Dostoevsky Still Speaks to Us, 200 Years Later

Although he was born 200 years ago, in a world that should be foreign to me, Dostoevsky formed my way of seeing the world more than almost any other person has.

As a college student, I read Notes From Underground and found it weird and befuddling. Then, I read The Brothers Karamazov, and I was unmade. What I thought I knew about Christianity seemed to be flipped inside out. What I thought I believed about life, death, suffering and love was all held up to a new light and found wanting.

Fyodor Dostoevsky was born on Nov. 11, 1821, in a world where a czar reigned, Napoleon had recently marched on Moscow, and serfdom was still the norm. Unlike every other notable 19th-century Russian author — as his biographer Joseph Frank points out — Dostoevsky belonged more to the peasant class than the landed gentry. He did not uplift the ideal of the poor, authentic Russian. He experienced poverty firsthand and refused to romanticize it.

One of my college professors was Erich Heller, whose course provided an excellent study of a wide range of works written by German authors including Nietzsche, Goethe, Kafka, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Kant, and others.
I still have a copy of his excellent book: THE DISINHERITED MIND. In the book’s introduction, Heller offers a quite profound synopsis of what these mostly EXISTENTIALIST authors were about. As Heller writes:
“Willingly or unwillingly, Darwin had to give still greater force to that sysyem of unsystemized, inarticulate metaphysical fallacies which one might term the Creed of Ontological Invalidity; both in the sense that it dismisses
[am using caps for italicized words] A PRIORI as invalid all ontological assertions, ie., assertions about the the nature and meaning of Being (as different from the laws governing the processes, connections and interconections of the phenomenal world, of all that becomes, develops, evolves), as well as in the sense that it has made an incurable invalid of that faculty of the human intelligence which, grasping their relevance, is capable of responding positively to questions asked about WHAT the world is. To such questions the modern intelligence is prone to respond with that mixture of shame, embarrassment, revulsion and arrogance which is the characteristic reation of impotence to unfortunately unmangable demands. This invalid has been left ever since in the nursing care of unhappy poets, dreamers or religious eccentrics if he was not happy with the treatment he received as an outpatient of the Church.”
[This is the key point]
“Once man’s abity to respond creatively to the ontological mystery had been stunted into something that produced merely an irritated state of mystification, he was left to the spiritual destructiveness of that battle raging within himself: between the conviction of being nothing in the vastness of the universe, and the natural urge which, prompted by the ungrace of self-assertion, persuades himself of his all-importance. To be nothing and yet everything—this seeming paradox is the pride and humility of the creature before a God of infinite power and infinite love; but it is the spiritual death suffered by man in the incessant struggle between arrogance and humiliation, in his exposure to the mighty lovelessness of a chance constellation of energy. It is this gloomy story that is told by modern literature from Nietzsche to Kafka, from Proust to Sartre, from Yeats to T. S. Eliot, from Dostoevsky—to his being banned by a government which has decreed that the ontological mystery is to abolished.”

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