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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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I stagger into the studios of KZSU today like a battered goat, an abused dog,
a tormented inmate, a bewildered witness of something strange and disturbing.
That's right, I've been rereading Dostoyevsky friends, in particular, the brothers kara Madsov.
And my nerves are shattered by this cast of characters.
Almost all of them deeply flawed, afflicted, and fascinating.
They don't call it a Russian novel for nothing.
The meek and the mild need not apply to read this book.
I realize now why most of us take on Dostoyevsky when we're young.
You need the resilience and vigor of youth to venture into this whirlpool of passions,
paradoxes and pathologies.
But also into ice cold underground waters of human psychology that reach the most remote recesses of self-laceration and self-deception.
To say nothing of the remorseless clinical analyses of good and evil, of the existence of God, and our basic human need for miracle, mystery, and authority.
That is no country for old men, for sure.
Never wake up in a good mood again.
Take a seat, everyone. We have a show on Dostoyevsky for you today.
The brothers k, coming your way from the rumbling studios of KZSU, home of entitled opinions.
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I am extremely happy to be back on air today with my friend and colleague Monika Greenleaf, professor of Slavic's here at Stanford.
The last time we did a show together was in the very first year of our broadcast. It was on Vladimir Nabokov, one of my all-time favorite episodes of entitled opinions.
Today Monika joins me to talk about the great Fjord Dostoyevsky, and in particular his novel, The Brothers Karamadzov. Monika, welcome to the program.
It's wonderful to be here. I really enjoyed doing the Lolita broadcast and I got many responses to it.
You'll probably get equally as many this time, if not more, I'm sure. Now I'm not going to pretend that I re-read the whole novel for this show, the Brothers K, that's impossible, but I have read that novel several times when I was young.
But this time around when I revisited various chapters in particular, the Grand Inquisitor, it struck me just how much Dostoyevsky comes across as a visionary of sorts. It's as if the tragic history of Russia in the 20th century, at least for my point of view, a tragic history, especially as political history, has been largely foreseen or had been largely foreseen by him in this and some of his other novels.
Do you find that Dostoyevsky still remains relevant pertinent and insightful for all of us, but especially for our fellow men and women over in Russia, which is going through another dramatic phase of its novelistic history?
Yes, I actually think that Dostoyevsky is always pertinent, as you said, he's really pertinent for all young people, high school students, undergraduate. I was bemused though when you said that it's no country for old men and will we ever wake up in a good mood again after reading Dostoyevsky, because that's in a way the kind of classic idea Russian novels are big and incredibly depressing, whereas in fact they're hilarious.
hilarious and maybe if you read perhaps the Pivir and Valler Haunsky
translation actually emphasizes the opportunities for humor. When I read the
first pages out loud to my undergraduate's people crack up because they
start to hear all of the sinister and hilarious takebacks of the narrator as he
modifies what he's saying. He continually says something and then reverses what
he's saying and it has so many internal voices that sound very much like our own
internal voices. So does Daphsky was a performer? He was a performer of every
possible extreme and he took them to the hilt. He was very interested in
theater all his life and he was himself an extremely good performer on stage and
I think one of the first things that we start to realize is that Daphsky has
returned to Russian now as a subject for theater. Every single thing that he's
written is now being performed on the stage in Moscow and in other cities
capitals. Are they being performed in order to amuse the public with humor or
are they being staged in order to engage in serious political critique? Both
of course you can't take them apart. I mean I'm not saying that he's just you know
a comic writer. It's comic writing interlaced with the most extreme tragic and
horrifying philosophical ideas and also a quite realistic assessment I think
of where we're going. Yeah well I was thinking this morning of course what do I
know about Putin and his psychology but it struck me that there's a Dostoevsky
and element there where revisiting these characters and the brothers
K. It seems to me that it's not just a question of the honor which is so important
and disgrace but humiliation seems to be one of these Baso Continos of so
many people in their motivation. So there's humiliation on the one and then
the drive for aspiration for redemption on the other and so this is deep
psychological territory that we enter into Indosoyevsky and I have a feeling
that we in America don't understand even the ABCs of a Russian psyche like
that of a Putin. Yeah probably nobody does. All tyrants or dictators have a
complicated psyche and I think everybody knows that Putin began as in an orphanage
in foster care and things like that he was small he had to fight for his
existence he also had to be very clever he was sent off to be in the KGB in
Germany and the thing about Putin is that you could say that the legend of the
grand inquisitor is a very good model for Putin because he like the grand inquisitor
constructs the effects of a religion without say I mean he claims he believes in
it but without necessarily believing in it it's kind of like the Wizard of Oz
you decide what it is that religion does to people and then you produce them by
technology by other means and as you said miracle mystery and authority and
this obviously a dictator has the power to create miracles of bread feed everybody or
make it possible for them to feed themselves use capitalism Western capitalism
and oil to suddenly create much more prosperity than there was produce
miracles like the Sochi you know Olympics where it seems that Russia is able to
master technology and to create a spectacle like no other and also that business of
people wanting to worship together reunifying Russia which feels very fractured
by the influx of Western influences along with this weird kind of Putin
capitalism at the same time you master it by tapping into old desires for
unity it's you know people it was amazing how the Soviet citizens who had
renounced religion for two or three generations very quickly came back to
eighty five percent or ninety percent about Russian Orthodox now well of
course I should tell our listeners that you're alluding to Ivan kind of
as a foreign to three brothers katamads who in his just position on the
grand inquisitor where the inquisitor tells Jesus Christ that he made a
mistake in resisting the three temptations of the devil and those temptations
why don't you turn stones into bread and why don't you jump from a big you
know be saved by angels and so forth or why don't you build a power base here so
these three temptations are ones that you're saying proofing has actually gone
for and that therefore it's under the eegis of that kind of satanic law which
presumes to know the people much better than Christ knew the people
according to the inquisitor which is why he puts him to death yes good that's a
very good statement and and and the finesse of it is using the riches of oil
wealth and capitalism funneled you know and manipulated the way the state
does to produce this sense of a new world and new pride for a Russian population
that one was always a late-comer on the stage of European history this was
one of the prime ideas Russia had lived in the dark ages Peter the Great
opened the window to Europe by founding Petersburg as push can said broke a
window into Europe violently and then essentially conquered his own people and
turned them into a westernized you know westernized system of classes none of
which really works very well and the Slavophile idea emerged with you know and
with the idea that Russian civilization was supposed to bring something new
something redemptive the west had run its course it was mired in capitalism and
Russia would create a new synthesis and indeed it delivered it in the form of
its art I mean one of the strangest things on earth is that between 1862 and
1881 which is only 19 years all of the great Russian novels were written just
19 years I mean I don't think there's something comparable in the history of
the world really and you know my personal opinion is that that body of novels
out classes any other nations novelistic well for sure and I did a show years ago
with our colleague Grisha Frigin yes there when we were talking about
Isaac Baba I asked him the question that I'm going to ask you now which is if
Soviet communism had had not come about would that tradition that great
novelistic tradition flourished even more perhaps in the 20th century or did
the communist just stomp it to death in its infancy like a snake I don't know
one there are actually great Russian prose works it's just that they're not
readily translatable because it's modernism so it doesn't have a strong
plot and characters and things like that so I could mention plateau enough a
great Soviet writer but you would probably say fairly unreadable because in
translation it sort of disintegrates and you know what great novels were
written in the West well the 20th century is full of them it's full of them but
they it we at least I tend to think of modernism as being kind of the last
place where great novels were written yeah I mean Lolita jumps up there partly
because there aren't a lot of great competitors exactly and I did a show just
you know there aired this week on the post-war American fiction and yes I was
very constrained I did not allow myself on air to say that there very few
Lolita is with one of the big exceptions of a truly great novel and they post
war period in America and it's not that there aren't a lot of good ones there
are tons of good ones but you know maybe it's it's just not every genre has
its kind of a lifeline I know I know and and I agree that it's maybe not the
moment for the novel but I have this strong conviction that the first
half the 20th century could have seen the most extraordinary flourishing of the
Russian novel tradition it's possible but that it was stomps yes no I think you're
right I mean I'm not a great fan of socialist realism so can I now that we're
talking about the politics of contemporary Russia and where and the grand
inquisitor and of course even kara-mads of it's not only in the grand inquisitor
chapter but in the very early part of the novel he's written an article yes
ecclesiastical article where he makes the case that the church has to
incorporate the state and that state has to become the church and he gives
lines of reasoning very similar to the one that he proposes in the grand
inquisitor which are the stark are alternatives either God and immortality
exist in which case there is a foundation for morality and people will do good
and love their neighbor or God does not exist and immortality does not exist in
which case logically speaking there is no prohibition against the
unconditional pursuit of one's own self-interest even at the price of crime not
only is everything permitted but you are almost enjoined to adopt any means
necessary to promote yourself interest to very stark alternatives that he
proposes there now I'll bet Kamui when he writes in his book The Rebel and
when he analyzes Ivan Kamajov's argument there he sees an Ivan a figure for the
20th century metaphysical rebel who is also wants to bring about in the
political sphere a all the sort of transformations that will be predicated on
this atheism that God does not exist that immortality doesn't exist and that
now the state will become the administrator of this new disenchanted reality if
I can read to you and have you respond to what he says as we know the grand
inquisitor is there interrogating Christ in the in the prison cell and he
says to Christ the affair of this reorganization of the world has only just begun
it is far from being terminated and the world has many other things to suffer but
we shall achieve our aim we shall be Caesar and then we shall begin to think
about universal happiness okay end quote this is where revolutionary movements
always make a promise we're gonna get there but not now yes I continue this is
a come here now by then the prisoner has been executed the grand inquisitors
rain alone listening to quote the profound spirit the spirit of destruction
and death the grand inquisitors proudly refuse freedom and the bread of heaven and
offer the bread of this earth without freedom quote come down from the cross and
we will believe in you their police agents are already crying on Golgotha but
he did not come down and even at the most tortured moment of his agony he
protested to God having been forsaken thus there are no longer any
truths but faith and the mystery that the rebels reject and at which the
grand inquisitors got everything is permitted and centuries of crime are prepared
in that cataclysmic moment from Paul to Stalin the popes who have chosen
Caesar have prepared the way for Caesar's who quickly learned to despise
popes the unity of the world which was not achieved with God will henceforth be
attempted in defiance of God and I think here come news the popes who have chosen
Caesar and prepared the way for the Caesar's are the intellectuals yes above
all and of course just to be a see had very strong views about that kind of the
role that the intellectual plays in paving the way for these Caesar's do you
find that this is an analysis that does something that gets provides a true
insight into those he sees thinking about how a new regime of atheism or
drawing the consequences of the absence of God and immortality can lead to this
kind of totalitarianism in his already there in the brothers cut him out so
was he was he prophetic in that sense yes he was prophetic also just in the
absolutism with which it's phrased this idea that you know all or nothing if
you have an afterlife haunting you then you're going to live your life in
order to either achieve a good afterlife for avoid a terrible afterlife and
that that will somehow continue when I think it's probably it can be shown that
that actually doesn't hinder anything that life has all kinds of you know
contains all different kinds of actions and religion always has some kind of a
safety valve for people who believe in God and yet you know per per
try crimes those are all you know all dusty f skis populated by people like that
at nor are all intellectuals completely terrible atheists who then
authorize crime that's an extremely polarizing kind of description of the
intellectual and dusty asky is kind of partly responsible actually Russian
novelists are responsible for that dramatic distribution of roles that there are
natural people naturally religious people and then there are the
intellectuals who have a distorted way of thinking and that is essentially a
akin to a crime against the idea of humanity and what it's capable of what
about the and that there are all those people in between it's interesting I
liked what he said about from Paul to Stalin that actually Paul the creator of
institutionalized Christianity and actually in some ways the destroyer of
early Christianity is associated with the line of people who have taken
religious faith and used it in order to create a totalizing system Stalin of
course was brought up I mean he studied in a seminary and he used religion very
much and religious sensibility very much for his own ends put you in
certainly takes a leaf out of Stalin's book in that respect do you find that the
brothers kind of much of the as a whole is an attempt to not only probe this
either or proposal of Dimitri but even but it also actually takes aside in
this either or equation that either there is a god and therefore there's
morality and so forth and there's neighborly love is possible or there is no god
and everything is permitted I think it's just a s.ky expresses the
extremes but there are characters within brothers Karamazov who don't live on
either side of those extremes and the characters are all in motion vis-a-vis
each other the process of the novel is one that I think constantly demonstrates
that there is an area in between the extremes or a synthesis of the
extremes that goes beyond those extremes and one character like that is
father's a sema one of the things about father's a sema is that he himself when we
hear about him through Ayush's retelling of his life he himself was a
sinner he was involved in an officer's life he was somebody quite like Dimitri
when he was young and he gets involved with dueling and things like that he's
almost sets up a duel which would have involved the killing of an innocent man
and so on and and his humiliation before his wife and then he steps away from it
but he also in another episode he does something he forces a man named Michael
who killed a woman out of jealousy he forces him to a confession which
actually will destroy the lives of his family and it's way after the effects
and he's confronted his conscience and so on there's the possibility that
father's a sema actually went too far in his aciduousness as a young novice to
actually sort of prosecute the extreme of you know of church confession and
after that he never does anything like that again it's as if he went to that
limit of extreme and then stepped back he believes in God and immortality but he
believes that there are thousand paths there are two extremes obviously
that are channeled by Dostayeski the extreme atheist although one of the
things about Ivan is that he has a hunger for religion and it constantly shows
when he says things as provocations and that's something that father to
see a man notices about him he really wants to be put a stop to actually he's
looking for the edge and he wants it to establish itself and when he has the
long conversation with Aliyosha about the torture of children the constant
torment sadistic torment of children in all societies and especially in
Russian society and is it would you agree Aliyosha to found a religion on the
tears of even one innocent child and Aliyosha essentially can't say yes to that
he says but Christ allows us to do that because Christ took on all the sins of
the world but that's an abstraction when it comes to actually torturing a child
you know in front of you it's not possible to
ascent to that but this is part of Ivan's denunciation of or let's say his
indictment of God it's his indictment of God but he really wants to somebody
to explain to him how it's possible and he continues throughout his life in the
novel to be looking for situations where he crosses a line and is finally told
where to stop you can imagine that you know psychologically speaking all of
these sons have had a father field of the Pavlovitch Karamazov one of the
greatest characters and literature who really permits himself everything and
has provided no indication of where there might be a limit and so they're all
feeling their way attempting to find in their own lives something that will
give them a shape and a limit that includes Dimitri who is the officer who also
strangely is a poet for us that wouldn't fit you know he walks along with his
yard long strides and he's violent and so on but he's the most poetic character
by far and Ivan is the one who has the most extreme God hunger he does but he
and God there stands also for the father and it's on it's on behalf of innocent
children the suffering of the innocent children that he feels that God is
guilty in this tribunal that he sets up to judge him and in that sense when he
philosophically at least concedes that his own father could be killed we
permissible to kill his own father there's clearly some sort of conflation going
on between Fjordor kind of madze of the father and you know God the father
and even yes and actually I just like to say one thing about that Fjordor
Karamazov wears of course Fjordor Dosteevsky's name Fjordor which means gift of
God and definitely there is a sense that every character who contains a huge
mixture of qualities has to work those out during the course of his life and
it's a never-ending process so just to jump to you know belief in God and
therefore the rest the world is tamed everything is orderly for Dosteevsky is
the wrong answer being in a crucible of doubt is actually the right place to be
every single day having to go through that feeling of doubt before you arrive and
in fact nobody ever does arrive because all of his novels actually don't end
but have to be continued kind of attached to them brothers Karamazov was
supposed to be a trilogy called the life of a great center and most people
think okay he's the great center will of course it's going to be one or it's
gonna be demetri well the life of the great center was going to be a
Lioria and Dosteevsky told a friend of his that the in the sequels to brothers
Karamazov allure was going to become a terrorist and he was going to go through
this immensely epic life of terrible sinning and essentially the very same
things that Dosteevsky was involved with as a young man and that youth were
involved with during Dosteevsky's old age attempting to make the world better by
a revolutionary well that's what I was trying to get at yes is that how Dosteevsky
understood the danger of atheism is that if you if you don't believe in God if
you don't believe there is a God then you are driven to take charge of the
recreation of the world according to your human norms of justice and that all
means are justified because you're trying to achieve this end what you and you
earlier spoke about the unification of Russian whatever transcendentals you
want to invoke for the project of remaking things in the absence of a divine
being yes the idea of a materialized justice that's visible in our lifetime
however this does you know it brings back the idea of Christ as a
revolutionary who actually did want to overturn a social order and didn't want to
you know who preached real property throw everything away not the religion
the Christianity turned out to be it was a very common idea in the 19th century
that Christ would first of all have been arrested and executed under 19th
century Christianity for sure but what I find dangerous yes disturbing
perturbing about even is what you mentioned earlier that he does have a real
nostalgia for religion and for a God and yet he doesn't believe it and regimes
that want to take the place of God yes who don't want to give up the the
function of God that they want to fill that void that they're the ones that
become dangerous I think that a real soft atheistic society where you have a
kind of incremental ameliorism or little reforms here and there we make our lives
more bearable getting through the days good enough that it's the
fanatic longing for the absolute that is in the souls of so many of Dosto F.C.'s
characters in this novel and others that it's certain ones and you're
completely right I mean dictatorships resemble theocracy more than anything
and they tend to have very thick kind of structures but I wanted to point out
that Alioa Shou is a character who kind of stumbles his way through the brothers
kara Ma's off he's the one who often is the listener but Dosto F.C. makes it
very clear that he starts to blush he starts to have secrets he starts to have
pink notes he you know he gets in he starts to perceive sexuality and all the
things that he was kind of he himself had very absolutely walled himself off from
because field of parlava just such a frightening image of everything is
possible everything goes he is at the end he becomes the founder of a religion
which is based on the death of a child Elioa who is actually who dies because
of a bunch of boys who create this peculiar cult around another boy
Koya Krasotkin and and what Alioa Shou does at the end is to create this group and
create a meaning around the death so that the actual you know it's the
creation of meaning is that a violation of the you know the boy or is that
something that's useful for the future those very boys are going to be the
terrorists in the next volume and I want it but let me say one more thing and
that is that father's a SEMA when he's actually preaching is so much like what
you were saying incremental every day has its own little problems to solve
and what those memorable things that he says that really speak to us now are
the in our life the extremes touch the life is a chain and there is nothing
that you do in your life that doesn't affect everybody around you think about
what you're doing even with your back if a child is behind you and you are doing
something unseemly you're imprinting the child with an image for the rest of
his life so always think that you're connected and he creates an image of our
kind of world you know an image that's both sort of biological physics you
know everything touches on a chemical level and everything touches also on a
moral level of you know the levi-nass idea respond to the human face in front of you
for Yvonne Yvonne has the niche in idea but the human face is disgusting I can't
stand actual proximity to my neighbor I can love him in the abstract but I can't
love him when he's right next to me and father's a SEMA says the hardest thing
in the world is to be with that face whether it's ugly whatever it is and to do
unto him or her as you would like her to do to you so that is an embodied Christianity
that is very far from a paternalistic God that sets limits it's yeah and I
like that I suppose to the abstraction right every abstraction of Yvonne which
is also translated into especially for me Soviet totalitarian abstraction
from the from the everyday the concrete and it's just becomes very easy to
speak about the iron laws of history this has to happen that has to happen you
have a bureaucracy that's removed from the actual real-life consequences of
their decisions and you just have horrors being perpetrated in in a realm of
abstraction now so Zima is enigmatic in a number of ways
I wanted to just mention that he was incredibly unpopular with the Russian
Orthodox clergy they hated him they said he was pantheistic he was an
earth lover he was a kmennical he had all different kinds of religious objects
on his table he occasionally ate sweets you know he broke fast and this and
that so they really disliked him in the novel in the novel
there's certain ones who dislike him know the clergy as readers they really dislike this
picture of this Orthodox priest they found him utterly for one thing you
know just to pantheistic too much in love with the earth as God's creation and
and so he's actually to to me he's a very progressive figure
could I ask about that powerful scene at the beginning of the novel where the
three brothers are united the father comes there demetri and the father go at it
and the son you know raises his hand up against the father which is the whole
question of does mankind have a right to rise up against an unjust God the way
demetri is presuming to rise up against an unjust father and at the end of
that scene so Zima father so Zima has this gesture of going and bowing
kneeling prostrating him I don't know exactly what the gesture is but but he
bows deeply in front of demetri and no one can understand what he meant by
doing that this gesture and gestures in general in the book I think are very
important what kind of gesture is it what is there anything that we can decode
in it yes it's that scene is set up as something that does they have
ski love to do you could call it a bowing duel we see them often and you know
people how do people pass each other in the street so that they don't lose
status you know who chips is hat slightly more than the other so in the
bowing duel you have first of all this question of how do you enter the space of
the sacred elders you know room and everybody does something that indicates to
what degree they're westernized and mousse of his very western and he you know and the
question is do you do a bow with your hands to the side do you bow how low do you
bow and things like that that's the secular European courtly bow that implies
we are all gentlemen here but our degree of bowing depends how big a
gentleman we are and on the other hand you have the orthodox bow which is a
bow when father's a seema does it he does does the full one it is a lying down on
the ground completely prostrate which means bowing down to the earth and really
being very close to what a lotia does later which is kissing the earth and that
is the idea that the earth itself is sacred it's it's a mother and you're not
sort of raising your hands and gesturing to god in the sky you're actually
confirming your faith by lying down on the earth and it confirms the faith in human
beings working out their destinies in time and you know in earthly space and so
you could say that father's a seema bows down as he says as later said to the
suffering because he feels that Demetri's course will be a course of intense
suffering but it will have a sacred element to it later on when Katarina a
Demetri's telling Alioa Shabal his experiences with Katarina and he says this
is going to be in the style of Paul the cock who was the French you know sort of
paperback novelist full of sleazy scenes and he does tell some sleazy scenes
and there we have this interesting repetition of the bowing duel because
there Demetri essentially it's about lending the money and what she has to do to get
the money and he doesn't it's not that he says she has to give herself to him
he undresses her with his eyes he just stares at her and she hit her whole body is
exposed to him as an object and he slowly runs his eyes down her and she is
made to feel the humiliation of being in this officer's power and she
and he didn't boast yes and he bows and he bows so you have that combination of
gentlemanly power you know and he he's able to do it because for once he's cut
money and he can use it to establish his what something something very dubious
which is his nobility his nobility is very shaky and so then what does she do
she prostrate herself on the ground all the way down a true Russian bout of the
earth and you could say okay she's quoting father's a seamless bow but look at
the context she's using it to trump him with the Russian Orthodox sacred
spiritual bow and then it becomes actually a weapon in this battle battle of
wills between them so there's no such thing in Dostosky as a gesture that's not
contextualizing that that doesn't enter into this relationship of power and
humiliation going back and forth so that is if you want to do a deep psychology
find that there's a lot of perversion in that duel because she has been
humiliated by him and the way she deals with that humility is not to get
revenge on him at least not immediately but to take upon herself this
humiliation and this is that great word that is the title of one of the chapter
sections that if not the roof which means how would you translate that it's well
this is one of those regional words that's very hard to translate and I'm happy
to talk about it it's often it used to be translated as lacerations and I think
we think of lacerations as something external like cuts or mark you know with marks
or something like that and it's also by Pavir and Valahon skid's translated as
strains and I have to say that strains kind of you know it we tend to think of
straining as you know you try really hard you know straining to do something
Nadrif means an internal rupture it's an internal rupture of organs or
something inside that starts to split and you know and the word that I thought of
this morning because I just taught Beckett yesterday was dehi sense dehi
sauce which is rupturing along the same place where there was a scene where there
was surgery a surgical wound that doesn't heal properly and it starts to rip
in the same place and even deeper into the tissues further dehi sauce which is
you know nobody's gonna translate as dehi sauce because you know very few people
know what it means and but it's one it's a word that Beckett really liked and
it's the idea that language and everything rips along the same wounds you
stitch it up with other language but it'll rip even further because those are
wounded places and those are also the fertile places because the other
meaning of dehi sauce is also the scattering of seeds when the pod rips and this
is a very dusty f-skiing idea that the very wound and the splitting of the
apparent sutures actually then creates something fertile the famous epigraph to
brothers K which is you know let the seed fall into the earth if the seed falls
into the earth and rarts it will bring forth much fruit but it has to die first
and this is and that is the essential dusty f-skiing progress through any
novel that anybody who tries to pick God first and allow God then to dictate
his life is not passing through that fertile dying and being reborn again
through doubt yeah but let's stick for a moment with Demetri and Gia because her
I'm gonna use the word laceration it's all right good enough or what what's
wrong with rapture well ruptures fine except that okay so here is Edward
Vasio like who writes about the word where he says to this must be added
the dosais special use of the word to mean a purposeful hurting of oneself
and to this an explanation of the purpose it is for dosaiski a purposeful and
pleasurable self hurt good yeah this idea of a self yeah that that seems to be
very committed to in a kind of perverse is it masochism is it the kind of
self hurt that won't let go of the wound because it's it's a profound humiliation
and that therefore her taking on of all these gestures of submission this
total submission to Demetri as if you were a God to whom she prostrates herself
the way the sousema would to to his God that this all involves some kind of
not healing of the wound but aggravation and of the wound itself and it seems to
be part of the psychology not only of her but of other characters who are
dominated by sense of humiliation yes you're completely right and but I
wanted to ask something has a such a laceration I think a lot of people would
say that yes although I didn't want to get you off track go ahead yeah no what I
wanted to say about that is that yes she says I want you to worship me as a
God sorry you said that she worships with Demetri but in fact very you know
not too far later she says I want you Demetri to worship me as a God you
know I will give you everything you need and she puts herself in that
totalitarian position you have to admit that there's something very
tempting for the Christian mentality to do that to take its own acceptance of
suffering and Christ suffering as the position therefore of power if I've
suffered then I've made the ultimate sacrifice I mean we see it all over our
country therefore now I am in the position of power I assume the God
position by virtue of my constant self-inflicted suffering I mean it's
something that Nietzsche essentially diagnosed and and and just I think one of
the reasons Nietzsche loved us they ask you so much is because he recognized
that actually being dramatized constantly in the psychology of the
characters do you believe that you know sie ski thought that's suffering is or
could be under certain circumstances redemptive yes of course definitely I
mean he always he always thinks it's redemptive if it continually changes it
being stuck in a self-lacerating you know just essentially which is a self
pleasuring in a masochistic way a sadomasochistic way that is you know he
doesn't if it's stuck and it's arrested and it's just perpetually repeating
itself obviously that's a dead end but doesn't even have the the most
devastating argument against that that suffering is redemptive and he brings in
all this forensic evidence from newspaper articles and so forth the
suffering of children and that anyone who is going to say that all this human
misery that makes up history yes can be
transfigured some kind of redemptive scenario is just the strain of the
credibility as such that even at least can't go that far yes but I think
everybody who reads those passages recognizes that Ivan is he he collects
clippings you know he's one of those fanatic collectors of likes you know he
collects only things that match he creates this big box of clippings of
sadistic torture of children well that is going to really change your opinion of
the world if that's what you collect so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy it is
that laceration and you could say that feel the
problem it did torch torment its children by neglect by it all kinds of
different ways so he creates a world view that fits what he has collected and
that therefore he eliminates everything else and one of the things that we see
with allure and the boys is that allure should goes into that situation that
seems to be clear cut somebody's you know the bunch of boys are beating up a
one weaker boy the weaker boy turns out to have done something really
disgusting so they were right and then it turns out that every single boy has
his individual reasons for behave going along with the group and things
like that and gradually their different voices start to emerge and it might be the
case that children are not as innocent as even believes they're not as
he says he says age seven you know after age seven you know it's all over
only up to age seven so he like a lot of absolutist people is looking for
purity purity does not exist it may exist chemically
in the world but it does not exist in human beings so why does even go mad
interview? Ivan goes mad because Dastaya
industry asking novels madness is the place of fertility as it is in Shakespeare
as it is in Joyce as it is in many artistic writers it's it's rational
sticking to limits or rational rules of argumentation
that actually are undone by artists of this type Dastaya
ski was a passionate reader of Shakespeare I just wanted to mention that in one
year at the engineering institute when he was going to classes his father made
him
try to become an engineer and I always tell this to Stanford students like your
parents he wants you to be an engineer but at night he read
voraciously and in one year he read all of Shakespeare
all of good to almost all of buzz-zack all of ETA Hoffman those were just the
for that he he mentions and all of these you can imagine
that in his incredibly fertile mind they're really
interacting with each other and you see really this tremendous
performative quality of Dastaya ski to
allow threads from all of the different artists that he loves to
interpenetrate if you look at field of the problem of it how is he like field of
Dastaya ski
he is like field of Dastaya ski in have being the most incredible
tissue of quotations and illusions to all kinds of cultural sources
including a lot of the Bible and he mixes it up when you look at the footnotes
it's just this wonderful tap tapestry um so the bringing of
different text into contact with each other so that they strike sparks against
each other that is Dastaya skis genius
and he also liked to read philosophy um he also at another point read
vico and tear and teary and he said i want to read a
do systematic education of myself in philosophy and in cultural anthropology
uh it's interesting the vico connection
because one could say and i think it has been suggested uh by one critic that
the brother's case does have a vaconian system vico
i keep promising our listeners will do a show on in one day
yeah you really said but uh he had a theory of the natural course of
development of any civilization that they go through these
ages the age of gods the age of heroes the age of men
and then at the end of this course you have the age of the renewed barbarism
which is the barbarism or reflection so there's this sense that
uh and then it all starts over but that you that all the brothers
represent a different age uh and that smet yakuj
who is the illegitimate son uh may represent the age of this undoing of the whole
course and they're and the descent into cynicism and barbarism or
reflection and this kind of disaggregation of the whole story
i don't know but he's not the last word in the book
no he's not the last word because uh like vico doesn't allow the
barbarism or reflection to be the last word because he says that we can always
do something to offset it and make sure it doesn't it there's nothing
that dictates it's necessarily having to happen
but what would be necessary to offset it is a certain kind of
pace to conceal some on the moral level the ethical level and maybe a
certain set of recipes of dosuise himself proposes
in order to uh for stall the coming of the anarchy of the anarchist
soon or of the the cynics and the skeptics
so that's just an aside here about the connection between dosuise and vico
it shows you how many ways the brothers could could actually be read
yes well i as i think that you know it's a temptation to read the
brothers as types and of course dastesky sets that have that way
however i think that the more the novel progresses the more we see that the
age of god heroes and men isn't each of them in action
one of the things that one of the prime beliefs of Russians was that they
came in order to syncretize and synthesize so they in some ways are a
separate people they you know they read vico they love the idea
of a providential design every nation having its own way of developing
but then the Russian ideas that they come along and they synthesize from
everybody else their late cameras they're incredibly well-read they're
also auto-didax and they synthesize it all each person for himself and
for the nation and that means that god heroes and men are all operating at
the same time along with the smiad deco for reflection
good for you now now we get into the real
substance of the of the vikonian theory because
the actual last stage which is the barbarism of reflection is not a fourth
stage that follows upon the previous three it is actually the
chaotic commingling and co-presence of all the ages at the same time okay
so the barbarism of reflection is
when the whole course or the course of things
becomes chaotic and and all of everything that has
preceded that moment now is uh...
comes back and and is is
chaoticly uh...
jumbled together
in that moment so i
i didn't want to suggest that it's a fourth stage distinct from the previous
on the contrary it is now
the Russian desire to synthesize a different thing because synthesis would
mean ordering
yes here is and a new form
yes or order
this is the disordering of that
yes and actually uh...
the brothers karmaz f has a very beautiful order really
uh... it of course is plotted onto the idea
of a court case that you know we have this image of
the reform justice system that's an imported from the west but
russians are of course
you know it's being um...
developed in russian circumstances in highly unorthodox ways
and we have what you could say is we know that it's a miscarriage of justice i
mean it's amazing how many times does d_f_s_ keep can have us go through
different versions of the story and still remain completely enthralled by it
while we
know we think we know exactly what happened
to meet three didn't do it something saved him at that moment when he could
have committed the act of violence while watching his father in
in that screen is literally like he's watching a movie he's sitting there in
in the dark and looking at his father lit up on a screen and he's imagining
everything
that would lead to
the final act of violence that's been predicted all over because
languages violent
the novel has a great structure in that we see that the court case actually
emerges in a miscarriage
uh... of justice
and yet we've seen enough evidence which dame tree actually accepts that
spiritually he was in the wrong because he gave off in all his life
he produced violence at every turn in language in threats
in everything that created an atmosphere violence and so he takes that on
himself
he didn't do the act you know the patriarchal act
but he created small acts of violence everywhere
and for that
and that is essentially his internal acceptance
money cut to wrap up i'd like to ask this question
about justice whether
you believe that for dus ria ski justice is the highest value
and the reason i asked that is because for
sub someone like even it is the highest value and that in the name of justice he
can actually indict god
yes justice world
but uh...
i have a
suspicion that for dus ria ski justice might not have been the highest value
finally
i think you're completely right and actually
i mean this will probably sound a bit
wet but
does dia skis perception of life was that it was paradise
and what his aim was was to
get people to
for at least a moment to
let the scales from
fall from their eyes and to live as if they were in paradise as if they were
worthy of living on this earth
and to treat it the earth itself as god's paradise and
human beings as people who constantly blind themselves to the truth that
they are in paradise
and they destroy
you know the possibility of its being a paradise
so it that's also a very i think a modern kind of
uh... vision
uh... which is different from the idea of justice which is kind of
counting up offenses and figuring out some kind of retribution that will
cancel them out so that you start on another place
the steevsky's place and this was something that he said when he was sent to
siberia
he said he wrote to his brother in this famous letter
if only
i still feel that i'm in paradise just let me stand in the sun
that's good enough for me
we've been speaking with moneeka green leaf professor of slavix and
comparative literature here at stanford
thanks for coming on moneeka
it was a delight
and i am robert harris and for entitled opinions
stay tuned for our next broadcast next week
take care
beepy
to one of the up inside of the up
to one forget about the other the other the up
I've won't stay in love with my soul but God, I've won't let it go
I've been told with this screen, who knew couldn't hide but after there's a way to show
I've won't let it start to break so cold
Just did a train, who left us in love with me and I hadn't written to love to me
What now was wrong with me, with me, yeah
To all of me, I've been saying everything, to all of forget the fear of me
I've won't stay in love with my soul, I've won't let it go
I've won't let it go, I've been saying everything, with me
From the world's no love here in the darkness, I know my soul
Can't break free until I'm out and gone