Excerpts of Analysis about Inner Struggle of Isolated Individuals from Dostoevsky's Work by Georg Lukacs

"These works have become even more topical and more fresh as time goes on."

(Read Full Article : Dostoevsky by Georg Lukacs 1949 at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1949/dostoyevsky.htm)

Chekhov made a definitive statement about this whole matter when he drew a sharp distinction between “the solution of a question and the correct putting of the question. Only the last is required of the artist." In Anna Karenina and Onegin not a single question is solved yet these works satisfy us fully only because all questions are put in them correctly.”

This insight is particularly important for a judgment of Dostoevsky for many – even most – of his political and social answers are false, have nothing to do with present-day reality or with the striving of the best today. They were obsolete, even reactionary, when they were pronounced.

Still, Dostoevsky is a writer of world eminence. For he knew how during a crisis of his country and the whole human race, to put questions in an imaginatively decisive sense. He created men whose destiny and inner life, whose conflicts and interrelations with other characters, whose attraction and rejection of men and ideas illuminated all the deepest questions of that age, sooner, more deeply, and more widely than in average life itself. This imaginative anticipation of the spiritual and moral development of the civilized world assured the powerful and lasting effect of Dostoevsky’s works. These works have become even more topical and more fresh as time goes on.

The experiment with oneself, the execution of an action not so much for the sake of the contents and effects of the action, but in order to know oneself once for all, in depth, to the very bottom, is one of the main human problems of the bourgeois and intellectual world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Only when this individualism turns inward – when it fails to find an Archimedean point either in current social aims or in the spontaneous urge of an egotistical ambition – does the problem of Dostoevsky’s experiments arise.

All these cases, however diverse, have something important in common. First of all, they are without exception the actions of lonely men – men who are completely dependent on themselves as they understand life and their environment, who live so deeply and intensely in themselves that the soul of others remains to them forever an unknown country. The other man is to them only a strange and menacing power which either subjugates them or becomes subject to them. . . Isolation, separation, loneliness reduces the relations among men to a struggle for superiority or inferiority. The experiment is a sublimated spiritual form, a psychological turning inward of naked struggles for power.

But by this solitude, by this immersion of the subject in itself, the self becomes bottomless. There arises either the anarchy of Stavrogin, a loss of direction in all instincts, or the obsession of a Raskolnikov by an “idea.” A feeling, an aim, an ideal acquires absolute sovereignty over the soul of a man: I, you, all men disappear, turn into shadows, exist only subsumed under the “idea.”

When the Characters Come out of Books......

Dostoevsky (1821 – 1881)

First of all I would like to share some views of Dostoevsky regarding the literature. About the character of any book, Dostoevsky have following type of views,

"There are certain people of whom it is difficult to say anything which will at once throw them into relief—in other words, describe them graphically in their typical characteristics. These are they who are generally known as ‘commonplace people,’ and this class comprises, of course, the immense majority of mankind."
He adds,

"Podkoleosin’ [A character in Gogol’s comedy, The Wedding.] was perhaps an exaggeration, but he was by no means a non-existent character; on the contrary, how many intelligent people, after hearing of this Podkoleosin from Gogol, immediately began to find that scores of their friends were exactly like him! They knew, perhaps, before Gogol told them, that their friends were like Podkoleosin, but they did not know what name to give them.",

"..in real life typical characters are ‘watered down,’ so to speak; and all these Dandins and Podkoleosins actually exist among us every day, but in a diluted form. I will just add, however, that Georges Dandin might have existed exactly as Moliere presented him, and probably does exist now and then, though rarely..."

Now, after reading these lines from the Dostoevsky's novel "Idiot" I tried to observe people of the society in more better way; and then I read another novel "The Song of Youth" by Yang Mo, written in 1956. This novel gave me an observation that all the characters of novel were exactly same as real life, which were as Dostoevsky has explained, "in real life typical characters are ‘watered down,'". At this movement, analysis of the Dostoevsky has given a great view to observe these characters of the books, which all exist around us in "watered" form. Most of the times we all must observe many characters present in our real life, as explained by Chekhov, Gorky, Premchand, Diderot and many others....

It can be sourly said that art is the mirror of society. And once we see the present art and literature of society where we are living, we sourly observe the real images of regressive, greedy, dishonest, and cheap values of the present society. Everyone in his life, must have seen a lot of people, a lot of culture in present capitalist society around him; and also must have observed that many imaginary characters of the books come out live in the single person...

After it I re-analyzed all the characters of the books I have read since my childhood and it was all true....

And now it is true that these literature books help us to identify the characters of the people walking around us, expose the culture of the society hidden from our conscious observation, and above all, gives us a will to leave the wrong and negative, and accept the true and positive to work for the truth in a conscious manner....

At last last before "leaving" the topic, I would like to share a paragraph from the same novel "Idiot", which Dostoevsky have written about a character of Gogol's short story "Nevsky Prospekt" who "has not the slightest doubt of his own genius". Dostoevsky writes,

"This confidence of a stupid man in his own talents has been wonderfully depicted by Gogol in the amazing character of Pirogoff. Pirogoff has not the slightest doubt of his own genius,—nay, of his SUPERIORITY of genius,—so certain is he of it that he never questions it. How many Pirogoffs have there not been among our writers—scholars—propagandists? I say ‘have been,’ but indeed there are plenty of them at this very day."

We can say that this is a reason few people who have some part of the character like Pirogoff remain satisfied in what they do, which is actually nothing. These type of characters afraid from critique and fear from doing new things, and mostly have no strength to break the old way of living. So, they make their own imaginary world and start believing in their own "SUPERIORITY of genius".