JOSEPH FRANK
Dostoevsky and Evil
I
N THE SPRING OF 2002,
a colloquium on the problem of evil, spon–
sored by the Nexus Foundation, was held at the University of
Tilburg in Holland . I was a member of a panel assigned to discuss
Dostoevsky, certainly the modern writer who has given the theme of evil
one of its most powerful expressions. Our keynote speaker was the
South African novelist
J.
M. Coetzee, who, however, sprung a surprise
on his fellow panelists and the audience by not speaking about Dosto–
evsky at all. Instead, he read a sketch supposedly written by a fictional
personage already familiar from his work, a writer like himself named
Elizabeth Costello, presumably invited to speak at precisely such a con–
ference on precisely such a topic; and she finds herself rebelling at the
task she had assumed.
Her own experience with evil, as she now horrifiedly recalls, was of
having been badly beaten by a would-be lover, whom she had carelessly
picked up as a young student out of self-indulgence and a youthful
search for adventure. After accompanying him
to
a rooming house, she
finally refused her favors; and, his frustration then turning to sadism, he
beat her so brutally and relentlessly that, among other injuries, he broke
her jaw. This had been her own personal experience with evil, the
release of demonic forces in a human personality-forces, she had con–
cluded, that craved satisfaction in her thwarted lover even more strongly
than his initial demand for sexual surrender. The encounter left her with
a psychic-emotional scar that had never healed; and although she had
since become a successful novelist and essayist, she had never utilized
this traumatic episode in her works.
It
had been too painful for her to
resuscitate even in some altered artistic form. Now she was wondering
why she had accepted the invitation to speak as a writer at a conference
on evil. For she had begun to doubt whether anyone should be encour–
aged to depict its all-too-widespread ravages in the modern world and
whether those who did should be approved and applauded.
Joseph Frank is Professor, Emeritus, in the Departments of Slavic Lan–
guages and Literature and Comparative Literature at Stanford University.
