(In my posted entry Three Sources Of Stalin’s Power [February 5, 2011], I wrote about Stalin’s fascination with the criminal world, which translated into practical results, and well before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 had set him apart from, and vastly superior to, all his Bolshevik Comrades. Indeed, it can be said that in the Lenin-Stalin relationship, it was Stalin calling the shots and using Lenin for his purposes, rather than the other way round. Russia’s criminal world had become perhaps the greatest source of Stalin’s power, and eventually assured him of political supremacy.
Was it intuition, or was Comrade Stalin, a well-educated man who had studied for priesthood in his younger years, sufficiently acquainted with the thinking of Bakunin and the works of Dostoyevsky to have their help in coming to his momentous conclusions? I am sure that it was a combination of both.
This short preamble gives an additional significance to the present entry on Dostoyevsky.)
The great Dostoyevsky is occasionally described as a detective story writer, and there is nothing demeaning in such a description. Most Dostoyevskyan novels are indeed centered around criminal acts, to which Crime and Punishment, Besy, and Brothers Karamazov bear immediate and explicit witness.
To be sure, however, the focus of Dostoyevsky’s attention in each such case is not so much the anatomy of the crime itself, as the psychology of the criminal. Having spent some part of his life among criminals, he is supremely capable of capitalizing on his observations, and the results are truly amazing. One may justly say that Dostoyevsky learns human psychology by studying the criminal, in which he is, of course, in tune with the great Bakunin. The big difference between the two of them, though, is that Bakunin is the revolutionist, the rebel, the anarchist, who extols the criminal as the lifeblood of the nation, whereas Dostoyevsky admits only that the criminal is the best type of personality to learn human psychology from, and he does. Although Dostoyevsky finds the criminal monstrous and revolting (such as, say, in the case of Peter Verkhovensky, in the novel Besy), he nevertheless recognizes that the non-criminal part of society is prone to corruption and degeneration, and prescribes war as a remedy. In fact, according to him, war brings out the best in people, when it is a good defensive war; it energizes society, as though effectively elevating it to the creative level of the criminal, thus finding in war an adequate substitute for crime.
Remarkably, but not surprisingly, Nietzsche reveres Dostoyevsky as a psychologist and teacher, and thus explains the psychological phenomenon of the criminal, rationalizing Dostoyevsky’s preoccupation with the criminal mind. The extended quotation is from Nietzsche’s Götzer-Dämmerung: Skirmishes of an Untimely Man: #45:
“45. The criminal and what is related to him. The criminal type is the type of the strong human being under unfavorable circumstances: a strong human being made sick. He lacks the wilderness, a somehow freer and more dangerous environment and form of existence, where everything that is weapons and armor in the instinct of the strong human being has its rightful place. His virtues are ostracized by society; the most vivid drives with which he is endowed soon grow together with the depressing affects--- with suspicion, fear, and dishonor. Yet this is almost the recipe for physiological degeneration. Whoever must do secretly, with long suspense, caution and cunning what he can do best and would like most to do becomes anemic; and because he always harvests only danger, persecution, and calamity from his instincts, his attitude to these instincts is reversed too, and he comes to experience them fatalistically. It is society, our tame, mediocre, emasculated society, in which a natural human being, who comes from the mountains or from the adventures of the sea, necessarily degenerates into a criminal. Or almost necessarily; for there are cases in which such a man proves stronger than society: the Corsican, Napoleon, is the most famous case.
The testimony of Dostoevsky is relevant to this problem--- Dostoevsky, the only psychologist, incidentally, from whom I had something to learn; he ranks among the most beautiful strokes of fortune in my life, even more than my discovery of Stendhal; this profound human being who was ten times right in his low estimate of the superficial Germans, lived for a long time among the convicts in Siberia,--- hardened criminals, for whom there was no way back to society,--and found them very different from what he himself had expected: they were carved out of just about the best, hardest and most valuable wood growing anywhere on Russian soil.
Let us generalize the case of the criminal: let us think of men so constituted that, for one reason or another, they lack public approval and know that they are not felt to be beneficent or useful — that chandala feeling that one is not considered equal, but an outcast, unworthy, contaminating… All men so constituted have a subterranean hue to their thoughts and actions; everything about them becomes paler than in those whose existence is touched by daylight. Yet almost all forms of existence which we consider distinguished today once lived in this half-tomblike atmosphere: the scientific character, the artist, the genius, the free spirit, the actor, the merchant, the great discoverer. As long as the priest was being considered the supreme type, every valuable kind of human being was devaluated. The time will come, I promise, when the priest will be considered the lowest type, our chandala the most mendacious, the most indecent kind of human being. I call attention to the fact that even now, under the mildest regimen of morals which has ever ruled on earth, or at least in Europe, every deviation, every long, all-too-long sojourn below, every unusual or opaque form of existence, brings one closer to that type, which is perfected in the criminal. All innovators of the spirit must for a time bear the pallid and fatal mark of the chandala on their foreheads, not because they are that way considered by others, but because they themselves feel the terrible cleavage which separates them from everything that is customary or reputable. Almost every genius knows, as one stage of his development, the “Catilinarian existence” — a feeling of hatred, revenge, and rebellion against everything which already is, which no longer becomes. Catiline — the form of pre-existence of every Caesar.”
...One may agree or disagree with Nietzsche here, on this specific point,--it does not matter. What is important is that the closed triangle Russia--Dostoyevsky--Nietzsche--Russia connects Nietzsche’s discerning genius to Russia’s genius, and that they somehow found and appreciated each other. (See my pertinent entry Russia And Nietzsche.) Together, the two of them cannot go wrong on this incredibly subtle, even esoteric matter.
And finally, another amazing Nietzschean mention of Dostoyevsky, coming from Der Fall Wagner:
“…In the narrower sphere of so-called moral values, one cannot find a greater contrast than that between a master morality and the morality of Christian value concepts: the latter developed on soil that was morbid through and through (the Gospels present us with precisely the same physiological types that Dostoevsky’s novels describe), master morality (“Roman,” “pagan,” “classical,” “Renaissance”) is, conversely, the sign language of what has turned out well, of ascending life, of the will to power as the principle of life. Master morality affirms as instinctively as Christian morality negates (“God,” “beyond,” “self-denial”—all of them negations). The former gives to things out of its own abundance—it transfigures, it beautifies the world and makes it more rational—the latter impoverishes, pales and makes uglier the value of things, it negates the world. “World” is a Christian term of abuse.—”
Well, dear Nietzsche, in the Russian psyche, the Christians are right: the world is a place of abuse, and thus deserves abuse in return. Which in a way justifies the Dostoyevskyan criminal, and adds extra glamour to the hagiography of crime.
Was it intuition, or was Comrade Stalin, a well-educated man who had studied for priesthood in his younger years, sufficiently acquainted with the thinking of Bakunin and the works of Dostoyevsky to have their help in coming to his momentous conclusions? I am sure that it was a combination of both.
This short preamble gives an additional significance to the present entry on Dostoyevsky.)
The great Dostoyevsky is occasionally described as a detective story writer, and there is nothing demeaning in such a description. Most Dostoyevskyan novels are indeed centered around criminal acts, to which Crime and Punishment, Besy, and Brothers Karamazov bear immediate and explicit witness.
To be sure, however, the focus of Dostoyevsky’s attention in each such case is not so much the anatomy of the crime itself, as the psychology of the criminal. Having spent some part of his life among criminals, he is supremely capable of capitalizing on his observations, and the results are truly amazing. One may justly say that Dostoyevsky learns human psychology by studying the criminal, in which he is, of course, in tune with the great Bakunin. The big difference between the two of them, though, is that Bakunin is the revolutionist, the rebel, the anarchist, who extols the criminal as the lifeblood of the nation, whereas Dostoyevsky admits only that the criminal is the best type of personality to learn human psychology from, and he does. Although Dostoyevsky finds the criminal monstrous and revolting (such as, say, in the case of Peter Verkhovensky, in the novel Besy), he nevertheless recognizes that the non-criminal part of society is prone to corruption and degeneration, and prescribes war as a remedy. In fact, according to him, war brings out the best in people, when it is a good defensive war; it energizes society, as though effectively elevating it to the creative level of the criminal, thus finding in war an adequate substitute for crime.
Remarkably, but not surprisingly, Nietzsche reveres Dostoyevsky as a psychologist and teacher, and thus explains the psychological phenomenon of the criminal, rationalizing Dostoyevsky’s preoccupation with the criminal mind. The extended quotation is from Nietzsche’s Götzer-Dämmerung: Skirmishes of an Untimely Man: #45:
“45. The criminal and what is related to him. The criminal type is the type of the strong human being under unfavorable circumstances: a strong human being made sick. He lacks the wilderness, a somehow freer and more dangerous environment and form of existence, where everything that is weapons and armor in the instinct of the strong human being has its rightful place. His virtues are ostracized by society; the most vivid drives with which he is endowed soon grow together with the depressing affects--- with suspicion, fear, and dishonor. Yet this is almost the recipe for physiological degeneration. Whoever must do secretly, with long suspense, caution and cunning what he can do best and would like most to do becomes anemic; and because he always harvests only danger, persecution, and calamity from his instincts, his attitude to these instincts is reversed too, and he comes to experience them fatalistically. It is society, our tame, mediocre, emasculated society, in which a natural human being, who comes from the mountains or from the adventures of the sea, necessarily degenerates into a criminal. Or almost necessarily; for there are cases in which such a man proves stronger than society: the Corsican, Napoleon, is the most famous case.
The testimony of Dostoevsky is relevant to this problem--- Dostoevsky, the only psychologist, incidentally, from whom I had something to learn; he ranks among the most beautiful strokes of fortune in my life, even more than my discovery of Stendhal; this profound human being who was ten times right in his low estimate of the superficial Germans, lived for a long time among the convicts in Siberia,--- hardened criminals, for whom there was no way back to society,--and found them very different from what he himself had expected: they were carved out of just about the best, hardest and most valuable wood growing anywhere on Russian soil.
Let us generalize the case of the criminal: let us think of men so constituted that, for one reason or another, they lack public approval and know that they are not felt to be beneficent or useful — that chandala feeling that one is not considered equal, but an outcast, unworthy, contaminating… All men so constituted have a subterranean hue to their thoughts and actions; everything about them becomes paler than in those whose existence is touched by daylight. Yet almost all forms of existence which we consider distinguished today once lived in this half-tomblike atmosphere: the scientific character, the artist, the genius, the free spirit, the actor, the merchant, the great discoverer. As long as the priest was being considered the supreme type, every valuable kind of human being was devaluated. The time will come, I promise, when the priest will be considered the lowest type, our chandala the most mendacious, the most indecent kind of human being. I call attention to the fact that even now, under the mildest regimen of morals which has ever ruled on earth, or at least in Europe, every deviation, every long, all-too-long sojourn below, every unusual or opaque form of existence, brings one closer to that type, which is perfected in the criminal. All innovators of the spirit must for a time bear the pallid and fatal mark of the chandala on their foreheads, not because they are that way considered by others, but because they themselves feel the terrible cleavage which separates them from everything that is customary or reputable. Almost every genius knows, as one stage of his development, the “Catilinarian existence” — a feeling of hatred, revenge, and rebellion against everything which already is, which no longer becomes. Catiline — the form of pre-existence of every Caesar.”
...One may agree or disagree with Nietzsche here, on this specific point,--it does not matter. What is important is that the closed triangle Russia--Dostoyevsky--Nietzsche--Russia connects Nietzsche’s discerning genius to Russia’s genius, and that they somehow found and appreciated each other. (See my pertinent entry Russia And Nietzsche.) Together, the two of them cannot go wrong on this incredibly subtle, even esoteric matter.
And finally, another amazing Nietzschean mention of Dostoyevsky, coming from Der Fall Wagner:
“…In the narrower sphere of so-called moral values, one cannot find a greater contrast than that between a master morality and the morality of Christian value concepts: the latter developed on soil that was morbid through and through (the Gospels present us with precisely the same physiological types that Dostoevsky’s novels describe), master morality (“Roman,” “pagan,” “classical,” “Renaissance”) is, conversely, the sign language of what has turned out well, of ascending life, of the will to power as the principle of life. Master morality affirms as instinctively as Christian morality negates (“God,” “beyond,” “self-denial”—all of them negations). The former gives to things out of its own abundance—it transfigures, it beautifies the world and makes it more rational—the latter impoverishes, pales and makes uglier the value of things, it negates the world. “World” is a Christian term of abuse.—”
Well, dear Nietzsche, in the Russian psyche, the Christians are right: the world is a place of abuse, and thus deserves abuse in return. Which in a way justifies the Dostoyevskyan criminal, and adds extra glamour to the hagiography of crime.
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