“Umjetnost riječi” LXV (2021) • 3–4 • Zagreb • July – December

ROUNDTABLE

DOSTOEVSKY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

For this issue of Umjetnost riječi/The Art of Words, we present a virtually held
roundtable titled Dostoevsky in the Twenty-First Century to commemorate the
200th anniversary of the birth of the great Russian writer Fyodor Mikhailovich
Dostoevsky (1821–1881). We have invited top Dostoevsky experts from
different parts of the world (Italy, Russia, Serbia, USA) to share their opinions
and to illuminate some aspects of Dostoevsky’s oeuvre.
Our participants are: Stefano Aloe, Associate Professor at the University of
Verona. He is a Vice-President of the International Dostoevsky Society and the
Managing Editor of the journal Dostoevsky Studies; Carol Apollonio, Professor 255
of the Practice at Duke University. She is the author, editor, co-editor, and
translator of books and articles on Russian literature; she currently serves as
President of the International Dostoevsky Society; Yuri Corrigan, Associate
Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Boston University, is the
author of Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self (Northwestern University Press,
2017), and is working on a new book, titled Soul: A Russian Literary History;
Kornelija Ičin, Professor of Russian Literature at the Faculty of Philology,
University of Belgrade, is a literary scholar and a translator; Sergey Kibalnik,
a literary scholar and writer, is a senior research fellow at the Institute of
Russian Literature (Pushkin House) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and
Professor at the Saint Petersburg State University; Boris Tihomirov is the
Deputy Director of the research department at the F. M. Dostoevsky Literary-
Memorial Museum in Saint Petersburg.
Umjetnost riječi: Dostoevsky influenced numerous twentieth-century writers and
thinkers. In your opinion, what constitutes his impact and what was innovative about
his work?
Boris Tihomirov: Dostoevsky’s influence on twentieth- and twenty-
first-century literature and culture is total and multifarious. As one Russian’s
first-wave emigrant succinctly puts it, “No one will pass by Dostoevsky
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unpunished”. Also, as regards Dostoevsky’s influence, some artists and thinkers

tried to follow him in every possible way (Leonid Andreev, Aleksey Remizov,
Knut Hamsun, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, William Faulkner and others),
while others tried to be as different from him as possible, calling themselves
Dostoevsky’s rivals (Vladimir Nabokov, Ivan Bunin). However, it seems that
none achieved the totality and wholeness of Dostoevsky’s oeuvre, the most
important feature of which is the unbreakable bond between art and religious
topics. Dostoevsky is one of the biggest religious thinkers not only in Russia
but in the world, and he is at the same time one of the biggest artists in the
history of mankind. A clear distinctive feature of this writer is his religious
and philosophical thought that is not only embodied in an art form but can
clearly reach its authentic apex only in that form (he lowers his style of writing,
even deforms it in his essayist writing, for example, and this undoubtedly
demands theoretical considerations). And conversely, Dostoevsky’s art reaches
its uppermost tension and reveals the totality of its creative power exactly
when it stems from religious topics. In so doing, his religious and philosophical
thought is not only embodied in an art form (as a result), but is also realised
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in that very form (as a process); its driving impulses for the development and
construction feed on art itself. Dostoevsky is also an artist-innovator primarily
because in his late post-Siberian writing, he demonstrated a potential artistic
energy (one that can literally shatter mind and soul) that can be unlocked by
tackling the key, final, “cursed” existential questions – about God, immortality,
the nature of sin, the purpose of human existence…
Kornelija Ičin: I would say that his impact was comprehensive. Without
Dostoevsky, the twentieth century would not have been as we know it. Most
of all, Dostoevsky influenced literature and philosophy of the Silver Age: the
idea of Merezhkovsky’s Third Testament comes from Dostoevsky’s concept
about the reconciliation of body and soul, mind and heart, from Dostoevsky’
idea of the restored man. The idea of “life-creation” (Rus. zhiznetvorchestvo)
by Vyacheslav Ivanov and Andrei Bely is also based on Dostoevsky’s ideas
about man. Dostoevsky’s thoughts about the slavery and freedom of man
impacted the philosophical concepts of Berdyaev and Shestov, as well as the
whole of anti-utopian literature. Russian futurism sprouted from the character
of Raskolnikov. The OBERIU poets owe their oeuvre to Captain Lebyadkin.
Dostoevsky’s works are the foundation of literature and philosophy of the
absurd. The novelty is the “style of tremor” that reverberates through many
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of his works. There are also new ideas about the capital/capitalism and the
destiny of man under capitalism, about money as the fifth cataclysm.
Sergey Kibalnik: Dostoevsky revealed and wrote about the real complexity
of the human soul before it became a topic in literature. At the same time, he
turned out to be a serious artistic philosopher in whose novels philosophical
ideas are not the subject of dialogues, as in Plato, but the subject of an artistic
method for testing them through the plot.
Yuri Corrigan: Though Dostoevsky certainly had a strong effect on
the major intellectual movements of the twentieth century – especially on
existentialism, psychoanalysis, and the modernist novel – one thinks of him
less, it seems, as an architect of the age and more as a conscientious objector.
Indeed, if Dostoevsky had written The Twentieth Century as a dystopian novel,
it might have turned out quite similar to the one the world experienced. He
might easily have made, for example, both of the century’s most brilliant
philosophers fall prey to monstrous ideologies – Sartre to Stalinism, Heidegger
to Nazism. Reviewers might have complained that this was too much an
imposition of Dostoevsky’s own views, too schematic an illustration of his 257
conviction that the modern personality, in rejecting the idea of transcendent
roots, in trying to make a foundation of itself, would have nothing to stand
on, and would therefore be seized – regardless of its best moral impulses – by
the first murderous credo that came along. In general, Dostoevsky stands as
an alternative to each of the major intellectual engineers of the century. Both
Marx and Nietzsche, for example, had a greater influence on the twentieth
century than Dostoevsky, and yet they too, like Sartre and Heidegger, seem
eerily like characters from one of Dostoevsky’s novels – characters whose
basic assumptions about life would lead them, by about page 400, into agony,
madness, and even suicide – much like the century they inspired.
Stefano Aloe: Dostoevsky is possibly the first writer of the twentieth
century. At the same time, as his biography shows, he was a man who totally
belonged to his era and, in many aspects, was its typical representative. His
personal views on politics, for example, were pretty banal. The same could
be said, arguably, about his taste in visual art, music, etc. For the most part,
it is a portrait of a nineteenth-century man, albeit a weirdo... At the same
time, his style of writing, storylines that revolve around moral conflicts,
his construction of characters who are “responsible” for their thoughts and
actions, a continuous tense permeation of his inner sensations with the
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ideas of the period, have resulted in fascinating solutions. The system of the
nineteenth-century culture with its targeted foundations and landmarks is
replaced with the “theory of relativity”, fragmentation, illusiveness of each
attempt to explain the world: in short – the twentieth century. The reference
point becomes more important than the “fact”, the Dasein is more important
than the Sein. The positivist belief in reason is replaced, not with a belief
in spirituality, as this issue is frequently simplified, but with a desire for
contemporaneity, for faith and reason (where there can be no absolute belief
in faith and reason, which is the very source of relativity and fragility of our
convictions and knowledge). The nineteenth century erased questions by
providing answers. And Dostoevsky became the destroyer of all answers by
raising new questions or enacting the old ones in a new way. And he did it by
using “experimental” modes of narration which set the mood for twentieth-
century prose. He really dramatically influenced thinkers and writers of the
period of the aftermath.
Carol Apollonio: Dostoevsky wrote during a time when new ways of
thinking and new literary forms that came in from the West were posing
258 intense challenges to Russian identity. A voracious reader, he incorporated
these influences into his own writing, even as he engaged in a mighty struggle
against them. Of all his contemporaries, Dostoevsky probably adopted the
widest variety of themes and forms from the West. The restlessness and
dynamism of his fiction reflects the intensity of his struggle to speak his own,
Russian, truth—and elevates his writing above the topical issues of the day.
His intensity reflects the upheavals of his times, the Great Reforms, but his
continual focus on “eternal questions” is what attracts him to readers today.
He borrowed material—words, plots, characters—from Western models
and Russian predecessors, but what he did with these elements was absolutely
unique. Dostoevsky probes deeper into the human psychology than any
other writer before him (here, drawing upon Lermontov as much as Gogol),
giving voice to those dark and dangerous thoughts, emotions, and desires that
social convention requires never to be spoken aloud. Reading the murderer’s
thoughts, and identifying with him as he brings down the axe—this was
something new, and it opened up a whole new way of writing that spread
through world literature.
Also unique for its time was the philosophical depth of his writing.
Dostoevsky’s novels grapple with the great unsolvable problems of ontology;
his characters live on the boundary between the material world and the
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tantalizingly inaccessible world beyond, which cannot be measured, but whose

forces they feel luring and repelling them deep within. Morality, good and
evil, originate out there, but use their bodies and souls as their battlefield—as
Dmitry Karamazov famously states.
Dostoevsky also gives voice to a uniquely Eastern religiosity, which is under
attack both from Western atheism, empiricism, and rationalism, but also from
Roman Catholicism and other forms of Christian religion. His struggle on this
battlefield, too, unfolds inside and outside his characters—and readers. It is
not a simplistic advocacy for Russian Orthodoxy, but an ongoing struggle that
all thinking people then and now can identify with, particularly as the most
powerful scenes of spiritual experience in his works occur outside of church
ritual and structures—in the marketplace, in nature, on a riverbank in Siberia.
I find most intriguing Dostoevsky’s positive depictions of Muslim believers,
notably in Notes from the Dead House. This may make his works doubly relevant
in today’s world, which has changed so radically since Dostoevsky’s time, but
in which the questions he raises have only increased in their relevance.

Umjetnost riječi: In literary theory, we assume that the modern novel abandons 259
the universality and totality of the world. Are Dostoevsky’s novels still “total” novels
or just fragments? Are his novels realist in the full sense of the term or do they already
have modernist tendencies?
Kornelija Ičin: Dostoevsky’s novels are not realist. This does not only
imply the author’s determination to create works that represent “realism
in a higher sense”, but also refers to the fact that his novels are in effect
conceptualistic: those are novels of ideas. That is why they should be defined
as proto-modernist.
Sergey Kibalnik: Dostoevsky’s novels might really be the last ones in
world literature to preserve the universality of the world. Those are classical
novels which already incorporate the man of modernism, in the same way as
Stavrogin, according to Akim Volynsky, heralds a decadent man.
Stefano Aloe: I think that categories such as “classical” and “modernist”
are not helpful in understanding Dostoevsky’s novels. They are simply
inadequate. The same applies to “realism”, because Dostoevsky specified and
adapted his concepts to talk about “realism in a higher sense”: it contains key
aspects that distinguish his novels from classical realist works. If we want to
use abstract terms in their wider sense, I believe that Dostoevsky’s poetics
can be called “neo-baroque”. In other words, his poetics shares some features
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with those tendencies in art that resist, in one way or another, classicism and
renaissance. It is not a coincidence that Dostoevsky bears so many similarities
with the geniuses of baroque art (Cervantes, Calderón, Shakespeare), nor is
his familiarity with the Romantic movement a coincidence (regardless of
his considerable detachment from the Romantic movement). It is also worth
mentioning that all anti-classicistic tendencies in the twentieth century
(neo-romanticism, modernism, postmodernism…) draw on Dostoevsky.
At the same time, Dostoevsky (unlike Tolstoy) has never become a model
writer for specific literary movements: all writers influenced by Dostoevsky
have appropriated him in their own distinct way. Dostoevsky is a template
for narrative diversity and poetic freedom. That is how he positioned himself
towards his own templates. This is why we can talk about the wholeness of his
novels only to the extent of its instability and its continuously changing nature:
it is an artistically and philosophically disordered wholeness. Dostoevsky’s
wholeness is entropic: not only does it include its own completeness, but also
its opposite. A true question is whether we can at all talk about a “total” poetic
world where everything is, but wherein cosmos remains unpresentable. It is
260 hard to provide an answer to that.
Carol Apollonio: Such a great question. Despite the ambitious and
seemingly chaotic structure of his novels, they show an underlying order. This
is particularly notable with The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment,
whose extraordinarily balanced structure, with a strongly grounded fulcrum
at the center from which the plot, character development, and argumentation
fans out to both ends (In BK the diptych of the Grand Inquisitor and
the Russian Monk; in CP the entrance of Svidrigailov into Raskolnikov’s
consciousness), reflects an engineer’s mind at work. We should never forget
that Dostoevsky was trained as an engineer. Interestingly, he did complete his
works, mostly—in comparison with the restless Pushkin, for example, who
was known for his brilliant fragments. So, looking at their surface structure,
we see completed novels. But the inner tension of his works exemplifies the
extraordinary challenges of the world at his time (and ours), which, yes, was
abandoning its sense of totality and universality, and struggling to maintain
some sense of order. The angularity of his writing, his lack of concern, mostly,
for the niceties of description, particularly of landscape, his deployment
of outrageous coincidences in plot and disdain for boundaries between
characters’ consciousnesses—all of this feels modernist. Realism comes in the
identity readers feel with his characters deep within our shared psychology.
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Boris Tihomirov: Dostoevsky defined his own creative method as

“realism in a higher sense”. In defining it, he stated that the highest task of
creation is to “find the man in man with full realism”. That is his understanding
of himself and his own description of Dostoevsky as an artist. At the same
time, he was sceptical towards the “realism” of writers, his contemporaries,
stating that their realism was “very weak”. What lies behind these statements?
Dostoevsky as an artist started from the fact “that evil lies deeper in human
beings than our social-physicians suppose; that no social structure will
eliminate evil; that the human soul will remain as it always has been; that
abnormality and sin arise from the soul itself ”. Let’s not forget the “abysses”
in human nature revealed, for example, by the Grand Inquisitor. So, in “full
realism”, in clear awareness and understanding of the deep-rootedness of
evil in “human soul” (“social-physicians” in this sense are less “realistic” than
Dostoevsky), he set up the task to find “the man in man”. In this regard, V. V.
Zenkovsky’s statement comes to mind (even though its wording is not totally
correct): “Dostoevsky’s faith in man does not reside in some sentimental
elevation of man, but on the contrary, it celebrates the penetration into the
darkest parts of human soul”. Many modernists regarded Dostoevsky their 261
master, by appropriating, as they pleased, his topics, by developing some
of his “procedures” (and this has no doubt enriched art). However, in their
writing, what Dostoevsky conceived as a gruesome problem and an effort of
desperate faith turns into a game and “literature”.
Yuri Corrigan: Georg Lukacs described the modern novel memorably as
a world of irremediable homelessness, but Dostoevsky’s novels are all about
going home, though unwillingly, and with great trepidation. There is a home in
Dostoevsky’s world, a sense of wholeness trying to reclaim his characters, and
the novel is born from their resistance to it. Raskolnikov finds out his family is
coming to visit him, which sends him into a hysterical tailspin. Myshkin comes
back to Russia, the place of his orphan-hood and madness. Stavrogin comes
back to his haunted childhood home. Arkady Dolgoruky moves to Petersburg to
rejoin his long-estranged family. The brothers Karamazov return to the scene of
their troubled childhood. Even Notes from Underground only becomes a cohesive,
engrossing narrative in the moment when the hero accidentally stumbles into
a reunion with his old schoolmates, the remnants of a past that he has “cursed
and scattered to dust.” The novel, for Dostoevsky, is born of the nervous energy,
and the hope and fear emitted from these returns. In each case, there’s a sense
of wholeness that seeks to reclaim his protagonists, who will do anything to
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make it go away. To actually go home, to integrate one’s roots, to become more

than a fragment, is the hardest heroic feat of all, and if they didn’t resist it – if
they weren’t fragmented moderns at war with themselves, with the content of
their own souls – there would be no novel. So, the novel depends on the sense
of fragmentation, but the backdrop is still the promise of wholeness – though
to Dostoevsky’s characters it’s more of a threat than a promise.

Umjetnost riječi: Can you elaborate on the influence Dostoevsky had in your
culture (country)? (Reception, translations, required school reading…). When did you
first start reading Dostoevsky?
Sergey Kibalnik: For a long time I had a wrong idea about Dostoevsky,
which still seems to be predominant about him – that he is a writer who does
not only express, but is immersed in the world of psychological aberrations. I
had more appreciation for Pushkin, whom I researched for many years. It was
only when I started studying Dostoevsky that I discovered quite surprisingly
that Blok was right when he wrote about the “happy name” of Pushkin in
1921. Now it is high time to proclaim and talk continuously about the “shining
262 name” of Dostoevsky.
Boris Tihomirov: I started reading Dostoevsky unforgivingly late,
when I was twenty doing my military service in the Soviet Army (stationed
in Germany). My true discovery of Dostoevsky happened at the university,
owing to my fabulous professor Yakov Semenovich Bilinkis, one of the greatest
experts on Tolstoy, under whose supervision I wrote my MA thesis titled “The
Creative History of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment” (defended in 1986).
Kornelija Ičin: In Serbia, Dostoevsky has not only inspired writers
(Svetolik Ranković, Bora Stanković, Momčilo Nastasijević, Isidora Sekulić,
Milica Janković, Veljko Petrović, Branimir Čosić), but also thinkers (Prof.
Nikola Milošević). Dostojevsky’s oeuvre was stubbornly and continuously
translated by professional translators (Jovan Maksimović, Radivoj Maskimović,
Ljubomir Maksimović, Sergej Slastikov, Branka Kovačević, Kosara Cvetković,
Nikola Nikolić, Miloš Ivković, Branislava Kovačević, Milosav Babović), as well
as by poets and cultural commentators (Desanka Maksimović, Milan Kašanin).
The first Serbian translation appeared in 1881 (a fragment from A Writer’s Diary
for 1877) and in that very same year his oeuvre was included in the school
curriculum. First translations of his literary works appeared in 1888 (Poor Folk
and Crime and Punishment). Collected Works by Dostoevsky in 35 volumes appeared
in 1933 (edited by Serbian writer Isidora Sekulić). Many book-length studies
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on Dostoevsky have been published at various times. I will mention only the
most important ones: Grigorij Petrov, Dostojevski i dostojevština (1923); Justin
Popović, Dostojevski o Evropi i slovenstvu (1940); Milosav Babović, Dostojevski
kod Srba (1962); Milica Nikolić, Igra protivrečja ili “Krotka” F. M. Dostojevskog
(1975); Nikola Milošević, Dostojevski kao mislilac (1981); Milivoje Jovanović,
Dostojevski i ruska književnost 20. veka (1985); Milivoje Jovanović, Dostojevski: od
romana tajni ka romanu-mitu (1992); Milivoje Jovanović, Dostojevski: od romana
tajni ka romanu-mitu – metamorfoza žanra (1993); Vitomir Vuletić, Dostojevski i
univerzalna konfliktnost (2011); Jasmina Ahmetagić, Knjiga o Dostojevskom: bolest
prekomernog saznanja (2013); Olivera Žižović, Živi lik istine F. M. Dostojevskog:
“San smešnog čoveka” (2013); Predrag Čičovački, Dostojevski i svetost života (2014);
Father Stevan Stefanović, Bogoslovlje Dostojevskog (2019), Father Atanasije Jevtić,
Dostojevski (2020). The first theatre adaptation of Dostoevsky was staged in
1907 in the National Theatre in Belgrade (Crime and Punishment). Today this
very same theatre is staging Demons, directed by Tanja Mandić Rigonat. I was
twelve when I first came across Dostoevsky, when I frantically read Crime
and Punishment.
Stefano Aloe: It is hard to assess Dostoevsky’s impact on Italian culture
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from the twentieth century onwards: his influence is deep and visible in
literature, in the history of ideas, in the way in which the issues of ethics,
politics and aesthetics have been studied. The best Italian philosophers and
theologians looked for answers to many fundamental questions in Dostoevsky’s
novels. Those were primarily the questions about the nature of evil (especially
after the tragedy of WWII), the nature of power, about the interrelation
between power and man, about the tragedy of believers’ sensibility, and
many others. The influence of Dostoevsky’s “political” protagonists was
immense: Raskolnikov, the heroes of Demons, Ivan Karamazov, and most of all
his Grand Inquisitor. His works such as Notes from Underground and A Gentle
Creature, among others, became for many Italian writers the foundation for a
new way of interior storytelling, revealing possibilities of narrating not only
about psychology, but also about the protagonist’s elusive subconsciousness.
The quantity of Italian translations of Dostoevsky’s work is astonishing.
Even today he remains among the few authors who are not only regarded
as “classic”, but are also attracting young generations and readers owing to
their “contemporaneity” (at a time when books are increasingly losing their
appeal). I personally discovered Dostoevsky late, even though I was an ardent
reader as a child. I obviously knew his name, but for some reason I didn’t start
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reading him before the age of twenty. So, my reading of Dostoevsky started
when I became a student of Russian language and literature. In Year 1, we
had to read at least two or three works by Dostoevsky. Somehow, I had great
expectation when I started reading The Double (I was obviously attracted by
the topic of the double), and I have to admit that I was disappointed. But soon
after, I read Notes from Underground and it was a true discovery. For the next two
years, I read (in Italian) almost all of Dostoevsky’s oeuvre. He became my idol.
Carol Apollonio: It’s a hard question because I’ve mostly been reading
Russian literature! It lured me in early. What I can say is that in the US at least,
Dostoevsky appeals to a particular kind of young reader: extremely intelligent,
a questioner and seeker, someone who looks at a long book as an adventure,
not a threat or an obstacle. The students who choose my classes at Duke are
a true elite; they are sensitive and thoughtful, hard-working, and brilliant in
their writing and discussion. I find it interesting that of the Russian “big three”,
Dostoevsky appeals most immediately and directly to young people. I think it
is because at that age, people still trust the power of their rational brain to solve
the burning questions of life. Tolstoy comes later, when we are ready to enter
264 a fully tangible world and see it and experience its challenges through the eyes
of his characters. Chekhov is for those who appreciate reading for the purely
artistic experience of it, as one appreciates and savors a musical performance.
Our young readers also look to Dostoevsky, now and always, as a window into
the “Russian mind,” whatever that is.
Yuri Corrigan: I grew up in the province of Saskatchewan, in Canada,
where I didn’t detect any Dostoevskian imprint on the culture at all. And
I’m grateful in a sense that Dostoevsky wasn’t required reading in school.
Dostoevsky’s North American readers are a self-selecting group. You probably
need to have some inner supply of anguish and alienation to search out
Dostoevsky in the first place, and if you find him (in my case through my
family), and you make the connection, then it feels very personal, unmediated
by any system or curriculum. I’ve noticed that Americans who love Dostoevsky
often feel possessive of him for this reason, and there’s almost a sense of
resentment that everyone else gets to read him too and have an opinion about
him. In teaching Dostoevsky to undergraduates, I find it sometimes harder
(though I’ve seen many exceptions to this rule) for students from Russia to
be as open to the text since it has been forced on them by teachers, by the
kind of people whom one doesn’t necessarily associate with the tremulous,
solitary strivings of the imagination.
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Umjetnost riječi: We are cautious when we discuss humour in Dostoevsky’s oeuvre,

even though we are aware of the existence of indirect and subtle humour, unbridled
laughter in his short stories and novels. Nevertheless, can we talk about humour as being
integral to his work? Can we define its characteristics?
Stefano Aloe: Yes, humour in Dostoevsky does not only exist but is also
one of the basic aspects of his poetics. At the same time, this is not the usual
humour, it is rarely open and even more rarely incites laughter in the reader.
This is a different type of humour, a type that shares very few features with
the comical. When Dostoevsky tries to be funny or is getting closer to satire,
he is not that persuasive (for example, in the novella The Crocodile or in Uncle’s
Dream). That is why it is difficult to define his distinctive type of humour.
It seems that the key for decoding this humour lies in Dostoevsky’s ideas
that are paradoxical and contradictory. It is no wonder that one of the main
distinctive features of his heroes, and the author himself, is doubt: Dostoevsky
doubts even that which is clear and indisputable. It is not quite correct to say
that this is contradictory: in effect, therein lies a specific logic, and this is the
logic according to which we and the world we live in are unstable, made of
different elements that are continuously changing and are in opposition to 265
one another. I can be a true believer and at the same time doubt my faith and
even the existence of God or his goodness since there are different principles
in me, because I am free and because nothing is really predestined. So, that
deep awareness of human nature is “humoristic”, because it is based on the
idea that the self changes depending on the viewpoint, and consists of shifts
from general ideas and from the wholeness of personality and existence. This
is the source of Dostoevsky’s antidogmatic faith and his ability to subvert
every biased standpoint. Humour lies in the fact that the world as we know
it does not exist, but that we accept it as such.
Yuri Corrigan: Apart from being consistently very funny, Dostoevsky’s
novels, taken together, constitute an entire school of thought on the
phenomenon of laughter. When Arkady in The Adolescent says that “the surest
way to understand someone” is “to watch that person laugh,” Dostoevsky is
instructing us on how to understand his characters. There are the hordes
of mirthless “scoffers,” competing over who gets to be more ironic, more
“intelligent”; there are the titterers, like Porfiry Petrovich, who use their
laughter to provoke, to find something out; there are the abject self-haters,
like Lebedev, who try to stay ahead of other people’s mockery by laughing
at themselves; then there are the non-laughers, the inwardly deadened or
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inert, like Stavrogin, whose interlocutors are always saying, “aha, I see you’re
laughing,” when they are in fact dead serious, and who only laugh when
nothing funny is happening. But then there’s also the best kind of laughter,
what Arkady calls the true “cheerful” or “mirthful” laughter, when something
takes hold of one and laughs through one’s body. “The vast majority of people,”
Arkady says, “don’t know how to laugh at all. It’s not a matter of knowing how,
though: it’s a gift” – for Dostoevsky, possibly even a gift as great as the “gift of
tears.” Dostoevsky gives these moments of the deepest, most sincere laughter
to his favorite characters – the way Myshkin, for example, laughs at General
Ivolgin. Ivolgin tells Myshkin all those crazy lies about his childhood, about
his bedtime bonding with Napoleon, and when he goes away, Myshkin sits
there laughing “for about ten minutes” – which is a really long time to sit by
oneself laughing at someone. The fact that Myshkin sits there for ten whole
minutes laughing about the ridiculous lies of this crazy old man tells us a lot
about Dostoevsky’s profound respect for laughter; this is probably Myshkin’s
least charitable moment, but it’s one in which we feel particularly close to him.
Carol Apollonio: Sometimes Dostoevsky is hilarious. I fully agree that
266 we have to be cautious, not because he’s not funny, but because analyzing
his humor can kill it. And humor is so deeply rooted in its own cultural
context. To readers in our day and age, some of the humor feels forced—for
example, when Germans start talking in his works, it’s supposed to be funny,
but tends to fall flat for contemporary readers (at least on this side of the
pond). The funniest parts in Dostoevsky are Gogolian—when his absurdist
liars, for example, General Ivolgin in The Idiot, tell their crazy tales. Readers
of Dostoevsky should laugh out loud in parts, and take a moment to just feel
the funniness. It may feel funnier against the background of all the darkness
that dominates the novels. I should add that some translators have done a
great job with the humor. But I have no desire to analyze it.
Boris Tihomirov: Dostoevsky is really a wonderful literary humourist. In
addition, his humour has a rather large range: from simple humoristic novellas,
such as Another Man’s Wife and a Husband under the Bed to dark humour in the
novella Bobok or grotesque fantasy in The Crocodile. But his artistically best
humour is probably in his latest novels – in The Idiot, Demons, The Brothers
Karamazov. Humour is a constituent part of the architecture of these novels.
I will just mention several of his “ingenious jokers”: Lebedev, Lebjadkin and
especially Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, all of whom have a specific artistic
function. With their unconstrained and rampant behaviour, these protagonists
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parody the most important metaphysical problems of the “Great Five Books”,
by emphasising them grotesquely and illuminating them in a new way. This
also includes the Devil, Ivan Karamazov’s double. General Ivolgin, a comical
character in The Idiot, plays a somewhat different but a very prominent role.
His whole story as to how he was Napoleon’s page is the gem of Dostoevsky’s
humour. Dostoevsky also paints a fantastic portrait of what defines humour:
“humour is astuteness of deep feelings”.
Kornelija Ičin: Annensky wrote about humour in Dostoevsky, and so did
many scholars on Dostoevsky that followed, such as Bakhtin and Lapshin. In
this regard it is worth mentioning Lev Lunts’ words at Boris Eikhenbaum’s
seminar on the comic in Dostoevsky (on Captain Lebjadkin and buffoonery).
Naturally, it is possible to talk about humour in Dostoevsky. And this is a
special “reduced humour” which appears at the moment when an ideally
imagined rational construction crumbles: on the surface of a highly elaborated
idea of subordinating life to arithmetic operations, Raskolnikov with a fever
wearing a felt hat looks as funny as the open door of the apartment of the
pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna.
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Sergey Kibalnik: Most of all, I like talking about Dostoevsky as a fabulous
humourist (humour is just one element of the comic). He is a humourist
not in some other sense, but in the sense of the comic in Shakespeare’s and
Dickens’ works. Complexity lies in him being a comic and a tragic writer
simultaneously, as Shakespeare – which is exactly what human life is, comic
and tragic at the same time. If there is more humour in Shakespeare’s comedies
and more tragedy in his tragedies, in Dostoevsky there is a lot of comic and
tragic in his “Great Five Books”. However, since the comic is a constituent
part of portraying the “phenomenological” being of the majority of his
protagonists, and the tragic constitutes their metaphysical depth, most readers
tend to notice only the second aspect of these two inseparable components.

Umjetnost riječi: Some critics argue that Dostoevsky is far more interested in
expressing ideas and is indifferent towards style. This led to conclusions that he was
always rushing and not inclined to “spruce up” his work. What can you say about his style?
Carol Apollonio: Those whose tastes run to decorum and polish can’t
get through a single Dostoevskian sentence. He’s always running into things
and breaking things. He repeats himself, waves his arms in the air, deploys
melodramatic cliches, descends into sentimentality; his characters shout,
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fall to the ground, slap one another, rush madly from place to place. He sets
up a drawing room, only so that Shatov, or Rogozhin, or Marya Lebyadkina,
or Grushenka, or Nastasya Filippovna, can rush in and create a scandal. So,
his style feels this way too! You are not here for a cup of tea and some light
entertainment; you are flailing in the darkness, burning with big questions
that polite conversation cannot answer. Dostoevsky is writing to the parts of
ourselves that crave something deeper, underneath that scandalous surface.
That being said, I will repeat that despite the surface appearance, his most
famous novels are extraordinarily well structured, with good load-bearing
walls and beams. He is a master of dramatic construction—particularly in his
design of the novelistic space, placement of characters in it, and (famously)
their entrances and exits. The reader who pays attention to visual images and
dreams in Dostoevsky will discover a whole new level of meaning beyond
the words. He is the master of binaries, paradoxes, and contrasts: light and
darkness; silence and noise; anguish and peace; good and evil—not just in
dialogues between two characters who disagree, but in the dramatic space
where it occurs. In cramped, human-built dwellings and public buildings
the human soul is itself cramped, miserable, unfree. He keeps himself, his
268 character, and his reader in there as long as we can stand it, and then, when we
can take no more, he gives us a radiant dream. We rush outside, fall weeping
with joy, to the wide-open, green earth, and feel the freedom that can only
come when we have experienced its opposite—a darkness which may indeed
entail a seeming awkwardness of style.
Yuri Corrigan: Sometimes I’ll think of a scene in Dostoevsky, and I
can picture the mood and weather so clearly – like, for example, the scene
of Shatov’s murder in Demons – but when I look at the text, apart from a
few scattered words here and there (“it was dark,” “in the dark”), I can only
find one very small descriptive sentence. In the case of Shatov’s murder,
it’s: “Ветер колыхал верхушки сосен.” (“The wind swayed the tops of the
pines”). This a great sentence, and Dostoevsky was a master of finding exactly
the right places for these efficient and concise descriptions. But then there
are also the parts of the following, hypothetical sentence, of which we see
many different combinations: “Suddenly – for some reason – almost even as
if on purpose – he gave a start – and was as though suddenly – filled with
some kind of boundless disgust.” It’s here, in these extremely vague and
problematic sentences (which any decent editor would flag for omission),
that Dostoevsky gives up control of his text, leaves room for speculation and
mystery – which I think is a greatly undervalued literary impulse. I admire
Dostoevsky’s courage in letting his defenses down to allow vulnerable, raw
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psychic material onto the page, and also his courage in permitting himself—
maybe more than any other major modern writer, including even Dickens—to
write emotionally, not sentimentally, but with fearless emotion. If Dostoevsky
had written like Nabokov—in that neat, self-censored style—if he were as
afraid of being mocked, what would be left? One can just imagine Nabokov
editing Dostoevsky: deleting Alyosha’s speech at the stone, the Lazarus scene
from Crime and Punishment, probably over half of The Idiot, or at least the most
memorable parts.
Stefano Aloe: The idea of Dostoevsky as a “bad stylist” is still embraced
by many researches in the long tradition of Dostoevsky’s reception. This idea
is simultaneously true and false. It is true if we analyse Dostoevsky’s style
through the prism of literary canon and its evolution from the antiquity to the
mid-nineteenth century. Dostoevsky really lacks proportion, the control of
his content, attention to aesthetic values and rhetorical complexity of the text,
both on the level of the plot and its individual parts. Dostoevsky dodged the
idea of mimesis, of mimicking reality as an aesthetic procedure that regulates
reality to the final point via artistic means. There is no transformation of the
world into a harmonious synthesis. Dostoevsky’s poetics is a poetics of transfer
of the same chaos, the same “fantastic” disorder so that we are able to feel 269
and recognise it in its totality. But to conclude that due to this Dostoevsky
is a “bad” writer is a gross error. Dostoevsky is an excellent stylist, aware of
and focused on his goal. His style corresponds to his poetics: chaos can only
be presented as chaos and he invented new stylistic procedures to transmit
this matter without a form. The beauty of his style consists of a magnetic,
fluid movement without dead points, of unexpected solutions and vitality.
Everything happens in a seemingly haphazard manner even though the
author thought about it thoroughly. He did not focus on decorative phrases
(his writing seems fast and immediate), but created voices and gestures of his
heroes through a long and complicated process: he fixed “alive speech” before
he introduced it into the storyline. In that way everything is stylistically fixed
while everything else flows like a stream of consciousness. That is in effect
his style that is stronger because he knew how to masterfully use rhetorical
devices, not to decorate his text, but to structure the speech of his narrator
and his characters.
Boris Tihomirov: This is true and not true. It is indisputable that
Dostoevsky is a “writer of ideas”, or as Bakhtin called him, an “artist of
ideas”. In that regard he is unique and one-of-a-kind. And at the same time
his distinctiveness lies in the fact that he was an artist who thought in images
of a thinker, thus creating live heroes-intellectuals, such as as the paradoxical
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Underground Man, Ippolit Terent’ev, Kirillov, Versilov, Ivan Karamazov

and others. Regarding the rebellious god-defying position of his protagonist
Ivan Karamazov, Dostoevsky said that “in Europe, there has never been such
a powerful atheistic statement”. In other words, the final depth and rigour
of Ivan’s god-defying criticism belongs primarily to the author himself; he
develops this cycle of ideas to the full as if from somebody else’s thinking
position, as an artist in order to show the thoughts of his character. And this
distinctive artistic activity on Dostoevsky’s part turns out to be crucial for
the development of his own polarising religious thought. This thought finds
within itself (or rather creates in itself) the totality of a god-defying argument
(in this example) just to allegedly push it away, which in turn is artistically
enacted in the form of a literary hero. Thus, Dostoevsky as a thinker and an
artist gets an exceptional chance to construct this type of a hero-ideologue
as the protagonist of the “great dialogue” in the novel in order to enter into
“a dialogical communication” with him, “which is deep, serious, real and not
rhetorically playful or conditioned by literature” (Bakhtin). As regards his
style, Dostoevsky is inconsistent. For example, in The Idiot, apart from pages
270 that astonish the reader with their artistic perfection (though of a distinctive
order), such as the scene with Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin near the dead
body of Nastasya Filippovna, there are crumbled, forced pages, obviously
written in haste and without inspiration (just check the beginning of the
second part of the novel). But such pages are not Dostoevsky’s “business
card”. He is an excellent stylist who shines brightly in his humoristic works,
as I mentioned earlier in relation to his humour.
Sergey Kibalnik: The best way for someone to prove his own stylistic
clumsiness is to blurt out something about Dostoevsky’s stylistic imperfection.
Even Nabokov admired The Brothers Karamazov in the 1930s before he realised
that his comparison to Dostoevsky was not good for him. The artistic world
and man in Dostoevsky are like that, even more alive than the real world
around us. Hence, Dostoevsky’s style creates a miracle that is subordinate
only to true art where style is not separate from other levels of a work of art,
but constitutes its organic whole with those other levels.
Kornelija Ičin: His style is such that the reader can’t put the book down.
Who thinks about Dostoevsky’s style when we become involved with his
ideas that capture the paradox of human existence he managed to illuminate,
and captivate the characters he created? His style corresponds to the heroes,
their everydayness, the surrounding, the issues that torment them. The style
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corresponds to the author’s hectic writing and also to the hectic thoughts that
keep his protagonists alive.

Umjetnost riječi: Can we talk about Dostoevsky in the twenty-first century or about
the twenty-first-century Dostoevsky? To what degree are his works contemporary in our
present moment? Can you single out some works without which contemporary literature
and culture would be inconceivable?
Kornelija Ičin: Dostoevsky can’t be measured in the categories of
historical time. “Dostoevsky is immortal”, as Behemoth says in Master and
Margarita… Dostoevsky is our contemporary, as he was in the twentieth
century, as he will be in the twenty-second century and beyond. Dostoevsky
completely matters today – with his questions about slavery and freedom of
man, his “theory” about the right to life of others, with his thoughts about man
and the capital/accumulation, about the dehumanisation of the world, about
life in the underground, about the killing of God within us… Contemporary
culture can’t be imagined without his Notes from Underground, The Gambler,
Crime and Punishment, Demons, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov.
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Boris Tihomirov: Mikhail Bakhtin insisted that the author of The Idiot,
Demons and The Brothers Karamazov should be evaluated and studied in the
context of “Great Time”. Dostoevsky is an epochal phenomenon. However,
Dostoevsky’s epoch hasn’t finished. We live in times that in a way belong to
Dostoevsky’s epoch. And this is primarily how the meaning of the spiritual
heritage of the great Russian writer for contemporary society is defined.
Dostoevsky’s epoch is an epoch marked by the beginning of a major crisis
of religious consciousness, faith. Dostoevsky thoroughly problematises
traditional Christianity – Christian dogma, Christian morality, the Christian
understanding of the world – through many of his heroes in the “Great Five
Books” (Ippolit Terent’ev, Versilov, Ivan Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor).
One of his notes before his death states: “It is not as a child that I believe and
confess Christ. My hosanna is born of an enormous crucible of doubt.” This
confession not only testifies to Dostoevsky’s personal painstaking religious
quests and discoveries, but at the same time represents a complete formula
of his creation that reveals the deep impulses and the powerful nature of
the author’s creative energy. Because to embody “hosanna” in Dostoevsky’s
oeuvre – the highest praise to God and the world he has created – is possible
only by showing the journey through the tremendous “crucible of doubt”
because this is the only way how human soul can become free. The reader is
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overcome by Dostoevsky’s oeuvre by these controversial issues, by this fight

between pro and contra that happens not in speculations of the mind but in
the human heart where “The Devil and God are fighting”. And arguably this
applies most of all to the reader of our time marked by the highest “critical
mass” of contra arguments that obstructs our faith in God and mankind, a
time that alongside the crisis of faith is increasingly going through the crisis
of disbelief, a dead-end path of disbelief, whose overcoming can only be
understood and accepted if we go on “Dostoevsky’s journey” – the journey
of a free spirit that is experiencing the “crucible of doubt”.
Stefano Aloe: Dostoevsky is always up-to-date. Each era will imagine
its “own” Dostoevsky, in other words, it will read him pursuant to a specific
context. But, generally speaking, he didn’t belong to his epoch; and neither
does he belong to the twentieth century, nor the contemporary moment.
The reason for this is simple: he asked universal questions that will never be
answered by religion, philosophy or science, and he asked them honestly so
that we will always feel connected with them. Dostoevsky makes the reader
his companion, his accomplice in these questions. The reader is strongly
“infected” by Dostoevsky’s responsibility for his ideas and the actions of his
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protagonists. Readers of Dostoevsky are never bystanders or witnesses: if
they don’t put down the book (which many do), they find themselves in the
inner world of these novels and they find themselves more in the minds of his
protagonists than in the middle of their actions. Dostoevsky lures his readers,
deprives them of orientation points and fixed focalisation points. Which is why
he gives his readers hope and perspective to continue the journey initiated
by his characters on their own. In this regard, his essential works are Crime
and Punishment, Notes from Underground, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, and
maybe The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.
Sergey Kibalnik: I also organised and published a roundtable titled “A
World without Dostoevsky”. However, participants such as Igor P. Smirnov and
Jasmina Vojvodić believe that, on the one hand, our world is already a world
without Dostoevsky, and on the other, that Dostoevsky has managed to remain
present in the twenty-first century – if nothing else, for many individuals.
It is totally obvious today that at least his novels The Idiot and The Brothers
Karamazov have entered the mind and body of contemporary world culture.
Yuri Corrigan: Dostoevsky, I believe, is the novelist for the internet age,
the age of the “shallows”, of bezlichnost’ (personality-lessness), where our
inner lives are under siege, our ability to remember compromised by search
engines, where we are becoming increasingly incapable of contemplation.
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Pyotr Verkhovensky’s plans for seizing control of others depends on what

he calls the lack of an “inner idea,” the absence of an inward dimension
that makes people “obedient like wax,” defenseless against an “external
will” – and there’s no question that Pyotr Stepanovich, if he were around
today, would be somehow involved in engineering social media platforms,
where the possibilities for making people “into a web of knots,” with “blind
obedience” to “some enormous, but mysterious” center are unprecedented.
Dostoevsky is also the best explainer of what it means to be trapped in a
faceless web of connectivity. His underground man is still the best paradigm
for understanding the trolls who write horrible things in the comment sections,
not to mention the humiliated, embittered, lonely, invisible people who take
violent revenge on the world around them as a desperate bid for existence. And
of course, Dostoevsky’s “demons” are still the best paradigm for understanding
the ideologically inflamed, those who repeat “other people’s thoughts” with
sanctimony and self-righteousness, and whose idealism, fueled by a contempt
for actual human beings, is perfectly suited to the online format. What’s so
crucial about Dostoevsky for the twenty-first century is not only that he
diagnosed these elements so shrewdly, but that he also tried to conceive of 273
antidotes. For Dostoevsky, the antidote begins with what he calls the “seed”
– a good image that enters the mind at an early age, that serves as a kind of
protection, or immunity. This “seed” was closely connected in Dostoevsky’s
thought with the images of the Gospel, but for those of his readers who might
not be able to follow him in that direction, he also had in mind the best images
of world literature, an insight which offers us a potential blueprint for the
work of the humanities in the age of inward erosion: the cultivation of an
inner landscape, a place to go that’s deeper than the aggressive shallows and
that can provide a different kind of stability.
Carol Apollonio: Certainly, this Dostoevsky bicentennial year is a good
time to think about this question. I’d say that Notes from Underground may
have been the most influential of Dostoevsky’s works on the modern mind,
particularly as it has been read and taught in philosophy. But I do think that the
biggest challenge in our current moment is that reading itself has become less
central as a source of knowledge and communication. My students connect
with the world around them not through books, or in fact the written word,
but through online sources—short, catchy ones at that: bursts of video, gifs,
memes, tweets, YouTube videos, Instagram and Snapchat things (whatever
they’re called). They don’t go to the library! Or they go to the library to study,
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not to look at books. They communicate through short text messages, and
reach each other instantaneously around the world. Education has changed:
there’s no point in lecturing about facts when one click can get you any fact
you need on the Internet. My students now find an assignment to watch a
film burdensome! So, we do need to ask ourselves what literature’s value is,
or rather, since those of us “talking” here don’t need to be convinced of its
value, we need to understand how to communicate this to people who don’t
actually see a need for spending hours alone with a book. I find it incredibly
heartening that during the COVID lockdowns, people seem to have rekindled
an interest in reading, and I hope that that will last. It is our job as teachers
to nurture that love for literature, and to help students develop their skills
as readers, their concentration, their stamina, and their ability to tune out
external stimuli. The culture at large also is inclined to see value only in
income-producing skills, in STEM, and to label literature and the arts as
frivolous and impractical. I’m getting off track here, but these are basics,
preconditions for appreciating Dostoevsky’s writing, and that of other great
writers. The themes he addresses—Apocalypse, tyranny, freedom, plague (at
274 the end of Crime and Punishment)—of course, are uncannily prescient, such
that among some readers in his homeland he enjoys status close to that of a
prophet. So, in short, my answer is that as long as there are readers, they will
appreciate Dostoevsky.

Umjetnost riječi: Are there any contemporary twenty-first-century writers (in

Russian, European, American and other literatures) who are considered to be his successors?
Yuri Corrigan: If you can make it through the emotionally gruesome
pages of Michel Houellebecq’s Serotonin (2019), the piercing final paragraph
seems to come almost directly out of Dostoevsky. What we’re medicating
into non-existence with pharmaceutical psychiatry, Houellebecq suggests, is
ultimately the howling of God within us, the “active love” that is constantly
being sent into us from the depths. We prefer not to be carriers of this energy,
Houellebecq concludes; we choose instead to be tranquil, superficial, hollow.
And it seems there’s a movement in fiction today that seeks to address this
problem of hollowness and superficiality, with Dostoevsky as a guide and
interlocutor. The Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgård offers another
way of thinking about this problem in My Struggle, Book 2 (2009), where he
laments that it’s only teenagers today who care about the meaning of life and
the problem of nihilism, and who therefore search out “Uncle Dostoevsky”
for help. Adults avoid these questions, he says, by encouraging the intellectual
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life to be “swallowed up” by “ideas of justice and equality, which of course are
the very ones that legitimize and steer the development of our society and the
abyssless life we live within it.” Out of the writers who are trying to redirect
us back towards the “abyss,” Marilynne Robinson has done a great deal to
embolden intellectuals to shed their embarrassment over being religious or
spiritual; and Donna Tartt has made a massive career from reimagining crime
novels of suspense in the Dostoevskian mode as metaphysical quests. Each of
these writers (among many others) tends to lean on “Uncle Dostoevsky” as
still possibly the greatest defender of the field of “soul” within a reductively
positivist and materialist milieu.
Boris Tihomirov: I’ve mentioned them earlier…
Carol Apollonio: I find Dostoevsky in Japanese writers like Yukio
Mishima or Kenzaburō Ōe. Since I spend most of my time immersed in
Russian literature, I’m embarrassed to say, I don’t know of Anglophone
writers who can stand proudly next to Dostoevsky—but I know they must
be out there. Some of my Dostoevsky students at Duke (Corey Sobel, Maria
Kuznetsova) have gone on to write novels, but their style and sensibility is 275
quite different, less dark and interior in tonality.
Kornelija Ičin: We could call the Russian writer Yuri Mamleev or the
French author Michel Houellebecq the twenty-first-century Dostoevsky.
Our dialogue with Dostoevsky continues in the twenty-first century. At the
beginning of the twenty-first century Sorokin wrote a play entitled Dostoevsky-
trip (1997) that incorporates parts of The Idiot to illustrate one level of the
protagonist’s collective awareness. In 2000 Andrej Levkin published a story
“Dostoevsky as a Russian Folktale – Crime and Punishment in New Clothes”.
Akunin in his novel F. M. (2006) also refers to Crime and Punishment. Many of
Mamleev’s texts continue with Dostoevsky’s ideas about heroes’ attempts to
reach transcendence, about their strange transformations, about the problem
of man’s double abyss and others. So, we can rightfully regard Mamleev as
Dostoevsky’s twenty-first-century successor.
Sergey Kibalnik: Without doubt Philip Roth, Kazuo Ishiguro and our
Victor Pelevin – this is in a way Dostoevsky today. Irrespective of pretty
radical changes and, logically, improvements in art.
Stefano Aloe: Dostoevsky has no successors in a strict sense, and
there haven’t been any. Those who imitate him, imitate him only in a
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given aspect (thematic, narratological, especially in the sense of “anti-

confession”). There are writers who are influenced to a certain degree by
Dostoevsky’s oeuvre. I don’t recall contemporary writers in whose writing
I’ve detected a direct parallel with Dostoevsky, even though there are works
where Dostoevsky’s influence is somewhat visible. Tempting paradoxes of
Michel Houellebecq with his bellicose critique of western culture could be
compared to Dostoevsky’s paradoxes. Dostoevsky exists in the tradition of the
contemporary Japanese novel. In contemporary Russian literature, Eugene
Vodolazkin has risen above the formulaic appropriations of Dostoevsky, with
his novel Laurus. However, parallels with Dostoevsky are mostly limited to
the topic of Russian piety and not much else.

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