(To the right, a portrait of Dostoevsky by Vasily Perov) (
It was 34 years ago in 1992 that I stood in the St. Petersburg apartment where Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky lived and wrote. In his writing room were his desk, his last pack of cigarettes, the couch on which he died. Outside a window in the apartment was a church.
“He insisted that he be able to look out the window and see a church,” our tour guide told us.
I’ve had Dostoevsky on my mind in recent weeks. My son, a lawyer with the U.S. Coast Guard in New Orleans, sent me a copy of the writer’s 1873 novel Demons, and I’m making my way through the 714-page tome. Actually I’m reading it a second time. The first, when its title was The Possessed, was when my late wife Marilyn and I went to Russia in 1992.
(Photos by Joseph B. Atkins of Dostoevsky's apartment in St. Petersburg, Russia)
Besides being one of the world’s greatest novelists, Dostoevsky was also something of a prophet. The entire theme of Demons—and implied theme of his other works—is the incipient spiritual downfall of modern mankind, particularly his beloved Russia.
As a former socialist who spent eight years in a Siberian prison for his youthful radicalism, Dostoevsky saw the invasion of all the “isms” from Europe as indeed demonic, foreshadowing of Russia’s own descent into materialism and atheism, what indeed became of Russia after the 1917 revolution and its subsequent 70 years of Communist rule as the Soviet Union.
“Idealism, rationalism, empiricism, materialism, utilitarianism, positivism, socialism, anarchism, nihilism, and, underlying them all, atheism,” writes translator Richard Pevear in his foreword to Demons describing Dostoevsky’s world view. “The assertion of human autonomy is finally a revolt against God; it is also the final lie.”
Does Dostoevsky has something to say to the modern West, where war and greed and materialism rule not only our headlines but our lives. Isn’t Europe today deeply compromised by a materialist neoliberal agenda that pushes immigration on its citizens so that its capitalist warlords can have cheap labor, that pushes coup d’etats and war in Ukraine and elsewhere to serve the American Empire rather than its own economic and social interests? Aren’t the European Union and NATO the very symbols of this?
I lived in Germany for four years in the 1970s and never saw one of its magnificent cathedrals actually crowded with worshipers. I never met a strongly religious European.
“The spirit of the continent’s religion … drove people to war and stirred them to defense,” writes Charles Murray in his 2017 book The Strange Death of Europe. “It also drove Europeans to the greatest heights of human creativity. It drove Europeans to build St. Peter’s in Rome, the Cathedral at Chartres, the Duomo of Florence and the Basilica of St. Mark in Venice. It inspired the works of Bach, Beethoven and Messiaen, GrΓΌnewald’s altarpiece at Isenheim and Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks.”
Certainly two world wars and a long Cold War left an exhausted, spiritually depleted Europe where even the philosophers had given up the search for truth in exchange for deconstructed word games.
Today, in the face of massive numbers of Muslim immigrants, many of them highly religious, Europeans have little spiritually to offer in response.
In the United States, fundamentalist Christianity does wield at least a kind of superficial influence in the Trump Administration, but this version of the faith is grounded in a “ministry of success” that extols raw capitalism and ignores large chunks of Jesus’ teachings.
When I was in Russia, I remember walking past the Museum of Atheism in St. Petersburg. Much more impressive were the crowded Orthodox churches and monasteries, where priests and monks heard confessions and offered prayers that 70 years of official atheism couldn’t erase. Years later, I saw similarly crowded churches and cathedrals in Poland that gave testament to a faith forgotten or ignored farther to the west.
“God is good to us,” 20-year-old Arthur Smolyak told my wife and me in Russia in 1992. He was a seminarian from Moldavia studying in Zagorsk, an ancient center of the Orthodox faith 44 miles northeast of Moscow. “It used to be easy to get in the seminary. Now it’s very hard because so many people want to get in.”
Dostoevsky didn’t allow his religious faith to blind him from the needs of the people. It only deepened his awareness of those needs. “I could never understand the notion that only one-tenth of people should attain higher development, and the remaining nine-tenths should only serve as a means and material to that goal while themselves remaining in darkness,” he wrote in Diary of a Writer in 1876.
However, Dostoevsky saw that too many so-called saviors or champions of those nine-tenths are themselves so spiritually empty that they in their heart of hearts only “love money terribly … and value it to the extreme.” That is their god—money—and one could add power. In shedding a light onto this darkness, Dostoevsky stressed that ultimately man has the power to choose whether to allow the “demons” of the world to rule his life.
His hope was that man would make the right choice. His fear was that he would not.
