This is a piece I wrote for a class on literature and totalitarianism at Bucknell Unviersity in 2017, on a course website. I re-post it here because we are exploring this topic again in another class on the Bible as Literature.

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
–Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karmazov

“Hell is other people.”
–Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

These two quotes indicate a distinction as well as an overlap between Dostoevsky’s type of existentialism (Christian and Eastern European) and Sartre’s (secular and Western European), with cross-influences between the two. Sartre was referring to the way in which he felt identity was shaped by objectification from the gaze of others, which the individual should work to escape. Dostoevsky was referring to how identity in his view is shaped in relationality to others who in turn could not be objectified in their relation to a personal God.

In a Venn diagram of distinction and overlap between existentialism and nihilism, Dostoevsky’s cultural context arguably included a third aspect: apophatic theology. Apophatic means beyond-speakable. In the tradition of apophaticism influential on Russian mysticism, dating back centuries to the Byzantine fusion of Greek philosophy with Judaeo-Christian scripture, God is “beyond not-knowing,” even while being a personal ultimate reality (rather than an impersonal one). At the same time, the purpose of human life is deification: Becoming one with God in energies but not essence. “God became man so that man could become a god,” wrote Athanasius in the fourth century. This may seem parallel in a way to the nihilist idea Dostoevsky terms the “man-God.” But, in Dosteovsky’s view, it limits individual autonomy by recognizing the preeminence of the God-man Christ, and the mystical essentiality of dialogue in the Word as Divine Person. Personalism as an intersection of embodiedness and immaterial relationship was important to his philosophy, rather than individualism.

According to the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, Dostoevsky’s sense of dialogue involved voice-images, in which the word of dialogue and many voices is personal, not impersonal–ultimately in relation to “the hidden God” of the Word or Harmony, Who is both beyond-knowing and a Person, not an object.

Bakhtin wrote that for Dostoevsky, “Precisely the image of a human being, a voice not the author’s own, was the ultimate artistic criterion for Dostoevsky: not fidelity to his own convictions and not fidelity to convictions themselves taken abstractly, but precisely a fidelity to the authoritative image of a human being.” The latter for Dostoevsky is the image of Christ or the biblical image of God in man. (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics).

In this sense, neither Shatov nor Kirillov can have the final philosophical say in Demons–nor even Dostoevsky as author who is in dialogue with us as readers. For Dostoevsky the final Word is God, Who paradoxically is both personal and unknowable, both love and mystery, not an impersonal idea or ideology.

“Active love” involves a certain reciprocity for Dostoevsky in which neither self nor other are objects, but merge and shape one another, in relation to the ultimate dialogue with God Dostoevsky in his books seems to see a nihilistic “man-god” becoming ultimately isolated from love and falling prey to essentializing lies about the self. These can produce isolation and terror, as in Arendt’s philosophy of totalitarianism. But they also in Dostoevsky’s view involve a kind of demonic possession by ideas, producing a seemingly fearless Stavrogin who becomes a focus of violent chaos and Pyotr as its agent.

During the novel Demons, Stepan is portrayed as reading the 1863 Russian utopian-revolutionary novel What is to be Done? by Nikolai Chernyshevsky to get an idea of how to handle the revolutionaries in town. Their nihilistic ideas he perceives as extensions of his own aesthetic and rationalistic liberalism of a generation before. The novel centers on a couple’s total devotion to a revolutionary cause, that of establishing small communes as a basis for a new society. The book is thought to have helped inspire the murderer and revolutionary Sergei Nechayev, inspiration for Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky in Demons. Some commentators even claim that the philosophy of rational egoism in What is to be Done? influenceed the work of the Russian-educated Ayn Rand and her ultra-individualistic Objectivism influential on modern libertarianism, despite the latter’s anti-socialist perspective. Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground was written partly as a response to the original novel.

What is to be Done? became known as a classic to Russian revolutionaries like Lenin, who in 1902 wrote his own version with the same title. In it, Lenin argued that Marxists should form a dedicated vanguard of revolutionaries to spread Marxist ideas into mass industrial society. Lenin’s approach in his text was criticized by his fellow revolutionary and sometime rival Leon Trotsky, who argued it would lead to another revolutionary elite and a “Reign of Terror” like the French Revolution.