ERH & FD: Second post on ERH and Dostoevsky

The following comments by ERH speak for themselves as we move from the intellectual conditions of the preceding time to the time of Dostoevsky:

"In the sixties, after the emancipation of the peasants, when the split between official Czarism and the Intelligentsia had become final, when the revolutionary youth vanished from the surface and sank into the people, the soul of old Little Russia began to expire. But some poets caught the sigh. Through their voice and through the atmosphere created in their writings Russia could still breathe between 1870 and 1914. This literature, by being highly representative in a revolutionized world, became the contribution of Russia to the rest of the world. Without Dostoevski and Tolstoi, Western Europe would not know what man really is. These Russian writers, using the Western forms of the novel, gave back to the West a knowledge of the human soul which makes all French, English and German literature wither in comparison. Step by step Russian literature works its way closer and closer to the work-a-day world of the Russian peasant, pedlar, soldier, prisoner.
The title pages of Dostoevski's novels tell the story: The Idiot, The Humiliated and Offended, Reminiscences of the Dead-house (which means Siberian forced labour), The Demons.

Dostoevski extricates the types of men who will become the standard bearers of the Revolution. To read Dostoevski is to read the psychic history of the Russian Revolution. All the facts, of course, are different; he ignores any quantitative questions of society. On the other hand, state and government must disappear, as in the Marxian theory of society. Since the artist and seer is unwilling to see life in terms of quantities, the only future he can think of is a church-like order. In The Brothers Karamasov, his greatest book, the venerable Staretz, an orthodox abbot and somewhat a saint, exclaims prophetically: 'Not the Church becoming State, but the State becoming Church, mark that well!' Government by military or police force no longer has any meaning for Dostoevski. The men he describes have nothing to do with the hilarious and creative geniuses of Western civilization. They are as dirty, as weak and as horrible as humanity itself, but they are as highly explosive, too. The homeless soul is the hero of Dostoevski, the nomadic soul.

In this inner vision of Dostoevski, the prodigal son is the central figure, the prodigal son, yes, but paralyzed midway, impenitent, obdurate, hardened, refractory. Incendiary, blasphemous, criminal, he sometimes is, but only because he cannot find the way home to his father's house. In a miraculous way, the situation of the man who leaves home at fourteen to go into a factory and never goes home again because he never starts on an independent career, the proletarian form of life, is anticipated in Dostoevski. To a certain extent, the disillusion with our first home and its reconstruction after a time of homelessness has to be experienced by every man during .the years between fourteen and thirty. If he escape this crisis it is true he would never become a man. But in The Adolescent (another of Dostoevski's novels) all life seems to be concentrated in this unique phenomenon of the wandering between the old home and the new. This type of man is "in becoming." He is open to every temptation, he is agnostic, he is immature. All the hell of humanity lives in the visitations and manias of the eternal revolutionary.

Society has always had to deal with this side of our nature.
But man preferred to appear strong, rich, human, intelligent, and the rules of the social game were based on the pretence that the human being is rich, good, and beautiful. Dostoevski lays the corner-stone for a new building of humanity. In the new house, the prodigal son becomes the basic element. Hell is opened. Mankind, always frightened by hell before, now resolves to bear its presence consciously. The class consciousness of the proletariat, a favourite topic of Marxism, finds its explanation in the fact that the uprooted outlawed stranger, the idiot, the proletarian, have nothing but their consciousness. He who lives in peace and has roots in the earth, has little need of consciousness. The Russian intellectuals need consciousness.

Something eternally human gains form and shape in these Russian figures. These novels, therefore, belong to the Russian Revolution and to the history of the world. The deepest stratum of our being, the one most alienated from light, is lifted up into the clear day of history. The reverse of all our creative power, namely, our capacity for destruction, our demons, our self-contempt, hatred and laziness, envy and indifference, greediness and jealousy, are faced without the fury of the moralist, or the indifference of the anatomist, but with a glowing passion of solidarity in our short-comings..."(ERH, OoR, p.118-120)