10 Dostoevskii and science
People who say two times two is not four do not at all intend to say exactly that, but, without doubt, mean and want to express something else.
F. M. Dostoevskii1
In the summer of 1862, Dostoevskii made his first trip to Western Europe. In his account of this journey, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863), he first broaches the problem of science in connection with his visit to the World Exhibition in London. The Exhibition was devoted to celebrating the achievements of science and technology and was sited in the Crystal Palace, an enormous glass and iron structure, itself a feat of engineering. Victorian Britain was the world centre of industrial development and technological invention. This was the period of heroic materialism, the heyday of faith in material progress and human improvement driven by scientific discovery. The age-old dream of conquering Nature and perfecting human nature and society would now, thanks to science, be achievable on earth. Dostoevskii found the Exhibition ‘staggering’; there was nothing remotely like it in backward Russia. But it also aroused in him a profound disquiet:
You feel a terrifying force which has joined here all these numberless people who have come from all over the world into the one fold; you’re aware of a gigantic thought, you feel that something here has already been achieved, that here is a victory, a triumph. You even, as it were, begin to be afraid of something. However independent you may be, for some reason you become frightened. Is not this really the achieved ideal? [. . .] Is not the end here? Is not this in fact the ‘one fold’? Won’t you really have to accept this for the complete truth and fall silent once and for all? It’s all so triumphant, victorious and proud [. . .] It’s a kind of biblical picture, something like Babylon, some kind of prophecy from the Apocalypse being fulfilled before your eyes. You feel you’ll need a great deal of perpetual spiritual resistance and denial not to give in, not to submit to the impression, not to bow to the fact, not to idolise Baal, that is, not to accept what exists as your ideal.
(V, 69–70; Ch. 5)
The apprehension about science expressed here was to remain with Dostoevskii to the end. Characteristic of his eschatological imagination are the apocalyptic imagery and biblical allusion to Christ’s prophecy (John 10:16); and so is his determination to resist taking the new scientific, technological future as his ideal. Two visions of an ideal future collide in this passage: the new apocalypse of science, which looks as if it is already ‘fulfilled’ and the biblical apocalypse to come, when all will be gathered together into ‘one fold’, united in universal love and led by Christ. The Exhibition epitomised the nineteenth-century belief that science was going to solve the world’s problems ‘once and for all’, which is to say that the ‘complete truth’ of science is a finite truth. For Dostoevskii, though, truth is infinite, to be sought only in Christ, and the search for the truth in Him was a lifelong dialogic quest. Hence, to ‘fall silent once and for all’ is to be absolutely dead as a human being. Thus, the worship of science and progress, which the Exhibition so stunningly embodied, was, for him, tantamount to idolatry (Baal), for it was threatening to turn people away from the ‘one fold’. Given that Russia looked to the West as a model to be emulated, Dostoevskii could only fear that what he saw here was a prophetic image of Russia’s future, an anxiety that was exacerbated by the sudden, rapid arrival of science in his homeland.
The scientific revolution came to Russia later than to Western Europe, but its impact was no less profound. The way for its acceptance had been prepared by the successive waves of Western influence on Russian society, beginning with the reforms of Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century. The steady Westernisation and modernisation of Russia had led by the mid-nineteenth century to the gradual secularisation of Russian culture and society. Science took this process much further. For science is not merely an accumulation of facts but a whole new way of looking at the world.2 Scientific ideas and methods spread into areas of thought where they had hitherto been absent: into biblical scholarship, history, philosophy and social and political theory. With the rise of science, the old debate between faith and reason progressively shifted in favour of reason. Science gave new, powerful legitimisation to philosophical materialism and thus encouraged determinist and positivist ideas. The claims of religion to absolute truth were being steadily undermined by science to the extent that the very notion of truth changed: science and truth came to be synonymous, and religion was relegated to the sphere of myth and superstition. Dostoevskii was well informed of all these new trends.
Up to the mid-nineteenth century, science had made little impression on Russian literature. In Dostoevskii’s pre-Siberian works references to the natural sciences are virtually non-existent. But towards the second half of the nineteenth century, news of scientific ideas and discoveries began to sweep into Russia from the West so that by 1860, when Dostoevskii returned from Siberia, he was confronted with quite a different intellectual landscape from the one he had left. Science had captured the allegiance of the young radical intelligentsia who were atheists and politically on the left. They were convinced that the unprecedented and powerful tools of prediction, calculation and validation that the natural sciences offered to humanity could be applied to the solution of social and political problems.
Turgenev was the first of Russia’s great writers to depict a representative of the new scientific world-view in his hero, Bazarov, the nihilist medical scientist in Fathers and Sons (1862). However, Turgenev, unlike Dostoevskii, was not preoccupied with the challenge science presented to faith. Of all the great nineteenth-century writers, it was Dostoevskii who most acutely saw science as a major religious, philosophical and social problem, fraught with immense implications for the notion of truth, the conception of the human being and the future organisation of society. A detailed knowledge of Dostoevskii’s biography and his historical and cultural context is essential for a full understanding of his attitudes to science. The focus here is on a poetic interpretation of scientific allusions in Dostoevskii’s literary works, and on the meanings which emerge from them and point beyond them. In literature, and especially in Dostoevskii’s art, we are concerned not with the validity of scientific ideas or facts, but with how they impinge on the consciousnesses of his heroes and their worlds, and what their responses tell us about the human condition. As Bakhtin has shown, for Dostoevskii there are no ideas in themselves; an idea is always somebody’s idea. Thus, references to scientific facts become utterances, that is, charged with a person’s intentions, questions, aspirations and anticipations of the other’s response. Primary attention will be devoted to the two works that deal most fully with the problem of science: Notes from Underground, the first major work of Dostoevskii’s post-Siberian period, and his last, The Brothers Karamazov.
Notes from Underground
It is in Part 1 of Notes from Underground (1865) that Dostoevskii engages head on with the scientific world-view in his depiction of his first fully fledged ideological hero, or ‘anti-hero’, an unnamed Russian intellectual who conducts an impassioned polemic with contemporary ideas. Notes from Underground is an intellectual drama which enacts in one head the conflict between free will and necessity. In the light of this philosophical agenda, it is particularly significant that the Underground Man’s word is replete with references to science, from medicine, physiology, logic, mathematics, statistics, biology, economics and psychology to evolution. However, it is not science itself which most concentrates his attention, but those recent social and philosophical theories from the West that aimed to model human society and behaviour on scientific paradigms as their proponents understood or misunderstood them. Common to all these nineteenth-century theories – positivism, evolution, utopian socialism, utilitarianism, empiricism, rational egoism, social Darwinism – is a philosophical grounding in materialism and determinism, underpinned by scientific thought and methodology.
Part 1 is set in what the Underground Man calls ‘our negative age’ (V, 110; Pt 1, Sec. 6), that is, in the 1860s, that crucial decade for Russian thought when many of the young intelligentsia were rejecting the religious, social and aesthetic values of their predecessors. Alone, self-imprisoned in his no-home of the underground, obsessed with abstract ideas, he resides in St Petersburg, the ‘most abstract and premeditated city in the entire globe’ (V, 101; Pt 1, Sec. 2). His internal dialogue is divided into two voices, his own and that of various imaginary interlocutors whom he constructs as defenders of the new scientific thinking, trying to reason with an exasperating man who persists in being irrational.
The hero begins his Notes complaining that he is ill and mocking medicine. His liver aches but he won’t go to a doctor ‘from spite’ (V, 99; Pt 1, Sec. 1). But whom is he spiting? One cannot spite medicine, only a person. Since the Underground Man lives in self-imposed isolation, there is no one to be spiteful towards; consequently, he spites himself, he mentally beats himself. It turns out that he is not suffering from a physical illness, but from an unrelenting ‘hyper-consciousness’: to be ‘overly conscious’, he maintains, is ‘an illness’ (V, 101; Pt 1, Sec. 2). But consciousness of what? Of the fact that he, being a clever, educated man, is acutely aware that his mind is constantly running up against a ‘stone wall’, his metaphor for ‘the laws of Nature, the deductions of the natural sciences, mathematics’ (V, 105; Pt 1, Sec. 3). The Underground Man feels insulted, hurt and humiliated by the laws of Nature and the reasons for his grievance against them are the main subject of his discourse. Precisely the laws of Nature, for the advent of science compelled a change in the way Nature was viewed. Nature was no longer a manifestation of God’s creation, but of its own immanent laws; and these laws, which were interpreted in a strictly positivist sense, had become the object of scientific study. Nature became thoroughly rationalised, and depersonalised.
The Underground Man’s consciousness of the laws of Nature is constantly taking him along an endless mental route from ‘the most inevitable logical combinations to the most repulsive conclusions’ (V, 106; Pt 1, Sec. 3). His self-torture is an ineluctable symptom of his spiritual dead end, of his desperate though admittedly perverted attempt to assert his human feelings against the grain of intellectually persuasive ideas, to make himself feel something in a world drained of feeling by compulsive abstract reasoning. All his feelings, even spite, undergo ‘chemical dissolution’ owing to these ‘damn’ laws’ (V, 108; Pt 1, Sec. 5). Perhaps he would be glad of a slap but, should he feel magnanimous and wish to forgive his offender, it would be utterly useless, since his offender might have hit him ‘because of the laws of Nature, and one cannot forgive a law of Nature’ (V, 103; Pt 1, Sec. 2). Yet he cannot forget the slap, nor see it as other than an insult. ‘I’m guilty without guilt’, he complains, because of the laws of Nature (V, 103; Pt 1, Sec. 2). One can only be guilty before a person: that is, conscience presupposes a person to whom one is accountable; one cannot be accountable to a voiceless, personless law of Nature. Since there is no one to feel guilty before, he can only be hyper-conscious of his guilt, but can never expiate it or repent. Nor can he regenerate or transcend himself from his self-consciousness alone. Thus, two key Christian tenets, the action of conscience and the imperative to forgive, are rendered meaningless. The result is a transfer of responsibility from the subject (the old morality) on to an impersonal agent (a law of Nature), which by definition cannot be held responsible. Hitherto one could blame other persons, or personified beings such as the gods, God or the devil, or – in case of one’s own sins – oneself. But now no one is responsible and so there is no one to blame. Thus, ‘it turns out that there is no one even to be angry with; that an object does not exist, and perhaps, will never be found’ (V, 106; Pt 1, Sec. 3). Seeking a responding subject, he encounters only an eternal stone wall.
Psychology has also contributed to a reductive view of the person with its axiom of man’s innate selfishness: ‘If they prove to you that one drop of your own fat must be more precious to you than one hundred thousand of your fellow men, and that all the so-called virtues and obligations are just ravings and prejudices, then accept it, there’s nothing to be done because twice two is mathematics. Just try to object’ (V, 105; Pt 1, Sec. 3). The result is the nullification of the central Christian virtue of self-sacrifice. The theory of evolution, of which the Underground Man is already aware, has fundamentally altered the modern conception of the human being: ‘Once they prove to you that you’re descended from a monkey, there’s no point in frowning about it; accept it as it is’ (V, 105; Pt 1, Sec. 3). If we are evolved animals, more complex, more developed animals, to be sure, but animals nonetheless, then we cannot have been created in the ‘image and likeness’ of God. What we see here is the relentless stripping away of the traditional Christian virtues and humane values owing to a radical redefinition of the human being as a species of animal conditioned and determined by the laws of Nature. Apparently, though, the idea of human descent from the apes did not unduly trouble Dostoevskii. In a letter of 1876, he says:
Christ directly announces that in man, besides the animal world, there is a spiritual one. Well, and so what – let man originate from anywhere you like (in the Bible it’s not at all explained how God fashioned him from clay, took him from the earth), but it is said that God breathed into him the breath of life (though sometimes man in his sins can turn into a beast again).
(XXIX/2, 85; letter of 7 June 1876)
The concept of the person: I. the scientific view of the future person
Science is above all oriented towards the future. According to the scientific outlook, all the laws of human nature are already given, they need only to be detected. In other words, man is a finite entity susceptible to being completely understood, and hence finalised. The project of the radical utopian socialists was nothing less than the remaking of human nature along rational, scientific lines. Science legitimated the case for viewing the human being as a material object, as solely a product of Nature whose mind and behaviour would eventually be brought under total rational control. This new way of defining man gave impetus to the tendency to move in the direction of reification and away from personality, from the conception of the person as a developing, creating human being full of unpredictable potentials. The Underground Man takes this tendency to its ultimate, logical conclusion: the radical de-personalisation of the person. Insistently running through the Notes are the questions: who are we, who (or what) are we becoming, and where are we going?
The Underground Man’s opponents are convinced they have the answer. The ‘human being of the future’, they maintain, won’t go against reason, or his own best interests: ‘that’s mathematics’ (V, 115; Pt 1, Sec. 8). Human will ‘will coincide with the laws of natural science and arithmetic’ (V, 117; Pt 1, Sec. 8). Science, having ‘anatomised’ the person, has demonstrated ‘that wanting and so-called free will’ are illusions (V, 114; Pt 1, Sec. 8).
Science itself will teach man [. . .] that he really has neither free will nor caprice and never did, and that he himself is nothing more than a kind of piano key or organ peg [. . .] everything he does, he does not at all according to his wanting, but according to the laws of Nature. Consequently, one only has to discover these laws of Nature and then man will not answer for his acts [. . .] All human actions, of course, will then be calculated by these laws, mathematically, like a table of logarithms, up to 108,000 and entered into a calendar.
(V, 112–13; Pt 1, Sec. 7)
But the statisticians, he counters, have taken into their register of human benefits only the statistical mean drawn ‘from statistical figures and scientific-economic formulae’; they always leave out that ‘most beneficial benefit’ which evades any ‘classification’, namely, one’s own ‘independent’, ‘voluntary and free wanting’ (V, 110; Pt 1, Sec. 7). However:
I was just about to shout that wanting, the devil knows on what it depends and thank God, perhaps, for that, but then I remembered science and . . . lost my confidence [. . .] if they really find some day a formula for all our wanting and caprices, that is, what they depend on, by precisely what laws they occur, precisely how they spread [. . .] that is, a real mathematical formula – then man will, perhaps, immediately stop wanting [. . .] Well, who wants to want according to a little table? Moreover, he will immediately turn from a man into an organ peg.
(V, 114; Pt 1, Sec. 8)
What makes the Underground Man falter here is his anxiety that the champions of science may be right. He already likens himself to a laboratory instrument, remarking that he (like all those afflicted with hyper-consciousness) has not been ‘born from Nature, but from a retort’ – he is, he says, a ‘retort man’ (retortnyi chelovek) (V, 104; Pt 1, Sec. 3). For if all human responses are automatic, if they are all determined and can be mathematically calculated and predicted, then we no longer have a person but a thing, an organ peg. This is the logic, and in fact it is quite tight.
This has the most fundamental moral consequences: if man is a puppet ruled by the laws of Nature, then he cannot ‘answer for his acts’. Science in itself offers no ground for morality. Scientific explanations of human behaviour are by and large contrary, or inimical, to the idea of the person as a free moral agent. Moral decisions depend on free choice, and if, according to science, there is no free will, then there can be no morality. Dostoevskii was to be preoccupied with this problem of moral responsibility for the rest of his life. Ivan Karamazov’s idea of ‘all is permitted’ is a consequence of there being no one to be answerable to if there is no God.
‘Thing and personality’, remarks Bakhtin, are ‘the two limits’ in the spectrum of relating to others.3 The human personality is infinite in its meaning and ‘immortal’ in its ‘creative nucleus’ (hence his idea of the non-coincidence of a person with himself).4 The closer one moves towards personality, the less applicable are generalisations, abstractions. As Bakhtin observes: ‘into the subject matter’ of science ‘the speaker and his word do not enter’; ‘the mathematical and natural sciences’ are ‘directed towards mastery over mute objects, brute things, that do not reveal themselves in words, that do not comment on themselves’.5 Science is thus by necessity ‘monologic’. ‘Science, in objectifying the subject, turns it into a voiceless thing. Any object of knowledge (including man) can be perceived and cognised as a thing. But a subject [. . .] cannot be perceived and studied as a thing’ because ‘it cannot become voiceless and consequently, the cognition of it can only be dialogic’.6 Science is a collection of statements, rationally argued; literature, a body of utterances artistically organised. You cannot address scientific statements, nor anticipate their responses, nor can they answer you. Consequently the whole dialogic structure, built on utterance, anticipation and response, so distinctive of Dostoevskii’s poetics, has no place in science. Science treats everything it investigates as objects, units, aggregates, whereas Dostoevskii’s characters are pre-eminently subjects, personalities. The scientific word is no one’s word, or anyone’s word; it does not have an author whose response inheres in it, it does not normally evoke the image of a person; it is faceless, or anyone’s face, its speakers are completely interchangeable. It does not represent someone’s semantic position, it cannot assuage the heart, it cannot offer a word of love or hate. Which is to say, it tends to the extreme of de-personification.
The natural sciences and mathematics are context-free object systems, devoid of subjects, of human reference; they are not bound by history, by specific times and places. The Pythagorean theorem is true no matter where, when or who states it; its meaning exists only as an object of pure abstract cognition. The Underground Man’s famous attack on the arithmetical formula ‘two times two equals four’ has become symbolic of human rebellion against the whole rationalist world-view: ‘twice two is four is no longer life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death [. . .] two times two is four is a most unbearable thing. Two times two is four – this is, in my opinion, just impudence. Two times two is four is a cocky-looking fop, who stands in your way, arms akimbo, and spits’ (V, 118–19; Pt 1, Sec. 9).
Here Dostoevskii’s profoundly personalist poetics and vision of the world emerge with striking clarity. From an abstract arithmetical formula the image of a person assumes bodily form and human qualities: a person who taunts and insults the hero and blocks his way to any further word, to any further seeking in life. ‘After two times two, of course, there will no longer be anything not only to do, but even to find out’ (V, 119; Pt 1, Sec. 9). Twice two thus robs the person of potentials and reduces him to finitude; it is the end of dialogue – for Dostoevskii, the end of life. In the face of such insolence, the Underground Man can only hurl back his challenge of ‘two times two is five is a nice little thing too’. Dostoevskii was always personifying, giving voice, trying to elicit a response; in every significant phenomenon, he sought a word. The Underground Man’s objection that ‘twice two will be four without my will’ succinctly expresses the fact that science, its truths and judgements, are indifferent, impervious to our reactions (V, 117; Pt 1, Sec. 8). As his imaginary critics tell him: ‘Nature doesn’t ask you; it doesn’t care about your wishes, whether you like its laws or not’ (V, 105; Pt 1, Sec. 3).
And yet, twice two is four is irrefutable; it is a final word or idea. You can have a view about it, but it will change nothing. The hyper-developed consciousness of a clever man sees there is no way out. The result is paralysis. Unable to act, but possessing a hyperactive mind, full of idées fixes, voice-ideas obsessively spinning around in his head, he says, in effect: ‘I think, therefore I do nothing.’ His helpless rage against the choking-off of his word and feelings by the implacable laws of Nature induces crippling inertia. He cannot break through to a potentially convinced word. His mind comes up against brute facts, mute objects which he personifies either directly, or by introducing imaginary hostile interlocutors who smugly believe in the new ideas, whom he cannot rationally defeat, but whom at the same time he despises. He feels predetermined by impervious manipulators of the laws of Nature who view him as an object, who reduce him to a thing.7 All he can do is rebel, ‘stick out one’s tongue’, send ‘all these logarithms to the devil!’ (V, 113; Pt 1, Sec. 7).
The Underground Man is the most isolated of all Dostoevskii’s ideological heroes. He has an animated relationship with quasi-personified ideas, but no communion with real, living persons. In his youth (in the 1840s) he felt: ‘I am alone and they are everyone else’, a remark that is one of the most profoundly formulated expressions of the solipsistic consciousness in Dostoevskii’s fiction (V, 125; Pt 2, Sec. 1). As Bakhtin observes, everyone is ‘other’ for him, he ‘reduces all people to a single common denominator’.8 In the 1840s, though, he, a Westernised Russian, saw himself as a Romantic hero, above the run of ordinary people, whereas in the 1860s, with the rise of science, this fantasy seems ridiculous, totally unsustainable. The young radicals of the 1860s, armed with science, are a hard-headed version of the Westernised Russian who scorns the Romantic aesthetic and humanitarian values of the 1840s. Now the Underground Man finds himself consigned to the reductive category of a retrograde, irrelevant ‘other’, despite his efforts to accept their views.
The Underground Man maintains that he, like any clever, hyper-conscious man of ‘our unfortunate nineteenth century’, must be ‘without character’ and self-respect (V, 100; Pt 1, Sec. 2). This is because he has been trying to live by those rational, positivist certitudes that subvert the very basis of character and deny the reality of any transcendent ideals. Focussed on abstractions and not on persons, he has ‘not succeeded in becoming anything’, or anyone, and he never will (V, 100; Pt 1, Sec. 2). ‘I cannot be other than I am for there is nothing to remake myself into!’ (V, 102; Pt 1, Sec. 2). Thus in Part 1, Dostoevskii, with consummate artistic precision, represents him as a nameless, disembodied voice. To be nameless means to be without personal identity, to sink to the status of a thing. Consequently, he is adrift, without roots: ‘Where are the primary foundations’, he asks, ‘on which I can rest?’ (V, 108; Pt 1, Sec. 5). He strives to assert himself as a person, but cannot become a person in a world he has de-personalised and which now de-personalises him. He cannot ‘respect’ himself because he fears that he may be just a product of natural forces, a predetermined being without a spiritual, moral dimension, without free will and hence without dignity. Yet he cannot expunge the sense of himself as a person from his soul. Bereft of any higher model, human or divine, with which to construct his identity, he issues his challenging appeal: ‘give me another ideal [. . .] show me something better, and I will follow you’ (V, 120). He knows full well that ‘the underground is not at all better, but something different, completely different, which I long for but will in no way find!’ (V, 121; Pt 1, Sec. 11).
The Underground Man opposes the reductive rationalist view of the person with a rhetoric of parts versus the whole. ‘Life’, he counters, ‘is not just the extraction of square roots’ (V, 115; Pt 1, Sec. 8). ‘Consciousness is infinitely higher than twice two’, because it embraces the whole person with all his or her desires (V, 119; Pt 1, Sec. 9). Rational operations satisfy only our rational capacities. Man is much more than that. The reach of imagination, of consciousness, is infinite. Feelings make life meaningful. The Underground Man’s rebellion is evidence that his heart, though in a state of terminal atrophy, is not dead yet, nor is his conscience. He inveighs against the reduction of the person to things, to inanimate abstractions that can be manipulated by impersonal agents. He rails against the Crystal Palace, the utopian dwelling of the new rational people of the future envisaged in Chernyshevskii’s novel What Is to Be Done?. The Crystal Palace is no one’s home; there is no structure more ‘abstract and premeditated’ than the Crystal Palace. These are metaphors for all those views that deny the ‘most important and most precious thing’, a person’s ‘individuality’, his or her unique ‘personality’ (lichnost’) (V, 115; Pt 1, Sec. 8). This insistence on the primacy of ‘personality’, ‘caprice’, ‘independent wanting’ and free will is not a plea for unbridled licence. Rather his objection to the finite, deterministic view of human beings goes to the heart of a fundamental ideal: the absolute, irreducible value of a person.
The concept of the person: II. the theological view
A person is a relational concept. Every person is a unique, unrepeatable centre of human relationships; one cannot be a self except among other selves. One becomes a person in interaction, in communion with others. Dostoevskii’s conception of the human being rests on the biblical definition according to which God created man in His ‘image and likeness’ (Genesis 1:26). With the Incarnation, this expression received a human form and historical content which offered humanity a model which all may aspire to realise in their lives. It also inspired the theological idea of personhood. The concept of the person derives from the Greek Fathers who, in their meditations on the Triune God, held that God is a person, moreover, that He exists in the person of the Father Who ‘begat’ the Son and brought forth the Holy Spirit out of His love. God is love and His mode of existence is an act of continual trinitarian communion in which all can freely participate. A relationship with God, then, is a personal relationship, loving and unending. And because God freely willed man to be, freedom became an inalienable constituent of human dignity. It was this understanding of the person’s free, inviolable, sacred core that was being relentlessly undermined by science and the atheist social theories it generated or supported. In the words of the Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas: ‘It is atheistic humanism which has detached the concept of the person from theology’ – and science, we may add, has been its strongest ally.9 In the Orthodox tradition, to which Dostoevskii belonged, the person’s uniqueness is absolute; it resists being ‘regarded as an arithmetical concept’, ‘combined with other objects, or used as a means, even for the most sacred goal [. . .] The goal is the person itself: personhood is the total fulfilment of being.’10 For Dostoevskii, truth resides not in concepts, but in a person, in Christ, the uniquely perfect Person, the model of personhood. If truth inheres in science, and not in Christ, then science can and will dispense with Christ. Confronted with this bleak eventuality, Dostoevskii, as is well known, chose to ‘remain with Christ’ (XXVIII, 1, 176: undated letter of January–February 1854 to N. D. Fonvizina).
Christ is not present in Notes from Underground. Dostoevskii originally included a passage in Chapter 10 which ‘deduced the need for faith and Christ’, but it was excised by the censors (XXVIII/2, 73; letter of 26 March 1864). He never restored the cuts. Aesthetically and rhetorically he was right to leave the content of his ideal implicit in his hero’s existential malaise. For had the Underground Man already realised that he needed ‘faith and Christ’, he would have glimpsed a prospect towards heaven and thus would have ceased to be ‘underground’. In that case, the image of a Russian intellectual unhinged by Western rationalism would have been considerably weakened since, in Dostoevskii, this realisation alone begins to be transformational.
Notes from Underground is the most concentrated and sustained exploration in Dostoevskii’s 
uvre of the problems science posed for the individual person, and by implication, for society. The Underground Man, as Frank argues, is conceived as ‘a satirical parody’ who exemplifies the dire consequences of taking to the limit the radically determinist ideas of the 1860s, and, we may add, without having anything to replace or transcend them.11 He is also a cautionary figure of universal significance who, despite his cynical wit, suffers from genuine existential dilemmas, a man of intense feelings who protests against being regarded as an object, against being reified in the name of science. Dostoevskii’s depiction of an acutely self-conscious man registering his awareness of the far-reaching implications of science on his thoughts and feelings is what makes this work seem so astonishingly modern, and so relevant to present dilemmas. The problems it raises about science reappear in Dostoevskii’s subsequent major fiction in dialogues between embodied persons, where they become entangled with real-life dramas, with crimes, which acutely pose the question of ‘the need for faith and Christ’.
In Crime and Punishment, one short episode brings into clear relief how the new scientific thinking underpinning social theories can affect behaviour in pressing, practical situations. In Part 1 (before the murders) Raskolnikov, while walking along the street, notices a young girl of ‘about fifteen or sixteen’ staggering ahead of him. She has obviously been drugged with drink, sexually abused and abandoned, and is being pursued by a predatory ‘dandy’. Like the biblical prototype of the Good Samaritan, Raskolnikov takes energetic measures to help her. Full of indignation towards the man and compassion for the girl, completely heedless of any danger to himself, he rushes at the ‘dandy’ with clenched fists. A policeman intervenes, Raskolnikov explains the situation and gives him all his coins to call a cab for the girl. However, ‘something’ suddenly ‘stings him’, prompting a cynical volte-face: ‘Leave off’, he tells the policeman, ‘What’s it to you? Let him amuse himself’ (VI, 42; Pt 1, Sec. 4). Left to himself, Raskolnikov surmises that the policeman will accept a bribe from the man to leave him alone with the girl. ‘Let them swallow each other alive! – what’s it to me?’, a sentiment that will be echoed by Ivan Karamazov when, apropos his detested father and brother, he exclaims: ‘One reptile will eat another reptile, and serve them both right!’ (XIV, 129; Bk 3, Sec. 9). Both utterances betray the influence of social Darwinism, of the ‘survival of the fittest’, and both, significantly, are expressed shortly before their authors murder, or let a murder take place. After these ‘strange words’, Raskolnikov suddenly feels ‘very depressed’. ‘Poor girl!’, he says, noticing the ‘deserted corner of the bench’ on which the girl had been sitting. Her absence sets him to musing. He imagines a short and terrible future for her in which she will end as a diseased, broken prostitute by the age of ‘eighteen or nineteen’. He continues:
Such a percentage, they say, go every year this way . . . somewhere . . . to the devil. They say, that’s how it has to be in order that the rest be refreshed and not bothered. A percentage! They really have these splendid little words: they are so soothing, scientific. Once you say ‘percentage’, then there’s nothing to worry about. And if they used a different word, well then . . . it would, perhaps, be more disturbing . . . But what if Dunechka [his beloved sister] fell into this percentage? And if not in this one, then in another one?
(VI, 43; Pt 1, Sec. 4)
Once human beings and their tragedies can be converted into numerical aggregates, into ciphers in a deterministic table of statistics, they can be erased from conscience. The calculations of sociological utilitarianism overwhelm Raskolnikov with a sense of the futility of even attempting to perform a good act and induce an attitude of moral nihilism. And this chimes in with Marmeladov’s earlier remark about ‘a follower of the new [utilitarian] ideas’, who explained to him ‘that compassion in our time is even forbidden by science’ (VI, 14; Pt 1, Sec. 2). Raskolnikov falls back into the grip of his idea, and under the influence of the same type of calculations, of a particularly lethal combination of Romantic, utilitarian and nihilistic ideas, he suppresses his moral sensibilities, and goes on ‘mechanically’ to murder two women. Nevertheless, at least one ‘statistic’ was briefly endowed with flesh and blood, thanks to the hero’s ability to ‘linger intently’ over another person’s life in un-self-interested detail. Raskolnikov’s sympathetic imagination, his ability to forget himself and go spontaneously to the aid of others, are qualities which guarantee his eventual ‘resurrection’. But then the affirmation of Christ’s raising of Lazarus organises the whole novel; hence resurrection is affirmed as a real possibility for all those who accept Him. In Dostoevskii’s next novel divine, and consequently human, resurrection is put under severe doubt by the ‘laws of nature’.
In The Idiot Ippolit, the dying young man, describes his reaction to Holbein’s painting of the dead Christ Who is depicted totally alone, in a cramped tomb, His wounds rendered in uncompromisingly naturalistic detail, and without any marks of His divinity:
here is only Nature [. . .] Christ did not suffer figuratively, but really and His body was fully and completely subject to the law of Nature [. . .] would His disciples [. . .] looking at such a corpse, believe that this martyr would arise? [. . .] if death is so terrible and the laws of Nature so powerful, then how can they be overcome [. . .] when even He, Who conquered Nature in His lifetime, did not conquer them now? He Whom Nature obeyed, Who said ‘Talitha kumi’ and the girl arose? [. . .] Looking at this picture, Nature appears [. . .] in the shape of some huge machine of the most recent construction which senselessly seized, smashed and swallowed into itself a great and precious Being, such a Being worth all of Nature and all its laws [. . .] The idea of a dark, insolent and senselessly eternal force, to which everything is subjected, is expressed by this picture and conveyed to you.
(VIII, 339; Pt 3, Sec. 6)
The latest ‘machine’ may stand as a metaphor for the technological age, for blind mechanical necessity, for the crushing triumph of a brute man-made thing over the only Person free from causality and the laws of Nature. Holbein’s Christ is only a corpse, a person reduced to a thing. As Jostein Børtnes has pointed out, the dead Christ ‘is the central symbol of The Idiot’, but one that ‘has been emptied of its divine content’; therefore His sacrifice, and consequently the whole Christian tradition, ‘has lost its meaning’.12 No consolations are offered. The failure of Myshkin to save anyone is a reflection of the absence of the divine Christ in the world of The Idiot. Dostoevskii was never again to put his ideal to such unsparing scrutiny. Only a troubled awareness of the scientific basis of the laws of Nature, in which miracles have no place, could have generated such a conception.
In The Devils, the socialist theorist Shigalev asserts that all previous creators of ideal social systems went hopelessly astray because they ‘understood absolutely nothing about natural science and that strange animal called man’ (X, 311; Pt 2, Ch. 7). He bases his ‘system’ for solving the social problem and organising a future society on ‘scientific data’ and a programme of eugenics. The human ‘herd’, which will comprise nine-tenths of humanity, will be deprived of their ‘personality’ and ‘entire generations’ will undergo ‘re-education’, resulting in a number of ‘rebirths’ until they achieve a state of ‘primeval innocence’ (X, 132; Pt 1, Ch. 5). This will regrettably entail ‘unlimited despotism’ by the élite, but there is no other way to attain the ‘earthly paradise’. What was adumbrated in Notes from Underground is spelled out in ‘Shigalevism’, where science underpins and legitimates the loss of personality and freedom in the name of establishing a perfect society.
Hitherto Dostoevskii has been primarily concerned with the misapplication of scientific thought and practice to the problematics of society and the person. From the mid-1870s he begins to incorporate recent mathematical and cosmological concepts of infinity into his characters’ dialogues on ultimate questions, whereby biblical morality and eschatology come into conflict with the modern scientific view of the cosmos. The impact of contemporary astronomical theories prompts Arkadii Dolgorukii, the hero of A Raw Youth, to nihilistic reflections on faith and morality which anticipate Ivan Karamazov’s dilemmas:
Why should I love my neighbour or your future mankind, which I’ll never see, which will not know about me and which [. . .] will be reduced to dust, without any trace or memory [. . .] when the Earth will [. . .] turn into an icy rock and will fly in vacuous space along with an infinite number of the same kind of ice rocks [. . .]? One cannot imagine anything more senseless.
(XIII, 48–9; Pt 1, Ch. 3)
Here Dostoevskii uses a current astronomical speculation about the earth’s future in order to formulate one of his most disturbing moral questions. If this is the ultimate future of humanity, what will keep us on the path of virtue, or, as Arkadii asks, why should we be ‘noble’?
These questions return with enhanced poetic and philosophical depth in Dostoevskii’s last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, where he introduces his first hero-scientist, Ivan Karamazov, who had completed a ‘course in natural sciences’ and was reputed to be an atheist. Ivan is a dreamer and theoretician on a cosmological scale. For Dostoevskii, to seek the truth is to transcend the limits of this world in a quest to divine the Word of Christ. Ivan too seeks the truth beyond the limits of this world, but chooses the direction offered by a scientific view of the cosmos. Science and mathematics also deal with concepts of infinity; but they do not locate the infinite in the human soul or a transcendent God, but in the relationships between matter, in the great abstractions of space, time and number. These ideas Ivan finds intellectually compelling, but they do not satisfy the deepest longings of his ‘higher heart’.
During his conversation with Alesha on the incompatibility of the existence of God with an unjust world, Ivan introduces the recent discovery of non-Euclidean geometry, one of the great breakthroughs in mathematics. Euclid’s geometry, which had long been taken as universal truth, postulated that parallel lines can never meet. However, Euclid did not have the notion of infinity; his laws applied only to finite planes. Non-Euclidean geometry demonstrated that there exist parallel lines that meet at infinity. It thus opened up another reality beyond our finite, three-dimensional world, but it also had a destabilising effect on old certainties. The demotion of Euclid’s geometry from its pinnacle of immutable truth was correlated with the contemporary failure of revealed religion to explain various natural phenomena. Ivan makes a somewhat similar correlation, drawing a parallel between the incomprehensibility of non-Euclidean geometry and the senseless suffering on earth. The human mind, he says, being created with a conception of only three dimensions, can no more grasp such notions as infinity, which are ‘not of this world’, than the ways of God which are manifestly unconcerned with the concrete, unjust suffering of this world. Ivan then uses this mathematical discovery to construct an accusation against ‘God’s world’ and to tempt Alesha into joining him in his rebellious despair. For Ivan, non-Euclidean geometry is a metaphor for God’s absence from this world, for the Deus absconditus. Since God cannot be watching over this world, ‘all is permitted’. It is this idea which precipitates the tragedy of the murder of Fedor Pavlovich.
Ivan’s brother Mitia (Dmitrii) has his views on science, though in quite a different key. Visiting Mitia in prison on the eve of his trial for the murder of their father, Alesha finds him distraught, confused and despondent. However, it is not his impending trial that is ‘killing’ him, but ‘various philosophies’: ‘Well, Aleksei, now my head’s lost, not my head, but what was in my head is lost [. . .] Ideas, ideas, that’s what! Ethics. What is ethics? [. . .] some kind of science? [. . .] Claude Bernard? What is it? Chemistry or something? [. . .] Ugh, these Bernards! A lot of them are breeding! Why am I lost? Hmm. In essence . . . on the whole – I’m sorry for God, that’s why!’ (XV, 28; Bk 11, Sec. 4). One would be hard put to find such a sentiment, such an inversion of the relationship between man and God, before the age of science. It emerges that Rakitin (a shallow progressive careerist) has been giving Mitia lessons in material determinism, with explanations of the vasomotor system which had been recently discovered by Claude Bernard, the French positivist physiologist. Says Mitia:
in the brain are these nerves [. . .] they have little tails [. . .] as soon as they begin to quiver, an image appears [. . .] this is why I visualise, and then think . . . because of these little tails, and not at all because I have a soul and am a kind of image and likeness . . . It’s splendid, this science, Alesha! A new man will come, this I understand . . . But all the same, I’m sorry for God [. . .] Chemistry, brother, chemistry! Nothing can be done about it – move over a little, Your Reverence, chemistry is coming!
(XV, 28–9; Bk 11, Sec. 4)
Science is redefining man and God has to ‘move over’ to make way for the ‘new man’, who is a material object without a soul, who can be cognised and broken down into his physiological components. Mitia echoes the Underground Man’s sense of helplessness before the triumphant advance of the ‘new men’. In Mitia’s sorrowful tones sounds the pathos of the great historical drama of the eclipse of Christianity by the emergent scientific world-view.
Precisely when Ivan can no longer hide from himself his complicity in his father’s murder, his ideas, now repugnant to him, come to haunt him in the guise of the devil. The devil is an ancient transcendent figure of cosmic significance, laden with evil associations, who roams the cosmos at will. In Dostoevskii’s novel, he has taken up residence as a voice in Ivan from which the latter now vainly struggles to dissociate himself. The result is a split in Ivan’s consciousness which precipitates his descent into mental breakdown. It is his devil who quotes Ivan’s scientific ideas back to him, only in tones of mockery. And it is his devil, evidently the first in European literature, who invokes a host of scientific ideas as instruments of torment. Reminding Ivan that they share the ‘same philosophy’, the devil continues: ‘Really, I myself, just like you, suffer from the fantastic, and that’s why I love your earthly realism. Here you have everything defined, here is the formula, here is geometry, but all we have are indeterminate equations’ (XV, 73; Bk 11, Sec. 9). As the reader knows, Ivan does not love ‘earthly realism’ or its ‘Euclidean nonsense’ (XIV, 222; Bk 5, Sec. 4). He rejects this world while secretly hoping for a better one beyond; but having no factual evidence of it, he despairs of its existence. But the devil demolishes Ivan’s tenuous hope when he defines his realm in terms of total mathematical indeterminacy, and implies there is nothing else. For the devil has no fixed spatial, temporal location, but comes from the infinite reaches where ‘non-Euclidean geometry’ and ‘indeterminate equations’ are the norm, where there are no defined outlines and thus no stable images, where there is no up or down, high or low, right or wrong. His frequent motifs of Nature turned upside down serve the same purpose of tormenting Ivan with the idea of an absurd, utterly meaningless universe.
Referring to recent advances in earthly science, the devil says:
‘all of us there are agitated now, and it’s all because of your sciences. While there were still just atoms, five senses, four elements, well then everything somehow held together. They had atoms in the ancient world too. But when we found out that you had discovered your ‘chemical molecule’, and ‘protoplasm’, and the devil knows what else [. . .] real confusion set in.’
(XV, 78; Bk 11, Sec. 9)
The science of classical Greece not only co-existed with Christianity, but was accepted by the church as immutable truth. This religious and scientific stasis ‘held together’ for many centuries. But the growth of modern science is sowing confusion in the devil’s realm, for if it is a threat to faith it is also a threat to the devil, since an atheist neither worships the one nor fears the other. Not surprisingly, then, Ivan, the ‘atheist’ who wishes to believe, ‘strangely, suddenly’ says to the devil: ‘I, however, would like to believe in you!’
Complaining about his baffling role of negation in the universe, the devil returns to his metaphor of mathematical indeterminacy: ‘I suffer, but still I don’t live. I am the x in an indeterminate equation.’ X is the symbol used when something, such as a person’s name, is unknown, or is to be left undetermined, and this accords with the devil’s having ‘forgotten’ what to call himself. But now the devil takes the metaphor much further: he is that critical element which converts determinacy into indeterminacy, faith into doubt. ‘I am the x’ is a maximally abstract version of Christ’s self-defining metaphors of the type A is B (‘I am the light of the world’, ‘I am the door’) where the concrete metaphors are aimed at showing the listener the way to reach the light, to approach God. The devil’s ‘x’ leads to anything, or nothing.
The same type of metaphor is embedded in the devil’s subsequent mathematical reference where he depicts himself as a long-suffering victim who has been assigned the onerous task of leading people into temptation. Why this should be so is a mystery to him: ‘I know, after all, there is a secret here, but they do not want for any price to reveal the secret to me, because then, having guessed what it’s about, I might shout “hosanna” and then the necessary minus would immediately disappear and in the whole world reasonableness would set in’ (XV, 82; Bk 11, Sec. 9). Another non-self-definition involving a mathematical symbol yields the metaphor ‘I am the necessary minus.’ ‘Necessary’ implies a plan. If the devil is ‘necessary’, it can only be a divine plan. Now ‘minus’ is equivalent not to non-existence but to a negative quantity or quality. In other words, if we have -x we still have a notion of x. Even the devil is not equal to that ‘absolute zero’ Ivan gave in reply to Fedor’s query whether there exists ‘just a tiny little bit’ of God and immortality (XIV, 123; Bk 3, Sec. 8). The devil uses figures of mathematical indeterminacy in order to torture Ivan on his sorest point, his wish to know once and for all ‘Does God exist or not?’ But from the devil he gets only indeterminate answers: ‘My dear fellow, honest to God, I don’t know’ (XV, 77; Bk 11, Sec. 9).
Continuing his torment of Ivan, the devil advances a vision of cosmic palingenesis drawn from recent geological and astronomical findings:
Really, the present earth may have repeated itself a billion times; it died out, iced over, cracked, crumbled, disintegrated into its constituent elements, again the waters which were above the firmament, then again a comet, again the sun, again from the sun the earth – really, this development may have been repeated an infinite number of times, and always in the very same form, to the smallest detail. A most indecent bore.
(XV, 79; Bk 11, Sec. 9)
All the verbs the devil intones to depict the terrestrial cycles are intransitive, conveying self-repeating processes of disintegration, annihilation and colossal movements of massive inanimate matter. Significantly, the devil quotes only a fragment of Genesis 1:7: ‘And God made the firmament, and divided the waters under the firmament from the waters above the firmament; and it was so.’ Omitting the biblical subject, God, and the transitive verbs signifying His cosmic creative acts, the devil banishes God the Creator from the universe, and replaces Him with a positivist, self-existent, self-acting and self-perpetuating cosmogony. If for Ivan God is absent from this world, the devil insinuates that He is absent from the universe, that He is not even at that place where parallel lines meet. Annexing the idea of an infinitely repeating series, the devil converts terrestrial and solar evolution from a linear one, in which change is possible, into a cosmogony of the vicious circle, of doomed repetition. Implicit in his scheme is the idea that human beings are helplessly trapped, condemned perpetually to re-experience their earthly misery ‘to the smallest detail’. Forever spinning around with insentient inorganic masses in an immutable cycle, humanity approximates the attributes of brute matter. No one can ever ascend to a higher level of spiritual being; there is no redemption, salvation or divine love and mercy. This means that innocent suffering can never be atoned; worse, it has been and ever will be eternally repeated ‘to the smallest detail’. Thus, the devil insidiously extends Ivan’s accusations against God on the grounds of innocent, unatoned suffering. The sombre implication is that the Crucifixion will be infinitely repeated, and thus Christ’s coming achieved nothing, and never will. It would be hard to imagine a more hellish vision.
The infinity Ivan’s devil presents to him is an evil infinity which opens out into nothing, into a void where man is in free fall. Father Zosima’s vision of infinity is one where ‘the roots of our thoughts and feelings are in other worlds’, and everything lives thanks to this ‘feeling of contact with mysterious other worlds’ (XIV, 290; Bk 6, Sec. 3). For Zosima, the universe is presided over by ‘our Sun’, a loving Person, Who is ‘infinitely merciful’, and ceaselessly inviting us to Him ‘forever and ever’ (XIV, 327; Bk 7, Sec. 4).
Nearing the end of their conversation, the devil sums up Ivan’s recent composition on a future utopian society. To create the new society, the ‘new people’ do not need to destroy anything, averred Ivan, except ‘the idea of God’:
Once humankind to a person renounces God (and I believe that this [. . .] will come to pass), then the whole former world-view will fall away of itself, without anthropophagy, and – the main thing – so will the whole former morality, and then everything new will come. People will join together to take from life everything that it can give, but absolutely for happiness and joy only in this world. Man will be exalted with a divine spirit, a titanic pride, and the man-god will appear. Every hour conquering Nature, now without limits, with his will and science, man every hour will feel a delight so lofty that it will take the place for him of all the former hopes of heavenly delight.
(XV, 83; Bk 11, Sec. 9)
This is the ultimate secularisation and destruction of Christianity, and science is the indispensable instrument of its demise. God must not only ‘move over’ but be permanently expelled from every head. The new men of science will take over the Orthodox ideal of theosis and turn it into self-deification. They will appropriate the Christian hope of immortality and turn it into prolonging life on earth, into an ideology of prolongevism, perfectibilism and hedonism. Man will become omnipotent over matter, over Nature. What Mitia sorrowfully intuited about the ‘new men of chemistry’, Ivan openly promoted in adopting the serpent’s temptational promise: ‘Ye shall be as gods’ (Genesis 1:35). The ‘terrifying force’ Dostoevskii anxiously apprehended at the Great Exhibition is here given poetic expression in a young Russian scientist’s prophetic fantasy of a future technological golden age which he had viewed as the ‘final’ stage of human development, its final achieved ideal.
Afterword
Since the nineteenth century Christianity has been finding itself increasingly on the defensive, while science has gone its own way and has now become virtually identified with truth. Science, says Bakhtin, knows only ‘its own immanent law’ and because it evades the question of its purposes, it ‘may serve evil rather than good’. Dostoevskii did not deny the benefits of science, but he was more concerned to emphasise the dangers. He knew very well that, as Bakhtin says, a scientific advance that is initially rationally defensible can develop into a ‘terrifying, deadly’ and ‘irresponsibly destructive force’ when divorced from life.13 The famous twentieth-century dystopias of Evgenii Zamiatin (We), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (1984) project totalitarian world orders which use advanced science and technology as instruments of total control over human beings, and, in so doing, take the reification and de-personalisation of humans beings to their limits. We now live in what is already called a post-Christian society. Though some warn against the dangers of scientism, science has now become unstoppable. Says the Underground Man: ‘If we really are rushing towards [. . .] the retort, what can we do, we’ll have to accept the retort! Or else, it will get accepted of itself, without you’ (V, 115; Pt 1, Sec. 8). It is not Zosima’s vision, as Dostoevskii hoped, but Ivan Karamazov’s utopian ideas which are being fulfilled before our eyes. Indeed, some of Dostoevskii’s worst fears have already been realised in those scientific trends and discoveries of today which aim to make man omnipotent over his own organism, trends such as behaviourism, cloning – including the ‘therapeutic cloning’ of human embryos for spare parts – the human genome project (which is not very far from the Underground Man’s ‘calendar’ of 108,000 human actions), robotics, cryonics, genetic engineering, ‘virtual reality’ people, designer babies, artificial intelligence, and on the social level, hedonism, the breakdown of community and a sense of pervasive anonymity. ‘We have long ceased to be born from living fathers. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea’, says the Underground Man at the end of his Notes (V, 179; Pt 2, Sec. 10). Whether we and our descendants will like such a world remains an open question. As early as the 1860s Dostoevskii foresaw the dilemmas with unparalleled depth and prescience.
Capitalisation of personal and possessive pronouns relating to God and Christ, intended by Dostoevskii but excised from Soviet editions of his works, has been restored in quotations in this article.
1 Quoted by N. N. Strakhov in F. M. Dostoevskii: Novye materialy i issledovaniia (New Materials and Studies), Literaturnoe nasledstvo 86 (Moscow: Nauka, 1973), p. 560.
2 The Russian nauka means both ‘science’ and ‘scholarship’. The context determines which sense is meant. By Dostoevskii’s time it had come increasingly to be used for the natural sciences, mathematics, statistics and economics.
3 M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), pp. 138–9 and 164–5.
4 Ibid., p. 168.
5 M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 351.
6 Bakhtin, Speech Genres, p. 161.
7 M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 236.
8 As Bakhtin puts it: ‘In everything he senses above all someone else’s will predetermining him’ (ibid., p. 253).
9 John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion (London: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), p. 27.
10 Ibid., p. 47. Some humanist atheists invoke the sacredness of the person as an ethical principle, but in their case ‘sacred’ is an empty concept since they have nothing transcendent to attach it to. Their appeal to ‘sacred’ is but a fading echo of a once living idea.
11 Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865 (Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 314.
12 Jostein Børtnes, ‘Dostoevskij’s Idiot or the poetics of emptiness’, Scando-Slavica 40 (1994), p. 13. I thank Jostein Børtnes for kindly reading an earlier version of the present chapter.
13 M. M. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, trans. Vadim Liapunov, ed. Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), pp. 7–8.