What Dostoevsky and Rand have in common
The surprising parallels between our two favourite Russian-born crazies
A friend found it surprising that I’m a fan of both Ayn Rand and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The latter writes sentences that get quoted by moody folks like J. D. Salinger: “What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” And he writes character descriptions that leave you reeling:
"He resembled a man who had long been submissive and endured much, but who had now conceived a desire to leap up and declare himself. Or, even better, like a man who would horribly like to deal you a blow, but who was horribly afraid that you would deal him one back."
-The Brothers Karamazov, Penguin Classics edition, p. 260
The former creates archetypal heroes who are downright inhuman. Rand’s railway execs, steel moguls, and skyscraper architects are less human beings than they are rationalism incarnate, perfect abstractions. One can almost imagine her philosophy re-expressed in a caveman-like grunt: Man apply reason. Man achieve goal. Man beat chest, man roar. (Critics of her work would argue that this is roughly the level of emotional nuance displayed in her novels.)
Or, as my friend put it: “you get the sense that if Dagny Taggart met anybody from a Dostoevksy novel, she’d tell them to shut the hell up and just get on with it.”
There is this interesting divide, often along gendered lines, about the right way to deal with problems. One camp, often dubbed the feminine one, suggests that you can’t solve a problem if you cannot talk about it1: this is the cornerstone of therapy, of undergraduate philosophy classes, of learning to sit with your emotions and articulate them. The other camp, often dubbed the masculine one, is the realm of getting shit done: that while the rest of us sit around and talk our feelings to death, somebody has to actually go out there and blast a tunnel through the mountain, shovel coal into the furnace, cut the granite slab, etc. In such a world, emotions are a distraction and a waste of time. This mindset lines up quite well with a certain type of modern personality that positively fetishes output: the folks who, quote, don’t read fiction because it’s “unproductive”.
The irony, of course, is that Atlas Shrugged is one of the most emotional polemics never written. Rand’s characters are many things, but they are never chill. They rail each other with the type of fervour that is only possible via slight insanity, and indeed it takes slight insanity to successfully turn a business discussion about railroad tracks into actual foreplay. In Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne. C. Heller, I learned that the Bolsheviks seized her father’s pharmacy in October 1917, when little Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum would have been just 13 years old. And suddenly it all made sense: nobody writes (and re-writes) the same howling, torrid, seething lament against socialism over the course of their lifetime just because they got terribly excited about political philosophy in undergrad. Oh no. That kind of vitriol - that kind of relentless, lifelong, undying rage: that takes trauma. That takes a “my childhood was disrupted, and now I will spent my entire life exacting revenge on the evil people who caused it” kind of trauma:
“Papa,” he said, “I’ll make myself rich, I’ll join the officer corps and defeat them all, the Tsar will give me a medal, I’ll come back here and then no one will dare touch you.” After that he was silent for a bit, and then he said - his little lips were still quivering the way they’d been before - “Papa,” he said, “what a nasty town ours is, papa!”
-The Brothers Karamazov, Penguin Classics edition, p. 272
To people who think emotions are a waste of time, and get in the way of productivity, I sometimes find it helpful to remind them that their emotions are likely the only reason they do anything at all. A Rand novel is a balm to those who believe that life should be measured in productivity: a bunch of competent people are very passionate about doing their jobs right, and in the end they win over the lazy, dishonest, and (worst of all) mediocre loafers who don’t. It’s an awfully nice fantasy.
Likewise a Dostoevsky novel is a balm to the depressed: that perhaps even worse than crippling sadness is the inability to feel anything, and in that sense a Dostoevsky novel is also an indulgent fantasy, because every character in a Dostoevsky novel feels and cares so damn much. It’s why brothers and fathers are backstabbing and murdering each other over women, and it’s why those same women are hysterical and fainting all the time, and it’s why Alyosha feels so bewildered by the simple act of a child throwing a stone at him: he cares, he is pained by it, he needs to to know why. Just as Rand rages against the apathetic mediocrity of a job half-assed - a badly built tunnel, a poorly designed building, a rusted railroad track - Dostoevsky rages against the apathetic numbness of not feeling, that empty detachment which so many of us wear in order to survive another day. Which is why it’s worth repeating the quote, from The Brothers Karamazov, that J. D. Salinger’s Sergeant X chose to scrawl:
Written in ink, in German, in a small, hopelessly sincere handwriting, were the words “Dear God, life is hell.” Nothing led up to or away from it. Alone on the page, and in the sickly stillness of the room, the words appeared to have the stature of an uncontestable, even classic indictment. X stared at the page for several minutes, trying, against heavy odds, not to be taken in. Then, with far more zeal than he had done anything in weeks, he picked up a pencil stub and wrote down under the inscription, in English, “Fathers and teachers, I ponder `What is hell?’ I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
-For Esme With Love and Squalor, by J. D. Salinger
Week 3 (of my bid to write one essay a week, for the rest of the year. Apologies for being a day late on this one.)
Funnily enough this saying is often misattributed to Einstein, whose poor name is often maligned in HBR and other similarly milquetoast “leadership” publications, in some form of the following with no citation:
“If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.”