DOSTOEVSKY'S SOCIALISM
417
Dostoevsky was also, as we know, peculiarly sensitive at this time
(and perhaps also later) to the effects of twilight and darkness, which
plunged him into a mood of melancholy and indefinable anxiety. There
is an allusion to this fact in one of his letters from prison in September,
1849. "The difficult days of Autumn are at hand," he remarks sadly
to his brother Mikhail, "and with them my hypochondria. Already
the sky is getting darker; and the strip of blue sky that one sees from
my cell is the guarantee of my health and good spirits." In
The In–
sulted and Injured,
a novel in which Dostoevsky uses a good many
autobiographical details from his life in the forties, there is the descrip–
tion of the onset of such a mood that brings it into at least a quasi–
religious focus.
"At the approach of dusk," writes the hero of himself, "I began
to fall into the state of spirit which, now that I am ill comes over me
so often, and which I have named
Mystic Terror.
This is the most
painful and torturing fear of a danger that I cannot define myself, a
peril
inconceivable and non-existent in the order of things, but which,
inevitably, perhaps at this very minute, is going to materialize, as
if
out of contempt for all the arguments of reason-and which will
arise and stand before me as an irrefutable, frightening, monstrous
and inexorable fact." No matter how he might choose to explain it,
this encounter with the numinous and uncanny, this massive and ir–
reducible question mark of Dostoevsky's sensibility, could hardly be
discounted.
It
is not difficult to imagine that such experiences might
pose a permanent and impassable barrier to any acceptance of a totally
rational atheism.
However that may be, there can be no question that Belinsky's
diatribes did give rise to a profound ferment in Dostoevsky's spirit-a
ferment that was only resolved emotionally (if one can truly speak of
a resolution in such a case) as a result of his arrest, mock execution
and the years of his Siberian exile. It was these awesome events which,
in combination with his earlier apprehensions, finally confirmed his
conviction of the irrational necessity of faith. But it should not be
imagined, as it has invariably and mistakenly been, that Dostoevsky
first encountered the problems of God and religious faith only when
he became acquainted with their vehement opponent in the person
of Belinsky. What probably upset Dostoevsky the most in Belinsky's
ideas was the logical rigor and psychological penetration of the new
Feuerbachian argument that God was nothing but an alienated and
