,
DOSTOEVSKI AND PARRICIDE
539
assume that the original meaning remains unchanged behind all later
overlayings. It may be said that Dostoevski never got free from the
remorse due to his desire to murder his father.
It
also determined
his attitude to the two other domains in which the father relation is
the decisive factor, the authority of the State and religion. In the first
he ended up with complete submission to the Tsar, the Little Father,
who in reality had once played with him the comedy of murder
which his attacks so often preluded for him. Here penitence gained
the upper hand. In the religious sphere he retained more freedom: \
according to apparently reliable reports, up to the last instant of
h~
life, he wavered between faith and atheism. His great intellect made
it impossible for him to overlook a single one of the intellectual dif–
ficulties to which faith leads. By an individual repetition of historical
evolution, he hoped to find a way out and a redemption from guilt in
the Christ ideal, to use his very sufferings as a claim to a Christ role.
That he did not entirely succeed in this and become a reactionary
was due to the fact that ,!be universal human filial guilt, on which 7
religious feeling is built, had in him attained to a super-individual
strength, and remained insuperable even to his great mind. Here we
are laying ourselves open to the objection that we have abandoned
the impartiality of analysis, and are subjecting Dostoevski to values
which are justifiable only from the partial standpoint of a definite
philosophy. A conservative would take the side of the Grand In–
quisitor, and judge Dostoevski differently. The objection is just; one
can only say in extenuation that Dostoevski's decision appears to have
been determined by an intellectual inhibition due to his neurosis.
It can scarcely be mere coincidence that three of the master–
pieces of the literature of all time, the
Oedipus Rex
of Sophocles,
Shakespeare's
Hamlet,
and Dostoevski's
The Brothers Karamazov,
should all deal with the same subject, a father's murder. In all three,
too, the motive for the deed, sexual rivalry for the woman, is laid
bare. The most straightforward is certainly the representation in the.
drama built up on the Greek legend. In it the hero himself commits
the crime. But poetic treatment is impossible without softening and
disguise. The naked confession of a desire to murder a father, as we
the fact that he seemed to himself a criminal, and could not get rid of the
feeling that he was guilty of an offence unknown to him, that he had com–
mitted a terrible evil deed, which oppressed him
(Dostojewski' s Heilige Krankheit,
page 1188). In these complaints, psychoanalysis sees a proof of recognition of
the "psychic reality," and tries to bring a knowledge of the unknown offence to
the surface of consciousness.
