Fyodor Dostoevsky

A good trick, with his name, is to say ‘toy’ in the middle: Dos-toy-ev-ski.
He was born 1821 and grew up on the outskirts of Moscow. His family were
comfortably off – his father was a successful doctor, though he happened to
work at a charitable hospital that provided medical services for the very poor.
The family had a house in the hospital complex, so the young Dostoevsky was
from the very beginning powerfully exposed to experiences from which other
children of his background were usually carefully sheltered. Like almost
everyone in Tsarist Russia his parents were devout Orthodox Christians – and
Dostoevsky’s own religious faith got deeper and stronger all his life.

At the age of 12 he was sent away to school first in Moscow and later in the
capital, St Petersburg – he got a good education, though as a child of the tiny
professional middle-class he felt out of place among his more aristocratic
classmates. While he was away at school his father died – possibly murdered
by his own serfs.
After graduating Dostoevsky worked as an engineer for a while. He started
gambling and losing money (something that was to plague him all his life). In
his late twenties he became friends with a group of radical writers and
intellectuals. He wasn’t deeply involved but when the government decided to
crack down on dissent, Dostoevsky was rounded up too and sentenced to be
shot by a firing squad. At the last moment – when the soldiers were ready to
fire – the message of a reprieve arrived. He was sent instead to Siberia for four
years of forced labour in horrific conditions.

It was only after his return from Siberia that Dostoevsky established himself
as a writer. Starting in middle age he produced a series of major books.
1864 – Notes from Underground
1866 – Crime and Punishment
1869 – The Idiot
1872 – Demons
1880 – Brothers Karamazov
They are dark, violent and tragic – and usually very long and complicated. He
wrote them to preach five important lessons to the world.
(The discussion of Dostoevsky’s ideas involves revealing the plots of some of
his novels. It’s not something that would have worried him because his books
are written to be read more than once. But if it bothers you, this is the place to
break off.)
1. The value of suffering
His first big book – Notes from Underground – is an extended rant against life
and the world delivered by a retired civil servant. He is deeply unreasonable,
inconsistent and furious with everyone (including himself); he’s always getting
into rows, he goes to a reunion of some former colleagues and tells them all
how much he always hated them; he wants to puncture everyone’s illusions
and make them as unhappy as he is. He seems like a grotesque character to
build a book around. But he’s doing something important. He’s insisting – with
a peculiar kind of intensity – on a very strange fact about the human condition:
we want happiness but we have a special talent for making ourselves miserable
– “Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering: that
is a fact,” he asserts.

In the novel, Dostoevsky is taking aim at philosophies of progress and

improvement – which were highly popular in his age (as they continue to be in
ours). He is attacking our habit of telling ourselves that if only this or that thing
were different, we could leave suffering behind. If we got that great job,
changed the government, could afford that great house, invented a machine to
fly us faster around the world, could get together with (or get divorced from) a
particular person, then all would go well. This, Dostoevsky argues, is a
delusion. Suffering will always pursue us. Schemes for improving the world
always contain a flaw: they won’t eliminate suffering, they will only change
the things that cause us pain. Life can only ever be a process of changing the
focus of pain, never removing pain itself. There will always be something to
agonise us. Stop people starving, says Dostoevsky – with calculated
wickedness – and you’ll soon find there’s a new range of agonies: they’ll start
to suffer from boredom, greed or intense melancholy that they haven’t been
invited to the right party.

In this spirit, Notes from Underground launches an attack on all ideologies of

technical or social progress which aspire to the elimination of suffering. They
won’t succeed because as soon as they solve one problem, they’ll direct our
nature to become unhappy in new ways. Dostoevsky is fascinated by the secret
ways we actually don’t want what we theoretically seek: he discusses the
pleasure a lot of people get from feelings of superiority (and for whom,
consequently, an egalitarian society would be a nightmare); or the disavowed
(but real) thrill we get from hearing about violent crimes on the news – in which
case we’d actually feel thwarted in a truly peaceful world. Notes from
Underground is a dark, awkwardly insightful, counterpoint to well-intentioned
modern liberalism.
It doesn’t really show that social improvement is meaningless. But it does
remind us that we’ll always carry our very complex and difficult selves with
us and that progress will never be as clear and clean as we might like to
imagine.
2. We don’t know ourselves
In Crime and Punishment, we meet an impoverished intellectual, Rodion
Raskolnikov. Though he’s a currently nobody, he’s fascinated by power and
ruthlessness. He thinks of himself as a version of Napoleon: “leaders of men,
such as Napoleon, were all without exception criminals, they broke the ancient
laws of their people to make new ones that suited them better, and they never
feared bloodshed.”

Raskolnikov is also desperate for money and so, with his philosophy of
aristocratic superiority in mind, he decides to murder an old woman who is a
small time pawn broker and money lender and steal her cash. He’s tormented
by the mad injustice of the fact that this horrible, mean old character has
drawers full of roubles while he – who is clever, energetic and profound – is
starving. (He doesn’t spend much time thinking about options like taking a job
as a waiter.) He breaks into her apartment and bludgeons her to death; and –
surprised in the act by the woman’s pregnant half-sister – kills her too.
But it turns out he’s nothing like the cold-blooded, rational hero of his
imagination. He is tormented by guilt and horror at what he has done.
Eventually he turns himself over to the police in order to face the proper
punishment for his crime.

We’re (probably) never going to do what Raskolnikov did. But we often share
a troubling tendency with him: we think we know ourselves better than we
actually do. Raskolnikov thinks he’s ruthless; actually he’s rather tender
hearted. He thinks he won’t feel guilt; but he’s overwhelmed by remorse.
Part of our life’s journey is to engage in the tricky task of disentangling
ourselves from what we think we’re like – in order to discover our true nature.
Raskolnikov is especially fascinating because of the direction this self-
discovery takes. His striking realisation is that he’s actually a much nicer
person than he takes himself to be.
Whereas so many novelists delight in showing the sickly reality beneath a
glamorous or enticing facade, Dostoevsky is embarked on a more curious but
rewarding mission: he wants to reveal that beneath the so-called monster, there
is very often a far more interesting tender-hearted character lurking: a nice but
deluded, intelligent but frightened and panicked person.

3. Nice people do some terrible things

Sticking for the moment with Crime and Punishment, it’s very significant the
way Dostoevsky gets us to like his murderous hero. Raskolnikov is clearly an
attractive person. At the very start we’re told –
“By the way, Raskolnikov is handsome, above the average in height, slim,
well-built, with lovely dark eyes and dark brown hair.”
Dostoevsky is lessening the imaginative distance between ‘us’ who live mainly
law abiding and more of less manageable lives and ‘them’ – the ones who do
terrible things and wreak havoc with their lives and those of others. That
person, he is saying, is more like you than you might initially want to think –
and therefore more accessible to sympathy.

The idea that you can be a good person, do something very bad and still deserve
some compassion sounds very slight and obvious – until one has need of this
kind of forgiveness in one’s own life (you may have to be over 30). This is
where Dostoevsky wants to enter our inner conversation with ourselves – and
tell us all about his character Raskolnikov – a serious, thoughtful, good-looking
man who did worse then we have and still can be compassionately understood,
as we can and must all be. This is Dostoevsky’s Christianity at work: no one is
outside the circle of God’s love and understanding.

4. We must learn to appreciate the beauty of life

Dostoevsky’s next great book, The Idiot, takes off from his near-death
experience before the firing squad. In the novel, he recounts what it was like.
Three minutes before his expected death he is able to see life clearly for the
first time. He notices the gilded spire of a nearby church, and how it glitters in
the sun. He’d never before realised how entrancing a glint of sunlight could be.
He is filled with an immense, deep love of the world. You might see a beggar
and think how you would love to change places with them so as to be able to
continue to breathe the air and feel the wind – merely to exist seems (at that
moment of final revelation) infinitely precious. And then the revised order
comes and it is not over at all.
What would it be like to go through one’s whole life in such a state of gratitude
and generosity? You wouldn’t share any of the normal attitudes. You’d love
everyone equally, you’d be enchanted by the simplest things, you’d never feel
angry or frightened. You would seem to other people to be a kind of idiot.
Hence the title of the book.

It’s an extreme version of a very interesting step. We’re continually surrounded

by things which could delight us, if only we saw them the right way, if only
we could learn to appreciate them. Dostoevsky was desperate to communicate
the value of existence before death would overtake him – and us.
5. Idealism has its limits
In Dostoyevsky’s final great work – Brothers Karamazov, which came out
when he was nearly sixty – one of the central characters tells a long story-
within-a-story. It’s called The Grand Inquisitor and imagines that the greatest
event looked forward to by Christian theology – the second coming of Christ
– has in fact already happened. Jesus did come back, several hundred years ago
and turned up in Spain, during the highest period of power of the Catholic
Church – the organisation established, in theory at least, entirely in devotion to
him. Christ is back to fulfil his teachings of forgiveness and universal love. But
something odd happens. The most powerful religious leader – the Grand
Inquisitor – has him arrested and imprisoned.
In the middle of the night, the Grand Inquisitor visits Christ in his cell and
explains that he cannot allow him to do his work on Earth, because he is a
threat to the stability of society.

Christ, he says, is too ambitious – too pure, too perfect. Humanity can’t live up
to the impossible goals he sets us. The fact is, people haven’t been able to live
according to his teachings and Jesus should admit he failed and that his ideas
of redemption were essentially misguided.
The Grand Inquisitor is not really a monster. In fact, Dostoevsky portrays him
as quite an admirable figure in the story. He is a guide to a crucial idea for
Dostoevsky, that human beings cannot live in purity, cannot ever be truly good,
cannot live up to Christ’s message – and that this is something we should
reconcile ourselves to with grace rather than fury or self-hatred.

We have to accept a great deal of unreasonableness, folly, greed, selfishness

and shortsightedness as ineradicable parts of the human condition and plan
accordingly. And it’s not just a pessimistic thesis about politics or religion that
we’re being introduced to. The primary relevance of this thesis is as a
commentary on our own lives: we won’t sort them out, we won’t stop being
being a bit mad and wayward. And we shouldn’t torment ourselves with the
dream that we could – if only we tried hard enough – become the ideal beings
that idealistic philosophies like Christianity like to sketch all too readily.
Dostoyevsky died in 1881. He had a very hard life, but he succeeded in
conveying an idea which perhaps he understood more clearly than anyone: in
a world that’s very keen on upbeat stories, we will always run up against our
limitations as deeply flawed and profoundly muddled creatures. Dostoyevsky’s
attitude – bleak but compassionate, tragic but kind – is needed more than ever
in our naive and sentimental age that so fervently clings to the idea – which
this great Russian loathed – that science can save us all and that we may yet be
made perfect through technology. Dostoyevsky guides us to a more humane
truth: that – as the great sages have always known – life is and ever will be
suffering, and yet that there is great redemption available in articulating this
message in great and complex works of art.