The record is stunning. To take only one microcosmic example: In the year 1866, two important works of literature had begun to appear in serial form side by side in the same literary journal. The Russian Mesenger (Russky vestnik).
The first novel was War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. The second was Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
The Age of Nihilism: Christendom from the Great War to the Culture Wars, by John Strickland
Stickland is describing the boom that occurred in Russian secular culture once the West’s humanist ideals were embraced. Here, Stickland will focus on Dostoevsky, noting that he would document, better than any of his contemporaries, the growing crisis of utopian Christendom – the version of Christendom that came to replace, in Strickland’s view, the paradisaical Christendom that existed for the first thousand years in the West, and, until more recently, in the East.
Dostoevsky, son of a brutal father who was murdered when his peasants rose up against him, was never an atheist, although he nevertheless liked to spend his time among atheists. He would keep up with the latest streams of progressive Western thought. Most in this camp would look at the Russian Orthodox Church with contempt.
They would also look down on the poor and impoverished. Dostoevsky would write of these same poor and impoverished, stirring dissatisfaction with the status quo. A lesson for our time, perhaps: when the status quo is atheist, it is the Christian who is a rebel:
John 15: 18-19 If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.
Dostoevsky would write, when contemplating how different he was, the torment he suffered as “a child of this century”:
“And despite all this, God sent me moments of great tranquility, moments during which I love and find I am loved by others. … This symbol is very simple, and here is what it is: to believe that there is nothing more beautiful, more profound, than Christ…”
Yet, he would remain rebellious in temperament. He would join a group that would meet at night, discussing books by prominent French socialists. Having been found out, the members of the group were sentenced to execution.
As they were being marched out to receive this punishment, a rider came up with a message from the tsar: they would not be executed, but instead sent for hard labor in Siberia. A reprieve. In Siberia, instead of limiting himself to live within the world of the intelligentsia, he would have hardened criminals for companions: murderers, rapists, child abusers.
He was not allowed to bring any of his books with him, yet somehow a charitable society did provide copies of the New Testament for the prisoners. Dostoevsky would keep his under his pillow in the barracks for the next four years.
What Dostoevsky would discover in his time with the criminals: even if the world was transformed into a utopia, with everyone given wealth, health, and freedom, in the end that world was still populated by men such as these. There is nothing in such a utopia that would heal the hearts of such men.
“In the course of several years, I never saw a sign of repentance among these people…”
Just like Nietzsche, Dostoevsky saw the dark side, the nihilism. Dostoevsky was in prison, Nietzsche in the splendor of Bayreuth. Yet, unlike Nietzsche, Dostoevsky was a Christian – this reality gave Dostoevsky the means to transcend this broken world.
Seeing a man savagely beaten in prison, Dostoevsky’s mind raced back to a time in childhood. Out in the family forest, he heard the cry of a wolf. Terrified, he fled the wood and came to Marey, one of his father’s peasants. Peasants who were so cruelly beaten by Dostoevsky’s father that they would one day rise up and murder him.