Germany:

Mann’s View of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in Times of War and Peace: Doctor Faustus (1947)1

Elizaveta Sokolova

Russian culture was truly meaningful to Thomas Mann (1875–1955), the celebrated German writer (laureate of the 1929 Nobel Prize for Literature), who lived in exile in the USA from September 1938 onwards, and who undoubtedly belonged to Pascale Casanova’s list of “great cosmopolitan intermediaries” who determine the world literary canon and its development in their time.2 Mann significantly “surpassed the other German writers of his generation” in “the fullness of his spiritual connections with Russian literature”.3 Reflections of the creative thought and biographies of many Russian writers are clearly distinguishable in his work, to the extent that some scholars emphasise the essential and even ‘salvific’ role of Russian literature in Mann’s own development as a great writer of the twentieth century, “a holy literature indeed”.4

Mann’s acquaintance with Russian literature began in his early youth, made possible by the increasingly positive reception of Russian literature in Germany in the 1880s. He read Russian authors in German translations, which had just begun proliferating.5 Certain Russian writers contributed significantly to this trend, including the bilingual Karolina Pavlova (1807–93), one of the first translators of nineteenth-century Russian literature into German; Ivan Turgenev (1818–83), who called Germany his “second homeland”,6 and later, in the early twentieth century, Dmitri Merezhkovskii (1865–1941), a noted Russian philosopher who settled in Paris in 1920, where he remained an important Russian literary influence abroad, a connoisseur and a populariser of Russian thought in Europe.7 Among the first translators of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy into German, Jürgen Lehmann singles out Wilhelm Wolfsohn (1820–65), who “facilitated” the reception of Russian literature for readers brought up on German classical philosophy and aesthetics.8 Lehmann also acknowledges translations by Friedrich von Bodenstedt (1819–92)—who produced an edition of Turgenev’s short stories—although he considers von Bodenstedt less gifted than Wolfsohn.9 From the mid-1880s, translators of Russian literature into German increased rapidly in number, thus we cannot always determine whose translations introduced Mann to a specific text. He evidently read Tolstoy and Turgenev in different translations. Tolstoy’s works, for example, were translated by Raphael Löwenfeld, August Scholz, and Frida Rubiner.10 Mann is known to have read The Brothers Karamazov (Brat’ia Karamazovy, 1880) in Karl Nötzel’s translation, and Dostoevsky’s remaining novels mostly in Hermann Röll’s versions.11 He may also have been familiar with other translations including Raskolnikow (1882), a version of Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie, 1866) by Wilhelm Henckel (1825–1910).12 This was the very first translation of a Dostoevsky novel in Western Europe, preceding Victor Derély’s 1884 French Le Crime et le châtiment by two years. Henckel’s translations may also have introduced Mann to the work of Anton Chekhov.

Russian literature occupies an important place in Mann’s own critical writings. He wrote three essays on Tolstoy;13 one on Dostoevsky,14 in which he compares the latter with Nietzsche; and another on Chekhov, as its title clarifies (Versuch über Tschekhov, 1954).15 He was well acquainted with Merezhkovskii’s Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (Lev Tolstoi i Dostoevskii, 1901), published in Berlin in 1919 in Carl von Gütschow’s German translation.16 Mann owed Merezhkovskii not only the idea of contrasting Tolstoy (as a “seer of the flesh”) with the “seer of the spirit” Dostoevsky, but also the notion that “the greater are an artist’s creative powers, the more precisely he is able to summon the contents of his imagination into both the reality of his life and that of his works”.17 This informed Mann’s admiration for Tolstoy as the embodiment of such powers. We should also mention Maksim Gorky, whose Memories of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy (Vospominaniia o L’ve Nikolaeviche Tolstom, 1919), according to Mann, his best book,18 served the latter as a reliable source of information about the life and personality of the “great writer of the Russian lands”.¹⁹ The first critical views on Mann’s assessments of Russian literature and his expression of Russian motifs in his work were offered by Alois Hofmann in German or Tamara Motyleva in Russian.20 More recently, Aleksei Zherebin also lends profound insight into Mann’s perception of Russian literature as a whole.21 Intertextual connections with Russian literature in Mann’s work have been studied globally, showing that, while the universe of Mann’s Russian influences accommodated numerous writers, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were crucial among them.22

Despite his own “rather sceptical attitude” towards Tolstoy’s moralising and to some of his pedagogical ideas, Thomas Mann always found in his work “the highest example of epic art”.23 While working on Buddenbrooks (1897–1901), he kept Tolstoy’s portrait on his desk as a “mythical mentor” in the genre of the epic.24 Some scholars identify Tolstoyan traits in Leo Naphta, the mystically inclined Jesuit in Mann’s The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924), who preaches “Byzantine-Asian anarchist despotism” and hence opposes the Italian scholar Lodovico Settembrini with his codes of “classical” European humanism.25 Solomon Apt, the Russian translator of Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers (Joseph und seine Brüder, 1933–43) and Doctor Faustus (Doktor Faustus, 1947), likens Tolstoy to Mynheer Peeperkorn, another Magic Mountain character who represents Mann’s “ideal of a vital solar unconsciousness” and an alternative way of life for the novel’s protagonist, Hans Castorp.26 Apt identifies the kinship between the majestic Dutchman Peeperkorn and Tolstoy in an episode from the last chapter of Mann’s novel, where Peeperkorn urges his listeners to look at the sky, pointing out a soaring eagle. “’Jupiters Vogel’ [Jupiter’s bird], says Peeperkorn, ‘flies high, sees wide and pursues its natural prey […]’”.27 Apt finds a corresponding episode from Tolstoy’s life in Gorky’s Memories of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy (Vospominaniia o L’ve Nikolaeviche Tolstom, 1919), arguing that the symbolism of the eagle shows the significance of Tolstoy’s personality to Mann.28 Peeperkorn seems to overshadow both Settembrini and Naphta in their “fighting for the soul” of the future (in the person of Castorp) by “the very fact of his being there, the inexplicable magic of his life force, victorious naturalness and integrity”.29 Almost the same could have been written by Mann about Tolstoy, Apt insists.30 Describing the set of tropes to which Mann “confines his stylised image of Tolstoy”, Zherebin also notes “Herculean strength”, “unrestrained sensuality” and “wisdom of the ancient sorcerer”, bestowed by “the mysterious connection of a child of nature with life in general” stimulating “mystical awe”.31

At the same time, Mann’s attitude towards Tolstoy was not unambiguous. In his article ‘Tolstoy: On the Centenary of His Birth’ (‘Tolstoi. Zur Jahrhundertfeier seiner Geburt’, 1928),32 Mann portrayed the Russian writer as “an ally in his [Mann’s] own struggle against irrationalism, […] that ideological dope having intoxicated the whole of Europe while making Germany more and more defenceless before the Nazis”.33 But in the early 1930s, in the second version of his essay ‘Goethe and Tolstoy’, “der grosse Dichter des Russenlandes” (”the great writer of the Russian lands”) was clearly opposed to the idealised figure of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.34 According to Mann, the latter had successfully completed the synthesis of nature and spirit in his life and work, and therefore still remains a true educator of the German nation, leading it towards humanity. In contrast, Tolstoy, as a native of the “element of Sarmatian savagery”, failed in a similar task.35 Apt emphasises that Mann, though admiring Tolstoy’s vitality and power, questioned his spirituality. The German writer seems to be unable to completely overcome a deep inner prejudice against what he saw as Tolstoy’s alignment with the physical in the conflict of “vitality” and “spirit”, writing: “What a blessed life! But so tragically, even tragicomically, blessed with power not spirit”.36

Precisely this antithesis underlies the distinction which Mann perceived between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. In ‘Dostoevsky—with Moderation’ (‘Dostojewski—mit Maszen’, 1945–46) Mann opposes one dyad, Goethe and Tolstoy, to another pair—Nietzsche and Dostoevsky—in analogy to health (both physical and spiritual) versus illness.37 In other words, the Tolstoy-Dostoevsky contrast embodies for Mann the antithesis of spirituality to the natural creative gift (like the contrast between sickness and wellness). This opposition is central for Doctor Faustus, where the title character Adrian Leverkühn personifies the problematic relationship between genius and illness in the historical context of the two wars waged by Germany against the rest of the world. At the same time, Leverkühn illustrates how the “integral ideal of an artist of genius and a humanist intellectual” can split into antinomic pairs—“spirit and life, life and art, art and spirit”.38

Unsurprisingly, therefore, while working on Doctor Faustus (May 1943-January 1947)³⁹—including the last two years of World War II—Mann admitted his own “decisive preponderance of interest in Dostoevsky’s grotesque-apocalyptic world of suffering” over “a usually deeper attraction to Tolstoy’s epic gift”.40 The correlation between crises in world history and Mann’s interest in Dostoevsky was already revealed by many authors. Georgii Fridlender points out Mann’s turn toward Dostoevsky during World Wars I and II,41 while Ekaterina Barinova identifies three such periods: the 1890s and the First and Second World Wars.⁴² Mann studied Dostoevsky’s novels between 1938 and 1943, mainly reading the 1921 twenty-five volume edition of his collected works in German.43 In his diaries and letters, he mentions repeatedly “reading” and “re-reading” Uncle’s Dream (Diadiushkin son, 1859), The Eternal Husband (Vechnyi muzh, 1870), The House of the Dead (Zapiski iz mertvogo doma, 1862), Notes from Underground (Zapiski iz podpol’ia, 1864), The Village of Stepanchikovo (Selo Stepanchikovo i ego obitateli, 1859), The Gambler (Igrok, 1867), The Idiot (Idiot, 1869), Crime and Punishment, Demons (Besy, 1872), and The Brothers Karamazov.44

The edition of Dostoevsky which Mann was reading, with an introductory article by Stefan Zweig, includes all Dostoevsky’s novels in German translations by Karl Nötzel (The Brothers Karamazov) and Hermann Röll (the remaining novels). Thus we know that Mann’s Doctor Faustus was influenced by the style of Karl Nötzel (1870–1945), author of numerous books on the history of Russian literature and translator of Tolstoy, Gogol, and Nikolai Leskov, as well as Dostoevsky. Michael Wegner postulates that in 1938 Mann was already deeply impressed by the scene from Chapter IX of Book Eleven of The Brothers Karamazov, where the dialogue between Ivan Karamazov and the devil occurs; later, he repeatedly re-read it.45

In his major essay The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus (Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus. Roman eines Romans, 1949),⁴⁶ Mann mentions having read only The Brothers Karamazov, Uncle’s Dream and The House of the Dead by that time.47 Besides the war, a practical reason had arisen for Mann to re-read Dostoevsky in the mid-1940s: the American publisher Dial Press had invited him to write an introduction for a proposed new edition of Dostoevsky (The Short Novels of Dostoevsky, 1945). According to the chronology given in The Story of a Novel, Mann turned to the scene with the devil from The Brothers Karamazov while working on Chapter XIV of Doctor Faustus, where the starting point of his protagonist Adrian Leverkühn’s “turn towards the devil” is to be found. At the conclusion of that chapter, Mann’s narrator Serenus Zeitblom expresses his confidence in Adrian’s imminent departure from the Theological faculty.48 Mann confessed that he was studying this particular scene from Dostoevsky at that time “with detached mindfulness”, much as he had explored Flaubert’s Salambo before commencing work on Joseph and his Brothers.49

Indeed, Chapter XXV of Doctor Faustus, which features Leverkühn’s conversation with the devil, turns out to be the climax of the whole novel, where the storyline of Adrian’s renunciation of God also culminates. Soon after finishing that viscerally troubling chapter on 20 February 1945,⁵⁰ Mann re-read Uncle’s Dream.⁵¹ But only much later, already working on the ending of his own novel, did he immerse himself in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead.52 Meanwhile, Leverkühn suffers a stroke after an unsuccessful attempt at public confession and remains depressed for the next ten years until his death (like Nietzsche in Turin). We thus find three main points in the “spirit degradation storyline” central for Mann’s novel, namely its exposition (in Chapter XIV), culmination (Chapter XXV) and the denouement (in Chapter XLVII). These stages correlate with Mann’s records of his “reading and rereading” of Dostoevsky’s works in The Story of a Novel.

Another correlation is also striking: Mann wrote Chapters XIV–XXV (which chronicle Leverkühn’s spiritual decline) soon after the tide turned for Germany in World War II, as the Soviet army finally started to advance westwards. Just as he was working on Chapter XIX (where Adrian’s ultimately fatal contact with “the hetaera” Esmeralda takes place), several important cities surrendered to the Soviet army: Minsk, Lviv, Brest-Litovsk, the “river”, which “was forced incredibly quickly”, all of which Mann cites in one sentence.53 It is notable, therefore, how much was surrendered to the “demonic forces” at exactly the “point” in The Story of a Novel which corresponds chronologically to Chapter XIX: as if all the debts that had not been collected in time (in previous chapters, where Adrian’s own decline was only implied) were suddenly called in. From that point, both “declines” (that of Adrian and of Fascist Germany) develop in parallel and with increasing speed. Only two pages later, the Russians are already “near Warsaw, threatening Memel”.54 And as in Chapter XXI, Leverkühn (to the horror of the humanist Zeitblom) opposes “art” to “truth”, identifying art with cold and rational cognition, thereby striking a devastating blow to the ideals of “holy Russian literature” in attacking Dostoevsky. It is no coincidence that the paragraph announcing in The Story of a Novel the completion of Mann’s work on the “conversation with the devil” (20 February 1945) says also that the “Russians” are already thirty miles from Berlin and are gathering forces for the final blow.55 The next paragraph mentions the Yalta Conference (the new world order) and “the end” of Germany.56 The End was also the title of the article Thomas Mann wrote at that time for the American press about the German catastrophe.57 Recovery from a catastrophe on this scale takes a lot of time, and a three-month-long pause in the work on Doctor Faustus followed the completion of its climactic chapter (XXV). By that time, the deadline for the introduction about Dostoevsky had arrived, and in July 1945, shortly after the celebration of the victorious Independence Day, a “chilled and tired” Mann, “issued 24 pages in 12 days” so that “in the last third of the month”, having finally turned the tide of his disease, he could “return to Faustus again”.58

‘Dostoevsky—with Moderation’ is the title of the article, which Mann ends by quoting his unnamed friend: “When I told a friend of my intention to provide a preface for three volumes he said laughing: ‘Be careful! You will write a book about him!’ I was careful”, announces Mann in conclusion before returning to his own Faustus.59 However, despite all Mann’s “caution”, Dostoevsky (besides Nietzsche and Schoenberg) is often suggested as a prototype for Adrian Leverkühn.60 In the above-named article, Mann likens Nietzsche’s syphilis to Dostoevsky’s epilepsy and places this “holy disease” at the centre of the Russian writer’s personality, in which sense, Mann’s Leverkühn mirrors not only Dostoevsky but also Nietzsche.61 Paying minimal attention to the continuity of ideas between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, Mann still calls these two “brothers in spirit”, viewing their diseases—Dostoevsky’s epilepsy and Nietzsche’s progressive paralysis—as almost the main reason for such brotherhood.62 Mann speculates that each of them at least partially owed their breakthroughs into the sphere of the spirit (or at least beyond the limits of human morality) to the diseases they suffered.

Scholars quite often draw parallels between Doctor Faustus and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov while focusing on the conversations with the devil in each text.63 Summarising their conclusions, Jürgen Lehmann notes many similarities in the demonic visions (or encounters) of Ivan Karamazov and Adrian Leverkühn.⁶⁴ In both cases, the devil is depicted as both a double of the protagonist and as an allegorical expression either of excessive intellectualism coloured by mental illness (in Dostoevsky) or of illness as a source of creative productivity (in Thomas Mann). Both Ivan Karamazov and Adrian Leverkühn seem to have been expecting the devil’s visit. At first, they try to convince themselves that what they are seeing is mere delirium; each feels sick and weak while speaking with their devil. Both devils express the innermost thoughts of their interlocutors: Ivan Karamazov’s doubts about the existence of God; Leverkühn’s guesses about the connection between illness and creativity (much as this topic is treated in Mann’s ‘Dostoevski with Moderation’) as well as his reflections on the essential mediocrity of modern culture and its inevitable end. The course of each conversation, each outwardly bland demonic interlocutor, and even certain details of their clothing (caps, chequered patterns) echo the end of mediocre modernity in the other text. And although Karamazov, unlike Leverkühn, does not reach a deal with his devil, the bargain made by the latter diverges from the ‘classical’ Faust-context: by giving up his soul to the devil (or to his illness), Adrian receives in return a “dangerous gift of guaranteed genius”65 (within a fundamentally unoriginal culture), agreeing at the same time to the absence of love and intimacy from his life. The main difference between these two demonic conversations seems to lie in their respective degree of spirituality: Ivan Karamazov is concerned with issues of a higher order (theodicy, the limits of human freedom), while Leverkühn does not leave the field of the Apollonian and Dionysian rupture in art (remember Nietzsche again).

Doctor Faustus is compared to Dostoevsky’s Demons almost as often as to Brothers Karamazov. For example, Georgii Fridlender identifies significant similarity between Leverkühn and Stavrogin, “perhaps mysteriously the most compelling character in all of world literature” according to Mann.66 The life of Stavrogin, “the denier of the spirit”, with the “fatal consequences” of his nihilism for “himself, the surrounding people and social life as a whole”, unfolds in Demons much as the life and the fate of Adrian Leverkühn unfold in Doctor Faustus.67 And the spiritual nihilism (the resistance to the spirit) shown in both novels as “a tragic phenomenon threatening all the foundations of human life” is grounded in the loss of faith in “living life” and in God (by Dostoevsky) and in “universal values of humanism, unshakable moral principles” (by Mann).68 Parallels may be drawn between Adrian Leverkühn and Aleksei Kirillov (who describes his own epileptic aura in Demons) or even the postal official Liamshin in the latter novel—particularly through the latter’s style of playing music.69 The Adolescent (Podrostok, 1975) has also been mentioned in connection with Doctor Faustus—by none other than Mikhail Bakhtin.70

Yet Dostoevsky is named just once in Doctor Faustus, and even then indirectly: Saul Fitelberg (in Chapter XXXVII) refers to Hugo Wolf’s “perplexing” statements about him.⁷¹ However, this is adequate proof that the Leverkühn was intended to be aware of the Russian writer but not necessarily of Arnold Schoenberg or Friedrich Nietzsche whose fates, ideas, and creative achievements were also “appropriated” by Mann’s protagonist, although they are never named in the novel. But if Schoenberg’s involuntary contribution to the artistic level of the novel is indirectly confirmed by Mann in the refutation at its conclusion (added later at the insistence of the composer himself), then Nietzsche’s contribution remains anonymous: despite his ideological and biographical overlaps with Adrian, he is never mentioned in the novel—as if he had never existed in Leverkühn’s world. Could this imply that Adrian Leverkühn plays a Nietzsche-like role in the global catastrophe described in Mann’s novel? If so, it looks as if Mann had some burning questions for Nietzsche by the mid-1940s.

Salvation from “spiritual death” came to Thomas Mann in his youth via two phenomena: Nietzsche’s rebellious philosophy and the “essence of the Russian soul” known to him through “holy Russian literature”, as he confirmed again, already middle-aged, in his introduction to the Russian Anthology (Russische Antologie, 1921), a special issue of the German journal Süddeutsche Monatshefte, ((18), February 1921), which he co-edited with the translator Alexander Eliasberg.72 But in the 1940s, the “German spirit” as a whole seemed to have come very close to death—both through fascism and by its reflection in the fate of the “German composer” Adrian Leverkühn. So, in his final great novel, Doctor Faustus, Mann symbolically called upon both his former “saviours”—Nietzsche and “holy Russian literature” (now personified by Dostoevsky more than anyone)—for help, or perhaps to be held accountable. And Dostoevsky came to the rescue.