Anyone who knows me knows I love Fyodor Dostoevsky. In this, I am not alone; it is widely argued that Dostoevsky is one of the greatest novelists in literary history, his alleged lack of style notwithstanding. (One Will Durant ranked him 'best novelist' alongside Shakespeare's 'best poet.') And personally, I am an apologist for Dostoevsky's prolixity. After all, his texts deal with the most harrowing agitations of modernity, namely the torrid political and spiritual landscape of 19th century Russia; why shouldn't they bloat with the dark, seething morass of murder, violence, and self-hatred contained in their pages? (The dizzying litany of characters with unpronounceable and nearly indistinguishable names is just the masochistic cherry on top.)
What I perhaps enjoy best about Dostoevsky is his faith, not because I share it - I don't - but because it was the hardwon product of a singular toil, the least of which, if it is possible, includes his mock execution and banishment to a Siberian prison camp for reading illicit materials. Responding to the critics of his The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky sneered, "The dolts have ridiculed my obscurantism and the reactionary character of my faith. These fools could not even conceive so strong a denial of God as the one to which I gave expression... The whole book is an answer to that.... You might search Europe in vain for so powerful an expression of atheism. Thus it is not like a child that I believe in Christ and confess Him. My hosanna has come forth from the crucible of doubt."
What is immediately evident to anyone who has interfaced with Dostoevsky's writing is that he knew the breadth of human evil intimately. Indeed, he personified it with a voice that is both sonorous and hypnotic, most iconically in the form of the Grand Inquisitor, who promises humanity, as Satan promised Christ in the desert, everything in exchange for the one thing that makes us what we are: the freedom of our will to choose or to reject at any and every moment what our conscience shows us to be right. In Christ's name, the Grand Inquisitor proposes to unburden his flock of the continual, uninterrupted, and inescapable act of choice which alone makes free love possible but always, by the same token, injustice.
Unlike his predecessors, Plato and Aristotle, who influenced the main Christian tradition and saw human will as being ultimately good, Dostoevsky knew the truth: our will is radically free and totally irrational, at least as much open to evil as it is to good, if not more so, given how deliciously tempting evil can be. Also unlike his predecessors, Dostoevsky knew that freedom, when it is actualized in evil, is not always a botched attempt at do-gooding, born from the overextension of the will beyond knowledge, but sometimes (often?) the product of authentic choosing. Yet, our freedom is our humanity itself, he maintained, and to do away with it would be to reduce humanity "to a unanimous [albeit] harmonious ant-heap."
For Dostoevsky, the Grand Inquisitor represented the greatest temptation of his young life: the refusal of God in the face of perennial suffering, especially when it is inflicted upon the innocent. Still, Dostoevsky's faith remained sturdy and steadfast. We are made in God's image, Dostoevsky believed, and sculpted from the same primordial clay. Although our freedom gives us ample space to indulge our demons, we've also space to indulge our angels, and our choice is meaningful insofar as we have license to both, and there is conversation between them. It is this double-vision - this odious optimism that coexists with (nay, arises from!) unflinching realism - that won Dostoevsky my affection not only as a writer but, more importantly, as an intellectual idol.
Ultimately, Dostoevsky was a mouthpiece "for love, and for truth and justice, too" (cue Sailor Moon). That he was a veritable reflector of human misery was, I believe, part of Dostoevsky's larger strategy to prove the strength of his own beliefs by focusing intently on their antitheses. Dostoevsky knew the world's darkness; he did not hide from it. Because he had already conquered the darkness within himself, however, he could abide to look at it, and was able to endure in his conviction. For all of his focus on opposing ideas, Dostoevsky was none too ambiguous about where he stood, but it is precisely because of that focus, that willingness to go where one has the most to fear, that Dostoevsky's bright and epiphanic faith had legs. Like Dante before him, Dostoevsky showed us that Hell is the pathway to Heaven. In the spirit of my intellectual forebear, I intend this blog to be my own self-imposed purgatory, where my hosannas will be tried. Abandon hope, all me who enter here.