Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self by Yuri Corrigan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self by Yuri Corrigan Octavian Gabor (bio) Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self Yuri Corrigan Northwestern University Press, 2017. 248 pp. $120.00 cloth. $39.95 paperback. There is a unifying thought that brings together the various chapters of Yuri Corrigan's Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self: Dostoevsky's concern in his writings is to portray humans' unwillingness to look deeper inside themselves. [End Page 154] This unwillingness stems from various wounds that determine the characters of Dostoevsky's stories to run from their memories, which results in further pain. The interior life of the person is feared because one finds inside not only beauty, but also darkness. Dancing between the notions of interiority and collective self, Corrigan writes a book in which he contemplates how Dostoevsky's characters find themselves in communication with others, but also lose themselves in their attempts to feast on other people's flesh. His argument is compelling, and his writing is smooth and attractive. Corrigan travels through the majority of Dostoevsky's works, finding a constant tension between interiority and intersubjectivity, which, in his view, defines the problem of selfhood in Dostoevsky (25). In order to find themselves, broken characters lean on others, needing them desperately for survival. As Corrigan says, there is an "insatiable hunger for the other of a disturbed psyche" (28). The need for others is indeed recurrent in all of Dostoevsky's writings, and Corrigan emphasizes well this aspect. He shows how such dependence on another person represents also an attempt to run from the deep and feared interior. After all, this dichotomy between the interior and the exterior remains Dostoevsky's problem in all of his novels. For him, the others seem to be people who produce fear, but also people without whom someone cannot live unless this person falls into the despair given by the encounter with one's interior darkness. The notion of hunger is, I believe, very telling for Dostoevsky's world, and Corrigan shows this masterfully. The notion of confession also has an interesting development in Corrigan's book. He shows how confession is connected with self-transparency, the act of revealing oneself fully to others. We can see the difficulty of this notion precisely in this aspect of it, that the revelation is of something that is not clearly known. Since confession is of the self, then it is intrinsically connected with self-knowledge. For what is the one who is revealed? We can indeed see in Dostoevsky's writings that self-revelation has various levels of authenticity, and thus it can have positive or negative aspects. Corrigan begins by showing how revelation works in an early work, The Insulted and the Injured, in which we have two contrasting attitudes: a confession that is "sadistic self-exposure" (54), and a "tormented, self-sacrificial recollection of the buried past" (54). These two confessions prepare the path for the requested self-revelations that remain central in Crime and Punishment: the different attempts of Sonia and Porfiry to make Raskolnikov confess the same deed. The requests come from different perspectives and demand a different sort of revelation because each of them looks at the person of Raskolnikov in a different way. While Porfiry wants to reveal the murderer, Sonia wants to bring to the surface the real person who, through confession, [End Page 155] can redeem his life. The dichotomy between revelation and hindrance that is at play in various souls of Dostoevsky's world is connected with the notion of nourishment or thirst for other people. In its most negative aspect, thirst for others is manifested in both demoniacs and demons. As Corrigan says, "the notion of interior emptiness characterizes both the possessed and the possessors" (95), as we see especially in The Demons. Corrigan shows how many characters thirst for the presence of others, and they nourish themselves with these presences. Many of the characters of Dostoevsky's stories are indeed devouring others or allowing themselves to be devoured by others; some of them, on the contrary, offer themselves as nourishment for their brethren. Two such characters come to mind, Sonia from Crime and...