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Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin

Alexander Pushkin is held by his countrymen to be their greatest writer, something which always strikes Westerners as unusual. The main problem is that Pushkin was primarily a poet, and poets, particularly Russian ones, are exceedingly difficult to translate and still harder to translate well. Yet Pushkin did write prose. His novel The Captain’s Daughter, and his short story “The Queen of Spades”, are among his best-known prose works. Another is the cycle of short stories, The Tales of Belkin, which I finished recently. While I can’t deny Pushkin’s verve for verse, his prose is rather more – if you’ll forgive the pun – prosaic.

What is particularly interesting about these five stories is more how we see in them the seeds out of which grew the magnificent prose that for so many exemplifies Russian literature. A saying often attributed to Dostoevsky is that Russian writers “all came out of Gogol’s “Overcoat””. But Gogol’s story in turn came out of these tales.

For all their significance as trailblazers, though, that’s not to say that these five stories can’t stand on their own.

The Editor’s Introduction

The Tales of Belkin, as its title indicates, purport not to be Pushkin’s own work at all, but rather that of the late Ivan Petrovich Belkin. The stories are introduced to us by Pushkin himself, acting as an editor (he did run a magazine for some time). This brief introduction, though, has much to say. Most of it is given over to a letter from one of Belkin’s friends, in which he describes the late author. Belkin was a young man, “humble and honest”, who let his estate in the country go to seed and died something of a recluse with many unfinished manuscripts lying around.

The letter-writer and editor note that the tales were all reportedly told to Belkin by someone else, and these names are given in a footnote by Pushkin. This, alongside the description of Belkin himself “average height, grey eyes, reddish hair, straight nose”, and the inclusion of a real date to the letter “Nov 16, 1830”, has the effect of giving The Tales of Belkin an extra dash of realism. We feel their author is a real person because he is treated like one. Many of the stories themselves feature a narrator as a character, who is then told the main story by someone else. This is quite a democratic approach, because many of these extra storytellers are from the lower ranks of society and it gives them a voice. It anticipates Turgenev’s Collection A Sportsman’s Sketches, where the approach is used to great effect.

“The Shot”

“The Shot”, the first of The Tales of Belkin, contains one of the classic examples of a duel in Russian literature, slotting in neatly next to Evgenii Onegin, A Hero of Our Time, and that squib in Fathers and Sons. Our narrator, an officer, is beguiled by Silvio, a Russian with a distinctly non-Slavic name. Silvio is an excellent shot, and though he is not an officer but simply a nobleman living nearby, he spends much of his time with the officers. They, for their part, enjoy such traditional pleasures as carousing and shooting each other in duels. One evening Silvio suffers an embarrassment at the hands of another officer, for which he should have called him to a duel, but Silvio declines at great cost to his honour. Our narrator is confused by this, thinking that Silvio is possibly a coward. But then Silvio tells him his own story.

It turns out that Silvio cannot fight in a duel because he needs to get revenge on another man, and this requires Silvio to take care of his own life. The incident in question happened when Silvio was in the army. A newcomer turned out to be equal to Silvio in popularity and talent, and Silvio felt threatened, eventually finding an excuse to duel him. Alas, he was fighting a Russian of the new generation: “His indifference made me lose my temper. What was the point, I thought, of taking his life when he didn’t seem to give a damn what I did?” Silvio let the man live, but he was determined to get his revenge. He waits until he hears the man has married, then he goes to his country estate with the intention of finally shooting, this time against an opponent who has a reason to fear death.

It works. He does not hit his opponent, for his goal was simply to regain his lost honour. His rival survives, but shaken and embarrassed in front of his new wife. One thing that’s particularly interesting about “The Shot” is the way that it plays with our notions of truth. Not only is the narrator himself a character, but he hears the story in two halves. The first comes from Silvio, while the second part, detailing Silvio’s ultimate revenge, comes from the rival himself. The overall effect is to make us wary of trusting anyone by drawing our attention to the biases out of which our understanding of truth is necessarily built. With that said, I’m not sure how much I enjoyed the story itself, however much its ideas of honour and its narrative complexity are important for the later tradition, particularly with Lermontov, for instance.

“The Blizzard”

“The Blizzard” is another of The Tales of Belkin which seems particularly interested in narrative itself. Our heroine, Maria, has been “brought up on French novels” and has a rather overdeveloped imagination as a result. She and her lover, a poor soldier, are forbidden to meet by their parents, but together they hatch a plan to elope, relying on their parents to accept them once they are legally married. Alas, it does not work out. The night they are supposed to marry there is a terrible blizzard, and Vladimir, her husband-to-be, gets lost on the way to the church. Maria, meanwhile, reads in everything an ill omen as she heads there herself. Pushkin constantly switches perspective between the two lovers, before finally shifting forward to the next morning at Maria’s house, where she seems to wake up as if nothing had happened.

But it is not so. Maria falls ill from her failure to marry Vladimir, and her parents meanwhile forbid him to set one foot within their house ever again. Vladimir, dejected, returns to the army and fights against the French, who at this point are advancing on Russian territory (we are in 1812). We lose track of him, and then hear that he has died. But Maria, with a Romantic constancy, refuses to marry anyone else, and holds onto everything of Vladimir’s that she can lay her hands on. However, one day she meets Burmin, a Hussar, and they get on swimmingly. Yet for some reason, though time passes, he does not propose to her. At last, she pressures him into explaining himself, and he says that he’s already married. Now, finally, Burmin gives us the missing piece, explaining what actually happened in the church on the night Maria was awaiting Vladimir.

It is ridiculous. But the story is more interesting than it seems. On one level, it’s a magical “everything turns out okay” kind of ending. But it’s complicated by Pushkin’s shifting of perspectives, consciously manipulating the reader’s knowledge and setting limitations on it. Most importantly, it’s complicated by the way that Burmin himself does not recognise the woman he somehow married. While I don’t doubt she would have been wearing a veil at the time, it is still rather ominous. At least it seems so to me.

“The Undertaker”

“The Undertaker” is a rather unusual story, the most fantastical of the stories of The Tales of Belkin. Our hero is a grumpy old undertaker who has recently moved into a new house. Unlike, as Pushkin notes, the undertakers of Shakespeare or Walter Scott, his own is humourless. But that’s not to say the text is without humour, because Pushkin’s undertaker’s pleasure at hearing about other people dying, and his disappointment when they don’t, is all part of the comedy. One day the undertaker is invited by a German shoemaker to a birthday dinner, and there the old man drinks far too much. Made uneasy by a comment one of the Germans had made – that we should toast our clients and invite them to a party – he suggests he will indeed invite the dead back and goes home.

To his horror the dead do turn up. They seem in a good-enough mood, but unsurprisingly the undertaker is rather shocked by their presence. He ends up pushing a skeleton out of anger, and at this point the dead turn against him. At this point he faints, or rather “loses the presence of his soul”, and wakes up. The experience of death lends itself to a psychological reading quite easily. The undertaker has repressed his ambivalent feelings towards his clients – people whose deaths make him glad, though they should not – and these feelings burst out in a bad and drunken dream. The effect of this is immediate. We have a sense that the undertaker has awoken a changed man – his final words are to call in his daughters for tea, perhaps thereupon to make amends for treating them badly until then. We can only guess, for the story ends there.

This little story – it’s the shortest of all the Tales of Belkin – is still packed with things to think about. At its heart is that simple but rather unanswerable question which has always plagued Russian writers – how should we live? It takes a bad dream to jolt the undertaker out of his bad existence. Perhaps for Pushkin’s readers, it may take only this story.

“The Station Master”

Of all The Tales of Belkin perhaps my favourite was “The Station Master”. It tells the story of a station master, a man who was in charge of a station on a road where tired horses could be exchanged for fresh and food and rest sought, a little like an inn. The story is focused on questions of sympathy. It begins humorously, with an epigraph from Prince Vyazemskii (a poet) about how these station masters are little dictators within their realms, before Pushkin himself lists the difficulties and frustrations of using their services, including the pointless complaint we write optimistically in their feedback booklets. (How little, I thought, has changed!). But then Pushkin suddenly stops us to say: “if we really get into their position properly, then instead of frustration our hearts will be filled with an honest sympathy for them”.

We are introduced to a particular station master, whose daughter, Dunya, is his helper. He is extremely proud of her – touchingly so – and guards her fiercely. The daughter’s attractiveness is irresistible to the narrator, and he kisses her before he leaves. A few years later he comes by the same road and expects to see her again. Instead, he finds a changed place, an inn “without flowers in the windows, where all around there was a feeling of carelessness and decay”. The station master himself is still there, but his daughter has vanished, and without her he has fallen into ruin. He tells the narrator how she disappeared – kidnapped and married by an officer passing through – and how his own attempts to get her back from her new home failed.

Dunya, alas, was happy there, though we have a feeling that her position is unstable, as it always was for the many girls who left the provinces for the city during those days, and were reliant upon the goodwill of whoever had seduced them, for class differences meant that a marriage was unlikely. In the inn, the narrator draws our attention twice to a cycle of paintings showing the story of the Prodigal Son from the Bible, and once the station master refers to Dunya in similar terms.

Yet one of the ways that Pushkin plays with his readers is to frustrate their expectations. The narrator leaves the station for the second time, and the next time he passes through the area he finds the man already long dead. He manages to locate his grave and there is told by a local about a noblewoman who once visited it, coming on a wonderfully rich carriage and with children in tow. It is no doubt Dunya herself. Though we are disappointed that no reconciliation between father and daughter took place, still Pushkin surprises us by showing that her own story at least has a happy ending.

In focusing so much on questions of sympathy and rank, “The Station Master” is an obvious inspiration for Gogol’s short stories, particularly “The Overcoat”. But it stands on its own. I cared for the characters and their fates, and that’s perhaps all that matters.

“The Noblewoman-Peasant”

“The Noblewoman-Peasant” is the final story of The Tales of Belkin. It tells the story of a romance between a noblewoman and a nobleman whose fathers are at odds with one another. Liza cannot meet Aleksei because as a noblewoman, she has no reason to go to his house without her father’s permission, and so she contrives a plan to bump into him in the countryside, dressed up as a peasant (so that nobody, least of all Aleksei himself, can suspect she is a noblewoman). It is an idiotic scheme, but Pushkin reminds us that it is not unbelievable for a country girl, whose entire knowledge of the world is from silly novels.

Liza successfully meets Aleksei, who himself is forced into a role – he doesn’t want to startle the peasant girl he thinks he’s caught by suggesting he’s a nobleman, so he pretends to be the nobleman’s assistant. Liza, meanwhile, has to contend with the fact that sexual mores among peasant girls aren’t quite the same as among noblewomen, and has to break character to tell Aleksei politely that she won’t be going to bed with him in the bushes. But this remark, delivered in the perfect Russian of a noblewoman, only piques Aleksei’s interest still further. They meet again, and again, and fall in love – even though both, faking their identities, know that the relationship can go no further.

But then, amazingly, their fathers make up and the two youths are supposed to meet. Even worse, the fathers decide the children would be a good match. Liza does not wish to reveal her deception, so she once more adopts a fake role, dressing herself up unrecognizably in a hideous dress, covering herself with makeup, and refusing to speak any language other than French. Liza survives the meeting, but Aleksei’s love for her peasant alter-ego grows unstoppable. The “Romantic idea” of marrying a peasant comes to absorb him, and he makes ready to propose. Luckily, this story does end happily, and just as madly as it began.

But under even this comic exterior, there’s a lot going on. As Aleksei’s father pressures him to marry Liza we have a sense of the generational conflicts that will be especially prominent in the 1860s, with works like Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. Meanwhile, though there’s a slight irony to its description of noblewomen in the countryside, Pushkin nevertheless demonstrates the difficult boredom of life there for them, practically trapped in their rooms and with nothing to do but read and gossip.

Conclusion

The Tales of Belkin are a cycle of short stories, and one thing that I looked for while reading them was points of connection between them, beyond their own imaginary author. It is not easy to say what they are all about, at least once one discards such broad and probably useless generalisations like “the meaning of life”, or “love”, and so on. Instead, I think the clue might be in the editor’s introduction. The stories are all about imagination. The undertaker’s imagination changes his life for the better, while Liza’s idea of dressing up as a peasant, however risible, ends up getting her exactly what she wants. I admit that it is not a fool proof suggestion, but it seems to work for most of the stories. Pushkin is interested in the ways that we tell stories, in narrative strategies, and imagination is part of that.

Taken separately, these stories are simply stories, but taken together The Tales of Belkin are in some sense an exploration of the ways we tell stories, and what their value can be. Either way, they’re worth reading if you come across some Pushkin lying around.

Author as Prophet: the Problem with Late Tolstoy

Towards the end of his time writing Anna Karenina Tolstoy had something of a spiritual crisis and it almost killed him. He suddenly realised that the life he was living was pointless. Worse still, he was unable to identify any way of living that would return a sense of meaning to it. In A Confession, a short work of non-fiction published soon after the conversion, Tolstoy describes being driven nearly to suicide as a result of his despair. The only way out of his predicament except for suicide, as Tolstoy saw it, was through belief in God. The spiritual transformation that then came over him had profound implications for his work and the rest of his life. He eventually abandoned the city, lived like a peasant in the countryside, and began a career as a pamphleteer. What fiction did come this period was blunt and didactic, with rare exceptions like Hadji-Murat.

Many people would consider Tolstoy one of the greatest writers of all time, but they rarely have the late Tolstoy in mind. The late Tolstoy is a strange creature and just as strange a writer. I’m currently reading his only novel from the period, Resurrection, which partly prompts this post. The other prompt is that I’m dipping into essays by the wonderful American writer Wendell Berry, who seems to have sprung from the cradle just the same as Tolstoy eventually became. Berry is a defender of the old and simple ways, of a faith bound closely to the soil. I like Berry a lot, but something’s bothering me about his writing, just as Resurrection is bothering me, and just as other things Tolstoy wrote late in life have bothered me.

By “bothered”, I do not mean that my spirit is touched – it’s not that kind of bothering. If anything, the problem is the opposite. The problem is that I’m struggling to care. It’s all well and good to simply accuse the late Tolstoy of didacticism, but I think there’s some value in trying to go into detail to answer what exactly has gone wrong. There must be a reason why Anna Karenina and War and Peace are beloved by all, but Resurrection has failed to be resurrected from its canonical grave. In this essay I’d like to have a go working it out.

Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?

To begin with, it’s worth going back and thinking about Dostoevsky and his own fiction. Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are world famous, but generally people prefer one or the other. I started out life as a huge fan of Dostoevsky, but now I’m in Tolstoy’s camp. What Dostoevsky does well is often called polyphony, after the name given it by the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. By “polyphony” I mean that Dostoevsky creates a great many characters who seem to be existing independently of their author. Their views are no longer Dostoevsky’s own. But more than that, their views are so developed, and so passionately felt, that the characters seem like they cannot be the creation of Dostoevsky at all, but rather real figures, animated by belief. I cannot think of any other writer who has written people who feel so intensely as Dostoevsky’s characters do.

For a young person, these kinds of characters are well-suited to themselves. When you are young you want desperately to believe in something. Almost without exception we were all, in our youth, hopelessly idealistic. Dostoevsky provides, in a way, a buffet of ideas for us to try. But over time we come to realise that these ideas are for the most part incompatible with a good life. Suicides, murders, and despair are the keynotes of Dostoevsky’s fiction, and they are so because they are the consequences of the characters’ ideas. Those few characters who seem to find happiness are religious, like Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, or Sonya. These characters are not particularly interesting. After all, we say, religion is for idiots.

Tolstoy’s Early and Middle Fiction

Tolstoy’s fiction before his late period is not the battleground of ideas that Dostoevsky’s is. There are characters who believe passionately, such as Levin’s radical brother in Anna Karenina, but they are few and far between. Most characters do not believe in anything, at least not actively. Anna Karenina wouldn’t say she believes in love – she just does. The same would go for Vronsky and his honour, or Dolly and her family. These people are unideological because they are all striving for one thing – a good life. Dostoevsky’s characters don’t really seem to care about happiness, and they are not striving for anything in particular. For them, the act of searching is enough. They just need some kind of outlet for the passionate feeling they have within them. The outlet’s nature, whether murder or kindness, is neither here nor there.

There are people in Tolstoy’s fiction who are after answers, who have that additional store of passion needed to demand a kind of seeking. They are the likes of Pierre and Andrei Bolkonsky in War and Peace, and Levin in Anna Karenina. But their crises are not the same as those of Dostoevsky’s heroes. Levin’s problem is that he is looking for an authentic and moral life. He wants to know how to live. He looks at the world of the city, where people like Stiva Oblonsky spend their days eating oysters and their nights chasing after women, and he’s disgusted. In the countryside, sitting on a haybale or cutting the wheat, he feels a kind of peace. We may call it a connection with God, but I think that that would be incorrect. What he feels is a oneness with the world, something that is more pantheistic than Christian.

Spiritual Vacuums, past and present

We can always look to Nietzsche as a great prophet of atheism, but he’s not the first by a long shot. From the Enlightenment onwards God and organised religion faced salvo upon salvo from intellectual circles, with nary any intellectually-grounded fire returned. Society was left with an absent centre, a spiritual vacuum. This was filled in many cases with radical politics. Marx called religion the “opium of the masses”, the implication being that revolutionary communism was what they really should be smoking. Nationalism also filled the void. At first that nationalism was well-intentioned, a unifying force, as it was in Italy, Germany, Greece. But in the 20^th century both Marx’s teachings and nationalism morphed into horrible monsters, leaving millions and millions of dead as a result. Nietzsche, of course, proposed his own solutions to “nihilism”, but they’ve hardly filtered out and aren’t always to everyone’s taste to begin with.

So we are left today with an even greater blank than there existed back then. Nationalism nowadays is reactionary and selfish, while left wing politics can seem so focused upon marginalised groups that any utopian thinking about the greatest marginalised group of all – the working class – appears to have fallen by the wayside. More importantly, it’s not even clear if there are enough workers left to really have a revolution. Marxism has, in some sense, just fizzled out.

Our modern-day preachers, such as Jordan Peterson, attempt to fill the void for their followers. Peter Singer’s Effective Altruism attempts to provide a philosophically-sound answer to the question of what we must do, telling us that we should give away as much as we can and focus on raising the world’s happiness in utilitarian terms. Nationalism and Islamic terrorism, meanwhile, both work by preying upon those who feel dislocated from the world they inhabit. The hatred many people feel for “outsiders” is not driven by the outsiders themselves, but by the need to feel something. And anything is better than nothing. For, there are plenty among us who feel just that – nothing, or else depression and despair. For those people, the conditions of late capitalism have successfully snuffed out their hope. And hope is one of the few things capable of expanding into the space left by the spiritual void.

One Reason Why we Read Tolstoy

To people today, characters like Levin and Pierre – and their novels – are attractive because they record a search for meaning. Not for that passionate, violent meaning that dominates Dostoevsky’s works. Most of us don’t need something to die for; we just want something to live for. We want that peace and calm in our (possibly non-existent) souls. Tolstoy’s fiction, with its emphasis on the simple, rural life, is all about that quiet faith which people once-upon-a-time would have found in religion, but now they cannot get from it for any number of valid reasons. Anna Karenina’s faith is attractive because there’s nothing to believe in except that Levin’s searching is worthwhile. There’s no God at the end of it, whatever Levin seems to think. There’s simply a sense of wholeness. A good, humble life – a virtuous life – has filled the spiritual vacuum he had once had.

And when we read Anna Karenina or War and Peace, we get the sense that we too can see the gap within us filled too, if only we go out and seek the answers, and then live them when we find them.

The Late Tolstoy – The Prophet Defeats the Disciple

After Tolstoy had his conversion, he had all the answers. No longer was he content to describe the path to harmony, he wanted to force that specific harmony upon us. As time went on that harmony became ever more specific, and ever harder to stomach. A simple life became a particularly Russian peasant life. A kind of vague pantheism became a radical form of anarchic Christianity. For some people, this is to their liking. But I have spent enough time in the Russian countryside of the present day to have my own view on what the Russian peasant’s life was probably like, and it’s not exactly positive. Tolstoy’s earlier works are so effective because they see the value of searching; his later works seem only interested in the destination.

Resurrection

Take Resurrection. I am about half-way through, and I have definitely read enough to comment on it. Tolstoy’s story is not very subtle, not because he’s forgotten how to write but because didacticism, convincing us that he’s right, is now the most important thing. Take the very first sentence, in Rosemary Edmonds’ translation:

“Though men in their hundreds of thousands had tried their hardest to disfigure that little corner of the earth where they had crowded themselves together, paving the ground with stones so that nothing could grow, weeding out every blade of vegetation, filling the air with the fumes of coal and gas, cutting down the trees and driving away every beast and every bird – spring, however, was still spring, even in the town.”

This is great prose, but it is impossible to read this without feeling Tolstoy behind it. The late Tolstoy can no longer see objects without also seeing the way they fit into his moral system and feeling obliged to put them within said system. And this quickly becomes grating.

Resurrection is, from the title onwards, not exactly coy about its moral bent. A young man, Prince Nekhlyudov, finds himself on jury duty, tasked with judging for murder and theft a girl who he had once seduced. It turns out that his careless seduction, one winter’s night, of this servant girl, led to a whole string of events resulting in her presence in the courtroom some years later: she became pregnant, was kicked out, found work again and lost it, and eventually became a prostitute, her job when the murder took place. Nekhlyudov recognises his complicity in her fallen nature and determines to set things right, whatever the cost. Thus begins the process of his spiritual regeneration.

He breaks off his relations with a young lady, moves out of his house, gives away most of his land to his peasants, and is within a hundred pages far further down the path to a new life than Levin or Pierre managed to get in almost a thousand. Tolstoy is in such a rush to show us the wrongs of the world through Nekhlyudov’s refreshed eyes that he completely forgets to make Nekhlyudov truly breathe to begin with. His conversion is all too brief, and it feels cheap. In my head I can easily picture Tolstoy standing behind his hero with a whip, forcing Nekhlyudov to morally contort himself into the shape Tolstoy demands of him rather than letting things take their natural course.

But Nekhlyodov is not our only hero, for we also follow Maslova, the prostitute he wronged. She smokes; she drinks; she’s rude and rough. But when I read about her I can’t help but feel I’m basically just reading a list of things Tolstoy doesn’t approve of, things that Maslova will undoubtedly abandon once she’s been redeemed herself. Compare Maslova with Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov never feels like he’s waiting for redemption. There’s no sense of inevitability there. In a religious sense, perhaps, but not in a thematic sense, from the perspective of the story itself. Maslova, however, needs to be redeemed. Tolstoy just can’t leave her alone.

Both Maslova and Nekhlyodov feel like pawns upon the pages of Tolstoy’s novel, and their only purpose seems to be to advance Tolstoy’s views. They don’t seem to have any kind of independence, either of thought or of action. Reading the late Tolstoy doesn’t feel like a journey – it feels like being shackled and dragged along a specific path. We know where the destination is when we set out, whereas with Levin or Pierre we always have the feeling that there are other roads, other options for them to potentially take.

This lack of human freedom in Resurrection, when it’s coupled with Tolstoy’s didacticism, is exhausting. Like Karolina Pavlova in A Double Life, Tolstoy’s anger leaves Resurrection feeling unbalanced. It is too clear who is good and who is bad. Every detail, from Nekhlyudov’s golden cufflinks to Maslova’s drinking, seems to have its purpose as a criticism of the world as it lies before Tolstoy’s eyes. He can’t see anything without judging it, and the judgements are always unfavourable. In spite of Tolstoy’s determination to bring us to the good life, what actually happens is that the experience of reading Resurrection is depressing. And not because it’s a story about prisons.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich

A good comparison for Resurrection is another one of Tolstoy’s later works, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which I reread recently. Ivan was published in 1886, ten years before Resurrection, and it shows. The novella still tries to take us towards a good life, but the methods are more subtle, and the work as a whole is more joyous.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich is first and foremost an extremely funny book. Tolstoy absolutely hates Ivan’s stupid boring vapid existence, but he understands that it’s better to dismantle it through laughter than try to annihilate it with a diatribe. Take the moment one of Ivan’s friends beholds his dead body and thinks “the only thing he was certain of was that in this situation you couldn’t go wrong if you made the sign of the cross”. Or how the first thought of people, hearing he’s died, is “a feeling of delight that he had died and they hadn’t”. In undermining the solemnity of the occasion Tolstoy has his purpose – he wants to show the citizens as selfish, unvirtuous, and themselves unprepared for death. But he does it in a way that’s a joy to read.

Where Resurrection is blunt, Ivan is full of wonderful ironies and subtleties. Things that stuck out for me included the way Ivan receives his fatal injury while decorating his drawing room – meaning that he literally dies because of the banal existence he’d been living. Another moment was when Ivan is lying there dying, and his daughter’s fiancé comes and talks about an actress with him instead of showing any kind of compassion. The novella is really funny, and yet it is perfectly capable of conveying a serious message too. In fact, the seriousness is heightened by its contrast to the levity. When Ivan tells himself at last that “death has gone”, it’s a magical moment. In Resurrection, which is entirely drab, there’s far less room for any spiritual manoeuvre.

An Evangelical is Rarely Convincing…

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve spent some time volunteering in a prison, so I know a little about what Tolstoy describes in Resurrection from personal experience. I also once volunteered in a community project with people who had Down’s syndrome. Both of these experiences proved life-changing, but there’s a reason I don’t write about them, either fictionally or non-fictionally. That reason is, simply put, that I don’t think there’s much value in talking about them. The greatest lesson I took away from both experiences is that experience is much more important than thought. This is not something I can transfer, really, in writing. I don’t want to be like Tolstoy and tell people what to think. I have my views on rehabilitation, just as I have my views on everything else, but I have no desire to evangelise.

This a good time to think back to Dostoevsky again, who I deliberately brought up at the beginning. What happens in the fiction of late Tolstoy is something akin to what we would see in Dostoevsky’s works if they had only one fully-developed character – Tolstoy himself. Without showing the possibility of passionate alternative views, of the sort that (for example) each of the Karamazov brothers offer in their novel, Tolstoy sucks the ideological air from his late fiction, leaving only his own viewpoint. But in doing so, he sucks more than ideology from his pages – in some real sense he removes the life from his stories altogether.

Tolstoy’s “Good Life” in Practice

And Tolstoy himself, who ultimately lived what Dostoevsky simply had his characters feel, is the best argument against his own late fiction. He did not really find the good life – he just found something that eased his conscience and he tried to force it upon others. He tore his family apart through bickering and pettiness. Aside from stunts like making shoes by hand and walking to far-off monasteries, he could never bring himself to fully abandon his aristocratic position and home. He became an object of ridicule, or else of pity. And though he had his followers, I don’t think he was happy. Not in the way that Levin becomes happy, at least.

The spirit of searching, of passionate inquiry, that dominates Anna Karenina and War and Peace, is fundamentally unideological. It doesn’t tell us how to think, only to think. But once Tolstoy’s views are calcified in his old age, there’s no longer any point in us readers thinking for thinking’s sake – thinking now only has value inasmuch as it can lead us to Tolstoy’s views. And this demands not a garden of delightful ideas, but a path along an empty alley, at the end of which stand Tolstoy and his beliefs, and nothing besides.

Stories- not Authors – Change Us

I don’t think I can respect any writer who writes without a sincere desire to make the world a better place; but I also don’t think I can truly enjoy a writer who lets that desire overwhelm their stories and whatever else they might be able to say. The fire within them must be for the act of striving after answers, and not for the answers themselves.

Tolstoy’s mistake in his later fiction is that he forgets that although many people come to fiction to learn, they come to learn for themselves, and not to be told what to think. That is why, I think, the best fiction, in the sense of morally best as well as greatest, has always been didactic not in the sense of telling us what to think, but in reminding us of the value of thinking, of trying to find the answers for ourselves. The best fiction does not change us – it helps us to change ourselves. Anna Karenina, like War and Peace, shows what changing looks like. Both do little more than that, and for that we should be thankful.

Conclusion

The question “what must we do” has bothered me almost my entire life. I have looked everywhere for the answer, and though I have found many answers, including in Wendell Berry and Tolstoy, I have never found something that made me think it was worth giving up the search and stopping where I stood. The day we stop seeking is the day we stop growing; it is the day we lose our dynamism and become boring. It is a bitter irony that those searching for goodness and the good life are often better and kinder people than those who’ve stop at a certain idea of goodness and way of living, thinking they’re finished. Life itself is also much more interesting when we keep ourselves searching. Tolstoy himself, perhaps, understood this at the very end. A. N. Wilson ascribes to the dying Tolstoy the following words: “Search, also go on searching”.

Here at least, the late Tolstoy is absolutely right.

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 19^th 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 19^th 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.