Lavrin - A Note on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky

The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review

A Note on Nietzsche and DostoevskyAuthor(s): Janko LavrinSource: Russian Review, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Apr., 1969), pp. 160-170Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/127505 .

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A Note on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky

By Janko Lavrin

THE frequent mention of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky to- gether is still topical for the very reason that both of them

were among the acutest anatomists of our cultural, social, and moral crisis, the symptoms of which were already so prominent in the second half of the nineteenth century, let alone the century that followed. The character of their writing may have been conditioned also by their own bad health, since Dostoev- sky was racked by attacks of epilepsy, while Nietzsche had to fight a long and painful illness which ended in progressive paralysis and a complete mental collapse. Yet their very ailments fostered in a way their psychological insight as well as their belief in the value of hypersensitive or extraordinary states of mind and body. Anti-rationalistic in their approach to the funda- mental problems of man's existence, they were both keen ques- tioners and doubters. They were also inwardly torn between a strong religious temperament and that strong anti-religious attitude which was so frequent a phenomenon of the age they lived in. Finally, both were "underworld minds" unable to come to terms either with other people or with the conditions they saw around them.

It is almost sure that Dostoevsky, who died in 1881, had never even heard the name of Nietzsche. Nietzsche, on the other hand, not only knew some of Dostoevsky's principal works, but actually acknowledged (in The Twilight of the Idols) that he regarded him as the only psychologist from whom he had anything to learn and who belonged among the "happiest windfalls" of his life. He greatly admired The House of the Dead. He was also familiar with that formidable document of human frustra-

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A Note on Dostoevsky and Nietzsche 161

tion, Notes from the Underworld, in which individual self- assertion (or "will to power") is proclaimed to be the main- spring of our actions-even amidst the greatest mishaps and humiliations. In his Theory of Individual Psychology, Alfred Adler, the champion of ego-libido in contrast to Freud's sexual libido, contends that "anyone who has felt to what degree Dostoevsky has recognized the tendency to despotism implanted in the human soul, will admit that Dostoevsky must be regarded as our teacher even today, as the teacher Nietzsche hailed him to be."

Nietzsche must have been further familiar with Crime and Punishment; the more so because in this novel Dostoevsky explored one of Nietzsche's basic themes quite a few years before it was tackled in all seriousness by Nietzsche himself. To what extent the German philosopher had a first-hand knowledge of The Idiot, The Possessed, The Adolescent, and The Brothers Karamazov is a matter of conjecture.' The fact remains that most of the vital problems which Dostoevsky had projected into the characters of his own novels were also probed by the philosopher Nietzsche, however different his final conclusions may have been. Another feature which both of them shared was the fact that the Tiefenpsychologie (depth-psychology) in their works was largely a result of the inner war each had to wage against the "complexes" and contradictions in his self-divided consciousness. If Nietzsche was a decadent fighting first of all his own decadence, Dostoevsky was a skeptic and a secret unbeliever passionately fighting his own unbelief in the name of a religious acceptance of life. In short, their psychological and spiritual findings were due to their personal experience in the world they lived in. And as far as the general character of their work is con- cerned, it entitles them to a prominent place among the pioneers of existentialism, although they represent two of its opposite poles.

1 It is not excluded that, during her friendly relations with Nietzsche, in 1882, Lou Salom6 had initiated him, as she did later Rainer Maria Rilke, into certain aspects of Russian literature.



162 The Russian Review

What mattered, and vitally so, to Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, was the ultimate significance of man in the world and the universe. Does man's existence also contain transcendence, or is he nothing more than a specimen of the forlornness or Geworfen- heit (to use Heidegger's expression) without any sense or meaning in an equally senseless and meaningless universe? But if there is a deep significance in it all, where does it come from and in what does it consist? Which brings one invariably to the problem of God's existence, to begin with. For if God as a transcendental intelligence ruling the universe does exist, then there must be a higher sense and purpose in it all. On the other hand, if "God is dead," then the whole of the universe is but an absurd casual play of casual blind forces, a "vaudeville of the devils"- as one of Dostoevsky's characters put it. In this case the general nullity of existence makes one realize sooner or later the nullity of one's own personal life, however much one tries to force upon it all sorts of emergency exits or else engagements a la Sartre. Moreover, our moral values, which have been based on God's existence, become obsolete, and the anarchic formula that "all things are lawful" may eventually lead to universal anarchy, chaos and destruction.

The problem becomes particularly crucial for a highly de- veloped consciousness insofar as the ubiquitous presence of suffering, of ineradicable evil, makes such a world utterly un- acceptable. "If I had the power to destroy the world), I would do so out of protest and indignation; but since I cannot do so, I will show my protest at least by destroying myself." Such is the reasoning of some of Dostoevsky's characters who mean what they say. Whereas Nietzsche devised his own idea of the super- man in order to impose upon life a man-made sense or meaning; to Dostoevsky's Hippolyte (in The Idiot) and Kirillov (in The Possessed) this would be camouflaged delusion. No wonder they both saw the only decent reaction to it all in suicide out of protest.

But supposing that one takes the existence of God for granted




in spite of all, an uncompromising consciousness may yet reject the world created by Him, since it is so full of injustice, suffering and evil. At a certain level of inner development one may re- pudiate such a God even for moral reasons, unless a convincing justification for all the evils is provided. As Ivan Karamazov argues in his talk with Alyosha: "It is not that I don't accept God. It is the world created by Him I don't and cannot accept. . . . From love of humanity I don't want it. .. ." Nor is Ivan anxious to contemplate a compensation in the shape of some promised harmony or paradise after death. Clamoring for justice here on earth, he refuses such a compensation. 'I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied [moral] indignation even if I were wrong. Besides too high a price is asked for harmony; it is beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It is not God that I don't accept, only I most respectfully return H-im the ticket."2

In his passionate wish for religion Dostoevsky had to explore the problem of God from the angle of a believer and an unbeliever. Yet in contrast to the pious young Nietzsche (who, despite his subsequent denial of everything religious and Christian, at first studied theology at Bonn University in order to become a pastor), Dostoevsky's youth was marked by skepticism which tormented him to the end of his life. In his twenties he not only became a follower of the atheist Belinsky, but also joined the revolutionary Petrashevsky circle on account of which he was sent (for eight years) to Siberia. It was in Siberia that he underwent a profound inner change. But even during that process he wrote, in 1854, his pathetic letter to Mime. Fonvizina in which he confessed: "I am a child of the age, a child of un- faith and skepticism and probably-indeed I know it-shall remain so to the end of my life. How dreadfully it has tormented

2 The Brothers Karamazov, trans. by Constance Garnett (Heinemann).




ne-and torments me even now-the longing for faith, which is all the stronger for proofs I have against it."3

This position between the neant or the universal vacuum on the one hand, and a religious affirmation of existence on the other, turned Dostoevsky into an inveterate fighter for that very view of life which the grown-up Nietzsche kept struggling against with might and main. The direction of man's self-will became here of paramount importance. In his Notes from the Underworld, as well as his previous narrative The Double, Dostoevsky examined this problem from the standpoint of the individual's social frustration; but by the middle of the 1860s he broached the same dilemma on the plane of the "Nietzschean"9 will to power, without knowing anything about Nietzsche. He did this in his Crime and Punishment, where he grappled with some of the most paradoxical mazes of the Nietzschean "beyond good and evil."

Raskolnikov, the hero of this novel, was a Russian intellectual of the positivist and irreligious 1860s. So Nietzsche's notorious "death of God" would have been taken by him for granted. It was a scientific dogma which Raskolnikov shared with the vanguard intelligentsia of that period. By repudiating God he was, however, logically compelled to reject also those moral values which are rooted in man's belief in God. In this respect he was certainly "beyond good and evil" -an attitude which entitled him to commit even crimes if these were required by some sufficiently plausible pretext or other. But as he realized full well that, if everybody adopted such a standpoint, universal anarchy would be sure to ensue, he had to conclude that a truth of this kind was only for those few individuals who were ripe for it. This was why he divided (again several years before Nietzsche) mankind into two categories: into an elate of master- ful men strong enough to be a law unto themselves; and into the great herd of common people whose function is to be ordered about and to obey.

3Letters of M. F. Dostoevsky, trans. by Colburn Mayne (Chatto & Windus).




Raskolnikov himself was anxious to be one of the elite, one of those who have discarded and left behind the old values of good and evil with a good conscience. But as he was not quite sure whether or not he was really entitled to be in that category, he decided to prove "worthy"> of it by committing a murder (or as it happened two murders), prompted by the slogan that if God is dead then "all things are lawful." In short, according to his Weltanschauung there was not and could not be crime as such. Yet no sooner had the murder been committed than an un- expected kind of inner punishment or reaction set in. It came neither from his conscience nor from his logic (which, anyway, regarded crime as but a fiction). What he experienced was the feeling of being drowned in an endless inner void which cut him off from all human beings without any hope of ever finding an outlet from this cosmic isolation. "Did I murder the old woman?" he wondered. "I murdered myself, not her. I murdered myself forever." The nightmare became so crushing indeed that in the end it compelled him to surrender to the authorities and to confess his crime, even though he was still convinced that crime as such did not exist at all.

It was this aspect of the "beyond good and evil" in practice that evaded even the perspicacity of Nietzsche. True enough, in the chapter "On the Pale Criminal" (in the first book of Thus Spake Zarathustra) he seems to hmit at Raskolnikov by making a distinction between crime and the reminiscence of the same crime. Yet Raskolnlikov's inner punishment, which emanated from what might be called man's transmoral spiritual plane, could not be tackled by Nietzsche for the simple reason that lhe did not (or did not want to) believe in it. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, explored Raskolnikov's case of "all things are lawful"> also in Stavrogin (The Possessed) and in Ivan Karamazov. The spiritually devastated nihilist Stavrogin did not believe in any moral principles. In spite of this he too was inwardly so much impelled to confess his heinous crime (the rape of a little girl who afterwards hanged herself) that he intended to publish a




printed avowal of it all. He probably would have done so, had he not suddenly "wiped himself out like a nasty insect."

Another conspicuous case is that of Ivan Karamazov. By convincing "his ape"-the flunkey Smerdyakov-that "all things are lawful," he had only indirectly induced him to murder the hated old Karamazov. Yet during the court proceedings after the crime the delirious Ivan decided to go to the law-court and give himself up as the actual culprit, even though he knew that no one would believe him. Hence the sardonic jeering of his nightmare devil: "You are going to perform an act of heroic virtue and you don't believe in virtue, that is what tortues you and makes you vindictive.... Why do you want to go on meddling, if your sacrifice is of no use to anyone? Because you don't know yourself why you go! Oh, you'd give a great deal to know yourself why you go.... That's the riddle for you." Not a bad piece of reasoning on the part of a devil who appeared to be only a nightmare apparition. Still, the riddle remained.

Neither Nietzsche nor Dostoevsky provided a satisfactory solution to the riddle itself. Dostoevsky at least did not stop here, but investigated (as far as he could) man's consciousness facing the universal neant devoid of God. An obvious warning was of course Stavrogin. But so also were the shallow nihilists around him who wanted to become usurpers of power for power's and destruction's sake, "starting with absolute freedom and ending with absolute tyranny." Kirillov again, in the same novel, is another complex case anticipating as it were Nietzsche's "'super- man," but from an angle of his own. Like Nietzsche the crazy Kirillov, who does not believe in any transcendental order of the universe, makes the logical conclusion that if there is no God, then man is the only divinity on earth: he becomes man- God. But whereas Nietzsche's Zarathustra found in such a position the highest tragic exaltation of man and of his self-imposed task or obligation here on earth, Kiillov saw plainly that in a meaningless universe all such obligations are as meaningless as




is man's existence itself. All is delusion and self-delusion. The only way in which he could assert himself was fearlessly (as it behooves a "divinity") to commit suicide in protest against such a universe. The highest act of his self-assertion thus coincided with his self-destruction.

It is known that Nietzsche (with his strong but repressed religious temperament) was on the look-out for adequate com- pensations for the sacrifices he had made to his "biological" outlook. Whereas in the irrational Dionysiac element he found a kind of substitute for the brotherhood of man, his conception of the idea of Eternal Recurrence (die ewige Wiederkunft) served him as a substitute for eternity. But Dostoevsky, who was familiar with this idea, made Ivan's devil-again independently of Nietzsche-poke fun at the theory that our earth may have repeated itself a billion times, become extinct, broken up, disintegrated, and then-the sun once more, the planets, the earth.... All this, "an endless number of times, and always the same to the smallest detail. Unseemliest tedium, the whole of it." Dostoevsky of course did not know that this was a parody of Nietzsche's subsequent ewige WViederkunft.

But in The Brothers Karamazov he anticipated, in a much more cruel parody, even Nietzsche's system of human community based upon a strict order of rank. He did this in Ivan's Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. His Grand Inquisitor, like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, is a formidable tragic figure. He, too, is aware of the universal void, yet he is strong enough to face it without flinching. He is equally aware of all the weakness and meanness of human beings whom he thoroughly despises and at the same time is also full of pity for them. Prompted by both scorn and pity, he wants to set up a social order plausible enough to save them from their inner and outer misery. This is why Dostoevsky divides humanity into an elite of "supermen" (who can bear the horrid truth of existence) on the one hand, and on the other, the vast herd of ordinary human beings who could not bear the truth. What he wants to do is to lower the con-




sciousness of the masses to that infantile level where no problems arise and where, in any case, comforting prefabricated "truths" are provided for. "There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil. . . But we shall keep the secret, and for the sake of their happiness we shall lure them with the reward of heaven and eternity. For if there were anything in the other world, it certainly would not be for such as they."

Both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky saw, each in his own way, the threat of nihilism and they gave unmistakable warnings to the whole of their age, but in opposite directions. Nietzsche did it in the name of an anti-religious and anti-Christian outlook which, but for his aristocratic valuations (obligatory for the elite) was not very far removed from the Grand Inquisitor. Dos- toevsky, on the other hand, saw the only possible final solution in those religious-ethical values which he derived from his own conception of Christ. Having started with the same dilemma, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky thus reached, whatever their point of contact, diametrically opposite conclusions. The divergence between the two is of further interest insofar as it leads, socially speaking, to two entirely different conceptions of human community, one of them taking the direction of mankind as a social organism, and the other as a mere organization.

In the first case the association of human beings takes place above all from within. It is not a compulsory but a free association by means of that kind of sympathy which alone can achieve unity through diversity. This requires, however, according to Dostoevsky, a spiritual or religious-ethical basis without which one cannot speak convincingly of human love and sympathy, and least of all human brotherhood as such. Hence he clung all the more to a religious conception of life the more deeply he realized that its actual alternative was homo homini lupus, however much it be camouflaged by all sorts of legal systems and ar-




rangements. Precisely because he was still tormented by the old doubter or skeptic in him, he clung fervently to Christ (as he understood Him), to Slavophilism, and to that kind of rooted- ness in the native soil which (in his opinion) ought to bring the estranged intelligentsia back to the people and to the inherited spiritual realm of the people. That realm may have had some distorted aspects of its own, but even so he preferred it to the pathologic lust for power of some Shigalkv or other (The Possessed), or to the penny-pamphlet liberalism of a Rakitin (The Brothers Karamazov).

Nietzsche, however, who arrived at the opposite pole from Dostoevsky, could think of human society only in terms of a rigorous organization, a kind of military community set up according to the strictest order of rank. Regulated from outside, it aimed at disciplined uniformity rather than unity, with the heroically aloof supermen on top of it all. Nietzsche indulged in his "Caristocratic radicalism" (a label given to it by Brandes) to the verge of absurdity precisely because of his incredibly low assessment of average human beings. Anyhow, his order of rank demanded the unconditional submission of the "many-too- many" to those chosen few entitled to use power in their own right. In contrast to Dostoevsky the Christian, Nietzsche regarded himself-already on the brink of his mental breakdown- as the great Antichrist whose "transvaluation of all values" was going to change the course of human history in the direction laid down by himself.

In his capacity of a first-rate psychologist Dostoevsky had no high opinion of average human specimens either. But although aware of their weakness and their miserable condition (so scornfully enumerated by the Grand Inquisitor), he yet added to his sincere striving for religion and equally strong wish for universal sympathy for the very reason that outside it he saw either totalitarian tyranny, or else chaos and destruction. Be- lieving at least in the potential spiritual possibilities of man, he did his best to retain this faith in spite of all. Hence he came to




the Utopia of mankind as an organism on the plane of God-man (or Christ) -the very antipodes of Nietzsche's self-appointed man-God.

What Dostoevsky meant by his final conception of Christian- ity is best shown by the starets Zosima in The Brothers Kara- mazov. Zosima's teaching has nothing to do with the gloomy and ascetic tradition. On the contrary: it is an affirmation of joy and beauty through all-embracing sympathy and love. He would have had nothing to learn from Zarathustra's dictum Bleibt der Erde treu (Be faithful to the earth). For instead of repudiating the earth, he accepts it most fervently, but on a plane entirely different from that of Nietzsche's Zarathustra. To repeat Zosima's simple words: "Love all God's creation and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mys- tery of things."

Nietzsche, who had to fight all the time for his own health, came to regard strife and struggle as essential for the growth of life in general. Dostoevsky, too, demanded a continuous striving effort, but in the direction of that religious affirmation of life in which alone he saw a future worthy of human beings. Not long before his death he noted in his private diary that the moment would come when the God-man would meet the man-God. Dostoevsky called that encounter the most critical moment in mankind's history. What he meant was really the difference between humanity as an organism on the one hand, and humanity as a mere totalitarian organization (whether from the left or from the right) on the other. The whole of mankind's future may depend on which of these two possibilities will prevail.



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