Dostoevsky as a religious thinker

F. M. Dostoevsky is our only and inimitable writer-artist in many respects, and above all in the fact that only he took upon himself and brilliantly completed the task of drawing a living image of a holy man. There is nothing easier than writing the life of a saint in the Byzantine style: for this task there are hagiographic stencils, which are usually used by masters of writings of this kind. The task of these writings is facilitated to the last degree by the abstract ascetic ideal of Byzantine holiness. A Christian ascetic, saving his soul, directs all his attention and all his effort to seclude himself from life, break all the threads connecting him with living people, suppress all interests, all passionate movements, concentrate on one thought about God and the future blissful life. The saint of life is buried alive, and the path of his exploits is the path of gradual dying. An established tradition is to paint Christian saints in watercolors, not oil paints. In their lives everything is conditional, symbolic, everything is dominated by one idea, one thought, in them every touch of the flesh is erased by the heavenly heights of the spirit. But it is a completely different matter and extremely difficult to imagine a Christian ideal person in everyday life and in everyday encounters. The difficulty here lies not only on the subjective side, that is, so that the writer himself is able to rise to the heights of the Christian ideal, but also on the objective side, since the current life of society does not provide examples of Christian perfection. Here, “the task is not only for the artist-writer, to the extent of subjective receptivity, to grasp the features of a given reality and combine them in an aesthetic image, but also for him to go further than historical reality, to anticipate its future development - the task is not only artistic and epistemological, but also creative. In this case, artistic creativity becomes a religious matter. The writings of F. M. Dostoevsky have such religious significance. L.N. Tolstoy could not artistically grasp and reproduce the positive side of the Christian ideal; his Christian types appear before the reader only from a funny side; later he comprehended the height of the Christian ideal only mentally, verbally, and speaks about it in the form of sermons, mainly of an accusatory nature. This is not what we see in F. M. Dostoevsky: among his artistic types we find living images of Christian heights. These are Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin (an idiot) and Alyosha Karamazov. Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin stands out from the society around him with his extraordinary “simplicity” and amazing “sincerity.” The Gospel law of spiritual life: “if you do not become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of God” is fulfilled here to the point of typicality. This is noted already in the first pages of the novel. The first time we meet him in the carriage of the St. Petersburg-Warsaw train, returning from abroad, dressed very lightly, out of season and not in Russian style. “In his hands dangled a skinny bundle made from an old, faded foulard, which seemed to contain all his travel property.” His “black-haired neighbor,” as it turned out, Rogozhin, strikes up a conversation with him with a question addressed to him “with that indelicate grin in which people’s pleasure at the failures of their neighbor is sometimes so unceremoniously and carelessly expressed: “Very,” he answered with extreme readiness, “and mind you, it’s still a thaw.” What if it was frosty? I didn't even think it was so cold here. Out of habit. The black-haired man whistled and laughed. A conversation ensued. The readiness of the blond young man in a Swiss cloak to answer all the questions of his dark-skinned neighbor was amazing and without any suspicion of complete negligence, inappropriateness and idleness of other questions. Answering, he announced, among other things, that he had indeed not been in Russia for a long time, too much for four years, that he had been sent abroad due to illness, some strange nervous illness, something like epilepsy or Witt’s dance, some tremors and convulsions. Listening to him, the black man grinned several times; He laughed especially when, in response to the question: “Well, were they cured?” - the blond answered that “no, they weren’t cured.” - Heh! They must have overpaid the money for nothing, but we trust them here,” the black man sarcastically remarked.” There followed explanations from the Swiss patient about the disinterestedness of the doctor who treated him, that Mr. Pavlishchev, who supported him, died two years ago, that he only had a distant relative, General Epanchin, who, however, did not answer his letter. - That is, where will I stay?.. I don’t know yet, really... so... - Haven’t you decided yet? - “And perhaps your whole essence lies in this bundle? asked the black man. It turned out that this was so: the blond young man immediately and with extraordinary haste admitted it.” When his interlocutors - Rogozhin and the official who got involved in the conversation - expressed doubt about the reality of his relationship with General Epanchina, he answered: - “Oh, you guessed it again, - after all, I’m really almost mistaken, that is, almost not a relative; so much so that I really wasn’t at all surprised then that they didn’t answer me there. That's what I was waiting for." When asked about his name, Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin “with complete and immediate readiness” identified himself. The official, thoughtfully, noted that “the Myshkin princes are nowhere to be found.” - “Oh, of course! The prince immediately answered: “There are no Myshkin princes at all now, except me; I think I'm the last one. As for our fathers and grandfathers, they were also our same palace owners. My father, however, was a second lieutenant in the army, one of the cadets." This is the first exit of Prince Myshkin. Completely alien to the impulses of talkativeness and obsession, he is equally completely unaware of isolation and guile. Without the slightest shadow of pride, in response to questions addressed to him, he reveals his whole soul, all the weaknesses of his condition and position. He reveals himself decisively as he really is, says what he thinks and feels. He does not show off at all, he does not show the slightest concern to win over his interlocutors, to impress them, his words and his appearance do not hide his soul and his state, he speaks directly, from heart to heart. He sees in himself only what can be seen in him from the outside, he looks at himself objectively, without the slightest bias - and this is precisely what attracts him to him, binds him. Everyone sees that the prince has nothing to fear, that he does not take care of himself at all. And this greatest Christian humility does not cost him any effort. For him, all this comes out by itself, unintentionally, without effort, without violence against himself. And with these traits of Christian character, Prince Myshkin remains before the reader all the time, with them he enters into all kinds of everyday conflicts and easily gets out of the most difficult, most confusing situations. Here are two examples of the most striking ones. ... "Ganya's vision grew dim, and he, completely forgotten, swung at his sister with all his might. The blow would certainly hit her in the face. But suddenly another hand stopped Ganin’s hand in mid-flight. The prince stood between him and his sister. - Come on, that's enough! he said insistently, but also trembling all over, as if from an extremely strong shock. “Yes, forever, or something, you will cross my path,” Ganya roared, throwing Varya’s hand, and with his freed hand, in the last degree of rage, he slapped the prince in the face with all his might. - Oh, Kolya clasped his hands: - oh, my God! There were exclamations from all sides. The prince turned pale. With a strange and reproachful look, he looked directly into Gana’s eyes; his lips trembled and tried to say something; some strange and completely inappropriate smile crooked them. “Well, let me have it... but I won’t give it to her...!” he said quietly at last, but suddenly he couldn’t stand it, threw Ganya, covered his face with his hands, went into a corner, stood facing the wall and said in a broken voice: - Oh, how ashamed you will be of your action! Ganya, indeed, stood as if destroyed. Kolya rushed to hug and kiss the prince; Rogozhin, Varya, Ptitsyn, Nina Aleksandrovna, everyone, even old Ardalion Aleksandrovich, crowded behind him. - Nothing, nothing! the prince muttered in all directions, with the same inappropriate smile. - And you will repent! Rogozhin shouted: “You will be ashamed, Ganka, for insulting such a... sheep (he couldn’t find another word)!” Prince, my soul, leave them; spit on them, let's go! You will find out how much Rogozhin loves! Nastasya Filippovna was also very amazed by Ganya’s act and the prince’s answer.”... The prince not only was not ashamed to look into the eyes of everyone who saw his shame, but after that everyone loved him with the last love, reverent love: Christian humility appeared in an aura of charming heroism. The shame of a slap is the ultimate touchstone of Christian character. And Prince Myshkin passed this test without the slightest false note, without the slightest pretense or insincerity. Prince Myshkin also emerged from other trials, perhaps not so harsh, but more complicated, requiring more subtle manifestations of humility, deeper foundations of Christian character. The prince's wedding was expected with Nastasya Filippovna, who had a bad reputation. A huge crowd of scandal-hungry audiences awaited the spectacle. And a bigger scandal broke out than expected - the bride ran away when the prince was already in the church. ..."The prince left the church, apparently calm and cheerful; At least that’s what many people noticed and later reported. He seemed to really want to get home and be alone as quickly as possible; but this was not given to him. Following him, some of the invitees entered the room... In addition, the entire house was literally besieged by an idle audience. Even from the terrace, the prince heard how Keller and Lebedev entered into a fierce argument with some completely unknown, although apparently official, people who wanted to enter the terrace at all costs. The prince approached those arguing, inquired what was the matter, and politely pushing aside Lebedev and Keller, delicately turned to one already gray-haired and stout gentleman, standing on the steps of the porch at the head of several other people, and invited him to do the honor of honoring him with a visit. The gentleman was embarrassed, but nevertheless he went; behind him is another, a third. From the entire crowd, about seven or eight visitors emerged, who entered, trying to do it as cheekily as possible; but there were no more hunters, and soon, in the crowd, they began to condemn the upstarts. Those who entered were seated, a conversation began, tea began to be served - all this was extremely decent, modest, to some surprise of those who entered. There were, of course, several attempts to lighten the conversation and lead to the “proper” topic; Several indiscreet questions were uttered, several “dashing” remarks were made. The prince answered everyone so simply and cordially, and at the same time with such dignity, with such trust in the integrity of his guests, that the indiscreet questions died down by themselves. Little by little the conversation began to become almost serious... Almost an hour passed, they drank tea, and after tea the guests finally became ashamed to sit even longer. The doctor and the gray-haired gentleman eagerly said goodbye to the prince; and everyone said goodbye with fervor and noise. Wishes and opinions were expressed, such as that “there is nothing to grieve and that, perhaps, it’s all for the better,” and so on. There were, however, attempts to ask for champagne, but the older guests stopped the younger ones. When everyone had dispersed, Keller leaned over to Lebedev and told him: “You and I would have started a shouting match, fought, disgraced ourselves, and would have brought in the police; and he, look, he’s made new friends!” Lebedev sighed and said: “I hid it from the wise and prudent and revealed it to babies”... In the face of the prince we see that humility is the greatest strength, sometimes irreplaceable. Along with his unpretentiousness, the prince possessed the qualities of extreme non-acquisitiveness and gullibility. He arrived in Russia with only a few small coins in his pocket. General Epanchin gives him twenty-five rubles - he distributes this money (to Ivolgin and Terentyeva) very soon... Fate soon sends him a significant inheritance, but he disposed of it “stupidly,” according to General Epanchin: “for example, the creditors of the late merchant appeared, according to the documents are controversial, insignificant, and others, having caught wind of the prince, were without documents at all, so what? The prince satisfied almost everyone, despite the ideas of his friends that all these little people and creditors had absolutely no rights; and therefore only satisfied that it really turned out that some of them actually suffered.” On the same basis, the prince encountered a fraudulent gang grouped near Burdovsky. He managed not only to uncover this fraud with extreme ease, but also to make his friends the members of this group, which others had joined out of ignorance. “I must tell you,” Aglaya said to Nastasya Filippovna, “that I have never met a single person in my life like him in noble simplicity and boundless gullibility. Anyone who wants can deceive him, and whoever deceives him will then forgive everyone." Prince Myshkin combined with Christian humility a strong love for everything weak and suffering, for children, the sick, the humiliated, the unfortunate. This was also revealed in him during his stay in a Swiss village in relation to the children of that village and to one unfortunate girl Marie. “The children laughed at me,” the prince later said, “and then they even started throwing stones at me when they saw that I had kissed Marie.” Marie, a pitiful, weak, thin girl, the daughter of a poor mother, was seduced and abandoned by a passing French commie. She was covered in terrible shame: everyone looked at her like she was a vermin; the old people condemned and scolded, the young people laughed, the women scolded her, condemned her, looked with such contempt as if she were a spider, the children followed her in a crowd, teased her and threw dirt at her. After the death of her mother and the sermon of the priest, who named her as the culprit of this death, the situation of the sick, hungry, ragged girl became completely unbearable. “I wanted to do something for Marie; I really needed to give her money, but I never had a penny there. I had a small diamond pin, and I sold it to a reseller... I tried for a long time to meet Marie alone; Finally, we met outside the village, by a hedge, on a side path up the mountain, behind a tree. Then I gave her eight francs (all I got for the pin) and told her to take care of it, because I wouldn’t have any more, and then I kissed her and told her not to think that I had any bad intentions, and that I was kissing her not because I was in love with her, but because I was very sorry for her and that from the very beginning I did not consider her at all guilty, but only unfortunate. I really wanted to console her and assure her that she shouldn’t consider herself so low in front of everyone, but she didn’t seem to understand. I noticed this now, although she was almost silent all the time and stood in front of me with downcast eyes and terribly ashamed. When I finished, she kissed my hand, and I immediately took her hand and wanted to kiss it, but she quickly pulled it away. Suddenly, at this time, children, a whole crowd, spied on us; I later found out that they had been spying on me for a long time. They began to whistle, clap and laugh, and Marie began to run. I wanted to speak, but they started throwing stones at me. That same day everyone found out, the whole village; everything fell on Marie again: they began to dislike her even more. “I even heard that they wanted to sentence her to punishment, but, thank God, it turned out that way; That's why the children didn't give her permission, they teased her more than ever, they threw dirt at her; they are chasing her, she runs from them with her weak chest, suffocates, they follow her, screaming, cursing. Once I even rushed to fight with them. Then I started telling them, I talked to them every day as soon as I could. They stopped and listened, although they were still swearing. I told them how unhappy Marie was; They soon stopped cursing and began to walk away in silence. Little by little we began to talk, I did not hide anything from them; I told them everything. They listened very curiously and soon began to feel sorry for Marie... Soon everyone began to love her, and at the same time they suddenly began to love me.” The last days of the unfortunate girl - she soon died - were brightened up by this love. When she died, “it was impossible to keep the children here: they filled her entire coffin with flowers and put a wreath on her head.” Prince Myshkin lives with the same love for all who suffer during his stay in Russia, which the author describes. He does not belong to himself at all; a sense of duty and attention to other people’s affairs completely own him. He goes where he is needed, where he considers his presence useful; he recognizes the deeds and sorrows of others as his own deeds and sorrows. And he sacrifices himself - he sacrifices not only his property, his peace of mind, forgets about necessary rest, sleep and food, he even sacrifices his interests, which are usually not considered possible to sacrifice. Even Swiss children understood his love for Marie as love for his bride. “I did not dissuade them that I did not love Marie at all, that is, I was not in love with her, that I only felt very sorry for her; I saw from everything that they wanted it more, as they themselves imagined and put it between themselves, and therefore I remained silent and pretended that they had guessed.”... What the children imagined about his relationship with Marie was reality later in his relationship with Nastasya Filippovna. This, also an unhappy girl, although not pathetic in appearance, desired her marriage to the prince, and he, already having Aglaya, whom he loved, as his bride, agreed to this. “He loved Nastasya Filippovna not with love, but with pity.” And this created a drama in the prince’s life, which he could not bear... Was Prince Myshkin funny? Apparently, he is placed in the most ridiculous, most impossible positions; but in essence he is never funny. They laugh and mock him a lot, but only those who “were unworthy to understand” his soul laugh. This laughter always fell on the heads of those laughing, like laughter at a shrine, and always branded low people, incapable of rising to the lofty and beautiful. And those who laughed and were indignant - almost all of them - shook off this laughter, this anger, and clung to the prince. And in the end, everyone loved him extraordinarily and needed him; good souls rejoiced with him, bad souls became better in his presence; he carried with him a special atmosphere that involuntarily captivated everyone, brought out the best in everyone, turned everyone into children, simple, sincere. Ganya, who at first hated the prince, then became frank with him and confessed to him: - You are the first of the noble people I came across... The scoundrel Keller, the main participant in Burdovsky’s fraudulent business, “came to tell the prince his whole life.” He revealed himself to him in all his baseness, “with extraordinary readiness he admitted to such matters that it was impossible to imagine how it was possible to talk about such matters.” “You,” he said to the prince, “you alone, and only in order to help your development!” No one else; I will die and take away my secret under the shroud!.. “Well, here you are,” Lebedev said to Prince, “I’ll tell you the truth only, because you penetrate a person... I wouldn’t tell anyone else - he’ll laugh or spit; but you, prince, judge humanly... The Epanchins - mother and daughters - loved the prince enthusiastically. Especially Aglaya. “With you,” she said to the prince, “I want to talk about everything, everything, even about the most important things, whenever I want... I want to talk about everything with at least one person as if I were talking to myself... Sometimes the prince did not bring any benefit, but “there are people whom for some reason it is pleasant to see next to you in other difficult moments.” And for all that, the prince was not a child in mind. It cannot be said about him that he did not know how to distinguish his right hand from his left, good from evil, he did not stand in the zone of Buddhist indifference. In its simplicity, it almost always turns out to be clairvoyant; he understands people's motives well; capable of forgiving almost everything, he is ashamed of the base lies of others, and sometimes becomes indignant. According to the author's intention, there is nothing funny about the prince. There is only something in him for which he must necessarily suffer - his loneliness among people, his monasticism. He is not of this world. And this is expressed in his symbolic idiocy. And then - alone in the field is not a warrior: the idiot prince is powerless in the fight against circumstances, against human passions, against worldly evil - and he dies, falling into his former idiocy. The sick idiocy of the prince is the only thing that leaves the great task unfinished: the author completed it brilliantly, but still did not complete it. The prince's idiocy forms his original natural incompleteness, abnormality, while a fully living holy man must be naturally normal. Such a naturally normal saint is Alyosha Karamazov. I will not talk about him, because I spoke about him in another place (Types of religious and moral life)... But I will note that in the person of Alyosha Karamazov the picture of living holiness is not completed, since Alyosha was left by the author only on the threshold of life. In addition to the indicated difference, Alyosha Karamazov is an exact copy of Prince Myshkin. In addition to these two types, Dostoevsky also identifies other saints. Elder Zosima and Makar Ivanovich are saints with an inclination towards asceticism and contemplation. Dostoevsky's heroes are most often good people. “We are all comically kind people,” says one of them. The “teenager” wants power and wealth solely in order to give all his millions to people. Raskolnikov kills the old pawnbroker in order to gain the opportunity to do good. “I only wanted to take the first step - to put myself in an independent position, to achieve the means, and then everything would be smoothed over by immeasurable, comparatively, benefits. I wanted good for people." Almost all of Dostoevsky’s heroes, no matter how low they stand ethically, no matter how deeply they fall, have in their hearts sparks of goodness, or Christian self-denial, or humanitarian heroism, or a thirst for truth and higher harmony. Just as the ancient Christian apologists noticed the seeds of the Logos in the history of the pagan world and called the pagan sages Christians before Christ, Dostoevsky, among criminals, social scum, behind the walls of a dead house in which he himself spent several years, listens to the beating of a good heart and a strong will. “And how many youths were buried in vain within these walls, how many great forces died here in vain! After all, everything must be said: after all, these people were an extraordinary people. After all, this, perhaps, is the most gifted, the most powerful people of all our people.” Next to the images of Christian holiness, love and humility, with the images of Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov, Dostoevsky gives an image of the deepest fall to which a person can reach, the last abysses of denial, all the power of passions and the uncontrollability of crimes. Tolstoy dwells with the greatest love on everyday pictures, on ordinary phenomena of family and social life, and with the greatest attention describes the normal development of these phenomena, their universal, historical side. Such pictures are almost absent in Dostoevsky’s art; he takes moments and cases, he describes what can only happen, what sometimes happens - under an unusual combination of conditions and circumstances, which even in other respects seems incredible. He needs these combinations of cases and circumstances, these unusual confluences and coincidences not in themselves, but as a canvas on which a person’s inner world is revealed, as a framework into which human characters are inserted. And again, the inner world of a person interests him not from its general mental side, not in the normal development of ordinary characters, but in the highest points to which this development sometimes reaches, in religious and philosophical enlightenments, in extreme revelations of the final truth, in those experiences that are rarer, the more curious. The extreme development of passions that cross ordinary boundaries and take on sophisticated logical forms in line with higher determinism, and the extreme development of bold and new ideas embodied in living and strong feelings are the beloved sphere of his genius. With intense attention he peers at the point where lies become truth and truth lies, where denial acquires positive force and affirmation reaches relaxing heights, where faith falls into unbelief and unbelief becomes faith, where love degenerates into hatred and love grows out of hatred. The emergence of the soul from ordinary facets, the transgression of ordinary laws, the individual revelation of mental power, the bizarre combination of mental forces, the extreme tension of passions, the bends of individual experience in one direction or another and, therefore, in the direction of fall - this is what Dostoevsky rivets the eyes of his readers. Spending a week among his heroes is like spending it in a psychiatric ward, or in a confessional. All these Raskolnikovs, Myshkins, Rogozhins, Karamazovs act in conditions of an illness that is already beginning, some kind of fever, a nervous breakdown - in painful conditions that are valuable because they throw off a person’s usual shackles of common life, the accepted restraint, that in them the soul opens up in its elemental-unconscious nature. “Listen,” Liza said to Alyosha Karamazov, “now your brother is being tried for killing his father, and everyone loves that he killed his father.” - They love it, everyone loves it! Everyone says it’s terrible, but secretly they love it terribly. I love you first. “There is some truth in your words about everyone,” Alyosha said quietly. And in all the heroes of Dostoevsky, in the idiocy of Myshkin, in Karamazovism, in the logic of Raskolnikov - in all there is some truth, in all human nature is revealed, usually covered by a thousand-year-old veil of cultural equalization, communal smoothing. Dostoevsky has almost no wooden figures, dead souls like the groom Luzhin, the image of which does not affect anything in the reader’s soul. The most extreme humiliation into which a person falls, the most extreme degree of moral decline to which he reaches - in Dostoevsky’s depiction does not erase his human face, does not break his kinship with the reader’s soul. It is precisely the fact that his heroes, at the very bottom of their moral fall, retain the features of the human heart, a spark of goodness, - this circumstance highlights the human nature of their moral death, makes this death understandable to readers, arouses intense sympathy for them - but at the same time highlights it from its most difficult side. The reader of Dostoevsky sees most clearly to what extent a person can fall, what baseness can be contained in his heart, to what abyss of denial and unbelief he can reach. Marmeladov, carrying in his heart “painful love for his wife and family,” drinks away the last crumbs of family supplies, takes away their last piece of bread. And what a piece of bread: his daughter Sonya sacrificed her body for the family, took upon herself the suffering of debauchery, and her drunken father takes money from her for drunkenness. “Today I was at Sonya’s, I went to ask for a hangover!.. This very half-shtof was bought with her money,” said Marmeladov, turning to Raskolnikov. “I took out thirty kopecks with my own hands, the last ones, I saw everything that was there... Svidrigailov, with his undoubted non-acquisitiveness and nobility, with the ability for a higher view of life and a feeling of world sorrow, “who never had great hatred for anyone and never even particularly wanted to take revenge,” amazes with the last depths of cynicism and depravity. - This is the most depraved and lost in vices of all people of this kind! Luzhin spoke about Svidrigailov. “I have significant reason to believe that Marfa Petrovna, who had the misfortune of falling in love with him so much and redeeming him from his debts eight years ago, served him in another respect: it was only through her efforts and sacrifices that, at the very beginning, a criminal case was extinguished, with an admixture of brutal and, so to speak, fantastic murder, for which he very, very could have gone to Siberia... Here she lived and now, it seems, lives, a certain Resslich, a foreigner and, moreover, a small pawnbroker, also involved in other matters. Mr. Svidrigailov had long been in some very close and mysterious relations with this Resslich. She had a distant relative, a niece, apparently deaf and dumb, a girl of fifteen or even fourteen years old, whom this Resslich hated infinitely and reproached with every morsel; I even beat her inhumanly. Once she was found hanged in the attic. It was ruled as suicide. After the usual procedures, the matter ended, but subsequently, however, a denunciation appeared that the child was... cruelly insulted by Svidrigailov... When Svidrigailov told Raskolnikov about his love for children and cited several cases from his relationships with girls, he could not help but feel disgust and a shudder of heart. - Leave, leave your vile, low jokes, depraved, low, voluptuous person! Nikolai Stavrogin, a man of enormous willpower, who suffered a slap in the face with the greatness of Prince Myshkin, who had the courage to disregard the opinion of society and challenged it with his marriage to the holy fool Lebyadkina, also harbored within himself an “extraordinary capacity for crime.” “Is it true that you,” Shatov told him angrily, “is it true that you belonged to a bestial, voluptuous secret society in St. Petersburg?” Is it true that the Marquis de Sade could learn from you? Is it true that you lured and corrupted children?.. Karamazovism, which gave us a beautiful, unparalleled in literature, image of the “early lover of humanity” Alyosha, showed at the same time the depth of moral decline and the abyss of religious negation. The father of this family, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, is “a depraved voluptuous man and a vile comedian.” This is how his own son Dmitry Fedorovich defines him. Fyodor Pavlovich opened his whole soul in a conversation with his youngest son “I, dear Alexey Fedorovich, intend to live as long as possible in the world, if only you knew this, and therefore I need every penny, and the longer I live, the more necessary it will be.” Now I’m still a man, fifty-five in total, but I want to be a man for another twenty years, because when I get old, I’ll become filthy, they won’t come to me with good will then, well, that’s where I’ll need money. So now I’m saving up more and more, and more, for myself alone, sir, my dear son Alexei Fedorovich, if only you knew, because I want to live in my filth to the end, if only you knew this. It’s sweeter in filth: everyone scolds it, but everyone lives in it, only everything is secret, but I openly. It was because of my innocence that all the bad guys attacked me. But I don’t want to go to your paradise, Alexey Fedorovich, you would know that, but for a decent person it would be indecent even to go to your paradise, even if there is one there. In my opinion, he fell asleep and didn’t wake up, and there’s nothing, remember me if you want, but if you don’t want to, then damn you. That's my philosophy. The corresponding rules of life also flowed from this philosophy. “For me,” he said to his children, “for me... Oh, you guys!” Children, you little pigs, for me... even in my entire life there has never been an ugly woman, that’s my rule!.. Smerdyakov, born from the ugly beggar Lizaveta Smerdyashchaya, was rumored to be the son of Fyodor Pavlovich. This Karamazovism lurks and operates in all of Fyodor Pavlovich’s children. All of them, with all the differences in their characters, are capable of high impulses and have a truly kind heart - not only Alyosha, a holy man, but also Dmitry, who spoke in his torn dream about crying village children, hungry, cold, blackened by black misfortune, and Ivan, who is busy with a peasant... And all of them, with their high impulses, they are all children of their father, Karamazov - not only the dissolute reveler Dmitry, burned with passion, trembling at the mere thought of the infernal curve, “which echoed even in the little finger on the left leg” of his beloved woman, not only Ivan, who, according to Smerdyakov, “of all the children came out most like Fyodor Pavlovich, with the same soul as him,” but also Alyosha. “I,” he admitted to Liza, “have already touched a lot, a lot... Oh, I’m Karamazov too!... Ivan Karamazov went further than his brothers in the area of ​​religious and ethical doubt. In relation to God, he proclaimed rebellion - and this rebellion is so firmly founded that it costs the reader enormous effort of thought and will to free himself from his nightmare. In the ethical field, he put forward the principle “everything is allowed,” which decisively turned the moral consciousness of the people of our generation upside down. In the person of the “teenager,” the author, in his own words (in the Writer’s Diary), “took a sinless soul, but already polluted by the terrible possibility of depravity.” Prince Sergei Sokolsky also “passionately respects nobility, but only in an ideal way. All his life he constantly curses himself and repents, but never corrects himself. He’s looking for greater achievement, but he’s doing dirty tricks over little things.” The height of ideals and the baseness of life - such is Prince Sokolsky... Let's go down from the main characters to the secondary ones, from the secondary ones to the tertiary ones - and in all of them we will find the same combination of high impulses and low actions. Keller confesses to Prince Myshkin with emotion: - Noble, noble, chivalrously noble! But you know, prince, everything is just in dreams and, so to speak, in courage, in reality it never works out... Lebedev tells the prince the same thing. - Well, here you are, I will tell you the truth only, because you discern a person: words, deeds, lies, and truth - I have everything together and completely sincerely... So, the types of Christian holiness derived from Dostoevsky are high and his heroes are immeasurably low in their moral decline, in their spiritual corruption. But there is no impassable gulf between the two: its saints are living people, and its sinners retain sparks of goodness in the very last stench of their moral corruption. Before the problem of the highest synthesis, the final harmony, is posed, the foundations for its solution have already been given in the very understanding of spiritual height and carnal baseness. However, it is not difficult to see that these foundations are purely psychological in nature, but in no way fundamental. We see in the human soul layers of different experiences, just as in social life we ​​simultaneously see layers left over from different historical eras and overlapping one another. The result is a bizarre mixture, which in general weakens every aspect of human life, erases the various colors of impulses into one gray colorlessness), but in particular leads to many tragic conflicts. Evolutionary science speaks of disharmonies not only in the social and family instincts of man, but also in the structure and functions of his bodily organs. Adaptation of the body, both mental and physical, to changing conditions requires considerable time, hence temporary disharmonies are inevitable. These disharmonies constitute a fact of our life, which in itself does not provide any fundamental conclusions. There is no direct transition from what is available to what should be: this requires intermediate links. Disharmony needs to be comprehended, and for this it is necessary to raise it to some higher principle, standing outside of one and the other side - only in this case it becomes a fact of a higher order, united in a higher synthesis. Of course, the evolutionary theory does not want to know such a reconciliation and discards all higher ideas with contempt. her last hope is the dysfunctional vestigial organs, and she views disharmonies, both physiological and social, equally. Evolution will extinguish instincts that contradict new social conditions. Over time, a person will be naturally virtuous, completely social - serving society will not give him anything other than pleasure, and will be reduced to exclusively selfish motives. Virtue will be rational selfishness. Of course, all the excessively heavenly impulses generated in the days of the youth of the human race will also disappear; good will coincide with public benefit. But then the wild bloodthirsty instincts will disappear, and everything will be leveled out in everyday prudence. But the religious view of life cannot be content with these evolutionary aspirations. Firstly, religion wants to give every moment of historical life a non-random meaning, to record every era in the heavenly book of eternity. The human soul is not the same as a physiological function, and the pangs of mental disharmony cannot be sufficiently atoned for by the coming equation. The highest synthesis is required for every time. Secondly, some types of disharmony are made up of halves of which one does not want to sacrifice. # It is easy to resolve the issue of the cecum, but it is difficult to say what is more valuable to us, the bubbling of earthly passions or the silence of heavenly peace, the torment of suffering and struggle or the bliss of nirvana. In any case, the ideal of “human benefits, calculated as an average from statistical figures and scientific-economic formulas” must be recognized as not satisfying a person, because this “register” does not include “the most profitable benefit that is dearest to a person” - the benefit of personal initiative, individual feelings, one’s will. Happiness is not “in happiness itself,” but in personal and unique efforts to achieve it. The colors of life, the bubbling of passions, self-will “may be more beneficial than all benefits, even in this case, if it brings us obvious harm and contradicts the most sound conclusions of our reason about benefits, because in any case it preserves for us what is most important and dearest, that is, our personality and our individuality.” Another question is whether a person - in his highest contemplations and final dreams - will want to part with his passions-suffering, with the disharmony of light and darkness, whether he will want a universal equation and the final “hosanna”: after all, this “hosanna” would mean the end of life, the end of everything that gives the picture richness. – What would have happened after my “hosanna”? Everything in the world would immediately fade away and no incidents would happen... I know there is a secret here, but they never want to tell me the secret... But until the secret is revealed, for me there are two truths: one there, theirs, not yet known to me at all, and the other is mine. And it remains to be seen which will be purer”... While we live, our religion lies in the reconciliation of both halves of disharmony, in the synthesis of both poles of life. The psychologically random compatibility of the two poles makes a higher synthesis possible, but only possible, constitutes its condition and only the condition. Essentially, synthesis presupposes a principle that lies outside the disharmonious sides, above them, above them. Dostoevsky points out this principle in life itself. He confesses it through the mouth of Ivan Karamazov. “I don’t believe in life, even if I lose faith in a dear woman, if I lose faith in the order of things, if I even become convinced that everything, on the contrary, is disordered, damned and, perhaps, demonic chaos, even if all the horrors of human disappointment strike me, I still want to live, and even as I fell for this cup, I won’t tear myself away from it until I overcome it all!.. My youth will conquer everything - every disappointment, any aversion to life. I asked myself many times: is there such despair in the world that this frenzied and perhaps indecent thirst for life would overcome in me, and I decided that, it seems, there is no such thing... Other consumptive brats-moralists often call this thirst for life vile, especially poets. It’s partly Karamazov’s trait, it’s true, this thirst for life, no matter what, but why is it vile? There is still an awful lot of centripetal force on our planet. I want to live, and I live, even if against logic. I may not believe in the order of things, but dear to me are the sticky leaves that bloom in spring, dear to the blue sky, dear to me is another person whom you sometimes don’t know why you love, dear to another human feat in which you may have stopped believing long ago, but still, out of old memory, you honor him with your heart... Sticky spring leaves, blue sky, I love, that’s what! This is not intelligence, this is not logic, here you love with your gut, here with your womb, you love your first young strength... Do you understand anything in my nonsense, Alyoshka, or not? Ivan suddenly laughed. “I understand too much, Ivan: with your gut and belly you want to love,” you said it beautifully, and I’m terribly glad that you want to live like this, exclaimed Alyosha. - I think that everyone should, first of all, love life in the world... - Love life more than its meaning? “It’s absolutely necessary to love before logic, as you say, to love before logic, and only then will I understand the meaning.” This is what I have been imagining for a long time. Half of your work is done, Ivan, and acquired: you love to live... Dostoevsky said many new words. But perhaps his most precious new word is this word about life, about love for life more than for its meaning. Life is more important than any thoughts about life - the feeling of life is more important than any feelings that complicate life. Let life be beautiful, life meaningful is higher than just life, but life, life itself, is more significant than any definitions and any direction of life. Life itself is a mystery, and the consciousness of life, its sensation, is the first basis of religion: life in its very essence is mystical and religious. The first prayer of a person is reverence for life, solemn listening to it. Life as such is an inevitable and direct path to God. He who lives thereby already knows God and serves Him. On the contrary, lifeless holiness, the height of invented ideals, head ideas, is a fiction, fata morgana, a dream. It is true that life is born in blood and mud, and it develops in carnal passions - and all this is disgusting to the disgusting spirit: it seems that as life shortens, this mud is shaken off, this heat cools, and it becomes purer. But this is an empty dream: the soul of man is in living blood, and through living blood he ascends to God. “It’s terrible for a person to endure a lot on earth,” Dmitry said to Alyosha, “he’s afraid of a lot of troubles!” Brother, I almost only think about this, about this humiliated man, because I myself am such a person. I walk and don’t know whether I’ve landed in stink and shame or in light and joy. That’s where the trouble lies, because everything in the world is a mystery! And when I happened to plunge into the deepest shame of depravity (and that was all I ever did), I always read this poem. Did it fix me? Never! Because I am Karamazov. Because if I’m going to fly into the abyss, I’ll do it straight, head down and heels up, and I’m even pleased that it’s in this humiliating position that I fall and consider it beauty for myself. And in this very shame I suddenly begin the anthem. Let me be cursed, let me be low and vile, but let me kiss the hem of the robe in which my God is clothed; let me follow the devil at the same time, but I am still Your son, Lord, and I love You, and I feel joy, without which the world cannot stand and be... Later in prison, on suspicion of parricide, and awaiting hard labor, Dmitry Karamazov saves himself with the same love of life. - We will be in chains, and there will be no will, but then, in our great grief, we will rise again into joy, without which it is impossible for man to live, and for God to be, for God gives joy, this is His great privilege... Then we, underground people, will sing from the bowels of the earth a tragic hymn to God, who has joy! Long live God and His joy! I love Him!.. No, life is full, there is life underground!.. And what is suffering? I’m not afraid of it, even if it were countless... And it seems that there is so much of this power in me now that I will overcome everything, all suffering, just to say and tell myself every minute: I am! In a thousand torments - I am, in torture I writhe - but I am!... The thirst for life and its joy saves Dmitry Karamazov both in the shame of debauchery and in the agony of suffering. And Alyosha Karamazov, in the most difficult moment of his life, is saved by “union with the earth” - “he kissed her while crying, sobbing and pouring his tears, and frantically swore to love her, to love her forever and ever”... Such was the covenant of his holy elder - “to drench the earth with tears of joy.” And the holy fool Lebyadkina, Stavrogin’s wife, babbles that “God and nature are all one,” that “the Mother of God is the great mother of the damp earth,” that one must kiss the ground in prayer. Life itself, as the principle of thought and feeling, reconciles disharmonious sides, opposite poles - life itself constitutes the all-reconciling religious content. Good and evil, bliss and suffering, moral height and the shame of fall have something in common that stands above them and reconciles them: this is the flowering of life, the joy of being. Above abstract good, head ideals, living good, living man, but also in evil, in the stench of depravity, man also lives and sings a hymn to God. Evil is absolutely disgusting when it becomes an abstract principle, shortens human life, when “it is not a person who eats an idea, but an idea that eats a person”; but under this condition, goodness “smells like carrion.” Good is valuable because it makes a person alive, but the shame of falling, the pangs of suffering are not absolutely disgusting if they cover a living person, if they are permeated with a feeling of life, the joy of being. And this connection of poles in the sphere of life is so real and effective that a holy person, if he is alive, “touches” a lot, “understands” a lot - and the thirst for life already carries within himself a guarantee of good. “You,” Versilov said to the teenager, “you want to live so much and are so thirsty to live that, it seems, if you were given three lives, even those would not be enough for you; Well, these people are mostly good-natured. He who loves life cannot help but be kind in the last defilement of the fall, at the very bottom of depravity. But, it goes without saying, it is not these sparks of goodness, preserved at the bottom of the fall, that provide the highest solution to all-reconciling harmony, for this would mean that goodness is highest and that the separation of the poles is irremovable. No, it is not goodness, abundant at one pole and meager at the other, that provides the final reconciliation, but religion, life as a religious principle. The joy of life, which turns the heart to God, can be as strong in a sinner as in a righteous person; the faith of the prodigal son warmed his heart more strongly than the cold legalistic complacency of the eldest son, his soul burned with fiery love for the all-forgiving Father, not in the least weakened by his depraved life, but rather strengthened by this consciousness of his baseness. It is not good deeds that save a person, atone for his sins, but religious faith. - And he will judge and forgive everyone, both the good and the evil, both the wise and the humble... And when he has finished with everyone, then he will say to us: “Come out,” he will say, you too! Come out drunk, come out weak, come out drunk!” And we will all go out without shame and stand. And he will say: “You pigs! The image of the beast and its seal; but come too!” And the wise will say, the wise will say: “Lord! Why do you accept these people?” He will say: “That is why I accept them, the wise ones, because I accept them, the wise ones, because not a single one of these himself considered himself worthy of this”... And he will stretch out His hands to us, and we will fall down... and cry... and we will understand everything! Then we will understand everything!., and everyone will understand... Hak judged Marmeladov with his drunken tongue. And the holy elder Zosima taught: - Brothers, do not be afraid of the sin of people, love a person even in his sin, for this similarity to divine love is the height of love on earth. Love all of God's creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God. Love animals, love plants, love everything. You will love every thing and you will comprehend the mystery of God in things... Divine love for people, for the righteous and sinners, is the same love as love for every thing - love that transcends the differences between good and evil. Religious joy of life gives the highest harmony that lies beyond the boundaries of ethical poles. But the principle of life does only half the job. - Half of your work is done, Ivan, and acquired: you love to live. Now you need to try for your other half, and you are saved. The principle of life is half the battle, because nevertheless it does not destroy the internal difference between good and evil, moral height and moral lowness, yet from within the disharmony remains unreconciled. This remainder is reconciled, apparently, according to the principle of beauty: in both poles there can be the same beauty. – Beauty is a terrible and terrible thing! Terrible because it is indefinable, but it is impossible to determine, because God gave only riddles. Here the shores meet, here all the contradictions live together... Another person, even higher in heart and with a lofty mind, begins with the ideal of the Madonna, and ends with the ideal of Sodom. It is even more terrible for someone who, already with the ideal of Sodom in his soul, does not deny the ideal of the Madonna, and his heart burns from it, and in truth, in truth, burns, as in his young, blameless years. No, the man is wide, too wide, I would narrow it down. The devil knows what it even is, that's what! What seems disgraceful to the mind is pure beauty to the heart. Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe that it is in Sodom that she sits for the vast majority of people... The terrible thing is that beauty is not only a terrible, but also a mysterious thing. Here the devil fights with God, and the battlefield is the hearts of people... The beauty of both poles is not the same as the psychologically random combination of disharmonious sides noted above - “touching everything” of holy souls and sparks of goodness preserved in the stench of the fall. Now we are talking about a fundamental reconciliation of the poles, about their coincidence in their last points. That combination, for example, means that the criminal, despite his crime, retains something good in his soul, some good feelings, good thoughts, love for someone, and this fundamental reconciliation means that the crime itself can be committed in the name of good, for the sake of some higher motives, that sublime love for humanity, boldly brought to the final conclusions, leads to the transgression of obstacles, that the crime is resolved “by conscience,” with its sanction, with religious sanctification. Criminals who carry in their souls some kind of love for good, despite their fall, have long been known, and the idea of ​​resolving a crime according to conscience “for the first time” came to Raskolnikov. “Then I came up with one idea that no one had ever thought of before me... So, it is in this fundamental sense that Dostoevsky uses the idea of beauty to reconcile different poles. Good, in addition to the sense of duty by which it is determined, also contains beauty, but evil, in its conscious and extreme manifestations, contains the same beauty. The most sacred book says: “You are neither cold nor hot; Oh, that you were cold or hot! But because you are warm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of My mouth.” Lukewarmness, sluggish service to goodness, when a person does not dare to bring the poisoned cup of evil to his lips, but cannot fully cleave to goodness - this lukewarmness has something absolutely disgusting in it. On the contrary, in resolute coldness, in resolute service to the earth, in resolute worship of evil, there is something aesthetically great, soul-grabbing, fascinating. The embodiment of this all-reconciling beauty in the soul of man, in the soul of chosen people, some “special” people who feel the same beauty in both poles and, as it were, prophesying the coming world reconciliation of good and evil, most of all attracted Dostoevsky’s attention. About Raskolnikov, Razumikhin says: - It’s as if two opposite characters alternately replace him. Prince Myshkin loves Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya at the same time “with two different loves,” that is, he loves Nastasya Filippovna with pity, and out of pity he wants to marry her - “it’s just so easy to marry,” and at the same time he loves Aglaya with husband-woman love. – I love Nastasya Filippovna with all my soul! - And at the same time they assured Aglaya Ivanovna of their love? - How? So you want to love both? Versilov is the same type. He says about himself: – I am infinitely strong by the direct power of getting along with anything. Nothing can destroy me, nothing can destroy me, and nothing can surprise me. I can comfortably feel two opposite feelings at the same time. Mostly Versilov feels this “contact of opposites” in the field of love: he also has two loves - one for Sofya Andreevna, the mother of the “teenager” (“more, so to speak, humane and universal love than simple love”) and the other for other women, for example, for Katerina Nikolaevna (simple, passionate love). During one of the transitions from one love to another, he said to Sofya Andreevna: - Goodbye, Sonya, I’m going on a journey again, as I’ve already left you several times... Well, of course, someday I’ll come to you again - in this sense, you are inevitable. And this is how he depicts his internal state at the same time: “You know, it seems to me that I’m completely split into two, I’m mentally split into two and I’m terribly afraid of it.” Your double is standing exactly next to you; You yourself are smart and reasonable, but he certainly wants to do some nonsense, and sometimes a funny thing, next to you; and suddenly you notice that you yourself want to do this fun thing, and God knows why, that is, you somehow reluctantly want to, resisting with all your might. I once knew a doctor who, at his father’s funeral in church, suddenly whistled... Versilov took the image in his hands and hit it with all his might against the corner of the stove: the image split into exactly two pieces. Also with Versilov in other respects: “worldwide pain for everyone” and the most undisguised egoism, the height of impulses, the power of faith, chains - and the bubbling of passions, atheism... The simultaneous sensation of two abysses is all of nature and Dmitry Karamazov. The psychologist-prosecutor, discussing the character of Dmitry Karamazov, his ability for noble impulses and disgusting actions, finds this ability to be the most revealing of the depths of his soul. – It usually happens in life that when there are two opposites, the truth must be sought in the middle; in the present case this is literally not the case. Most likely, in the first case he was sincerely noble, and in the second case he was also sincerely low. Why? But precisely because we are broad, Karamazov-like natures, capable of containing all sorts of opposites and contemplating both abysses at once, the abyss above us, the abyss of the highest ideals, and the abyss below us, the abyss of the lowest and most fetid fall... The feeling of the baseness of the fall is just as necessary for these unbridled, unbridled natures, as is the feeling of the highest nobility... It is they who need this unnatural mixture constantly and incessantly. Two abysses at the same moment - without this we are unhappy and dissatisfied, our existence is not complete. We are wide, wide like all of our Mother Russia, we can accommodate everything and get along with everything! Nikolai Stavrogin is the same type and, at the same time, the brightest, most prominently expressed. The soul of his soul is a “thirst for contrasts.” He was capable of the most sublime generosity, and at the same time, anger lurked in his soul, cold, calm and reasonable, therefore, the most disgusting, the most terrible that could be. At the same time, he plants God and his homeland in Shatov’s heart, preaches to him the fanatical idea of ​​a God-bearing people, and at the same time, on the same days, he poisons Kirilov’s heart with the poison of decisive atheism. He did not know the difference in beauty between some voluptuous, brutal thing and any feat, even a sacrifice of life for humanity - in both poles he found a coincidence of beauty, the sameness of pleasure. On the eve of his death, his suicide, he confessed to his beloved girl: “I tried my strength everywhere.” You advised me this “to get to know yourself.” At tests for herself and for the show, she turned out to be limitless. Before your eyes, I suffered a slap in the face from your brother; I confessed my marriage (to Lebyadkina) publicly... I can wish to do a good deed and I feel pleasure from it; next to me I wish for evil and I also feel pleasure. The idea of ​​the all-reconciling power of beauty, the aesthetic coincidence of poles, the sameness of pleasure in good and evil is one of the most daring ideas that could ever have arisen in Dostoevsky’s soul. And what - do we have in this idea the final reconciliation of opposites, does it give the final harmony, can the highest synthesis be considered achieved? We have no reason to answer this question in the affirmative. Beauty does not provide a real synthesis of opposites. We can undoubtedly establish this in all of Dostoevsky’s “extraordinary people”, in whom a coincidence of opposites is revealed. All “extraordinary people”, bearers of the same pleasure in both poles, can be divided into three categories. In the first two categories, the disharmonious sides are presented unequally, not with equal reality, but in such a way that either good acts only in the form of head ideals, in the form of empty abstract dreams, while evil manifests itself in rich colors, in deep passions, or, on the contrary, earthly feelings and evil thoughts stir in the soul too weakly, theoretically colorless, abstractly, while love for good completely and firmly controls the soul. Only in the third category of “extraordinary people” do we observe equal strength of both poles. So, the first category is people with a real inclination towards the earth and abstract dreams of the sublime and beautiful; the second category - people with a real aspiration to heaven and with a weak sense of earth, with an abstract thought about evil; third category - people with an equal inclination towards good and evil. The first type is the hero of the “underground” and Dmitry Karamazov. Here is the first confession. – My streak of debauchery was ending and I felt terribly sick... But I had a way out that reconciled everything, this was to escape into “everything beautiful and lofty”, of course in dreams. I dreamed terribly, I dreamed for three months in a row... I suddenly became a hero... Dreams came to me especially sweeter and stronger after debauchery, they came with repentance and tears, with curses and delight. There were moments of such positive rapture, such happiness that even the slightest ridicule was not felt inside me, by God. There was faith, hope, love. I blindly believed then that by some miracle, by some external circumstance, all this would suddenly move apart, expand - and then I would suddenly appear in the light of God, almost on a white horse and not in a laurel wreath. I couldn’t even understand the secondary role, and that’s precisely why, in fact, I occupied the latter very calmly. Either a hero or dirt, there was no middle ground. This is what ruined me, because in the mud I consoled myself with the fact that at other times I was a hero, but the hero covered up the mud. It is remarkable that these tides of “everything beautiful and lofty” came to me even during debauchery, and precisely when I was already at the very bottom, they came in separate flashes, as if reminding me of themselves, but did not, however, destroy debauchery with their appearance; on the contrary, it was as if they were enlivening it with contrast... But how much love, Lord, how much love I experienced in these dreams of mine, in these “salvation into everything beautiful and lofty”; although it was a fantastic love, although it had never actually been applied to anything human, there was so much of it, this love, that later, in fact, there was no need to even apply it... So is Dmitry Karamazov. All his life, “with a Diogenes lantern,” he seeks nobility and at the same time lives a careless, ugly, drunken, dirty life. He speaks about himself, about his life to Alyosha: “I loved debauchery, I loved the shame of debauchery, I loved cruelty: am I not a bug, am I not an evil insect? It’s said – Karamazov!” Dmitry Fedorovich is a voluptuous and evil insect. The ideal of Madonna, which he carries in his soul along with this Sodomite ideal, is deeply hidden in his heart, peeking out from there timidly and inactively. “When I happened to plunge into the deepest, deepest shame of depravity (and that’s all that ever happened to me), I always read a poem about Ceres. Did it fix me? Never! Because I am Karamazov. Because if I’m going to fly into the abyss, I’ll do it right, head down and heels up”... That’s how he really lived. Dmitry Fedorovich. However, in those days, which are described in the novel, he experiences something new under the thunder of special circumstances - he experiences a rebirth, a resurrection. “Brother,” he says to Alyosha, while in prison, “in these last two months I felt a new person in myself. A new person has risen in me! Was imprisoned within me, but would never have appeared if not for this thunder.” From Dmitry Karamazov, who simultaneously felt two abysses, through the hero of the underground, through Prince Sokolsky, we gradually descend to Marmeladov, Keller, Lebedev, who did not know any abysses, but lived simply in. dirt, retaining a vague memory of the kingdom of God, which could not rise to the height of their sparks, to the height of their good moments, solely from moral weakness, from powerlessness before the demands of the social environment. These Marmeladovs simply lack culture; for them, all their salvation, a small, philistine salvation, will come from social evolution, from the development of economic and social conditions. It is not the gods who burn the bricks, and it is not religion that is needed to cure a person of alcoholism, rowdyism, usury, and fraud. It's easy to see; but it is noteworthy that the transition from the extraordinary people of the double poles to these weak and drunken ones occurs with amazing gradualness - there is absolutely no way to indicate the boundaries between them. And the breadth of Dmitry Karamazov has too many spontaneous and uncultured elements in it; it is entirely due to his moral weakness, his spiritual depravity. Personal good inclinations and the savagery of his environment, the height of abstract ideals and the strength of social disorder - these are the springs of his inner tragedy. Obviously, the first category of extraordinary people does not take us one step beyond the limits of the elemental-psychic compatibility of different mental strata, and does not move us one inch towards the height of the fundamental reconciliation of the poles. Dmitry Karamazov is all from the spontaneous past, and there is nothing fundamentally future in him... The same must be said about the other two categories. The second category is people with a real aspiration to heaven and with a weak sense of earth, with an abstract thought about evil. These are Prince Myshkin, Raskolnikov, Kirilov. Explaining to Evgeny Pavlovich about his “two loves” for Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya and instructing him to talk about something with Aglaya, to explain to her that by marrying Nastasya Filippovna, he does not in the least contradict his love for Aglaya, the prince at the same time expresses an involuntary feeling of some kind of guilt. - Oh, yes, it's my fault! Most likely it's all my fault! I still don’t know what exactly, but I’m to blame... There’s something here that I can’t explain to you, Evgeny Pavlovich, and I don’t have the words, but... Aglaya Ivanovna will understand! Oh, I always believed that she would understand. - No, prince, he won’t understand! Aglaya Ivanovna loved like a woman, like a person, and not like... an abstract spirit. Do you know what, my poor prince: most likely, you never loved either one! The prince loved Nastasya Filippovna with love and pity, but with simple love the prince did not love either Nastasya Filippovna or Aglaya. And this was his fault, and hence his “two loves,” which he could not figure out. “Are you, prince, a big hunter of the female gender?” - I n-n-no! I mean... You may not know, because due to my congenital illness I don’t even know women at all. This is where the prince's guilt comes from. A living saint in all respects, the prince in one respect turned out to be a dead mummy - in the respect in which he split into two, split into two poles, in relation to a woman. The combination of two poles, “two loves” in one heart in this case serves as undoubted evidence of natural weakness and abnormality. As for Prince Myshkin, the same should be said about Alyosha Karamazov. In him we see essentially one thing heavenly, spiritual. If he tells Lisa about himself that “he has touched a lot,” that he understands the terrible malice of people, then these are words, only words that are not confirmed by a single line in the course of the novel. Likewise, his love for Liza Khokhlakova, despite the kiss, is some kind of childish, bloodless love. The unchildish Lisa simply tells him one day: “You are not fit to be a husband. I will marry you, and suddenly I will give a note to take to the one I love after you (for example, Ivan Fedorovich). You will take it and certainly carry it back, and you will also bring an answer.” Such bloodless, jealousy-free love does not satisfy Lisa... We see the same infirmity that Prince Myshkin has in a completely different attitude, in relation to crime, in Raskolnikov. Of course, this weakness, the weakness to crime, is one of those in which the power of God is accomplished, but for aesthetics there is no ethical point of view, it only knows two poles and the sameness of pleasure in them - and it is enough for us in this place to note only the pallor of one of the poles. Raskolnikov is a deep lover of humanity. Love for people permeates him to the marrow of his bones. On the contrary, his capacity for crime is purely theoretical - “bookish dreams, a theoretically irritated heart.” Therefore, it is no coincidence that Raskolnikov cannot stand crime. His crime for good purposes is the hasty confusion of a good heart with a head theory. Kirilov's head, fictitious (inspired by Stavrogin) atheism is combined with the most good-natured, good-heartedness. This atheist, who decided to kill himself, solely to prove his willfulness (the first atheistic-theoretical suicide, like Raskolnikov’s first theoretical crime), and at the same time lighting a lamp because “the old woman loves,” amusing the child with a ball and rejoicing at the birth of the Shatovs’ baby, this atheist, who was “slain by the idea,” is the heaviest, most pitiful creation of artistic creativity. Now let us turn to the third category of extraordinary people. These are Versilov, Ivan Karamazov, Svidrigailov and especially Stavrogin. They have equal inclination towards both poles. But this “most convenient” adaptation to all circumstances cannot be recognized as the pinnacle of human development. The sameness of pleasure in both poles, upon closer observation, turns out to be not an ideal combination, but a spontaneously chaotic mixture, which can only be approved by vulgar everyday prudence. This is not an ideal peak, it is a pitiful, vulgar middle ground that does not dare to stick to either shore. The hero of the underground insightfully discusses this disgusting trait of our “romantics.” Among us, “suprastellar natures” are not found “in their pure state.” Our romantics know how to manage their affairs perfectly, they will give in to everything politically, they will bypass everything, they know how to combine superstar dreams with government apartments, pensions, ranks; their main concern is to preserve themselves, to “save their soul,” like some piece of jewelry. This is what this “capacity for the most contradictory sensations” means; This is why our “broad” natures, even at the very last fall, never lose their ideal. Versilov fits this standard quite well. He himself admits his prudence. – I am infinitely strong due to the immediate power of getting along with anything, so characteristic of all smart Russian people (“smart romantics”) of our generation. You can’t destroy me with anything, you can’t offend me with anything and you can’t surprise me with anything. I am as resilient as a yard dog. I can conveniently feel two opposite feelings at the same time - and, of course, not of my own free will. But nevertheless, I know that this is dishonest, most importantly because it is too prudent... The “teenager”, in love with Versilov and thoughtfully observing him, comes to the conclusion that “Versilov cannot be capable of any feeling other than boundless self-love.” But one can see that placing oneself at the center of the universe with inappropriate actual strength, impressing weak and soft-hearted souls, plunging them into rapturous awe, should seem ridiculous to more original observers. This middle mixture of extremes is ridiculous, this prudent accommodatingness, so inconsistent with high claims. “I always thought there was something funny about you.” Katerina Nikolaevna says this to Versilov. Prince Myshkin, Raskolnikov, Kirilov, Dmitry Karamazov are not funny, 1 but Versilov, Ivan Karamazov, Svidrigailov, Stavrogin are funny and funny: laughter follows them on their heels, like a mirror reflecting their average vulgarity. What is Ivan Karamazov, with all the audacity of his religious doubt, with all the courage of his ethical denial, who inspires enthusiastic awe in exalted women and slavish devotion to the fanatical lackeys Smerdyakov? This lackey Smerdyakov, related to Ivan Karamazov in spirit (and in flesh), defines the character of his “idol” this way: -You are very smart, sir. You love money, you love honor too, because you are very proud, you love women’s charms excessively, and most of all, to live in calm contentment and not to bow to anyone - this is most of all, sir. Love of peace and pride are two main traits in the character of Ivan Karamazov, both of which speak of his average vulgarity. These characters cannot help but be proud and vain. With even greater brightness than in the lackey Smerdyakov, Ivan’s character is reflected in his nightmare-devil, this “embodiment of his thoughts and feelings, only the most disgusting and stupid.” This is precisely the “vulgar devil”, disgusting in his bourgeois meanness, in his lackeyness. “I’ve never been such a lackey!” Why could my soul give birth to such a lackey? Yes, the fact of the matter is that Ivan has always been such a lackey. His proud mind, wandering from one pole to the other, since everything is allowed to him, as the chosen one, - his proud mind serves only as a background against which his lackey vulgarity emerges. At the most important moment of his life, when Smerdyakov, hypnotizing him, agreed with him to kill his father, “he (Ivan Fedorovich) suddenly, to Smerdyakov’s surprise, laughed and quickly went out the gate, continuing to laugh.” The next morning, leaving for Chermashnya, as Smerdyakov wished, he said goodbye to him “with some kind of nervous laugh”... Svidrigailov, a man of “aesthetics and comfort,” came to the conclusion through his own experience: “the trouble is to be broad without special genius.” The trouble is breadth that exceeds the measure of actual strength, and this can happen with any degree of strength, because any degree of strength can be surpassed by an even greater degree of breadth, pretension, and pride. The last days and last hours in which we find Svidrigailov amaze and depress the reader’s soul with hopeless grayness, an impenetrable fog of fine continuous rain: everything is possible, everything has been tested, but nothing reaches the last depths of the soul, everything slides on its surface, the taste for everything is lost. And this was his whole life: he never hated anything, did not even want to take revenge, but did not experience all-encompassing love; I didn’t like to argue either, I didn’t get excited... Gray and colorless! But this lackey vulgarity emerges especially clearly in the face of Nikolai Stavrogin. His strength in testing - for himself and for show - turned out to be limitless. But this infinity is not natural, but artificial, rational and, mainly, ostentatious. Apparently, he endured the slap with the same greatness as Prince Myshkin, but from the inside they were two completely different phenomena. For Prince Myshkin it was immediate and natural, but for Stavrogin it was artificial, deliberate, “retort” (as an underground hero would say). The prince had absolutely no pride, as Aglaya noted, and Stavrogin was excessively proud, petty-vain, a self-satisfied aristocrat above the average order, a bourgeois aristocrat, a lackey-aristocrat. “You are an atheist,” Shatov told Stavrogin, “because you are a nobleman.” You have lost the distinction between evil and good because you stopped recognizing your people... I am also a barich, the son of your serf lackey Pashka... Not to believe in God out of pride, to deny the difference between good and evil out of aristocratic complacency - but could there be anything more vulgar than this! “I don’t believe in God, in whom the common people believe, I don’t recognize a universally obligatory duty, because my trousers are cut better than others!” Only a lackey, a Smerdyakov soul can reason like this, only a lackey can not understand that the difference of any measure is insignificant before infinity. – You don’t insult anyone, and everyone hates you; You look like everyone else, and everyone is afraid of you. No one will come up to you to pat you on the shoulder. You are a terrible aristocrat. This is what Peter Verkhovensky said to Stavrogin in the delight of idolatry, not even suspecting that he had a disgusting idol before him. Stavrogin is afraid, more than anything else, of seeming funny: the complete opposite of Prince Myshkin. And his marriage to Lebyadkina is also not from nature, but from proud thoughts, from anguish. He announces his marriage to Lebyadkina “with boundless arrogance.” Prince Myshkin would have felt and acted completely differently. And with all his contempt for society, Stavrogin wishes the death of his wife: he played a role and needs to get rid of someone else’s clothes. He knows other women, accepting their caresses with the indifference of a spoiled little bark, or perhaps with the impotence of an exhausted libertine... And everything that Stavrogin does, every magnificent feat of his has a farcical basis, turns out to be the clowning of a bad actor. In a duel with Mavriky Nikolaevich, he behaves like a hero: he withstands the enemy’s shot and shoots to the side. Kirilov, his second, effortlessly manages to show him that he behaved like a farcical Petrushka and that he should be ashamed. “If for me,” Kirilov said, the burden is easy, because it is by nature, then perhaps the burden is more difficult for you, because it is such a nature. There is very little to be ashamed of, just a little... You are not a strong person. Despite his apparent strength, despite his ostentatious strength, Stavrogin is not a strong person on the inside. He is precisely “wandering from the edge,” contrary to Shatov’s contrary opinion; he wanders from one shore to another. “I have an insignificant character,” he admits to Kirilov. He speaks out even more frankly in a letter to Daria Pavlovna. – I can wish to do a good deed and feel pleasure from it; next to me I wish for evil and I also feel pleasure. But both feelings are always too small, and they never happen very much. My desires are too weak: they cannot lead. You can cross a river on a log, but not on a piece of wood... Stavrogin’s trouble, like Svidrigailov’s, is his breadth of nature with internal impotence; his demon, like Ivan Karamazov’s devil, is a demon of average vulgarity: “he’s just a small, nasty, scrofulous imp with a runny nose, one of the failed ones.” His trouble is that he, having an internally powerless nature, nevertheless climbed into strong people, although he did not admit this to Kirilov. Let’s say again, it’s not at all a matter of the degree of strength or powerlessness - he was still a very strong man - but the fact that his claims exceeded his strength, that he artificially, with strain, built his life. He lived not according to nature, but according to retort recipes, rationally mixing different parts. And therefore he did not have the spontaneity of feeling, did not give himself entirely to either one direction or the other. Kirilov said about him: – Stavrogin, if he believes, then does not believe that he believes. If he does not believe, then he does not believe that he does not believe. (The same can be said about Ivan Karamazov). Stavrogin has his demon and his “halucinations”; He also has his own lackey, his “monkey” - Pyotr Verkhovensky, like Ivan Karamazov - Smerdyakov. Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky is absolutely capable of anything: for him, killing a person is the same as slaughtering a chicken. He is capable of anything because of his terrible spiritual emptiness, his wooden insensibility, his terrible vile frivolity. Pyotr Stepanovich is connected with Stavrogin just as inextricably and commits crimes for him as Smerdyakov did for Ivan Karamazov. “I’m a buffoon,” Verkhovensky told Stavrogin, but you are my main half. - You are a “boat”, you are an old, leaky, wood-burning barge for scrapping! – You are a trashy, lascivious, broken little bark! External, ostentatious strength did not correspond to Stavrogin’s internal powerlessness. He had enormous physical strength and was a handsome man, but his face resembled a mask. “Speak in a human voice at least once in your life,” Shatov begged Stavrogin. Fracturedness, inconsistency between internal and external, lasciviousness - such is the character of Stavrogin. And he himself, from the inside, knows his weak, funny side better than anyone. “I really want to laugh, keep laughing, continuously, for a long time, a lot.” I'm definitely filled with laughter... And this laughter from Stavrogin is transmitted to all the people close to him, to all who, deceived by him, by his appearance, revered him, adored him, bowed to him, prayed for him. The scene when Marya Timofeevna, Stavrogin’s pitiful wife, admits that she considered him a prince (for example, Prince Myshkin), and now sees his imposture, explains to him in her delusional, frenzied, but deeply soulful language that a real prince, a falcon, would not be ashamed of his wife in front of the world, that he cannot bear the weight lifted upon himself, that he is not a falcon, but an eagle owl, a blind owl, Grishka Otrepiev - this scene is filled with extraordinary tragedy. “I must confess to you,” Lisa told Stavrogin, “the idea has strengthened in me that there is something terrible, dirty and bloody in your soul, and... and at the same time, something that makes you look terribly funny.” Be careful not to tell me if it’s true: I’ll laugh at you. I will laugh at you all your life. Only Dasha does not laugh at Stavrogin, who has doomed herself in advance to the role of a nurse, humiliating and humiliating for Stavrogin. We see that all the “extraordinary people” who rise to the all-reconciling power of beauty, to the sameness of pleasure in both poles, all of them, of all ranks, in fact do not reach the heights to which they “climb”, do not reach ideal harmony - they are all mental types and have nothing fundamentally prophetic in themselves, they are all a product of complex cultural conditions, and not forerunners of the future, they all relate to the past, and not to to the future. “I marveled a thousand times,” says the “teenager,” “at this ability of a person (and, it seems, a Russian person par excellence) to cherish in his soul the highest ideal next to the greatest meanness, and all completely sincerely.” Is it a special broadness in a Russian person that will take him far, or just meanness - that is the question. It may be neither one nor the other. This is how V.S. Solovyov answers this question. – “Russia is the great outskirts of Europe towards Asia. Given its marginal position, our fatherland naturally experiences the influence of the Asian element much more than other European countries, which is where our entire supposed originality lies. With us, from the beginning, and especially since the time of Batu, the Asian element entered into nature and became a second soul, so that the Germans could say about us with a sigh: Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in ihrer Brust, Die eine will sich top der andern trennen. It is impossible for us to completely get rid of our second soul, and it is not necessary - we also owe something to it, but in order not to be torn apart in such a collision, it is necessary for one soul to decisively prevail and prevail, and, of course, the best one. The principle of beauty, the same at both poles, does not lead a person out of that mental compatibility of opposites, from that natural “broadness” that can serve as a natural basis for solving a religious problem, but does not yet constitute the solution itself. Aesthetic reconciliation is only a ghost, a phantom, a phenomenon of a historical-cultural, or even pathological order, like those strange seconds that precede attacks of epilepsy. “In the epileptic state of Prince Myshkin there was one degree almost before the seizure (if only the seizure came in reality), when suddenly, amid sadness, spiritual darkness, pressure, for moments his brain seemed to ignite, and with an extraordinary impulse all his vital forces were strained at once. The feeling of life, self-awareness almost increased tenfold in these moments, which lasted like lightning. The mind and heart were illuminated with extraordinary light; all his worries, all his doubts, all his worries seemed to be pacified at once, resolved into some kind of supreme calm, full of clear, harmonious joy and hope, full of reason and final reason. But these moments, these glimpses were still only a premonition of that final second (never more than a second) from which the attack itself began. This second was, of course, unbearable. Thinking about this moment later, already in a healthy state, he often said to himself: that after all, all these lightning and glimpses of higher self-awareness and self-awareness, and, therefore, “higher being,” are nothing more than a disease, a violation of the normal state, and if so, then this is not a higher being at all, but, on the contrary, should be ranked among the lowest. And yet, he still came to an extremely paradoxical conclusion: “What’s wrong with the fact that this is a disease?” he decided, “what does it matter that this tension is abnormal, if the very result, if a minute of sensation, recalled and considered already in a healthy state, turns out to be extremely harmony, beauty, gives an unheard-of and hitherto unknown feeling of completeness, measure, reconciliation and alarmed prayerful merging with the highest synthesis of life?” That this is truly “beauty and prayer”, that this is truly the “highest synthesis of life”, he could not doubt that... If at the very last conscious moment before the attack he happened to have time to clearly and consciously say to himself: “yes, for this moment you can give your whole life!” then, of course, this moment in itself was worth the whole life.” The “reality of sensation” cannot be doubted. But all the power is not in the phenomenon, but in its interpretation. Meanwhile, “there was, without a doubt, a mistake in assessing this moment.” Indeed. No matter how blissful this moment was for Prince Myshkin, “dullness, spiritual darkness, idiocy stood before him as a vivid consequence of these highest moments.” Is it possible to recognize these “highest moments” as the final synthesis if they were followed by such gloomy consequences? What kind of supreme reconciliation is this if it is so powerless in the face of gloomy reality? What kind of beauty is in this “stupidity and idiocy”?... What is very important here is that beauty, as the second synthetic principle, comes to the denial of the first, most basic principle - life. If “you can give your whole life for this moment,” then in any case it will not be a sacrifice of life for the sake of a higher form of life, for the sake of its highest fullness, for the sake of “life in abundance,” as is the case with the self-sacrifice of love, - it will be a sacrifice of life for the sake of what is the most decisive denial of life and what entails the most terrible darkness of “dullness and idiocy.” Kirilov, who also experienced similar moments and gave them a prophetic meaning of foretelling a time when “there will be no time,” expected that the person would “change physically.” But as long as there are no these physical changes, as long as beauty is powerless before nature, and the “highest synthesis” is only painful self-deception And yet, it is not this natural isolation, subjectivity, that constitutes the final weakness of beauty: its most final downfall is that the poles have an ethical character and therefore aesthetic indifference lies on a completely different plane. The same temperature of two bodies of different masses does not make them identical in weight and does not destroy this difference in weight. The sameness of pleasure in both poles can be fully recognized, but the difference between the poles in its ethical side is not weakened by this. And when aesthetics takes its place, it does not collide with ethics; beauty and goodness can coexist peacefully, like two sides of a multifaceted life. But when beauty pretends to play the highest role of an all-reconciling principle, dares to overcome goodness in its specific features, to erase its characteristic colors, then goodness becomes defensive, powerfully and furiously repelling the attacks of beauty. Dostoevsky decisively and clearly raises the question of the comparative power of good and beauty, and solves this question in the sense of the predominant power of good. In this regard, Raskolnikov’s experience is decisive, which leads to the final conclusion: for a person, goodness is above all. In the sphere of relations between man and man, the aesthetic coincidence of opposites is not only naturally powerless, but simply a theoretical invention, a fantastic nonsense. Actually, the human absolute is good. Dostoevsky's language comes closest to the language and philosophy of the categorical imperative. And the fact that Dostoevsky, who so deeply and originally penetrated into the mystery of the aesthetic coincidence of both poles, the sameness of pleasure, did not stop at aesthetic reconciliation, was not seduced by hasty harmony - in this one must see his extraordinary moral power and outstanding sense of truth, brilliantly bold love for the truth. So, in Dostoevsky’s worldview we have two basic concepts - real life and the highest good - and the synthetic problem comes down to the reconciliation of life and good. If love for life is half the matter, half in the matter of saving a person, then the other half must be recognized as good, and in the combination of these halves whole perfection is given. The problem of goodness in Dostoevsky has an original formulation precisely from this combination of goodness with life. This new formulation of the ethical problem breaks down into two tasks. First, you need to indicate the meaning of goodness for life, the vital meaning of the highest ideal. Dostoevsky solves this problem with sufficient certainty. “The whole law of human existence,” said Stepan Trofimovich, “is that a person can always bow before the immeasurably great. If you deprive people of immeasurably great things, they will not live and will die in despair. The immeasurable and infinite are as necessary for man as the small planet on which he lives." Elder Zosima says the same thing. “Much on earth is hidden from us, but in return we have been given a secret, intimate feeling of our living connection with another world, with the heavenly and higher world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here, but in other worlds. God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this earth and grew His garden, and everything that could sprout came up, but what grew up lives and is alive only by the feeling of its contact with the mysterious other worlds; if this feeling weakens or is destroyed in you, then the one nurtured in you also dies. Then you will become indifferent to life and even hate it.” So, the second half - the highest principle of life - is as necessary for a person as life itself; only this highest principle provides the final justification for life itself. Secondly. If the highest principle is precisely good, and if it justifies, or sanctifies, life, if it must be inserted into the framework of a full real life, if it is not an ascetic-self-sufficient principle (which is the originality of Dostoevsky’s thought), then in its essence it must be understood as a principle that is heterogeneous along with the natural-historical side of life. Beauty, in its elemental character, does not separate man from nature, but equates him with nature - it awakens the natural-elemental basis in him. On the contrary, good is a specifically human principle, not natural-divine, or elementally divine, but divine-human. The infinite will prevail over the finite, By faith in our sacred meaning, We will stir up a counter current To understand the good flow as a natural flow means to eliminate the very problem of higher synthesis. But at the same time, it is impossible to stop at one confrontation, because this would make synthesis absolutely impossible. All this involuntarily pushes us towards the recognition of the heterogeneity of spheres - natural-historical and moral-human. But Dostoevsky, having approached this truth, did not cross its threshold - and it forms the limit of his forward movement. He stopped at the confrontation and could not step over it. In the philosophy of the “underground” and in the thought of Ivan Karamazov, the presence of disharmony between the laws of natural-historical life and the moral-human principle is recognized: “God, what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic, when I don’t like these laws and two and two are four.” Man is “disgusted to come to terms” with this natural-historical necessity. Dostoevsky, as if enchanted, could not take his eyes off this abyss - and did not have the faith to rise above it. Ippolit expresses Dostoevsky's feelings about the painting in Rogozhin's house. ... “This picture depicts Christ, just taken down from the cross. Painters usually got into the habit of depicting Christ both on the cross and taken down from the cross, still with a touch of extraordinary beauty in his face; They seek to preserve this beauty for Him even in the most terrible torment. In Rogozhin’s film there is not a word about beauty; this is the complete corpse of a man who endured endless torment even before the cross, wounds, torture, beatings from the guards, beatings from the people when He carried the cross and fell under the cross, and, finally, the agony of the cross for six hours... there is one nature here, and truly this is what the corpse of a person, no matter who he is, should be after such torment. I know that the Christian Church established back in the first centuries that Christ suffered not figuratively, but really, and that his body, therefore, was completely and completely subordinated on the cross to the law of nature. In the picture, this face is terribly broken by blows, swollen, with terrible, swollen and bloody bruises, the eyes are open, the pupils are squinted; the large, open whites of the eyes sparkle with some deathly, glassy glow... Here the concept involuntarily comes that if death is so terrible and the laws of nature are so strong, then how can one overcome them? How to overcome them, when even the One who conquered nature during his lifetime did not defeat them now? When looking at this picture, nature seems to be in the form of some huge, inexorable and dumb beast, or in the form of some huge machine of the latest design, which senselessly captured, crushed and absorbed into itself, dully and insensitively, a great and priceless Being - such a Being that alone was worth all of nature and all its laws, the entire earth, which was created, perhaps, solely for the appearance this Creature! This picture seems to precisely express this concept - a dark, arrogant and meaninglessly eternal force to which everything is subordinated.” Kirilov repeated the same words and the same feelings were experienced by Alyosha Karamazov at the grave of his beloved elder, regarding his prematurely revealed corruption... The horror of the infinite power that embraces man from everywhere, of this dark, deaf and dumb nature, of this huge and disgusting tarantula - Dostoevsky knew this horror. And no matter what he understood with his enormous mind, he could not bear this horror in his heart. He did not accept the truth of natural necessity in his heart. “God makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” Dostoevsky could not accommodate this gospel truth. He also did not understand, could not accommodate in his heart, the natural laws of history that led him to the rebellion of Ivan Karamazov. “Do you think that the Galileans, whose blood Pilate mixed with their sacrifices, were more sinful than all the Galileans, that they suffered so much? No, I’m telling you”... But Ivan Karamazov did not know this gospel truth, and he could not endure unjust suffering, for the sake of it he did not accept history. “I don’t want harmony, I don’t want it out of love for humanity. I want to remain better with unavenged suffering. It would be better for me to remain with my unavenged suffering and my unsatisfied indignation, even if I was wrong. They valued harmony too dearly; we can’t afford to pay that much for admission. That’s why I’m in a hurry to return my entry ticket. I don’t accept God, I just respectfully return the ticket to Him. Nature does not know our differences between good and evil, between the righteous and sinners; it has a completely different dimension. Health and illness, strength and weakness, heat and cold, storms and earthquakes are distributed in decisive independence from the standards of truth and sin. One cannot seek moral satisfaction in nature; Nor can moral indignation be applied to her. In the same way, history takes place according to its own independent laws: they capture a person and he can interfere with its course, good and evil can be historical forces, but there can never be a complete coincidence here; essentially these two areas are different. Both in knowledge and in activity: not accepting the laws of nature and history, Dostoevsky, for the same reasons, in the name of the highest love for man, did not accept legalism, did not accept the natural social structure of human happiness. Dostoevsky's negative attitude towards the economic liberation movement - for the sake of the atheistic or nihilistic worldview associated with this movement - is a highly remarkable fact. After all, it is obvious that the highest love for man and the social structure of human happiness, the structure of the “crystal palace”, Western culture do not exclude one another, although they do not completely coincide. And this discrepancy in what goes deep into the human soul forced Dostoevsky to go against what he should have stood for according to the properties of his heart. Isn't this an instructive fact? But Dostoevsky could not be consistent in this denial: one only needs to compare, on the one hand, his “Demons”, the theory of Pyotr Verkhovensky, who dreamed of giving the whole world to the pope or spreading rumors about an impostor, generally forcibly organizing humanity, Shigalev’s theory of artificially lowering the mental level of humanity, and on the other hand, the Grand Inquisitor, in order to see that “this idea has not yet been decided in the heart” of Dostoevsky and that he, as “martyr”, “loved to amuse himself with his despair.” I point out a fact that among Dostoevsky’s critics is completely well known and has a variety of interpretations: for my part, I point out the reason for this fact solely in the confusion of heterogeneous spheres - personal faith with its absoluteness, boundlessness, immensity, and conditionally social regularity. Without accepting the truth of the Gospel, Dostoevsky also discussed the religious significance of the people in a non-evangelical manner. Not knowing the reasons for his tragedy, he was looking for “soil” for himself and thought to find it in folk religion, considering the social movement he hated to be a superficial matter. He overestimated the religious significance of the people. He considered religion to be a people's matter. He believed that religion is only a majestic and deep movement if it takes place in the depths of the people's life - at the same time, he believed that the people's soul finds its deepest expression in nothing other than religion. “The goal of the entire national movement, in every nation and in every period of its existence, is only the search for God, one’s own God, certainly one’s own, and faith in Him as the only true one. God is the synthetic personality of the entire people, taken from its beginning to its end. It has never happened before that all or many peoples had one common God, but each one always had a special one. A sign of the destruction of nationalities, when the gods begin to become common. When the gods become common, then the gods and faith in them die, along with the peoples themselves. The stronger the people, the more special their god." We cannot call these views on religion deep enough and, most importantly, evangelical. Folk religion, it’s true, is one of the stages in religious evolution. Religion has gone through three phases - naturalistic, popular and personal. But folk religion is only one of the phases in religious evolution - not eternal and not supreme. In the age of Christ, all religions, both Jewish and pagan-classical, stood at the level of the folk, but it is the gospel that marks the degeneration of the folk (Jewish) religion into a personal religion. The Gospel Heavenly Father is “my Father”, “your Father”; but this is not the Father of this or that people. And now the religions of some peoples have remained at the naturalistic level, others at the folk level, but our religion is a personal religion, we can no longer return to lower religious levels. One can fully agree with the idea that generalized gods, united, eclectic, testify to the decline of folk religious life, but our God is not such a generalization, he is the God of man, as a person, and therefore precisely a God who does not know national and state borders. Overestimating the religious significance of nationality, Dostoevsky considered Orthodoxy to be the folk religion of Russia, the religion of the Russian people. He said everything about the Orthodoxy of the Russian people that can be said about the ancient Jewish religion. Just as a Jew could not be imagined without his national religion, just as the purpose of the Jewish people was to lead all peoples to the religion of Jehovah and through that bring dominion to God’s chosen people, so Dostoevsky argued that “a non-Orthodox cannot be Russian”, that “everything, everything that the Russian people are looking for, lies for them in Orthodoxy - in Orthodoxy alone there is truth and the salvation of the Russian people” and that “the most important pre-elected purpose of the Russian people is in the destinies of all humanity and consists in the fact that the divine face of Christ, preserved in Orthodoxy, when the time comes, should be revealed to the whole world, which has lost its ways.” It should be noted that Dostoevsky “understood” “Orthodoxy” in a very sublime and “spiritual” way. Everything that he says about the slave form of Christ, as primarily beloved by the Russian people, about the suffering of the Russian people and their humility, about his ideal of “worldwide pain”, “worldwide unification”, “moral resolution” of all the issues that now concern Europe - both political, social and economic - all this is deeply imbued with the biblical spirit. We can safely say that Dostoevsky, in understanding the Orthodoxy of the Russian people, stands at the height of the ancient Jewish prophets, who intended the Jewish people a great mission - to preach peace, truth and salvation to the whole world... But the height of the Jewish prophets is a relative height, immeasurably surpassed in the Gospel. And the Jewish prophets could not rise above the limitations that were essentially contained in the very idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe people's chosenness of God. For them, this limitation was in the inextricable connection between the cause of Jehovah and the cause of the people - in the fact that the service of the Jewish people to the cause of Jehovah indissolubly coincided with Jehovah's service to the glory of the Jewish people. And this is the only reason why Christ was rejected by the Jews. And Dostoevsky stands at the height of the Jewish prophets, and not at the height of the gospel. And for him, the Christian-Orthodox idea, the moral resolution of all issues, is the same as the Slavic idea, the Russian resolution of issues. And he fell religiously even to the point that he spoke of his “blood disgust to the point of hatred” for Europe, preached about the Russian seizure of Constantinople in the name of higher Christian considerations (as in our days, for the same reasons, they talked about the Russian seizure of Manchuria), - preached about the inextricable union of Orthodoxy with a certain form of government, etc. There is a deep idea in the fact that Dostoevsky called Orthodoxy the national-Russian form of Christianity. But he, like Kirilov (let us repeat these words once again), was driven by the idea, and not he was driven by the idea. This historical phenomenon, the historical form of Christianity, seemed to him to be an ideal manifestation of the Christian spirit, its ideal form; he failed to appreciate it from the height of the eternal gospel idea. It is easy to see what consequence this national limitation entailed in the essential solution of the Christian problem. "The Jews are looking for a sign." Both naturalistic and social-folk religion cannot exist without a miracle. At these stages of religious consciousness there is still no place for the recognition of special spheres of natural and historical necessity; it requires the continuous intervention of Providence in the course of nature and in the course of history. Natural necessity and socio-historical regularity can be religiously sanctified only at the highest level of religious consciousness, at the height of spiritual and personal religion. Spiritual-personal absoluteness gives, along with itself, a place of natural necessity and socio-historical convention. Only in this case is religious holiness embodied in the fullness of natural life and in the conventionality of social activity - only in this case could Prince Myshkin be freed from his natural morbidity and Alyosha Karamazov could enter the manhood of family and social life. We find an interesting interpretation of the artistic concepts of F. M. Dostoevsky in the book by D. S. Merezhkovsky The Religion of L. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The author wants to understand the Christian religion as a denial of morality, a crime of its laws. “Christianity is not a moral phenomenon, but a religious, super-moral one, transgressing all the limits and barriers of the moral law, a manifestation of the greatest freedom on the other side of good and evil.” At the same time, he sees religiosity precisely in this freedom of the subject, in the self-will of the person, in antitheism, in anti-Christianity, in man-divinity. “Rebellion against humanity (i.e., denial of morality), against God, against Christ - these are the ascending steps of this new moral evolution. · Unlimited freedom, limitless Self, deified Self, I am God - this is the last word of this religion.” So, morality is not as the autonomy of reason, but as unlimited freedom, and religion is not as faith, but as self-divinity. The author we are talking about sees brilliant representatives of the new religion - historical in Napoleon, literary in Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky). Napoleon - “immeasurable in everything, but even stranger, not only crosses all lines, but also goes beyond all limits; with his temperament, his instincts, his abilities, his imagination, his passions, his morality, he seems cast in a special mold, from a different metal than his fellow citizens and contemporaries. – He looks at a human being as a circumstance or a thing, but not as his own kind. He has neither love nor hatred for people: he is alone - everything is for himself - other creatures are just numbers. “Involuntarily he looks at himself as a creature, the only one in the world created to rule. “I have the right to object to all your complaints with the eternal I,” he once answered the well-deserved reproaches of one person close to him and then added: “I am not like anyone else, I do not accept anyone’s conditions... I, he said, am not a person like everyone else, and the laws of morality and social conditions cannot have meaning for me.” To put it briefly, Napoleon is a brilliant bearer of extreme self-will, boundless freedom, and not in words, but in deeds, in action. Raskolnikov says about him: “a real ruler, to whom everything is permitted, destroys Toulon, carries out a massacre in Paris, forgets the army in Egypt, spends half a million on the Moscow campaign and gets away with a pun in Vilna - everything is permitted to him.” Merezhkovsky looks at this self-will, at this freedom, religiously, sacredly: Napoleon created a religion. He only lacked awareness of his religious significance, lacked religious consciousness: the ability to act in him outweighed the ability to contemplate. He “he himself did not know what he was doing, he himself did not know what spirit he was.” But “with his life, his example, the greatness of his happiness and the greatness of his death, he shook, as no one had ever shaken, the deepest foundations of all Christian and pre-Christian morality; against his will, against his will, he began to re-evaluate all prices, aroused unprecedented doubts in the earliest revelations of human conscience.” Raskolnikov is Napoleon's double. “I wanted to become Napoleon, that’s why I killed... Then I came up with one idea that no one had ever thought up before me.” Raskolnikov's crime is completely special, unique. “We must understand to the end all the real novelty and unprecedentedness of this idea: all previous atrocities were committed, regardless of calculation or out of passion, but for some purpose; if the criminal had renounced his goal, freed himself from passion, he might not have done what he did; Raskolnikov, the first of people, invents and commits a truly unprecedented, unknown in the world, a new crime, one that no one has ever committed before, a crime of a new order of moral dimensions - a crime for a crime - without calculation, without a goal, without passion, at least without the passion of the heart, only with the cold, abstract passion of the mind, knowledge, curiosity, experience. He wants to learn through experience, to try the last essence of what people call “evil” and “good”, he wants to know the last limits of human freedom. And he recognized them." What did he learn? When answering this question, Dostoevsky and Merezhkovsky differ. According to Dostoevsky, Raskolnikov could not bear his crime, and this is how it should be, and this is reasonable. True, Dostoevsky does not present the matter as simply as it is for the arithmetic-legal mind - you have sinned before the law, you will suffer according to the law. In front of people, Raskolnikov does not admit guilt; He is also indignant at the legal punishment of suffering from people. He sinned against himself, “killed the principle”; and his suffering is internal, his own, “internal curse.” But behind this complexity lies the direct idea that Raskolnikov could not bear his crime, remained defeated, could not bear the internal curse. “I was in hard labor,” writes Dostoevsky in his Diary, and saw criminals, “decided” criminals. It was a long school. Not one of them stopped considering themselves a criminal. In appearance they were a terrible and cruel people. However, only the stupid ones, the new ones, “showed off”, and they laughed at them. For the most part the people were gloomy and thoughtful. No one talked about their crimes. I never heard any murmur. You couldn’t even talk about your crimes out loud. It happened that someone’s word would be heard with a challenge and a twist, and “the whole hard labor,” as one person, would stop the upstart. It was not customary to talk about this. But, I say correctly, maybe not one of them escaped the long mental suffering within themselves, which was the most cleansing and strengthening.” Merezhkovsky looks at Raskolnikov’s Crime and Punishment differently. He corrects Dostoevsky: “everything that follows (in the novel, i.e., Raskolnikov’s repentance and resurrection) is so artificially and unskillfully attached, stuck on, that it falls off by itself, like a mask from a living face.” Shestov also speaks of the “superman” in Nietzsche’s system, and both of them reject Tolstoy’s Christianity as an outgrowth of his paganism. This “correction” is already the consciousness of powerlessness to understand and embrace. Merezhkovsky does not understand all of Tolstoy, and he does not understand all of Dostoevsky; he explains them one-sidedly, tendentiously. According to Merezhkovsky, the value of the experience of Raskolnikov’s new crime is completely different. “The conclusions of the experience exceeded his expectations: he thought that man was free; but he still did not think that man was free to such an extent. It was this boundlessness of freedom that he could not bear: it crushed him more than the entire weight of the punitive law.” The Romans saw only bare white walls in the Holy of Holies of the Jerusalem Temple. “Raskolnikov, with the same fearless, cynical gaze as the Roman legionnaires, looked into where no one had looked before - into the holy of holies of the human conscience. And he saw, or it seems to him that he saw, “nothing,” an empty place, empty air, white bare walls. He did not expect this to such an extent: when he went to try, he still doubted - otherwise there would have been no reason to try - and not only doubted, but, perhaps, hoped, even directly wished, of course, without suspecting it, that it was not so “simply,” as it seems to him, “to take everything by the tail and shake it to hell.” And so he probably learned that from the outside it is indeed very difficult and dangerous, but inside - and inside is the most important thing for him, the only important thing - it is even much simpler than he expected. It was this simplicity that made him scared: he became scared because there was nothing scary at all. A horror took possession of him, greater than which there is nothing in the world, and from which all nature flees - the horror of emptiness, the horror of nothing.” We must recognize these conclusions of Merezhkovsky as inconsistent with Raskolnikov’s actual mood. “And really,” said Raskolnikov, do you think, Sonya, that I didn’t know, for example, that even if I began to ask and interrogate myself whether I have the right and the power to have, then, therefore, I don’t have the right to have the power. Or what if I ask the question: is a person a louse? then, therefore, a person is no longer a louse for me, but a louse for someone who doesn’t even think about it, and who goes straight without asking questions... If I suffered for so many days, would Napoleon go or not? so I clearly felt that I was not Napoleon... I had a presentiment in advance that I would tell myself this after I killed him! How can anything compare with such horror? Oh, vulgarity! Oh, vulgarity! The horror of emptiness, the horror of incredible lightness, airiness, limitlessness - this is not an observation of Raskolnikov on the part of Merezhkovsky, but fantasy. Merezhkovsky sees his weakness in the fact that Raskolnikov could not bear freedom. “Raskolnikov’s tragedy lies not in the fact that, imagining himself bronze, he turned out to be earthy, but only in the fact that his body is really not all made of bronze, and his soul is not all bronze, and his mistake is not that he tried a new word, but only that he tried a new action, while he was born only for a new word. However, this contradiction, this gap between contemplation and action is not at all Raskolnikov’s personal weakness, but the weakness of all people of the new European culture in general. Napoleon is weaker in contemplation than in action. Raskolnikov is the opposite." Merezhkovsky regrets Raskolnikov's weakness. Still, he values ​​his experience highly. He calls this experience religious. “The struggle that takes place in Raskolnikov is immeasurably deeper than politics, deeper than morality: it is a struggle between the two most primordial religious elements of the human spirit... It was not the reproaches of his conscience that he was afraid of, but the silence of his conscience, not the overwhelming consciousness of his guilt, but the immeasurably more overwhelming consciousness of his innocence, not the threat of punishment, but inevitable impunity... This is our horror, our tragedy, never before committed in the world, a new tragedy of freedom, opposite to the old tragedy of conscience, a new, discovered by us, as if the fourth, tragic dimension of the world and the spirit. This is our horror, and if we die from it, then we have the right to be proud before all centuries of the greatness of this horror.” On the contrary, according to Dostoevsky, Raskolnikov’s weakness is his salvation. The more Raskolnikov is indignant at the violent punishment from people (“that’s why the external punishment of the law is terrible, because it takes away from the criminal any possibility of internal voluntary redemption”), the more he despises his weakness, his vulgarity, the more he suffers from the consciousness: “a man is not a louse for me, but I myself am more vile and nastier than a killed louse”; the more surely he, in the eyes of Dostoevsky, follows the path of salvation. Until the last line of the novel, Raskolnikov does not know the salvation of his suffering, does not suspect it, and this is his tragedy; but Dostoevsky leads his hero unmistakably. In the brazenly frank Porfiry with his cruel words about Raskolnikov: “let him walk for now, let him, because I already know that he is my victim,” the image of the author is visible. The assessment of Raskolnikov's experience from the point of view of Dostoevsky himself is helped by the remarkable parallelism of his crime with Sonya's crime. “Didn’t you do the same thing? Raskolnikov tells her. You also stepped over... were able to step over. You committed suicide, you ruined your life... Yours (it’s all the same!). You could live in spirit and mind, but you will end up on Sennaya... We are cursed together, together we will go - along the same road! " In the person of Sonya one can least of all see a priestess of free love, riotous fun, her crime least of all was moral emptiness, airiness, limitlessness; she is a victim of the social system, of social need, she is thrown by society into the jaws of depravity. She is a “great sinner,” but her crime is not externally illegal, not externally legal, but internal, against her personality, and her internal curse is that she began to live a life “without spirit and reason.” The same is the crime and the curse of Raskolnikov: he “killed the principle.” Legally legalistic innocence, innocence before people, and internal damnation - this is the burden of Raskolnikov, which Merezhkovsky tendentiously overlooked. In the person of Raskolnikov we must see, scientifically speaking, a denier of utilitarian, legalistic morality, and a bearer of autonomous morality. The clash of one and the other morality, the transition from social-legalistic, social-utilitarian morality to rational-autonomous morality - this is the main theme of the novel Crime and Punishment. And this theme is revealed by Dostoevsky with such subtlety, which you admire the more the more you study Raskolnikov’s crime. This subtlety is striking given the complexity and intricacy in which these two moralities appear, both in reality and in the novel. Apparently, one imperceptibly passes into the other, and this provides the opportunity for temptation, which Raskolnikov could not resist. Light touches in the novel highlight Raskolnikov's warmth and love. It would be a grave mistake on the part of critics to be seduced by this ease and recognize Raskolnikov’s cordiality as a secondary trait. This lightness screams and attracts special attention; like a hissing whistle on the noise of the market. Here are the pearls of Raskolnikov’s love: he loves his mother and sister, gives money to the Marmeladovs on his first visit - “he grabbed as much copper money as he had to” (given his extreme poverty), stands up for a drunken girl - 20 kopecks to a policeman, cries in his sleep over a nag, gives a nickel to a street singer, three nickels to Duklida, gives the last money sent to him by his mother for Marmeladov’s funeral, gives “the remaining nickel” a beggar - and this at a time when his soul was torn from torment. Raskolnikov’s love for his former bride is also extremely remarkable. “She was such a sick girl,” Raskolnikov himself recalls, “she was completely ill; She loved to give to the poor and kept dreaming about a monastery, and once she burst into tears when she started talking to me about it... She's such an ugly girl. I really don’t know why I became attached to her then, it seems, because she was always sick... If she were still lame or hunchbacked, I think I would have loved her even more.” Already during the trial, “former student Ruzumikhin dug up information from somewhere and presented evidence that the criminal Raskolnikov, while at the university, used his last means to help one of his poor and consumptive university friends and almost supported him for six months. When he died, he looked after the surviving, old and weakened father of his deceased comrade (who supported and fed his father with his labors), finally placed this old man in the hospital, and when he also died, he buried him... The former mistress of Raskolnikov herself, the mother of his deceased bride, the widow of Zarnitsyn, also testified that when they were still living in another house, near Five Corners, Raskolnikov, during a fire, at night, pulled out two small children from one apartment, which had already caught fire, and was burned in the process. This fact has been thoroughly investigated and quite well attested by many witnesses.” Raskolnikov is a knight of pity and Christian love. His crime is the crime of a man with a loving heart. “A man is not a louse for me,” says Raskolnikov (emphasized by Dostoevsky). “How can you,” Sonya says to Raskolnikov, “you, such... (Dostoevsky’s italics) could decide on this?.. But what is this!” True, Raskolnikov’s cruelty is also noted. Razumikhin speaks of him: “Generous and kind. Sometimes, however, he is cold and insensitive to the point of inhumanity, as if two opposing characters are replacing in him.” Merezhkovsky grasps this “contact of opposites” with greed. He sees in Raskolnikov the same “coincidence of beauty in both poles” as in Svidrigailov and Stavrogin. He attaches primary importance in Raskolnikov’s character to his Napoleonic cruelty, considering his cordiality to be the “weak remnant” of humanity. But this is an extremely tendentious, false portrayal of Raskolnikov’s character. Merezhkovsky overlooks the fact that, apart from the only crime - the murder of the old woman and her sister, which he “could not bear”, in the entire novel not a single fact of Raskolnikov’s cruelty is indicated (just as there is no hint of voluptuousness at all), on the contrary, it is noted with emphasis that the kindness in him was heartfelt, and the cruelty was mental, abstract. “He was young, distracted and, therefore, cruel.” His dreams about Napoleon, about the inhumanity of heroes are abstract dreams. In particular, his crime has the same dual character. On the one hand, it is heartily connected with his kindness. “One evil and a hundred good deeds,” in the words of Svidrigailov. By committing a crime, in Raskolnikov’s own words, he “only wanted to put himself in an independent position, to take the first step, to achieve the means, and then everything would be smoothed over with comparatively immeasurable benefits.” On the other hand, the basis of his crime was the idea of ​​​​heroism, that everything is allowed to the prophet. This duality in the nature of the crime should be kept in mind, and special attention must be paid to the fact that the kindness in him was heartfelt, and the dreams of Napoleon were abstract. This duality is precisely assessed by Raskolnikov himself. After the crime, he calls his dreams of Napoleon in a “direct” speech with Sonya nonsense: “This is all nonsense, almost just chatter.” The main thing is taking care of my mother and sister. “I wanted good for people.” But even then, he approves of these dreams, as a thought: “this whole thought was not so stupid at all.” Due to the abstraction of the dream of Napoleon, Raskolnikov’s crime was the fruit of theory. “The playful sharpness of the mind and abstract arguments of reason tempt you,” Porfiry tells him. According to the clairvoyance of this seer, Raskolnikov, with his abstract calculations, was mistaken in his “reality and nature.” “Here,” he says about Raskolnikov’s crime, “bookish dreams, sir, here is a theoretically irritated heart; here you can see the determination to take the first step, but a special kind of determination - he decided, but it was like he fell from a mountain, or flew off a bell tower, and it was as if he had come to commit a crime not with his own feet.” He “invented a theory.” And Svidrigailov said to Dunya: “here is a kind of theory... Its own theory; so-so theory." But besides this abstract dream, in Raskolnikov, in his crime, there is a living moral principle. In it, morality struggles with casuistry, which is “sharpened like a razor.” What is most important to him is the “moral resolution of the issue.” The theoretical nature of the crime is its highest consciousness; But for the idea of ​​the novel, what is essential is not theoretical consciousness itself, which leads to airlessness, to a white wall, but the moral coloring of consciousness. Raskolnikov wanted not just to step over, but “to allow his conscience to step over other obstacles, and only if the fulfillment of an idea (sometimes saving, perhaps for all of humanity) requires it.” Not airless consciousness, but the consciousness of crime in the light of conscience - that is Raskolnikov’s only originality. “What is truly original (Dostoevsky’s italics) in all this,” Razumikhin told Raskolnikov, “and really belongs to you alone, to my horror, is that you still authorize blood according to your conscience... After all, this permission to blood according to your conscience, this... this, in my opinion, is more terrible than the official permission to shed blood, legal.” The ethical point of view played a primary role in Crime and Punishment. “I wanted to become Napoleon, that’s why I killed him. – I once asked myself this question: what if, for example, Napoleon had happened in my place, and he had no Toulon, no Egypt, no crossing of Mont Blanc to start his career, but instead of all these beautiful and monumental things, there would have been, quite simply, some funny old woman receptionist, who, in addition, had to be killed in order to steal money from her chest, well, would he have decided what if there was no other way out? Wouldn’t you cringe because this is too unmonumental and sinful?”... You need to delve into these words. The more insignificant this old woman, the registrar, the moneylender, the stronger Raskolnikov’s love for man emerges. “A man is not a louse to me.” This is the main tone of the entire novel. Aesthetics hides morality; The splendor of war, the thunder of guns, require a huge crowd, but completely hide the person. You need to give up aesthetics to get to the person, to ethics. “I absolutely don’t understand: why hitting people with bombs in a proper siege is a more respectable form? Fear of aesthetics is the first sign of powerlessness!” Raskolnikov abandoned aesthetics, he set his sights on a pitiful old woman, and he became stronger than Napoleon. “I finally realized that not only would it not have bothered him, but it would not even have occurred to him that this was not monumental... and he would not even have understood at all why there was any need to be upset.” But this apparent strength of the great Napoleon is his real powerlessness, and Raskolnikov’s weakness is his strength. Napoleon would not have noticed the non-monumental nature of this crime, because he did not know the value of a person. For him, a person was a thing. Therefore, for Napoleon, the transition from Toulon and Egypt to the old woman would have been a transition from the great to the ridiculous. But for Raskolnikov this is a transition from aesthetically majestic to morally great. He noticed the old woman's insignificance because he saw a person in her. The holiness of man for man in this non-monumental form appeared to Raskolnikov with the force of a categorical imperative. Merezhkovsky did not pay attention to this and thus turned out to be incomparably lower than Dostoevsky, lower than his thought. “Before Napoleon,” writes Merezhkovsky, Raskolnikov even has some advantage; he sees not only external, but also internal obstacles, delays that he must overcome in order to have the right. Napoleon doesn't see them at all. Perhaps, however, this blindness was partly the source of his strength.”... Some? partly? only? No, all the greatness of Napoleon is in his blindness and all the advantage of Raskolnikov is in the clarity of his consciousness. Napoleon went against the social and moral law with full consciousness, but he did not have an internally rational consciousness of the holiness of the human person. Raskolnikov's problem could never arise before him. On the contrary, for Raskolnikov the most fatal question is the holiness of man for man. The question of Crime and Punishment is the question of whether it is possible to combine the freedom of Napoleon with the consciousness of Raskolnikov. Previously, in Eternal Companions, Merezhkovsky understood this better, although not completely. “There is something truly terrifying and almost inhuman in such fanatics of the idea as Robespierre and Calvin. Sending thousands of innocents to the stake for God or to the guillotine for freedom, shedding blood like a river, they sincerely consider themselves benefactors of the human race and great righteous people... Corsairs Julien are constantly portrayed as if they were playing a role, naively believing in their rightness and strength. And Dostoevsky’s hero already doubts whether he is right. They die irreconcilable, but for him this state of proud loneliness and break with people is only a temporary crisis, a transition to a different worldview.” But even then Merezhkovsky did not see this transition for what it really consisted of. “Raskolnikov, through fierce protest, reached the point of denying moral laws, to the point where he finally cast aside all the obligations of duty as an unnecessary burden, as a prejudice. At this icy theoretical height, in this loneliness, all life ends. And Raskolnikov would inevitably have died if another principle had not been hidden in his soul. Dostoevsky brought him to the moment when a suppressed, but not killed, religious feeling awakens in him.” So, the other principle seems to awaken only at the end, and during the crime it is suppressed. But this is too sluggish for Raskolnikov. Another principle is actually already operating in him during the crime, causing him deep suffering and not allowing him to reach icy heights. “True heroes, great criminals of the law do not cry and are not moved. Calvin, Robespierre, Torquemada did not feel the suffering of others - this is their strength, their integrity; they seem to be carved from one block of granite; and in Dostoevsky’s hero there is already an eternal source of weakness - duality, split will... Woe to the great criminals of the law if in their soul, burned by the passion of an idea, at least something human remains! Woe to the people of bronze if even one corner of their heart remains alive! A weak cry of conscience is enough for them to wake up, understand and perish.” This is what the new worldview has been reduced to - to a weak remnant of conscience, to the original duality! This is too weak for Dostoevsky! No, the difference between Raskolnikov and Napoleon is not in weak remnants of the past, but in a completely new principle. “Fanaticism of ideas is only one side of his character. It contains tenderness, love, pity for people, and tears of tenderness. This is his weakness, this is what destroys him.” But in this weakness is Raskolnikov’s new strength, which does not destroy him, but saves him, which elevates him above Napoleon. The point is precisely that his pity for people is not just a weak echo of nature, a remnant of the past, but it is a new principle, conscious of its absoluteness. To understand Raskolnikov you don’t need to go below Napoleon, but you need to go further: Raskolnikov is all Napoleon, but he is more than Napoleon. "Crime? says Raskolnikov... What crime?... The fact that I killed a nasty, malicious louse, an old pawnbroker, whose killing forty sins is forgiven, who sucked the juice out of the poor - and this is a crime? Yes, a crime; Even such a person is not a louse to a person; even killing such a person means killing the principle. This is not an echo of natural pity, this is love raised to the height of an absolute principle. Ethics with the character of autonomous absoluteness, at the height of the religious principle - this is the essence of Raskolnikov, this is the force before which Napoleon’s self-will yields. Genius and aesthetics must fade into insignificance before the non-monumental absoluteness of autonomous ethics. It’s unaesthetic and therefore difficult, that’s the tragedy. But these are the pangs of a new birth, the pangs of Napoleon’s rebirth into Alyosha Karamazov, “Truly, truly, I say to you: you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice; you will be sad, but your sorrow will turn into joy. When a woman gives birth, she suffers sorrow, because her hour has come; but when she gives birth to a baby, she no longer remembers the sorrow for joy, because a man was born into the world.” Instead of the evil louse, the old pawnbroker, a man was born in the soul of Raskolnikov, who could not bear the crime, because for him man is not a louse. In place of the monumental aesthetics of great self-will, there is a new beauty of inner strength, autonomous reason. “Everything is allowed to me, but not everything” I want. In place of boundless self-will there is boundless and free self-restraint. Napoleon, Torquemada, Robespierre are images of the past, this is the grain that must rot in Raskolnikov’s heart for Alyosha Karamazov to be born. They are justified in Raskolnikov’s heart, but justification of the past does not give self-will for the future; Justified as a natural, aesthetic phenomenon of the past, these images disappear in the moral force of the future. To understand Raskolnikov as a type weaker than Napoleon means returning to the Nero and Robespierres. You need to understand him as the inner-strongest type. “Everything is fine,” said Kirilov (“Demons”). - A person is unhappy because he does not know that he is happy, only because. Whoever dies of hunger and whoever offends and dishonors a girl is good.” And whoever breaks his head for a child, that’s good; and whoever doesn’t crush it, that’s good... One must not only endure, but also love what is necessary.” But this is only in relation to the past, only contemplation of the past, only the dead point of the present - for action in the future, for life, something else is needed. “They are not good,” Kirilov said further, “because they don’t know that they are good. When they find out, they will not rape the girl. They need to know that they are good, and they will all immediately become good, every single one of them.” So for Kirilov, fate is in the past, goodness is in the future. And this is something else, equal to the fate of the past, just as absolute and indestructible, although... the inner, the tender, the weak, is human autonomy. This is not “something human”, this is “human, too human”, this is human at the level of the absolute, divine, this is moral at the height of the religious. This is precisely what a person has, to the point of absoluteness, to divinity, to the point of inalienability. “Raskolnikov, according to Merezhkovsky, experienced something similar to what a person who would suddenly lose the feeling of the weight and density of his body should experience: no barriers, no delays; everywhere there is emptiness, airiness, infinity; neither above nor below; no point of support." This, we said, is Merezhkovsky’s fantasy. Raskolnikov did not reach such a state, because another principle was already operating in him during the crime. Of course, that state, if he “endured” the crime, is assumed, only assumed - but this is not a state of airiness, groundlessness, but a state of soullessness, meaninglessness, as if a person spiritually “killed himself”, called upon himself madness, tore out his own heart, desecrated his shrine, “killed his principle”, remained “without reason and spirit.” To be aware of the approach of madness is the greatest suffering, but it is impossible to rationally desire madness. And Raskolnikov killed only with his hands, but “could not bear” the crime, so in fact he did not kill his principle, just as Sonya was not dead, “living: in the dirt that she hated.” At the same time, one must also recognize Merezhkovsky’s reasoning about Raskolnikov’s loneliness as a pathetic fantasy: in his opinion, this is loneliness that has reached heights on the other side of good and evil. True, Raskolnikov, after the crime, cannot stand the company of his mother and sister, but for him it was “a hopeless and difficult solitude.” Yes, and this is privacy. it was not unconditional, and this is the most important thing. While the thought of Duna and his mother filled him with panic, he sought the company of Sonya, who became “one of his own” for him. “I have only you now,” he told her... I came to you. We are cursed together, we will go together. No one will understand anything, among people, if you tell them, but I understood. I need you, that’s why I came to you... You also stepped over. But you can’t stand it, and if you’re left alone, you’ll go crazy, just like me. Therefore, we must go together, along the same road.” Well, is there even one hint of “power and solitude” here! Why Raskolnikov, seeking Sonya’s company, avoided his mother and sister, this was very clear to Sonya. “And to live,” she told him, “how will you live? What will you live with? Is this possible now? Well, how are you going to talk to your mother? (Oh, what will happen to them, what will happen to them now!) What am I saying! After all, you already abandoned your mother and sister. Well, he’s already given up, he’s given up. Oh my God! she exclaimed. – After all, he already knows all this himself! Well, how, how can one live without a person! What will happen to you now! In these same feelings of Raskolnikov, in his attitude towards his mother and sister, and especially towards Sonya, in his nature, in his cordiality, lies the reason for his revival. From Dostoevsky’s point of view, Raskolnikov’s resurrection is most understandable, completely natural, completely artless. Raskolnikov suffers because his nature does not correspond to his abstract dreams, his thoughts - he despises himself according to his theory. Then, he suffers from those he loves. “Walking to Sonya, he felt that all his hope and all the outcome lay in her; he was thinking of laying down at least part of his torment, and suddenly now, when her whole heart turned to him, he suddenly felt and realized that he had become unparalleledly more unhappy than he was before.” Equally, he failed to alienate himself from his mother and sister. Temporary hatred for them was apparent; underneath it lay love, which soon floated to the top again. “Oh,” he exclaimed, “if I were alone, and no one loved me, and I myself would never love anyone! All this wouldn’t exist”, i.e. suffering that forced him to open up. Raskolnikov does not realize that that (internal) suffering and this suffering were one and the same: love, which weighed heavily on his abstract thought - love made his relationship with Sonya and his family suffering. He also did not understand that in the increase of these sufferings, when he became even more unhappy from mutual love, especially from love for Sonya, there was his resurrection. He was resurrected when his love reached absoluteness, infinity. How deeply truthful this is, how deeply Christian. Raskolnikov, on the surface of his consciousness, in his thoughts, completely despises his cowardice, and at the same time, in the depths of his soul, his love grows. And unnoticed by him, resurrection approached. “He himself didn’t know how it happened, but suddenly something seemed to pick him up and seem to throw him at her (Sonya’s) feet. He cried and hugged her knees. At the first moment she was terribly frightened, and her whole face turned pale. She jumped up from her seat and, trembling, looked at him. But immediately, in that very moment, she understood everything. Infinite happiness shone in her eyes; she understood, and there was no longer any doubt for her that he loved, loved her endlessly, and that this moment had finally come.” This word loves and explains the resurrection. It was not in his thoughts that a change occurred, not one theory defeated another, but “life came instead of dialectics.” And how artless it is in Dostoevsky: on the same pages he shows us the last echoes of Raskolnikov’s inner drama, his theoretical contempt for his cowardice and this resurrecting power of love. A critic needs to become a slave to his idea in order to see Dostoevsky’s “unskillful prefix” here! The bright human divine is, first of all, the opposite of the elemental-unconscious, majestic-aesthetic. But it also has another opposite – social-utilitarian. Napoleons and Robespierres, sending thousands to the stake, violating social and moral laws, could consider themselves benefactors of humanity, because for them both denial and affirmation belonged to the same area: some were slaughtered so that others would feel good. Both are comparable. It’s a different matter with a new dimension, when the dignity of the individual rises to religious heights. Here the personality is already incommensurable with the social-utilitarian. Meanwhile, apparently, boundaries cannot be drawn here. This is the temptation. “I only wanted to take the first step - to put myself in an independent position, to achieve the means, and there everything would be smoothed over with immeasurable, comparatively, benefits. I wanted good for people." For the good of people, for the benefit of society, to kill one vile old woman: isn’t that tempting? And so, despite the apparent seductiveness, it turns out that it is impossible: killing the old woman turns out to be killing the principle. Man is above society; the old woman, as a person, is above public benefit; love for man is higher than love for people, for society. Only in man is the absolute, but not in the social-utilitarian. This is religion. It is a personal religion, a spiritual one, not a religion of the crowd. That it was precisely in this simultaneous denial of utilitarian ethics and the affirmation of the sanctity of the individual that religion was for Dostoevsky, this can be seen from the following words of his Pushkin speech. “What kind of happiness can there be (both for the individual and for society) if it is based on someone else’s misfortune? Let me imagine that you yourself are erecting the building of human destiny with the goal in the end - to make people happy, to finally give them peace and quiet. And now, imagine, too, that for this it is necessary and inevitably necessary to torture just one human being, moreover, even if it is not so worthy, funny even at another glance, not some kind of Shakespeare... And now we just need to disgrace, dishonor and torture him and build our building on (his) tears! Would you agree to be the architect of such a building on this condition? And can you even admit for a moment the idea that the people for whom this building was built would agree to accept such happiness from you, if its foundation is based on the suffering of, say, an insignificant creature, but mercilessly and unfairly tortured, and, having accepted this happiness, remain happy forever? Here... you can’t go beyond the limit.” Thus Dostoevsky elevates goodness from utilitarian baseness to the religious heights of personal shrine. For him, absolute value is in the human person, in human life, it doesn’t matter - in someone else’s or his own; here the only crime is the death of life, no matter whether it’s your own or someone else’s. Raskolnikov killed someone else's life; Sonya “killed and betrayed herself” for the sake of others: she killed because she lost “life in spirit and mind,” and therefore she killed herself in vain, sacrificing her personality for public benefit. She is a great sinner and her curse is the same as Raskolnikov’s curse. The holiness of the individual is the limit of sacrifice. Sacrifice for another should be physically limitless, love - to the point of death, but not to the point of destroying someone else’s life, not to the point of losing one’s spiritual personality. With true sacrifice, the spiritual personality grows to absoluteness. “Whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.” This love for a person is higher than the social-utilitarian law. Likewise, the suffering from a crime against this love is deeper than legal punishment. That is why Raskolnikov does not plead guilty before people, guilty from a social-legalistic point of view. Although Dmitry Karamazov himself “bursts” with “unexpected” and uncontrollable laughter, it is some kind of wild, tragic laughter, and astute observers saw in him not funny features. You might be interested in: