“A full meal with a vitamin pill and extra wheatgerm”: Woody Allen, Dostoevsky, and Existential Morality

Abstract

Woody Allen has paid tribute to Dostoevsky throughout his career, as in his early story, “Notes from the Overfed,” with its subtitle, “After reading Dostoevski and the new ‘Weight Watchers’ magazine on the same plane trip” (Getting Even 62–67). This humorous piece bears little resemblance to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, yet the protagonist struggles over the existence of God and the problem of theodicy, recurring concepts in Dostoevsky’s works. In Husbands and Wives (1992), Gabe (Allen) and Rain (Juliette Lewis) discuss Russian writers. Gabe describes Dostoevsky as a “full meal, with a vitamin pill and extra wheatgerm.” Allen’s indebtedness to Dostoevsky continues in his most recent collection of writings, Mere Anarchy (2007), such as the story “This Nib for Hire” that begins thusly: “It is said Dostoyevsky wrote for money to sponsor his lust for the roulette tables of St. Petersburg” (35). Allen apparently also stays abreast of Dostoevsky scholarship, as he admitted in a 1988 interview that he had been rereading The Idiot after studying George Steiner’s Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (Lax, Conversations 85–86). In interviews, Allen reveals that he is not envious of other writers, except “like everybody else, I would have liked to have written the Russian novels” (Lax, Biography 227). He also confesses:

I don’t think that one can aim more deeply than at the so-called existential themes, the spiritual themes. That’s probably why I’d consider the Russian novelists as greater than other novelists. Even though Flaubert, for example, is a much more skilled writer than, I think, either Dostoevsky or Tolstoy-he was surely more skilled than Dostoevsky, as a technician-his work can never be as great, for me, personally, as the other two. (qtd. in Bjorkman 211)

When asked why someone with such a fondness for the Scandinavian mindset (as revealed in Ibsen, Strindberg, and Bergman), could also feel attached to Russian literature, Allen replies,

I’m true to my Germanic origins…. But I do appreciate the Russian milieu and when I shot Love and Death I found the Russians inter-esting because they were close to the subject I love. At the period in which the film was set, Russian intellectuals knew Romanticism and had an obsession with death, immortality, religion; they discussed Swedenborg the way Scandinavians do. (qtd. in Benayoun 157)