Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, and Shestov. Three Russian Apostles of Freedom

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Russia geographically is so huge that something inside a Russian feels without limit. No matter how strongly Russians are controlled politically, they still feel that something within them, some sense of themselves that arises freely in their souls, can never be controlled. The soul cries out that it should not be ruled by anything, neither by a power in the outside world nor by some power in the mind. At times something wonderful comes alive in the Russian soul, something infinitely gentle and unworldly. Even when such moments pass, Russians refuse to believe their souls are empty and worthless. This belief gives the soul the strength to endure anything coming at it from the outside world.

Western European values based on materialism and scientific rationality entered Russia in the 18th century. They did not fit smoothly with Russian customs. Tsar Peter the Great imported Italian and French artists and architects to build the city of Saint Petersburg using eighteenth-century technologies. The result was a strange artificial city placed on Russian soil as if from nowhere. Fyodor Dostoevsky, the nineteenth-century Russian novelist, wrote that the Tsar’s city, Saint Petersburg, is “the most abstract and intentional city on the whole terrestrial globe”. The idea that a city could be produced intentionally stuck in Dostoevsky’s mind. If a whole city resulted from a premeditated rational idea, what prevented people in an intentional city from acting intentionally? And if architects could create a city intentionally, why could not he, Dostoevsky, create a novel with a hero who acts only intentionally and refuses to act naturally like those around him?

Let’s follow his young intentional hero through the streets of Saint Petersburg in the 1860s. Where is the young man, Raskolnikov, going? He is on his way to visit a sixty-year-old woman, a pawnbroker. He has visited her before and pawned objects for money. He is dressed negligently and is in need of money. He lives in a very small room, has little means and is thin and poorly nourished. He enters the woman’s apartment and talks with her about how much money she will give him for a watch.

She gives him one rouble and fifteen kopecks but money this day is not his only object. Raskolnikov intends to experiment intentionally with reality rather than let reality experiment with him as do most people. He is going to test Western European rationalistic culture. Such culture exists inside him because he is perfectly capable as are other Petersburg students of acting rationally. It is in fact the easiest thing in the world to be rational and act rationally but something urges him to carry rationality to an extreme, to test how far rationality can go.

Where did Saint Petersburg come from? Why is Tzar Peter the Great’s “intentional” city here? Where is the spiritual freedom and cultural independence of the Russian past? Why are some people around him as he walks to the pawnbroker dressed in Western European style clothes? Don’t they see that they look odd compared to the way most people in Petersburg dress? He too when he dresses well is peculiar just like they. And all the socialist agitators in his neighborhood, don’t they realize that their ideas are unseemly, that their revolutionary desire to create some new world is illusory? Raskolnikov is going to find out if an action motivated by nothing at all except a rational intention born in his own mind and nowhere else can be authentic. Why should not a rational person, if he must live guided by his reason because he lives in a modern abstract and intentional city, not be allowed to do anything at all that can be conceived rationally? A rational being like young Raskolnikov might act rationally in order to do something that the masses of people think despicable, evil, insane, but could not a man superior to the masses prove his superiority by daring to do something of the sort? He might use his reason to the extreme to establish his superiority just as the rational Western European architects went to a rational extreme by constructing Peter the Great’s “intentional” city. If rationality is the final destiny of all humans, something they must adopt to conduct their lives whether they like it or not, if rationality is everything then everything must be able to be done rationally, and even an insane terrible act should not have an irrational result in a feeling of guilt or shame if it is done intentionally. Raskolnikov has been alone brooding and thinking in his small room for many days avoiding human contact. He visits the pawnbroker not just for money but also to examine the inside of her apartment. One idea dominates his being, the idea of slicing an axe into the skull of the old pawnbroker simply to prove to himself that he could carry out rationally any act no matter how terrible.

Dostoevsky knew that Russian holy men of God are not motivated by the mind but by feelings that come from the heart. But why could he not create a new opposite type of holy man, a sort of holy man in reverse, a man who dares to draw his inspiration not from the feelings within his heart but from the ideas in his mind? Raskolnikov wants to use his mind to go beyond the normal mind. His mind and his self have become the same thing. He does not want to have anything to do with feelings of any kind. The miserable people around him on the streets of Petersburg are full of feelings because in their misery they have no tool to try to escape from their poverty except their feelings which are petty and inspired by their misery and just lead to more misery. Raskolnikov is a creature of bourgeois culture living in his mind and willing to test his mind to the extreme to experience its limitless power. Dostoevsky’s ultimate message in his novel Crime And Punishment is that to live guided by ideas alone turns you yourself into a kind of abstract being that is no longer your true being. The living soul within you becomes a thing if you become instead of a living human being an idea directing the way you act.

Yet as Raskolnikov walks along the street in Petersburg after his meeting with the old pawnbroker, he feels the need for human contact. He has been alone for many days in his little shabby room avoiding contact with people, living in his mind forgetful of normal life. He comes to the entrance to a cheap tavern and decides to go in and drink a beer. He is a young handsome student whose mind has taken hold of him completely and driven him to try to live in a realm beyond that of normal people. But here in the tavern the side of himself that is normal comes to the surface and he feels “suddenly set free from a terrible burden”. His burden, his problem is the power his mind exercises over his actions. A Russian critic of the 19th and 20th centuries, Lev Shestov, put the problem of living as an idea, Raskolnikov’s problem, in this way, “Man does not dare or has no power to think in the categories in which he lives, and is forced to live in those categories in which he thinks.” Raskolnikov has been living alone, estranged from society, living in the categories where he thinks. It is the problem of the Russian soul. A Russian wants to think only in the categories where he lives and he is horrified when something makes him live in the categories where he thinks. Raskolnikov’s passion is to live always where he thinks and nowhere else but drinking his beer in the tavern he does escape for a time living where he thinks because he is among poor drunken common Russians who are incapable of doing anything but think where they live. Raskolnikov feels “suddenly set free from a terrible burden” but he also has “a dim foreboding that this happier frame of mind was…not normal”. How long will he be free from his “terrible burden”? He will eventually have to leave his beer and his tavern and the world he faces outside will again make him think and thinking will again make him live in the categories where he thinks cut off from all regular human experience.

Dostoevsky’s novel is just his fancy set down in words creating imagined humans in action. But the Russian problem of the soul is real and the problem Dostoevsky treats in his novel is real because it is a problem he never succeeded in solving by using his mind, by thinking. But he thought and thought and he thought like all of us and the more he thought the more he thought that the mind itself was the problem, or rather, that the mind could not ever solve the fundamental problem of Russia and of life. What to do? We must do something but to do something we must first think what we are going to do and then what we end up doing habitually transforms us and we soon become no longer our authentic self but some superficial self that our ego makes up for ourselves using the rational power of the mind. We give up our freedom and make ourselves objects so quickly and so normally and so automatically that we reach a point where we are not even aware that we have given up ourselves and become other than ourselves. This other alien self should be Raskolnikov’s sworn enemy. But the enemy in his mind and in our minds is incapable of appearing to us as anything but our friend and we are afraid to think of him as an enemy from fear of perhaps going out of our minds. Raskolnikov is the kind of man who believes that something in the mind can reach out infinitely and discover something unknowable to the normal frame of mind. In some region of the mind, such men think, there is another dimension of the mind. The world is full of symbols of this transcendent world. All philosophers and scientists and some religious men believe this world, this other world, exists even though they never find it. But the quest for it is satisfying. It delights them that their petty human nature has a kind of divine globe, the mind, and they enjoy knowing that their minds give flashes at times of a world beyond our senses but not beyond our minds. No enemy lives within such men. They delight in thinking. Thinking leads to an absence of life that their ideas magically transform to the illusion of a presence. They think and think but it produces only more thinking not more life, not a release from the burden of life, but just more thinking until , as Lev Shestov wrote, they are not thinking in the categories where they live but living in the categories where they think.

In the tavern a man over fifty with a look in his eyes “as though of intense feeling” and perhaps “of thought and intelligence” but also with “a gleam of something like madness” begins talking to Raskolnikov. He moves to a seat at his table to engage him in conversation. He is dressed slovenly and is bloated with drink. He has been drinking for five days and sleeping on hay barges at night on the Neva river. His madness however is real. It is not at all like Raskolnikov’s insanity of living as exclusively as possible in his mind. Marmeladov’s madness comes from living blind to any thought about his welfare. He has given up everything. He is out of his mind because he has thrown away all interest in any thought that might lead him to some kind of normalcy by thinking and acting rationally. His madness is the kind of Russian madness that Dostoevsky loved. It is the kind that bravely throws overboard completely, as completely as possible, the regular rational thoughts of the mind. Dostoevsky loved such madness. Madness has driven Marmeladov to give up working and providing for his wife, three young children and a daughter of eighteen. Instead he uses what money they might have used to ease their starvation for drink. Living only where you think, or at least living as best you can where you think, is profitable. It is positive. It produces results. Marmeladov mentions, as he begins a long description for Raskolnikov of his sufferings, most of them caused by himself, that a certain Mr. Lebeziatnikov “who keeps up with modern ideas” explained to him the other day “that compassion is forbidden nowadays by science itself, and that that’s what is done now in England, where there is political economy.” Compassion is forbidden by science itself and this produces political economy. Political economy, science and rational behavior rule the world outside the tavern and produce positive results but inside the tavern in a world hidden from the ordinary world, what is truly alive is Marmeladov’s madness, a madness that has its roots in the agony of remorse and human feelings caused by suffering.

Raskolnikov will carry out his idea. He will live ruled by an idea that will result in his murdering the old pawnbroker. His logic is that if one is forced to live where one thinks, then thought can produce an action totally devoid of human feeling. And if this is so, then even an extreme act like killing an old pawnbroker can be done without feeling. A human ruled completely by an extreme idea and willing to carry out the logic of his idea by a concrete action will become necessarily a human more than human, a superman. But testing this logic will happen in Raskolnikov’s future. For the present, in our tavern, Marmeladov relates to Raskolnikov an act carried out by his young eighteen-year-old daughter Sonya not because of an idea but by compassion. Compassion, feeling, in the case of Sonya motivates the idea and then the act and not the other way around whereby some inhuman idea produces an act.

Sonya has once lived with Marmeladov and her stepmother, Katerina Ivanova, and her two stepbrothers and stepsister in one room in extreme poverty. They were starving because of Marmeladov’s failings and in a rage caused by her extreme sufferings, Katerina Ivanova drove her pure and meek eighteen-year-old stepdaughter Sonya, who can find no legitimate work, to begin selling herself on the streets of Petersburg. In the tavern other men, listening to Marmeladov’s conversation with Raskolnikov, laugh from time to time at what he relates. But when he speaks with deep feeling about what will be the ultimate fate of his daughter, strangely those listening are moved. But before we hear what Marmeladov says, inspired by religion, we should examine Dostoevsky’s general point of view.

For Dostoevsky Raskolnikov, dressed carelessly, brooding alone day after day in his room barely bigger than a closet, eating little, avoiding human contact, despising the life going on around him, is a pastiche, carried to an absurd degree, of an eastern holy man. He wants to go beyond the life around him by using his mind so exclusively that he loses touch with regular life. He denies life to find life like some eastern holy man and this direction for Dostoevsky leads to nothing, to a transcendence of normal life that is empty and worthless and destructive. For Dostoevsky, all of Western European culture goes in this direction. The mind dictates in Europe how life should be lived. It is the source of truth and goodness. Even refined poetic and aesthetic experience is fashioned into cultural objects by the mind and all scientific and mathematical products are always the result of rational thinking. The Western European ideal of blessedness is the state of the perfectly indifferent mind thinking about itself. Thinkers like Aristotle and Plato and others in the ancient world along with medieval European scholastic thinkers of the Catholic Church as well as renaissance thinkers down to the rule in Dostoevsky’s time of European thinkers who exclude experience that does not fit within the boundaries of bourgeois rationalism have fallen all of them into the mind’s fatal trap. European thought has led Europeans to live in the categories where they think. Dostoevsky will have none of it. For him Raskolnikov is searching for a separate superior state of being that does not exist except as an illusion created by the power of his mind. Only Marmeladov’s madness can lead to real spirituality because it is profoundly human.

At this point in his novel Dostoevsky throws out to us bits of Christian religious truth as an example of truth totally beyond the vision and the soul of his main character, Raskolnikov. He knows that we as well as Raskolnikov will pay no attention to what Marmeladov says. We all live in the categories where we think and we are too fascinated, as we read along, with young Raskolnikov’s adventure inspired by his mind. It is where we ourselves look too for adventure and we pass quickly over what Marmeladov says. It is the raving of a madman. It has nothing to do with rational people like Raskolnikov and ourselves.

Marmeladov’s daughter Sonya has gone out to the streets to earn money to feed her stepmother and her stepbrothers and stepsister. She even is so humble and self-sacrificing that she gives some of the money so fouly earned to her father to continue his five-day drunk. “He will pity us Who has had pity on all men,” Marmeladov says with genuine human feeling to young Raskolnikov sitting across the table in the tavern listening. “He will come in that day and he will ask: ‘Where is the daughter who gave herself for her cross, consumptive stepmother, and for the little children of another? Where is the daughter who had pity on the filthy drunkard, her earthly father, undismayed by his beastliness?’ And He will say, ‘Come to me! I have already forgiven thee once…I have forgiven thee once… Thy sins which are many are forgiven thee for thou hast loved much…’ And he will forgive my Sonya, He will forgive, I know it…I felt it in my heart when I was with her just now!” But Dostoevsky does not end Marmeladov’s passionate words here. He does not let those who live by rationality and without compassion and have achieved “political economy” slip away without throwing them a punch. For as he continues his passionate outpouring of his feelings Marmeladov speaks of what will be said at the final judgment to “the wise ones and those of understanding” and he explains why the meek and the humble and weak will be accepted by Him. “This is why I receive them, o ye wise,” Marmeladov goes on with feeling, “this is why I receive them, o ye of understanding, that not one of them believed himself to be worthy of this.”

Two days later, Raskolnikov will hammer the blunt backside of an axe onto the head of a sixty-year-old woman, a pawnbroker, killing her. A few moments after the murder, while he searches in the dead woman’s bedroom for valuables, the pawnbroker’s half-sister, Lizaveta, comes in the main room of the apartment and discovers the dead body of her half-sister on the floor bloodied. Raskolnikov already knows about Lizaveta and she knows a little about him from the comings and goings of people in that area of the city. Dostoevsky describes her, “She was a single woman of about thirty-five, tall, clumsy, timid, submissive and almost idiotic. She was a complete slave and went in fear and trembling of her sister, who made her work day and night, and even beat her.” Lizaveta sees the dead body on the floor and then Raskolnikov comes out of the bedroom. “And this hapless Lizaveta was so simple and had been so thoroughly crushed and scared that she did not even raise a hand to guard her face, though that was the most necessary and natural action at the moment, for the axe was raised above her face. She only put up her empty left hand, but not to her face, slowly holding it out before her as though motioning him away. The axe fell with the sharp edge just on the skull and split at one blow all the top of the head.”

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What can be done with such people? Isn’t the logic directing Raskolnikov’s act reasonable? Does an old woman, a pawnbroker scratching out a living for herself on the poverty and misery of the poor, deserve to live? Of course everyone knows what is evil and what is good and she should absolutely not be murdered with a blow on her head from an axe, but isn’t it more or less necessary to murder her some way or another? What role can she play in society except to live a miserable life? Isn’t misery itself a kind of murder, a slow murder of the poor by those who possess riches and live a higher form of life enlightened by reason? And the hapless Lizaveta, simple and meek and crushed by the burden of living, what can society do with her except find some way to get rid of her, not murder her but at least keep her out of sight somewhere so that enlightened people don’t come in contact with her disgraceful poverty? Besides, it was an accident that caused her death. She happened to walk into the scene of her half-sister’s murder and confront by accident her killer. Raskolnikov was forced by circumstances to kill her too. Circumstances and chance kill the poor all the time. To be unlucky is disgraceful and all the poor are unlucky. They are incapable of living rationally, of making real progress. They don’t think in the proper manner about their actions before they take action. They deserve their fate. In fact, from a larger point of view, the poor are necessary in order to give higher meaning to the lives of the rich and successful. The enlightenment of the mind is a necessary development that superior people seek caused partly by their observation of the miserable lives of the poor. Raskolnikov is an instrument of bourgeois society. He took a drastic step upward to enlightenment by ridding society of two beings whom society in a civilized manner was getting rid of anyway.

The only thing Raskolnikov cares about after the double murder is himself. Two men come to the door of the pawnbroker’s apartment. When the bell of the apartment tinkles and then someone begins banging loudly on the door, he has no thought at all of the two dead women near him on the floor. A giddiness comes over him but when a voice on the other side of the door calls out loudly to the pawnbroker, he recovers himself. He thinks and thinks and thinks again of how to escape. He sneaks out to the street unobserved aided by his reason now alive and vital and dynamic. It has become a strange delight for him to now exist safely only by thinking and to be isolated now in a state of supreme detachment from any connection with people he now passes on the street. He is no longer like those around him. He alone counts. His safety, his defiance of all regular habits, his criminal state, this alone now makes Raskolnikov Raskolnikov.

At any moment society can reach out and grasp him like some scared chicken running around a farmyard unless he pretends successfully to be like everyone else. Only his mind is of any use in this new exhilarating drama. He must make himself as enlightened as possible. He is like an actor in a theater separated from the public before him and feeling strangely and magically alive even though his every word and his every act is counterfeited and false. He must be a light shining in the darkness of a society now totally alien to him but a light visible only to himself. Remorse? It does not exist and can not exist in him because his state of criminality must have no influence at all coming from the soul if he is to exist successfully and safely. The problem of the Russian soul no longer exists for Raskolnikov. He is not divided anymore by the influences that drive the soul inwardly or outwardly. He is condemned by his criminal act to live only where he thinks and it excites him to live there with a strange delight that grows more delightful as he escapes again and again from normal humans who are all now his enemies.

Raskolnikov has now reached, in a strange and unique fashion, the pinnacle of Western European religious and intellectual culture. His mind produced the thoughts that led to his crime but it observed his crime with perfect indifference just as it does all human actions. He can no longer live ever again as a normal human unless the unthinkable happens and he breaks the connection with his mind that his thinking produces. In order to experience remorse for what he has done, he would have to reach a place in his soul where a mysterious voice that has nothing to do with his mind and his thoughts cries out to him passionately that he should not have done it. This is impossible. Remorse is a form of compassion, a kind of compassion that a person feels for himself, a compassion of regret for a wrong he has committed. Modern European science, according to what a man has told Marmeladov, forbids compassion and successful enlightened modern Europeans have forbidden themselves not only compassion but remorse for the sufferings and injuries they inflict on the poor. Dostoevsky resists any attempt on his part to direct his hero towards remorse and instead directs him to imprison himself in his own mind more and more intensely even when influences caused by compassion for him by others should move him towards remorse. Dostoevsky is not out to convert Raskolnikov to the truths of the soul. He has driven Raskolnikov’s self so deeply into his mind that there is no place within him anymore for a soul. He does have moments when he is moved by compassion for the poor and he has other emotional moments, especially moments of fear, but these are fleeting moments.