The Weekly Screed (#624)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Boston
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — While experts and amateurs alike, professional sleuths as well as armchair dilettantes, were flocking to Twitter and Vkontakte, rummaging for “terrorist” connections among Chechnyan separatists, in militant Islam, in sub-chapters of al Qaeda spin-offs and, of course, behind the tinted glass of the cockpits in the black helicopters of the Black President, I was trying to figure out the two Tsarnaev punks by re-reading my Dostoyevsky.

I mean, duh! These idiots are Russian.

It was Dostoyevsky, more directly and vividly than any previous thinker, and more accessibly than most “psychological novelists” who’ve followed his footsteps, who captured the arrogant, contorted, self-hating and squalid mental landscape of the alienated individual in mass society. In Notes from the Underground, a short, hypnotic and truly uncomfortable novel written in 1863, Dostoyevsky crafted the portrait of a tortured man willing to confess most anything about himself — especially the ugly stuff — but unable to face the one truth that might reconcile him to a life he is loath to live. He can’t admit that his private war against the unwelcoming society that surrounds him is a conflict that begins and ends within his own twitchy skin.

In the typically ironic first words of Underground, Dostoyevsky warns the reader that he’s in for a stroll through the dark: “I am a sick man… I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver…”

I’m not suggesting that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev undertook their killing spree in Boston because something uniquely Russian in their genes (or livers) compelled them toward anarchy and homicide. But there’s a thread in the history of Russian thought that tempts that nation’s great minds to plumb the dark corners of the soul and challenge the purpose of human existence. Early in Underground, our “hero” reveals that he, at age 40, has long since forsaken any effort to better himself. Why bother? He says, “… that you could not escape [your miserable self]; you could never make yourself into a different person; that even if enough faith and time remained for you to make yourself into something different, you probably wouldn’t want to change yourself; and even if you did want to, you wouldn’t do anything, because, after all, perhaps it wasn’t worthwhile to change.”

Soon, he’s comparing himself to a “highly conscious mouse,” trampled by uncaring humanity and desperate for a sort of generalized revenge. “There in its nasty stinking cellar our offended, browbeaten and derided mouse sinks at once into cold, venomous, and above all undying resentment. It will sit there for forty years together remembering the insult in the minutest and most shameful detail and constantly adding more shameful details of its own invention, maliciously tormenting and fretting itself with its own imagination.”

The underground man, while despising his long-cultivated mousiness, nonetheless sees himself as superior to common folk. He is exalted by a heightened self-awareness. He unshackles his conscience from family and neighborhood, saying, “…an ounce of your own fat ought essentially to be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow creatures.” And from here, he offers a supremely Dostoyevskian proposition: that civilized people, who pretend to glorify reason, would be bored to tears — and violence — in a thoroughly rational world.

The underground man insists that man needs to act on impulse, even against his own interests. Spontaneous volition is more truly a measure of human nature than thoughtful planning and reasoned discourse. Humans, he cries, are not piano-keys to be played in an orderly, harmonious sequence. And he says, “…if men really turned out to be piano keys , and if it was proved to them by science and mathematics, even then they would not see reason, but on the contrary would deliberately do something out of sheer ingratitude in order, in fact, to have their own way. And if they had not the means to do this, they would contrive to create destruction and chaos, invent various sufferings, and so still have their own way.”

In Notes from the Underground, Dostoyevsky doesn’t permit his misanthrope protagonist to act — ruthlessly — on his own conclusions. This character is too timid to live up to his philosophy. But in his next novel, Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky followed his non-hero’s nihilism to its logical extreme. Raskalnikov, an arrogant pauper, a younger version of the underground man, laments the meaningless of human existence and — in an experiment to test his convictions — murders a harmless pawnbroker.

Like the Tsarnaev brothers, Raskalnikov anticipates no consequences from his crime. He purports to be guilt-free (and impossible to catch) because he’s intellectually superior and morally immune, and because life itself — whether a pawnbroker’s or his own — is of little value.

Eventually, Raskalnikov comes around to confession and remorse, under the patient psychological pressure applied by detective Porfiry Petrovich — whose style is far more elegant than the methods applied to the Tsarnaev boys by the FBI and the police forces of greater Boston. But the crimes themselves — atrocities inflicted on the innocent by the pathologically disappointed — hearken circuitously back to Dostoyevsky in 1865, to October 1917, to the purges of Stalin, and to a peculiarly Russian streak of deadly narcissism.

Among many outspoken criminologists, Senator Lindsey Graham — a hopeless romantic who yearns for a return to the Cold War and its sublime thermonuclear simplicity — reacted to the Boston Marathon tragedy by declaring the callow bomb-throwers “enemy combatants,” apparently the vanguard of some vast phantom army, risen from the East and slouching toward Bethlehem.

At the end of Notes from the Underground, Dostoyevsky’s non-hero describes a world too atomized and complacent to hatch the sort of grand schemes Graham imagines: “We are born dead, and moreover we have ceased to be the sons of living fathers; and we become more and more contented with our condition.”

With one brother dead and the other incommunicado (perhaps forever), we may never plumb the shallows of the Marathon murderers. But in the musings of the underground man, I suspect there’s more of the Tsarnaev boys — born into the stubborn bleakness of the Russian soul — than in the Middle Earth Manicheism of the honorable senator from the Land of Cotton.