ELEMENTS OF DOSTOEVSKY IN THE NOVELS OF KURT VONNEGUT

Donald M. Fiene, University of Tennessee

In this essay I shall not only discuss the apparent influence of Dostoevsky on Vonnegut, but also
comment on the extent of Vonnegut's awareness of this influence, based primarily on my
correspondence and various conversations with him. (1)

Vonnegut's appreciation of Dostoevsky is not especially obvious in his writings - except for the
memorable passage in "Slaughterhouse-Five" when Eliot Rosewater says to Billy Pilgrim in the
mental hospital: "(E)verything there (is) to know about life (is) in 'The Brothers Karamazov'...
But that isn't enough any more..." (2) Here we have both profound admiration of the Russian
master and the probably not impertinent implication that Rosewater's creator, having been
born a century later, knows a few things that Dostoevsky did not. (E.g. he knows that most
modern readers will not accept a divine Christ as the solution to their moral and spiritual
problems.)

When I first read the above-quoted passage in 1969, I was a graduate student in Russian at
Indiana University. Three years earlier, having just returned from a summer's stay in the USSR, I
read Vonnegut for the first time and soon read all his early works: "Player Piano" (1952); "Sirens
of Titan" (1959); "Mother Night" (1961); "Cat's Cradle" (1963); and "God Bless You, Mr.
Rosewater" (1965). I liked this author so much that I recommended to the Soviet Russian
translator, Rita Rait-Kovaleva, then about seventy years old, that she translate Vonnegut into
Russian. She read his work and, as she wrote me, "quite fell in love with Vonnegut." By 1970
she had translated "Cat's Cradle" and "Slaughterhouse-Five" into Russian, both books achieving
critical as well as popular success. Most of Vonnegut's works appeared in Soviet editions over
the ensuing decade; it may now be said that Vonnegut is the most popular and respected
contemporary American author in the Soviet Union.

Even by 1972 the extraordinary extent of Vonnegut's popularity in the USSR was obvious, and
several Soviet critics had already remarked on some of the Russian and even Dostoevskian
features in the American author's writing. (3) It was in 1972 that I first met Vonnegut at Brown's
Hotel in London, on October 27. On the next day he was to meet his Russian translator, Rita
Rait, in Paris, where she was doing research. I had done a Jot toward arranging their meeting,
via letter and telegram, at Rita's insistence; Vonnegut consequently wanted to meet me and to
ask me some questions about Rita before seeing her in person.

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Fairly early in our conversation I remarked to Vonnegut that I could see a lot of Dostoevsky in
his writing. He at once brightened, insisting that I tell him exactly what I saw. But I suddenly
realized I had no firm evidence for my impressions. Embarrassed, I finally managed to stammer,
"You both have a strong chiliastic outlook." As it happened, Vonnegut loved the word chiliastic;
he said he'd never heard it before, but that he knew exactly what it meant. So we shifted over
to a discussion of semantics and I was off the hook on Dostoevsky. But that writer was
mentioned later when Vonnegut asked me who Rita's favorite Russian author was - assuming it
to be Dostoevsky. I said that in fact Rita cared little for Dostoevsky (in comparison, say, with
Tolstoy) - an attitude rather common in her generation. At this Vonnegut thanked me
elaborately - for saving him from making a dumb mistake with Rita, from prattling on and on
about a writer she didn't like. Vonnegut seemed to be just as nervous about meeting Rita as she
was about meeting him. As it turned out, they became friends (and they still are close friends)
and Rita went on to translate "Breakfast of Champions" and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater," in
1974 and 1978, respectively, as well as several stories.

I also saw Vonnegut from time to time after our meeting and exchanged a number of letters
with him. By 1974 I had decided to commit myself to doing the research for an article about
Vonnegut's reception in the Soviet Union and the possible influence of Russian literature on his
work. I hinted now and then in letters to Vonnegut that I needed answers to questions
concerning such influence. All such hints were ignored. Then, in a letter written on 3une 27,
1975, I mentioned to Vonnegut that a course I had proposed on Dostoevsky and Vonnegut had
been approved by the Comparative Literature Committee of the University of Tennessee. As a
partial justification of this course, I wrote in my letter: "I think that anyone who has not read
Dostoevsky cannot properly understand you. It's not so much a question of influence as an
implicit assumption on your part that the reader you envision while writing has a lasting love
for the Karamazovs..." Surprisingly, Vonnegut responded to this with a paragraph in his letter to
me of July 2, 1975: "About 'The Brothers Karamazov:' It was the first book I read after becoming
a civilian after WW II. My new wife (nee Jane Cox, a Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore) made
me read it on our honeymoon in Culver, Indiana. Culver is on Lake Maxincuckee. The cottage in
which we stayed had belonged to my family for three generations. It had just been sold. The
new owner let us honeymoon there because he was a sentimentalist. I also painted my first
picture there. It was of a chair. It was really pretty good. I have no idea what became of it."

Though short on the right kind of details, this paragraph establishes the crucial fact that
Vonnegut read the novel in September, 1945 (he was married on September first - he was then
twenty-two), just after his harrowing experiences as a prisoner of war in Dresden (where he
survived the firestorm of February 13, 1945) and some five or six years before he began writing
full time.

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I should mention also that I had learned a year or so earlier that Vonnegut has the same birth
date as Dostoevsky (with the latter's date corrected for calendar error) - that is, November 11,
once known as Armistice Day in the United States. (Dostoevsky was born in 1821, Vonnegut in
1922.) I found this coincidence pleasing and told Vonnegut of it; he said he had learned about it
only a year earlier. (This would tend to preclude Vonnegut's having had the impression, at least
prior to 1973 or so, that he was a reincarnation of Dostoevsky. Better writers than Vonnegut, by
the way, have imagined stranger things!) Other such coincidences include the fact that
Vonnegut and Dostoevsky were both educated as engineers, the mothers of each died
relatively young (when Dostoevsky was 16, Vonnegut, 21), and both writers served time in
labor camps.

Not until the end of 1976 did I complete my article, "Kurt Vonnegut's Popularity in the Soviet
Union and His Affinities with Russian Literature." (4) Much of it dealt with Vonnegut's
relationship with Rita Rait and with Soviet criticism of his work (which has been uniformly
positive); there was discussion of the numerous general affinities between Vonnegut and
Russian literature; and there was commentary on the influence of, or parallels with,
Dostoevsky. With respect to the latter, I noted the reference to Dostoevsky in "Slaughterhouse-
Five" and quotations from him in "Breakfast of Champions" and "Slapstick." I referred to the
moral didacticism shared by both writers; their occasional sentimentality; their sensitivity to
suffering; their frequent preoccupation with insanity, suicide and despair; their mutual
devotion to the messianic, the apocalyptic, the eschatological, and the chiliastic, and the
tendency of both to dramatize in a single work of fiction one major idea, often exaggerating it
to an extreme limit. I mentioned in a footnote the preoccupation of each with Jesus Christ, and
I discussed perfunctorily Vonnegut's use of a Grand Inquisitor figure.

I sent Vonnegut a copy of my rough draft of this article; he was much moved by it. He liked it so
much, in fact, that in his letter acknowledging receipt of it he asked me formally if I would be
his literary executor! I believe this astonishing response to the article is due primarily to my
having placed Vonnegut in the tradition of the great Russian writers; no other critic of his has
done that, as far as I know, although many have noted the influence on him of Swift, Twain,
Voltaire, Anatole France and other Western authors. Certainly there were many other scholars
for Vonnegut to choose from - to name as literary executor - from among the authors of over
100 articles, ten books, and thirteen dissertations about him (as of 1978) and thirteen
additional dissertations about him in comparison with other writers. I have met a dozen or
more of these Vonnegut scholars, all of whom would make excellent literary executors - but
they fail to mention the Russian connection.

For all his enthusiastic acceptance of my article, Vonnegut said almost nothing in his letter of
reply to acknowledge a true awareness of Russian literary influence on his writing. The part of
his letter most relevant to this matter is as follows:

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I once conceived of an experiment in which every piece of information received by a human

being would be entered in a log - from birth to the age of twenty-one, say. We would then be
able to determine whether that person had also inherited certain knowledge, or perhaps
received it telepathically or clairvoyantly. If that experiment had been performed on me, it
would be obvious that I am not an educated man. I haven't read nearly all I should. As a
chemist, and then as an engineer, and then as an anthropologist, I was kept busy reading, all
right. But what I read was not what is customarily thought of as being literature. The only
period in my life when I studied literature with some concentration and continuity was when I
was a discussion leader in a Great Books group on Cape Cod for about three years - when I was
in my middle thirties. People have urged me to read this or that from time to time, and I have
usually obeyed them and been grateful. Thus I discovered Blake and Cйline and Edward Lewis
Wallant, and on and on. As for the Russians: My wife had studied them intensively at
Swarthmore, and she brought about twenty volumes of their work in Modern Library editions
as the core of her dowry. So I read them, and in my heart I liked Gogol best. (Letter of
November 20, 1976)
In commenting on this long quote, I would like to say first that the reference to Gogol by no
means indicates a denial of Dostoevsky, as I feel certain we have already established. Actually,
almost anyone thinking first of Vonnegut's humor and satire would look to Gogol rather than
Dostoevsky as the more important influence - and that influence is undoubtedly there, as I
pointed out in my article. There is also the fact that Vonnegut's characters, like Gogol's, tend to
be caricatures rather than fully developed personalities. At the same time, Vonnegut's humor,
at least, does not set him apart from Dostoevsky, for both humor and satire are important
elements in almost all of the latter's writings. (5) Furthermore, the influence of Gogol on the
early Dostoevsky is apparent and fully acknowledged by the latter.

In any case, Vonnegut acknowledges having read the major Russian writers, Dostoevsky and
Gogol among them, at a critical time in his life. His sense of having been directly influenced by
them, however, is by no means certain. What the earlier portion of the above quotation means
to me is that Vonnegut finds convincing my discovery of Russian elements in his fiction,
although he was not in fact conscious of the origin of these elements while writing; hence, he
has the mystical sense of having been served by creative powers seemingly outside himself -
and he is humbled by that.

Probably some feeling similar to this applies to at least half the writers in whom determined
literary scholars perceive direct and "obvious" influences. Related to this is the question of just
how well writers remember their favorite novels - the books that presumably influence them
the most. In a conversation with Vonnegut early in April of 1977 I happened to mention
"Grushenka's onion" from "The Brothers Karamazov;" I was astonished that Vonnegut could not
recall this passage - and indeed could

133

not even remember who Grushenka was! I summarized Grushenka's anecdote for him, the
essence of which is that even if you do no more good in all your life than to give away but one
little onion, then that is still potentially enough, in the eyes of God, to gain you entrance into
heaven. This "little onion" is to me the basic theme of "The Brothers Karamazov," and it is
fundamental to most of Vonnegut's writings, too - his compassion not only for ordinary people,
but for the disreputable, the ugly, the unlovable, and his greater concern, as a writer, for the
few virtues of these sufferers rather than for their many sins. But Vonnegut must have only the
haziest of impressions that a possible source for this concern is "The Brothers Karamazov" - a
novel that he has never reread. (I should mention, however, that while he forgot Grushenka, he
did remember Smerdjakov, whom he cites as an example of a fictional villain in a letter to me of
December 19, 1977.)
One might suppose a generally greater familiarity with the novel than this, as Vonnegut quotes
from it twice - first in "Breakfast of Champions," 1973, and then again in "Slapstick" (1976).
However, he names only Dostoevsky and not the novel as his source at the places where he
quotes the author, and as it turns out, he had no idea he was quoting from "The Brothers
Karamazov" and not some other work by Dostoevsky. The quotation in "Breakfast of
Champions" is as follows, with Vonnegut speaking in his own voice: " 'It's all like an ocean!'
cried Dostoevsky. I say it's all like cellophane." (Delacorte, p. 234.) Vonnegut's remark stems
from Kilgore Trout's having waded across a polluted creek, which coats his legs with a film of
plastic - and from further speculation by Vonnegut about the infinite extendability of a typical
polymer molecule.

The quotation in "Slapstick," with Wilbur Swain, a spokesman for Vonnegut, narrating, is as
follows: "Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, the Russian novelist, said one time that, 'One sacred
memory from childhood is perhaps the best education.' I can think of another quickie education
for a child, which, in its way, is almost as salutary: Meeting a human being who is tremendously
respected by the adult world, and realizing that that person is actually a malicious lunatic."
(Delacorte, p. 90.) Swain adds a footnote two paragraphs later: "I have an Encyclopedia
Britannica here in the lobby of the Empire State Building, which is the reason I am able to give
Dostoevski his middle name." Swain is speaking (or writing) in the future, after the economic
and political collapse of the United States; the malicious lunatic he refers to is a psychologist
who did a terrible job of testing his mental abilities as a child.

When I was working on the rough draft of my article on Vonnegut and Russia, I myself had no
idea where the above quotes were from. I wrote Vonnegut, asking for the sources, and he
replied as follows: "The quotation about 'One sacred memory...' was handed on a slip of paper
to my wife at the end of her course at Swarthmore. The teacher was an adored old man, Harold
Goddard, who customarily made a gift of a quotation to each student at semester's end. Jane
still has the piece of paper. The author is named, but not the book it came from. Jane herself
does not know."

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(Letter of November 20, 1976.) The "ocean" quote, as he told me much later, was one his wife
3ane Cox often uttered, from the first days of their marriage. For Vonnegut there was always an
automatic connection between "It's all like an ocean!" and Fedor Dostoevsky, though he never
knew where Dostoevsky had written it. I found the quotation given in "Slapstick" relatively
easily; it is from the next to last page of "The Brothers Karamazov," from Alesha's speech to the
boys:

"You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for
life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People
talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from
childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into
life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one's heart,
even that may sometimes be the means of saving us. Perhaps we may even grow wicked later
on, may be unable to refrain from a bad action, may laugh at men's tears and at those people
who say as Kolya did just now, 'I want to suffer for all men; and may even jeer spitefully at such
people. But however bad we may become - which God forbid - yet, when we recall how we
buried Ilyusha, how we loved him in his last days, and how we have been talking like friends all
together, at this stone, the cruelest and most mocking of us - if we do become so - will not dare
to laugh inwardly at having been kind and good at this moment! What's more, perhaps, that
one memory may keep him from great evil and he will reflect and say, 'Yes, I was good and
brave and honest then!'" (Norton Critical Edition, p. 734)
As this context was not known to Vonnegut when he used the quote, there is little point in
speculating about its precise influence on him. However, some part of the general philosophy
expressed here may be seen in "Slaughterhouse-Five," if we remember its subtitle, "The
Children's Crusade," and view it as a desperate and hopeless appeal to end all wars, by telling a
story about the suffering of children.

The "ocean" quote was in essence impossible to find. (6) I and twenty students looked out for it
as we read and discussed "The Brothers Karamazov" - and we all missed it. Then in May of
1977, long after I had given up hope of finding this quote, I happened to be reading a brief
excerpt from Dostoevsky's novel in an anthology. The phone rang. It was Vonnegut. We talked
for ten minutes and I returned to my book. And right away I spotted the five elusive words
glowing serenely in a passage from "The Conversations and Exhortations of Father Zosima"
(Book VI, Chapter 3, Section g):

My brother asked the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an
ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of
the earth. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but birds would be happier at
your side - a little happier, anyway - and children and all
135

animals, if you yourself were nobler than you are now. It's all like an ocean, I tell you. Then you
would pray to the birds, too, consumed by an all-embracing love, in a sort of transport, and
pray that they, too, will forgive you your sin. Treasure this ecstasy, however senseless it may
seem to men. (Norton Critical Edition, p. 299.) (7)

This unexpected appeal to pantheism in the midst of Father Zosima's Christian exhortations is
an interesting indication that Dostoevsky (for whom Zosima is in part a spokesman) was not so
orthodox a Christian as many critics have insisted. (8) For all that, Christ, if not His church, was
always squarely at the center of Dostoevsky's work. As for the birds in the quoted passage: they
do not seem to exemplify an obvious motif in Dostoevsky, but there are, coincidentally, birds
galore in Vonnegut's novels, beginning with the giant bluebirds - "the most admirable creatures
in Titan" - worshipped by Chrono in "Sirens of Titan," and continuing for twenty years with birds
in every novel through "Jailbird" with its symbolic, golden prothonotary warblers.
In "Jailbird," incidentally, Vonnegut's next novel after "Slapstick", there are no references to
Dostoevsky, but Vonnegut provocatively juxtaposes Christianity and revolution as he retells the
story of Sacco and Vanzetti so as to compare their martyrdom with that of Jesus Christ. Then,
one year after "Jailbird" was released, Vonnegut delivered a guest sermon on Palm Sunday,
1980, at St. Clement's Episcopal Church, West 46th St., Manhattan, wherein, after first
identifying himself as a "Christ-worshipping agnostic," he analyzes John 12:8: "The poor you
always have with you, but you do not always have me," - excusing Jesus of responsibility for any
interpretation of these lines to mean that it is all right to ignore the poor, as there are so many
of them anyway... The sermon appears in a book of Vonnegut's essays published by Delacorte
in March, 1981, under the title "Palm Sunday." Late in 1980 Vonnegut wrote a version of the
Nativity for children, with art by Ivan Chermayeff, under the title "Sun Moon Star" (Harper and
Row). These preoccupations together with the important references to Jesus in "God Bless You,
Mr. Rosewater," "Slaughterhouse-Five," "Breakfast of Champions," and "Slapstick" point to a
gradually increasing concern with Christianity and Christ. In this we may recognize considerable
common ground with Dostoevsky. Vonnegut himself recognizes a certain psychological ground
in common with Dostoevsky, expressed in an interesting passage written in 1980:

So I am embarrassed about the failure of my first marriage. I am embarrassed by my older

relatives' responses to my books. But I was embarrassed before I was married or had written a
book. A bad dream I have dreamed for as long as I can remember may hold a clue. In that
dream, I know that I have murdered an old women a long time ago. I have led an exemplary life
ever since. But now the police have come to get me, with incontrovertible evidence of my
crime. This is more or less the plot of Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment," of course. By
coincidence, Dostoevsky and I have the same birthday, too. ("Palm Sunday," p. 189)
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Most importantly Vonnegut's novels from the first are much occupied with religious questions,
as are virtually all of Dostoevsky's. In addition, both writers make use of what may be called the
strange, the coincidental and the mystical - not to promote established religion, but primarily to
demonstrate the wonderful complexity and unpredictability of life itself. An example of this sort
of thing in Vonnegut is his invented term karass a karass being one of the many special teams,
according to Bokonon, the religious sage of "Cat's Cradle," into which all humanity is organized.
These teams "do God's will without ever discovering what they are doing," says Bokonon, and
he adds that "if you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical
reason, that person may be a member of your karass." (Dell, pp. 11-12.) There is something
almost like a karass at work in "The Brothers Karamazov" as Dostoevsky guides Alesha into
"accidental" involvement with Grushenka, Iljusha and others. When Alesha hears Grushenka's
story of the little onion and observes the change that has taken place in her before his eyes, he
himself is spiritually transformed and becomes imbued with a sense of the miraculous.
Dostoevsky means for this miracle, coming out of life itself, to be seen as the true counterpart
to the false miracle of the Grand Inquisitor's tripartite formula - "miracle, mystery and
authority" - for gaining and holding power over the Christian masses for their own good. Later
Alesha's relationship with Iljusha and Kolja inevitably requires of him that he preach a quiet
funeral sermon to the boys (quoted in part earlier in this paper) at Iljusha's stone. Here the
mystery and authority of the Grand Inquisitor's institutional church are challenged by the
ordinary stone or rock, which derives its authority as a place of worship from the simple fact
that people of good faith have gathered around it; while Alesha acquires the authority to
preach only from the natural respect he has earned through his friendship with the boys. It is
interesting that the name of Christ is never uttered by Alesha in this speech that ends the novel,
nor is Christ mentioned anywhere in the final chapter - though his presence is symbolized not
only by the "rock" (that is Peter) upon which Christ founded his church, but by the fact that
there are "about twelve" boys surrounding Alesha (Norton, p. 727). I do not think Dostoevsky
means for us to see Alesha, surrounded by his disciples, as Christ, but only as a kind of secular
analogue to Christ that any of us might hope to emulate. In any case, it is through this specially
constructed "karass," if you will, that Dostoevsky elaborates his reply to Ivan's Grand Inquisitor,
showing that ordinary people are capable of practicing without coercion or deception a simple
and direct form of Christianity in their daily lives.

While Dostoevsky's challenge to the Grand Inquisitor is but hazily recalled by most readers of
"The Brothers Karamazov," the Grand Inquisitor himself is remembered by everyone - including,
of course, Vonnegut - although no two people seem to remember this figure in the same way. I
suspect that many readers tend to forget the depth of intelligence and spirituality that
Dostoevsky, through Ivan Karamazov, grants to his creation. Thus, the Grand Inquisitor
repeatedly speaks to Christ of his suffering for having deceived men, for having taken their sins
upon himself for their happiness, and his anguish as one of the elite who guard

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the mystery and who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil.
He dares Christ to judge him.

"Know that I fear thee not," he says. "Know that I too have been in the wilderness, I too have
lived on roots and locusts, I too prized the freedom with which Thou has blessed men, and I too
was striving to stand among Thy elect..." (Norton, p. 240.) Ivan later asks Alesha, "Why can
there not be...one martyr oppressed by great sorrow and loving humanity? You see, only
suppose that there was one such man among all those who desire nothing but filthy material
gain - if there's one like my old inquisitor, who had himself eaten roots in the desert and made
frenzied efforts to subdue his flesh to make himself free and perfect. But yet all his life he loved
humanity, and suddenly his eyes were opened, and he saw that it is no great moral blessedness
to attain perfection and freedom, if at the same time one gains the conviction that millions of
God's creatures have been created as a mockery (and) that they will never be capable of using
their freedom..." (pp. 241-2.)
In this, by the way, we may recognize the attitude of the bodhisattva, who, out of compassion,
forgoes nirvana in order to teach others how to attain it. Although Ivan confesses to Alesha that
the Grand Inquisitor has ceased to believe in God, he insists that this in itself is a sufficient
cause of the old man's suffering and tragedy. In any case, the kiss that Christ bestows on the
"bloodless aged lips" of the Grand Inquisitor is, at the very least, a powerful and poetically
brilliant sign of Christ's perception of the genuineness of the old man's suffering.
The type of the Grand Inquisitor has made its primary appearance in Western literature, I
believe, in the twentieth-century anti-utopian novel. Vonnegut's principal contribution to this
genre is "Player Piano" (1952), his first novel. In an interview in 1973 he said of that novel, "I
cheerfully ripped off the plot of (it from) "Brave New World," whose plot had been cheerfully
ripped off from Eugene Zamiatin's 'We'." (9) This remark is interesting as it shows an awareness
of the Russian origin of the story line; it seems unlikely, however, that Vonnegut would also
have known that Zamjatin's novel (written in 1920-21 and first published in 1924 - in English
translation) frequently echoes Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground." For instance, the
"bright and sparkling glass" of which all the structures in "We" are built recalls the famous
Crystal Palace of the earlier work-symbol of the future utilitarian and super-rational society that
the narrator of "Notes" rejects. (10) Also, the leader of Zamjatin's United State, a benevolent
dictator known as the Benefactor (or Well-Doer), makes a speech in Chapter 36 about Christ
and the difficult and important part played by those who killed him - for if not for them, he
says, "how could that magnificent tragedy ever have been staged?" This clearly calls to mind
the Grand Inquisitor, although Zamjatin's Benefactor is not presented as one who suffers in the
manner of the Dostoevskian prototype.

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Although Huxley denied that he had read "We" prior to 1931 when he wrote "Brave New
World," (11) nearly everyone, including Vonnegut, is convinced that he was directly influenced
by Zamjatin. For instance, Huxley's World Controller, like Zamjatin's Benefactor, is also a Grand
Inquisitor type, though he is actually closer to Dostoevsky's creation than Zamjatin's more
schematic figure. In Chapter 16 Huxley's leader speaks of the many years that the people have
been under total control and comments, "It hasn't been very good for truth, of course. But it's
been very good for happiness." He alludes to the pain he has endured as one obliged to
sacrifice truth. In one important respect "Brave New World" is not like "We," for it lacks the
revolutionary uprising that determines so much of the plot of the latter.

Vonnegut's remark about the plot of "Player Piano" implies that he had not read "We," but only
"Brave New World." (12) Perhaps, then, he borrowed the workers' revolution in his novel from
Orwell's "1984" (published in 1948) - a novel Vonnegut mentions elsewhere that he read and
one quite obviously based on "We," although Orwell's Big Brother is influenced more by Stalin
and Hitler than Zamjatin's Benefactor. Big Brother's chief concern is for power and he has little
if any interest in happiness for the masses; he is thus a rather weak example of the Grand
Inquisitor, lacking all the virtue and subtlety of the archetype. (13)

Vonnegut's benevolent dictator in "Player Piano" owes nothing to the Big Brother type; he also
lacks the intellectual refinement of Huxley's World Controller; and he has little of the symbolic
interest of Zamjatin's Benefactor. His name is Doctor Francis Eldgrin Gelhorne and his title is
National Industrial, Commercial, Communications, Foodstuffs and Resources Director. He is old,
shrewd, unafraid, always dresses formally, has concern for the well-being of the masses, and
tends to speak in aphorisms: "Nobody's so damn well educated that you can't learn ninety
percent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten percent is decoration... Show me a
specialist, and I'll show you a man who's so scared he's dug a hole for himself to hide in...
Almost nobody's competent:... It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at
their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in the kingdom of
the blind." (Avon, 1967, p. 219.)

Owing to literary circumstances, Gelhorne qualifies as a Grand Inquisitor type, but he is not a
developed character and he lacks the subtlety of the model. However, in the same novel, the
Reverend James 3. Lasher, who engineers the creation of a false but convincing messiah to lead
the workers' revolution, is spiritually much closer to the Grand Inquisitor: he combines religious
compassion and self-sacrifice with regretful cynicism as he commits himself to the workers'
struggle. He does not, however, appear in public as does the Grand Inquisitor.

More developed figures of this type are to be found in Vonnegut's later novels "The Sirens of
Titan" (1959) and "Cat's Cradle" (1963). In the former, Winston Niles Rumfoord, a heroic,
sensitive figure of style and

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brilliance, orchestrates a war between .Mars and Earth and then establishes a new church on
Earth with the aim of uniting all humanity in peace and brotherhood. Rumfoord, speaking of
himself in particular, declares that "Any man who would change the world in a significant way
must have showmanship, a genial willingness to shed other people's blood, and a plausible new
religion to introduce during the brief period of repentance and horror that usually follows
bloodshed." (Dell, 1966, p. 174.) The "plausible religion" introduced by Rumfoord is made one-
hundred-percent credible by him, as he has knowledge of the future that Earthlings lack and is
thus able to bring about apparent miracles, create vast pageants of ritual and mystery, and
establish absolutely his own authority. The parallel with the Grand Inquisitor seems obvious
and conscious, although Rumfoord iconoclastically supplants establishment Christianity with
what he calls The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, the motto of which is, "Take care of the
people, and God Almighty will take care of himself," and the two chief teachings of which are:
"Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of
God." (p. 180) Much of the practice of this religion consists in eliminating "luck" from human
affairs, to make human beings as nearly equal as possible. In this there is much humor and
exaggeration, in keeping with the satirical tone of the novel as a whole - but one sees here
nevertheless the same ambivalence that is dramatized in Ivan Karamazov's "poem" about the
Grand Inquisitor: on the one hand, agonized resentment of a God indifferent to human
suffering and, on the other, a passionate desire, based wholly on the teachings of Jesus, to
eliminate that suffering, even if those teachings must be violated in the process.

Much the same ambivalence or tension is dramatized in "Cat's Cradle," except that the
manipulative Grand Inquisitor figure is now played by two persons in concert - the beloved,
saintly Bokonon, who is seen as all good by the dirt-poor denizens of San Lorenzo who follow
his religious teachings; and the feared and hated "Papa" Monzano, a dictator viewed as pure
evil by the populace. Monzano threatens gruesome punishment for practicing the outlawed
Bokononist religion - which only inspires the people to practice it more fervently. In thus risking
their lives, the starving and wretched San Lorenzans attain a dignity otherwise unavailable to
them on their deprived and barren little island. The religion they follow is codified in the Books
of Bokonon, the first sentence of which is: "Ail of the true things I am about to tell you are
shameless lies." (p. 14.) (14) The religion offers virtually no hope; yet, because of the "priceless
equilibrium" between good and evil engineered in secret by Bokonon and Monzano, the people
are brought in spite of their condition to a quite admirable level of spiritual happiness.
Vonnegut's assumptions here are well known to Ivan's Grand Inquisitor, who would insist that
human beings are capable of suffering for their religion only for very short periods. But
Vonnegut makes a real effort to teach in "Cat's Cradle" that human beings are better than that,
and thus comes close to agreeing with Dostoevsky's arguments against the Grand Inquisitor in
the latter part of "The Brothers Karamazov."

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In "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" (1965), these arguments are dramatized without benefit of
an inquisitor figure. They may be summarized in a few aphoristic quotations from the work:
"Pretend to be good always and even God will be fooled." (Dell, 1970, p. 177.) "The problem (of
our time) is this: How to love people who have no use." (p. 183.) "(P)eople can use all the
uncritical love they can get." (p. 186.) And finally, baptizing Mary Moody's twins in a strictly
secular ceremony, Eliot Rosewater says: "There's only one rule that I know of, babies - : "God
damn it, you've got to be kind.' " (P. 93.) These few lines characterize not only the essential
philosophy of Vonnegut both before and after "Rosewater," but, in a highly abridged form, the
views of Dostoevsky, especially in the final chapter of "The Brothers Karamazov," when Alesha
speaks to the boys at Iljusha's stone.

Although more may be said on the similarities between Vonnegut and Dostoevsky, (15) it seems
to me that enough has been said here to show that these similarities are more than
coincidental. On the question of coincidence, however, I would like to add one more note to
provide a conclusion to this essay.

In 1975 Vonnegut's son Mark published a book called "Eden Express," about his experiences as
a sufferer from schizophrenia. At one point he records a conversation that he imagines he had
with his father just after being released from a mental hospital. He tells his father that he has
just begun reading "The Brothers Karamazov." His father says this was a mistake - but a
beautiful one. Then Vonnegut suggests to his son that he open the book at random. Mark
writes: "I let the book (fall) open. About halfway down on the right-hand page, one sentence
stood out, glowing, from the rest of the print: The end of time will be marked by acts of
unfathomable compassion.' " (Praeger, 1975, p. 176)

Who but Dostoevsky could have written these remarkable chiliastic lines? But I have never
been able to find them in "The Brothers Karamazov." Dostoevsky scholars to whom I've
appealed have suggested likely places to search - but to no avail. I had written to Mark
Vonnegut on the matter, but he never answered - so that I was always half persuaded that the
quote was simply made up, some kind of hallucination. Vonnegut himself assured me (just a
week or two prior to my writing these lines, in May 1981) that his own role in his son's text was
pure hallucination. He gave me Mark's telephone number and said to call him - which I did.

Young Vonnegut has now completed his medical degree at Harvard University and is working as
an intern. He no longer suffers from hallucinations. Furthermore, he can distinguish between
hallucination and reality when recalling his schizophrenic past. And he swears that the quote
from Dostoevsky is something he read; he did not make it up. He admits that his father was not
present physically when "The Brothers Karamazov" fell open to the fateful page. He can no
longer recall the edition or the translator, but the page itself (as described in the passage
quoted above) is vivid in his memory. And he is convinced that the

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moment when Dostoevsky's prophetic words leaped out at him marked the turning point in his
recovery from mental illness.

NOTES
This essay is a revision of a paper of the same title read on Feb. 13, 1981, at a conference of the
Southern Comparative Literature Association held at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. As
my analysis incidentally treats the subject of coincidence, 1 want to mention that my paper was
read by chance on the twenty-sixth anniversary of the Dresden firestorm, a profoundly
important event in Vonnegut's life and work.
"Slaughterhouse-Five" (New York: Delacorte, 1969), p. 87.
See the bibliography in my article described in note 4 below.
"Russian Literature Triquarterly," 14 (Winter 1976), 166-190; repr. with changes under different
title, pp. 258-293 in "Vonnegut in America," ed. J. Klinkowitz and D. Lawler (New York:
Delacorte, 1977).
Among numerous articles on humor in Dostoevsky, see Roger L. Cox, "Dostoevsky and the
Ridiculous," Dostoevsky Studies, 1 (1980), 103 - 109.
That is, impossible for me to find. I thought to test Professor Robert Louis Jackson on its source
just before I read this paper (see note 1); he knew it right away.
I have discussed these quotes also in "Notes on Modern American Literature," 1/4 (Fall 1977),
Note 29.
For a recent article on non-Christian elements in Zosima's theology, see Roger B. Anderson,
"Mythical implications of Father Zosima's Religious Teachings," Slavic Review, 38/2 (June 1979),
272-289.
"Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons" (New York: Delacorte, 1974), p. 261.
For a full analysis of the influence of "Notes from Underground" on "We," see R. L. Jackson,
"Zamiatin's 'We,' " pp. 150-157 in Jackson's "Dostoevsky's Underground Man in Russian
Literature" ('s-Gravenhage: Mouton, 1958); Patricia Warrick, "The Source of Zamjatin's 'We' in
Dostoevsky's 'Notes from Underground,'" Extrapolation, 17/1 (De cember 1975), 63-77; and
others.
See discussion of this in Alex M. Shane, "The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin" (Berkeley/L.A.:
U. of California Press, 1968), p. 140.
He did not in fact read "We" until the early 1960's. Parallels with "We" are coincidental - for
instance Vonnegut's frequent identifica tion of the characters in "Player Piano" by their job
classification numbers: R-127, EC-002, etc. -similar to the naming system used by Zamjatin.
For an excellent discussion of Zamjatin, Huxley and Orwell, see Edward J. Brown, "Brave New
World, 1984 and We: An Essay on Anti- Utopia" (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1976).
After reading the first draft of this essay, Professor R. Neuhдuser
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suggested that this quoted passage from "Cat's Cradle" is interestingly similar to the lines in
Dostoevsky's "Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatlenijakh": "Vy znaete tozhe naverno, chto esli ja
i navru, to navru, buduchi uveren, chto ne vru." (Chapter 5, opening paragraph.)
I will say more on this matter in a book on "Vonnegut and Russia," which I think I am now about
ready to begin writing.