The Death Of The Kierkegaardian Aesthete: Thought For The Day

It was there that the big building with the watchtower stood. By the big locked gates of the building, leaning with his shoulder against them, stood a little man wrapped in a gray soldier's greatcoat and wearing a brass Achilles helmet. With drowsy eyes, coldly, he glanced sidelong at the approaching Svidrigalov. His face bore that expression of eternal, grumbling sorrow that is so sourly imprinted upon all faces of the Jewish tribe without exception. The two of them, Svidrigalov and Achilles, studied each other silently for a while. Achilles finlly thought it out of order for a an who was not drunk to be standing there in front of him, three steps away, staring at him point-blank and saying nothing.

"Zo vat do you vant here?" he said, still without moving or changing his position.

"Nothing, brother. Good morning!" Svidrigalov replied.

"It's de wrong place."

"I'm off to foreign lands, brother."

"To foreign lands?"

"To America."

"America?"

Svidrigalov took out the revolver and cocked it. Achilles raised his eyebrows.

"Zo vat's dis, a choke? It's de wrong place!"

"But why is it the wrong place?"

"Because it's de wrong place!"

"Well never mind, brother. It's a good place. If they start asking you, just tell them he went to America."

He put the revolver to his right temple.

"Oi, dat's not allowed, it's de wrong place!" Achilles roused himself, his pupils widening more and more.

Svidrigalov pulled the trigger.

---From Chapter 6 of Part 6 of Crime and Punishment. I want to write an extended post at some point about the subject of Tolstoyevsky. Specifically, I want to argue that although Tolstoy was the greater novelist qua novelist, Dostoevsky far more acutely registered the deep truths of the human condition. Till I get around to it, I'd appreciate it if someone could enlighten me as to exactly why Nabokov detested Dostoevsky so. Sheer egoism played a part---but there's got to be more to it. After all, he overcompensated in his praise for Tolstoy, and acknowledged his huge debt to Joyce.

Speaking of whom, as minimally perceptive readers of this blog will have noticed, I'm clearly a Joyce guy. (That's why there's no apostrophe in "Finnegans"---though I insist it's named after both the book and the song.) Nevertheless, I'm beginning to be convinced, partly through life-experience and partly through my work in philosophy---in which I find radical skepticism, sucky as it is, the only ultimately tenable position in any field---that Dostoevsky (and Kierkegaard too, I think, despite the executive summaries of his works) appreciated something that Joyce might not have: namely that in the end, human life really can't be redeemed.