18. LITERATURE - Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Part 2/2.
[Video: part 2/2: 07:36 to 13:56.
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Nice people do some terrible things] Sticking for the moment with “Crime and Punishment,” it's very significant the way Dostoevsky gets us to like his murderous hero.
Raskolnikov is clearly an attractive person. At the very start we're told: “By the way, Raskolnikov is handsome, above the average in height, slim, well-built, with lovely dark eyes and dark brown hair.”
Dostoevsky throughout lessens the imaginative distance between ‘us' who live mainly law abiding and more of less manageable lives and ‘them' – the ones who do terrible things and wreak havoc with their lives and those of others.
That person, he is saying, is more like you than you might initially want to think – and therefore more accessible to sympathy. The idea that you can be a good person, do something very bad and still deserve some compassion sounds very slight and obvious – until one has need of this kind of forgiveness in one's own life (you may have to be over 30).
This is where Dostoevsky wants to enter our inner conversation with ourselves – and tell us all about his character Raskolnikov – a serious, thoughtful, good-looking man who did worse then we have and still can be compassionately understood, as we can and must all be. This is Dostoevsky's Christianity at work: no one is outside the circle of God's love and understanding. [4.
We must learn to appreciate the beauty of life] Dostoevsky's next great book, “The Idiot”, takes off from his near-death experience before the firing squad.
In the novel, he recounts what that was like. Three minutes before his expected death he is able to see life clearly for the first time. He notices the gilded spire of a nearby church, and how it glitters in the sun. He'd never before realised how entrancing a glint of sunlight could be. He is filled with an immense, deep love of the world. You might see a beggar and think how you would love to change places with them so as to be able to continue to breathe the air and feel the wind – merely to exist seems (at that moment of final revelation) infinitely precious. And then the revised order comes and it is not over at all. What would it be like to go through one's whole life in such a state of gratitude and generosity?
You wouldn't share any of the normal attitudes. You'd love everyone equally, you'd be enchanted by the simplest things, you'd never feel angry or frightened. You would seem to other people to be a kind of idiot. Hence the title of Dostoevsky's book. It's an extreme version of a very interesting step.
We're continually surrounded by things which could delight us, if only we saw them the right way, if only we could learn to appreciate them. Dostoevsky was desperate to communicate the value of existence before death would overtake him – and us. [5.
Idealism has its limits] In Dostoyevsky's final great work – “Brothers Karamazov”, which came out when he was nearly sixty – one of the central characters tells a long story-within-a-story.
It's called “The Grand Inquisitor” and imagines that the greatest event looked forward to by Christian theology – the second coming of Christ – has in fact already happened. Jesus did come back, several hundred years ago. He turned up in Spain, during the highest period of power of the Catholic Church – the organisation established, in theory at least, entirely in devotion to him. Christ is back to fulfil his teachings of forgiveness and universal love. But something rather odd happens. The most powerful religious leader – the Grand Inquisitor – has Jesus arrested and imprisoned. In the middle of the night, the Grand Inquisitor visits Christ in his cell and explains that he cannot allow him to do his work on Earth, because he is a threat to the stability of society.
Christ, he says, is too ambitious – too pure, too perfect.
Humanity can't live up to the impossible goals he sets before us. The fact is, people haven't been able to live according to his teachings and Jesus should admit he failed and that his ideas of redemption were essentially misguided. The Grand Inquisitor is not really a monster.
In fact, Dostoevsky portrays him as quite an admirable figure in the story. He is a guide to a crucial idea (for Dostoevsky), that human beings cannot live in purity, cannot ever be truly good, cannot live up to Christ's message – and that this is something we should reconcile ourselves to with grace rather than fury or self-hatred. We have to accept a great deal of unreasonableness, folly, greed, selfishness and shortsightedness as ineradicable parts of the human condition and plan accordingly.
And it's not just a pessimistic thesis about politics or religion that we're being introduced to. The primary relevance of this thesis is as a commentary on our own lives: we won't sort them out, we won't stop being being a bit mad and wayward. And we shouldn't torment ourselves with the dream that we could – if only we tried hard enough – become the ideal beings that idealistic philosophies like Christianity like to sketch all too readily. Dostoyevsky died in 1881.
He had a very hard life, but he succeeded in conveying an idea which perhaps he understood more clearly than anyone: in a world that's very keen on upbeat stories, we will always run up against our limitations as deeply flawed and profoundly muddled creatures. Dostoyevsky's attitude – bleak but compassionate, tragic but kind – is needed more than ever in our naive and sentimental age that so fervently clings to the idea – which this great Russian loathed – that science can save us all and that we may yet be made perfect through technology. Dostoyevsky guides us to a more humane truth: that – as the great sages have always known – life is and ever will be suffering, and yet that there is great redemption available in articulating this message in brilliant and moving, complex and subtle works of art.
