Dostoevsky (89 page)

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:

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.

¹⁵
Ibid., 362; April 13, 1864.

¹⁶
Ibid., 365.

¹⁷
Ibid., 1: 142; February 20, 1854.

¹⁸
Ibid., 58; January 1, 1840.

¹⁹
Timothy Ware,
The Orthodox Church
(Baltimore, 1963), 224–225.

Few works in modern literature are more widely read than Dostoevsky’s
Notes from Underground
(
Zapiski iz podpol’ya
) or so often cited as a key text revelatory of the hidden depths of the sensibility of our time. The term “underground man” has become part of the vocabulary of contemporary culture, and this character has now achieved—like Hamlet, Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Faust—the stature of one of the great archetypal literary creations. Most important cultural developments of the present century—Nietzscheanism, Freudianism, expressionism, surrealism, crisis theology, existentialism—have claimed the underground man as their own or have been linked with him by zealous interpreters; and when the underground man has not been hailed as a prophetic anticipation, he has been held up to exhibition as a luridly repulsive warning. The underground man has thus entered into the very warp and woof of modern culture in a fashion testifying to the philosophical suggestiveness and hypnotic power of this first great creation of Dostoevsky’s post-Siberian years.

Notes from Underground
attracted little attention when first published (no critical notice was taken of it in any Russian journal). In 1883, N. K. Mikhailovsky wrote his all-too-influential article, “A Cruel Talent,” citing some of its more sadistic passages and arguing that the utterances and actions of the character illustrated Dostoevsky’s own “tendencies to torture.”
¹
Eight years later, writing from an opposed ideological perspective, V. V. Rozanov interpreted the work as essentially inspired by Dostoevsky’s awareness of the irrational depths of the human soul, with all its conflicting impulses for evil as well as for good. No world order based on reason and rationality could possibly contain this seething
chaos of the human psyche; only religion (Eastern Orthodoxy) could aid man to overcome his capricious and destructive propensities.
²

It was evident from the day of publication that Dostoevsky’s
Notes from Underground
was an attack, particularly in
Part I
, on Chernyshevsky’s philosophy of “rational egoism,” but up to the early 1920s interpreters paid little attention to this ancient quarrel, which was considered only incidental and of no artistic importance. It was assumed that Dostoevsky had been aroused by opposition to Chernyshevsky but had used radical ideas only as a foil. Chernyshevsky had believed that man was innately good and amenable to reason, and that, once enlightened as to his true interests, he would be able, with the help of reason and science, to construct a perfect society. Dostoevsky may have also believed man to be capable of good, but he considered him equally full of evil, irrational, capricious, and destructive inclinations, and, or so interpreters argued, it was
this
disturbing truth that he presented through the underground man as an answer to Chernyshevsky’s naïve optimism.

Such a simplistic reading can hardly be sustained after a little reflection, for it would require us to consider Dostoevsky as just about the worst polemicist in all of literary history. He was, after all, supposedly writing to dissuade readers from accepting Chernyshevsky’s ideas. Could he really have imagined that anyone in his right mind would
prefer
the life of the underground man to the radiant happiness of Chernyshevsky’s denizens of Utopia? Obviously not, and since Dostoevsky was anything but a fool, it may be assumed that the invention of the underground man was not inspired by any such self-defeating notion. In reality, as another line of interpretation soon began to make clear, his attack on Chernyshevsky and the radicals is far more intricate and cunning than had previously been suspected.

The first true glimpse into the artistic logic of
Notes from Underground
appears in an article by V. L. Komarovich, who in 1921 pointed out that Dostoevsky’s novella was structurally dependent on
What Is To Be Done?
³
Whole sections of the work in the second part—the attempt of the underground man to bump into an officer on the Nevsky Prospect, for example, or the famous encounter with the prostitute Liza—are modeled on episodes in Chernyshevsky’s book, and are obvious
parodies
that inverted the meaning of those episodes in their original context. But Komarovich continued to regard the imprecations of the underground man against “reason” in the first part simply as a straightforward argument with Utilitarianism. The underground man was
still speaking for Dostoevsky and could be identified with the author’s own position.