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Five years of arrest, a mock execution, and a Siberian prison made Dostoevsky the psychologist the world still studies. This lecture from Academy of Ideas tells that story. Before the ordeal he was a washed-up young writer; after it, he gave us Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Demons. In prison he learned that meaning and hope are not luxuries but survival itself — and that useless labor can break a human mind. His conclusion, hard-won in suffering: a person is steeled by suffering, and comfort breeds weakness.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky is considered one of history’s greatest novelists, but he is also one of history’s greatest psychologists.
His stories contain depictions of characters who span the spectrum of human personality, from those of abject evil to those saintly in nature.
Friedrich Nietzsche was so impressed with the works of Dostoevsky that in a letter to a friend
he stated that Dostoevsky’s novels contain the most valuable psychological material I know.
In this video, we explore the life events that transformed Dostoevsky into a tortured genius
and helped him attain his unmatched understanding of the human psyche.
In the first months of 1849, Dostoevsky, then 27 years old,
was considered a writer who had not lived up to his early potential.
Three years prior, he had published the book Poor Folk,
which catapulted him to fame in the Russian literary scene.
But his subsequent works were panned by critics and largely ignored by the public,
and by 1849, many saw him as washed up.
Dostoevsky’s career, however, had hardly started.
In the decades that followed, he would write some of history’s greatest works of fiction,
such as Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov,
The Idiot, and Demons. What transformed Dostoevsky from a writer of mediocre success
to one of the most famous authors of all time was a five-year descent into a personal hell.
Dostoevsky was arrested, placed in solitary confinement, forced to endure a mock execution,
and imprisoned in Siberia for four years where he lived in filth and squalor with criminals of
the most depraved kind. This experience made Dostoevsky intimately familiar with both the
darkest depths and the greatest heights of the human soul, and it provided him with ample
material for his stories.
The cause of Dostoevsky’s five years of misfortune began with his decision to join
the Petrushevsky Circle, a weekly social gathering named after its host.
At these gatherings, participants discussed the social and political ideas that were shaping
Russia and Europe.
By 1848, the number of people who attended the circle grew and it morphed into a sort
of debate club. Dostoevsky, as a pathologically shy and socially awkward individual, spent more
time listening to other people debating than actively participating, or as he stated regarding
his participation in the group, I am far from being a loudmouth, and everybody who knows me
will say the same. I do not like to speak noisily and lengthily, even with friends, of whom I have
a very few, and still more in society, where I have the reputation of being an uncommunicative,
reserved, unsociable person. At the time Dostoevsky joined the Petrushevsky
Circle these gatherings were not illegal. But in 1848, as revolutions broke out across
Europe, Russia’s ruling class became nervous. Believing that European political and social
ideas could initiate unrest in Russia, the Russian government began to clamp down on
freedom of speech and adopted an increasingly censorious policy.
The Petrushevsky Circle was infiltrated by the secret police and in April of 1849 members
of the group were rounded up and arrested.
Dostoevsky was taken from his home in the middle of the night and locked away in the
Peter and Paul Fortress, where he was held in solitary confinement for six months awaiting
sentence.
When I found myself in the fortress, I thought that the end had come and that I would not
last three days, he told a friend in 1873.
Dostoevsky, however, quickly learned that he could adapt to the horrid conditions of a 19th
century maximum security prison, and he discovered that as humans we possess untapped reservoirs of
energy and an unrealized capacity for resilience. Most of us do not make use of these capacities
unless fate forces our hand, but when it does, we discover that we can cope with challenges that
far exceed what we previously believed to be possible, or as Dostoevsky wrote in a letter
from his prison cell. A good disposition depends on myself alone. Man has infinite reserves
of toughness and vitality. I really did not think there was so much, but now I know it
from experience.” In September of 1849, the Commission of Inquiry
into the Petrushevsky Circle completed its investigation. They concluded that the members
of the Circle were in general notable for a spirit of opposition to the government and
a desire to alter the existing state of things. Dostoevsky and 14 others were brought to
Semenovsky Square in St. Petersburg, where their sentence was announced, death by firing squad,
to be met out immediately. After hearing these words, Dostoevsky believed he was minutes away
from death. In a state of shock, he turned to another of the condemned men and said,
we shall be with Christ. But the man, who was an atheist, smiled at Dostoevsky, pointed to the
ground and said, a handful of dust. Dostoevsky then experienced what he would later in life
call a mystic terror, a description of which is found in his novel The Idiot, where the character
Prince Mishkin recounts a story about a man who believed he was five minutes away from death by
execution. He divided up the time that still remained for him to live, two minutes to say
goodbye to his companions, two minutes for inward meditation one last time, and the remainder to
look around him one final time. He was going to die at 27 full of health and vigor. After saying
goodbye, he began the period of two minutes reserved for inward meditation. He knew in advance
what he would think about. He wished to focus his attention firmly and as rapidly and clearly as
possible on what was going to happen. Right now, he was existing and living. In three minutes,
something would occur, someone or something, but who, where? Nearby rose a church whose golden
cupola sparkled under a brilliant sun. He could not take his eyes away. Those rays seemed to him
to be that new nature that was to be his own, and he imagined that in three minutes he would become
part of them. His uncertainty and his repulsion before the unknown, which was going to overtake
him immediately, was terrible. The 15 condemned men were lined up to be executed in groups
of three. Dostoevsky was in the second group. When the first group was positioned in front
of the firing squad, a cart arrived delivering a letter from the Tsar, commuting the death
sentence. Dostoevsky, however, was not a free man, as his death sentence was replaced by
a four-year sentence in a Siberian military prison camp. On returning to his cell in the
Peter and Paul Fortress, Dostoevsky wrote a letter to his brother describing how flirting
with death had changed him. When I look back on my past and think how much time I wasted on
nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live,
how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul, then my heart
bleeds. Life is a gift. Life is happiness. Every minute can be an eternity of happiness. If youth
only new. Now, in changing my life, I am reborn in a new form. The relief Dostoevsky experienced
soon turned to despair, as he was shipped off to Siberia where he would spend the next four
years of his life surrounded by criminals, living in horrid conditions, eating the meagerest of
rations and spending his days toiling in hard labor. Dostoevsky noticed, however, that none
of his fellow prisoners seemed disturbed by the filth and squalor in which they lived,
and this led him to realize that one thing that defines man is his great ability to acclimate to
even the harshest of conditions. Or as he wrote in Notes from a Dead House, which is an account
of his life in prison, man is a creature who gets used to everything, and that, I think,
is the best definition of him. Dostoevsky found that one of the most exhausting elements of prison
life was the constant presence of other people. No matter what he did or where he went, he was
always surrounded by inmates or guards. The inability to escape from the gaze of others
drove home to Dostoevsky something those in freedom take for granted, namely the value of
a solitary existence. Or as he remarked, I could never have imagined, for instance,
how terrible and agonizing it would be never once for a single minute to be alone for the years of
my imprisonment. But while always physically surrounded by others, Dostoevsky’s four years
of prison was a time of unending spiritual solitude. He was, in other words, very much
psychologically alone and he never developed strong friendships. At first Dostoevsky found
his psychological solitude to be a burden, but over time he recognized that this solitude had
the power to initiate a radical self-transformation, or as he wrote,
I remember that in all that time, despite having hundreds of fellow prisoners,
I was in terrible solitude, and I finally came to love that solitude.
Spiritually alone, I revisited all my past life,
went through everything down to the smallest detail,
pondered my past, judged myself alone strictly and implacably,
and sometimes even blessed my fate for having sent me that solitude,
without which neither that judgment of myself
nor that strict review of my past life could have been done.
I outlined a program for the whole of my future
and resolved to follow it firmly. A blind faith arose in me that I would and could fulfill it all.
I waited. I called for freedom to come quickly. I wanted to test myself anew, in a new struggle.
Time in prison also taught Dostoevsky of man’s great capacity for evil. Not only was he forced
to live with criminals of the most depraved sort, but observing the prison guards also taught him
the relationship between power and evil. Dostoevsky came to realize that when an
individual is granted too much power over others, the inevitable result is cruelty.
Many of the guards who worked at the prison camp were normal, decent men when they began
their careers. But the power they possessed over the prisoners consumed them and warped
their characters. In Notes from a Dead House, Dostoevsky warned that those who are corrupted
by the evil that arises from too much power and control over others rarely recover from this
deformity or as he wrote a man who has once experienced this power this unlimited lordship
over the body blood and spirit of a man just like himself a man who has experienced this power and
the full possibility of inflicting the ultimate humiliation upon another being somehow involuntarily
loses control of his sensations. Tyranny is a habit. It is endowed with development and develops
finally into an illness. I stand upon this, that the best of men can, from habit, become coarse
and stupefied to the point of brutality. Blood and power intoxicate. Coarseness and depravity
develop. The most abnormal phenomena become accessible and, finally, sweet to the mind and
feelings. Man and citizen perish forever in the tyrant, and the return to human dignity becomes
almost impossible for him. It wasn’t only the dark side of man that Dostoevsky became familiar with
in prison. He was also awakened to man’s boundless capacity for good. When he first entered prison,
Dostoevsky despised most of his fellow prisoners and looked down upon them. He saw little of worth
in these criminals, and as an educated member of the nobility, he doubted that the uneducated
and often illiterate serfs he was forced to live with would have anything to teach him.
This view, however, changed as over the years he learned that under the rough persona of
some of these prisoners resided a greatness of character and an advanced moral integrity.
Uneducated by way of book, these men were miles ahead of most others in terms of wisdom
of world and particularly of the inner world of the psyche or as dostoevsky wrote in prison it
sometimes happened that you would know a man for several years and think he was a beast not a man
and despise him and suddenly a chance moment would come when his soul on an involuntary impulse would
open up and you would see in it such riches feeling heart such a clear understanding of his
own and others suffering, as if your own eyes had been opened, and in the first moment you
would not even believe what you saw and heard.
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Prison also made Dostoevsky acutely aware of man’s need for meaning and purpose.
This awareness stemmed from his observation that almost all his fellow prisoners adopted
some form of hobby or side business, to escape from the monotony of hard labor.
Dostoevsky points out that these hobbies were technically outlawed, but prison officials
looked the other way in the realization that if they rid the prisoners of these purpose
and meaning-giving activities, the prisoners would riot.
Recognizing how crucial meaning and purpose is to psychological well-being, Dostoevsky
suggested that if you wanted to drive a man mad, or force him to take his own life, all
you have to do is compel him to spend his days laboring in some form of pointless work,
such as moving a pile of rocks from one spot to another and then back again.
This meaningless and purposeless existence would be an unbearable torture.
Or as Dostoevsky wrote in Notes from a Dead House,
It occurred to me once that if they wanted to crush, to annihilate a man totally, to
punish him with the most terrible punishment, so that the most dreadful murderer would shudder
at this punishment and be frightened of it beforehand, they would only need to give the
labour a character of complete total uselessness and meaninglessness.
If he were forced, for instance, to pour water from one tub into another and from the other
into the first, to grind sand, to carry a pile of dirt from one place to another and
back again, I think the prisoner would die rather than endure such humiliation, shame,
and torment. To be sure, such a punishment would turn into torture, revenge, and would
be meaningless, because it would achieve no reasonable purpose.”
Decades later, Dostoevsky’s thought experiment was put into practice in a Nazi concentration
camp. The prisoners of this camp worked in a factory, but the factory was destroyed by
a bombing campaign. Not wanting to give the prisoners a respite from hard labor, the prison
officials forced them to perform the type of meaningless work which Dostoevsky had imagined.
Eugene Heimler, a survivor of this concentration camp explained how the commander of the camp
ordered a few hundred of us to move sand from one end of the factory to another, and when
we had completed this task we were ordered to move it back to the original place.
At first we thought that our guards must have made a mistake, but it soon became clear they
had not.
From then on, day after day, week after week, we had to carry sand to and fro until gradually
people’s minds began to give way.
Even those who had been working steadily in the factory before it was bombed were affected,
for the work had some use and purpose, even if it was for the Germans.
But in face of a completely meaningless task people started to lose their sanity.
Some went berserk and tried to run away, only to be shot by the guards.
Others ran against the electrified wire fence and burnt themselves to death.
Prison life also taught Dostoevsky that hope, in addition to meaning and purpose, is crucial
to psychological health and integral in sustaining a man through hardship.
Dostoevsky observed that prisoners who lacked any hope for a better future struggled to
survive the mental challenge of prison and if the capacity for hope was completely destroyed,
this was a sign that madness or death was not far off. For example, one of Dostoevsky’s fellow
inmates lost all hope in the future and in this state of utter despair he attacked one of the men
in charge of the prison, seeing a martyr’s end as better than a hopeless life. Having gone out of
his mind, the bible-reading prisoner who attacked the major with a brick was probably also one of
those in despair, those whose last hope had abandoned them, and since it is impossible to
live with no hope at all, he invented a way out for himself in a voluntary, almost artificial
martyrdom. No living man lives without some sort of goal in striving towards it. Having lost both
goal and hope, a man often turns into a monster from anguish.” The hardships that Dostoevsky
endured between 1849 and 1854 also taught him important lessons about nervous disorders,
of which Dostoevsky had suffered immensely for most of his life. For example, he was consumed
by debilitating social anxiety, so much so that he once fainted upon being introduced to a beautiful
woman at a party. Dostoevsky was also a hypochondriac. He had a neurotic fear that he
would fall into a deep sleep be mistaken for dead and buried alive this fear was so intense that he
left notes around his home to inform anyone who might find him dead to wait several days before
burying him he even went through a period where he was so panic stricken that he felt himself to
be dying or as he said in a conversation with a friend two years before siberia at the time of my
various literary difficulties and quarrels i was the victim of some sort of strange and unbearably
torturing nervous disorder. I cannot tell you what these hideous sensations were,
but I remember them vividly. It often seemed to me that I was dying, and the truth is,
real death came and then went away again. After emerging from prison, Dostoevsky was able to
inform his brother that his five years of immense ordeal had cured him of his neurotic ways.
If you believe there is still anything remaining in me of that nervousness, that apprehensiveness,
that tendency to suspect that I had every conceivable illness.
As in Petersburg, please change your mind.
There is not a trace of that, as of many other things.
Above all else, what Dostoevsky’s arrest, time in solitary confinement, mock execution,
and a four-year prison sentence taught him is that a man is steeled by suffering.
Comfort and ease are a recipe for weakness and mediocrity.
While those who voluntarily, or forced by fate, do battle with adversity,
rid themselves of their petty weaknesses and ascend to a greater level of their potential.
Without enduring his five years of personal hell, Dostoevsky would have been incapable of writing
the great works of fiction he is most famous for, and would likely have remained a neurotic man
and a writer who never lived up to his potential. Pain and suffering, he wrote in Crime and
punishment, are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.
The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.
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