17. LITERATURE - Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Part 1/2.

A good trick, with his name, is to say ‘toy' in the middle: Dos-“toy”-ev-ski.

He was born 1821 and grew up on the outskirts of Moscow.

His family were comfortably off – his father was a successful doctor, though he happened to work at a charitable hospital that provided medical services for the very poor. The family had a house in the hospital complex, so the young Dostoevsky was from the very beginning powerfully exposed to experiences from which other children of his background were usually carefully sheltered. Like almost everyone in Tsarist Russia his parents were devout Orthodox Christians – and Dostoevsky's own religious faith got deeper and stronger all his life. At the age of 12 he was sent away to school first in Moscow and later in the capital, St Petersburg – he got a good education, though as a child of the tiny professional middle-class he felt out of place among his more aristocratic classmates.

While he was away at school his father died – possibly murdered by his own serfs. After graduating Dostoevsky worked as an engineer for a while.

He started gambling and losing money (something that was to plague him all his life). In his late twenties he became friends with a group of radical writers and intellectuals. He wasn't deeply involved but when the government decided to crack down on dissent, Dostoevsky was rounded up too and sentenced to be shot by a firing squad. However, at the last moment – just when the soldiers were ready to fire – the message of a reprieve arrived. Dostoevsky was sent instead to Siberia for four years of forced labour in horrific conditions. It was only after his return from Siberia that Dostoevsky established himself as a writer.

Starting in middle age he produced a series of major books. “Notes from Underground” ( 1864), “Crime and Punishment” (1866), “The Idiot” (1869), “Demons” (1872) and the “Brothers Karamazov” (1880).

They are dark, violent and tragic – and usually very long and complicated.

He wrote them to preach five important lessons to the world. Incidentally the discussion of Dostoevsky's ideas does involve revealing the plots of some of his novels.

It's not something that would have worried him because his books are written to be read more than once. But if it bothers you, this is the place to break off. [1.

The value of suffering] Dostoevsky's first big book – “Notes from Underground” – is an extended rant against life and the world delivered by a retired civil servant.

This civil servant is deeply unreasonable, inconsistent and furious with everyone (including himself); he's always getting into rows, he goes to a reunion of some former colleagues and tells them all how much he always hated them; he wants to puncture everyone's illusions and make them as unhappy as he is. He seems like a grotesque character to build a book around. But he's doing something important. He's insisting – with a peculiar kind of intensity – on a very strange fact about the human condition: we want happiness but we have a special talent for making ourselves miserable – “Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering: that is a fact,” he asserts. In the novel, Dostoevsky is taking aim at philosophies of progress and improvement – which were highly popular in his age (as they continue to be in ours).

He is attacking our habit of telling ourselves that if only this or that thing were different, we could leave suffering behind. If we got that great job, changed the government, could afford that great house, invented a machine to fly us faster around the world, could get together with (or get divorced from) a particular person, then all would go well. This, Dostoevsky argues, is a delusion. Suffering will always pursue us. Schemes for improving the world always contain a flaw: they won't eliminate suffering, they will only change the things that cause us pain. Life can only ever be a process of changing the focus of pain, never removing pain itself. There will always be “something” to agonise us. Stop people starving, says Dostoevsky – with calculated wickedness – and you'll soon find there's a new range of agonies: they'll start to suffer from boredom, greed or intense melancholy that they haven't been invited to the right party. In this spirit, “Notes from Underground” launches an attack on all ideologies of technical or social progress which aspire to the elimination of suffering.

They won't succeed because as soon as they solve one problem, they'll direct our nature to become unhappy in new ways. Dostoevsky is fascinated by the secret ways we actually don't want what we theoretically seek: he discusses the pleasure a lot of people get from feelings of superiority (and for whom, consequently, an egalitarian society would be a nightmare); or the disavowed (but real) thrill we get from hearing about violent crimes on the news – in which case we'd actually feel thwarted in a truly peaceful world. “Notes from Underground” is a dark, awkwardly insightful, counterpoint to well-intentioned modern liberalism. It doesn't really show that social improvement is meaningless.

But it does remind us that we'll always carry our very complex and difficult selves with us and that progress will never be as clear and clean as we might like to imagine. [2.

We don't know ourselves] In “Crime and Punishment,” we meet an impoverished intellectual, Rodion Raskolnikov.

Though he's a currently nobody, he's fascinated by power and ruthlessness. He thinks of himself as a version of Napoleon: “leaders of men, such as Napoleon, were all without exception criminals [we hear], they broke the ancient laws of their people to make new ones that suited them better, and they never feared bloodshed.” Raskolnikov is also desperate for money and so, with his philosophy of aristocratic superiority in mind, he decides to murder an old woman who is a small time pawn broker and money lender and steal her cash.

He's tormented by the mad injustice of the fact that this horrible, mean old character has drawers full of roubles while he – who is clever, energetic and profound – is starving. He doesn't spend much time thinking about options like taking a job as a waiter. So Raskolnikov breaks into her apartment and bludgeons her to death; and – surprised in the act by the woman's pregnant half-sister – kills her too. But it turns out he's nothing like the cold-blooded, rational hero of his imagination.

He is tormented by guilt and horror at what he has done. Eventually he turns himself over to the police in order to face the proper punishment for his crime. We're (probably) never going to do what Raskolnikov did.

But we often share a troubling tendency with him: we "think" we know ourselves better than we actually do. Raskolnikov thinks he's ruthless; actually he's rather tender hearted. He thinks he won't feel guilt; but he's overwhelmed by remorse. Part of our life's journey is to engage in the tricky task of disentangling ourselves from what we think we're like – in order to discover our true nature.

Raskolnikov is especially fascinating because of the direction this self-discovery takes. His striking realisation is that he's actually a much nicer person than he takes himself to be. Whereas so many novelists delight in showing the sickly reality beneath a glamorous or enticing facade, Dostoevsky is embarked on a more curious but rewarding mission: he wants to reveal that beneath the so-called monster, there can very often be a far more interesting tender-hearted character lurking: a nice but deluded, intelligent but frightened and panicked person.