The Existentialism of Dostoievski

Extract

Albert Camus declared in the preface to his last work that Dostoievski was the teacher of his youth, that The Possessed was one of the four or five books most influential in his life. Dostoievski, so influential upon us in his own works and through great men like Camus, liked to maintain that he had a faith that had been tried by fire, that had gone down into the abysses, and had risen up again. He surely had an ardent love for Jesus Christ: perhaps no one has ever written of Christ with words of more intense beauty. Yet Dostoievsky's faith is no clear call to unity; it is as scattered and dispersed as are men’s consciences today. Nonbelievers claim him equally with believers. Orthodox and Protestant spirits hail him as their own, and point to his rather virulent anti- Romanism. Guardini observes that Dostoievski hardly knew Rome, and finds that Dostoievsky's themes expose the profound depths of the Roman faith. William Hamilton writes of Dostoievski’s hesitant faith as an image of our own—the faith of Ivan Karamazov who cannot accept at once both God and his creation. What are we to think? Is Dostoievsky’s faith Christian or is it not? How far can we identify ourselves with it? The question has repercussions upon our relationship to the existentialist and rationalist currents in our modern world.

Part of the problem in understanding Dostoievski is due to the difference of his times from our own, and part of it is due to the qualities of his religious vision. Dostoievski—and Nietzsche and Kierkegaard— wrote in and for a complacent nineteenth century. Their protest against scientism and hypocrisy was urgent, passionate—and unavailing. They knew what underrode the surface of that smug age, they knew what could erupt: screaming voices, marching boots, crunching tanks, and bombs, and wire fences.