Vladimir Nabokov, Butterfly Hunter.  (Ithica, NY, 1958; photograph by Carl Mydans)

“Dostoevski’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity- all this is difficult to admire.  I do not like this trick his characters have of “sinning their way to Jesus” or, as a Russian author Ivan Bunin put it more bluntly, “spilling Jesus all over the place.”

- Nabokov lecture on Dostoevsky and discussion of sentimentalism.  

I love to read Dostoevsky and don’t agree with Nabokov, but I also love reading great author’s diss on other established, great authors.

A side note:  I’m sorry for the lack of posts on my Tumblr over the past couple of weeks.  The semester is ending, I have a couple of research papers I’m working on, and a bunch of fantastic personal problems I won’t be sharing here.  Wait and I will post more…

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (via Life images).

“…Do you know that centuries will pass and mankind will proclaim with the mouth of its wisdom and science that there is no crime, and therefore no sin, but only hungry men? ‘Feed them first, then ask virtue of them!’ - that is what they will write on the banner they raise against you, and by which your temple will be destroyed.  In place of your temple a new edifice will be raised, the terrible Tower of Babel will be raised again, and though, like the former one, this one will not be completed either, still you could have avoided this new tower and shortened people’s suffering by a thousand years - for it is to us they will come after suffering for a thousand years with their tower!  They will seek us out again, underground, in catacombs, hiding (for again we shall be persecuted and tortured), they will find us and cry out:  ’Feed us, for those who promised us fire from heaven did not give it.’  And then we shall finish building their tower, for only he who feeds them will finish it, and only we shall feed them, in your name, for we shall lie that it is in your name.  Oh, never, never will they feed themselves without us!  No science will give them bread as long as they remain free, but in the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us:  ’Better that you enslave us, but feed us.’  …”

- Ivan Karamazov gives a narration of his creation, or poem, “The Grand Inquisitor,” to his religious brother Alyosha.  Here, the old Inquisitor is talking to Jesus, risen again in the 16th century Spain.  A complex and amazing section of The Brothers Karamazov.

It is an open criticism of the Catholic Church and religious institutions, obviously, but Dostoyevsky had amazing foresight and this section could be seen as foretelling the Soviet and other fascist regimes of the 20th century.  Not to mention that Ivan’s argument against God and religion are pretty much answered (and refuted?) by the whole of Karamazov.  As Milton said a century or so before, Dostoyevsky, as well, used his novel to “justify the ways of God to man.”  Or, at least, that’s one of hundreds of interpretations.  

Vissarion Belinsky (via wiki commons).

Belinsky’s angry correspondence and reply to Nikolai Gogol in 1847 couldn’t be printed in Russia until 1906, but that didn’t stop the manuscript copies from being circulated through different radical groups all over the country.  The reading of this letter to the Petrashevsky Circle in 1849 is why Fyodor Dostoyevsky was banished to Siberia.

Here is an excerpt (click the picture for the whole letter):

“You have not noticed that Russia sees her salvation not in mysticism, not in asceticism, not in pietism, but in the progress of civilization, enlightenment, humaneness.  Russia does not need sermons (she has heard enough of those!), not prayers (she has said enough of those!), but the awakening in the people of a feeling of human dignity, which has been lost so many centuries in dirt and trash, of justice and laws in keeping not with the teaching of the church, but with healthy common sense and justice, and their being applied as strictly as possible…”