How to Read Me

The sentences are long. I know this. My editor knew it too, and said so, at some length, in sentences that were themselves not short. But the length is not an accident or a failure of discipline — it is the shape of a mind that cannot stop qualifying, cannot stop seeing the next objection, cannot land on a conclusion without immediately undermining it. You will learn to read this. The sentence that runs for a paragraph is not meandering; it is building. Follow it to the end.

The names will be a difficulty. Russians have three: a given name, a patronymic, and a surname. They use all of them, interchangeably, depending on who is speaking and how formal the moment is. Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov is also Alyosha, also Alexei, also — to his enemies — Karamazov. Keep a small list in the margins. You will not need it for long.

The intensity will be a difficulty of a different kind. My characters do not have moderate feelings. They love absolutely, hate absolutely, doubt absolutely, believe absolutely — and sometimes do all of these simultaneously, which is the part that is hardest to render on the page and perhaps most true. If you are accustomed to fiction in which people are coherent, the incoherence here will seem like bad writing. It is not. People are incoherent. I noticed this in prison, and I never forgot it.

There is one question behind everything I wrote: Can a man be free and good at the same time? The nineteenth century had two answers. The first was the liberal answer: educate him, improve his conditions, and he will naturally tend toward the good. The second was the religious answer: surrender to God and the good will follow. I did not trust either answer, and spent forty years trying to find out why.

The underground man is my experiment with the first. He is educated, he is intelligent, he understands perfectly well what is in his interest — and he refuses it. Not because he is stupid. Because he is a man. The will to defy, to choose against one's own interest simply to prove that one can choose — this is not a defect. It is evidence of something irreducible in the human creature that no Crystal Palace can accommodate.

Raskolnikov is my experiment with the second. He commits murder on principle — a logical principle, coherently reasoned — and is destroyed not by punishment but by the part of him that knew, before the reasoning began, that it was wrong. That knowing has no name. It is prior to the reasoning. I have spent a great deal of time trying to understand what it is.

And then there is Alyosha, who is my answer, insofar as I have one. He does not argue. He loves. It is not a sentimental love — it is a love that sees clearly and accepts what it sees. This is harder than anything the Grand Inquisitor proposes.

Nietzsche read me. He said I was the only psychologist from whom he had learned anything. He was not easy to please. He took from me the underground man — the will that defies the rational calculus — and developed it into something I would not have recognized and might not have approved. But the seed was mine.

Kafka found in my work a way to render the experience of guilt without the possibility of absolution — something I thought I had put there only for Russia, but which turned out to be portable. His Trial is my Grand Inquisitor made modern and stripped of faith. I am not sure this is an improvement, but I understand why he did it.

The French existentialists — Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir — built their philosophy from my question: if there is no God, what grounds the obligation to be good? They gave different answers than I did. Camus in particular could not accept my answer, which required Christ, and said so directly. I respect this. A man who refuses an answer he cannot believe is more honest than one who accepts it without examination.

Freud cited me in his essay on the uncanny. I confess I find it amusing to have contributed to psychoanalysis from four centuries away, without a couch. The double — the self that watches the self, and hates what it sees — was something I wrote before the vocabulary for it existed. Freud gave it a vocabulary. I remain unconvinced the vocabulary explains it.

And then there are the ordinary readers — the ones who find me at nineteen, at some difficult hour, and come away changed in a way they cannot quite account for. These are the ones I wrote for. I find I am more moved by them than by the philosophers.