Dostoevsky: Volume 6, #4

By Seth Myers, William Collen, Mary Lou Cornish and 7 more

Dostoevsky

Sober Hope: Finding Faith in the Bleak Midwinter

 

As winter descends to end the year 2023, it is a time for contemplation: a time to revel in the joys and find balm for the woes of the past year, a time to find the courage to hold on, and the hope to thrive in the new year. Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 - 1881) faced his own bleak (and Russian!) winters, from childhood play amongst the impoverished at his father's medical clinic to a last minute reprieve from the Tsar's firing squad for discussing banned books followed by ten years of prison camp and military service in exile. While his novels, such as Crime & Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov demonstrate human depravity they also give glimmers of grace, love, and beauty which have made him one of the most beloved novelists of all time.

 

It is our hope that as you find time to relax during the holiday season (making it a habit for the new year!), that you will find these discussions deeply meaningful. Awaiting for you within are discussions of his characters from novels and short stories alike, Dostoevsky-inspired poems, and reviews of films, books, and even contemporary music which reflect the light and warmth he dared to find in his own bleak winter.

 

CONTRIBUTORS

• "Dostoevsky for Our Times" by Editorial introduction by Seth Myers.

DOSTOEVSKY: THE FUNDAMENTALS

• "Dostoevsky the Culturally Active Christian" by William Collen
• "Dostoevsky's Narrative of (Un)Belief: From Psychology to Theology" by John Givens 
• "Underground Apologetics" by George Scondras 
• "A Midterm in Russian Literature" by Tom Sims

THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV

• "The Brothers Karamazov and the Existential Problem of Atheism" by Josiah Peterson 
• "Fifty Shades of Bleak: The Karamazov Principle Explored" by Matthew Lilley 
• "Dear, Kind God: A Divine Dilemma" by Grant Walker Broadhurst

THE IDIOT

• "Beauty in Tragedy: The Idiot, Dostoevsky, and Eucatastrophe" by Clark Weidner 
• "Interpreting Prince Myshkin: The Idiot" by Joshua Jo Wah Yen 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

• "What Would I Be Without God?" by Sojourna Howfree 
• "By Their Fruit: An Allegorical Tale" by Brian Melton

SHORT STORIES AND POEMS

• "Crazy Love: The Action and Call of Grace in Dostoevsky's 'The Dream of the Ridiculous Man'" by Theresa Pihl 
• "The Heart of Christ and Dostoevsky's 'The Christmas Tree and a Wedding'" by Christy Luis 
• "2057 Carnot Street" by Patricia Newberry 
• "Another Magi's Journey" by Awara Fernandez 
• "Necropolis and the Soul's Well" by Katie Windham

REVIEWS

• "From Literature to Film: Adapting Dostoevsky's Works" by Mary Lou Cornish 
• "Soul Survival Kit: Tolstoy and Dostoevsky" by Seth Myers .
• "Dostoevsky, Man About Town: Gulags, Muscovite Gentlemen, and Murakami" by Seth Myers 
• "Review of James Scanlan's Dostoevsky the Thinker," by Seth Myers
• "Dostoevsky in Midnights' Metropolis: Midnights' Anti-Hero and Marvel-ous Heroes" by Seth Myers 

Volume 6, Issue 4, Advent 2024
330 pages
Cover Image: Riz Crescini 

• Language: English
• Publisher: An Unexpected Journal
• Release date: Dec 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223763185

Book preview

Dostoevsky for

Our Times

Editorial introduction by Seth Myers.

Nineteenth century Russian novelist, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821 – 1881), widely regarded among the great novelists of world literature, is celebrated in this year’s Christmas season issue. Long winter months in Russia made for not just a fearsome tradition in chess-playing but also in the writing and reading of stories. The philosophical legacy of Russian writers and thinkers is often bequeathed to us in such works as Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose and The Overcoat, Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, and the array of novels and short stories written by Dostoevsky. While Russia’s current war against Ukraine is not to be celebrated, the spiritual message of the Russian novelist who himself protested human depravity and abuses by the Tsar is fit to be remembered at this time.

In this issue, we examine his well-known novels such as Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Notes from Underground, as well as short stories such as Dream of a Ridiculous Man, White Nights, and The Christmas Tree and a Wedding. Also included are poems illustrating themes espoused by Dostoevsky, reviews of books either on Dostoevsky or influenced by him, and a look at how contemporary popular culture such as Taylor’s Swift’s latest album, Midnights (2022), and the genre of Marvel and DC Comics superhero films, illustrate Dostoevsky’s profound insights.

The Muscovite writer is as relevant today as at any time. He offered the way of a spirituality-sourced love (reflecting his Christian faith) at the same time that Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) was arguing for power politics owing to the death of God. Dostoevsky claimed that autonomous human rationality was limited (as in Notes from Underground, 1864). This stance fueled his critique of Enlightenment and socialist-style Westernizing reforms of traditional, religious Russian society. His claim is also cited as pivotal in Existential thought so prominent in the mid-twentieth century. His love of the spiritual heritage of lands influenced by the Eastern Orthodox church made him a proponent of the Russian Idea and Slavophilism, as an antidote to encroachment by scientific and materialist progress from Europe, or the West in general. Even today, leaders from both the Communist Party and the Orthodox church cite him in support of at least a spiritual form of Russian nationalism. In a similar sense, non-majority world critics of Westernization can find inspiration in his spiritual reaction against the inevitable march of an often-dehumanizing material progress.

The insights found in Dostoevsky’s novels can be traced not just to his faith but also to his life experiences. He was the son of a medical doctor, yet raised in a home in which the enjoyment of literature and fairy tales was encouraged. Dostoevsky soon augmented his career as a military engineer by translating novels, and then by writing his own. Poor Folk (1845), his first novel, reflected his childhood encounters with patients at his father’s medical clinic who came from impoverished backgrounds, while Crime and Punishment (1866), Demons (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) draw from his observations of human depravity. But it is Dostoevsky’s insistence on our irreducibly spiritual nature which is his enduring legacy. The Idiot’s Prince Myshkin asks if beauty will save the world. And it is only by infinite love that Raskalnikov is able to contemplate how he might redeem all [Sonya’s] sufferings in Crime and Punishment. It is our pleasure to present these discussions of Dostoevsky’s works.

DOSTOEVSKY:

THE FUNDAMENTALS

Dostoevsky the Culturally Active Christian

William Collen on how his stories and faith responded to the challenges of the nineteenth century.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s well-deserved fame rests primarily on his fictional works: the series of novels he wrote in the 1860s and 1870s, among them Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and especially The Brothers Karamazov. The list of writers and thinkers who have expressed admiration for Dostoevsky’s works and his psychological insights is a long list filled with luminaries; Sigmund Freud said that The Brothers Karamazov was the most magnificent novel ever written.¹ James Joyce said He is the man more than any other who has created modern prose.² Virginia Woolf said Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading.³ His books contain profound explorations of the human psyche, and readers have, for generations, been entranced by Dostoevsky’s ability to describe in detail the motivations and feelings of his characters. His stories prefigure the twentieth century’s fixation with psychology, and the existentialist philosophers are greatly in his debt. His works deal with the great questions of faith, doubt, the meaning of existence, and many other weighty themes; he has sometimes acquired the reputation of a difficult writer, one whose handling of lofty and complicated ideas can be intimidating to the novice. But with patience, perseverance, and some introductory material, his works reveal their true value. His novels are consistently regarded by his readers as masterpieces, and Dostoevsky himself as a genius storyteller.

But Dostoevsky was so much more than a simple storyteller, albeit one of singular genius; he is a prime example of an artist using art to affect change in society. The path he took to get to that point in his thinking was a spectacularly convoluted one and matches the high drama of his best fiction. At the start of his career, he wrote novels of social realism such as Poor People and Netochka Nezvanova — works which displayed the plight of the lower classes in a manner which was then fashionable within the Russian literary scene. He was noticed by the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky, and quickly swept up into the network of socialist-leaning discussion groups that were then talking about Russian societal transformation and change, sometimes of a violent nature. Dostoevsky’s involvement with these groups may not have gone all the way to political upheaval and destruction, but the authorities saw his activities as dangerously subversive; he was apprehended, convicted, sentenced to death, and at the last minute — right in front of the firing squad! — had his sentence commuted to hard labor in Siberia followed by compulsory military service. During this time Dostoevsky revisited the Russian Orthodox faith of his upbringing and found solace in Christianity. From then on, he was an ardent defender of the Christian religion, fighting against what he saw as a tendency among Russian intellectuals to abandon the faith which he saw as a key component of the Russian heritage and vitally necessary to the project of achieving lasting social betterment.⁴

Dostoevsky’s first masterpiece, written upon returning to public life after his exile, was the short work Notes From Underground. In this brilliant little book, half narrative and half theoretical argument, he pushes back against the philosophies of his day, while also writing a very penetrating diagnosis of the mental state of his unnamed protagonist, the underground man. More psychologically oriented novels followed: The Eternal Husband, Crime and Punishment, and The Idiot among them. These last two are part of Dostoevsky’s attempt to give expression to his religious belief — in Crime and Punishment, the protagonist finds true forgiveness, restoration, and meaning to his life after coming to faith in Christ; in The Idiot, Dostoevsky attempted to represent what it would be like if another Christ figure, a positively good and beautiful man, were to come to earth again.⁵

But Dostoevsky did not only write novels. He was a key player in the journalistic debates which formed a large part of Russian intellectual life in the late nineteenth century, founding two periodicals of his own and writing for numerous others. In 1863 he published Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, a sharply critical indictment of the national characteristics and cultural tendencies of the various nations of western Europe. Dostoevsky had no patience for Westernism, the fashion among some Russian intellectuals to copy the ways of mainstream European culture; instead, he advocated for a return to the ways of the Russian peasantry, and especially their genuinely held, childlike faith in God.

Dostoevsky’s main opponents in the 1870s were the radical thinkers which had begun to emerge in the previous decade, the nihilists famously caricatured in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. The nihilists talked of uprooting all of society yet had no real plan for what was to come after they were done; this filled Dostoevsky with apprehension. News of a political murder perpetrated by a revolutionary group led by the agitator Sergei Nechaev was the spark that motivated Dostoevsky to write Demons, his sternly prophetic warning against the implications of revolutionary thought. At times fiercely satirical, at times hilarious, and at times deeply depressing, Demons represents Dostoevsky at his finest, fighting a deadly-serious war of words with the intellectual currents swirling around him. Dostoevsky biographer Joseph Frank calls it an encyclopedia of the Russian culture of its time and says that the more one knows about the Russian culture of the period, the more one marvels at Dostoevsky’s intellectual sophistication, skill and sureness of touch.⁶ Perhaps, for this reason, Demons is also somewhat difficult for 21st-century audiences to appreciate; so much of it is tied to currents in contemporary Russian discourse that its intellectual import can often be lost on the modern reader. A significant amount of the book’s force lies in its satire of Dostoevsky’s enemies, and this satire can easily be missed without knowledge of Dostoevsky’s milieu. The book was very relevant to its time, though, and even though his ideological opponents knew exactly what Dostoevsky was up to, they listened to him and still respected him. He alienated many of the younger generation when he wrote this book, but he knew that the prophetic role of truth-telling is not always easy or popular.

The work most crucial to understanding Dostoevsky’s philosophy and mental outlook is A Writer’s Diary, the magazine he published in the latter half of the 1870s. The collected run of A Writer’s Diary is more than one thousand pages long; Dostoevsky wrote and edited the entire thing himself. Many large portions of A Writer’s Diary are concerned with political analyses and commentary on what was happening in Russia at the time; sometimes these passages have little relevance to contemporary readers but they can be vital to understanding his vision of what he wanted his homeland to be: a Christ-centered, unified nation, proud of its heritage of faith, and committed to a role as world leader informed by that faith. Dostoevsky sincerely believed that the Russian people had something of vital importance to give to the rest of the world in the form of their commitment to God. Sometimes, in its pages, Dostoevsky drifts toward valuing the institutional church, or even the Russian state, more than Christ. Dostoevsky was certainly not as aware of his own biases as he could have been. But he was honestly concerned with the direction he saw his homeland taking and wanted the best for his fellow Russians; he was not afraid to speak his mind about what he believed to be the serious dangers of Westernism and Nihilism. In reacting against these damaging philosophical tendencies, he always returned to the faith he shared with the Russian peasantry — the key, in his mind, to a true renewal of Russia’s importance on the world stage.

Dostoevsky drew heavily from his Christian faith to create his greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Whereas Demons addresses the unfolding developments of Russian thought at a specific moment in time, The Brothers Karamazov has a much more universal relevance, both in time and place, because it discusses one of the most fundamental questions anyone can ask: the value of morality and ethics apart from God. The whole novel is built around lengthy explications and disputations of the idea that if there is no God, then everything is permitted; the idea is confronted by almost every major character in the book. Lengthy passages of the novel are also given over to descriptions of religious experiences, some good and some bad: Ivan Karamazov even makes a very compelling argument against Christianity in the book’s famous Rebellion chapter.

Of course, Dostoevsky himself doesn’t agree with his character Ivan Karamazov. This ability to resist authorial meddling or editorializing and let his characters explain themselves in their own words, without using them as mouthpieces for his own ideas, is one of the hallmarks of Dostoevsky’s poetics, and part of his genius as a storyteller. He will always be celebrated for his vast, wide-angle perspective on the Russia of his day; every class and stratum of humanity, from princes and titled nobility to escaped convicts and homeless beggars, half-mad monks, invalid girls, schoolboys, and everyone in between, are given fair and respectful treatment in his novels. It is sometimes easy to forget that Dostoevsky was writing popular fiction — his plots center around romantic intrigues, murders, and other sensational events. Dostoevsky the novelist has earned his place in the hearts of readers the world over. But let us not forget about Dostoevsky the activist, the prophet, and the culturally involved Christian who used art to speak to the culture around him and who tried to show a better way.

Dostoevsky’s Narratives of (un)Belief: From Psychology to Theology

John Givens on the psychology of both belief and unbelief in his novels.

Unbelief and Dostoevsky

For a writer universally considered one of the greatest Christian novelists of our age, Fyodor Dostoevsky actually spent as much time in his post-Siberia novels writing about unbelief as he did about faith. If you read Crime and Punishment attentively, for instance, you will see that nowhere in the novel — even in its famous epilogue that some critics have found to be artistically inconsistent and tacked on — does Rodion Raskolnikov actually ever repent of his double murder or profess a renewed faith in God. Despite the efforts of the novel’s greatest believer, the angelic and self-sacrificing Sonya, faith does not emerge triumphant by the closing pages of the book. Even in the moment when Raskolnikov throws himself at the feet of Sonya, who has followed him to Siberia, and the dawn of a renewed future, of a complete resurrection into a new life shine in his and Sonya’s expressions, we never witness a fully articulated repentance or genuine Christian conversion on Raskolnikov’s part. Instead, we are told that a gradual renewal and regeneration are to make the subject of a new story, one that we, of course, will never be privy to.⁷ Knowing how many times Raskolnikov has stepped back from repentance and self-judgment previously, just when he seemed poised to perform both actions, it is easy for readers not to trust that he will indeed ever change.

The faith narrative that Dostoevsky seemed determined to write all of his life seems to fail in his next novel as well. According to the author in a January 1868 letter to his niece (PSS 28 pt 2:251), the hero of The Idiot (1868), Prince Myshkin, was to be a positively beautiful person modeled on the only positively beautiful person in the world — Christ.⁸ Myshkin’s sudden arrival from abroad was to allow Dostoevsky the chance to explore how a truly Christ-like person would be received in the mercantile, materialist St. Petersburg of his day. The answer is foreordained: a society obsessed with money and prestige has no interest in the good and the meek, no matter how Christ-like. While many consider Myshkin a failed Christ figure (a reading I have disputed), it is true that his actions in the novel are powerless to prevent the very act of murder he has so assiduously labored to avert almost from the moment he arrives in Saint Petersburg.⁹ His failure emphasizes the inadequacy of belief as both an abstract and a practical philosophy, an outcome all the more lamentable since, as Sarah Young argues, "The Idiot ends with fewer hints of spiritual regeneration or the possibility of new life than Dostoevsky’s other novels."¹⁰ In Demons (1871-72), written about nihilist revolutionaries, Dostoevsky’s faith narrative disappears almost entirely in a work that constitutes the author’s deepest dive into the depths of unbelief yet, with heroes either professing a non-divine Christ (Shatov, who believes in a Christ outside the truth) or committing suicide to spite God and to declare the advent of the Man-God (Kirillov, who declares If there is no God, then I am God). It is a novel haunted by death and destruction and marked by arson, five murders, two suicides, and two untimely deaths, thereby striking an even bleaker note than The Idiot. Even Dostoevsky’s most faith-filled novel — Brothers Karamazov, 1879-80 — is dominated by the specter of unbelief in the claims and provocations of Ivan Karamazov that comprise much of the novel’s theological preoccupations. From his thesis that there is no immorality if there is no immortality, to his catalogue of crimes against innocent children in a supposedly God-ruled universe, to his poem of the Grand Inquisitor and his new godless religion meant to bring earthly bread and comfort to the masses, Ivan makes persuasive arguments for the non-existence of God while criticizing the teachings of Christ as overly demanding and unfulfillable.

The more we look for faith in Dostoevsky’s works, the more we encounter a pronounced and formidable unbelief. Doubt, of course, has long been a companion to people striving to believe, from the disciple Thomas to Martin Luther, C.S. Lewis and Mother Theresa. Indeed, it is the test that all faith must pass. God is by definition ineffable and incomprehensible. At the same time, what we cannot know about the existence of God can actually bring us closer to faith. Such is the premise of negative theology, prominent in Dostoevsky’s native Eastern Orthodoxy and a notable part of the prayer life of the monasteries he visited. Originating in the writings of the fifth-century theologian Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, apophaticism requires that we empty ourselves of all conceptual thinking by saying to ourselves what God is not, in the hope that we can attain what Vladimir Lossky called the darkness of absolute ignorance¹¹ and what St. John of the Cross called the dark night of the soul,¹² both states that can create the condition of utmost selfless and self-denying receptivity to God that makes possible an ecstatic transrational union with the divinity.

This is the nature of Dostoevsky’s doubt. With Dostoevsky, the darkness of doubt was not something he overcame in his life but rather something he acknowledged as an essential condition of his quest to believe. As early as his famous March 1854 letter to the Decembrist wife Natalia Fonvizina, he declared, I am a child of this century, a child of doubt and disbelief, I have been and shall ever be (that I know), until they close the lid of my coffin. What a terrible torment this thirst to believe has cost me and is still costing me, and the stronger it becomes in my soul, the stronger are the arguments against it.¹³

To understand how he came to this state of mind we must remind ourselves of the forces at work in European culture in Dostoevsky’s day. Born in 1821 into what he described as a family that was Russian and pious where he and his brother knew the Gospels virtually from our earliest childhood, Dostoevsky grew up in the decades of Romanticism’s height in Russia, which replaced Neoclassicism and the reign of Enlightenment ideas with a cult of feelings and the reassertion of religious sensibilities.¹⁴ The advent of realism in Russia in the 1840s, just when Dostoevsky was taking his first formative steps as a writer, together with a rising secularism, however, soon changed the intellectual landscape in Russia. The publication in 1835 of David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus Critically Examined commenced the most serious assault on faith since the Enlightenment. It circulated in Russia over the next several years, creating a sensation among Russian intellectuals. While Strauss was not the first scholar of the historical critical school, he was one of the most influential. Together with Ernest Renan, whose Life of Jesus was published in 1863 and translated into Russian a year later, Strauss championed a more academic approach to understanding Jesus, distinguishing between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. Strauss rejected the divinity of Jesus as implausible and unnecessary. What Jesus revealed was the divinity