"The devil -- or hell -- is in the details!"

Dostoevsky

Gregory Eanes

A few days ago, I blogged on finding the devil in the details of Dostoevsky's writings, only to discover -- through the assistance of regular reader and redoubtable scholar, Erdal -- that the devil was missing in one of the details! With Erdal's help, followed up by research of my own, I've rectified that problem, so here is a list of selected quotes from nine of Dostoevsky's novels:

1. The Brothers Karamazov: "I am Satan, and nothing human is alien to me." (Satan sum et nihil humanum a me alienum puto.)

2. Notes from Underground: "Devil only knows what desire depends upon . . ." (хотенье . . . черт знает от чего зависит)

3. The Idiot: "Devil knows what's going on now . . ." (черт знает что такое теперь происходит)

4. The Eternal Husband: "I can go to the devil, sir, but let's first have a drink!" (Я могу убраться к черту-с, но сперва мы выпьем!)

5. Demons: "This town is like hell carried in a basket, but shaken." (здешний город -- это всё равно, что черт в корзине нес, да растрес.)

6. The Gambler: "To hell with this wretched zero!" (Брось этот пакостный зеришко к черту!)

7. Humiliated and Insulted: "To hell with philosophy! Drink, my dear!" (К черту философию! Buvons, mon cher!)

8. Crime and Punishment: "When reason fails, the devil helps!" (Не рассудок, так бес!)

9. The House of the Dead: "It's truly got the devil in it . . ." (точно бес в него влез)

The attentive reader will have noticed that the devil still doesn't appear in all of these details. That's partly because the Russian term chjert/chjertu (черт/черту) can be translated as "devil" or "hell." Numbers 6 and 7 could say "devil," as in "to the devil." Even number 5 is sometimes translated as "devil," as in "It's as if the devil carried this town around in a basket and shook it." One could thus get the devil into nearly all of the details. In the Latin quote from The Brothers Karamazov, however, we find "Satan," which is not exactly "devil," but is of course the proper name for the chief of the devils (though in Hebrew, the word simply means "adversary"). The Russian term bjes (бес) can be translated as "demon," "devil," or "fiend," and I obviously prefer "devil."

Thus the revised saying: "The devil -- or hell -- is in the details!" Thanks again to Erdal for his work in finding several of these for me and for inspiring me to figure out how to check the original Russian myself. Russian experts are welcome to offer better translations for the quotes.

The secret behind this obsession with the devil and hell in Dostoesky will be revealed sometime in the not-too-distant future . . .

The devil is in the details . . .

A Youthful Fyodor Dostoevsky (1847)
Portrait by Konstiantyn Trutovsky
Wikipedia

I've had a devilish time lately with a number of diabolical quotes from Dostoevsky's novels, but perhaps some kind soul can help me out in my quest. The first quote is Latin and poses no problem, either in its location or its translation, but the eight that follow lie beyond my ken:

"Satan sum et nihil humanum a me alienum puto." - Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

1. Notes from Underground: "The devil only knows what choice depends upon . . ."

2. The Idiot: "The devil knows what it all means!"

3. The Eternal Husband: "I can go to the devil, sir, but let's first have a drink!"

4. Demons: "As if the devil had carried the town in a basket and scattered it about . . ."

5. The Gambler: "To the devil with that zero!"

6. Humiliated and Insulted: "The wary old devil had become so sensitive . . ."

7. Crime and Punishment: "Where reason fails, the devil helps!"

8. The House of the Dead: "As though possessed by a devil . . ."

These are the quotes, but they're from English translations, slightly modified for effect, but what do they correspond to in the original Russian, I wonder, and are they adequately translated?

Any readers out there who can judge? If some kind connoisseur of Dostoevsky's works could provide the original Russian and a closer translation, I'd be forever grateful . . .

Dostoevsky Meets Dickens: Too Good To Be True?

In her 2008 book, Dickens and Creativity, Barbara Nathan Hardy notes with her opening words to chapter seven, "Subversions and Oppositions," that:

Readers of Paradise Lost have sometimes felt that the Devil is so articulate and alluring that he undermines the Divine power and presence. To descend a little from Milton's Sublime, we find Dickens also creating powerful subversions, presences that accompany his portraits and proposals of morality, to counter, criticize, or undermine them. (page 87)

Hardy writes some five pages later of an 'event' that might have been able to offer some insight toward explaining this two-fold nature of Dickens:

In a fascinating interview Dickens had with Dostoevsky, he apparently told his great Russian admirer that both his pure simple characters like Nell and his villains were himself; the good were what he would like to be and the evil derived from his worse self. (page 92)

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me begin at the beginning. Yesterday, my daughter and I were reading an article on Dickens by the novelist David Gates, "Off the pages, a Dickensian life, too" (November 5-6, 2011), in the weekend issue of the International Herald Tribune. To my surprise, the article described a meeting in 1862 between Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky. At the thought of such a scene, I recalled my freshman year Baylor University professor, Morse Hamilton, who taught creative writing and English literature, loved Dickens, but also knew Russian and had read Dostoevsky -- whom he loved as well -- in the original, and I exclaimed:

"Morse would have been thrilled!"

I exclaimed to myself, anyway, for Sa-Rah was reading aloud, and I didn't want to interrupt. But I had a second thought, also unarticulated:

"It sounds too good to be true."

The anecdote on Dickens and Dostoevsky appears in an online version in the New York Times, "Being Charles Dickens" (November 3, 2011), but a fuller version appears earlier, likewise in the NYT, in "Two-Sided Man Gets Two New Biographies" (October 24, 2011), Michiko Kakutani's review of the same two biographies: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist and Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life. Kakutani provides a fuller quote than Gates, so let's look at his account:

He told me that all the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. Only two people? I asked.

This may in fact describe Dickens well, but it sounds like something that Dostoevsky might have said about himself . . . or what someone might have imagined Dostoevsky saying about himself, or about Dickens. Douglas-Fairhurst seems not to have recounted the anecdote in his biography, so Kakutani's quote -- and the shorter version in Gates -- come from Tomalin. The same anecdote, however, appears in an earlier biography of Dickens by Michael Slater, Charles Dickens, published in 2009. Gates notes Slater's earlier account, and that both Tomalin and Slater learned of the anecdote in a 2002 issue of The Dickensian, but Kakutani says nothing of this, though he does later offer a "Correction: October 29, 2011," which states:

The Books of The Times review on Tuesday, about "Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist" by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, and "Charles Dickens" by Claire Tomalin, recounted an anecdote in Ms. Tomalin's book in which Dostoyevsky told of meeting Dickens. While others have also written of such a meeting and of a letter in which Dostoyevsky was said to have described it, some scholars have questioned the authenticity of the letter and whether the meeting ever occurred.

One such scholar is Sarah J. Young, who identifies the article that describes this supposed letter: Stephanie Harvey, "Dickens's Villains: Confession and a Suggestion," The Dickensian, 98.3 (Winter 2002), 233-235. Young probably isn't the first skeptic, for she writes of this only on December 19, 2010 -- some eight years later -- in a post, "Russians in London: Dostoevsky," on her website, Sarah J. Young: Lecturer in Russian at SSEES. Here's what she says:

A short article in The Dickensian claims that Dostoevsky met Dickens during his visit, citing a letter from 1878 to S. D. Yanovsky in which Dostoevsky states, 'Dickens told me the same thing when I met him at the office of his magazine All the Year Round in 1862' (Harvey, p. 233). One might explain the absence of reference to this meeting in Dickens's papers by the fact that Dostoevsky didn't really become known in Britain until some years later, after the former’s death, but it seems highly unlikely that Dostoevsky would have kept quiet about it until 16 years after the event. The source of the letter seems dubious too. It was supposedly published in 1987 in Vedomosti Akademii Nauk Kazakhskoi SSR (Bulletin of the Kazakh SSR Academy of Sciences), which I'm pretty sure does not exist, and if it had appeared in that year, then it's almost inconceivable that it wouldn't have been included in Dostoevsky's correspondence in the Complete Works -- those volumes were published from 1988. One can only conclude therefore that the letter isn't genuine, which is rather sad, because the idea of the two men meeting is so wonderful.

For some reason, I can't access The Dickensian (though readers can try, then perhaps report back), and I've also been unable to find anything about Ms. Stephanie Harvey, so I'm not in a position either to satisfy my curiosity about the supposed letter or about Ms. Harvey's credentials.

But the meeting does seem to have turned out as I feared: too good to be true.

Dostoevsky on Christ and Truth?

Monument to Dostoevsky

Russian State Library, Moscow

(Image from Times Online)

I once criticized the Archbishop of Canterbury in this blog for his suggestion that sharia be legally recognized as applying to British Muslims on issues of family law if they wished to appeal to Islamic principles, for he seemed not to realize that women are accorded fewer rights than men in sharia. On a personal level, however, I like Archbishop Rowan Williams, and I speak in the strictest sense of "personal," for I met the person in Scotland at St. Andrews some years back during a conference there on the Gospel of John. Probably, I like him because he laughed at a joke that I made.

I imagine that I would also like what he has to say much of the time, and I ought to read his book on a subject of mutual interest, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction. The book was published two years ago, so I'm too late for reading to review, but Salley Vickers reviewed it in 2008 for The Times in an article available online. Ms. Vickers goes to the heart of the matter concerning Dostoevsky, as does the Archbishop, for she writes:

Williams begins [his book] with a perplexing comment in the 1854 letter that Dostoevsky wrote when just released from labour camp. The letter, to the woman who had given him, while in prison, a copy of the New Testament which had dramatically affected his beliefs, asserts "if someone were to prove to me that Christ was outside the truth, and it was really the case that the truth lay outside Christ, then I should choose to stay with Christ rather than with the truth". This declaration has disturbed Dostoevsky readers ever since. Versions of it resound throughout the fiction, finding the clearest echo in The Devils, in the question put to one of the characters: "Didn't you tell me that if it were mathematically proved to you that truth was outside Christ you would rather remain with Christ than truth?"

This passage by Ms. Vickers motivates me to order a copy of the Archbishop's book, for I'd like to know how he unpacks Dostoevsky's assertion of a fideism against his better judgment in the hypothetical case Dostoevsky sets up. The novelist's remark sounds extreme, but I wonder how many contemporary Christians may have intuited the same potential dilemma. A couple of times in the past two years, I've heard intelligent ministers offer similarly fideistic views, one of them arguing that we must set aside our human logic and accept God's truth and the other arguing that we have to get back behind the Age of Reason and accept some mysteries that sound like a contradiction.

Well, I have a problem with that sort of fideism, for if one accepts that contradictions are acceptable, how does one decide which contradictions to accept, given that there are an unbounded number to choose from?

In my opinion, a contradiction requires resolution, or least an honest attempt at resolution, rather than the sacrifice of one's rationality. I'm not so arrogant as to imagine that I can resolve all contradictions, but I do believe that they impose a duty on us to attempt resolution.

I'd therefore like to see what the Archbishop has to say on Dostoevsky's formulation of this problem.

"Pleased to meet you hope you guess my name": The Devil in Dostoyevsky and Bulgakov

"Sympathy for the Devil"

Lyrics from Rolling Stones

(Image from Wikipedia)

I've just recently finished my re-reading of Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov, and I found myself wondering whether or not Ivan's feverish dream of the Devil had any influence upon Mikhail Bulgakov's depiction of the Devil in The Master and Margarita. I haven't noticed any clear parallels, so today's blog entry has nothing especially insightful to offer . . . though some regular readers might retort that it never does have (so why read regularly?). Anyway, with that caveat, I'll quote Dostoyevsky's description of what Ivan sees:

And so he was sitting almost conscious himself of his delirium and as I have said already，looking persistently at some object on the sofa against the opposite wall. Some one appeared to be sitting there, though goodness knows how he had come in, for he had been in the room when Ivan came into it, on his return from Smerdyakov. This was a person, or, more accurately speaking, a Russian gentleman of a particular kind, no longer young, qui faisait la cinquantaine, as the French say, with rather long, still thick, dark hair, slightly streaked with grey and a small pointed beard. He was wearing a brownish reefer jacket, rather shabby, evidently made by a good tailor though, and of a fashion at least three years old, that had been discarded by smart and well-to-do people for the last two years. His linen and his long scarf-like neck-tie were all such as are worn by people who aim at being stylish, but on closer inspection his linen was not over clean and his wide scarf was very threadbare. The visitor's check trousers were of excellent cut, but were too light in colour and too tight for the present fashion. His soft fluffy white hat was out of keeping with the season.

In brief there was every appearance of gentility on straitened means. It looked as though the gentleman belonged to that class of idle landowners who used to flourish in the times of serfdom. He had unmistakably been, at some time, in good and fashionable society, had once had good connections, had possibly preserved them indeed, but, after a gay youth, becoming gradually impoverished on the abolition of serfdom, he had sunk into the position of a poor relation of the best class, wandering from one good old friend to another and received by them for his companionable and accommodating disposition and as being after all a gentleman who could be asked to sit down with any one, though, of course, not in a place of honour. Such gentlemen of accommodating temper and dependent position, who can tell a story, take a hand at cards, and who have a distinct aversion for any duties that may be forced upon them, are usually solitary creatures, either bachelors or widowers. Sometimes they have children, but if so, the children are always being brought up at a distance, at some aunt's, to whom these gentlemen never allude in good society, seeming ashamed of the relationship. They gradually lose sight of their children altogether, though at intervals they receive a birthday or Christmas letter from them and sometimes even answer it.

The countenance of the unexpected visitor was not so much good-natured, as accommodating and ready to assume any amiable expression as occasions might arise. He had no watch, but he had a tortoise-shell lorgnette on a black ribbon. On the middle finger of his right hand was a massive gold ring with a cheap opal stone in it. (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Constance Garnett, Vintage Books, 1950, pages 772-773)

I could quote passages from Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, but I see little need, for in looking at several just now, I find few similarities exist between Dostoyevsky's Devil and Bulgakov's Devil -- who goes by the name Woland, you'll recall. Possibly of interest, however, is the fact that Woland's demon assistant Korovyov wears checked pants . . . and also a pince-nez, but that's not the same as a lorgnette -- though each eyepiece does give these two comically demonic characters a somewhat foppish air. Still, too few parallels occur on the surface for me to make an issue of them.

Nevertheless, Bulgakov elsewhere exhibited great interest in Ivan's delirious dream of the Devil, for Riitta H. Pittman, in her article "Dreamers and Dreaming in M. A. Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita" (in Bulgakov: The Novelist-Playwright, edited by Leslie Milne, Routledge, 1996), writes:

Bulgakov's preoccupation with the Karamazov devil is apparent from an episode depicting Aleksei Turbin's nightmare, which was at one time intended for the Days of the Turbins. The nightmare brings "greetings from Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky". Aleksei's instinctive reaction is to instinctive reaction is to exclaim: "The devil!", but almost instantaneously he resorts to reason and begins to insist: ". . . you don't exist. I am seeing you in my dream. And I am now going to wake up", to which the nightmare retorts: "You are mistaken . . . I am not a dream, but most genuinely real. And who can tell anyway, what a dream might be?" Aleksei next calls his devil a nightmare and a myth, and finally threatens to shoot him. Correspondingly, in Brothers Karamazov (Part IV, Book Eleven, Ch. 9) Ivan insists that his devil is "a lie", "a phantom", "a hallucination" and a symptom of his illness. (Pittman, "Dreamers and Dreaming," page 159)

Bulgakov would thus seem to have been thinking a lot about Dostoyevsky's Devil, at least in his play Days of the Turbins, which leads me to wonder if some profounder parallels exist between devils in The Master and Margarita and The Brothers Karamazov that aren't obviously visible on the surface. In comparing the devils in these two Russian authors' works generally, Pittman argues that "Both Dostoevsky's and Bulgakov's devils represent or evoke ideas which the intellectual, or pseudo-intellectual, protagonists try to resist or to suppress on the grounds of reason, but which surge forth from their minds involuntarily . . . [and] emerge as metaphorical extensions or aspects of the protagonists' own personalities, of their 'shadow' selves" (page 159), a point perhaps well taken for Ivan's Devil in Brothers Karamazov though it seems less likely in Master and Margarita, for Ivan alone sees the Devil in the former, whereas all of the characters see the various devils in the latter -- but you can read further on Pittman's views for yourself.

As for the Rolling Stones and their infamous "Sympathy for the Devil," they seem to take his existence for granted in his rather traditional role -- though Douglas Cruickshank and "others" want to find Mick Jagger's inspired writing "under the spell of Mikhail Bulgakov's classic allegorical novel of good and evil, 'The Master and Margarita.'" Read Cruickshank's remarks if you will, but also go to the source itself, the song:

Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long long year stolen many man's soul and faith
I was around when Jesus Christ had His moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that Pilate washed his hands and sealed His fate
Pleased to meet you hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game

Stuck around St. Petersburg when I saw it was a time for a change
Killed the Tzar and his ministers, Anastasia screamed in vain
I rode a tank held a gen'rals rank when the blitzkrieg
raged and the bodies stank
Pleased to meet you hope you guess my name. Oh yeah
Ah what's puzzling you is the nature of my game. Oh yeah

I watched the glee while your kings and queens fought for
ten decades for the Gods they made
I shouted out "Who killed the Kennedy's?" when after all
it was you and me
Let me please introduce myself I'm a man of wealth and taste
And I lay traps for troubadors who get killed before they reach Bombay
Pleased to meet you hope you guess my name. Oh yeah
But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game. Oh yeah
Pleased to meet you hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game

Just as every cop is a criminal and all the sinners, Saints
as heads is tails, just call me Lucifer 'cause I'm in need
of some restraint
So if you meet me, have some courtesy have some sympathy
and some taste
Use all your well learned politesse or I'll lay your soul to waste
Pleased to meet you hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game

As I noted, this Satan seems more traditional -- dangerous and to be taken very seriously. For an eight-minute recording of the Stones' 1968 live performance of this song, go to You Tube and along with John Lennon . . . enjoy?

Recurrence of "Eternal Recurrence"?

Friedrich Nietzsche

(Image from Wikipedia)

I'm nearing the end of my re-reading of Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov and have recently finished chapter 9 of Part 4, Book 11, titled "The Devil. Ivan's Nightmare," which recounts Ivan Karamazov's descent into insanity through an illness called 'brain fever' that brings on a hallucinatory encounter with the Devil that seems to prefigure some of the later Bulgakov's devilish concerns. Some themes come around again and again, I suppose. And that brings me to my point, namely, that Dostoyevsky introduces something rather like Nietzsche's concept of "eternal recurrence" when the Devil tells Ivan:

"Why, you keep thinking of our present earth! But our present earth may have been repeated a billion times. Why, it's become extinct, been frozen; cracked, broken to bits, disintegrated into its elements, again 'the water above the firmament,' then again a comet, again a sun, again from the sun it becomes earth -- and the same sequence may have been repeated endlessly and exactly the same to every detail, most unseemly and insufferably tedious . . ." (Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Constance Garnett, page 619)

This passage -- as with the entire book of course -- first appeared in print in 1880. Two years later, in Book 4, Section 341 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche's similar thought appears in print:

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence -- even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again -- and you with it, speck of dust!" -- Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine!" If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you; the question in each and every thing, "Do you desire this once more, and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

Though Nietzsche does a lot more with the idea in this particular passage, the basic concept of "eternal recurrence" appears already in Dostoyevsky -- and both times expounded by a demon!

I'm not claiming that Nietzsche read Dostoyevsky's novel -- and indeed, that seems unlikely -- but the thought of eternal recurrence would appear to have been 'in the air'. Walter Kaufmann, who translated much of Nietzsche into English, suggests that Nietzsche had been reading Heinrich Heine, who earlier in the 19th century had written:

[T]ime is infinite, but the things in time, the concrete bodies, are finite. They may indeed disperse into the smallest particles; but these particles, the atoms, have their determinate numbers, and the numbers of the configurations which, all of themselves, are formed out of them is also determinate. Now, however long a time may pass, according to the eternal laws governing the combinations of this eternal play of repetition, all configurations which have previously existed on this earth must yet meet, attract, repulse, kiss, and corrupt each other again. (cf. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 1959, page 276; see also Helge Kragh, Entropic Creation, page 142)

From Heine to Nietzsche? Perhaps so, and if so, perhaps also Dostoyevsky had been reading Heine. Be that as it may, I'm not the first to notice the similarity between Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky on this, for in researching the point, I've discovered that Gino Moliterno, in his article "Zarathustra's Gift in Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice" (Screening the Past, Issue 12, 2001), tells us that the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's "explicit reference to Nietzsche's doctrine of the Eternal Return must appear highly charged with significance" in The Sacrifice (1985), especially since Tarkovsky had considered retitling his film The Eternal Return and seems to have wanted to insist on Nietzsche rather than Dostoyevsky as his own source, as Moliterno tells us in footnote 19:

It seems signficant, too, that Tarkovsky, at least in the film, is at pains to name Nietzsche specifically because, for a Russian filmmaker, another non-philosophical source for the idea of the eternal return would have been closer to hand. The notion appears in nuce in the mouth of the devil who appears to Ivan in chapter 12 of part 4 of The Brothers Karamazov:

"Why, you keep thinking of our present earth! But our present earth may have been repeated a billion times. Why, it's become extinct, been frozen; cracked, broken to bits, disintegrated into its elements, again 'the water above the firmament', then again a comet, again a sun, again from the sun it becomes earth -- and the same sequence may have been repeated endlessly, and exactly the same to every detail, most unseemly and insufferably tedious . . ." Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (London: Heinemann, 1974), 683.

Curiously enough, in the published screenplay, after Otto has talked about Nietzsche's dwarf and expanded on what the notion of Eternal Recurrence entails, Alexander answers:

"That's already been done! Another, Svidrigailov . . . Don't think that you invented it!" Collected Screenplays, 519.

What's most curious is that Alexander is citing Dostoevsky but not referring to the relevant passage from The Brothers Karamazov quoted above; the allusion is instead to one of the major characters in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment who commits suicide at the end of the novel without ever making any reference to the notion of Eternal Return.

Both Tarkovsky and Moliterno would seem to have noted the 'recurrence' of Dostoyevsky's idea in Nietzsche (even if Tarkovsky preferred Nietzsche and erred in the Dostoyevsky citation).

I'm sure that I could go on and on about sources and parallels concerning "eternal recurrence," but I'll simply end by agreeing with Nietzsche that knowledge of an eternal recurrence of my life as I've lived it would be the heaviest weight, and I prefer Dostoyevsky's happier ending.

Oh, you don't know about that comedy of errors? Well, go forth and read.

Vladimir Putin as Grand Inquisitor?

The Washington Post

I see that I'm not the only one reading The Brothers Karamazov these days, for David Ignatius of the Washington Post is drawing upon Dostoyevsky's famous novel to portray Vladimir Putin as "Russia's Grand Inquisitor" (July 1, 2009):

As Barack Obama packs for his trip to Russia next week, he should bring along a copy of "The Brothers Karamazov." For the modern Russia of Vladimir Putin is still struggling with the same political riddles that Fyodor Dostoyevsky described 130 years ago.

Human beings would happily trade their freedom for food and security, Dostoyevsky wrote in the novel's famous chapter, "The Grand Inquisitor." In place of this anarchic freedom, the Inquisitor offered the people "miracle, mystery and authority. And mankind rejoiced that they were once more led like sheep, and that at last such a terrible gift, which had brought them so much suffering, had been taken from their hearts."

There's a palpable sense here that Putin has brought "miracle, mystery and authority" to a Russia that was severely traumatized by the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. The country is certainly less free than it was under Boris Yeltsin, but Putin is immensely popular -- and nobody wants to return to the crazy, freewheeling time of transition.

Vladimir Putin as the Grand Inquisitor? But I thought that President Bush had looked into Putin's eyes and taken the measure of the man's soul. Apparently, Bush should have read Dostoyevsky first to acquire the properly standardized metric for measuring Putin to see how well the Russian leader's muscular frame might fit the ascetic Inquisitor's "coarse, old, monk's cassock" and how capable this former KGB agent might be of providing "miracle, mystery, and authority" for contemporary Russia.

Certainly, Putin has his authoritarian tendencies that have stood him in good stead in a culture that prizes strong leaders:

Putin is the tough guy who put a wounded country back together after the fall of communism. "Russia emerged from the chaos of 1991 with disproportionately large political and socio-psychological scars," explained Alexey Chesnakov, a former Putin adviser who is director of the Center for Current Policy. When Putin became president in 1999, he brought "authoritarianism by consensus," said the head of another Russian think tank.

Ignatius doesn't offer quotes on what the "miracle" and the "mystery" are. Perhaps the miracle was the oil-boom wealth and the mystery Putin's continuing popularity despite the oil-price bust. Or are the miracle and the mystery Putin's perhaps authentic affirmation of Russian Orthodox Christianity?

And who's Christ in this drama, anyway? In Dostoyevsky's version, the terrible Grand Inquisitor has to be confronted by the one "with a gentle smile of infinite compassion" that perhaps overcomes even the Inquisitor's cynicism. Would that be President Obama? I suppose that I could here descend to the level of joking about "Obamessiah" . . . but I won't. Instead, I'll simply quote again from the article by Ignatius, who . . .

. . . was pleased when yet another Putin adviser, a publisher who helped organize the conference, reassured the group that these problems [of freedom versus authority] go back more than a century: "This is a Russian conversation you can see since Dostoyevsky's time."

A conversation that sometimes grows as heated as an argument, admittedly. Anyway, I guess that I have chosen the precisely right time to re-read Dostoyevsky's great work since it's now required reading for Russia experts such as myself, and I trust that I am maintaining proper modesty in suggesting that President Obama ought to take me aboard as one of his advisors when he heads for Russia to talk with the inquisitive Putin.

The Scapegoat in Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ursula K. Le Guin, and William James?

The Scapegoat (1854)

William Holman Hunt

(Image from Wikipedia)

In re-reading Dostoyevsky's greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov, I came upon the 'scapegoat' passage quoted below not long after reading of the character Ivan Karamazov describing cases of abuse practiced upon children -- including that of a very young child 'punished' by having excrement smeared upon its face and in its mouth and being locked in a privy, where she beats her fist against her breast and cries out to God for help -- and shortly before reading of Ivan recounting his story of "The Grand Inquisitor":

Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature -- that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance -- and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? (Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, New York: Vintage, 1950, translated by Constance Garnett, page 291)

Although the word "scapegoat" does not appear here (and indeed surfaces only once in my English copy, on page 780), I instantly knew from where Ursula K. Le Guin had drawn the inspiration for her short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," which tells of a utopia mysteriously founded upon the suffering of one innocent young victim locked in a dark basement closet where it sits in its own filth, a 'scapegoat' somehow necessary, metaphysically, to the perfect lives of all the inhabitants of the city Omelas (although her story does not use the term "scapegoat"):

In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is.

The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room, a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes -- the child has no understanding of time or interval -- sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked; the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. "I will be good, " it says. "Please let me out. I will be good!" They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, "eh-haa, eh-haa," and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery. (Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," Backpack Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, edited by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, New York: Pearson/Longman, 2006, pages 21-212)

One of my students a couple of years ago wrote on this story and argued that it was perhaps a critique of Christianity, for the story takes the problem of evil and intensifies it by implying that the suffering of the scapegoat Jesus cannot be justified by the perfect world to come in the eschaton precisely because that suffering is innocent. The student pointed out, of course, that a significant difference between the two cases is that in the New Testament, Jesus is presented as a willing victim. The student didn't know of Le Guin's source in Dostoyevsky, but he could have cited the response of Ivan's brother Aloysha:

"Brother," said Aloysha suddenly, with flashing eyes, "you said just now, is there a being in the whole world who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? But there is a Being and He can forgive everything, all and for all, because He gave His innocent blood for all and everything. You have forgotten Him, and on Him is built the edifice, and it is to Him they cry aloud, 'Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed!'" (Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, page 292)

Aloysha's point is that the willing victim can forgive and therefore justify. That might simply kick the metaphysical can further down the road, but let me take this blog entry in another direction. When I decided to look into this point today, I discovered that some folks at Wikipedia have already noted the connection between Le Guin and Dostoyevsky, for in the entry on "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," an editor notes that Le Guin gave a hint in an interview in which she told of seeing a road sign for Salem, Oregon in a car mirror (from which came "Omelas"):

"[… People ask me] 'Where do you get your ideas from, Ms. Le Guin?' From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?" (X. J. Kennedy, An Introduction to Fiction, Longman, 2004, page 274)

I haven't yet found this interview online -- though I recall reading somewhere about the road sign. Perhaps a reader can supply some link.

The Wikipedia entry also led me to a passage in an essay by William James, "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," which was originally an address to the Yale Philosophical Club but was published in the International Journal of Ethics in April 1891 (although, again, the term "scapegoat" is not used):

"[I]f the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, . . . [would we not] immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?"

One might imagine that James had read Dostoyevsky's novel, but a mere decade had passed since the novel's Russian publication in 1880, so this is unlikely. Besides, the problem of evil posed in terms of innocent suffering has been posed before, so the similarity of James and Dostoyevsky in these two passages should not surprise us.

But are the three writers even thinking of a scapegoat's role in the problem of evil since none of them identify the suffering innocent one as a scapegoat? This would require some reflection on the meaning of scapegoat, and now that I consider it, a scapegoat seems rather a different creature -- similar in bearing the 'sins and impurity' of others but not a condition upon which a utopia is to be founded, and not even Jesus would seem to have been portrayed as a scapegoat (for a sacrificial victim is different).

But enough of that. I'll just note in closing that while the strictly logical problem of evil has been answered -- in the sense that an all-powerful, benevolent, omniscient deity might have a good reason for allowing evil even if we human beings remain ignorant of that reason -- our moral revulsion at concrete instances of innocent suffering might give some of us reason to balk at the conditions for taking even the initial step of faith.

Perhaps that was why "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" walked away from Omelas.

Dostoyevsky's Kantian 'Proof' of God

Immanuel Kant

'the immortal Kant'

(Image from Wikipedia)

Some readers may recall that I recently re-read Mikhail Bulgakov's magnum opus, The Master and Margarita. If so, those readers will surely recall the passage that I cited on Kant. Berlioz and Bezdomny had been speaking of Christ just before the novel's opening scene, when they were suddenly joined by the devil, i.e., Woland, who was extraordinarily interested in their atheism:

"But, may I ask," resumed the guest from abroad after a moment's troubled reflection, "what do you make of the proofs of God's existence, of which, as you know, there are five?"

"Alas!" answered Berlioz regretfully, "all of those proofs are worthless, and mankind has long since consigned them to oblivion. Surely you would agree that reason dictates that there can be no proof of God's existence."

"Bravo!" exclaimed the foreigner, "Bravo! You've said just what that restless old sage Immanuel said about this very same subject. But here's the rub: he completely demolished all five proofs, and then, in a seeming display of self-mockery, he constructed a sixth proof all his own!"

"Kant's proof," retorted the educated editor with a faint smile, "is also unconvincing. No wonder Schiller said that only slaves could be satisfied with Kant's arguments on this subject, while Strauss simply laughed at his proof." (Bulgakov, Master and Margarita, translated by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor, pages 7-8)

Kant's proof, proposed in his Critique of Practical Reason, held that even though one cannot demonstrate the existence of God as an idea of pure reason, the idea of God is inextricably bound up with the link between happiness and morality, for only God can guarantee immortality as reward for moral virtue. Therefore, absolute morality, the gift of immortality, and the existence of God are all essential postulates of practical reason even though they cannot be grounded in pure reason. Or something like that.

Bulgakov may have been reflecting not only upon a passage in Kant but also upon a scene in The Brothers Karamazov, for in an early passage in the novel, Dostoyevsky -- or, at least, his omniscient albeit mortal narrator -- has Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miüsov recount something that Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov had said a few days earlier:

"I will tell you instead, gentlemen, another interesting and rather characteristic anecdote of Ivan Fyodorovitch himself. Only five days ago, in a gathering here, principally of ladies, he solemnly declared in argument that there was nothing in the whole world to make men love their neighbours. That there was no law of nature that man should love mankind, and that, if there had been any love on earth hitherto, it was not owing to a natural law, but simply because men have believed in immortality. Ivan Fyodorovitch added in parenthesis that the whole natural law lies in that faith, and that if you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism. That's not all. He ended by asserting that for every individual, like ourselves, who does not believe in God or immortality, the moral law of nature must immediately be changed into the exact contrary of the former religious law, and that egoism, even to crime, must become not only lawful but even recognised as the inevitable, the most rational, even honourable outcome of his position. From this paradox, gentlemen, you can judge of the rest of our eccentric and paradoxical friend Ivan Fyodorovitch's theories." (Dostoyevsky, The Brother's Karamazov (New York: Random House, 1950), translated by Constance Garnett, page 78)

Obviously, Ivan -- and therefore Dostoyevsky -- had in mind Kant's sixth proof of God's existence, the moral argument in which God is a postulate of practical reason necessary for guaranteeing the ground of morality, namely immortality. Thus does Ivan hold that "whole natural law [of love for others] lies in . . . the belief in immortality," without which, "nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful."

Dostoyevsky may also have been alluding to the legendary founder of the mysterious but ruthless Assassians, Hasan-i-Sabah, a rather unorthodox Muslim who reputedly stated, "Nothing is true, everything is permitted," perhaps based on an extreme interpretation of Surah 3:54 (cf. 8:30) in the Qur'an, which according to some translations states that "Allah is the best of deceivers" ("Allahu khayru al-makireena," the lexical form of makireena, i.e., makara, having as one of its meanings "to practice deceit" [cf. Miim-Kaf-Ra; also Edward William Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon (pdf)]).

But God knows best . . . even if He isn't telling.

Dostoyevsky: "to set up heaven on earth"

Hanging Gardens of Babylon

with

Tower of Babel in Background

'a little heaven on earth'

Marten Jacobszoon Heemskerk van Veen

(Image from Wikipedia)

Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov, also called Alyosha, is the 'hero' of Dostoyevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov. At the age of 19, he opts for the life of a monk, an existential choice that Dostoyevski describes in a very intriguing manner:

I shall be told, perhaps, that Alyosha was stupid, undeveloped, had not finished his studies, and so on. That he did not finish his studies is true, but to say that he was stupid or dull would be a great injustice. I'll simply repeat what I have said above. He entered upon this path only because, at that time, it alone struck his imagination and presented itself to him as offering an ideal means of escape for his soul from darkness to light. Add to that that he was to some extent a youth of our last epoch -- that is, honest in nature, desiring the truth, seeking for it and believing in it, and seeking to serve it at once with all the strength of his soul, seeking for immediate action, and ready to sacrifice everything, life itself, for it. Though these young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply tenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set before them as their goal such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of them. The path Alyosha chose was a path going in the opposite direction, but he chose it with the same thirst for swift achievement. As soon as he reflected seriously he was convinced of the existence of God and immortality, and at once he instinctively said to himself: "I want to live for immortality, and I will accept no compromise." In the same way, if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labour question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth. Alyosha would have found it strange and impossible to go on living as before. It is written: "Give all that thou hast to the poor and follow Me, if thou wouldst be perfect." (Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov (New York: Random House, 1950), pages 25-26)

Had Alyosha turned atheist, he would have been a very dangerous man, for that turn would have turned him from a revolutionary of the soul to a social revolutionary and turned his spiritual energies from seeking perfection of his own soul to seeking perfection of all society. Socialism of the late 19th century was often a violent doctrine, looking back for inspiration to the French Revolution, and though Dostoyevsky does not make explicit in this passage that Alyosha would have turned to violence in pursuit of a socialist society, such might be implicit given that Alyosha is described as the sort of passionate young man "seeking for immediate action, and ready to sacrifice everything, [even] life itself," for his aim of perfection.

Dostoyevsky's insight into the religious impulse behind revolutionary socialism has since become nearly a sociological cliché -- the secularization of eschatology -- but it remains an interesting inquiry. My own thoughts on this matter, partly impelled by Dostoyevsky's depiction of Alyosha, turn from the moment of a revolutionary grab for power to the process of constructing utopia, the Tower of Babel being built "to set up heaven on earth." Such utopian visions always turn to dystopian realities because the search for perfection, when no longer directed toward one's individual soul, where it would have better experienced the bitter, personal truth of human imperfectibility, directs itself instead toward a perfection of mankind believed attainable through constructing a society so totally regulated that it exerts ideological force upon the innermost being of each individual. This never works, of course, for no social mechanisms can perfectly construct, or reconstruct, the soul. Human evil is ineradicable by merely human means, so the mechanisms must be applied with ever-greater pressure toward bending human nature to the revolutionary will, a repression that never totally succeeds and must therefore become ever more repressive . . . except that the revolutionaries, being merely human themselves, come to apply the machinery not for the explicit aim of human perfection but in the implicit interest of personal power. They grow cynical and accept bribes but must constantly extol the revolution and revolutionary purity -- and thereby only succeed in constructing a totally dishonest society. Thus does the misdirected quest for perfection result in deeper corruption.

Gary Saul Morson also has some thoughts on this theme in Dostoyevsky's writings.

Why I read . . . and now re-read Dostoyevsky

St. Ambrose

Holy Elder

Optina Monastery

(Image from Wikipedia)

According to Marc Slonim, who wrote the Introduction to Constance Garnett's translation of The Brother's Karamazov, "the Holy Elder Ambrose," depicted above, "was definitely the model of Father Zossima," and it was this Ambrose whom Dostoyevsky -- accompanied by the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov -- "had gone . . . to the Optina Monastery to meet" (Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov (New York: Random House, 1950), p. xiii). Father Zossima has some insightful words about resentment that are relevant not only for my interest in the 'resentful' character of Darcy in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice but also for the resentment that I recently encountered on this blog.

I am, of course, no stranger to the experience of resentment within myself, though I hope that I have overcome most of that, and I recall not only cases of 'justifiable' resentment but also (and even more so) cases of unjustifiable resentment. At times, I believe, we find that we wish to take offense . . . though I think that this happens more often when we are young and passionate, before the passage of years has taught us to entertain more suspicions about our own precious 'causes'. We carry a chip on our shoulder -- sometimes the right, sometimes the left -- and not merely wait but positively expect, even hope, yes actually actively seek, for someone to knock it off. We nurture a base and baseless resentment that we hope to help grow.

In Dostoyevsky's novel The Brothers Karamzov, the insightful and saintly Father Zossima speaks to those who resent without cause:

"Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love . . . . The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offence, isn't it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill -- he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offence, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vindictiveness." (Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov, p. 48)

How true, that a "man may know that nobody has insulted him, . . . yet he will be the first to take offence . . . and so pass to genuine vindictiveness." Such a man will gesture toward equanimity, extoll his own reasonability, praise himself and his own patience to the heavens, and fall into an outraged indignation at the mildest challenge to his opinions, expressing his vindictive outrage through harsh but ultimately ineffectual insults of his own.

But perhaps we learn, some of us, from experience . . . the best teacher.

Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1879)

Shortly before Karamazov

(Image from Wikipedia)

When I was 18 and taking a freshman writing course under Morse Hamilton at Baylor University, I wrote a short story about a morose down-and-out fellow who lived underground in the basement of some abandoned building, felt himself alienated from society, and philosophized about life as he survived by gleaning forgotten change from the coin return boxes of vending machines.

It was a ridiculous story, but Morse liked it well enough and asked me if I'd read Notes from Underground, by Dostoyevsky.

"Who's Dostoyevsky?" I asked.

"Oh, just some Russian writer," replied Morse, smiling but giving me a peculiar look.

I got the book somehow and read it quickly. Immediately taken by Dostoyevsky's themes, I read everything by him that I could get my hands on . . . which wasn't much, admittedly. I was poor, and I depended on what I could find secondhand in the Baylor Bookstore. Morse made sure that I read The Brothers Karamazov.

A semester or two later, I was surprised in an existentialism class taught by Robert Baird to read an excerpt, "The Grand Inquisitor," from this novel, and I began to appreciate that one could legitimately read literature as philosophy, which meant reading primarily for ideas rather than for the story. Actually, that fit how I had read the novel even before my existentialism course, but the course reinforced my tendency to read stories for their intellectual depth, sometimes to the detriment of appreciating the story for itself.

Dostoyevsky can certainly be read for philosophical insights, for he self-consciously wrote novels of ideas, but I discovered over the years, as I looked back on my youthful reading of this greatest work of his, that I could recall nothing of the plot, and having recently finished re-reading Jane Austen's works, I've decided to return to Dostoyevsky and am currently re-reading Constance Garnett's translation of The Brothers Karamazov, which is probably the same copy that I read nearly 35 years ago, for the book that I have has heavily yellowed pages with what appears to be my occasional, somewhat random underlining.

Upon this re-reading, I've noticed something odd.

The narrator self-consciously puts himself forward as an individual who knows the Karamazov family, as well as other characters, and claims to be native to the same place in Russia as the Karamazovs. He still seems to be currently living there, too, for in speaking of the Karamazov family's reunion in their place of birth, he tells of the two brothers by the father's second wife (the first wife having borne a son as well) and says:

"The younger brother, Alexey, had been a year already among us, having been the first of the three to arrive."

In itself, this isn't odd, for a narrator can be a character reporting on what another character does, but consider this report on a reaction to the monks in the local monastery by one of the many other characters, Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miüsov:

"Oh, devil take them all! An outer show elaborated through centuries, and nothing but charlatanism and nonsense underneath," flashed through Miüsov's mind.

Notice the oddity? Our narrator, a character in the novel and telling us the story, is privy to another character's unspoken thoughts -- even thoughts that simply flash through that character's mind.

This is the sort of thing that passed unnoticed by me in my jejune reading at 19, so I've perhaps grown more subtle with age despite the daily loss of brain cells.

"The It Girl"

The It Girl

"attracting oculophiliacs since 1977"

(Image from Lexiphanic)

Well, "The It Girl" has tagged me and set forth the following rules:

1. Link to the person who tagged you, and post the rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 random facts about yourself.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of the post, and include links to their blogs.
4. Let each person know they've been tagged by commenting on their blog.
5. Please "feel free to ignore the lame chain game."

Actually, I added rule number five, but the words fell from the lips of the "The It Girl" herself.

Okay, here goes:

1. I never participate in these lame chain games.
2. I'm not entirely consistent.
3. I really hate the overuse of italics.
4. Why can't an adverb simply express emphasis without italics?
5. Does it strike anyone else as slightly odd that "adverb" is a noun?
6. Numbers 4 and 5 are not directly facts about me.
7. Number 6 also lacks factitude -- but factually expresses nonfactitude -- about me.

Okay, I tag the following seven bludgers:

Clara Gordon Bow
Richard Harris
Douglas Noël Adams
Hans Blumenberg
Hans Jonas
Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский
Лев Николаевич Толстой

These seven unfortunates should feel free to ignore me. Indeed, I would be a bit disconcerted if any of them were somehow to respond to my tag...