Description of a Struggle

"You cannot take a man who was all struggle," wrote Tolstoy of Dostoyevsky, after his great rival's death, "and set him up on a monument for the instruction of posterity."

To which struggle exactly was Count Tolstoy referring? Certainly not the liberal cause that had condemned Dostoyevsky to spending four years in a Siberian labor camp and six more as a soldier in the army. In his mid-20s Fyodor Mikhailovich had fallen under the charismatic influence of the revolutionary Nikolay Speshnev and joined his secret society. Immediately he was anxious: Speshnev had lent him a large sum of money. How could the young writer ever repay this "Mephistopheles of my own" and escape this compromising situation? Three days after being arrested and placed in solitary confinement, Dostoyevsky tells us, he felt an enormous sense of relief and serenity. Later he would remark: "Penal servitude saved me."

Such moments of relief, of internal conflict resolved in extreme well-being, feature prominently in Dostoyevsky's work. Usually they follow a dramatic surrender of pride on the part of a powerful personality: A murderer confesses, or the great man kneels before the holy hermit or the innocent prostitute, though never before having passed through agonies of uncertainty and rebellion. Notes From Underground (1864), however, is unique among Dostoyevsky's writings in that it begins with a struggle that is long over and that has ended in failure: "I am a sick man.... I am a wicked man," our anonymous narrator opens his hundred-page monologue. More than any of his other works, this will be Dostoyevsky's justification for a life that is all struggle.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.