To the question “What did Dostoevsky teach you?” I answer: personal responsibility. He was alien to the common excuse “Wednesday stuck.” Blaming our dramas and failures on a bad world, we voluntarily give up the main gift that we have – freedom.
It is surprising that Dostoevsky, being perhaps the most national among our classics, is at the same time better known than all other Russian writers in the world. Why is that? “I am only a realist in the highest sense, that is, I depict all the depths of the human soul,” he wrote about himself. And what worries every person who is able to look into such depths? Why did I come into this world and according to what laws it is arranged; what is the meaning of human existence; what awaits me after death? This is what Dostoevsky writes about. He had an experience that almost none of us can – the experience of the nearness of imminent death. Members of the revolutionary circle headed by Mikhail Petrashevsky, among whom was Dostoyevsky, were sentenced to death. The convicts were brought to the parade ground, the first three were tied to poles and hoods were pulled over their heads, the command “At the sight!” – and only after that the final verdict was read: different terms of hard labor. The execution turned out to be just a staging. On the evening of the same day, before being sent to hard labor, Dostoevsky wrote to his brother: “To be a man among people, not to lose heart and not fall – that is what life is, what is its task (…) On voit le soleil! (the sun is visible! – fr.) “.
The main thing in his novels is dialogue – a dialogue of a person with his second “I”, a dialogue of characters with each other, the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin argued. And the main question of any dialogue is the question of the structure of the world, where even such a “positively beautiful” person as Prince Myshkin cannot save everyone: saving one, he inevitably leaves the other to the mercy of fate …
One of Dostoevsky’s discoveries is that we do not always act according to the laws of reason and truth, even knowing them perfectly well: “And where did all these wise men get it from, that a person needs a prudently beneficial desire? A person needs only one independent desire, no matter what this independence costs and no matter what it leads to. So, attempts to rationally organize society are doomed? “It is clear and understandable to the point that evil lurks deeper in humanity than socialist doctors suggest, that in no structure of society you can escape evil, that the human soul will remain the same, that abnormality and sin come from itself …” Society will be fragile where a person could not do evil – he will always find both a reason and an opportunity for this. It is necessary that a person could, but did not want to do evil. And for this you need to find and see a person – both in yourself and in your neighbor. See him as a brother in humanity.
His dates
- 11 ноября 1821 Родился в Москве в семье штаб-лекаря Мариинской больницы.
- 1846 Выходит в свет первое произведение – роман «Бедные люди».
- 1849 For participation in the Petrashevsky circle, he was exiled to hard labor in the Omsk prison.
- 1854 At the age of 33 he is released and serves as a soldier and then as an officer in Semipalatinsk.
- 1859 He is allowed to return to Central Russia.
- 1864 First wife Marya Dmitrievna and brother Mikhail die, Notes from the Underground are published.
- 1866 The first novel of the great Pentateuch is Crime and Punishment.
- 1867 Женитьба на Анне Григорьевне Сниткиной, отъезд на несколько лет за границу.
- 1880 “The Brothers Karamazov”; speech at the Pushkin Festival in Moscow.
- 9 февраля 1881 Скончался в своей квартире в Санкт-Петербурге.
Карен Степанян, доктор филологических наук, вице-президент российского Общества Достоевского, автор монографии «Явление и диалог в романах Ф. М. Достоевского» (Крига, 2010).
His view of the world
“Man is a mystery. It must be unraveled (…); I am engaged in this secret, because I want to be a man. This thought of the 17-year-old Dostoevsky will sound later in a speech about Pushkin, who took with him to the coffin “… a great secret. And now we are solving this mystery without him.” Morality is more than honest behavior. The one who burns heretics cannot be recognized as moral, even if he acts in accordance with his convictions: “this is only honesty (the Russian language is rich), but not morality.”
The answer to the question “What beauty will save the world?” is in the drafts for the novel “Demons”: “The beauty of Christ will save the world.” Why did he stay in the drafts? Because Dostoevsky did not impose anything on anyone, believing that everyone should come to the truth on their own.
“Being alone is a normal need”
“I will tell you about myself that I am a child of the century, a child of disbelief and doubt until now and even (I know this) to the grave. What terrible torments this thirst to believe has cost and costs me now (…) And yet, God sometimes sends me moments in which I am completely calm; in these moments I love and find that I am loved by others, and in such and such moments I have formed within myself a symbol of faith in which everything is clear and sacred to me. This symbol is very simple, here it is: to believe that there is nothing more beautiful, deeper, more sympathetic, more reasonable, more courageous and more perfect than Christ, and not only not, but with jealous love I tell myself that it cannot be. Moreover, if someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and indeed it would be that the truth is outside of Christ, then I would rather stay with Christ than with the truth. But it’s better to stop talking about it. However, I don’t know why some subjects of conversation are completely excluded from use in society, and if they speak somehow, then others seem to jar? But past about it. (…) For five years now, I have been under escort or in a crowd of people, and I have not been alone for a single hour. To be alone is a normal need, like drinking and eating, otherwise in this forced communism you will become a misanthrope. The society of people will become poison and infection, and it was from this unbearable torment that I suffered most of all during these four years. I also had moments when I hated everyone I met, right and wrong, and looked at them as if they were thieves who stole my life from me with impunity. The most unbearable misfortune is when you yourself become unjust, angry, vile, you realize all this, you even reproach yourself – and you cannot overcome yourself. I experienced it.”
Письмо Н. Д. Фонвизиной. 1854 год. Полное собрание сочинений в 30 т. ( Наука, 1972–1990).