Laughter of the Devil: Re-reading Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov

I've had an eventful month. I haven't posted here for a while: having a broken computer really lends itself to getting quality reading done.

Last night I finished The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It's a remarkable book. I love it; I really do. Maxime Gorky said Fyodor proves in it that he is a sadist. Karamazov is not a cruel book - it is a funny book. Gorky missed the joke
A hard joke, a difficult and passionate joke, but still - Dostoyevsky is bullet-to-the-head humor. If it doesn't knock you down like it did Gorky, do you think you even have a soul in you?

Penguin translator David McDuff pinpoints the main characteristic of Brothers Karamazov: it is the work of the devil. He falls short: the real devil in Karamazov is Dostoyevsky. The outrageous humour of the Evil One himself dressed as the teacher and sage of Tzarist Russian peity and patriotism is not to be missed.

Brothers Karamazov also reads forward in time to Kafka, Nietzsche, Gide, Lawrence, Hemingway, Faulkner, providing a context and critique to the future. It is prophetic if you suppose the horrors of the future can only be endured by horrible mockery. Dostoyevsky is a nasty insect, and to read him is to shed a carapace made from the purest hysterics and mocking laughter. What remains is the Devil himself.

McDuff translates as 'crack-ups' the chapter where all the main characters go mad. It's as good a word choice as any. For Dostoyevsky, then, we all crack up when shame and guilt makes us act in a hateful way - and for him this crack up is the only thing that has the power to bring you to accept God's Will. That's how I read it: Dostoyevsky's Devil is the guide to God, and his frightening laughter lights the way.

Practically speaking, for those considering reading Karamazov, I recommend skipping these chapters as tedious:

- Book One, part three - 'Voluptuaries' tediously demonstrates the Karamazov vileness which part one describes in fewer words.
- The entire Public Procurator's speech is just a wasteland.
- The Chapters on the life of the Elder Zosima; they are merely background color to render the monks more ridiculous. Since they already are silly, it can be omitted.

For a first time reader I suggest you start at the moment the family visits the monastry, and then return to the long introductory chapters on Fyodor Pavlovich's life, which are less interesting material. I am re-reading these chapters now, for the fourth time, just for the pleasure of Alyosha's childhood and Fyodor Pavlovich's amusing life.

The most remarkable chapters in the piece, for which the greatest attention should be preserved, are the Onion, the Wedding at Cana, the Grand Inquisitor, the entire hilarious Crackups Section, "It's always interesting to speak with an intelligent man" (this requires the most precise attention, and the outrageously black and funny three talks between Ivan Fyodorovich and Schmerdyakov, and "For a moment the lie becomes truth", which is the only sublime chapter untainted by satanic hilarity.

I read Karamazov as a teen and in my mid-twenties. Reading it now at 34 years of age, I finally get the joke. It's a comedy of the sweetest and most sacred kind, and to be approached in a reverent way. I had little realized how profoundly it had influenced my own book, Savage Things. Now had I realized the effort it must have taken Dostoyevsky to utter his book - enmeshed in the absurdly uptight society of the time, he managed to utter a few free words. Compared to his, my own Savage Things exists in an existential void where the upmost freedom of choice is available to all characters, but like Gide's Michel, no guide or signpost as to what actions are right or proper to a free man.

As it happens, I am reading Chekhov's stories and plays pretty constantly this last month and the next, so many of these questions find original answers in the generation after Dostoyevsky. I cannot wait to read Bulgakov's Master and Margarita. Even now, reading Chekhov has cast an incredible light onto Isaac Babel in explanation. I love and take a lot of joy in Russian literature at the moment; they seem to me the natural inheritors of the Greek Enlightenment (6 century BCE) and French Enlightenment of the 17th century.

On Authentic Aesthetic Pleasure

The sure sign of authentic aesthetic pleasure is that we forget where we are, lose awareness of what amount of time passed in the enjoyment of the pleasure, and for a blessed moment shuck off the isolated ego. This happened to me four nights ago while reading Chekhov's short story 'The Grasshopper'.

Chekhov set out to write a story about a secular saint. In a way, the hero of this story is the bastard child of Dostyevsky's Idiot of the enopymous novel.

I resisted buying the cheap edition of Chekhov's stories because they featured "short, humorous sketches". Instead, I brought the second of the attractive and unobtrusive three volume Penguin edition, which chronologically arranges his stories around stylistic periods, entitled 'Ward No. 6 & Other Stories'.

I began to read 'Grasshopper' in the vaulted Adelaide Railway Station as Mozart's Jupiter Symphony played over the loudspeakers - it was Saturday night and Mozart has been found to sooth the violence of the drunkards and drug-addicts passing through the turnstiles. It is profoundly reassuring to me that in Australia even the most vulgar can find some useful end satisfied by Mozart.

But in combination with Chekhov the music of Mozart produced a sort of exalted absent-mindedness, a condition which reminds me of nothing so much as the ecstatic fugue preceding an epileptic fit so amazingly evoked by Dostoyevsky in the Idiot - the clear mild euphoria that precedes the aesthetic experience, subtle and pure like life-giving water, the original mind of zen in which insight becomes if not possible then potential.

I don't remember getting on the train. As the train streamed express to Goodwood through the downpour and darkness I finished the story and closed the book and looked around.

Where I am? I wondered. Had the train stopped already? Had I passed my home station? For all I knew at that moment, the train had been moving forever in accordance with the fixed stars.

The next day I tracked down Chekhov's literary child and grand-child in the University library. I could not hold back my eagerness. I read Babel's 'Crossing Into Poland'. I read Cheever's 'Goodbye, My Brother'. A cloud of mozartian grandeur spilled over from divine zimzum, chilled me into reverent silence.That day I got two Cheever books secondhand. It was a day before I spoke about it.

Yesterday to Dan then I showed him Babel's 'Crossing Into Poland'. I asked him to read it, then I explained the aesthetics of trauma - that is, how profound shock in literature will alienate the reader unless it is couched in a kind of ecstatic lyricism. Then we examined the words themselves of the opening two pars. I asked him to listen while I picked out the violent words from the apparently innocent description of the Polish landscape.

"Stop," he said. "It's positively morbid."

Dan's comment was a relief to me. Thank goodness somebody else could see it. I suppose I wanted to reality test the words to make sure the effect was in them and not simply in my imagination alone.

As we went out to dinner I popped into the secondhand bookstore and discovered the very rare Morison translation of Babel's Collected Stories, for only eight dollars. What a treasure!

I feel so blessed.