The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (123 page)

So Dostoyevsky transforms the bloodless abstractions of theology into human hopes and conflicts. The powerful “negations of God … in the Grand Inquisitor” showed that Dostoyevsky himself had faced the question. “Even in Europe there have never been atheistic expressions of such power. Consequently, I do not believe in Christ and His confession as a child, but my hosanna has come through a great
furnace of doubt
.”

Dostoyevsky did not long outlive the spectacular success of his
Brothers Karamazov
. When it first appeared in book form in January 1881 it sold fifteen hundred copies in a few days. But by the end of that month he suffered fatal hemorrhages of the lungs complicated by an attack of epilepsy. The attacks had occurred from childhood but became acute only after Dostoyevsky was snatched from execution to his years in Siberian hard labor. Thereafter they had occurred about once a month, sometimes twice a week. The onset of an attack, Dostoyevsky himself recounted, was a sense of rapture and resurrection, of being born again. But the terrible aftermath brought a “feeling of being a criminal,” guilty of some horrible unknown crime. All this, says Thomas Mann, we can see in the “profound, criminal, saintly face of Dostoyevsky.” So Mann was “filled with awe, with a profound, mystic silence-enjoining awe, in the presence of the religious greatness of the damned, in the presence of genius of disease and the disease of genius, of the type of the afflicted and the possessed, in whom saint and criminal are one.”

In a vast public funeral Dostoyevsky was praised as the irreplaceable champion of Holy Russia. Turgenev, with a wit Dostoyevsky lacked, noted that the Russian bishops there were really celebrating the Russian Marquis de Sade. It was said that students had to be prevented from marching behind the coffin with fetters like those Dostoyevsky had worn for four years in Siberia to commemorate the death of the man who had once loved freedom and been punished for it.

The cult of Dostoyevsky, like that of Wagner, attests to the victory of art over ideas. Both had their own curious brands of chauvinism and expounded ideas unpopular in the free West, yet both attained there a cosmopolitan fame and influence. Thus Dostoyevsky proved the ineffectiveness of the “lackeys of thought” against the sagas of the soul. Although he aimed to reach everybody, he has remained, as his biographer Avrahm Yarmolinsky observes, largely “a writer’s writer,” finding his most enthusiastic response among fellow literati. His ever-widening audience can be explained,
too, by what other writers were not saying. And by the vivid passion and suffering of his characters.

Western readers, delighted by the commemorative involutions of Proust and the filigreed everyday trivia of Joyce, would be challenged by the mysteries of Dostoyevsky’s men and women in search of God. His characters discovered their uniqueness in their soul, in their own peculiar circumstances—lover, priest, parricide, reformer, revolutionary—and in the infinite variety of choices of good and evil.

Dostoyevsky’s fanatic Slavomania reminded the West that there might be dimensions of life not seen in the clear stream of consciousness or in the murky depths of the unconscious. So he provided a foil for the Western self. As a chauvinist Russian he had declared war on the West, whose symbols were science, reason, and materialism. He opposed the perversion of Christianity into an authoritarian Catholic Church, the perversion of selflessness into the enforced sharing of socialism, and the multiplying of desires by industrial capitalism.

While Marxist scriptures exhorted workingmen of the world to “lose their chains,” Dostoyevsky dramatized the virtue of unmerited suffering. When
The Brothers Karamazov
ends with Dmitri being found guilty of a crime he did not commit, he protests his innocence. But he adds, “I accept the torture of accusation, and my public shame. I want to suffer and by suffering I shall purify myself.” Nurturing his punishment, Dmitri refuses escape to America. “I hate that America already! And though they may be wonderful at machinery, everyone of them, damn them, they are not of my soul. I love Russia, Alyosha, I love the Russian God, though I am a scoundrel myself. I shall choke there!” While Dostoyevsky never sold suffering to the West, he gave the experience of it in his novels an outlandish charm. So he lends an exotic cosmic dimension to our struggles within ourselves.

At his last public appearance, at the Pushkin Festival in Moscow on June 8, 1880, he offered the future mission of Russia. If Russia would be backward and behind the West in wealth, this only saved her from materialist distraction, preparing for her world mission to unify mankind under Christ. To which his enthusiasts in the audience exclaimed “Saint!” “Prophet!” While some comrades after the Russian Revolution of 1917 also hailed him as a prophet, when Lenin was asked what he thought of Dostoyevsky he is reported to have said, “I have no time for such trash!”

W
HEN
Dante thanked Brunetto Latini for teaching him “how man becomes eternal” through the written word, he was speaking for the Western tradition. The writer aimed to create something with an independent life outside himself. But the writer who chronicled a world inside himself could well believe that world was bounded by his life. Franz Kafka (1883–1924) repeatedly said, “I consist of literature, and am unable to be anything else.” When he died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-one in a sanatorium outside Vienna on June 3, 1924, he left notes to his friend Max Brod instructing him to destroy all his unpublished manuscripts and not to republish any of his works already printed. By then Kafka had published only fragments from his prodigious imagination.

If Brod had obeyed his friend’s instructions, Kafka would hardly be known to the world of letters. But Kafka was in character when he left his instructions to the one person in the world who had his complete confidence and who therefore could be trusted (as he had assured Kafka in advance) not to carry out these instructions. So Kafka’s writings survive in an aura of uncertainty whether he even intended them to reach us. Kafka’s fame in Western letters is itself a tease, fruit of the loyal disobedience of his closest friend.

Kafka created a whole new world of rich ambivalence and tantalizing ambiguities. Even as a young man of twenty-one, before he had begun serious writing, he seemed clear enough on the kind of books that should be written.

Within himself Kafka would create adventures as engrossing as Gargantua’s Parisian frolics or Don Quixote’s knightly sallies. In his short, sedentary, tuberculosis-ridden life, he lived centuries “in my own interior.”

Born in Prague to a prosperous Jewish family in 1883, he went there to school and university. He made his living in Prague and took only brief summer trips to the countryside, to Paris, Switzerland, and Berlin, and a week’s pilgrimage with Brod to Goethe’s Weimar. His last eight years were spent in hospitals and sanatoriums.

Kafka’s life was surrounded by inhibitions, of which his father, Hermann, became the unpleasant symbol. From the countryside, Hermann Kafka had come to Prague, married the daughter of a wealthy brewery owner, and prospered as a merchant in fancy goods. As he climbed the social ladder in the status-conscious Jewish community, he remained acutely conscious of status. Kafka recorded later in his undelivered “Letter to His Father” the sources of his fear. As a child one night he kept whimpering for water, and would not stop after repeated warnings. His father came into the bedroom, snatched him up, carried him out to the balcony in his nightgown, and locked the door. “I subsequently became a rather obedient child, but I suffered inner damage as a result.… I kept being haunted by fantasies of this giant of a man, my father, the ultimate judge, coming to get me in the middle of the night, and for almost no reason at all dragging me out of bed onto the balcony—in other words, that as far as he was concerned, I was an absolute Nothing.” His acquiescent mother could not repair the damage, nor was she a bulwark against Hermann’s uncomprehending hostility to Franz’s literary life.

Kafka’s obsession with the father-son relationship even led him once to give Hermann a copy of Benjamin Franklin’s
Autobiography
. Kafka hoped Franklin’s description of his pleasant relationship with his own father, in a memoir written for his son, would awaken Hermann to their problem. But Hermann sarcastically dismissed the gift as a feeble defense of Kafka’s vegetarianism.

The very language that Franz spoke and in which he would write was an instrument of oppression. From Vienna, German-speaking emperors of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, seeing the Czech language as a vehicle of disloyalty, separation, and disorder, required the education of the literate classes in German. In Franz’s youth the bitter language question was agitated with violence. Hermann Kafka himself was at home in the Czech
language, which helped his business in Czech-speaking Prague. But Franz went to German-speaking schools, received his law degree from the German university in Prague, and wrote in German. Still, he sympathized with the Czech independence movement, and occasionally attended Czech mass meetings and debates.

The grand constricting and nourishing fact of Franz’s life was his Jewishness. The repression of Jews, a leitmotif of all European history, had touched Kafka’s own family. Franz’s grandfather, Jakob Kafka, born in a one-room shack in a Czech village in 1814, was the second of nine children. “A surly giant of a man,” reputed to be able to lift a bag of potatoes with his teeth, he made his living as a kosher butcher. Under the Austro-Hungarian laws designed to curb the Jewish population, only the eldest son in any Jewish family was allowed a marriage license. And since Jakob had a stepbrother elder by a year, he could not marry or have legitimate children. After the Revolution of 1848 the Hapsburg monarchs, desperate for an antidote to the rising demands of contending nationalities, sought to make allies of the Jewish peddlers and moneylenders. They granted full citizenship to all the Jews in the empire, which included the right to settle in cities, to enter previously closed trades and professions, and to marry at will. The thirty-four-year-old Jakob could finally get married, which he promptly did, to the daughter of his next-door neighbor.

Franz’s father, Hermann, was of the first generation of “liberated” Jews. Along with many others, Franz’s family seized the opportunity to become “non-Jewish Jews—Austrian citizens of the Mosaic faith.” “At bottom, your guiding faith in life,” Franz wrote in his “Letter to His Father,” “consisted of the belief that the opinions of a certain Jewish social class were unassailably correct; since these opinions were also part and parcel of your own personality, you actually believed in yourself. Even this still contained enough Judaism, but not enough to pass on to the child; it dribbled away in the process. Part of the problem was the impossibility of passing on the memories of one’s youth, the other was the fear you inspired.” Franz’s “religion” remained uncertain and elusive, but his Jewish identity was never in doubt. Yet his boredom in the synagogue, the rowdiness of the Passover Seder, the charade of the bar mitzvah, led him to think that “getting rid of the faith” might be “the most reverential of acts.” Now that the Jews were no longer living in their ghetto, his Jewishness separated him by an invisible wall.

This Jewish sense of being different was all the more tantalizing because it was not closely tied to dogma or ritual but consisted only of being thought of by the world and oneself as indelibly different. Its residue, a sense of “otherness,” of living in a larger community but not being wholly part of it and not quite understanding why not, would qualify Kafka to be the
prophet and the acknowledged spokesman of modern man’s sense of “alienation.” The story of Kafka’s life is how these and other forces pushed him back into himself, and made him a pioneer into the wilderness that he would explore and re-create in words.

Kafka’s qualifications to express twentieth-century man’s bewilderment were reinforced by the bureaucratic routine of his own employment and his observation of the industrial technology that he could only partly comprehend and could not control. No dweller on any Left Bank, he earned his living in the mainstream of the new industrial bureaucracy. After receiving his law degree at the university, and serving the legal internship for the civil service, he secured through his uncle’s influence a job in the Prague branch of an Italian insurance company. Oppressed by the meager pay for nine hours a day for six days a week, he dreamed “of someday sitting in chairs in faraway countries, looking out of the office windows at fields of sugar cane or Mohammedan cemeteries.”

Within a year, in 1908, the father of a schoolmate helped him move to a position at the Workers Insurance Company for the kingdom of Bohemia. This company, half private, half public, had been set up in Prague following Bismarck’s example, to give Czech workers their rights to accident insurance against injuries on the job. Luckily this was a “single shift” job from 8:00
A.M
. to 2:00
P.M
. six days a week, and would be Kafka’s only paid position for the rest of his life. Workmen were not getting their rights, and “the company seemed little more than a dead body, whose sole sign of life was its growing deficit.” The situation soon changed with a new director who was willing to resist the employers’ violent protests. In the insurance company, according to his superiors, the twenty-five-year-old Kafka showed “superb administrative talent” by filing papers for injured workers, drafting policy statements on compulsory insurance, and writing brochures to inform workers of their rights.