Terrorism. Radicalism. Torture. Madness. Reading Dostoevsky in 2006 induces a queasy sense of recognition. Hailed as a prophet by his contemporaries, Russia's most devastating chronicler of 19th-century political violence sees further into the brutality of our own time than any of today's mass-market sages.
When I first saw "Dostoevsky: Novelist as Journalist, Journalist as Novelist" on the Graduate School of Journalism course schedule for the spring semester, I thought it sounded, well, esoteric. At the j-school, I spent most of my time in classes I thought of as "practical," learning to shoot video, edit audio, and read between the lines on corporate earnings statements.
Robert Hass
Still, entering my last semester, I knew I wanted to work with Mark Danner, a journalism professor and staff writer at The New Yorker, best known recently for his assiduous journalistic excavation of Abu Ghraib. Robert Hass, the former poet laureate of the United States, would co-teach the course.
Since January, Hass and Danner have opened up a literary world of appalling relevance to our own. As a journalist, I have been reminded of good writing's urgent moral force. And I have been shown that craft is only as useful as the moral intelligence that informs it.
In the first class, Hass described the course's genesis. Danner lives in the former home of Nobel Prize-winning poet and longtime Berkeley professor Czeslaw Milosz, who died in 2004. And Milosz left scraps of his legacy behind. Next to his own writing desk, Danner found editions of Dostoevksy's novels crammed with Milosz's notes scribbled in the margins. He also discovered a syllabus for Milosz's class on Dostoevsky, a legendary series of lectures that captivated a generation of Berkeley undergraduates.
Mark Danner
Danner told Hass about the find, and the two decided to carry Milosz's work forward by offering their own Dostoevsky class."It seemed like a good time to look at this writer who could think about politics in extremis," says Hass, the primary translator of Milosz's poetry into English.
"By the time we're through with Demons and the Brothers Karamozov, I think we'll have some kind of intellectual hold on strains of the origins of the ideological stuff of the 20th century, stuff that's still with us today."
Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821-1881)
Works covered have included Dostoevsky's early non-fiction for St. Petersburg newspapers, along with Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, a scathing travelogue decrying what Dostoevsky saw as Western Europe's decadent ideology of materialistic individualism. The House of the Dead, the first novel Dostoevsky wrote after his eight-year exile in Siberia, skirts the blurry boundary between fiction and documentary in its visceral rendition of life in a Russian prison. It was in prison, Danner has observed, that Dostoevsky felt he could most clearly ascertain "the moral character of his country."
But the bulk of the class is necessarily given over to the novels, what Hass has called a "Mount Everest" of world literature. In Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamozov, Dostoevsky dramatizes the social upheaval that rocked 19th-century Russia as it struggled to forge its own modern identity. The romantic liberalism of the 1840s gave way to a radical utilitarianism of the 1860s that would ultimately culminate in the Russian Revolution. Dostoevsky himself was a one-time anti-czarist revolutionary turned conservative Orthodox nationalist and occasional anti-Semite. But his own ideological myopias never clouded his artistic vision, dedicated to portraying the violence wrought by what Hass calls the "abstract application of principles based on some Enlightenment idea of universal justice to actual and complex societies." Iraqis and U.S. soldiers dying in Baghdad, Hass believes, could attest to Dostoevsky's prescience.
By the end of the semester, we'll have read more than 3,000 pages of Dostoevsky's relentless prose. So far, despite a thesis and other more "practical" classes, I've kept up with the reading. And, it seems, have all my classmates. "Dostoevsky: Novelist as Journalist, Journalist as Novelist" has generated the kind of passion that comes from engaging ideas not as fodder for intellectual parlor games but as surging social forces that motivate action. As Dostoevsky himself demonstrates, the all-too-practical consequence of not recognizing this distinction is catastrophe.
– Marcus Wohlsen