The Notebooks for The Possessed (1869-1872)

More than any of Dostoevsky’s previous writings, the Notebooks for The Possessed show his exploration of political ideas.  He seems to have set out to try to demonstrate the problems of the social utopianist beliefs of many of the leading Russian intellectuals at the time, (people like Chernechevsy, who Dostoevsky satirized in Notes from Underground).  

Dostoevsky loves to explore implications.  If one lives this way, his novels seem to say, where will it lead?  He notices among his contemporary thinkers a desire to create a just society without any reference to God.  He believes that this could lead to cruelty.

He pictures it like this: say there were two neighboring farmers, and one of the farmers had a fire that destroyed all he had.  And say the other farmer decided to make sacrifices on his farm to give half of what he had to his suffering neighbor.  This act is beautiful.  But to take this act and convert it into an abstract concept that is then made into a political system, could, as Dostoevsky saw it, lead to cruelty.

Why?  Say we call this abstraction “equality.”  If a government were to try to restructure their society around this concept, how could the government discern how far to go with it, if the concept itself is their only guide?  Literacy makes people unequal—why not burn the books?  Talent makes people unequal—why not yank Michael Jordan off the court?  Beauty makes people unequal—why not disfigure or eliminate the beautiful?  Obviously, there are situations in which illiteracy, mediocrity, and plainness can’t be done away with (without doing away with people), so for there to be equality, the higher end must be lopped off.  If abstract principles are our only guide, nothing stops them from taking us to inhumane places.  

He has the same misgivings about trying to solve societal problems by bolstering the economy.  By encouraging everyone to focus on money, people are more likely to become envious and demanding rather than harmonioius.

Dostoevsky claims that people can’t be made to get along by simply restructuring their environment or by educating them with a certain ideology.  An emphasis on material comforts might lead to a fixation on obtaining more material comforts.  Learning about equality is just as likely to make someone more demanding as more giving.

According to Dostoevsky, societal harmony can’t be acheived by a rational system imposed on an individual from without.  If people are to get along, the motivation must arise from within.

So how does he think this could happen?  Granted the notebooks are largely comprised of his characters speaking, but from what I can gather, he seems to think that there’s only one real solution to societal problems: following Christ.  He often baldly states that if the individuals in a society are not following Christ, then that society will decay.  And conversely, “If one humbly follows Christ, all problems would be solved . . . Christianity contains the solution to all social and moral problems,” and the economy would take care of itself, because “if everyone was Christ, how could there be poverty?”

But what does that phrase “following Christ” mean to Dostoevsky?  How does it differ from shooting after a concept like equality?  He calls Christ the “ideal of beauty and goodness.”  If only God was good and beautiful, regeneration would become a mere daydream, but since Christ became human, we know that humans can become good.  To know that goodness is possible, we need an ideal with a face.

What are the characteristics of this goodness?  Here’s how Dostoevsky describes it: finding one’s individual happiness in “voluntary and self-desired renunciation of his individuality, if others would benefit from it.”  He sums up this goodness as “a slave yet free.”

Okay, but how is that just not another abstraction?  Because it comes about in a relational way as opposed to rational effort.  Dostoevsky claims that “man does not have the strength to save himself.”  The solution is “God’s miraculous intervention.”  How this works exactly is not laid out in the notebooks.  

At first this seems to be just as out-of-touch as Chernechevsky’s utopia.  After all, there have been Christian societies, and they were less than wonderful.  But Dostoevsky is careful to point out the gap between believing in Christ and following Christ.  Merely believing in Christ doesn’t change much because “faith is dead without deeds.”  Or, perhaps more precisely, if someone isn’t following Christ with deeds, that belief may be largely imaginary.

And this is the question the characters in the notebooks worry over.  Say it’s true that all would be dandy if we just believe in Christ—is it possible for just anyone to believe like that?  How does one get there?  

Dostoevsky thinks that part of the problem is that our image of Christ has become blurred by Western secularization.  These ideas of mapping out a just system that would have no need for God came from nonreligious thinkers in the West.

But, according to Dostoevsky, not only has the image of Christ become muddied by these atheists, it also has been muddied by the two branches of the Western church: Catholicism and Protestantism.

Dostoevsky believes that the image of Christ has become distorted in the Catholic church because it became so entangled with wealth and political power.  This flirtation with Mammon obscured its spiritual sight.

Dostoevsky also believes that the Protestant church lacks a sufficient commitment to tradition, which renders it too vulnerable to the atheistic currents of the secular West.  Because the Protestant church lacks ceremonies to keep a firm hold on the image of Christ, it inevitably drifts toward the temptations of looking to wealth and human reason for social flourishing.  Thus the Protestant Church quickly becomes (in any practical sense) indestinguishable from atheism.  He also believes that because Protestants are so eager to topple any notions of heirarchy, their thinking veers toward atheism because for God to be God, He must be a higher being, which is pretty darn undemocratic.

Dostoevsky believes the Orthodox Church to be different.  Its historic suffering made it less vulnerable to the temptations of money and political power, thus it has mantained a hold on the purest image of Christ.  So Russia, as the primary holder of Orthodoxy, has something crucial to offer the rest of the world.  The very poverty and barbarousness of Russian history made it a more capable holder of Christ’s image.

As a Protestant Westerner, I can’t help but think that Dostoevsky has overlooked some of the tremendous ways that the Holy Spirit has worked through the Catholic and Protestant Churches (and perhaps even through the atheists).  But I also find his astonishingly high view of Christ’s role in social justice a welcome challenge.  I can’t help but think while reading that as a Protestant Westerner, I have blindspots that Dostoevsky can help point out.  

Dostoevsky is eager to avoid treating Christianity as a sort of hobby, something that has no place in my worldly affairs, but is something I idly muse about after dinner to “aid digestion.”  His challenge is this: let’s get honest about what we’re really hoping for in our society.  How much of it is just plain, old-fashioned Mammon-worship?  We say that Christ is important, but how important is He?

What’s striking about all these thoughts is how few of them actually made it into the novel.  These notebooks can be read almost as a sloughing off of Dostoevsky’s ideas to get to the living characters of the story.  This can be most clearly seen in the development of the character Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky.  He starts out as an embodiment of Chernechevsky’s ideas.  Dostoevsky seems to want to show through him that atheistic socialism can lead to cruelty.  But by the end of the notebooks, this isn’t who Pyotr is at all.  In fact, Pyotr shows distain for such abstractions.  Pyotr becomes this sort of mindless craving for destruction that has little to do with political theory.  Like Dostoevsky, he despises hobbiest theoreticians and “faith without deeds,” but this unleashes in him a thirst for chaos which is perhaps best termed demonic.  In Pyotr, what started as a journalistic polemic became something mysteriously alive.

Edward Wasiolek, the English editor of these notebooks, says that “Dostoevsky’s genius lies [ . . . ] in his creative capacity to sacrifice what he wants for what must be.”  If I suspect the people who hold to the other side of an issue are stupid, Dostoevsky reasons, then I must be willing to consider the inverse: maybe I’m stupid.  After all, if someone were stupid, they probably wouldn’t know it.  This is the comical side of any debate.  Thus Dostoevsky’s genius lies in his ability to admit that he might be stupid.  And so, with his characteristic wariness of clutching ideology too tightly, Dostoevsky is even willing to relinquish his own in the face of human mystery.