Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, and Shestov. Three Russian Apostles of Freedom. Daniel Francis McNeill

I made pathetic speeches to you the other night. So you were softened and now you want more of these pathetic speeches. Well, I may as well tell you at once I was laughing at you then. And I’m laughing at you now….I had been insulted before, at dinner, by the fellows who came before me that night….So to avenge my wounded pride on someone, to get my own back, I vented my spite on you and I laughed at you. I had been humiliated, so I wanted to humiliate someone…I wanted power. Power was what I wanted then. I wanted sport. I wanted to see you cry. I wanted to humiliate you. To make you hysterical….And do you realize that now that I’ve told you all this I shall hate you for having been here and listened to me?”

      He crushes her and humiliates her but his actions strip her of any power to defend herself and because she is now without anything even approaching a reasonable well-ordered respect for herself, because he has forced her to slip into the irrational side of her nature and come directly in contact with her soul, she loves! The eyes of her soul let her see that behind all his negative talk against her and against himself, is a man who is suffering. She loves! She holds out her hands to him. She rushes at him, throws her arms around him, and bursts into tears. He begins sobbing “as I had never in my life sobbed before”. He falls on the sofa and sobs for a quarter of an hour. She clings to him and puts her arms around him and seems “to remain frozen in that embrace”.

      So the underground man has been all talk! His reason and his heart and his soul live in him harmoniously with one another as they do in us and just like we he too can love and love will certainly change him and teach him self-respect! Two lost unhappy souls are now saved! The “bookish” idealistic world is the true world! The world of the “good and the beautiful” is real! Groundlessness and irrationality and willfulness have no place in the world of goodness and love! The real world has finally revealed itself to Lisa and the man from the underground!

      He lies on the sofa and is ashamed to look at her. He is ashamed! It occurs to him “that our parts were now completely changed, that she was the heroine now, while I was exactly the same crushed and humiliated creature as she had appeared to me that night – four days before”. He envies her! “I cannot live without feeling that I have someone completely in my power, that I am free to tyrannize over some human being.” In his heart blazes up a feeling of domination and possession. “I clasped her hands violently. How I hated her and how I was drawn to her at that moment!…At first she looked bewildered and even frightened, but only for one moment. She embraced me warmly and rapturously.”

      A quarter hour later Lisa is sitting on the floor leaning her head against the edge of the bed crying. The underground man is impatient with her and wants her to leave. “This time she knew everything. I had insulted her finally…She guessed that my outburst of passion was nothing but revenge, a fresh insult for her, and that to my earlier, almost aimless, hatred, there was now added a personal, jealous hatred of her….However, I can’t be certain that she did understand it all so clearly; what she certainly did understand was that I was a loathsome man and that, above all, I was incapable of loving her.”

      Just as Raskolnikov cannot simply love Sonya, the man from the underground cannot seize the love that Lisa offers him and love her! He too is gone, removed like Raskolnikov from the human, because he is incapable of ruling himself as normal people do with his reason. Even when the body of a young attractive woman embraces him weeping full of love, he must act willfully. He insults her with his lust when he should have respected her and himself by giving way not to lust but to love. But even as Lisa cries leaning her head on the edge of the bed, all is not lost. Moments of lust do not kill love if it is real and Lisa despite his hatred and jealousy does love him. In spite of his need to be willful, how can he resist a miracle when it falls on him from out of nowhere? It is perhaps only the second act in the drama of Lisa and the underground man and other acts can still follow and can produce a happy ending.

      She comes from the bed and looks at him hard. He smiles at her maliciously. She says goodbye and goes to the door but before she can reach it, he runs up to her and puts money in her hand. Then he rushes away from the door. She leaves. He says that he put what he put in her hand “not because my heart, but because my wicked brain prompted me to do it”. But soon, overwhelmed with shame, he rushes out the door after her. He calls to her down the staircase but receives no answer. When he returns to his rooms, he discovers on the table near the door the five-rouble note which minutes before he had pressed into her hand.

      He acts willfully with the world and experiences a strange enjoyment but he acts rationally with a woman who loves him and learns that his heart is empty. But he is a hero nonetheless the underground man. The world demands that he act moderately and rationally and women demand that he love. He can do neither and he refuses to live falsely. Groundlessness is painful but it is at least free. The underground man lives where he must live, underground where the struggles to reach the deep things of the soul live and where the idealistic and “bookish” lights from the world of the “good and the beautiful” never shine.

      9

      Dostoevsky confessed that his belief came from “the fire of doubt”. His belief in God went hand in hand with doubt but his belief in Russia and his belief that without the Russian Orthodox church there could be no Russia were not subject to doubt. How could Sonya with little education and experience have found the secret treasure within her if there were no church that transmitted from generation to generation religious practices and kept the possibility of goodness and genuine religious experience alive? The religious experience offered by church rituals and the unity of Russia politically under the Tzar seemed essential to Dostoevsky even if the political system was far from perfect and even though the rituals of the church produced only lukewarm experience. But the goodness that resulted from the public presence of the church did not lead him to the mystery of creation. His “second pair of eyes” drove him to look for truth against nature and in what was behind and hidden from normal eyes.

      However in his novel, The Idiot, Dostoevsky tests for us the fate of a man who is genuinely and totally good. His hero, Prince Myshkin, is so good that his extreme goodness is as much a flaw in his character as was extreme rationality in the case of Raskolnikov or extreme willfulness in the case of the Underground Man. The Prince returns to Russia after a long absence in Switzerland and becomes directly involved with several normal people in Saint Petersburg society who are relating to one another trying to resolve regular problems of life. The Prince gets caught personally in their emotional conflicts. He interacts with them with such complete honesty and total goodness that he ends by not helping them but harming them. He is so good he can not fit in regular society. His Christian goodness erodes the power of his human will and isolates him tragically from normal people.