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The International Dostoevsky Society has the sad duty to inform you that Prof. Dr. Horst-Jürgen Gerigk passed away on February 9, 2024 in Heidelberg at the age of 86. Horst-Jürgen Gerigk was one of the founding members of our Society, he was its President from 1998 to 2004 and was subsequently appointed Honorary President. From 1999 to 2018, he was the Managing Editor of Dostoevsky Studies. His numerous monographs and essays on Dostoevsky have not only considerably expanded knowledge of this author in the German-speaking world, but have also provided decisive impulses in an international context. The International Dostoevsky Society will continue to honor his memory.

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For over 150 years the work of F.M. Dostoevsky has stirred the imagination of readers all over the world. A master storyteller, he combined a psychologist’s perception with a philosopher’s depth and a political dissident’s suspicion of authority. Controversial during his lifetime and to this day, he revolutionized world literature with works like Notes from Underground , Crime and Punishment , The Idiot , The Devils , and T he Brothers Karamazov .

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Fyodor Dostoevsky: philosopher of freedom

On the political and moral lessons of Fyodor Dostoevsky.

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O n December 22, 1849, a group of political radicals were taken from their prison cells in Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress, where they had been interrogated for eight months. Led to the Semenovsky Square, they heard a sentence of death by firing squad. They were given long white peasant blouses and nightcaps—their funeral shrouds—and offered last rites. The first three prisoners were seized by the arms and tied to the stake. One prisoner refused a blindfold and stared defiantly into the guns trained on them. At the last possible moment, the guns were lowered as a courier galloped up with an imperial decree reducing death sentences to imprisonment in a Siberian prison camp followed by service as a private in the army. The last-minute rescue was in fact planned in advance as part of the punishment, an aspect of social life that Russians understand especially well.

Accounts affirm: of the young men who endured this terrible ordeal, one had his hair turn white; a second went mad and never recovered his sanity; a third, whose two-hundredth birthday we celebrate in 2021, went on to write Crime and Punishment .

The mock-execution and the years in Siberian prison—thinly fictionalized in his novel Notes from the House of the Dead (1860)—changed Dostoevsky forever. His naive, hopeful romanticism disappeared. His religious faith deepened. The sadism of both prisoners and guards taught him that the sunny view of human nature presumed by utilitarianism, liberalism, and socialism were preposterous. Real human beings differed fundamentally from what these philosophies presumed.

At the last possible moment, the guns were lowered as a courier galloped up.

People do not live by bread—or, what philosophers called the maximalization of “advantage”—alone. All utopian ideologies presuppose that human nature is fundamentally good and simple: evil and apparent complexity result from a corrupt social order. Eliminate want and you eliminate crime. For many intellectuals, science itself had proven these contentions and indicated the way to the best of all possible worlds. Dostoevsky rejected all these ideas as pernicious nonsense. “It is clear and intelligible to the point of obviousness,” he wrote in a review of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina , “that evil lies deeper in human beings than our social-physicians suppose; that no social structure will eliminate evil; that the human soul will remain as it always has been . . . and, finally, that the laws of the human soul are still so little known, so obscure to science, so undefined, and so mysterious, that there are not and cannot be either physicians or final judges” except God Himself.

Dostoevsky’s characters astonish by their complexity. Their unpredictable but believable behavior reminds us of experiences beyond the reach of “scientific” theories. We appreciate that people, far from maximizing their own advantage, sometimes deliberately make victims of themselves in order, for example, to feel morally superior. In The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Father Zosima observes that it can be very pleasant to take offense, and Fyodor Pavlovich replies that it can even be positively distinguished.

People are not just material objects, and will do anything, no matter how self-destructive, to prove they are not.

In fact, people harm themselves for many reasons. They tear at their own wounds and derive a peculiar pleasure from doing so. They deliberately humiliate themselves. To their own surprise, they experience impulses stemming from resentments long suppressed and, as a result, create scandalous scenes or commit horrible crimes. Freud particularly appreciated Dostoevsky’s exploration of the dynamics of guilt. But neither Freud nor most Western readers have grasped that Dostoevsky intended his descriptions of human complexity to convey political lessons. If people are so surprising, so “undefined and mysterious,” then social engineers are bound to cause more harm than good.

The narrator of The House of the Dead describes how prisoners sometimes, for no apparent reason, suddenly do something highly self-destructive. They may attack a guard, even though the punishment—running a gauntlet of thousands of blows—usually proves fatal. Why? The answer is that the essence of humanness lies in the possibility of surprise. The behavior of material objects can be fully explained by natural laws, and for materialists the same is true of people, if not yet, then in the near future. But people are not just material objects, and will do anything, no matter how self-destructive, to prove they are not.

The whole point of prison, as Dostoevsky experienced it, is to restrict people’s ability to make their own choices. But choice is what makes us human. Those prisoners lash out because of their ineradicable craving to have a will of their own, and that craving is ultimately more important than their own well-being and, indeed, than life itself.

T he nameless narrator of Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella Notes from Underground (usually called “the underground man”) insists that the aspiration of social sciences to discover the iron laws of human behavior threatens to reduce people to “piano keys or organ stops.” If such laws exist, if “some day they truly discover a formula for all our desires and caprices,” he reasons, then each person will realize that “everything is done by itself according to the laws of nature.” As soon as those laws are discovered, people will no longer be responsible for their actions. What’s more,

All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000. . . . there would be published certain edifying works like the present encyclopedia lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and designated that there will be no more . . . adventures in the world. . . . Then the crystal palace [utopia] will be built.

There will be no more adventures because adventures involve suspense, and suspense entails moments that are truly momentous: depending on what one does, more than one outcome is possible. But for a determinist, the laws of nature ensure that at any given moment only one thing can happen. Suspense is just an illusion resulting from ignorance of what must be.

If so, then all agonies of choice are pointless. So are guilt and regret, since both emotions depend on the possibility that we could have done something else. We experience what we must, but we accomplish nothing. As Tolstoy expressed the point in War and Peace , “If we concede that human life can be [exhaustively] governed by reason, then the possibility of life is destroyed.”

“They call me a psychologist; this is not true,” Dostoevsky wrote. “I am merely a realist in the higher sense.”

The supposedly “scientific” view of humanity turns people into objects—literally dehumanizes them—and there can be no greater insult. “All my life I have been offended by the laws of nature,” the underground man wryly observes, and concludes that people will rebel against any denial of their humanness. They will engage in what he calls “spite,” action undertaken “just because,” for no reason except to show they can act against their own advantage and contrary to whatever so-called laws of human psychology predict.

“They call me a psychologist; this is not true,” Dostoevsky wrote. “I am merely a realist in the higher sense, that is, I portray all the depths of the human soul.” Dostoevsky denied being a psychologist because he, unlike practitioners of this science, acknowledged that people are truly agents, who make real choices for which they can properly be held responsible. No matter how thoroughly one describes the psychological or sociological forces that act on a person, there is always something left over —some “surplus of humanness,” as the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin paraphrased Dostoevsky’s idea. We cherish that surplus, “the man in man” as Dostoevsky called it, and will defend it at all costs.

A p assage in Notes from Underground looks forward to modern dystopian novels, works like Y ev geny Zamyatin’s We (1920–21) or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), where heroes rebel against guaranteed happiness. They want their lives to be their own. Put man in utopia, the underground man observes, and he will devise “destruction and chaos,” do something perverse, and, if given the chance, return to the world of suffering. In short, “the whole work of man seems really to consist in nothing but proving to himself continually that he is a man and not an organ stop. It may be at the cost of his skin; but he has proved it.”

In an essay ostensibly devoted to the Russian craze for séances and communication with demons, Dostoevsky addresses the skeptical objection that since these devils could easily prove their existence by giving us some fabulous inventions, they couldn’t exist. They are just a fraud perpetrated on the gullible. With tongue in cheek, Dostoevsky replies that this argument fails because devils (that is, if there are devils) would foresee the hatred people would eventually feel towards the resulting utopia and the devils who enabled it.

To be sure, people would at first be ecstatic that, “as our socialists dream,” all needs were satisfied, the “corrupting [social] environment, once the source of all flaws,” had vanished, and there was nothing more to wish for. But within a generation,

People would suddenly see that they had no more life left, that they had no freedom of spirit, no will, no personality. . . . they would see that their human image had disappeared . . . that their lives had been taken away for the sake of bread, for “stones turned into bread.” People would realize that there is no happiness in inactivity, that the mind which does not labor will wither, that it is not possible to love one’s neighbor without sacrificing something to him of one’s labor . . . and that happiness lies not in happiness but only in the attempt to achieve it .

Or as the underground man observes, social engineers imagine a world that is “completed,” a perfect finished product. In fact, “an amazing edifice of that type” already exists: “the anthill.” The anthill became Dostoevsky’s favorite image of socialism.

Humanness, as opposed to formicness, requires not just product but process. Effort has value only when it can fail, while choices matter only if the world is vulnerable and depends in part on our doing one thing rather than another. Ants do not make choices. “With the anthill, the respectable race of ants began and with the anthill they will probably end, which does the greatest credit to their perseverance and staidness. But man is a frivolous creature, and perhaps, like a chessplayer, loves only the process of the game, not the end itself.”

When you multiply two by two the result is always the same: there is no suspense, no uncertainty, no surprise. 

Perhaps, the underground man reasons, “the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in the incessant process of attaining, or in other words, in life itself, and not particularly in the goal which, of course, must always be ‘twice two makes four,’ that is, a formula, and after all, twice two makes four is no longer life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death.” When you multiply two by two the result is always the same: there is no suspense, no uncertainty, no surprise. You don’t have to wait and see what those multiplying digits will come up with this time. If life is like that, it is senseless. In a paroxysm of angry wit, the underground man famously concludes:

Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a fop standing with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes also a very charming little thing.

In the same spirit, a character in Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot (1869) remarks: “Oh, you may be sure that Columbus was not happy when he had discovered America, but while he was discovering it. It’s life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, and not the discovery itself.”

People are always in the making or, as Bakhtin expressed the point, they are “unfinalizable.” They retain the capacity “to render untrue any externalizing and finalizing definition of them. As long as a person is alive he lives by the fact that he is not yet finalized, that he has not yet uttered his ultimate word.”

Ethics demands that we treat people as people, not as objects, and that means we must treat them as endowed with “surprisingness.” One must never be too certain about others, collectively or individually. In The Brothers Karamazov , Alyosha explains to Lise that the impoverished and humiliated Captain Snegiryov, who in his pride has refused a large sum of money offered him, will certainly take it if offered again. Having saved his human dignity, he will surely accept the gift he so badly needs. Lise replies:

Listen, Alexey Fyodorovich. Isn’t there in all our analysis . . . aren’t we showing contempt for him, for that poor man—in analyzing his soul like this, as it were, from above, eh? In being so certain that he will take the money?

D os toevsky understood not only our need for freedom but also our desire to rid ourselves of it. Freedom comes with a terrible cost, and social movements that promise to relieve us of it will always command a following. That is the theme of the most famous pages Dostoevsky ever wrote, “The Grand Inquisitor,” a chapter in Karamazov . The intellectual Ivan narrates his unwritten “poem” in prose to his saintly brother Alyosha to explain his deepest anxieties.

Set in Spain during the Inquisition, the story opens with the Grand Inquisitor burning heretics in an auto-da-fé. As the flames scent air already rich with laurel and lemon, the people, like sheep, witness the terrifying spectacle with cowed reverence. It has been fifteen centuries since Jesus promised to return quickly, and they yearn for some sign from Him. With His infinite pity, He decides to show Himself to them. Softly, silently, He moves among them, and they recognize Him at once. “That might be one of the best passages in the poem, I mean, how they recognized Him,” Ivan remarks with wry self-deprecation. How do they know he is not an imposter? The answer is that when you see divine goodness, it is so beautiful that one cannot doubt.

The Inquisitor also knows who the stranger is—and promptly orders his arrest! Christ’s vicar arrests Him! Why? And why do the guards obey and the people not resist? We learn the answer to these questions when the Inquisitor visits the Prisoner in His cell and unburdens his heart to him.

Dmitri remarks: “Man is broad, too broad; I’d have him narrower!”

Throughout human history, the Inquisitor explains, two views of life and human nature have contended with each other. Each changes its name and specific dogmas to suit time and place, but remains the same in essence. One view, which the Inquisitor rejects, is Jesus’s: human beings are free and goodness has meaning only when freely chosen. The other view, maintained by the Inquisitor, is that freedom is an insufferable burden because it leads to endless guilt, regret, anxiety, and unresolvable doubts. The goal of life is not freedom, but happiness, and to be happy people must rid themselves of freedom and adopt some philosophy claiming to have all the answers. The third Karamazov brother, Dmitri, has remarked: “Man is broad, too broad; I’d have him narrower!,” and the Inquisitor would ensure human happiness by “narrowing” human nature.

Medieval Catholicism speaks in the name of Christ, but in fact it represents the Inquisitor’s philosophy. That is why the Inquisitor has arrested Jesus and intends to burn him as the greatest of heretics. In our time, Dostoevsky makes clear, the Inquisitor’s view of life takes the form of socialism. As with medieval Catholicism, people surrender freedom for security and trade the agonies of choice for the contentment of certainty. In so doing, they give up their humanness, but the bargain is well worth it.

T o explain his position, the Inquisitor retells the Biblical story of Jesus’s three temptations, a story that, in his view, expresses the essential problems of human existence as only a divine intelligence could. Could you imagine, he asks rhetorically, that if those questions had been lost, any group of sages could have re-created them?

In the Inquisitor’s paraphrase, the devil first demands:

Thou wouldst go into the world . . . with some promise of freedom which men in their simplicity . . . cannot even understand, which they fear and dread—for nothing has even been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom. But seest Thou these stones in this parched and barren wilderness? Turn them into bread, and mankind will run after Thee like a flock of sheep.

Jesus answers: “man does not live by bread alone.” Just so, the Inquisitor replies, but that is why Jesus should have accepted the devil’s temptation. People do indeed crave the meaningful, but they can never be sure they distinguish the truly meaningful from its counterfeits. That is why they persecute nonbelievers and try to convert or conquer nations of a different faith, as if universal agreement were itself a proof. There is only one thing that no one can doubt: material power. When we suffer great pain, that, at least, is indubitable. In other words, the appeal of materialism is spiritual! People accept it because it is certain .

“Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.”

Instead of making people happy by taking away the burden of freedom, the Inquisitor reproaches Jesus, You increased it! “Didst Thou forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil? Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.” People want to call themselves free, not to be free, and so, the Inquisitor reasons, the right course is to call unfreedom freedom of a higher kind, as socialists, of course, usually do.

To make people happy, one must banish all doubt. People do not want to be presented with information that, as we would say today, contradicts their “narrative.” They will do anything to preclude unwanted facts from coming to their attention. The plot of Karamazov , in fact, turns on Ivan’s desire not to admit to himself that he desires his father’s death. Without allowing himself to realize it, he makes the wished-for murder possible. One cannot begin to understand either individual people or society unless one grasps the many forms of what might be called preventive epistemology.

The devil next tempts Jesus to prove His divinity by casting Himself down from a high place so God will save him by a miracle, but Jesus refuses. The reason, according to the Inquisitor, is to show that faith must not be based on miracles. Once one witnesses a miracle, one is so overawed that doubt is impossible, and that means faith is impossible. Properly understood, faith does not resemble scientific knowledge or mathematical proof, and it is nothing like accepting Newton’s laws or the Pythagorean theorem. It is possible only in a world of uncertainty, because only then can it be freely chosen.

For the same reason, one should behave morally not to be rewarded, whether in this world or the next, but simply because it is the right thing to do. Behaving morally to earn a heavenly reward transforms goodness into prudence, like saving for retirement. To be sure, Jesus performed miracles, but if you believe because of them, then—despite what many churches say—you are not a Christian.

Finally the devil offers Jesus the empire of the world, which He rejects, but, according to the Inquisitor, should have accepted. The only way to keep people from doubt, he tells Jesus, is by miracle , mystery (just believe us, we know), and authority , which universal empire would ensure. Only a few strong people are capable of freedom, the Inquisitor explains, so your philosophy condemns the overwhelming portion of humanity to misery. And so, the Inquisitor chillingly concludes, we “have corrected Thy work.”

In The Possessed (1871), Dostoevsky predicts with astonishing accuracy what totalitarianism would be in practice. In Karamazov he asks whether the socialist idea is good even in theory. The revolutionaries in The Possessed are despicable, but the Inquisitor, on the contrary, is entirely selfless. He knows that he will go to hell for corrupting Jesus’s teaching, but he is willing to do so out of love for humanity. In short, he betrays Christ for Christian reasons! Indeed, he outdoes Christ, who gave his earthly life, by sacrificing his eternal life. Dostoevsky sharpens these paradoxes as much as possible. With his unmatched intellectual integrity, he portrays the best possible socialist while elucidating arguments for socialism more profoundly than real socialists ever did.

Would you choose to surrender all choice in exchange for a guarantee of happiness?

Alyosha at last exclaims: “your poem is in praise of Jesus, not in blame of him, as you meant it to be!” Since all the arguments have come from the Inquisitor, and Jesus has uttered not a word in response, how can that be? Ask yourself: having heard the Inquisitor’s arguments, would you choose to surrender all choice in exchange for a guarantee of happiness? Would you have everything decided for you by some wise substitute for parents and remain a perpetual child? Or is there something higher than mere contentment? I have asked my students this question for years, and none has agreed to accept the Inquisitor’s bargain.

W e live in a world where the Inquisitor’s way of thinking grows increasingly attractive. Social scientists and philosophers assume that people are simply complicated material objects, no more capable of genuine surprise than the laws of nature are capable of suspending themselves. Intellectuals, ever more certain that they know how to achieve justice and make people happy, find the freedom of others an obstacle to human well-being.

For Dostoevsky, by contrast, freedom, responsibility, and the potential for surprise define the human essence. That essence makes possible everything of value. The human soul is “so little known, so obscure to science, and so mysterious, that there are not and cannot be either physicians or final judges,” only unfinalizable people under the God who made them free.

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What Does It Mean To Be Russian? On Dostoevsky’s Early Literary Ambitions

Kevin birmingham investigates state censorship under czar nicholas.

Dostoevsky was 23 years old, unemployed and aimless in a city dominated by the military, the bureaucracy, and rank. Becoming a writer meant resisting the city’s ratIonal order. This was particularly difficult to do because another key to Nicholas’s control of Russia was his control over literature and the circulation of ideas. Nicholas’s regime considered virtually all secular literature hostile to orderly society. Nicholas expanded the dragnet for dangerous words almost immediately after his coronation.

More than a dozen censorship offices in different ministries inspected virtually all printed material, and the list of banned books was updated monthly. The “Black Office” reviewed foreign periodicals arriving by mail. International tourists had to forfeit their books and wait, sometimes for days, for the Foreign Censorship Committee to clear them. Censors worried about secret codes hidden in musical scores, and phrases like “forces of nature” and “intellectual ferment” were unacceptably inflammatory. Nicholas shut down a newspaper for publishing an unfavorable review of a play he quite liked. He outlawed German philosophy altogether.

Domestic journalism was hamstrung. Every new periodical required state approval, which could take years. Censors pored over each issue before it could be printed, which made timely issues difficult and newspapers almost impossible. Editors were sometimes incarcerated for violations, as were overly permissive censors. Warier censors anticipated how an irate superior or a skittish high-ranking noble might react to any particular article or phrase. Enterprising censors rewrote questionable passages themselves.

Russian literature had been largely a state- and church-sponsored enterprise for decades. The government founded or supported dozens of journals that operated as state organs. Officials co-opted influential writers and editors by paying them. Newspapers couldn’t be sold on the street or in railway stations, and commercial advertisements were banned, which kept prices high. Publications struggled to reach more than a few thousand subscribers with scattershot news items, meandering letters from Russians abroad, and reports on occasional crimes (usually foreign).

Russian censorship had long created eerie silences. There was not a single reference to Petersburg’s flood of 1824 in any Russian newspaper. Hundreds of thousands of people lived through a disaster that consumed the capital, and it was as if it had never happened. Under Nicholas’s reign, the silences rippled outward. While the annual number of books published in Russia had tripled in the first third of the 19th century, by 1837 the growth had ceased. It would remain stagnant for the next 15 years.

Dostoevsky’s decision to renounce his estate to become a writer was, by any reasonable estimate, absurd. It was nearly unheard of to make a living from literary fiction. Pulp adventure tales and illustrated chapbooks were profitable. Literature wasn’t. Almost all Russian writers of note were either landed gentry deriving income from estates with hundreds of serfs or else high-ranking state or military officials. Lermontov, Pushkin, Turgenev, Goncharov, Tolstoy—none of them renounced anything in order to write fiction because no one turned to writing to pay their bills. Russian literature developed as a social grace for elites, and their disdain for professional writing helped them retain control. Genuine literature, they insisted, was unsullied by commerce. Money destroys an author’s principles, keen thinking, and good taste. Dostoevsky’s plan was not just an “imprudent risk.” For an upwardly striving family, it was crass.

Even without its social taboos and government hostility, Russia would have been a difficult place for a writer. The mid-19th-century literacy rate was low—15 percent is probably a generous estimate—while Germany, France, Britain, and the United States all had majority-literate populations. Russia’s small readership forced publishers to rely on high prices. A copy of Gogol’s Dead Souls cost ten rubles, and many novels cost 25 to 30—nearly half of the average bureaucrat’s monthly salary. High prices kept the book market small. There were only about a thousand titles published in Russia every year, and nearly half of them were foreign.

The best solution to the adverse market was to aggregate as many readers as possible in subscription lists for wide-ranging monthly journals. Purchasing a book was a commitment, but subscribing to a journal was a stroll through the arcade. Novels appeared in installments. If you didn’t like one narrative’s development, there was another one in the same issue. If you didn’t like novels at all, you could read summaries of world events, or about Constantinople in the fourth century, or about recent discoveries in physiology, or “A Popular Essay on How the New Planet Neptune Was Discovered.” Some contributions were specialized. “The Causes and Fluctuations of Grain Prices,” for example, or “On the Possibility of Definitive Measures of Confidence in the Result of the Sciences of Observation and Particularly Statistics.” Literature was bundled with everything.

They became known as “thick” journals—each issue was hundreds of pages. The Library for Reading , one of the first thick journals, boasted 57 contributors. Its content was generally light and apolitical, but it published translations of Victor Hugo and Balzac, Dickens and James Fenimore Cooper. Seven thousand subscribers paid 50 rubles per year—the price of a few books—to be cultured and informed. More than 200 journals came and went during Nicholas’s reign. The turnover was a sign of precarity, but it was also a sign that people found the risks worth taking. By the 1840s, there was a small ecosystem of durable journals, and they paid their writers well. Book publishing still lagged behind Europe, but Russia’s biggest journals had circulations about as high as their British and French counterparts. And the reach was wider than the subscription list.

For ambitious young writers like Dostoevsky, however, the thick journals’ domination seemed like a trap. Russia’s embryonic market allowed a handful of opportunistic publishers to band together and squeeze out competitors. It was a club sustained by bribes, threats, favors, blacklists, and mutual promotion. “It’s an oligarchy,” Dostoevsky complained to his brother in 1845. Submitting your work to a journal meant yoking yourself to editors and their sycophants, “to the main maître d’hôtel ,” he complained, and “to all the sluts and kitchen boys who nestle in the nests from which enlightenment is disseminated.” Everyone thought the business was crass.

Nicolaevan Russia was an unlikely place for a world literature to develop, but beneath the surface there was just enough wealth and education, enough curiosity and self-scrutiny, enough daring and insecurity and pride to create a new literary capital on an old continent. Petersburg was becoming the center of Russian literature in the 1840s, and the city’s readers were shaping its content. Roughly half of Russia’s readers were civil servants or military officials engaged in meaningless work for a state they earnestly wanted to value. It was as if there were a surplus of meaning floating downstream looking for somewhere to land. That experience needed articulation.

The most influential person shaping Russian literature at the time was a tempestuous critic named Vissarion Belinsky. He was the first Russian writer to devote his entire career to literary criticism, and he dominated public opinion in a way no other critic ever had. Belinsky started and ended writers’ careers. His reviews determined booksellers’ orders. His annual roundups of the literary scene covered significant translations and trends, all the major journals, and virtually every notable Russian publication across all genres. He reviewed contemporary authors and interpreted decades-old publications. If Belinsky didn’t write about you, you didn’t matter.

Belinsky identified four types of literature in Russia: kopeck literature, trade literature—distinguishable only by the profit margins—“graybeard literature” (just what it sounds like), and genuine literature. He claimed there were only a dozen genuine Russian writers. Belinsky thought good critics created a literate society, which meant drawing clear lines. “Scribblers in frieze coats,” he wrote, “with unshaven chins, write miserable little books at the order of petty booksellers.” They “ruin the public taste, deface literature, and the calling of the literary man.” Belinsky hated the kitchen boys, too. He was 28 years old and already the most well-known critic in Russia when he moved from Moscow to Petersburg in 1839 to join a newly revived journal called Notes of the Fatherland . Its goal was to take down the oligarchs, the scribblers, the graybeards, and the status quo.

“I feel sorrow and pity for those who do not share my opinion,” Belinsky said. His pity was sincere. Disagreements with him opened up into Manichaean divides between those seeking truth and those who wallowed in ignorance. Ideas mattered . His voice quavered and his cheeks trembled when he attacked the ignorant during disputes. His outbursts earned him the nickname Furious Vissarion.

Belinsky’s ideas were routed through his emotions. “Thinking and feeling, understanding and suffering,” he wrote to a friend in 1841, “are one and the same thing.” He paced through his rooms while reading, agitated or thrilled. He would lock himself in his study, stand at his writing desk, fill a sheet of paper, and then throw himself into a book until the sheet’s ink dried. Then he’d continue on a clean page. He’d shuttle back and forth, reading and writing, until he was too weak to go further. His finished essays featured sharp insights and succinct judgments rather than extended lines of reasoning. They were earnest, lyrical, and meandering—one of the oligarchs believed he wrote only while drunk. What readers loved about Belinsky was his fervor. He had a prophet’s zeal, and it was that sense of calling, a temple-cleansing mission, that made him so persuasive.

Belinsky was the son of a provincial military doctor; he had a “plebeian origin,” as Ivan Turgenev called it. He was expelled from Moscow University for his “limited capacities” (he didn’t pass a single exam in three years), and the expulsion denied him both the status of the degree and the finer points of a higher education. He knew that people noticed the gaps in his knowledge (he spoke no foreign languages, not even French), and he was convinced he was too ugly to be a suitable companion.

Temperamental though he was, Belinsky thought of literature as a form of empiricism. He referred to “the mysterious laboratory of nature” and to creativity’s laws. “Reality—that is the motto and the last word of the contemporary world.” While this sounds like being a partisan for everything, Belinsky was rebuffing the vestiges of romanticism that seemed blind to everyday life. He preferred a nonfiction genre that the French called physiologies , detailed and precise descriptions of people or places. When Belinsky referred to one physiological sketch as “living statistics,” it was high praise. The genre was built upon the notion that a careful delineation of a specimen can lead to general insights about the increasingly complicated world—the same way you could learn about all kidneys by dissecting one of them. The genre was an outcropping of realism, and as such it often focused on unseemly urban details. One physiology about Petersburg’s tenements described the leftovers of insects smeared on the walls.

Gritty realism had its detractors. One of the Russian oligarchs objected to the tendency to rummage “in the dark corners and alleys of life.” Blood-smeared walls and flies circling unconscious drunks were not, in themselves, beautiful, so how could describing it ad nauseam be art? For people like Belinsky, beholding the truth, however unsavory, was invaluable. Literature was the news when the news wasn’t legal.

What Belinsky really wanted was a rendering of what it meant to be Russian. That’s what drew him to Gogol. Belinsky was the first critic to praise his talent. Gogol, Belinsky wrote, gives us Russian life “in all its nudity, in all its frightening formlessness.” He captured the mania and pettiness of life in a ranked society. “ Here is the Russian spirit, this smells Russian! ” Belinsky exclaimed about Dead Souls . Russia was fragmented by rank, but literature, he believed, could turn fragmentation into a deeper organic unity.

A sense of organic wholeness was crucial because some Russians had begun to question their nation’s unity. Alongside post-Napoleonic optimism was a persistent unease about Russia—just a feeling, usually, or a budding thought, something you would repeatedly uproot. But one day it became clear that someone had allowed it to grow like a poisonous flower, and the thought was cultivated in a long letter addressed to a lady who never ultimately received it. Instead, the letter circulated for years in handmade copies passed among friends until a journal in Moscow somehow published it uncensored in 1836 under the heading “First Philosophical Letter.”

What the letter announced, with alarming force and clarity, was that Russian culture, Russian history, Russian thought and literature, and even the Russian people did not exist at all. There was nothing to unify. “We belong to none of the great families of mankind,” the letter stated, “we are neither of the West nor of the East, and we possess the traditions of neither.” Russia had no foundation: “There are no rules, there is no home life, there is nothing to which we could be attached… nothing durable, nothing lasting; everything flows, everything passes, leaving no traces either outside or within us.”

The letter was unsigned, though people knew it was written by Peter Chaadaev, a former officer in the Napoleonic Wars who had resigned at the height of his career and become a recluse. Chaadaev was an iconoclastic traditionalist, and for him the absence of a national tradition was Russia’s defining quality, the only thing that affected all aspects of Russian life. “What is habit, instinct, among other peoples we must get into our heads by hammerstrokes. Our memories go no further back than yesterday; we are, as it were, strangers to ourselves.” To read the letter was to hear someone happily demolishing Russia’s overweening nationalism with his own relentless hammerstrokes. “Isolated in the world, we have given nothing to the world, we have taken nothing from the world; we have not added a single idea to the mass of human ideas; we have contributed nothing to the progress of the human spirit. And we have disfigured everything we touched of that progress.”

None of these statements were even remotely acceptable—in public or in private. The censor who approved it claimed that the journal’s editor had read selected passages to him while he was playing cards. It was, in any case, the embarrassing task of the head of the Chief Directorate of Censorship to inform Tsar Nicholas that an article appearing in The Telescope constituted a “direct attack on the past, present and future of the motherland.” Nicholas swiftly denounced the “First Philosophical Letter” as a “jumble of insolent absurdities worthy of a madman.” He declared Chaadaev insane and placed him under medical and police supervision. The censor lost his rank and his pension, and the editor of The Telescope was exiled to the edge of European Russia. The journal was banned, of course, as was any article that even mentioned it.

Chaadaev subtracted everything. The dominant theory of Russian autocracy was that tradition shaped and justified the tsar’s authority, and Russian identity, in turn, flowed out from the tsar. Chaadaev’s insistence that Russia did not have a tradition essentially turned the tsar into a tyrant. And so without a tradition or a legitimate ruler, Russians would have to find another way to be a people. Dostoevsky read Chaadaev’s letter just as he was hoping to become a writer of national significance, and his original pursuit—studying the mystery of being human—became intertwined with another more immediate question: What does it mean to be Russian?

__________________________________

Excerpted from The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece . Used with the permission of Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Kevin Birmingham.

Kevin Birmingham

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Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born October 30, 1821, in Moscow's Hospital for the Poor. He was the second of seven children born to a former army surgeon, who was murdered in 1839 when his own serfs poured vodka down his throat until he died.

Following a boarding school education in Moscow with his older brother Mikhail, Fyodor was admitted to the Academy of Military Engineers in St. Petersburg in 1838. He completed his studies in 1843, graduating as a lieutenant, but was quickly...

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The Jewish Question - Fyodor Dostoevsky

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