Why Dostoevsky’s Unrealistic Characters Are So Real They Frighten You
If you are unfortunate enough to come across Dostoevsky’s critics before you read him yourself, you might be at a loss.
On the one hand, you might stumble upon Saltykov, Mikhailovsky, or Tolstoy who all find his characters to be contrived and unconvincing. They condemn Dostoevsky’s characters for using the same language and expressions, being poor facades to the author’s own voice. Belinsky writes that Dostoevsky’s ‘madmen belong in lunatic asylums, not in novels’.
On the other hand, you could come across Freud who placed Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov first among all novels ever written. You could find the great precursor to modern psychology, Nietzsche, calling Dostoevsky ‘the only psychologist, incidentally, from whom I had something to learn’. Or clinical psychiatrist Jordan Peterson who names Crime and Punishment as ‘the greatest novel ever written’.
How can one author’s treatment of human nature be so divisive? What truths about our own selves did Dostoevsky bring to light and how did he shape the course of literature? Read on to find out.
Dostoevsky’s unusual understanding of people begins with his unusual history:
In 1849, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, a young writer, is arrested as a member of the socialist Petrashevsky Circle. He is accused of anti-tsarist conspiracy and imprisoned at a maximum-security fortress. He is held there for four months among the most dangerous of Russian criminals and then sentenced to death.
Before the moment of execution, a letter arrives stating that, by the Tsar’s mercy, the members of the Petrashevsky Circle will be spared their lives. Their new sentence is exile, four years of hard labour at a prison camp in Siberia.
‘In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall … We were packed like herrings in a barrel … There was no room to turn around. From dusk to dawn it was impossible not to behave like pigs … Fleas, lice, and black beetles by the bushel …’
(Dostoevsky on his barracks in Siberia)
Dostoevsky is classified as ‘one of the most dangerous convicts’. His hands and feet are shackled during the entirety of his four-year sentence. He is forbidden to read anything but the New Testament. He is forbidden to write.
Stephen King once wrote: ‘If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot’. Young Dostoevsky did neither. He spent his late twenties and early thirties shackled among the outcasts of Russia. He ate, slept, worked, and entertained himself among them. By the end of his sentence, he had grown to feel them as brothers.
Dostoevsky walked out of Siberia a changed man and a new understanding of human nature had dawned in him. In prison camp, he had seen kind and humble men who had committed terrible crimes. He had also seen evil men treat him with brotherly love. The wisdom he acquired was that the human spirit is more mysterious than anyone is willing to believe. He saw that good and evil not only coexist in the same heart, but often give rise to each other.
He called this broadness.
‘I can’t bear it that some man, even with a lofty heart and the highest mind, should start from the ideal of the Madonna [virtue] and end with the ideal of Sodom [sin]. It’s even more fearful when someone who already has the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not deny the ideal of the Madonna either […] No, man is broad, even too broad, I would narrow him down […] Here the devil is struggling with God, and the battlefield is the human heart.’
(The Brothers Karamazov)
While Nabokov criticized him for ‘his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes’, Dostoevsky understood that every person is part angel, part monster and that human nature is the dance between the two. His characters embody this duality to the extreme. Many of them are capable of selfless love in one moment, and ruthless evil in the next. One of his most intelligent and refined characters, Nikolai Stavrogin, rapes an eleven-year-old girl and later listens to her as she hangs herself.
Many critics have condemned Dostoevsky’s obsession with crises and extraordinary events. They have claimed he is incapable of portraying normal human life. His books are full of scandals, murders, conspiracies, affairs, hallucinations, suicides, etc. But the author’s depiction of the human condition in crises was deliberate. He believed that the exceptional reveals more about the true nature of the world than the ordinary.
Dostoevsky called himself ‘a realist in a higher sense’. He believed that a book which reveals something about the essence of reality is in a higher sense realistic than a book which simply contains commonplace characters in everyday circumstances. Indeed, the more grotesque his characters get, the deeper they probe the human spirit.
Dostoevsky’s characters do not only think their ideas, they act them out.
Plato, when setting the foundations of philosophy some two millennia ago, chose the dialogue form to test and communicate his ideas. Dostoevsky’s work is best understood within this dialectic tradition; his characters embody ideas in the flesh. The drama of their lives depicts the real-life consequences and interactions of what would otherwise be abstract concepts.
If a character in a novel of Dostoevsky’s believes he is superior to human morality, he will act in disregard of it and suffer the consequences (Raskolnikov’s murder). If a character disdains the fear of death, he would kill himself to overcome it (Kirilov’s suicide). If a character believes that ‘if there is no God everything is permitted,’ he would put his very sanity on the line by acting accordingly (Ivan Karamazov). Philosophy in Dostoevsky’s works is anything but dry or abstract. It creates conflict and drives the plot. It makes the reader devour page after page, excited not only for the fate of characters, but for what happens to their beliefs as well.
Dostoevsky’s characters explore the destructive power of pride and the pursuit of independence. Many of them prefer to ‘reign in Hell than serve in Heaven’. They purposefully ruin their lives and seek out suffering. Why?
‘The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key!’
(Notes from the Underground)
Because they need to know they can. Because true freedom includes the freedom to destroy yourself, to be ugly and evil. Dostoevsky’s characters can never be happy unless they know they are free to be miserable. In a perverse sense, they find pleasure in destroying their lives: in this they see their true independence.
Dostoevsky’s characters are not so much driven by the rational, straightforward motivations typical of literature before him. Their actions are expressions of the chthonic, irrational side of the mind. He is the first great writer to delve so deep into the dark corners of the psyche. His characters are often puppets to their subconscious urges and this depiction frightened the readers and critics of his time.
Dostoevsky broke the old tradition in literature where plots are linear and characters have clear, rational intentions. He correctly prophesied the time that came shortly after his death, a time of moral confusion, fragmented values, and global psychosis. Decades later, James Joyce would call him ‘the man more than any other who has created modern prose’.
Dostoevsky is much more a writer of our time than he was of his. Today his achievements are unquestionable. He was a man both enchanted by the old traditional values and tortured by the confusion and anxieties of modern times. He saw further than any of his contemporaries and what he suffered privately during his life became the status quo less than a century after his death. His stories and characters explore the search for meaning of modern people, a search for truth in a time when all values seem relative.
Dostoevsky was a man who felt deeply and refused to simplify the contradictions of the human heart. For the same reason that his contemporaries found him bizarre and inappropriate, we remember him as one of the greatest students of the human spirit.
Man is a mystery. It needs to be unraveled, and if you spend your whole life unraveling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time.
(Dostoevsky)
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