The politics of reading Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov in 2022 (Part II of to-be-determined)

 I would like to pick up where my commentary trailed last Sunday.  Much about modern discourse, in addition to my need to take some time thinking about literature beyond science fiction, has led me to reconsider Fyodor Dostoevsky, and most importantly, The Brothers Karamazov.  Last Sunday, I wrote a few scattered observations about Dostoevsky's ethics, but today, let us consider the importance of those ethics in modern discourse, particularly as they relate to my reasons for returning to Fyodor the author, rather than Fyodor the character (the latter of whom is a shit).

The novel has been making something of a comeback lately, and those who are most fond of it are an interesting sort.  It was a set of comments by Douglas Murray, the iconoclastic writer and raconteur who has inherited the mantle of Christopher Hitchens, whose praise made me decide that I needed to go back for another perusal.  Murray is a contrarian, hence Hitch, but his acerbic rejection of woke-ism has led to a mischaracterization of him as a right-wing wacko.  He is not, but many of the others who are returning to The Brothers Karamazov are more of the right, and more overtly religious than Murray.  This leads to some interesting puzzles when we consider the actual content of the novel.  One should maybe actually read it.  Just sayin'.

Last Sunday, I wrote about Dostoevsky's generalized ethics, the importance he placed on forgiveness, humility, and really, it is very much a sermon on the mount kind of novel.  There are plenty of deeply flawed characters, but there are also characters who are presented to the reader as noble, admirable, and perhaps maybe even saintly.  The latter word is chosen intentionally, and with all reference to beatification intended.  Dostoevsky's admirable characters are the gentle, humble, forgiving and loving monks, including Father Zossima, who went from a rather rough youth in the military to a penitent life in the monastery.  Zossima did not believe in a literal hell, in the sense of Dante, he taught the monks a kind of hippy-ish love for everyone, including the earth, and through characters like Zossima, his disciple, Alexey Karamazov, and perhaps some others, one derives the morality Dostoevsky presents to the reader.

It goes along with some misogyny, big, heaping helpings of antisemitism, and various other anachronistic ideas, but even being on the other side of some of the bigotry Dostoevsky casually tosses out there, all the woke virtue signaling in science fiction makes the casual bigotry directed at me almost refreshing.  Yeah, my skin is thick enough to understand that a guy writing a century and a half ago in Russia was not gonna like my kind.  I'm not going to crumple into a little ball about it.  Wait... I might... nope, it passed.  I'm fine.

Anyway, in the scheme of things, Dostoevsky was pretty enlightened, presenting a very specific but very nice view of how one should live, if on the extreme end.  Also, one rooted in christianity, and incapable of comprehending decency separate from christianity.  There are no debates between the monks over deontological morality versus biblical morality (Kant having written his treatise a century earlier), or anything like that, much less jainism, even though jainists would dig Zossima.  Yet here, we begin to unravel the modern politics.  Or perhaps ravel them.  Call me a ravel-rouser.

The Brothers Karamazov presents a moral system inextricable, at least by its own telling, from christianity.  One can understand, then, why those who would root a moral and political world view in christianity might look to Dostoevsky, and such people being on the right, one would observe a Dostoevsky revival of sorts, more on the right than the left.

Yet the paradox is precisely as some on the left would assert.  Had they, you know, read the book, but that would be reading a dead, white guy.  Asceticism is not exactly core to capitalism (writes the capitalist), and the ideas of universal love, charity and forgiveness?  Try that at CPAC.  Zossima didn't believe in actual, literal hell, but there is a retributive element to conservatism, which is core to conservatism in its modern iteration.

The modern left, too, is motivated by retribution.  The lens through which the modern left sees the world is the oppressor/oppressed dyad, and you can construct that around class, or any identity group you choose.  Once you do that, the left seeks not merely the end of oppression, but retribution against anyone placed, by group markers, into the oppressor box.

If you read this book and think Zossima is going to give you the thumbs up, he won't.  He's not going to scorn you and tell you that you are doing everything wrong, because that's not his style, but nor will he tell you that you have found a sinless life and that he approves of your choices.  Not being an ascetic christian, nor a christian of any kind, I don't need his approval, meaningless as the idea is, given that he is the invention of some dead Russian weirdo who needed an editor (there, I said it), but the observation here is that the modern left tells itself that it believes in those doctrines, separate from the religion much of the time, yet it is the modern right where one finds a revival and modern embrace of the novel for the religiously rooted ethics against which most would chafe.

Do you actually love your enemy, and beg your enemy's forgiveness if your enemy keeps coming at you because you have failed to make peace?  That is the ethic of Dostoevsky's novel.  Do you believe in this ethic?  You can argue.  You can argue that the world would be a better place if everyone followed the principle, but the point is that if they did, there would be no enemies.  (Hurray, right?)  But the real point is that's not the real world.  What do you do in the real world?  It's a nice idea.  Is this really the path you will follow, that you will advise others to follow?  Is it an extreme version of a core idea that you like?  Do you even really like the idea?

So I return to the odd politics of the question: who reads Dostoevsky in 2022?  Personally, I'm not looking for a guidebook, a central text, or one piece to elevate above all others in the canon.  It should be enough if a novel has some interesting ideas.

More to come.  Maybe?  I might write something about Russia, the internal view of Russia from the novel, modern Russia, and alternate perspectives.  Or maybe I'll move on.  Dunno.

Breakestra, "How Do You Really Feel," from Hit The Floor.