The Dostoevsky Journal: An Independent Review, 14-15 (2013-2014), 12-26.

ANTONY JOHAE

ON THE TELEOLOGICAL THRESHOLD: DOS-

TOEVSKY’S EXECUTION
OF THE EXECUTION MOTIF

ABSTRACT:
The traumatic event in the author’s life – a mock execution – has found
its way into his works, both fiction and non-fiction, in an almost obses-
sively repetitious manner. Dostoevsky finds this original trauma analo-
gous to many kinds of “threshold” events in which the moment before the
final crossing over – be it murder, confession or a proposal of marriage –
is experienced similarly as one of heightened awareness and acute inten-
sity. The paper explores such “threshold” events in Dostoevsky’s opus.

KEY WORDS:
Punishment, Execution, Threshold, Analogy, Philosophy
In his forward to ‘The Meek One’ (also known in English as ‘A Gen-
tle Spirit’),1 Dostoevsky, in discussing the implausible position of the nar-
rator in his story, offers Victor Hugo’s Dernier jour d’un condamné (The
Last Days of a Condemned Man) as an example of the kind of narration
he has himself attempted. Hugo, Dostoevsky remarks, presumed that a
man condemned to death would have been able (and would have had
time) to keep a diary not only of his last day, but even in his last hour –
and, literally during his last minute. However, had he not resorted to this
fantasy, the work itself would have been non-existent [. . .]2
Underlining the formal point Dostoevsky is making, there is perhaps a
much more important oblique reference to the recurring motif of execu-
tion in his own novels, for he, unlike the French writer, did live through

                                                            
1. The story was published in the November edition of The Diary of a Writer,
1876.
2. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Diary of a Writer, Boris Brasol, trans. (Haslemere:
Ianmede, 1984), pp. 491-92. Dostoevsky cites Hugo in the letter to his brother, Mi-
chael, following the stay of execution: “On voit le soleil!” words which he later puts
into the mouth of Dmitry Karamazov on hearing sentence pronounced. See Konstan-
tin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, Michael M. Miniham, trans. (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 141-42.
On the Teleological Threshold: Dostoevsky’s Execution of the Execution Motif 13

the last day, hour and even minute before execution, but without the final
shot being fired. In 1849, he was arrested for participating in a meeting of
the radical Petrashevsky circle and was condemned, without trial, to face
the firing squad together with other members of the circle. Dostoevsky
described the scene of execution thus:

To-day, the 22nd of December, we were all taken to

Semjonovsky Square. There the death-sentence was read to us, we
were given the Cross to kiss, the dagger was broken over our
heads, and our funeral toilet (white shirts) was made. Then three of
us were put standing before the palisades for the execution of the
death-sentence. I was sixth in the row; we were called up by groups
of three, and so I was in the second group, and had not more than a
minute to live. [. . .] I had time to embrace Plestcheiev and Dourov,
who stood near me, and to take my leave of them. Finally, retreat
was sounded, those who were bound to the palisades were brought
back, and it was read to us that His Imperial Majesty granted us our
lives. Then the final sentences were recited.3

If, in this account written in a letter to his brother, Michael, Dostoev-

sky appears remarkably detached, it is so because the letter was written
immediately following the stay of execution and had to pass the scrutiny
of the prison authorities. Dostoevsky merely wished to convey the facts to
his brother without in any way evoking the horror of the experience and
thus jeopardizing any possibility of the letter reaching its destination.
Years later in an article written for the journal Grazhdanin (The Citizen),4
Dostoevsky was vividly to recall what he had endured:
I also stood on the scaffold, condemned to death [he addresses his
readers], and I assure you that I stood there in the company of educated
people. [. . .] No, we were not unruly and, perhaps, we were even not bad
young men. The verdict of capital punishment, by facing a firing squad,
preliminarily read to all of us, had been read by no means jestingly: al-
most all the condemned men were convinced that it would be carried out,
and they endured at least ten dreadful, boundlessly horrible minutes
awaiting death. During these last minutes several among us [. . .] instinc-
tively wrapped ourselves deep in our thoughts and momentarily glanced
over our whole, still so youthful, lives, even perhaps repenting some of
our bad deeds (those which in every man lie secretly buried in his con-
science). But the deed for which we were convicted; those ideas and con-
                                                            
3. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to His Family
and Friends, Ethel Colburn, trans. (New York: New York Library, 1961), p. 53.
4. Dostoevsky published The Diary of a Writer in Grazhdanin (The Citizen).
14 The Dostoevsky Journal: An Independent Review

ceptions which ruled our spirit, were regarded by us not only as not re-
quiring repentance but even as something purifying – as martyrdom, for
which we would be forgiven much!5
It is hardly surprising that such a traumatic event in the author’s life
should find its way into his works, both fiction and non-fiction, in an al-
most obsessively repetitious manner; but it is perhaps not so easily recog-
nized that Dostoevsky should find it analogous to many kinds of “thresh-
old” event in which the moment before the final crossing over – be it
murder, confession or a proposal of marriage – is experienced similarly as
one of heightened awareness and acute intensity. It is the kind of crossing
over from which one feels that, once made, there can be no retraction.
In one of a number of his discussions of court cases in The Diary of a
Writer, Dostoevsky likens the near murder of an actress, Kairova by
name, to execution by making oblique reference to his own experience:

She [Kairova] endured several [. . .] minutes of deadly fear. Do

you know what deadly fear is? [Dostoevsky asks his readers.] He
who has never faced death at close range can hardly comprehend it.
She had been awakened at night by the razor of her murderess who
slashed her on her throat; she saw bending over herself an infuriat-
ed face; she defended herself while the other kept slashing her. Of
course, during those first, unbearable minutes she was sure that she
would be killed and that death was inevitable. Indeed, this is un-
bearable; this is a delirious nightmare experienced while awake,
and thus a hundred times more tortuous. This is almost akin to a
death sentence to a man tied to a post to be shot [. . .] when a hood
is already pulled over his head [. . .]6

It is worth noting the nightmarish quality of both the experience of be-

ing murdered and that of being executed, the point being that nightmare
actually implies a reprieve for the victim because at the crucial moment
of finalizing the action, the murderer or the executioner is forestalled by
the intervention of a controlling influence having the power to restore
conditions to a circumstantial, and therefore emotional, equilibrium: the
dreamer awakens from his nightmare!
In another reference to a court case concerning a woman, Kornilova,
committed for re-trial having once been sentenced to hard labor, Dostoev-
sky expresses the hope that she will not once again be found guilty, be-
cause to be found so would be

                                                            
5. Dostoevsky, The Diary of a Writer, pp. 147, 151-52.
6. Ibid., pp. 328-29.
On the Teleological Threshold: Dostoevsky’s Execution of the Execution Motif 15

akin to a situation where a man condemned to die before a firing

squad would suddenly be untied from the post; hope would be re-
stored to him; the bandage would be removed from his eyes; once
more he would be seeing the sunlight – but five minutes later he
would again be tied to the post.7

No doubt in employing such an analogy Dostoevsky had in mind not

only his own experience, but was also thinking of the mental projections
he had made of a rescinded reprieve – the nightmares, as it were, arising
out of the experience of mock execution.
Again in The Diary of a Writer Dostoevsky likens the distracted mo-
ment of loading a gun preceding a sacrilegious act to the moments before
the execution of Madame Dubarry who apparently cried to the execution-
er, “Encore un moment, Monsieur le borreau, encore un moment!” in or-
der to gain a momentary reprieve.8 Here Dostoevsky uses the analogy
slightly differently because whereas in the previous examples it is the re-
cipient of the violent act who is placed at the center of the crisis, here it is
the “murderer” himself who finds himself subject to a dread similar to
that felt by the “victim”. Dread lies at the centre of what, on the face of it,
appear to be disparate experiences, which explains how, in Crime and
Punishment, Raskol’nikov approaches the moment of confession to Sonia
with the same awesome intensity as he had when disengaging the axe
with the intention of murdering the money lender, and how, again, imme-
diately preceding confession, “he felt like a man who was about to jump
off a high church tower.”9 Suicide, confession, murder and execution, de-
picted by Dostoevsky both literally and metaphorically, act as circum-
stantial variables for the constant emotion – Dread; and dread, as Mac-
quarrie aptly puts it, drawing on Søren Kierkegaard’s views expressed in
The Concept of Dread, is “a kind of instability before action. It is [. . .]
the ‘vertigo’ or ‘dizziness’ of freedom. For freedom means possibility,
and to stand on the edge of possibility is rather like standing on the edge
of a precipice.”10
One recalls Dostoevsky’s penchant for gambling which provided him
with first hand material for his novel, The Gambler. Again what is im-
                                                            
7. Ibid., pp. 532-33.
8. Ibid,, p. 41.
9. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, David Magarshack, trans. (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 422 and 424. For similar metaphors of height in
conjunction with “threshold” experience, see “The Double” in Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Notes from Underground and The Double, Jessie Coulson, trans. (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1972), p. 171 and Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, David
Magarshack, trans. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 1:223 and 246.
10. John Macquarrie, Existentialism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 167.
16 The Dostoevsky Journal: An Independent Review

portant here is not the “vice” itself (about which Freud has something to
say),11 but the teleological moment of anxiety on the threshold of experi-
ence, a moment which Sartre describes as being like “the gambler who
has freely and sincerely decided not to gamble anymore and who, when
he approaches the gaming table, suddenly sees all his resolutions melt
away.”12 Gambling, however, does not appear as one of the dominant af-
fective motifs in Dostoevsky’s works, apart, that is, from the novel, The
Gambler. The theme of violence, on the other hand, is one that does and
is nearly always drawn, either from the first hand experience of a novel
character, or secondarily from reported sources as in The Idiot where
Prince Myshkin recalls the account given him by a man who, while facing
the firing squad, is granted a last minute reprieve.13 It is an experience
which is to be re-enacted analogously with the prince in the central role of
“condemned man”. The primary circumstance for this is Myshkin’s epi-
lepsy where in the awesome seconds before a fit there is “an intense
heightening of awareness [. . .] and at the same time of the most direct
sensation of one’s own existence to the most intense degree,”14 corre-
sponding to the dreadful moments before execution. In these moments
time suffers a transformation: instants are converted into eons. The mo-
ments before execution appear to the condemned man “like an eternity to
him, riches beyond the dreams of avarice,”15 while the onset of an epilep-
tic fit vindicates “the extraordinary saying that ‘there shall be time no
longer’ [. . . .] this is the very second in which there was not time enough
for the water from the pitcher of the epileptic Mahomet to spill, while he
had plenty of time in that very second to behold all the dwellings of Al-
lah.”16
The person at the centre of the occurrence is able in those moments to
make out final causes without in any way being able to find an adequate
language with which to express his insight. One recalls, here, Kierke-
gaard’s notion of the teleological occurrence and, in particular, his words
concerning Abraham’s journey to Mount Moriah to sacrifice his son, Is-
sac. “I would remind the audience” says Kierkegaard, “that the journey
                                                            
11. Sigmund Freud, “Dostoevsky and Parricide”, in Rene Wellek, ed., Dostoevsky:
A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962), pp. 108-
09. For a comprehensive survey of the gambling motif in Dostoevsky’s works see
Jacques Catteau, Dostoevsky and the Process of Literary Creation, Audrey Little-
wood, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), ch. 6.
12. Quoted from Macquarrie, Existentialism, p. 170.
13. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, David Magarshack, trans. (Harmonsdworth: Penguin,
1971), pp. 86-88.
14. Ibid., p. 259.
15. Ibid., p. 87.
16. Ibid., p. 259.
On the Teleological Threshold: Dostoevsky’s Execution of the Execution Motif 17

lasted three days and a good part of the fourth, yea, that these three and a
half days were infinitely longer than the few thousand years which sepa-
rate me from Abraham.”17 Kierkegaard rejects any romantic heroic inter-
pretation of Abraham’s ordeal of the kind where

one mounts a winged horse the same instant one is at Mount Mori-
ah, the same instant one sees the ram; one forgets that Abraham
rode only upon an ass, which walks slowly along the road, that he
had a journey of three days, that he needed some time to cleave the
wood, to bind Isaac, and to sharpen the knife.18

Whereas a “winged” horse connotes an unrealistic romantic attitude

towards heroic deeds, the “plodding” ass is allied to the distress, dread
and torment involved in the tortuous journey to God. From a Christian ex-
istentialist viewpoint, to be “condemned” as the patriarch Abraham was
“condemned” is actually to exist in an uncommon dimension of reality in
which the temporal takes on the attributes of infinitude. There is an affec-
tual and philosophical trans-valuation of time of the kind St. Augustine
wrote of in his Confessions: “The past is always driven on by the future,
the future always follows on the heels of the past and both the past and
the future have their beginning and their end in the eternal present.”19 It is
important to reiterate, though, that here is no flight in the romantic mode,
but rather the acceptance of human limitations: life is taken on trust in all
its multiple absurdity. The sharpened consciousness of the condemned
man, while it is moved by a “blinding inner light”20 and is also acutely re-
ceptive to the minutiae of the world which surrounds it, is nevertheless
blinded by the inner light, as, indeed, it cannot see through the surface of
the exterior world. The condemned man finds himself confronted by the
Absurd, yet suspects that as “Dreams [. . .] are often most profound when
they seem most crazy,”21 so, too, life bears its signification when display-
ing its unreasonable aspect. Time and again in Dostoevsky’s novels the
moment before execution is invoked as an epitome of the inherently ab-
surd situation of humans in the world. It is a motif recurring so frequently

                                                            
17. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling with The Sickness unto Death, Walter
Lowrie, trans. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), p. 64.
18. Ibid., pp. 62-63.
19. Augustine, Confessions, R.S. Pine-Coffinp, trans. (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1973), p. 262.
20. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, p. 267.
21. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, James Strachey, trans. (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 575.
18 The Dostoevsky Journal: An Independent Review

and with such pervasiveness and intensity that it has the value of sym-
bol.22
If, as Richard Peace asserts, “Judgment and condemnation, [in The Id-
iot] and its development proceeds according to the logic of inversion and
the fluidity of concepts which characterize the progress of a dream,”23 it
is relevant to note that Myshkin does actually dream about an execution,
though whether or not he takes the part of the condemned man or the exe-
cutioner is never made clear because the dream is never recounted. Mau-
ry, a French contemporary of Dostoevsky, did record just such a dream in
his Le sommeil et les rêves (Sleep and Dreams), the details of which bear
a remarkable likeness to Dostoevsky’s descriptions. (Maury’s dream is
here recounted by Freud):

He was ill and lying in his room in bed, with his mother sitting
beside him, and dreamt that it was during the Reign of Terror. Af-
ter witnessing a number of frightful scenes of murder, he was final-
ly himself brought before the revolutionary tribunal. There he saw
Robespierre, Marat, Fouquier-Tinville and the rest of the grim he-
roes of those terrible days. He was questioned by them, and after a
number of incidents which were not retained in his memory, was
condemned, and led to the place of execution surrounded by an
immense mob. He climbed on to the scaffold and was bound to the
plank by the executioner. It was tipped up. The blade of the guillo-
tine fell. He felt his head being separated from his body, woke up
in extreme anxiety [. . .]24

Myshkin’s dream of the last five minutes before execution, which no

doubt was experienced with all the clarity and horror of the Frenchman’s
dream, is actually made up from what Freud describes as the “residues of
the day”; i.e., images deriving from the day prior to the dream. Myshkin,
it will be recalled, dreamed his dream after he had been told about the ex-
perience of mock execution.25 Similarly, in Crime and Punishment,
Raskolnilov dreams that his landlady is beaten by the assistant superin-
tendent following shortly upon the violence he has himself committed
towards the money lender, Alyona, and her half-sister, Lizaveta. Dream
images do not emanate from the initial experiential source but are merely

                                                            
22. See, for example, Crime and Punishment, p. 92; The Idiot, pp. 87, 92; The
Brothers Karamazov pp. 598-99, 758, 845, 851.
23. Richard Peace, Dostoevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), p. 120.
24. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, pp. 87-88.
25. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, p. 88.
On the Teleological Threshold: Dostoevsky’s Execution of the Execution Motif 19

the ostensible material for the original dream thought. The etiology of the
dream cannot be assigned either to the account of execution given to
Myshkin, nor to Raskol’nikov’s act of murder, for these events are too re-
cent in their experience to figure as anything bur symbolic elements in the
dream. They must stem from some event in the dreamer’s past for which
the network of dream symbols is merely a paradigmatic disguise. In The
Idiot there is insufficient data concerning the early years of the orphaned
Prince Myshkin to allow the motivational source of the dream to be locat-
ed with any certitude. This notwithstanding, one cannot help but be struck
by the obsessive way in which execution recurs in Myshkin’s thoughts –
both conscious and unconscious; not only does he recount someone else’s
experience of last minute reprieve before execution with such precision
that it is almost as though the experience had been his own,26 but he has
also, a month earlier in Lyons, witnessed a public guillotine, a spectacle
which has made such a deep impression on him that he had dreamed of it
“half a dozen” times since.27 It is the process of public execution recount-
ed which prompts Myshkin to suggest the title: “the condemned man a
minute before the fall of the guillotine blade”28 as a subject for Adelaida
Yepanchin to paint, the theme having already been suggested to him by a
painting he has seen in Basel.29 In his discourse with the Yepanchins’
footman preceding his first interview with the Yepanchin family, Mysh-
kin already makes an association between the suffering of a condemned
man and the agony of Christ, and it is no doubt the painting by Holbein of
the crucified Christ taken down from the cross and placed in the tomb
(i.e., the Basel picture), a reproduction of which Myshkin’s surrogate
brother, Rogozhin, has hanging in his house, which confirms for him the
burden of universal suffering which all condemned men take upon them-
selves.
It might be argued that Myshkin’s preoccupation has the marks of an
unhealthy obsession in the manner of Maturin or De Sade, both of whom
took pleasure in public execution.30 There is a tinge of ambiguity about
the way in which, at the execution in Lyons, Myshkin “didn’t like it at
all”, “was rather ill afterwards”, yet looked at the execution “as though
rooted to the spot.”31 And in one instance at least, he betrays a bad faith
that puts into question his whole interest in capital punishment. The occa-

                                                            
26. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, pp. 86-87.
27. Ibid., pp. 46-48.
28. Ibid., p. 90
29. Ibid., p. 90.
30. See Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, Angus Davidson, trans. 3rd ed. (London:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 119, note 68.
31. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, p. 189.
20 The Dostoevsky Journal: An Independent Review

sion for this is when he suggests to the Yepanchin footman that “Possibly
there are men who have sentences of death read out to them and have
been given time to go through this torture, and have then been told, you
can go now, you’ve been reprieved”32 knowing full well that a person of
his acquaintance has been through exactly this ordeal. Myshkin’s concern
may not be ethically based but rather a case of what Freud calls “hysteri-
cal identification,” a condition which “enables patients to express in their
symptoms not only their own experiences, but also those of a large num-
ber of other people; it enables them, as it were, to suffer on behalf of a
whole crowd of people and to act all the parts in a play single-handed.”33
Certainly there is an accumulation of evidence supporting a proposition
of neurotic symptoms fulfilling unconscious wishes. Why else would
Myshkin time and again recount at length the feelings of a man going to
his death right up to “the last fraction of a second when his head already
lies on the block and he waits, and he – knows, and suddenly he hears the
iron come slithering down over his head!”34 or describe in detail the
mechanism of execution? – “It only takes an instant. The man is laid
down, then a sort of broad knife falls down on an engine – they call it a
guillotine. It comes down heavily, with tremendous force [etc.]”?35 Why,
again, should he take such delight in hearing anguished accounts of exe-
cution? – “I very much liked to listen to him when he used to recall his
impression of those moments [before execution],” Myshkin announces to
the Yepanchin women.36 Why, also, is he so eager for literal representa-
tions of execution – of the condemned man’s face “as white as paper [. . .]
the priest’s face, the faces of the executioner and his two assistants [. .
.]”37 – to be painted by Adelaida, a depiction of abject suffering equal in
intensity to that depicted by Holbein? And, finally, what is his general
purpose in carrying out research into capital punishment?38
If it is true that Myshkin’s mind is so haunted by the notion of execu-
tion that his concern appears like an obsession, it may also be the case
that a deeply held moral conviction, supported by a practice involving the
assumption of responsibility for the burden of others, is adhered to by
Myshkin with the same single-mindedness as one of Kierkegaard’s
“knights of faith.”

                                                            
32. Ibid., p. 48.
33. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 232.
34. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, p. 92.
35. Ibid., p. 46.
36. Ibid., p. 86.
37. Ibid., p. 193.
38. Ibid., p. 423.
On the Teleological Threshold: Dostoevsky’s Execution of the Execution Motif 21

[T]he knight will have power to concentrate the whole content

of life and the whole significance of reality in one single wish
[Kierkegaard writes]. If a man lacks this concentration, this intensi-
ty, if his soul from the beginning is dispersed in the multifarious,
he never comes to the point of making the movement, he will deal
shrewdly in life like the capitalists who invest their money in all
sorts of securities, so as to gain on the one what they lose on the
other – in short, he is not a knight.39

Myshkin’s intense concentration on the lot of the condemned con-

forms, not to the diffused activities of the capitalist of whom there are
numerous representatives in The Idiot, but rather to the few who are pre-
pared to endure the paradoxes of faith. The pain “is his [the knight of
faith’s] assurance that he is in the right way.”40 It is “a solitary path, nar-
row and steep” which he walks “without meeting a single traveler. He
knows very well where he is and how he is related to men. Humanly
speaking, he is crazy and cannot make himself intelligible to anyone.”41
In Myshkin’s case what seems like madness may actually be a mani-
festation of his belief that compassion is “the chief and, perhaps, the only
law of all human existence,”42 the practice of which is a complete empa-
thy with, and participation in, the sufferings of those condemned: with
Nastasya Filippovna, (who is eventually murdered) and with Rogozhin
(the murderer who will be condemned in his turn). The willingness with
which Myshkin takes upon himself the sufferings of others has the effect
of bringing to the surface the phobias, obsessions and vices of those for
whom his concern is expressed; he suffers with them and by so doing is
able to intuit the nature of their malaise – Rogozhin’s penchant for meting
out flagellation and Nastasya Filippovna’s penchant for receiving it. It is
Myshkin who, to some extent, uncovers the concealed characteristics of-
fered by the author in nomenclatural clues.43
Another of the condemned with whom Myshkin avows empathy is Ip-
polit Terentev, who attempts to commit suicide in order to outdo his inev-
itable death by consumption. (Dostoevsky was himself to die from a lung
complaint.) For Ippolit, as for Myshkin, the figure of the dead Christ tak-
en down from the cross poses somber questions concerning human suffer-
ing, mortality and futurity.

                                                            
39. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 53.
40. Ibid., p. 90.
41. Ibid., p. 86.
42. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, p. 263.
43. For a comprehensive survey of Dostoevsky’s covert naming symbolism, see
Peace, Dostoevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels, pp. 84-86.
22 The Dostoevsky Journal: An Independent Review

Looking at that picture, [Ippolit observes] you get the impres-

sion of nature as some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or
to put it more correctly, much more correctly, though it may seem
strange, as some huge engine of the latest design, which has sense-
lessly seized, cut to pieces and swallowed up – impassively and un-
feelingly – a great and priceless Being, a Being worth the whole of
nature and all of its laws, worth the entire earth, which was perhaps
created solely for the coming of that Being! The picture seems to
give expression to the idea of a dark, insolent, and senselessly eter-
nal power, to which everything is subordinated, and this idea is
suggested to you unconsciously.44

But whereas Myshkin rejects the literal manner of the picture because
it seems to offer no hope of resurrection, Ippolit acknowledges it as an
authentic depiction of a mindless and pitiless reality from which there is
no escape for anyone. This does not mean to say that he is resigned to
such a fate, for as he himself says, “I cannot submit to a dark power
which assumes the form of a tarantula,”45 which is why in a gesture of
freedom he puts the pistol to his head.
We may see, then, that differing attitudes towards the outcome of
death cannot in any way alter the indisputable fact of death, an event
which every human being has eventually to face. Myshkin’s propensity
for punishment may not be a morbid seeking after death, as we have ear-
lier surmised, but a search beyond death to ascertain whether or not the
“soul will fly out of [the] body,”46 or whether the rich inner life is ulti-
mately to be proved an absurdity by nature of its mortality.
Kierkegaard wrote in Fear and Trembling: “[. . .] that no-one can ex-
perience death before he actually dies [. . .] appears to me a crass materi-
alism [. . .].”47 Myshkin’s conduct vindicates Kierkegaard’s words, yet
still the questions raised by the probe remain unanswered. No little death,
whether it is an epileptic fit, mock execution or a baulked attempt at sui-
cide, will suffice. Only, with the experience of Death itself – “the one
form of punishment which admits of no degrees”48 – can anyone “know”

                                                            
44. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, p. 447. On Holbein’s painting in The Idiot, see Antony
Johae, “Dostoevsky's Walls and Holbein’s Paintings,” Germano-Slavica, 7.2-8.1
(1992-1993), pp. 102-05.
45. Ibid., p. 450.
46. Ibid., p. 47.
47. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 56.
48. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 355, note.2.
On the Teleological Threshold: Dostoevsky’s Execution of the Execution Motif 23

what lies on the other side of mortality; but it is also a “knowing” which
cuts one off from communicating with the world.
The theme of punishment in Dostoevsky’s novels is a particularly in-
teresting one for discussion because it relates so closely to the author’s
experience; he even shares with Myshkin both his epileptic fits and his
penchant for recapitulating the process of execution. Sophie Kovalevsky
records how, in 1866 when she was a child, Dostoevsky was in the habit
of visiting her family’s home in St. Petersburg, and how he used to tell
them about the novels he was planning. “I can still remember clearly”,
she writes “how, for example, he described the moment when he, con-
demned to death, stood with his eyes blindfolded before the company of
soldiers, and waited for the word ‘Fire!’ and how instead there came the
beating of drums, and they heard that they were pardoned.”49 One is re-
minded of Myshkin’s vivid recounting of mock execution endured by
someone of his acquaintance, a man who at the time of his ordeal was
twenty-seven years old,50 almost the same age as Dostoevsky, who was
twenty-eight when he endured his ordeal. Furthermore, Sophie Kovalev-
sky’s recollection of Dostoevsky’s clumsy behavior when courting her
sister, Anna, bears a remarkable similarity to Prince Myshkin’s awkward
wooing of Aglaya Yepanchin, a shared ineptitude which, when it is re-
membered that the encounters took place in 1866, a year before work was
begun on The Idiot, suggests Dostoevsky himself as the model for the fic-
tional character of the prince.
Identification of the author in the novel character is also possible in
The Brothers Karamazov, but here there is a diffusion of the author’s per-
sona concomitant with a much more intricate reformation of actual event
into fictional occurrence. One of these events, which we believe to be of
crucial importance to an understanding of Dostoevsky’s characterization
in The Brothers Karamazov, was the death of the author’s father in 1839
of apoplexy. It was thought at the time that he had been murdered by
peasants and it was not until the peasants had been acquitted on the
strength of the doctor’s diagnoses that the true cause of death became
known.51 It might have occurred to the eighteen-year-old Dostoevsky in
his state of shock that his father’s behavior towards his peasants had war-
ranted such a murder, and it is even possible in view of the parricide
theme in The Brothers Karamazov that, like Ivan Karamazov, he had se-
cretly desired it. One of the peasants describes the author’s father thus:
                                                            
49. Dostoevsky, Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to His Family and
Friends, p. 325.
50. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, p. 87.
51. For a full account, see Catteau, Dostoevsky and the Process of Literary Crea-
tion, p. 134, note.2.
24 The Dostoevsky Journal: An Independent Review

“The man was a beast. His soul was dark – that’s it [. . . . ] The master
was a stern, unrighteous lord, but the mistress was kind-hearted. He
didn’t live well with her; beat her. He flogged the peasants for nothing.”52
Even this brief description leaves little room to doubt who the model was
for the debauched father in The Brothers Karamazov, though the manner
of their deaths was not the same: Fyodor Karamazov is killed by one of
his offspring while Dostoevsky’s father died from natural causes. This
notwithstanding, it seems likely that the murder in The Brothers Karama-
zov was partly drawn from the false accusations brought against the peas-
ants, especially if it is remembered that it is the innocent Dmitry Karama-
zov who is accused of murdering his father. On the other hand, by having
the epileptic, Smerdyakov, commit the murder; it is as though Dostoev-
sky has established an association between his own illness and the death
of his father. This association of father and son with parricide and epilep-
sy is further reinforced by the fact that the author gave his own Christian
name to the father in the novel. Certainly epilepsy is related to the vio-
lence of parricide in The Brothers Karamazov as it is to the violence of
execution in The Idiot, an observation which gives credence to at least
one aspect of Freud’s otherwise discredited essay on Dostoevsky.53 Freud
writes:

Dostoevsky’s condemnation as a political prisoner was unjust

and he must have known it, but he accepted the undeserved pun-
ishment at the hands of the Little Father, the Tsar, as a substitute
for the punishment he deserved for his sin against his real father.
Instead of punishing himself, he got himself punished by his fa-
ther’s deputy.54

If this seems at first rather far-fetched, it should be remembered that it

is Dmitry Karamazov who, in the end, willingly submits to the sentence
of penal servitude, not because he is guilty of parricide (he isn’t), but be-
cause he has harbored thoughts of it.
Freud goes on to maintain that Dostoevsky’s feelings of guilt towards
his father “also determined his attitude in the two other spheres in which
the father-relation is the decisive factor, his attitude towards the authority
of the State and towards belief in God.” Towards the state he bowed; to-

                                                            
52. Quoted from Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, p. 6.
53. See Catteau, Dostoevsky and the Process of Literary Creation, pp. 133-39 and
Joseph Frank, “Freud’s Case-History of Dostoevsky,” Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Re-
volt, 1821-1849 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 379-91. See also in
the same work pp. 82-89.
54. Sigmund Freud, “Dostoevsky and Parricide,” pp. 105-06.
On the Teleological Threshold: Dostoevsky’s Execution of the Execution Motif 25

wards God he vacillated. Freud concludes that Dostoevsky could not

shake himself free of the filial guilt which is the basis of all religious feel-
ing.55 It is here, though, that we part company with Freud, because we
neither agree with his concluding axiom nor admit that Dostoevsky was
ever resigned to the ordeal he was made to endure. If it is true that he
submitted to punishment for a crime he had not committed in lieu of one
which, from a psychological point of view, he had (i.e., thoughts of parri-
cide) – and this is perhaps one of the parenthetical “bad deeds” of which
Dostoevsky repented in the moments before execution56 This does not
mean to say that he condoned the cruel jest of mock execution, nor for
that matter, that he was ever a party to corporal punishment. In his ac-
count of his confinement in the penal colony in Siberia, The House of the
Dead, he clearly comes out against ruthless forms of chastisement, such
as the birch, seeing such torture as a despotic concentration of power
which, if it is condoned by society, can only lead to its contamination.57
He is adamantly against repressive authority from whatever source it em-
anates. Freud’s reduction of Dostoevsky’s metaphysical and political
concerns to psychological factors fails to take account of the philosophi-
cally complex integration of such issues as the relationship of the “son” to
authority, whether to the father, the head of a department, the head of
State, or the God-head. Dostoevsky’s narratives admit of no single per-
spective of the universe but rather a many-faceted view raising far more
questions than it answers. In other words, Dostoevsky’s method is dialec-
tical while Freud’s is positivistic.
Dostoevsky does not in any sense devalue the religious aspect of the
interdependence of parental authority with the larger authority of bureau-
cracy, the State, or the Kingdom of God. Nor does he eschew the psycho-
logical factors, but actually goes further than this by establishing a con-
gruence between the psychological domain, the political, the philosophi-
cal, the religious, and any other pertinent area. The problem of guilt and
punishment is not merely a problem of psychology; it deals with existen-
tial problems rooted, it is true, in personal experience but probing deep
into problems of a metaphysical kind: who are we in time and space? Are
we free or is our sense of freedom merely an illusion – part of a cosmic
joke where all is predestined without our knowing it? What is the mean-
ing of the constant dread harbored within ourselves, and does this malaise
herald obsolescence? Is death nothing but the engine of inevitable execu-
tion? Or is there to be a moment of eternal reprieve in which human kind
is rescued from the palisade of worldly suffering? It may be that, with the
                                                            
55. Ibid., p. 106.
56. See note 5.
57. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead, pp. 181-82.
26 The Dostoevsky Journal: An Independent Review

experience of mock execution, Dostoevsky found himself thrust teleolog-

ically across the threshold of being and experienced a revelatory moment
when some of these questions were inexplicably answered.

Colchester, United Kingdom