Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  The truth of these words is proven by a letter that Dostoevsky wrote, almost immediately after his release, to Mme Fonvizina: “It is now almost five years that I have been under guard among a crowd of people, and I never had a single hour alone. To be alone is a normal need, like eating and drinking; otherwise, in this enforced communism one turns into a hater of mankind. The society of other people becomes an unbearable torture, and it was from this that I suffered most during those four years.”22 It is striking to see how early Dostoevsky identifies his prison-camp existence with life in one of those ideal Socialist Utopias (Fourier, Cabet) that so many of his friends in the Petrashevsky Circle had once admired. He had, to be sure, never fully accepted such Utopias himself, but his rejection had now become viscerally rooted in this overwhelming sense of the need for the personality to defend itself against psychic encroachment.

  A much more dramatic illustration of the power of irrational impulse over human behavior is provided by Dostoevsky’s remarks about prisoners awaiting punishment by flogging or beating. “To defer the moment of punishment . . . convicts sometimes resorted to terrible expedients; by stabbing one of the officials or a fellow convict they would get a new trial, and their punishment would be deferred for some two months and their aim would be attained. It was nothing to them that their punishment, when it did come, two months later, would be twice or three times as severe” (4: 144). One of the patients in the hospital had drunk a jug of vodka mixed with snuff to delay his punishment, and died from the effects. Commonplace prudence, as we see, was swept away by a fear too elemental to master.

  The irrational component of such examples is still motivated by comprehensible causes. This is not the case with other types of behavior, where the cause is so slight as to be entirely incommensurate with the effect, or where no immediate cause is perceptible. Dostoevsky’s true genius reveals itself when he turns to explore these aberrant extremes, and intuits the deep human significance of what looks like madness. A peculiar feature of peasant convict life, for example, was the general attitude toward money. It was, Dostoevsky points out, “of vast and overwhelming importance” in prison, allowing the convict to obtain all sorts of forbidden luxuries—extra food, tobacco, vodka, sex—which helped make life more endurable. One would thus assume that the convicts hung on to their money for dear life and used it sparingly, but exactly the opposite turned out to be the case. Every convict who managed to scrape together a sufficient sum would invariably squander it gloriously on a drunken fling. And so, after amassing the money “with cruel effort, or making use of extraordinary cunning, often in conjunction with theft and cheating,” the convict threw it away with what Dostoevsky calls “childish senselessness” (4: 65–66).

  But, he hastens to explain, “if he throws it away like so much rubbish, he throws it away on what he considers of even more value.” And what is more precious for the convict than all the material benefits he can obtain from money? “Freedom or the dream of freedom,” Dostoevsky replies. For one must realize that “the word convict means nothing else but a man with no will of his own, and in spending money he is showing a will of his own.” By drinking and carousing, by breaking the rules of prison discipline and bullying his companions in misery, the convict is “pretending to his companions and even persuading himself, if only for a time, that he has infinitely more power and freedom than is supposed” (4: 66). Nothing is more important for the convict than to feel that he can assert his will and thus exercise his freedom; there is no risk he will refuse to run, no punishment he will not endure, for the sake of his temporary (and illusory) but infinitely precious satisfaction.

  Here Dostoevsky is no longer simply stressing the dominating role of irrational elements in human behavior; now the need of the human personality to exercise its will, and hence to experience a sense of autonomy while doing so, is seen as the strongest drive of the psyche. The inability to fulfill this drive can be disastrous. Even, Dostoevsky observes, “this sudden outbreak in the man from whom one would least have expected it, is simply the poignant hysterical craving for self-expression, the unconscious yearning for himself, the desire to assert himself, to assert his crushed personality, a desire which suddenly takes possession of him and reaches the pitch of fury, or spite, of mental aberration, of fits and nervous convulsions. So perhaps a man buried alive and awakening in his coffin might beat upon its lid and struggle to fling it off, though of course reason might convince him that all his efforts would be useless; but the trouble is that it is not a question of reason, it is a question of nervous convulsions” (4: 66–67).

  Similar conditions exist outside, and many of the convicts had landed in the camp precisely for having revolted against them. Each had been a peasant, house serf, soldier, or workman who had long led a quiet and peaceable life, bearing the burdens of his lot with patience and resignation. “Suddenly something in him seems to snap; his patience gives way and he sticks a knife into his enemy and oppressor” (4: 87–88). Such descriptions of personalities oppressed beyond endurance, who break out in hysterical frenzy and revolt against their subjugation, are among the most impressive passages in the book. Here we are at the source of what was one day to become the revolt of the underground man, but this work could be written only after Dostoevsky had become convinced that, in the world envisaged by the radical ideology of the 1860s, the situation of the human personality would become identical with what he had seen and felt in the prison camp.

  Many details of House of the Dead help us understand how the peasant convicts maintained their psychic equilibrium, and here again emphasis is placed on the prevalence of irrational components over other aspects of convict behavior. The convicts preferred to be given a “task” rather than simply to work the regulation number of hours; the assignment would incite them to work harder so as to gain a little extra free time and acquire some slight degree of control over their lives. For this very reason, everyone hated the forced labor and found it particularly burdensome, even though Dostoevsky was surprised to find it so relatively light. Many peasant convicts had worked much harder in civilian life, and Dostoevsky admits to realizing “only long afterwards . . . that the hardness, the penal character of the work lay not in its being difficult and uninterrupted but in its being compulsory, obligatory, enforced” (4: 20).

  Most of the convicts were skilled craftsmen who earned a little money by selling their products to the local population. All the convicts possessed forbidden tools, and Dostoevsky surmised that “the authorities shut their eyes” to this infraction of the rules because they understood intuitively that such work was a safety valve for the prisoners. “If it were not for his own private work to which he was devoted with his whole mind, his whole interest,” Dostoevsky writes, “a man could not live in prison.” More important than the extra money were the psychic benefits of this self-imposed task, freely performed and which guarantees the individual a sense of self-possession and moral autonomy. “Without labor, without lawful normal property man cannot live; he becomes depraved and is transformed into a beast. . . . Work saved them from crime; without [private] work the convicts would have devoured one another like spiders in a glass jar” (4: 16–17). The social-political implications of this assertion constitute a flat rejection of the moral basis of Utopian Socialism (or any other kind), which views private property as the root of all evil.

  But just as the human personality could be driven to irrational crime and self-destruction, so too it had an irrational inner self-defense against reaching such a state. And this self-defense is the human capacity to hope. “From the very first day of my life in prison,” Dostoevsky says, “I began to dream of freedom.” In the case of many other convicts, “the amazing audacity of their hopes impressed me from the beginning.” It was as if prison life was not part of a convict’s existence, and he was emotionally unable to accept it as such. “Every convict . . . looks at twenty years as though they were two, and is fully convinced that when he leaves prison at fifty-five he will be a
s full of life and energy as he is now at thirty-five” (4: 79). Even convicts condemned to life sentences continued to hope for a change of luck, and, writes Dostoevsky, “this strange impatient and intense hope, which sometimes found involuntary utterance, at times so wild as to be almost like delirium, and what was most striking of all, often persisted in by men of apparently the greatest common sense—gave a special aspect and character to the place” (4: 196).

  One of Dostoevsky’s most hallucinatory evocations is his recollection of having seen convicts chained to the wall in the Tobolsk prison and kept like that, unable to move more than a distance of seven feet, for five and sometimes ten years. And yet all were well-behaved and quiet, and “everyone is intensely anxious for the end of the sentence. Why, one wonders? I will tell you why: he will get out of the stifling dark room with its low vaulted roof of brick, and will walk in the prison yard . . . and that is all. He will never be allowed out of the prison. . . . He knows that and yet he is desperately eager for the end of his time on the chain. But for that longing how could he remain five or six years on the chain without dying or going out of his mind? Some of them would not endure it at all” (4: 79–80).

  It is the capacity to hope, then, that keeps men alive and sane even under the most ghastly conditions. “When he has lost all hope, all object in life,” Dostoevsky writes, in a piercing phrase, “man often becomes a monster in his misery” (4: 197). The vast majority of the convicts, wrapped in their incessant dream of freedom, fortunately never reached such a state of total despair. All the same, Dostoevsky’s imagination at this point could not resist taking the eschatological leap that was to become so characteristic for him—the leap to the end condition of whatever empirical situation he is considering—and so, in order to dramatize the supreme importance of hope for human life, he deliberately invents a situation in which it is systematically destroyed. Such a passage, the most haunting in the book, appears in the midst of his analysis of the differing reactions to free and to forced labor.

  The idea has occurred to me that if one wanted to crush, to annihilate a man utterly, . . . one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character. . . . [I]f he had to pour water from one vessel into another and back, over and over again, to pound sand, to move a heap of earth from one place to another and back again—I believe the convict would hang himself in a few days or would commit a thousand crimes, preferring rather to die than to endure such humiliation, shame and torture. (4: 20)

  One has only to transpose the terms of this passage slightly in order to see its metaphysical implications. Not to believe in God and immortality, for the later Dostoevsky, is to be condemned to live in an ultimately senseless universe, and the characters in his great novels who reach this level of self-awareness inevitably destroy themselves because, refusing to endure the torment of living without hope, they have become monsters in their misery.

  The matrix of the later Dostoevsky is already contained in the deceptively objective and noncommittal pages of House of the Dead, and this work provides the proper context within which to gloss one of the most disputed passages Dostoevsky ever wrote. Contained in his frank and moving letter to Mme Fonvizina shortly after being released, this passage offers a revealing glimpse into Dostoevsky’s wrestlings with the problem of faith. By this time his erstwhile benefactress had returned to Russia, and Dostoevsky has gathered from her letter that the homecoming has overwhelmed her with feelings far more of sadness than of joy. “I understand that,” Dostoevsky assures her, “and I have sometimes thought that if I returned to my country one day my impressions would contain more of suffering than of gladness. I think that on returning to his country each exile has to live over again, in his consciousness and memory, all of his past misfortune. It resembles a scale on which one weighs and gauges the true weight of everything one has suffered, endured, lost, and what the virtuous people have taken from us.”

  After thus linking the sadness of return with the exile’s rankling animosity toward “the virtuous people,” Dostoevsky offers Mme Fonvizina the consolation against such bitterness that he has found himself in his religious faith. What he is about to say, his words suggest, has helped him master the surges of his own moods of melancholy and anger. “I have heard many people say that you are a believer, N. D. . . . It’s not because you are a believer, but because I myself have lived and felt that [her mood of dejection] that I will tell you that at such moments one thirsts for faith as ‘the parched grass,’ and one finds it at last because truth becomes evident in unhappiness. I will tell you that I am a child of the century, a child of disbelief and doubt, I am that today and (I know it) will remain so until the grave. How much terrible torture this thirst for faith has cost me and costs me even now, which is all the stronger in my soul the more arguments I can find against it. And yet, God sends me sometimes instants when I am completely calm; at those instants I love and feel loved by others, and it is at these instants that I have shaped for myself a Credo where everything is clear and sacred for me. This Credo is very simple, here it is: to believe that nothing is more beautiful, profound, sympathetic, reasonable, manly, and more perfect than Christ; and I tell myself with a jealous love not only that there is nothing but that there cannot be anything. Even more, if someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.”23

  Dostoevsky’s answers, as first revealed in this crucial letter, originate in the two most momentous experiences of his prison years. One is the peasant Marey vision, whose inspiration helped him to achieve those moments of inner tranquility and loving identification with others during which he could formulate his credo. The other, contained in his new grasp of the centrality and power of the irrational as a force in human life, resulted in his unambiguous choice of Christ over “the truth.” The ideal and the message of Christ had now come to mean something far more intimate and personal than a doctrine of social transformation; something far more deeply intertwined with the most anguishing needs of his own sensibility. Faith in Christ had supported him at the moment he had confronted death, it had proven to be a crucial link between himself and his fellow Russians, and it had rescued him from the ghastly prospect of living in a universe without hope. All of Dostoevsky’s doubts as “a child of the century”—and he had been familiar with them long before meeting Belinsky—had simply been overpowered by his new comprehension of the psychic-emotive demands of the human spirit. Such doubts could no longer shake his faith, because everything in the house of the dead had spoken against them and had proclaimed the feebleness and paltriness of reason when confronted by the crisis situations of human existence.

  It has often been questioned whether Dostoevsky’s credo should be taken at face value. Can a person with such an admittedly ineradicable skepticism truly be considered a believing Christian? But the clash between reason and faith has been a constant of the Christian tradition ever since St. Paul (who knew that his faith was “foolishness to the Greeks”), and a line of Christian thinkers running from Tertullian and St. Augustine to Luther, Pascal, and Kierkegaard has dwelt on the opposition between reason and revelation. Dostoevsky is closest of all to the great Danish defender of the faith, who, confronting the full impact of the Left Hegelian critique of religion as the self-alienation of the human spirit, chose to accept this critique and to separate faith off entirely from human reason.

  Like Dostoevsky, and even more rigorously, Kierkegaard decided to take his stand with the irrational of faith against reason and to push the opposition between the two to the point of paradox. Faith, he said, is “subjective certainty,” which he defined as “objective uncertainty . . . grasped with the apprehension of the most passionate inwardness.”24 Some words in Kierkegaard’s notebooks further help to illuminate the subjective, existential aspect of that “most passionate inwardness” on which Dostoevsky also fell back to compensate for the “object
ive uncertainty” of his own belief in Christ. “Whether I have faith,” Kierkegaard wrote, “can never be ascertained by me with immediate certainty—for faith is precisely this dialectical hovering, which is unceasingly in fear and trembling but never in despair; faith is exactly this never-ending worry about oneself, which keeps one alert and ready to risk everything, this worry about oneself as to whether one truly has faith—and look! precisely this worry about oneself is faith.”25 No better description can be given of the ever-unstable balancing point of Dostoevsky’s own faith, which, as we see it spontaneously expressed in his credo, will always remain perilously poised in “dialectical hovering” above the abyss of doubt.

  1 DW (1873), 152.

  2 Ibid.

  3 V. G. Belinsky, Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow, 1948), 125.

  4 P. K. Martyanov, “V perelome veka,” Istorichesky Vestnik 10–11 (1895), 11: 448.

  5 Alexander Pushkin, The Captain’s Daughter, trans. Natalie Duddington, reprinted in The Poems, Prose and Plays of Pushkin, ed. Avrahm Yarmolinsky (New York, 1936), 741.

  6 Pis’ma, 1: 143; February 20, 1854.

  7 PSS, 7: 315, 408.

  8 Georg Brandes told Nietzsche himself that Dostoevsky represented the very slave morality against which the German thinker was philosophizing with a hammer. Nietzsche agreed, and replied in a letter (November 20, 1888): “I treasure him, all the same, as the most valuable psychological material I know—I am exceedingly grateful to him, however much he always grates against my deepest instincts.” Cited in Wolfgang Gesemann, “Nietzsche’s Verhältnnis zu Dostoevsky auf dem europäischen Hintergrund der 80er Jahre,” Die Welt der Slaven 2 (July 1961), 142.