to detail and their expert narration.
I wish I could say there was a second group of writers, of which Dostoyevsky was one. But I cannot say that Dostoyevsky is the most lucid and interesting member of such a group, for he is its only member. For a writer like Dostoyevsky, the world is a place that is in the process of becoming; unfinished, it is somehow lacking. It resembles our own world, which is also in the process of becoming, so we want to dig deep: to understand the rules that govern this world, to find inside it a corner wherein we might live by our own ideas of right and wrong. But as we do so, we begin to feel as if we ourselves are part of this half-finished world that the book is trying to fathom. As we struggle with the novel, we do not just sense the terror and uncertainty of this world still in progress, we begin to feel almost responsible for it, as if our struggle with the book has become part of a personal struggle to decipher our own beings. This is why, when we read Dostoyevsky, the things we learn about ourselves make us so fearful: The rules are never quite clear.
The impassioned questions that consume most people when they are young—what it means to believe in something, where faith in God or in religion leads, what it means to embrace a creed to the end, how to reconcile such metaphysical questions with society and everyday life—these matters occupied Dostoyevsky throughout his life, and in The Brothers Karamazov he examines them more deeply than ever before and on all fronts. The Brothers Karamazov is a fundamental text, best read while young. Reflecting as it does the agonies, fears, and hidden desires that afflict us most keenly in our early years—I am thinking here of the patricide at the heart of the book and the guilt to which it gives rise—it is a shocking experience for the young reader. In his famous essay on Dostoyevsky, which underlines the greatness and importance of The Brothers Karamazov, Freud notes the parallels with Sophocles (Oedipus) and Shakespeare (Hamlet), noting that the element that makes all these stories so shocking is patricide.
But we can still enjoy this novel later in life, when our understanding has matured. What I admired most on my second reading was the way in which Dostoyevsky pitted the local culture and its humble traditions against the sacred values of the modern age—enterprise, authority and war, the rights to question and to rebel. Various ideas entertained in The Idiot are dealt with in a richer way here: Dostoyevsky has Ivan Karamazov inform us that the intelligent are doomed to humility and guilt, while the stupid will tend to purity and steadfastness. On my second reading, I could not find it in myself to hate Father Karamazov in the way Dostoyevsky intended: His coarse manners, his interest in his children, his addiction to pleasure, and his propensity for lying made me smile—he seemed drawn from life and close to life as I knew it. Most great writers write against their beliefs, or at least unwittingly interrogate them to such a degree that they sometimes seem to be writing against them. It is in The Brothers Karamazov that Dostoyevsky puts his beliefs to the greatest test, in the heroes’ conflicts and spiritual anguish. One cannot but feel awe for Dostoyevsky’s ability to create so many characters who are so distinct from one another and to bring them to life in the reader’s mind in such detail, color, and convincing depth. Other writers—Dickens, for example—create memorable characters, but mostly we remember them for their strange, sweet peculiarities. In Dostoyevsky’s world, the heroes’ tormented souls haunt us. Because the three Karamazov brothers are also, in a strange sense, brothers of the spirit, the reader tries to choose among them, to identify with them, to talk about them, to argue with them—and before long to argue with each of the Karamazov brothers is to argue about life.
In my youth I identified most with Alyosha: His purity of heart, his desire to see the good in everyone, and his struggle to understand all those around him spoke to the moralist in me. But a part of me knew that—as with Prince Mishkin of The Idiot—this sort of purity took great effort to attain. That was how I came to understand that Ivan, the theor
y-addicted, book-addicted absolutist, was closer to my own nature. All angry young men who live in poor non-Western countries and bury their moralizing selves in books and ideas have something of Ivan’s merciless sangfroid. We can see in Ivan shades of the political conspirators whom Dostoyevsky studied in Demons and who went on to govern Russia after the Bolshevik revolution—people willing to go to any extreme, and resort to the worst cruelty, in pursuit of a great ideal. But he’s still a Karamazov, this brother; in spite of all his anger, passions, and excesses, his hunger for love has left him wounded, and he is softened by a sweet compassion that Dostoyevsky sensitively conveys. The eldest, Dimitri, I saw as a distant hero, and that is how I still see him. He is too worldly, and in this way he resembles his father; his rivalry with his father over a woman makes him more real than his brothers, but for the same reason he is more easily forgotten. Having noted how similar he is to his father, we don’t, in the end, feel involved in Dimitri’s problems—by which I mean we don’t feel these problems inside us. It’s another brother (an illegitimate half brother) who frightens me, and that is the servant boy, Smerdyakov. He prompts the frightening thought that our fathers might have other lives, also awakening middle-class fears about the poor: the anxieties about being spied on, judged, and condemned by them. Judging from the honest, merciless, and precise logic he deploys after the murder, Smerdyakov shows how a marginal character can sometimes, through exercise of wit and intuition, take control.