Man changes during the course of his life, especially spiritual men who willingly accept the imperative for moral improvement…men who understand that God’s gracious sovereignty actually includes a man’s own prayers and dedicated efforts to change. And sometimes the changes occurring in life are not pleasant ones. For instance, trials can mellow a man, give him greater humility and understanding, give him a more profound gratitude for the grace of God that comes through Jesus Christ. But sometimes it turns out that trials can distract and deter a man from his previously held early purposes and principles. They can even break his spirit and leave him cynical, morose, with only the murkiest of spiritual hopes.
I’ve pondered these thoughts after recently re-reading two short works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man. White Nights is 55 pages, Dream a mere 25 pages but, especially when read together, they illustrate how remarkably changed were Dostoevsky’s attitudes and perceptions of life from his early years starting out in Saint Petersburg’s literary circle until his days in Staraya.
White Nights was written in 1848. Dostoevsky was young and just getting started. He had high principles and firm hopes – both rooted in an optimistic socialism. He was a very emotional, introspective man (those traits never changed) but he was a believer in rationality, progress, and the positive role that a Christian could have in establishing meaningful relationships and in building a just society.
White Nights is a compelling love story that reflects these things. It isn’t an easy read for Westerners. Indeed, the lovesick protagonists are sometimes maudlin and verbose to a point most of us would believe silly, but one must remember Dostoevsky was writing to a 19th Century Russian audience who loved Pushkin’s and Gogol’s over-the-top emotional scenes.
The story introduces a young recluse who has retired into a weird, introspective fantasy life after failing in normal relationships. He imagines passersby as his friends; he thinks of buildings as greeting him in his daily walks; he builds love castles in the air. But one day he fumbles his way though a strange circumstance in which he actually speaks to a girl. He loves her immediately and releases all the stored up passion in his lonely heart. She eventually agrees to marry him until an unexpected twist in the story takes her back to a former suitor. It’s all a bit eerie and, on the surface, every relationship left in the story looks unhealthy and doomed.
But not exactly so. For Dostoevsky describes the boy’s love, unrequited as it is, to be an ennobling, liberating, and highly spiritual experience. And even in a Western reader’s discomfort with the story’s heavy emotionalism (and perhaps their disappointment in the story’s conclusion), one is left with a moving respect for Dostoevsky’s commitment to the exalting power of unconditional love. It is a bright and joyous tale even though the boy loses the girl (as a wife anyhow) because it reveals how sacrificial love has transformed the boy’s life into something beyond loneliness. He is now a man with a true heart and noble goals who is finally involved in the real world.
But White Nights was written before Dostoevsky’s arrest, before the famed “almost execution” where he was minutes away from a firing squad. It was written before his imprisonment, exile, and intense suffering from a variety of illnesses. The changes wrought in the author's life by these grievous trials were profound. Indeed, Dostoevsky’s already emotional and introspective personality began to bend still further towards mystery, then doubt, and eventually to a fascination with the irrational and morbid. Though still deeply religious, the optimism and joy ebbed away from Dostoevsky and he began to plumb the murkier waters of man’s fallen nature.
His contemporary Ivan Turgenev determined that Dostoevsky was the nastiest Christian he had ever known.
So by the time Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote The Dream of a Ridiculous Man nearly 30 years later, his beliefs and artistic purposes dramatically changed. This, the last short story he ever wrote, is a brief and bizarre tale about another reclusive dreamer and another accidental (but life-changing) meeting. As the story begins, the protagonist (never named) is planning his suicide. He has ceased to think along rational lines but is guilty of overthinking nonetheless, trying to fathom the deepest motives behind his and others’ actions.
A crying child, panicked because of a catastrophe that has befallen her, appeals to the man. He shuns her, even runs away from her. But his subsequent examination of why he was so cruel and selfish distracts him from his suicide plans. He sleeps for the first time in days. While he sleeps, he experiences a wild dream in which he’s taken to another planet, an Edenic society where the inhabitants are all gentle, loving and pure. However, rather than embracing the peace and innocence he finds here, the protagonist ends up contaminating the entire world. The people of the paradise all fall into sin just as did Adam and Eve. The story thus allows Dostoevsky ample opportunity to describe the bleak pessimism that now owned his life.
Below is an excerpt…
They learned about shame and they made a virtue of it. The concept of honor appeared, and each alliance hoisted its colors. They started to torture animals, and the animals escaped into the forests and became their enemies. They fought to secede, for independence, for individual advantages, for what’s mine and what’s yours. They ended speaking different languages; they experienced suffering, and came to love; they declared that suffering was the only way to Truth. Then science spread among them.
As they became evil, they talked about fraternity and humanitarianism and came to understand those concepts; as they became criminal, they invented justice and drew up voluminous codes of laws to enforce their justice – and built a guillotine to enforce their laws.
They only dimly recalled the things they had lost and refused to believe that there had been a time when they were pure and happy. They even dismissed as ridiculous all possibility of return to that lost bliss, branding it a pipe dream. They were unable to visualize or conceive of it...
Religions appeared worshiping the nonbeing and self-annihilation for the sake of an eternal repose in nothingness.
Finally these people grew tired in their senseless efforts and suffering appeared on their faces. Then they proclaimed that suffering is beautiful because suffering alone contains thought. So they praised suffering in their songs. I walked among them wringing my hands in despair and crying over them. I believe I loved them even more than before the suffering had appeared on their features, when they were still so pure and beautiful. I loved their degraded earth more than I had loved it when it was a Garden of Eden, if only because sorrow had made its appearance in it. Alas, though I’ve always welcomed sorrow and torment myself, I was not happy to see them struck by it, and it made me cry.”
Near the end of Dostoevsky’s story, the man finally awakens from the nightmare. But it has caused him to be an even stranger, more manic personality than ever. In fact, he becomes a kind of preacher -- though he confesses that he doesn’t make much sense and is really quite unable to put into words the message of his dream. He is ridiculous to others and even to himself.
Ironically though, Dostoevsky’s hero is no longer suicidal. He’s not even lonely or unhappy. He now understands that true happiness, real spirituality is something which emerges from feeling, not thinking. He had been too tied up by rationality. Freedom came as he released himself to God. And God was to be found not in organized religion or divine revelation but from purely subjective sources...even the surrealism of a dream.
The Dream of the Ridiculous Man thus underscores several of Dostoevsky’s philosophic themes from those last years of his life. Society is a sham, composed of hypocritical people and unjust institutions. Religion surely gives meaning to an individual’s life, he would argue, but it will be a religion that is subjective, incommunicable, non-rational. And suffering, even when it is caused by wickedness, is a positive thing not because it provides opportunity for character transformation (which would be the traditional Christian view), but because it thus provokes an escape from the world of reason and social relationships into the more profound spiritual mysteries of the self. In Dostoevsky’s view now, prayer becomes less a conversation with God than it is an exercise in self-contained meditation.
Certainly Dostoevsky’s popularity has waned in recent decades. His dualism, dark moods and distorted characters are tough to take in regular doses. Readers now prefer brighter themes. Even the most committed cynics have moved away from such dark writers as Kafka, Nietzsche, Camus, and Dostoevsky, preferring their skepticism colored in lighter shades and guided by the elements of Eastern religion or socialism, Scientism or liberal self-help formulas, even Gaia-inspired nature love.
And Christian readers? Well, they were never all that attracted to Fyodor Dostoevsky anyhow. And while they might be persuaded to share an occasional evening with such curmudgeons as T.S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, or Hilaire Belloc, Fyodor Dostoevsky was way too much of a downer to endure. True, there is that marvelous chapter from The Brothers Karamazov, “The Grand Inquisitor,” that they read in college or in an anthology. That was okay. But for the long haul, they desire cheerier companions, Christian writers who applaud and promote the fruits of the Spirit in one’s life -- writers who gratefully acknowledge objectivity, rationality, social relationships, beauty, the value of love in action, the trustworthy revelation of Scripture, and the triumph of Christ’s atoning work.
Had Fyodor Dostoevsky kept the enthusiasm for life and love and optimism that he so compelling portrayed in “White Nights,” I have no doubt he would have remained not only in the pantheon of great writers, but in the one dedicated to popular and beloved writers as well. But alas, by concentrating his search for truth in the turgid waters of subjective suffering, mystery, and the unknowable depths of the human psyche, he made sure his following (that is, the people who actually read him and try to understand his work) will be small.
