Brief reflections on The Diary of a Writer by Fyodor Dostoevsky (originally published in Dec 2022)

Having just finished The Diary of a Writer, all 1,000+ pages of it, I am feeling a bit like a bloated boa constrictor trying to digest its last meal. Published irregularly as a literary journal between 1873 and 1881 (the last issue came out a month before Dostoevsky’s death), the one-man operation was mostly high-caliber punditry, though it did contain a smattering of fiction. But if you have to read Dostoevsky right now, go for the punditry. In fiction you see the writer; in his nonfiction, where there are no characters to provide camouflage, you see the man. Nine months into Russia’s “special operation” in Ukraine, one will learn a lot more about Putin’s Russia from The Diary than from Father Zosima or Netochka Nezvanova. Not that Vladimir Putin necessarily draws his weltanschauung from Dostoevsky; I am not sure how the “Russian World” and the homegrown “manifest destiny” advanced by Russian elites square with their predilection for luxury yachts, European real estate, and offshore bank accounts. This is not what Dostoevsky had in mind when he wrote about the renewal that Russian civilization offered its spiritually and morally bankrupt Western counterpart.

But if the power structure of Putin’s regime is not itself idea-driven, whatever its outward manifestations, it can, and does, gin up popular support by appealing to those ideas that Dostoevsky propounded in his day and that still have a lot of currency in Russia’s ideological marketplace. Reading The Diary, one is amazed by how little Russia has changed since the 19th century, in some ways. The Petrine PTSD and the accompanying identity crisis, the chasm between elites and masses, the opposition between Slavophile conservatives and Westernizing liberals — it’s as if Russian history is covered by permafrost. If he were alive now, I doubt Dostoevsky would be especially overawed by President Putin, but I am certain he’d be on board with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. For Dostoevsky, national glory doesn’t stem from material comforts. He scoffs at countries whose only ambition is to raise the living standards of their people; nations with a bourgeois ethos have a short shelf life. Only those nations that carry a missionary torch have a right to longevity. It doesn’t matter if much of the citizenry has no modern plumbing and uses outhouses for its needs; Russian spaceships in outer space trump modern plumbing. That example is mine, not Dostoevsky’s — but that’s the crux of it.

Dostoevsky’s Russia is a country on a mission. That’s bad news for Russia’s neighbors — a country with a great mission may require military persuasion when soft power fails to do the job. Dostoevsky claims that the Russians, the greatest among Slavs, embody the true spirit of Christ. Thanks to their special spiritual qualities, they have a unique task before them: to unite all Slavic peoples, to treat the afflictions of putrefying Western Europe, and to bring the entire human race together under the fraternal banner of the cross. A tall order, but Dostoevsky’s confidence in Russia’s ability to pull it off is religious. Just like his other predictions (a great conflagration in Western Europe at the end of the 19th century, a Russian Constantinople, etc.), this one hasn’t quite panned out. For a man venerated by many as a near-prophet, Dostoevsky’s oracular track record is lackluster, an inevitability when the prophet’s great humanizing mission must be reconciled with an unshakeable belief in the superiority of his own tribe and the concomitant inferiority of the Other. Dostoevsky’s chauvinist reflexes are always easy to trigger. He thinks nothing of dismissing whole nations with a slur or a facile label, as when he calls Germans conceited and self-satisfied. He takes another pundit to task for daring to suggest that the Russians are only primus inter pares in their country and that an ethnic group such as the Tatars can also lay claim to the land; Russia, Dostoevsky says, belongs exclusively to Russians, and the Tatars (and everyone else not of the host population) are aliens on Russian soil, where they merely live on sufferance. This is a problematic argument in an ethnically diverse country as well as in an empire; Russia was both. In the last pages, Dostoevsky praises Russia’s expansion into Asia; in Europe, he writes, we are only poor relations and slaves, but in Asia we will be masters, backed by the victorious sword of the “white tsar.” So much for Christ-like fraternity.

Dostoevsky was an unequivocal supporter of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, and a good deal of The Diary concerns the “Eastern question,” with its oneiric longings for a Russian conquest of Constantinople. Dostoevsky sees Russia’s war as a justified response to Turkish oppression of Slavs in the Ottoman Empire. But there is more to this than tribal sympathy; the war serves an auxiliary purpose. He writes, “We need this war ourselves; we are not going to war only for our ‘Slavic brothers,’ oppressed by the Turks as they are, but also for our own salvation: the war will clear the stultifying air we breathe while we stew in our corrupting powerlessness and spiritual gridlock.” The war is sold as a way to cure Russian society of its spiritual debility. Whatever this is, it is not the embodiment of Christ and His message.

Dostoevsky’s Judeophobia is especially striking. Thick and dyspeptic, it pervades the pages of The Diary — and stains them. Dostoevsky’s Jews are insatiable bloodsuckers forever feasting on the carcass of any country foolish enough to have let them in. In a chapter called (what else?) “The Jewish Question,” Dostoevsky mentions a legend he heard back in his childhood, according to which every Jew awaits a messiah who will gather all members of the tribe at the gates of Jerusalem. As the Jews want to make sure they travel to Jerusalem in style when the hour comes, they flock to trades that allow them to hoard gold in preparation for the big day. This, then, explains the attraction that money-making pursuits hold for the Jews. We are practically one step away from the blood libel here.

Dostoevsky employs the word “zhid” to describe the Jews — “yid” in modern Russian usage, but still a borderline term in 19th-century Russia. Those who were attuned to such nuances used evrei; Dostoevsky did not trouble himself with such nuances, and he was unapologetic about it. As he explains to Jewish readers piqued by his antisemitic outbursts, “zhid” is a description of a certain general idea, a “style of the times,” as Ernst Jünger would have put it. It has more of a spiritual connotation than an ethnic one. This is not just an exercise in disingenuousness, though of course it is also that. Dostoevsky does, after all, use evrei occasionally, usually in reference to those Jews who made it into his good graces. When he writes that it is incumbent on ethnic Russians to settle Crimea lest the “zhidy” descend on it and poison its soil (July/August issue, 1876), there is no ambiguity concerning the intended target, here and elsewhere. (In one English translation of Brothers Karamazov, Mitya tells Alesha, “I won’t keep you in suspense” — an instance of deft linguistic alchemy on the part of Constance Garnett, who must have wanted to water down the sentence to suit Western reading palates. The original text literally reads: “I won’t squeeze the Jew [yid] out of myself.”)

But he is not entirely disingenuous. Dostoevsky’s antisemitism is less personalistic than ontological. Jewishness for him is a state of being — a spirit as much as an ethnic classification. It is a toxic spirit, one of commercialism and usury that brings with it exploitation and parasitism. Hostile to the doctrine of Christ, it destroys those societies it contaminates. Anybody can fall prey to this spirit, Jews and non-Jews alike. This allows Dostoevsky to write of “Jewified” Christians (or Europeans, or Russians). But “Jewified” non-Jews can presumably be “de-Jewified”; the Jews, whose long history of homelessness renders them “status in statu” (a state within a state), are beyond redemption. This kind of antisemitism is arguably more dangerous than the personalistic one, since it turns the Jews into something of an infectious pathogen. Infectious pathogens are managed through eradication, and various 20th-century regimes made attempts to be exemplary managers. The question is not whether Dostoevsky understood the implications of his ideas, but whether he at all cared. He does not disagree with the objection, expressed by his Jewish readers, that most Jews did not live like the Rothschilds, but he finds it inconsequential; if the majority of Jews are mired in abject indigence, surely this is a sign of penance, a karmic form of expiation for their sins. Guilty in wealth and guilty in poverty — a few loyal readers of The Diary excepted, the Jews just can’t win here.

Dostoevsky was a deep thinker, but one with many blind spots. He writes about Russians’ Christ-like nature, but does not explain how that jives with Russia’s suicide epidemics or its gross mistreatment of children, dreadful phenomena that were rampant in the society of his time and that are described at sometimes soporific length in The Diary. Dostoevsky criticizes Western-oriented liberals for abandoning the Russian peasant for the sake of universalist ideas of some abstract humanism, but he does the same thing when he calls on Russians to forgo material comforts in the name of hazy historical grandeur (Russian spaceships over modern plumbing). Commenting on reports of Serbian soldiers deserting the battlefield to return to their villages during the Russo-Turkish War, he suggests they were simply unaccustomed to the idea of responsibility, having been deprived of any autonomy by their (doubtlessly Europeanized and probably “Jewified”) overlords. The possibility that the Serbs returned to their villages because they lacked the pan-Slavic fervor to fight for their Bulgarian brethren simply does not cross his mind.

The Diary has few illuminations, few “eureka” moments, few flashes of lightning that expose the dark folds of the horizon in the thick of the night. There is no feeling of intellectual discovery, of revelatory effervescence, that one experiences with de Tocqueville, Ortega y Gasset, or Berdyaev, to name but a few writers who were past masters at taking the pulse of their times. The text is constricting and almost claustrophobic, less a cerebral maze than a coffin. But it should still be read. Henry Kissinger, a man wise in the ways of the world, once referred to Putin as a character out of Dostoevsky. A nice formulation, but it doesn’t tell us very much. I am not sure if the Russian president resembles any of Dostoevsky’s characters; he is certainly nothing like their author. Dostoevsky has the smell of the Black Hundreds about him; Putin, however odious, does not, and no book by Dostoevsky will tell you who Putin really is. What The Diary of a Writer will do is help you understand why Putin is.