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Social Sciences
Vol. 29, No. 3/August 1998
Dostoyevsky’s Metaphysical Self
By Vladimir Bachinin *
| “In the day of adversity consider.” |
| Ecclesiastes 7, 14 |
Dostoyevsky possessed a metaphysical vision and ear that were exceptionally sharp and penetrating. All his senses were always in a state of tense concentration on his inner self, well hidden from the outside world, including that part of his inner “I” that was capable of establishing a contact with the other-worldly metaphysical reality. Even during the periods of serious interest in socio-political matters, as was the case in the years when he was publishing his Writer’s Diary journal, he would seemingly unexpectedly produce a metaphysical piece, such as Bobok or The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, as an attempt to penetrate the depths of his own inner world and the metaphysical world of the universal and the absolute.
Marcel Proust noted once that there was only one way of writing for everybody, and that is writing without thinking about anybody. This fully applies to Dostoyevsky’s metaphysical excursions. The three of his works taken together: Notes from Underground (1864), Bobok (1870), and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), create a kind of a triptych self-portrait, depicting the writer’s metaphysical “I” in its association with the other worlds. For the sake of fairness it should be noted that speaking about various manifestations of Dostoyevsky’s “I” we do not mean it literally but rather as the writer’s literary shadows, existing relatively independently.
The three novellas are united by their confessional intonation and utmost sincerity, the writer’s aim being to approach as closely as possible the hidden mysteries of metaphysical being.
The three stories are three portraits of the same “I”, belonging to the same type of person who is not embarrassed to call himself “a vile Petersburger”. At the same time genre-wise the three pieces are travel notes, describing metaphysical journeys rather than ordinary travels. In Notes from Underground the narrator’s “I” moves along the depths of self, the underground,the inner recesses of one’s own spirit. In Bobok, the reader becomes the author’s companion as he submerges into the metaphysical underground of the after-death that is common for all. The Dream of a Ridiculous Man is a skyward journey into the supernatural world existing outside physical time and space.
| “So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me...” |
| Ecclesiastes 2, 17 |
The confessional tone of Notes from Underground is reminiscent of the feverish delirium of the spirit, caught in the maelstrom of some mad dance. At times the narrator’s “I” exposes itself completely, casting off all conventions and then it freezes in a pose of haughty contempt towards the whole universe and all the laws in it. Moreover, with maniacal constancy and seemingly intentionally, it finds itself in stark contradiction with self, now denigrating itself and now indulging in self-admiration.
Who is that highly unusual hero? Where did he come from? What sort of metamorphoses must have happened to this human self before it ventured to expose itself so openly? Could that forty-year-old misanthrope be the same person who was featured in The White Nights twenty years previously? It is almost impossible to believe that the confessions of the angel-like youth from The White Nights and those of the devil-like “vile Petersburger” had been written by the same hand, poured out of the same heart, that both the nameless heroes are different manifestations of the same spirit, the two alter egos of the same person separated in time.
Let us suppose that the twenty-year-old sentimental youth, a romantic dreamer wandering alone around St. Petersburg embankments at night is suddenly confronted with his own portrait twenty years later as it appears in Notes from Underground. He would certainly recoil from the image not believing in the possibility of such improbable metamorphoses.
And yet that metamorphosis did take place: ordeals had changed the lives of both the author and his Dreamer. The author of the Notes from Underground (originally entitled Confessions in the drafts) is a man who had experienced hard labor, imprisonment in a fortress, feigned execution, Siberian prison and army service as a rank-and-file soldier. This is a man with a different worldview compared to the Dreamer’s, a worldview that had formed through great suffering.
Dostoyevsky’s post-imprisonment writing developed from two cocoons as it were, which were not, strictly speaking, artistic works but confessional-autobiographical notes. Notes from the Dead House (1862) unfolded from the sociological cocoon while Notes from Underground (1864) from the metaphysical cocoon. The following novels were in effect the author’s artistic interpretations based on either the first or the second Notes.
For Dostoyevsky hard labor became the place which gave birth to ideas that could not have been born in any other place. The world that had shrunk for him to the size of his prison changed his inner life beyond recognition. In the absence of the outer life, everything that was going on in his rich inner world increased in intensity many-fold and was conducive to the development of a very special frame of mind. Only Dostoyevsky could have discerned a Dantean Hell in the prison bath-house and it could only happen in prison.
Dostoyevsky’s first creative step in tackling this special material was to describe his observations and thoughts in psychosociological essays about life in a prison camp, examining the “physiology” of the unavoidable prison unfreedom.
The case of Notes from Underground was different. There was not just a chronological interval of two years between the two works, this space of time was filled with intense spiritual and creative search. Lev Shestov gave one of the most convincing interpretations of the outcome of that search: after his term in the prison camp Dostoyevsky was no longer interested in empoverished and humiliated civil servants; his creative mind was wholly focussed on the theme of crime and the personality of a criminal. Already at the prison camp he was preoccupied with the questions: “What sort of people these criminals are? Why do I feel so week, second-rate and colorless next to them? Perhaps they were right in despising me and those whom they considered unimportant?” In his Notes from the Dead House Dostoyevsky confessed with pain that criminals treated him with contempt, although not all of them. At the prison camp he became aware of a strangely irresistible interest in criminals, even akin to envy. He envied their strength of spirit, never leaving their tortured, emaciated bodies chained in shackles.
That envy, of rather uncertain origin, was followed by an urge to sort out his feelings. It was not at once that Dostoyevsky penetrated their metaphysical and psychological essence. In fact, all the works following his imprisonment were devoted to the analysis of his prison experiences.
Notes from Underground was a breakthrough into a new thinking. Dostoyevsky no longer defended “the humiliated and the injured” little man but attacked the liberals’ and the progressists’ traditional beliefs concerning good, freedom and justice.
After his release from prison Dostoyevsky could not fully liberate himself from the burden of the prison perception of the world. Hence the constant duality of his “I”: in captivity he used to fly away mentally into the free world but once outside prison his memories returned him constantly to criminal-prison reality. In the following decades of his St Petersburg life his inner world resembled an existence of a man who rushes between the two realities, having to overcome the dividing gap every time. These shifts in the existential space of the hierarchies of meanings, norms, and values marked visibly the creative work of the mature Dostoyevsky. The need to overcome the inertia of now one and now the other of his states, to undergo the sharp evaluational overfalls, was a great strain on the writer’s psychology. At the same time this need gave his works and his imagery an utmost openness of meaning verging at times on the paradox. This is probably why the Underground Man, mutilated as he is by his voluntary captivity, lives as if he is in prison while many prisoners from the Dead House possess a free spirit. And all of the above characters are portrayed against the background of the inner life of the writer’s “I”, breathing alternatively “the stale air of freedom” and “the fresh air of prison”.
The metaphor and the symbolism of the prison provide the semantic environment in which his Notes from Underground are born. In this new light he takes a different look at the normative dictate of the civilization, limiting the space of one’s personal freedom and averaging the individual. His Underground Man declares with insane daring: “What do I care about the laws of nature and science when I don’t like them.” He rises against the world without grace, wallowing in evil, and commits a mental crime in his protest against the civilization’s normative foundations. He does not recognize any wonders, mysteries or authorities. He is the Serpent, Cain and Ham rolled into one, who juxtaposes himself to the God’s world completely unafraid of its mysterious power. Living in a state of constant existential crisis he provokes metaphysical scandals, thus creating chaos and confusion, blocking the way to Theodicy and creating the embryo of the new, non-Euclidean, non-classical worldview. He is virtually a philosopher of proto-modernism, taking unheard-of liberties in his appraisals, boldly reviewing classical values, rejecting traditions, and creating new semantic premises for a new ontology and metaphysics.
The paradoxicalist is not satisfied with the linear-progressist view of the world where everything is interconnected into a rigid cause-and-effect system, where consequences are compatible with the causes and are predictable, while chances are treated as minor misadventures and unimportant obstacles. He defends the right of his individual “I” to absolute freedom, to any whim, to unpredictability and endless opportunities. He is attracted to freedom per se, not as a means or a way towards something concrete. He rejects freedom as a gift granted to him by the socium and he does not recognize the right of society to measure out freedom to the individual as it think fit.
The paradoxicalist’s mind repudiates and denounces the traditional theocentric model of the world. For him “God is dead” and the world is “Theomort”, a “dead life”, which puts an end to the hierarchic pyramid of inter-dependent values created by religion and its absolutes, morality and its norms, science and its laws, history and its so-called logic. That “little anti-Christ” with an urge for destruction that had possessed him and his contempt for people becomes a true “outlaw”. In civilization, which is the result of the combined effort of normal human beings, he sees only a laughable embodiment of their imperfections and stupidity.
Dostoyevsky’s hero moves towards a new perception of the world through deep-going existential collisions while at times elevating his confessional rhetoric to the dramatic style of the Biblical Ecclesiastes. And there are good reasons for doing so. Like the ancient thinker he had also tried to test everything with the power of his mind and finally discovered that “all is vanity”. Similarly to Ecclesiastes who came to the conclusion that “in much wisdom is much vexation” the Underground Man concludes that man’s well-developed ability for understanding many things is a disease bringing suffering. Similarly to Ecclesiastes who had traversed the road of all normal people, who had an active life, was engaged in building, accumulated riches, but finally saw that all was vanity, the paradoxicalist rejects the way of the ordinary people immersed as they are in petty pursuits and spiritually distant from the higher life. Similarly to Ecclesiastes who spoke about man’s likeness to animals and that the fate of both is the same, the Underground Man insists on comparing himself now to a mouse and now to an insect.
But Ecclesiastes had a firm support — God, whereas the Underground Man has no such support, and we hear despair and doom in his monologue. For the same reason the hero of Notes from Underground insists that his time is a time to break down and not a time to build, a time to cast away stones and not a time to gather stones.
Later in his crime novels Dostoyevsky will give a chance to such characters not only to have their say but also to reach their limit in action, identifying this limit with crime.
Having destroyed the worlds of both Theodicy and Anthropodicy, having condemned the two classical pictures of world order, the paradoxicalist freezes at the zero point, surrounded only with metaphysical emptiness both above and around himself. The rejected God and civilization pay him in kind, rejecting him in their turn. As a result he acquires his metaphysical freedom at the expense of loneliness and metaphysical anguish.
At the times of Pascal it was believed that God could not have possibly created human beings hating Him, but in the times of Dostoyevsky it was precisely the God-hater who was the center of attention of all the proto-modern philosophical constructions. That was “an ignoble-looking gentleman” who was carried away with the business of creating a peculiar “Egodicy”: a clear case of an anti-Narcissus, confronted by his reflections whereever he looks, yet unlike Narcissus he does not admire his reflections but shudders with disgust at the sight of himself. In fact he does not admire or justify anything, he believes that there cannot be any justification for anything because all is vanity and void. Therefore he stands for shattering everyting to pieces, to stage a universal uproar, showing off his most disgusting self and relish his downfall and shame. In this he is akin to Kirillov from The Possessed, who said before committing suicide that in his suicidal note he would like to curse everything and draw an ugly mug with a sticking tongue to the world.
If we were to draw a space pattern of the inner world of the Underground Man we’d have to elongate it downwards rather than upwards, it would have to go down into that underground whose nature is not physical, not even psychic but rather metaphysical. Its lower limit reaches the world of non-existence where one disintegrates spiritually for good. Due to its absolute lack of grace it is precisely the underground that is the metaphysical source of negativism, lawlessness, vices, and crime.
Whereas in the direct psychological sense the immersion in the underground means entering the state of cold, biting acrimony towards the whole world, in the metaphysical sense it is a visit to one’s personal section in the common Hell and the subsequent endless circling inside its vortex. Similarly to Dante’s descent into the ever lower circles of Hell, the paradoxicalist descends into ever darker and ominous lower depths of his own “underground”. But thanks to his love for Beatrice, Dante finds the way out of Hell and reaches Paradise while the Underground Man remains a captive of his own hell, his own “underground”. The sin of “God-killing”, of unlove and voluntary isolation doomed him to a miserable existence and moral self-burial alive.
In the underground there is no place for either physical or spiritual light. Darkness fills in almost all the space of the Underground Man’s inner world, depriving him of any possibility to distinguish good from evil and crime. Despite his highly viable and powerful intellect and the clarity of thought his “I” remains in the state of moral obscurity when all prohibitions can be easily ignored, when the gates to one’s inner hell are opened and what surface from its dark depths are desires, motifs and images that are frightening in their ungovernable agressiveness. As a result the paradoxicalist’s consciousness remains forever in the dark and the state of his mind could be compared to that of Hamlet when he said:
| ‘Tis now the very witching time of night When churchyards yearn and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood, And do such bitter business as the day Would quake to look on. 1 |
The darkened consciousness of the hero of Notes from Underground produced in him an urge for destruction and chaos, leading to his “mental crimes” which later became the more odious mental crimes committed by the heroes of Dostoyevsky’s crime novels. The Underground Man himself was the prototype of many of Dostoyevsky’s criminal heroes and his role turned out to be similar to Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov who fathered criminal sons.
| “And so I saw the wicked buried, who had come and gone from the pace of the holy, and they were forgotten in the city where they had so done.” |
| Ecclesiastes, 8, 10 |
The novella Bobok also belongs to the genre of Notes and is subtitled : “Notes of a certain person”. Dostoyevsky favoured the genre of notes because it afforded him maximum creative freedom not only for his publicistic sketches and psychological observations but, above all, for his experiments in confessional genres.
Bobok is a self-portrait in two dimentions: socio-psychological and metaphysical. The first is evident in the famous portrait of Dostoyevsky painted by Vassily Perov. Critics commented at the time that the portrait showed a man who was obviously gravely ill 2 . The fact was later included in the novella in the following remark of the hero: “It so happened that I let myself be painted by that artist. ‘You’re a writer after all,’ he says. I agreed and he exhibited the portrait. And then I read: ‘Go and see that sickly insane face.’” 3
The same critics neither understood nor accepted the novella, regarding it as a failure and a fantastic quirk of the writer’s sickly imagination. Dostoyevsky even had to give a public explanation of what his hero’s sepulchral visions at the Petersburg graveyard meant. He wrote that “that man had been so depressed by the general cynicism of the contemporary world, by the society’s sluggishness and fragility, by the depravity and lack of measure in everything, and, moreover, by finding the same faults in himself, too, that one day as he happened to wander into a cemetery in a fit of desperation he imagined that even in that place where all grief and passions come to an end, where all anguish is calmed, that even there one finds the same cynicism as here on earth.” 4
Both the critics and the general reader disregarded the metaphysical aspects of the novella, they did not even make an attempt to understand its meaning. It was Mikhail Bakhtin who was the first to make such an attempt in the 1920s. He saw in Bobok one of the greatest, in its daring and depth, menippean satires in world literature. The nature of the manippean satire as a “universal genre for posing ultimate questions” enabled one to see the events described in the novella as something that is not happening “here and now” but everywhere and always, not only on earth but in the supernatural reality as well.
In Dostoyevsky’s novella the metaphysical “I” of the Petersburg writer Ivan Ivanovich happens to get involved in what happens to the recently deceased persons in the other world. It is as if the universal after-life underground opened up before him, revealing the void of non-existence. He was surprised to discover new existence beyond the boundary separating life from death, he learnt that physical death did not mean complete cessation of life, that human consciousness remains within the body for some more time after death, as if by inertia, and the dead are able to speak among themselves for a few months after death until the corpse decomposes completely.
The souls of the dead lost their creative abilities, fell into a state of indifference towards their higher predestination, and started sliding into decay. In the same way as the formerly hidden skeleton shows up in the partly decomposed body the disintegrating souls reveal the formerly hidden vices in their stark nakedness, all that is lowly and dark and ugly. And nothing can hold them in check any longer. The earthly restraints no longer work, there are no more prohibitions in the world of the dead.
The cadaverous characters in “Bobok” try to make merry on the other side of life so as to make the most of the time left to them. In this sense they bring to mind “the merry dead man” speaking to the worms from Baudelaire’s Le fleurs du mal.
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O vers! noirs compagnons sans creille et sans yeux Voyer venir a vous un mort libre et joyeux; Philosophes viveurs, fils de la pourriture, A traversma ruineallez donc sans remords... 5 |
This is a carnival inside out where the dead do not don masks but, on the contrary, take off the masks they had been wearing all their lives — the masks of decency, propriety, and good manners.
Bobok is a good illustration of Erich Fromm’s theory of necrophilia. Fromm asserts that many people suffer from hidden necrofilia, their rich imagination prompting them in this direction. If the hero of Bobok was free from necrophilia he would hardly ponder on how exactly the corpses decompose in the graves and he would hardly lie down on a grave for a nap. But his particular brand of necrophilia is not very strong and could be described as contemplative, that is, not provoking actions but revealing itself in dreams in which the nether world comes to him and communicates with him through the voices of the dead.
What the dead are saying cannot be understood literally. What is happening beyond the life’s limit is a symbolic reflection of the earthly reality which requires interpretation. Behind the necrophilic sexuality when corpses flirt with one another, expose themselves, tell indecent stories and make improper hints, one can see nothing but anomie. The decomposition of the physical bodies and resulting stench stand for moral decomposition and “moral stench”. The characteristic necrophilic motif of “forced interruption of living links” is revealed here in the likening of living people’s socio-moral ties to rotten ropes which are bound to snap.
The sleeping hero’s immersion in the after-life underground where all things turn into grotesque and absurdity, is a symbolic expression of a very serious danger: the widespread spirit of decadence, decay and death overcoming the living.
| “For it comes into vanity and goes into darkness and in darkness its name is covered.” |
| Ecclesiastes, 6,4. |
The Dream of a Ridiculous Man could have been titled “The Dream of a Madman” because the story’s nameless hero confesses several times that people call him insane. But it is precisely his abnormality, distinguishing him from so called normal, middle-class people that makes him a metaphysical hero who is privy to other worlds and to the truths that are beyond the comprehension of ordinary mortals. He is a madman and a sage, reminiscent of a traditional Russian folk character of a simpleton or “wise fool”, who penetrates the essence of things much better than the reasonable people around him. This is Dostoyevsky’s favourite type. Unlike the other people “he carries within himself the core of the whole” and his attitude towards life expresses the innermost essence of being.
The Dream of a Ridiculous Man is a story of a journey of a certain metaphysical self not into its own personal underground, as in Notes from Underground, and not into the nether world, as in Bobok, but into the boundless transphysical heights of other worlds. Here the theme of a metaphysical journey is combined with the theme of suicide. In a way this novella absorbed the author’s previous metaphysical journeys, combining the theme of the underground and the after-life with the dominant theme of a metaphysical suicide.
Dostoyevsky was always greatly agitated by the news of someone killing himself without any obvious reason. He was intrigued by the mystery of such suicides, which in 1870s assumed the proportions of an epidemic. In The Dream of a Ridiculous Man his hero decides to take his life for no apparent reason, just because one nasty autumn night he glimpses a nameless star as the clift between the clouds and thus he was prompted to commit suicide that very night.
To follow the logic of Albert Camus, the Ridiculous Man is a true metaphysical philosopher who is trying to solve the only really important philosophical problem for himself: that of suicide. This mood is brought about by an unquenchable, interminable metaphysical anguish. But his philosophical conclusion comes into conflict with his sheer will for life and their duel is resolved in a saving sleep. It is precisely in his sleep that the hero can fully experience the situation of suicide with all its metaphysical consequences and still remain alive. It is not accidental that the novella brings to mind a metaphysical pantomime where all action is going on in silence and only the hero’s inner monologue can be heard, and where even the fateful shot is soundless because it happens in a dream.
The hero’s retreat into the metaphysical world was preceded by his metaphysical perception of St. Petersburg in November. Characteristically, all the three novellas are set in autumn and winter, that is, when St Petersburg is at its gloomiest. In Notes from Underground the second part is called “On the Subject of Sleet”; Bobok is set in late October. In The Dream of a Ridiculous Man the image of St Petersburg is particularly eloquent. Its deserted dark streets at night prepare the reader for the coming supernatural events. “I remember walking home at about eleven o’clock at night, thinking that the night could not be more depressing. Even in the physical sense. It had been raining the whole day, and it was the most depressing rain I can remember, I would even call it an ominous rain, I remember it distinctly, obviously hostile to humans; and suddenly it stopped at about eleven, leaving heavy dampness, which was even damper and colder than during the rain, some sort of steam rose from all objects, from every stone in the street, from every side lane if you look deeper into it...” 6 This description reminds you (whether intentionally or not) an equally depressing picture from Dante’s Divine Comedy, the third cirle of Hell:
| I’m in the third Cirle, of the rain Accurst, eternal, crushing, cold; not ever In mode or measure shall it change again. Coarse hail, discoloured water mixed with snow Pour down together through the murky air; And the ground stinks that drinks them in below... 7 |
And all that happening in complete darkness where Cerberus tortures sinners by hiding them raw as they “howl in the dawnpour like bitches”.
The city, which the Ridiculous Man sees as Dante’s third circle of Hell, does not encourage him to live on, and that is why the hero decides he’s had enough.
The story does not offer a detailed motivation of the suicide but six months previously, in the October issue of the Writer’s Diary for 1876, Dostoyevsky explained it himself in his article “The Verdict”. Describing a “logical suicide” type he also gave a metaphysical formula of such a frame of mind. Using his favorite genre of a confession he wrote a supposedly suicidal note of a certain NN who was determined to end his life without any apparent reason. His reasoning is highly reminiscent of the Ridiculous Man’s motives for suicide.
NN’s arguments boil down to several metaphysical principles. First, it is his conviction that a human being, although possessing consciousness and an ability to suffer, is incapable of penetrating the designs of the higher forces. According to the heavenly designs there is an absolute harmony of the whole for the sake of which people should patiently endure their earthly ordeals but people find it hard to agree with these designs.
Secondly, all the earthly beings will eventually turn to dust, to original chaos, to “zero”, and therefore human aspirations and hopes are meaningless. In such circumstances man finds it insulting to go on living for the sake of suffering. That is why, NN reasons, I take upon myself the role of both the judge and the accused and “give a death sentence to myself and to nature that so impudently and unceremoniously condemned me to suffering. And since it is not in my power to liquidate nature then I can only liquidate myself for the sole reason that I find it unbearable to put up with the tyranny where there is no guilty party.” 8
Two months later in the December issue of the Writer’s Diary, Dostoyevsky returns to the hero of “The Verdict”, saying that NN’s argumentation is faultless if you only view it from the logical point of view. It is true that civilization is perishable as everything else that is mortal. There is a general axyom that everything which has a beginning is bound to have an ending. And yet NN’s conclusions are false. What is his mistake? His only mistake, Dostoyevsky insists, is that he had lost faith in his immortal soul. He writes: “The point of this confession of a person committing ‘a logical suicide’ is the necessity of an immediate conclusion that without faith in the immortality of one’s soul human existence is unnatural, unthinkable, and unbearable.” 9 For those who reject the upper world, seeing man as just another species of the animal world, and who live only for the sake of “sleeping, eating, excreting, and sitting on soft seats” life becomes unbearable and insulting. Such people are particularly widespread among the intelligentsia: is that probably the reason, Dostoyevsky writes, that there is an increased number of suicides among them.
One of those is the hero of The Dream of a Ridiculous Man. Overcome by metaphysical yearning for a higher meaning of life and the disturbing thought that in all probability “it’s all the same everywhere in the world”, he approaches that boundary line which separates personal existence from non-existence. Not believing in either God or immortal soul he believes that after a shot in the head he will turn into an “absolute zero”, dissolves in the absolute non-existence. But something unforeseen happens instead, something disproving his beliefs. His metaphysical “I” outlives the suicide, the dying, and the burial. What he experiences in the process resembles Pavel Florensky’s description of a dream about his own death: “I had no visions but only inner feelings. Pitch darkness, almost tangible and viscose, enveloped me. Some forces were drawing me towards the edge, and I realized that that was the edge of God’s world, and that beyond it there was nothing. I wanted to cry out but was unable to utter a sound. I knew that in an instant I would be thrown into the outer darkness which had already started penetrating my whole being, my consciousness was partly gone and I knew that it was absolute, metaphysical annihilation. In my last desperation I screamed with all my might: ‘O Lord, I appeal to you from the depth, hear my voice...’ My whole soul was in those words. Some powerful hands got hold of me then, as I was already drowning, and threw me far away from the abyss. The push was unexpected and imperious. Suddenly I found myself in my usual surroundings, in my own room. From the mystical world I returned to my usual everyday existence. I felt that I was facing God and I woke up completely drenched in cold sweat.” 10
Unlike Florensky the Ridiculous Man is saved not by God or an angel sent by God, but by some dark creature for which he suddenly feels utter disgust instead of gratitude. In all probability it was a demon of death, the Devil’s messenger who rescues the Ridiculous Man from the nether world persuing his own far-reaching aims: he intends to use him as the seed of evil, to plant him in other worlds and thus grow a rich harvest of evil there.
The suicidal shot, a sinful deed in itself, extorts the Ridiculous Man from the physical world (terminating the life of his body), from society (depriving him of any possibility to play social roles in the earthly life), from culture (excluding him from the protection of religion and morals, with their higher, absolute demands and prohibitions), finally leaving him without God’s protection. Having rejected all of the above his soul deprives itself of any defense mechanisms and finally finds itself facing the abyss where it is seized by the demon of darkness and carried off through the icy whirlpool.
Having discovered an opportunity to travel beyond the bounds of the physical space and time, the writer’s metaphysical “I” is confronted with the reality outside the living people’s comprehension, unreachable by their sciences and devices.
The scene of the Ridiculous Man’s flight with the Demon reminds one of a similar flight of Cain and Lucifer from Byron’s Cain: a Mystery.
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Cain:
Oh! how we cleave the blue! The stars fade from us The earth! where’s my earth? Let me look on it, For I was made of it.
Lucifer: This now beyond thee, |
Byron’s Cain had been beyond the bounds of life, in the other world where he acquired the evil knowledge about the realm of the eternal dark and death as well as an understanding that death means a different form of life.
The similarity between Byron’s poem and Dostoyevsky’s story is even more than that. The same as Cain became the world’s first murderer, the Ridiculous Man also becomes the “first criminal”, not on the Earth but on an unknown planet, that is as yet innocent of evil, where before his coming its dwellers lived according to the laws of love, in harmonious unity with the universe.
As a result of the artistic-optical effect the mythologem of the Fall moved closer from the Biblical distance, allowing the hero to enter its semantic meaning, and not just enter but assume one of the key roles, that of the Serpent, seducing and corrupting the heretofore perfectly happy mankind. In that story Dostoyevsky thinks in terms of the Gospel thesis about the world that is doomed to languish in evil. This thesis assumes that vices and crime have always existed and will always exist on earth, that in the physical world evil is eternal, and even if a period of general reason and harmony would set in temporarily there is bound to appear some “ignoble-looking gentleman” who will spoil everything. In The Dream of a Ridiculous Man this is precisely what happens: among the happy and reasonable dwellers of the wonderful planet such a “gentleman” appears. The Ridiculous Man’s condemned existence, culminating in a sinful suicide and followed by a journey with a dark demon of evil, prepared him for the role of a culprit in the general Fall, he destroys the harmony of the Golden Age and opens the gates for vices and crime.
But the main discovery the Ridiculous Man’s metaphysical “I” makes is that of a different life beyond his human existence, that his soul is immortal, and therefore apart from the dark demon and the Devil there exists also God.
In each of the three heroes Dostoyevsky portrays part of his own self, thus revealing his contradictory personal metaphysical experience. As a matter of fact he never concealed these contradictions, he had confessed on many occasions that the question of God’s existence had been torturing him all his life, and that the more arguments against his existence his mind offered the stronger was his heart’s desire to achieve faith in the immortality of soul. The Cartesian principle of methodological doubt invading his life more and more insistently turned it into a metaphysical drama of Theodicy. A passionate attraction to the super-personal, a powerful synergetic verticalness of his spiritual aspirations, extatic impetuousness in the search for higher principles, metaphysical cosmologism — all of these gave his spiritual life a baroque nature. Baroque, with its striving towards God, had by then become somewhat outdated in Europe but was suddenly resurrected on its eurasian outskirts, in Dostoyevsky’s work.
The essence of baroque (in the Christian meaning of Theodicy) is in man’s passionate desire to restore God’s authority that had, due to certain circumstances, been diminished. It was precisely these sentiments that were dominant in the 19th century Russian culture permeated as it was with the spirit of Theodicy. A powerful creative upsurge that was obvious in the 19th century Russian culture could be partly explained by that transitional, Renaissance-Baroque nature of the spiritual life at the time. It should be noted that although the life of the Russian spirit did correspond to the norms and values of the baroque paradigm, it was still a specifically Russian Baroque, richly endowed with all the attributes of a Big Style in a characteristically Russian version.
Dostoyevsky’s typically Russian Theodicy with its heavenward aspirations was developing as opposition to the new forces, the kind of which were unknown in the 17th century: the nihilistic consequences of the scientific progress, the influence of positivism and socialism, the naturalistic ideas in art, the destructive drive of the European neoromantic Anthropodicy. These influences infused his art with great expressiveness, tension, explosiveness, and impetuosity, all of which made Dostoyevsky the most baroque of all the Russian writers and thinkers.
Dostoyevsky’s Theodicy developed not only as defence of God but also as an attempt to disprove the ideas of the followers of Anthropodicy and Demonodicy. Having experienced the temptation of the latter two paradigms and returning, as a prodigal son, to his faith in God and immortality of the soul, Dostoyevsky could say in the end that his hosanna had been tempered in the crucible of great doubts.
Translated by Natalia Perova
Endnotes
*: V. Bachinin, D.Sc. (Sociology), professor at the National Law Academy of the Ukraine. This article was published in Russian in the journal Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost, No. 6, 1997. Back.
Note 1: William Shakespeare, Hamlet, London, 1957, p. 117. Back.
Note 2: F.M.Dostoyevsky, Complete Works in 30 vols, Vol 21, Leningrad, 1980 (in Russian). Back.
Note 3: F.M.Dostoyevsky, Complete Works, Vol 22, Leningrad 1981, pp. 41, 42 (in Russian). Back.
Note 4: Opp cit, Vol 21, p. 309. Back.
Note 5: Charles Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal, Paris, 1964, p. 92–93. Back.
Note 6: F.M.Dostoyevsky, Complete Works, Vol 25, Leningrad, 1983, p. 105. Back.
Note 7: Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, N.Y., 1931, p. 26. Back.
Note 8: F.M.Dostoyevsky, Complete Works, Vol 23, Leningrad, 1981, p. 148. Back.
Note 9: Op. cit, Vol 24, Leningrad, 1982, p. 46. Back.
Note 10: Pavel Florensky, Stoll and Asserting the Truth, Moscow, 1914, p. 205 (in Russian). Back.
Note 11: The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 5, New York, 1966, p. 238. Back.