Shankman, Steven Turned Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 547 Shankman, Steven. Turned Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2017. xiii + 169 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $34.95 (paperback). In 2004, Alain Toumayan wrote that Dostoevskii’s fiction ‘frames and heralds some of Levinas’s most creative, striking, and provocative formulas’ (Yale French Studies 104, p. 66). Yet given the obvious parallels between their lives and thought, comparisons with the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas came relatively late to Dostoevskii studies. Levinas, who died in 1995, published his major treatises between 1960 and the mid-1980s. From 1941 to 1945, as a French POW, he was imprisoned in German labour camps; his experience echoes Dostoevskii’s five-year incarceration in a prison camp near Omsk in the 1850s. Despite renouncing theodicy in the aftermath of the Shoah, Levinas remained a practising Jew; Dostoevskii was a practising Orthodox Christian with a weakness for antisemitic propaganda. (In the book under review, Steven Shankman studies the troubling issue of Dostoevskii’s antisemitism with tact and insight.) Crucially, both thinkers maintained their faith in living ethically in a damaged world. Levinas often admitted his debt to Dostoevskii, attributing his interest in philosophy to his early love for Russian literature. He virtually fetishized (according to his French biographer) the famous line uttered by Father Zosima’s brother Markel in Brothers Karamazov: ‘Each of us is guilty before everyone for everyone, and I more than all the others.’ The notion that every individual is responsible (and therefore guilty) not just for their own acts, but also those of everyone else (all the Others), would become a central tenet of Levinas’s thought. While Steven Shankman is not the first scholar to read Dostoevskii through the lens of Levinas (he acknowledges the influence of Toumayan and Val Vinokur), his Turned Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison is the first monograph to perform this exercise in the context of literature classes taught to Oregon State Penitentiary inmates and University of Oregon college students between 2007 and 2013. Instructing prisoners and college students together is a flagship project of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, in which Shankman participated. Happily, the slogan ‘Inside-Out’ matches Levinas’s expression of an important spiritual experience, the undermining of individual identity through being ‘turned inside-out’ (à l’envers) by exposure to someone else’s reality. In the first two chapters of this book, Shankman reconstructs Levinas’s complex and subtle ideas about moral responsibility, transcendence and illeity (approaching God through Others) from selected essays, interviews and key texts, as well as Shankman’s own readings of Jewish doctrine and rabbinical philosophy. As in his Inside-Out classes, Shankman then reads Dostoevskii’s letters and fiction and (in chapter five) Vasilii Grossman’s Life and Fate, for epiphanies and moral paradoxes that appear to anticipate Levinas’s teachings. He finds characters ‘turned inside-out’ in all Dostoevskii’s major SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 548 novels: Raskolnikov, by his love for Sonia; Prince Myshkin, by all human vulnerability; even Petr Stepanovich Verkhovenskii, by Stavrogin. Shankman argues that both Dostoevskii’s and Grossman’s characters act out the task proposed by Levinas of ‘thinking God on the basic of ethics’, that is, attempting to relate to the divine outside of conventional ontology. God, certainly for Levinas, and arguably for Dostoevskii, does not have being; rather, God is a way of doing. In the words of the camp inmate Ikonnikov, a character in Grossman’s Life and Fate, ‘There is neither God nor the Good, but there is goodness’. Levinas cited this line in conversation as essential to his own ‘thesis’; it is thoroughly and lucidly analysed in Turned Inside Out, with other ethical questions raised by Grossman’s novel (like Ikonnikov’s refusal to continue digging foundations for a building he knows will become a gas chamber for Jews, even at the cost of his own life; like Levinas, Ikonnikov accepts personal responsibility for the Other). Hence, by showing kindness to others, and attempting to act ethically, we can approach divine goodness even in a post-Karamazov, post-Shoah world where everything is, apparently, permitted. IfShankman’sstyleissomewhatteacherlyandponderous,thisiscompensated by the clarity and patience with...