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Hello, and welcome to Humanities Matter, brought to you by Brill. I'm Lee Jung Riko, and this week, we'll be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. Today we're speaking with Slobiranka Vladiv Glutter. She's an adjunct professor at the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics at Monash University in Australia.
She's also the editor-in-chief of the Dostoevsky Journal. Slobiranka, thank you so much for sitting down with us today. 2021 marks the bicentennial birth of Jodor Dostoevsky. Could you first just tell us a bit about him and some of his best-known works?
Yes, Jodor Mihailurich Dostoevsky was a Russian writer who had a very difficult and fairly short life, but a very productive one. He remains one of the most enigmatic writers, even today. His reception has not fully achieved itself. In other words, we still do not understand him fully.
We still do not have a perfect understanding of all the aesthetic messages of his works. He was an engineer, the son of an army doctor. He aged very quickly because he had to endure a death sentence when he was 27 years old. He was condemned to death for reading a prohibited letter from one literature person to another in Russia in a reading circle called the Petrashevsky Circle.
All the members of the Petrashevsky Circle who discussed European philosophy of the day, which was the 1840s, and incidentally, just before they were all arrested, just during the revolution of 1848 in Europe, all the revolutions of 1848, which were anti-monarchist anti-establishment. So this was a circle which practiced discussions, discussions of European works of literature and European works of philosophy. However, the death sentence was not carried out. It was commuted to 10 years of banishment in Siberia.
Four of these years, those years, he spent in chains in the on-spinal settlements, living amongst criminals. He only had one copy of the Bible in Russian as his reading for four years. He was gradually rehabilitated and allowed to move to the town of Semipal-Antinsky in 1854, still in Siberia, where he married the widow Maria Isiva, who died two years later. He returned to European Russia in 1859, and then was allowed to go back to St.
Petersburg in December of 1859, but he was continually under surveillance until about the 1870s. He started a journal with his brother to earn money, but he never earned a lot of money. What did he write? Well, he shot to fame even before his exile.
He shot to fame in 1846 when he published his two first major works. The first was called Port-Folk, and the second one was called The Double, and The Double was a radically new kind of work in European literature, in European and Russian literature. He was already a fully-formed writer in 1846, and his career was interrupted by this exile in 1849, which lasted for 10 years. So he was exiled from mainstream Russian literature and Russian thought and Russian letters, and European thought for that matter.
For 10 years, he lived completely outside the mainstream. However, when he came back from exile, and he came to St. Petersburg in 1859, 60, he immediately started producing works which were addedly received by his contemporaries. People were waiting for him to come out of exile and to start writing.
He was a well-known major Russian writer already before his exile, but after the exile, people were waiting. So he produced notes from the House of the Dead, which was based on his experiences in the prison. Then a novel which wasn't so successful, The Insulted and the Injured. Then he had a trip to London.
His first trip abroad was in 1862. He had always dreamt of going abroad, but his exile interrupted that plan. And he had to wait for 10 years to make it to Europe. So he went to London, and after he came back, he published a kind of attack on British capitalism and European civilization in a sort of a track that called Winter Notes on Summer Impressions.
And the next major fictional work was notes from the Underground. Now this note from the Underground was again his signature Dostoyevsky Poetics, the kind of Poetics that he had produced in 1846 with the double. Then followed his major novels. In the 1860s and 1870s, he wrote his three major novels.
All of them were written more or less abroad because he had to leave Russia in order to escape his creditors and to save his marriage to Anastina, a girl who was 25 years his junior and who was not accepted by his family and he was not accepted by interfering too much. So they fled abroad to have a bit of peace and also to live a little bit more cheaply because the rule was very strong at that time. So he wrote Crime and Punishment in 1866, the idiot in 1868 to 69, the demons in 1870 to 72. After that, he returned to Russia and stayed in Russia until his death with very short trips abroad only.
And his last novel was the Brothers Karamazov in 1881. Now, when he published the Brothers Karamazov at the end of his life, he was revered in Russia. But he never made money. He was paid one fifth printed page of the amount paid through his contemporaries, Tolstoy and Turgenov.
He was always borrowing money and pouring things. He had a very hard life with his first documented epileptic attack recorded during his exile in Siberia. He had frequent fits. He smoked and died of emphysema.
But he was also lucky. He married a woman 25 years his junior in 1967, Anna Gregorin as a snikina, a stenographer. In fact, a new woman who was a working woman, not a lady of leisure. And he met her through his work when he could not meet the publisher's deadline to submit the manuscript of Crime and Punishment.
Anna, a snikina was recommended as a stenographer to whom he would dictate his work. So 200 years after his birth, what makes Dostoyevsky such a groundbreaking writer today? Dostoyevsky's works overshot the horizon of expectation of his reading public. And even today, there are not enough approaches which do his epistemology at Boetics Justice.
His works are topical. He portrayed from the first to the last, that is from 1846 to 1881, the what could be called in modern criticism, the de-centered modern subject. This was the modern subject proposed in European philosophy of the phenomenological direction by philosophers like Kant, Fichte, and in particular, Friedrich Hegel. So this was a new subject, posited by European philosophy, which Dostoyevsky made the foundation of his poetics.
Some of his 19th century readers had inspired glimpses of his poetics. For example, about the idiot, some of his contemporaries appreciated the fact that his characters were somehow motivated in a peculiar new fashion. They were not psychological portraits. They were like puppets moved by invisible drives.
And what the 19th century did not say is that these were the drives in the unconscious, because Dostoyevsky's poetics pre-empted Freud's psychoanalysis. Nietzsche also said that he learned from Dostoyevsky. So Dostoyevsky's poetics consisted of these staged characters who came to life through their language, through their expressivity. There was a lot of comedy in this expressivity, and not many realized, not many of his readers, some deep, but not many of his readers, and not many of his critics in the 20th century, in the 21st century, see that he is funny and hilarious, and that his characters are buffooned characters.
This was all described by the Russian theorist of Dostoyevsky's novel called Mikhail Bakin, who summed this kind of comedy under the term carnival. And another thing which was absolutely new and radical in Dostoyevsky's prose was his dialectical method of portraying character. That is, it's not simple equivalence, but it is structured, his characters and his narration is structured in the same method as Hegel's dialectic in the phenomenology of spirit. So the C.S.P.
is very complex. It is not easy reading. You can't just lie back. Of course you can, but you only get the plot then.
You know, you only read the plot. But the C.S.P. is novels are not clear cut. They are not easy to decode.
So what are some interesting myths about Dostoyevsky and what still needs to be challenged? Well, he, the man, therefore, meets. That he was a sliver file. That he was a nationalist.
That he was a political conservative. And that he was a Christian believer. Now, if you put all these, where did all these come from? All these myths.
Well, they came because of Dostoyevsky's ex-thebrab pronouncement. Dostoyevsky had a lot of publicistic writing. He was the editor of a journal. He wrote in his journals.
He expressed himself in public forums. And all this was very polemical. So he had many, many articles which were not fictional, which were not fiction. They are his journalistic publicistic writings.
Or fiction, which was like on the edge of journalism, like with the notes on summer impressions after his London visit. So he actually cultivated a kind of provocative style, which was in keeping with the philosophy and the policies of the Tsarist regime. And he enunciated things which would go down well with the regime, which had nearly killed him when he was a young man. So he was under police surveillance.
When he left Siberia, he was constantly under police surveillance until 1878. All his publications, like everybody else's publications in Russia, had to be submitted for preliminary censorship. The state censorship apparatus had historical roots in Russia and existed in full force during Dostoyevsky's career. There was the statute of censorship passed in 1828 by Nicholas I, which lasted until 1905.
Then there was the third section of the chancillary, the so-called Clazio de Union, also as David Scharnikal was the first. And this third department had to report on the spread of atheism in which he works. The censorship committees were established in administrative regions right across Russia. There was an ecclesiastical censorship committee, as well as a post-doc censorship mechanism called the Black Office, which examined all income in books and printed materials from abroad.
And the policy of the Tsarist autocracy was, the official policy was nationalism, autocracy, and Christian faith. And what do you think his work tells us about his view of Russian politics and history? So Dostoyevsky was operating with these very dangerous ideas for which he nearly lost his life, for which other people abroad were also persecuted. For example, the German philosopher Fijte was precluded from a position at the end and was actually dismissed from a professorship of philosophy at the end in the 1840s because of the spread of atheism.
He was accused of the spread of atheism. So it was not possible to publicize once modern philosophical ideas, including the ideas of Hegel, although Hegel was able to lecture publicly, but that's because no one understood Hegel. Hegel was very hard to understand, and the sense I could not understand Hegel. Now, the sense I also could not understand Dostoyevsky's Hegelian prose, Dostoyevsky's politics, which was grounded in Hegel's dialectic.
And that is why he was able to say everything he wanted to say, his message, his aesthetic message, he didn't have a political message, he did not have an ideological message, he did not have a religious message, his message was couch in aesthetics, and it was an aesthetic message, which the reader, a new reader, created by this new structure of the dialectical novel, of the dialectical prose of Dostoyevsky, was created by that prose. So Dostoyevsky created a new reader, and even though he created a new reader, this reader who appreciated Dostoyevsky in the 19th century, and in the 20th and 21st century, still hasn't really come abreast with all this entire Dostoyevsky message. So to sum up, Dostoyevsky introduced a radical politics into European, the European novel, and we have to call Dostoyevsky a European writer. Sure, he was writing in Russia, sure he was immersed in the Russian day-to-day social and political issues, but he was also following European day-to-day issues and European politics, and he was fully aware of the state-of-the-art of Republican governments, of democratic governments, if you like, of which there were not many, you know, there was a democracy in America, and democracy in France, out of the French Revolution, and then the rest of Europe had monarchs.
So in this atmosphere, Dostoyevsky, who was as advanced as anyone in his time, as advanced as the German philosophers, like Hegel, especially like Hegel, he could only express his ideas through this radical politics, not ex-cathidra. What he said ex-cathidra was part of his public persona. So that's about what you can say in brief about Dostoyevsky, but in your read, Dostoyevsky reading carefully and sitting up, you can't just line bed and read it. He is a very difficult read.
Slobodanka of Ladi Vlava, she's an adjunct professor, the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures, and linguistics at Monash University, and she's editor-in-chief of the Dostoyevsky Journal. Slobodanka, thank you again. Lovely to meet you. Thank you.
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