Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Novels, Short Stories and Autobiographical Writings

"Crime and Punishment," "The Idiot," "The Possessed," "A Lad of Twenty," "The Brothers Karamazov," are the great novels of Dostoyevsky. The most accessible to Western readers is certainly "Crime and Punishment." Raskolnikov, who aspired to be a sort of Napoleon in the domain of moral problems, is more or less a universal type of the intellectual. He wished to assert his proud will, to dare to be free in his revolt. He was a super-man before Nietzsche. The Russian part of the Raskolnikov problem begins with his repentance which overflows his soul with an elemental force. "She was no better than vermin, the woman I killed—and yet I must atone for my crime as if it had been of the greatest consequence."

This is the central point of the novel. "Go at once," urges Sonia, who is Raskolnikov's spiritual guide, "go this very minute, stop at the crossing of the roads, bow to the earth, kiss the soil thou hast defiled, bow then to all the world, to all the four sides, and say in a loud voice: 'I have killed.'" Raskolnikov kisses the earth with an ecstasy of joy. His repentance and his atonement are his moral victory, the achievement of the heroic ideal he vainly aspired to achieve by violence.

"Crime and Punishment" is a complete novel in itself; it puts up a problem and solves it to the end. All the other novels are each part of Dostoyevsky's teaching, and the characters which appear in them are related to each other, some of them representing the aspiring mystic faith, and some the revolted agnosticism fighting against it. The hero of "The Idiot," Prince Myshkin, represents the fullest realization of Dostoyevsky's ideal of those "who are of the future city of light." He is an idiot, an epileptic, unsound in the eyes of ordinary people, but his "flaming' brain" sees visions of a harmonic universe, and he is ready to pay the price of his life for a moment of these revelations. His inner fight helps all the suffering humanity that surrounds him, all those who are entangled in the problems of their passions, whose love is a cruel desire to subjugate and to victimize the weaker souls or to fight the stronger ones. He loves no one with an exclusive love but he pities all, and his pity is a miraculous means to come to a simple harmony of life, to achieve in each single soul its individual problem. The character opposed to him, Rogozhine, is a man out of the "real city," a man rooted in reality with all his contradictory passions, a man of the Russian soil. Yet in the eyes of Dostoyevsky, Myshkin, who passes like a vision through the novel, represents the true—the mystic reality, and the real men and women are apparitions, "dreams in a dream."

"The Idiot," as well as "Crime and Punishment," deals chiefly and almost exclusively with individual problems. In "The Possessed" and in his most synthetic novel, "The Brothers Karamazov," Dostoyevsky plunges into the deepest religious and national problems. "The Possessed" was conceived partly as a satire against the Russian revolutionaries. In his strong opposition to all violence as being contrary to the spirit of Russia, Dostoyevsky became an adversary of revolutionary ways in politics; his chief grievance against the socialists was their agnosticism. This forms the foundation of "The Possessed" (the title points to the revolutionaries possessed by evil spirits), but the novel is much more than a satire. It contains the religious teaching of Dostoyevsky, the ideal of the "God-man," of the man who sees his salvation in the submergence of his human individuality in God, in the closest communion with Christ, in the readiness to take upon himself the sacrifice of Christ and to unite with the Son of the Lord in God the Father, to disappear as a personality for the supreme resurrection in the all-embracing unity of God. The contrast of the "God-man" in the teaching of Dostoyevsky is the "man-God" the Antichrist, the revolted agnostic whose desire is to destroy the faith in order to become God himself. No human being can exist without an ideal, without a symbol of sacredness. If his temple is empty he will put his own image on the altar. This is how Dostoyevsky explains the psychology of all the agnostics he pictures in "The Possessed." There is a large collection of them in the novel. The chief, the most fascinating, the real Antichrist is Nikolai Stavrogin, the leader of the socialist group. He wants to be the god of all those he fascinates and seduces by his intellectual power. He is ready to offer shrewd arguments to support the idea of "God-man" when he speaks to those whose faith is yet unshaken; but he does it in order to gain them over to his own proud agnosticism and to his self-assertion. He is an eloquent agnostic and preacher of a man-God ideal when addressing his followers. He dares much, he destroys many souls, but he is wrecked because he dared too much. He becomes a prey to the "evil spirits" and commits suicide. So does the other "possessed" of the novel, Kirilov. He preached the man-God theory all his life, but the desire to commune with the living God, the mystic thirst becomes such an agony to his soul that he puts an end to his doubts by taking his own life. And all the "possessed" are the victims of their doubts and their revolt against the divine truth of the universe.

"The Brothers Karamazov" contains the national message of Dostoyevsky, intimately connected with his religious ideals. Those of the future "city of light" are represented in the novel by the most inspired creations of Dostoyevsky, by the saintly recluse, Father Zosima, and the youngest of the Karamazovs, the pure boy, Alesha. They both know how the contest between the theories of God-man and man-God can and ought to be solved. They found the issue in the soul of the Russian peasant who unites the truth on earth, the truth of the earth, which is the life and the work on the land, with the divine truth which is not yet revealed but will be revealed. The almost identical Russian word for Christian and peasant (krestianin and khristianin) is in the eyes of Dostoyevsky a symbol of the mystic message of the Russian peasant to the universe. This message is, according to Dostoyevsky, the universal spiritual union of all men in Christ. The opposed element, the revolt against faith, is represented in the novel by powerful symbolic figures: by the devil who appears to Ivan Karamazov and tempts him with arguments of materialistic reason mystically tinged by revelations of supernatural truth. The other Antichrist of the novel is the Spanish Jesuit, the head of the Counsel of Inquisition. He defends the power of the Church against Christ himself. His argument is that the safeguard of the human conscience lies in the Church and that men are not prepared and not fit to exist on earth in the presence of Christ Between the two extremes of faith and revolt moves the criminal family of the Karamazovs, representing all of suffering and erring humanity. To them, to the whole of Russia, and to the whole universe does Dostoyevsky address his message of mystical pity and redeeming endurance and love which he has discovered in the soul of the Russian peasant.

In the rest of his novels Dostoyevsky studies the same problems, penetrating into all the shades of human passions, of human doubts and failings, and discovering the mystic issues they reveal. Dostoyevsky felt so absolutely united with all that is contained in the soul of the Russian people that we always think he was the truest mirror of Russia. The Western readers of his works must feel the truth of it. If they are won by the fascination of his genius, they certainly will love in his art his country, which was the greatest love of Dostoyevsky.

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THE life of Dostoevski contrasts harshly with the luxurious ease and steady level seen in the outward existence of his two great contemporaries, Turgenev and Tolstoi. From beginning to end he lived in the very heart of storms, in the midst of mortal coil. He was often as poor as a rat; he suffered from a horrible disease; he was sick and in prison, and no one visited him; he knew the bitterness of death. Such a man’s testimony as to the value of life is worth attention; he was a faithful witness, and we know that his testimony is true.