The Political Dostoevsky

Derek Suszko

Derek Suszko is the Associate Editor of the St. Croix Review. This essay on Dostoevsky will appear in two parts.

Introduction

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), the famed Russian epic religious novelist and dramatic philosopher, is the most interesting, and potentially most consequential great literary writer for the looming dialectic of the 21st century. The judgment sounds extravagant, yet anyone with even a passing awareness of the trends of youthful readership in America and the West will know that Dostoevsky is a favorite authority among the emergent intellectual class. The popular psychologist and podcaster Jordan Peterson is one of many “new intellectuals” who admit that the influence of Dostoevsky and his novels are ubiquitous on “reading lists” for young men in particular. For all the fascination with Dostoevsky, in both the 20th century and our own, an inability to grapple with the totality of his achievement and the true quality of his influence persists. An aura of the forbidden still hangs over Dostoevsky’s works. This is due partly, but not entirely, to the length and complexity of his great novels, and to the adamantine exoticism of all portrayals of Russia to Western auditors. But it is due also to a general uneasiness with Dostoevsky’s formidable condemnations of the courses of modern life. This uneasiness is pronounced most strongly in considerations of the “political Dostoevsky.” As one of the rare “universal” artists, Dostoevsky presents in his oeuvre a total vision of human experience, and seeks to answer all our major intellectual uncertainties. His conclusions in many matters are most unsavory for the ruling ideologies of the present-day Western world, but all attempts to press him into the position of antiquated aesthetic eminence are made awkward by his uncanny and continuous prophetic capacity. Dostoevsky’s insight into the dilemmas of modernism make him a writer of abiding practical interest, yet his proposed remedies are imminently dangerous to the prestige of our seemingly settled and enlightened notions of governance and society. No great writer of any language in the last two centuries is as overtly reactionary as Dostoevsky. The difficulty for the Western reader of Dostoevsky is to reconcile his problematic prescriptions with his indisputable discernment of the modern malady. This essay proposes to offer a summation of Dostoevsky’s views and give an avenue for such a reconciliation. I begin with a basic overview of Dostoevsky’s achievement and character, and proceed to a summary of his reception. I then examine the different aspects of Dostoevsky’s artistic realization and analyze the possible relevance of his difficult implications for the politics of our present time.

Dostoevsky in Overview

In 1864, Dostoevsky published the short first-person novella Notes from the Underground and inaugurated European existentialist literature. He went on to produce four monumental great novels: Crime and Punishment in 1866, The Idiot in 1869, Demons in 1872, and his masterwork The Brothers Karamazov in 1880, just before his death.¹ The artistic eminence of Dostoevsky rests on the enduring power of these five works, and my analysis will encompass each of them. Crime and Punishment is the shortest, most accessible and readily familiar of the novels. It centers on the intellectual-murderer Raskolnikov, who commits the “rational crime” of killing a pawnbroker woman with an axe and endures the “punishment” of a guilty conscience he cannot expiate. The Idiot is the most Russian, and perhaps least accessible of the novels to Western readers. It centers around “the idiot” Prince Myshkin, “a wholly innocent” man designed in contrast to “the guilty man” Raskolnikov. Myshkin is saintly and naive, and gradually succumbs to despair and madness by his inability to comprehend the social intrigues and psychological perversions of those around him. Demons is the bleakest, most overtly political and the diffusest of the four. The main thrust of the action is the conspiracy of a group of socialist revolutionaries (the “demons”) to murder a renunciate and induce social disintegration. The Brothers Karamazov is the longest, most totally encompassing and scriptural of the works. The “brothers” are the sensual Dmitri, the intellectual Ivan, and the spiritual Alyosha. Dmitri is put on trial for the murder of the father Fyodor Pavlovich, and the novel deals with the impact of the murder on all three of the brothers.

Even this rudimentary overview of the novels displays Dostoevsky’s essential preoccupations and gives clues to the causes of his lasting popularity. Behind the dramatic virtues of the stories and the engrossing characterizations resides Dostoevsky’s cumulative philosophical vision of human life. This vision is not archaic, and it is impossible to consign even his practical prescriptives to the idiosyncrasies of the times in which he lived. This extends to the immediate subject of politics. No one today reads Dante’s Divine Comedy for perspectives on the medieval papacy and the bickering of the Florentine Guelphs. No one reads John Milton for embedded critiques of the English Restoration monarchy. The political circumstances of their day, so important to the poets, have passed away. The great writers persist out of aesthetic eminence, as heroes of the poetic imagination. But with Dostoevsky, we are too close to the specificity of his concerns to wholly set aside his dogmatic outlooks in religion and politics. The world of Dostoevsky still seems very near to ours, and we cannot so readily dismiss his dogmatism as antiquated and irrelevant to his artistic achievement. Certainly, many have done exactly that, as the summary of his reception will make clear. But it is evident that many present-day readers of Dostoevsky (mostly young men) do not approach him only from unassociated aesthetic interest but also to glean practical possibilities for the modern world. This puts Dostoevsky in a rather different light than other “classic” writers with wide readership, and admits the prospect of Dostoevsky having a tangible influence on the course of our politics and culture.

The Character of Dostoevsky

No one gets far in considerations of Dostoevsky the man without pondering his commuted execution by the tsarist state. As a young Saint Petersburg writer, Dostoevsky associated with the Petrashevsky Circle of early socialist revolutionaries. This was no group of idle pontificators. The associates not only concocted, but occasionally executed, terrorist schemes and low-level political assassinations. Their activities were discovered by the state police and Dostoevsky and others were sentenced to death by firing squad. At the last moment, literally at the place of execution, a commutation from Tsar Nicholas I sentenced the revolutionaries instead to a term of hard labor in Siberian exile. It was in exile that Dostoevsky experienced his conversion to Christianity and emerged from his five-year sentence as a stalwart defender of the tsarist order. The ordeal cast a decisive shadow on Dostoevsky’s artistic development, and the psychological impact of standing “at the point of death” and being saved was, by Dostoevsky’s own admission, the formative experience of his whole life. There are numerous examinations of the dread of confronting imminent death in the novels. The deep precision of these passages, augmented by the writer’s personal experience, catalyzed a profuse existentialist literature on the same theme, the most famous of which is Albert Camus’ The Stranger. It is a curious oddity that Dostoevsky’s great contemporary and analogue Leo Tolstoy also experienced a profound, personal conversion to Christianity. The nature of these respective conversions were highly disparate. Dostoevsky became a staunch, even violent, polemicist for Orthodoxy and tsarist supremacy, while Tolstoy became something of an iconoclast Anabaptist in ethical outlook, railing with ferocity against the Tsar, Orthodoxy and all organized religion. Naturally, Tolstoy’s universalist Christianity is far more compatible with our dominant “secular religion” of liberal globalism than is Dostoevsky’s Orthodox dogmatism, but it is notable that it was Tolstoy, not Dostoevsky, who spent his last days in a state of personal anguish.² 

I cast no doubt on the sincerity of Dostoevsky’s Christian conversion to note that it manifested most peculiarly, very unlike what we would expect from a zealous convert. Dostoevsky was determined at all costs not to be a skeptic, and unlike Dante he did not have the succor of medieval culture to balm his apprehensions. He was not a mystic, and nowhere does he give any indication that he came to the truth of Christianity by what we might call individual religious experience. Instead, the labor of his major novels evinces a great personal struggle to overcome all possible intellectual hindrances to genuine Christian belief. This necessitated an intense fixation on the dark and unsavory aspects of human life and nature, and the vivid presentation of the consequences of a fallen and spiritually barren world. It is difficult for a thorough reader to agree with the “joyful” reading of Dostoevsky advanced by some of his optimistic commentators. Dostoevsky tacked some consolatory elements to the endings of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov in particular, but these are not enough to erase the deflating and tragic effects of the whole. He certainly insisted on a confident hope in Christian revelation throughout his work, but the people of his novels are mostly lacking in such hope, and Dostoevsky declines to dramatize in any depth his promise that some of his characters come to attain it. Since The Brothers Karamazov was projected to be the first in a series of novels, it is possible that had Dostoevsky lived longer, he would have transitioned to a more cumulatively uplifting message of Christian apologetics. But we have what we have, and what there is demonstrates a persistently unique project of Christian advocacy through the negative portrayal of a world without the comfort and cohesion of Christ.

I will examine Dostoevsky’s strength as a “Christian” writer below, but it is crucial to note that his greatness has rarely, if ever, been argued on the grounds that he himself wished for it. The difficulty in reconciling his artistic achievement in drama and character with the persuasiveness of his dogmatic purposes is the crux of all contentions about Dostoevsky. The situation is complicated further by the fact that, of all the indisputably great fiction writers of the last two centuries, Dostoevsky is by far the least acceptable to the ruling liberal sensibilities in the West. A fierce political reactionary, Dostoevsky was never subdued in his religious and political pronouncements. Even a skimming of his Diary of a Writer makes this abundantly clear. To conveniently “tuck away” Dostoevsky’s polemic is insufficient, for it is deeply embedded in his novels. The fear that Dostoevsky’s works might be a lurking impetus to the embrace of hyper-nationalism and religious fundamentalism is the unspoken undersong of much of the discomfort expressed by “enlightened” commentators on his works. It hardly escapes my notice that the American film industry assiduously avoids cinematic and serial adaptations of Dostoevsky’s works (in contrast to Tolstoy, who is endlessly adapted). The complexities of such an undertaking notwithstanding, anyone familiar with Dostoevsky’s pronouncements on certain matters is not surprised by this neglect. There is a strong incentive for those invested in upholding a liberal and secular consensus in the West to either ignore Dostoevsky (surely a futile venture) or to totally disparage his credibility on political or religious matters, in favor of contextualizing him in his time as a great epic novelist of the 19th century. If they concede Dostoevsky to be a modern sage, it might legitimize his perspectives on all manner of topics endangering to the rapidly eroding prestige of our ruling ideologies.

Contextualizing Dostoevsky in his time and place does little to aid our comprehension of the man, for he was well enough aware of his gigantism to recognize his relevance in remote epochs. His preoccupation with colossal questions overwhelms his occasional digressions into the mundane whims of 19th century European upper society. His addiction to gambling manifested in an extraordinary habit of deliberately impoverishing himself at the tables before commencing work on his novels. He was dangerously epileptic (a fact much dwelt on by Sigmund Freud in his wild essay Dostoevsky and Parricide) and gave the condition to some of his characters, including “the idiot” Prince Myshkin. These facts reveal more about his idiosyncratic personality than any general considerations of the dissolute Russian land-holding aristocracy, or the emergent intellectual bourgeois of the declining tsarist state. Undoubtedly, he was a severe and even savage character, much akin to Richard Wagner. Like Wagner, he believed his art was total, and could encompass all questions, religious, political, aesthetic, moral, and philosophical. And also, like Wagner, he sanctified his forays into malicious utterance by his irreplaceable monumentality. Dostoevsky attained a somewhat assured place in the hallowed pantheon of world literature, but the problem of grappling with the legacy of his work remains. These problems are evident in a review of his reception.

The Reception of Dostoevsky

The reception of Dostoevsky is replete with paradox. This “most Russian of Russian writers” never wrote about anyone but Russians, never set his fictions in any place but Russia, and insisted adamantly that his works were primarily (but not exclusively) for Russians. It is strange, then, that Dostoevsky has been read and discussed far more widely in translation than in Russian. No doubt, the arrival of the Soviet state less than forty years after his death played a decisive role in knee-capping his continuous influence in Russia. Dostoevsky was little read in the USSR, and if he was, his Orthodox and Tsarist sympathies were heavily redacted. His most popular works throughout the Soviet era were his minor early novellas. While Dostoevsky’s portrayals of the plight of urban or imprisoned “poor folk” could be contorted into sound Marxism, his extensive repudiations of socialism and atheism could not. And yet, Joseph Stalin, of all people, professed an enduring admiration for The Brothers Karamazov. We can only speculate what such a proclamation really meant for the protean assiduity of Stalin. Dostoevsky was translated into European languages within the three decades after his death, first in German, and then in French and English. The English editions of the early 20th century were translated by Constance Garnett, an industrious English lady who learned Russian rather late in life. Her translations are far better than the implications of some recent suggestions, though she is a little stilted for present-day English readers. The translations of Richard Pevear and his wife Larissa Volokhonsky of the late 20th century have largely superseded Garnett’s as definitive. Outside Russia there has always been an unavoidable likening of Dostoevsky with Tolstoy, and many early 20th century literary critics engaged with Dostoevsky as Tolstoy’s “mighty opposite.” This is hardly an adequate avenue for a satisfactory grappling with Dostoevsky, and the adoring reverence bestowed by many English “literary men” on Tolstoy led to a long period of piddling commentary on Dostoevsky from that quarter.

Some of the reservations of genuinely discerning critics were more credible. Reactions to Dostoevsky among fellow creative writers have been frequently ambivalent, if not hostile. Many have taken him to task for apparent stylistic crudity. The dismissive contempt of the ultra-stylist Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita, is illustrative:

“If you examine closely any of his works you will note that the natural background and all things relevant to the perceptions of the senses hardly exist. What landscape there is is a landscape of ideas, a moral landscape. The weather does not exist in this world, so it does not much matter how people dress.”

Dostoevsky’s style is hasty and reckless and retains elements we might be tempted to associate with inferior artistry: His relative neglect of narrative description; his scant interest in setting; his tendency to present dialogue in the form of lengthy and improbable monologues; the meandering, episodic nature of his plots; the gruff and histrionic portrayal of women characters.³ All these testify to a writer not at all impounded to the refined conventions of the 19th century European realist novel. Many have insisted he was more of a dramatist than a novelist, and only wrote novels for their potential for greater scope of expression. Certainly, to call Dostoevsky a “novelist,” even in the indulgent Russian tradition, seems unfitting. He was really a dramatic philosopher in the manner of Plato, and found the most suitable medium for the elucidation of ideas in the creation of fictive characters. His scenes often take the form of symposiums in which one or more characters expound intellectual credos.⁴ None of Dostoevsky’s major personalities (with the possible exception of Alyosha, youngest of the Karamazov brothers) are in any literal sense “true to life.” Even peasants and other “non-intellectual” persons in the novels display an ability to convey their thoughts in words with great thoroughness and precision. In this way, Dostoevsky represents a partial return to the unreality of Shakespearean soliloquy and blank verse exposition. Like Shakespeare, Dostoevsky’s persons speak the language of thoughts, not speech. As a prober of the inner mind, Dostoevsky rises well above the realist constrictions that characterize his novelistic and dramatic contemporaries. He embodies in this a profound contrast, for instance, with the drama of Anton Chekhov. In Chekhov, what goes unspoken counts a great deal more than what is spoken, but in Dostoevsky everything is spoken. This purging of ellipsis is fitting for so firm a dogmatist, and yet it inevitably provokes the irritation of those foremostly concerned with refinement and subtlety in artistic expression. Dostoevsky skirts these parameters because of the magnitude of his emphasis and the extraordinary cognition of his characters. Since he was a dramatic philosopher more than a novelist, questions of proportioned “style” are finally irrelevant to his real worth.

In contrast to the reservations of writers and literary critics, Dostoevsky’s reception among not strictly literary people has been almost uniformly adulatory, highlighted by Sigmund Freud’s assertion that The Brothers Karamazov was “the greatest of all novels.”⁵ Hardly a “writer’s writer,” Dostoevsky seems to speak more vividly to psychologists, philosophers, and statesmen than to fellow novelists, poets, and literary critics. His niche is further exacerbated by the impression that his focus on young male angst, his deeply intellectual manner, and his dramatic emphasis on violence make him a “masculine” writer. There are few women, on the whole, who take well to Dostoevsky. When his women characters are admirable (as is Sonya in Crime and Punishment) they are formulaic. Much saturated in the hysterical tendencies of many a Russian woman, he declined to consider the myriad psychic responses of women to the 19th century world as Tolstoy did. His romantic subplots are garish, and nowhere in the works do we spy any confidence in a possible harmony between men and women in matters of love. His dominant focus makes clear his belief that the primary problems of the modern world were intellectual problems, and that the aimless “thinking man” was the essential lynchpin of modern dilemmas. If this marginalizes him from the universal scope of readership achieved by Tolstoy, it nevertheless makes him far more central to the most consequential readers in any society: Intellectual young men. Tolstoy, in our time, belongs firmly to the aesthetic realm, and his intellectual speculations are quirks not very relevant to more practical considerations of the 21st century. But Dostoevsky seeks, and among many readers has, the status of a modern philosopher, whatever discomfort that entails to our dominant ideologues. In securing the devoted attention of a pivotal niche readership, his ideas abide as a living, tangible influence on the course of modern history.

Dostoevsky the Philosopher

Dostoevsky’s philosophical greatness is not in question and indeed displays a prolepsis for the trends of 20th century thought that is almost uncanny. But as with all things Dostoevsky, paradox abounds. It is an amusing venture to speculate on Dostoevsky’s probable dissatisfaction with the course taken by his philosophical influence. None of his major philosophical admirers had any interest in reinforcing his existential discursions as appeals for Christian revivalism. This fact might seem to confirm the notion that Dostoevsky falls short of useful religious insight and miscalculated his own philosophical purposes. But it actually attests to the grossly secularizing tendencies of modern thought, and insofar as commentators think they can casually dismiss Dostoevsky’s religion and freely deploy his philosophical ideas as secularism they “come within the compass of his curse.” The infrangible quality of Dostoevsky’s religious belief enabled him to fearlessly present the naked and difficult outgrowths of modern skepticism with a detached reserve. There is nothing of the proud jubilation of Nietzsche in Dostoesvsky’s treatments of philosophical skepticism, even when the ideas expressed are uncannily alike. In Part Three Chapter 5 of Crime and Punishment, the police inspector Porfiry Petrovich surprises Raskolnikov by questioning him about a philosophical article Raskolnikov had written some months before he murdered the pawnbroker. In the article, Raskolnikov proclaims that an “extraordinary man” like Napoleon is not governed by the normal moral considerations of others and is instead licensed to impose his own ethical vision as an exercise of his superior will. The modern world has vacated all accepted values, and notions of justice in the world now depend on the strengths and inclinations of the “extraordinary few.” In context, the implication is ironic since Dostoevsky demonstrates that Raskolnikov, the petty murderer, is no such “extraordinary man.” But the idea clearly anticipates Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Ubermensch, and Dostoevsky’s rendering can be fairly cited as the “missing link” from Hegel’s “great man” who acts out the will of Geist to Nietzsche’s “creator of new values.” Dostoevsky deplored this extreme moral skepticism, but joins Nietzsche in proclaiming that if God is dead or exiled from human hearts, moral value can only rest on the subjective demonstration of individual strength of will.

The entire 20th century philosophical and literary movement of Existentialism has its roots in the mutterings of the Underground Man, Ippolit in The Idiot and Kirillov in Demons. The French existentialists Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre made the debt to Dostoevsky most explicit, an irony, since they were virulently atheist. For Dostoevsky, the plague of existentialist preoccupation could not be cured by exercises of the “rational” mind; but agnostic existentialist philosophers were happy to refute him and insist it could. To the French existentialists, the acknowledgment of the meaninglessness of life (following the archetype of Sisyphus) was both an exercise of freedom and an act of courage. The man (or woman!) who comes to this acknowledgment attains an indifferent heroism that can calm the mind of existential angst by the nobility of the resignation. To the agnostic existentialists, the human impulse to moral conduct was not evidence of divine influence as it was to Dostoevsky. Rather, human cleaving to morality was an attempt to reject the solipsistic freedom that is engrafted on every mind and so difficult for the free and isolated self to fully accept. This is a total reversal of the Kantian idea that acting in accordance with the moral law is actually the highest evidence of human freedom. We can imagine Dostoevsky’s satisfaction in noting the irreconcilable tangle between Kant’s deployments of reason and the “rational” existentialists. Rationality for Dostoevsky led only to contradiction and negation, and so the refuge of religious revelation was not a “cop-out,” but a necessary conclusion in the face of the basic deficiency of human reason.

Dostoevsky’s finest philosophical contribution is the notorious sequence of “The Grand Inquisitor,” and with it we confront again the bizarre fact that this meticulous construction is meant to be ironic and self-effacing in context. The “Grand Inquisitor” is a “prose poem” written by the desperately atheist Ivan Karamazov and narrated to his brother, the monk Alyosha. I have much to say about “the Grand Inquisitor” when I come to Dostoevsky’s politics, but in its purely philosophical aspects it is easily the most dramatically satisfying challenge to theodicy since the Book of Job. The Grand Inquisitor is a 90-year-old priest sniffing out heretics in Seville during the time of the Spanish Inquisition. When Jesus makes an inconspicuous appearance on the earth (not the Second Coming) the people immediately recognize Him and hail Him as the Messiah. Jesus is arrested in short order by the Grand Inquisitor and informed that He will be burned at the stake the next day as a heretic. The Grand Inquisitor proceeds to expound a vast philosophy of the necessity of this action. In proclaiming that “man lives not by bread alone” and creating man with free will, Christ has mangled His own creation and ensured that the mass of men will not fulfill the purposes He demands of them. Christ’s great gift to humankind was freedom, not material sustenance or the alleviation of suffering. To the Grand Inquisitor, this is a divine error because the material needs of men and the horror of suffering always impede a fair exercise of freedom. Christ’s demonstration of miracles, both in the Gospels and at the beginning of the “prose poem,” is cruel because it is arbitrary. Christ has the power to alleviate suffering in the world, but He only does so on the privileged occasions of His appearance on the earth. Most men and women must live by faith and bear a patient suffering in hopeful expectation of another world. The Grand Inquisitor proclaims that this is impossibly cruel, and he insists that the secular authority of an earthly “church” can usurp Christ’s monopoly on miracle by deception. This “miracle” is providing mankind the assurance of material comfort that God, who could have, declined to give them. Men, in their weakness, relinquish their freedom in favor of material necessity, and come to worship the earthly “church” as divine in place of God. The Grand Inquisitor, as an agent of this secular “church,” works to “correct” Christ’s deed by usurping “miracle, mystery and authority” in the service of alleviating man’s suffering, including the suffering caused by his freedom.

Throughout this diatribe Jesus says not a word, and His only action is to kiss the Grand Inquisitor on the lips after he stops talking. The repellant exuberance of the Grand Inquisitor makes us question his claims to compassion, but does not detract from the impressive thoroughness of his skepticism. Dostoevsky deals with ancient questions of “good God for a horrible world” and the dilemma of free will, but the novelty of the episode rests in its special application to the modern world. The Grand Inquisitor boasts with gusto that Christ’s resonance is slipping in a world where His authorities can be convincingly mimicked by temporal powers. The difficulty for many modern Christians with Christ’s frequent proclamations of exclusivity (“wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat”) shares in the Grand Inquisitor’s principle, that God does not appear to be sufficiently compassionate to the weaknesses of His creation. Dostoevsky answers this charge in the “Homily of Father Zosima” that appears in The Brothers Karamazov immediately after the Grand Inquisitor episode, and I will reserve consideration of it for the section below. Though he is refutable, the Grand Inquisitor remains a powerful archetype for the essential persuasiveness of modern secular authority. Like Satan, the Grand Inquisitor never rejects belief in God or questions His authority over the universe, nor does he proclaim himself to be a nihilist seeking the obliteration of all meaning. His outrage is at God’s purported monopoly on human possibilities for resonance, and he gleefully sanctions the “achievement” of the modern world in having deciphered so many apparent alternatives to the Gospel. If God will “punish” those who fall for the easy allures of these alternatives, the fault lies with His mistakenly simultaneous investment in the human of both freedom and capacity for pain.

Dostoevsky the Psychologist 

Dostoevsky is widely hailed as a psychologist of the highest order, but even this is an uneasy admission from some quarters because his major characters are so relentlessly and existentially agitated. He had little patience for the meticulous portrayal of “ordinary” psychology. His characters are so outsized in cognitive capacity and emotional amplitude that the world of his novels can sometimes seem a kind of intellectual madhouse. This is especially true in The Idiot where everybody is beset with a kind of nervous hysteria. It is in this aspect of eccentric color that a strange comparison with Charles Dickens is in order. The macabre strain in Dostoevsky’s psychology has preserved his general popularity in excess of any literary novelist in English of the 19th century except Austen and Dickens. The elegant drawing-room decorum of Henry James or the mannered astuteness of George Eliot are forgotten worlds, but Dostoevsky’s world of angst and alienation is exactly our own. It was once fashionable to call Dostoevsky “Gothic” but his scope is far too monumental to pigeon-hole him with such tepid designation. It does not belittle his stature in the slightest to suggest that he somewhat anticipated the wide popularity of horror movies, thrillers, and crime documentaries. He shrewdly calculated that the material comforts of the modern world would lead to a loosening of restraint and a consumptive appetite for morbidity, and depictions of abnormal psychology. He did not disappoint in this regard, though he remains intellectually far above any screen depictions of such fare.

Dostoevsky’s basic psychological project was to examine the responses of the human mind to the advent of a modern, secular world. His necessity for our time, even setting aside his immense artistic merits, is secure on this basis, for no writer comprehends the diseases of modernism more than he does. Nietzsche might have matched Dostoevsky’s conceptual understanding of the dilemmas of the modern world, but he addressed himself to an archaic few, whereas Dostoevsky addressed himself to common readers. The psychological diseases of modernism are most amply illustrated in Dostoevsky’s “waverers”: Raskolnikov, the student-murderer and protagonist of Crime and Punishment; Kirillov, the idle intellectual of Demons who has “thought through” to rational suicide; and Ivan Karamazov, the middle brother who desperately holds to the idea that the rational mind can suppress irrational yearnings. The faith of the “waverers” in rationalism only leads them to the borders of nihilism. But they cannot bear to join the “devout” nihilists Svidrigailov, Stavrogin and Smerdyakov in a complete rejection of human meaning and ethical imposition. The intellectual powers of the “waverers” prevent them from submitting to the supra-intellectual conceptions of religious revelation. Yet they have nowhere to go, for all the rational powers they can muster only produce a contradictory morass of reductive negation and unlimited license. Dostoevsky certainly means to be dogmatic with these portrayals and insist that no one of a secular mind, however content his outward circumstances, can rid himself (or herself) of the crippling angst of human futility and nothingness. We have now a thoroughly secular society in the West, and it is easy to say Dostoevsky is exaggerating his case. And yet how many bubbling Raskolnikovs do we have among us? Anxiety, depression, and mental disorders of all colors abound in the most materially comfortable societies in human history. If religious comfort is a human need, the technological and scientific proliferations of our rational powers have opened a wide chasm between the implications of our minds and the ability to sustain the unsettling of our hearts.

Dostoevsky despised the 19th century trend of utilitarianism and “scientific” ethics and shows through the “waverers” both the ultimate impossibility and the horrific consequence of dispassionate moral calculus. Raskolnikov resolves to murder “a louse” in the old pawnbroker because he calculates that the elimination of a greedy, predatory hoarder will produce a net gain in general happiness. His delusion crumbles before the blood is dry by the interference of the pawnbroker’s saintly sister Lizaveta, who Raskolnikov is obliged to murder to prevent witnesses. The frigid rationality of Kirillov leads him to accept being the “prop man” for the revolutionaries’ murder of the renunciate radical Shatov. Kirillov agrees to commit suicide after the murder and write a note confessing to the crime. But when the revolutionary leader Pyotr Verkhovensky demands the act, Kirillov’s “indifferent rationalism” falters and he forces Verkhovensky to murder him. Ivan Karamazov insists that he has no affection for his father, Fyodor Pavlovich, or his elder brother Dmitri, but, tormented by the suggestions of Smerdyakov, he cannot alleviate his guilt for his father’s murder. His “rational” mind tells him that Dmitri must have done the murder, but his “irrational” conscience correctly suspects Smerdyakov and also implicates himself. All of these portrayals convey the uselessness of rational intellectualism at the extremities of human experience. Rationalism cannot account for the spiritual yearnings of the human heart, and so all purely rational constructions of the world must resolve in the complete spiritual reduction of nihilism.

Dostoevsky was hardly the first great writer to render a compelling literary archetype of the darkly exuberant and intellectually formidable nihilist. There are three titanic portrayals of intellectual nihilists from English literature in Chaucer’s Pardoner, Shakespeare’s Iago, and Milton’s Satan. The specter of nihilism is characteristic of the human animal of any time and place, but for Dostoevsky the modern world was uniquely fertile ground for the blossoming of “philosophers of the abyss.” There are three nihilists with exceptional intellectual capacities in the novels and their names have a sinister ring together: Svidrigailov, the obsessed interloper of Crime and Punishment; Stavrogin, the eerie and oddly inert inspirer of the revolutionaries in Demons; and Smerdyakov, the epileptic bastard son and apparent murderer of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. The perverse satisfaction of these characters in total intellectual and moral reduction is ultimately self-destroying, since all three resort to suicide. Dostoevsky is no existentialist, and he sees to it that they die not in a state of anti-heroic indifference but in the thrall of deep emotional pain and self-loathing. I gladly take this to be Dostoevsky’s comment on the human impossibility of perfectly sustained psychopathy in defiance of our rather too tidy psychological diagnoses.⁶ Nonetheless, Dostoevsky catches the dangerous allures of nihilism by granting each of these characters a warped dignity of expression. They are not caricatures of malignancy, and there is a seductive freedom in their apparent lack of inner angst and negative vitality. Their bad ends indicate that this appearance of greater freedom was illusory, but Dostoevsky takes deadly seriously their tantalizing power on others for having “let go.” Stavrogin in particular induces an obsessive fascination in nearly all other characters in Demons. In a world devoid of transcendent faith in a moral God, the anti-spiritual authority of the authentic nihilist attains a depraved admiration.

The depiction of the modern pressures to nihilism yields very uncomfortable implications for human sexuality. There is in Dostoevsky a deep dedication to the portrayal of the male sex drive as a one-way ticket to the abyss. Since the uncontrollable nature of sexual desire is an affront to the intellect, the spiritually divested man requires a certain brainlessness in order to rise above a general misogyny. Thus, his “sensualists” are distinguishable by gradations of intellectual power. The Underground Man, Svidrigailov, and Stavrogin resort to the intellectual consolation of sexual deviancy and degradation because they recognize in sexuality a force akin to religious longing, in that no palliative is to be found in the rational mind. But the “pure sensualists” Dmitri Karamazov and his father-rival Fyodor Pavlovich avoid a general hatred of women, and a passion to inflict humiliation, because they do not have the intellectual pride to be troubled by the uncontrollable.⁷ All this is naturally harrowing to women readers, but also implicitly philogynous, since Dostoevsky suggests that hatred of women goes inevitably with hatred of God. The force of Dostoevsky’s bleak portrayals of male sexual psychology are doubly powerful in our own world of disintegrating sexual cooperation. Dostoevsky was nothing if not anticipatory, and his vision of sexuality untethered from societal and religious regulation is not pessimism but modern reality.⁸

Dostoevsky the Christian

After plumbing these depths, we return to the “Christian” Dostoevsky. The bizarre and diverse reception of Dostoevsky in the 20th century seems to indicate that it is quite possible to shrug off his religious dogmatism and engage with his works on independent aesthetic and philosophical grounds. But is it? Dostoevsky endlessly reiterates his religious intentions in all four of his great novels. The English reader who associates Dostoevsky primarily with dark, brooding psychology is sometimes disgruntled to discover the incessant religious preoccupations of the works. Dostoevsky’s choice (and implicit endorsement) of the timid monk Alyosha as the peripheral protagonist of The Brothers Karamazov, and not the embattled older brothers Dmitri and Ivan, has been the subject of considerable scrutiny. Many readers find the short epilogue of Crime and Punishment, suggesting the penitent Raskolnikov’s embrace of Christianity in Siberian exile, forced and unconvincing. So too, they question Dostoevsky’s insistence on the saintliness of “the idiot” Prince Myshkin, who, though innocent and humble enough, sometimes breaks into vulgar polemic that is difficult to square with Western notions of genuine religiosity. It is a little too convenient to Western liberal sensibilities to insist that Dostoevsky is least persuasive when he deals with overtly religious matters, and authoritative when he deals with more worldly matters of individual psychology. For Dostoevsky, the secular Western distinction between religious dogma and psychological portrayal would have been nonsensical anyway, since to him all human psychology was a spiritual matter. The question of how to harness Dostoevsky’s “religious philosophy” is difficult even for sincere Christian readers in the West, because they are unlikely to be Orthodox. While Dostoevsky is sometimes an aggressive polemicist for Russian Orthodoxy, at his best he becomes an intellectual apostle for all Christian believers.

I reiterate that Dostoevsky’s “Christian” credentials are very peculiar; but it is this very peculiarity that makes him indispensable for Christian intellectuals of the 21st century. Surely no Christian writer has ever confronted more deeply and honestly all the possible intellectual refutations to the Christian worldview. This curious insistence on Christian advocacy by antithesis, and on presentation of the devil’s case in undiluted strength, amply disqualifies Dostoevsky as a writer for the Christian masses. But Dostoevsky is the champion of the Christian intellectual, the intrepid spirit who wishes to think through to the truth of Christian revelation by surmounting all the possible rebuttals of intellect. Dostoevsky troubles some believers of the mystical variety because the basis of his religious appeal is rational reductionism and not “religious experience.” But in the modern world, where sophisticated secular populations must be won back to Christ, the initial effectiveness of subjective invocations to “feeling the Spirit” or “personal relationship with God” may be limited. I do not mean to suggest that religious experience of this kind is not genuine, but that it can only come to someone who has accepted the paradigm of the experience as “religious” in the first place. Hence the imminent necessity of intellectual arguments in favor of Christianity for modern skeptics. A thorough reading of Dostoevsky arms the apologist against the most formidable philosophical attacks on Christianity, and forges a finely equipped missionary for a post-modern world.

For all Dostoevsky’s merits as a Christian writer, there remains the occasional difficulty of his Orthodox dogmatism. Dostoevsky (and all Russia) encountered ideas of religious tolerance from the European “Enlightenment” second-hand, and his polemical inclinations are quite overt and crude from a Western perspective. The dogmatism is incessant in his personal writings and seeps sporadically into the novels. Dostoevsky’s contempt for Roman Catholicism is displayed most notoriously by the Grand Inquisitor episode, where the Grand Inquisitor is a spokesperson both for the Catholic Church and Satan. Whether he thought better or worse of Protestantism is a little unclear, but his religious thought is not very Protestant in emphasis. He was not much enamored with the “God within” or the working out of a personal salvation in the mind. The consolidation of faith in Dostoevsky comes more from a contemplation of the external world of other believers and the apprenticeship to seasoned authority and tradition. He shared the belief of most Russians that the Russian Orthodox Church was the true apostolic church, taken up from Byzantine Orthodoxy after the fall of Constantinople, and correctly holding to schism from the Latin West. There is little that a non-Russian Christian can make of his habit of referring explicitly to Russians as “God’s people.”

All this might seem to hinder Dostoevsky’s eligibility as an authorial Christian writer in a universal sense. Yet Dostoevsky rises above denominational polemic in the weightier religious discourse of the novels, most particularly in the tremendous “Homily of Father Zosima” embedded in Book Six Chapters 2-3 of The Brothers Karamazov. This treatise gets at the cosmic heart of the Christian worldview, and must be admitted as deeply relevant and consequential to Christian believers of all pigments. I judge the conceptual center of this mighty oration to be the difficult passage coming at the very close:

“For though the righteous would forgive [the damned] from paradise, seeing their torments, and call them to themselves, loving them boundlessly, they would thereby only increase their torments, for they would arouse in them an even stronger flame of thirst for reciprocal, active, and grateful love, which is no longer possible. Nevertheless, in the timidity of my heart I think that the very awareness of this impossibility would serve in the end to relieve them, for, having accepted the love of the righteous together with the impossibility of requiring it, in this obedience and act of humility they would attain at last to a certain image, as it were, of the active love they scorned on earth.” 

This is a deep Christian metaphysics, and offers a paradigm unique to Dostoevsky. Zosima reconciles the eternal problem of free will (and combats the Grand Inquisitor) by clarifying the relation of freedom and love. Man is free to love or not to love but he is not free to not comprehend love, for this is the necessary attribute of mutual existence. The comprehension of love (i.e., the ability to conceptualize its nature independent of feeling it) is necessary for all interaction whatsoever (even material), because interaction is the consequence of any two things that exist. In the Platonic sense, love is the highest, most intimate form of interaction, and so all interaction (i.e. all that mutually exists) is existentially bracketed in the hierarchy of interaction, the summit of which is the interaction of love. All creation is the interaction of what exists with what also exists. Hell is the state of the soul in which the freedom to love is rejected but the comprehension of love cannot be lifted. The damned fight the war against this comprehension, but it can only be won by the negation of their Being or the negation of all Being but themselves. Since the human soul, and all that exists, partakes of the creative substance of God, the existence of anything cannot be terminated unless God’s existence is terminated. The project of nihilism is thus the destruction of the mutual conditions of Being (oneself or everything else including God) in order to be spared the comprehension of love. Zosima is wary of imposing a strict determinism even on souls already in Hell, but he suggests that the damned soul caught up in the unwinnable struggle to destroy its ability to comprehend love is terminally incapable of moving to the higher phase of actually expressing its freedom to love. Dostoevsky shares the belief of all religious philosophers that the human comprehension of the moral law cannot be a biological or chemical phenomenon. The agent of evil ontologically presupposes a combative comprehension of love, and so does not refute the existence of a loving God but actually confirms it.

Part II of this essay, examining the relevance of Dostoevsky to our politics, will appear in the next issue.

Notes

1. The third great novel Demons was for many decades known under the erroneous English title The Possessed. The Russian title word Besy is most accurately translated as Demons and, more loosely, Devils.
2. The famous death of Tolstoy, involving the octogenarian’s flight from his home and family, is memorably rendered in the flawed but compelling film The Last Station. An engaging contrast on the respective writer’s views of the imminence of death can be found by comparing Myshkin’s account of witnessing a commuted execution in Part One Chapter 5 of The Idiot with Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
3. Dostoevsky’s lack of interest in descriptive writing in favor of situational dialogue is something he shares with Jane Austen, a great novelist otherwise wholly alien to his tone and emphasis. I myself have read Austen’s six novels in sequence with the five works by Dostoevsky mentioned, alternating in turn. The oscillating effect was quite grand.
4. The side effect of Dostoevsky’s rare recourse to meticulous descriptions of setting is the heightened impact produced when he does so. Witness the description of the bedchamber in Part Four Chapter 11 of The Idiot or the “night” scenes of Demons.
5. The veneration of Freud, a secularized Viennese Jew, for The Brothers Karamazov, the masterpiece of the Orthodox Russophile Dostoevsky, is not as surprising as it first appears. As with Nietzsche, Dostoevsky seems to have beaten Freud to some of his crucial insights. Not only is The Brothers Karamazov a modern reprisal of the primal myth of Freud’s Totem and Taboo whereby the brothers murder, devour, and deify the father, but the actual characters fit perfectly into Freud’s divisions of the human psyche. Alyosha embodies the higher spiritual conceptions of the superego; Ivan, the rational powers of the ego; and Dmitiri, the sensual instincts of the id. If we add the lecherous father Fyodor Pavlovich as the embodiment of the pleasure principle, and the bastard half-brother Smerdyakov as the death drive, the novel can quite literally be taken as a map of Freudian ideas of human consciousness.
6. Dostoevsky probably would have refuted the 20th century idea of the “banality of evil,” popularized by Hannah Arendt, as mistargeted. An “ordinary” man might be capable of committing a malevolent act indifferently, but this is only because he retains a spiritual or transcendent conception of the authority commanding it. Thus, the “bureaucratic murderers” of the 20th century were either intellectual nihilists (i.e., pathological malignants) or else deep, unassuming believers in the spiritual authority of the commanding State. For Dostoevsky, there can be nothing truly “banal” about the infliction of harm. It always exacts a spiritual price, and therefore must come from a compensatory spiritual (or anti-spiritual) motive.
7. Roghozin, the morbid sensualist in The Idiot, is a special case in that the disease of his sexuality is overwhelming possessiveness, and not intellectual outrage. The male impulse to sexual violence need not be intellectually rooted, though in Dostoevsky, more than others, it most often is.
8. Though I cannot grant Dostoevsky great insight in the representation of women’s sexuality, I confess that the hyper-feral Nastasya Filloppovna in The Idiot possesses a monstrous vitality, and as such is one of my favorites. She attains a poignant pathos against all odds, not at all comparable to the genuinely innocent Desdemona, but a poignancy nonetheless.     *