Dostoevsky and Me

A while back,

Meg Oolders

interviewed me for an abandoned podcast and asked, “What was your motivation for writing your Walt Darling series?” and the answer was two parts: 1) I wanted a serial story on my Substack to encourage subscriptions, just like the other authors of the Great Substack Story Challenge II and 2) I had just written the following post, which pretends to be about Dostoevsky and existentialist quotes, but whose heart is my friend’s coming-out story, and I felt guilty sharing his story of self-discovery, without first sharing my own.

Here then is that post I wrote way back at the end of 2022 (you can tell it’s early because of my DFWallaceian overuse of footnotes), and the indirect inspiration for all the Walt Darling that followed.

2001 and my university’s baccalaureate speaker says, “It’s not the books you read during your time here, it’s the books you read after you graduate that will shape you.” (She was a distinguished librarian).

That summer I’m working in Acadia National Park in Maine¹ because I daydreamed during a sermon at a Campus Crusade for Christ convention I attended in the spring of my junior year.² I worked in the gift shop beside the restaurant by “The Bubbles” - two perfectly round hills on the other side of a mountain pond that resembled a pair of breasts. 

My prior work life had been as a lifeguard and a Resident Assistant, so working in the gift shop was the first time I learned the value of stocking the higher priced drinks on the easiest shelf to reach (roughly shoulder height) and how to slip back into the world any rogue Canadian coins in your change drawer (to someone distracted, like a parent).

Part of the perks of employment was staff housing.³ Two of my roommates were Russians on an employment exchange program; they worked as busboys in the restaurant. On one of my non-Sunday days off, I wondered into the bookstore in Bar Harbor and picked up a copy of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and The Brothers Karamazov, recently translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I had never read any of the Great Russians, except maybe in excerpted quotes in an Illustrated Intro to Existentialism.⁴

That summer, I liked to hike to the top of one of the many island mountains, find a rocky ledge overlooking the Atlantic to dangle my feet off, and read. Other books I remember reading for the first time that summer was Pascal’s Pensees, Thomas A Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ, and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.⁵ 

I quickly finished Notes from the Underground and asked my Russian roommates if they liked Dostoevsky. 

“I have not read him,” one said. 

“Me either,” said the other, “Why would you think we have read Dostoevsky?”

I said, “I don’t know. I guess because I’ve read Mark Twain. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ernest Hemingway.” 

“Who are these names,” they said. “Do not sound very Russian.”

It took me much longer to read The Brothers Karamazov. I didn’t finish it while I was in Acadia. In fact, I remember it being kind of a slog for the first third; I kept taking a break from it and then one weekend when visiting my best friend who lived in Austin - something clicked. I was enthralled and stayed up all night reading to the end.

What I remember is that the external plots were secondary to the tumultuous inner struggle of Dostoevsky’s characters. They were all at war with themselves; their desires clashing; their competing wants internally and eternally in conflict, tormenting and tearing at their hearts; their hidden passions beating beneath their breasts, battering the inside of their chests, desperate to burst out and be revealed. In my memory, Dostoevsky captured the tension and conflict within every human heart. I loved reading him. His works were windows into a world both foreign and frighteningly familiar. Is my memory true? Or does my memory mislead? If I read him today, would I feel the same? I am afraid to find out.

Because I had been accepted into AmeriCorps*NCCC but had to wait half a year before my service year started, after my summer in Acadia I moved back in with my parents. During the week, I picked up part-time substitute teaching gigs. At night and on weekends, I worked at a Blockbuster Video.⁶ I wrote a couple short stories and had big dreams of being a famous author. The mostly lone character (with an interesting voice) nature of Notes from the Underground inspired me to write a couple short stories with only one character. Think Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Think Kafka’s The Metamorphoses. One of my coworkers at Blockbuster video loved them.⁷ 

Also, being home, I reconnected with a college friend, S_____. S_____ and I had got close my senior year. He was attracted to men, but didn’t want to be, and thought having a close, platonic male friend would help. So, I rolled with that weird request for friendship and discovered we had a lot in common. One thing being an admiration for the Baptist pastor John Piper’s teaching of Christian Hedonism.⁸ Another being enjoying debating the existence of free will.⁹ 

S_____ wanted to be more athletic; I taught him to swim.¹⁰ He introduced me to Vivaldi. I introduced him to the Beatles.¹¹ We attended campus performances of Shakespeare. We prayed for each other.

After Acadia but before I left for AmeriCorps, S_____ and I attended a talk at a Russian Eastern Orthodox Church¹² in Dallas where the speaker claimed that Dostoevsky’s five major novels could be read as one epic five-act work, so we embarked on a journey to read them all. New translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky were published about once a year and I think four had already been released by the time we started our book club of two. 

After the Dostoevsky lecture, a kind old man, another attendee and member of the church, gave each of us each an Intro to Orthodoxy pamphlet. S_____ started to attend their Sunday services. He joined one of their Beginner Orthodoxy study groups. He volunteered. S_____ embraced Orthodoxy, in part, because he believed the Orthodox church might provide a better faith framework than his Southern Baptist upbringing to resist his attraction to men.¹³ It all backfired when, putting away chairs after an event, alone with the kind old man who had given us the Intro to Orthodoxy pamphlets, the kind old man kissed him.¹⁴

S_____ left that church and Orthodox Christianity. Then, S_____ left any kind of Christianity. Then, any kind of God. S_____ quit fighting himself.¹⁵ We could no longer honestly debate the meaning of “predestination.” But we could still chat up Dostoevsky. We still had three novels to go!  (The Idiot, Demons, and The Adolescent).¹⁶ 

I moved to the Northeast to start my AmeriCorps*NCCC service. I met my future wife.¹⁷ I read that line in The Idiot, where the prince (when speaking with the girl he loves) thinks, ‘guns could be firing outside and the world could be ending, but I was talking to her and she was talking to me, and I was looking in her eyes, and she into mine, and that was the only thing in the world that mattered.’ And that’s how I felt every time I spoke with my (future) wife!

S_____ moved to Antartica.¹⁸ 

When my AmeriCorps*NCCC team was assigned a project in New York City, I attended a Gay and Faithful event in the hopes of finding some helpful answer for my friend. I sent him a copy of their Helpful Resources bibliography handout¹⁹. It was too late. By then, nothing anyone else wrote on the subject interested him.²⁰

I read The Eternal Husband and Other Short Stories. The House of the Dead. Poor Folk. The Gambler and The Double. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. Eventually, S_____ found a man who loved him and was up for traveling the world with him.²¹ We pursued our own interests and lost contact.²² 

And as S_____ and I drifted apart, so did my interest in Dostoevsky. I didn’t notice at first. During the initial purge of my bookshelf, before my wife and I moved to Austin, I kept only my collection of C.S. Lewis, Chuck Palahniuk, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.²³ But when it was time to move from Maryland to China? I realized I hadn’t pulled out the Dostoevsky in years. And not only had I not cracked one open in years, but I was worried if I did I would no longer enjoy them. Sometime in the fifteen or so years between collecting all the Dostoevsky I could find and wanting to purge all unnecessary possessions before moving to China, my literary tastes had changed.²⁴

My Palahniuk and Lewis went into long-term storage. I gave my Dostoevsky collection away. 

But, without needing to look them up or think too hard to recall, here are a few of my favorite Dostoevsky quotes I can recite:

“Guilty for everything to everyone by everybody.”²⁵

“All my life I’ve been lying and I only now realized it.”²⁶

“Why count the years, why count the months? When one day is enough to know all happiness.”²⁷

1. Farthest I’d ever been from where I grew up. 

2. I hadn’t been paying attention to the speaker when most everyone around me stood up. So, I rose. As the speaker continued, I realized that he had asked the gathered student leaders who in the stadium would commit a year of their life to Christ after graduation. I figured, this must be how providence works. The next year, as graduation approached and I doubted my holiness to ask family and friends to financially support me to be staff with the parachurch ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ, I walked past a table in front of the Student Center that was advertising an organization called A Christian Ministry in the National Parks. You get hired by a concessionaire in one of the many US national parks (none of which I had ever visited), and guaranteed Sundays off to help lead worship in the campgrounds. I assisted with services in ampitheaters at two different camping areas in the morning and with an evening service on Cadillac Mountain. There were two others I worked with in planning the Sunday services; a girl who continued on in other ministries and who for a couple years after our time working together I contributed a small amount each month to help financially support, and a boy who was maybe the only nemesis I’ve ever had in my life. 

3. My roommates were not part of A Christian Ministry in the National Park, just other employees of the concessionaire in Acadia.

4. In the main bar in Bar Harbor (it sold ostrich burgers!), another short-term job adventurer wore his AmeriCorps NCCC sweatshirt. I had never heard of the program (it was still relatively new then) and he had become disillusioned with whether his volunteer service mattered. As he talked about how he doubted whether any of the service he did actually changed the world for the better, I envied his sweatshirt. Plus, I still owed God a little over half a year of ministry. I applied for AmeriCorps*NCCC (but had to wait a session to start, since the program received a flood of applications from other idealistic patriots in the wake of 9/11). In my campus house, I met friends I still FaceTime with every couple of months, and on my AmeriCorps*NCCC team, I met my wife. So, providence! Yeah!

(Maybe I was just one of the aimless college graduates of the early aughts living out concepts like, “quarter-life crisis.” Or maybe it was all part of some divine plan. God knows).

Hopefully, I’ll write a lot more about my AmeriCorps*NCCC experience in future posts. But for this note, real quick, true story - in AmeriCorps, this guy on another AmeriCorps team was at our house when the mail came and saw me open up a package inside of which was Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and Elie Wiesel’s Night trilogy. “I didn’t realize you were into this shit,” he said. And then, every time he saw me afterwards he would shout out an existentialist quote. I jog past his porch with and he shouts at me, “Existence precedes essence!” Picking up needles from under a park bench during a neighborhood cleanup in a Baltimore park, I hear him yell, "There is only one true philosophical problem and it is whether to kill yourself or not.” Crossing paths heading back from the townie bar, he laughs and says, “Every war is begun because of man’s inability to sit alone in a room with his own thoughts.” Waving goodbye when he quit the program early because he learned he had a previously unknown son, he hollers out of the departing van, “Man can get used to anything. I wonder if that is not the best definition of a man.” I would later learn that last quote comes from Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead. (It’s more powerful when you know it’s spoken out of the mouth of a character in a Siberian prison camp). But I didn’t know that then.  

5. Yes, the island of Acadia was also where I first read Palahniuk, whose influence would eventually supplant Dostoevsky’s. Some future post will detail my love of Palahniuk.

6. I think I imagined I could follow Tarantino’s path to fame. Instead, I just watched a lot of movies. FYI, this movie is an unaccredited adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Gambler! 

7. Years later when I discovered the paywalled writer’s forum at chuckpalahniuk.net and I posted one of these single character tales that I was particularly proud of, it was (rightly) unanimously excoriated for being boring by (honest) internet strangers. 

8. On S_____ suggestion, we road tripped to Minneapolis to hear him preach. 

9. S_____ tended to argue on the side of predestination; I tended to argue for enlarging the definition of predestination to include its opposite meaning. 

10. He swam laps at the university pool during my shifts.

11. I knew little about classical music; he knew nothing about popular music.

12. Every time I’m in an Orthodox church I feel like I’m worshiping inside a comic book!

13. I should note that, while uncommon, gay-friendly churches weren’t unheard of back then. For example, I knew Dallas had a large LGBT church and I had frequently visited the Would Jesus Discriminate website (either because I saw the billboards or some brochures at our campus’ diversity center). But the concept of ex-gay was also around at the time. So, while we can judge my enabling approach now, at the time I trusted S_____’s assessment of his experience. And to be honest, go even further back in my history and I am guilty of even worse homophobia. My role in S_____’s story, however, did more to change my attitude and actions than any helpful book. 

14. And not a quick kiss on the cheek, the kind that might occur at any church during the meet-and-greet. This was an old-yet-firm-hands-on-the-ass, you-can-tell-I’m-happy-to-see-you, tight-embrace, kind of kiss. 

15. For my part, I realized I wasn’t rooting for S_____ to "win,”  as much as I was simply rooting for S_____. 

16. The books were not translated in publication order. 

17. It would be three or more years before we would date/get engaged. It was not love at first sight (for her). 

18. In my imagination, the South Pole is a gay paradise like Provincetown or Palm Springs and S_____ was pleasantly surprised to not be as isolated and alone as he imagined when first decamping there. 

19. So, yes, back then the internet existed, but Google didn’t. At least, not like today. 

20. S_____ is now one of those beautiful apostates who, when you tell them that you will mention them in your prayers, they still believe enough to put their hand on your shoulder and gently plead, “please, don’t.”

21. Not unlike how my wife and I enjoy moving every couple of years. 

22. Well, kind of. Occasionally, our paths overlap. Usually, in the DC area since my wife and I touch base there every couple of years and sometimes he passes through. And I instagram messaged him yesterday to tell him I had been reminded of my former love of Dostoevsky and therefore of him. We’re in the midst of reconnecting. I asked if Antartica was secretly a gay paradise. He laughed and said, “not a paradise. But sometimes we outnumbered the breeders.” 

23. Also, a couple Best American Short Story Anthologies, the Collected Fiction of Jorges Luis Borges, and Donald Barthelme’s 60 Stories and 40 Stories. And our cookbooks. 

24. A topic worthy of another post. Or a family-tree like drawing of authors, showing the influence of Chuck Palahniuk’s lessons in praise of minimalism.

25. Essentially, the answer (spoiler alert) to the murder mystery in The Brothers Karamazov.

26. From Demons, at the end when the old man realizes he never believed the ideas/values he professed like the young men he influenced.

27. This used to be my favorite quote, back when I held being able to remember a quote as important. (It’s also from The Brothers Karamazov).