Why Dostoevsky Matters?

Why does Dostoevsky matter? More than a century and a half after his death? The bi-centenary of the novelist’s birth, observed the world over on November 11, is the right moment to reflect on this question.

From the last decades of the 19th century to this day several influential philosophers, eminent psychologists, acclaimed critics of culture and great litterateurs have revered Fyodor Dostoevsky as their guru. From among his several distinctions, I will elaborate upon just one aspect of his literary art. This is Dostoevsky’s penchant for dissecting the most unglamorous, quotidian events of life through the lens of philosophical and psychological enquiry. The events and experiences do not remain confined to the life of a specific individual character. Rather they become a totalized expression of a corporate life across an expanded time. I shall give three instances from his personal life and show how he has transformed those incidents into the timelessness of artistic expression.

When Dostoevsky was around 16 years of age he travelled to St. Petersburg from Moscow, the city of his birth, with his elder brother Mikhail to take admission in a military residential school. Reaching St. Petersburg, they boarded a horse-drawn carriage to take them to the appointed place. As they were waiting, a stout and hefty post peon, around six-and-a-half foot tall, got into the carriage holding a gigantic mailbag. The man landed two heavy blows on the neck of the coachman from behind as soon as he settled down in the coach. Without protesting against this kind of inhuman behavior the coachman started lashing hard at the horse with his whip. The coach ran with great speed. The event had a huge impact on Dostoevsky and found its way into Notes from Underground, published in 1864. In it is a scene in which the novel’s anti-hero behaves exactly like the bullying post-peon. The coachman of the novel, however, protests against this behavior, though mildly. We find here a glimpse of how a person, subjected to pain and humiliation, seeks psychological compensation for his suffering by tyrannising over a less powerful person. This has been heart-rendingly represented towards the end of the same novel. I quote a paragraph where the anti-hero humiliated by his four powerful friends, and unable to take revenge against them, heaps mental torture and humiliation upon Liza, a helpless prostitute, for no fault of hers. 

    “Why did you come? Answer me! Answer me!” I shouted, beside myself. “I’ll tell you why you came, my dear woman. You came because I spoke words of sympathy to you the other night. Well, now you’ve gone soft and want to hear ‘words of sympathy’ again. Well, let me tell you that I was laughing at you then. … I’d been humiliated, so I wanted to humiliate someone. I’d been treated like a doormat, so I wanted to show my power”

Dostoevsky seems to have plumbed the depths of human depravity in the above paragraph.

A literary text not only describes events, it also hints at larger social and cultural forces in operation. Dostoevsky’s novel does this sublimely by pointing to the cultural contradictions of the Russian society. Dostoevsky realised that for several reasons a large cultural chasm had been created in Russian society between the intellectual elites and ordinary human beings. There was the obvious economic disparity, but the more dangerous cultural disconnect was the taking away of the expressive ability of many and relegating them to “underground”. Some day the society was going to pay a heavy price for this disjunction.

The aesthetic and cultural consciousness may help ward off many threats of chaos from the corporate life. When one learns about the history of torture and mass murders during Russian revolution and in the Stalinist ‘Gulag’ – a heart-rending account of which can be found in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s writings – one can realise that Dostoevsky was not only a great philosopher and a psychologist of considerable merit, but also a prophet. For having ignored Dostoevsky’s prophetic vision the Russian society had to undergo a great deal of suffering after around three decades of his death.

The proof of his prophetic vision can be deciphered from my second account. During his European tour in 1862 he spent eight days in London. Since 1851 London had boasted of a gigantic glamorous structure called the “Crystal Palace”. That was a symbol of man’s, especially of western civilization’s wealth and progress, industrial and technological advancement, hegemonic spread and, to top it all, its triumphalist egotism and vainglory. Dostoevsky was deeply troubled by that spectacle. The anti-hero of Notes from Underground has expressed his anger and hatred for the “crystal palace” again and again through biting satire. But the real irony and satire of Dostoevsky is directed against the ideology underlying that symbol. That is the ideology of human perfectibility, built on the twin pillars of positivism and rationalism, and fashioning a utopia by using them as instruments of social engineering which had become dominant in the west since the 18th century. This Newtonian and Descartesian ideology has been under critical scanner from the early decades of 20th century scientific enquiry. Scientists like Einstein and Heisenberg had questioned the separation of the observing subject and observed object. Coming much before them, Dostoevsky’s novel had ridiculed the simplistic representations of scientific truths. It mirrored his belief that all kinds of utopian imagination, whether socialist or consumerist, is an obstacle on the path of human quest for truth and enlightenment.

    “I’m not campaigning for suffering, or for prosperity. I’m advocating…my own caprice and that it should be guaranteed me when the need arises. In vaudevilles, for example, suffering is taboo, I know that. In the Crystal Palace it’s unthinkable: suffering is doubt, negation, and what kind of crystal palace could it be where there’s room for doubt? And yet I’m convinced that … Suffering- Yes, that’s surely the sole cause of consciousness. … Consciousness, for example, is infinitely superior to twice two is four. …. This may be retrograde, but it’s still better than nothing.”

Not only the west, but the entire world has had to pay a heavy price for ignoring Dostoevsky’s prophetic insight. Through two world wars and the Nazi tyranny. For Dostoevsky, truth is not a static thing, but a continuous process, an eternal pilgrimage of ever new discoveries. What Upanishads call chareibati chareibati. If a half-truth is anointed on the throne of power, it becomes a tyrannical ideology. It causes great suffering like Hitler’s oppression of Jews, killing of sparrow by Mao and his cultural cleansing and Stalin’s suppression of the so-called counter-revolution.

Not any easy ritual, the quest for truth for Dostoevsky was an arduous ‘sadhana’ whose foundations were swadharma and love. Lacking these qualities, the anti-hero of this novel has expressed his hatred and disgust for all kinds of hypocrisy and half-truths, very much like Nietzsche’s berating of Christian religious rituals, but has not been able to indicate a way out towards a bright horizon. For such a vision, we have to wait for the subsequent five great novels of Dostoevsky i.e. Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, The Raw Youth and The Brothers Karamazov. It is worth mentioning one account of the difficult ‘sadhana’ in quest for truth given in his last and probably the best novel, The Brothers Karamazov, which has been designated as the ‘spiritual autobiography of the entire human race’ by the famous critic Nochulsky. There is an exchange between the younger brother Alyosha, who is on the path of becoming a Christian monk, and the middle brother Ivan, the cynical atheist. Ivan is asking Alyosha, suppose in a winter night the parents turn away a young girl from home to discipline her because she had been troublesome. Terribly frightened because of the darkness around and trembling because of severe cold, the girl is shrieking loudly. Then you are asked to torture her to death in exchange of eternal peace all around the world. Will you be able to do that? Alyosha says he cannot do it. Then Ivan points out that the cruelty which you are unwilling to perpetrate, the God you believe in is silently letting that happen. Needless to say, during his journalism days Dostoevsky had come across the account of such a real incident.

Dostoevsky was aware of the weakness and sinfulness of Christian religious establishments which had earned the ire of Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil). But the difference is that the creative Dostoevsky was looking for transcendence beyond these weaknesses unlike the angry and intolerant philosopher Nietzsche. Dostoevsky tried to confront all the difficult issues surrounding questions of faith. By love and commitment to one’s duty, he believed one could find a way out of the impasse like the patient Alyosha who ultimately wins over the intellectual Ivan.

Dostoevsky’s gifts are many. I highlighted just one aspect of his narrative style. And one, in fact, needs to be humble in front of the myriad mindedness of his genius in the same way as Dostoevsky himself advises humility in the presence of truth’s profundity. I would like to round off with one last observation: as long as self-consciousness and imagination continue to be parts of the ‘being’ of human existence, Dostoevsky’s life-world and literary achievement would continue to matter for mankind.

(The author is a Professor of English, BHU, Banaras. A short story writer, he has translated Notes from Underground into Odia as Patalaru Chithi)