The link between Dostoyevsky and Saul Bellow

In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche declared, with rare humility, that Dostoyevsky was “the only psychologist from whom I had something to learn.” Saul Bellow, psychoanalyzed for decades, learned more about psychology from Dostoyevsky (above) than from Freud.

Bellow’s parents were born in Russia, and as his father read Dostoyevsky in Yiddish to his young son, the novelist’s work seeped into his receptive heart. When preparing to teach Crime and Punishment, Bellow contrasted it to Anglophone fiction and emphasised that he was liberated by the intensity and extremism of his soul mate: “The Russians have an immediate charismatic appeal. Their conventions allow them to express freely their feelings about nature and human beings. We have inherited a more restricted and imprisoning attitude toward the emotions. We have to work around puritanical and stoical restraints. We lack the Russian openness.”

The Russian-born, Partisan Review critic Philip Rahv, whose six authoritative essays helped establish Dostoyevsky’s reputation in America, confirmed Bellow’s admiration. Bellow allowed that his first novel, Dangling Man (1944), had “close affinities of spirit to Dostoyevsky” and that his second novel, The Victim (1947), was “very much under the spell of Dostoyevsky’s The Eternal Husband.” Though critics following Bellow’s lead have repeatedly emphasised the influence of Notes From Underground and The Eternal Husband, the influence of The Idiot (1868) on the agonised autobiographical hero and the emotional plot of Herzog (1964) is much greater.

Bellow frequently expressed his admiration for the Russian novelist and declared: “I would make a distinction between Dostoyevsky and anybody else because he was the greatest writer by far… He has a deadly accurate sadistic insight into the motives of people.” Bellow also acknowledged that his early novels were indebted to him: “my patron saint is Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man… a creature of resentful, impotent intelligence… His spite, his coldness, his venom, combined with the largeness of his mind, give him an exceptional stature.” The challenging opening sentence of Herzog, “If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog,” echoes the Underground Man’s masochistic exclamation, “So my liver hurts? Good, let it hurt even more!”

In Herzog Bellow employs several of Dostoyevsky’s narrative techniques. George Steiner noted how the Russian, fascinated with the monstrous, uses half-delirious monologues, swift reversals of mood and hallucinatory pace to achieve his distinctive ferocious comedy. Disturbed, hysterical and out of control, his insulted and injured characters glory in their self-abasement. In The Idiot Dostoyevsky portrays extreme situations that reveal searing guilt and self-destructive impulses, and creates an atmosphere of intoxication, hysteria and suffering, of chaos, madness and the abyss.

The critic Edward Garnett, whose wife Constance translated Dostoyevsky’s work, wrote that reading The Idiot produces the effect of drowning in an emotional maelstrom: “one has the sensation of being carried along in turbulent flood, engulfed in whirlpools of passionate feeling, whirled along in rapids of thought, caught up and held fast in strong currents.”

Dostoyevsky’s novel, written under the strain of extreme penury and pressure, used his own epileptic fits and his emotions when he was nearly executed as a political prisoner in Siberia to create his central character. He drew on his own feelings as Prince Mishkin witnesses a death by guillotine in France: “what dreadful convulsions his whole spirit must have endured; it is an outrage of the soul.” Joseph Frank, Dostoyevsky’s great biographer, declared that the novel “is the most personal of his major works, the book which embodies his most intimate, cherished and sacred convictions.” Bellow’s most personal novel also courageously exposes his own humiliation, and Herzog is spiritually at home with the Prince’s egoism of suffering.

The hypersensitive Prince is not really an idiot. He is (as Herzog is) a holy fool and idiot savant, extremely gifted yet mentally unstable. Dostoyevsky wryly observes that most Russians are incapable of rational behavior and “if all such people were put under restraint, there would be no one left for keepers.” The Prince’s self-abasement causes chaos and torment, and his fits intensify his feverish, delirious nature. But he also suffers with all those who suffer. Dostoyevsky self-reflectively portrays the Prince with sympathy and compassion, as “a man endowed with real truthfulness of spirit.” A great suffocating weight seems to lie upon his chest as he “tries to understand why men should be for ever tormenting themselves.” Joseph Frank concluded that at the end of the novel the Prince’s “grasp of the real world becomes weaker and weaker as all hope of human happiness for him vanishes irrevocably; he now lives at the mercy of the shifting moods of the unbalanced Nastasia.”

The Prince is torn between affect and reason, impulse and intellect. He feels compassionate love for the fallen Nastasia and romantic love for the idealised Aglaya. But he arouses jealousy, causes pain and hatred, and is unable to give himself to either of them. “He was such a simple-minded man,” Dostoyevsky writes, “and believed that he could be happy with a woman of Nastasia’s debased character.” A friend, foreseeing the Prince’s sad fate, asks, “How does the fellow manage to love two of them? Two different kinds of love, I suppose! This is very interesting — poor idiot! What on earth will become of him now?”

Nastasia is an intensely emotional and destructive woman — beautiful, intelligent, fierce and intimidating. Just as the Prince is torn between Nastasia and Aglaya, Nastasia herself is torn between the Prince and her evil suitor Rogozhin. Dostoyevsky writes that in the Prince’s love for Nastasia “there was the sort of tenderness one feels for a sick unhappy child who cannot be left alone.” Another friend warns him, “You behave just as though you weren’t a man at all… She wants a clown like you to play with… And right glad I am that she’ll make a thorough good fool of you.” In a seminal passage about Nastasia, Gania — another avaricious but hopeless suitor — asks the Prince, “Would Rogozhin marry her, do you think?” The prince prophetically replies, “‘Why not? Certainly he would, I should think. He will marry her tomorrow! — marry her tomorrow and murder her in a week.’ Hardly had the Prince uttered the last word when Gania [perceiving the tragic truth] gave such a fearful shudder that the prince almost cried out.”

In addition to the saturnine mood of The Idiot (which precisely matches Bellow’s) its loose structure and proliferation of vividly portrayed minor characters, the novel also gave Bellow a situation that reflected his own life. Herzog’s treacherous ex-wife Madeleine has all the vicious yet alluring traits of Nastasia that made Herzog hate her yet still desire her. Dostoyevsky observed of Nastasia, in a sentence that must have resonated when the bitterly wounded Bellow portrayed Madeleine: “It was as though she had a pebble in place of a heart, as though her feelings and affections were dried up and withered forever.” Like the Prince, Herzog is torn between the loneliness of his crippled celibacy and his inability to commit himself to another woman: either to his sensual and obliging Japanese girlfriend Sono or to the sophisticated and devoted Ramona. Rogozhin attempts to stab the Prince and actually murders Nastasia. Herzog plans to murder Madeleine and his close friend Valentine Gersbach, who’s deceived him, seduced his wife and stolen the affection of his little daughter.

Though Herzog has a prodigious intellect, but like the Prince he is hopeless when subjected to intrigue. He cannot comprehend why Gersbach ever became his friend and why Madeleine rejected his exalted character for his superficial and worthless rival. Mixing memory and desire, Herzog doesn’t realise that Madeleine is attracted to rather than repelled by the lame Gersbach, who walks with the dipping movement of a gondolier. He’s appalled by that “piece of orange-tufted flesh,” that “loud, flamboyant, ass-clutching brute” who was still capable of three-legged copulation. Both men, almost simultaneously, had been buried in Madeleine’s corrupt and seductive flesh.

Madeleine had cunningly insisted that Herzog undergo analysis as a condition of remaining his wife. Later, when the deceptive veil is lifted, he realises that “four afternoons a week they knew where I was, on the couch, and so were safe in bed. . . .

He could not help thinking how much he must have added to Gersbach’s pleasure by his gullibility.” After Madeleine leaves Herzog, Gersbach returns to their house to “pack her things. And what he had mainly come for — her diaphragm.” Herzog humbly hands over the intimate contraceptive device and thinks, in another whirl of self-abasement, “my idiocy inspired them, and sent them to greater heights of perversity.”

When deceived, Herzog calls himself a fool and an idiot. His friend crudely expresses a major theme in the novel by explaining how such a brilliant man can also be so stupid: “Somewhere in every intellectual is a dumb prick.” Herzog’s mental anguish has originated in his childhood. He maintains that his Russian family, fleeing from persecution and pogroms, “had a great schooling in grief. I still know these cries of the soul.” Like his brother he is “demonstrative, passionate, explosive, given to bursts of rage.” Knowing he’s irrational, he is unable to behave rationally. One of those “confused high-minded people” with precious moral feelings, “he was determined to act without clearly knowing what to do, and even recognising that he had no power over his impulses.” He had an “intense way of doing everything and a talent for making fatal choices.”

But his mad behavior has serious consequences: “He was swindled, conned, manipulated, his savings taken, driven into debt, his trust betrayed by wife, friend, physician.” Crushed by failure, he sees “how a man will submit his whole life to some extreme endeavor, often crippling, even killing himself in his chosen sphere… He realised that he had mismanaged everything — everything. His life was, as the phrase goes, ruined.” In a tragicomic perception, Herzog despairingly defines “the story of my life — how I rose from humble origins to disaster.”

Herzog, like the Prince, is dejected and miserable, and searches for meaning in his wretched life. He dislikes happiness, which is painful, and “lacked the strength of character to bear joy.” He is “a deep man, beautiful… but sad, unable to take what his heart really desired, a man tempted by God, longing for grace, but escaping headlong from his salvation, often close at hand.” Since Herzog cannot be happy, he turns from self-hatred to hatred of those who have hurt him and to the pleasure of plotting revenge. “To hate, to be in a position to do something about it” is a perverse way to regain his self-respect. “He had more enemies and hatreds than anyone could easily guess from his thoughtful expression.” Echoing what the Prince said to Gania, Herzog insists, “The knife and the wound were aching for each other.”

After their babysitter reveals that Madeleine and Gersbach had left his little daughter June locked alone in the car while they had sex, Herzog confesses that “I actually feel capable of murdering them both. Well, it’s true. I’ve tested it in my mind with a gun, a knife, and felt no horror, no guilt.” But his strong paternal feelings, his most appealing quality, allows him to suppress his murderous impulse and respond positively to Gersbach at the very moment when he is stealing his beloved June away from him. Herzog returns to his old home, peers through the bathroom window and voyeuristically watches Gersbach bathing little June. Though this great scene was sexually charged and potentially pedophile, Herzog is strangely moved by Gersbach’s paternal affection, his playfulness and tenderness as he washes, dries and powders her naked body.

A friend tells Herzog — hinting at the source of Bellow’s pain and inspiration — “unless you’re having a bad time with a woman you can’t believe you’re being serious.” At the end of the novel Herzog, like a wounded animal, crawls back to his country lair. Though he prepares dinner for Ramona in this rare moment of healing, he still remains vulnerable and dubiously asserts, “I don’t contemplate putting myself in the hands of Ramona or any woman, at this time.” Like Theodore Roethke, who wrote “this shaking keeps me steady,” Herzog thinks that “by staggering he could recover his balance, or by admitting a bit of madness come to his senses.”

Herzog’s idiotic behavior is engaging and often amusing. He writes hysterical letters, a kind of epistolary therapy, to the living and the dead with no hope of a response; he naively thinks Madeleine would be happy with no social life in an isolated rural house; he tolerates her short-lived Catholic conversion and pretentious Russian studies; he never finishes his over-ambitious and endlessly delayed book; he’s intelligent but doesn’t realise he’s been deceived by his best friend; he’s still in love with Madeleine who’s betrayed him and has demanded an extortionate divorce settlement; he humbly returns her diaphragm instead of destroying it; he buys flashy new clothes for an impulsive trip to Martha’s Vineyard, but returns home right after he arrives; he intends to murder Madeleine and Gersbach; he has a highway accident with June in the car; and he is arrested with her for carrying a loaded but unlicensed gun.

Herzog, Bellow’s most Russian novel, is filled with imaginative energy, compassionate insight and gloomy fatality. Its convulsive mood, convoluted plot and self-loathing main character were inspired by the profound and nourishing influence of Dostoyevsky, whom he called the “greatest novelist by far.” The tumultuous Russian helped Herzog cure his love for Madeleine and extinguish the memory of her betrayal, and this cathartic experience enabled him recover his sanity. Bellow not only introduced the novel of ideas into American literature, but by absorbing the Russian influence also greatly enhanced the form and content of postwar fiction.