DOSTOEVSKY AND SOCIALISM

Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground is often considered the prologue to his five long novels. The first of these is Crime and Punishment. Intellectually Notes is primarily a polemic with Western ideas fashionable among Russian intellectuals of the nineteenth century, ideas that, logically developed, led eventually to Vladimir Lenin, the Socialist Revolution of 1917, and the victory of communism.

Dostoevsky himself was so much influenced as a young man by utopian socialist ideas that he joined the most radical wing of the Petrashevsky Circle, which was a kind of club of intellectuals who met to discuss social and economic issues in St. Petersburg. In April of 1849 the Petrasheskyites were all arrested, imprisoned and interrogated. In December of that year they were subjected to a mock execution, after which they were sent to Siberian labor camps.

During his years in Siberia Dostoevsky changed his views on socialism; in addition, he re-embraced the Russian Orthodox religion, in which he had been raised but which had taken a back seat to atheistic socialism in his mind. When he was released and eventually allowed to return to European Russia he was a different person. For the rest of his life, both in his journalistic writings and in his fiction, he battled against what he saw as the oversimplified and naïve left-wing ideas so fashionable with Russian intellectuals.

Dostoevsky’s literary work as a whole amounts to a thorough dismantling of the Socialist edifice before it was even built. Despite that monumental effort the building was built all the same. Forty years after Dostoevsky’s death, upon the cornerstone of leftist utopian ideas, the U.S.S.R. was constructed. Here is a letter that Dostoevsky wrote to M.N. Katkov (Apr. 25, 1866):

“All nihilists are socialists. Socialism (particularly in its Russian form) demands especially the severing of all connections. They are completely certain that on the tabula rasa they will immediately build a paradise. Fourier was convinced that all it will take is to build one phalanstery and the whole world will immediately be awash in phalansteries; those are his own words [ideas of the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier (1772-1837) were much in vogue with Russian intellectuals; a phalanstery is a dormitory intended for communal living]. 

"And our Chernyshevsky said that he need only talk to the people for a quarter hour and immediately he would convince them to convert to socialism [Dostoevsky’s narrator in Notes from the Underground thoroughly demolishes the naïve ideas of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, expressed most widely in his novel of 1863, What Is To Be Done? Notwithstanding that demolishment, Chernyshevsky became a hero of the Russian Revolution in the twentieth century, and an exemplar of glorious Socialism for anyone who lived in the Soviet Union].

“Moreover, in our poor little defenseless Russian boys and girls, there is one more, eternally persisting, fundamental point upon which socialism will base itself for a long time to come: enthusiasm for the good, and the purity of their hearts. Frauds and foul people there are many among them. But all those high school students, schoolboys of whom I have seen so many, have converted to nihilism so purely, so selflessly in the name of honor, truth, and true welfare. They are defenseless against these absurdities and accept them as if they were perfection itself. Sound science, of course, will eradicate it all. But when will it happen? How many victims is socialism going to swallow until then?” [letter cited in Norton Critical Edition of C and P, p. 478-79]

As it turned out, the socialist myth persisted in the U.S.S.R. for roughly seventy years, wreaking havoc on innocent people, killing untold millions, as does any utopian idea put into practice. All of Dostoevsky’s mighty intellectual forces were powerless to prevent the logical development of what were, essentially, misguided notions. Of course, if you look at the “revolution” of the sixties in the U.S. you see an eerie repetition of what was happening in Russian exactly a hundred years before that. With the same  oversimplifications. We are well into a new century now, but the ideas of the sixties still reverberate in the U.S.—naïve ideas, stupid ideas, such as “political correctness,” that attempt to regulate free flow of words and ideas.

Now that socialism is dead or moribund worldwide, what do we have to replace it? Unfortunately, the triumph of capitalism has been far from successful in solving basic human problems. But, then again, Dostoevsky might have predicted this failure as well. He was already castigating incipient capitalism in Russia (see the despicable Luzhin in Crime and Punishment). He knew that the culprit was, as always, human nature, with its beastly proclivities. Whatever social and political system you impose, human nature remains the same. 

I wonder what Dostoevsky would think of D.J. Trump, the moron/clown who is our current president, whose misguided followers voted for him, at least in part, as a way of rejecting some of the more bizarre leftist ideas that came out of the sixties?

                               Part of the Cast of Characters in Crime and Punishment