Dostoevsky: A Self-Portrait by Jessie Coulson
This book, Jessie Coulson’s Dostoevsky: A Self-Portrait (currently out of print but can still be purchased cheaply), is an interesting idea. It’s the story of Dostoevsky told through a selection of his letters (which make up the majority of the text), and the narrative is linked together by intervening editorial commentary. So it’s kind of a cross between biography and autobiography.
Letters have about them an attractive personal touch. You get to find out what people were like in their day-to-day lives and in their personal interactions. At the same time, if you want to know about Dostoevsky’s deepest thoughts and dreams, you’d do well to go to his novels instead. For most people do not necessarily carry about with them in the open their deepest thoughts and dreams and convictions about reality. Odd that, since it’s those things that really shape the way we look at everything. But one thing that struck me after I had read the majority of the letters is that you’d never know what a great man he was—artistically, literarily, and in the profound depth of his thought—from his letters alone. What comes through is a profoundly fallible person. Perhaps the most humiliating letters revolve around his hopeless addiction to gambling—overcome in the end, however—where he writes his wife explaining how he had lost everything (this happened numerous times), and asks her to send him money so he could return home, only to then lose that money at the roulette tables as well, with his family already in dire financial straits (which is of course what drove him to the tables in the first place). Along these lines, if you’re interested in reading the letters, be prepared to hear a lot about money, a topic of constant concern for the often-nearly-destitute Dostoevsky. But overall a kind and a good (albeit fallen) man appears through his letters, and there are several beautiful relationships that emerge.
I found myself very interested in the unfolding narrative of his life while at the same time being disappointed that there weren’t more insights into his novels or even very often his deeper thoughts, though occasionally gems do appear. The most interesting for me (or at any rate the freshest, since it comes near the end) is perhaps the insights revealed on the Brothers Karamazov. Out of his novels that I’ve read, Crime and Punishment and The Idiot are my two favorites (it’s a toss up between them), with Brothers coming next, but after seeing what he was trying to do in Brothers, and its importance to his overall vision, I’m definitely interested in digging back into it. He explains that the story, perhaps the central element in the story, is a very intentional argument, incarnated in the characters of the story, between two visions of reality, one, embodied by Ivan, holding that life is without meaning (if there is no God, all things are permitted—i.e., arbitrary, reality is meaningless), and the other, embodied most fully by Zossima, holding that life is an astonishing gift, who therefore pours his out for the good of others. For those interested, these antithetical visions come in books 5 and 6, respectively, of Brothers.
I enjoyed the book, but overall I think I’d only recommend it for Dostoevsky fanatics.
