"Dostoevsky and the Gospel of John": translated from the French article by N.A. Struve (1983) with comments

Potemkina Ekaterina Vladimirovna ORCID: 0000-0001-5905-6891 PhD in Pedagogy Teaching Fellow, Department of the Russian language for foreign students of the Faculty of Philology, Faculty of Philology, Lomonosov Moscow State University 119331, Russia, Moscow region, Moscow, Krupskaya str., 11, sq. 117 kpisareva@yandex.ru

Stremoukhova Anastasiya Dmitrievna Teaching Fellow, Institute of Russian Language and Culture MSU 108849, Russia, Moscow region, Moscow, Samuil Marshak str., 23 nastya1272@mail.ru

And Dostoevsky's style? These pleonasm, these hyperbole, this choking speech…But just think about this strange form, and you will discover significance in it: this is what the language of an agitated conscience should be, which thickens, brainwashes, repeats, chokes, and at the same time is still afraid to trust the density of its colors, the power of its image. (I.F. Annensky) Dostoevistics has accumulated a lot of works devoted to the influence of Holy Scripture on the life, creativity and spiritual path of F.M. Dostoevsky (Balashov N.V., Bashkirov D.L., Volgin I.L., Gacheva A.G., Dudkin V.V., Esaulov I.A., Kasatkina T.A., Stepanyan K.A., Tarasov F.B., Tikhomirov B.N., prot.

Khondzinsky P.V., etc.), however, there are not many studies among them that raise the question of the influence of the text of Holy Scripture on the writer's idiosyncrasy ^[14]. For us, the syntax of Dostoevsky is of particular interest, namely, the comparison of the compositional connections of words in his works and the text of the Gospel of John. Following M.M. Bakhtin, we believe that formal means of expressing the category "author-creator" are found, among other things, in word connections (metaphors, metonymy, repetitions, questions, parallelisms, etc.) ^[1]. Following V.V. Vinogradov, we consider syntax in this way as a set of techniques for organizing artistic reality.

  As I.V. Ruzhitsky notes, in addition to hypotaxis, his parataxis is of no less interest for studying Dostoevsky's language, i.e. compositional connections of words. Researchers have long drawn attention to such a feature of Dostoevsky's style as a kind of "forcing" of meaning, "stringing" words close in meaning on each other: bad and unpleasant; a bad, useless performer and a negligent musician; such an evil, such a bad child; bad and empty; what, however, I am bad, hypochondriacal and what a vain one; forgive a stupid, bad, spoiled girl <...>. The analysis of parataxis allows us to enter into the paradigmatics of Dostoevsky, as well as to pay attention to such figures of speech as refinement, gradation, amplification, artistic juxtaposition, zeugma" ^[13]. We will also give an example of using repetition and playing on the ambiguity of words, thanks to which you can more clearly "see" the author's idiostyle:

Now is the judgment of this world; now the prince of this world will be cast out (John 12, 31; cf. 16, 11) <...> If the world hates you, know that it hated me before you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but as you are not of the world, but I have chosen you from the world, therefore the world hates you (John 15, 18-19; cf. 17, 14-16).

Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth then these tears of a baby to "God". (The Brothers Karamazov)

In the drafts we read:

If you were creating the world, would you create a child on a tear in order to make people happy in the final, give them peace and quiet? and to do this, it is absolutely necessary to torture only one tiny creature, that's the one who beat his chest with his fists and cried to God. Tears of a child (I'm only talking about a child). No, if you're honest, is the world worth a fist?

NB. All things and everything in the world are not finished for man, and yet the meaning of all things in the world is in man.

In one of the rough sketches:

... if there are other worlds, and if it is true that man is immortal, that is, he himself is from other worlds, then, therefore, there is everything, and a connection with other worlds. There is also a miracle.

  According to I. Brodsky, it was the Russian language that made Dostoevsky great, and through language, first of all, the reader gets acquainted with the writer. That is why works that examine stylistic features of biblical texts in their subsequent comparison with Dostoevsky's texts are of particular value to us. The subject of this study was one article by the French Russianist, publicist and translator N.A. Struve (1931-2016), still unknown in Russian, entitled "Dostoevsky et l'Evangile selon Saint Jean" ("Dostoevsky and the Gospel of John"). It was published in 1983 in the publishing house "Verdier" in the collection "Dostoevsky. Les Cahiers de la nuit surveill?e" (No. 220) is proof of Dostoevsky's interest in the gospel theme not only in Russian literary criticism, but also abroad. At the same time, there are not so many points of contact between French- and Russian-speaking authors, largely due to the lack of translations, as evidenced by the indirect mention of N. Struve's work in K.A. Stepanyan's article "The Gospel of John and the novel "Idiot"":

  The topic of "Dostoevsky and the Gospel" is huge, it, of course, is not limited to studying the writer's droppings on his personal, "Siberian" copy of the Gospel (and this work has just begun). Each of the four Gospels, Acts, Epistles, Revelation — all deserves a separate study in the light of its influence on Dostoevsky's work. The Fourth Gospel undoubtedly deserves a separate study. Researchers (G.F. Kogan, G. Hyetso, and others) noted Dostoevsky's special commitment to the Gospel of John. This same Gospel is often called the "Russian Gospel", and Orthodoxy is called "John's Christianity". All this makes the topic "Dostoevsky and the Gospel of John" extremely important. In addition to the works of the scientists mentioned above, a very informative article by V.V. Dudkin of the same name should be noted; in turn, Dudkin refers to the work of Nikita Struve in the early 80s, which I have not yet managed to get acquainted with. But all this, of course, is just the beginning of the theme development. Dostoevsky is inexhaustible, and despite thousands of books and studies, a huge unexplored virgin land still stretches before us. This article practically does not overlap with Dudkin's work, I think Nikita Struve also writes about something else ^[17].

  In order to avoid similar conclusions based on guesses in the future, we suggest getting acquainted with the translation of the above-mentioned article by N.A. Struve. The work includes the following compositional parts. In the introduction, the author presents Dostoevsky as an innovator writer and lists the prerequisites for the formation of his worldview and creative method, which are closely related to reading and studying the texts of Holy Scripture. A special place among them, of course, is occupied by the Gospel of John, which, according to the author, is manifested not only at the level of ideas, but also at the level of poetics and text. This provision is further elaborated on the examples of John's techniques and finds parallels in the works ^{[11, 16]}, which is reflected in the commentary to the translation. N.A. Struve pays special attention to the problem of interpretation of the mystery of the Incarnation in Dostoevsky's works, his perception of the key formula for Christianity, the Word flesh being, which is one of the central ones in Dostoevistics. It is also worth noting the mention by the author in connection with the studied problem of the French writer Leon Blois, practically unknown to the Russian-speaking reader, whom N.A. Berdyaev put next to Dostoevsky's surname ^[2], and prot. Tkachev calls "the knight of Christ the poor man" ^[19]. Finally, pointing to the fact that the Gospel of John had an exceptional influence on the novel "The Idiot", N.A. Struve also writes about the novel "The Brothers Karamazov", which is more syncretic from the point of view of poetics, in which other evangelical texts are more reflected.

So, let's turn to the work of N.A. Struve ¹.

 Dostoevsky and the Gospel of John Dostoevsky was the first in the history of literature to inscribe in a secular novel the evangelical figure of Christ, both divine and human.

It was an unprecedented bold writer's move: Dostoevsky managed to make one of the heroes of the novel Christ ², without thereby turning the novel into a religious one. On the contrary, he ceases to follow the classical canons of the Napoleonic, heroic novel and moves into the detective genre. In addition, Dostoevsky takes an equally bold step in religious interpretation: he detaches Christ from church dogmas and rituals in order to bring Him closer to our world, people, sinners and harlots again, without belittling and even more so without humiliating the ideal of the Gospel.

  This double literary and religious innovation became possible due to the fact that Dostoevsky was completely imbued with the mystery of the Revelation of John the Theologian. Dostoevsky discovered Christ in different ways: through his own sufferings and the sufferings of his loved ones, through hard labor, through states before epileptic seizures, but mainly through the Bible. Dostoevsky turned to the Bible from his earliest childhood until his death. Three sections of the great Book of Life especially inspired Dostoevsky and shaped his worldview: the book of Job in the Old Testament on the one hand, the Apocalypse on the other, and the Gospel of John between them.

  Dostoevsky knew the Gospel by heart. He never parted with a copy of the New Testament in Russian, which Natalia Fonvizina gave him when he was sent to a hard labor prison. For Dostoevsky, ignorance of the gospel texts was a distinctive feature of the new pro-Western elite, which had lost touch with its people. ³ In the drafts of the Brothers Karamazov, he notes: "It is very important: the landowner (Fyodor Karamazov) quotes the Gospel with gross errors. Even the scientist (his son Ivan) is wrong! No one knows the gospel..." [Dostoevsky 1976b. p. 206]. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov casually flips through the Gospel in search of a narrative about the resurrection of Lazarus, not knowing that St. Nicholas does not have it. John. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan makes a deep mistake by distorting the liturgical verse, which, in his opinion, was taken from the Gospel, whereas in fact it is taken from the Psalter, thereby showing his superficial knowledge of both sacred texts and worship. Dostoevsky's great novels abound with quotations from the Gospel. But if Elder Zosima recommends that novice Christians read the parables from the Gospel of Luke ⁴, then the novels themselves and even their structure are inextricably linked with the Gospel of John.

  John's influence manifests itself on three levels: at the level of ideas (an obvious borrowing of his great thoughts); at the level of poetics (presentation of these ideas in the form of a novel)⁵ and, finally, at the level of text (direct inclusion of two long passages from the Gospel of John).

  From the beginning of the Gospel of John, the most beautiful of Christian texts, where beauty, according to Louis Bouillet's formula, is nothing but "the splendor of truth" [Bouillet 1955. p. 38], Dostoevsky extracted (in Church Slavonic translation) three words in which the whole riddle and the whole source of controversy in Christianity are concentrated: The word flesh was (John 1:14).

  Of course, all four Gospels recognize the divine nature of Jesus Christ. Moreover, they were written precisely to confirm this divinity. However, each evangelist has his own dominant point of view, his own special view of Jesus and his mission. For St. John Jesus is the Word made flesh, who came to give life to the world. The mystery of God's Incarnation runs like a red thread through all his testimony. In the drafts of The Demons, Dostoevsky returns several times to this key formula, in which, in his words, "the source of life, and salvation from despair of all people, and the condition, sine qua non, and the pledge for the existence of the whole world."⁶ Dostoevsky further adds: "Many people think that it is enough to believe in the morality of Christ to be a Christian. It is not the morality of Christ, not the teaching of Christ that will save the world, but precisely the belief that the word is flesh. This faith is not just a mental recognition of the superiority of his teaching, but an immediate attraction. It is necessary to believe that this is the ultimate ideal of man, the whole incarnate word, God incarnate" ^[6].

  It's hard to be more precise. Pierre Pascal, undoubtedly, did not know about this work when he wrote in his work "Dostoevsky before God" that Dostoevsky's admiration, even worship of Christ did not lead to the writer's recognition of his divinity ^[12].

  On the contrary, according to Dostoevsky, Christ can be truly worshipped only if he is God. And in a way, Dostoevsky's metaphysical plan is aimed at combating the downplaying of the humanism of Christianity. In the West, I found such an interest in the fact of God Incarnation only in Leon Blois. In a remarkable and unfairly little-known book, The Soul of Napoleon, he writes: "This Embodiment is not only a mystery, as it is considered, but also the center of all mysteries in general." It is curious that Blois, who undoubtedly has not read Dostoevsky (if he had read him, he would not have been able to understand), sheds new light on the mystical meaning of the earth, which we find in the author of the Brothers Karamazov: "It is said that the Son of God ? His Word ? 'became flesh', and this is equivalent to the fact that He became the earth, since man in the flesh was created from the dust of the earth. But God, having become human, inevitably acted according to his divine nature, that is, he remained the absolute truth, and thereby became a Man more than all other people created from dust, He himself became the Earth in the most mystical and profound sense of the word" ^[3]. Thus, it turns out that the veneration of the Earth by Dostoevsky is not a concession to pagan or naturalistic romanticism, but rather a material, cosmic expansion of faith in the Incarnation of God. ⁷

  Sv. John reveals to us another important point, namely, the source of contradictions generated by the Incarnation of God. The word, through which "all things began to be" (Jn 1:3), humbly turned into flesh, became at the same time an object of glory and dishonor (after all, the Jews did not want to have a Messiah who was not endowed with power), at the same time limited by the limits of the visible image and able to triumph over him, which, however, only a believer can see. That is why "the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not embraced it" (Jn 1:5).

  The "Rembrandt" light in Dostoevsky's novels is directly inspired by the prologue of the Gospel of John: in "Crime and Punishment" it is reduced to a single point (a fallen woman reading the Gospel to a criminal); in "Idiot" the light shines, but nevertheless is surrounded by darkness; in "Demons" it gradually fades until it does not disappear at all, remaining visible only conditionally; finally, in the final work "The Brothers Karamazov", the light is distributed most evenly. ⁸

  In fact, this is all the poetics of tension (which Efim Etkind points out), dating back to the Gospel of John: tension in the process of the struggle of light and darkness, tension between the two categories of creation, human and divine, in which all the characters move, temporary tension, finally. At St. John time is never linear, it is never purely eventful. It, like Dostoevsky's, is extremely concentrated and symbolically expressed, because, on the one hand, it is imbued with eternity, and on the other hand, it goes to a catastrophic end, predetermined and yet voluntary, inevitable, but repeatedly postponed. Thus, after the prologue, which takes place outside of time, the first chapter (and the beginning of the second) of the Gospel of John (in which there are only twenty chapters) covers one week, which is described almost day after day. Similarly, from the sixth chapter to the end, the Gospel of John presents the last week of Jesus' life, which the evangelist describes as carefully as the first.

  The conflict in the Gospel of John arises from the very beginning: Jesus expels from the Temple the traffickers of animals intended for sacrifice, and announces, speaking about the destruction of the Temple, about his future sufferings. This scandal looms over Christ with the threat of death, which will increase (chapter V, Chapter VII, Chapter X: stoning attempt), but which will be postponed, because in order to fully fulfill his mission, Christ chooses his moment, his kairos ⁹: "My time has not yet come ...".

  This temporal structure, this predicted but delayed catastrophe, we find almost in its purest form in The Idiot, because this novel is like a long continuous reading of the Gospel, a kind of "romantic passion" according to John ¹⁰). The same concentration of time as in the Gospel (only one day for the first part), the same repeated announcements of impending, but delayed catastrophe. This catastrophe will first affect Nastasia Filippovna Barashkova, the "immortal sheep" according to her first and last name, then Prince Myshkin, whom one of the main characters calls a "sheep"¹¹. Prince Myshkin is a symbolic, romantic and, of course, a distant copy of Christ, and he really adheres to John's approach: he is a messenger who came from outside, an object of indignation for people who, admiring him, at the same time grumble at him. In his first monologues, the prince adopts the stylistic features of John's writings, including antithetical and progressive parallelism. ¹² Here are some examples: "Now I'm going to people; I may not know anything, but a new life has come." "I know very well that it's a shame to talk about my feelings to everyone, but I'm talking to you, and I'm not ashamed with you..."¹³.

  In addition to the writing style, the structure of the novel itself reflects the structure of the Gospel. Myshkin refers not only to the history of events (that is, to the plot of the novel), but also to a timeless symbol. He moves easily in both categories of creation, in real places and in metaphysical space. Example: the meeting of the Prince and Nastasia Filippovna takes place both in Gani's apartment, in November of that year, and outside the spatial and temporal boundaries. This is a real meeting, but also a myth about the timelessness of love and, moreover, a symbol of the Savior who comes to recognize and return the fallen Creation to its original state. Like the Gospel of John, Dostoevsky's novel presents us with "facts and truths that are not opposed, but are inextricably connected, connected so perfectly that to neglect facts and look only at truths means to blur them, and to discard truths in order to adhere only to facts means to condemn yourself to never to achieve these truths only if they are fundamentally impoverished, disfigured and unrecognizable" ^[4].

  Two episodes of reading the Gospel of John in "Crime and Punishment" and in "The Brothers Karamazov" are written using John's technique: a real fact is given, inextricably linked with the truth. Reading the narrative of Lazarus' resurrection, it is impossible to separate fact from its truth. The fact is the return to life of a man who has been dead for four days and has already stank. Truth is the testimony that Christ gives to himself: "I am the resurrection..." (Jn 11:25), and this is Martha's confession of faith even before her brother was resurrected: "I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God" (Jn 11:27). For Raskolnikov, spiritual and physical resurrection must occur through the act of confessing faith in Christ-God, a confession that is rejected at the very end of the novel and beyond the epilogue.

  The reading of the passage about Cana of Galilee is part of the ritual reading that is held for deceased clergy. In the novel The Brothers Karamazov, this happens near the body of the deceased Zosima (as in Lazarus). Its central importance is emphasized by the symbolism of numbers: it appears in the seventh book of the third part...

  In the passage about Lazarus there was a victory of life over death, a symbol and expectation of the transformation of everything created. The transformation of water into wine in the passage about Cana is a symbol of the ontological transition from earthly life to higher life. Raskolnikov was randomly longing for the promise of the Savior, but could not believe. Alyosha had already found God, but his faith was shaken, because the body of the elder, who died at the peak of holiness, emitted a corrupting spirit to the chagrin of his disciples. However, the meaning and result of the appearance of two passages in Dostoevsky's text is the same: the transition from death to life is prepared for Raskolnikov in the future, and Alyosha is experienced in the present.

  The examples given, in my opinion, are enough to show the special role of the Gospel of John in Dostoevsky's Christological work, but its significance is not exceptional. In his sermon to the youths, elder Zosima, as we know, instructs to read parables from the Gospel of Luke. One of them, the parable of pigs possessed by demons, is the epigraph and the central idea of "Demons". The bookseller, who revealed the gospel truth to a lost soul, has the symbolic name of Sophia (Wisdom) and the no less symbolic patronymic Matveevna (daughter of Matthew)¹⁴.

  In The Brothers Karamazov, and especially in The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, Dostoevsky resorts to St. Matthew and St. Mark to take the last step. Before that, in his novels, Christ appeared indirectly: through reading the Gospel, through symbolic characters, through inversion. All these techniques were preserved in The Brothers Karamazov (reading the passage about the Wedding Feast in Cana, the dialogues of Zosima and Alyosha, the "Revolt" of Ivan), but here for the first time Dostoevsky dared to portray the living Christ, again present among people, healing the sick, resurrecting the dead. This description of Christ immersed in the crowd is clearly inspired by the "folk" Gospels of Matthew and Mark.

  Thus, if "The Idiot" is a novel by St. John, if the "Demons" reveal the parable according to St. The novel "The Brothers Karamazov" is a work of synthesis: full of parables, as in St. Luke, visual, picturesque and lively, as in St. Matthew, and mysterious and mystical, as in St. Luke. John.