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Dostoevsky (1821-1881): poet and monument
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I felt idiotic: Narcissism, kitsch or feeling great? When I finally stood in front of the grave of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky in St. Petersburg a few years ago, I actually had tears in my eyes, found myself a bit ridiculous, but somehow also elevated and sublime. One can assume that he would have liked a scene: a young man, prone to brooding, engrossed in self-talk or in dialogue with a higher power, balancing his life between demands and reality, light and dark, private and political, state and Church, with everything: suffering with relish. Ah! With great poets you always think of yourself as greater. Big mistake.
As a high school graduate I had once done a job during the summer holidays in order to be able to afford a complete edition of Dostoyevsky and to read everything; Then later the most important things again, after the great translator Swetlana Geier had devoted the rest of her life to retransmitting Dostoyevsky's greatest works: "Crime and Punishment", first known in Germany as "Guilt and Atonement", "Böse Geister" (demons), "The Green Youth", the immortal "Brothers Karamazov" and of course "The Idiot". She affectionately called them the "Five Elephants". Rightly.
Dostoyevsky's books are not only mighty on the shelf, they have always stood in the way: unusually bulky for today's reading habits, page-long reflections in the tone of a preacher, dialogues and monologues, often in the guise of a crime thriller with unsolved murder cases, but actually hardly driven by action.
Unlike the realist Leo Tolstoy (with whom he avoided any conversation), Dostoyevsky took you on fantastic inner journeys, led us with his characters to our own abysses, the great moral dilemmas, nervous wars and ethical questions. Thomas Mann described "Guilt and Atonement" as the greatest detective novel in history. In fact, it is a poisonous and ingenious seduction: Dostoevsky manages to read it to become a sympathizer of the murderer Raskolnikoff, who murders a greedy usurer (i.e. private banker) in order to be able to study the money. Raskolnikoff creeps into one's mind and conscience and touches one's own dark sides: would I be capable of that too?
To this day he is revered as a great psychologist in literature, precisely because it is not stories about mother Russia from father frustration in the 19th century, but timeless, human questions: the responsibility of the individual in his system.
With Dostoevsky, to jump into the present, you can vaccinate yourself against almost anything - with long-term effects.
Mock execution on behalf of the Tsar
Nietzsche maintained, not immodestly, that Dostoyevsky was the only psychologist from whom he had learned anything; the greats of psychoanalysis, Freud and CG Jung, refer to him; everyone found their own Dostoevsky, a fate that turns classics into classics, everyone adorns their own interests and goals with their own name: once a Goebbels as well as today great Russian fantasists who misused the reactionary nationalists, who was Dostoevsky in the end, as a role model. “They call me a psychologist”, he defended himself against this interpretation during his lifetime: “That is not correct. I am only a realist in a higher sense, that means: I show all the depths of the human soul. "
Because the Dostoevsky monument, in front of which everyone kneels for his 200th birthday, and the "elephants" also block the view of Dostoevsky, an equally touching, pathetic, but also angry figure. A driven man with demons, who cannot survive without tall women and without whom his late work, the "elephants", probably would not have existed.
Dostoyevsky's relationship with women is often explained with the early loss of his mother, who died when he was 15. She was the cultured one in the household of the father's military doctor, a house with many books. The next person to relate to was his brother Mikhail, not his father, who sent the sensitive boy to a military training course in St. Petersburg, which he gave up in his early 20s with the aim of becoming an author. A very courageous step for the time. Dostoevsky wanted to make a living from writing and writing alone. His debut "poor people" was indeed a success, today it would be called an empathic social report, a relentless look at the hard life in the Russian tenement - as he led it himself.
As the new literary star in the Russian skies, he quickly found access to intellectual circles and, as a literary mouthpiece for the poor, sympathized with socialist ideas.
His reading group, whose members secretly read and discussed forbidden writings from abroad in Tsarist Russia, was denounced and Dostoyevsky's group was sentenced to death.
With a certain shooting death in mind, the condemned were pardoned seconds before the public execution, a staged mock execution on behalf of the tsar, but a lifelong trauma.
He was "pardoned" for four years in a camp and forced labor in Siberia.
He came out of this camp as a different person: the socialist became a nationalist, the skeptic deeply religious, the seeker an addict.
And a human understanding: the encounter with criminals, the harshness, the torture did not make him bitter, but softer: he managed to meet even murderers, rapists and fraudsters with humble curiosity, he wanted to understand, not judge and always tried something human to be discovered in the inhuman: the basis of guilt and atonement.
Always in the extreme
This just didn't apply to himself and his immediate environment. From then on Dostoevsky lived almost manic-depressive, always in the extreme. He ran into an unhappy marriage, cheated on his seriously ill wife, fled into a violent affair with the student Polonia, whom he followed as far as Paris while his wife was dying; he ensnared the wife of one of his best friends, accumulated debts for his magazine, lived again and again at the expense of his brother, who always supported him. Epileptic seizures and gambling addiction destroyed strength, wealth and confidence. Educational trips abroad were an escape from the debt tower.
After the death of his first wife, he put everything on one card through indebtedness and signed a gag contract with his publisher: In just one month he manages to submit a new novel, otherwise he would have lost all rights to his work for everything he had written - and should still write.
For this autobiographical novel "The Gambler" he hired a stenographer to whom he dictated the book while wandering restlessly. She became his savior and manager, his second wife Anna. With her, too, he fled the debts abroad, what came in he gambled away in German casinos, including the jewelry, the wedding ring, the last warm dress of his pregnant wife - who endured everything, let him go his way again and again. The player wasn't interested in the money, the profit. For him it was about the game, the extreme feeling, the intensity. Their first daughter was only a few months old, and later a son died in front of his eyes of inherited epilepsy. It was Anna who organized the couple's survival; as head of the household and literary agent, she made it possible for Dostoevsky to write his elephants.She protected him from the world and from herself.
Thought experiment in the "Grand Inquisitor"
Only at the end of his life did he achieve modest prosperity, despite his already existing world fame.
The last book, The Brothers Karamazov, remained a fragment of a manuscript with 1,400 pages (and is nevertheless a key work).
In 1881, thousands walked through the streets of St. Petersburg behind the coffin to attend the burial of the almost 60-year-old.
Anna survived him by decades and took care of the fame and estate.
The almost religious veneration of the giant, not only in Russia, still harbors problems today.
Hardly a young reader can approach it without awe, one is almost forced to find it impressive.
As if Dostoevsky was a name that can only be pronounced with a whisper and amazement.
Or you avoid it completely, like a mountain that is too high.
He also had humorous sides: "I believe that the best name for human beings would be: a being that stands on two legs and is ungrateful."
His thought experiments, such as in the "Grand Inquisitor", are not only fun for pensive people: What a great idea and story to bring Jesus back to earth and then let the Inquisition persecute him, which recognizes him but doesn't use him can.
The many human flaws, about which he wrote so accurately, make one forget that others, especially women, usually paid for his own flaws.
And evidently he was an anti-Semite, too, and people like to write over it.
The only Jew Dostoevsky ever had a good hair on was Jesus.
One tends to protect greats like him, to explain it with the zeitgeist, but anti-Semitism as mainstream doesn't make it better, on the contrary.
Marcel Reich-Ranicki once said roughly about Richard Wagner: the anti-Semite was clear, but he still had to cry at "Tristan and Isolde".
But the work does not excuse people.
It can only explain him better.
What an idiot, this Dostoevsky, in the spirit of Prince Myshkin, his hero from the novel "The Idiot".
Not born for this world, not understandable by anyone, not viable without the help of others, too extreme to be true, ultimately only (over) viable in literature, he dissolves in compassion for all without knowing himself.
It's time to get Dostoevsky off the pedestal.
Then his books are even more fun.