Philosophical Themes of Dostoevsky
Beliefs and Ethical Dilemmas in This Existentialist Writer's Works
Recurring themes in Fyodor Dostoevsky's novels; despair, suffering and redemption. This article explores the source of his struggle to understand humanity's pain.
The writing of Fyodor Dostoevsky has a dark brilliance. The brutal power of his words - the desperation embodied in his characters - somehow manages to coalesce into a philosophical expression of free will struggling to assert itself in a hostile world. The genius of his writing is his ability to use the grotesque to contrast the fragile beauty of life.
Early History
Dostoevsky saw much ugliness in his early life; his father was a vicious drunk, a retired military surgeon who worked in a hospital housed in one of the most wretched areas of Moscow, along with a prison and an insane asylum. He had a miserable home life, and spent much time in the hospital gardens talking to the patients, fascinated by their illnesses and stories.
He attended the Military Engineering Academy in St. Petersburg where he studied literature, and began his writing career after he graduated in 1844. He was twenty-four years old. In 1849, life took a decided turn for the worse. He was a member of the liberal Petrashevsky Circle, at a time when the tsar had decided to stamp down any hint of insurrection. He and the other members of the circle were arrested and sentenced to death. Later in the year, he was subjected to a mock execution; he was blind-folded and the guards shot, but not to kill. It was devastating to an overly sensitive mind such as his, and the psychological scar never quite healed.
His sentence was then commuted to four years of hard labour in Siberia. This was a living hell for him; men cramped so close in stinking, putrid quarters that he likened to a coffin. He later told his brother that it was "impossible not to behave like pigs." He was released in 1854 and was sent to serve in the Siberian Regiment for five years.
Change of Heart, Change of Mind
The time spent in prison and in the military changed his political and religious views considerably. He began to despise Western culture, which was trickling irreversibly into his native Russia, whose traditions he began to value greatly. He'd had a religious conversion in prison, which strengthened his Russian Orthodox faith, and he began to write more serious works, into whose characters he wove the themes of "spiritual torment, religious awakening and psychological confusion."
Dostoevsky is thought by many to be the founder of the existentialist movement; a philosophy which emphases free will and accepting responsibility for one's actions, and stresses the "isolation and pain endured in a hostile or indifferent universe". For Dostoevsky, the hostility seems to have emanated from the world, rather than an indifferent universe; his religious mysticism was rooted deeply in the traditional dogma of the Orthodox Church.
He was vehemently against the socialist movement, as he held each individual to be of infinite and equal worth. This stark quotation from "The Brother's Karamazov" makes his stance clear: "Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature - that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance - and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on these conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth?"
Philosophical Conviction
Conversion and redemption play recurring roles in all of his novels, as does compassion for the poor and abused of this world. He reveals the various paths to conversion: it may be sudden and unexpected, reached via paths rife with disillusionment and suffering, or it may be a gentle awakening.
Dostoevsky's understanding and acceptance of human suffering is summed up in his chosen epitaph: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, unless a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." John 12:24
From the suffering and emotional torment which plagued his life, he drew out the beautiful meaning of suffering, and of mankind's very existence; he brought forth much fruit.
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