Authors: Joseph Frank
Dostoevsky (49 page)
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 “objective 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.
9
Waclaw Lednicki,
Russia, Poland and the West
(New York, 1954), 275. Lednicki’s book contains a translation of most of the chapter that Tokarzewski devotes to Dostoevsky in his
Siedem lat katorgi
(Warsaw, 1907).
10
Ibid., 272–273.
11
DW
(1876), 206.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid.
15
Ibid., 206–207.
16
Ibid., 207.
17
Ibid., 209.
18
Ibid., 210.
19
Ibid.
20
William James,
The Varieties of Religious Experience
(New York, 1929), 172.
21
DW
(1876), 202.
22
Pis’ma
, 1: 143; February 20, 1854.
23
Ibid., 142.
24
Walter Lowrie,
Kierkegaard
, 2 vols. (New York, 1962), 2: 138.
25
Cited in Walter Ruttenbeck,
Sören Kierkegaard, der Christliche Denker und sein Werk
(Berlin, 1929), 225.
Private Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky was released from the Omsk stockade on February 15, 1854, but the freedom for which he had waited so long was still minimal. As he remarked in his letter to Mme Fonvizina, “In the overcoat of a soldier, I am just as much of a prisoner as before.”
1
For reasons of health he was allowed to remain in Omsk for a month, and both he and Durov lived at the home of the hospitable Konstantin Ivanov and his wife.
Dostoevsky’s letters give us a graphic picture of his plight as a lowly soldier. Completely dependent on the good will and even charity of others, he was forced to continually plead for help. What made his situation even worse was the conviction that he had emerged from prison camp with new powers as a writer and that, if he were only allowed to utilize his talents, all his problems could be solved at one stroke. In his letter to Mikhail written during his recuperation in Omsk, Dostoevsky makes no effort to conceal his personal agenda when he asks for a full report on all his relatives and on the exact state of Mikhail’s finances. (Mikhail had opened a small cigarette factory with his share of the distribution of the Dostoevsky family property.) Dostoevsky is determined to fight his way back into Russian literature and he knows this will involve a long campaign, during which his survival will depend on the help he can muster from family and friends. “I need money,” he tells Mikhail bluntly. “
I have to live, brother. These years will not have passed without bearing their fruits
. . . . What you spend for me—will not be lost. If I manage to live, I will return it with interest . . . and now I will no longer write trifles. You will hear of me being talked about.”
2
A further request to Mikhail, made in even more pressing terms, was for the dispatch of books. Even after Major Krivtsov had been toppled, Dostoevsky’s relation to literature had been too emotionally charged to allow him to pick up a book lightly. He recalls “the strange and agitating impression of the first book I read in prison”—one of the Russian “thick” periodicals containing literary works, criticism, and social commentary. “My former life rose up before me full of light and color and I tried from what I had read to conjecture how far I had
dropped behind. . . . What emotions were agitating people now? What questions were occupying their minds? I pored over every word, tried to read between the lines and to find secret meanings and allusions to the past; I looked for traces of what had agitated us in my time. And how sad it was for me to realize how remote I was from this new life, how cut off I was from it all. I should have to get used to everything afresh, to make acquaintance with a new generation again” (4: 229).