Dostoevsky

Freedom on trial.

If nothing holds, everything is permitted.

If something holds, one must still become able to love.

Notes from Underground (1864) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80) (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

Message

The human being will not be fitted into a crystal palace. Give him utopia, reason, 2+2=4, and he will smash it for the mere right to want what is harmful, because independent choice is dearer than advantage. That is Notes from Underground: freedom as spite, the self as a mouse that cannot stop remembering an insult.

The Brothers Karamazov raises the same freedom to the height of God. Ivan’s thesis, reported and then lived: if there is no God and no immortality, everything is permitted. The novel does not refute this with a syllogism. It tests it: a father is murdered; a brother is willing to have been the idea of the murder; a child is tortured in Ivan’s catalogue of injustices; a saint says hell is the suffering of being unable to love. The Grand Inquisitor tells Christ that men do not want the freedom He brought; they want bread, miracle, mystery, and authority. Dostoevsky’s own wager is the opposite of a proof: only a freely given love, purchased through the furnace of doubt, can answer Ivan. He does not claim the answer is easy, or that he himself is finished with the furnace.

Where Pascal wagers on God from the wretchedness of man, Dostoevsky wagers on God from the danger of man. Where Schopenhauer sees will as suffering to be denied, Dostoevsky sees will as a person who can murder or kneel. He is the missing dramatic link between Kierkegaard’s individual before God and Sartre’s “everything is permitted.”

Content

Notes from Underground: Part I, a confession against scientific determinism and rational egoism (Chernyshevsky’s crystal palace); Part II, the remembered humiliation with the officer, the schoolfellows, and Liza the prostitute—freedom used to refuse love.

The Brothers Karamazov: three brothers as three metaphysics—Dmitri the sensual, Ivan the intellect, Alyosha the novice—around the rotten father Fyodor. “Rebellion,” “The Grand Inquisitor,” Zosima’s discourses, the trial. The book was to be the first panel of a larger life of Alyosha; death cut it off.

Presentation

Polyphony: no single narrator owns the truth. Confession, tavern speech, court record, hagiography, nightmare (Ivan and the devil). The idea is never clean; it is always in someone’s mouth, with bad teeth. This is philosophy that can be arrested, drunk, or kissed.

Method

The idea as lived experiment. Dostoevsky does not argue that atheism entails crime; he writes a man in whom that entailment becomes a destiny, and another man in whom holiness becomes a destiny, and lets them collide. The “dialogic” novel (Bakhtin’s later word) is the method: every position is answered by a voice, not by the author from above—though the author’s thumb is not invisible.

Summary

A self that is only reason will invent spite to prove it is not only reason. A culture that kills God does not become humane; it becomes unsure why it may not do anything. Love is not a sentiment. It is the one thing that would make Ivan’s logic unnecessary—and the one thing Ivan cannot perform.

What shaped Dostoevsky

People: the harsh father (murdered by serfs in 1839—an event that never leaves the fiction); Belinsky and the Petrashevsky circle; Sonia / Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina (stenographer, then wife, who made the late novels possible); Christ as read in prison, not as a concept; Gogol, Pushkin, Dickens; the radicals Chernyshevsky and Bakunin as antagonists.

Place: Moscow childhood; St Petersburg’s Haymarket and boarding houses; the Peter and Paul Fortress; the Omsk stockade; Semipalatinsk exile; Baden-Baden and the roulette tables; Staraya Russa.

Formative experiences: mock execution on the Semyonov Square, 22 December 1849—the sentence of death commuted at the last minute to Siberia; four years in the katorga among murderers; epilepsy; compulsive gambling; the death of his first wife and his brother Mikhail; the Diary of a Writer as public ministry.

Cultural events: the Petrashevsky conspiracy and Nicholas I’s repression; the emancipation of the serfs (1861); Russian Nihilism and Populism; the assassination climate that would kill Alexander II the month after Dostoevsky’s own death; Orthodox Christianity against Western liberalism and against the new scientific atheism.

Quotes

“I am a sick man… I am a wicked man.”

“Twice two makes four is an insufferable thing. Twice two makes four is a fop standing with arms akimbo, barring your path and spitting.”

“What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.”

“So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.”

“If there is no immortality, there is no virtue… Without God and immortal life? Then everything is permitted, one can do anything.” (Dmitri restating Ivan; Ivan’s position as reported: without immortality “nothing would be immoral, everything would be permitted, even cannibalism.”)

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

“If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.”

Grand Inquisitor: You wanted them to be free; we have corrected Your work; they will be happy.
“I came to the conclusion that… one could not love one’s neighbours in the concrete, though one might in the abstract.”

From the underground: the most advantageous advantage is to refuse advantage.