some thoughts from Dostoevsky

I promised you a few weeks ago that I'd give some periodic updates on my journey into Russian Literature. After only a couple of lectures  I'm still only 100+ pages into The Brothers Karamazov.  I have to really concentrate when writing 'Karamazov' in order to spell it correctly (3 'a's!).  The book is incredibly rich, both theologically and philosophically, but it hasn't yet begun rolling along with all that juicy love and lust that keeps the pages turning in Anna Karenina.

Sitting in Gary Morson's lectures, though,  has become one of the highlights of my week.  Riding my bike under the ivy covered towers of Northwestern with showers of yellow leaves falling on my head, I wonder how I got here and can't help but feel thankful for this opportunity.  One of the things that is so interesting about Dostoevsky is the depth of his Christian faith and the honesty with which he struggles with this faith.  Morson not only does not shy away from this but actively engages the moral and religious questions the novel raises.  Consider some of the more powerful quotes from this week's reading.

"Never be frightened at your own faint-heartedness in attaining love. Don’t be frightened overmuch even at your evil actions. I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labour and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science. But I predict that just when you see with horror that in spite of all your efforts you are getting farther from your goal instead of nearer to it-at that very moment I predict that you will reach it and behold clearly the miraculous power of the Lord who has been all the time loving and mysteriously guiding you."


"I love humanity, but I wonder at myself.  The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.  In my dreams I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity...and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with any one for two days together..."


And later in the novel one of the brothers struggles with the reality that both good and evil exist within the hearts of men at the same time.  This passage is rich, but try to hang with it.  As you read it understand that when the character says Madonna he means all that is holy, beautiful, pure, and good, and when he says Sodom he means all that is dark, sinful,  corrupt, and wicked in our hearts.

"I am an insect, brother, and it is said of me especially.  All we Karamazovs are insects, and that insect lives in you too and will stir up tempest in your blood....Beauty is a terrible and awful thing!  It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed....I can't endure the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom.  What is still more awful is that a man with the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not renounce the ideal of the Madonna, and his heart may be on fire with the ideal, genuinely on fire.  Man is broad, too broad.  I'd have him narrower!  Is there beauty in Sodom?  Believe me, that for the immense mass of mankind beauty is found in Sodom.  Did you know that secret?  The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible.  God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man."
 -Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov p. 117-8.