DOSTOEVSKY, FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH. - The greatest Russian novelist, b. to a military doctor, in straitened economic circumstances, in Moscow on 30 Oct. 1821, d. in St. Petersburg on 9 Feb. 1881.
I. LIFE AND WORKS
From 1856 he attended the military engineering school in St. Petersburg. He finished his studies in 1843 and was subsequently promoted officer. His stay in the army, moreover, was not long. In fact, shortly afterwards he began to devote himself entirely to literature.
His first story Poor Folk was well received by the critic Belinsky, who nevertheless misunderstood its meaning. In St. Petersburg he became acquainted with the progressive circles; and, as a frequenter of the circle of Butashevich-Petrashevsky, broadly oriented toward the utopian socialism of C. Fourier, in 1849 he was arrested together with other young men. Some of these, among them D. himself, were condemned to death: the execution, however, was suspended at the last moment and the death sentence commuted to four years of hard labor in Siberia. His stay in the prison house brought him closer to the people and estranged him from the Europeanizing and progressive ideas of his youth. In 1857 he married a widow, who died in 1864. In 1859 he was finally able to settle in St. Petersburg, where he wrote - the fruit of the tragic experience of the penal colony - Memoirs from the House of the Dead (1861-62). There followed The Insulted and the Injured (1862) and Notes from Underground (1863). Ever more clearly there took shape in the writer's mind an attempt at reconciliation between Slavophilism and Westernism ("reconciliation of civilization with the popular principle, synthesis of the educated Russian class with the forces of the popular classes, synthesis of all the ideas developed singly in the various countries of Europe into an idea of universal humanity"). This tendency was finally fully developed by D. in his famous speech on Pushkin in 1880, with an ever more religious accent.
The novel Crime and Punishment (1865-66) contributed powerfully to the universality of his fame. In 1867 he remarried and, hounded by creditors, often ill (he also suffered from epilepsy), he left Russia with his new wife. He stayed abroad for four years (from April 1867 to July 1871). He was a passionate gambler. Abroad he wrote The Gambler, The Idiot (1869), The Eternal Husband and The Demons (1870 ff.). Back in Russia there appeared The Adolescent (1875) and The Brothers Karamazov (1878-80), a novel conceived as part of a larger work. He also resumed his journalistic activity and began to publish, continuing it until his death, the Diary of a Writer. Having returned to St. Petersburg, D. died there. Considered by a certain Russian criticism as a mystic revealer of a great ideal typically Russian and Slav, misunderstood by others as an "artist of chaos," universally admired for his profound introspection of the human soul in good and in evil, the most recent Italian criticism has recognized in him the great classic.
The principal problems for D. are God and man. D. is tormented by the problem of the existence of God and of atheism (cf. the dialectic and psychology of the hero of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, of the heroes of The Demons, Kirillov and Stavrogin, of Ivan Karamazov, etc.). Starting, like Gogol, from the analysis of the Russian man, of Russian political and social life, he arrives at scrutinizing man in general and humanity. D. studies man, not only conscious, but also in the subconscious, man between good and evil, in the duplicity of his existence which has the choice between faith and atheism, God and himself, total unity or inner isolation. For D. as a Christian the alternative holds: either the man-God (cf. Nietzsche's superman) or the God-man Christ. According to D. all merely natural attempts to organize society according to pre-established plans are vain, given the irrational nature of man, who seeks to affirm his own freedom without limit, even for the sake of destruction and chaos. Hence his aversion to socialism, the Catholic Church and especially the papacy, which would agree in the realization of a dechristianized uniform society, dominated by measures of force and by purely external authority (an "anthill," a "crystal palace," a "chicken coop"). But, waging such a struggle against the harmony of the world (cf. Ivan Karamazov) and the Catholic Church, he does not see that he is rebelling indirectly against God, the author of such an order. Therefore D., although purely natural humanism reached in him its culmination and its crisis - which consists in the knowledge that pure humanity comes to destroy itself, to commit suicide, if it is not illuminated from above, regenerated, redeemed by Christ -, remains incapable of refuting it and of entirely overcoming it.
In his Slavophile messianism D. shows very close ties with Ivan Kireyevsky and with Khomyakov. From Gogol he took various suggestions in his youthful stories, especially in Poor Folk and in The Double (Dvojnik). D.'s friendship with the young Solovyov was close (from 1873 onward), as was their communion of ideas (it is reflected, for example, in the application of the three temptations of Christ to the history of Catholicism, in Solovyov's "Lectures on Divine Humanity" and in D.'s "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor"; one may also compare the idea of Divine Humanity in Solovyov with the man-God and the God-man in D.). D. then inspired the so-called "Russian Renaissance," at the beginning of the 20th century, at whose center stood V. Ivanov, N. Berdyaev, S. Bulgakov, P. Florensky, etc. From D. derives especially the Russian current of existentialism, whose principal representatives were N. Berdyaev and Lev Shestov. D. notably influenced the new modernist Russian soteriology (especially that taught by M. Tareev, by Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), by N. Berdyaev, N. Arsenyev and others).
II. DOSTOEVSKY FROM THE CATHOLIC POINT OF VIEW
Personally D. had a deep faith and felt Christ intimately. He saw Christ at the center of the whole world ("Christocentrism"). For him Christ is all love, gentleness, meekness, freedom; he excludes from Christ, as from the Church, everything that is authoritarian and juridical. In the mystery of the Redemption he emphasizes exclusively the example of Christ and his regenerating influence that is psychologically conscious (passing over in silence the objective part). D.'s Christianity is one-sided, too ideal, abstract and not without a certain sentimental accent. There are traces of paganism (e.g., the cult of the mother earth). His Christianity is decidedly national
("Russian God", "Russian Christ"), and it lacks universality. Despite the efforts made, D. did not succeed in finding the balance between true Russian Orthodoxy and true universal Christianity, between Russian messianism and the recognition of the Christian vocation of all peoples. His theory that the State should become the Church is illusory. He fails to bring Christ and the Church into relation with the field of everyday human activity, with work, with culture, with the social field. Finally, his point of view on Catholicism is erroneous. He pushed the Slavophile conception (especially that of Kiréevskij and Chomjakov) to extremes, namely that Catholicism is the continuation of the pagan Roman Empire, that at bottom it is based on unbelief, that from it were born first Protestantism, then rationalism and modern atheism, and also atheistic socialism, that Catholicism preaches a disfigured Christ, an anti-Christianity, that, in short, the papacy came out of the mind of the tempter of Christ in the desert. On the other hand D. showed an unjustified optimism regarding "Russian Christianity", as the history of the Russian Church has recently demonstrated.
Bibliography8 works
Bernardo Schultze