Who could resist the title? László F. Földényi’s new book of essays is called “Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts Into Tears” (Yale). It sounds like something that might happen in a Dostoyevsky novel: cause and effect scrambled, reason abolished by extremity, the thunderclap of irrationality producing religious storms of weeping and abasement. And behind it all something faintly farcical, deliberately exaggerated—another of Dostoyevsky’s self-consciously scandalous “scenes.” After all, who in world history has ever read Hegel and burst into tears? Except of frustration?
It turns out that we don’t know if Dostoyevsky burst into tears, either; Földényi is punting here. But Dostoyevsky may well have read Hegel in Siberia. His American biographer, Joseph Frank, tells us that in 1854 he wrote to his brother in St. Petersburg, imploring him to send Kant, Vico, Ranke, and the Church Fathers, and “to slip Hegel in without fail, especially Hegel’s History of Philosophy. My entire future is tied up with that.” In 1849, Dostoyevsky had been arrested on bogus charges of revolutionary conspiracy in St. Petersburg, and sentenced to four years of hard labor in a prison camp in the Siberian town of Omsk. On his release, in the spring of 1854, he was sent to Semipalatinsk, in southern Siberia, where he began several years of military service. In effect, this was a further installment of exile: consignment to an “Asiatic” oubliette, a place unnoticed and forgotten, far from “European” Russia. Földényi, in the title essay of his collection, vividly sketches the town’s stark otherness—a gray, treeless outpost, surrounded by barren sandy plains, with a population of between five thousand and six thousand, “half of whom were nomadic Kazakhs, for the most part living in yurts.” An American journalist, visiting in 1885, struck by the sight of camels and “white-turbaned and white-bearded mullahs,” likened the place to “a Mohammedan town built in the middle of a North African desert.”
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