“How have Russian boys handled things up to now… Take, for instance, some stinking tavern. . . . They’ve never seen each other before in their whole lives, and when they walk out of the tavern, they won’t see each other again for forty years.
Well, then, what are they going to argue about, seizing this moment in the tavern? About none other than the universal questions: is there a God, is there immortality? And those who do not believe in God, well, they will talk about socialism and anarchism, about transforming the whole of mankind according to a new order, but it’s the same damned thing, the questions are all the same, only from the other end.”
—Ivan Karamazov to his brother Alyosha, in Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
It is no accident that this book begins with the Russians. Walter Kaufmann’s classic anthology, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, claimed Notes from Underground as the founding text of existentialism. And the Russians always had a thing or two to tell the French about being worried about existence.
After all, it was Russia (according to Freud) that exported the “death instinct” to the West, along with caviar and ballet. To be Russian is to fret about being—about being Russian or about not being Russian enough, about being human or about not being human enough.
Emmanuel Levinas, a Jewish “Russian boy” who journeyed into the world of Continental thought, described the “philosophical problem . . . as the meaning of the human, as the search for the famous ‘meaning of life’—about which the Russian novelists ceaselessly wonder.”
To situate existentialism’s birth amidst the lay philosophy of Russian novelists reveals something basic about “the anxiety about being.” This anxiety is not just what remains after the death of God and the rise of scientific functionalism, as Nietzsche or Heidegger might have it, but is also the outcry of the modern isolated individual who needs answers.
This is the egoism that makes possible the solipsism of the underground man, that permits Ivan’s rebellion against God in The Brothers Karamazov, and that informs Levin’s provisional “conversion” at the end of Anna Karenina.
Accordingly, by beginning with Russian existentialism, we can recover a heritage that begins with the ancient problem of theodicy—of how to account for evil in a world created by a good, omniscient, and all-powerful deity—as it reemerges in its modern inflections within the individual struggling to reconcile private authenticity and public ethics.
Here we examine key moments from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov, as well as from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, in order to evoke a “Russian existentialism,” avant la lettre, that avoids the tendency to focus exclusively on Russian literary angst and instead attends to the range and complexity of the human “about which the Russian novelists ceaselessly wonder.”
Along the way, we will revisit such “religious” Russian proto-existentialists and literary commentators as Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov and also locate Levinas within this broader tradition. I will engage throughout in a peculiar two-step, for my goal is to show both what may be specifically Russian about this approach and how this Russianness plumbs the depths of the human condition more broadly. This is the tension between Russian existentialism and existential “Russianism.
In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky depicted what happens to the modern self when it embraces secular freedom: it discovers that it is split, that it does not identify with itself, and that its freedom is thereby a curse. Indeed, Sartre’s concepts of vertigo and anguish owe much to Dostoevsky’s idea of free consciousness as a doubling and a “sickness.”
This is the agony of Sartre’s gambler—culled from the “letters of Dostoevsky”—when confronted with a roulette table after having resolved not to gamble. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre wrote: I am not the self which I will be . . . because time separates me from it . . . [and] no actual existent can determine strictly what I am going to be.
Yet as I am already what I will be . . . , I am the self which I will be, in the mode of not being it. . . . Anguish is precisely my consciousness of being my own future, in the mode of not-being. . . . Vertigo appears as the apprehension of this dependence.
I approach the precipice, and my scrutiny is searching for myself in my very depths. . . . I play with my possibilities. . . . Indecision in its turn calls for decision. I abruptly put myself at a distance from the edge of the precipice and resume my way. [This is] “anguish in the face of the future.”
There exists another: anguish in the face of the past. . . . What the gambler apprehends . . . is the permanent rupture in determinism; it is nothingness which separates him from himself; I should have liked so much not to gamble anymore; yesterday I even had a synthetic apprehension of the situation (threatening ruin, disappointment of my relatives) as forbidding me to play. . . . And now I suddenly perceive that my former understanding of the situation is no more than a memory of an idea, a memory of a feeling. . . . I am alone and naked before temptation as I was the day before. . . . Nothing prevents me from gambling.
Gambling, of course, is itself a metaphor for the anguish and vertigo of indecision and decision, and it is absorbing for this very reason: gambling transfers the location of my possible choices and outcomes to a throw of the dice.
The vertigo of arbitrary freedom—which Sartre elsewhere calls the “poisoned” freedom in Dostoevsky’s novels —is resolved by the fall into obsession (unfreedom). As Nicholas Berdyaev noted, a “man obsessed is no longer free.” Beyond Dostoevsky’s gambling, one sees dédoublement and splitting in nearly every atom of his literary universe.
Beginning with Golyadkin, the Petersburg petty clerk of his early second novel The Double, his heroes often seem little more than bundles of anguish and vertigo, forever arriving at Yogi Berra’s fork in the road and taking it. Golyadkin’s tendency to exhibit decisive indecision results in his fantastical cleavage into Golyadkin Senior and Golyadkin Junior, the latter an incarnation of a desired self that, unlike the original, knows how to fawn, ingratiate, connive, undermine, and manipulate (the necessary two-faced modes of late capitalist life).
But it is in Notes from Underground that we find Dostoevsky’s first mature exposition of this theme without recourse to the fantastic—an exposition that relies on architectural metaphors to situate consciousness in its murky and physical landscape. In Notes we will see that the architecture of the self is entangled in the architecture that surrounds it.
The nearly two decades between The Double (1846) and Notes from Underground (1864) were eventful ones for Dostoevsky, to put it mildly. In 1859 he returned from a decade of hard labor and exile in Siberia, after a mock execution and last-minute commutation of an 1849 death sentence (by firing squad) for subversion—because of his membership in a liberal reading circle.
The authorities were not aware that he also belonged to a radical splinter group of Petrashevsky’s Circle, led by Nikolai Speshnev, which had considered the use of violence. In Siberia, forced to live among the peasant “masses” that the liberal Petersburg milieu wished to rescue with Western ideas, Dostoevsky came to doubt the secular Romantic idealism of his youth.
In the soul of the Russian convict, he saw an innate propensity for evil and an abiding contempt for the nobility (represented by political prisoners like himself), alongside a mysterious and profound capacity for human dignity. According to Shestov, when Dostoevsky returned to the capital:
He soon began to notice that the life of freedom came more and more to resemble the life in the convict settlement, and that “the vast dome of the sky” which had seemed to him limitless when he was in prison now began to crush and to press on him as much as the barrack vaults had used to do;
that the ideals which had sustained his fainting soul when he lived amongst the lowest dregs of humanity and shared their fate had not made a better man of him, nor liberated him, but on the contrary weighed him down and humiliated him as grievously as the chains of his prison. . . . Dostoevsky suddenly “saw” that the sky and the prison walls, ideals and chains are not contradictory to one another, as he had wished and thought formerly, when he still wished and thought like normal men.
In other words, prison convinced Dostoevsky that the human condition itself is prisonlike. The period during which Notes was composed also marked the deaths of his brother and first wife, the closing by the authorities of two journals that he had founded, and the onset of a terrible gambling addiction and financial difficulties.
Although this biographical context has inclined many, including Shestov, to identify the narrator of the Notes with Dostoevsky himself, one should point out the absurdity of suggesting an equivalence not only between any author and narrator but especially between the author and this narrator, who is unable to identify even with himself!
Furthermore, to treat Dostoevsky’s biography as the final “explanation” for this work would be to render the novel a mere idiosyncratic confession worthy only of being shelved in a cabinet of curiosities. It is typical to offer Tolstoy as a more “universal” antidote to Dostoevsky’s “twisted” portrayal of consciousness.
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were really chasing the same prey, one by tail and the other by snout: subjectivity, consciousness, and the architecture of the self. Perhaps Tolstoy finally confessed his love for Dostoevsky because he realized that, as the underground man puts it, “not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.”
To be a self is to be sick of oneself—even though we may enjoy this sickness, as the underground man claims to do in his “pleasure of despair”: “It’s their sicknesses that everyone takes pride in, and I, perhaps, more than anyone.” I more than anyone: we will revisit the urgency of that boastful little coda. From Dostoevsky’s perspective in 1860s Petersburg, the splendid isolation of pleasant despair seemed more sensible than the disoriented progress of what Levinas would later call the “heroic conception of human destiny,”
according to which the undivided self (and its “interests”) stakes its freedom against “being,” against the “obstacle” or “wall” of the world as it is given. In its dialectical heroism, however, the self is oblivious to its selfdivision.
This oblivion characterizes what the underground man calls the “ingenuous man that I regard as the real, normal man, the way his tender mother—nature—herself wished to see him when she so kindly conceived him on earth”:
Such a gentleman just lunges straight for his goal like an enraged bull, horns lowered, and maybe only a wall can stop him. Incidentally: before a wall, these gentlemen—that is, ingenuous people and active figures—quite sincerely fold.
For them, a wall is not a deflection, as it is, for example, for us, people who think and consequently do nothing; it is not a pretext for turning back, a pretext which our sort usually doesn’t believe in but is always very glad to have.
No, they fold in all sincerity. For them a wall possesses something soothing, morally resolving and final, perhaps even something mystical.) I envy such a man to the point of extreme bile. He is stupid . . . but perhaps a normal man ought to be stupid.
In the first of a series of architectural metaphors, Dostoevsky’s antihero posits the “wall” as the point at which the world says “No!” to my free choice. The normal person “sincerely folds” before this wall because he experiences it as the temporary limit of a world that is always in the process of being made in his image.
In contrast, the “man of heightened consciousness” (or “our sort”), “who came . . . not from the bosom of nature but from a retort,” responds to this wall not like a man but like a “highly conscious mouse. . . . And, above all, it is he, he himself, who regards himself as a mouse; no one asks him to; and that is an important point.”
The practical nature of the “wall” is very different for the mouse-man. Because the man of heightened consciousness is too neurotic to interact “normally” with “normal” people, for him the wall looms everywhere: the wall is a barrel-chested officer who bumps into him on Nevsky Prospect without acknowledging his existence;
the wall is an insincere dinner invitation that he is supposed to turn down but accepts out of pride and sheer perversity; the wall is the fact that his rented room is so filthy he is embarrassed to receive a prostitute who had responded to his experimental love letter. And his mouse-like response to this ever reappearing wall is to burrow under it and to peak with envy and contempt through a crack in the baseboard.
This passive, underground freedom arises because the mouse-man is merely externalizing the wall that is in him. Indeed, the underground man’s farcical adventures are all largely the spastic, hyperaware externalizations of an inward awkwardness that normal people deny or seek to circumvent by mastering social forms.
To those who would object that the underground man is an exception to the human condition, he responds at the end of his confession with the following claim, which is central to Dostoevsky’s description of his fiction as a form of “higher” realism: I know you’ll probably get angry . . . , shout, stamp your feet: “Speak just for yourself and your miseries in the underground, and don’t go saying ‘we all.’”
Excuse me, gentlemen, but I am not justifying myself with this allishness. As far as I am concerned, I have merely carried to an extreme in my life what you have not dared carry even halfway, and, what’s more, you’ve taken your cowardice for good sense, and found comfort in thus deceiving yourselves.
This internal revolt is what Levinas refers to as “the escape”: “Escape . . . puts in question precisely this alleged peace-with-self, since it aspires to break the chains of the I to the self.” The agitation of Dostoevsky’s antihero precisely reflects the inability of idealism to escape being. This is why he is always lapsing from philosophical abstraction into increasingly concrete architectural metaphors: the wall, the Crystal Palace, the chicken coop, the underground.
For if the specificity of a given place does not remind the idealist of the heaviness of being, then being there long enough surely will. By converting ideas into architecture, the underground man suggests that Western idealism and the idea of human progress are mere prejudices, European refinements that perhaps do not promise happiness and dignity to all.
In his sardonic fashion the underground man asks: What if the Universal won’t have me? And let’s say it will, what then? What if I won’t have the Universal? The narrator expresses this paradox in an imaginary dialogue with a “reasonable” interlocutor, who introduces another key architectural metaphor:
New economic relations will come, quite ready-made, and also calculated with mathematical precision, so that all possible questions will vanish in an instant, essentially because they will have been given all possible answers.
Then the Crystal Palace will be built. . . . Of course, there’s no guaranteeing (this is me speaking now) that it won’t, for example, be terribly boring then (because what is there to do if everything’s calculated according to some little table?) . . .
I . . . would not be the least bit surprised if suddenly, out of the blue, some gentleman of ignoble, or better, of retrograde and jeering physiognomy, should emerge, set his arms akimbo, and say to us all: “Well, gentlemen, why don’t we reduce all this reasonableness to dust with one good kick, for the sole purpose of sending all these logarithms to the devil and living once more according to our stupid will!”
Western idealism and rationalism, with their reduction of human motives to various kinds of interests and “profit,” leave out what the underground man calls “one’s own caprice, however wild, . . . the most profitable profit, the omitted one, which does not fit into any classification, and because of which all systems and theories are constantly blown to the devil.”
Such is sheer perversity, the pure hell of it. Dostoevsky builds an elaborate metaphor from the Crystal Palace, a vast structure of glass and cast iron that was built in London to house the Great Exhibition of 1851.
The exhibition glorified the Industrial Revolution, and the palace was an aesthetic, commercial, political, and technical achievement—a secular paradise enclosing full-grown, living trees alongside the world’s first public restrooms.
Like any escape artist, the narrator’s rejection of the Crystal Palace, to savor instead his “own caprice” underground, is by nature unstable. As an escape from being, it is nowhere. The underground man does not make the Crystal Palace disappear, and does not make it any less palatial, because such capricious negation is no substitute for the affirmative and collective dream that the Palace represents: Well, and perhaps I’m afraid of this edifice precisely because it is crystal and forever indestructible, and it will be impossible to put out one’s tongue at it even on the sly.
Now look: if instead of a palace there is instead a chicken coop, and it starts to rain, I will perhaps get into the chicken coop to avoid a wetting, but all the same I will not take a chicken coop for a palace out of gratitude for its having kept me from the rain.
You laugh, you even say that in that case it makes no difference—chicken coop or mansion. Yes, say I, if one were to live only so as not to get wet. But what’s to be done if I’ve taken it into my head that one does not live only for that, and that if one is to live, it had better be in a mansion?
The Crystal Palace embodies the target of the underground man’s radical questions: bourgeois liberal progress and practicality, the entire mid-Victorian ethos. But that doesn’t mean he will accept something less. That is, even if the Universal is just some Western superstition, once he knows about it there is no substitute.
The underground man resembles Milton’s Satan, who would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven but still dreams of climbing back to his native firmament. A dry chicken coop won’t replace a leaky palace. In the same way that William Blake and the Romantics sought to recast Milton’s Satan as an existential rebel, Shestov claims that Dostoevsky “rehabilitates the rights of the underground man,” which is to say the rights of tragic heroes, who are “all . . . egoists.”
“The philosophy of tragedy is, in principle, hostile to the philosophy of commonplaceness. In those instances when commonplaceness says ‘the end’ and turns away, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche see the beginning and start to seek.”
The underground man is not a tragic hero in the classical, Aristotelian sense; instead, his self-defeating paradoxicalism confers upon him a kind of dignity, a perverse and contrary individualism. But Shestov alludes to the redemptive irony at work here: “Perhaps the underground man was unjust to the ‘laws of nature’ when he said they offended him more than anything else!
After all, those laws gave him—an insignificant, despised creature whom everyone had rejected—a proud sense of his human dignity and led him to the conviction that the entire world is worth no more than one underground man!”
The wall of nature is really a canvas, a perfect surface for graffiti. If you “don’t believe” that the wall can stop you, you are nonetheless “glad to have” it, because it lets you hold forth, underground, in a purely discursive threshold realm beyond which infinite freedom is reduced to banal and finite action.
Underground, a toothache is a source of pleasure because it is a pretext for moaning. I Am Not I, and This Is Not My World: Theodicy and the Meaning of Life in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy Having considered how Dostoevsky portrays split consciousness and its ramifications in his Notes from Underground, let us now turn to the outside world as depicted by Russian existentialists; we take as examples The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina.
It is perhaps not surprising that the cloven underground self cleaves the world into an all-or-nothing proposition. Dostoevsky’s antiheroes, in their naked freedom and their sickness (the fruits of consciousness), challenge the world entire as if to say: Reveal yourself or disappear! Right now! Nothing short of an absolute and immediate answer to the human condition will do.
Berdyaev’s classic typology of the bipolar Russian soul reflects this Dostoevskian tendency: Russians classify themselves as “apocalypsists” or “nihilists,” showing thereby that they are not comfortable in a temperate psychical climate. . . .
From the opposed sides whence they are come, excess of religion as well as of atheism, apocalypsism and nihilism are equally destructive of culture and history that occupy a middle way. . . . “Nihilism has appeared among us because we are all nihilists,” wrote Dostoevsky in his diary, and it is this nihilism that he probed to the bottom, a nihilism . . . that is only an inverted apocalypsism.
Nihilism is an “inverted apocalypsism” because the former is merely a despondent version of the latter: this compromised world, full of evil, must end one way or another—if not by the kingdom of God, then by human negation (passive or active). Such bipolar maximalism arises not from an irrational soul, as Shestov might suggest, but rather from an excess of reason, a desire for radical individual clarity at the expense of collective “reasonableness.”
Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov calls this unreasonable starkness “Russianism.” As he explains: “Russian conversations on these subjects are all conducted as stupidly as possible. . . . The stupider, the more to the point. The stupider, the clearer. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while reason hedges and hides. Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest.”
As we see in the epigraph to this chapter (from the same famous dialogue), it is Russianism that accounts for his blunt haste in this, his first real adult conversation with his younger brother Alyosha, who has been living in the local monastery as Father Zosima’s acolyte: “My task is to explain to you as quickly as possible my essence. . . .
And therefore I declare that I accept God pure and simple . . . , but moreover I also accept his wisdom and his purpose, which are completely unknown to us; I believe in order, in the meaning of life, I believe in eternal harmony, in which we are all supposed to merge, I believe in the Word for whom the universe is yearning, and who himself was ‘with God,’ who himself is God, and so on, and so on and so forth to infinity. . . .
And now imagine that in the final outcome I do not accept this world of God’s, I do not admit it at all, though it exists. It’s not God that I do not accept, it is this world of God’s, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept. . . .
I have a childlike conviction that all sufferings will be healed and smoothed over, that the whole offensive comedy of human contradictions will disappear like a pitiful mirage, a vile concoction of man’s Euclidean mind, feeble and puny as an atom . . . let all of this come true and be revealed, but I do not accept it and do not want to accept it! Let the parallel lines even meet before my own eyes: I shall look and say, yes, they meet, and still I will not accept it.”
Dostoevsky completed The Brothers Karamazov in 1880, a year before his death. He wrote it during a period of marital and financial stability, at the height of his esteem as an author and public figure welcome at the court of Alexander II and at Petersburg’s aristocratic salons (thirty thousand people would accompany his funeral procession in 1881).
None of these favorable circumstances stopped him from writing yet another novel about murder (parricide this time), madness, faith, and nihilism that featured an underground voice (Ivan’s) even more compelling than the narrator’s in Notes. In my view, this is because (as before) these extremes, these violent questions, underscore a broader existential condition and not simply Dostoevsky’s special neuroses.
Ivan admits that his existential Russianism is stupid. It would, after all, seem “stupid” to do as he does and orient one’s “essence” around the kinds of sensational limit cases with which he torments Alyosha: the torture and deaths of innocent children by Turkish soldiers, the Russian landowner who let his dogs loose on his serf’s little boy—lurid tales culled from the popular press. But logic will not abide exceptions.
Ivan’s “Euclidean mind” rejects a world in which such things happen and even more vehemently rejects any future harmony or theodicy that could excuse or explain such a world or that would promise future harmony in a world to come: “‘I don’t understand anything,’ Ivan went on as if in delirium, ‘and I no longer want to understand anything.
I want to stick to the fact. I made up my mind long ago not to understand. If I wanted to understand something, I would immediately have to betray the fact.’” If the stubborn fact of innocent suffering children cannot be understood or accepted, then there is nothing else to understand or accept.
“Why do [children] get thrown on the pile, to manure someone’s future harmony with themselves? I understand solidarity in sin among men; solidarity in retribution I also understand; but what solidarity in sin do little children have? . . . Some joker will say, perhaps, that in any case the child will grow up and have time enough to sin, but there’s this boy who didn’t grow up but was torn apart by dogs at the age of eight. . . .
The mother . . . has no right to forgive the suffering of her child who was torn to pieces . . . even if the child himself were to forgive! . . . I don’t want harmony. . . . I’d rather remain with my unrequited suffering and my unrequited indignation, even if I am wrong. Besides, they have put too high a price on harmony; we can’t afford to pay so much for admission. . . . It’s not that I don’t accept God, Alyosha, I just most respectfully return him the ticket.”
Of course, Ivan won’t do anything about this except vow to “smash the cup” at the age of thirty, so as not to endure the pointlessness of a life lived too long or to become a debauched buffoon like his father Fyodor. Another of Dostoevsky’s characters (Kirillov in Demons) lives in the shadow of this doctrine of “logical suicide,” although, unlike Ivan, he views the free act of suicide as a heroic affirmation of human godhood and not simply rebellion.
But just as Kirillov’s godlessness is deeply theological, so too does Ivan retain a sliver of apocalyptic hope in the midst of his nihilist rebellion before Alyosha. “Russian boys” will be boys, Ivan suggests, not only in their rebellion but also in their need for a hug—that childish belief that help will come just because you need it.
The full implications of Ivan’s “returning the ticket” are left in the shadow realm of his notorious Cardinal Grand Inquisitor, his unwritten, paraphrased “poem” of sixteenth-century Seville, delivered gleefully with footnotes and flourishes to Alyosha in the tavern right after his “Russianist” confession.
In conjuring this figure of a theocrat who resolves to “correct” Christ’s refusal of the three temptations in the wilderness by relieving human beings from the burden of God-given freedom, Ivan suggests one of the logical outcomes of his rebellion against any kind of theodicy: the secular fanaticism of the totalitarian.
For if the evil in God’s world cannot be justified or accepted, then it falls to human authority to remake the world in man’s image. As Alyosha understands his brother’s relationship to his parable, the tragic ego must account for the whole world and become an Inquisitor (or its modern variant, a violent revolutionary) or die.
However, Ivan wants neither to become a self-righteous tyrant nor to kill himself just yet, and he attributes his willingness to drag on until his thirtieth year to “the Karamazov force.” “Karamazovism” is typically characterized in the novel as baseness and depravity, an undifferentiating and teeming life force by which Fyodor Karamazov declares that he has never met an ugly woman, not even Stinking Lizaveta (mother of his bastard, Smerdyakov, who later murders him).
But it is also the force that keeps Ivan alive, the force of and for the time being, which, in the absence of Berdyaev’s cultural middle, wends a path between “nihilism and apocalypsism.” I would even argue that Karamazovism is the force by which the Grand Inquisitor releases the returning Christ from the auto-da-fé after the latter responds to his accusations with a gentle kiss on his “bloodless, ninety-year-old lips.”
When Alyosha offers Ivan the same kiss in response to his brother’s provocations, the latter rapturously cries, “Literary theft!” and concludes: “if, indeed, I hold out for the sticky little leaves, I shall love them only remembering you. It’s enough for me that you are here somewhere, and I shall not stop wanting to live. . . . I will also make you a promise: when I’m thirty and want ‘to smash the cup on the floor,’ then, wherever you may be, I will still come to talk things over with you once more.”
The commonness of this plagiarized smooch is precisely what disrupts both the Inquisitor and Ivan’s binary “Russianism.” The gesture—gratuitous, forgiving, silly—deflates the urgency of the problem of theodicy, making light of the Inquisitor’s bloody earnestness and Ivan’s rebellion against God’s world. The kiss reminds one that not everything must be resolved and decided today.
Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, published when Dostoevsky began work on The Brothers Karamazov, explores a similar theme. Although the parallel plots of Tolstoy’s novel, which Dostoevsky deemed “flawless as a work of art,” trace how the sin of adultery distinguishes a “happy” family (Levin’s) from an “unhappy” one (Anna Karenina’s), ultimately both fictional strands warn against something similar to Ivan’s “Russianism”—against the kind of absolute rationalism one finds in the stream of consciousness that leads to Anna’s suicide.
Unlike Ivan, whose fate is uncertain by the end of The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina succeeds in “returning the ticket” before Tolstoy’s novel ends. Anna’s Euclidean formula about the purpose of human reason first appears in a conversation she has with her sister-in-law, Dolly (Darya Alexandrovna— wife of Anna’s brother, the philandering Stiva Oblonsky), to clarify why she doesn’t want any more children with her lover, Vronsky.
Anna explains: “Why have I been given reason, if I don’t use it so as not to bring unfortunate children into the world? . . . I would always feel guilty before these unfortunate children. . . . If they don’t exist, at least they won’t be unfortunate, and if they’re unfortunate, I alone am to blame.”
These were the same arguments Darya Alexandrovna had produced for herself, but now she listened to them and could not understand them. “How can she be guilty before beings who don’t exist?” she wondered.
And suddenly a thought came to her: could it be better in any possible case for her favorite, Grisha, if he had never existed? And it seemed so wild to her, so strange, that she shook her head to scatter this whirling confusion of mad thoughts.
Indeed, Dolly did produce the “same arguments” for herself in the carriage on the way to Anna and Vronsky’s estate, when she recalled the cheerful response of a beautiful young peasant woman to the question of whether she had children: “I had one girl, but God freed me, I buried her during Lent. . . . Why be sorry? The old man has lots of grandchildren.
Nothing but trouble. No work, no nothing. Just bondage.” This answer had seemed repulsive to Darya Alexandrovna, . . . but now she inadvertently recalled those words. Cynical as they were, there was some truth in them. . . . “Labour, suffering, ugly suffering, that last moment . . . then nursing, the sleepless nights. . . . Then the children’s illnesses, this eternal fear; then their upbringing, vile inclinations. . . . And on top of it all, the death of these same children.”
After Dolly arrives at Anna and Vronsky’s and hears the same argument in Anna’s mouth, its logic seems incomprehensible in all of its Cartesian hubris. For how can one judge whether “beings who don’t exist” are better off for not existing and whether beings who do exist would be better off not having existed?
In these characters’ deliberations about child rearing, with its travails monumental and banal, Tolstoy (much like Ivan Karamazov) raises the question of whether being or nothingness, frail hope or inevitable tragedy, best defines what it means to be human—and whether one has a choice in the matter.
What Ivan, Anna, and Dolly reveal in the preceding passages is an intellectual rebellion against the very terms of the question, a rebellion that presumes one can reject a world that offers such an absurd choice.
These characters straddle what Sartre calls the “divide” in each consciousness, which “includes in itself the consciousness both of being responsible for itself and of not being the cause of it’s own being.” In Ivan, Anna, and Dolly, the Cartesian consciousness responsible for itself is frustrated by the gratuitousness of consciousness and responds by assuming a negative responsibility for the entire world, revoking the rights of everything that exists.
This is Mephisto’s “Eternal Emptiness,” which Goethe’s devil invokes when a chorus proclaims that Faust’s life is “over.” “Over!?” Mephisto retorts, “Over and pure nothing, it is all the same. Why have eternally creation, when all is subject to annihilation?” Why have children if they are to suffer and die? Why have anything if children are to suffer and die?
These are the pressing questions of Tolstoy’s discussions about child rearing in Anna Karenina. The logic returns us to Ivan Karamazov’s rebellion against any harmony grown on the “manure” of dead children. Of course, Ivan’s rebellion is itself grown on the manure of dead children.
But here it is crucial to note both the connection and the key difference between Ivan’s “suffering children” and those of Zosima and Alyosha— and indeed of Dostoevsky himself, who in 1878 lost his three-year-old son Alexei (Alyosha) to epilepsy, a condition the boy inherited from his father. In both cases, dead children signal the monstrousness of any theodicy.
But in Ivan’s examples, children suffer because of human evil that God passively allows, while Zosima and Alyosha (and Dostoevsky) use the loss of children to confront the natural order that God supposedly sustains.
As perplexing philosophical quandaries go, it may be easier to respond to the latter than the former. As Berdyaev argues, the “problem of evil and of wrongdoing is part and parcel of the problem of freedom. . . . If there were no freedom then God alone could be responsible for evil.” However, this only explains human evil—Ivan’s Turkish soldiers or Russian landowners torturing babies.
Of course, Ivan would say (as his Grand Inquisitor does) that only a nasty God would burden us with such freedom. Berdyaev responds to such a conception of God by insisting that compulsory goodness is not goodness but slavery. This argument is taken to a level deeper, however, because neither Berdyaev nor Ivan contends—as Zosima and Alyosha do—with natural evil.
Ivan’s limit cases inspire an easy and infectious fury: What should we do with the landowner who lets his hounds hunt down a child before his mother’s eyes? “Shoot him!” even the angelic Alyosha bursts out darkly.45 But even though you can shoot the landowner; you can’t shoot God—especially if God doesn’t exist, as Ivan’s rejection of theodicy suggests.
Still, even if God gave the landowner the freedom with which to sin, wouldn’t it be more understandable to fault God (or “God’s world”) for the unmediated suffering of a child who dies of “natural” causes? Although Ivan is often pegged as an atheist, he is deliberately avoiding the label in his tavern talk with Alyosha because to reject God directly is already to accept the world as your own, which is to accept the futility and limits of a prolonged anger at the world.
Confronted with such limits, you are less angry than simply bereft. You can only feel bereft over the death of a child you knew—not Ivan’s newspaper children but rather Ilyusha Snegiryov and Alexei, the fourth baby buried by Nastasia, the peasant woman who comes to Zosima for comfort. The way that Alyosha responds to Ilyusha Snegiryov’s death and Zosima to Alexei’s is the definitive response to Ivan’s rebellion.
I would like to linger on these two exemplary episodes because the novel itself lingers on them, paradoxically, not to reject the world (as Ivan does) but instead to affirm it on a deeper basis. Here is the exchange between the pilgrim Nastasia and Father Zosima: “I grieve for my little [three-year-old] son, father, for my little son.
He was the last little son left to us, we had four, Nikitushka and I, but our children didn’t stay, they didn’t stay. When I buried the first three, I wasn’t too sorry about them, but this last one I buried and I can’t forget him. . . . My soul is wasted over him. I look at his clothes, at his little shirt or his little boots, and start howling. . . . I’m through with [my husband], through, I’m through with everybody. And I don’t even want to see my house now.”
When Zosima attempts to comfort her with platitudes about her son being in the ranks of the angels, she objects powerfully: “The same way my Nikitushka was comforting me, word for word. . . . I’d say, ‘where else can he be if not with the Lord God, only he isn’t here with us . . . he isn’t sitting here with us like before!’ . . . But he’s gone, dear father, he’s gone, and I’ll never hear him again!
His little belt is here, but he’s gone, and I’ll never hear him again!” She took her boy’s little goldbraided belt from her bosom and, at the sight of it, began shaking with sobs. . . . “This,” said the elder, “is Rachel of old ‘weeping for her children, and she would not be comforted, because they are not’ [Jer. 31:15, Matt. 2:18]. . . .
And do not be comforted, you should not be comforted, but weep. . . . And you will be filled with this great mother’s weeping for a long time, but in the end it will turn into quiet joy for you, and your bitter tears will become tears of quiet tenderness and the heart’s purification. . . . Only it is a sin for you to desert [your husband].
Go to your husband and take care of him. Your little boy will look down and see that you’ve abandoned his father, and will weep for both of you. . . . You see him now in your dreams and are tormented, but at home he will send you quiet dreams.”
Nastasia vows to return to her husband, telling Zosima: “You’ve touched my heart.” The elder finally reaches her not with theodicy or images of heaven (the stuff that repels Ivan) but rather with an acknowledgment of her inconsolability, an irreconcilability that must be allowed to evolve into something else—for example, into an urgent need to honor the dead by reestablishing a connection to the living (even to the world that allowed a child to die).
It is, however, the life and death of Ilyusha (Ilyushechka) Snegiryov that constitute a Dostoevskian tour de force of mingled bathos and pathos, all of which Zosima’s “heir” Alyosha Karamazov must shape into an act of memory. Ilyusha is at the heart of the novel’s microcosmic subplot about the schoolboys that Alyosha befriends and mentors.
Alyosha first encounters the boys as they are throwing stones at Ilyusha, who viciously bites Alyosha’s finger after he comes to his rescue. Alyosha soon learns that the boys had been teasing Ilyusha because Dmitry Karamazov (Ivan and Alyosha’s half-brother) had dragged his father Captain Snegiryov by his “whiskbroom” beard in the public square.
By the end of the novel, Alyosha helps orchestrate a moving reconciliation between the boy and his friends as well as assistance for the boy’s family, but Ilyusha’s health worsens and he dies two days after Dmitry is sentenced (unjustly) for the murder of Fyodor Karamazov.
Ilyushechka’s funeral and Alyosha’s impromptu eulogy, the “Speech at the Stone,” constitute the last chapter of the novel. The funeral itself is described in several pages of nearly unbearable naturalistic detail: When it came time to take leave of the dead and cover the coffin, [Captain Snegiryov] threw his arms around it as if to keep them from covering Ilyushechka, and began quickly, greedily, repeatedly kissing his dead boy on the mouth. . . .
“Flowers for mama, flowers for mama! Mama’s feelings have been hurt!” he suddenly started exclaiming. . . . All the boys were crying . . . and though Smurov . . . was also crying terribly, he still managed, while almost running, to snatch up a piece of brick lying red on the snow-covered path and fling it at a flock of sparrows flying quickly by.
He missed, of course, and went on running, crying. . . . [Captain Snegiryov] fell on the snow, struggling, screaming, sobbing, and began crying out: “Ilyushechka, dear fellow, dear old fellow!” Alyosha and Kolya set about lifting him up, pleading with him, persuading him. “Enough, captain, a brave man must endure,” Kolya mumbled. “And you’ll ruin the flowers,” Alyosha added, “and ‘mama’ is waiting for them, she’s sitting there crying because you didn’t give her any flowers from Ilyushechka this morning.”
In this scene, Alyosha turns the captain, as Zosima had turned Nastasia, back toward ethical attention to his spouse as an appropriate response to grief. It is striking that intense grief is essentially infantile, as Dostoevsky paints the scene.
Indeed, Dostoevsky’s comic-pathetic tone in this chapter and the banal details he includes—Smurov throwing stones at sparrows while running and crying, the Snegiryovs squabbling over flowers—is what some readers have ascribed to Dostoevsky’s “cruel talent,” his dramatic emphasis on the painful comedy of scandal and travesty.
But Dostoevsky also believed in a “wit that comes from deep feeling,” a compassionate laughter that could rescue the soul by loosening it from an intolerable present. After all, hysterical grief is infantile precisely because it is a feeling of being trapped in time, in a present experienced as pure loss.
As such, Dostoevsky presents scene after scene of parents who see the traces of their child, like Snegiryoy who finds his dead child’s boots, wailing in inexhaustible and unassuageable sorrow. Once again, Alyosha actively manages this grief: “Let them cry it through,” [Alyosha] said to Kolya, “of course there’s no use trying to comfort them now.
Let’s wait a minute and then go back. . . . He may get drunk. Just you and I will come, and that will be enough . . .; if we all come at once, we’ll remind them of everything again,” Alyosha advised. [Kolya replied,] “The landlady is setting the table for them now—for this memorial dinner or whatever. . . . It’s all so strange, Karamazov, such grief, and then pancakes all of a sudden— how unnatural it all is in our religion!”
It is interesting that, at the end of Demons, Stepan Trofimovich’s “conversion” is also prefigured by a sudden eruption of pancakes at the tavern where he soon breathes his last. In each case, the sensual-mundane triggers an act of memory.
In both cases, pancakes represent an end run around the intellectual thicket of theodicy precisely through their evocation of a happy part of childhood. Egoist rebellion against unacceptable suffering (like Ilyushechka’s death) is quickly exhausted and turns into a more complicated agony over how to honor the departed: what to do with the palpable loss and its traces, what to forget and what to remember and how to do so. Rejecting the world is easy: even God “regretted” (Gen. 6:6) his creation before destroying it by flood (which he will also regret).
Far more difficult is the craft of selective memory, as ephemeral as the rainbow God devises to remind himself (not Noah) of his promise that he will never again annihilate the world in response to the evil that is innate to human freedom (Gen. 9:16). Alyosha invokes the power and fragility of such memory in his impromptu eulogy, delivered not by the grave in the churchyard but instead near the “heathenish stone” where Snegiryov had actually wanted to bury his son.
In the “Speech at the Stone” that follows and concludes the novel, Alyosha accomplishes several rather subtle things. First, he includes himself and the boys in a shared responsibility for Ilyushechka’s fate. Second, he invokes a corollary responsibility: the obligation to aspire actively to one’s better memory, to the better “facts” of human nature.
“‘Let us never forget how good we once felt here, all together, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, for the time that we loved the poor boy, perhaps better than we actually are, . . . that alone may serve some day for our salvation.’”
The third thing the eulogy performs occurs as part of a dialogue with the boys: “Ah, dear children, dear friends, do not be afraid of life! How good life is when you do something good and rightful!” . . . “Karamazov!” cried Kolya, “can it really be true as religion says, that all shall rise from the dead, and come to life, and see one another again, and everyone, and Ilyushechka?”
“Certainly we shall rise, certainly we shall see and gladly, joyfully tell one another all that has been,” Alyosha replied, half laughing, half in ecstasy. . . . “Well, and now let’s end our speeches and go to his memorial dinner. Don’t be disturbed that we’ll be eating pancakes. It’s an ancient, eternal thing, and there’s good in that too,” laughed Alyosha.
Where Ivan Karamazov would find the arrival of the Kingdom of God an inadequate theodicy, pancakes suffice for Alyosha. It seems that, at least for that moment, Dostoevsky defeats Ivan and the underground man with comfort food. Camus’s ruminations on Dostoevsky conveyed how existentialists understood the Russian novelist, in his treatment of consciousness and theodicy, as a precursor to some of their own key themes.
For Camus, Ivan was a tsar in indifference . . . by refusing to surrender the royal powers of the mind. To those, like his brother [Alyosha], who prove by their lives that it is essential to humiliate oneself in order to believe, he might reply that the condition is shameful. His key word is: “Everything is permitted,” with the appropriate shade of melancholy.
Of course, like Nietzsche, the most famous of God’s assassins, he ends in madness. But this is a risk worth running, and, faced with such tragic ends, the essential impulse of the absurd mind is to ask: “What does that prove?”
Indeed, what do madness or suicide “prove” in Dostoevsky’s case studies? The absurdist (or Shestov’s tragic egoist) would respond: all it proves is that there is an unbridgeable chasm between human truth and human need.
Accordingly, even though Camus called Alyosha’s invocation of the immortality of the soul an example of Dostoevsky’s “stirring acquiescence, riddled with doubts, uncertain and ardent,” he described it also as man exchanging “his divinity for happiness” and declared that this ultimately makes Dostoevsky not an “absurdist . . . but [rather] an existentialist novelist.”
By this Camus meant that Dostoevsky—unlike the absurdist, who lives (or dies) without offering a solution to the human problem of meaning—ends up accommodating necessity by responding to Kirillov and Ivan as Alyosha responds to Kolya: “existence is illusory and it is eternal.”
In Camus’s reading, it is illusory because God is dead and it is eternal because, apparently, we cannot live without God. As Blaise Pascal famously quipped: “It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.” “Which is better—cheap happiness, or lofty suffering?” asked the underground man as he reflected on his excuses for letting his prospective love interest, the prostitute Liza, flee from his rented room after he deliberately insulted her by trying to pay—for she did not come to sleep with him for money but because he had tried to persuade her to leave her trade.
He implies that setting up house with Liza would be cheap happiness, presumably for both of them, while his cruel insult will instill a lofty (and, he claims, true and thus “useful”) suffering—again, presumably in both of them. The question begs the insight that happiness is in fact always cheap, that is, prosaic. In Levinas’s phrase, “life is love of life”—fulfillment of the needs that life comprises is life’s joy. On the other hand, a suffering that is chosen (or useful) is always lofty in that it assumes that my suffering challenges some sort of universal meaning, which of course presupposes that universal meaning is possible.
Alyosha peddles cheap happiness (the pancakes) precisely because it comes so dearly. Father Zosima, in his homily on memorable Biblical moments, expresses this paradox most clearly and painfully in a discussion of the unsatisfying, even monstrous, epilogue to the Book of Job: “God restores Job again, once more many years pass, and he has new children, different ones, and he loves them—Oh Lord, one thinks, ‘but how could he so love these new ones, when his former children are no more, when he has lost them?
Remembering them, was it possible for him to be fully happy?’ . . . But it is possible, it is possible: the old grief, by a great mystery of human life, gradually passes into quiet tender joy; instead of young, ebullient blood comes a mild, serene old age.”
Ivan Karamazov’s “ebullient blood” would have simmered over the loss of the first family, just as it probably simmers over his own sorry childhood spent as a ward in the homes of others. But just as the deaths of the beloved former children are a stubborn, unjustifiable fact, so too are the beloved new children: a reality as weird and common as the rising and setting of the sun.
It is what Philip Hallie called the “lucid mystery” of goodness. What is to be done with this other kind of fact, the kind that probably would not appear in Ivan’s newspapers? Zosima’s “mild, serene old age” does not weigh one stubborn fact against the other (for that would be a crass sort of theodicy indeed) and remembering, acknowledging both evil and the banality of goodness.
Camus discounted too quickly the possibility that such an affirmation partakes of the absurd. Alyosha’s invocation of eternity is split into the ridiculous (eating pancakes!) and the ethically transcendent (the memory of Ilyushechka as a unifying bond).
Indeed, for French existentialists to ignore, rue, or misunderstand the religious (“humiliated”) end of the Russian equation, while drawing inspiration from the atheist (“intelligent”) end, was to fall into a false equilibrium. Kirillov’s “pistol rang out somewhere in Russia,” Camus wrote, “but the world continued to cherish its blind hopes.”
If M. Kiriloff’s “logical suicide” was toasted with anisette in a Left Bank café, then it too easily sloughs off the horns of Dostoevsky’s dilemma. For at least in the Russian context, God is less dead than constantly and necessarily forgotten. In such a context, “God” is basically a mnemonic device for responsibility and for the suspension of the all-negating rational ego.
As a peasant explains to Levin near the end of Anna Karenina: “One man just lives for his own needs . . . , just to stuff his own belly, but Fokanych—he’s an upright old man. He lives for the soul. He remembers God.” And to remember God, one needs to have forgotten him.
As Bernard Martin noted in his account of Shestov: “Later he was to make clear, in a great comment on the Psalmist’s cry, ‘Out of the depths, I called unto thee, O Lord’ [Ps. 130], the connection between the tragedies of existence and God: ‘What relationship is there between “the depths” and “Lord”? When there is neither depth, nor horror, nor despair, man does not see God and does not call to Him.’”
The cliché about no atheists in foxholes signals the irrelevance of “belief”: sometimes it feels like there is no God, and other times it feels like there is. The power of the lucid mystery—whereby a person (believer or not) doesn’t live simply to stuff his belly—relies on our absurd tendency to forget and then suddenly remember this power and call on it in moments of horror and despair, even when this call is not heard.
Indeed, the lucid mystery finds its proof not just in kindness but also in grief, as mysterious as kindness. Grief feels fresh each time it is invoked, drawing its power from the shoddiness of our emotional memory. After all, if we remembered that we already grieved for something, why would we ever want to grieve for it again?
Yet this is exactly what we do. This sort of sensitivity—the naive freshness of such forgetfulness—also permits us to relive simple ethical revelations again and again and to be hopeful for others when they do so. The Ivan Karamazov inside all of us bristles at such loose ends.
Or, as explained by the shabby devil who visits Ivan shortly before his descent into brain fever: “I’m leading you alternately between belief and disbelief, and I have my own purpose in doing so. A new method, sir: when you’ve completely lost faith in me, then you’ll immediately start convincing me to my face that I am not a dream but a reality—I know you now; and then my goal will be achieved. And it is a noble goal. I will sow just a tiny seed of faith in you, and from it an oak will grow.”
Ivan’s devil is a self-professed demon of uncertainty—uncertainty over whether one must engage the world materially or spiritually. Philip Hallie describes a similar Faustian struggle between two souls in the breast: one soul that sees evil as resulting from an imbalance of power that can be corrected only by an opposed power; another soul that responds to evil not with power but with hope and generosity.
The first soul is nourished by truth—and the more impersonal, lucid, and objective the better. The second soul is fed by hope, which is intimate, personal, and based on the ability of each of us to shape a narrative that comforts. In the dialogue between Russian boys in the stinking tavern, the first soul is represented by Ivan and the second by Aloysha.
Hallie refuses to reconcile these two incompatible souls: “We live off the bodies of others. This is the system we are part of, whether we like it or not. If we cannot learn to live and love in such a bloody, ambiguous world as this, we starve to death emotionally and cognitively, for we live with truth as necessarily as we live with high hopes.”
The mess of both is needed. It is no accident that Hallie ultimately relies on storytelling—on a highly aestheticized truth seeking. Indeed, the open-endedness of literary art can be an honest and humane way of acknowledging our animal cruelty (living off the bodies of others) even as we cultivate and live out shared hopes for salvation.
Thus the challenge for the second, hopeful soul is to stand firm in the bloody instability witnessed by the truth-seeking soul. Aesthetic activity (including critical dialogue) is a realm where it is possible to stand firm on shaky ground, and here again the Russian novels are often the right place to start looking—and perhaps a good place to return to after our journey into philosophy.
Nietzsche, with his own brand of stark “Russianism,” proposed the following: What if . . . a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you. . . .
The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” . . .
How well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? Nietzsche’s demon of eternal recurrence represents the idea that there is no other world or hereafter and that this world is just one cycle of an endless, tortured pattern of existence.
But Nietzsche also suggested that this demon can be transformed by a “tremendous moment,” or by (in Alyosha’s words) “some good memory,” into an ethical impetus. I submit that this “tremendous moment” might simply be the ability to forget, even if only momentarily, that the world remains the world even after you have experienced the lucid mystery of goodness.
What this suggests is that the philosophy of tragedy leads not to metaphysical transcendence or negation—both of which are still slaves to the being they hope to defeat—but instead to ethical transcendence. And because ethical transcendence has meaning and expression only as mundane justice and care, we return to the world of face-to-face relations so deliberately depicted by the Russian novelists.
Existential Russianism thus leaves us between two limit cases: the dark and violent freedom characterized by the individual’s perverse need to escape the other-in-myself and an “insatiable compassion” toward the other-as-other.
One experiences each case—be it self-nausea or infinite responsibility—“more than anyone.” From the underground man’s assertion that everyone takes pride in their sicknesses, “and I more than anyone,” Dostoevsky eventually arrived at the idea in The Brothers Karamazov—an idea Levinas later embraced as his own: “Each of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I more than anyone.”
In each case it is the “I more than anyone”—the literary, antiphilosophical coda—that reflects what it is like to have a self, a subjectivity irreducible and irreplaceable, whether it wallows in the mire or takes responsibility for the world as it exists and as it ought to be. This is the Russians’ gift to existentialism: recovery of the self amidst the collective mobilizations of modernity.
It is a radical subjectivity, expressed well by Levin’s thoughts at the end of Anna Karenina: “It’s a secret that’s necessary and important for me alone and inexpressible in words. This new feeling hasn’t changed me, hasn’t made me happy or suddenly enlightened. . . . Nor was there any surprise. And faith or not faith—I don’t know what it is—but this new feeling has entered into me just as imperceptibly through suffering and has firmly lodged itself in my soul.
I’ll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife, I’ll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I’ll fail in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray—but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!
As an epiphany, this is all so provisional and so hedged with caveats that Levin’s exclamation point seems farcical. But perhaps the caveats are the epiphany. Levin, whose “life was good but [whose] thinking was bad,” accepts that his world will forever exceed his thinking. And, somewhat paradoxically, this is really an acceptance of human freedom in all of its heady responsibility.
Whether cogito ergo sum or Es denkt, it is always up to me to think well—up to me “more than anyone.” To think well, for Dostoevsky and Tolstoy alike, is to realize that even though pure consciousness is the royal realm of human freedom, it can also be a tyrant—a “sickness,” as the underground man calls it—when it is unmoored from the compromises demanded by everything else that calls the individual into question.
Ivan Karamazov and the underground man are utterly enslaved by their boundless consciousness. To think well is to keep in mind that pure thought tends toward a limitlessness that is blind to any experience that would humiliate it.
As Berdyaev reminds us, Russians did not have full recourse to the bourgeois culture of the West, where it seemed for a time the sovereign realms of the mind and the world could coexist in a historically evolving middle. During the twentieth century, it became clear that the West did not really have recourse to this middle, either.
This is what existentialist readers of the Russian novel sensed in the stark and schismatic “Russianism” of a dialogue like the one between Ivan and Alyosha: that the torn subject— wrenched apart in utter loss or impossible decision, slipping on insupportable ground—can, absurdly, find support not in an impersonal idealism but in this very schism between rebellion and hope.