“Glimpse into the havoc”

German-born novelist, Hermann Hesse, whose writings captivated the German people’s longing for a new order amid the chaos of a broken German Empire following its defeat in the Second World War, held in high regard the writings of 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky; but Hesse cautioned . . . to read Dostoevsky is like a “glimpse into the havoc.”

A characterization that certainly seems befitting of the present, nearly a decade into the 21st-century.

Hesse’s remark was, in all likelihood, founded on the fact that most of Dostoevsky’s literary works expose a vision of the chaotic sociopolitical structure of contemporary Russia during that era.

Despite the fact that, for a time, Dostoevsky had to beg for money, he eventually became one of the most widely read and highly regarded Russian authors. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest psychologists in world literature and, as testimony to this recognition, his books have been translated into more than 170 languages.

Kenneth Lantz, author of The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004, writes, “Like many other writers of enduring literature, he engages timeless moral and theological issues. His writings and ideas are complex and reflect the swirling political and intellectual controversies of his time.”

Ideas, presumably, arrived at through complex intellectual and personal struggles.

Case in point: Dostoevsky was arrested at the age of 28 in the spring of 1849 as a member of a Russian literary discussion group which Russian Tsar Nicolas I feared might incite revolution. Nicolas sentenced the alleged circle of conspirators to death by firing squad.

The execution was stayed, however, when a cart delivered a letter from the tsar, three days before Christmas that same year. Dostoevsky’s sentence was commuted to a Siberian labor camp, where he worked for four years. Classified as “one of the most dangerous convicts,” Dostoevsky had his hands and feet shackled until his release.

Dostoevsky’s experience proved transformative.

Author Malcolm Jones chronicles in his book, Dostoevsky and the Dynamics of Religious Experience, Anthem Press, 2005, “After his arrest, aborted execution and subsequent imprisonment, he focused intensely on the figure of Christ and on the New Testament, the only book allowed in prison. In a January 1854 letter to the woman who had sent him the New Testament, Dostoevsky wrote that he was a ‘child of unbelief and doubt up to this moment, and I am certain that I shall remain so to the grave.’ He also wrote, ‘even if someone were to prove to me that the truth lay outside Christ, I should choose to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.’

Jones contends, “The spiritual map of human experience that Dostoevsky offers includes only the occasional small island of serenity in vast, turbulent oceans of doubt, rebellion, rejection, indifference and disbelief.”

Lantz claims Dostoevsky’s ideal was a utopian, Christianized Russia where “if everyone were actively Christian, not a single social question would come up … If they were Christians they would settle everything.” Dostoevsky believed democracy and oligarchy [power rests with a small number of people] were poor systems; of France he wrote, “the oligarchs are only concerned with the interest of the wealthy; the democrats, only with the interest of the poor; but the interests of society, the interest of all and the future of France as a whole—no one there bothers about these things.”

Dostoevsky maintained that political parties ultimately lead to social discord.

As Lantz points out: “In Dostoevsky’s incomplete article ‘Socialism and Christianity,’ he claimed civilization had become degraded, and it was moving towards liberalism and losing its faith in God. He asserted that the traditional concept of Christianity should be recovered. He thought that contemporary Western Europe had ‘rejected the single formula for their salvation that came from God and was proclaimed through revelation,’ and replaced it with practical conclusions such as, ‘every man for himself and God for all,’ or ‘scientific’ slogans like ‘survival of the fittest.’ Dostoevsky considered this crisis to be the consequence of the collision between communal and individual interests, brought about by a decline in religious and moral principles.”

For all that, to place Dostoevsky politically is not that simple. Lantz suggests, “as a Christian, he rejected the atheistic socialism; as a traditionalist, he rejected the destruction of the institutions and, as a pacifist, any violent method or upheaval led by both progressives or reactionaries.”

While seeing his children for the last time before he died– February 9, 1881, at the age of 59–Dostoevsky requested that the parable of the Prodigal Son be read. The profound meaning of this request is called to attention by author Joseph Frank, in his book, Dostoevsky. A Writer in His Time, Princeton University Press, 2010:

“It was this parable of transgression, repentance, and forgiveness that he wished to leave as a last heritage to his children, and it may well be seen as his own ultimate understanding of the meaning of his life and the message of his work.”

As we “glimpse into the havoc” of our day, let’s appreciate the insight conveyed in these Dostoevsky quotations . . .

“Let us not forget that the reasons for human actions are usually incalculably more complex and diverse than we tend to explain them later, and are seldom clearly manifest.”

“ . . . men love abstract reasoning and neat systematization so much that they think nothing of distorting the truth, closing their eyes and ears to contrary evidence to preserve their logical constructions.

“A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others.”

“Believe to the end, [therefore], even if all men went astray and you were left the only one faithful; bring your offering even then and praise God in your loneliness.”

Former Cook County Commissioner Garry Gamble is writing this ongoing column about the various ways government works, as well as other topics. At times the column is editorial in nature.