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The Prophetic Art of Dostoyevski
| Article
# : |
12997 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1987 |
3,901 Words |
| Author
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Dmitry Grigorieff
Dmitry Grigorieff is professor of Russian language and
literature at Georgetown University and dean of St. Nicholas
Orthodox Cathedral in Washington, D.C. |
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevski lived and worked a little bit more than a century ago. At that time it seemed that tranquility, the permanency of the established order, and the continuing progress of humanity were assured. However, Dostoyevski heard the underground rumble and was painfully aware of pending great upheavals. His penetration into the depths of the human heart--for example, Raskolnikov's tormented soul in Crime and Punishment--sounded a prophetic warning and portentously anticipated the mass murders and concentration camps of the next century. Dostoyevski called himself "the real realist." His realism penetrated into the very essence of things.
Literary, political, psychological, and religio-philosophical levels are woven together in the novels of Dostoyevski. The religio-philosophical level is the most important one. All of Dostoyevski's great novels reveal his religious insights and vision and his great inner struggle to attain faith, to understand the will of God in this incomprehensible world.
A traditional religious and patriotic upbringing in the physician's living quarters of his conservative father on the grounds of the Moscow hospital for the poor; in the summer months living in the country and listening to pious tales of wandering peasants making pilgrimages to the holy places; a romantic youth in St. Petersburg and infatuation with Schiller; the loss of his religious faith after a fateful encounter with Western revolutionary ideas just catching on among the Russian intelligentsia; the frenzied experience of a mock execution and banishment to a Siberian hard labor prison; a new discovery of the Russian common people and the Russian soil while in prison; and the subsequent revival of his religious faith--these are the biographical incidents that point to his inner spiritual tensions and developments.
The human tragedy described in the works of Dostoyevski develops against the background of his profound questioning of God's purpose:
"Why hast Thou created me?"
"Why hast Thou made the world as bad as it is?"
Man with his unique personality and his tragic human destiny in a world pervaded by sin and death is the center of his artistic attention. "His novels show man in all his perplexity and contradictions," Nicolas Zernov said recently, "and disclose a power of good and evil such as most men are seldom ready to
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