Episode #12: The Underground Inspired Scorsese: Dostoevsky (Part One)

Episode Transcript
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Travis (00:03):
Okay, okay.

(00:23):
Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in1821 in Moscow to a strict
religious mother and adomineering father, a doctor at
a charity hospital for the poor,who was so disliked by his
serfs that they may havemurdered him.
Dostoevsky was just a teenagerwhen he lost both parents and by
his mid-twenties he wasarrested for attending radical

(00:44):
intellectual salons.
His crime Reading bannedpolitical texts.
He was sentenced to death Atthe last possible moment,
literally seconds beforeexecution to a firing squad.
A messenger on horsebackarrived with a pardon from the
Tsar.
It had all been staged anelaborate psychological
punishment.
It had all been staged, anelaborate psychological
punishment.
Dostoevsky had already said hisgoodbyes, already thought his

(01:08):
last thoughts.
He would later write that thosefinal minutes changed
everything.
He never forgot the feel of thesunlight on his face or the
faces of the men beside him whowould never be the same.
Then came four years of hardlabor in a Siberian prison camp
where he was forbidden to readanything but the Bible.
He emerged broken, epileptic,impoverished and reborn.

(01:30):
This wasn't a sanitizedreligious conversion.
It was brutal, raw andunresolved.
But it marked the beginning ofwhat would become one of the
most spiritually explosivebodies of work in world
literature.
He didn't write books so much asdetonate them.
Dostoevsky's novels aren'tpolite explorations of morality.

(01:52):
They're desperate dialoguesbetween angels and demons,
reason and madness, belief andblasphemy, and all of them
happen inside of a single humansoul Crime and punishment, the
idiot demons, the BrothersKaramazov.
These aren't simply books.
They're battlegrounds of themind and the heart.
They had the uncanny ability towrite voices that were he had

(02:16):
the uncanny ability to writevoices that weren't his own.
Atheists, nihilists, mystics,terrorists, holy fools all speak
with equal power.
He didn't caricature.
He inhabited the characters.
That's why both Nietzsche andSolzhenitsyn admired him.
That's why Sartre and Camuscalled him a forerunner.
That's why Jordan Petersonquotes him constantly.

(02:38):
It's why monks and misanthropesboth claim him.
Fyodor Dostoevsky was not yourtypical literary genius.
He didn't look the part.
He was awkward, intense, smallin stature, with darting eyes
and a nervous stammer.
His gambling addiction once hadhim pawning his wife's shoes

(02:59):
and then begging friends for themoney to buy them back.
He lived perpetually on theedge of bankruptcy, mental
collapse and spiritual crisis.
And yet out of this chaos camesome of the most searing,
transcendent literature everwritten.
He wasn't trying to convince youof a position.
He was trying to get you tolook at yourself deeply and
unflinchingly, to face yourillusions, your justifications,

(03:22):
your false gods.
He believed the human soul wasa furnace where good and evil
are forged in agony, and hedared to ask whether salvation
real salvation was even possiblein this world.
And that's why Dostoevsky stillmatters.
We live in an age of spiritualconfusion, shallow certainty and
moral performance.
Dostoevsky offers no easyanswers.

(03:42):
And moral performance.
Dostoevsky offers no easyanswers.
He forces you to ask betterquestions.
Is freedom a gift or a curse?
Can a person truly change?
Can God be trusted when life isunbearable?
What if suffering isn't justsomething to escape, but
something that might impossiblyredeem us?
He's not a safe rider.

(04:03):
He is politically messy,religiously unsettling and
morally dangerous.
He is also, strangely, fiercelyhopeful.
He believed in grace, not as acliche, but as a terrifying and
burning reality.
His novels are like cathedralsof contradiction, where doubt

(04:24):
and devotion kneel side by side.
So this series won't teach youabout Dostoevsky.
It's going to bring you face toface with him and with yourself
, because for Dostoevsky thesoul isn't a metaphor, it's the
war zone and the stakes areeternal.
Well cheers, professor.
Well, what an opening.

(04:50):
It's quite, quite an opening.
A lot to live up to well, uh,you've had a little experience
with this guy, apparently oh, Itaught him for a long time, many
, many years yeah, well, as weget started, can you tell us um
how long you taught him and what?
was the class, or was itmultiple classes?

Professor Larry (05:07):
Pretty much.
I taught a class on the Russianrealists in translation
Dostoevsky, tolstoy and Chekhov,okay and we would read.
I would read Brothers Karamazovevery year for maybe 25, 30
years.

(05:27):
I think that is crazy.
So, um, uh, not that I I rereadit every year, but most years I
did, and most years in in, uh,in discussing the book with the
students.
You know you'd read a goodportion of it all over again and
, yeah, it's one of those booksyou know it never ends.

(05:50):
It's, it's a constantconversation and one year you
read it and you you kind of rootfor one character and the next
year you root for another oneand and it's, it's a very
intense conversation that takesplace constantly between all of
these figures, these Saints andthese Sinners, these murderers

(06:13):
and these, uh, spiritualdirectors and everybody in
between, and that that's part ofyou know in in the introduction
.
That's part of you know in theintroduction that they don't.
You know, when introducing theextremes, you forget that he
also includes everybody inbetween, which means you know

(06:36):
the marginal atheist, the partlyreligious fanatic, yeah, the
partly religious fanatic, yeah,not just the extreme case, but
but we remember the extremecases because they become the
most powerful and eloquentvoices for their point of view
yeah, and I, I like.

Travis (06:58):
I like the synopsis in the intro of like spiritual.
We live in an age of spiritualconfusion, shallow certainty and
moral performance.
I'm not.
I have not read Brothers K 25,30 times.
I have read it zero times andI'm part of the way in on it and
I'm part of the way in on thisone.
I can show you how far I am.

Oh, okay.

Travis (07:20):
On Crime and Punishment.

Yeah.

Travis (07:22):
But that I truly have been reading.
It's not like audiobook oranything.
I've been focused when I readit.
But even in just those two Isee the spiritual confusion, the
shallow certainty, the moralperformance like embodied in
characters, which is really cool.

Yeah.

Travis (07:39):
But the shallow certainty really marks our day,
and spiritual, actually allthree.
Spiritual confusion, shallowcertainty marks our day, and
spiritual, actually all three.
Spiritual confusion, shallowcertainty, moral performance.
So why, why so relevant?
There's, that's part of it,right there.

Oh yeah, and that's why you can see why
Jordan Peterson goes to him forquotes, and and why Nietzsche
said that he was the, thatDostoevsky was the only
psychologist from which he hadanything to learn.

Travis (08:10):
That's such a compliment .

And coming from Nietzsche.
It's very interesting becauseit explains the difference
between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.
You read Nietzsche, you know,and you come away with these
telling aphorisms, thesepowerful paragraphs, even these
arguments.
But you read Dostoevsky andthose arguments are given flesh.

(08:36):
It's sort of like, well, whatwould it be like to really
believe that God was dead?
How would that change the wayyou lived?
And and what if you believedGod is dead, but the woman you
love didn't?
Or your best friend and yourbrother did and you didn't?

(08:59):
Yeah, that becomes a scene inthe novel.
And, and that scene in thenovel isn't there to entertain
you.
It's there to try to work out,okay, what's a human being?
How do the beliefs shape whothey are and what do they do
with these ideas?
Do they perform them and notbelieve them?

(09:24):
Do they really believe them andthen fake not believing them?
The human being is a verycomplicated spiritual,
psychological reality thatDostoevsky kind of redefined,

(09:59):
and that's why he's kind of thefather of Christian modernism,
because he sort of redefinedbeing a human being in a way
that Kant and the Germanidealists never did.
It's sort of like he had towrite literature because
philosophy had become toorational.

Travis (10:10):
It was human beings aren't rational okay, sorry, so
that that triggers me exactly totheology.
It's like here's what theologyhas become so rational yeah I'm
not going to read another here'sproper theology book, but give
me dosiewski.
You know it's like a same samething.

I have a philosophy as with uh, theology
then oh, exactly, yeah, and uhuh, milan, milan kondera, the
the um czech novelist.
He has a wonderful book.
I recommend it.
The Art of the Novel and thenovel was born roughly.

(10:49):
Most people say that the firstnovel was Don Quixote or close
to it in terms of telling thestory of a person trying to live
the truth of their values in areal world and or an imaginary
world that was real, not in aabstract philosophical space

(11:12):
where you control the argumentand you try to uh amass a
rational purity that borders onmathematics.
So so the inner life went toliterature and philosophy
forfeited.

Travis (11:29):
And would we say that happened in the 1700s or 1600s
with Don Quixote, or is he 1800s?

Right around.
I think he's 1611 or 16.

Travis (11:41):
Yeah, I thought he was a lot earlier than some of these
guys, huh.

Yeah, so it's right when it happened.
When we talk about modernity,we have these different
definitions, and theEnlightenment is part of it, but
it isn't complete in modernity,because modernity includes the
Renaissance and the Reformation,things like that.
Elie Wiesel I don't know if youknow him he wrote a book called

(12:11):
Night, A Jewish writer whosurvived the Holocaust.

Travis (12:15):
Yeah.

Won the.

Travis (12:16):
Pulitzer, I know the name.
I haven't read anything yet.

Yeah Well, he won the Pulitzer Peace Prize,
the Pulitzer Peace Prize.
And he tells that he has a sortof a Hasidic story that
explains modernity.
And he says you know, rightaround 1600, man and God had a

(12:41):
conversation.
And man said to God you know,you've been in control all these
years and we've been trying toyou know, believe in you and
follow you, but we don't reallyknow your experience.
So could we change places forfive minutes, just so that I

(13:01):
could see how I look throughyour eyes and you could see how
I look through my eyes?
And God says well, you knowthat I appreciate the sentiment,
you know, but if I ever let youbecome God, then how would I
know that you would ever changeback?

(13:22):
And man says oh no, I wouldchange back.
You know, this is just athought experiment and I just
want to look at the worldthrough your eyes for even just
a second and then come back downto being a human again.
So God said OK, let's do it.

(13:43):
So they traded places and theminute that man became god, he
no longer wanted to trade back,and so at that moment, god
became man and man became godand the spirit of god lives in
man, and man plays as if he wereGod.

(14:05):
And that's the story ofmodernity Human beings trying to
become gods.

Travis (14:15):
Usurping God.

Usurping God's power and prestige for
themselves.
And he says you know, says itas a folk tale.
And then he says and so thishas gone on for 400 years and
only in the last hundred haveboth parties become

(14:38):
uncomfortable with thearrangement.
And he's talking about talkingabout you know.
I wonder if that quote's inyour book.
Uh, I think it sounds familiarit's in there yeah it's in there
, and and dostoevsky realizedthat both parties had come
uncomfortable with thearrangement and some of the

(15:01):
characters are moreuncomfortable than others.
Others are more content tousurp the nature of people's

(15:22):
lives and how they come tounderstand who they are and what
faith is, and if God is even abelievable possibility, or is it
a human concept, or you knowall those crazy debates that all
his characters have.

(15:43):
Yeah, so that's the world ofdostoevsky?
Um, it's.
It's a world in which, uh, it'snot.
Uh, the arguments and thestruggles between the saints and
the and the sinners and themurderers and the psychopaths,

(16:04):
and the murderers and thepsychopaths and the aesthetic
geniuses doesn't take place inrational Kantian space.
It takes place in the lives ofpeople, in existential reality,
and that's the world that hedescribes.
And that's the world that hedescribes.

(16:30):
Now, when you, when you read abook like his master, you know,
and all his books were, um,avant-garde literature in the
sense that they were breakingall the rules regarding
character structure, uh, or getyou know, plot structure.
He wasn't, he wasn't trying towrite bestsellers or tell these

(16:50):
comfortable or interestingstories about people.
He was trying to get at realityand test these ideas against
real human beings that he couldimagine, so like every so, would
you say, because that's not theonly time I'm hearing this

(17:10):
about Dostoevsky?

Travis (17:11):
He's not.
You have this quote in the bookfrom Rene Girard about how it's
not about his quality writing,would you say.
It's almost not that he's awriter, even it's more that he's
playing out psychology andphilosophy through characters.
And he was forced to do itthrough writing, writing fiction
, because everything had becomeso empiricist.

(17:33):
He had to, he needed to have atheater to play out his ideas
exactly, exactly well, and heknew it yes I mean that's pretty
, that's pretty cool right there, just like that's pretty cool
right there, just like that's avery cool, unique thing.
Because he's not known there'smultiple insults on his body of
work as not the best, writinglike flawed, and I'll read that

(17:56):
quote from your book.
Most of his novels and thisincludes a Rene Girard for the
audience, this includes a ReneGirard quote, who is in our
future of subversive orthodoxy,um, people that we're going to
talk about?
But uh, most of his novels arenot great works but flawed,
moral slash, aestheticexperiments, heroic attempts to

(18:16):
solve insoluble problems, toreconcile christianity with
enlightenment, skepticism, faithwith doubt, terror with hope,
and most of them fail.
Even you said that's youtalking.
Then Rene Girard even goes sofar as to say Dostoevsky and his
work are exemplary, but not inthe sense of a corpus of work

(18:39):
and a life without fault, but inexactly the opposite sense.
In observing this author's lifeand writing we learn, perhaps,
that peace of soul is the mostdifficult of conquests, that
genius is not a naturalphenomenon.
So what did you mean by that?
He's like, or whatever thenature are?
I mean, he's just what you'rewatching a soul thrashing for

(19:00):
meaning and and working it outthrough crazy amount of writing
through their lifetime.
Is that kind of what he'ssaying?
Well, yeah, the hacking, hacking, hacky, till you find something
.

Well, well you.
You said it well at thebeginning when you talked about
his um life changing experiencebefore the firing squad.
Yeah, uh, he was not in thefirst group that were brought
before the um gun, the guns, thefiring second group right and
the first group got shot secondgroup and the first group.

(19:34):
They fired blanks oh, yeah,yeah and the first group.
Um, I think there were four inthe first group and one of those
guys later committed suicide.
Another of those guys had anervous breakdown.
Another of those guys neverrecovered from it

(19:56):
psychologically, went crazy, andone of them apparently survived
and served out his term withDostoevsky in the labor camp in
Siberia.
Dostoevsky himself, being, youknow, in the second group,

(20:16):
experienced it with the samedegree of trauma pretty much as
the ones who survived it, andthat's when he became epileptic.
From that point on, he hadepileptic seizures for the rest
of his life and in thoseepileptic seizures he would have
moments of clarity that wouldprecede the seizure, that gave

(20:41):
him mystic experiences thatinformed his writing in terms of
the characters that he had, wholived from their religious
moments of sublime epileptic joy, as well as the suffering he

(21:05):
endured living in a labor campfor four years.
And you got to remember,dostoevsky was, I think he's 27
or 28 years old when thishappened and he'd written a
couple of short books, but hetranslated Balzac from the
French into Russian.
So he was a radical literaryscholar and now he's being

(21:31):
thrown into one of the worstlabor camps in the world, a
Siberian labor camp.
And you know, a 28-year-oldintellectual.
Every mother raper, fatherraper, psychopath, enemy of the

(21:51):
state, all in.
You know this, this muddybarracks and just trying to
survive among those people,needless to say, changed him and

(22:13):
changed his politics and turnedhim from a liberal wannabe
reformer who had joined adiscussion group that had been
infiltrated by the czaristpolice, to a guy who had decided
that he could not waste anothersecond of his life if he was
going to be the next greatrussian writer, which the

(22:38):
critics in saint petersburg so.
So dostoevsky was living inthis, uh, labor camp and had
decided, the moment that hesurvived, that he would not
waste another minute and becomethe greatest writer in russia.
And this was not an impossibleambition, because he'd been told

(23:03):
in saint petersburg by thecritics that he was the next
great writer, and this at thetime are you saying he said that
that happened before?
yeah, before he'd been uh joinedthe discussion group and had
been arrested, he'd been told bythe local literary elite, who

(23:25):
had read his first book, poorFolk, that it was a breakout,
that he was the next greatRussian writer and it went kind
of to his head of to his head,uh, and, and a lot of

(23:49):
descriptions of him at the timewas where that he was a bit of a
in terms of of you know, uh,thinking that he was all that
and this uh experience he hadbeing betrayed by the, by the
guys in his discussion group whowere czarist spies and
sentenced to death for treasonand then brought up and sent to

(24:11):
this labor camp, really cooledhis heels and he began thinking
okay, I can't waste anothersecond with ego and I can't
waste another second notpreparing to be the writer that
I want to be, and so I'm gonnado my my time as well as I can

(24:36):
and get out of there as soon asI can so that I can get on with
the business of writing the, thehitherto uncreated conscience
of the Russian people, which isnot, like Joyce, an intellectual
conversion so much as a kind ofsurvival of his own soul under

(25:04):
extreme duress.

Travis (25:07):
And trying to represent his own, his people's soul.

Well, to try to represent what the what the
Russian soul was, and andrealizing that it wasn't all
that great that there was thatthere was, that there was a dark
side to the human psyche thathe had not really experienced

(25:33):
until he went into that prisoncamp.
And that prison camp changed hispolitics radically because
that's where he developed whathe called the psychology of the
underground and that changed hisentire worldview and another

(25:54):
way of putting it, not so much aworldview, because that makes
it sound sort of philosophicalor Kantian.
You know, it was a completelydifferent anthropology.
You know what shapes a humanbeing.
You know he's not a rationalsocial animal.
In one of in Notes from theUnderground, dostoevsky says you

(26:19):
know that the human being isnot the rational animal, he's
the ungrateful biped and hedoesn't live for his rational
self-interest.
He lives to not be your fooland to not suffer your

(26:42):
patronizing, that there's apride at the heart of man which
is Whoa almost like competitivemore than anything, like I don't
want to be put down, I don'twant to be your fool.
Right.
Well, it's both his glory andhis failure that we have this.

(27:03):
What he learned in the prisoncamps were that the guys who
survived, they would beat thecrap out of you for a cigarette
and and they would die beforethey let you punk them, and

(27:23):
dostoevsky saying what is withthis?
You know, why would you die fora cigarette?
Why would you beat somebodywithin an inch of their life for
something that didn't matter?
Oh, I see I don't reallyunderstand people at all.
I have to recalibrate.
And have I been doing this?

Travis (27:45):
Wait, so that was in the prison camp.

That was in the prison camp.

Travis (27:49):
So he has these formidable, well formational
events, obviously, first of allthinking he's the next greatest
writer, yes.
Then facing his death Right,and the psychology of all that
with all the people involved.
Then the third thing you justsaid yeah and and uh the uh.

He wrote a, a novella about a life in the
camps and um, for a life of justnow, I, I can't remember.
It's a famous little novellaabout the title.

Travis (28:25):
Oh God I can find it real quick.
Yeah, it's called House of theDead, house of the dead, house

(28:51):
of the dead.
Yeah, now, um, along with that,I mean if you want to say
something about that book or not.
But that's maybe getting alittle bit too focused on
something there.
Yeah, one thing I wanted to askyou is, like, before we go into
another segment, can you Ithink it's a good time now
because you mentioned it justunpack that, um, that theme that
you see overall of theunderground?
and that might help frame wherewe're going with other things

(29:14):
yeah, so yeah, so he has thebook notes from the underground
which is told.
I started that on audio and itwas really hard because it was
just like you're in one guy'smind for like an endless amount
of time in the intro and I wasjust like I don't know if I can
do this right now.
This is, it was heavy.
Just the just the start of itwas not like a hook, it was like

(29:35):
wow, you're in deep in somecrazy guy's psychology.

Okay, Well, you want to show me talk a little
bit about that.

Travis (29:44):
Well, yeah, yeah, you said.
You said notes from theunderground is almost like a way
of looking at the world, or, orthe underground is a metaphor
or something you were telling methat you want to go into yeah,
I do, I want, I wanted, I thinkthat um the psychology of the
underground as a cartography ofthe inner life yes, uh, I don't
know what cartography means amap okay uh.

So at one point in his career, when dostoevsky
was famous, they, they asked himof all your novels, which novel
do you want to have on yourgravestone?
do you want it to say author ofinteresting question crime and

(30:28):
punishment, or our brotherskaramazov, which, what is it?
And he says, well, I want to, Iwant to be known as the
discoverer of the psychology ofthe underground, wow.
So he placed that at the Wowand what?
And it's, it's not exactlyfallen, it's, it's also elevated

(31:07):
.
You know, it's sort of likeit's the thing which makes us
willing to die for a cigarette.
I mean, there's somethingDostoevsky would have, would
admire those guys, in one sensethat you know, he was giving up
everything just to survive.
And then here's this guy sayingyou know, no, not my cigarette.

(31:29):
And so he says well, what isthat?
You know, there there arepeople like that.
I know people like that I have.
I never knew that this wasabout survival.
I always thought that they werejust uneducated.
So now he's got to recalibrateeverything while he's in the

(31:51):
camps, and it was a big change.
And so the psychology of theunderground is the linchpin.
Now, when I taught these books,you know I couldn't read.
I could only read maybe twobooks by Dostoevsky, and if one
of them was going to be theBrothers Karamazov, which was

(32:11):
going to take half the quarteranyway, to add another book was,
you know, pushing it.
You know pushing it, but I hadto.
I had to assign notes from theunderground because it's the
closest thing you get to apsychological portrait of the

(32:36):
underground at its most extremeform, a person for whom the will
overrides the reason at everyturn.
That's an underground person.
That's the psychology of theunderground, can you say?

Travis (32:54):
that again.

One's will overrides their reason.

Travis (32:59):
Yeah.

The Kantian notion was try to behave
rationally.
The Kantian golden rule wasalways act as if what you did
became a universal rule foreverybody.
So if you can imagine a worldwhere everybody stole, then

(33:26):
maybe you know stealing isrational.
But the world wouldn't work ifeverybody stole.
The world wouldn't work ifpeople lied all the time.
So you can't get away with that.
So the Kantian categoricalimperative was it's got to be
true for everybody or you don'tget to do it.

(33:47):
And the ultimate truth is thegolden rule you act in a way
that you would want other peopleto act toward you.
You know, coming in 1800,having spent time in a prison
camp, having been arrested fortreason and sentenced to death
by irrational courts and atotalitarian, authoritarian

(34:11):
government who claims to speakfor God knows that reason can be
used against him in ways thatfurther other people's
irrational desires and thatthey're not living for reason,
they're living for their whims.
And so is there a bettercategorical imperative than that

(34:35):
rational imperative that dealswith the irrational?
And that was the search in allthe books how do you get or how
do you act or deal with a worldin which people are willful

(34:58):
against their own self-interest?
Just to spite you, just tospite you, just to troll you.
What do they get out of it, youknow?
Is it just?
Is it just pride?
What can it be?
Can it be disarmed?
How would you disarm that?
Can I imagine a character thatwould disarm that?

(35:20):
So in the in the, let's justtalk about notes from
underground quickly, and then,you know, we'll get onto the
notes from the underground.
Well, uh, ideas about it.
So the first it's got two partsto it.
The first part is this 40 yearold man who is describing his

(35:40):
philosophy of life, and he haslived his entire life in the
underground based on trying toassert his well over other
people and not take crap andhave self-respect even though
it's a self-respect earned atgetting fired all the time, not

(36:08):
having Now when you're saying inthe book context, what's the
underground?

Travis (36:13):
I don't know if we said that yet, did we?

Oh well, they just call him the underground
man.
He doesn't have a name and helives in what he calls the
underground.

Travis (36:25):
And the book starts with no context of what the
underground is.

Right.
It's a state of mind that thischaracter is embodying, so he is
sort of the archetypalunderground man of the

(36:51):
archetypal underground man, anextreme example of the
psychological type which issomebody who, when you go
underground, you leave culturein order to nurse your own petty
ideas and then you imagineinflicting those ideas on the
world in order to prove thatyou're better than the people
that disagree with you.

(37:11):
It's kind of an identity basedon resentment.

Travis (37:17):
Sounds a little bit like social media.

Well, yeah, it can be, it certainly does to
destroy thousands of people tofulfill their sense of their own
, uh, human nobility and andrights um, yeah, I was.

Travis (37:53):
I was telling one of my friends, um, that he's listened
to a few of the podcasts I don'tknow if he's listened to all of
them, but about dostoevsky'scoming up and he goes oh, I like
dostoevsky.
Is he the one that wrote notesfrom the underground?
And I go yeah, and he goes.
I love how that book opens.

That's why I loved him immediately the book
opens.

Travis (38:12):
I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man, I am an
unattractive man.

Yes, and so that whole first part you know.
If you can make it through thefirst part, you know, and then
he talks in there about certainthings that happened to him.
Then second part is how hebecame this way.
So it takes you back into whenthe underground man was 20 years

(38:49):
old or in his 20s and you saidwhat made him this way and it's,
uh, it's the story of what madehim this way.
Uh, it, it is the moment wherehe went underground, which is to
say he made a choice, a moralchoice, to choose his

(39:11):
willfulness over his reason, hisdesires over the desires of
other people, and nurse a pettyresentment that he himself was
being victimized by the worldaround him.
And this is the underground inits most extreme, sort of

(39:34):
negative version.
And so it tells a story of himand it's kind of I mean it's a
very interesting story.
Him, and it's kind of I meanit's a very interesting story.
Uh, I mean it's a typical sortof dostoevsky story that he was
writing about before.
But, um, well, let's just, I'lljust quickly tell you the story

(39:57):
so just to overview yeah.
So there's this guy and he findsout that they're having a high
school reunion.
He's having his high schoolreunion.
Well, no, it's not a highschool reunion.
What it is is it's his old highschool class is getting

(40:19):
together to have a party for oneof the guys who has just been
given a commission in theRussian army, and he's going to
be leaving St Petersburg andhe's going to be going to the
Crimea or someplace like that.
And so the underground man whowas never a popular person in

(40:47):
high school because this is sortof classic, that resentment
would be born out of isolationand urban life was going to
produce more and more isolatedpeople who were underground, who
lived in their imaginationsabout.

Travis (41:09):
It's proved true, right yeah, Think of like a kooky
person who lives in theirapartment by themselves in New
York City and we've seen tons ofmovies about that person.

Right, the Taxi Driver is the classic
underground man movie.
Oh wow.

Travis (41:27):
Was it intentional or?

related?
I don't know if it's.
I'm sure that uh scorsese knowsthe underground well.
So is um the um, the one aboutthe the boxer, um raging bull oh
that's also that man alsodeniro uh that's also De Niro,
that's De Niro and that's alsoScorsese.

Travis (41:47):
Oh, wow.

And the story there is I give up everything my
marriage, my body, my brain tobe middleweight champion of the
world.
To be middleweight champion ofthe world Now, to be
middleweight champion of theworld is kind of a great

(42:09):
accomplishment.
But to give up your marriage,your family, your body, why
would you do that?
Why would a human being do that?
Well, to show you that I amsomebody, well.

(42:35):
Well, is that pride or is thatheroism?
Well, dostoevsky would say it'sboth.
And until we figure that out,until we're going to have
problems forever.
And I've been in hell, in thiscamp, and I've seen the demons
and I've seen the people thathave survived it and I've seen

(42:56):
the saints that have been ableto live with it.
And I gotta write their stories, because people are under the
false conception that some sortof ideology or utopian society
is going to clean this up.
Well, hey, look again.
So that becomes.

(43:18):
What happens in part two is,this guy goes back to this party
and, as would happen, he getsthere an hour early, so he got
the wrong time.
But he thinks that they, thatthey purposely told him the
wrong time to make fun of him.
So he sits in the back of theroom and he drinks until he just

(43:38):
gets totally smashed and hewaits until the man of honor is
allowed to speak.
And then he stands up andinsults the guy and talks about
what an asshole he was in highschool and how he always hated
him and how he thought he was abig deal but he really was just

(43:58):
a jerk, and insults this guy infront of all his friends.
And so all his friends say well, thanks a lot for coming.
We're going to go to the afterparty.
Unfortunately we don't haveroom for you, and so they leave.

(44:20):
And then he decides that, well,I know where these guys are
going.
They're going to go to a houseof prostitution, because in
Russia in the 1800s, houses ofprostitution were run by the
government, so they were publichouses.

(44:41):
So he goes to one of thesepublic houses looking for his
so-called friends, and they'renot there.
They went to a nice place, theydidn't go to a house of
prostitution.
It's sort of like something thatTravis Bickle in the Taxi
Driver takes his date to an Xrated movie because he doesn't

(45:05):
know how to fit in.
He never fit in, he was alwaysan outsider.
And so he goes to this placeand there's a young prostitute
there, full of himself, and hetells her that she shouldn't be
in this business because guyslike his friend, who's the

(45:28):
soldier, would exploit her andthat if she ever wants to get
out of the business she shouldcome and visit him and he would
help her get out.
And so he leaves feeling very,very brave and very noble but
then realizes what, if shereally shows up and she sees

(45:48):
that I live in this hovel andthat I don't have a job and that
my life is a shambles, I willhumiliate myself.
So she shows up and he says gee, you know, I didn't really
think you'd take me seriously,because you're just a whore.

(46:08):
And he insults her and callsher every name in the book.
Now Dostoevsky was experimentingwith an idea in this story.
In this story he had met peoplewho had suffered, who were poor
, who maybe even sold theirbodies, and some of them had

(46:39):
become really soulful people andlifted themselves out of their
circumstances and had a sympathyfor other underground people.
That would shame all thepowerful people in his society
and he was wondering would aprostitute with a heart of gold
be able to turn this guy aroundby her showing sympathy for him

(47:04):
rather than contempt?

Travis (47:06):
So we're in the notes to the underground story, correct,
yeah?

we're in the story and he's trying to imagine
how that conversation would go.
Now, these are scenes all overDostoevsky and in the Brothers
Karamazov.
They begin on page one and theydon't stop till you're at the
end.
So once you know what you'redealing with here, you're

(47:30):
dealing with the battle for theunderground.
You know every single.
You know what's happening onevery page and it isn't some
plot that's unfolding, it's aspiritual battle between uh,
forgiveness and self-hatred.
That's where it's at,everywhere, all the time.

Travis (47:49):
Hmm, that is really really cool and powerful.
And so she's, can I pause?
Yeah, sure Can you rememberwhere?
You're headed.
Yeah, will you be able toremember it.
If I interject something, yeahsure In, remember it.

(48:11):
If I interject something, yeahsure, um, in.
Now I'm forgetting for a second.
I'm making sure you couldremember where you were headed.
Well, I forgot what I washeaded.
Yeah, um, oh, yeah, yeah, Iknow what it was.
So it to, in a sense of like alot of what we want to do with

(48:33):
this podcast is like hooksomeone into, uh, or knowing
what the hook is about, thiswriter or that writer like, or
this person, and so I think Ithink what you're just
describing sounds a lot like howsomeone hooked me into certain
shows, where I think shows was,he said, the situations, the
situational moral dilemmas areso compelling and complex.

(49:16):
That's why you got to watch theshow.
Yes, sounds exactly what theunderground's about exactly like
, like, even.
Even morality is not black andwhite in those situations and
the layers of complexity in ahuman heart, with morality and
with not like, something's justblanket wrong.

(49:37):
What if it's right in a certaincontext of a situation?
That's something that I think alot of Christians in the church
has gotten pretty wrong with,like under of thinking in black
and white, totally just aboutthe Bible says this or that and,
and you know, you have that,you have that, I'm almost done.

(49:59):
But you have that example oflike, of like.
People lying to the Nazis tohide, hide Jews in their house
is a great example, obviouslyLike what's better protecting
this life or me telling a lie toa Nazi?
You know.

Exactly, and the fundamentalists want to call
this situational ethics rightand they put it down for not
being absolute.
Well, really, they're puttingit down because it's not Kantian
.

Travis (50:25):
What it is.
Kant as a philosopherrepresents real black and white
thinking.

Yes, well, I mean that there's a rational
answer.
And Dostoevsky, along withKierkegaard, is a Christian
existentialist.
It's sometimes you're in aninexistence.
Human beings are functioningwith the will and the reason at

(50:52):
the same time, and sometimesgoing in different directions
and together.
And you can have a guy who'strying to pump himself up as a
good person by putting down aprostitute, and so Dostoevsky

(51:15):
says okay.
So what if the prostitute,though, was a Christian angel,
who would not let this insultbother her, but see through the
pain in this man's life that hehad been put down by all his

(51:36):
friends and that the only way hecould get back any self-pride
was to put me down.
And I'm not offended by it, I,I don't take this seriously.
I forgive him.
So, in this scene, she says tothe guy more or less I'll
paraphrase I don't have it infront of me right now she says

(52:00):
to him, after he chews her outoh you, poor baby, you really
are screwed up up.
Who did this to you?
Now, what does he do?
Does he come out of theunderground and say yeah, you're

(52:23):
right, I'm sorry?
Well, not if you're in theunderground.
You can't let a prostitute bemore moral than you are.
You can't let her forgive you.
You've got to reassert yoursuperiority, right.
And so he just goes crazy, andthat's the moment where he is

(52:51):
committed to the underground, infact becomes criminal in his
behavior, and that becomes theend of the, that part of the
story.
And, and then the very end, uh,dostoevsky unites the, the and
the end where, now that I'm 40,looking back on the turning

(53:14):
point in my life when I made themistake to choose my will over
my reason and myself over otherpeople, and this has made all
the difference.
Now, another way of saying it isDostoevsky was enough of a
realist to think I really can'timagine a scene where a woman

(53:38):
would be able to persuade a guylike that.
I would like to write thatscene, I would like to give
lessons in that kind of change,but I can't do it.
In a way, that's true, andbecause I'm a writer who writes
the truth and tells you whatI've experienced and what I know

(53:59):
from what I experienced andwhat I know in those camps guys
like that would not turn around,no matter how much love you
gave them.
Guys like that would not turnaround, no matter how much love
you gave them.
And so that's the end of thestory.
So now, where?
What do you do now?
Well, I'm gonna write a bookwhere I can imagine a way that

(54:21):
love will turn around andunderground, narcissistic,
megalomaniac.
But how?
What would that look like, youknow?
So then, uh, he has um, crimeand punishment.
That is kind of another similarkind of exploration into a.

(54:42):
Can I turn an undergroundperson around?
Can raskolnikov find redemptionafter giving himself over to
the dark side, kind of thing.
Would that realistically bepossible?
Uh, and there again there's awoman involved who tries to to
turn him around and and bringhim out of his underground, out

(55:15):
of his underground shell.
And that one you know, he, hehas a somewhat of a of a
turnaround, but it's not aspersuasive, right?
Yeah, so so then you say, well,he's, I see what we, we read
him, I see where he wants to go,but he didn't get there quite
yet.
It was not persuasive.
Same way with the idiot.
The idiot is he was dramatizingan ideal Christian and trying
to imagine an eccentricChristian who goes into— which I

(55:39):
love the title based on thatpremise.

Travis (55:44):
He's talking about me basically.

The world thinks he's an idiot.
But no, he sees through theunderground.
And what would happen to him?
Well, I created a romanticChristian that I don't really
think could exist in the world Iknow, exist in the world, I

(56:13):
know, and so in some ways it's afailure as a work of art, but
not in terms of aanthropological experiment, you
know, a, a thought experiment intrying to imagine, uh, what a
an ideal christian would be.
And so then he, he moves on tohis he's, he has this idea that
he's going to write a, uh, asuper novel called the um, the

(56:39):
life of a great sinner, in whichhe tells the story of, of an
underground man who, who isturned around and becomes an
exemplary Christian but findsthat it's too complicated to put
into one character.

(56:59):
The only way you could reallytalk about that dynamic would be
in multiple characters, apolyphonic novel, where you had
brothers and each brotherrepresented the complexity of
the human psyche in oneparticular incarnation, and then

(57:20):
you brought them together andthey had conversations, and then
they had conversations withother underground figures, or
other saintly figures, or halfsaint figures or half murderers,
and that would be the way youcould maybe bring it to life.
So the brothers karamazov?

(57:43):
The exemplary christian isaliosha, yeah, and, but you
don't meet him as an exemplarychristian.
You meet him as the youngestbrother of three extremely weird
underground men one who's anunderground sensualist and then

(58:12):
one who's just a downrightpsychopath.
And then there's another onewho's the father of this family,
who was the father ofdysfunction, if you want to
think of it that way, anarchetypal underground figure
for whom he sacrificed his ownsons, for his own wellfulness.

Travis (58:35):
Yeah.

And then that plays itself out on all these
levels simultaneously.

Travis (58:43):
I found the dad, the father to be I'm not that far,
far in, but I've got a, I've gota pretty good dose of each
character and I found the fatherto be a lot like um, well, I'm
sure that I'm sure there'splenty of examples in in movies
and such, but there's a movie orthere's a show called
succession yes, of course that'sa great movie.

(59:04):
That's very ghosted skin wouldyou think, yeah, but what's
what's interesting?
It's so underground because Imean almost makes I'm later.
I'm going to ask you where'sthe redemptive?
You know stuff coming through,but about the underground or or
in spite of the underground, butbut like that movie, my, I've
told a few friends this, thatmovie or that show, and another

(59:26):
show called all the light youCannot See.
Have you seen that one?

No, I haven't seen that one.

Travis (59:31):
It's about a blind French girl using Braille to
read classic novels through codefor the US to bomb parts of
Paris against the Nazis.

And it's super powerful.
That's very Dostoevsky and hecould get behind that kind of a
novel.

Travis (59:52):
Well, what was, what was unique about these two shows?
Juxtapose?
Juxtapose to each other,because I watched them back to
back you know, somewhat back toback.
My thought from succession wasyou know, we couldn't stop
watching it for one thing, butsecondly, why can't we stop
watching it?
Every one of these charactersis morally bankrupt.
There's no hero right it iszero.

(01:00:15):
Like you start to, you start tosympathize with a couple of them
, and then they turn and then,but nobody is good, like there
is no good person in it.
They are all out for themselves.
They're literally morallybankrupt, it is.
It is kind of like can youwrite a show like?
Can you write a story like this?
I mean, is that even?

(01:00:36):
Is that even believable?
And then then you go to all thelight.
You cannot see.
It's exact opposite.
Yes, all these good, beautifulpeople.
You know Nazis being thecaricature of evil in the
situation, and then, but evenone of the Nazis is good.

Professor Larry (01:00:55):
Yes.

Travis (01:00:55):
And he's functioning in a deceitful way against his own
army, in a good way with thepeople he's not wanting to kill.
So it's a really I don't know.
I don't know what I'm saying,but I just noticed.

What Dostoevsky does in Brothers Karamazov,
which is his masterpiece, whichcomes as close as he ever came
to defining the underground andthen defining the way out of the
underground in a believable way, at least for some of the
characters some of the time, andwith that it becomes a

(01:01:34):
transcendent work of art.
And so if you want to do that,you could combine those two
movies would be a dostoevsky andcreate.
You know, you have the darkcharacters who are running the
world and then you have the, thecharacters of light who are

(01:01:55):
trying to redeem it right out ofthe mouths of the underground,
and that becomes the story ofthe brothers karamazov.
And the good news is that hefelt that he succeeded in being
fair to all the different pointsof view and still having

(01:02:20):
Alyosha come out as an exemplaryChristian figure.
Some critics argue well, no,alyosha doesn't come out as an
exemplary Christian figure.
The hero of the novel is theatheist and the story is really

(01:02:42):
about the impossibility of anhonest intellectual to believe
in God.
I think that's a grossmisreading.
It certainly violatesdostoevsky's own goals for the
for the work.
But you know, if you're anatheist critic and you're
reading dostoevsky anddostoevsky's being true, being

(01:03:04):
um fair to all sides of theargument.
Being true, being fair to allsides of the argument, you get
to pick who you follow.
Right, it's a polyphonic novel,so you identify with the guy
who's most like, you Pick yourhero and pick your hero, kind of
thing.
Whereas if you know Dostoevsky'slife, you know the other books,

(01:03:26):
you know the things hestruggled with and the story
he's been trying to tell hiswhole life, and then you know
about Alyosha, and if we have ashow where we talk about the

(01:04:13):
Brothers Karamazov, there's somany allusions to Alyosha that
relate to Dostoevsky's ownsearch for meaning in his own
life that you can't miss that.
This is the story he wants totell of how somebody could
navigate the underground withoutfalling victim to its tricks
and its evils.
Yeah, now I wanted to read youa couple of quotes here from
Berdenev, because we didBerdenev on one of our episodes
and not that you have had tohave heard that episode, but
once you sort of hear what Berdabout dostoevsky, you might want
to go back after you readdostoevsky or we talk about

(01:04:35):
dostoevsky, uh to see whereburdenia was coming from.
But he wrote a very interestingbook on dostoevsky oh, he wrote
a whole book on him yeah and uh, uh, and he was.
He was betrayed by the russianrevolution, burden was a
supporter of the russianrevolution and then when the

(01:04:55):
bolsheviks took over and stalland took over they, they
arrested him for treason andthey and he was exiled to the
philosopher's ship in the middleof the ocean and later exiled
to paris, to the philosopher'sship in the middle of the ocean
and later exiled to paris, livedin paris and wrote about ex
christian existentialism untilthe nazis took over paris and

(01:05:22):
then he was driven out of parisand found his way back to the
ukraine.
And there's a couple of quoteshere where he's talking about
Dostoevsky and he says that he'stalking about Russia and how
Russia could have had thisrevolution against the Tsar that

(01:05:45):
turned into an authoritarianstate, that created a prison
camp system.
And so he says you know Russiaif you look at Russia and its
place in history.
Russia has made absolutely nopositive contribution to world

(01:06:09):
history.
Her only purpose is to serve asa negative example, except for
the possible contribution ofFyodor Dostoevsky and Leo
Tolstoy.

Travis (01:06:30):
Berdiv said that.

Yes, and this is what he says about Dostoevsky
.
In the final paragraph of thebook on Dostoevsky he says he
says so great is the worth ofDostoevsky that to have produced

(01:06:59):
him is by itself sufficientjustification for the existence
of the Russian people in theworld, justification for the
existence of the russian peoplein the world, and he will bear
witness for his countrymen atthe last judgment of nations for
all their crimes.
Whoa, now, that was.

(01:07:22):
You know, you could see that hewas probably, uh, you know,
very emotional at that point,because he's probably writing in
the 20s, you know, at theheight that, in 30s, at the
height that said well, no, maybeeven later, maybe in the 40s,
um, he's extremely angry atrussia extremely angry.
Um and uh, you know, anddrzewski and tolstoy were not

(01:07:46):
read by the communists.
I mean they were.
They were tolerated as kind oflike precursors to the great
communist novels, which were allpropaganda tracks, um, until
you got to, uh, solstice, andthen the, or the dissident
writers, like pasternak.
But this is this is anotherquote from Rodenia that sort of

(01:08:12):
explains what we've been talkingabout.
He says Dostoevsky's novels arenot properly speaking novels at
all.
They are parts of a tragedy,the inner tragedy of human
destiny, the unique human spiritrevealing itself in its various

(01:08:34):
aspects and at different stepsin its journey, and the reader
is carried along into thehurricane.
Dostoevsky was, more thananything else, an anthropologist
, an experimentalist in humannature, who formulated a new

(01:08:55):
science of man and applied it toa method of investigation
hitherto unknown.
His artistic science, themodern novel, his scientific art
science.
The modern novel, hisscientific art, studied that
nature in its endlessconvolutions and limitless

(01:09:15):
extent, uncovering its lowestand its most hidden layers.
He subjected man to a spiritualexperiment, putting him into
unusual situations and thentaking away all the external
stops, one after another, tillhis whole social framework had

(01:09:35):
gone.
Dostoevsky pursued his studyaccording to the methods of
Dionysian art, and when he hasmade his way into the deep
places of human nature, he tookhis whirlwind with him.
His work is an anthropology inmotion in which things are seen

(01:09:56):
as such an atmosphere of flameand ecstasy that they have
meaning only for those who arethemselves involved in the
spiritual tempest.
Involved in the spiritualtempest.
A careful reading of Dostoevskyis an event in one's life from
which the soul never fullyrecovers.

(01:10:16):
It receives its baptism of fire.
The person who has lived for atime in Dostoevsky's world has
seen it, as it were, has seen,as it were, the unpublic forms
of being, for he is above all agreat revolutionary of the

(01:10:39):
spirit, opposing himself toevery kind of cliche, lie,
stagnation, fraud and hardeningof the human soul.
So that's you know, kind ofabstract language, to put it.
And I think we're preciselypersuading, we're praising

(01:11:05):
Dostoevsky for his ability totake that out of abstract
language and put it into theconcrete.

Travis (01:11:14):
I have a couple quotes of other people talking about
him.
So Kierkegaard, he never wroteextensively about him, it says,
but his themes resonate closely.
Especially I noticed, obviously, par paradox with him and a lot
of these guys, um, birdie,birdie, evan, uh, chesterton too

(01:11:36):
with paradox, um, butkierkegaard loved his, uh,
exploration of despair andinwardness and then, uh, yeah,
that was it.
I don't actually have a quotefrom him, but then nietzsche
said the quote that you said.
Dostoevsky is the onlypsychologist from whom I have
anything to learn.
He respected his deep analysisof human psychology, especially

(01:11:59):
the darker sides of desire andmorality.
Yeah, um, though nietzscherejected, obviously,
christianity, he saw dostoevskyas a keen observer of the will
and suffering.
And then Chesterton had aunique take Dostoevsky is a man
who knew everything except howto be a good man.
And it says Chestertonappreciated Dostoevsky's

(01:12:21):
spiritual intensity and insightinto evil and suffering, but
noted his tragic wrestling withfaith and redemption.
Chesterton viewed Dostoevsky asa profound but tortured
Christian thinker who dramatizedthe battle between good and
evil within the soul.
Tortured is right.

Yeah, and you know it's interesting,
dostoevsky and I don't know,chesterton puts his finger on
this, and but Dostoevsky thoughtthat there was a reason why the

(01:12:59):
dark side came up first.
After, as a response to runawayrationality of the
enlightenment and scientism, hesaid, you know I don't think
there's a specific place that heputs it, but it's sort of like

(01:13:21):
that there was a kind ofrebellion that came up, that was
the dark side first.
There was a kind of rebellionthat came up, that was the dark
side first.
It was sort of like you know,you can have your crystal
cathedrals and your yourengineering masterpieces and
they will serve as targetingmarkers for nazi planes in

(01:13:44):
another 20 years you couldcreate, you could split the atom
and in another 40 years they'llbe using that atom to destroy
120 000 people, uh, in a day incities in in japan.
So it was sort of likedostoevsky thought you know that
this dark side has has to bedealt with first, um, that you

(01:14:11):
can't just, you know,spiritually bypass and jump into
goodness, um.
And how does he know this?
Well, I think probably it hasto do with his experience, right
of being betrayed and beingsent to a camp and of having to
survive and having to admire thedark side of man as much as the

(01:14:36):
positive side.
But then seeing that it was histask to try to create the image
of the transcendent and it is akind of an anthropology, it
isn't a theology the image ofthe transcendent, and it is a
kind of an anthropology.
It isn't a theology, it is akind of spiritual anthropology

(01:14:59):
of how do you bring the goodinto the world of the bad.
And that becomes the story inthe brothers karamazov, and what
happens to aliosha and what helearns from father zazima, and

(01:15:20):
what happens to father zazima interms of his learning, you know
, beginning his life as anunderground figure and then
finding uh god and and uhjoining the monastery, and how
far he got on his journey, allbecomes positive.
You know it's, it's.

(01:15:40):
And so when in his last yearsit looked like he wasn't, brodus
Karamazov was supposed to bepart one of a two-volume book,
and part one was supposed to bethe origins of Alyosha and part
two was going to be his currentreality, and so it was going to

(01:16:03):
take place in the present Russia, not like a retrospective, and
he never got around to writingit, but he was able to give some
speeches and talk about wherehe was taking it, and it was all

(01:16:24):
sort of in the hopes of makingAlyosha an exemplary heroic
figure in a new way.
The hero is not going to be theexceptional man.
The hero is going to be thegood man.
And the good man is not special.

(01:16:48):
The good man is only special inthe sense that he knows enough
of the underground to love.

(01:17:10):
The stories he tells are filledwith trauma and
disingenuousness and greed andall of the, all of those things,
uh, and unbridled passions andall of these things that become
the mark of a great Dostoevskystory.
But they, but he also has allthe people in between, and

(01:17:34):
that's one of the things youdon't get at like in succession,
right, you don't.
You don't get a spectrum aspectrum and you don't.
I mean, there was one guy, the,the, the guy who was married to
the daughter, yeah, who had, whohad some moments of, of

(01:17:55):
normality.
I guess you'd say you know thata less of a, of a person who
was living out his traumaticself-doubts and hatred, but not
enough to really fight back orshow how you might respond to

(01:18:19):
this in a way that could helpheal rather than just survive.
But that might be.
If they do a season two, thatwould might be a great.
It probably wouldn't be aspopular because, um, we find the
the underground more like like,um, a taxi driver.

(01:18:43):
You know the that that wholemovie is just a journey into the
underground, yeah, uh, and thesame with a lot of scorsese's
movies.
And now that he's, you know theone, the one, uh, filmmaker who
, who tried to reconcile hischristianity with his modernism

(01:19:08):
was Fellini.
And if you look at Eight and aHalf through a Christian lens,
you see a Dostoevskian attemptat hack, at bringing the

(01:19:28):
underground, coming out of theunderground, into the light.
In what are you talking about?
There's a Fellini's movie,eight and a half oh, I don't
know that has.
It's about an advertisingexecutive who has to deal with,

(01:19:50):
you know, manipulating people tobuy these consumer goods in
post-war Italy and he's having aspiritual crisis and he's
trying to reconcile hisCatholicism with his job.
He's trying to reconcile hisCatholicism with his job and

(01:20:26):
he's making a movie in which hereconciles faith with commerce
and succeeds from his own pointof view, and it's one of
Fellini's best movies.
It's called eight and a halfbecause it's, uh, the eight and
a half year of his work as adirector and it symbolizes for
him his halfway mark and histurn to more explicitly positive

(01:20:53):
stories and things.
But he doesn't keep up withthat.
So eight and a half, it wasreally kind of the apex for
Fellini for my money, but that'sjust my opinion.

Travis (01:21:08):
Yeah, I want to transition to a few pieces here
that I've got and I'm going toobviously ask you for your
commentary.
Okay, one is well, actuallyI'll just put this one to you as
a question.
Yeah, does underground like,according, according to

(01:21:30):
dostoevsky, does his undergroundconcept relate to you know how?
Is it saying somethingdifferent than the bible or is
it just proving the bible?
Um, in the sense of our heartsare deceitful we are.
There is no one who does good.
So the bible has a pessimisticview of human, fallen, human,

(01:21:52):
fallen humanity.
And for the, for the audience,um, that is the main emphasis of
most evangelical christians andmaybe catholics too, is the
fallen nature of man, whichoftentimes eclipses the original
goodness of like.
Man was created very good, sothere's an original goodness

(01:22:14):
that gets completely thrown outthe window.
This is in a theological sense,but it totally relates to what
dos, yes, he's doing here.
So there's an original goodness.
And then there's the heavyemphasis on the fallen nature,
which verses in the bible thatyou know, mic drop verses like
all have sinned, not no one whodoes.
No one does good, not even one.

(01:22:36):
Jesus himself saying why do youcall me good?
There is no one good but god.
So it's very.
The bible is pretty clear thatthere's a fallen nature to
humanity.
My wife and I were listening toa parenting book the other day
and this lady said the wholepremise of her book is that
everyone is good and we are allgood.

(01:22:57):
Our children are good inside.
The book's called Good Inside.

Yeah.

Travis (01:23:01):
And I said we can probably learn something from
this book, but I definitely dodisagree with the premise.
And she said the whole bookdepends on that premise.
Um, but yeah, it's the exactopposite of the bible and
dilsievski, obviously.
But my question to you,professor, is you know, we have
drug cartels, politicalcorruption, sex trafficking,

(01:23:22):
child abuse, murder, um, evenchild pornography, about as evil
as you can possibly get.
What is Dostoevsky saying?
You know different?
Or is he proving it out in morecomplexity?
Or how would you?
How would you frame that?

well with the underground yeah, that's a great
question and we don't havevolume two of the Brothers
Karamazov where Aliosha will beable to put his faith into
practice on his brothers asbeing beyond him in terms of him

(01:24:14):
being able to get them out ofthe underground, Because Zosima
as a spiritual director, and oneway of reading Brothers
Karamazov it's that it's amanual and spiritual direction,
and there's plenty of sceneswhere where zossima is

(01:24:35):
counseling families andcounseling people with with
tragic events in their lives andtraumatized, and his response
to them in every case iswhatever you do and you're going
to have to make your owndecision, but whatever you do,

(01:24:56):
don't go underground.
Zosima says that explicitly Indifferent ways.

Travis (01:25:04):
Oh, okay.

But basically it translates to to don't go
underground, and what goingunderground means is don't nurse
a resentment wait, are yousaying he actually uses that
terminology in the book?

Travis (01:25:22):
yeah okay, so notes from the underground he doesn't
ideas.
Ideas like the idea ofunderground gets imported into
brothers k oh, yeah, yeah Ididn't know that.

Yeah, I'm not there yet, I guess for example
um, there's a, a woman who comesto father's awesome very early
in the book, like oh, I mighthave read this one uh, where
she's lost her third child umwho's who's done her husband
didn't care and stuff like that.

Travis (01:25:51):
He's like oh, get over it, he's in heaven yeah, and
woman.

Get over it, he's in heaven and, uh, she
can't get over it yeah she goesto her, her pastor, and says the
it was the last part I listenedto.
Yeah, I'm uh, I can't get overthe over the death of the of the
child.

Travis (01:26:12):
And she said, she said she could get over the first one
she lost and the second one.

Yeah.

Travis (01:26:16):
But this third one she can't.

Right.
And so father Zosima says well,the, the guy who told you you
know that that you, that he's inheaven is, is right, you know.
And then he was.
He was trying to get you to seethat there, uh, that there's an
order, there's goodness in theuniverse, you know, and, but

(01:26:40):
you're not feeling it.
And um, because he doesn't knowsomething.
I know because zazima is theonly monk, who who allows women
to come to the gates of themonastery to receive spiritual
direction.
None of the other monks willtalk to women.

(01:27:01):
So he says well, because theydon't talk to women, they don't
understand this, that everychild that dies has a different
degree of mourning.
They want from their parents,and some want you to mourn for a
week, some a day, some years,and it sounds to me like this

(01:27:26):
little child wants you to mourna long time, and you can do that
.
And that doesn't mean you'velost your faith.
In fact, you have faith.
That's what allows you to carrythe grief.

(01:27:46):
You have faith, that's whatallows you to carry the grief.
And so you carry that grief aslong as you have to, and one day
he'll give you a sign.
Now what?

(01:28:06):
did he do.
He gave that woman hope and hegave her a way of carrying her

(01:28:31):
grief, not to lose her faith,not blame herself, not blame god
for the death of her, of herchild.
And so she says, oh, thank youso much, thank you so much, you
know, you've you, I can livewith that.
Right, yeah, he didn't.
He didn't say you know, I'llraise your child from the dead

(01:28:55):
or something.
You know, you'll have a babythat looks just like him and
it'll be a reincarnation oranything.
You know it was.
It was a way ofreconceptualizing her faith, in
a way that dealt with thepsychological reality that she
was struggling with.
And then immediately becauseDostoevsky loves to work in

(01:29:20):
parallels then immediately therich woman with little faith
comes in and talks to FatherZosima and she has a different
problem.
Her problem isn't that she'shad three babies that have died.
Her problem is that she can'tconceive of eternal life and

(01:29:48):
knows that it's one of thedoctrines of the faith.
And so this has really botheredher, because she would like to
believe in eternal life, becausewithout eternal life, all her
money and all her parties seemmeaningless.
All her money and all herparties seem meaningless.
But if she could know that theparty goes on forever and the

(01:30:14):
road never dies, never ends.
Was that Willie Nelson song?
Then she could enjoy her wealthand her money and her money and
her, her uh uh, parties.
And so, zazima, you know well,what does he say?

(01:30:36):
To that does he say, oh yeah,you're gonna live forever and
you'll have parties forever.
Go home and enjoy your nextparty.
You know which is kind of whatshe wants to hear and enjoy your
next party.
You know which is kind of whatshe wants to hear.
But he wants to sort of soberher up but at the same time not

(01:30:59):
drive her underground.
So he says to her you know,you're asking me to explain to
you the doctrine of eternal life, and eternal life is not an
idea you believe.
It's not an idea that youaccept and therefore believe.
It's more of a concept that'sgiven to you as a grace by God

(01:31:26):
and you can't just believe it bywanting to believe it.
You come to it as a grace.
Now, how do you come to it as agrace?
Well, you live an eternal lifein this life and I happen to
know a woman who's just lost herbaby and she could really do

(01:31:49):
with a nice dinner, and she andher poor family, and you know
they, they haven't had much foodever since the baby died.
And you could invite her to oneof those uh uh parties.
And the the wealthy woman saysI knew you would have nothing to

(01:32:17):
tell me.
You, frog, I came here wantingto know, can you give me this
bullshit?
And then gets in her littlecart and drives away.
Wow, now, who's the underground?
Who's above ground?
What's hope?
What's despair?

(01:32:37):
You carry your despair into theconfessional with you.
You carry it or you carry yourfaith in with your despair with
the other woman.
I mean, this is the humancondition and Dostoevsky is
giving you these incredible, youknow, 3d goggles by which to

(01:33:01):
view it.
You know, the wealthy womanisn't bad because she's rich.
The wealthy woman isunderground because she's rich
and it really isn't her fault.
But she, even when we give hera hand up, she doesn't take it.

(01:33:22):
And how do you deal with that?
Uh, even even the most saintlyspiritual director couldn't pull
her out.

Travis (01:33:34):
Yeah, that was what he was trying to do.
Is like uh, jesus and the richyoung ruler yes and he's putting
salvation right in, right infront of him and he can't see it
and that lady couldn't see it.
So it's the salvation, meaninglike the grace and the mystery
of like stepping out of theunderground yes, and so is man a

(01:33:58):
sinner or is man innately good?

Well, he's both .
That's either.
Or theology that makes you feelsecure in an ambiguous
spiritual reality.
That should not make you feelunambiguous.

(01:34:23):
You should be able to say, forexample, the kids, for example,
like you know, my daughter is anursery school teacher and you
know it is a rule, it is anaxiom, that there's nothing

(01:34:45):
wrong with those babies.
They are god's gift and and youtreat them with the love and
respect, uh, that you know theypossess in their eternal souls,
right?
But that doesn't mean, whenthey become teenagers, that

(01:35:06):
they're not going to want tohave lunch with their father and
their mother, that they'regoing to want to hang with the
good-looking kid with the fancyhaircut, and it doesn't mean
that they are innately evil now.
It means that the undergroundis making its way into the

(01:35:28):
junior high and the spiritualdirectors have to give the kids
tools so they do not gounderground.
And the way you do that is youdon't punish them for wanting to
go to the party, right?
You sort of say I know why youwant to go to the party.

(01:35:50):
When I was your age, I wantedto go to the party too, but we
have rules about going to theseparties.
And there's there was a scenescene.
What was the scene?
There's a uh, there's a scenein in the brothers karamazov

(01:36:11):
where he's dealing with umteenagers.
And there's one teenager that,uh, um tried to uh to fed a dog
a piece of meat with a needle init to try to kill him, and all
the other teenagers want to beatup this little boy that did

(01:36:35):
this.
And Alyosha is trying to bringreconciliation but he's pretty
taken aback by the evil of thiskid.
But he doesn't want him to gounderground and identify with
that.
So he goes.

(01:36:56):
He asked the kid to take him tohis home, the kid to take him
to his home.
And he goes over to and findsout that the kid comes from this
family with a poverty-strickenfamily, with a father who's an
alcoholic uh, who beats the kid,but not because he's he's like

(01:37:18):
a twisted guy, but because he'sjust twisted guy, but because
he's just, you know, has nocontrol.
So he goes back to hisgirlfriend and asks you know, do
you have any advice on what todo with this uh kid?

(01:37:39):
And so see, now we're gettinginto what would be the plot of a
, of a secession episode thattried to say how do you heal the
underground?
I mean, how do you get theseguys out of the underground
Right?
And it's not going to be a onestep thing and it's not going to
be easy, and we don't reallyknow how to do it ourselves.

(01:38:01):
We don't even know how to do itin our own desire.
I know that when I'm workingreally hard and really good, I
know I could go another hour.
It's a capitulation to my my uhside that says treat yourself,

(01:38:28):
you deserve it.
You've been working hard,whereas if I just stayed on the
job, I'd have it done in 20minutes, you know.
And so now aliosha is okay.
Well, what do I?
How do I deal with this?
Right?
So he runs into one of the otherkids who's in this gang that
are torturing the boy, you know,and throwing things at him, you

(01:38:51):
know, for having tried to killthe dog.
And he talks to the boy who'sthe leader, and he says you know
, do you know this boy that youguys are throwing things at?
And he says, yeah, he goes toour school.
Just do you know this boy thatyou guys are throwing things at?
And he says, yeah, he goes toour school, just do you know
where he lives.
And he takes the boy over tothe house and shows him how the
boy lives in poverty and hisdad's a drunk and his mother has

(01:39:15):
like 15 kids that she's tryingto raise, doesn't have any time
for the boy, and he shows thekid that this house.
And then the kid says oh gee,you know, I'm sorry, I didn't
realize this.
Um, I I'll talk to the guys andwe'll, we'll back off, uh, on

(01:39:40):
him for a while, back off on himfor a while.
And so that's the beginning ofhow these little seeds of
goodness, you know, begin toinfiltrate an underground
situation.
But if you had just taken thatboy out of his family and given

(01:40:02):
him to a foster home boy out ofhis family and given him to a
foster home, that that wouldn'thave been as organic a
reconciliation to his communityas aliosha discovers, just by
getting his hands dirty, right,yeah, and suffering the whole
thing out.
That's a good word, and sothat's what?
What?
That's a good word, and sothat's like a scene in a

(01:40:24):
Dostoevsky novel.

Travis (01:40:26):
Yeah.

And you go.
My God, I'm learning about whatlife is.
Why didn't anybody tell me this?
They give me these formulaicanswers for everything in the
modern world that all derivefrom the Kantian imperative, and
the Kantian imperative doesn'ttake into account the dual

(01:40:46):
nature of man.
He's not fallen, he's not saved.
There's a dual nature.
He moves in and out of theunderground and he's tempted by
the underground.
And I named it and I said thisis not a perpetual state of man,
this is an aspect of humannature that the modern world is

(01:41:07):
bringing up for examination.
And where, where all theseschool shooters come from,
that's the underground.
It's like the world telling you, fix the underground, get
people out of the underground,and we don't listen to it.

Travis (01:41:24):
Yeah.

And so that's his message.
And so you know you readDostoevsky and you know you'll
be surprised when you know, justtalking about it today, you
start reading that.
Just the background history ofthe families, the background
history of the families of the,the Carol's Mazov's family.
You know where he goes through,the, the like all novels of

(01:41:49):
that 18th century.
Did they give you the familyhistory?
Yeah Well, in a Dulcevskyfamily history it's the history
of trauma, it's a trauma tree.
Which is which is reality too,which is reality, and then this
is where this came from, and youand you're thinking this

(01:42:12):
dostoevsky what a dark bastard.
You know why does he have totell us every dark thing that
happened to every family memberin the in the care of mazoff's
family tree?
Well, because he's trying totell you the story that the
other novels didn't tell youbecause they were a little too

(01:42:37):
hands-offish when it came todealing with, uh, the dark side
as well as the light side ofhuman existence.

Travis (01:42:48):
Kind of like a problem with Disney and a problem with
Hallmark.
Yes, and probably 80% of popculture.

Yes, and then when you want to have the evil,
it's a caricature.
It's just one guy who's justabsolutely evil.
Now this new I think it's aPixar movie or I don't know what
it is the Bad Guys 2.
I hear it's an animated movieabout the cartoon bad guys.

(01:43:22):
Um, get um, uh, restorativejustice that's funny concept
yeah, and they're brought backinto harmony with their world.
Uh, and I think I I can justimagine it being a very funny
movie, because you know,restorative justice is something

(01:43:42):
that that Dostoevsky is into,but not in a in necessarily in a
programmatic way.
You know it's it and it, andI'm sure that this, this movie,
probably plays with that.
You know what restorativejustice would really look like
for a cartoon bear or something.
You know what would that, uh,and the results would be pretty

(01:44:06):
funny.
But I think the.

Travis (01:44:08):
I think the um, the underground, kind of exposes,
like you know, as we still see,it's completely active, the
underground.
It's maybe more, maybe alwaysbeen just as active or maybe
more active than ever.
Um, as like a chaos agent inour, in our world, because now

(01:44:30):
you hear about so many morethings happening because of
social media and phonesrecording things and and such.
It may have always been thesame level all along, but we're
more aware of it now because ofall of that, and I think in the
traditional christian view, youknow, the way out of the
underground.
To me as an evangelical pastor,all these years was like people

(01:44:53):
just need to hear about jesus,they just need to repent and
receive grace and they'll betransformed.
It was almost, almost thatformulaic, yeah, um, but to
modern people that are notnecessarily evangelical or or
christian in any sense, you knowthey've tried with their ways,
which has been like education,um, being the number one

(01:45:15):
probably through all the years,where people think education's
the answer yeah um technology.
In some ways now we see it moreas a problem.
Economic reform, you know,people think, oh, if people
weren't poor, if people weren'tin bad situations, they wouldn't
.
You know, all this bad stuffwouldn't happen.
And then obviously, politicalrevolution.

(01:45:36):
People think, oh, it's becauseof these policies, so it's all
blaming something on external.
Yes, and it seems likeDostoevsky's saying you know
there's no formula for this.
That's all sounds really naive.
Even if you fix externalconditions, what we have here is
a problem that's veryirrational and proud and

(01:45:58):
self-destructive in the humanheart.

Right.
And so the first step andthat's why you know conversion,
or you know, giving yourselfover to Jesus is a great first
step because it reverses thefield on the underground right.
It's like I'm not going to fallmy will over my reason, or even

(01:46:23):
my will over my faith.
I'm going to give myself overto a larger power, not my own
agenda.

Travis (01:46:32):
My own chaos rule, which it does affirm the idea of AA,
where people who have livedchaos where people who have
lived chaos.
A word that I hear in thisunderground concept is chaos.
So the chaos of your own willimpulsive, will like doing what

(01:46:52):
you want in the moment, and itmay not even make sense to even
yourself or your conscience.
And we've all done that.
You know, you've had, we've allhad a time where we did
something.
We're I don't know why I didthat or I don't know why I said
that, and you know teenagers andchildren do that especially,
but we do even as adults, and Iknow there's times where I did
something that really hurtsomeone and I'm like I literally

(01:47:15):
don't know why I did that.
I'm really sorry and um, butlike the where I was going with
that is that um crap.

I forgot Um, but like the where I was going
with that, is that um crap Iforgot Hang in there it might
come back.

Travis (01:47:31):
We got yeah, we can edit though.
Yeah, um, what was I sayingright before that?

Yeah.

Travis (01:47:38):
Oh the chaos.
So one of the one of the moviesthat it it uh reference like
when I looked up like whatmovies represent Dostoevsky's um
concept of underground, theJoker comes to the top too,
along with taxi driver.
So Joker, the movie, um, themovie from 2019 with um Joaquin

(01:48:00):
phoenix, and it's a very it's aguy who's like very emotionally
disturbed and socially awkwardand starts to find, you know,
find vision and being chaotic.
Yeah, um, and same as the otherjoker, and the dark night rises

(01:48:22):
.
Um, that Joker, he, he says hismotive is is chaos.

Yeah.

Travis (01:48:28):
Which, you know, I was telling my son the other day.
We were talking about villainsin all the movies, all the all
the comic movies, and we bothagree that Joker was the best.
And I said, you know what I say?
You know what I think aboutJoker is that, um, most villains
have, like something they'retrying to get, like gold or
money or um control or power.

(01:48:50):
And to the joker in that movie,it was none of that, it was
just chaos.
Yeah, and I think that's veryreal.
To like a shooter, a massshooter or a it's like that
impulsive curiousness where it'slike what would happen if I do
this?
Well, I'm going to do that andthey start building this, this
plan, in the underground oftheir, of their heart and mind,

(01:49:11):
and literally on the dark web ofthe internet.
And, um, what it?
What it tells me about?
Like the human heart has thispropensity to total chaos.
That isn't right and isn'trational.
And that's like what?
What dosius?
He's actually like affirmingthat.

(01:49:33):
He's almost like proving thebible more true than we ever
thought, because we thought sinmeant like disobedience to god's
law.
But he's saying he's sayingit's like rebellion against
meaning itself.
Yeah, very well put, whichthat's pretty gnarly.
That word means getting smashedby a wave into some rocks, um,

(01:49:54):
and then another contrast likeevil.
In the Bible evil is likedeviation from good, but it
sounds like in dos yes, keysaying evil can be conscious
revolt against good for the sakeof asserting self-will.
So it can be like activelyrevolting against good, not just

(01:50:15):
deviating and that's, andthat's what one of Alyosha's
brothers says, and then one ofthe other contrasts was like in
the biblical view, all havesinned and need grace, but in
Dostoevsky's Underground, humansoften sin deliberately,
irrationally and pridefully,even knowing it will hurt them

(01:50:36):
or others, Right?
So it's almost like sin incolor, and the Bible is giving
you the basic framework and thenDostoevsky is filling it in
with color.

Yes, yes.
Boy that's well put.
Okay, let me just go a littlebit over here, and then we can
edit it down.

Travis (01:51:12):
One of the things that Father Zosima who's—.
Can you pause for one second?
I've been having to go to thebathroom for a while.

Okay, I don't know whether we want to save
this quote for when we—if we doanother one about the Brothers
Karamazov.

Travis (01:51:23):
Oh, we are, we are definitely.

Okay, because there but this might be a little
part of it that we could teasewith it Because the book is, you
know, dealing with theunderground and the ubiquitous
nature of the underground.
I mean it's, it's, it'severywhere to some degree.

(01:51:46):
I mean it's, you know, notevery family has a criminal or,
you know, a willful personrebelling, but there's always
conflict and there's alwayswillfulness and and imperfection
and dysfunction and this ispart of the human condition.

(01:52:10):
It shouldn't be anything thatscares you.
And Aliosha is, and Zosima isthe one who said you know, I
mean, he began his life as anunderground figure and then,
when he saw through it, sawhimself through the eyes of the
people that were suffering underhis willfulness.
That's when he had hisconversion.

(01:52:32):
And so one of the things thathe says and this is a way of
thinking of it, if you're aphilosopher out there that the
Kantian imperative.
You know that I should act in away that if it were a universal
law, you know it would be goodto all people.

(01:52:54):
Right to treat others as youwould like others to treat you.
Zosima raises the stakes, likeyou were saying.
You know evil in 3D or evil intechnicolor I guess that's what

(01:53:16):
Nazism is or you know the cultmovements of history that have
destroyed people.
Zosima says his rule of thumbis I am responsible for not only

(01:53:37):
myself, but for everyone else,and I more than anyone else.

Travis (01:53:47):
Can you say it again?

I am responsible not only for my
behavior, but for the behaviorof everyone else.

Travis (01:53:56):
What does he mean?

Well, what did I contribute to the fact that we
live in a technological societywhere children are made
vulnerable to visions ofdarkness that they are not
psychologically prepared todefend themselves against, or or

(01:54:22):
what didn't I do that made thatpossible, right?
Yeah, so for zazima, the kindof like um christ figure in the
in the novel, it's sort of likethat's a question to ask
yourself when, when you'reconfronted with a problem Like

(01:54:44):
you know, okay, my kid wants togo to the party and I don't
trust the kids that are at thatparty.
Well, what did I do tocontribute to this?
Did I talk about how I love myparties I went to when I was a

(01:55:07):
kid, you know?
Am I?
Am I in some way contributingto this?
And, and that becomes part ofthe, the spiritual discernment
of the.
There's that scene in in g.
The woman comes to Gandhi andsays you know, my son won't stop

(01:55:29):
eating sugar, and could youtell him not to eat sugar
because it's destroying histeeth?
And Gandhi says, yeah, but youhave to give me two weeks.
And so two weeks go by and hetells.
He says, he tells the kid, youknow now you shouldn't, uh, eat

(01:55:49):
sugar.
And the mom says well, why didyou make me wait two weeks for
you to tell him that?
And he says well, because I waseating sugar and I had to fast
for two weeks in order tocleanse myself.
To say that with some authority,that's awesome and that's.
You know that that's what jesusin the bible you know, right,

(01:56:11):
he spoke with authority.
He didn't speak like thescribes, who you know, and the
philistines who whom pharisees,pharisees who memorized the
aphorisms.
But then you know, where arethey carrying the disease with

(01:56:39):
them, or the, you know, thehuman stain, and we're all
carrying the human stain.
One last example, and this willbe it.
Okay, and then we'll do theBrothers K another time.
You want to do that Becauseit's getting pretty late, right?

Travis (01:56:52):
Yeah, I got to go in one minute, but it may not be just
Brothers K, I think everythingwas good, so we may just have
more episodes than we thought.

Okay, Well then we'll.
We'll do.
Maybe the gambler?
The gambler is a classicunderground man got a thing and
it deals with addiction as anunderground attribute.
And they'll see ask you,suffered from gambling addiction
?

Travis (01:57:19):
Yeah, so it's, and they made it and he wrote it, and he
wrote it in 30 days in order topay off gambling debt.

Right.

Travis (01:57:26):
It's going to be crazy to talk about that one.

The other thing is also he some of his novels
he ends, you know, withouttotally resolving them, because
he needed the money and he hadto get and they paid him by the
page, and they paid him by thepage.
So, okay, you know, I can getthis in by the end of the month
in order to pay my gambling debtand my rent, but it's not going

(01:57:49):
to be as good.

Travis (01:57:51):
Yeah.

And I'm willing to make that deal.
But the brother's Karamazov wasthe one where he he felt he he
had made yeah, he didn't cutcorners that this was the real
deal and that if he just liveslong enough he'll be able to
write volume two.
But there might be some reasonhe never wrote volume two.

(01:58:13):
It might've been adisappointment, you know.
It might not have followed upon on the um, the vision that
this book, uh, lets us invent.

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