while reading bhaktin book dostoviesky !!!!!!!!! This plurality of equally authoritative ideological positions and an
extreme heterogeneity of material has also been singled out as a
primary characteristic of Dostoevsky's work by Otto Kaus, * in his
book Dostojewski und sein Schicksal. No author, according to Kaus,
concentrated in himself so many utterly contradictory and mutually
exclusive concepts, judgments, and evaluations as did Dostoevskybut
most astonishing is the fact that Dostoevsky's works justify as it
were all these contradictory points of view: every one of them really
does find support for itself in Dostoevsky's novels.
Here is how Kaus characterizes this extraordinary multi-sided and
multi-leveled quality of Dostoevsky:
Dostoevsky is like a host who gets on marvelously with the most motley guests,
who is able to command the attention of the most ill-assorted company and can
hold all in an equal state of suspense. An old-fashioned realist can with full justification
admire the descriptions of forced labor, of the streets and squares of
Petersburg, of the arbitrary will of the autocracy; but a mystic can with no less
justification be enthusiastic about coming into contact with Alyosha, with Prince
Myshkin, with Ivan Karamazov who is visited by the devil. Utopians of all persuasions
will take delight in the dreams of the "Ridiculous Man," or the dreams
of Versilov or Stavrogin, and religious people can fortify their spirit by that
struggle for God waged in these novels by saints and sinners alike. Health and
strength, radi,:al pessimism and an ardent faith in redemption, a thirst for life
and a longing for death- here all these things wage a struggle that is never to be
resolved. Violence and goodness, proud arrogance and sacrificial humility-all
the immense fullness of life is embodied in the most vivid form in every particle
of his work. Even being as strict and as critically conscientious as possible, each
reader can interpret Dostoevsky's ultimate word in his own way. Dostoevsky is
many-sided and unpredictable in all the movements of his artistic thought; his
works are saturated with forces and intentions which seem to be separated from
one another by insurmountable..chasms.Z6
How does Kaus explain this peculiar characteristic of Dostoevsky?
Kaus claims that Dostoevsky's world is the purest and most authentic
expression of the spirit of capitalism. At some earlier time
those worlds, those planes-social, cultural, and ideological-which
collide in Dostoevsky's work were each self-sufficient, organically
sealed, and stable; each made sense internally as an isolated unit.
There was no real-life, material plane of essential contact or interpenetration
with one another. Capitalism destroyed the isolation of
these worlds, broke down the seclusion and inner ideological selfsufficiency
of these social spheres. In its tendency to level everything,
to leave intact no divisions except the division between proletariat
and capitalist, capitalism jolted these worlds and wove them into its
own contradictory evolving unity. These worlds had not yet lost their
own individual profile, worked out over centuries, but they had
ceased to be self-sufficient. Their blind co-existence and their peaceful
and trusting ideological ignorance of one another came to an end;
their mutual contradictoriness and at the same time their interconnectedness
was revealed with the utmost clarity. Every atom of life
trembled with this contradictory unity of the capitalist world and
capitalist consciousness, permitting nothing to rest easily in isolation,
but at the same time resolving nothing. The spirit of this world-inthe-
state-of-becoming found its fullest expression in the works of
Dostoevsky. "Dostoevsky's powerful influence in our time, and all
that is unclear and undefined in this influence, finds its explanation
and sole justification in the fundamental trait of his nature: Dostoevsky
is the most decisive, consistent, and implacable singer of capitalist
man. His art is not the funeral dirge but the cradle song of our contemporary
world, a world born out of the fiery breath of capitalism...............