Reading Dostoevsky Now, from the Margins

Reading Dostoevsky Now, from the Margins Ani Kokobobo (bio) Against increasing calls to "cancel" Dostoevsky due to the Russian nationalism espoused in his writings, Ani Kokobobo chooses to hold on to a Dostoevsky of the margins, a Dostoevsky who tests us ethically when we rationalize horrible means to justify an imagined greater good. As a scholar and reader of literature, I have never seen books as divorced from the present or from our subjective experiences. Books are personal. The subjective intimacy that emerges out of reading is such that books grow part of who we are. When we reenter the same book, we hark back to earlier selves that preserve aspects of who we were. As a scholar of literature, I inevitably find myself reentering the same literary universes over and over, with visitations from past selves in the margins, bemusing in their enthusiasm, insight, and the occasional pedestrian underlining. However historically removed from the present, literature speaks directly to our present personal and geopolitical realities. As a person who doesn't keep a diary, I find some of my most pointed personal opinions in the margins of books. I see my own past memorialized in those margins, while my realities speak back to the text, confronting the urgency of the past with the sometimes-louder urgency of the present. Click for larger view View full resolution Photo of monument to Russian novelist Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky by abs0lute / Stock. adobe. com For me, the current Russian violence in Ukraine has been howling loudly at the pages and margins of Fyodor Dostoevsky ever since February 24, 2022. Many of his words denounce his other words, in an excruciating cacophony of voices that shows no signs of coming to a reconciliation. Some Dostoevsky passages may seem to enshrine Russian nationalism and "greatness, " End Page 20 furthering the Russian government's pernicious global and political agendas, while others morally shake us to the point of recoiling from everything that's happened and continues to happen in Ukraine. Reading Dostoevsky now, I find myself furious with parts of his writings, processing the world through Dostoevsky and yet also knowing many of his ideas have been made complicit in what is happening. And this, all the while coming into direct confrontation with the me in the margins who read Dostoevsky ten or twenty years ago, the me who became a scholar because of Dostoevsky. Twenty years ago, Dostoevsky was at the center of my own liberal arts journey as a student. I've written primarily about Tolstoy in my scholarly career, but studying Dostoevsky is how I learned to become a scholar in the first place. Dostoevsky helped me be the version of myself that wouldn't be complete without my scholarly identity; he helped nurture that version of me which now sometimes recoils at the cultural baggage embodied in the cult of the "great Russian writer. " If the occasional contradictoriness of my narrative reads like something out of Dostoevsky, that is not entirely accidental, because few writers have the capacity to capture the paradoxical complexity of our readerly reactions and often of our reactions to our very selves. I cling to Dostoevsky for the complexity, the multivalence and multivoicedness, the contradictoriness, the concealment and overexposure, the embodied subjective messiness, the openness to misinterpretation—the many human things that so often resist the consistent clear-mindedness of ideology and political systems of propaganda. Dostoevsky writes as a writer who has long stopped believing in systems, for whom there is no rule of law outside our moral conscience to provide adjudication of our experiences—it's why so much of what he says is open to interpretation, why so much of the experience of reading Dostoevsky is tethered to ourselves reading and making meaning, rather than the author ushering this meaning into completed form. Dostoevsky sees human beings making sense of a flawed world, alone, or simply in tow with one another. He leaves us alone to make sense of his books, and nothing has changed now, except that there are more meanings with which to wrestle. ________ "Dostoevsky's messianic nationalism is the most controversial feature of his intellectual outlook, " writes James Scanlan in. . .