Abstract
This essay explores how Dostoevsky, in the four great novels of his maturity (Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov) and Vasily Grossman, the author of the Tolstoyan, Soviet-era novel Life and Fate, both attempt to “think God” (penser Dieu), as Emmanuel Levinas puts it, on the basis of ethics (à partir de l’éthique), outside of the question of ontology—outside, that is, of the question of God’s existence or non-existence.
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Notes
Complete Letters 3, 248. Translation modified.
Vladimir Korolenko (1853–1921) was a Ukrainian-Russian writer of short stories.
For a discussion of how many of the concerns of epic—or, more precisely, of “higher narrative”—are preserved in the great, nearly contemporaneous eighteenth-century novels Clarissa and The Dream of the Red Chamber (Hongloumeng), see Shankman (2011).
Atterton (2007) sees Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov as exemplifying Levinas’s view of ethical asymmetry, of God without theodicy. For me, however, what is notable about Ivan is the fact that, in spite of the moral outrage he articulates at the level of what Levinas refers to as the “said” (a discourse about rather than addressed to the other), he does not take personal responsibility, and thus exemplify the “saying” (of “Here I am” before the face of the other) until the trial scene when he—having become a kind of holy fool, with “brain fever”—says to the jury at the trial of his brother Dimitri, “Come, take me instead of him!”
Lingis’ translation slightly modified.
For a fine presentation and analysis of the many Kantian “antinomies” of belief in Dostoevsky’s thought and fiction, see Cassedy (2005), Dostoevsky’s Religion, especially Chapter 4 (“Belief is Expressed in Antinomies”).
In a particularly dense but crucial section (no. 14) of his important and difficult essay “God and Philosophy,” Levinas says that illeity is manifested in the way in which “the Infinite, or … God,” from the heart [or from the bosom, or womb: du sein] of its very desirability [i.e. the desirability of God or of the Infinite],” turns me towards “the undesirable proximity of the others” (Levinas 1998, Of God who comes to mind, p. 69; 1982a, De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, pp. 113–114). Levinas associates this “extraordinary turning around” (retournement extra-ordinaire) with illeity. Then comes a sentence that, in 1975 (Levinas did not mention Grossman in print until 1984), anticipates Levinas’s later preoccupation with Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate, which I discuss in the next section of this essay. By means of this “turning around,” Levinas says, “the Desirable escapes Desire.” Or, as Levinas often states this phenomenon (and in fact does so in this very passage): ethics—the call to responsibility for the other—is the non-erotic par excellence. Levinas continues, “The goodness of the Good—of the Good that neither sleeps nor slumbers [the language here is reminiscent of the description of God’s unsleeping moral vigilance in Psalm 121]—inclines the movement it calls forth to turn it away from the Good and orient it toward the other, and only thus toward the Good [italics are mine].” Here Levinas articulates the chief moral insight of Grossman’s great novel, that prefers concrete and senseless acts of human kindness to an adherence to abstract notions of the Good that, for Grossman, have historically resulted in murder and cruelty committed in the name of the perpetrator’s idea of the “Good.” See Ikonnikov’s scribblings, Part Two, Chapter 15 of Life and Fate (Chapter 16 in the Russian text). In the same section of his essay “God and Philosophy,” Levinas goes on to discuss the relation between goodness and il-leity. “Intangible, the Desirable separates itself from the relationship with Desire that it calls forth and, by this separation or holiness, remains a third person: He [Il] at the root of the You [Tu]. He [Il] is Good in this very precise, eminent sense: He [Il] … compels me to goodness [m’astreint à la bonté]” (Levinas 1998a, Of God Who Comes to Mind, p. 69; 1982a De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, p. 114). Levinas is here describing the transcendence of illeity. I am attempting, in this essay, to show how Dostoevsky and Vasily Grossman, in their novels, are charting this same itinerary of an illeity conceived outside of ontology, outside of the question of God’s existence.
Like Levinas’s awakened I, Ivan’s is here being “faithful to an engagement that it never made.” Ivan’s I is being “sobered up from the ecstasy of intentionality.”
As Frank (2002) remarks, “An obvious ‘miscarriage of justice’ (the title of the entire Book 12) has occurred on the legal level, though Dimitry has inwardly accepted the justice of suffering for his parricidal impulses” (Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, p. 698).
See Morgan (2007, Discovering Levinas, p. 189), who refers the reader to Levinas’s essay “Meaning and Sense” in Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, pp. 61 and 64.
Dostoevsky employs this same patronymic, with the same intent, in the scene in which Fyodor bids Ivan farewell, for the last time, as Ivan leaves Fyodor’s house for his journey to Moscow. The old man accompanies his son onto the steps of his house, where Ivan had been staying, and is about to kiss Ivan good-bye when “Ivan Fyodorovich made haste to hold out his hand, obviously avoiding the kiss” (Norton Critical Edition, p. 241). Dostoevsky (2011b) uses the same patronymic, to the same effect, three more times before Ivan sets off in his carriage.
On Levinas and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, which preoccupied Levinas during the last decade and a half of his life, see Morgan (2007, Discovering Levinas, pp. 1–13). Levinas made a number of inspiring comments on Grossman’s novel that are scattered throughout Is It Righteous to Be? On Grossman’s life and work, see Garrard (1996, The Bones of Berdichev).
See Father Patrick Desbois (2008), The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews.
In the phrase пред людьми (literally, “before the people”), the force of the preposition пред/pred, meaning “before” or “in front of,” is “in front of others,” i.e. “before people’s faces.”
The Talmudic passage on which Levinas comments is from the Tractate Yoma, pp. 85a–b.
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