Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, and Shestov. Three Russian Apostles of Freedom
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Dostoevsky had been a member of a radical group when he was twenty-seven that was inspired by liberal and socialist ideas. Some members of the group met secretly, obtained a printing press, and planned to publish their radical notions for changing society for the better. Dostoevsky was arrested along with others and condemned by the government to be shot by a firing squad. The young writer stood on a platform on a cold December morning waiting for the bullets that would end all his radical thoughts and along with them all his regular human thoughts of whatever kind forever. In those seconds before his death Dostoevsky, to borrow Lev Shestov’s expression, received “a new pair of eyes”. Never again after he received his new eyes, both during the few seconds that remained to him before his death and in the millions of seconds that remained to him because the Tsar unexpectedly stopped his execution – – never again did he look at anything only with regular, normal eyes. But what changed the sight that came forth from his eyes was what the nearness of death had done to his soul. He would never again look at anything except with the new vision that the eyes of the soul gave him. We can not know ourselves what he experienced in those deadly seconds when his death was certain and about to arrive instantly and certainly. We see it with our normal eyes but our eyes are guided by our minds and not by our soul so we do not see what Dostoevsky suddenly saw and continued to see. We think he gained his new eyes because of some kind of religious experience and since we think of religion as being something above and beyond our normal life, we think that Dostoevsky must have begun looking beyond his merely human life to something divine and spiritual in some hidden world above and beyond the human world. Dostoevsky was a Christian but his Christianity did not change his purely human actions and instead taught him he should not change, that his human nature itself, insulted, injured and suffering, was the only temple in which the true God could be met truly. All types of religious experience that were based on seeking some divine experience achieved through some type of mental discipline became alien to him. He grew to hate all doctrines that tried to separate a human being from his authentic self. Liberal ideas, socialist ideas, even some Christian ideas – – he threw them all away onto the same garbage heap where the experience of facing death had thrown away his old eyes. He despised all Western European thought because it was all based on elevated forms of reasoning that did little more than alienate a human being from his own being. European critics experienced his despite and contempt for them and lashed back at him. The German bourgeois novelist Thomas Mann said that Dostoevsky’s works were full of “religious prating”. A Russian critic despised him as someone always “looking for buried treasure”. In his greatest novel, The Possessed, he creates a character, based on the Russian writer Turgenev, and makes him the butt of his satire almost maliciously. Turgenev in turn despised Dostoevsky’s Christianity and gave an example of the cruel beating he observed him once giving his servant as illustrating the effect on Dostoevsky of his Christianity. Turgenev believed Dostoevsky was a writer who knew nothing of real freedom, which for Turgenev was based, as among all Western European intellectuals, on the elevating power of the mind. What interested Dostoevsky most was not religion itself, or doctrines of any kind including even Christian doctrine, but humans driven to the point where they might change radically and discover not some divine world off somewhere in the clouds but the new self within them, rooted in their very humanity, that they themselves had been themselves hiding from themselves. The mind made men and women selfish and cruel humans yet Dostoevsky sought God paradoxically only in humans and nowhere else.
Raskolnikov is a holy man in reverse, that is, for Dostoevsky he is not a holy man at all and until he has himself discovered that his human nature when ruled only by the mind is foul, he will never be anything, nothing but a human nothing living in the categories where he thinks. He goes out of his little room a short time after his crime thinking not of the murders but only of walking about and finding some place to get rid of the objects he possesses taken from the pawnbroker that might be evidence of his involvement. He buries them under a huge stone. Then he walks on without resting. “He had a terrible longing for some distraction, but he did not know what to do, what to attempt. A new overwhelming sensation was gaining more and more mastery over him every moment; this was an immeasurable, almost physical, repulsion for everything surrounding him, an obstinate, malignant feeling of hatred. All who met him were loathsome to him – he loathed their faces, their movements, their gestures. If anyone had addressed him, he felt that he might have spat at him or bitten him…”
Who is mad, Marmeladov or Raskolnikov? If they are both mad then they are mad in two different ways completely. Before the murders just after the talk between Raskolnikov and Marmeladov in the tavern, we get a closer look at Marmeladov’s type of madness. It is profoundly human. The two leave the tavern and Raskolnikov aids the older, drunken man to walk home. Instead of walking into his one-room home with three starving children and his emaciated, sickly wife, Katerina Ivanova, Marmeladov drops to his knees in the doorway. “‘Ah!,’ she cried out in a frenzy, ‘he has come back! The criminal! The monster!…And where is the money? What’s in your pocket, show me! And your clothes are all different! Where are your clothes? Where is the money! Speak!’” All the money is gone. “She seized him by the hair and dragged him into the room. Marmeladov seconded her efforts by meekly crawling along on his knees.” Marmeladov’s madness separated him from his family but not by any means from human feeling and he returned to his family to remain with it full of remorse. Raskolnikov’s madness is purely of the mind so it is not Marmeladov’s kind of madness. It is a separation from human feeling. It is the doctrine of self-isolation taught by the mind whenever an ego submits to it that it wants to be nothing but an ego more powerful than all other egos, an ego that can not see with the eyes of a Dostoevsky that see that such an ego imprisoned by such a mind is worthless.
3
After the murder and after hiding the stolen objects, Raskolnikov returns to his small room. He is in a kind of delirium for five days, eating little, sleeping for long periods. His friend, the student Razumihin, looks over him and the servant girl in his rooming house, Nastasya, looks in on him at times offering food or tea. Razumihin informs him during one of his awakened periods that money has arrived from his mother and sister who will soon arrive in Petersburg. Razumihin, a young healthy positive type, uses the money to buy Raskolnikov a new set of clothes and he has brought to his room an acquaintance, the doctor Zossimov, to look over him. Raskolnikov treats them indifferently, even spitefully, paying little attention to them. Only when they start discussing the murders does Raskolnikov revive and give them his full attention. Pyotr Petrovitch Luzhin, a successful government official, arrives to present himself to Raskolnikov. He has recently become engaged to Raskolnikov’s sister. He is a forty-five-year-old positive figure. Raskolnikov has found out through a letter sent to him by his mother just before the murders that his young sister has accepted Luzhin’s proposal of marriage only to gain a higher more secure place in society for her mother and her brother Raskolnikov whom she loves dearly. Razumihin and Zossimov treat Luzhin respectfully, agreeing in their conversation with some of Luzhin’s liberal ideas. Raskolnikov accuses Luzhin, breaking in on the conversation, of putting his mother and sister up in a cheap boarding house in Petersburg. Worse still, influenced by what his mother has reported of what Luzhin said during his courtship, Raskolnikov again breaks in on the conversation. “‘And is it true,’ Raskolnikov asked Luzhin, in a voice quivering with fury and delight in insulting him, ‘is it true that you told your fiancee…within an hour of her acceptance, that what pleased you most…was that she was a beggar…because it was better to raise a wife from poverty, so that you may have complete control over her, and reproach her with your being her benefactor?’” After defending himself with some embarrassment, the insult soon drives Luzhin from Raskolnikov’s little room“How could you – how could you!” Razumihin says to Raskolnikov just after Luzhin leaves, “shaking his head in perplexity”.
“‘Let me alone – let me alone all of you!’ Raskolnikov cried in a frenzy. ‘Will you ever leave off tormenting me? I am not afraid of you! I am not afraid of anyone, anyone now! Get away from me. I want to be alone, alone, alone!’”
Razumihin and Zossimov leave at once but strangely Raskolnikov left alone does not remain in his room alone. His defense of his sister with his stinging insult to the man she is engaged to marry is the first genuinely human experience he has had since the murders and it perhaps motivates him to leave his room and seek some contact with the world outside of his room and his mind. Dostoevsky must bring his character into the everyday world of normal men and women if he is to somehow bring him also towards the world of human remorse which is never discovered in the human mind relying only on itself for guidance.
He dresses in his new set of clothes that Razumihin has bought for him, puts his rubles and his kopecks in his pocket, and steps out into the Petersburg night. It is eight o’clock with the sun setting and he does not think where he is going. Thought now, for some reason, tortures him. He now feels “that everything must be changed ‘one way or another’”. We have suddenly left thought, the world of thought, and have begun taking steps towards the world of feeling. He walks toward the Hay Market. He comes to a young man with a barrel organ accompanying the singing of a girl of fifteen hoping to earn a few kopecks. Raskolnikov stops and listens among two or three listeners. He takes out a five kopeck piece and puts it in the girl’s hand. He is on the street and among people and the man who sliced an axe onto the head of Lizaveta who “only put up her empty left hand” touches the hand of a girl. It is a sign, a brief sign from Dostoevsky, that his character has taken the first step to the only world that counts because it is the only world that is real, the human world. Dostoevsky will never read any sign, any of the thousands of signs in the universe without and in the mind within, that lead anywhere “upward” and “beyond” mentally or physically, spiritually or scientifically. He will follow no sign unless it leads to a purely human step.
A middle-aged man is standing idly by Raskolnikov as they listen to the boy and girl singing to music from a street organ. Raskolnikov tries for human contact with a stranger. “ ‘I love to hear singing to a street organ,’ said Raskolnikov, and his manner seemed strangely out of keeping with the subject. ‘I like it on cold, dark, damp autumn evenings – they must be damp – when all the passers-by have pale green, sickly faces, or better still when wet snow is falling straight down, when there’s no wind – you know what I mean? And the street lamps shine through it…’” “‘I don’t know…Excuse me’, muttered the stranger, frightened by the question and Raskolnikov’s strange manner, and he crossed over to the other side of the street.”
Raskolnikov’s manner is now strange in a way different from what it was before. Before his manner was strange because of his silence and his need to be separate from people around him. Now his manner is strange because of the way he talks to people in his surroundings. His need to talk seems like perhaps the first steps from his former silent madness ruled by his mind towards the Marmeladov kind of madness that has its origin in human feeling. But in Dostoevsky’s understanding of psychology, the mind and the soul are enemies and neither show any mercy to the other until one gives in to the other and commits itself because of its defeat to be the other’s servant. Raskolnikov has felt a minor touch of compassion and pressed five kopecks into the hand of a girl. He has sent off words of feeling and poetry to the astonished ears of a stranger. Something is making him speak. What if this something continues to put pressure on him? What if it presses him not to just talk but to talk about it? He had but one thought earlier when he left his room. His complete thought was “that all this must be ended today, once for all, immediately; that he would not return home without it, because he would not go on living like that.” Raskolnikov like Marmeladov has now a need to get everything out in the open.
His wanderings this night through the Hay Market and other places around Petersburg where normal people are doing normal things trying to enjoy the evening include a series of accidents. He tries to get information from hucksters in the Hay Market who had dealings with Lizaveta. He speaks to a young man standing before a shop. But he makes no progress with his questions. The young man quickly tires of talking to him and directs him laughing to an eating-house saying “you’ll find princesses there too.…La,la”. He crosses a square and pushes his way into a dense crowd of peasants. “He felt an unaccountable inclination to enter into conversation with people. But the peasants took no notice of him; they were all shouting in groups together.” He wandered off silently to a marketplace that he knew well with dram shops and eating-houses. He saw women running in and out of various festive establishments. From one came the sounds of singing, the tinkling of a guitar and shouts of merriment. He passed a drunken soldier swearing and smoking a cigarette. A beggar was quarrelling with another beggar and a drunk was lying right across the road. Life, in other words, the bald unthinking life of real people, humans, is all around him. He is now in the midst of life unfolding not intentionally but accidentally. Two women speak to him seductively. One asks him for six kopecks for a drink and he gives her fifteen. A woman “pock-marked…covered with bruises with her upper lip swollen” but nonetheless alive and, so to speak, greedy to continue living to her last breath sets Raskolnikov to thinking about life. “‘Where is it,’ thought Raskolnikov. ‘Where is it I’ve read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d have only the room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!’” But Raskolnikov is still thinking not living and his thinking has him in such a firm grip that it will not allow him to live like those around him.
He remembers why he has come out, to get some newspapers to read what has been written about the murders. He enters a spacious and clean restaurant and orders tea and newspapers. Suddenly, as he searches the newspapers, the head clerk of the police station that he has recently visited on a matter not related to the murders, sits down smiling at his table. Zametov tells him that he has visited him recently at his room when he was lying on his couch sleeping. Raskolnikov talks to him strangely and insultingly. He accuses him of drinking champagne at others expense. He accuses him of taking money corruptly and profiting from everything. Zametov has sat down for friendly conversation and tells Raskolnikov he is speaking strangely and must still be unwell. The conversation goes on back and forth argumentatively with no normal human connection between the murderer and the police official. They begin on the subject that Raskolnikov has just been reading about in the newspapers, the murders of the two women. Raskolnikov gives a long description of what he would have done if he were the murderer to hide the objects that were stolen from the dead pawnbroker. But he describes to Zametov in great detail how he actually hid the objects under a stone without admitting to Zametov that he was the murderer and as though he were simply imagining for Zametov’s benefit how he would have hidden the objects. Zametov calls him a madman because he is fed up with Raskolnikov’s wild, strange imaginings. “‘And what if it was I who murdered the old woman and Lizaveta?’ he said suddenly and – realized what he had done.” Zametov decides Raskolnikov is merely joking or playing with him maliciously and refuses to believe him. But Raskolnikov has really said it! He has gotten the truth in his mind out in the company of men! It jolts him and he soon leaves the restaurant. “He went out, trembling all over from a sort of wild hysterical sensation, in which there was an element of insufferable rapture.” But this touch of sudden, intense life comes from a daring intentional act of the mind not from a sudden touch of remorse in the soul.