Fëodor Dostoyevsky
From Philosopedia
Dostoyevsky, Fëodor (Mikhailovich ) (11 November 1821 - 9 February 1881)
Фёдор Миха́йлович Достое́вский, Fëdor Mihajlovič Dostoevskij, sometimes transliterated Dostoyevsky, wrote about atheism but was a believer, stating that atheism sprang from our hatred of the world as it is. “To recognize that there’s no God without recognizing at the same time that you yourself have become God makes no sense,” he wrote.
In 1849, he was arrested for membership in a secret political group, was exiled to Siberia where he was allowed to read only the Bible, and served for four years at hard labor. As a prisoner, he was forced to take part in a ceremony just prior to being executed, and at the last minute a pre-arranged reprieve was tendered, while he was standing in front of a scaffold. The incident so traumatized him that he is said to have been transformed from a youthful liberal into a fervently religious and orthodox believer.
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His Works
Notes from the Underground (1864) was an existentialistic work which was followed by many literary successes, a major one of which was Prestuplenie i Nakazanie (Crime and Punishment) (1866). That consummate portrait of sin, remorse, and redemption was followed by The Idiot (1868), about a failed Christ figure. In 1872, he wrote The Devils, a portrayal of modern Nihilism in which he defines its ultimate consequences: “Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism,” leading Soviet critics to attack it decades later and resulting in its being made unavailable to Soviet readers.
Another of his major works, and likely his most important, was The Brothers Karamazov (1880), in which he plumbs the depths and complexities of the human “soul.” As for Smerdyakov’s dictum in The Brothers Karamazov, “If God doesn’t exist, all things are permissible,” Adolf Grünbaum and others have denied that theism is logically necessary as one of the premises of a systematic moral code. “Indeed,” writes Grünbaum, “Smerdyakov’s epigram boomerangs: Since atheism and theism are alike ethically barren, neither doctrine itself imposes any concrete moral prohibitions on human conduct.”
Personal
Dostoyevsky suffered from a serious gambling compulsion, and some have said that he finished Crime and Punishment quickly because he needed his publisher's advance, having become penniless from gambling.
He traveled to Western Europe in an attempt to continue a love affair with Apollinaria (Polina) Suslova, a young university student with whom he had had an affair several years prior. When she refused his marriage proposal. Dostoevsky was heartbroken but soon met Anna Grigorevna, a twenty-year-old stenographer whom he married in 1867. This period resulted in the writing of his greatest books.
From 1873 to 1881 he vindicated his earlier journalistic failures by publishing a monthly journal full of short stories, sketches, and articles on current events - The Writer's Diary. The journal was an enormous success.
Dostoevsky is also known to have influenced and been influenced by Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov, a Russian philosopher who proposed a universal Christianity which would unite the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and he attempted a synthesis of religious philosophy with science. His main work is The Crisis of Western Philosophy: Against the Positivists (1874. Solovyov is noted as the inspiration for the character Alyosha Karamazov.
In 1877 Dostoevsky gave the keynote eulogy at the funeral of his friend, the poet Nekrasov, to much controversy. In 1880, shortly before he died, he gave his famous Pushkin speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow.
His Death
In his later years, Dostoevsky lived for a long time at the resort of Staraya Russa which was closer to St Petersburg and less expensive than German resorts. He died on 28 January (O.S.) 1881 of a lung hemorrhage associated with emphysema and an epileptic seizure and was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, St. Petersburg, Russia.
Forty thousand mourning Russians attended his funeral. His tombstone reads "Verily, Verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit," from John 12:24, which is also the epigraph of his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov.
Biographers Aimée Dostoyevsky and David Magarshack report that for spiritual guidance Dostoyevsky would open the Bible to the New Testament and, by random choice, would read whatever lines he came upon. When on January 25, 1881, he had a sudden hemorrhage and the physician was rushed to his bedside, Dostoyevsky asked his wife to open the Bible and read whatever she first saw: “And Jesus answering said unto him, hold me not back for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness.” Apparently, Dostoyevsky felt this was a spiritual sign, and he said, “Did you hear? Hold me not back. My hour has come. I must die.” Whereupon he bade farewell to his children and to his wife, slowly lost consciousness, and died that evening.
From any vantage point, Dostoyevsky stands out as one of the towering figures of world literature. His work influenced existentialist and expressionistic authors.
{CE; CL; ER; EU, Hugh McLean; Free Inquiry, Fall 1992; PA; TYD}
DOSTOYEVSKY’S EPILEPSY
Physicians today talk about a left-temporal-lobe seizure called “Dostoyevsky’s epilepsy,” a rare condition.
- Freud thought Dostoyevsky was a hysterical epileptic, a condition which he believed was psychogenic in origin.
- Thom Jones noted that such an epileptic, in the split second before a fit, experiences an “ecstatic well-being unlike anything an ordinary mortal could hope to imagine. . . . Dostoyevsky was nervous and depressed, a tormented hypochondriac, a compulsive writer obsessed with religious and philosophic themes. He was hyperloquacious, raving, etc. & etc. His gambling addiction is well known. By most accounts he was a sick soul.”
- Thom Jones, who writes that he personally has had such a seizure, added, “It is thought that St. Paul had a temporal-lobe fit on the road to Damascus. Paul warns us in First Corinthians that God will confound the intellectuals.
- It is known that Muhammad composed the Qur’an after attacks of epilepsy.
- Black Elk [A Sioux holy man and Christian] experienced fits before his grand "buffalo: vision.
- Joan of Arc is thought to have been a left-temporal-lobe epileptic.
"Each of these in a terrible flash of brain lightning was able to pierce the murky veil of illusion which is spread over all things. Just so did the scales fall from my eyes. It is called the ‘sacred disease.’ ” Jones added, “Even Dostoyevsky, the fervent Christian, makes an almost airtight case against the possibility of the existence of God in the Grand Inquisitor digression in The Brothers Karamazov. It is probably the greatest passage in all of world literature, and it tilts you to the court of the atheist. This is what happens when you approach Him with the intellect.”
{The New Yorker, December 2, 1991; Eve LaPlante, Seized (1993)}
