SUSAN MCREYNOLDS
Dostoevsky
in Europe:
The Political as the Spiritual
O
n December
22,
r849, only hours after facing Nikolai I's firing
squad and receiving a last-minute reprieve commuting his death
sentence to nine years of hard labor and military service in
Siberia, Dostoevsky wrote to his brother Mikhail: "Now, upon chang–
ing my life, I am being born again in a new form." His premonition of
rebirth proved true. Dostoevsky dedicated the remainder of his life to
repudiating the materialist philosophy behind the French utopian social–
ism whose appeal for him led to his arrest. He was seized in April r849
as a member of the Petrashevsky Circle, an association dedicated to
advancing views of human nature and society set forth in the works of
thinkers such as Fourier and St. Simon. The nine months of incarcera–
tion in the infamous Peter and Paul Fortress caused some of
Dostoevsky's fellow Petrashevtsy to go mad or attempt suicide. For Dos–
toevsky, who by all accounts remained composed, they initiated a reval–
uation of his beliefs that led to his decisive repudiation of materialism
as an alien Western philosophy, and to his rejection of the two forms of
Western society, socialism and capitalism, as dying forms of civilization
that would be succeeded by a universal Russian Christian culture.
Western readers are familiar with the inveterate opposition to the
West expressed in Dostoevsky's mature art. His great novels are struc–
tured around a clear distinction between characters infected with this
life-negating philosophy of materialism-seen as a simplistic reduction
of the human being to a bundle of responses to external stimuli, and
thus the denial of the soul, the seat of moral consciousness and
freedom-and those characters who display the life-affirming spiritual
freedom inherent in Russian Orthodox faith. This structure is exempli–
fied in
Crime and Punishment,
the story of Raskolnikov's attempt to sti–
fle his moral conscience as mere prejudice and to live according to his
rationally calculated self-interest. The logical end of the traj ectory that
begins with his murder of the pawnbroker would be suicide, but this
fate is visited instead on Svidrigailov, the sensualist who lives exclusively
for pleasure and self-interest. Raskolnikov is saved from suicide by
