On Dostoevsky Night
We threw a literary party & told no one (very few)
But first, a quick note from Hailo:
We're doing a ~drop~ but I'd rather call it a ~debut~. A little softer, right? Rolls off the tongue. Think of it as a little debutante ball for something like merch, if you can call it that. It's a very small, very bespoke collection of thrifted clothing and curated used books. Each book will come with my own reflection on Dostoevsky Night, the ideation of it, etc. It will be personal and only in print. See a preview of the FYODOR COLLECTION in the video below (along with details for the irl pop-up). For our ride or die non-nyc Literatis, it will be online as well (I'm sorry international ones, still haven't cracked shipping outside of the US but haven't forgotten about you). First come, first served (clicks count! online stock is the same as what we'll have irl). xoxoxo
And now, Dostoevsky Night, as told by
, with a treat by at the end.ON DOSTOEVSKY NIGHT
Late April. Dostoevsky Night. A bar and club in Bushwick that looks like it more often hosts hip hop and punk rock shows.
A soulful bouncer who somehow knows my middle name from the moment he meets me, Hailey Cognetti, and I stand in the little entry vestibule. The first arrivals start to come in: the bouncer cards them and Hailey takes their cover and tapes their phone cameras. I ask the arrivals to plant their feet fully on the floor, take a deep breath, and close their eyes. I recite an extemporaneous version of one of three passages from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot to welcome them to the night.
A man is sentenced to death and led to the scaffold to be executed by firing squad. Twenty minutes later, at the last possible moment, his sentence is commuted (this happened to Dostoevsky in real life) but during those minutes when he thinks he’s about to be shot, everything stretches around him with almost unbearable vividness. He watches the shaft of light falling on the beams of a nearby church and reflects on what an infinity of time he would have if he got to live. But after being given back his life, given that infinity, he fails to live at that degree of intensity. For some reason it isn’t possible.
Prince Myshkin declares himself: I love you Nastasya Filippovna. I would die for you. You would be doing me an honor, and not I you. You are proud, Nastasya Filippovna. Perhaps you are so unhappy that you really think you are to blame. You want a lot of looking after, Nastasya Filippovna. I will look after you. If we’re poor, I’ll work. But perhaps we won’t have to—I’ve received a letter about an inheritance . . . I will love you all my life, Natasya Filippovna.
A general visits prisoners in Sibera all his life, giving small gifts and just listening to them talk about their lives. Even after he’s died, sometimes decades later a hardened murderer will look up and wonder what’s become of him. Who can say what seeds our acts of kindness plant in the souls of others?
At some point, the line becomes too long, and we just have to hurry them through: “No cameras, no phones. Take a picture and we’ll send you to Siberia!”
~
Fyodor and I go way back. I read Notes from Underground several times as a teenager; Crime and Punishment while feverish with a head cold, riding in trains in France while backpacking the year after college; The Brothers Karamazov during a year of upheaval in my mid-twenties. But it’s The Idiot that’s the most closely held. I first read it the summer between junior and senior year of high school and again in college. In my thirties, I reread it in tandem with my dad as a way to stay connected during the early pandemic lockdown. Stepping back into the world of that novel is like breathing; the sincerity and high stakes are my element.
During those same teenage years when I read Dostoevsky so avidly, I also began to internalize the old, interminable misogynies, by which being feminine and serious, hot and brilliant, felt at odds. This was not unrelated to my nascent growth as a writer. Looking through a tranche of files recovered from an old Compaq from my teenage years to see if I saved a high school essay I remember writing about Notes from Underground (lost) I instead find a short story that begins, “Rule #1. Cut out the ‘girly shit’, ornate descriptions and purple prose.”
My heat sinks to find the evidence of my own artistic and emotional machismo, my disavowal of girlhood, so plainly displayed. The directive would have come from the 20th Century macho minimalists. I could have stayed with Dostoevsky. Prince Myshkin disarms those around him by always speaking from the heart. The novel contains the most nuanced female characters in Dostoevsky. The smart, impetuous Agalia Epanchin and the indelible, willful Nastasya Filippovna, sexually groomed from childhood by a much older nobleman who uses her as his mistress for years. Nastasya’s experience of sexual coercion has filled her with spite and self-hate. Prince Myshkin sees through this, insists on her essential goodness, and falls in love.
~
The bar and larger room are buzzing. Mari Sitner, an actor, playwright, and theatremaker, moves through the crowd. She urgently pushes into the bathroom line, interjecting, “Have you seen my sister?” At Dostoevsky Night, The Brothers Karamazov becomes The Sisters K, the fervid energy of rival siblings interrupts conversations, snaking through the evening.
Some time after midnight, I’m handed a mic and gather everyone in the back room for the Mr. Myshkin Contest. This was a great brainwave of Hailo’s, when we were brainstorming for the night: to organize a moral beauty pageant and crown a Mr. Myshkin.
In the crowded back room I beckon the audience closer and explain. “In The Idiot, Dostoevsky set out to depict a truly morally beautiful man through the character of Prince Myshkin, whose goodness and sincerity baffle 19th Century Petersburg. We’re here to find out what moral beauty looks like in Brooklyn in 2024.” I invite up male identifying guests and a big, stretching queue forms across the stage area. The one who’s crowned Mr. Myshkin will drink free for the rest of the night.
I walk the line, asking the guests variants on the question of what moral beauty means to them. One man says something along the lines, “I don’t think moral beauty talks about itself, or proclaims itself. I think it just listens and is as attuned to others as possible”—one of the more Myshkin-like responses. I ask another, “If you knew a woman who’d been treated badly and who thought she didn’t deserve to be loved, what would you say to her?”
“Wait, what?” he replied. “I thought we were supposed to talk about moral beauty.” (That man is not crowned Mr. Myshkin.)
A female-bodied participant who joined the line-up grabs the mic from him; fulminates, “I don’t think moral beauty has anything to do with being male.”
“No,” I reply, “moral beauty doesn’t have anything to do with gender.” I do point out that women are more likely to be objectified and judged on both their physical and moral beauty by our culture. But how would we imagine moral beauty in a male form today? “For Dostoyevsky, that looked like Christ. Myshkin is kind, sincere, self-sacrificing, at home with children. But he doesn’t have an erotic side. I think for moral beauty today we need someone who’s integrated: emotionally, intellectually, sexually.”
We pick the winner through crowd applause over the contestants. The female participant, a therapist, shares the crown with one of the guys. The night rolls on.
~
It’s not much of a spoiler to tell you that The Idiot doesn’t end happily, for Nastasya or for the prince. He pursues her, but she flees and leaves him for a more destructive partner. Today it reads to me as a tragedy precisely because of Myshkin’s lack of eros: he loves her with intense agape, but it’s in her erotic experience Nastasya’s been wounded and where she needs to experience love and wholeness. In the absence of a healing, fully embodied sexual love, Nastasya goes to a partner who will love her violently and even destroy her, because she doesn’t know anything else. Myshkin’s Christlike fraternal love is not enough to break the pattern.
That vision of wholeness—of sexuality integrated with mind and spirit, integrated with goodness—was not available to Dostoevsky, born in 1821. But we need to find our way to it today. The divide between flesh and spirit was firmly rooted then, and is exactly what we need to reunify now, in our own intimacies and in our relationship with the wider web of being, all the ecologies around us.
It's not unrelated to the project of Hot Literati, which I wish I could go back and give as a gift to my teenage self. Yes, you can be hot and serious and brilliant and intense and kind and sincere, honey. We’re going to change what seriousness looks like and sounds like; change how it reads.
We’ve inherited values that split us apart, internally and collectively. We’re creating a more integrated world. And we’re going to give a modern Myshkin and Natasya a happy ending.
~
I say my good-byes, hug the bouncer, and step out to walk across the borough and across the night, from Bushwick back to central Brooklyn. A couple blocks south, a cat with calico splotches on her body mews at me, rubs against my legs, and jumps into my lap when I sit down.
Back at Dostoevsky Night, The Sisters K finds its climax: a scream comes from the back room, and everyone is asked to leave. In the world of the play as in the novel, a murder has been committed. But there’s laughter as people find their way to the sidewalk. We’ve gathered this night under the sign of creativity, and joy.
The old stories are reconstituted through us, through every reimagining. The new also begins to form, take shape, and find its way into the world.
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