Dostoevsky on the Vagaries of Self-knowledge

That Dostoevsky is my favorite novelist. For one, I applaud the robustness of his faith born in the face of human misery and suffering. As he noted towards the end of his life: “It is not as a child that I believe in Christ and confess him. My hosanna has passed through a great crucible of doubt.” Most honest believers can relate to such sentiments - the need to nurture patience and praise in the absence of answers. (On this point, Tomáš Halik perceptively notes in his Patience with God that it is precisely patience that accounts for the major difference between faith and agnosticism).

And then there is grace! It is quite marvelous, actually, to see it shimmering in the most unlikeliest of places in Dostoevsky's novels. Be it the drunkard Marmeladov, or the prostitute Sonia, or the sensualist Dmitri—they all epitomize the power of God’s grace to make the “light shine out of darkness” (2 Cor. 4:6). For Dostoevsky, it is an unplanned intrusion, grace is, full of polyphonic severity and freshness. As U2's “Grace”puts it:

She takes the blame
She covers the shame
Removes the stain

That's Dostoyevsky - our existence, in all of its idiosyncrasies, deluged in God’s incalculable beneficence!

But there is one more reason why I value him so much as a writer. I really appreciate the way he gets human nature, the way he gets us as human beings. He has this uncanny ability to probe the workings of the human psyche and is acutely aware of the complex and often contradictory impulses that drive us to action. Like Shakespeare writing in a different age and genre, Dostoevsky pokes fun at the idea that we are aware of the things that motivate us; that we are somehow completely transparent to ourselves. (René Girard refers to that illusion as the "romantic lie" of which Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is a perfect illustration). The people that populate his novels are disoriented without being aware of it, and are confused while claiming to be in control. The contradictions of their convictions and the blindness concerning their choices are presented to us readers in a painful way. “Lying to ourselves,” he writes, “is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.” That’s why he laughs at the superficial ways in which people “try to find themselves,” the way they attempt to mine for their true self, for their inner child. Dostoevsky is not into that; he definitely is not into inner children. (That needs to be qualified a bit, however, given that he intensely values the simplicity of goodness as portrayed in Zosima from The Brothers Karamazov).

Just think of his Crime and Punishment. In that soggy and rather depressing novel, Raskolnikov, an impoverished and radicalized student, commits a horrible crime by killing a greedy moneylender and her sister. Initially, we are tempted to buy into Raskolnikov’s explanation that he did all that for purely humanitarian reasons; to help the world rid itself, as it were, of evil and injustice. And as a reader, you find yourself dragged into that pulp of confused thinking. Dostoevsky brilliantly manipulates the plotline to trick us in that way. It is only gradually that we realize the true nature of Raskolnikov’s action. He is no paragon of humanitarianism; actually, he despises humanity and is contemptuous of people. He acts for purely egotistical reasons, out of belief that conventional morality does not apply to him. As his name implies, he is a schismatic (raskolnik), a moral horror hiding himself behind the story he is telling himself about himself.

I often think about Dostoevsky and his antihero, and I have to admit that I am quite disturbed about the whole thing. Not just because of the wrongdoing he commits, heinous as it is. No, it’s not that. The reason I find him so unsettling is that he mirrors us. In Raskolnikov we see an image of fallen humanity. We too continually tell fictional stories to ourselves about who we are and why we do the things we do and have the thoughts we have. We tell them when we write our journals, when we explain ourselves to others, and when we attempt to mobilize others for our cause. We construct them while selling ourselves during job interviews, when we whine about our victimhood, and sometimes even when we say that we are on fire for God and zealous about his name. Most of the time we don’t do it consciously, but we do it nonetheless. We polish, package, and present our motives in a Facebook way—all glitter, joy, innocence, and benevolence. Like Milton's Lucifer, Dante's Ulysses, Kierkegaard's aesthete, or Jesus' Judas, we get entangled in fabricated narratives. Indeed, as Saul Bellow puts it in To Jerusalem and Back, "a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep” (127). (Readers of Ian McEwan's Atonement will find a manifest exemplar of such a self-scrubbing in guilt-driven Briony, the main character of the book).