Ippolit Terentyev in Dostoevsky’s novel “The Idiot” is the son of Marfa Terentyeva, the “girlfriend” of the alcoholic General Ivolgin. His father died. Hippolyte is only eighteen years old, but he suffers from severe consumption, doctors tell him that his end is near. But he is not in the hospital, but at home (which was a common practice of that time), and only occasionally goes out and visits his friends.
Like Ganya, Ippolit has not yet found himself, but he stubbornly dreams of being “noticed.” In this respect, he is also a typical representative of Russian youth of that time. Hippolytus despises common sense, he is passionate about various theories; sentimentalism, with its cult of human feelings, is alien to him. He is friends with the insignificant Antip Burdovsky. Radomsky, who serves as a “reasoner” in the novel, ridicules this immature young man, which evokes a feeling of protest in Hippolyte. However, people look down on him.
Although Ippolit Terentyev in Dostoevsky’s novel “The Idiot” is a representative of “modern” Russia, his character is still somewhat different from Ganya and others like him. He is not characterized by selfish calculation, he does not strive to rise above others. When he accidentally meets a poor doctor and his wife who have come from the village to St. Petersburg to look for work in a government agency, he understands their difficult circumstances and sincerely offers his help. When they want to thank him, he feels joy. The desire for love is hidden in Hippolytus's soul. In theory he protests against helping the weak, he tries his best to follow this principle and avoid "human" feelings, but in reality he is unable to disdain specific good deeds. When others are not looking at him, his soul is good. Elizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina sees in him a naive and somewhat “twisted” person, so she is cold with Ganya, and she welcomes Ippolit much warmer. He is not at all such a “realist” as Ganya, for whom only the “stomach” constitutes the common basis for the entire society. In some respects, young Hippolytus is a shadow of the “Good Samaritan.”
Knowing of his imminent death, Hippolytus writes the long “My Necessary Explanation.” Its main provisions will then be developed into a whole theory by Kirillov from “Demons”. Their essence is that a person tries, with the help of his will, to overcome all-consuming death. If death must happen anyway, then it is better to commit suicide, and not wait for it in the face of “dark” nature; it is better if you set a limit for yourself. These arguments are seen to be influenced by the philosophy of Feuerbach and Schopenhauer.
Ippolit reads out his “Necessary Explanation” at the “full gathering” of the novel’s heroes at Lebedev’s dacha. Myshkin, Radomsky, and Rogozhin are there. After finishing this reading, he planned a spectacular ending - suicide.
This chapter is full of deep feelings, suffering and sarcasm. But it “draws us in” not because it affects our mind with Hippolytus’s “head” reasoning about overcoming death. No, in this confession of a young man who can barely stand on his feet due to illness, we are concerned primarily with his sincere feelings. This is a desperate desire to live, envy of those living, despair, resentment at fate, anger directed towards someone unknown, suffering from the fact that you are deprived of a place at this celebration of life, horror, desire for compassion, naivety, contempt... Ippolit decided to leave life, but he desperately calls out to the living.
In this most important scene, Dostoevsky mocks Ippolit. After he finishes reading, he immediately takes a pistol out of his pocket and pulls the trigger. But he forgot to put in the primer, and the gun misfires. Seeing the pistol, those present run up to Hippolytus, but when the reason for the failure becomes clear, they begin to laugh at him. Hippolyte, who seemed to believe for a moment in his death, understands that now his heartfelt speech looks extremely stupid. He cries like a child, grabs those present by the hands, tries to justify himself: they say, I wanted to do everything for real, but only my memory let me down. And the tragedy turns into a pathetic farce.
But Dostoevsky, having made Ippolit Terentyev a laughing stock in the novel “The Idiot,” does not leave him in this capacity. He will once again listen to the secret desire of this character. If the “healthy” inhabitants of this world knew this desire, they would be truly amazed.
On the day when Ippolit feels approaching death from consumption, he comes to Myshkin and tells him with feeling: “I’m going there, and this time, it seems, seriously. Kaput! I’m not out for compassion, believe me... I went to bed today, at ten o’clock, so as not to get up at all until then, but I changed my mind and got up again to go to you... so it’s necessary.”
Ippolit's speeches are quite frightening, but he wants to tell Myshkin the following. He asks Myshkin to touch his body with his hand and heal him. In other words, someone on the verge of death asks Christ to touch him and heal him. He is like a New Testament man suffering recovery.
Soviet researcher D. L. Sorkina, in her article devoted to the prototypes of Myshkin’s image, said that the roots of “The Idiot” should be sought in Renan’s book “The Life of Jesus.” Indeed, in Myshkin one can see Christ stripped of his greatness. And throughout the novel one can see the “story of Christ” taking place in Russia at that time. In the sketches for The Idiot, Myshkin is actually called “Prince Christ.”
As it becomes clear from the at times respectful attitude of the jester Lebedev towards Myshkin, Myshkin makes a “Christ-like” impression on the people around him, although Myshkin himself only feels that he is a person different from the inhabitants of this world. The heroes of the novel do not seem to think so, but the image of Christ still hovers in the air. In this sense, Ippolit, heading to meet Myshkin, corresponds to the general atmosphere of the novel. Ippolit expects a miraculous healing from Myshkin, but one can say that he is counting on deliverance from death. This salvation is not an abstract theological concept, it is a completely concrete and bodily feeling, it is a calculation of bodily warmth that will save him from death. When Hippolytus says that he will lie “until that very time,” this is not a literary metaphor, but an expectation of resurrection.
As I have said many times, salvation from physical death permeates Dostoevsky’s entire life. Each time after an epileptic seizure he was resurrected, but the fear of death haunted him. Thus, death and resurrection were not empty concepts for Dostoevsky. In this respect, he had a "materialistic" experience of death and resurrection. And Myshkin is also characterized in the novel as a “materialist.” As already noted, while writing The Idiot, Dostoevsky suffered from frequent seizures. He constantly felt the horror of death and the desire to be resurrected. In a letter to his niece Sonya (dated April 10, 1868), he wrote: “Dear Sonya, you do not believe in the continuation of life... Let us be rewarded with better worlds and resurrection, and not death in lower worlds!” Dostoevsky exhorted her to cast aside disbelief in eternal life and believe in a better world in which there is resurrection, a world in which there is no death.
The episode when Myshkin is visited by Hippolytus, whom the doctors give only three weeks to live, is not only a “recasting” of the New Testament, but also the result of the writer’s own experience - the experience of death and resurrection.
How does the “Christ-like” prince respond to Hippolytus’ appeal to him? He doesn't seem to notice him. The answer from Myshkin and Dostoevsky seems to be that death cannot be avoided. That’s why Ippolit says to him ironically: “Well, that’s enough. They regretted it, therefore, and enough for the sake of social politeness.”
Another time, when Ippolit approaches Myshkin with the same secret desire, he quietly replies: “Pass us and forgive us our happiness! - the prince said in a quiet voice. Hippolyte says: “Ha ha ha! That's what I thought!<...>Eloquent people!
In other words, the “wonderful man” Myshkin shows his powerlessness and turns out to be worthy of his last name. Hippolyte just turns pale and replies that he didn’t expect anything different. He had just expected to be reborn to life, but he was convinced of the inevitability of death. An eighteen-year-old boy realizes that “Christ” has rejected him. This is the tragedy of a “beautiful” but powerless person.
In The Brothers Karamazov, his last novel, a young man also appears who, like Ippolit, suffers from consumption and for whom there is no place at the “celebration of life.” This is the elder brother of Elder Zosima, Markel, who died at the age of seventeen. Markel also suffers from a premonition of death, but he managed to overcome his suffering and fears, but not with the help of rationality, but with the help of faith. He feels that he, standing on the threshold of death, is present at the celebration of life, which is part of the world created by God. He manages to transform his failed fate and fear of death into gratitude for life, praise for it. For Dostoevsky, were not Ippolit and Markel the result of similar work of the mind? Both young men strive to overcome the fear of death, they share the despair and joy that fill their lives.
1.3. The revolt of Hippolytus.
The rebellion of Ippolit Terentyev, which found its expression in his confession and intention to kill himself, is polemically directed against the ideas of Prince Myshkin and Dostoevsky himself. According to Myshkin, compassion, which is the main and perhaps the only “law of existence” of all humanity and “single goodness” can lead to the moral revival of people and, in the future, to social harmony.
Hippolytus has his own view on this: “individual good” and even the organization of “public alms” do not solve the issue of personal freedom.
Let us consider the motives that led Hippolytus to the “rebellion,” the highest manifestation of which was supposed to be suicide. In our opinion, there are four of them.
The first motive, it is only outlined in “The Idiot”, and will continue in “Demons”, is rebellion for the sake of happiness. Hippolytus says that he would like to live for the happiness of all people and for the “proclamation of the truth”, that only a quarter of an hour would be enough for him to speak and convince everyone. He does not deny “individual good,” but if for Myshkin it is a means of organizing, changing and reviving society, then for Ippolit this measure does not solve the main issue - about the freedom and well-being of mankind. He blames people for their poverty: if they put up with this situation, then they themselves are to blame, they were defeated by “blind nature.” He is firmly convinced that not everyone is capable of rebellion. This is the destiny of only strong people.
This gives rise to the second motive for rebellion and suicide as its manifestation - to declare one’s will to protest. Only selected, strong individuals are capable of such an expression of will. Having come to the idea that it is he, Ippolit Terentyev, who can do this, he “forgets” the original goal (the happiness of people and his own) and sees the acquisition of personal freedom in the very expression of will. Will and self-will become both a means and a goal. “Oh, rest assured that Columbus was happy not when he discovered America, but when he discovered it... The point is in life, in one life - in its discovery, continuous and eternal, and not in the discovery at all!” (VIII; 327). For Hippolyte, the results that his actions can lead to are no longer important; the process of action and protest itself is important to him; it is important to prove that he can, that he has the will to do it.
Since the means (expression of will) also becomes the goal, it no longer matters what to do or in what to show will. But Hippolytus is limited in time (the doctors “gave” him a few weeks) and he decides that: “suicide is the only thing that I can still manage to start and finish according to my own will” (VIII; 344).
The third motive for rebellion is disgust at the very idea of gaining freedom through expression of will, which takes on ugly forms. In a nightmare, life and all the surrounding nature appear to Hippolytus in the form of a disgusting insect, from which it is difficult to hide. Everything around is pure “mutual devouring.” Hippolyte concludes: if life is so disgusting, then life is not worth living. This is not only a rebellion, but also a surrender to life. These beliefs of Hippolyte become even more solid after he saw Hans Holbein’s painting “Christ in the Tomb” in Rogozhin’s house. “When you look at this corpse of an exhausted man, one special and curious question arises: if such a corpse (and it certainly should have been exactly like that) was seen by all his disciples, his main future apostles, saw the women who walked behind him and stood at the cross, everyone who believed in him and adored him, then how could they believe, looking at such a corpse, that this martyr would rise again?.. When looking at this picture, nature seems to be in the form of some huge, inexorable, dumb beast... ”, which swallowed “dumbly and insensitively a great and priceless creature, which alone was worth all of nature and all its laws” (VIII, 339).
This means that there are laws of nature that are stronger than God, who allows such mockery of his best creatures - people.
Hippolytus asks the question: how to become stronger than these laws, how to overcome the fear of them and of their highest manifestation - death? And he comes to the idea that suicide is the very means that can overcome the fear of death and thereby get out of the power of blind nature and circumstances. The idea of suicide, according to Dostoevsky, is a logical consequence of atheism - the denial of God and immortality. The Bible repeatedly says that “the beginning of wisdom, morality and obedience to the law is the fear of God. We are talking here not about the simple emotion of fear, but about the incommensurability of two such quantities as God and man, and also about the fact that the latter is obliged to recognize the unconditional authority of God and His right to undivided power over himself.” And this is not at all about the fear of afterlife, hellish torment.
Hippolytus does not take into account the most important and fundamental idea of Christianity - the body is only a vessel for the immortal soul, the basis and purpose of human existence on earth - love and faith. “The covenant that Christ left to people is a covenant of selfless love. There is neither painful humiliation nor exaltation in it: “A new commandment I give to you, love one another, as I have loved you” (John XIII, 34).” But in Hippolyte’s heart there is no faith, no love, and the only hope is in the revolver. That is why he suffers and suffers. But suffering and torment should lead a person to repentance and humility. In the case of Hippolytus, his confession-self-execution is not repentance because Hippolytus still remains closed in his own pride (arrogance). He is not able to ask for forgiveness, and, therefore, cannot forgive others, cannot sincerely repent.
Hippolyte's rebellion and his capitulation to life are interpreted by him as something even more necessary, when the very idea of gaining freedom through a declaration of will in practice takes on ugly forms in Rogozhin's actions.
“One of the functions of the image of Rogozhin in the novel is precisely to be a “double” of Ippolit in bringing his idea of expression of will to its logical conclusion. When Ippolit begins reading his confession, Rogozhin is the only one who understands its main idea from the very beginning: “There’s a lot to talk about,” said Rogozhin, who had been silent all the time. Ippolit looked at him, and when their eyes met, Rogozhin grinned bitterly and biliously and slowly said: “This is not how this item should be handled, guy, not like that...” (VIII; 320).
Rogozhin and Ippolit are brought together by the power of protest, manifested in the desire to express their will.” The difference between them is, in our opinion, that one declares it in the act of suicide, and the other - murder. Rogozhin for Ippolit is also a product of an ugly and terrible reality, this is precisely why he is unpleasant to him, which aggravates the thought of suicide. “This special incident, which I described in such detail,” says Ippolit about Rogozhin’s visit to him during delirium, “was the reason that I completely “decided”... It is impossible to remain in a life that takes such strange forms that offend me. This ghost humiliated me” (VIII; 341). However, this motive of suicide as an act of “rebellion” is not the main one.
The fourth motive is associated with the idea of fighting against God and this is what, in our opinion, becomes the main one. It is closely related to the above motives, prepared by them and follows from thoughts about the existence of God and immortality. It was here that Dostoevsky’s thoughts about logical suicide had an impact. If there is no God and immortality, then the path to suicide (and murder, and other crimes) is open, this is the writer’s position. The thought of God is needed as a moral ideal. He is gone - and we are witnessing the triumph of the principle “after me, even a flood,” taken by Hippolytus as an epigraph for his confession.
According to Dostoevsky, this principle can only be opposed by faith - a moral ideal, and faith without evidence, without reasoning. But the rebel Hippolytus opposes this, he does not want to blindly believe, he wants to understand everything logically.
Hippolytus rebels against the need to humble himself before the circumstances of life only because it is all in the hands of God and everything will pay off in the next world. “Is it really not possible to simply eat me, without demanding from me praise for what ate me?”, “Why was my humility needed?” - the hero is indignant (VIII; 343-344). Moreover, the main thing that deprives a person of freedom, according to Hippolytus, and makes him a toy in the hands of blind nature, is death, which will come sooner or later, but it is unknown when it will be. A person must obediently wait for her, without freely disposing of the duration of his life. For Hippolytus, this is unbearable: “... who, in the name of what right, in the name of what motivation would want to challenge me now for my right to these two or three weeks of my term?” (VIII; 342). Hippolytus wants to decide for himself how long to live and when to die.
Dostoevsky believes that these claims of Ippolit logically follow from his disbelief in the immortality of the soul. The young man asks the question: how to become stronger than the laws of nature, how to overcome the fear of them and of their highest manifestation - death? And Hippolyte comes to the idea that suicide is the very means that can overcome the fear of death and thereby get out of the power of blind nature and circumstances. The idea of suicide, according to Dostoevsky, is a logical consequence of atheism - the denial of immortality, illness of the soul.
It is very important to note the place in Hippolytus’s confession where he deliberately draws attention to the fact that his idea of suicide, his “main” conviction, does not depend on his illness. “Let anyone who gets into the hands of my “Explanation” and who has the patience to read it, consider me a madman or even a high school student, or, most likely, sentenced to death... I declare that my reader will be mistaken and that my conviction is complete regardless of my death sentence" (VIII; 327). As you can see, one should not exaggerate the fact of Hippolyte’s illness, as A.P. Skaftymov did, for example: “Hippolyte’s consumption plays the role of a reagent that should serve as a manifestation of the given properties of his spirit... a tragedy of moral deficiency was needed... resentment.”
Thus, in Hippolytus's rebellion, his denial of life is indisputably consistent and compelling.
CHAPTER 2. Transformation of the image of a “funny man”: from a logical suicide to a preacher.
2.1. “The Dream of a Funny Man” and its place in the “Diary”
writer."
The fantastic story “The Dream of a Funny Man” was first published in the “Diary of a Writer” in April 1877 (the early draft dates back to approximately the first half of April, the second to the end of April). It is interesting to note that the hero of this story - a “funny man”, as he characterizes himself already in the first line of the story - had his dream in “last November,” namely November 3, and last November, that is, in November 1876, Another fantastic story was published in the “Diary of a Writer” - “The Meek” (about the untimely death of a young life). Coincidence? But, be that as it may, “The Dream of a Funny Man” develops a philosophical theme and solves the ideological problem of the story “The Meek One.” These two stories include one more - “Bobok” - and our attention is presented to the original cycle of fantastic stories published on the pages of the “Diary of a Writer”.
Note that in 1876, on the pages of the “Diary of a Writer,” a confession of a suicide “out of boredom” entitled “The Verdict” also appeared.
“The Verdict” gives the confession of a suicidal atheist who suffers from the lack of higher meaning in his life. He is ready to give up the happiness of temporary existence, because he is sure that tomorrow “all humanity will turn into nothing, into the former chaos” (XXIII, 146). Life becomes meaningless and unnecessary if it is temporary and everything ends with the disintegration of matter: “... our planet is not eternal and humanity’s term is the same moment as mine” (XXIII, 146). Possible future harmony will not save us from corrosive cosmic pessimism. The “logical suicide” thinks: “And no matter how rationally, joyfully, righteously and holy humanity has settled on earth, destruction is still inevitable,” “all this will also be equal to the same zero tomorrow” (XXIII; 147). For a person who is aware of a spiritually free eternal principle within himself, life that arose according to some omnipotent, dead laws of nature is offensive...
This suicide - a consistent materialist - proceeds from the fact that it is not consciousness that creates the world, but nature that created it and its consciousness. And this is what he cannot forgive nature; what right did she have to create him “conscious”, therefore “suffering”? And in general, wasn’t man created as some kind of blatant test to see if such a creature could live on earth?
And the “suicide out of boredom,” citing quite convincing logical arguments, decides: since he cannot destroy the nature that produced him, he destroys himself alone “solely out of boredom, enduring a tyranny for which there is no one to blame” (XXIII; 148). According to E. Hartmann, “the desire for individual negation of will is just as absurd and aimless, even more absurd than suicide.” He considered the end of the world process necessary and inevitable due to the internal logic of its development, and religious grounds do not play a role here. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, on the contrary, argued that a person is not able to live if he does not have faith in God and in the immortality of the soul.
This was Dostoevsky’s thought at the end of 1876, and six months after the “Verdict” he published the fantastic story “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” and in it he recognized the possibility of a “golden age of humanity” on earth.
As for the genre, Dostoevsky “filled the story with deep philosophical meaning, gave it psychological expressiveness and serious ideological significance. He proved that the story is capable of solving such problems of high genres (poem, tragedy, novel, story) as the problem of moral choice, conscience, truth, the meaning of life, place and destiny of a person.” The story could be anything - any life situation or incident - from a love story to a hero’s dream.
What others see (all others, not some), and, relying on the sum of everything, they see everything that others do not see." Both Pascal and Dostoevsky can be called strategic thinkers who considered the fundamental projects for the development of the world "with God" and “without God,” in the combination of the main signs of greatness and poverty in the dramatic mystery of human existence, and the very methodology of their thinking...
At the Well in Victor Hugo's Miserables; it pierces the heart once, and then the wound remains forever” (13; 382). A very special role in Dostoevsky’s work was played by Hugo’s novel “The Last Day of a Man Condemned to Death” (1828) - one of the first examples of a psychological novel in European literature, the content of which was not external events, but the movement of thought of someone isolated from people, locked in...
Life and gives life “for a single glance.” Akhmatova’s woman acts as the guardian of that lofty and eternal, tragic and painful feeling, whose name is love. Akhmatovsky Petersburg (materials for essay) Petersburg in the literature of the last century existed in two traditions. The first is Pushkin’s city, “beauty and wonder of midnight lands,” proud and beautiful, the city is the fate of Russia, “a window into...
Herbart translated the “statics and dynamics of ideas” into a language accessible to empirical analysis. The transition from speculative constructions, which included the concept of the unconscious psyche (in particular, the philosophy of Schopenhauer), to use in experimental science began in the middle of the 19th century, when the study of the functions of the sense organs and higher nerve centers prompted natural scientists to turn to...
Hippolyte is a young man who will soon leave this world; he suffers from consumption and has completely cut himself off from the world. A young man of only 17 years old thinks like a sophisticated philosopher. He looked a lot at the dirty wall of the opposite house and in this looking reflected on various essential details of existence.
Of course, for Ippolit, as well as for Dostoevsky, the main question is the question of the meaning of existence and the inevitability of human death. The young man does not have a religious consciousness; he questions religion, but does not become despondent. In a strange way, he not only does not lose faith like Rogozhin, who looks at Goldbein’s painting, but even strengthens his own faith.
Young Terentyev does not believe in the Resurrection, he believes in universal reason, in the philosophical Lord, whose goal is general harmony and the creation of the world. Therefore, Hippolytus does not lose faith, because his personal fate, sad and tragic, in fact, does not matter for world harmony. Even, perhaps, his personal suffering is necessary to maintain this harmony, to enable the world mind to continue to comprehend itself.
Ippolit and Rogozhin are two extremes that are incredibly close. Rogozhin destroys another person, Ippolit destroys himself. However, the young man could have destroyed many other people; moreover, he rather defiantly calls his final confession “Aprs moi le deluge” and quite clearly hints at a rather deep understanding of his own situation.
So, Rogozhin appears in this combination of opposites as an example of maximum vitality and activity. Hippolytus, in turn, is a kind of lifelessness, he seems to be outside of this world, looking at Meyer’s wall. At the same time, the characters are quite similar and are in almost identical positions.
In fact, there is nothing special about the rapid death of Hippolytus from consumption. Indeed, through this hero the author expresses a simple thought - if the Resurrection has not happened, then everyone is condemned, regardless of the presence or absence of illness, and if everyone is sentenced in this way, then only a ruthless creator rules the whole world and man cannot escape the nature that dominates him. .
Several interesting essays
- Characters of the play Nedorosl (comedy by Fonvizin)
The work of D. I. Fonvizin “The Minor” showed the positive character traits that every conscientious citizen of the state must have.
- The Battle of Shengraben in the novel War and Peace by Tolstoy
One of the striking episodes in Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy’s novel “War and Peace” was the depiction of the military clash of enemy troops at Shengraben.
- Analysis of the story Sign of Trouble by Bykov
In the center of the events we see an elderly couple who live near the village, where the German occupiers come and occupy their house. At first, Petrok obeys them and does everything they order.
- Analysis of the story Wormhole by Sholokhov
Sholokhov wrote a lot of different stories. And his achievement is the description of the open soul of a simple Cossack. This is where true humanity, beauty, and the tradition of classical literature are revealed.
When my mother was in school, there were 17 people in their class. 8 boys and 9 girls. Mom studied at a rural school. There weren't many classes. The school was a one-story, old building.
Fragment from F. M. Dostoevsky's novel "The Idiot". An excerpt from “Confession” by student Ippolit Terentyev, who was terminally ill with consumption.
“The idea (he continued to read) that it was not worth living for several weeks began to overcome me in a real way, I think, about a month ago, when I still had four weeks to live, but it completely took possession of me only three days ago, when I returned since that evening in Pavlovsk. The first moment of complete, immediate penetration by this thought occurred on the terrace of the prince, at that very moment when I decided to make the last test of life, I wanted to see people and trees (even if I said it myself), I got excited, insisted. on the right of Burdovsky, “my neighbor,” and dreamed that they would all suddenly open their arms and take me into their arms, and ask me for forgiveness for something, and I, in a word, ended up like a mediocre fool. It was in these hours that the “last conviction” flared up in me. I am now surprised how I could live for six whole months without this “conviction”! I positively knew that I had consumption, and I did not deceive myself; the matter is clear. But the more clearly I understood it, the more frantically I wanted to live; I clung to life and wanted to live at all costs. I agree that I could then be angry at the dark and deaf lot that ordered me to be crushed like a fly and, of course, without knowing why; but why didn’t I end with anger alone? Why did I really start living, knowing that I couldn’t start again; tried it, knowing that I had nothing left to try? Meanwhile, I couldn’t even read books and stopped reading: why read, why learn for six months? This thought made me drop the book more than once.
Yes, this Meyer's wall can tell a lot! I recorded a lot on it. There wasn't a spot on that dirty wall that I didn't learn. Damn wall! And yet she is dearer to me than all Pavlov’s trees, that is, she should be dearer than all of them if I didn’t care now.
I remember now with what greedy interest I began to follow their lives then; Such interest has never happened before. I sometimes waited impatiently and scoldingly for Kolya, when I myself became so ill that I could not leave the room. I was so immersed in all the little things, interested in all sorts of rumors, that it seems that I became a gossip. I did not understand, for example, how these people, having so much life, do not know how to become rich (however, I still don’t understand). I knew one poor man, about whom they later told me that he died of hunger, and I remember this drove me crazy: if it were possible to revive this poor man, I think I would have executed him. Sometimes I felt better for whole weeks, and I could go outside; but the street finally began to make me so angry that I deliberately stayed locked up for whole days, although I could go out like everyone else. I could not stand this scurrying, fussing, always preoccupied, gloomy and alarmed people who scurried around me on the sidewalks. Why their eternal sadness, their eternal anxiety and vanity; their eternal, sullen anger (because they are evil, evil, evil)? Who is to blame that they are unhappy and do not know how to live, having sixty years of life ahead of them? Why did Zarnitsyn allow himself to die of hunger, having sixty years ahead of him? And everyone shows his rags, his working hands, gets angry and shouts: “We work like oxen, we work, we are hungry like dogs and poor! Others don’t work or toil, but they are rich!” (Eternal chorus!) Running next to them and fussing from morning to night is some unfortunate morel “of the noble ones,” Ivan Fomich Surikov, - in our house, lives above us, - always with torn elbows, with crumbling buttons, from different people on errands, on someone’s instructions, and from morning to night. Talk to him: “Poor, poor and wretched, his wife died, there was nothing to buy medicine for, and in the winter the child was frozen; the eldest daughter went to support..."; always whining, always crying! Oh, no, no, I had no pity for these fools, neither now nor before - I say this with pride! Why isn't he Rothschild himself? Who is to blame that he doesn’t have millions like Rothschild, that he doesn’t have a mountain of golden imperials and Napoleons, such a mountain, such a high mountain, like at Shrovetide under the booths! If he lives, then everything is in his power! Who is to blame for not understanding this?
Oh, now I don’t care anymore, now I have no time to be angry, but then, then, I repeat, I literally gnawed my pillow at night and tore my blanket out of rage. Oh, how I dreamed then, how I wished, how I deliberately wished that I, eighteen years old, barely dressed, barely covered, would suddenly be thrown out onto the street and left completely alone, without an apartment, without a job, without a piece of bread, without relatives, without a single acquaintance. a person in a huge city, hungry, beaten down (so much the better!), but healthy, and then I would show ... "
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All texts from the collection "Circle of Reading":
Reviews
What a passion dies without fading... An extraordinary face, not at all a “character”, but a living tragedy of departure, doom, comparable to Laocoon’s torment, like the loss of a chance for the most important thing. Without which neither Rothschild nor Surikov can become... And any destiny is attractive, because it is equal to life, to being on our vain land.
With love for the unfortunate boy, I recalled this passage in my memory.
Thank you, Captain.
Olga
Orlyatskaya 03/10/2017 13:58
Introduction 2
Chapter 1. “Suicide with a loophole”: The image of Ippolit Terentyev.
1.1. The image of Hippolytus and his place in the novel 10
1.2. Ippolit Terentyev: “lost soul” 17
1.3. Riot of Hippolytus 23
Chapter 2. Transformation of the image of a “funny man”: from a logical suicide to a preacher.
2.1. “The Dream of a Funny Man” and its place in the “Diary of a Writer” 32
2.2. The image of a “funny man” 35
2.3. Secrets of the “funny man’s” sleep 40
2.4. "Awakening" and rebirth of "funny"
person" 46
Conclusion 49
References 55
INTRODUCTION
The world is in a constant search for truth. After the appearance of Christ as the ideal of man in the flesh, it became clear that the highest, final development of the human personality must reach the point where “man finds, realizes and is convinced that the highest use that a person can make of his personality is to destroy your Self, to give it to everyone completely and wholeheartedly,” says Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. Man “needs, first of all, that, despite all the meaninglessness of world life, there is a general condition of meaningfulness, so that its final, highest and absolute basis is not a blind chance, not cloudy, throwing everything out for a moment, and again absorbing everything in the flow of time, not the darkness of ignorance, but God as the eternal stronghold, eternal life, absolute good and all-encompassing light of reason.”
Christ is love, kindness, beauty and Truth. A person must strive for them, because if a person does not fulfill the “law of striving for the ideal,” then suffering and spiritual confusion await him.
Dostoevsky is, of course, a man of an “intelligent type,” and he is undoubtedly a man struck by universal injustice. He himself repeatedly stated with excruciating pain about the injustice reigning in the world, and it is this feeling that forms the basis of the constant thoughts of his heroes. This feeling gives rise to a protest in the souls of the heroes, reaching the point of “rebellion” against the Creator: Raskolnikov, Ippolit Terentyev, Ivan Karamazov are noted for this. The feeling of injustice and powerlessness in the face of it cripple the consciousness and psyche of the heroes, sometimes turning them into twitchy, grimacing neurasthenics. For a reasonable, thinking person (especially for a Russian intellectual prone to reflection), injustice is always “nonsense, unreasonableness.” Dostoevsky and his heroes, struck by the disasters of the world, are looking for a rational basis for life.
Finding faith is not a one-time act, it is a path, everyone has their own, but always conscious and infinitely sincere. The path of Dostoevsky himself, a man who survived the horror of the death penalty, fell from the pinnacle of intellectual life into the swamp of hard labor, found himself among thieves and murderers, was full of grief and doubt. And in this darkness - His bright image, embodied in the New Testament, the only refuge for those who find themselves, like Dostoevsky, on the verge of life and death with one thought - to survive and keep the soul alive.
Dostoevsky's brilliant insights cannot be counted. He saw the horror of life, but also that there was a way out in God. He never talked about people being abandoned. Despite all their humiliation and insult, there is a way out for them in faith, repentance, humility and forgiveness of each other. Dostoevsky's greatest merit is that he showed amazingly clearly that if there is no God, then there is no man.
On the one hand, Dostoevsky predicts what will happen in the last times. Life without God is a complete collapse. On the other hand, he describes sin so vividly, depicts it so well, as if drawing the reader into it. He makes vice not without scope and charm. The Russian person’s love for looking into the abyss, which Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky speaks about so inspiredly, turned into a fall into this abyss for the person.
“Camus and Gide called Dostoevsky their teacher because they liked to consider the depths to which a person can fall. Dostoevsky's heroes enter into a dangerous game, posing the question: “Can I or not cross the line that separates man from demons?” Camus transcends this: there is no life, there is no death, there is nothing if there is no God.” Existentialists are all fans of Dostoevsky without God. “Dostoevsky once wrote that “if there is no God, then everything is permitted.” This is the starting point of existentialism (late Latin “existence”). In fact, everything is permitted if God does not exist, and therefore a person is abandoned, he has nothing to rely on either within himself or outside. First of all, he has no excuses. Indeed, if existence precedes essence, then nothing can be explained by reference to the once and for all given human nature. In other words, “there is no determinism”, man is free, man is freedom.
On the other hand, if there is no God, we have no moral values or precepts to justify our actions. Thus, neither behind ourselves nor in front of ourselves - in the bright kingdom of values - we have neither justifications nor apologies. We are alone and we have no excuses. This is what I express in words: man is condemned to be free. Condemned because he did not create himself; and yet free, because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” Thus, existentialism gives each person ownership of his being and places full responsibility for existence on him.
In this regard, two main directions of existentialism have emerged in world philosophical thought - Christian and atheistic - they are united by only one conviction that existence precedes essence. Let us leave outside the scope of the study the problems of interest to existentialist-atheists, and pay attention to the Christian direction, to which the works of Berdyaev, Rozanov, Solovyov, Shestov belong to Russian philosophy.
At the center of Russian religious existentialism is the problem of human freedom. Through the concept of transcending - going beyond - domestic philosophers come to religious transcendence, which, in turn, leads them to the conviction that true freedom is in God, and God himself is going beyond.
It was inevitable for Russian existentialists to turn to the legacy of Dostoevsky. As a philosophical movement, existentialism arose at the beginning of the twentieth century in Russia, Germany, France and a number of other European countries. The main question that philosophers asked was the question of the freedom of human existence - one of the main ones for Dostoevsky. He anticipated a number of ideas of existentialism, including the individual honor and dignity of man, and his freedom - as the most important thing that exists on earth. Spiritual experience, Dostoevsky’s extraordinary ability to penetrate into the innermost of man and nature, knowledge of “what has never happened before” made the writer’s work a truly inexhaustible source that fed Russian philosophical thought of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The work of the existentialists carries within itself a tragic breakdown. If freedom is dearer to a person than anything else in the world, if it is his last “essence,” then it turns out to be a burden that is very difficult to bear. Freedom, leaving a person alone with himself, reveals only chaos in his soul, exposes its darkest and lowest movements, that is, it turns a person into a slave of passions, bringing only painful suffering. Freedom led man to the path of evil. Evil became her test.
But Dostoevsky in his works overcomes this evil “with the power of love that emanated from him, he dispersed all darkness with streams of psychic light, and as in the famous words about “the sun rising over the evil and the good” - he also broke down the partitions of good and evil and again felt nature and the world innocent, even in their most evil."
Freedom opens up space for demonism in a person, but it can also elevate the angelic principle in him. In movements of freedom there is a dialectic of evil, but there is also a dialectic of good in them. Is this not the meaning of the need for suffering through which (often through sin) this dialectic of good comes into motion?
Dostoevsky is interested in and reveals not only sin, depravity, selfishness and the “demonic” element in man in general, but no less deeply reflects the movements of truth and goodness in the human soul, the “angelic” principle in him. All his life Dostoevsky did not deviate from this “Christian naturalism” and faith in the hidden, not obvious, but true “perfection” of human nature. All Dostoevsky’s doubts about man, all the revelations of chaos in him, are neutralized by the writer with the conviction that a great power lurks in man, saving him and the world - the only sorrow is that humanity does not know how to use this power.
A kind of conclusion arises that it was truly not so much God who tormented and tested man, but rather man himself who tormented and tested God - in his reality and in his depth, in his fatal crimes, in his bright deeds and good deeds.
The purpose of this work is an attempt to highlight the cross-cutting themes of the late work of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (themes of freedom, existence, death and immortality of man) and to determine their significance (in the interpretation of Dostoevsky) for the Russian existentialist philosophers Solovyov, Rozanov, Berdyaev, Shestov.
CHAPTER 1. “Suicide with a loophole”: The image of Ippolit Terentyev.
1.1. The image of Hippolytus and his place in the novel.
The idea for the novel “The Idiot” came to Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky in the fall of 1867 and underwent serious changes in the process of working on it. At the beginning, the central character - the “idiot” - was conceived as a morally ugly, evil, repulsive person. But the initial edition did not satisfy Dostoevsky, and from the end of winter 1867 he began to write “another” novel: Dostoevsky decides to bring to life his “favorite” idea - to portray a “quite wonderful person.” Readers were able to see for the first time how he succeeded in the magazine “Russian Messenger” for 1868.
Ippolit Terentyev, who interests us more than all the other characters in the novel, is part of a group of young people, characters in the novel, whom Dostoevsky himself described in one of his letters as “modern positivists from the most extreme youth” (XXI, 2; 120). Among them: “boxer” Keller, Lebedev’s nephew Doktorenko, the imaginary “son of Pavlishchev” Antip Burdovsky and Ippolit Terentyev himself.
Lebedev, expressing the thought of Dostoevsky himself, says about them: “... they are not exactly nihilists... Nihilists are still sometimes knowledgeable people, even scientists, but these have gone further, sir, because first of all they are business-minded, sir. These, in fact, are some consequences of nihilism, but not directly, but by hearsay and indirectly, and not in some article, but directly in practice, sir” (VIII; 213).
According to Dostoevsky, which he expressed more than once in letters and notes, the “nihilistic theories” of the sixties, denying religion, which in the eyes of the writer was the only solid foundation of morality, open up wide scope for various vacillations of thought among young people. Dostoevsky explained the growth of crime and immorality by the development of these very revolutionary “nihilistic theories.”
The parodic images of Keller, Doktorenko, and Burdovsky are contrasted with the image of Ippolit. “Revolt” and Terentyev’s confession reveal what Dostoevsky himself was inclined to recognize as serious and worthy of attention in the ideas of the younger generation.
Hippolytus is by no means a comical figure. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky entrusted him with the mission of an ideological opponent of Prince Myshkin. Besides the prince himself, Ippolit is the only character in the novel who has a complete and integral philosophical and ethical system of views - a system that Dostoevsky himself does not accept and tries to refute, but which he treats with complete seriousness, showing that Ippolit’s views are stage of spiritual development of the individual.
As it turns out, there was a moment in the prince’s life when he experienced the same thing as Ippolit. However, the difference is that for Myshkin, Ippolit’s conclusions became a transitional moment on the path of spiritual development to another, higher (from Dostoevsky’s point of view) stage, while Ippolit himself lingered at the stage of thinking, which only aggravates the tragic issues of life, without giving answers to them (See about this: IX; 279).
L.M. Lotman in his work “Dostoevsky’s Novel and Russian Legend” points out that “Ippolit is the ideological and psychological antipode of Prince Myshkin. The young man understands more clearly than others that the very personality of the prince represents a miracle.” “I will say goodbye to the Man,” says Hippolytus before attempting suicide (VIII, 348). Despair in the face of inevitable death and the lack of moral support to overcome despair forces Ippolit to seek support from Prince Myshkin. The young man trusts the prince, he is convinced of his truthfulness and kindness. In it he seeks compassion, but immediately takes revenge for his weakness. “I don’t need your benefits, I won’t accept anything from anyone!” (VIII, 249).
Hippolytus and the prince are victims of “unreason and chaos,” the causes of which are not only in social life and society, but also in nature itself. Hippolytus is terminally ill and doomed to an early death. He is aware of his strengths and aspirations and cannot come to terms with the meaninglessness that he sees in everything around him. This tragic injustice causes indignation and protest of the young man. Nature appears to him as a dark and meaningless force; in the dream described in the confession, nature appears to Hippolytus in the form of “a terrible animal, some kind of monster, in which lies something fatal” (VIII; 340).
The suffering caused by social conditions is secondary for Hippolytus compared to the suffering that the eternal contradictions of nature cause him. To a young man, completely occupied with the thought of his inevitable and senseless death, the most terrible manifestation of injustice seems to be inequality between healthy and sick people, and not at all between rich and poor. All people in his eyes are divided into the healthy (happy darlings of fate), whom he painfully envies, and the sick (offended and robbed by life), to whom he considers himself. It seems to Hippolytus that if he were healthy, this alone would make his life full and happy. “Oh, how I dreamed then, how I wished, how I deliberately wished that I, eighteen years old, barely dressed... would suddenly be thrown out onto the street and left completely alone, without an apartment, without a job,... without a single person I knew in a huge city, .. but healthy, and then I would show...” (VIII; 327).
The way out of such mental suffering, according to Dostoevsky, can only be given by faith, only by that Christian forgiveness that Myshkin preaches. It is significant that both Hippolytus and the prince are both seriously ill, both rejected by nature. “Both Ippolit and Myshkin in their portrayal of the writer proceed from the same philosophical and ethical premises. But from these identical premises they draw opposite conclusions.”
What Ippolit thought and felt is familiar to Myshkin not from the outside, but from his own experience. What Hippolytus expressed in a heightened, conscious and distinct form “dumbly and silently” worried the prince at one of the past moments of his life. But, unlike Hippolytus, he managed to overcome his suffering, achieve inner clarity and reconciliation, and his faith and Christian ideals helped him in this. The prince urged Hippolyta to turn away from the path of individualistic indignation and protest to the path of meekness and humility. “Pass us and forgive us our happiness!” - the prince answers Hippolytus’ doubts (VIII; 433). Spiritually disconnected from other people and suffering from this separation, Ippolit can, according to Dostoevsky, overcome this separation only by “forgiving” other people for their superiority and humbly accepting the same Christian forgiveness from them.
Two elements are fighting in Hippolytus: the first is pride (arrogance), selfishness, which do not allow him to rise above his grief, become better and live for others. Dostoevsky wrote that “it is by living for others, those around you, pouring out your kindness and the work of your heart on them, that you will become an example” (XXX, 18). And the second element is the authentic, personal “I”, yearning for love, friendship and forgiveness. “And I dreamed that they would all suddenly open their arms and take me into their arms and ask me for forgiveness for something, and I would ask them for forgiveness” (VIII, 249). Hippolytus is tormented by his ordinariness. He has a “heart”, but no spiritual strength. “Lebedev realized that Ippolit’s despair and dying curses cover a tender, loving soul, seeking and not finding reciprocity. In penetrating into the “secret secrets” of a person, he alone was equal to Prince Myshkin.”
Hippolytus painfully seeks the support and understanding of other people. The stronger his physical and moral suffering, the more he needs people who can understand and treat him humanely.
But he does not dare admit to himself that he is tormented by his own loneliness, that the main reason for his suffering is not illness, but the lack of human attitude and attention from others around him. He looks at the suffering caused to him by loneliness as a shameful weakness, humiliating him, unworthy of him as a thinking person. Constantly looking for support from other people, Hippolyte hides this noble aspiration under the false mask of self-indulgent pride and a feigned cynical attitude towards himself. Dostoevsky presented this “pride” as the main source of Ippolit’s suffering. As soon as he humbles himself, renounces his “pride,” courageously admits to himself that he needs fraternal communication with other people, Dostoevsky is sure, and his suffering will end by itself. “The true life of an individual is accessible only to dialogical penetration into it, to which it itself responsively and freely reveals itself.”
The fact that Dostoevsky attached great importance to the image of Ippolit is evidenced by the writer’s initial plans. In Dostoevsky’s archival notes we can read: “Ippolit is the main axis of the entire novel. He even takes possession of the prince, but, in essence, does not notice that he will never be able to take possession of him” (IX; 277). In the original version of the novel, Ippolit and Prince Myshkin were supposed to resolve the same issues related to the fate of Russia in the future. Moreover, Dostoevsky portrayed Ippolit as either strong or weak, sometimes rebellious, sometimes willingly submitting. Some complex of contradictions remained in Hippolyte by the will of the writer and in the final version of the novel.
1.2. Ippolit Terentyev: “lost soul.”
The loss of faith in eternal life, according to Dostoevsky, is fraught with the justification of not only any immoral acts, but also the denial of the very meaning of existence. This idea was reflected in Dostoevsky’s articles and in his “Diary of a Writer” (1876). “It seemed to me,” writes Dostoevsky, “that I had clearly expressed the formula for logical suicide, that I had found it. Belief in immortality does not exist for him, he explains this at the very beginning. Little by little, with his thoughts about his own aimlessness and hatred for the voicelessness of the surrounding inertia, he reaches the inevitable conviction of the complete absurdity of human existence on Earth” (XXIV, 46-47). Dostoevsky understands the logical suicide and respects his quest and torment in him. “My suicide is precisely a passionate exponent of his idea, that is, the need for suicide, and not an indifferent and not a cast-iron person. He really suffers and suffers... It is too obvious to him that he cannot live and he knows too much that he is right that it is impossible to refute him” (XXV, 28).
Almost any character of Dostoevsky (Ippolit especially), as a rule, acts at the very limit of the human capabilities inherent in him. He is almost always in the grip of passion. This is a hero with a restless soul. We see Hippolytus in the vicissitudes of the most acute internal and external struggle. For him, there is always, at every moment, too much at stake. That is why “Dostoevsky’s man,” according to the observation of M.M. Bakhtin, often acts and speaks “with caution,” “with a loophole” (that is, he reserves the possibility of a “reverse move”). The failed suicide of Hippolytus is nothing more than a “suicide with a loophole.”
Myshkin correctly defined this idea. Answering Aglaya, who suggests that Ippolit wanted to shoot himself only so that she would later read his confession, he says: “That is, this is... how can I tell you? It's very difficult to say. Only he probably wanted everyone to surround him and tell him that they loved and respected him very much, and everyone would really beg him to stay alive. It may very well be that he had you in mind more than anyone else, because at such a moment he mentioned you... although, perhaps, he himself did not know that he had you in mind” (VIII, 354).
This is by no means a crude calculation, it is precisely the “loophole” that Hippolytus’s will leaves and which confuses his attitude towards himself to the same extent as his attitude towards others. And the prince correctly guesses this: “...besides, maybe he didn’t think at all, but only wanted this...he wanted to meet people for the last time, to earn their respect and love.” (VIII, 354). Therefore, Hippolytus’s voice has some internal incompleteness. It is not for nothing that his last words (as the outcome should be according to his plan) actually turned out to be not quite his last, since the suicide failed.
Dostoevsky introduces us to a new type of double: at the same time a torturer and a martyr. Here is how V.R. Pereverzev writes about him: “The type of philosophizing double, the double who raised the question of the relationship between the world and man, first appears to us in the person of one of the minor characters in the novel “The Idiot” by Ippolit Terentyev.” Self-love and self-hatred, pride and self-spitting, torment and self-torture are only a new expression of this basic dichotomy.
A person is convinced that reality does not correspond to his ideals, which means he can demand a different life, which means he has the right to blame the world and rage against it. In contradiction with the hidden attitude towards recognition by others, which determines the entire tone and style of the whole, are Hippolytus’s open declarations, which determine the content of his confession: independence from the court of others, indifference to it and the manifestation of self-will. “I don’t want to leave,” he says, “without leaving a word in response, a free word, not a forced one, not for justification, - oh, no! I have no one to ask for forgiveness and nothing for, but this is because I want it myself” (VIII, 342). The entire image of Hippolytus is built on this contradiction; it determines his every thought, every word.
Intertwined with this “personal” word of Hippolytus about himself is the ideological word, which is addressed to the universe, addressed with protest: the expression of this protest should be suicide. His thought about the world develops in the forms of dialogue with a higher power that once offended him.
Having reached the “limit of shame” in the consciousness of his own “insignificance and powerlessness,” Hippolytus decided not to recognize anyone’s power over himself - and to do this, take his own life. “Suicide is the only thing that I can still manage to start and finish according to my own will” (VIII, 344).
For Hippolyte, suicide is a protest against the meaninglessness of nature, a protest of a “pathetic creature” against the omnipotent blind, hostile force, which for Hippolyte is the world around him, with which Dostoevsky’s hero is in the process of colliding. He decides to shoot himself at the first rays of the sun in order to express his main thought: “I will die directly looking at the source of strength and life, and I will not want this life” (VIII, 344). His suicide should be an act of supreme self-will, for by his death Hippolytus wants to exalt himself. He does not accept Myshkin's philosophy because of its basic principle - the recognition of the decisive role of humility. “They say that humility is a terrible force” (VIII, 347) - he noted in confession, and he does not agree with this. Rebellion against the “nonsense of nature” is the opposite of recognizing humility as a “terrible force.” According to Dostoevsky, only religion, only that humility and Christian forgiveness that Prince Myshkin preaches, can provide a way out of the torment and suffering that Ippolit experiences. V.N. Zakharov presented his thoughts on this topic: “In Dostoevsky’s library there was a translation of Thomas a à Kempis’ book “On the Imitation of Christ,” published with a preface and notes by the translator K. Pobedonostsev in 1869. The title of the book reveals one of the cornerstone commandments of Christianity: everyone can repeat the redemptive path of Christ, everyone can change their image - be transformed, everyone can have their divine and human essence revealed to them. And in Dostoevsky, “dead souls” are resurrected, but the “immortal” soul, which has forgotten God, dies. In his works, a “great sinner” may be resurrected, but a “true underground” would not be corrected, whose confession is not resolved by “rebirth of convictions” - repentance and atonement.”
Both Ippolit and Myshkin are seriously ill, both equally rejected by nature, but unlike Ippolit, the prince did not freeze at the stage of that tragic fragmentation and discord with himself on which the young man stands. Hippolytus failed to overcome his suffering and failed to achieve inner clarity. The prince was given clarity and harmony with himself by his religious, Christian ideals.
1.3. The revolt of Hippolytus.
The rebellion of Ippolit Terentyev, which found its expression in his confession and intention to kill himself, is polemically directed against the ideas of Prince Myshkin and Dostoevsky himself. According to Myshkin, compassion, which is the main and perhaps the only “law of existence” of all humanity and “single goodness” can lead to the moral revival of people and, in the future, to social harmony.
Hippolytus has his own view on this: “individual good” and even the organization of “public alms” do not solve the issue of personal freedom.
Let us consider the motives that led Hippolytus to the “rebellion,” the highest manifestation of which was supposed to be suicide. In our opinion, there are four of them.
The first motive, it is only outlined in “The Idiot”, and will continue in “Demons”, is rebellion for the sake of happiness. Hippolytus says that he would like to live for the happiness of all people and for the “proclamation of the truth”, that only a quarter of an hour would be enough for him to speak and convince everyone. He does not deny “individual good,” but if for Myshkin it is a means of organizing, changing and reviving society, then for Ippolit this measure does not solve the main issue - about the freedom and well-being of mankind. He blames people for their poverty: if they put up with this situation, then they themselves are to blame, they were defeated by “blind nature.” He is firmly convinced that not everyone is capable of rebellion. This is the destiny of only strong people.
This gives rise to the second motive for rebellion and suicide as its manifestation - to declare one’s will to protest. Only selected, strong individuals are capable of such an expression of will. Having come to the idea that it is he, Ippolit Terentyev, who can do this, he “forgets” the original goal (the happiness of people and his own) and sees the acquisition of personal freedom in the very expression of will. Will and self-will become both a means and a goal. “Oh, rest assured that Columbus was happy not when he discovered America, but when he discovered it... The point is in life, in one life - in its discovery, continuous and eternal, and not in the discovery at all!” (VIII; 327). For Hippolyte, the results that his actions can lead to are no longer important; the process of action and protest itself is important to him; it is important to prove that he can, that he has the will to do it.
Since the means (expression of will) also becomes the goal, it no longer matters what to do or in what to show will. But Hippolytus is limited in time (the doctors “gave” him a few weeks) and he decides that: “suicide is the only thing that I can still manage to start and finish according to my own will” (VIII; 344).
The third motive for rebellion is disgust at the very idea of gaining freedom through expression of will, which takes on ugly forms. In a nightmare, life and all the surrounding nature appear to Hippolytus in the form of a disgusting insect, from which it is difficult to hide. Everything around is pure “mutual devouring.” Hippolyte concludes: if life is so disgusting, then life is not worth living. This is not only a rebellion, but also a surrender to life. These beliefs of Hippolyte become even more solid after he saw Hans Holbein’s painting “Christ in the Tomb” in Rogozhin’s house. “When you look at this corpse of an exhausted man, one special and curious question arises: if such a corpse (and it certainly should have been exactly like that) was seen by all his disciples, his main future apostles, saw the women who walked behind him and stood at the cross, everyone who believed in him and adored him, then how could they believe, looking at such a corpse, that this martyr would rise again?.. When looking at this picture, nature seems to be in the form of some huge, inexorable, dumb beast... ”, which swallowed “dumbly and insensitively a great and priceless creature, which alone was worth all of nature and all its laws” (VIII, 339).
This means that there are laws of nature that are stronger than God, who allows such mockery of his best creatures - people.
Hippolytus asks the question: how to become stronger than these laws, how to overcome the fear of them and of their highest manifestation - death? And he comes to the idea that suicide is the very means that can overcome the fear of death and thereby get out of the power of blind nature and circumstances. The idea of suicide, according to Dostoevsky, is a logical consequence of atheism - the denial of God and immortality. The Bible repeatedly says that “the beginning of wisdom, morality and obedience to the law is the fear of God. We are talking here not about the simple emotion of fear, but about the incommensurability of two such quantities as God and man, and also about the fact that the latter is obliged to recognize the unconditional authority of God and His right to undivided power over himself.” And this is not at all about the fear of afterlife, hellish torment.
Hippolytus does not take into account the most important and fundamental idea of Christianity - the body is only a vessel for the immortal soul, the basis and purpose of human existence on earth - love and faith. “The covenant that Christ left to people is a covenant of selfless love. There is neither painful humiliation nor exaltation in it: “A new commandment I give to you, love one another, as I have loved you” (John XIII, 34).” But in Hippolyte’s heart there is no faith, no love, and the only hope is in the revolver. That is why he suffers and suffers. But suffering and torment should lead a person to repentance and humility. In the case of Hippolytus, his confession-self-execution is not repentance because Hippolytus still remains closed in his own pride (arrogance). He is not able to ask for forgiveness, and, therefore, cannot forgive others, cannot sincerely repent.
Hippolyte's rebellion and his capitulation to life are interpreted by him as something even more necessary, when the very idea of gaining freedom through a declaration of will in practice takes on ugly forms in Rogozhin's actions.
“One of the functions of the image of Rogozhin in the novel is precisely to be a “double” of Ippolit in bringing his idea of expression of will to its logical conclusion. When Ippolit begins reading his confession, Rogozhin is the only one who understands its main idea from the very beginning: “There’s a lot to talk about,” said Rogozhin, who had been silent all the time. Ippolit looked at him, and when their eyes met, Rogozhin grinned bitterly and biliously and slowly said: “This is not how this item should be handled, guy, not like that...” (VIII; 320).
Rogozhin and Ippolit are brought together by the power of protest, manifested in the desire to express their will.” The difference between them is, in our opinion, that one declares it in the act of suicide, and the other - murder. Rogozhin for Ippolit is also a product of an ugly and terrible reality, this is precisely why he is unpleasant to him, which aggravates the thought of suicide. “This special incident, which I described in such detail,” says Ippolit about Rogozhin’s visit to him during delirium, “was the reason that I completely “decided”... It is impossible to remain in a life that takes such strange forms that offend me. This ghost humiliated me” (VIII; 341). However, this motive of suicide as an act of “rebellion” is not the main one.
The fourth motive is associated with the idea of fighting against God and this is what, in our opinion, becomes the main one. It is closely related to the above motives, prepared by them and follows from thoughts about the existence of God and immortality. It was here that Dostoevsky’s thoughts about logical suicide had an impact. If there is no God and immortality, then the path to suicide (and murder, and other crimes) is open, this is the writer’s position. The thought of God is needed as a moral ideal. He is gone - and we are witnessing the triumph of the principle “after me, even a flood,” taken by Hippolytus as an epigraph for his confession.
According to Dostoevsky, this principle can only be opposed by faith - a moral ideal, and faith without evidence, without reasoning. But the rebel Hippolytus opposes this, he does not want to blindly believe, he wants to understand everything logically.
Hippolytus rebels against the need to humble himself before the circumstances of life only because it is all in the hands of God and everything will pay off in the next world. “Is it really not possible to simply eat me, without demanding from me praise for what ate me?”, “Why was my humility needed?” - the hero is indignant (VIII; 343-344). Moreover, the main thing that deprives a person of freedom, according to Hippolytus, and makes him a toy in the hands of blind nature, is death, which will come sooner or later, but it is unknown when it will be. A person must obediently wait for her, without freely disposing of the duration of his life. For Hippolytus, this is unbearable: “... who, in the name of what right, in the name of what motivation would want to challenge me now for my right to these two or three weeks of my term?” (VIII; 342). Hippolytus wants to decide for himself how long to live and when to die.
Dostoevsky believes that these claims of Ippolit logically follow from his disbelief in the immortality of the soul. The young man asks the question: how to become stronger than the laws of nature, how to overcome the fear of them and of their highest manifestation - death? And Hippolyte comes to the idea that suicide is the very means that can overcome the fear of death and thereby get out of the power of blind nature and circumstances. The idea of suicide, according to Dostoevsky, is a logical consequence of atheism - the denial of immortality, illness of the soul.
It is very important to note the place in Hippolytus’s confession where he deliberately draws attention to the fact that his idea of suicide, his “main” conviction, does not depend on his illness. “Let anyone who gets into the hands of my “Explanation” and who has the patience to read it, consider me a madman or even a high school student, or, most likely, sentenced to death... I declare that my reader will be mistaken and that my conviction is complete regardless of my death sentence" (VIII; 327). As you can see, one should not exaggerate the fact of Hippolyte’s illness, as A.P. Skaftymov did, for example: “Hippolyte’s consumption plays the role of a reagent that should serve as a manifestation of the given properties of his spirit... a tragedy of moral deficiency was needed... resentment.”
Thus, in Hippolytus's rebellion, his denial of life is indisputably consistent and compelling.
CHAPTER 2. Transformation of the image of a “funny man”: from a logical suicide to a preacher.
2.1. “The Dream of a Funny Man” and its place in the “Diary”
writer."
The fantastic story “The Dream of a Funny Man” was first published in the “Diary of a Writer” in April 1877 (the early draft dates back to approximately the first half of April, the second to the end of April). It is interesting to note that the hero of this story - a “funny man”, as he characterizes himself already in the first line of the story - had his dream in “last November,” namely November 3, and last November, that is, in November 1876, Another fantastic story was published in the “Diary of a Writer” - “The Meek” (about the untimely death of a young life). Coincidence? But, be that as it may, “The Dream of a Funny Man” develops a philosophical theme and solves the ideological problem of the story “The Meek One.” These two stories include one more - “Bobok” - and our attention is presented to the original cycle of fantastic stories published on the pages of the “Diary of a Writer”.
Note that in 1876, on the pages of the “Diary of a Writer,” a confession of a suicide “out of boredom” entitled “The Verdict” also appeared.
“The Verdict” gives the confession of a suicidal atheist who suffers from the lack of higher meaning in his life. He is ready to give up the happiness of temporary existence, because he is sure that tomorrow “all humanity will turn into nothing, into the former chaos” (XXIII, 146). Life becomes meaningless and unnecessary if it is temporary and everything ends with the disintegration of matter: “... our planet is not eternal and humanity’s term is the same moment as mine” (XXIII, 146). Possible future harmony will not save us from corrosive cosmic pessimism. The “logical suicide” thinks: “And no matter how rationally, joyfully, righteously and holy humanity has settled on earth, destruction is still inevitable,” “all this will also be equal to the same zero tomorrow” (XXIII; 147). For a person who is aware of a spiritually free eternal principle within himself, life that arose according to some omnipotent, dead laws of nature is offensive...
This suicide - a consistent materialist - proceeds from the fact that it is not consciousness that creates the world, but nature that created it and its consciousness. And this is what he cannot forgive nature; what right did she have to create him “conscious”, therefore “suffering”? And in general, wasn’t man created as some kind of blatant test to see if such a creature could live on earth?
And the “suicide out of boredom,” citing quite convincing logical arguments, decides: since he cannot destroy the nature that produced him, he destroys himself alone “solely out of boredom, enduring a tyranny for which there is no one to blame” (XXIII; 148). According to E. Hartmann, “the desire for individual negation of will is just as absurd and aimless, even more absurd than suicide.” He considered the end of the world process necessary and inevitable due to the internal logic of its development, and religious grounds do not play a role here. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, on the contrary, argued that a person is not able to live if he does not have faith in God and in the immortality of the soul.
This was Dostoevsky’s thought at the end of 1876, and six months after the “Verdict” he published the fantastic story “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” and in it he recognized the possibility of a “golden age of humanity” on earth.
As for the genre, Dostoevsky “filled the story with deep philosophical meaning, gave it psychological expressiveness and serious ideological significance. He proved that the story is capable of solving such problems of high genres (poem, tragedy, novel, story) as the problem of moral choice, conscience, truth, the meaning of life, place and destiny of a person.” The story could be anything - any life situation or incident - from a love story to a hero’s dream.
2.2. Analysis of the image of a “funny person”.
The “funny man” - the hero of the story we are considering - “decided” to shoot himself, in other words, he decided to commit suicide. A person loses faith in himself in God, he is overcome by melancholy and indifference: “In my soul, longing grew for one circumstance that was already infinitely higher than all of me: it was this one conviction that befell me that everywhere in the world it’s all the same... I I suddenly felt that I wouldn’t care if the world existed or if there was nothing anywhere…” (XXV; 105).
The disease of time is a disease of the spirit and soul: the absence of a “higher idea” of existence. This is also characteristic of the pan-European crisis of traditional religiosity. And from it, from this very “highest idea,” from faith comes the entire highest meaning and significance of life, the very desire to live. But in order to search for meaning and idea, you need to be aware of the need for this search. In a letter to A.N. Maikov, Dostoevsky himself noted (March, 1870): “The main question... is the same one with which I have been tormented consciously and unconsciously all my life - the existence of God” (XXI, 2; 117). In a notebook from 1880-1881, he spoke about his faith, which had gone through great trials (XXVII; 48, 81). The “funny man” does not entertain the thought of such quests.
The ideas of this “great melancholy” seem to be in the air, they live and spread and multiply according to laws incomprehensible to us, they are contagious and know neither boundaries nor classes: the melancholy inherent in a highly educated and developed mind can suddenly be transferred to an illiterate, rude and never cared about anything. These people have one thing in common - the loss of faith in the immortality of the human soul.
Suicide, with disbelief in immortality, becomes an inevitable necessity for such a person. Immortality, promising eternal life, firmly binds a person to the earth, no matter how paradoxical it may sound.
A contradiction would seem to arise: if there is another life besides the earthly one, then why cling to the earthly one? The whole point is that with faith in his immortality, a person comprehends the entire rational purpose of his stay on the sinful earth. Without this conviction in one’s own immortality, a person’s connections with the earth are torn, become thin and fragile. And the loss of higher meaning (in the form of that very unconscious melancholy) undoubtedly leads to suicide - as the only right decision in the current situation.
This unconscious melancholy and indifference of the “funny man” is, in essence, a dead balance of will and consciousness - the person is in a state of true inertia. Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man” only talked about inertia, but in fact he actively denied the world, and for him the end of history comes - the voluntary taking of one’s own life. The “funny man” goes further - he is convinced that life is meaningless and decides to shoot himself.
“The Funny Man” is different from Dostoevsky’s other suicides: Kirillov shot himself to prove that he was God; Kraft committed suicide out of disbelief in Russia; Hippolytus tried to take his own life out of hatred for “blind and arrogant” nature; Svidrigailov could not bear his own abomination; “a funny person” cannot withstand the psychological and moral weight of solipsism.
“I’ll shoot myself,” the hero of the story reflects, “and there will be no peace, at least for me. Not to mention the fact that, perhaps, there really will be nothing for anyone after me, and the whole world, as soon as my consciousness fades away, will fade away immediately, like a ghost, as an attribute of my consciousness alone, and will be abolished, for, maybe this world and all these people – I myself am the only one” (XXV, 108).
“The funny man” could join the pessimistic aphorism of Kierkegaard’s aesthetician: “how empty, insignificant life is! They bury a person, escort the coffin to the grave, throw a handful of earth into it; They go there in a carriage and return in a carriage, console themselves with the fact that they still have a long life ahead. What exactly is 7-10 years? Why not finish it off right away, not everyone stay in the cemetery, casting lots to see who will have the misfortune of being the last and throwing the last handful of earth on the grave of the last deceased?” The inner emptiness of such a philosophy of indifference led the “funny man” to the decision to commit suicide, and at the same time the world. In the November issue of the “Diary of a Writer” for 1876, in “The Unverbal Statement,” Dostoevsky says: “... without faith in one’s soul and in its immortality, human existence is unnatural, unthinkable and unbearable” (XXIV; 46). Having lost faith in God and immortality, a person comes to the inevitable conviction of the complete absurdity of the existence of humanity on earth. In this case, a thinking and feeling person will inevitably think about suicide. “I will not and cannot be happy under the condition of tomorrow’s threat of zero” (XXIV; 46), says the suicidal atheist in “Balanced Statements.” There is something to despair about here, and logical suicide can turn into real suicide - there are many such cases.
The “funny man” did not fulfill his intention. The suicide was prevented by a beggar girl he met on his way home. She called him, asked for help, but the “funny man” drove the girl away and went to his place “on the fifth floor,” in a poor little room with an attic window. He usually spent his evenings and nights in this room, indulging in vague, incoherent and unaccountable thoughts.
He took out a revolver that was in the desk drawer and placed it in front of him. But then the “funny man” started thinking about the girl - why didn’t he respond to her call? But he didn’t help her because he “decided” to shoot himself two hours later, and in this case, neither the feeling of pity nor the feeling of shame after the meanness committed could have any meaning...
But now, sitting in a chair in front of the revolver, he realized that “it doesn’t matter” that he felt sorry for the girl. “I remember that I felt very sorry for her, to the point of some kind of strange pain, and quite incredible in my situation... and I was very irritated, as I had not been for a long time” (XXV; 108).
A moral gap formed in the consciousness of the “funny man”: his ideally constructed concept of indifference cracked at the very moment when, it would seem, it should have triumphed.
2.3. Secrets of the “funny man’s” sleep.
He fell asleep, “which has never... happened before, at the table, in the chairs” (XXV; 108).
It should be noted that for the hero his dream is the same reality as reality, he lives his dream truly and realistically. Not every dream is fantasy. Many of them lie within the realm of the real or probable; there is nothing impossible about them. “The dreamer, even knowing that he is dreaming, believes in the reality of what is happening.” Dostoevsky has dreams that remain dreams and nothing more. The psychological content comes to the fore in them; they have an important compositional meaning, but do not create a “secondary plan”. “In the story “The Dream of a Funny Man,” a dream is introduced “precisely as the possibility of a completely different life, organized according to completely different laws than the usual one (sometimes just like “the world inside out”).” Life seen in a dream defamiliarizes ordinary life, makes us understand and appreciate it in a new way (in the light of a different possibility seen); the dream carries with it a certain philosophical significance. And the person himself becomes different in a dream, reveals other possibilities in himself (both better and worse), he is tested and tested by sleep. Sometimes a dream is directly constructed as a crowning or debunking of a person and life.”
“The Dream of a Funny Man” is a story about the hero’s moral insight through a dream, about his discovery of the truth. The dream itself can be called a truly fantastic element in the story, but it was born from the heart and mind of the hero, is conditioned by real life and is connected with many concepts. Dostoevsky himself, in a letter to Yu.F. Abaza dated June 15, 1880, wrote: “Even if this is a fantastic fairy tale, the fantastic in art has limits and rules. The fantastic must be so in touch with the real that you must almost believe it” (XXV; 399).
The dream began with very real (long-awaited for the hero) events - he shot himself, he was buried. Then he was “taken from the grave by some dark and unknown creature,” and they “found themselves in space” (XXV; 110). By this creature, the “funny man” was lifted up to the very star that he saw in the clearing of the clouds when he returned home in the evening. And this star turned out to be a planet completely similar to our Earth.
Earlier, in the mid-60s, Dostoevsky suggested that the future “paradise” life could be created on some other planet. And now he takes the hero of his work to another planet.
Flying up to her, the “funny man” saw the sun, exactly the same as ours. “Are such repetitions really possible in the universe, is this really a natural law?.. And if this is the land there, then is it really the same land as ours... exactly the same, unfortunate, poor...” (XXV; 111), he exclaimed.
But Dostoevsky was not at all interested in the scientific side of the question of repetitions in the Universe. He was interested in: is it possible to replicate the moral laws, behavior, and psychology characteristic of people on Earth on other inhabited celestial bodies?
The “funny man” ended up on a planet where there was no Fall. “This was an earth not desecrated by the Fall, people who had not sinned lived on it, they lived in the same paradise in which, according to the legends of all mankind, our sinful ancestors lived” (XXV; 111).
From a religious point of view, the solution to the question of the purpose of history, the “golden age” of human happiness is inseparable from the history of the Fall of man.
What happened on this planet? What did the “funny man” see and experience on it?
“Oh, everything was exactly the same as with us, but it seemed that everywhere it shone with some kind of holiday and great, holy and finally achieved triumph” (XXV; 112).
People on the planet did not feel sad, because they had nothing to be sad about. Only love reigned there. These people did not have any melancholy because their material needs were fully satisfied; in their minds there was no antagonism between the “earthly” (transient) and the “heavenly” (eternal). The consciousness of these happy inhabitants of the “golden age” was characterized by direct knowledge of the secrets of existence.
They did not have religion, in our earthly sense, “but they had some kind of urgent, living and continuous unity with the Whole of the universe,” and in death they saw “an even greater expansion of contact with the Whole of the universe.” The essence of their religion was “a kind of love for each other, complete and universal” (XXV; 114).
And suddenly all this disappears, explodes, flies into the “black hole”: the “funny man” who came from the earth, the son of Adam, burdened with original sin, overthrew the “golden age”!.. “Yes, yes, it ended with me corrupting them all! How this could have happened - I don’t know, I don’t remember clearly... I only know that I was the cause of the Fall” (XXV; 115).
Dostoevsky is silent about how this could have happened. He confronts us with a fact, and on behalf of the “ridiculous man” he says: “They learned to lie and fell in love with lies and learned the beauty of lies” (XXV; 115). They came to know shame and elevated it to virtue, they fell in love with sorrow, torture became desirable for them, since truth is achieved only through suffering. Slavery, disunity, isolation appeared: wars began, blood flowed...
“Teachings have appeared calling on everyone to unite again, so that everyone, without ceasing to love himself more than anyone else, at the same time does not interfere with anyone else and thus all live together, as if in a harmonious society” (XXV; 117). This idea turned out to be stillborn and gave birth only to bloody wars, during which the “wise” tried to exterminate the “unwise” who did not understand their ideas.
Painfully experiencing his guilt in the corruption and destruction of the “golden age” on the planet, the “funny man” wants to atone for it. “I begged them to nail me to the cross, I taught them how to make a cross. I couldn’t, I didn’t have the strength to kill myself, but I wanted to accept torment from them, I longed for torment, so that in these torments all my blood would be shed to the last drop” (XXV; 117). It was not only the “funny man” who posed the question of atonement for his guilt, of the torment of his conscience and tried to solve it. “The pangs of conscience are more terrible for a person than the external punishment of state law. And a person, struck by the pangs of conscience, awaits punishment as a relief from his torment,” N.A. Berdyaev shares his opinion. .
At first, the “funny man” turned out to be a serpent-tempter, and then he wanted to become a savior-redeemer...
But on that planet-twin of the earth he did not become a likeness-double of Christ: no matter how much he begged to be crucified to atone for sin, they only laughed at him, they saw him as a holy fool, a madman. Moreover, the inhabitants of the “lost paradise” justified him, “they said that they received only what they themselves wanted, and that everything that is now could not but exist” (XXV; 117). Sorrow entered his soul, unbearable and painful, such that he felt death was approaching.
But then the “funny man” woke up. The planet remained in a state of sin and without hope of redemption and deliverance.
2.4. “Awakening” and rebirth of the “funny man.”
Waking up, he sees a revolver in front of him and pushes it away from him. The “funny man” again had an irresistible desire to live and... to preach.
He raised his hands and appealed to the eternal Truth that was revealed to him: “I saw the truth, and I saw, and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the ability to live on earth... The main thing is to love others as yourself, that’s the main thing, and that’s all, you don’t need anything else: you’ll immediately find a way to get settled” (XXV; 118-119).
After his fantastic journey, the “funny man” is convinced: a “golden age” is possible - a kingdom of goodness and happiness is possible. The guiding star on this difficult, winding and painful path is faith in man, in the necessity of human happiness. And the path to it, as Dostoevsky points out, is incredibly simple - “love your neighbor as yourself.”
Love filled the soul of the “funny man”, displacing melancholy and indifference. Faith and hope settled in her: “fate is not fate, but the freedom to choose between good and evil, which is the essence of man. It is not the soul that is purified, but the spirit; it is not passions that are eliminated, but ideas - through Dionysian absorption or, through the loss of a human face in them - a person is established in them, united by love with the world, who has taken upon himself full responsibility and guilt for the evil of this world.” .
A living, genuine attitude towards people’s lives is measured only by the degree of a person’s inner freedom, only by love that transcends the boundaries of reason and reason. Love becomes super-intelligent, rising to a feeling of inner connection with the whole world. Truth is not born in a test tube and is not proven by a mathematical formula, it exists. And, according to Dostoevsky, truth is such only if it is presented “in the form of confessional self-statement. In the mouth of another... the same statement would take on a different meaning, a different tone and would no longer be true.”
“I saw the truth - not what I invented with my mind, but I saw, I saw, and its living image filled my soul forever. I saw her in such complete integrity that I cannot believe that people could not have her” (XXV; 118).
Newfound love, faith and hope “took” the revolver away from the temple of the “funny man.” N.A. Berdyaev spoke about this “recipe” for suicide: “Suicide as an individual phenomenon is overcome by Christian faith, hope, love.”
From a logical suicide, overnight the “funny man” was reborn into a deeply and fervently religious person, rushing to do good, spread love and preach the truth that had been revealed to him.
CONCLUSION.
In 1893, Vasily Rozanov wrote in his article “About Dostoevsky”: “What is the general significance of genius in history? In no other way than in the vastness of spiritual experience, in which he surpasses other people, knowing what is scattered separately in thousands of them, which is sometimes hidden in the darkest, unspoken characters; Finally, he knows many things that have never been experienced by a person, and only by him, in his immensely rich inner life, has already been tested, measured and evaluated.” In our opinion, the undoubted merit of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky lies in the fact that he led many to an understanding of the ideas of Christianity. Dostoevsky makes you think about the most important thing. A thinking person cannot help but raise questions about life and death, about the purpose of his stay on earth. Dostoevsky is great because he is not afraid to look into the depths of human existence. He tries to the end to penetrate into the problem of evil, which is acquiring increasingly tragic significance for human consciousness. This problem, in our opinion, is at the source of different types of atheism, and it remains painful until the Truth is revealed to a peaceful person with grace.
Many great writers have touched on this topic, sometimes more deeply and vividly than philosophers and even theologians. They were a kind of prophets. One must know the depths of evil so as not to create illusions in social or moral terms. And you need to know the depth of goodness in order to resist atheism. We can only agree with our contemporary Archpriest Alexander, according to whom “the greatest of our prophets, the greatest soul who was tormented by the question of the confrontation between good and evil, was Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.”
The painful atmosphere of Dostoevsky's novels does not depress the reader and does not deprive him of hope. Despite the tragic outcome of the fate of the main characters, in “The Idiot”, as in other works of the writer, one can hear a passionate longing for a happy future for humanity. “Dostoevsky’s negative ending proved that hopelessness and cynicism are not justified - that evil has been undermined, that the way out, although unknown for now, is there, that we must find it at all costs - and then the ray of dawn will shine.”
Dostoevsky's hero is almost always placed in such a position that he needs a chance for salvation. For the “funny man,” such a chance was a dream, and for Ippolit Terentyev, it was a revolver that never fired. Another thing is that the “funny man” took advantage of this chance, and Hippolytus died without ever coming to terms with the world and, above all, with himself.
Unconditional faith and Christian humility are the keys to happiness, Dostoevsky believed. The “funny man” turned out to be able to rediscover the lost “higher goals” and “higher meaning of life.”
In the end, each of Dostoevsky’s heroes runs into hopelessness, before which he is powerless, like before the blank “Meier’s wall”, which Ippolit speaks about so mystically eloquently. But for Dostoevsky himself, the hopelessness in which his hero finds himself is only a new reason for searching for other means of overcoming it.
It is no coincidence that in all the writer’s latest novels, representatives of the younger generation – young men and children – play such a large role. In The Idiot, the image of Kolya Ivolgin is associated with this idea. Observing the lives of his parents and other people around him, friendship with Prince Myshkin, Aglaya, Ippolit becomes for Kolya a source of spiritual enrichment and growth of his individuality. The tragic experience of the older generation does not pass without a trace for Ivolgin Jr., forcing him to think early about the choice of his life path.
Reading Dostoevsky, novel after novel, is as if you are reading a single book about the single path of a single human spirit from the moment of its inception. The works of the great Russian writer seem to capture all the ups and downs of the human personality, which he understood as a single whole. All questions of the human spirit appear in all their irresistibility, since his personality is unique and unrepeatable. None of Dostoevsky’s works lives on its own, separately from others (the theme of “Crime and Punishment,” for example, almost directly flows into the theme of “The Idiot”).
In Dostoevsky we observe the complete fusion of preacher and artist: he preaches as an artist, and creates as a preacher. Every brilliant artist gravitates towards depicting the behind-the-scenes sides of human souls. Dostoevsky went further here than any of the great realists, without losing his calling. A writer of exclusively Russian themes, Dostoevsky plunges his hero, the Russian man, into the abyss of problems that arise before man in general throughout his entire history. On the pages of Dostoevsky's works, the entire history of humanity, human thought and culture comes to life in the refraction of individual consciousness. “In his best, golden pages, Dostoevsky evoked in the reader dreams of universal harmony, the brotherhood of men and peoples, the harmony of the inhabitant of the earth with this earth and sky he inhabits. “The Dream of a Funny Man”, in “The Diary of a Writer”, and some passages in the novel “The Teenager” make it possible to feel in Dostoevsky a heart that not only verbally, but actually touched the mystery of these harmonies. Half of Dostoevsky’s fame is based on these golden pages of his, just as the other half is based on his famous “psychological analysis”... To the direct and brief question: “Why do you love Dostoevsky so much,” “why does Russia honor him so much,” everyone will answer briefly and almost without thinking: “Why, this is the most insightful person in Russia, and the most loving.” Love and wisdom are the secret of Dostoevsky's greatness.
This is probably, in our opinion, the main reason for his worldwide, now ever-increasing fame. And, of course, this is precisely the reason for the interest in Dostoevsky’s work among philosophers of various movements and directions, the main one among which, undoubtedly, is the existential movement. Dostoevsky's legacy contains all the main questions that interested and are of interest to philosophers - and the most important question: about being, freedom and the existence of man. “Dostoevsky is the most Christian writer because at the center of him is man, human love and the revelations of the human soul. He is all a revelation of the heart, of human existence, of the heart of Jesus. Dostoevsky opens a new mystical science about man. Man is not the periphery of existence, as with many mystics and metaphysicians, not a transitory phenomenon, but the very depth of existence, going into the depths of Divine life,” notes N.A. Berdyaev. Dostoevsky is anthropocentric, he is absorbed in man; nothing worried the writer more than man and the movements of his spirit and soul.
The modern world, which has experienced and is experiencing the greatest socio-historical upheavals, is so structured that people of current generations are endowed with an unprecedented tendency to look into the most distant, hidden and dark depths of their souls. And a better assistant in this than Dostoevsky cannot be found to this day.
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