BBC Radio 3 Literary Proms: Archbishop on Dostoevsky

The Archbishop in discussion with Susan Hitch

Wednesday 20th August 2008

Read a transcript of the Archbishop's conversation with Susan Hitch below, or click download on the right to listen {19Mb]

Interview with Susan Hitch on BBC Radio 3 Literary Proms

Hello and welcome to the Royal College of Music in London for another of our Proms Literary Festival events; they are running here in the Britten theatre throughout the Proms season this summer. There's a feast of Russian music at this years Proms – the audience here this evening is going into a late night performance of Rachmaninov's Vespas and our discussion tonight will be broadcast during a performance of Tchaikovsky's ballet score for sleeping beauty. So it's fitting that four of our Proms Literary Festival events this year focus on Russian writers and authors, and we're starting tonight with the work of the nineteenth century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Doctor Rowan Williams, has somehow found time between sermons and Lambeth Conferences to write a thoughtful and illuminating study of Dostoevsky's work, 'Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction', which is published this month. Dr Williams, welcome.

Rowan Williams, is Dostoevsky a welcome break from the day job?

Yes. I've sometimes said that when I'm tired of tragedy and stress and all the rest of it I turn to Dostoevsky.

When did you first turn to him; when did you encounter Dostoevsky first?

I suppose late teens and early twenties. I read my way through the major novels I guess between the ages of about 19 and 23 and then started re-reading them every few years.

But you were already in some sense a Russianist weren't you?

Well not a Russianist; I'd got enthralled by Russia – Russian folklore, Russian film, watching Eisenstein on television in my teens, Russian music – so it was all part of that world.

We're also joined here tonight by the actor David Horovitch who's shortly going to read us an extract from Dostoevsky's best known novel, Crime and Punishment, which is the story of the poor student Rashkolnikov's murder of an old money lender and her vulnerable sister and the consequences of that murder. Rowan, would you give us the background to the passage you've chosen?

One of the major themes in Crime and Punishment is how Rashkolnikov, the murderer, is actually going to take a kind of human responsibility for what he's done. He starts with this fiction, this fantasy that he's a kind of superman who can murder people for good reason and it's all alright and gradually you see his self awareness dissolve under the pressure of what he's done and the only thing that begins to make a difference is when Sonia - the young prostitute who befriends him offers to exchange crosses with him, a very Russian sort of thing to do and it's the beginning of a kind of recognition that: 'Yes there is a human responsibility here' which is involved in exchange deliberately taking on the results of what you've done, so it's a key moment.

Reading 1, Crime & Punishment:

"I've come for your crosses, Sonya." Raskolnikov said with an ironic smile. "After all, it was you who told me to go to the crossroads; what's the matter? Now that it's come to the point, have you got cold feet?"

Sonya was staring at him in consternation. This tone of voice seemed strange to her; a cold shiver passed throughout her body, but a moment later, she realised that both tone and words was something he was affecting...

...It was as if he were not his own man. He was not even able to stay in the same place for a single moment, nor could he concentrate his attention on a single object; his thoughts kept leaping ahead, one after the other, his speech wandered and his hands were trembling slightly.

Without saying anything, Sonya produced two crucifixes from a drawer, a cypress one and a copper one, crossed herself, crossed him, and hung the cypress crucifix around his neck.

"I see, this is meant to symbolize my taking up the cross, hee, hee! As though I hadn't done enough suffering already! I get the cypress one, as befits a member of the common people; you get the copper one – it's Lizaveta's, isn't it? Let's see it – is that the one she was wearing... at the moment in question? I know of another two crosses, a silver one and one with an icon. I threw them on to the old woman's corpse that day. They're really the ones I ought to have now, they're the ones I ought to put on... But actually, I'm talking a lot of nonsense, I'm, forgetting the matter in hand; for some reason my mind's grown distracted...."

Rowan, it's a very long book and the murder happens really rather close to the beginning. Dostoevsky seems less interested in how and why the murder occurs than in what happens afterwards and so in your book do you – why?

I think what you have to see as the narrative of the book is almost Rashkolnikov rejoining the human race. You're introduced first of all to an intensely lonely almost paranoid figure who has these fantasies of being more than ordinarily human and so exempt from the ordinary human moral constraints, who's also able to justify what he's doing for economic reasons – so he thinks, he goes ahead with the murder and then cant cope fully with what's happened. And right through the book the recurrent theme is how does he actually relate to human beings as another human being not as a superman. Right at the end when he's in the prison camp, the crime's been discovered, he's been condemned to penal servitude; but even in the prison the other criminals at first think 'Oh he's superior, he's not like us', and they resent him and they hate him and very very gradually you see him even in the prison camp having to rejoin the human race.

It's already obvious from your account that it's the inner life of the characters that interests Dostoevsky, despite the fact that they are big social novels of a kind.

I think in Crime and Punishment you're taken more into the interior of one character than in any of the other books, and it's got a kind of feverish quality about it. I remember the first time I read it I was getting over flu and it's not a good time to read it at all, but it has that kind of dream-like quality and slightly dream-like hazy landscape of Petersburg is part of that. It's almost an unreal city with an unreal person; and yet at the heart of the story is this irremovably real event of a particularly brutal and heartless murder.

Marcel Proust claimed that 'Crime and Punishment' could be the title of any one of Dostoevsky's novels.

Indeed, all the major novels are crime stories, murder mysteries.

But it's also, I suppose, I wonder whether Crime and Punishment for it particularly, punishment in this world – is that particular to this kind of Christian story? Is it consistent with a Christian universe?

Very consistent with a Christian universe but in a rather particular way. It's not a story, Crime and Punishment, about a wicked deed that's punished and the book is closed. As I say, it's a story about how you grow into a certain kind of awareness and I think turning to the last of the great novels, Brothers Karamazov, that is quintessentially about growing into a particular sort of humanity. The punishment – I won't say it's irrelevant but it's more what happens to the self consciousness of somebody involved in crime and violence and how you acquire the sort of human capital to get you beyond that, that moment of violence and solipsism.

We're going to turn now to the Brothers Karamazov. Sigmund Freud described it as the most magnificent novel ever written, and of course as you've just said – it's another murder story. The complex plot resolves around the death of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and the varying degrees of complicity in it of each of his three sons. Superficially the three brothers represent different types of human temperament - ways of existing: there's the monastic life, there's the intellectual life and there's the sensual life – but do you already think that's already too simplistic?

All of the move from that, Ilyusha who begins representing the spiritual as you might say as a monastic novice; he's got to come out of the monastery – he's got to get involved in decision making, in the sexual life in the political life. Dostoevsky planned a continuation where Ilyusha would become a political activist. Ivan is in a sense the most tragic of the three; he's stuck with the intellectual life and doesn't manage to make connections with anything else, and so he turns inward and loses his mind eventually – loses what is most important to him. And the eldest brother, Dmitri, the sensualist is the one who in a sense becomes the moral touchstone of the whole book because he's the one who ends up taking responsibility for a crime he hasn't committed.

The first reading we're going to hear is from book VI of The Brothers Karamazov, From the Discourses of the Elder Zosima. Can you tell us a little bit about the character of Father Zosima?

Father Zosima is the spiritual Father to Ilyusha, he's the old monk who's inspired Ilyusha's monastic vocation and he's got a very special place in the monastery; not entirely uncontroversially - a lot of the other monks think he's a bit liberal, he's a bit peculiar, he's a bit too open to the world but he becomes another of those touchstone points in the story.

Reading 2, from Book VI of The Brothers Karamazov, From the Discourses of the Elder Zosima:

"Bear in mind particularly that you can be no man's judge. For a criminal can have no judge upon the earth until that judge himself has perceived that he is every bit as much a criminal as the man who stands before him, and that for the crime of the man who stands before him, he himself may well be more guilty than anyone else. Only when he grasps this may he become a judge. However insane this sounds, it is true. For were I myself righteous, it is possible that there would be no criminal standing before me. If you were able to take upon yourself the crime of the man who stands before you and is judged by your heart , then lose no time, but do so and suffer for him yourself, while letting him go without reproach. And even if the law itself appoints you as his judge, then act even in them to the best of your ability in this same spirit, for he will go away and condemn himself even more harshly than your judgement. But if with your kiss he departs unfeeling and laughing at you, then do not be tempted by this: it means that his season has not yet arrived, but it will arrive in its own good time; and if it does not arrive, it matters not: if not he, then another will do it instead of him, suffer and condemn, and take the blame upon himself, and the truth will be accomplished. Believe this, believe it without doubt, for in this lies the hope and faith of all the saints."

To what extent is Zosima speaking for Dostoevsky there? Is this Dostoevsky's code for the renewal of mankind – this notion of active love?

The whole of Karamazov I think pivots on this notion of 'active love' and what you mind call 'substitutionary love'; that is you take to yourself the responsibility for somebody else's sin or failing – and that can sound masochistic, it can sound strained and there is that; it is almost an artificially heightened pitch that Dostoevsky achieves in Karamazov. And yet I think in the discourses he's trying to put it into Zosima's mouth as in as distanced a way as possible; this is a sermon so to speak and what's being said is 'Everybody is to some extent complicit in human failure – recognise that. Embrace it, take it on yourself freely, don't try to avoid that complicity and if you do that out of love something actually happens to the human world that you're living in and redemption works in that way for Dostoevsky of course as for any Orthodox Christian that is if you like, based on the way in which God himself takes on responsibility for humanity – becomes human. And in that way becoming human: taking on the awareness, the weight of that complicity and evil. That's part of joining in the redemptive strand of life.

When I read the discourses of Zosima it seems to me that they have a quiet wisdom of tone which is part of their forcefulness, and very much in contrast to the frenzy of argument of previous book in which Ivan the intellectual brother is confronting the philosophical problem of evil and he concludes that he cant believe in a God who allows innocence to suffer. Actually a contrast isn't quite the same thing as an answer – does Dostoevsky ever provide an answer to that one?

No I don't think he does. He wrote occasionally as if he thought the Russian Monks' discourses were the answer to Ivan's great revolt against God but I think in the logic in the drama of the book it's almost admitted there's no answer in words. When Ivan's finished the great indictment of God for allowing suffering the only answer that Ilyusha gives him is to go and kiss him. And in a sense Dostoevsky leaves it there is appalling unspeakable evil in the world and he's drawn from the newspapers, these dreadful stories of cruelty to children particularly and abuse of children – nightmarish stories, and it's as if he says 'That's real; so is love, so is compassion – make what you will of it. I'm not going to give you any theoretical answer but it's as much of a puzzle and a challenge that there is compassion in the world as that there is unspeakable cruelty.

Our final reading is from Book XI of The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan Karamazov; the third brother, the intellectual is visited by the devil in a dream.

Reading 3, from Book XI of The Brothers Karamazov:

"If truth be told, you are losing your temper with me because I have not manifested myself to you in some red glow or other, but have appeared before you in such modest guise. In the first place, your aesthetic sense is offended and in the second your pride: how, you say, could such a vulgar devil come calling on such a great man as you? ....

When Mephistopheles appeared to Faust, he testified concerning himself that while wishing evil, he did only good. Well, that is as he likes, but I am quite the contrary. I may be the only person in all nature who loves truth and sincerely desires good.

I was there when the Word who died upon the cross ascended into heaven. I heard the joyful squeals of the cherubim, as they sang and cried 'Hosannah!' and the thunderous howl of ecstasy from the seraphim that shook heaven and all the universe. And lo, I swear by all that is holy, I wanted to join in the chorus and cry with them all, 'Hosannah!' It was already on the tip of my tongue, breaking from my bosom... I am, after all, you know, very sensitive and artistically impressionable. But common sense – oh, a most unfortunate property of my nature – restrained me even there within the proper limits, and I let the moment slip!

For what would have transpired after my 'Hosannah'? In an instant everything in the world would have become extinct and no more events would have taken place. And so you see, solely because of the call of duty and my social position, I was compelled to crush the moment of goodness within myself and remain with my loathsome deeds."

It's very easy to forget Dostoevsky's great comic talent but that characterisation of the devil is a brilliant flight of comic fancy. There's a very long tradition of rather smooth and elegant devils in literature – but who exactly is he actually satirising here? Is it the sensitive and artistically impressionable atheist?

That's part of it certainly. The devil that Ivan sees in his nightmare is a kind of second-rate journalistic intellectual really, who's full of fashionable phrases and exquisite sensibility in a very mid century way. What he's saying to Ivan is 'all the evidence for faith is before me but actually I couldn't quite square it with my conscience, and I realised if I said yes to God the whole universe would stop – nothing else would ever happen'. That I think I think is part of one of Dostoevsky's greatest insights which is that what is most distinctively human about us is, you might say, not just to accept evidence – we always go beyond evidence. It needs will or love or something and that's the characteristically human. We don't just accept the results of the equations; there's something else – a decision to be made.

The devil is also suggesting that the world couldn't exist without good and evil.

Something about the unfinished-ness of the question, I think that's what's being said. The world goes on because questions don't get closure. We go on asking, we go on being obliged to answer for ourselves. As he says in an earlier work, "If all that mattered were that two and two make four, there wouldn't be history, there wouldn't be a human world as we know it". It's not so much that good and evil have to co-exist; it's more that there is never going to be a final version of the truth in my mind – although the truth is there, because there's always something more I can say. And so the devil ironically here is defending the possibility of history going on; of humans going on asking and answering.

That's all we have time for this evening I'm afraid. Many many thanks to my guest here at the Royal College of Music, Dr Rowan Williams, to David Horovitch for reading from Dostoevsky – and of course to all of you in the audience here and at home for listening.

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