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A Russian Woman’s Lot – Karolina Pavlova’s A Double Life

Ask any Russian who their great 19th century women writers were and you’ll get little except confused looks. After discussing it with several Russian friends we decided to discount Nadezhda Teffi and Zinaida Gippius, both of whom really flourished in the early 20th century, leaving us with nobody at all. Russia had no George Sand, no Jane Austen, no Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. However, with the republication of Barbara Heldt’s translation of Karolina Pavlova’s A Double Life, alongside a new afterward by Daniel Green, the scene is set for Columbia University Press’s Russian Library to finally tell the Russians once and for all what they were unable to work out for themselves – that they had a great writer after all, and her name was Karolina Pavlova. A Double Life, her novel of 1848, is apparently her masterpiece.

When it appeared on my reading list, I was sceptical, to say the least. A Double Life is mentioned nowhere; there is no Russian edition published later than the days of the Soviet Union; it is impossible to buy it within Russia. But now that I’ve read it, I’m coming round. Pavlova is not a great writer of fiction, however much we might nobly wish that she were. (I’ve not read her poetry so can’t judge it). But nor is she talentless, shoehorned into my upcoming exams solely on the basis of her sex. A Double Life is an interesting book, it is an hilarious and tragic book, and most importantly it’s a valuable, eye-opening book. It may not stack up to Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky, or Gogol, but we shouldn’t hold that against Pavlova. Few of us, whatever our background or sex, can do that.

A painting of Karolina Pavlova, author of A Double Life.
Karolina Pavlova, author of poetry and the novel A Double Life, as painted by V. F. Binemann

What follows is a summary of the plot of A Double Life, an overview of its main themes, and finally a brief look at Pavlova’s life.

A Double Life – Plot Summary

Our heroine is Cecily von Lindenborn, an 18-year-old girl who has only just entered society. Her life’s goal, as it was for most young women in those days, is to get herself a good husband. The man she’s settled on is the alluring and rich Prince Viktor. Cecily has been trained her whole life long to live and succeed within high society’s bounds, with the result that she cannot commit or conceive even a single “peccadillo”. She’s about as interesting as we all were at that age, which is to say that she scarcely has a personality at all. This may perhaps be jointly blamed on her upbringing and on her environment. Her closest friend, Olga, is even more dull than she is.

Although Cecily thinks she’s in charge of her fate, she is much mistaken. She is unwittingly a pawn in a much greater game, played between the adults of A Double Life – the men and the mothers – to ensure suitable matches are made. And Olga’s own mother, Madame Valitskaya, has her own plans in mind involving the prince. Soon enough, Cecily will learn just how little control she really has.

A Double Life is by the standards of the 19th century Russian novel, awfully short. There are ten chapters, in all, and their structure is the same throughout – a daytime, waking scene, focusing on the banalities of aristocratic life, is then followed by an introspective bedroom scene where our heroine is alone, and then finally a few pages of poetry as she falls asleep. This contrast between day and night as two different “lives” is suggested both by the title and by the epigraph from Byron at the beginning of A Double Life.

Conversation and Propriety

A Double Life is built on conversation. So much is obvious from the novel’s very first words, “But are they rich?” But this is not the speech of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, that tortured desperate working out of questions like “what must I do?” and “how must I live?” In A Double Life there is not one moment where the dialogue serves to answer great questions. It’s purpose is the opposite – to suppress questioning, to control the tone, and to pass the time. People are incessantly talking, and Pavlova skilfully weaves her narration through different groups, giving us snatches at a time, which further lessen any chance of meaningful development of spoken ideas. What I noticed straight away was just how much blank space there was on the page. Pavlova’s characters are always uttering a few remarks, without expansion. They are simply filling the air.

“But are they rich?” Money, of course, is the most important thing for a young man or woman and the thing at the forefront of their minds. But not just money. People are obsessed with their appearance too. When mourning a dead woman, all Prince Viktor has to say is “She was not at all bad looking.” A Double Life’s world is a world in which people have forgotten how to express true feelings. Or rather, one where society forbids them too. When trying to assess Cecily as a match, one man says “I’ve never discussed anything with her except the weather and dances”. Later on, the narrator writes “How and by what means may one in an aristocratic drawing room distinguish the vulgar man from the brilliantly intelligent one? Surely only by the fact that the former usually seems more clever”. There is no way even to judge successfully.

The Language of A Double Life

Even if we cannot rely on people’s conversation as a source of truth, that doesn’t mean the spoken language of A Double Life is pointless. After all, it does show character. In addition to the vapidity of mourning, above, I was shocked and amused (a common feeling, reading this book), by the words of Dmitri, Prince Viktor’s competitor, when he tries to enlist the help of Olga’s mother: “I love Cecily Alexandrovna. I fell in love with her long ago”. This is a lie – he has “loved” her all of five pages. Vera Vladimirovna loses her daughter’s hand in an extremely distressing sequence in which Prince Viktor’s mother talks of a wonderful suitor, all without mentioning once that she is representing Dmitri and not Viktor himself. But Vera Vladimirovna cannot ask for clarification, because that would be beyond what is proper. Language is much more a straightjacket than a liberation here.

Outside of the dialogue, Pavlova’s language serves its purpose well – demonstrating the sheer soullessness of the world her characters inhabit. The word “nice”, is a common giveaway. For example, concerning Cecily’s talents she writes: “She sang very nicely and sketched very nicely as well”. Another word is “luxurious”, showing the materialism of the characters. This wonderful description of a summer residence demonstrates unequivocally how the aristocrats wish to be seen: “surrounding the luxurious cottage was a luxurious garden, its greenery always an excellent, a choice, or one might say an aristocratic greenery”. I also liked the comment that “nature made herself unnatural” – just as the characters must lose their nature to survive in society, so too must the landscape itself. Finally, Pavlova is quite like Austen in that she draws a distinction between native and foreign words. Frenchisms like “Comme il faut” all indicate society’s unnaturalness.

Boredom and Loneliness

If you are an aristocratic girl of 18 at the height of the Russian Empire, your options for enjoyment are rather limited. Unlike your male acquaintances you are unable to murder pawnbrokers, philosophise, or even go on a spree. The result is that everyone, knowingly or unknowingly, is awfully bored. As in Austen’s Emma, characters scheme and gossip away to pass the time. Even the talents they have, like Cecily’s singing, are limited in that they are only means to an end – securing an attractive husband. We are also made keenly aware of the lack of movement options for the women of A Double Life. Spatially, they are restricted to the drawing room and the bedroom. When Cecily finds a moment’s freedom on a horse, she is immediately stopped for going too fast – even the outdoors is no escape.

Cecily’s boredom is compounded by those around her. Olga, ostensibly her best friend, is amusingly banal. After a poetry reading Cecily turns to her:

“How fine that was,” said Cecily into Olga’s ear.

“Very good,” Olga replied, looking intently at someone through her lorgnette.

This is not the only example of a time where Olga immediately lowers the tone, preventing Cecily from expressing higher thoughts by depriving her of an interlocutor. At other times, Olga is simply a mouthpiece for her mother, manipulating Cecily so that she can secure the Prince for herself. And then class gets in the way of any other options. When Cecily is alone in her room with her old nanny, we are told that it means “in other words, completely alone”. With nobody to talk to it is no surprise that she is ultimately an undeveloped, boring, person.

Another representation of Pavlova. The next time you read a Russian novel in the 19th century, pay attention to the women. Male novelists rarely give them much character at all, leaving them either pure and spotless or irredeemable. Pavlova’s women may not be better, but they do provide a counterbalance to the women we might in the men’s works.

Freedom’s Enemies – Mothers…

We may blame “society” for the restrictions on Cecily’s freedom, and certainly there are many unspoken rules that bind her. But there are also people who are to blame – mothers, and men. A Double Life sees Cecily’s problems not only as stemming from her environment, but also very much from her upbringing. At the heart of the novel is the question of why mothers, whose experience of the world cannot have been any better than that of their daughters, continue to bring them up just as they themselves were brought up.

“All these educators have been young once, and had been brought up in the same way! Were they really so satisfied with their own lives and with themselves that they are happy to renew the experience with their children?”

Cecily’s mother leaves her with “her mind in a corset”. Vera Vladimirovna fears “any development of imagination and inspiration, those eternal enemies of propriety”, so much that even Cecily’s dreams are controlled by her: “instead of dreaming of the Marquis Poza, of Egmont, of Lara and the like, [Cecily] could only dream of a splendid ball, a new gown, and the outdoor fete on the first of May.” At no point do mother and daughter seriously talk. Cecily has no emotional support anywhere. I thought this line, from the first chapter, was particularly telling: “A child needs an English nurse more than a mother”. That is to say, that propriety and outward appearance is considered more important than actually nurturing the child. Instead, Vera Vladimirovna sees her role as guiding Cecily to the right husband, with lines like this: “a virtuous wife can completely reform a flighty husband”. Hardly emotional support.

…And Men

Next to the mothers, the men are not nearly so bad. However, I don’t wish to absolve us of guilt. The two main male characters are Dmitri and Prince Viktor, and both of them are equally faulty. Dmitri is a gambler, a self-centred lout. He only comes to “love” Cecily when he hears she might get a big inheritance. When he imagines her after that he thinks she is someone “who could make a husband very happy”. He does not once think of her own happiness. Dmitri is also a master of using society’s rules to his benefit. After Cecily’s brief burst of freedom galloping on horseback everyone wants to keep a watchful eye on her. Dmitri comes up and says “let me ride beside you. The last time you frightened me”. A horrible, stomach churning moment, precisely because she cannot say no.

Prince Viktor is not so bad. He breaks the rules more often, but Vera Vladimirovna is willing to make an exception for him because he’s rich. Around him Olga’s mother schemes so that he will marry Olga, however at the end of A Double Life he declares that he is going to go to Paris. It is a significant point. However talented the machinations of the mothers may be, the men of the novel still have the ultimate freedom because it is they who make the proposals. If Prince Viktor is disappointed that he’s missed out on Cecily, then he can go to Paris if he wants. As a man, nobody controls him.

The Poet and The Double Life

But there is one man in A Double Life who is controlled by others, just as the women are. In the third chapter there is a poetry recital by a young poet, who performs his rendition of Schiller’s “The Bell”. Immediately he comes under attack by one of the audience members. “We demand action,” he says. “Poetry should be useful; it should hold vice up to shame or set a crown on virtue”. The poet, surrounded by important aristocrats, is unable to defend himself. Like the women, his environment determines his identity even as his heart wishes to rebel in the name of higher feelings. Cecily is not a poet, but during A Double Life she begins moving down a path towards becoming one. Though she has been made to understand that being a woman poet is “the most pitiable, abnormal condition”, every night she hears poetry in her dreams.

This is the voice of her muse, at least I take it to be so. It comes as a warning, trying to warn Cecily before it’s too late both that society is not all there is to life, and that her “love”, when it comes, is not all it seems to be. The poems are translated without rhyme, focusing on the images. They were quite repetitive, filled with the usual chains and repressive bits and pieces. The speaker in them is a “he”, which adds a nice sense of reflection. In her poetic night-time double life Dmitri has another rival, but Cecily is not able to see that man’s worth until it is too late. The tone becomes one of resignation. “You will understand earthly reality / With a maturing soul: / You will buy a dear blessing / At a dear price.” Cecily will suffer, but she will learn.

At the end of A Double Life Cecily speaks for the first time a snippet from one of her poems. Olga calls it nonsense, and Cecily for her part refuses to claim it, saying she simply heard it somewhere. But that night there’s a change in the poems, and for the first time the voice is in the first person. Speaking of her poetry, it says: “Long had it lived mid worldly noise, / Free and bright within me”. Even as Cecily’s external world has suddenly grown constricted her internal world has reached a new level of freedom. For the narrator, who seems like an older, wiser woman, A Double Life’s plot is marked with a melancholy inevitability. “What maidenly soul does not understand the charm of these slight transgressions?” The narrator asks of Cecily’s first deluded moments in love.

For Cecily is only one of many women who were trapped within their society, and near the end of A Double Life she realises this in a moment of revelation.“And she felt and knew that everything going on now had definitely already happened to her once, that this moment was a repetition of something in her past and that she had already lived through it once before”. Cecily is in that moment all women, and it is here that A Double Life stakes its claim on universality. Just as Pavlova wrote a book to give knowledge of aristocratic women’s plight to the world, so too, do we feel, one day will Cecily. But before that time much suffering awaits. A Double Life marks the end of one of Cecily’s lives, but it also marks the birth of another. But that life is for another story, and Pavlova never wrote it – she lived it.

Karolina Pavlova and Her Critics

Reading about Karolina Pavlova’s life is not fun. The Introduction and Afterward give ample evidence to support the view that Pavlova was treated horrendously by the men of the world she inhabited. And, indeed, by the women too. In spite of her impeccable literary credentials – she rubbed shoulders with all of the major Russian writers of the period, including Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, and others – she found herself insulted by many of the critics of the day, and constantly demeaned. As a man, much of this makes for uncomfortable reading. An anonymous critic writes of his experience reading: “I suddenly had my doubts and looked again at the book’s title page to make certain – “did I not make a mistake? – was it really written by a woman? I had somehow thought that only men could be so sharp”. Reading this I wanted both to laugh and cry.

An old photograph of Adam Mickiewicz, Polish national poet
Adam Mickiewicz, perhaps the most important Polish poet, was one of the many influential literary figures who got to know Pavlova well. But somehow, she never rose to be as successful as they. Who, or what, is to blame for this?

But for Pavlova, there were only tears. Born Jaenisch in Yaroslavl in 1807 to a German professor, she was forced, a few years after the publication of A Double Life, to flee Russia to Dresden, where she lived for four decades in poverty, cut off from her home. At every turn she made enemies, such as when she initiated (perfectly justified) criminal proceedings against her husband for wasting all of her inheritance on gambling. Her dedication to her poetry made her an outsider – as a woman she was supposed to be raising children. Only Aleksei Tolstoy, himself a minor poet, was of any real literary support in her later years. When she died in 1893 she was already forgotten, waiting for the Silver Age poets to rediscover her poetry, and then critics like Barbara Heldt to rediscover her prose.

Conclusion

To say that Pavlova lived in a hostile environment would be a horrible understatement. Everyone, everything, men and women alike, conspired to insult and humiliate her and denigrate her poetic calling. Though she attempted to be stoical, no amount of character will let you withstand such hostility forever. I cannot fault her character, and I was truly shocked at her treatment. But heroism in life alone does not make for a good book.

A Double Life is not a great novel, Russian or otherwise. It has a number of faults that are simply impossible to look past. Its characters are poorly drawn, both the men and the women; the heroine is boring; the poetry’s repetitive; and the arguments are rarely subtle. In spite of this, you should definitely read it. It’s short, and it’s fascinating to see the world of ballrooms from a different perspective, even if Pavlova has an axe to grind. Pavlova is no Jane Austen – she lacks the subtlety of her characterisation and irony. But she is by no means talentless. A Double Life is at its best when it’s comic and satirical, rather than when it attempts loftiness. I really did laugh out loud at several moments.

Many diamonds in the rough can slip through literary history unnoticed, but rarely do truly polished ones. Ultimately, A Double Life is just the former, not the latter. So read it, but keep your expectations tempered, and you’ll no doubt enjoy it a lot.

What Does it Mean to Hate God? – Misotheism and Literature

I have always been interested in faith. Growing up in a wasteland, with the boundless sea on one end of my vision and high mountains enclosing the other, it would probably be strange if I hadn’t been left feeling like something was out there. But for me, the faith itself has always been more interesting than the container into which that faith was poured. Perhaps that’s because I myself have believed in many things, and from each of them in turn departed, disappointed in either myself or in the ideas themselves.

Dostoevsky was my literary catalyst for thinking about faith. Time and time again, he produced characters who believe in something – whether it’s a kind of superman, like Raskolnikov; or God’s injustice, like Ivan; or that menacing nothingness of Stavrogin. For the Russian mind, faith is almost a fact of life. As Dostoevsky himself wrote, only a Russian can believe in atheism.

A photo showing the light and hills of Scotland
The Highlands of Scotland, the place where I grew up. To live in such a place without believing in something is impossible, whether it be named God or nature.

This piece was motivated not by Dostoevsky though, but by two poems, which recently made me think about a particular type of faith. Misotheism, or hating God, is not the same as disbelieving in him. It is an entirely different kettle of fish. It is not to consign oneself to an eternity of void and emptiness, but to actually take arms against a hostile God and willingly go to hell sooner than submit to his will and failed world. To me, it is the ultimate act of bravery, of courage – but it is an act that has lost its meaning. So part of this essay will also ask what action, what rebellion, could today hold the same significance as turning one’s back on God. Could anything?

Two poems of Misotheism

Two writers, both Germans, started me off on this train of thought. Goethe’s “Prometheus”, and Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Hyperion’s Song of Fate”, both present a view of the world where there is a turning against God, a rejection of him without a denial of his existence. It was the height of German Romanticism, where rebellion was valued for rebellion’s sake.

Goethe’s Prometheus

Goethe’s work is the one that most embodies Misotheism. In “Prometheus” Zeus, who stands for all gods, is subjected to an attack from Prometheus himself. There is no respect here, none whatsoever. The gods would die, “If children and beggars / Were not trusting fools”. They have never helped the speaker – his only source of strength and achievement has been “My sacred glowing heart”. The poem shows the journey from a positive belief to Misotheism. “While yet a child”, Goethe writes, “I turned my wandering gaze / Up toward the sun” – nature, the source of almost all great belief, is the source of Prometheus’s belief also, but it is a belief that dies. “Who helped me / Against the Titans’ insolence?” – not the gods, but his heart alone.

Prometheus, in rejecting god, finds strength in that rejection, as the last two stanzas show. He does not learn to hate life, “Because not all / My blossoming dreams grew ripe”. Instead, he builds a new race, a people “To suffer, to weep, / To enjoy, to be glad, / And thee to scorn, / As I!”. In opposition to the boring perfection and isolation of the gods, lopping off the heads of thistles up above, Prometheus demands the birth of a people who will experience life, in all of its colours and shades of feeling. Rebelling, we take our attention away from the gods, and bring it down to earth. In so doing, though we will suffer, we will also be able to create a pride in ourselves. Only in independent opposition to god can we truly love ourselves. Such is the idea of Goethe’s Prometheus.

A painting showing Prometheus bringing fire to humankind.
Heinrich Füger, Prometheus Brings Fire to Mankind. Goethe’s poem presents a Misotheism where our suffering becomes our salvation, letting us experience the world more intensely than the gods above.

Hölderlin’s Hyperion and his Song of Fate

Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem, “Hyperion’s Song of Fate”, is not in and of itself an example of Misotheism. As with any poem, it is highly interpretable, and as I tried just now to find a translation for the blog the matter gets even harder because none that I have found really seem to get at what I myself see when I read the German. Given that, I’ll have a go at translating the bits I need myself.

Hölderlin’s poem is broken up into three stanzas. The first two address the gods, who “wander above in the light / On soft ground”. Their life is easy, one of art and of breezes. Unlike us they are “Schicksallos” – fateless, or without a destiny controlling them. But Hölderlin, at least to me, does not find in this situation anything to be envious of. The gods are like children – he compares them to the “Säugling”, or “babe”. And I read in his description of their “eternally blooming” spirit and “eternal clarity” of their eyes, with his repetition of the word “ewig” – eternal – a kind of scorn. In another poem, “To the Fates”, Hölderlin asks the Fates not for eternal life, but just for “one more year” to ensure he can achieve all of his creative potential. He does not want to be a boring god, but a successful human being.

Compared to his treatment of the gods in the first two stanzas, this is how he describes our kind:

But for us it is given,
On no place to rest - 
We fade and we fall,
We sufferers of fate,
Blindly from one
Hour to the next,
Like water that's thrown
From cliff onto cliff,
Year by year down into the unknown.

I read rebellion in these lines. Not in Goethe’s sense, not in the sense of an active revolt. But rather in the sense that Hölderlin wishes to show that in spite of our suffering – he doesn’t shy away from showing it – we still have a kind of dignity. “Year by year” we suffer, the playthings of fate, but it is precisely in this suffering that we find our uniqueness and redemption. I admit my idea’s perhaps too much indebted to Dostoevsky, but I do think Hölderlin may have had something similar in mind. We have “no place to rest”, which sets us apart from the gods, eternally resting up above. But their rest is not valuable – in our struggle we are achieving great things, we are actively living. As with “Prometheus”, “Hyperion’s Song of Fate” finds humankind’s glory in terms of our activeness, versus the gods’ passivity.

Job

Both Goethe and Hölderlin turn to a kind of Misotheism in response to the gods’ passivity. Joseph Roth’s Job: The Story of a Simple Man, which I have written about here, takes a different approach. Here, Mendel Singer, the modern Job that is the hero of his story, turns against God because of God’s cruelty. Mendel teaches children his religion, he has served and believed in God all his life, and yet God has made him lose one son to the Russians, killed another son in war, disappeared the third, and left Mendel’s daughter in a mental asylum. Mendel’s faith has not simply not been rewarded – God has actively spat on it. As Mendel yells, “The devil is kinder than God. Because he is not as powerful, he cannot be as cruel”.

Mendel is ultimately unable to burn his bible, but for a moment his Misotheism has reached heights of emotional intensity that not even Goethe and Hölderlin are able to reach. The reason for this is simple – the distance that Mendel has to travel is greater. He goes not only from faith to hostile faith, but from a loving faith to a hostility that has all the signs of despair.

An illustration of Job, conversing with his friends. Job's Misotheism is powerful because of the emotional distance he needs to travel when rebelling.
Job, as illustrated by Gustave Doré. Job’s suffering gains its power by just how far he has to go to turn against God, from love all the way to hate.

Ivan

Ivan Karamazov, of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, is no Job, but his Misotheism is equally powerful. When he declares that he is “returning his ticket to God” his reasons are not personal, but universal. He is concerned with the problem of evil, that thorny thicket that poses a challenge for anyone with religious belief – why does an omnipotent, omniscient God allow evil to exist? In the great chapter, “Rebellion”, Ivan tallies up God’s injustices not against adults, who after all have had time to sin, but against the children. For the suffering of children is the hardest suffering to justify, emotionally speaking, and for Ivan it is too much. He returns his ticket, turning his back on God without denying his existence. But unlike Job, or Goethe or Hölderlin, Ivan’s rebellion is not only Misotheism, but also a kind of Apotheosis – a kind of becoming God.

Because what Ivan wants is a better world. He wants, in a way, to be the God that God isn’t – kind and helpful and good. Because he turns our ideas of Misotheism on their head, he is in some sense unique among the misotheists. And his struggle is, for me, particularly tragic, precisely because it is doomed. One can successfully hate God, one can successfully rebel against him in the name of freedom for oneself, but one cannot rebel against God to make the world a better place. Or at least, one cannot achieve that goal, because we are not gods here on earth. But Ivan’s Christ-like determination to try, to take the sins of the world upon his shoulders and try to solve them, that makes his rebellion, his Misotheism, so glorious, so magnificent, so powerful.

Why is going against God so powerful?

It has been a whistle-stop tour of literature’s Misotheism. What we have seen is that under the unifying banner of rising against God or gods a great many motivations and aspirations can coexist. I find them all compelling, exciting. To go against God is to condemn oneself, it is to love life so much that we turn our back on anything beyond it. That requires great emotional depths – great suffering, great bravery. It requires, in short, determination and passion.  

But Misotheism has lost its touch. As a rule, we do not believe in God anymore, which means we cannot go against him. We can still be impressed when someone turns their back on God, but only at a surface level. Deep down, we’re still a little confused as to why they bother believing in the first place. I am not saying that society, in the West or anywhere else, has become atheistic. Instead, we have simply lost God. So when we have such anger, as felt Ivan, as felt Job, we have no outlet for it. There is no target. Our God now is the wind in the reeds, and just as difficult to catch. As a result, we cannot fight.

At its heart, Misotheism is a rebellion against a deeply held belief. This is still possible in our own time. A religious person can still go against God, a communist might turn against their beliefs after reading about their historical applications, while a capitalist might lose faith in their system’s ability to solve all problems. Someone who loves their family might turn against it. But what is true is that we have lost a universal belief, binding us all together. Almost everyone, publicly at least, believed in God in most of the 19th century. Charles Bradlaugh, the first British atheist MP, only joined Parliament at the end of that century. Misotheism was powerful in literature because it was a universal theme – now that is not the case. So perhaps the question is, what has replaced it?

Nietzsche – a modern alternative to Misotheism?

Friedrich Nietzsche is the person I naturally turn to when I think about religious faith in the modern era. In The Joyous Science section 125 he writes about the madman in the marketplace, who declares that “God is dead”. This declaration wasn’t designed to shock Nietzsche’s readers, just as it doesn’t shock those in the marketplace. Almost everybody in the 19th century, just as they publicly acknowledged God, privately also didn’t much care for his existence. But they went no further. Without God’s existence, Nietzsche points out, we must live differently. We must interrogate every one of our underlying conceptions and ideas to determine which have a solid basis, and which are only the legacy of a religious system we now ought to throw away. That was Nietzsche’s project, and it was a failure. Most still live by those past values as before.

A photo of Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche describes with his philosophical works a world in which the very rebellions that Misotheism describes – against the gods, to favour the lived life on earth – would become unnecessary. Unfortunately, nowadays we do not love the world like Nietzsche had hoped. And as a result, there is no modern act analogous in power to rebelling against the gods. We neither believe in God nor in the earth.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche makes what I consider his hope for what a modern version of Misotheism would look like. It would be, essentially, a reversal of the traditional one. Zarathustra, the prophet of the book, declares in section 3 of his Prologue that “To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful offence, and to esteem the bowels of the Inscrutable more highly than the meaning of the earth”. With Goethe we saw the most powerful and touching rebellion as moving from a focus on the divine to a focus on the earthly. In its place Nietzsche sees the most spirited (but here wrong) rebellion as one that rejects the earth instead. If Nietzsche’s project had been successful, he would be right. We would all be stunned and impressed by those who reject the earth for God, even as we mostly disagree with them.

It is not so.

Religious Terrorism as a Nietzschean Misotheism in practice

We do not believe in anything. What Nietzsche feared most of all, the descent into nihilism he saw as inevitable so long as we continued along Christian lines of thought, has come to pass in the West. We have lost our spiritual centre but have put nothing in its place. Of course, there are exceptions. Many of us now have a weak spiritualism and think of a kind of God up there, even if we cannot quite make him out. But this faith is personal, and rebellion against it is an act of mind, and not of body, as it is with Ivan, with Job, with Hyperion and Prometheus. It is less tragic to witness, and more simply sad. Few of us love the earth, because we do not have a connection to it. We are trapped in cities, desperate to survive, preyed on by systems far more powerful than ourselves.

But to rebel against these systems is nothing special either. Because nobody really supports them. Terrorism is perhaps the closest thing to a reverse-Misotheism in Nietzsche mould, but I have not one positive word for it (obviously). There are no positive angles to terrorism for anyone except the perpetrators: none of the hope and kindness of Ivan, none of the love of freedom and emotion of Goethe’s Prometheus. The power of Misotheism lay in the fact that when we rejected God we rejected him for something that in our hearts seemed even greater. With terror we reject the world for something lesser.

Conclusion

I wish I knew what the answer was to these problems of faith. I wish I knew a way to bring a kind of faith back. Not one that takes us from the world, but one that binds us to it, and to each other, more closely. At times I have felt like literature, truly great literature, can achieve this. I think of Levin in the fields, or Ivan again – these people made me want to live. They affirmed life, when nowadays most of us only live it. But literature only offers a kind of personal salvation. The only way to make people live, that I have found, is to get out and live yourself, and lead by example. Only then do we recapture some of the heroism, some of the bravery, that makes Misotheism in these great works of literature so powerful.

Thanks for reading. For more Dostoevsky, here’s Crime and Punishment; my review of Roth’s Job is here; as for thinking about the state of the modern world, Joker, Capitalist Realism, and Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends all have things to say.

If you enjoyed the piece and have thoughts of your own, please leave a comment. I’d love to hear what others have to say about the ideas I have discussed here.

Crime and Punishment Revisited

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is among the most accessible “classics” of world literature because its tale of murder and its consequences is immediately exciting. All the same, it took me about three attempts before I first finished it. I am now reading it a third time, and each time I feel I understand the book a little better. So far, I have read the first two parts of the book’s six, and I am already overflowing with impressions and observations that I would like to share. The book is so thought-provoking, that simply writing a post at its completion would be to do it an injustice.

World of Decay

I think the thing that has struck me the most this time round is just how grim and depressing the world of Crime and Punishment really is. Within the first two parts we have Marmeladov’s death, an attempted suicide, and plenty of other suggestions of abuse and suffering, not to mention the murder of the pawnbroker which forms the heart of the work.

Colour

Part of this grimness is delivered through Dostoevsky’s use of colour, especially the colour yellow, the traditional colour of sickness and decay. When we find it throughout the entire world of Crime and Punishment’s Saint Petersburg we are left with the feeling that the world itself is falling to pieces. We have Raskolnikov’s wallpaper, the “yellow glass filled with yellow water” that he is given at the police station, the yellow face of the woman who attempts suicide, Sonya’s yellow ticket legalising her work as a prostitute, and most memorably, the “ominous yellowish-black spot” that marks Marmeladov’s fatal wound from the horse’s hoof. There is also the red of blood. When Raskolnikov awakes in the beginning of part II he worries that his clothes are covered in it. Then, when he meets a member of the police later on, he is drenched in it – but in this case it’s Marmeladov’s.

A yellow and decaying wall
While I would like to say that the Saint Petersburg of today could not play host to a similar tragedy to that of Crime and Punishment, I feel like I’d be lying. Just last year a professor here killed and dismembered his student and tried to throw the pieces of her body and himself into the Neva river. Anyway, this is a view onto the inside of my courtyard. When I first moved in, my girlfriend said it looked like it had come from a Dostoevsky novel. Luckily the inside of my flat is nicer.

Clothes and Money

But colour is not the only thing that gives this world its feeling of decline. Money is constantly in focus in these early chapters, whether it be the landlady’s demands for rent, or else Marmeladov’s suffering family watching him drink his salary away, or else of course the pawnbroker herself with her miserliness. Like the characters themselves, who are always on the brink of destitution, we are unable to avoid reading about money in these chapters. Clothing in Crime and Punishment has a similar role, making us aware of the essential poverty of most of its characters. Razumikhin’s joke when he shows Raskolnikov the new clothes he has bought him, that “we have to make a human being out of you”, nonetheless expresses a fundamental truth about poverty’s ability to dehumanise its sufferers. These people can barely even dress themselves with dignity.

Women

But I think the final sign of decay that I’ve found hardest to avoid is Dostoevsky’s representation of women. In Crime and Punishment the women we come across are exclusively downtrodden and suffering. The differences between them concern simply whether they try to maintain some kind of dignity, like Raskolnikov’s mother and Marmeladov’s wife, or fail to, like the woman on the bridge who attempts suicide. Once, we meet a group of them: “some were over forty, but there were some younger than seventeen; almost every one of them had a black eye”. Dunya, Raskolnikov’s sister, suffers for him in a horrible job in their hometown. Sonya, likewise, suffers for her own family. Only by taking economic responsibility onto themselves to try to save others can the women have a chance of saving themselves. Even Nastasya, Raskolnikov’s comparatively not-falling-apart maid, has a “morbidly nervous laughter”. Everyone’s on edge here.

Crime and Punishment as a Horror Movie

Connected with the feverish yellow world of Crime and Punishment is the feeling I have had with this reading that Dostoevsky’s novel has a particularly intense portrayal of reality and bodies not far from their portrayal in works of horror, especially movies. Of course, there is the dinginess of the world, but there is also the murder itself. When Raskolnikov stands outside the pawnbroker’s door, he feels that “someone was standing silently just at the latch, hiding inside and listening, in the same way as he was outside, and also, it seemed, with an ear to the door…” Perhaps I am not explaining it well, but what I mean is this image of fear and closeness to mortal peril is just the sort of thing that we see in Alien when the xenomorph is right next to Ripley, but not yet aware of her.

A scene from the movie Alien 3 where Ripley, a human, is very close to an alien, but so far undetected
A scene in Alien 3 where Ripley has a close encounter with the xenomorph. In Crime and Punishment there are a lot of moments where characters seem to be unnaturally close to each other, both physically and sometimes spiritually, with the same horrific effect.

The incomprehensibility of violence is also an example of this. Raskolnikov’s terrifying dream, when he witnesses the brutal murder of a horse for very little reason, corresponds to that lurking question always present in horror movies with a vaguely humanoid villain – why? Why is this happening, why does this have to happen? When Raskolnikov is forced to kill the pawnbroker’s sister we are faced with another such moment, when the “why” we previously had – to give the crone’s money away to those who need it – is suddenly rendered inadequate, now that it seems to require a wholly innocent victim as well.

Dostoevsky’s language in Crime and Punishment has its own violent intensity too, such as when Raskolnikov feels “as if a nail were being driven into his skull”, or when he looks like he “had just been released from torture”. Our murderer’s mental tension is the same tensed suspense of a good horror movie, where danger is just around the corner.

Ideas and Responsibility

And then there are the ideas. I would not like to go into too much detail before I have finished the book, but I’d at least like to make some observations on the chessboard as it sits before me, as it were.

An illustration to Crime and Punishment by Nikolay Karazin, showing the moment Raskolnikov is forced to kill the pawnbroker's sister to defend himself from capture.
An illustration to Crime and Punishment by Nikolay Karazin, showing the moment Raskolnikov is forced to kill the pawnbroker’s sister to defend himself from capture.

For in Dostoevsky, there is always a war between ideas. We have by this point been introduced to one of Raskolnikov’s motivations in killing – that he could do some good with it by giving away the old woman’s money. But this theoretical approach has already come up against the unpredictability of the world – firstly in that he didn’t succeed in escaping with the money, secondly in that he was forced to kill the sister. Meanwhile, Razumikhin and Luzhin have already began arguing about the new ideas of progress, economic and otherwise. Extreme and self-centred rationality, we have already heard, will lead people to think it’s okay to put a knife into people. Obedience to much to a system is dangerous, as the wonderful image of Raskolnikov being dragged forwards, “as if a piece of his clothing had been caught in the cogs of a machine”, illustrates.

Glimpses of Redemption

Even as these two initial parts show some of the depths of the human soul, they also begin laying the foundations for later redemption. Raskolnikov’s isolation at the police station, “a dark sensation of tormenting, infinite solitude and estrangement suddenly rose to consciousness in his soul”, which is “more a sensation than an awareness, an idea”, is important for giving us understanding of the way that life is feeling just as much as it is idea. Marmeladov, in some way a double of Raskolnikov – they both have close encounters with horsemen and their whips – in his dying moments comes to understand the sacrifice that his family have made for him, and in doing so finds an implicit redemption, when he sees Sonya, “humiliated, crushed, bedizened, and ashamed”, for the first time in her prostitute’s garb. It is too late to change for life, but not too late for death.

Raskolnikov, meanwhile, through giving his money to Marmeladov’s family, has also found “a new, boundless sensation of a sudden influx of full and powerful life”. He has not found redemption yet, but he has taken his first step on the path to goodness, a journey that for me at least makes this novel so great.

Conclusion

For all this seriousness, I almost forgot to mention the humour in Crime and Punishment. Because this time round I’ve really started to find the whole thing quite funny. From this lovely exchange between Nastasya and Raskolnikov (one familiar, no doubt, to my fellow students) –

"Why don’t you do anything now?”
“I do something…” Raskolnikov said, reluctantly and sternly. 
“What do you do?” 
“Work…” 
“Which work?”
"I think.”

– to her comments when Raskolnikov awakes “And, what’s more, you were extremely interested in your own sock, extremely!”, with its equal measure for readers of humour and horror, Crime and Punishment is a hilarious book.

But the questions of guilt and redemption that lie at the heart of it are, and have always been, the ones that most appealed to me. I guess it was my Catholic upbringing that made me particularly aware of my own moral failures and need to atone for them, but I’ve always found these topics in literature, and elsewhere, the most compelling. Whether it be the Amnesia video games, to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, I’ve always enjoyed art that has challenged my ideas of personal responsibility, and shown how we can, and sometimes can’t, change. Perhaps it was thanks to Crime and Punishment that the first seeds towards my eventual time spent volunteering in prison were sowed. Who knows?

What do you think of Crime and Punishment and its themes?