Originally, I was supposed to give a talk here as part of a series of projects called “Nijinsky at Midnight (Nijinski à minuit),” but as you all know, due to the worldwide spread of the COVID-19 scourge, we are unable to get together, so today I am giving you my talk through video. I’ve also heard that there will be a lot of discussions based on these lectures.

The project was originally scheduled to be held last year, but it ended up being postponed for one year. Still, we thought that rather than simply waiting for a year without doing anything, we should try to develop the project during this time. And so we exchanged various opinions in the form of transit, in print and video.

At the time, we had assumed that we would be able to get together a little later. For my part, I was thinking of doing some research on the connection between Dostoevsky and Nijinsky, and then proceeding with the discussion. In the end, I decided to get involved in a project called “Nijinsky at Midnight” with the theme “Midnight of Dostoevsky to Nijinsky at Midnight,” and in transit I gave a trailer-like talk about it.

The “Nijinsky at Midnight” project that Ko Murobushi was trying to carry out was suspended when Murobushi passed away at the very beginning of the project. The project itself was suspended, but the people who were involved in the project—or who were not directly involved but were interested in the project—tried to make something new out of the suspended project, and I became involved in that.

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In this context, transit has led to the emergence of some very interesting thematic areas that I had never imagined.

It led me to the text that Steven Barber contributed to transit. In the text, he points out that Dostoevsky was to Ko Murobushi what Artaud was to Ko Murobushi, and that the ideas and activities of these two men may have been very meaningful to Ko Murobushi, drawing on the word “Judgments.”

Judgments and Punishments. The word “judgments”—in the plural—as well as “punishments.” The word “punishments,” “罰” in Japanese, is also plural, and these two are very big themes for Dostoevsky. They are just too big. It’s hard to put into words; when the words “Judgments and Punishments” were first translated into Japanese, someone had translated it as “罪と罰,” and this made me think about various things. That’s why I talked about it last time.

In other words, “Judgments and Punishments” is not crime and punishment. Crime and Punishment—Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment—is very important, of course; the word “Punishments” does encompass the “punishment” in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment as well. Not to mention, the word “Judgments” usually reminds us of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov.

It seems that Murobushi was originally interested in Dostoevsky and asked the question, “What is the law and what is code?” Then he wrote down “‘Judgment,’ Process, ‘Crime and Punishment.’” We don’t really know whether this judgment is referring to Dostoevsky’s judgment or Kafka’s judgment. If he meant Kafka’s judgment, then that would leave us with Kafka and process, crime and punishment, and Dostoevsky.

So, it is not hard to understand why Kafka and Dostoevsky have so much meaning for Murobushi in his activities of creating Butoh, so to speak. The process is a hearing. It is a legal hearing.

However, when you put crime, punishment, and judgment together, you don’t just think of Dostoevsky and Kafka. Someone who was thinking about something while envisioning the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov may have written this text while also keeping Artaud’s Pour en finir avec le jugement de Deu (To Have Done with the Judgment of God) in mind—that is what Stephen Barber imagined. Through this, I began to think that Artaud’s Pour en finir avec le jugement de Deu, which held an important position, and the story of the Grand Inquisitor that Dostoevsky had Ivan Karamazov tell in The Brothers Karamazov are prototypes of what we should do in order to separate God’s judgment and the story Dostoevsky had Ivan tell. To me, there was something in common between them.

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If you look at the Murobushi Ko Shusei (Murobushi Ko Collection) in this way, you will find the names of several important writers and thinkers. One of them is Nietzsche. From the fact that Murobushi wanted to create a work titled “Nijinsky at Midnight,” you can see that his interest in Nijinsky is very strong. In Murobushi’s mind, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Artaud held very important positions, and Nijinsky, the dancer, comes to join them.

With these five people in mind, if we are asked to name five people who played an important role and had great power in the 19th and 20th centuries, and if we think of these five people as being listed by Murobushi himself, I think we can conceive of something very meaningful. That’s what I’m beginning to think.

Since Nijinsky and Artaud are included in the list, it may be a little different for people in the literary field who are not active in dance or theater; but even if you are not active in dance or theater, you can list Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Kafka. For example, I could name Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Kafka instead of Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Dickens as people who presented important ideas and visions in the 19th and 20th centuries. I’m generally in the same generation as Murobushi; if people like myself in my generation who were not so attentive to literature or knowledgeable about ideas at the time were to name three people, they would be Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Kafka. So, with these three people at the center, if there were to be an expressionist thinking of a work called “Nijinsky at Midnight,” he would be trying to express that he was not the so-called Nijinsky, but the Nijinsky at Midnight. That’s how I began to think that the connection between Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Kafka is midnight.

If that is the case, then what is Midnight of Dostoevsky? Furthermore, what is Kafka’s midnight, or Nietzsche’s midnight? In fact, I still can’t explain it very well, so the question is how much I can talk about it today. When I can straighten it out, the theory of the 19th century and 20th century will have a shape—that is my thesis. I think Murobushi was creating his works in an ideological or cultural context that allowed him to think about such things.

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How should I explain this? Recently, I happened to see a performance of Maeterlinck’s The Blind (1890), directed by Akira Okamoto of Renniku-kobo.

The people are blind and are put in an asylum, where they live with their healers and caretakers. They go out for a walk, but they need someone to lead them, so a priest takes them on a walk in the forest. However, the priest goes away and doesn’t come back. The blind people are waiting for the priest to come back, but since they are blind, they can’t move from there. He doesn’t come back for some length of time.

In the meantime, the sun gradually sets. They suddenly realize that there is something nearby that is not moving, and it turns out to be the priest. The priest that the blind people are waiting for is already dead. In other words, there is no meaning in waiting for him. They are thrown into absolute despair.

This is the symbolist situation that Maeterlinck is writing about.

Symbolism, in this sense, depicts a state of absolute, ultimate, and extreme death. Ten years later, Russians began to attach great importance to Maeterlinck’s symbolist play about midnight with no way out, and plays about death began to be performed more frequently.

The Brothers Karamazov was written almost ten years before this one. When Dostoevsky’s midnight was expressed as this absolute void in Maeterlinck’s work, the Russian poets and writers who came after Dostoevsky praised it and were drawn into the symbolism of death. What is important here is that when the symbolists praise Dostoevsky’s midnight, the absolute death of symbolism, and the human being thrown into it, the blind people there do not despair.

In other words, in the middle of the night, those who are thrown into it do not despair, and this is reenacted by the symbolist poets who regard death as an absolute. This is what comes after Dostoevsky’s midnight—the midnight suggested in The Brothers Karamazov, which was completed around 1881.

And where this midnight comes from, in reference to the Grand Inquisitor, is the Judgment. The judgment of the Grand Inquisitor. And what happens after the judgment is made is what the Grand Inquisitor has judged and what kind of judgment he has made. “The people should be under submission and obedience, and live happily by being given so-called peace. The people should not fight in the midst of agony. Those who believe in God, the people who have found the joy of obedience by believing in God, are the ideal people we are leading and people who fight against it should go away. You must go, Jesus.” And when Jesus comes back, he says, “I don’t need people like you,” which is Dostoevsky’s judgment of the Grand Inquisitor.

While letting Ivan tell the story, Dostoevsky rejects midnight even in that form, and then reverses it to a kind of rebellion and treason there.

When the judgment comes, one will not walk in torment, though one will break bread there. In contrast to this judgment, the crime in Crime and Punishment is to step out of the situation. This is the meaning of the word translated as sin in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment—“presto prenier”: to step outside.

In other words, Dostoevsky’s midnight is about the human action of trying to step out of the complete darkness of midnight, in the absence of absolute hope. He calls it presto prenier; this is described in detail in the book Solution of the Riddle “Crime and Punishment” by Taku Egawa. There is another word in Russian, “grev,” for original sin in the sense of sinfulness in Japanese, or sin in the sense of religious sin. But presto-prenier is not that; it is to step out, stepping out from where you are. And for that, punishment will be given. Presto preniers is stepping out in defiance of the judgments; in other words, stepping to the outside. This is Dostoevsky’s midnight. So, if we talk about Dostoevsky’s midnight in this way, we can understand Murobushi’s theory of Dostoevsky in the single line he writes about judgment, inquisition, process, and crime and punishment.

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If Nijinsky, who looked at the vacuum of symbolism and the world of midnight from the world of Dostoevsky’s so-called 19th-century novels, started out as a dancer while gazing at such a world, then there must have been midnight in Nijinsky’s mind in the first place.

However, when Murobushi started to conceive of this “Nijinsky at Midnight” in the 2010s, he said that the sins committed in such a way—the actions of stepping outside—do not actually work, and he used the words “You have to resist.” “You have to resist. But I know, there is no victory, there is no attainment, there is no fulfillment. Resistance is not fulfilled. It is defeated. So it is absolutely convulsive.”

In other words, for Ko Murobushi, convulsions are presto-preniers, stepping out. And then you get punished. And the resistance is not fulfilled; it fails. But at midnight, man must resist. In that resistance, with its unfulfilled defeat, an absolute convulsion occurs. Therefore, in the process from Dostoevsky to the Russian Symbolists, in the midst of absolute death, instead of accepting the so-called peace of endurance, midnight is a resistance in the very darkness. And the dance that is performed there, as a result, appears as a convulsion. So, Nijinsky was trying to create a new work while thinking there is midnight.

In that sense, the work “Nijinsky at Midnight” is, at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, the resistance and convulsions that existed in the cultural movements of the 19th and 20th centuries—fading away, disappearing, and overturning the arrival of a world like the one described by the Grand Inquisitor, the pleasures of the gulag, and the joys of the gulag. I have come to think that “Nijinsky at Midnight” is a work that is about to be created based on such a concept, as a project that will overthrow the pleasures of the gulag.

With this in mind, I have been reading Shestov’s book The Philosophy of Tragedy, subtitled “Dostoevsky and Nietzsche,” as well as Berdyaev’s book Dostoevsky’s World View. To begin with, there is no book titled “Midnight in Dostoevsky,” but I think that if one were write a book with such a title, there is a possibility that something would be written about the starting point of the history of art in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The fact that Murobushi wrote this text and that Stephen Barber quoted it in a particularly privileged way makes me think that it might be a starting point for some new thinking, and I am currently researching on it. So, that’s it for today.