Few novelists have been feted with praise as much as the nineteenth-century Russian novelist Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821-1881). Numerous intellectuals regarded him as the prophet of their age, quite literally. Albert Camus proclaimed Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx, the “prophet of the twentieth century.” The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche despised Christianity but admired the Orthodox Dostoevsky, saying he was “the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn.”
Sigmund Freud called Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov “the most magnificent novel ever written.” Albert Einstein echoed Freud’s opinion, calling it “the most wonderful book I have ever laid my hands on” and that “Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss!” (He was referring to Carl Friedrich Gauss, a nineteenth century mathematician.)
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The reason for such adulation has to do with Dostoevsky’s response to his own life and times. For these thinkers, facing the upheavals of the 20th century, Dostoevsky represents one powerful reply to many of the cataclysmic changes that have swept modern Western civilization since the eighteenth century. And it is one that Catholics could learn a great deal from. In what follows, I outline for those readers not familiar with his work why his literary response to the crises of modernity is so compelling.
A Modern Life and Times
Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821, raised in a devout, middle-class household by his mother, whose faith influenced him, and his father, a physician. Born into a Russian Empire after the Napoleonic wars, racked by the influence of Revolutionary Western ideas—such ideas inspired a failed coup in December 1825 by Russian military officers against the Czar when he was four years old—Dostoevsky caught the spirit of that age as a young man.
Rejecting the career his father envisioned for him as a military engineer, he resigned his commission to become a writer in 1844. Finding success among critics with his first novel in 1846, he soon rejected his family’s Russian Orthodox faith and became an atheist. The next year, he fell in with a group of socialist thinkers called the Petrashevsky Circle, whose revolutionary schemes were mostly posturing. Dostoevsky would later satirize them in his writings.
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The Czarist government took them seriously, however, and, in 1849, arrested the group, including Dostoevsky. After putting them into box cars and letting them sit for several days, the government sent them before a firing squad, only to have the sentence of execution commuted to imprisonment in Siberia at the last moment. In reality, the whole affair was manufactured to punish Dostoevsky and his friends and make an example out of them. It worked: two of his colleagues committed suicide after their commutation.
Dostoevsky spent the next eight years in Siberia, and the whole affair changed his life. While in prison, the middle-class Dostoevsky encountered Russian peasants for the first time, and he found the decency and faith of some of them deeply moving. While in prison, he began to reconnect with his Orthodox faith, even as he struggled with a new challenge, the epileptic fits that would plague him the rest of his days.
When he returned from Siberia in 1859, Dostoevsky proclaimed new allegiances both as a writer and a believer. No longer a partisan of the “Westernizers,” those Russian intellectuals who wanted to reform Russian society along Enlightenment-inspired, often socialist lines, he threw in his lot with the Slavophiles, those intellectuals who looked to the Russian Orthodox tradition as the cure for the country’s ills.
