Not P but DFW: the implications of a human Christ

[Mark Kohut]

I have read The Brothers Karamazov and and others of his and Frank on him.
(went to the book after my first draft of this)

Frank's worK (originally 2 volumes) is what they call a critical biography,
that is, tracing the life's works for all the influences as Wallace
adumbrates
by linking the Brothers K with those other two works' protagonists...

Dostoevsky was religious, the Eastern brand of Catholicism. Another
tortured believer, however. Among much he was all caught up
in was what God's divinity meant---just looked up in Frank when he want to
attend A Russian philosopher named Soloviev's famous lecture
on The Godhead....(where he did NOT get to meet Leo Tolstoy because some
friend/ flack who knew them both learned from Tolstoy
that he, Tolstoy, did not want to meet Fyodor this night. FMD said why
didn't you at least point him out so I could see him)....
Dostoevsky did not like that an all-powerful God could have made the world
a better place but didn't...as Ivan K says in the book, he will not believe
in a God
who lets children suffer and die...FMD also hated how easy it was for
everyone to simply believe in the God or Christ of God-Anointed Church,
which had all the
supposed answers....That God, that JC, was not good enough for FMD....( I
urge you all to read the famous Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, if you
haven't
which my bookstore mentor told me all about (and led me to read the
Brothers K)....in which JC comes back and ...you should read..lit is pretty
great.
It is almost a surety TRP knows it,I say...The Grand Inquisitor Cleric
rejects JC because he wants JC to fall into the Church's JC....a human god
exhibiting
'miracle, mystery and authority'....lets call them  lies, illusion and pure
power in the Church...I won't reveal the Great Spoiler of this legend.

So, after seeing that Holbein picture, as FMD says in his Diary or maybe
The Idiot---Joseph Frank draws on the Diary a lot (in which we learn how
anti-semitic Dostoevky was..)
not easily available in English anymore but I have one...."That painting
would make one lose his faith" ...he is deathly dead, Christ is...

So D was obsessed, like a real artist, which he was, with what Frank calls
'the emptying of Christ"...emptying of the divine in JC for the human.  (Go
look at that
Holbein) ...and as Wallace says it is in D's works--not that I could see
all this when I did read them---the emptying of qualities in his characters
because they are 'human'--
why can't The Gambler stop?....a kinda good man why can't he control
himself?....if Myshkin in The Idoit  is a saint, as he is often seen,why is
he not perfect?

Those are Wallace's fuller meanings of "implications" I think. All
the human imperfections are the implications of being human including
death....



On Wed, Feb 11, 2026 at 11:02 AM Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> The following excerpt is from David Foster Wallace's *Joseph Frank's
> Dostoevsky*:
>
> Not surprisingly, FMD’s exact beliefs are idiosyncratic and complicated,
> and Joseph Frank is thorough and clear and detailed in explaining their
> evolution through the novels’ thematics (as in, e.g., the toxic effects of
> egoistic atheism on the Russian character in Notes and C&P; the deformation
> of Russian passion by worldly Europe in The Gambler; and, in The Idiot’s
> Myshkin and The Brothers Karamazov’s Zossima, the implications of a human
> Christ subjected literally to nature’s physical forces, an idea central to
> all the fiction Dostoevsky wrote after seeing Holbein the Younger’s “Dead
> Christ” at the Basel Museum in 1867).
>
> What does the word "implication" mean here exactly?
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>