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, latest development human personality It is precisely what must come to the point that “a person finds, realizes and is convinced that the highest use that a person can make of his personality is to destroy his Self, to give it to everyone completely and selflessly,” 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 disposition,” 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 marked by 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. Full of grief and there were also doubts about the path of Dostoevsky himself, a man who survived the horror of the death penalty, who fell from the pinnacle of intellectual life into the swamp of hard labor, who found himself among thieves and murderers. And in this darkness - the bright image of Him, 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 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 the 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 could fall. Dostoevsky's heroes enter into dangerous game, posing the question: “Can I or not cross the line that separates a person 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 transcendence - 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, extraordinary ability Dostoevsky’s insight into the innermost of man and nature, the knowledge of “what has never happened before” made the writer’s work a truly inexhaustible source that fed Russian philosophical thought late XIX - early XX 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 hidden, not obvious, but true “perfection” human nature. All Dostoevsky’s doubts about man, all the revelations of chaos in him, are neutralized by the writer with the conviction of what lies hidden in man great power, saving him and the world - the only grief 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 a “different” novel: Dostoevsky decides to bring to life his “favorite” idea - to depict “completely 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 that Dostoevsky himself was in ideas younger generation was inclined to recognize it as serious and worthy of attention.
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 lack of moral support to overcome despair, he 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 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 outrage and protest 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 were covering up his tender, loving soul looking for 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 main reason His suffering is not a disease, but a 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 final version novel.
1.2. Ippolit Terentyev: “lost soul.”
Losing faith in eternal life, according to Dostoevsky, is fraught with the justification not only of any immoral acts, but also with 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 last time meet people, 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, appears before us for the first time in the person of one of minor characters 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, their divine and human essence can be revealed to everyone. 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.
Ippolit Terentyev's rebellion, which found 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 which should have been 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 object 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 declare 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 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 believe blindly, 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 impossible 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, not freely managing 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 spiritual freedom in himself eternal beginning, 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 a story can solve such problems high genres(poem, tragedy, novel, story) as a problem moral choice, conscience, truth, meaning of life, place and destiny of man." 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“as if they are floating 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 a creature that is illiterate, rude and never cares about anything. caring. 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, like 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 you understand and appreciate it in a new way (in the light of a different opportunity 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 a 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... absolutely 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 wished 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 residents paradise lost“They 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. Guiding Star On this difficult, winding and painful path, faith in man, in the necessity of human happiness, becomes. 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 loss in them human face- they affirm a person united with 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 cannot be proven. mathematical formula, she exists. And, according to Dostoevsky, truth is such only if it is presented “in the form of confessional self-expression. 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 in one night, 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 man, 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 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 different types 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, in whose opinion “the greatest of our prophets, the most great soul", 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 tragic outcome 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 regain lost “ higher goals" and "the highest 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 so mystically eloquently about. 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, 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. Any genius artist tends to depict 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 rests on these golden pages of his, just as the other half rests on his famous “ psychological analysis“... To a direct and brief question: “Why do you love Dostoevsky so much,” “why does Russia honor him so much,” everyone will say briefly and almost without thinking: “Well, 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 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 best assistant in this, than Dostoevsky, one cannot find to this day.
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Prince Myshkin at the Epanchins. Still from the film "Idiot". Directed by Ivan Pyryev. 1958 RIA NovostiWhile visiting the Epanchins, Prince Myshkin says that after an exacerbation of epilepsy, he was sent to Switzerland:
“I remember: the sadness in me was unbearable; I even wanted to cry; I was still surprised and worried: it had a terrible effect on me that all this was foreign; I understood this. The alien was killing me. I completely awakened from this darkness, I remember, in the evening, in Basel, at the entrance to Switzerland, and I was awakened by the cry of a donkey in the city market. The donkey struck me terribly and for some reason I liked it extraordinarily, and at the same time, suddenly everything seemed to clear up in my head.”
At this moment, the Epanchin sisters begin to laugh, explaining that they themselves both saw and heard the donkey. For residents of Central Russia in the 19th century, the donkey was a strange animal. You could find out what it really looks like from books - for example, from descriptions of travel in Central Asian regions and southern countries. In St. Petersburg, donkeys, along with wild goats and other rare exhibits, were placed in menageries - small mobile or stationary zoos of that time.
But the reading public knew that a donkey is a fool and a symbol of stupidity. From the ba-sen translated from French, the image of a stupid animal migrated to others literary genres and correspondence. Until 1867, the word “donkey” was used exclusively as a curse word. Therefore, confusion arises in Myshkin’s conversation with the princesses. The prince sincerely tells the Epanchins about an important event for him, and the young ladies scoff, almost directly calling him a fool - there is no ambiguity in their speech. Myshkin is not offended; in fact, for the first time on the pages of the novel, he endured a direct, undeserved insult.
2. The mystery of the death penalty
While waiting to be received by the Epanchins, Prince Myshkin starts a conversation about the death penalty with their valet:
“Before, I didn’t know anything here, but now we hear so many new things that, they say, those who knew something have to relearn how to recognize them all over again. There's a lot of talk about courts here now.
- Hm!.. Courts. Courts, it’s true that they are courts. What do you think is more fair in court or not?
- Don't know. I've heard a lot of good things about ours. Here, again, we do not have the death penalty.
- Are they executed there?
- Yes. I saw it in France, in Lyon.”
Next, the prince begins to fantasize about the thoughts of the person sentenced to death in the last minutes before execution. However, in the 1860s the death penalty existed in Russia. According to the Code on Criminal and Correctional Punishments of 1866, the death penalty was imposed for crimes such as rebellion against the supreme authority, concealing the fact of arrival from places where the plague is rampant, high treason, and assassination attempt on the emperor. In the same year, 1866, Dmitry Karakozov was executed for trying to kill Alexander II, and Nikolai Ishutin, a member of the revolutionary Organization circle, was sentenced to death (however, this punishment was later replaced by life imprisonment). Annually Russian courts 10-15 people were sentenced to execution.
Nikolai Ishutin. 1868 oldserdobsk.ru
Ilya Repin. Portrait of Dmitry Karakozov before execution. 1866 Wikimedia Commons
Of course, Prince Myshkin’s story about the execution and his fantasy about the last minutes of the condemned man is the story of Dostoevsky himself, condemned to death in 1849. His punishment was replaced with hard labor, but he had to endure the “last minutes” before his death.
3. The Mystery of Dr. B-n
Eighteen-year-old young man Ippolit Terentyev is sick with consumption. When he first meets Myshkin and other heroes of the novel in Pavlovsk, he tells everyone that he is dying:
“...In two weeks, as I know, I will die... Last week B. himself announced to me...”
He later admits that he lied:
“...B-n didn’t tell me anything and never saw me.”
So why did he tell a lie, who is B-n and why was his opinion so important? Bn is Sergei Petrovich Botkin, one of the most famous St. Petersburg therapists of that time. In 1860, Botkin defended his dissertation, became a professor, and at the age of 29 headed a therapeutic clinic, opening a scientific laboratory there. IN different years Herzen, Nekrasov, and others were treated by him. Dostoevsky also turned to Botkin several times. In 1867, in which the novel takes place, getting an appointment with the famous doctor was not easy. He worked a lot in the clinic, reduced his personal practice and saw patients together with students, clearly explaining the methods and principles of work.
Sergei Botkin. Around 1874 Fine Art Images/Diomedia Quite quickly, Botkin gained a reputation as a doctor who never makes mistakes, although his colleagues and journalists tried to debunk this image. In 1862, the mistake he allegedly made almost became a sensation. A young man was admitted to the clinic in whom Botkin suspected portal vein thrombosis. At that time, this was a bold assumption - such a disease was confirmed only after an autopsy, and they did not know how to diagnose and treat thrombosis. The therapist predicted the man's imminent death. Time passed, the patient remained alive, continuing to suffer. He lasted more than 120 days under Botkin’s constant supervision, survived the operation, but then still died. During the autopsy, the pathologist removed the portal vein, which contained a blood clot. By mentioning Botkin in a conversation, Ippolit is trying to convince his interlocutors that he really will die soon and to attract their attention.
4. The mystery of the newspaper Indépendance Belge
The main media outlet for the novel “The Idiot” is the Belgian newspaper Indépendance Belge. Its name is mentioned several times in the novel, and General Ivolgin and Nastasya Filippovna are avid readers of this publication. The newspaper article contains a small conflict scene between these two characters. The general, who loves to fantasize and pass off someone else’s story as his own, tells how he threw his fellow passenger’s lap dog out of the train, offended by the remark. Nastasya Filippovna says that a few days ago she read about the same case in the newspaper.
Front page of L'Indépendance Belge. August 24, 1866 Bibliothèque royale de Belgique Indépendance Belge was one of the most popular publications of the time, with a network of correspondents throughout Europe, especially in France and Germany, a powerful news block and a sharp leftist position. It was read in Russia, but it was not particularly popular St. Petersburg newspapers referred to it less often in their publications than, for example, to the publications France, Times or Italia., but in coffee houses of that time - in the 19th century similar establishments there was a selection of periodicals for visitors - it could always be found. By purchasing at least a cup of coffee, one could gain access to foreign newspapers and magazines. This is what many students did, sometimes ordering one cup for two or three.
Why, of all the newspapers available in Russian Empire, Did Dostoevsky choose this one? Because I read it myself and loved it. He met the Indépendance Belge back in the 1850s in Semipalatinsk, when he was released from hard labor and entered the military service. Then he became friends with Alexander Yegorovich Wrangel, an official of the Ministry of Justice, a lawyer in criminal cases. He began to borrow books and newspapers from Wrangel, including Indépendance Belge. Wrangel also subscribed to the German newspaper Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, but Dostoevsky read more confidently in French. Therefore, it was the Belgian media that then became his main source of information about European events. He read it while working on “The Idiot” while abroad, which his wife Anna Grigorievna repeatedly recalled.
5. The secret of the eunuchs
We know a little about the Rogozhin family: they are rich St. Petersburg merchants, the head of the family died, leaving two and a half million in inheritance, and their house, “large, gloomy, three floors, without any architecture, dirty green in color,” is located on Gorokhovaya street. On it, Prince Myshkin sees a sign with the inscription “House of the Hereditary Honorary Citizen Rogozhin.” The title of honorary citizen exempted city residents from recruitment duties, corporal punishment and poll tax. But most importantly, it was a sign of prestige. In 1807, special rules were established for merchants: to receive such a title, one had to be a member of the first guild for 20 years, and then submit a special petition to the Senate. It turns out that the Rogozhins are either a fairly old merchant family, or extremely successful and not shy about demanding honors for themselves.
Even under Parfen Rogozhin’s grandfather, rooms in the house were rented by people who preached asceticism and celibacy. The latter was confirmed and consolidated by literally emasculation - both male and female. The sect existed largely due to the patronage of famous merchant families who appreciated business qualities Skoptsov. The sectarians kept money changers, but did not limit themselves to simply exchanging money, performing almost the entire possible range of banking operations, including storing money. There was no special and strict legislation to regulate such activities, and this opened up scope for gray financial transactions. And thanks to the renunciation of all possible passions and bad habits, the eunuchs were reliable partners.
Community of eunuchs in Yakutia. Late XIX- beginning of the 20th century yakutskhistory.net The connection with the eunuchs may be an indication both that the Rogozhins’ fortune was partly accumulated through illegal schemes, and also why the father of the family was so angry with his son Parfen when he spent money on jewelry for Nastasya Filippovna. This is not just a loss of wealth, but also an act in the name of carnal passion.
6. The mystery of the golden brushes
At the beginning of the novel, Rogozhin, talking about what happened to their family after the death of their father, swears at his brother and threatens him with criminal prosecution.
«— <...>At night, the brother cut cast gold tassels from the brocade cover on the coffin of his parent: “They say they cost a lot of money.” But he can go to Siberia for this alone if I want, because it is sacrilege. Hey you, scarecrow pea! - he turned to the official. - According to the law: sacrilege?
- Sacrilege! Sacrilege! - the official immediately assented.
- To Siberia for this?
- To Siberia, to Siberia! Off to Siberia immediately!”
According to the criminal code of the 19th century, Rogozhin actually had the opportunity (albeit small) to get rid of a relative and a claimant to the inheritance.
Sacrilege, which included the theft of church property, was considered a crime in Russia since the 18th century. For sacrilege they were exiled to Siberia - the period of exile depended on the nature of the crime. For example, for the theft of an icon from a church they gave fifteen years, for theft from a church storage - 6-8 years, etc.
But the coffin of Rogozhin’s father, apparently, was in their house in St. Petersburg - so the brother was able to cut off the gold tassels at night. The crime did not occur in a church or on a church premises, and therefore the court was not interested in sacrilege, but in the subject of the theft. And here the main question is when this all happened - before the funeral service or after. If after, then the cover is a consecrated object that was used in a church ceremony: cutting the brushes would turn into hard labor. If before, then with the help of a good lawyer, the brother could get rid of Parfen’s accusations.
7. The mystery of the murder of Nastasya Filippovna
“I covered it with oilcloth, good, American oilcloth, and on top of the oilcloth there was a sheet, and four bottles of Zhdanov’s liquid, uncorked, were placed there, and now they stand,” Rogozhin tells Prince Myshkin. Dostoevsky took the details of this murder from real life.
Dostoevsky used excerpts from crime chronicles when working on the novel Crime and Punishment. The same was the method of working on The Idiot. Dostoevsky was then abroad and was very worried that he was losing contact with his homeland and the book would not become topical. To make the novel modern and believable Observation by a researcher of Dostoevsky’s work, Vera Sergeevna Lyubimova-Dorovatovskaya., he read all the Russian newspapers he came across, paying special attention to reports of high-profile incidents.
The heroes of the novel “The Idiot” actively discuss two criminal cases. The first of them is the murder of six people in Tambov. The criminal was an 18-year-old youth, Vitold Gorsky, and his victims were the Zhemaryn family, where he gave lessons. At the trial, prosecutors tried to present the crime as political and ideological, but were unable to prove this version. The second incident was the murder and robbery of a moneylender in Moscow, committed by a 19-year-old student at Moscow University who did not have enough money for a wedding. These two cases are not related to the plot of “The Idiot”, but could have interested Dostoevsky due to echoes of his previous novel “Crime and Punishment”. The writer was worried that readers would not see a connection with reality in his works. In The Idiot, he persistently tries to convince readers and critics that his previous novel was not an idle fantasy..
But the main newspaper borrowing from “The Idiot” was the murder of Nastasya Filippovna. In 1867, newspapers reported the murder of jeweler Kalmykov in Moscow. It was accomplished by the Moscow merchant Mazurin. Like Rogozhin, after the death of his father, he became the rightful heir to a huge merchant fortune and a large house, where he ultimately committed his crime. Not knowing what to do with the corpse, the first thing he did was go and buy American oilcloth and Zhdanov liquid - a special solution that was used to combat strong unpleasant odors and air disinfection. And if this liquid was a unique product of its kind, then the choice of oilcloths in stores was quite wide. The fact that both the real killer and Rogozhin choose American, which was usually used for upholstery, can be considered a direct reference for readers familiar with the Mazurin case.
By the way, the writer’s contemporaries almost never accused him of bloodthirstiness, did not concentrate attention on how detailed he described crimes, and did not admit that he could think through murders in his spare time. Apparently, they immediately solved all the riddles that the writer left for them.
Ippolit Terentyev is one of the characters in F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel “The Idiot.” This is a seventeen or eighteen year old youth who is mortally ill with consumption.
Everything in Hippolyta’s appearance speaks of his illness and imminent death. He is terribly emaciated and thin, like a skeleton, has a pale yellow complexion, on which an expression of irritation appears every now and then.
Hippolytus is very weak and needs rest every now and then. He speaks in a “shrill, cracked” voice, while constantly coughing into his handkerchief, which greatly frightens those around him.
Terentyev only causes pity and irritation among his friends. Many of them cannot wait for the young man to finally die. However, this is exactly what the young man himself wants for himself.
One day, at an evening in honor of the birthday of Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, Ippolit speaks with his own literary work, “My Necessary Explanation.” After reading this work, the hero tries to shoot himself, but it turns out that the gun is not loaded.
His friend Kolya Ivolgin sincerely sympathizes with Ippolit. He supports the young man and even wants to rent a separate apartment with him, but there is no money for this. Prince Myshkin also treats Terentyev kindly, despite the fact that Ippolit often communicates sarcastically with him.
At the end of the novel, about two weeks after the murder
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.