The Nihilism of Dostoevsky, Vadim Filatov [top reads txt] 📗

The Nihilism of Dostoevsky
Vadim Filatov
(The public lecture given by 12.02.2012 in Arkhangelsk Teachers Training Institute during interuniversity scientific conference "Philological education: modern strategy and technologies")

The Russian nihilism of second half of the nineteenth century received all-European popularity. In many respects this occurred with the connection of creativity of the Russian writers. The significant place in promoting of ideas of the nihilism belongs to Fyodor Dostoevsky.

The Russian nihilists considered that God doesn't exist, therefore any moral is relative, and the sense of life is concluded in destruction. Thus the political nihilists have thought. The philosophizing nihilists were convinced that life has no any sense, and some of them even denied the reality of the life at all. The philosophical nihilism had very ancient history. But the Russian nihilism usually associates with a secondary, political version of nihilism. Now we begin our story about it.

POLITICAL NIHILISM

It is well known that the first Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin hated Dostoevsky's creativity. "I have no free time for this rubbish ", "This is a kind of moralizing vomiting", "Re-read his book and threw aside", - thus the revolutionary leader characterized Dostoevsky's works. On the other hand, Lev Tolstoy was called by Lenin as "a block" and "experienced man", and even as "a mirror of the Russian revolution". What were the reasons of such opposite estimates? Lev Tolstoy was imposed by Lenin with his withdrawal from Orthodoxy and his demonstrative opposition to autocracy. It is possible to declare that Tolstoy took approximately the same place in public life of Russia at the beginning of the 20th century which was appropriated by Solzhenitsyn on an outcome of existence of the USSR.
Both Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn have loosened ideologically the existed political systems, though Solzhenitsyn circumspectly was engaged in this destructive process being turned out abroad. On the contrary, Dostoevsky has convincingly showed that so-called "Russian revolution" was actually not the revolution of Russian people, but was the revolution of some "active minority", or revolution of demons. Therefore Dostoevsky was forbidden in the USSR up to the 50th years of 20 century, when he was returned to the school program with his very weak and harmless story "Poor Folk". Only at Khrushchev’s epoch, when revolutionary demons and their descendants, being worried by Stalin repressions went to their historical homeland — Dostoevsky returned with "Crime and Punishment".
The word "nihilism" was used in Russian literature for the first time in 1829 by publicist Nadezhdin in his article "The congestion of Nihilists", to which nobody paid attention. And only when IvanTurgenev have wrote in his novel "Fathers and Sons" (1862) about nihilist Bazarov, who said that any boots were much more useful than Raphael's pictures, such nihilism made great impression on youth and the word began to be used widely. When Turgenev returned from Europe to St.-Petersburg, there were many fires in the city in which the public opinion accused Chernyshevsky and the youth deceived by him. Thus the various acquaintances spoke to Turgenev: "Look what your nihilists do: burn down Petersburg!" Turgenev in reply has pretended coquettishly that didn't understand about what there was a speech. And in Dostoevsky's novel "The Demons" the mad governor von Lembke has desperately shouted: "It is arson! It is nihilism! If something flares, it is nihilism!" Many people really thought so. It is possible to understand these people, because the hero of the Turgenev’s novel, Bazarov, proclaimed that the society together with all its state institutes had to be destroyed.

After publication of the novel of Ivan Turgenev all the young people which have said constantly that they wanted to overthrow the tsar, which derided religion, cut frogs, and also supported female equality and free love, began to be called as “nihilists”. So nihilists (men) were represented in literature in the form of criminals and bandits, who were looked externally similar as tramps, and nihilists (women) as their accomplices, who are externally similar as men. For example, in 1870 Russian writer Nikolai Leskov published the novel “At Daggers Drawn”, as an angry attack aimed at the nihilist movement, which caused Dostoevsky's sharp disapproval.
Ivan Turgenev, who has composed Bazarov, didn't share his ideas. But Bazarov started leading his own life independent from the will of the author. The same may be told about the philosophizing nihilists thought up by Dostoevsky. The author wanted to show insolvency of their ideas, but suddenly these ideas became very strong and deep. Dostoevsky sought to consider sore points of human life and a non-existence to the latest limits and even further. Therefore philosophizing nihilists were looked so convincingly in his novels. And his political nihilists are represented derisively and mockingly. In 1866 Dostoevsky wrote to Katkov: "All nihilists were socialists... There were a lot of swindlers and small wreckers among them".
Dostoevsky quarreled with the founder of an image of Bazarov, Turgenev, when has lost all his money in roulette, and asked Turgenev for the credit. Hard-fisted Turgenev has borrowed only a half of the requested sum and later, tactlessly asked Dostoevsky to repay a debt. And finally the relations between two outstanding Russian classics fell apart. When Turgenev has published the next novel about the Russian political nihilists under the name "Smoke", Dostoevsky noticed to him maliciously:
- Ivan Sergeyevich, would you like to buy a telescope in order to see better our life from abroad?
Ivan Turgenev heard this and became very upset, as he always considered himself like the big expert on the Russian life.
Being not satisfied with this, Dostoevsky has represented Turgenev in his novel "The Demons" with image of the vainglorious writer Karmazinov.
In the 19th century the Russian revolutionary populists were nihilists. There were three directions in their movement: the propagandists led by Lavrov, the rebels, led by Bakunin who has proclaimed the nihilistic thesis that any kind of destruction represented a version of creation and, at last, the conspirators, led by Tkachev. Tkachev was one of the first populists who refused to idealize the simple people and began to say that revolution would be the result of actions of "revolutionary minority", "people of the future", whom the Russian academician Igor Shafarevich called as "the small folk" later. "Idealization of uncivilized crowd, - thus Tkachev spoke, - was one of the most dangerous and most widespread illusions..." But Dostoevsky has idealized the Russian people, with whom he connected the future of Russia. It is necessary to recognize unfortunately that Tkachev's views concerning the people were closer to truth, than the views of Dostoevsky and Lev Tolstoy. The last one have found rescue from his youthful pessimism, expressed in persuasive reflections about senselessness of life, in unification with the simple people by means of disguise in country clothes. Dostoevsky anticipated Lev Tolstoy’s tragic and comic flight from his estate and his death, when he have wrote about the hero of his novel "The Demons" Stephen Verkhovensky, who also left his house, saw a lot of simple people and immediately died. His son, the leader of gang of the district demons Peter Verkhovensky (according to Dostoevsky's plan), was urged to serve as a caricature on the well-known nihilist, the follower of Tkachev, Sergey Nechaev, who, in his "Catechism of the Revolutionary" admitted honestly that "any revolutionary is a washed-up person". As a result Peter Verkhovensky had to become the most banal and belittled double of philosophizing nihilist Stavrogin in "The Demons". And liberal Stephen Verkhovensky, weather wanted he this or not, brought up unscrupulous and cruel nihilist Peter, just as in 1917 the Provisional Government created conditions for coming to power of Bolsheviks. Actually it is possible to confirm that political nihilism in Dostoevsky's image has became more or less banal and belittled continuation of nihilism philosophical.

PHILOSOPHICAL NIHILISM

“Right or wrong, it's very pleasant to break something from time to time.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

Now it is possible to notice that not only Vladimir Lenin hated the creativity of Dostoevsky. In today's Russia the modern demon Anatoly Chubais hates it too. Their positions are quite clear. And Vladimir Nabokov, well-known Russian writer of the 20th century, spoke about Dostoevsky in such a manner:" Let's agree that Dostoevsky — first of all – was the author of detective novels, where each character who has appeared before us, remained the same up to the end, with the developed habits and hyphens". Thus Nabokov wrote in his "Lectures about the Russian literature". Nabokov has introduced this idea after listed diagnoses of the main characters of Dostoevsky. He summarized that the world of the writer was the world of sick people which is interesting only to those who was sick himself. Certainly, heroes of works of Dostoevsky, having been in the turned world, had to become (or even to ache) on the head for the aim to see all the surrounding in the correct foreshortening. Whether Nabokov, who destroyed stereotypes concerning the settled ideas of Dostoevsky's creativity, acted as the nihilist himself?
What is the philosophical nihilism? If briefly, without pressing in particular its various versions, the philosophical nihilism approves a non-existence priority (anything, emptiness) above the life, up to the full annihilation (destruction) of life. It is possible to carry out some ethical conclusions from this fundamental thesis. In the received conclusions the philosophical nihilism is crossed with political one, just as Stavrogin and Kirillov were crossed with Peter Verkhovensky. Nevertheless, the political nihilists, at least on the field of their denial of the standard ethical values, acted not as the purpose, but only as means of achievement of other, mercenary and ordinary purposes. So they represented a kind of weak imitation of philosophical nihilism. Friedrich Nietzsche, who has tried to clear the roots of this nihilism, attentively read and summarized Dostoevsky's novel "The Demons". Nietzsche considered the must general aspects of nihilism, such as illusiveness of idea of the transcendent God ("God died"), and also insolvency of a religious picture of the world acting as development of the idea of progress. He distinguished compassion, contempt and destruction as the fundamental signs of nihilism, and mentioned the pessimism as a source of nihilism and its classical representatives, such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. According to Nietzsche, they both were obviously inclined to compassion. Nietzsche explained this fact having addressed to the theory about racial fatigue of the Russian civilization and culture. (Other interesting representative of the German culture - Joseph Goebbels – also called Dostoevsky among his favourite writers. Darkness of the German soul is a very mysterious subject!) According to Nietzsche the consecutive nihilism is defined by its degree of exemption from behavioural dominants, ideals and values, from all usual moral, just as from recognition of ideal measurement of human existence as a whole. Stavrogin's scandalous confession in which he told about how he raped the juvenile girl, who didn't take out such mockery and was hung up - may be an indicative example of such release. However, Nietzsche, with all his loud appeals to revaluation of values, wasn't ready to accept Stavrogin's radical nihilism. The philosopher showed some kind of intellectual cowardice, having said that the original nihilism assumes the sufferings, caused pleasure as an indirect acceptance of reality.

"The nihilism represents the main direction of the development of Western history, - thus Martin Heidegger declared in the 20th century. - This movement finds