Deniz Utlu on the occasion of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 200th birthday. – Culture

“They haven’t known each other in their entire lives and when they leave the restaurant, they won’t hear from each other for another four decades, but what do they do, what will they talk about, in those fleeting minutes in the restaurant? About world questions, nothing else: from God and immortality. And those who don’t believe in God? Well, they talk about socialism and anarchism, about changing all of humanity to a new order, and that amounts to the same thing, it’s the same questions, just from the other end . “

These thoughts are expressed in Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky’s last novel, “The Karamazov Brothers”, in a farewell scene to his little brother Aljoscha, which is also the brothers’ first meeting. Ivan is about to leave, he would like to go to Europe, where the “dear dead rest”, the whole of Europe is now just a cemetery, even if it is the “very dearest”. Perhaps he is taking this path because the postulate of European enlighteners that one should use one’s own understanding could hardly replace the Christian promise of eternal life. Not even for a young intellectual who is oriented towards European thinking: “I want to live,” says Iwan, “even if it goes against logic.”

More about the person

Deniz Utlu’s most recent novel “Gegen Morgen” was published by Suhrkamp in 2019. In 2021 he was awarded the Alfred Döblin Prize.

In every line of Dostoyevsky, in all novels and stories, there is this thirst for life, the search for a way to live, against the humiliations and impositions of time and mortality. Whether or not there is eternal life is not only a religious question, it also becomes a social and ultimately even a legal one. When the dawn of modernity has irrevocably raised doubts about God’s existence or at least about life after death: Can mortality still be overcome?

Dostoyevsky’s goal: to remove the contradiction between impermanence and eternity

Little Aljoscha is concerned that the brothers only have so little time for their meeting, just a fish soup, that at any moment the getting to know each other, the whole fraternity that has just been discovered, is over. Ivan countered his brother’s fear calmly: “But why are you so worried that I am leaving? God knows how much time we still have until then. A whole eternity of time. An immortality.” The paradox, the temporal contradiction, in this sentence is more than an effect. The authority of an entire literary concern that has deepened over the decades is laid out in him. Namely, the salvation of eternal life into the modern age.

It is this project that later influenced Albert Camus in the development of his concept of the absurd. In his dramatization of Dostoyevsky’s “Evil Spirits” Camus gets to the heart of the matter: “Stavrogin: You believe in eternal life in the other world? – Kirillov: No, but in eternal life in this one.” If in Goethe’s “Faust” it still says: “I will say for the moment: / Stay a while! You are so beautiful / Then you may shackle me. / Then I want to perish!”, It is with Dostoyevsky In some places “Brothers Karamazov” alludes quite directly to “Faust”, the aim of eliminating the contradiction between impermanence and eternity.

From a narrative point of view, he succeeds in doing this in the restaurant scene. In the hour in which Ivan and Aljoscha say goodbye, they tell each other – show themselves – the essentials. So it is Ivan Karamazov who tells his brother the famous story of the Grand Inquisitor here. That story in which Jesus returns among the people and is locked up by the Grand Inquisitor because the freedom that Jesus offers the people is too great a torment for them. The intensity of the exchange is exactly what Camus suggests in the “Myth of Sisyphus” as an absurd way of dealing with a life without meaning: In view of mortality, it is important to intensify the moments through experience.

Dostoyevsky’s phrase for it is “living life”. Eternity in the now means vitality or life only comes to life with earthly eternity. The search for “living life” has not only been inspiring for Camus and, through the resulting responsibility that people have for one another and for their freedom, for Sartre, but also for many other writers. This is also the case for James Baldwin, who in his essay “After the flood, the fire” combines the tendency to power in society with a lack of knowledge about one’s own mortality. “To love life more than its purpose?”, Iwan asks his brother. “Yes, absolutely,” he replies.

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