Russian Studies in Literature

ISSN: 1061-1975 (Print) 1944-7167 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/mrsl20

Dostoevsky and Shakespeare

Characters and Authors in "Great Time"

Karen Stepanian

To cite this article: Karen Stepanian (2014) Dostoevsky and Shakespeare, Russian Studies in
Literature, 50:3, 53-77, DOI: 10.2753/RSL1061-1975500303

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.2753/RSL1061-1975500303

Published online: 07 Dec 2014.

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Russian Studies in Literature, vol. 50, no. 3, Summer 2014, pp. 53–77.
© 2014 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved. Permissions: www.copyright.com
ISSN 1061–1975 (print)/ISSN 1944–7167 (online)
DOI: 10.2753/RSL1061-1975500303

Karen Stepanian

Dostoevsky and Shakespeare

Characters and Authors in “Great Time”

Stepanian investigates and evaluates a persistent Hamletian subtext in

the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, including Crime and Punishment, The
Idiot, Demons, and The Adolescent.
In the drafts of Demons [Besy] Shakespeare is spoken of as “a prophet
sent by God to proclaim to us the mystery of man, of the hum[an] soul.”
Immediately prior to this, Dostoevsky had formulated one of the prime
principles of the creative method:
All of reality is not exhausted in what is here and now, for in enormous
part reality is subsumed in the here and now in the guise of the yet-latent
and unspoken future Word. Once in a rare while there appear prophets
who happen upon and utter that integral word.
And then comes the line about Shakespeare as one of those prophets
(11:237).1
Dostoevsky had begun reading Shakespeare in his younger days, when
the image of Hamlet had made an especially marked impression on him:
“How faint-hearted is man! Hamlet! Hamlet! When I remember those tem-
pestuous, savage speeches that resound with the groans of a torpid world,
then neither sorrow nor murmurous discontent nor reproach clenches my
breast. . . . The soul is so crushed by grief that one fears to understand it,
lest one tear oneself apart” (letter from the sixteen-year-old Dostoevsky

English translation © 2014 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text © 2013 “Voprosy
literatury.” “Dostoevskii i Shekspir: geroi i avtory v ‘bol’shom vremeni,’” Voprosy
literatury, 2013, no. 2, pp. 154–83. Translated by Liv Bliss.

53
54 russian studies in literature

to his brother Mikhail dated August 9, 1838—28, I:50). Considering the

repeated references to Hamlet in The Brothers Karamazov [Brat’ia Kara-
mazovy] and in the preparatory materials (below, PM) for his Writer’s
Diary [Dnevnik pisatelia] (including in one of the last articles he wrote
for it, which was the response to A.D. Gradovskii in chapter 3 of the
entry for August 1880), it may be said that the image of the Prince of
Denmark accompanied Dostoevsky on his entire spiritual journey. And
this is one reason for my having given so much attention to that particular
tragedy in this article.
Dostoevsky was reading Shakespeare—and this is very important—
during the decisive period in his life that was spent in the Peter and Paul
Fortress waiting for the court to hand down a verdict in the Petrashevsky
Affair. Dostoevsky’s brother sent books to him in prison, to which he
replied, “I thank you especially for the Shakespeare” (28, I:161).
But the interesting thing is this: Dostoevsky’s writings, even his pre-
paratory materials and drafts, in the first half of his life contain virtually
no mention of Shakespeare or references to his works or to images he
created (“A Little Hero” [Malen’kii geroi], which he wrote in prison, does
allude to two of Shakespeare’s comic characters), and when Shakespeare
does feature, it is in a humorous vein: “If you want to know how I have
suffered, ask Shakespeare: in his Hamlet, he will tell you about the state
of my soul,” exclaims Foma Opiskin [in Stepanchikovo—Trans.].
Somewhat of an exception to this is the tragicomic shriek of Makar
Devushkin [in Poor Folk—Trans.], who is in a snit at literature in general:
“And Shakespeare’s balderdash too, it’s all arrant balderdash, and it’s all
made just as a lampoon!”
It was not until Dostoevsky began work on Crime and Punishment
[Prestuplenie i nakazanie], and on from there to the end of his life,
that the images of Shakespeare and of Cervantes,2 Shakespeare’s great
contemporary and another prophet of human fates, became for him one
of the principal “constituents” of the knowledge achieved by mankind,
whose aid he invoked in his oeuvre.
This I shall analyze a little later, but to begin I shall discuss why, in
my view, it had to be this way and no other. In 1876, Dostoevsky wrote
this in his PM for A Writer’s Diary:
Ancient tragedy is an act of worship but Shakespeare is despair. What
is more despairing than Don Quixote? Desdemona’s beauty is only
offered as a sacrifice. . . . A Shakespeare of our times would also have
 summer 2014  55

introduced despair. But in Shakespeare’s times, faith was still strong.

Yet now everyone really wants happiness. . . . Society does not want
God, because God contradicts science. But from Literature they demand
the last word, a word to the plus side, which is happiness. They demand
the portrayal of people who are happy and contented in the truth and are
lovely without God and in the name of science, and of conditions in which
all of this can be, that is, they demand positive portrayals.
And a little below that:
Shakespeare is the poet of despair. . . . Shakespeare was still with Christ—
what was then permitted is now impermissible and has become the litera-
ture of despair. Perturbing questions . . . Hamlet. Don Quixote. Accursed
questions. . . . They do no know what is the truth and what is not.3
These notes, although extraordinarily and densely meaningful, may
potentially be compressed into the following understanding: Shakespeare
and Cervantes posed the most profound questions of human existence,
which, by their irresolubility, are apt to engender despair. But in their
time, faith was still strong and people were capable of sensing Christ’s
presence—the living ideal, so close—and they were therefore still able
to resolve the “accursed questions.” But things have changed. For that
reason it is so important for literature to answer the question of “what is
the truth and what is not”; for that reason, as Dostoevsky says in the same
passage, “the literature of beauty is the only salvation”—meaning here
the kind of beauty that is capable of transforming man, not the beauty
that is merely offered as a “sacrifice.”
But was Dostoevsky himself able to avoid despair and that sense of
irresolubility? Of course not: if he had, he would not have been able to
write about it as startlingly as he did. As has been correctly observed:
“This must, needless to say, not be understood in the primitive sense, as
if Dostoevsky had written a ‘Shakespeare of Our Times,’ all the while
implying himself. There is nevertheless no reason to question that, while
wracking himself with those tormenting doubts, he was seeking his way,
was striving to understand how to overcome despair.”4
As I see it Dostoevsky’s worldview crisis, which began in St. Petersburg
in his youth, under the influence of [Vissarion] Belinsky and his circle, did
not end immediately after his term at hard labor but continued all the way
to 1864. Having experienced and found meaning in two terrible depar-
tures from this life, with the death of his wife and his beloved brother,
and having gone through his own encounter with “the angel of death”
56 russian studies in literature

(Lev Shestov),5 when writing Notes from the Underground [Zapiski iz

podpol’ia], he gained the spiritual foundation that allowed him to set
about creating his great novels and answering the despair-inducing ques-
tions posed by his predecessors.
Probably the first to compare Raskolnikov with Macbeth was Eugène-
Melchior de Vogüé, with numerous other authors following suit (the last
substantive comparative analysis of those two universal images was, to
my knowledge, made by Andrei Nikolaevich Gorbunov6), but Raskol-
nikov and Hamlet have hardly ever been compared.7 This is apparently
based on the received notion of Hamlet as indecisive, full of doubt, forced
against his will to do evil, which is, in this case, necessary for good to
triumph. But the one important circumstance forgotten in all of this is
that Hamlet is, like Raskolnikov, convinced from the very outset that the
task imposed on him is no more and no less than to restore justice in the
world. As he says, “The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, / That ever
I was born to set it right!”
Although Hamlet is resentful, the challenge issued by his father’s
shade corresponds with his preexisting inner conviction that he is the
one charged with the mission of “setting the time right” (“My fate cries
out”). But is the Ghost, like Ivan Karamazov’s Devil, actually a projection
of his own spirit? Not coincidentally, even prior to the ghost’s appear-
ance, Hamlet is acknowledging that “methinks I see my father . . . In
my mind’s eye,”8 and, also not coincidentally, the Ghost, when it does
appear, elicits the same feelings in Hamlet as the Devil does in Ivan;
both are stunned by the visual manifestation of something that had been
inwardly expected, after which desire dissociates itself from them with
assistance from a variety of affronts.
A paternal image, as we recall, also appears to Raskolnikov (in the
dream—not in the recollection, as the reading often goes—of the beaten
horse), but this father is powerless to convince Raskolnikov that making
life right according to his lights is “none of our business.” Raskolnikov
believes that he has indeed been called to break “the law of our fathers.”
Once a person has appointed himself judge and transformer of the world
(and thereby enters into the service of evil), however, he promptly feels
the consequences: the fearsome solitude, the resentment, the ever more
slavish predetermination of one’s own actions.9
Both Raskolnikov and Hamlet hate the entire world around them
(“How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of
this world. / Fie on ’t! O fie! ’tis an unweeded garden / That grows to
 summer 2014  57

seed; things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely”), the very sun
itself, their nearest and dearest, and themselves. “Man is a scoundrel,”
says Raskolnikov. “This quintessence of dust”—man—“delights not
me,” exclaims Hamlet. And Dostoevsky himself was to hear those same
words in one of his life’s defining moments: in 1849, as he stood with
other members of the Petrashevsky Circle on the scaffold, knowing that
he would be dead in a matter of moments, he turned to Nikolai Speshnev,
his own “Mephistopheles,” and said “We shall be with Christ [?—K.S.],”
to which “Mephistopheles” replied with a smirk, saying “A handful of
dust.”10 As Tat’iana Kasatkina writes, all of Dostoevsky’s subsequent
oeuvre was a response to Speshnev’s facetious remark.11
Hamlet even doubts the reality of the world, wondering if everything
around is no more than “a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.”
And neither he nor Raskolnikov asks himself why bother performing good
works for, why bother saving, such a world, such people. The question
does not arise because that is not at all the ultimate goal.12
The great service done by the three geniuses Shakespeare, Cervantes,
and Dostoevsky—a service that will endure down the ages—was to
reveal and to validate the verity that all of mankind’s benefactors who
have taken on just such a globally important task are, irrespective of
how sincere they are and albeit in the very depths of their subconscious,
largely focused on themselves. They act primarily for themselves and
take as their ultimate goal the acquisition of personal fame and earthly
immortality (in the memory of generations to come).
Neither Raskolnikov nor Hamlet is ostensibly self-seeking. They are
both prepared to exist “in an arshin of space” or “an eggshell” (Raskol-
nikov) or “bounded in a nutshell” (Hamlet), but in all essentials, their
ambition actually extends to remaking the whole world according to their
lights. But once having placed themselves at the center of this world,
Hamlet and Raskolnikov paradoxically sense that they no longer belong
to themselves. Hamlet calls himself a “machine,” while to Raskolnikov,
it was “as if a piece of his clothing had been caught in the wheels of a
machine and he was being dragged into it.”
Both are tempted by suicide but Raskolnikov is able to save himself
from physical and spiritual death, whereas Hamlet passes into another
world, taking the lives of seven others with him and hoping only that
Horatio will vindicate him in the opinion of this world with his words
(which Hamlet had earlier scorned).
Raskolnikov, as we know, had dropped out of a university faculty of
58 russian studies in literature

law—Hamlet too, in all likelihood. His alma mater, the University of

Wittenberg, which has gone down in history as the cradle of Protestantism
and where he never did go “back to school,” had only three faculties—
theology (in which, judging from his more mature years, he would at
least already have received a bachelor’s degree and would therefore be
ordained), medicine (also to be eliminated, since nowhere in the play is
there any mention of his having any medical knowledge), and law. So
here we have two lawyers13 who have determined to restore justice on
earth, by way of a criminal act, by way of murder. For all their belief in
a Creator and Divine Providence, they hold that, until the coming of “the
New Jerusalem,” they are entitled to have their way with fate—both their
own and the world’s. And, even more terrible, that they are, no less, the
conduits of God’s will. For Hamlet, God’s image in Man is only “god-
like reason,” a conscience (translated variously into Russian as razum,
“reason” or sovest’, a literal “conscience,” and in Dostoevsky’s day more
often as sovest’14), whose only effect is to “make cowards of us all”15
(compare Dostoevsky’s PM for A Writer’s Diary: “my conscience, that
is: God judging in me” [24:109]).
In the PM for The Idiot—notes that Dostoevsky wrote for himself—
“Prince Christ” is mentioned three times (9:246, 249, 253), which fact
serves to this day as a source of virulent debates among experts in the
field. But Dostoevsky compiled the Prince’s original image from Iago—
“PLAN FOR IAGO. IAGO WITH THE CHARACTER OF THE IDIOT.
But he ends in piety” (9:161)—and as he came to the end of his prepa-
rations for the novel, from Othello—“The Prince, simply and clearly
(Othello), tells her [Nastasya Filippovna—K.S.] why he has fallen in
love with her. . . . The Prince suddenly speaks out from atop his pedestal”
(9:284). Like the hint of epilepsy in Othello (act 4, scene 1 [“My lord is
fallen into an epilepsy”—Trans]), that fact has yet to be reasoned out in
studies of the novel’s creative history.
In the same PM for The Idiot, Dostoevsky’s reference to April 23 as
Shakespeare’s birthday is immediately followed by a definitive formal-
ization of the conclusive conflict between the four main characters (My-
shkin, Nastasya Filippovna, Aglaya, and Rogozhin) but with important
differences from the canonical text:
Aglaya is jealous and N[astasya] F[ilippovna] is jealous. A rendezvous.
Aglaya stirs up Rogozhin’s jealousy. The Prince’s admonitions. Rogozhin
cuts down N. F. Aglaya perishes. The Prince is with her. (9:266)
 summer 2014  59

This finale is comparable with several of Shakespeare’s and especially

with Othello, the tragedy in which the body of the “sacrificed” heroine,
killed by a dagger16 (“by that same knife,” in Dostoevsky) lies behind
a curtain.
Eventually, as we know, Dostoevsky replaced this positively
Shakespearean finale with another, in which Platonic compassion and
passionate love are both dissociated and rendered equal by their fatal
consequences, and Myshkin and Rogozhin, both culpable in the death
of Nastasya Filippovna, come together in a tragic embrace over her body
(the Prince here being, in a sense, both Iago and Cassio (since it is his
“pity greater than love” that constantly rouses Rogozhin’s jealousy) and
at the same time Othello, crying the “medicinal” (Shakespeare’s epithet)
tears that wash Rogozhin’s face. In the PM, Rogozhin says to the Prince,
“If not for you I could not have been here” (9:286), and, although Dosto-
evsky removed that enormously polysemic utterance from the canonical
text, a trace of it does remain.
But Shakespeare also comes up earlier, in one of The Idiot’s key
scenes—the festivities for the Prince’s birthday (actually celebrated the
night before) at his dacha in Pavlovsk. The joyously excited Myshkin
is on his way there, anticipating the rendezvous that Aglaya has set and
the beginning of a new, radiant life. But Lebedev, “Professor Antichrist,”
meets him at the door and invites him to decide a question that the already
tipsy guests have come up with:
[B]ut if you only knew, Prince, what a theme we’ve got going! Remember
in Hamlet: “To be or not to be?” A modern theme, sir, modern! Questions
and answers . . . Come closer, Prince, and decide! [The Idiot, trans. Richard
Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Knopf/Everyman’s Library,
2002), p. 368—Trans.]
But the Prince can neither decide nor answer that question, just as he
cannot answer when Ippolit asks him what kind of beauty will save the
world and whether or not he, the Prince, is a zealous Christian. Ippolit
also essentially asks “to be or not to be?” in the scene where he reads his
“confession,” the “Necessary Explanation” (mainly in his interpretation
of Holbein’s “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb” and his discourse
on the nature of Christ and hence on the being—or the renunciation of
being—of all who stand before the face of death). All through that night
(and beyond), Ippolit is expecting the Prince to perform the miracle that
will save him. But there is no miracle. And although the sunrise suicide
60 russian studies in literature

that Ippolit had planned fails, before long the young man dies anyway, “in
terrible agitation.” The Prince never did “come closer” to him; the only
thing he ever gave him was the phrase, “Pass us by and forgive us our
happiness.” And a tragic end awaits all the others—Nastasya Filippovna,
Aglaya, Rogozhin, General Ivolgin—who had been hoping to gain salva-
tion from Myshkin or who trusted him most.
“In no other work by Shakespeare is death spoken of as much as it is
in Hamlet. Death reigns in this tragedy.”17 “From beginning to end, Death
rules [Hamlet’s] story.”18 The Idiot is also literally riddled with the theme
of death: in the number of deaths that occur or are mentioned here, it far
exceeds every other Dostoevsky work and possibly anything else in all of
Russian literature. And this is not surprising. In a novel about a “Prince
Christ” who is only a man, it could not be otherwise, just as there could
have been no victory over death had Christ been only a man.
Hamlet’s attempt to “set the time right” through murder also leads to
the triumph of nonbeing. Hamlet tries to send the souls of his enemies to
hell; Myshkin tries to save them all. But the results of everything they do
to save the world on their own account are oddly similar. Here it would
be germane to cite Aleksandr Parfenov’s subtle observation regarding
death and resurrection in Shakespeare, that in Macbeth and Measure for
Measure, the murder (departure) of the legitimate ruler (Duncan, Duke
Vincentio) and the accession of his (illegitimate) stand-in (Macbeth,
Angelo) lead to death and chaos that end only with the return of the
legitimate ruler.19
The protagonist of Demons is also partially Hamlet (as Dostoevsky
wrote in the PM: “A prince—a gloomy, passionate, demonic, and disor-
derly character, without any sense of measure, with a lofty question, all the
way to ‘to be or not to be?’ To live or to exterminate oneself?” [11:204]).
But, although Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina calls her son Hamlet,20 this is
a Hamlet with neither a Horatio nor an Ophelia, one in whom the gloom
has condensed until it can condense no further, forming a kind of “black
hole.” It is important to keep this in mind when considering the second
of the novel’s principal Shakespearean allusions, in which Stavrogin is
dubbed “Prince Harry.” The reference here is to a character in several
of Shakespeare’s histories—Prince Henry [Hal], who was later crowned
King Henry V. Early in his life, Shakespeare’s young English prince does
indeed resemble Stavrogin in the rakish and dissolute life he leads, but
later he resolutely abandoned the pursuits of his youth, broke off all ties
with his former retinue, and became the best of England’s kings, under
 summer 2014  61

whom the country flourished in unprecedented magnificence. As we

know, though, Stavrogin’s life ended in a fundamentally different way.
It must be remembered that Stavrogin is also called Ivan the Tsarevich
(the tsarevich archetype, as Nikita Kashurnikov notes in his recently
published study, assumes an indwelling on the cusp of societal and
cosmic principles that are determinative to both society and state21). At
this point, at least one of the meanings of this Russified Shakespearean
allusion becomes clear. Those “demons” are not Russia’s principal evil
or the novel’s principal negative pole; they are only a consequence of the
fact that Stavrogin is not the “sun” of this world (as his entourage would
wish him to be) but a flaw in creation through which all that fiendishness
bursts into this world. And this argument may be taken yet further.
Henry V is succeeded by his son, Henry VI, the protagonist of one of
the first histories Shakespeare ever wrote. In Shakespeare, this Henry,
known as “the quiet king” and prone to bouts of severe mental instabil-
ity that rendered him incapable of ruling, is strikingly reminiscent of
Prince Myshkin. He tries to make others put their differences aside and
admonishes all within earshot, instructs everyone on how to be good,
believes that no one is really of evil intent, is grieved when confronted
with evildoing but pities and forgives everyone, and in especially difficult
moments dreams of quitting this world of vanity and taking refuge in
“meditation” or becoming a shepherd. And, like Christ, he prays God to
forgive his murderer as he dies. But the net result of his “bookish rule”
(the words of Richard, Duke of York) and “harmful pity” is the country’s
collapse, the loss of all his father’s gains, and countless bloody rebellions
and internecine conflicts (his “lenity” multiplied the incidence of crime
and his reign saw the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses, whose toll on
the country was enormous and in whose course fathers killed their sons
and sons their fathers, heralding the coming of the “end times” [Matthew
10:35; Luke 12:53—Trans.]). And the upshot of all this was the accession
of the lascivious Edward IV, who was ultimately succeeded by Richard
III, his even more villainous brother. Thus, aided by these Shakespear-
ean allusions, yet another facet of the correlation between Myshkin and
Stavrogin, those two grand images that grow like twin trunks from the
single root of Dostoevsky’s master plan, becomes apparent. In Shake-
speare, the cause of Henry V, who began his journey in evil but went on
to save the country, is destroyed by Henry VI/Myshkin; in Dostoevsky,
one is compelled to wonder if here too Myshkin’s modus operandi might
actually be more pernicious than Stavrogin’s. Myshkin is intrinsically
62 russian studies in literature

prone to a kind of metaphysical idleness: he wants to help everyone but

does not want to see human nature as beset by sin,22 and fails to even
make a start on combating that darkness in man.23
Like Dostoevsky, Shakespeare combines on his stage this world and
the next, and both in their entirety: spirits, witches, shades, and ghosts
are listed among his plays’ dramatis personae. And had Dostoevsky’s
novels also been prefaced by a cast of characters, he would probably
have done the same. But this is not a one-to-one correspondence, since
Shakespeare’s other world is mainly represented by spirits of evil, and
not coincidentally so. While making frequent mention of God, Divine
Providence, and the Heavens (whose ways are inscrutable), Shakespeare’s
characters live as if “there was no heaven” (the Duke in Measure for
Measure.* The villains acknowledge their villainy and in some instances
even try to justify it morally, but that is as much as they can do; thus,
their spiritual story comes to an end. Most of his plays close with the
punishment of evil but by the villain’s (or villains’) death, as if in keep-
ing with the Old Testament’s “eye for an eye.” Here, God is essentially
an avenger like Hamlet, Henry VII, or Malcolm, only more mighty yet
than they.
Shakespeare turned man’s eyes inward, “into [the] very soul,” where he
saw “such black and grained spots as will not leave their tinct.” Mirrors
are frequently mentioned in his plays, but these are mirrors that show
nature and man as they are at the given time. The purpose of the drama
is “to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature,” says Hamlet, following
this with a very important addendum that is often translated too loosely:
“to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image” (meaning to show
goodness its worth and to make the despicable see its own countenance).24
In Shakespeare, man is never transformed (except for Henry V, his least
convincing image). But the New Testament has it differently: there, man
“beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord” is indeed transformed “into
that same image from glory to glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Dostoevsky
has it differently too, in that each of his great novels proves the possi-
bility of man’s transformation. That authorial “internal point of view”25
is actually what distinguishes Shakespeare from Dostoevsky. Macbeth
shows how a man trying to become more than he is, to arrogate divine

*This renders literally Osiia Soroka’s translation of Shakespeare’s “Sirrah, thou

art said to have a stubborn soul / That apprehends no further than this world, / And
squarest thy life according.”—Trans.
 summer 2014  63

status to himself through murder, instead devolves into an animal.26 But

in Shakespeare there is no going back (Othello and Lear recognize their
errors before they die, but that is still not what it should be). Late in his
life, he created The Tempest (his “poetic testament”27), in which man is
transformed but only with assistance from magic and books of sorcery.
And when Prospero disavows his “charms,” he is no longer able to effect
a change in anything. And again—this time from the lips of Prospero,
Shakespeare’s alter ego—comes the theme of the instability of everything
on earth, which will one day disappear: “And, like the baseless fabric of
this vision, / The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn
temples, the great globe itself, / Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve /
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind.”
Is this not where the secret of Prospero’s final words—“my ending is
despair” (recall Dostoevsky’s “Shakespeare is the poet of despair”)—
lies? Is this not the reason why Shakespeare abandoned the theater and
his writing in the last years of his life?28
This explains Dostoevsky’s remarkable notation in the PM for De-
mons: “And so the entire question is—Shakespeare or Christ or petro-
leum [the symbol of the Commune—K.S]?” (11:369). Those are the
three (three, not two) alternative paths (as Tat’iana Buzina, also known
as Kovaleskaia, has also noted29).
The PM for The Adolescent [Podrostok] begin with the mysterious
(maybe as mysterious as “Prince Christ”) “Hamlet the Christian” (16:5).
Did Dostoevsky want to create in his Life of a Great Sinner [Zhitie
velikogo greshnika] (The Adolescent being part of that master plan)
the image of Hamlet the Christian as something of a counterweight to
Shakespeare’s Hamlet? Because that novel’s plot is, after all, closer than
any other to a Shakespearean tragedy: the protagonist’s mother leaves her
lawful husband (Makar Dolgorukov) and enters into an illicit cohabita-
tion with Versilov30 (who is here the protagonist’s actual father, against
whom the Adolescent long seeks to “avenge himself,” in a parallel first
pointed out by Rimma Iakubova). It must also be remembered that Dos-
toevsky originally intended “the great sinner” to be “terribly enamored”
of Hamlet (9:129).
As we know, the story of Prince Hamlet, which was first set down
by the Danish chronicler Saxo Grammaticus and retold with only minor
changes almost four centuries later by François de Belleforest, is of pa-
gan origin. Shakespeare transferred the plot to the Christian world (so
that a clash between the pagan and the Christian worldview therefore
64 russian studies in literature

unfolds in the work’s very intent31) and poses two problems of colossal
importance—how should a person who calls himself a Christian relate to
a world that “lieth in wickedness” [I John 5:19] and how should he (and
should he even) combat that wickedness? This was an especially vexed
question during the Renaissance, with the growing entrenchment of the
idea of man’s equivalence to God [bogoravnost’]—not as a gift of divine
munificence, though, but as a self-willed acquisition. “The epoch that
began in Italy with a great expectancy” ended “in England and Spain with
a sense of great tragedy, the tragedy of humanism.”32 Having foreseen
the horrifying consequences of man’s self-exaltation and overweening
intentions for “fixing” creation all by himself, Shakespeare and Cervantes,
those two geniuses of world literature—one in southern and the other in
northern Europe but at virtually the same time, as the sixteenth century
became the seventeenth—responded with the two notes of caution that
were Hamlet and Don Quixote.
It was no great surprise when Shakespeare scholars in the past called
Hamlet “a disciple of the humanist principle,”33 since the concept of
“militant humanism” was making the rounds at that time. Yet relatively
recently Vladimir Kantor, unabashedly taking his cue from Erasmus of
Rotterdam’s Enchiridion militis Christiani (The Handbook of a Christian
Soldier), published a long article titled “Hamlet as a Christian Soldier”
[Gamlet kak khristianskii voin], in which he sought to prove that Hamlet
lived and acted as “a sincere and mindful Christian”!34 However, a char-
acter who kills five people (Polonius,35 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,
Claudius, and Laertes) in a brief interval, while actually endeavoring to
send their souls directly to hell,36 and declaring in the process that “They
are not near my conscience,” “heaven hath pleas’d it so,” and “in that
was heaven ordinant,” while also being indirectly to blame for the death
of his mother and the girl he loved can hardly be called a Christian, even
if all this was done to avenge his father or to defend his own life.
At this point, however, the argument in chief (which Kantor also of-
fers), arises and it is this: Hamlet has run up against a world that “lieth
in wickedness” and, as the rightful heir to the throne, he is duty bound
to restore order in that world. Furthermore, according to the laws of the
revenge tragedy (the classical model for which is supposedly Shake-
speare’s play), it rests with him to render to the evildoers evil for their
evil in assassinating his father, the rightful king, and plotting Hamlet’s
own murder (although one is at a loss to remember when and where
Christ called on his “soldiers” to wreak vengeance).
 summer 2014  65

Gyula Király, in the article referenced in note 7, also notes that Hamlet
and Raskolnikov are operating in two different sets of sociohistorical
conditions, two different epochs, and uses that to explain why Hamlet’s
actions, unlike Raskolnikov’s crime, have been assessed in unreserv-
edly positive terms. But even if one abandons Dostoevsky’s categorical
antagonism toward “environment” as the factor that deprives a person of
freedom and responsibility (even Soviet critics, after all, tried to “justify”
Raskolnikov as a warrior fighting bourgeois exploitation), who would
find Shakespeare and Dostoevsky interesting today and why would each
succeeding epoch produce its own reading of their great works, if they
had portrayed a person wholly defined by the times? The whole point of
historicism rests, as I see it, in an understanding of the extent to which
a given author approximates, through his epoch, a grasp of “the myster-
ies of the human soul.” In the case of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, that
approximation was as close as it could possibly have been.
Overall, Shakespeare’s play tempts us with the truth, just as Hamlet’s
father, that envoy from hell, tempts Hamlet (and as the witches tempt
Macbeth) with the truth.37 Yes, evil has been done, and the perpetrator has
ostensibly been brought to light in Hamlet’s court of law, but how should
a person who knows that the Creator of this world has said, “Vengeance
is mine; I will repay” [Romans 12:19] react to this? Hamlet decides that
he and no other is the judge and the chastising sword in the Lord’s hands
and that to him and no other has fallen the mission of “setting right” the
ramshackle age, restoring the disjointed time—which evidently means
making an admirable future follow on from what he sees as an admirable
past. “I must be cruel only to be kind,” says Hamlet after killing Polo-
nius, justifying himself as many rebels and revolutionaries have done
after him. But it is the next line—“Thus bad begins and worse remains
behind”—that bespeaks Shakespeare’s wisdom. Yet all he does, in the
end, is continue the chain of murders that began, within the confines
of this plot, with his father who himself killed the King of Norway,
Fortinbras’s father,38 and who is killed by Claudius, who is killed by
Hamlet, who kills Polonius and is himself killed—from a “just” sense
of vengeance!—by Laertes, Polonius’s son,39 who in turn perishes at
Hamlet’s hand.40 And if one accepts that Ophelia, whose death is largely
Hamlet’s fault, was carrying his child, then Hamlet is both an infanticide
and at fault for ending a dynasty. The country will now most likely de-
scend to Fortinbras, a Norwegian who places little value on human life.
Hamlet gives his “dying voice” to the future election of Fortinbras to the
66 russian studies in literature

Danish throne, and this is no random choice, since the Norwegian prince,
who has, without a shadow of a doubt, sent thousands to their deaths in
pursuit of his rights, supplied the example that helped Hamlet finally
form the “bloody” thought of avenging himself on all and sundry.
It may be thought that this contradicts what we may well call the
unambiguous assessment justly given to the pacifism, meekness, and
indiscriminately forgiving nature of Henry VI in Shakespeare’s epony-
mous historical series of plays. So presumably what happened there was
that Shakespeare’s artistic worldview evolved during the transition from
the histories (whose point is to portray history) to the tragedies (whose
point is man in the face of eternity). (While creating his great novels,
Dostoevsky experienced a somewhat comparable evolution, of which
more later.)
Hamlet ostensibly wants to restore order in the world, but, as we
remember, the world itself elicits only revulsion in him, and he even
doubts its actual existence. And that is entirely natural, since he is
preoccupied with himself and nothing but himself: his first speech in
the play is an aside addressed to himself.41 Many scholars have drawn
attention to this play’s surprise element, which is that everything in it is
seen only through Hamlet’s eyes42 (although the potential benefits of a
shift in perspective were demonstrated by John Updike in his remark-
able Gertrude and Claudius, Tom Stoppard in the play Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead, and others). Could it be that the structure of
Hamlet is one answer to the riddle of the young Dostoevsky’s definition
of Shakespeare as “a lyric poet” (28, I:69)? We will even go further, by
saying that although Hamlet never once refers to Providence, he does in
fact arrogate to himself the functions of Providence—for example, by
deciding the fates of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern or in his assumption
that Claudius’s posthumous fate depends on what he, Hamlet, does. Yet
this illicit appropriation results not in a merger with the infinite worlds
on either side of the grave but in a disastrous confinement of the world
within the notions and the will of the “I.”43
Hamlet is the only one of Shakespeare’s great tragedies to pose the
problem of a behest that passes from father to son (in my view, King
Lear, which also addresses the problem of “fathers and children,” has a
different perspective on this). For Dostoevsky too, this comprised the
essence of chronological continuity, the “link of the times.” Konstantin
Mochulsky even held that the phrase “The time is out of joint” (the
Russian version we are using gives “The link of the times has come
 summer 2014  67

apart” [Raspalas’ sviaz’ vremen], which is a slightly distorted variant of

“The link of the times has fallen away” [Pala sviaz’ vremen] in Andrei
Ivanovich Kronenberg’s translation that has entrenched itself in the Rus-
sian tradition) could serve as a epigraph to The Adolescent. 44 Dostoevsky
himself wrote along those lines in the PM for The Adolescent, defining
his principal idea there as “Disorder”: “The link, the guiding thread, the
whatever it was that held them all together has been lost” (16:64, 68,
80). It is therefore no surprise that when Dostoevsky applied himself to
that theme, the first thing to come to his mind was Shakespeare’s tragedy
(just as the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, who sincerely wanted
to be of practical assistance to others but proved quite unable to do so,
had come to him when he was creating Myshkin). But in venturing to
offer his own solution to the tragedy’s principal problem, he expressed
it in the utter brevity of three words: “Hamlet the Christian.”
The Adolescent is traveling to St. Petersburg, with the intention of
“passing judgment on” his mother’s seducer and taken up by the idea,
nourished over long years of woolgathering, of “avenging himself on
mankind” (although he constantly disavows that definition of his goal,
those around him who have felt his vengefulness at first hand return him
to a true understanding of what is really happening). He too, even as a
child, has never been able “to imagine [himself] anywhere else than in
first place”; for him, as for Hamlet, there is only one either/or: power and
strength or suicide. There is also here, however, another point of interplay
with Hamlet that is actually more important in my view.
Prior to creating The Adolescent, Dostoevsky’s attention was centered
on the heroic personality striving to change the world, with a bloody
theomachic act (Raskolnikov), with empathy (Prince Myshkin), or
with demonic titanism (“Prince” Stavrogin) (and let us not forget the
“predators”—Prince Valkovsky, Gazin, Petrov).45 In the mid-1870s,
Dostoevsky’s attention shifted from vertical relationships (the prominent
personality before God, in the company of others) to horizontal ones, or,
more accurately, to the kind of collegiate relationships whose integrality
harks back to God (which also brings up the “fathers and children” theme
and is why the preparatory materials for The Adolescent not only speak of
“the link of the times” but also say that “everyone is estranged”: 16:16).
It is very important here to remember something that Dostoevsky said
in his article “Mr. –bov and the Question of Art” [G-n –bov i vopros ob
iskusstve]: “An individual man cannot divine fully the eternal, universal
ideal, not even if he were Shakespeare himself” (18:102).46 That turn-
68 russian studies in literature

ing point may be traced in the preparatory materials to The Adolescent,

which begin with a complex struggle between two approaches. Who will
stand at the new novel’s center—HE, the truly heroic “predatory type”
(which would undoubtedly please his readers) or “the boy?” And a solu-
tion that is anything but simple begins to mature: “THE PROTAGONIST
is not HE but THE BOY!” (16:24; see further 28, 121, 127, 175). And
then everything changes. Versilov, who would seem to be an immedi-
ate successor to many of Dostoevsky’s above-mentioned protagonists
(which is confirmed even in direct citations such as his musings on
the “golden age”), becomes a “petticoat prophet [bab’ii prorok]” and
the “protagonist ” of a final scene that is in Professor Gerigk’s opinion
melodramatic47 (although that, I think, is not the point) and in which a
great deal of swooning goes on. And the novel’s center becomes Arkady
(“not a prince” he emphasizes constantly), an orphan whose parents are
not dead, who supposedly wishes and is bound to avenge himself against
Versilov, the man who has affronted him and seduced his mother. But
everything he does devolves into a search for “my future father . . . in
some sort of radiance” [v kakom-to siianii], to use the Adolescent’s own
expression. In sum, he not only gains both his physical father (Versilov)
and his spiritual father (Makar) but is once again, like the prodigal son he
is, adopted to Christ (the first time having been his first communion as an
infant) when Sofia, his mother, replies to his admission that he had “lied”
earlier in denying Christ by telling him, “Christ . . . will forgive . . . Christ
is our father, Christ needs nothing and will shine [siiat’ budet] even in
the deepest darkness.”
But how does all this come about? There are two crucial circumstances
here. The first is that although the Adolescent is concentrated on himself,
he finds other people interesting, important, and needful. He is able to hear
them and listen to them. And the second is that, as scholars have noted
on more than one occasion, he heals himself through his confessional
writings, in which he copes with the “horrifying difficulty” of “writing
the truth,” “not sparing myself” even when the words he writes debunk
his “idea.” The word, which in Hamlet serves for the most part as a bar-
rier between people or a tool of temptation or treachery,48 here becomes
what it should be: a means of initiation into the truth and a link between
people, especially with the appearance of Makar, who is the word forti-
fied by a person, the word become person.
Here also is decided the problem of man’s attitude toward the world:
 summer 2014  69

as long as the Adolescent is obsessed with the idea of revenge, the world
seems to him (as it does to Hamlet) spectral:
And if this fog breaks up and lifts, won’t this whole foul, slimy city go
with it, rise up with the fog and vanish like smoke? [The Adolescent, trans.
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Knopf/Everyman’s
Library, 2003), p. 135—Trans.]
But during his central spiritual crisis, after having been accused of theft,
the world finally becomes “no longer his”: “The Adolescent in a profound
and definitive battle: to avenge or to stand on his dignity. . . This is the
principal page in the novel,” Dostoevsky notes in the PM (16:390). But
the light that comes to him from Makar, who “has the look of a gardener”
(16:153) (remember Hamlet’s “unweeded garden,” “rank and gross”!)
turns him onto a different path, on which a person, now spiritually pure,
can say of everything around “all this I contained in myself.” Only by
giving oneself so wholly to the world and by accepting the world into
oneself can one attain a genuine community with it.
Something surprising happens in this novel. As the action progresses,
the Adolescent is constantly “rushing” to regale those around him with
his “candors” and avowals as if they were honest and noble people who
love him, but in response, they all ostensibly “hoodwink” him and turn
his avowals to their own selfish ends. As the book ends, however, they
all really do prove to be good people who love the Adolescent and are
as vulnerable as he. And this seemingly conspicuous artistic violation is
actually no such thing: it is simply that the Adolescent’s point of view has
altered. Although he began by wanting to “pare people away” [sokratit’
liudei], he loses not even one of those granted to him by God, other than
those who have parted from him on their own volition. And all at once,
the macrocosm changes: the law of revenge is abrogated and the world
becomes real. This manifests even in the Adolescent’s attitude toward
his reader. While at first assuming him to be insubstantial and snarling
at him, he later becomes increasingly solicitous of him, trying to ensure
that the reader has understood everything correctly and has made sense
of it all. And near the end, he lapses altogether into a submissive silence
and gives the floor to his alpha reader Nikolai Semenovich, or, more
accurately, to his creator, who in this case is speaking through a reader
(as Dostoevsky himself openly acknowledged in the PM, when he said
he was using that technique to express his thoughts through Nikolai
Semenovich). If we acknowledge that the entire preceding text is a
70 russian studies in literature

written confessional, this gives rise to a very meaningful parallel with

one of the Mysteries of the Church.
The final scene, which was mentioned above, is interesting. Before us
lie three bodies—Versilov, Akhmakova, and Lambert—seemingly done
to death, as in the finales of Shakespeare’s tragedies. But in the end, all
are still alive; they get up and go on their way. But before that happens,
the Adolescent grants life to Versilov (by knocking away the hand hold-
ing the pistol aimed at his heart), as Versilov once granted it to him. In
general as the novel progresses, the Adolescent and Versilov constantly
seem to be changing places (which is completely impossible to imagine
in Hamlet). Pavel Fokine noted this in his interesting article “The Ado-
lescent Versilov” [Podrostok Versilov],49 and it is even indicated in the
novel itself—for example, where the Adolescent applies to Versilov the
words of the father in the parable of the prodigal son, “For this man ‘was
dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’”
But what distinguishes the Adolescent from Versilov is this. After
eating the apple, Forefather Adam knew good and evil but from that
time on, one of man’s principal tasks has been to distinguish the place
of good from the place of evil. Stavrogin and Versilov are unable to cope
with this. Nor is Myshkin, in his own way (given that he does not expose
evil where it is evidently present). At first, the Adolescent also admits “I
don’t know myself from one minute to the next what is evil and what is
good.”50 But this is the point—that he is striving to ascertain that “from
one minute to the next.” And at last he comes to the knowledge of “where
the truth lies and where I have to go to attain it.” His capacity for upward
movement may be expressed in a passage from Makar’s previously cited
monologue: “The grass grows—then grow, God’s good grass!” That im-
age, incidentally, correlates with the protagonist of Shakespeare’s tragedy.
Rosencrantz objects when Hamlet says that he has no future, for how can
the heir to the Danish throne not have a future? “Ay, sir,” Hamlet replies,
“but ‘While the grass grows’” (“. . . the steed starves”), because his goal
is might and power. In the choice that both he and the Adolescent face
between “the law of I” and “the law of love” (see the remarkable diary
entry that Dostoevsky made at his first wife’s casket, “Masha is lying
on the table” [20:172–75]), the former chooses “the law of I” and the
latter, “the law of love” and thereby comes into ownership of his own
true selfhood. Having originally wished, like Hamlet, “to achieve good
even through evildoing” (16:31), the Adolescent later performs an act of
genuine moral heroism by rejecting his titanic (“Rothschildean”) idea,
 summer 2014  71

as Don Quixote also did as a result of his long wanderings in search of

the truth.
In his study “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” [Tragediia
o Gamlete, printse Datskom], Lev Vygotsky called Hamlet “a tragic
mystery” or “a mystical tragedy”: “The action takes place simultaneously
in two worlds. . . . The tragedy takes place on the margin that separates
this world from that. . . . [T]he thread of the otherworldly is woven into
what is here. . . . [T]ime has formed a gap in eternity.”51 Vygotsky’s
designation may well be accurate and applicable to other of Shake-
speare’s great tragedies (mystery plays, morality plays, and the tragedies
of antiquity being, as we know, an important source for Renaissance
theater and in particular for the English drama).52 In a recent article
titled “A Story with Chapters Omitted” [Istoriia s propushchennymi
glavami], Igor’ Shaitanov tells us that the efforts made by the famous
Shakespeare scholar G. Wilson Knight to read Measure for Measure
as “a model of the morality play” allowed for a new view of that great
play and “pointed to a semantic model wherein the theatrical text may
not be properly read absent the Christian myth and the means whereby
it was resident in the medieval mind.”53 The term “mystery play” is
also, in Bakhtin’s definition, applicable to Dostoevsky’s novels, since
in the mystery play “the word resounds before the heavens and before
the earth—that is, before the whole world” and in it “the fate of the
human race is decided.”54
Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Dostoevsky reflected in their great cre-
ations one and the same process—that of “the ‘immanentization’ of God,
the ‘psychologization’ of both God and religion” in which “any viewpoint
from without meets with a refusal.”55 (Bakhtin wrote about that process,
which began in Europe during the Renaissance, in his “Author and Hero
in Aesthetic Activity” [Avtor i geroi v esteticheskoi deiatel’nosti]). But
what they created was great because it remained untouched by the “crisis
of authorship,” the crisis of the author’s standpoint (which, as Bakhtin
also wrote, was engendered by that “immanentization” and had its mark
on the oeuvre of many other authors). The author’s “field of view” in
their works is wider than that of even their most significant characters,
and the very “despair” of the questions they pose points to the need for
those questions to be answered.
Both Shakespeare and Cervantes were producing their work during
“the departure of reality,” in which the distinction between the dream
state and the waking state was being increasingly eroded in people’s
72 russian studies in literature

minds. La vida es sueño [Life Is a Dream] (a play by Cervantes con-

temporary Pedro Calderón), “We are such stuff / As dreams are made
on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep” (The Tempest), “All
the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players” (As
You Like It)—all these are succinct formulations of that worldview. But
what can be set against that loss of linkage in both life and art? Only
realism of a new caliber, the higher realism56 in art that permits the
reacquisition of reality in life too. In both Hamlet and Don Quixote, it
is, characteristically, itinerant actors who help the heroes uncover the
truth about the world, while dreams assist them in learning the truth
about themselves.57
Among the principal idiosyncrasies of “realism in the higher sense” is
the way in which it concatenates the entire spiritual history of mankind,
from which particularly derives a cornerstone of Dostoevsky’s creative
method—the filtering of New Testament plots through the action in his
novels (as Tat’iana Kasatkina has convincingly argued). Shakespeare
also brought times together,58 and going beyond that, also made Time
a protagonist of his tragedies’ “internal plots.” But he was following a
different principle, one in which he made paganism and Christianity
filter through each other, so as to shine a stronger light on the difference
between them. Sometimes he strips that technique bare, as in King Lear,
which is set in distant, pre-Christian times and whose characters make
constant reference to pagan gods, but also talk about “patron saints’ days”
[prestol’nye prazdniki, the loose translation given here for Shakespeare’s
“wakes”—Trans.], while the jester declares, “This prophecy Merlin shall
make; for I live before his time”; or in Macbeth, whose action is his-
torically pegged to the eleventh century but, as scholars have observed,
speaks of cannons and cesarean birth. More often, however, Shakespeare
uses the technique with greater subtlety, as in Hamlet. But even where
time has been improbably distended, in both Dostoevsky and Shakespeare
the time in which the events unfold is maximally compressed; things that
took place over several months or even years (the latter in Shakespeare)
seem to occur in the course of two or three days. Yet in both writers, the
maximal condensation of time leads to an expansion of time into past and
future, into the fait accompli and the potential act, since “all of reality
is not exhausted in what is here and now” (we remember, for instance,
Raskolnikov’s dream of the trichinae, which did not really start coming
to pass until the twentieth century) renders the truths acquired therein
extratemporal and universal.
 summer 2014  73

Notes

1. Here and below, the quotations from Dostoevsky’s articles, notebooks, and
letters are from F.M. Dostoevskii [Dostoevsky], Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 30
vols. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–90), with volume and page number, separated by
a colon, given in parentheses following. Dostoevsky’s deletions are in italics; our
emphasis is given in boldface.
2. Of Don Quixote, Dostoevsky wrote: “There is in all the world nothing more
profound and powerful than this work. It is as yet the last and greatest word of the
human mind . . . and if the earth came to an end and people were asked somewhere
over there ‘Well, then, did you understand your life on earth and what have you
concluded about it?’ a person could silently hand over Don Quixote: ‘Here is my
conclusion about life, and can you condemn me for it?’ I am not asserting that
the person would be right in saying that, but . . .” (22:92). Regarding the creative
links between the writer from Russia and the writer from Spain, see Stepanian,
Dostoevskii i Servantes: dialog v bol’shom vremeni (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh
kul’tur, forthcoming).
3. The notes as reproduced here are from the revised version that the eminent
textologist Natal’ia Aleksandrovna Tarasova has recently created based on a study
of the manuscripts: Tarasova, “Dnevnik pisatelia” F.M. Dostoevskogo (1876–1877):
kritika teksta (Moscow: Kvadriga/Izdatel’stvo MBA, 2011), pp. 245–46.
4. Iu.D. Levin, Shekspir i russkaia literatura XIX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1988),
p. 150.
5. Lev Shestov, “Preodolenie samoochevidnosti (K stoletiiu so dnia rozhdeniia
F.M. Dostoevskogo),” in Vlastitel’ dum: F.M. Dostoevskii v russkoi kritike kontsa
XIX–nachala XX veka, comp., intro., and commentary, N. Ashimbaeva (St. Peters-
burg: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1997). While using Shestov’s well-found expres-
sion here, I invest it with a meaning somewhat different from what he intended; for
further detail, see K.A. Stepanian, Iavlenie i dialog v romanakh F.M. Dostoevskogo
(St. Petersburg: Kriga, 2009), pp. 117–19.
6. A.N. Gorbunov, Shekspirovskie konteksty (Moscow: MediaMir, 2006), pp.
54–63.
7. Only the introspection inherent to both characters has been noted, as in L.M.
Lotman, Realizm russkoi literatury 60-kh godov XIX veka (Leningrad: Nauka, 1974).
Gyula Király [D. Kirai in Russian transliteration—Trans.], whose comparison of the
two follows a direction entirely different from the one taken here, emphasizes the
difference (dubious, in my view) that in Shakespeare’s plays, cognition precedes
the act whereas in Dostoevsky’s novels, “the ‘biographical’ act precedes cognition.”
D. Kirai, “Raskol’nikov i Gamlet—XIX vek i renessans (Intellektual’no-psikho-
logicheskii roman F.M. Dostoevskogo), in Problemy poetiki russkogo realizma XIX
veka (Leningrad: Nauka, 1984), p. 119.
8. Others also see (or think they see) the Ghost in the early scenes, but only
Hamlet hears it, then and afterward (in the presence of Horatio and Marcellus, and
later, of Gertrude). (But is this not, as it is in Dostoevsky, actually a character con-
versing with himself?) Remember too King Henry’s words to his son in King Henry
the Fourth, Part II: “Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought” (act 4, scene 5).
9. It may be thought, writes Horst-Jürgen Gerigk, the famous German Dos-
toevsky scholar, that Raskolnikov comes upon his criminal ideas as a result of
74 russian studies in literature

spending too much time alone in that cubbyhole of his. “But it is quite the opposite.
Raskolnikov both finds that cubbyhole and falls ill because he is overwhelmed by
‘a mad self-conceit’ (as Hegel put it) that has led him to isolate himself altogether
from other people.” Kh-Iu. [H.-J.] Gerigk, “Dostoevskii i Shiller,” in Dostoevskii.
Materialy i issledovaniia, vol. 19 (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2010), p. 9.
10. “Zapiski o dele petrashevtsev. Rukopis’ N.F. L’vova s pometkami M.V.
Butashevich-Petrashevskogo. Publikatsiia V.R. Leikina-Svirskaia,” in Literaturnoe
nasledstvo, vol. 63 (Moscow: Nauka, 1956), p. 188.
11. T.A. Kasatkina, “ ‘Glavnyi vopros, kotorym ia muchilsia soznatel’no i
bessoznatel’no vsiu svoiu zhizn’—sushchestvovanie Bozhie.’ Opyt dukhovnoi
biografii F.M. Dostoevskogo,” in F.M. Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9 vols.
(Moscow: Astrel’/AST, 2003), vol. 1, p. 36.
12. As an early twentieth-century scholar wrote, Hamlet’s “utter disgust with the
world and humanity is not an incentive to the performance of hard duty.” Quoted
from R.A. Foakes, Hamlet Versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 16.
13. It may be marginally noted that Dostoevsky senior also dreamed of a legal
career for his two older sons, Mikhail and Fedor.
14. See Levin, Shekspir i russkaia literatura, pp. 188, 255, 278. See also www.
rus-shake.ru [all URLs accessed April 2014—Trans.].
15. Compare this with the words of Richard III: “Conscience is but a word that
cowards use, / Devis’d at first to keep the strong in awe.” Many commentators who
read Hamlet forget, as it were, to compare those two passages, but it is unlikely that
Shakespeare himself was not thinking of this when he made Hamlet repeat almost
verbatim the lines spoken by the bloody tyrant of his earlier play. Raskol’nikov
also curses “contemplation” [razdum’e] and “conscience” [sovest’] as obstacles on
the path to action.
16. In Boris Pasternak’s translation in the eight-volume Complete Works of Shake-
speare [Polnoe sobranie sochinenii Shekspira], Othello’s words after he sees that Des-
demona has survived his attempts to strangle her—“I that am cruel am yet merciful; /
I would not have thee linger in thy pain. / So, so”—are followed by a stage direction
“(Stabs her).” Shakespeare’s original has no such direction, but the “So, so” may well
be interpreted as the accompaniment to two dagger blows. Pasternak was right.
17. A.A. Anikst, Tvorchestvo Shekspira (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura,
1963), p. 380.
18. G. Wilson Knight, Shakespeare and Religion (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1968), p. 113.
19. A. Parfenov, “Tragediia Shekspira-khudozhnika,” in Shekspirovskie chteniia.
1993 (Moscow: Nauka, 1993), p. 143.
20. Robert L. Belknap has pointed to a certain similarity between the plots of De-
mons and Hamlet, in R. Belnep [Belknap], Genezis romana “Brat’ia Karamazovy.”
Esteticheskie, ideologicheskie i psikhologicheskie aspekty sozdaniia teksta, trans.
L. Vysotskii (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2003), pp. 40–41. [Originally
published as Belknap, The Genesis of The Brothers Karamazov: The Aesthetics,
Ideology, and Psychology of Making a Text (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1990)—Trans.]
21. N. Kashurnikov, “Ob arkhetipe tsarevicha v romane ‘Besy,’” in Dostoevskii
i mirovaia kul’tura, no. 26 (Moscow: Serebrianyi vek, 2009), pp. 63–67.
 summer 2014  75

22. “Oh, of course, he, too, sometimes noticed something dark and impatient, as
it were, in Aglaya’s eyes; but he believed more in something else, and the darkness
vanished of itself. Once having believed, he could no longer be shaken by anything”
[The Idiot, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, p. 520]. But darkness
never does vanish “of itself.”
23. A certain degree of commonality between Myshkin and Oblomov has been
pointed out by many scholars and was acknowledged by Dostoevsky himself (9:419).
As the English scholar A. Boyce Gibson has very subtly indicated, the collapse of
Myshkin’s mission to save those around him is by no means tantamount to a collapse
of Christianity in this novel; had Myshkin been acting as a true Christian, he would
have found the correct way to conduct himself in all instances, whereas his spiritual
inexperience led instead to a tragic outcome: Gibson, The Religion of Dostoevsky
(London: SCM Press, 1973), pp. 112–18.
24. Compare with Don Quixote’s statement that the art of the theater is “a mir-
ror in which we may see vividly displayed what goes on in human life; nor is there
any similitude that shows us more faithfully what we are and ought to be than the
play and the players” [from John Ormsby’s translation at Project Gutenberg: www.
gutenberg.org/files/5946/5946.txt—Trans.].
25. M.M. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6 (Moscow: Russkie slovari / Iazyki
slavianskoi kul’tury, 2002), p. 354.
26. T.V. Buzina, Samoobozhenie cheloveka v evropeiskoi kul’ture (St. Petersburg:
Dmitrii Bulanin, 2011), p. 203.
27. Anikst, Tvorchestvo Shekspira, p. 575.
28. “Shakespeare only asks questions [accursed questions!—K.S.] to which he
never gives a direct answer. . . . For the author of Troilus and Cressida at that time
of his life, God was in many respects a God “that hidest” (Isaiah 45:15) or, as Job
expressed it, that “hidest . . . thy face: (Job 13:24), as if turning away from man and
giving a deaf ear to his complaints—a distant and inaccessible God Whose ways
might then in purely outward terms call to mind the whims of Fortune.” Gorbunov,
Shekspirovskie konteksty, pp. 132–33.
29. Buzina, Samoobozhenie cheloveka, p. 270.
30. Yuri Levin holds that the notation “Hamlet the Christian” refers to Versilov
(Shekspir i russkaia literatura, p. 188). But how is one to understand the way in
which Hamlet’s situation relates to him?
31. And continues throughout the work, beginning with Marcellus’s assurance
that when “that season comes / Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated / no spirit
dares stir abroad; / . . . / No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,” to which
Horatio replies, “So have I heard and do in part believe it”—a point to which Reu-
ben Brower calls attention, although his conclusions differ from those that we draw
here: Brower, Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Greco-Roman Heroic Tradition
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 283–84. And yet the Ghost has come,
“making the night hideous.”
32. I.O. Shaitanov, Zapadnoevropeiskaia klassika: ot Shekspira do Gete (Moscow:
Izdatel’stvo MGU, 2001), p. 6.
33. A.A. Anikst, Tragediia Shekspira “Gamlet.” Literaturnyi kommentarii
(Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1986), p. 127. This work also “vindicates” Hamlet by
stating that “everyone whom he deprived of life had fought against him” (p. 176).
But Dostoevsky had his own answer for justifications such as these: “It is not dif-
76 russian studies in literature

ficult to be humane and moral when you yourself are plump and happy, but when it
comes to a struggle for existence, just stay away from me” (25:9).
34. V. Kantor, “Gamlet kak khristianskii voin,” Slovo/Word, 2008, no. 60.
35. He accidentally kills Polonius just for being in the wrong place at the wrong
time, much as Raskolnikov kills Lizaveta, the moneylender’s sister.
36. By refusing to kill Claudius at prayer and by giving explicit instructions in
the letter carried by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that they must die unshriven.
37. Buzina, Samoobozhenie cheloveka, p. 184.
38. Not coincidentally, the Ghost first appears to his son not in the form in which he
met his death but in the armor he was wearing when he killed the Norwegian king.
39. Laertes, unwavering in his desire to avenge his father, declares that he is
prepared to cut Hamlet’s throat “i’ the church” (!), to which Claudius replies, “Re-
venge should have no bounds.” But are we ready to acknowledge that Shakespeare
was with them in this?
40. Laertes and Hamlet do admittedly forgive each other before they die, but
while Laertes pardons Hamlet for both his father’s death and his own, Hamlet once
again dictates to the will of heaven with his “Heaven make thee free of it.”
41. Even if this aside was a later interpolation, as Mikhail Morozov assumes it
to be (Morozov, Teatr Shekspira [Moscow: Vserossiiskoe teatral’noe obshchestvo,
1984], p. 204) it is definitely not a random one.
42. “C.S. Lewis declared that all the problems associated with the tragedy’s
plot and action are immaterial, since, although Hamlet was intended for the stage,
it is, even so, less a drama than a narrative poem, in which the external action only
supplies the grounds for the hero’s lyrical effusions.” A.A. Anikst, “‘Gamlet, prints
Datskii,’” in U. Shekspir, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 8 vols. (Moscow: Iskusstvo,
1960), vol. 6, p. 594.
43. This is, in our view, a necessary supplement to (or refinement of) Turgenev’s
renowned description, in which Hamlet “lives wholly for himself; he is an egoist.” I.S.
Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem¸ 28 vols. (Moscow / Leningrad: Gosu-
darstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1960–1968), vol. 8, p. 174.
44. K. Mochul’skii [Mochusky], Gogol’. Solov’ev. Dostoevskii (Moscow: Res-
publika, 1995), p. 474.
45. It may be wondered whether Myshkin really has a rightful place in this roster
of heroes. But he too is a hero since he sets himself a heroic task: as a worldly man
plunging ever deeper into secular matters, he has adopted as his goal (as his “theory
of practical Christianity”) not only to behave strictly by the laws of Christianity
but also to sacrifice himself for everyone around (all the while seeking to accom-
modate this to the achievement of personal happiness in the secular understanding
of the word). And he also tries to deliver on that task under his own steam, and, as
expected, meets with failure.
46. This statement was made in 1861, predating the five great novels, but with
Dostoevsky there would sometimes be quite a gap between a thought and its artistic
embodiment. Characteristically, beginning with Demons (the origin of this turning
point), Dostoevsky abandoned the impersonal and omniscient narrator (a kind of
authorial alter ego) and entrusted the narration to a personified (Demons, The Ado-
lescent) or semipersonified (The Brothers Karamazov) narrator. The writing was
becoming more theatrical too: “everything in scenes,” he noted to himself in the PM
for The Adolescent, “description through facts à la Shakespeare” (16:295, 383).
 summer 2014  77

47. K.-Iu. [H.-J.] Gerigk, “O ‘Podrostke’ Dostoevskogo,” in Dostoevskii i

mirovaia kul’tura, no. 28 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo St. Korneev, 2012), pp. 18–20.
48. The Russian actor P.N. Pletnev, a famous interpreter of the role of Hamlet,
suggested that the book that Hamlet is reading as he makes his entrance to encounter
Polonius in act 2, scene 2, which he describes scornfully as “Words, words, words,”
is a Bible (Gorbunov, Shekspirovskie konteksty, p. 265). The Adolescent relates just
as scornfully as Hamlet to words (saying that “words are only rubbish” and even
calling the Ten Commandments “just words”).
49. P. Fokin [Fokine], “Podrostok Versilov,” in Dostoevskii i mirovaia kul’tura,
no. 22 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo, St. Korneev, 2007).
50. We recall the witches’ chant at the beginning of Macbeth: “Fair is foul and
foul is fair.”
51. See http://jewish-books.ru/vygotskij/psixologiya-iskusstva/3/2-11.htm. [This
URL does not contain the passages quoted here, which are found, for example, at
http://rumagic.com/ru_zar/sci_psychology/vyigotskiy/0/j41.html—Trans.]
52. A. Smirnov, “Uil’iam Shekspir,” in Shekspir, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii,
8 vols. (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1957), vol. 1, pp. 15–16; Gorbunov, Shekspirovskie
konteksty, p. 180. Parfenov writes that Macbeth, “like a morality play . . . portrays
the path of every human soul through temptation to sin and on to eternal damnation.”
Parfenov, “Tragediia Shekspira-khudozhnika,” p. 143.
53. I. Shaitanov, “Istoriia s propushchennymi glavami. Bakhtin i Pinskii v kon-
tekste sovetskogo shekspirovedeniia,” Voprosy literatury, 2011, no. 3, pp. 239–40.
54. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6, pp. 173, 348.
55. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 258. [Quoted from “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,”
trans. Vadim Liapunov, in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by
M.M. Bakhtin (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990)—Trans.]
56. “They call me a psychologist,” Dostoevsky wrote at the end of his life. “It’s
not true. I’m only a realist in the higher sense: i.e., I portray all the depths of the
human soul” (27:65).
57. Don Quixote’s dream in Montesinos’s cave; Hamlet’s admission that he has
bad dreams, to which Rosencrantz replies, “Which dreams indeed are ambition, for
the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream” (those familiar
with Dostoevsky’s oeuvre will not be surprised to find the truth placed into the mouth
of a negative character). It is very important to note that Rosencrantz uses the word
“ambition” here [ambitsiia in the Russian translation—Trans.], which was later a
key term in Macbeth and King Lear, the tragedies of two who sought to arrogate
divine prerogatives to themselves. We also recall how the unfortunate Golyadkin in
Dostoevsky’s Double [Dvoinik] was “consumed” with ambition.
58. From his analysis of “the mix of the most diverse epochs” (from the Vikings
to England’s Queen Elizabeth I) in Hamlet, Kuno Fischer concludes that “if we por-
tion out the historical events that inform Hamlet, we shall see that the play occupies
over 500 years” (quoted from I.I. Chekalov, “Cherty epicheskogo geroia v obraze
Gamleta i problema ‘vertikal_’nogo konteksta,’” in Atlantika/Atlantica: Zapiski
po istoricheskoi poetike, pt. 3 [Moscow, 1997], p. 124 [translated here from the
Russian—Trans.]). To see and portray the world in this way, of course, the authors
themselves would have to have located themselves naturally in eternity (hence,
presumably, the constant confusion over dates and even his own age in Dostoevsky’s
letters and notes to himself.