Notes of Grace from the Underground

Against a backdrop of evil, Fëdor Dostoevsky identified Christ as the way to freedom.

“ ‘Two times two makes five’ is sometimes a most delightful little thing.”

—Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

Few writers have proved as mysterious and at the same time as fascinating as Fëdor Dostoevsky. A nineteenth-century genius, he now belongs to the ages.

Since his death in January 1881, he has been subjected to innumerable literary studies. The Soviet Union has resurrected him from the grave as a genuine Socialist and Communist—ideologies that he detested. Sigmund Freud tried and failed to make Dostoevsky a classic illustration of his psychoanalytic theory. And evangelical seminaries like to quote his “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” (in The Brothers Karamazov) as proof of the basic error of Roman Catholicism.

William Hamilton, a protagonist of the unlamented “God-is-dead” movement, assured us that Dostoevsky was an atheist at heart. Yet the writer’s daughter, Lyubov (Aimée), tells us that on his deathbed Dostoevsky read to his children the parable of the Prodigal Son from Luke 15, and told them, “Children, preserve an unbounded faith in the Lord and never despair of his forgiveness. I love you dearly, but my love is nothing to the Lord’s infinite love for all men whom he has created.”

With new biographies of the man appearing regularly, the time has come to examine afresh the question: If Dostoevsky was indeed a Christian, why was he (to quote his own words) “consciously or unconsciously tormented all my life” by “the existence of God”? Why did he sometimes describe the monks of the Russian Orthodox Church, which he dearly loved, in such derogatory fashion? And why did he spend so much more time depicting the dark side of human nature than the good side?

Dostoevsky’S Personal Faith

The bare facts of Dostoevsky’s early life are well known. As a promising young writer, he was arrested because of his involvement in a circle of young socialist-minded intellectuals in St. Petersburg. With some friends, he was subjected to a mock public execution arranged by the Czar—a grisly royal joke in which the firing squad was interrupted at the last minute by the Czar’s “reprieve.”

Dostoevsky was then sentenced to four years in a Siberian prison and five years of military duty. As he and his fellow convicts arrived at Tobolsk, on the Siberian border, they were met by two wives of previously convicted prisoners. These ladies prayed with them and gave each prisoner a New Testament with 25 rubles in it. That was the only money and the only book Dostoevsky had for the first few years in the prison at Omsk.

To one of these ladies he wrote, “Sometimes God sends me moments in which I am utterly at peace. In those moments I have constructed for myself a creed in which everything is clear and holy for me. Here it is: to believe that there is nothing more beautiful, more profound, more sympathetic, more reasonable, more courageous and more perfect than Christ; and not only is there nothing, but I tell myself with jealous love that there never could be.”

But there were other moments when the evil and suffering in the world so overwhelmed the novelist that he seemed to despair of ever finding “the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” Many of his characters are convinced atheists, and seem to reflect the author’s viewpoint. In a famous dialogue with his brother Alyosha, Ivan Karamazov recites a horrible list of cruelties he has witnessed in order to justify his atheistic posture. He seems to imply that instead of offering forgiveness to man, God should be taking it. But in asking the bitter question “Why?” the author is not necessarily challenging God, or denying his existence, or (to use Ivan’s phrase) “returning his ticket.” As Dostoevsky wrote elsewhere, “It is not as a child that I believe in Christ and confess him. My hosanna has come forth from the crucible of doubt.”

Dostoevsky carefully studied the Bible the Dekabrist wives gave him, and his writings are replete with Scripture (something his biographers—Western and Eastern—have downgraded or ignored). As Aimée Dostoevsky suggested, her father “pondered every word, learned it by heart and never forgot it. His works are saturated with it, and it is this which gives them their power.” An unconscious acceptance of the authority of God’s Word is assumed. The very existence of the Bible was to him an article of faith, as the great novels bear witness.

Crime and Punishment, the first of his major works, takes as its theme the New Testament account of the raising of Lazarus. The novel some consider his most significant, The Demons, builds on the analogy of the Gadarene swine in the gospel story. Prince Myshkin, the central figure in The Idiot, is obviously a contemporary Christ figure; while Dostoevsky’s final work and his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, could be called a magnificent exposition of the text, “If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.”

In the millions of words that have been written about Dostoevsky, no doubt the critics have paid some attention to his use of the Bible; I have just not found it. But after one has studied his expressions of reverence for God’s Word, and has caught the depth of his love for Jesus Christ that shines forth from page after page, the issues of belief versus doubt should be retired. Dostoevsky did not build his faith on arguments of logic or reason; he built it on revelation. Once that fact is established, it follows that the brilliant expressions of unbelief he put in the mouths of such personalities as Ivan Karamazov and Pyotr Verhovensky help to build his characterizations. They are deliberately conceived, and serve to make what is now recognized as an artistic triumph.

At this point we might pause to ask, “So what? So Dostoevsky was a Christian. Who cares? Does it matter?” It matters because this man predicted and helped shape the twentieth century as did few men of his generation. He saw what was coming, he described it, he warned about it, and he pointed to a solution.

Let’s start with today’s newspaper or newscast. We see people standing in the ashes of their homes, destroyed by arsonists, and asking, “Who would want to do such a thing? What’s happening to people, to our world?” We thought we had progressed beyond that; that life had improved so that people can enjoy their private planes and margaritas and cabins by the lake. After all, there is the American Constitution, which guarantees reasonable freedom for reasonable people. Why all this flag burning? Why all the hate?

Dostoevsky’S Key To The Hate

An interesting clue can be found in a short novel Dostoevsky published in 1864. He called it Notes from Underground, and it begins with the words, “I am a sick man … I am a nasty man. A truly unattractive man. I think there’s something wrong with my liver … I’m not seeing a doctor about it.” The author went on to describe the Underground Man, a shocking, slimy, tormented, angry person. In some ways he is the prototype of a man born six years later, Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, who, under the pseudonym Nikolai Lenin, declared himself willing to kill off half the human race to push his social theories. In other ways he is the prototype of the twentieth-century terrorist, arsonist, and spy traitor. An American scholar, Robert Durgy, interprets: “The underground has come to symbolize the modern era’s spirit of rebellion against traditional forms and assumptions, its distrust of systems, and its acute awareness of the dark, irrational elements of human behavior.” (Remember the apostle Paul and his “beggarly elements” in Galatians 4:9?) Another modern critic, Irving Howe, writes, “In the twentieth century the Underground Man comes into his own and, like a rise of pus, breaks through the wrinkled skin of tradition. Thus far, at least, it is his century.”

Here we have an inkling that may partially explain some of the frightful things we see happening in our world. As a novelist, Dostoevsky was no preacher, but he was certainly a prophet. He predicted the Socialist revolution that would sweep over his beloved Russia, and he dreaded it. He saw that it would be founded on atheism and would become a new and total despotism.

But the Underground Man was not just a Russian phenomenon. Dostoevsky saw that he would be everywhere, and that he would be beyond social rehabilitation or reform, because his attack would be leveled against reason itself. Two plus two he would make into five. And so it has turned out to be. Presidential speeches, congressional resolutions, military helicopters are powerless against such men. We are grappling with the dark side of human nature, the Calibans of the twentieth century with their bombs and machine guns and hand grenades and boxes of matches. Evil has slipped its controls; the Underground Man is on a roll. At bottom we are dealing with the Devil, who is an existentialist and watches television by the hour, but never listens to reason.

Wiles Of The Underground Man

The Underground Man appears in one form or another in all of Dostoevsky’s major works, as a person constantly seeking to break out of the “Euclidean order” into some kind of freedom. How does he attempt this? In three ways. One is through crime. Rodion Raskolnikov, the central figure in Crime and Punishment, talks himself into committing a double ax murder as a means of self-assertion. He craves the experience of violence, and finds it in a passionate revolt of the demon within him. It was a deliberate choice of evil as a way of escape from the underground.

The second way is through revolution. The Underground Man conceives a political utopia, and decides the way to change men is to change the world. He becomes a “nihilist,” a believer in nothing, who will destroy a hundred million heads and “step over dead bodies without turning a hair.” This is Pyotr Verhovensky, who professes a love for humanity without love for God, and pursues his goal of political salvation with a series of gruesome murders in The Demons. He rejects the God-man in favor of a man-god, and urges a general destruction for the sake of ultimate good. This way, Dostoevsky predicted, was sheer disaster.

The third way to break out of the underground into freedom is through Christ—for the way of Christ is neither force nor reason per se; rather, it is love. “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit.” During his prison experiences, as is well known, Dostoevsky underwent a profound rethinking of his social and political views, which turned him against the socialist and nihilist positions of his former circle. Yet even more significant was his pilgrimage at the time and later to the spiritual convictions of his church-oriented youth. His later writings show increasingly fresh insights into the ministry of the spirit of love in Christ (the Holy Spirit) in giving humanity its one and only hope for a viable brotherhood.

This love issues in unworldly wisdom, childlike innocence, and sympathy for suffering people as exemplified by Prince Myshkin, the central figure of The Idiot. But Myshkin’s meekness ends in tragedy even while the freedom Christ gives him lifts him clear of the underground. That is because the underground still persists, and will persist until human beings begin to live together in a society that recognizes only love as its basis.

These three “escapes” Dostoevsky bound together into one whole in his final work, The Brothers Karamazov. The three brothers, Dmitri, Ivan, and Alexei or Alyosha, are all seeking some kind of freedom. Dmitri, the sensualist, does not actually murder his father, but he contemplates it, and his passionate nature is such that he looks for personal emancipation through strong action of his own.

Ivan, the atheist, dreams of massive social change, but his nihilistic outlook precipitates tragedy, and at the end of the book he is dying of brain fever. Only Alyosha, the Christian, emerges as a free person, yet he finds himself powerless to avert the debacle he knows is coming. He conveys throughout a sweet spirit that blesses everyone he meets; yet he suffers acutely amidst the tragedies that befall those he loves.

The Legacy

Such is the legacy of Fëdor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. What a message to come out of Russia, and how desperately we need it! True, he wrote as a Slavophile (though he had lived in Western Europe, including England, and was at home in the French and German languages). And he knew or cared little about the struggle for democratic liberty. But he knew much about the deeper freedom that Jesus Christ came to offer us, and in many inspiring and striking ways he shared with us both its glory and its cost.

Learning to Believe Again

The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s masterwork, includes the story of Alyosha, a devout young man whose faith is nearly crushed after the death of the beloved monk Zossima. Like the body of many saints of old, Father Zossima’s was expected to be miraculously preserved. Instead, it corrupts quickly.

This scene, adapted from the translation by Constance Garnett (Signet, 1957), describes the reflowering of Alyosha’s faith when he returns to the room where the body of the deceased Zossima lies in state.

Alyosha timidly opened the door and went into the elder’s cell where his coffin was now resting. There was no one in the cell but Father Paissy, reading the gospel in solitude over the coffin. He began listening to what Father Paissy was reading. And worn out he began to doze.

And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him: They have no wine … Alyosha heard.

“Ah, that miracle!,” thought Alyosha, “It was not men’s grief, but their joy Christ visited. He worked his first miracle to help men’s gladness.…”

His mother saith unto the servants: Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it …

“Do it.… Gladness, the gladness of some poor, very poor people.… Of course they were poor, since they hadn’t wine enough even at a wedding.… The historians write that, in those days, the people living about the Sea of Galilee were the poorest that can possibly be imagined.… And another great heart, that other great being, his mother, knew that he had come not only to make his great sacrifice. She knew that his heart was open even to the simple, artless merry-making of some obscure and unlearned people, who had warmly bidden him to their poor wedding.”

“But what’s this, what’s this? Why is the room growing wider?… Ah, yes … It’s the marriage, the wedding.… Yes, of course. Here are the guests, here is the young couple and the merry crowd and … But who is this? Who? Again the walls are receding.… Who is getting up there from the great table? What!… He here, too? But he’s in the coffin.…”

“Yes, my son, I am called, too, called and bidden,” he heard a soft voice saying over him. “Come and join us too.”

It was his voice, the voice of Father Zossima. And it must be he, since he called him. The elder took Alyosha by the hand and raised him from his knees.

“We are rejoicing,” the little, thin old man went on. “We are drinking the new wine, the wine of new, great gladness. Here are the bride and bridegroom, here is the wise governor of the feast, he is tasting the new wine. Why do you wonder at me? I gave an onion to a beggar, so I, too, am here. And many here have given only an onion each—only one little onion.… What are all our deeds? And you, my gentle one, you, my kind boy, you too have known how to give a famished woman an onion today. Begin your work, dear one, begin it, gentle one!… Do you see our Son, do you see him?”

Something glowed in Alyosha’s heart. Something filled it until it ached. Tears of rapture rose from his soul.… He stretched out his hands, uttered a cry and waked up.

Again the coffin, the open window, and the soft, solemn, distinct reading of the gospel. But Alyosha did not listen to the reading. It was strange, he had fallen asleep on his knees, but now he was on his feet, and suddenly, as though thrown forward, with three firm steps he went right up to the coffin. His shoulder brushed against Father Paissy without his noticing it. Father Paissy raised his eyes for an instant from his book, but looked away again at once, seeing that something strange was happening.

Alyosha gazed for half a minute at the coffin, at the covered, motionless dead man that lay in the coffin, with the icon on his breast and the peaked cap with the octangular cross, on his head. He had only just been hearing his voice, and that voice was still ringing in his ears. He was listening, still expecting other words, but suddenly he turned sharply and went out of the cell.

He did not stop on the steps either, but went quickly down; his soul, overflowing with rapture, yearned for freedom, space, openness. The vault of heaven, full of soft, shining stars, stretched vast and fathomless above him. The Milky Way ran in two pale streams from the zenith to the horizon. The fresh, motionless, still night enfolded the earth.

Alyosha stood, gazed out before him and then suddenly threw himself down on the earth. He did not know why he embraced it. He could not have told why he longed so irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss it.

There seemed to be threads from all those innumerable worlds of God, linking his soul to them, and his soul was trembling all over “in contact with other worlds.” He longed to forgive everyone and for everything, and to beg forgiveness. Oh, not for himself, but for all men, for all and for everything. But with every instant he felt clearly and, as it were, tangibly, that something firm and unshakable as that vault of heaven had entered into his soul. He had fallen on the earth a weak soul, but he rose up in strength, and he knew and felt it suddenly at the very moment of his ecstasy. And never, never, all his life, did Alyosha forget that minute.

“Someone visited my soul in that hour,” he used to say afterwards with implicit faith.

Within three days he left the monastery in accordance with the words of his elder, who had bidden him to “go forth into the world.”

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