By Bergotte
The series has been moving, in its way, toward this. Homer gave us mortality without consolation. Ovid gave us transformation without stability. Dante gave us love as the architecture of the universe. Shakespeare gave us the self as performance, unmoored from any fixed ground. What Dostoevsky gives us is the consequence of all that unmooring: a modern consciousness alone in the universe with a freedom it cannot bear, facing the question of whether God exists and discovering that the answer — either answer — is catastrophic. No writer has gone further into the extremity of the human situation, and no writer has done it with more compassion for the people he found there.
The Biography as Argument
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821, the second son of a staff doctor at a hospital for the poor. His childhood was not unhappy, but it was shadowed by the severity of his father, who was murdered by his own serfs in 1839 — possibly, though the evidence is disputed, in a way that marked his son for life. The novelist’s epilepsy began around this time, or perhaps earlier; the seizures would recur throughout his life, arriving without warning, leaving him exhausted and strange, and they gave him — as he was the first to argue — access to states of consciousness that the non-epileptic could not imagine: the aura before a fit, in which he sometimes experienced a sensation of absolute completeness, a moment of total, unconditioned love for the world that he described as worth ten years of ordinary life.
In 1849, Dostoevsky was arrested as a member of the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of young intellectuals discussing utopian socialism and the ideas of Fourier. The tsar sentenced him to death. He was led out with the other condemned men to Semyonovsky Square in St Petersburg, a firing squad was arranged, the order to fire was given — and then a reprieve arrived from the tsar. The execution had been staged, a deliberate exercise in psychological torture. One of the men went mad on the spot and never recovered. Dostoevsky stood in the line and felt the full weight of his imminent death and was brought back from it, and was never the same person again. He spent four years in a Siberian labour camp, followed by four years of compulsory military service, and he returned to St Petersburg in 1859 with his health broken, his epilepsy worsened, and a conviction that had fused with his bones: that suffering is not an obstacle to meaning but its ground, that the confrontation with death is the beginning of genuine life, and that the ideological systems that proposed to liberate humanity by removing God from the equation were not solutions to the human problem but its most dangerous expression.
This biography is inseparable from the work in a way that is not true of many writers. The mock execution gave Dostoevsky a relationship to mortality that no amount of philosophical reflection could have produced — a knowledge of it in the body, a physical acquaintance with the moment when the world narrows to a single point and everything that seemed important reveals itself as contingent. The Siberian years gave him intimate knowledge of the criminal mind, of suffering without the amelioration of ideology, of the human capacity for both cruelty and grace in conditions of absolute extremity. He came back from Siberia not with political convictions confirmed but with political convictions shattered and something rawer in their place: a religious faith that had been stripped of everything institutional and theoretical, leaving only the bedrock question — is there a God, and if there is, how do we account for the suffering of the innocent?
Everything he wrote after Siberia is an attempt to answer that question, or to be honest about the impossibility of answering it.
The Underground Man
Notes from Underground, published in 1864, is the shortest of the major works and in some ways the most consequential. It is the founding document of modern alienation — the work in which Dostoevsky created a voice that the twentieth century would recognise as its own, a voice that had not previously existed in literature and that, once heard, could not be forgotten.
The Underground Man, never named, is a minor civil servant in St Petersburg who has retired to a basement apartment and composed a lengthy monologue addressed to an imaginary audience he simultaneously despises and craves. He is intelligent, self-aware, spiteful, self-pitying, and almost totally incapable of action. He knows what is wrong with him. He cannot stop. He is, he tells us, a sick man. He is a spiteful man. He thinks his liver is diseased, but he refuses to see a doctor out of spite. The spite is not directed at anyone in particular. It is a condition of existence.
What the Underground Man has discovered — and what makes his monologue still devastating a hundred and sixty years after it was written — is that consciousness itself is the problem. The more aware you become, the less capable of action you are, because every impulse is immediately subjected to analysis that reveals its motives as mixed, its outcomes as uncertain, its pretensions as fraudulent. Ordinary people, the Underground Man observes with a mixture of contempt and envy, act without this difficulty because they are not troubled by the full implications of their actions. They are what he calls the men of action, the normal men, the men who take revenge cleanly and move on. The Underground Man cannot move on. He rehearses every grievance, real and imagined, with an obsessive thoroughness that prevents him from either redressing it or releasing it.
The second half of the book — which is properly a novella, divided into two parts — follows the Underground Man into a remembered episode from his past: a disastrous evening with old schoolfellows, a humiliation, and a subsequent encounter with a young prostitute named Liza whom he first lectures pompously about the horror of her life and then, when she responds with genuine trust and affection, repels with deliberate cruelty. He wants to love her. He is more comfortable hurting her, because hurting her puts him in control of a situation in which genuine connection would require him to be vulnerable. He destroys the possibility of the one relationship that might have reached him, and he knows he is destroying it, and he does it anyway.
The Underground Man is not a villain. That is the hardest thing to hold on to. He is a man whose intelligence has outrun his capacity for goodness, whose self-awareness has become a prison, whose suffering is real even though it is self-generated and self-perpetuating. Dostoevsky does not offer him an exit. The notes simply stop, the Underground Man retreating back into his underground, the imaginary audience dismissed with contempt. The book ends without resolution because its argument is that the modern consciousness, severed from God and community and the capacity for simple, unreflective love, cannot resolve itself through will or intelligence alone.
The Napoleon Theory
Crime and Punishment, published two years later in 1866, is the same argument made on a larger and more dramatic canvas. Raskolnikov, a young student in St Petersburg, has developed a theory: that human beings are divided into the ordinary, who are subject to the moral law, and the extraordinary — Napoleons, Solons, world-historical figures — who stand above it and whose transgressions serve the larger good. He tests his theory by murdering a pawnbroker whom he has decided is a louse, a parasite, a destructive presence whose removal will free up resources for better uses. The theory is meticulous. The murder is catastrophic.
What Dostoevsky understood, and what the novel demonstrates with terrible thoroughness, is that the theory is false not because it is logically incoherent — Raskolnikov’s arguments are never simply refuted, and the novel does not pretend they are — but because the human being who carries out the murder is not the abstraction the theory requires. Raskolnikov is not a Napoleon. He is a young man with a body that sweats and a mind that cannot stop thinking and a soul that registers the weight of what he has done in ways that no theory can prevent. The illness that follows the murder is not a metaphor. It is the body’s refusal to accept what the intellect has authorized. It is conscience expressed as fever.
The novel’s other great creation is Sonya Marmeladova, the daughter of a drunk, driven to prostitution to support her family, who loves Raskolnikov with a completeness and an absence of judgement that he finds simultaneously unbearable and magnetic. Sonya is a believer. Her faith is not intellectual — she cannot argue for God; she can barely articulate what she believes — but it is absolute, and it is expressed entirely through action, through the unthinking, unguarded love she extends to everyone who needs it. She reads to Raskolnikov the passage from the Gospel of John in which Lazarus is raised from the dead, and the scene is the emotional and theological hinge of the novel: the intellectual murderer, the faithful prostitute, the story of a man brought back from death. Dostoevsky does not make the redemption easy or immediate. The novel ends with Raskolnikov in Siberia, having confessed, beginning — only beginning — the long process that might eventually lead somewhere. The epilogue is not a triumph. It is a direction.
The Grand Inquisitor
The Brothers Karamazov, published in 1880 and the last of the major novels, contains what is, by general agreement, the most powerful single chapter in world literature: the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, told by Ivan Karamazov to his brother Alyosha in a tavern in a provincial Russian town. It is the argument at the centre of everything Dostoevsky wrote, and it is given to the character who does not share the author’s faith, which is either the most honest or the most generous thing a religious writer has ever done.
Ivan has constructed a poem in his mind. It is set in sixteenth-century Seville, during the Inquisition. Christ returns — quietly, without announcement, unmistakable — and the people recognise him and come to him and he performs miracles in the square before the cathedral. The Grand Inquisitor, a very old man, Cardinal of the Church, has him arrested and brought to a cell and visits him alone at night. And then the old man speaks, for pages, and Christ says nothing.
The Grand Inquisitor’s argument is this: you failed humanity. You came and offered freedom — genuine freedom, the freedom to choose good or evil, the freedom that makes love meaningful — and humanity cannot bear it. When you refused the three temptations in the desert, you refused the instruments through which the mass of humanity could have been given happiness: bread (material security), miracle (the comfort of certainty), and earthly kingdom (the peace of total authority). You wanted free love, freely given, earned rather than commanded — and the result has been suffering without end, because the great majority of people are not capable of free love. They want to be fed and guided and told what to believe. We in the Church have corrected your work, the Inquisitor says. We have given them the bread and the miracle and the authority. We have taken their freedom from them, and they are happy, or as happy as creatures like them can be. We carry the burden of freedom so that they do not have to. And now you return and threaten to undo what we have built.
When the old man finishes, Christ approaches him and kisses him on the lips, without a word. The Inquisitor shivers and opens the cell door. Go, and come no more… come not at all, never, never! The prisoner leaves. The Inquisitor is left with the kiss burning in his heart.
The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor is the most lucid statement of the case against Christianity — against any system that makes demands on human freedom — that has ever been written, and it was written by a Christian novelist. Dostoevsky does not refute the Inquisitor. The kiss is the only response offered, and it is not an argument. It is an act. What it says, wordlessly, is that the Inquisitor’s analysis, however accurate it may be as sociology and psychology, has missed the thing that matters — the possibility of a love that exceeds the calculation of human capacities, that refuses to be bounded by what most people can manage on their worst days.
Whether this response is adequate is a question that the novel refuses to close. Ivan tells the story, and when Alyosha says that the kiss is the answer, Ivan does not concede. The argument is drawn, not won. Dostoevsky was honest enough to know that the Grand Inquisitor’s position cannot be defeated by logic, only by life — by the demonstration, in actual existence, of what free love looks like when it is practised at its fullest. This is Alyosha’s function in the novel, and it is Dostoevsky’s function in the culture: to bear witness to the possibility even when the case against it is overwhelming.
Ivan’s Rebellion
Before the Grand Inquisitor legend, Ivan has already made the most agonising argument in the novel — agonising because it is the one that most resists both refutation and acceptance. He does not deny God. He returns the ticket. He tells Alyosha that even if God exists and the harmony of the universe is real and every tear will be accounted for in the final reckoning, he refuses to accept a harmony that was built on the suffering of a single tortured child.
He then proceeds to describe, with a meticulousness that Dostoevsky drew from actual newspaper accounts, the cases of children who have been abused and tortured by their parents and by the landowners who had power over them. A five-year-old girl locked in an outhouse in winter, her mouth filled with excrement, her parents beating her through the night. A small serf boy released to be hunted by dogs in front of his mother. Ivan does not exaggerate. The cases are chosen for their historical factuality, their ordinariness, their typicality. This is not exceptional evil. This is the world as it is.
Tell me yourself — I challenge you: let’s say you were called upon to build the edifice of human destiny so that men would finally be happy and would find peace and tranquillity. If you knew that in order to attain this, you would have to torture just one tiny creature — that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist — and that on her unavenged tears you would have to found that edifice, would you agree to be the architect on those conditions?
Alyosha says no. Ivan says that is the answer. That is his rebellion. The universe constructed on the suffering of the innocent is not a universe he can accept, regardless of its ultimate justice or beauty. He does not deny that the beauty might be real. He denies that it can be purchased at that price.
Dostoevsky’s response — his only response — is the figure of Father Zosima, the elder monk whom Alyosha loves, whose teachings on active love and the responsibility of each person for everyone and everything run through the novel like a counter-current to Ivan’s rebellion. Zosima teaches not theodicy but practice: not the justification of suffering but the transformation of it through love freely given. His most radical teaching is that each of us is responsible to all, for all — not in the abstract but in the concrete, daily act of choosing love over resentment, connection over isolation, the other over the self.
Whether this is an answer to Ivan is, again, a question the novel will not settle. The fact that Zosima’s body, after his death, begins to smell — that the saint does not receive the miraculous incorruption that tradition promised, that the physical world refuses the spiritual guarantee — is Dostoevsky’s most honest moment, the moment when he acknowledges that faith cannot be grounded in evidence, that the leap is a leap, that the alternatives are not belief or atheism but two different ways of living in the dark.
Freedom and Its Terrors
What Dostoevsky says about the human condition can be summarised, imperfectly, in a single word: freedom. We are creatures of freedom, and freedom is the source of our dignity and our destruction. Without it, love is impossible — you cannot love what you have been compelled to do. With it, every horror becomes available, every ideology of liberation becomes a vehicle for new forms of tyranny, every individual consciousness becomes a potential underground, folding in on itself in the cold.
The political novels — Demons, published in 1872, the most ferociously prophetic of the major works — extend this argument into the realm of revolution. Stavrogin, the charismatic, empty centre of the novel, inspires in others the ideological convictions he cannot hold himself, and the result is murder, arson, and the systematic destruction of a provincial community by a cell of would-be revolutionaries who have replaced God with the theory of history and found that the replacement makes them capable of anything. Dostoevsky watched the Russian nihilist movements of his era with a horror that has often been called reactionary — and in some of its political expression it was — but that was also, in its deeper register, a genuine insight: that the removal of transcendence does not liberate desire but removes its only available check, that the man who believes in nothing is not free but is instead at the mercy of whatever ideology presents itself as the most compelling substitute.
This is not a comfortable conclusion. It is also not a simple one. Dostoevsky is not arguing for institutional religion or for political conservatism or for any of the doctrinal positions with which his name is sometimes carelessly associated. He is arguing for the irreducibility of the moral life — for the claim that the question of how to live cannot be delegated to a theory or a party or a scientific system, that it returns, always, to the individual standing before the fact of another person’s suffering and deciding what to do.
He is also arguing, with everything he has, for compassion. The criminal, the prostitute, the murderer, the drunk, the underground man, the epileptic — all of them are held, in his fiction, with an attention that does not excuse but does not condemn, that sees the full complexity of the person and the full weight of the circumstances without surrendering either moral seriousness or human tenderness. This combination — rigour and compassion, the refusal of easy absolution and the refusal of easy judgement — is what makes Dostoevsky the indispensable novelist of the modern condition: the condition of creatures who have lost the map and must navigate by the light of their own suffering.
The mock execution in Semyonovsky Square lasted a few minutes. It took the rest of his life to write down what he learned there.
Sources and Further Reading
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Vintage, 1993.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Vintage, 1994.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Demons. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Vintage, 1994.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Idiot. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Vintage, 2001.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson. University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time. Abridged ed. Princeton University Press, 2010.
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin O’Brien. Vintage, 1955.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. Translated by Duncan Large. Oxford World’s Classics, 1998.
Girard, René. Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky. Translated by James Williams. Crossroad, 1997.
Steiner, George. Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism. 2nd ed. Yale University Press, 1996.
Mochulsky, Konstantin. Dostoevsky: His Life and Work. Translated by Michael Minihan. Princeton University Press, 1967.
Rowan Williams. Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction. Baylor University Press, 2011.
My World of Interiors 