Meanwhile, Dostoevsky was working away at the second part valiantly, but finding it increasingly difficult to surmount the crushing burden of his almost impossible circumstances. “My friend,” he writes Mikhail at the beginning of April, “I have been ill a good part of the month, then convalescent, and even now I am not yet entirely well. My nerves are shot and I have not been able to get back my strength. I am so grimly tormented by so many things that I don’t even wish to speak of them. My wife is dying, literally. There is not a day when, at such and such a moment, we do not believe that we see her going. Her sufferings are terrible and this works on me because. . . .” The sentence trails off in this fashion, and Dostoevsky evidently assumes that Mikhail will understand what he leaves unsaid; perhaps he was thinking of his affair with Suslova, whose secret only Mikhail was supposed to have known. Yet, Dostoevsky continues, “I write and write, every morning, . . . [and] the story is getting longer. Sometimes I imagine that it is worth nothing, and yet I write with enthusiasm; I do not know what it will give.”14 Dostoevsky hopes that he can send half of the second part soon to be set up in type, but insists that it can only be published as a whole and not in installments.
Several other letters to Mikhail in early April contain urgent requests for money; and he also outlines an elaborate strategy for extracting a loan on behalf of Epoch from their wealthy and pious Moscow aunt. On April 13, Dostoevsky again describes his lamentable condition (“I am in a frightening state, nervous, morally ill”),15 but provides additional information about his story. He now sees it comprising three chapters: the first is almost finished; the second is drafted but chaotic; the third is not yet begun. Dostoevsky wonders whether the first chapter could not be published by itself, though convinced it would injure the effect of the whole: “deprived of the sequel (the two others are essential) it loses all its juice. You know what a transition is in music. This is exactly the same. The first chapter seems to be nothing but chatter; but suddenly this chatter in the last two chapters is resolved by a sudden catastrophe.”16 These words, the last in Dostoevsky’s correspondence referring to the composition of Notes from Underground, were written six days before Marya Dimitrievna breathed her last.
Over the course of the next several days, other, more ruminative, thoughts occupied Dostoevsky. “Will I ever see Masha again?” Dostoevsky asks in a notebook fragment (20: 172). Keeping a vigil at the bier of his dead wife, Dostoevsky pored over their life together as he sat beside her corpse, and such thoughts led him on to ponder as well the great issues of life on earth and its meaning, and of the possibility of an eternity beyond the grave. In such a severe and solemn moment of self-scrutiny, he tried to unriddle his own answers to these perennial enigmas. Nowhere else does he tell us so unequivocally what he really thought about God, immortality, the role of Christ in human existence, and the meaning of human life on earth.
He endeavors not only to persuade himself that immortality exists, but also to explain why it must exist as a necessary completion of terrestrial human life. After asking the poignant question, Dostoevsky turns aside from eternity and shifts his gaze to the vicissitudes of the human condition. “To love man like oneself, according to the commandment of Christ,” he declares peremptorily, “is impossible. The law of personality on earth binds. The Ego stands in the way” (20: 172). These words were set down just after Dostoevsky had completed the first part of Notes from Underground, where he had portrayed the refusal of the human ego to surrender its right to self-assertion—in its rejection, even at the price of madness and self-destruction, of any philosophy that denied this irrepressible human need.
It may appear as if Dostoevsky were inclined to agree with Strakhov—and Christian doctrine—that human nature was incurably rotten, incapable of fulfilling the law of Christ except if strengthened by God’s grace. But Eastern Orthodoxy has always placed more emphasis on man’s free will than on grace; and in the very next sentences of his notebook entry, Dostoevsky makes clear that he does not consider any special gift of grace to be necessary: the incarnation of Christ has been sufficient to spur mankind into eternal struggle against its own limitations:
Christ alone could love man as himself, but Christ was a perpetual eternal ideal to which man strives and, according to the law of nature, should strive. Meanwhile, since the appearance of Christ as the ideal of man in the flesh, it has become as clear as day that the . . . highest use a man can make of his personality, of the full development of his Ego—is, as it were, to annihilate that Ego, to give it totally and to everyone undividedly and unselfishly. In this way, the law of the Ego fuses with the law of humanism, and in this fusion both the Ego and the all (apparently two extreme opposites) mutually annihilate themselves one for the other, and at the same time each attains separately, and to the highest degree, their own individual development. (20: 172)
Dostoevsky declares it a “law of nature” that mankind struggle to follow the example of Christ. This belief had been the sole ray of hope piercing the moral darkness by which he had been surrounded in the prison camp; and if its light had not been obscured even by the blackness of prison life, then its radiance could be assumed to continue to glimmer in every Christian breast. This is surely one reason why Dostoevsky had declared, in the heartfelt letter he wrote to Mme Fonvizina shortly after quitting the camp, that “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.”17 Dostoevsky is affirming here the depth and strength of his existential commitment to Christ—which meant, concretely, to the moral message of love and self-sacrifice that Christ had brought to the world.
Indeed, the sole significance of Christ, as Dostoevsky now speaks of him, is to serve as the divine enunciator of this morality; he fulfills no other purpose, not even the traditional one of redeeming mankind from the wages of sin and death. There is, in fact, not much difference between the Christ of the notebook entry and the Utopian Socialist Christ whom Dostoevsky had defended against Belinsky in 1845–1846, or the Christ he had described earlier as having been sent by God to the modern world, just as Homer had been dispatched to the ancient one, in order to provide “the organization of its spiritual and earthly life.”18 But, in the intervening years, Dostoevsky had acquired a new realization of all the obstacles that prevented Christ’s message from being embodied in such an “organization”—the chief one being the human ego itself, with its raging demand for the recognition of its rights.
Five years later, Dostoevsky sketched the plan for what he considered the most important project of his creative career—a series of novels to be called The Life of a Great Sinner; and the origins of this conception are in the words just quoted. For it is only when the egoism of personality has been expanded to its fullest stretch, only when someone has indeed become a “great sinner,” that the full sublimity of the imitatio Christi—the full grandeur of the voluntary self-sacrifice of the personality out of love—can be most effectively presented. Such a self-sacrifice, in Dostoevsky’s view, would unite the law of personality with that of “humanism,” and the use of this term, which had been employed twenty years earlier by Feuerbach and the Left Hegelians to denote the secular and social realization of the Christian law of love, testifies that Dostoevsky, without abandoning his earlier ideals, was now striving to integrate them with his more recently acquired convictions. But what had once been conceived as a worldly possibility has now receded into the infinite future, and he goes on to declare that “all history, whether of humanity in part or of each man separately, is only the development, struggle, and attainment of this goal [the fusion of egoism and humanism].” Once having reached it, however, mankind would then truly have arrived at “the Paradise of Christ” (20: 172).
In a movement typical of his imaginative manipulation of ideas, Dostoevsky thinks them through to the end and envisages the situation resulting from their completion. “But if that is the final goal of all humani
ty,” he reasons, “(having attained which it would no longer be necessary to develop, that is, . . . eternally strive toward it)—therefore, it would no longer be necessary to live—then, consequently, when man achieves this, he terminates his earthly existence. Therefore, man on earth is only a creature in development, consequently, someone not finished but transitional.” Earthly human nature, with its necessarily unresolved conflict between egoism and the law of love, is not, then, the final state of mankind, and this conviction enables Dostoevsky to answer the question posed at the beginning of his meditations. “It is completely senseless to attain such a great goal if upon attaining it everything is extinguished and disappears, that is, if man will no longer have life when he attains the goal. Consequently, there is a future paradisial life” (20: 172–173).
Here we have Dostoevsky’s argument for the necessity of immortality—without such a belief, the endless struggle of humanity on earth to fulfill the law of Christ would simply have no point. What motivates Dostoevsky’s reflections above all—what he cannot bear to contemplate as a possibility—is the dire prospect that all the toils and turmoils of human life should turn out to be entirely meaningless. Like another doubt-filled Christian who was also a child of his century, Blaise Pascal, nothing terrified Dostoevsky more than the specter of living in a senseless universe. House of the Dead provides a chilling imaginative evocation of this terror in one of the most self-revealing passages that Dostoevsky ever wrote. Here he describes forced labor “at a task whose character was absolutely useless and absurd” (4: 20), and intuits the suicidal self-destruction that would be the inevitable result. The question of immortality is not raised directly in that book, but it contains a haunting depiction of mankind’s unquenchable desire to exist in a universe whose infinite spaces, instead of remaining silent, would respond to the longings contained in every human soul. Although Dostoevsky illustrates the point in connection with compulsory labor, his conclusions apply with equal if not greater force to the problem of whether human life has any ultimate value or is just “a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.” It would be an intolerable insult to human dignity for man to live in a world totally deprived of sense, and such a world, in Dostoevsky’s view, would be one in which death simply meant extinction—a world in which the travails of human life would receive no satisfactory explanation. Here we penetrate to the heart of that intimate connection between psychology and religious metaphysics so typical of Dostoevsky, and this connection explains the rather unexpected nature of his argument in favor of immortality.
Dostoevsky then faces those whom he calls the “Antichrists,” who think they can refute Christianity by pointing to its failure to transform earthly life. “It will be,” Dostoevsky begins, alluding to such a transformation, “but it will be after the attainment of the goal, when man is finally reborn according to the laws of nature into another form which neither marries nor is given in marriage” (20: 173–174). No passage in Dostoevsky so clearly illuminates why his novels almost always present human life as inextricably embroiled in tragic conflicts. Ordinary human desires, even the most legitimate ones, even the duty, through marriage and the family, to fulfill society’s most sacrosanct obligations, must inevitably clash with the imperatives of the Christian law of love. Whatever else Dostoevsky may have been, he was not an uncritical defender of existing institutions, and these words show how continually he was reaching out in imagination beyond the bounds of all earthly establishments.
A summarizing passage of the utmost importance then returns to Dostoevsky’s point of departure and simultaneously offers a poignant glimpse into the personal roots of these touchingly tentative reflections:
And thus man strives on earth toward an ideal opposed to his nature. When a man has not fulfilled the law of striving toward the ideal, that is, has not through love sacrificed his Ego to people or to another person (Masha and myself) he suffers and calls this condition a sin. And so, man must unceasingly feel suffering, which is compensated for by the heavenly joy of fulfilling the law, that is, by sacrifice. Here is the earthly equilibrium. Otherwise, the earth would be senseless. (20: 174)
These pages reveal Dostoevsky inwardly striving to accept the essential dogmas of the divinity of Christ, personal immortality, the Second Coming, and the Resurrection. The highest aim of Dostoevsky’s Christianity, though, is not personal salvation but the fusion of the individual ego with the community in a symbiosis of love, and the only sin that Dostoevsky appears to recognize is the failure to fulfill this law of love. Suffering arises from the consciousness of such a failure, and Dostoevsky’s words help us to grasp not only why suffering plays such a prominent role in his works, but also why it is misleading to infer that he believes any kind of suffering to be necessarily good. Only that suffering is valuable which, by testifying to an awareness of insufficiency in responding to the example of Christ, also proclaims the moral autonomy of the human personality; and since human egoism will always prevent the ideal of Christ from being fully realized on earth, this type of suffering will not (and cannot) cease before the end of time.
In his artistic works, the fetters of the law of personality are in most cases felt impartially as an inescapable element of the human condition. For Dostoevsky never portrays the Christian ideal as a positively beneficent force in human life by which these fetters can be thrown off; sometimes this ideal even has the contrary effect. The appearance of a Christ-like figure in The Idiot, for example, only leads to a worsening of conflicts instead of aiding in their appeasement or resolution. But, as we have seen, the major significance that Dostoevsky ascribes to the Incarnation was precisely to exercise such an awakening and quickening function: Christ was sent by God not to give mankind the peace of absolution but to stir it to struggle against the law of personality. Dostoevsky points out that “Christ himself prophesied his teachings only as an ideal, predicted himself that strife and development will continue to the end of the world (the teaching about the sword)” [St. Mark quotes Christ as having said “Not peace I bring but a sword”] (20: 173–174). Life for Dostoevsky was, as it had been for Keats, “a vale of soul-making,” into which Christ had come to call mankind to battle against the death of immersion in matter and to inspire the struggle toward the ultimate victory over egoism.
Eastern Orthodoxy, unlike the Augustinian tradition of the West, has always regarded man not as having fallen into irredeemable sin from a state of perfection before the Fall but rather as having emerged into earthly life still imperfect and unformed; man contains the “image” of God but not his “likeness,” which John of Damascus defined as the “assimilation to God through virtue.”19 St. Irenaeus compares man on earth to a child required to grow and develop. For Dostoevsky, human life was the anvil on which souls were being forged by the human blows of fate, and it was only in eternity that this endless process would come to a halt. Only in eternity would the law of personality finally be overcome, and this is surely why Dostoevsky could never effectively imagine such a triumph within the realistic conventions of the nineteenth-century novel to which he remained faithful.
All of Dostoevsky’s major works will henceforth be controlled by the framework of values expressed in this notebook entry, and they will dramatize the fateful opposition between the law of Christ and the law of personality as Dostoevsky understood it. Yet to say this tells us little that would not be equally true of every great writer in the tradition of European literature beginning with Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. To understand Dostoevsky, we must try to grasp his particular understanding of this great theme, which he fills in, fleshes out, and dramatizes in terms of the social-cultural issues and conflicts of his own day. These conflicts provide him with the living substance of his works; it is through them that he rises to the heights of the great argument that possessed his spirit and inflamed his creative imagination; and his genius consists precisely in the ability to unite these two (at first sight) so very dissimilar levels. But the time has come to illustrate how he did
so in Notes from Underground, whose second part, completed in May 1864, was published two months after Marya Dimitrievna’s demise.
1 DMI, 543.
2 Pis’ma, 1: 341; November 19, 1863.
3 “The issues of The Contemporary in which it had been printed,” writes Andrzej Walicki, “were preserved with immense piety, as though they were family heirlooms. For many members of the younger generation the novel became a true ‘encyclopedia of life and knowledge.’ Plekhanov declared that ‘no printed work has had such a great success in Russia as Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done?’ ” Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Oxford, 1975), 190.
4 N. G. Chernyshevsky, Chto delat’? (Moscow, 1955), 129, 135.
5 Pis’ma, 1: 345; January 10, 1864.
6 L. P. Lansky, “Dostoevsky v neizdanoi perepiske sovremennikov (1837–1881),” LN 86 (Moscow, 1973), 393; January 1864.
7 Pis’ma, 1: 347; February 9, 1864.
8 Ibid., 349; February 29, 1864.
9 In the magazine, a footnote appended to the title of the work announced that the first installment “should count as an introduction to a whole book, almost a preface.” This phrase was eliminated on republication. See the commentary and textual variants in PSS, 5: 375; 342.
10 Pis’ma, 2: 608; October 9, 1859.
11 Ibid., 612; March 20, 1864.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 2: 353; March 26, 1864.
14 Ibid., 355; April 2, 1864.
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