[In the following essay, Jackson examines Dostoevsky's Notes From a Dead House, his account of imprisonment in Siberia, suggesting that although the novel ostensibly addresses the inhumanity of a physical prison, it also imagines Russia itself as a prison.]

There is a breathtaking moment in Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol when the Spirit of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come points to Scrooge's own grave stone. Scrooge anxiously asks: “Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point, answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?” The Ghost answers by pointing downward to the grave by which it stood.” Scrooge then exclaims, in what is one of the two philosophically most weighty lines of the story: “Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me,” Scrooge pleads. But the Spirit, Dickens tells us, was “immovable as ever.” With good reason, we may add: Even what is true in the moral life of man is not predetermined: it must be freely willed and chosen. It is the individual himself who must say: “It shall be thus.” Scrooge, at this point, reading his own name on the stone, falls on his knees and exclaims: “Am I that man who lay upon the bed?” The finger pointed from the grave to him, and back again. “No, Spirit! Oh, no, no!” Scrooge cries out. There follows in its play with tenses a most complex, yet revolutionary line, indeed, one that presages a moral-psychological leap: “Spirit!” Scrooge cried, tightly clutching at its robe, ‘hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse.’ For the first time the hand appeared to shake.”

In these lines Dickens encapsulates the creative interplay of freedom and determinism in human existence: determinism applies to the completed event, to our made choices, to the results of our acts that carry with them consequences: “Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead”; freedom—to what is taking place—to “this intercourse” now. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.” The past and future belong (though not ineluctably, not unconditionally) to determinism, to what has been, or will be, chosen; the present—to freedom and responsibility, this intercourse now.¹ The individual, Dickens suggests, is ultimately master of his past and future; Scrooge wrenches himself from their iron grasp by an act of free will. What powers his life, indeed, life itself, is the will strive for new ends—for what Dickens calls an “altered life.” And the one thing we know about Scrooge—it lies in the subtext of the story at the very beginning—is that he is “good upon 'change.” Death itself—seemingly the supreme unalterable and ineluctable fact—will be overcome in the story. “Marley was dead: to begin with.” Death, moral-spiritual as well as physical, Dickens announces obliquely in the opening line of his story, is only a beginning. The concept of freedom for Dickens in The Christmas Carol as for Dostoevsky, is inseparable from the basic metaphysical outlook of Christianity.

The accent in The Christmas Carol, for all its indubitable shadows, is overwhelmingly optimistic in its voluntarism, its faith in man's own inner spiritual resources and his capacity inwardly to transform himself: overnight. And, indeed, Scrooge does just that. And we are left in the story with a happiness “ever after”—at least as far as the main characters are concerned. Dostoevsky's own “Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” as Robin Feuer Miller has reminded us, draws heavily in details and structure upon Dickens' conversion story.² The Ridiculous Man's leap through time and space, his transformation overnight, and his discovery of “truth” (istina), echoes the revolutionary leap of Scrooge in a variety of ways. Yet the English and Russian models of moral change, for all their accent on the miracle of conversion, are at root different. Dickens' affirmation of freedom in The Christmas Carol, in the spirit of paradise regained, is in a major key. Dostoevsky's in “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” heavily shadowed by the fall, is in a minor key. There are awarenesses in the Ridiculous Man's discovery of the truth that point to his (and Dostoevsky's) recognition that man's potential for major change (not to be confused with his capacity for moral action) is limited. “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” is a utopian story with the awareness that the closest man can come ever come on earth to paradise lies in his striving for it, indeed, in a paradoxical striving for an ideal that is contrary to his earthly nature.

In beginning this discussion on “Dostoevsky and Freedom” with the voluntarism of Dickens' “Christmas Carol”—an attitude surely rooted in the special conditions of English social and religious history and temperament—I want to provide a counterpoint, at least in mood, to Dostoevsky's somber point of departure as a writer in the 1840's: a retarded history, an economically, socially and psychologically enserfed people; a congealed environment; a legacy of inertia and ossification; a fearful, seemingly unconquerable fatalism, a popular preoccupation with the “truth of the environment” that so blocked the arteries of life that when Russians did periodically burst forth, “tasting the sweets of the most unbridled and infinite liberty,” freedom quickly turned into a scourge and terror. “We have something in our blood that drives off all true progress,” Chaadaev wrote chillingly in his first “Philosophical Letter” in 1829³ “Of all European peoples precisely the Russian people are least in need of freedom,” Turgenev remarked skeptically in a letter to Herzen December 25, 1867. And, in 1847—when the revolutions in Europe were beginning to crest—Dostoevsky already was reflecting on the Russian, if not the human condition when one of his most unsavory characters, Murin in “The Landlady”—the kind who usually has something daring to say—observes:

Know this, sir, a weak man is incapable of holding out alone! You can give him everything, but he'll come to you himself and give it all back … Give this weak man a little bit of freedom and he'll tie it up himself and return it to you. Freedom is of no use to a foolish soul.

Here, as in his last great meditation on freedom in “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” Dostoevsky seems acutely conscious of the deadly undertow.

The subject, “Dostoevsky and Freedom,” is an immense one: its amplifications and ramifications are everywhere in Dostoevsky's artistic thought. The best one can do is to plot out some of its directions—its moving design. Here I shall set forth in concise form some of the thoughts that I have expanded on in my work on Dostoevsky over the years.⁴

“I speak only of things I have experienced”, Nietzsche once observed, “and do not only offer events in the head.” “I have at all times written my writings with my whole heart and soul: I do not know what purely intellectual problems are.”⁵ Dostoevsky surely brought a wealth of ideas on man and freedom to his prison camp in 1850, but with equal certainty his experience there dramatically, poignantly and permanently shaped his views, indeed, his whole moral-religious outlook with which his thoughts on the highest freedom are intimately connected. The affirmation of freedom with which he emerged from prison was hard won, and tragic in character.

“Those four years I consider a time in which I was buried alive and closed up as in a coffin,” Dostoevsky wrote to his brother, Andrei, shortly after his release from prison in 1854. “I haven't the strength to tell you, my friend, what a frightful time that was. It was inexpressible, endless suffering.” (28:1:181)⁶ The tomb or grave as a symbol of finality and death haunts Dostoevsky's works. But the tomb for him is also the gateway to freedom. “Freedom, a new life, resurrection from the dead! What a glorious moment!” the narrator exclaims at the end of Notes from the House of the Dead—a work whose central esthetic-spiritual effort is the restoration of the image of the fallen Russian people, or, in words Dostoevsky applied to Notre Dame and other works of Victor Hugo, “the justification of the humiliated and pariahs of society who are rejected by everyone.” (20:28)

“What happened to my soul, my beliefs, my mind and heart in those four years—I shall not tell you,” Dostoevsky wrote to another brother, Mikhail. “It would take too long. But eternal concentration within myself, where I took refuge from bitter reality, bore its fruits.” (28:1:171) “Truth dawns in adversity (V neschast'e jasneet istina),” he wrote in a moving letter to Natalya Fonvizina. (28:1:176) That truth for Dostoevsky was indubitably Christian truth.

Freedom for Dostoevsky in the “dead house” was, in the first instance, freedom from: freedom from immobility, incarceration, coercion; from the violation of one's human dignity, from an obligatory herd existence. Dostoevsky himself wrote on his release from the Omsk fortress: “To be alone is as normal a need as drinking and eating, otherwise you become a misanthrope in this compulsory communism. The society of people becomes a poison and a plague, and it is just from this unbearable torture that I have suffered most of all these past four years.” 28:1:177). The deprivation of freedom, Dostoevsky believed, is an almost unendurable torture.

“What is more important than money for the convict?” the narrator asks. “Freedom, or at least some dream of freedom.” “Money is coined freedom.” “The whole idea of the word convict postulates a man without free will; but when he flings away money the convict is acting of his own free will.” All the convicts' behavior, energies and activities, Dostoevsky maintains—his bragging, flamboyance, smuggling, gambling, drinking, storming about on a drunken spree—all in essence gives evidence of the convicts' unconscious, but desperate effort to assert his own personality and nature, to acquire, even for a moment, a sense of self-mastery and self-determination. “All this excess,” he writes, “has its risks, which means that all this provides at least some illusion of life, at least a distant illusion of freedom. And what will one not give for freedom?”

Noteworthy is Dostoevsky's phrase “illusion of freedom.”⁷ He does not in any sense suggest that the convict experiences what for him was the highest ethical and spiritual freedom. Yet Dostoevsky's thought is clear: The human being at all times needs to feel free. The illusion, or sense of the semblance of freedom, is also a component of reality. Freedom for man is a psychological necessity. Without this feeling—however illusory—he would not consent to live. Freedom here is embodied in self-expression. True, the convict's self-expression takes on palpably destructive and self-destructive forms. Yet precisely the wildness and desperation of his self-expression attests both to the profound wounds inflicted on the convict's ego and to his need to affirm his innermost sense of self and being. Thus, in a particularly striking passage, Dostoevsky observes that sometimes a perfectly meek and mild convict, a “trusty,” the model of meritorious conduct, would suddenly without rhyme or reason go berserk and plunge into criminal conduct. He would be watched with amazement.

Yet perhaps the whole cause of this violent break in a man … was an anguished, hysterical manifestation of personality, an instinctive yearning to be oneself, the desire to express oneself, one's humiliated personality, a desire which suddenly takes shape and reaches the pitch of malice, of madness, of the eclipse of reason, of fits and convulsions. Thus a person buried alive in a coffin and awakening in it, would thrust at the cover and try to throw it off, although, of course, reason might convince him that all his efforts were in vain. But the whole point is that it is not a question of reason: it is a question of convulsions.

In the passage just quoted, and twice in adjacent paragraphs, Dostoevsky quite deliberately juxtaposes the word “reason” (rassudok) with the word “convulsions” (sudoroga): “it is not a question of reason: it is a question of convulsions.” Dostoevsky is quite aware that—when scrambled—the letters of the word “rassudok,” reason, roughly may be reassembled as “sudoroga”, or convulsions. Dostoevsky's play with words and sounds here is to the point. The deconstruction of reason into convulsions is symptomatic of the catastrophe, the iron clad determinism, that has overtaken both reason and the individual in prison, that is, in what Dostoevsky once called “compulsory communism.” Reason has become irrational; it not only has ceased to serve the individual as a guide, but—as an incarnation of seemingly ineluctable order—threatens to annihilate the individual. To which the individual responds with … convulsions.

We have here, in a nutshell, the whole problematic of Notes from the Underground. The Underground Man not only embodies “convulsions” in his psychology, but gives conscious articulation of these convulsions in his irrational will philosophy.

Speaking of convulsions, “that is, of the destructive and self-destructive behavior of the convict, the narrator of House of the Dead notes: And so it would be better in every way not to bring [the convict] to this point. It would be more tranquil for everybody. Yes. But how is this to be done?” Dostoevsky, at this point in the text, provides no answer.

We may place these last remarks, if we wish, in the context of a work that certainly had as one of its dimensions a critique of the inhuman structure of prison and the social consequences of prison brutality. Or, if we wish to go further, we may see in the narrator's words an oblique reference to the prison house of Russia. It is noteworthy, in this connection, that Dostoevsky at one point provides an example of rebellion from outside the prison world: the hypothetical case of “a quiet and peaceable, yet bitter peasant, house serf, or townsman or soldier in whom something suddenly snaps. He can stand it no longer. He knifes his oppressor.” “This is comprehensible,” Dostoevsky writes. “But here is where the strangeness sets in. The man suddenly “breaks all bounds” and proceeds to cut up anybody who crosses his path: “‘Out of my way, don't cross my path, here I come!’” “It is precisely as though the man were drunk, precisely as though he were in a feverish delirium. It is as though, once having leaped beyond the boundary that was sacred for him, he now began to revel in the fact that nothing was sacred for him any more; as though he felt an urge at one bound to leap beyond all law and authority and to enjoy the most unbridled and limitless freedom.”

Dostoevsky certainly was addressing here the profound tensions in Russian life. Repression and anti-repressive behavior in the “dead house” had distinct parallels in Russian contemporary life. What Dostoevsky saw in the “dead house,” however, raised in his mind broad questions relating to the relations of the individual and society in general. He is concerned, moreover, not only with a socially generated conflict between the individual and society, but with the nature of man: the problem of the absence or presence of moral criteria in man, that is, in the words of the Grand Inquisitor, the problem of “the inborn anarchism” of man. What arrested Dostoevsky's attention in House of the Dead, then, was not only the convict's general need for freedom, for genuine self-expression, but the tragic dialectic of freedom: starting out with the defense of personality, with the natural demands for self-expression, the individual spins out of control and plunges into the “abyss of the most unbridled and limitless freedom,” revelling in the fact that “nothing was sacred for him any more.”⁸ We have here not only a basic theme of House of the Dead and Notes from the Underground, but one that Dostoevsky projects in all of his works: the theme of “all is permissible.”

In an article on popular education written shortly after the appearance of House of the Dead, Dostoevsky writes:

The need to affirm oneself, to distinguish oneself, to stand out, is a law of nature of every individual; it is his right, his essence, the law of his existence, which in the crude unstructured state of society manifests itself in the individual in extremely crude and even savage form, while in the community that has become cultivated it manifests itself in the morally-humane, conscious and completely free subordination of every person to the welfare of the whole community, and, the other way around, in the constant concern of the community itself to put the least constraint possible upon the rights of the individual.

(13:55)

We can easily single out the Russian convict-peasant in the reference to savage self-expression in “the crude unstructured state of society.” We cannot, however, locate anywhere—certainly not in Russia—the “cultivated” community that in Dostoevsky's discourse is marked by an ideal interaction of individual and society: an interaction in which each side voluntarily and graciously defers to the other. Such a social order belongs entirely to moral-spiritual utopia. Where does one find this harmonious state of being, and how does one pass from the egoism of self-will to the altruism of love and self-sacrifice? We come back to the question Dostoevsky poses with respect to the wild outbreaks of the convicts in prison: “It would be better in every way not to bring [the convict] to this point. It would be more tranquil for everybody. Yes. But how is this to be done?”

Dostoevsky provides the answer in “The Theatricals”—the eleventh chapter of House of the Dead: the structural and ideological center of the work. The chapter is entitled “Predstavlenie”—a word that in its literal root meaning might be translated as the “presentation,” the “representation,” the “showing”—and indeed that is what Dostoevsky is about: showing another form of freedom, or self-expression. In this case the “showing” is clearly linked with “revelation.” On the third day after Christmas, a holiday, the convicts are permitted to present some theatrical presentations: primitive skits that constitute a strange melange of Russian folk lore and elements of western morality plays.

The two chapters leading to the theatricals, “The Bathhouse” and “Feast of Christmas”, involve, appropriately, physical and spiritual cleansing. On Christmas Day the convicts did not work. “Everybody seemed to be expecting [that day] to bring some change.” And, indeed, the solemn religious services evoked in the convicts an inner change, one accompanied by memories of Christmas in their childhood. The convict, writes the narrator, was “unconsciously aware that by his observance of that day he brought himself into contact with all the world, that consequently he was not altogether an outcast, a lost soul, a piece of flotsam, and that even in prison things were the same as among real people. They felt it,” the narrator concludes.

The convict, then, recovers his humanity and dignity not through hurling himself against the wall, as it were, in order to get an “illusion” of freedom, not through disassociation from, and conflict with, his fellow convicts, with the establishment, with the “environment,” but through real and symbolic communion with each other, with the “world,” and with a spiritual reality that was outside of time and space. In this new world where “friendly feelings between convicts were almost entirely unknown,” remarks the narrator, “something like friendship made its appearance.”

The spirit of communion reaches its high point on the third day after Christmas when the convicts, in the same barracks where the Christmas services are observed, perform their theatricals and undergo what might be called an “esthetic education” in the spirit of Schiller. What is significant about this moment, Dostoevsky stresses, is not only the content of the plays, but the transformation that takes places in the convicts themselves and in the overall prison environment itself. The convicts are reunited with Russian people: spectators who come from outside the prison. Relations with the guards and with the gentry are momentarily reconciled. “Everyone behaved quietly and decorously.” In their transfiguration as actors and audience, in their dramatic roles as players and participants in the theatricals, in the free play of their faculties, in short, in the play of art, and in its deepest themes, the convicts literally and figuratively acquire new identities, become like babes (as the narrator notes), become full human beings. Schiller's observations here are apt: “But how can we speak of mere play, when we know that it is precisely play and play alone, which of all man's states and conditions is the one which makes him whole and unfolds both sides of his nature at once? … [T]he agreeable, the good, the perfect, with these man is merely in earnest; but with beauty he plays.”⁹

Dostoevsky's identification of the theater with the church is unmistakable.¹⁰ The convict audience sits, as in a church, with expressions of harmony and childlike bliss; they all sacrifice alike in making the curtain. As in the Orthodox church, so at this performance, the esthetic and the spiritual constitute a unity, and the theater-goers—a congregation. In short, the “presentation” or performance—and we should note that Dostoevsky actually was the director of the convicts' plays, not only its historian in House of the Dead—constitutes, as an event, a moment of liberation, of transfiguration, a kind of proverbial eleventh hour of symbolic salvation. Dostoevsky writes:

Everybody was somehow unusually content, one might even say, happy, and went to sleep not as on other nights, but almost with a tranquil spirit. And where did it all come from? … These poor creatures needed only to be allowed to have a bit of life in their own way, to enjoy themselves as human beings, to pass one little hour free from prison routine—and people morally changed, even if only for a few moments.

“And where did it all come from?” the narrator asks. All this was no “dream of my imagination,” he insists, “it was the truth, the real truth [pravda, istina]”. This highest truth [istina] that the narrator celebrates stands in opposition, however, to the earthly truth of prison. At night—we are at the end of the chapter—the narrator awakens in the dismal barracks, looks around in terror—no longer at the magical world of the prison-church-theater, but—I quote—“at the “pale faces of the convicts, their wretched beds, the hopeless destitution and poverty—I peer around, as though I wanted to assure myself that it was the real truth [pravda] and not the continuation of a monstrous dream. But this was the truth [pravda] somewhere a moan is heard; someone drops his arm heavily and there is a clank of chains. Another starts up in his sleep and begins to speak, while the old man on the stove prays for all ‘Orthodox Christians,’ and one can hear his measured, quiet, drawn out: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us!”

The narrator's juxtaposition of a believable higher truth of harmony and communion (“no dream of my imagination”) with a truly unbelievable (from the point of view of moral “realism”) earthly truth of poverty and destitution prefigures a similar juxtaposition of truths in “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.” When the Ridiculous Man, spiritually liberated, awakens from his dream of paradise (istina) and his nightmare of the fall (pravda) he exclaims ecstatically: “I have seen the truth [istina].” “I have seen and know that people can be beautiful and happy, without losing the capacity to live on earth.” “‘But it's all a dream, a delirium, an hallucination,’ people say to him. “Oh! Now isn't that clever?” he retorts. “A dream? What is a dream? And our life—isn't that a dream.” Dostoevsky's poetics of realism are forged in the “dead house.”

In sum, then, we can distinguish in Notes from the House of the Dead two kinds of freedom or self-expression: the one self-willed and manifested in beating in frenzy at the cover of the coffin in an effort to obtain an illusion of self-determination and self-mastery, an illusion of freedom; the other an experience of integrity, communion, harmony and symbolic liberation from the death house; two kinds of truth: the everyday truth of disfigured and disfiguring reality, of man “without an image” (bezobrazie), and the other truth—the truth of an inner spiritual reality in which the face of man momentarily emerges in the image and likeness of God (obraz).

In some passages of his literary memoir of his first travels in Europe, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863) Dostoevsky succinctly restates the negative and positive polarities of freedom that he had dramatized in House of the Dead. Yet we note a fundamental difference: the issues of freedom in the “dead house” now emerge as the issues of freedom in western bourgeois society—a shift that is not really a shift for Dostoevsky: for increasingly Europe, for Dostoevsky, is precisely a spiritual “dead house.”

In Winter Notes Dostoevsky identifies negative, self-willed freedom not with the tragedy of the beaten Russian convict striving to affirm his identity and suppressed humanity, but with the tragedy of western individualism. Western man, Dostoevsky writes, talks about “brotherhood” or fraternity, but brotherhood as such is not organic to the “Western nature”. In western Europe we find

the principle of individuality, the principle of isolation, of intense self-preservation, of personal gain, of the self-determination of the individual's own “I”, and an opposing of this “I” to all of nature and everybody else as an independent autonomous element completely equal and equivalent to all that exists outside itself. Well, fraternity could hardly arise from such a promotion of self.

Dostoevsky goes on to argue that in genuine fraternity it is not the self that is concerned with its rights and equality with everybody else, but “this everybody else that comes to the individual who is demanding his rights, comes to the separate I, and on its own, without being asked, recognizes the individual as equal in value in rights.” In turn the demanding rebellious individual first of all sacrifices to society his whole I, his whole self.” Here in self-sacrifice, Dostoevsky finds the highest expression of human personality and freedom:

Understand me well: voluntary, fully conscious self-sacrifice, utterly free of outside constraint, sacrifice of one's whole self for the benefit of all, is in my opinion the sign of the highest development of personality, of its supreme power, its absolute self-mastery, and its most complete freedom of its own will. …

Dostoevsky writes again:

True brotherhood, then, cannot be artificially established or created: It must live unconsciously in the nature of the entire race, in a word: to have the brotherly principle of love—one must love. One must instinctively be drawn to brotherhood … despite the age-old sufferings of a nation, despite the barbarous crudity and ignorance that has taken root there, despite age-old slavery and the invasion of foreign races—in a word, the need for brotherly communion must be in the nature of a people, must be born with them or have been assimilated as a way of life from time immemorial.

The age-old suffering of a nation,” “barbarous crudity and ignorance,” “age-old slavery,” etc. Here, clearly, was Russia: the everyday truth Dostoevsky had encountered in prison and that he, Gogol and others had found in Russia. But had Dostoevsky in the “dead house” really found in the Russian people, in Russian history and consciousness, the “brotherly principle of love”? Did the “dead house”—where nobody loved anybody—really provide evidence that the “need for brotherly communion” had been “assimilated as a way of life from time immemorial” in the Russian people? Here we must focus on the words “unconsciously in the nature of the entire race.” The knowledgeable reader will recall the moment of communion in Christmas and the theatricals when “the convict unconsciously [my italics—RLJ] felt that through his observance of the holiday” a connection with the real and spiritual world; the reader will return to the moment of higher truth, of transmutation, of poetry, that literally lies at the center of House of the Dead and figuratively constitutes the poetics of that work. For without a doubt the seed of Dostoevsky's concept of the Russian people as an unconscious repository of brotherly love people lies in the “dead house”—a seed that he cultivated in the long years in Siberia and tenderly nourished in House of the Dead: a work in which Dostoevsky refined and shaped his own memories and, in the process, gave historic shape to the unconscious memory of the fallen Russian people: a memory of communion.¹¹House of the Dead is an act of creation: here there is something new, a vision; but here, as in all creation, there is a link with the past: with the dream, with the mythic consciousness of the people.

Notes from the Underground, indubitably Dostoevsky's major statement on the pathos and tragedy of freedom in modern civilization, in essential respects takes its provenance from House of the Dead with its profound and ambiguous psychology of convict rebellion, and Winter Notes, with its negative assessment of western individualism, the western materialist ethos and socialist utopian theory—a theory which in essence, Dostoevsky recognized, remained bourgeois in its secret dreams.

In his psychology of malice, his psychology of revolt, in his irrational will philosophy, however, the Underground Man, a “western”-type individualist, also traces his roots to the “dead house.” Immanent in the concept of the “dead house”—not Dostoevsky's, not the convict's, however—is the notion of a universe dominated by ineluctable fate. The convict's entire behavior is an unconscious, passive, masochistic protest against the idea of a meaningless existence—a protest, however, in which he is not ennobled, but degraded.

The “underground” is precisely a metaphysical “underground” in which absolute determinism prevails, a world where the Underground Man conceives and carries out his disastrous psychological experiments, his bumping duels, a world in which the “laws of nature” have been humiliating him more than anything else. He feels sentenced to oblivion by the “very laws of nature,” he feels “guilty without guilt and, so to speak, through the laws of nature.”

The Underground Man, like the convict, starts out with a defense of his and man's dignity, a defense of free will, but he ends up with a demand for caprice and absolute self-will. “All man wants is absolutely free choice, however dear that freedom may cost him …” The tragedy of “underground” revolt—its ruling paradox—is plain. To borrow Max Horkheimer's words as he applied them to the twentieth century in The Eclipse of Reason: “The theme of this time is self-preservation, while there is no self to preserve.”¹² That is the tragedy of the “underground.”

The Russian philosopher Leo Shestov keenly observed that the Underground Man's irrationalist will philosophy constituted the true philosophy of penal servitude. Yet Shestov was wrong in identifying Dostoevsky with the Underground Man, in saying that Dostoevsky had renounced his ideals in Notes from the Underground. Dostoevsky in no way embraced the irrationalist philosophy of the Underground Man (however much he was capable of empathizing with him, however much he recognized underground psychology as deeply rooted in human nature); he in no way abandoned the ethical ideal and concept of higher freedom that he had set forth in Winter Notes and, obliquely, in House of the Dead.

Yet the question could be asked: does the reader perceive the Underground Man in the full critical light that Dostoevsky had intended to show him? The bankruptcy of the Underground Man should be evident even to the reader who finds an arsenal of weapons to be directed against an oppressive society. But had Dostoevsky made the case for higher freedom, for the ethical and religious ideal, with the same strength that he had made the case, through the agency of the Underground Man, against the rationalists and, in general, against the utopian mentality?

It is doubtful whether the impression of hopelessness and catastrophe that we carry away from our reading of Notes from the Underground would have substantially been altered if the case of the missing ideal, the missing image of Christ, had been resolved in the spirit of the original text.¹³ It is significant, in any case, that the twentieth century—itself a century of doubt and disbelief—has tended to focus on the Underground Man's will philosophy and to find in the work, apart from its tonic anti-utopianism, support for a bleak existential outlook: as expressed, for example, in the following words of the Underground Man: “Perhaps the whole aim mankind is striving to achieve on earth lies merely in [the] incessant process of achievement, or (to put it differently) in life itself, and not in the attainment of any goal. … When workmen have finished their work they at least receive their wages, and they go to a pub and later find themselves in a police cell … But where can man go?” This final question, though linked with the anti-utopian theme, goes beyond it and raises the question—an all-important one for Dostoevsky—of the nature of the life “process.”

The Underground Man's emphasis on process or movement as the creative essence of life most certainly echoes Dostoevsky's thought, but the emphasis on movement or process in a moral-spiritual vacuum (this is the environment of the “underground”); the emphasis on movement for itself alone (perpetuum mobile—as we find it dramatized in the Underground Man's behavior); is alien to Dostoevsky's highest thought. Like the Underground Man, Dostoevsky argues against any notion of finality, or final goal, in earthly human existence, but as we know from Dostoevsky's notebooks and other works written immediately before, or during the writing of Notes from the Underground, he in no way ignores the spiritual dimension of man's movement or striving. Yet this dimension of man's striving finds little direct emphasis in Notes from the Underground.

Dostoevsky would certainly have rejected out of hand Camus' idealization of despairing lucidity and revolt—an idealization that finds expression in his Sisyphean hero who is continually pushing his stone to the top of a mountain only to see it roll back again, and so on through eternity. Camus calls upon man to embrace this perpetuum mobile, intrepidly and cheerfully to face an essentially meaningless universe. “We must,” Camus writes of his mythic hero, “imagine him happy.” The situation is quite different in Notes from the Underground. Such a condition for Dostoevsky is unconditionally tragic. In no way does he idealize the posture of “underground” revolt.¹⁴

Dostoevsky put down his thoughts on these questions (thoughts that find artistic expression in his work at large) very succinctly and unambiguously in his notebook at the very time (1864) he was writing Notes from the Underground. He is absolutely clear in his understanding of the nature of man's striving. “Man on this earth is only a developing creature. His life is a permanent process of “achieving, struggling and, through all defeats, refocussing on the ideal [Christ] and struggling for it.” Dostoevsky posits this process of struggling or striving as a “law of nature,” calling it the “law of striving for the ideal.” Spiritual health for him is to be found neither in stasis nor in movement per se, but in creative tension toward the ideal—one unattainable, however, on earth. It is in this connection that Dostoevsky restates his ethical ideal of the highest freedom:

Man on earth strives for an ideal that is contrary to his nature. When man does not fulfill the law of striving for the ideal, i.e. when he does not sacrifice with love his own ‘I’ to people or other beings … then he feels the pains of suffering and calls this state sin. Thus man must continuously experience suffering, which is counterbalanced by the paradisiacal enjoyment of the fulfillment of law, i.e. by sacrifice. This is how equilibrium on earth is maintained. Otherwise life would be senseless.

(20:175)

The highest freedom, then, is not “freedom from,” which leaves one in isolation with oneself,” but “freedom for”—the power to direct oneself to an ideal, and to strive for it; and “freedom with”—a concept, as Paul Weiss has noted that contains within itself the recognition that “we are men in a society and men in a cosmos, and whatever freedom we may express is largely futile or frustrated if it does not intermesh with that exercised by others … we are genuinely free only when we are in harmony with equally free fellow men.”¹⁵

Dostoevsky's “law of striving for the ideal” enters into his conception of “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.” The Ridiculous Man posits the ideal as a point of permanent striving, while at the same time affirming the impossibility of achieving the ideal on earth. The higher truth (istina) in The Dream of a Ridiculous Man is bonded with tragedy—the reality of the fall (pravda). And there are clear indications that the Ridiculous Man is fully aware of this new reality. The Ridiculous Man repeatedly emphasizes that he knows he will “go astray again, perhaps several times, and even more seriously”; he knows that “heaven will never be realized on earth (“really I understand this very well!” he exclaims). Nonetheless he will go on preaching his dream, the “old truth” (staraja istina). Implicit in story is Goethe's truth that with striving inevitably comes error.¹⁶ Implicit, too, is the idea that truth is ecumenical: the Ridiculous Man does not speak either of Christianity or Christ. Rather he stresses that “Everybody is moving toward the very same thing … only by different roads. This is an old truth.”¹⁷ The “old truth” is also ethical: “love one another” (“in one day, one hour everything could be arranged at once”), but it is also the awareness that man cannot return to blissful innocence (“and yet it is an old truth, a truth that has been told over and over again, but in spite of that it finds no place among men!” “If only we wanted it …”—but we don't. The “old truth” is the awareness that to be free man must accept evil and with it the responsibility to struggle with it (“And I shall, I shall fight against it [the idea that] consciousness of life is higher than happiness.”). Dostoevsky's “old truth,” it would seem, would seem to echo Goethe's in “Vermächtnis” (Legacy):

Das Wahre war schon längst gefunden,
Hat edle Geisterschaft verbunden;
Das alte Wahre, fass es an!
(The truth has long since been known,
And has become a bond between noble
intelligences;
Grasp it, the age-old truth!)

.....

The main threat to modern man, Dostoevsky believed, came when the impulses of rational humanism were exhausted: when the failure of reason, science, capitalism or socialism to order life became evident; when the human spirit was overtaken by exhaustion, skepticism, cynicism and—in the chaos of self-assertion—by the loss all moral criteria; when, finally, the instinct for self-preservation had begun to weaken. With the cry, “Save us from ourselves,” the Grand Inquisitor makes his entrance.

Dostoevsky's final statement on “freedom” is certainly to be found in the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.” In the final analysis the “Legend” can only be deciphered in the context of the work of art as a whole, that is, in The Brothers Karamazov and in the lives of the heroes and heroines who live out and test, as it were, the questions raised in the “Legend.” The opposing positions, or truths, in the “Legend” and the ways they correlate with one another, can, however, be indicated.

Briefly the “Legend” might be said to be an extrapolation upon Dostoevsky's paradoxical notion:

Man on earth strives for an ideal that is contrary to his nature. (Chelovek na zemle stremitsja k idealu protivo-polozhnomu ego nature)

(20:175)

The position of the Grand Inquisitor on the issue of freedom is based on his understanding of man's “nature.” Man, he affirms is “weak, vicious, worthless and rebellious,” “a feeble, unruly ‘incomplete’ empirical creature created in jest.” Affirming the essentially weak, egoistic, vile and anarchic character of human nature, the Grand Inquisitor maintains that man is incapable of being free, of bearing the burden of responsibility, of bearing “the fearful burden of free choice.” “Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and human society than freedom.”

The position of Christ—the “great idealist”—on freedom is based on his faith in man's ability freely to choose the good, on his faith in man's transcendental striving for the ideal. In the words of the Grand Inquisitor, “Thou didst desire man's free love, that he should follow Thee freely, enticed and taken captive by Thee. In place of the rigid ancient law, man must hereafter with free heart decide for himself what is good and what is evil, having only Thy image before him as his guide.”

In his notebook Dostoevsky once observed that with Christ “there are not even any teachings, only occasional words, while the main thing is the image of Christ from which comes all teaching.” (11:192) What is involved in man's relation to Christ is “direct attraction.” (11:198) “That might be one of the best passages in the poem,” Ivan says of the moment Christ appears on the square before the cathedral, “that is, why precisely [the people] recognize him. The people are irresistibly drawn toward Him …” (Narod nepobedimoju siloj stremitsja k nemu.) The verb “stremitsja” is central in its motif of “striving.” The people are directly attracted not by words but by the stupendous image of Christ: “He silently passes among them … The sun of love burns in his heart, the rays of Light, Enlightenment and Power emanate from his eyes.”

“Man on earth strives for an ideal that is contrary to his nature.” It is clear, however, that the truth of man's “nature” and the truth of man's transcendental “striving” do not constitute a static opposition in Dostoevsky's artistic conception of man. How do these two truths interact with one another in the “Legend”? Only in their dynamic interaction is the static relativity of each side of the equation overcome. The kind of dynamic interaction I have in mind was disclosed by Dostoevsky in his moving letter to Natalya Fonvizina on his release from prison in 1854. Here Dostoevsky affirms that he is “a child of the century, a child of unbelief and doubt, always has been and shall forever be (I know this) until they close the lid of my coffin.” Yet he goes on to say that precisely in his moments of doubt and despair, when he is overwhelmed by “opposite proofs,” or “contrary evidences” (protivnye dovody), God sends him moments “in which he loves and finds that he is loved by others”; in such moments, Dostoevsky writes, “I form within myself a “symbol of faith”:“to believe that there is nothing more beautiful, more profound, more sympathetic, more reasonable, more steadfast and more perfect than Christ.”

Dostoevsky then goes on to set these opposing statements of doubt and faith in dynamic interaction. “Even more, if somebody proved to me that Christ was outside the truth, and it really were true that the truth was outside Christ, then I would rather remain with Christ than with the truth.” (28:1:176) It is the leap of faith, of course, that places Christ back in the circle of revealed truth. But if we allow that Dostoevsky will remain a “child of disbelief and doubt” throughout his life, then his leap that he makes is one that he is, and will be, continually making throughout his life. He is and will be, then, involved in a continuous process of invalidating “opposite proofs.” In this connection, I would like to emphasize: on the moral-psychological plane this eternally occurring leap of faith, this striving for the ideal serves to overcome the torment of fruitless underground destructive duality. “This duality in you is precisely the kind that has been in me all my life. It is a terrible torment and at the same time a great satisfaction,” Dostoevsky wrote to E.F. Junge April 13, 1880.” And in the spirit of his letter to Madame Fonvizina in 1854, Dostoevsky adds: “Dear, most respected Katerina Fedorovna, do you believe in Christ and his promises? If you believe (or very much want to believe) then give yourself over to him fully and the torments from the duality will be greatly mitigated and you will find spiritual release, and that's the main thing.” (30:1:149) But the main thing, we may add from our general reading of Dostoevsky, is that there is no spiritual rest. There is only a tension toward the ideal, now slackening, now reaffirming itself, but always present. That is precisely the human condition as Dostoevsky conceives it. The “law of striving for the ideal” is the moving center of his moral and spiritual outlook and of his concept of higher freedom. There is no freedom apart from the ideal and apart from a continuous striving for it.

“Man lives most of all at the very moment he is seeking, striving for something,” Dostoevsky wrote in his essay on Dobrolyubov in 1861. (18:94) And again to Nadezhda Suslova in a letter of 1865: “Do not lose touch with life, preserve your soul, believe in the truth. But seek it intently all life long, or else it is terribly easy to go astray.” (28:2:123) And finally, in a letter to the Alexander Kovner: “Raise your spirits and formulate your ideal. Surely you have been seeking it before now, or is this not the case?” (29:2:141)

Notes

1. Sidney Hook has put the matter very well: “We are responsible, whether we admit it or not, for what it is in our power to do; and most of the time we can't be sure what it is in our power to do until we attempt it. In spite of the alleged inevitabilities in personal life and history human effort can redetermine the direction of events, even though it cannot determine the conditions that make human effort possible. It is time enough to reconcile oneself to a secret shame or a public tyranny after one has done one's best to overcome it, and even then it isn't necessary.” See Hook's essay, “Necessity, Indeterminism, and Sentimentalism,” in Determinism and Freedom in the Age of Modern Science. A Philosophical Symposium, ed. by Sidney Hook (New York, 1958), p. 179.

2. See Robin Feuer Miller, “‘The Dream of the Ridiculous Man’: Unsealing the Generic Envelope,” in Freedom and Responsibility in Russian Literature. Essays in Honor of Robert Louis Jackson, ed. by Elizabeth Cheresh Allen and Gary Saul Morson (Evanston, IL, 1995), pp. 86-104.

3. See P. Ja. Chaadaev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenij i izbrannye pis'ma, tom 1 (Moscow, 1991), p. 97.

4. I have in mind, chiefly, my books in which I have set forth in detail my views. See my Dostoevsky's Underground Man in Russian Literature (The Hague, 1958) where I set forth my basic views on the theme of freedom in Notes from the Underground and other works of the period; The Quest for Form (1966) in which I elaborate on the place of the “quest for the ideal,” esthetic and religious, in Dostoevsky's poetics; The Art of Dostoevsky (1981) where I discuss Dostoevsky's poetics in the course of close analyses of Dostoevsky's texts, in particular, Notes from the House of the Dead; and, most recently, Dialogues with Dostoevsky. The Overwhelming Questions (1994) a work in which, among other matters, I consider the relation of my views of Dostoevsky's poetics to those expressed by Bakhtin in his study of Dostoevsky. In this connection, see Caryl Emerson, “Word and Image in Dostoevsky's Worlds: Robert Louis Jackson on Readings That Bakhtin Could not Do,” in Freedom and Responsibility in Russian Literature, op. cit., pp. 245-265. Her essay is reprinted in Russian translation in Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie No. 11 (1995), pp. 19-36.

5. Posthumously published notes. Cited by R. J. Hollingdale in the introduction to Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Translated with an introduction by R.J. Hollingdale (Middlesex, England, 1968), p. 12.

6. All citations in the text to Dostoevsky reference to Dostoevskij, Polnoe sobranie sochinenij v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad, 1972-1990).

7. “Prizrak” literarily has the meaning of ghost, phantom, apparition, mirage.

8. See also, in House of the Dead, the convict Baklushin: Holding a gun to the head of his enemy [outside of prison], he shouts in wild excitement: “Do you know that at this moment I can do anything I want with you?” Philka Morozov expresses similar sentiments in “Akulka's Story”: “Whatever I want to do to all of you now, that's what I'm going to do, because I'm no longer in control of myself.”

9. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man. In a Series of Letters. Edited and translated by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford, 1967), Letter 15, pp. 105-106.

10. For an elaboration of this view and other aspects of the theatricals, see Julie de Sherbinin's article, “Transcendence Through Art: The Convicts' Theatricals in Dostoevsky's Zapiski iz mertvogo doma,” SEEJ [Slavic and East European Journal] 35, No. 3 (Fall 1991): 339-351.

11. See Dostoevsky's recollections in “The Peasant Marey”—itself a mix of Dichtung and Wahrheit—where he says: “I would analyze these impressions, and new features to things that had happened long ago, and, mainly, I would correct, continually correct the picture, and herein lay my whole pleasure.”

12. Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (New York, 1947), p. 128.

13. Notes from the Underground had been censored. “The swinish censor,” Dostoevsky wrote his brother, “let pass those passages where I ridiculed everything and blasphemed for show, but where I deduce from all this the need for faith and Christ—this is forbidden.” Yet Dostoevsky never restored these passages, and we are left with only hints at the fact that the root of the Underground man's dilemma is his lack of faith. Only in the momentary embrace of the Underground Man and Lisa when he breaks down in tears do we have a hint that the resolution of the problem of freedom is not numerical, that it lies neither in irrationalist rebellion (2＋2=5) nor in submission to fate (2＋2=4), but in the dissolution of the boundaries of ego and in mutual acceptance of the “other.”

14. We are not arguing for or against the merits of Camus' worldview; we are merely signalling the abyss that separates him from Dostoevsky.

15. See Paul Weiss, “Common Sense and Beyond,” in Determinism and Freedom in the Age of Modern Science. A Philosophical Symposium, edited by Sidney Hook (New York, 1958), p. 221.

16. “Es irrt der Mensch solang er strebt” (Faust)

17. “There is no reason to be ashamed of one's idealism: it is the same road and to the same goal. Because idealism, in essence, is quite as real as realism, and never can disappear from the world,” Dostoevsky observes in similar terms in his Diary of a Writer (23:70).