Victoria Frede-Montemayor
University of California, Berkeley

This will not be a scholarly lecture, but just an account, from someone in academia, thinking more broadly about why Dostoevsky remains important, not as a historical figure, but as a writer we keep coming back to. There is something about the way one reads Dostoevsky that makes the interaction uniquely rich and productive. I’ll start with some general remarks about Dostoevsky and then try to illustrate the point about reading.

1. Reading Dostoevsky then and Now
   
   Dostoevsky was born in October 1821. He was only in his mid-twenties when he began publishing short-stories, and some of these are still read today: “The Double” (1846) and “White Nights” (1848). His arrest and exile prevented him from publishing in the 1850s. He was in his mid-forties to late fifties when he wrote his most famous works, of which his novels Crime and Punishment [1866] and Brothers Karamazov [1879-1880] are probably best known.
   
   Today, we tend to read Dostoevskii in neatly packaged editions, in hard-back [such as this volume of Dostoevskii’s collected works edition], paperback [This edition of Dostoevskii’s short-stories, dog-eared and heavily annotated], kindle, or audiobook. There are lots of translations, most recently, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, who have by now translated many of his works. People sometimes get caught up over the question of which translation to read. But there are older translations, and these are generally fine. Some of us might also have watched film versions or made-for-tv serials based on his work.
   
   For Dostoevsky’s contemporaries, reading his novels and short-stories was a bit like watching series on HBO or Netflix. They were in fact published serially—in installments—appearing in so-called “thick journals,” such as this one, the Russian Messenger. Dostoevsky lived off of the payments he received from journal editors, not off of the royalties from the book-length version. Reading his novels in this serialized format meant you couldn’t skip to the end. For over a year, each monthly edition would contain a new installment. Subscribers eagerly awaited delivery of their editions, often reading them aloud in groups. They then had three or four weeks to debate the contents while waiting for the next installment to arrive. Russkii Vestnik
   
   
2. Debate and controversy
   
   Dostoevsky intended for his readers to debate what he wrote, and we also see many of his characters debating with one another.  Dostoevsky liked controversies and he liked to stir up controversy. Many writers achieve notoriety precisely in this way, and in scholarly literature, Dostoevsky does sometimes figure as a polemicist, especially in the essays that he published in the journals he edited, such as The Epoch, or his Diary of a Writer, which he wrote and edited as a stand-alone journal for a short period. In those publications, Dostoevsky sometimes took aim directly at other writers, and he could be “vicious”, as one historian noted. This was not a writer who wanted to be liked by his readers. This stands out most clearly in Diary of a Writer, in which he continually threw strident, sometimes paradoxical, sometimes offensive statements toward them. One example was the strident stance he took on the Russo-Turkish war in the late 1870s. He repeatedly called on Russia to invade the Ottoman Empire and seize Istanbul. As he put it “Constantinople must be ours”. Despite his provocations, readers kept subscribing, including those on the left and those on the right (confirms Bishop Maxim’s statement that his writings “break the defensive armor of the modern ego and take us beyond its ideological constraints”).
   
   Dostoevsky’s skills as a polemicist are, obviously, not why he has remained so important after 200 years. Having entered into debates, he helped define the terms of the debate for his contemporaries. Most importantly, in his fictional writings, he distilled them to their most fundamental essence, helping readers to understand in their own mind, what the stakes were, and prompting a rare kind of reflection about them. This has to do with the way Dostoevsky invites us into the minds of his characters and narrators.
   
   
3. The relationship between narrator and reader. Exemplified best in short-stories where the narrator addresses the reader in the first person, making “I” statements. Such stories include “Notes from Underground” as well as “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.” I will focus on the first, just for the sake of time. In the opening, the narrator immediately inserts us into his train of thought. You are bound to remember the opening lines of Notes from Underground.
   
   

   "I’m a sick man…  a mean [or angry] man. There’s nothing attractive about me. I think there’s something wrong with my liver. But actually, I don’t understand a damn thing about my sickness; I’m not even too sure what it is that’s ailing me."

   
   The narrator gives us no opportunity to observe him from the outside: he takes us straight into the way his mind operates. The opening lines are fascinating, precisely because he seems to be shifting his position with every new sentence, throwing a series of apparent contradictions at us. The opening lines are funny for that reason.
   
   Inviting us into his mindset, however, the narrator is not asking us to sympathize with or even like him. The opening sentence, “I’m a sick man.. a mean [or angry] man” is not meant to be endearing. From the get-go, we are supposed to feel slightly uncomfortable with him.  Participating in the narrator’s mindset is not the same as sympathizing with him. Insofar as we identify with him, we feel uneasy.
   
   
4. Having established this slightly uncomfortable relationship with his readers, the narrator draws them into one of the thorniest and complex questions: the problem of free will and the status of the soul. At the time, this was a problem debated not primarily in theology, but in the fields of psychology and philosophy. Psychologists, influenced by philosophical materialism, had claimed that the sciences of physiology and chemistry could definitively prove that human beings have no soul: that people’s actions, motivations, and moral beliefs stem entirely from the chemical make-up of their bodies, as well as experiences and memories.
   
   The religion-science debate, more broadly, was one a major theme many in Dostoevsky’s writings of the 1860s and 1870s: it figures most largely in Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot, but also in Crime and Punishment, Demons and many other works.
   
   In “Notes from Underground,” however, Dostoevsky was specifically concerned with the notion that our ideas, inclinations, and beliefs can be accounted for in mechanical terms. His narrator is a man who has read some of the scientific literature, but finds that the scientific diagnosis of psychology do not match what happens in his head or body. Most importantly, he objects to the promise that science can deliver formulas to improve human life: such formulas are reductive, failing to encompass human needs and wants.   Taken together, materialism’s mechanical terms reduce human beings to the status of automata, to a “piano key”, as he keeps remarking.
   
   

   "Now, let me ask you something…
   I believe this is so, and I’m prepared to vouch for it, because it seems to me that the meaning of man’s life consists in proving to himself every minute that he’s a man and not a piano key. (…) Now you scream that no one intends to deprive me of my free will, that they’re only trying to arrange things so that my will coincides with what us is my own interest, the laws of nature, and arithmetic."

   
   Note how the polemic, even the invocation of shouting, is built into the narrative. This particular quote comes about 20 pages into the text, All the while, the reader has been trying to keep up with the narrator’s strange form of argumentation, at once baffling and compelling. By no means does the narrator have all of the answers. “That’s not what I call free will” – leaves open the question, “what do you call free will”, which he then glaringly sidesteps. The reader is left to ponder.
   
   In the second half of “Notes from Underground”, the narrator gives us ever more reasons to feel uneasy about identifying with him. Here, the discourse has changed from one about free will to a series of incidents, in which the narrator struggles to assert himself. As we discover, he is in fact a mean man. But by this stage, we have been following the narrator’s thoughts for quite some time, and find it difficult to entirely extract ours from his. By implication, we see… not that are ourselves mean men… but that we have thoughts, or are capable of having thoughts that we might not have known were there. We might have them, but might not like to admit this to ourselves.
   
   This is one reason why, I think, Dostoevsky remains so important after 200 years: reading him is an intense experience, and not just because his characters are deep, or his style is sophisticated, or the plots are well-constructed: it’s because of the way our minds work while we are reading. Reading books, or watching movies, or reflecting on art is, in some ways, pleasurable because we are drawn to and curious about the view points of other people. Dostoevsky challenges us, because in a unique and subtle way, we learn new things about ourselves.