Brodsky: Why Kundera hated Dostoevsky

Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), a Russian-American poet, at the age of 47, was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature after Camus for his poems of "enchantment," "beautiful rhythm," "symphonic richness," and "heroic devotion to art," making him the second young recipient of the World Literary Prize after Camus. Born in Leningrad to a Jewish family, Brodsky dropped out of school at the age of 15 and did more than ten jobs in furnaces, transporting corpses, geological exploration, etc., was repeatedly detained, imprisoned many times, and in 1964 was prosecuted for "parasites", exiled to the north, and later sentenced to five years in prison. In 1972, according to Brodsky himself, he was told, without a reasonable explanation, that the authorities "welcomed" him to leave the Soviet Union and, without his own words, was cucked into a plane that did not know where to fly, and thus began a life of exile abroad at an unknown end.

Why Kundera hated Dostoevsky

| Brodsky translated | TUCK

Milan Kundera recently wrote in the New York Times Book Review with several arguments to respond to. Disputes over taste are ultimately fruitless. Kundera's preferences, however, were based more on his sense of history than on his aesthetics.

　　When it comes to history, people stand on a more solid foundation, if not indestructible. It is enough to support the argument that history becomes the source of evil in the artist's destiny. Perhaps it also allows us to imagine that it can determine an artist's moral posture. But whoever thinks it can still determine an artist's aesthetics will collapse the foundations beneath his feet. Because this makes art succumb to the constraints of a certain creed, to the constraints of a certain philosophical system, to the constraints of the interests of a certain group, and in the final analysis to the constraints of some ideology. And art is more primitive and unavoidable than these things.

　　It is true that art has helped decorate churches, polish dogmas, sing praises to despotic tyranny, and build mausoleums. But art has never been possessed—neither by the patrons of the arts nor by the artist himself. It has its own drive, its own logic, its own genealogy and its own future. The aesthetics of the individual arise from the instinct for these things, not from the patrons. And it is a man's aesthetics that determine his moral standards and sense of history, not the other way around.

　　The worst thing about an artist is that he sees himself as the owner of art and art as his tool. This perception is a product of artistic sensibility in the commercial market, and on a psychological level, it is similar to the fact that art patrons see artists as employees they pay for. Both want to assume (or proclaim) something—for the former, the artist's own stylistic characteristics; for the latter, the patron's will and claim. And this always comes at the expense of others: the artist denies the stylistic characteristics of another artist; the patron denounces one style or another for withdrawing the commission for being unrealistic or degenerate, or even banning (or expelling) the artist. In both cases, it is art that suffers, or it can be said that all mankind, and eventually falls into the fate of its own value.

　　But if a patron (say, a country) can be forgiven because he probably knows so much, an artist (say, a writer) cannot be forgiven. Unlike the state, the writer cannot justify his actions on the grounds of historical necessity. If it is only because thousands of refugees, migrant workers, fleeing refugees, illegal immigrants, etc. can corrupt the aesthetics of an exiled writer, he cannot cover himself by quoting historical changes. He could have claimed aesthetic necessity, but the two words contradicted themselves. Aesthetics is a linear phenomenon, its development is unreachable, and to do so is to lift a stone and drop it on one's own feet.

　　Undoubtedly, the commercial market, with its ability to produce praise, can make the most humble cowards think about their posthumous merits. It would also allow a mature writer to see his car being stopped by soldiers of the occupying forces as a clash with history – something kundera seems to have felt in Czechoslovakia in 1968. At this point we can understand his feelings, but he went on to generalize the culture of the soldier and his representatives. Fear and disgust are understandable, but soldiers never represent culture, let alone literature—they are holding guns, not books.

　　In the mind of a writer with a complex relationship with his art, such an encounter awakens his insecurity and forces him to respond in a language of historical necessity rather than artistic necessity. In other words, he began desperately looking for a scapegoat. Convinced only of his own faction, he naturally attributed the mistake to a man who represented another style trait. It is likely that this stylistic trait has always threatened him and his self-esteem. Now that this misfortune had fallen upon him, he instinctively pointed his finger in a familiar direction. In his Introduction to a Variation, Kundera points the finger at Dostoevsky.

　　In 1968, one day after Soviet troops occupied Czechoslovakia, he was approached by a theater director sympathetic to Kundera and asked him to adapt Dostoevsky's "The Idiot" into a stage play under a pseudonym. Kundera's books have been banned, and he has no "proper" source of livelihood. Even so, he said in the text: "I reread The Idiot because of this, and I understood that even if I starved to death, I couldn't do this work." The world was full of excesses, dark profundity, and aggressive sentimentality that disgusted me. I suddenly felt a nostalgia for Jacques the Fatalist, unexplainable. ”

　　Kundera was not the first famous writer to resent Dostoevsky. Nabokov, for example, likes to compare his compatriots with Eugene Sue, Dickens of Paris (though this is hardly a disparagement in my opinion). But it is commendable that in his evaluation of Dostoevsky— and even his evaluation of Joy, Faulkner, and others — he did not underpin his arguments by historical changes, which will always be recorded in his artistic conscience.

　　But Kundera went on to say, "Why is there such an aversion to Dostoevsky?" An anti-Russian sentiment of a Czech who has been traumatized by the occupation of his country? No, because I never stopped loving Chekhov. Doubts about the aesthetic value of his work? No, because the disgust that I myself was surprised at did not have any objectivity. What disgusts me about Dostoevsky is the atmosphere of his book; a world in which everything becomes feelings; in other words, an emotion elevated to the position of value and truth. ”

　　Then he began to denounce the illogicity of emotions. He first pointed out the price our civilization pays for emotions, and then he turned to glorifying its opposite, that is, rational thought and the spirit of reason and questioning, and attributing them entirely to the Western world. The other world is about where his fingers are pointing, where emotions "become a value, a standard of truth, a reason for action," where Dostoevsky came from, and so did the tanks. In that world, thought is replaced by emotion, "the noblest national feelings can attest at all times to the most vicious atrocities; high feelings are stirred up in the chest, and a man does despicable things in the holy name of love." ”

　　That's not accurate, at least not that simple. The atrocities in that world were committed not in the name of love, but in the name of necessity—a historical necessity. The concept of historical necessity is the product of rational thought and has entered Russia from the West. The idea of noble barbarians, the idea that man's good qualities are hindered by bad mechanisms, the ideal state, social justice, etc., are not all formed and prevail on the Volga. It may be debatable to say that the modern totalitarian state originated from the talented and incompetent parasites of the 18th-century Paris Salon. But don't forget that Das Kapital was translated from German to Russian.

　　Perhaps because of Western rationalism, the "specter of communism" hovered in Europe for a long time and finally took root in the East. But it should also be seen that this specter has not encountered anywhere else the same strong resistance as in Russia. The first wave was Dostoevsky's The Devils, followed by the slaughter of the Civil War and the Great Purge; this resistance shows no sign of stopping even now. At least, the ghost encountered far fewer obstacles when it entered Kundera's home country in 1945 and regained control of it in 1968. The political system that left Kundera away from his job was both a product of Eastern emotional radicalism and a product of Western rationalism. To put it simply, when you see a Russian tank on the street, there are a million reasons to think of Diderot.

　　Kundera thinks of Dostoevsky either because his sense of place is limited by his sense of history or because Dostoevsky's presence makes him feel insecure. I tend to think of it as the latter, because it's probably the feeling that every professional writer would have about Dostoevsky. But also because the description of the environment in Dostoevsky's novel as a world in which everything is transformed into emotions, emotions are elevated to the height of value and truth, this in itself is an emotional perversion.

　　Even if Dostoevsky's novel is reduced to what Kundera considers, it is not about emotion itself, but about a hierarchy of emotions, which is clear. And these emotions are all responses to existing ideas, and most of these ideas are actually from the West, and they are highly rational. Most of Dostoevsky's novels are actually a Kind of Russian-style ending to events that took place in the West and outside Of Russia. Duke Myshkin went mad after returning from the West, where Ivan Karamazov's atheistic faith was derived, as did the source of Peter Verkhovsky's political radicalism and the hotbed of his conspiracies.

　　The main thrust of most of Dostoevsky's novels is a struggle for the soul of the individual, because he believes that everyone has a soul, that everyone is a spiritual entity. What he wrote about was a struggle or tug-of-war between faith and worldly utilitarianism, about the oscillation of the individual soul between the abyss of good and evil. These two abysses were jokingly called "dark profundity" by Kundera, and this vacillation was considered by him to be "excessive moves".

　　At the very least, Dostoevsky's portrayal of the human being is not as shallow as Kundera thought. It's more complex and harder to handle; that's part of what causes Kundera's false feelings. But his misreading is largely related to his simplistic approach to understanding humanity, which Dostoevsky opposes, which is, to put it mildly, the product of agnosticism. It is true that tanks and armies boringly enter Kundera's homeland from time to time from the East, but the reason why he thinks that the kind of man Dostoevsky depicts exists only in that world is precisely because the West has not yet produced a writer with the insight of Dostoevsky.

　　Hence Kundera's sense of place. In the same place, he saw the world of emotion and the world of reason, and his Russian predecessors saw the viciousness of mankind. Of all the peoples, the Czechs are in the best position to observe this human commonality. In 1968, of course, they had not forgotten the invasion from the West 30 years earlier. I don't know how Czech audiences recognized Jacques the Fatalist at that time.

　　A prudent person, in giving the supreme place to rational thought, should ask himself whether reason can introduce real discoveries or merely expound the knowledge we already have. This question is older than our civilization; in fact, it is one of the main carriers of transmission to our civilization. It is the carrier of most literary works, especially those of Dostoevsky.

　　Kundera does not ask himself such a question, not because of his need for imagination or because of his aversion to abstract thinking. A sad fact about him (and his Eastern European counterparts) is that this brilliant writer has unwittingly fallen victim to the geopolitical inevitability of his destiny—a concept of East-West division.

　　Indeed, there is no north-south distinction for Czechs (Polish?). Germany? Hungary? ）。 This concept of dividing the world between east and west is sad, but it is itself a kind of ideological laziness. It offers a convenient dichotomy: emotion-reason, Dostoevsky-Diderot, they-us, and so on. It forces a person to make a choice. The process is always dramatic and dangerous; once a choice is made, people have countless reasons to be heroes. The only trap here is that the options themselves are limited. It is either/or, this is its true nature.

　　This choice is often one of the most important events in an individual's life, and the inexorable after-the-fact interpretation makes it a real entity, but obscures its fundamental lack of options. Making limited choices under the pressure of a particular situation triggers the echoes of humanity's primitive dilemma. There's only one problem: it imposes a simplified notion of human potential that is implicit in every restricted choice—and that may be why that choice was proposed. Ignoring the possibilities of man, people begin to cling to the conclusions that their experience leads them to, whatever that conclusion may be, and thus reject or reject a more inclusive, broader, and more distant notion of man.

　　I think this is the root of Kundera's dislike for Dostoevsky. Thus the idea of combining emotion with rational thought is at least to be limited, if not completely superfluous, because the value of a point of view is embodied and measured by the quality of the response it provokes. If literature has a social responsibility, it is probably the maximum that shows man, the maximum he can achieve spiritually. In this sense, the supernatural characters in Dostoevsky's novels are far more valuable than Kundera's wounded idealists, no matter how modern and pervasive the latter may be.

　　It was certainly not Kundera's fault, though he himself should have been aware of it. When the Czech writer and Dostoevsky came face to face, many questions were involved. First, Kundera had strict disciplines about aesthetics, as evidenced by the sexual metaphors he often used when describing human behavior. It may sound paradoxical, but a true aesthete does not make multiple choice questions when he sees foreign tanks driving into the streets, and he should have foreseen—or imagined—such things (especially in this century). Second, Lutheran agnosticism forces people to use reason to stage their own doomsday judgments. This apocalyptic judgment of the self is even more cruel than God's, because people always think they know themselves better than God. The only rational equivalent of these rational men is the determination to abandon asceticism, so they abandon decency and turn to sinful hedonism.

　　The third, and perhaps most important, point: Kundera was continental European. Few mainlanders are able to see themselves from the outside. If there is, and without exception, it is in the Context of Europe, which provides them with a yardstick to measure their importance. The advantage of a stratified society is that individuals can easily feel their progress. Its disadvantage is that people feel limited and expand the scope of the world that has nothing to do with their lives. That is why a sedentary people always hates nomads: in addition to the real threat they pose, it is also because nomads undermine the concept of boundaries.

　　It can almost be said that the existence of continental Europeans is defined by various boundaries, including nations, communities, classes, traditions, hierarchies, or rationality. Coupled with their mesmerizing bureaucratic structures of the state, you will find that they lack a sense of contingency, both to themselves and to their peoples. Since he never knew that there were many options, he could at best consider a special wholesale alternative: he only liked what he had—East or West. If he becomes a writer, he must find a way to level it by dissolving the limitations of genre style. In this way he may be revered as avant-garde, but only among a group of people who have walked into a style dead end.

　　Kundera had lived in Eastern Europe (and for some, West Asia) for so long that it was perfectly normal for him to want to become more European than European. Among other things, this postural position must have been attractive to him, because it made Kundera's past and present more logically linked, which the average exile writer could not get. It also puts him in a good position to condemn the West for betraying its own values (formerly known as European civilization) and for abandoning countries that are still trying to preserve it even in the face of dangerous adversity.

　　At this point, everyone who can still read and write books should thank Kundera and his colleagues and friends in Czechoslovakia. Our only concern is that Kundera's ideas about European civilization are somewhat limited and skewed, because he sees Dostoevsky as one of them and sees it as a threat. Of course, there is also the contradiction here: as a victim of Eastern Europe, he considers his culture to be superior to that of the Villains of Western Europe, but this does not prevent him from longing for the benefits of the villains' system. To put it bluntly, if the victim's political dreams come true, the freedom and cultural atmosphere he ends up with is exactly what he now criticizes, the villains.

　　In order to resolve this contradiction, we should bear in mind two points: First, the betrayal, corrosion, and degradation of standard norms and other things are an organic part of civilization, which is an organism that also excretes, secretes, ages, and is reborn, and the part of death and decay is the price it pays for evolution. Second, the purity of the victim is a forced, artificial purity that is not worthy of our smallest freedom; our attraction to the cultural norms of the victim is essentially mournful, because it belongs to the civilization of the past, but is put in the refrigerator by the tyranny of ideology. Live fish is always fishy, and frozen fish only smells fishy when cooked.

　　At the end of his essay, Kundera writes: "In the face of the eternal night of Russia, I experienced the violent end of Western culture in Prague, which was conceived in the modern place, based on the individual and his reason, the diversity of thought and tolerance. In a small Western country, I experienced the end of the West. This is the great farewell. ”

　　It sounds grand and tragic, but it's pure acting. Culture dies only for those who cannot grasp it, just as morality dies for lustful people. Western civilization and its culture– including kundera's culture – are based on principles of devotion, on the idea that people die for their sins. When threatened, Western civilization and its culture are always determined to go to war with the enemy, even if it is an internal enemy. In many ways, World War II was a civil war in Western civilization. Killing is not a pleasure, and it is not in any way comparable to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, but as long as there are people who are willing to die for his ideals, those ideals are still there, and civilization is still there.

　　Even in Prague, it is too early to say goodbye to Western culture, as evidenced by jan Palach, a Czech student, who set himself on fire in public in January 1969 to protest Russian occupation. The Russian night that descended on Czechoslovakia was no darker than the night in 1948 when agents of the Soviet Secret Service threw Jan Masaryk out of the window. It was Western culture that helped Kundera through that night, and it was also the night he began to love Denis Diderot and Lawrence Stern, laughing at their laughter. And this laughter is the prerogative of the free man, and so is Dostoevsky's sorrow.