'Aleksei, Father.'
'A sweet name. After Aleksei the man of God?'
'Of God, Father, of God. Aleksei the man of God.'
'He was a great saint! I shall mention him in my prayers, Mother, I shall. And I shall mention your sorrow in my prayers, too, and your husband that he may live and prosper. Only you should not have left your husband. You must go back to him and look after him. Your little boy will look down on you and, seeing that you've forsaken his father, he will weep over you both: why do you destroy his bliss? For don't forget, he's living, he's living, for the soul lives for ever, and though he is no longer in the house, he's always there unseen beside you. How do you expect him to come home if you say you hate your house? To whom is he to go, if he won't find you, his father and mother, together? You see him in your dreams now and you grieve, but if you go back he will send you sweet dreams. Go to your husband, Mother, go back to him today.'67
Dostoevsky was a man who yearned for faith. But the death of little children was a fact he could not accept as a part of the divine plan. His notebooks from when he was working on The Brothers Karamazov are filled with agonizing commentaries on incidents of awful cruelty to children which he had read about in the contemporary press. One of these true stories appears at the centre of The Brothers Karamazov and
its discourse about God. It involved a general whose hunting dog was wounded when a serf boy on his estate threw a stone. The general had the serf boy arrested, stripped naked in front of the other villagers, and, to the cries of his desperate mother, torn to shreds by a pack of hunting dogs. This incident is cited by Ivan, the rationalist philosopher among the three Karamazov brothers, to explain to Alyosha, his younger brother and a novice at the monastery, why he cannot believe in the existence of a God if his truth entails the suffering of little innocents.
'I say beforehand that the entire truth is not worth such a price. I do not want a mother to embrace the torturer who had her child torn to pieces by his dogs… Is there in the whole world a being who could or would have the right to forgive? I don't want harmony. I don't want harmony, out of a love for mankind, I don't want it.'68
In a letter to a friend Dostoesvky said that Ivan's argument was 'irrefutable'.69 In terms of moral feeling it was unacceptable to leave such torture unavenged, and even Alyosha, who tries to follow Christ's example of forgiveness, agrees with Ivan that the general should be shot. Here was the fundamental question which Dostoevsky posed, not just in this novel, but in all his life and art: How could one believe in God when the world created by him was so full of suffering? It was a question he was bound to ask when he looked at the society in which he lived. How could God have made Russia?
Dostoevsky came, in his own words, from a 'pious Russian family' where 'we knew the Gospel almost from the cradle'.70 The teaching of the Gospels always remained at the core of Dostoevsky's personality and even when, in the 1840s, he became a socialist, the type of socialism to which he subscribed had a close affinity with Christ's ideals. He agreed with Belinsky that if Christ appeared in Russia he 'would join the socialists'.71 In 1849 Dostoevsky was arrested as a member of a radical underground movement which met at the house of the young socialist Mikhail Petrashevsky in St Petersburg. His offence was to have read out Belinsky's by-then famous but forbidden letter to Gogol of 1847 in which the literary critic had attacked religion and called for social reform in Russia. It was even forbidden to circulate or read handwritten copies of the letter as Dostoevsky did. Dostoevsky and
his comrades were condemned to death, but at the final moment, when they were on the parade ground waiting to be shot, they received a reprieve from the Tsar. Dostoevsky's sentence was commuted to four years of prison labour in Siberia, followed by service as a private soldier in a front-line Siberian regiment.
Dostoevsky's years in the Omsk prison camp were to be the turning point of his life. They brought him face to face with the roughest and most brutal of the common people and gave him what he thought of as a special insight into the hidden depths of the Russian soul. 'All in all, the time hasn't been lost', he wrote to his brother in 1854. 'I have learned to know, if not Russia, then at least her people, to know them, as perhaps very few know them.'72 What Dostoevsky found among his fellow convicts was a level of depravity that shook him from his old intelligentsia belief in the people's innate goodness and perfectibility. In this underworld of murderers and thieves he found not a shred of human decency - only greed and guile, violent cruelty and drunkenness, and hostility to himself as a gentleman. But the most depressing aspect of it all, as he describes it in The House of the Dead (1862), was an almost total absence of remorse.
I have already said that for a period of several years I saw among these people not the slightest trace of repentance, not one sign that their crime weighed heavily on their conscience, and that the majority of them consider themselves to be completely in the right. This is a fact. Of course, vanity, bad examples, foolhardiness and false shame are the causes of much of it. On the other hand, who can say that he has fathomed the depths of these lost hearts and has read in them that which is hidden from the whole world? It must surely have been possible over so many years to have noticed something, to have caught at least some feature of these hearts that bore witness to inner anguish, to suffering. But this was absent. Yet, it seems that crime cannot be comprehensible from points of view that are already given, and that its philosophy is rather more difficult than is commonly supposed.73
This dark vision of the human psyche was the inspiration for the murderers and thieves who populate the pages of Dostoevsky's post-Siberian novels, beginning with Crime and Punishment (1866).
And yet at the depths of his despair came a vision of redemption to
restore the writer's faith. The revelation appeared, as if by a miracle, at Easter time, if we are to believe Dostoevsky's own later recollection in A Writer's Diary.74 The prisoners were drinking, fighting and carousing, and Dostoevsky was lying down on his plank bed to escape. Suddenly, a long-forgotten incident from his childhood came into his mind. When he was aged nine he was staying at his family's country home, and one August day he wandered off alone into the woods. He heard a sound, thought that someone shouted 'There's a wolf!' and ran terrified into a nearby field, where one of his father's serfs, a peasant called Marey, took pity on the boy and tried to comfort him:
'Why you took a real fright, you did!' he said, wagging his head. 'Never mind, now, my dear. What a fine lad you are!'
He stretched out his hand and suddenly stroked my cheek.
'Never mind, now, there's nothing to be afraid of. Christ be with you. Cross yourself, lad.' But I couldn't cross myself; the corners of my mouth were trembling, and I think that particularly struck him. He quietly stretched out a thick, earth-soiled finger with a black nail and gently touched it to my trembling lips.
'Now, now,' he smiled at me with a broad, almost maternal smile. 'Lord, what a dreadful fuss. Dear, dear, dear!'75
Remembering this 'maternal' act of kindness magically transformed Dostoevsky's attitude towards his fellow prisoners.
And so when I climbed down from my bunk and looked around, I remember I suddenly felt I could regard these unfortunates in an entirely different way and that suddenly, through some sort of miracle, the former hatred and anger in my heart had vanished. I went off, peering intently into the faces of those I met. This disgraced peasant, with shaven head and brands on his cheek, drunk and roaring out his hoarse, drunken song - why he might also be that very same Marey; I cannot peer into his heart, after all.76
Suddenly it seemed to Dostoevsky that all the Russian convicts had some tiny glimmer of goodness in their hearts (although, always the nationalist, he denied its existence in the Polish ones). Over Christmas some of them put on a vaudeville, and at last, in a gesture of respect,
they sought his help as an educated man. The convicts might be thieves, but they also gave their money to an Old Believer in the prison camp, who had earned their tru
st and whose saintliness they recognized. Now, to Dostoevsky, the convicts' ability to preserve any sense of decency, in the dreadful conditions of the camp, seemed little short of miraculous, and the best proof there could be that Christ was alive in the Russian land. On this vision Dostoevsky built his faith. It was not much to build on. From the distant memory of a single peasant's kindness, he made a leap of faith to the belief that all Russian peasants harboured Christ's example somewhere in their souls. Not that he had any illusions about the way the peasants actually lived their lives (his horrific description of 'how a peasant beats his wife' is clear evidence of that). But he saw this barbarism as the 'filth' of centuries of oppression concealing, like a 'diamond', the peasant's Christian soul. 'One must know', he wrote,
how to segregate the beauty in the Russian peasant from the layers of barbarity that have accumulated over it… Judge the Russian people not by the abominations they so frequently commit, but by those great and sacred things for which, even in their abominations, they constantly yearn. Not all the people are villains; there are true saints, and what saints they are: they are radiant and illuminate the way for all!… Do not judge our People by what they are, but by what they would like to become.77
Dostoevsky was released and allowed to return to St Petersburg in 1859, three years after Volkonsky was set free by the 'Tsar Liberator' Alexander II. The educated circles of the capital were in a state of high excitement when Dostoevsky arrived from Siberia. The emancipation of the serfs, which was in its final stages of preparation, had given rise to hopes of a national and spiritual rebirth. The landlord and the peasant were to be reconciled on Russian-Christian principles. Dostoevsky compared the Decree to Russia's original conversion to Christi-anity in 988. He belonged at this time to the group of writers known as the 'native soil' movement (pochvennichestvo). They called on the intelligentsia (and on Russia's writers in particular) to turn toward the peasants, not just to discover their own nationality and express it in their art but, more importantly, in that truly 'Russian' spirit of Christian
brotherhood, to bring their Western learning to the backward villages.
For Dostoevsky, in particular, this turning towards 'Russia' became his defining credo. He was a repentant nihilist, as he described himself, an unhappy atheist who longed to find a Russian faith. In the early 1860s he mapped out a series of novels to be called 'The Life of a Great Sinner'. It would chart the spiritual journey of a Western-educated Russian man who had lost his faith and led a life of sin. He would go in search of truth to a monastery, become a Slavophile, join the Khlysty sect, and at the end he would find 'both Christ and the Russian land, the Russian Christ and the Russian God'. It was to be a 'gigantic novel', Dostoevsky wrote to the poet Apollon Maikov in December 1868: 'please don't tell anyone, but this is how it is for me: to write this last novel, even if it kills me - and I'll get it all out'.78 Dostoevsky never wrote 'The Life of a Great Sinner'. But his four great novels - Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils and The Brothers Karamazov - were all variations on its theme.
Like his sinner, Dostoevsky struggled over faith. 'I am a child of the age', he wrote in 1854, 'a child of unbelief and scepticism.'79 His novels are filled with figures, like himself, who yearn for a religion in the face of their own doubts and reasoning. Even the believers, such as Shatov in The Devils (1871), can never quite commit to an unambiguous belief in God. 'I believe in Russia,' Shatov tells Stavrogin.
'I believe in the Greek Orthodox Church. I - I believe in the body of Christ -I believe that the second coming will take place in Russia - I believe,' he murmured in a frenzy.
'But in God? In God?'
'I - I shall believe in God.'80
Dostoevsky's novels can be read as an open discourse between reason and belief in which the tension between the two is never quite resolved.81 According to Dostoevsky, truth is contained in reason and belief - one cannot be undermined by the other - and all true belief must be maintained in the face of all reason. There is no rational answer to Ivan's arguments against a God that allows little children to suffer. Nor is there a reasonable response to the arguments of the Grand Inquisitor, the subject of Ivan's poetic fantasy in The Brothers
Karamazov, who arrests Christ when he reappears in Counter-reformation Spain. Interrogating his prisoner, the Grand Inquisitor argues that the only way to prevent human suffering is, not by Christ's example, which ordinary mortals are too weak to follow, but by the construction of a rational order which can secure, by force if necessary, the peace and happiness that people really want. But Dostoevsky's faith was not of the sort that could be reached by any reasoning. He condemned as 'Western' all faiths which sought a reasoned understanding of Divinity or which had to be enforced by papal laws and hierarchies (and in this sense the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor was itself intended by Dostoevsky as an argument against the Roman Church). The 'Russian God' in which Dostoevsky believed could only be arrived at by a leap of faith: it was a mystical belief outside of all reasoning. As he wrote in 1854, in one of the rare statements of his own religious credo, 'if someone proved to me that Christ was outside the truth, and it really was that the truth lay outside Christ, I would prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth'.82
In Dostoevsky's view, the ability to continue to believe in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence was a peculiarly Russian gift. There is a scene in The Brothers Karamazov where Karamazov's servant Smerdyakov is holding forth on the question of God at a family dinner. In a confused effort to refute the Gospels, Smerdyakov says that nobody can move a mountain to the sea - except 'perhaps two hermits in the desert'.
'One moment!' screamed Karamazov in a transport of delight. 'So you think there are two men who can move mountains, do you? Ivan, make a note of this extraordinary fact, write it down. There you have the Russian all over!'83
Like Karamazov, Dostoevsky took delight in this 'Russian faith', this strange capacity to believe in miracles. It was the root of his nationalism and his messianic vision of the 'Russian soul' as the spiritual saviour of the rationalistic West, which ultimately led him, in the 1870s, to write in the nationalist press about the 'holy mission' of 'our great Russia' to build a Christian empire on the continent. The simple Russian people, Dostoevsky claimed, had found the solution to the intellectual's torment over faith. They needed their belief, it was central
to their lives, and it gave them strength to go on living and endure their suffering. This was the source of Dostoevsky's faith as well - the urge to go on believing, despite his doubts, because faith was necessary for life; rationalism led only to despair, to murder or to suicide - the fate of all the rationalists in his novels. Dostoevsky's answer to the voice of doubt and reason was a sort of existential 'credo ergo sum' that took its inspiration from those 'Russian types' - hermits, mystics, Holy Fools and simple Russian peasants - imaginary and real, whose faith stood beyond reasoning.
Dostoevsky's Orthodoxy was inseparable from his belief in the redemptive quality of the Russian peasant soul. In all his novels the quest of the 'Great Sinner' for a 'Russian faith' is intimately linked to the idea of salvation through reconciliation with the native soil. Dostoevsky's own salvation came to him in the Siberian prison camp where for the first time he came into close contact with the common Russian people, and this theme of penance and redemption was a leitmotif in all his later works. It is the central theme of Crime and Punishment, a murder novel which conceals a political subplot. Its main protagonist, Raskolnikov, tries to justify his senseless murder of the old pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna using the same utilitarian reasoning as that used by the nihilists and revolutionaries: that the old woman had been 'useless' to society and that he, meanwhile, was poor. He thus persuades himself that he killed the pawnbroker for altruistic reasons, just as the revolutionaries legitimized their crimes, when in fact, as he comes to realize with the help of his lover and spiritual guide, the prostitute Sonya, he killed her to demonstrate his superiority. Like Caesar and Napoleon, he
had believed himself exempt from the rules of ordinary morality. Raskolnikov confesses to his crime. He is sentenced to seven years' hard labour in a Siberian prison camp. One warm Easter Day Sonya comes to him. By some strange force, 'as though something had snatched at him', Raskolnikov is hurled to Sonya's feet, and in this act of repentance, she understands that he has learned to love. It is a moment of religious revelation:
Her eyes began to shine with an infinite happiness; she had understood, and now she was in no doubt that he loved her, loved her infinitely, and that at last it had arrived, that moment…
They tried to speak, but were unable to. There were tears in their eyes. Both of them looked pale and thin; but in these ill, pale faces there now gleamed the dawn of a renewed future, a complete recovery to a new life.84
Strengthened by Sonya's love, he turns for moral guidance to the copy of the Gospels which she had given him, and resolves to use his time in prison to start on the road to that new life.
The suffering of such convicts had long been seen by Russian writers as a form of spiritual redemption. The journey to Siberia became a journey towards God. Gogol, for example, had envisaged that in the final volume of Dead Souls the old rogue Chichikov would see the light in a Siberian penal colony.85 Among the Slavophiles, the Decembrist exiles had the status of martyrs. They venerated Sergei Volkonsky as an 'ideal Russian type', in the words of Ivan Aksakov, because he 'accepted all his suffering in the purest Christian spirit'.86 Maria Volkonsky was practically worshipped in the democratic circles of the mid-nineteenth century, where everybody knew by heart the poem by Nekrasov ('Russian Women') which compared Maria to a saint. Dostoevsky shared this veneration of the Decembrists and their suffering wives. During his own journey to Siberia, in 1850, his convoy had been met by the Decembrist wives in the Tobolsk transit camp. Even after a quarter of a century, in his recollection of this encounter in A Writer's Diary, his attitude towards them was deeply reverential:
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