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Gary Cox

Recent Projects

Dostoevsky's Characters in a Darwinian World; Gender Models in Group Behavior (see sample above)

Projects or Proposals Offered

Dostoevsky's Characters in a Darwinian World; Gender Models in Group Behavior (see sample above)

Searchable Keywords

evolution, rape, genocide, Russia, Yugoslavia

Specialties or Categories of Interest

Anthropology, History, Pre-History, Gender, East Europe, Language

Experience, Credits, and/or Awards

PhD, Russian Literature, Columbia SMU Godbey Series Authors' Award for "Crime and Punishment": A Mind to Murder (Boston: Twayne)

From The Book

Dostoevsky's Characters in a Darwinian World: Gender Models and Group Behavior.

Abstract: A popular reframing of the conclusions of “Russia's Feminine Soul Reconsidered” ("A Neo-Darwinian Look at Dostoevskian Group Psychology," New Zealand Slavonic Journal, vol. 35, 2001.) This monograph finds evidence in literature, linguistics, archaeo-anthropology and evolutionary psychology, folklore, and ancient history, for a gender-linked group behavior model that has produced highly authoritarian political systems in east Europe. Between the Neolithic era and early historical times, the impact of strategies of males-only genocide and conquest rape (comparable to what was seen in Yugoslavia in the 1990s) was sufficient to expunge the Indo-European word for “father” from Slavic languages, but served to strengthen authority systems imposed from outside, which were later internalized. (Available for publication in book form with reprint of the same author's classic "Tyrant and Victim in Dostoevsky," Slavica, 1980.) Excerpt from Dostoevsky's Characters in a Darwinian world:

Dostoevsky's characters sort themselves into a typology themed around charismatic dominance. His villains and heroes are tyrants and their victims, and his works spin on an axis formed between those opposites. What saves it all from becoming melodrama, one thing anyway, is role reversal – Dostoevsky's tyrants tend to bow to their victims at the end, and everybody gets saved, sometimes even in the religious sense. The other thing that keeps it from cloying is that he always knocks the type askew with at least one detail that doesn't fit – the whore is a devout, Bible-reading Christian; the atheist writes articles on church governance; the rake has a penchant for self-humiliation, and so forth. As a result, characters based on melodramatic types shimmer with contradictions and fascinate us with their complexity. That's one reason why believers and nihilists alike continue to read his books with passionate excitement.

Of course there are gender elements to this dyad, as we would expect given the way gender abuse works. The victims are more often women, the tyrants more often men. The reversals of Dostoevsky's works can have both redemptive religious meanings and raunchy erotic ones. Just like real life, in fact. Another reason we keep eagerly turning pages, whether we agree with the author's ideas or not.

When I put forward the 'tyrant-victim axis' as a key to Dostoevsky, in the early 1980s, I compared his characters to a tribe of islanders, and called the author an anthropologist of sorts, giving us a key to group behavior. Charismatic dominance and the tyrant/victim dyad operate not only between individuals in groups, but between groups as they interact with each other, so this pattern, including its gender-typical elements, can motivate political systems as they develop in human societies.

This takes us into evolutionary psychology, the relatively new field that investigates the origins of human behavior in our evolutionary past. It is proving possible to view changing human behavior, even cultural behavior, as a set of adaptations to changing environments, including cultural environments. Looking at Dostoevsky in Darwinian terms gets a bit funky, since Dostoevsky leaped into orthodox (and Orthodox) Christian faith as a solution to the problems posed in his works, and loathed Darwin and the whole naturalistic approach. As with any great writer, though, the characters have lives of their own, and we as readers are free to look at them any way we like.

One dimension of the Dostoevskian 'tyrant-victim' complex is the cliché that the 'Russian soul' is passive. Russian political culture stymies initiative, according to this truism; it lowers confidence in positive return, impairs one's sense of competence to act, even in everyday matters. Russian society sorts itself into a controlled mass and a distant controlling elite. Direct political action is seldom attempted; subversion of control mechanisms, often through brilliant works of literature, has been a preferred route to change.

Since 1991, western observers, expecting a middle class of empowered consumers to emerge in Russia once the invisible hand of capitalistic democracy was untied, have been dismayed by the culture's persistent bifurcation into top-heavy authority or oligarchy and a dispossessed mass. The behavior pattern resists change, although the leadup to the 2012 election showed some signs that it is finally appearing. This sort of persistent dysfunctional behavior is just the kind of pattern that an evolutionary approach can explain best.

Another version of this observation has been the assertion of “Russia's feminine soul”. What is meant is, of course, that Russian society typically allows itself, even more than most, to be constrained by a hyperactive authority system that is construed as masculine. This indisputably happens -- it could be called with equal justice a hyper-masculine society, after the authority system itself. The important point is that Slavic authority systems mimic patriarchal systems of personal control, and the 'tyrant/victim dyad' of Dostoevsky's work echoes this.

In a nutshell, there is an authority deficit at the center of everyday life in such cultures, with two reaction formations. What I call the 'androtypic' reaction produces an overly strong authority system which comes to dominate political life, while a 'gynotypic' reaction system allows itself to be co-opted by the political system, but finds effective ways to subvert it, often through artistic and other cultural behaviors.

You don't have to look far to find androtypic tyranny – It's cheap and widespread! What's distinctive about Russia is the cultural response of subversion through literature. So it's no insult to say the Russian soul is feminine – It gives the culture a very special identity and a unique place in human cultural evolution. Indeed, to construe the idea of a feminine soul as insulting embodies an underlying implicit sexism!

This paper contends that this trait set is a vestige of neurocultural adaptation to post-neolithic conditions. Its inception can be traced using evidence from archaeology, folklore, linguistics and ancient history, and current instances can be tracked in studies of contemporary culture and literature. The behavioral template very likely evolved in the kinship system when local politics was kinship-linked; so it is close to matters of personal identity. This line of research will take us far afield from the Dostoevskian perceptions that occasioned the study, but we will come round full circle to Dostoevsky in the end.

(This version available online by author's permission, without footnotes. Original scholarly version, with footnotes and bibliography, also available online by author's permission. Documentation can be added back in to the new, more popular, version, to whatever degree the publisher desires.)

Copyright 2012 - 2013, Gary Cox

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Author Reference Number	wr120903
Author Name	Gary Cox
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