Against Nihilism

Nietzsche Meets Dostoevsky

 Against Nihilism

Nietzsche Meets Dostoevsky

Maı̈a Stepenberg

Montreal/Chicago/London
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Against nihilism: Nietzsche meets Dostoevsky / Maı̈a Stepenberg.

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1. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900-Criticism and interpretation. 2.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 1821–1881–Criticism and interpretation. 3. Nihilism
(Philosophy). 4. Nihilism in literature. I. Title.

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To my husband and constant collaborator,
Daniel Gregorio Stepenberg,
this book is gratefully dedicated.
M.S.
[F]aith in God and denial of God are not simply two differ-
ent conceptions of the world, but two essentially different
worlds of the spirit, existing side by side, like an Earth and
a counter-Earth, each fully living for itself in its own orbit
of activity.
—Vyacheslav Ivanov, Freedom and the Tragic Life
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction xi

Chapter 1: Exile and Criminality 1

Nietzsche and Exile ................................................ 2
Nietzsche and Criminality ........................................ 5
Apollo versus Dionysus............................................ 6
Dostoevsky and Exile.............................................. 8
Dostoevsky and Criminality ..................................... 9
The Double........................................................... 12
The Apostle of Audacity.......................................... 16

Chapter 2: Existentialism and the Disease of Nihilism 25

Definitions of Existentialism ..................................... 26
The “Death of God” ............................................... 28
The Misery of Freedom ........................................... 34
The Value of Suffering............................................. 40

Chapter 3: Purity and Prophecy 47

Two Prophets ........................................................ 48
Nietzsche’s Poetic Quest For Purity ........................... 50
Dionysian Descent .................................................. 53
Romantic Rebellion ................................................ 56
Dostoevsky’s Vision of Strength Through Weakness ...... 58
Feminine Paragons of Purity .................................... 61
Sonia the Spiritual Virgin ........................................ 64
viii Against Nihilism

Chapter 4: The Dream of the Golden Age 77

Pagan Perfection .................................................... 80
The Funny Man as Unreliable Narrator ...................... 87
Stavrogin’s Golden Age Vision .................................. 89

Chapter 5: Against Nihilism 97

Twilight of the Idols and the Antichrist....................... 99
The Possessed ....................................................... 104

Chapter 6: Freedom or Christ? 115

Dmitri’s Pro.......................................................... 117
Ivan’s Contra ........................................................ 119
Alyosha’s Faith ...................................................... 123

Conclusion 133

Appendix A: Why Kids Shoot Up Schools 139

Appendix B: Selections from Students’ Scripts 147

A Select List of Consulted Readings 157

Index 165
Acknowledgments

This book was made possible by many students at Dawson College in

Montreal. To all my earliest students, who turned out to be “repeat
customers” in various classes on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky that I
first taught in the Humanities Department, I owe a particular debt of
gratitude. For their active collaboration in all the ideas of the present
book, which were then still in formation, I thank Mr. John-Kennedy
Alinsod, Miss Cristina Clemente, Mr. Alex Del Carpio Martel, Mr.
Joseph Cohen, Miss Melissa Di Lena, Miss Stefania Dzieciolowska, Mr.
Randy Etherington, Mr. Jeffrey Giorgi, Miss Chloe Grizenko, Miss
Hajar Halim, Miss Mariya Kartoshova, Miss Alexandra Lado Roy, Mr.
Kerwin Lucia, Mr. Matthew Maurice-Ventouris, Miss Andrea Miles,
Miss Sabrina O’Grady, Ms. Angeliki Pitsikoulis, Miss Emilie Potvin,
Mr. Carl Roberge, Mr. Inti Salinas, Miss Ulyana Stepaniv Lenyk, Miss
Dagmara Stephan, and Miss Kimberly Watson.
This book was also made possible by many people in the small town
of Goyena in the province of Buenos Aires in the country of Argentina
(my adopted homeland for the past dozen years). It was there, during
two years’ leave from teaching work in Montreal, that I found an ideal
writing retreat. Without the simple acceptance and kindness of these
people, who took vicarious pride in the production of a work that was
not in their own language, this project could not have acquired any
humbling larger dimension.
For their continued inspiration in subsequent courses I have devel-
oped on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky since my return to Montreal from
Argentina, I thank the second wave of “repeat customer” students,
in this book’s second phase of evolution: Mr. Timur Abdiyev, Miss
Andrea Angelescu, Mr. Emilio Bertrand-Diaz, Miss Anais Charbonneau-
Poitras, Mr. Odiseas Falagaras, Mr. Joseph Filiatreault, Miss Mariam
Galoustova, Miss Sofia Ghiassi, Miss Sara Halasz, Miss Katie Hawes,
Mr. Cedric Hupperetz, Mr. Ivan Marek-Cabral, Miss Claire-Amandine
Sempala, and Miss Pham Thuy Linh To.
For their warm friendship and true spirit of collegiality, I thank
my fellow teachers in the Dawson College Humanities Department, Dr.
Tamara Boness and Dr. Jennifer Harris. For his moral support of this
project from its very beginnings to its final form, I thank the former
Academic Dean of Dawson College, Dr. Robert Kavanagh. Publication
x Against Nihilism

of this book was made possible by the generous support of the Director
General of Dawson College, Mr. Richard Filion.
For his consummate tact and powers of discernment, I thank Nathan
McDonnell from Black Rose Books.
For crucially formative conversations, I can never thank enough
my chavrusa through our graduate school years together, Dr. Maria
Bloshteyn-Shoshan. I also thank my lifelong mentor and spiritual
mother, Miss Ruth Elizabeth Snider, for her gifts of faith and integrity.
And I thank my spiritual father, Padre Alejandro Iwaszewicz in Buenos
Aires, for blessing this work.
Permissions to reproduce the paintings reproduced in this book
were kindly granted by the following museums: Vasily Perov’s Portrait
of Dostoevsky appears in Chapter 1, courtesy of The State Tretyakov
Gallery in Moscow; Edvard Munch’s Portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche
appears in Chapter 1, courtesy of The National Gallery in Oslo; Hans
Holbein the Younger’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb
appears in Chapter 1, courtesy of The Kunstmuseum in Basel; Caspar
David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog appears in Chapter
3 courtesy of the Kunsthalle in Hamburg; Emil Filla’s A Reader of
Dostoevsky appears in Chapter 3 (as well as on the cover) courtesy of
The National Gallery in Prague; Claude Lorrain’s Coastal Landscape
with Acis and Galatea appears in Chapter 4, courtesy of Art Resource
Inc. in New York City (on behalf of the Kunstmuseum in Dresden); and
Albrecht Dürer’s Knight, Death, and Devil appears in the Conclusion,
courtesy of The National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh.
Finally, this book could not have ever seen the light of day without
the love and understanding of my family: Daniel, Rafael, Dante, and
Isaac. To them I know I owe the largest debt of all, since they are the
only men in all the world whom I love (honestly, infinitely, directly)
more than Nietzsche and Dostoevsky.
Introduction
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, as “brothers in spirit,” speak from opposite
sides to the same issues. God and man, morality and immorality, the
drama of faith versus doubt—these are the points on which their great di-
alogue, and their great quarrel, twists and turns repeatedly. A road map
to the book is presented in this chapter, naming the six themes to which
the subsequent six chapters are devoted, and briefly explaining how each
theme unfolds in both Nietzsche’s and Dostoevsky’s writing, chronolog-
ically and consistently and—most curiously of all—independently of
each other. A loose structural framework for containing and elaborating
the six themes is proposed based on the idea of authenticity which is so
central to both men’s books.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881)

were two giants of literature and philosophy who shared a strange kin-
ship. Thomas Mann once observed that Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were
“brothers in spirit” who were also “tragically grotesque companions in
misfortune.”1 Karl Stern later remarked that Nietzsche and Dostoevsky
were “twin brothers of the nineteenth century.”2 And indeed, although
they never met, both men were deeply and unquestionably related to
each other—arguing, as they alone knew how to do with persuasive
passion and power, about the same issues of God and morality. Dosto-
evsky stated it first: “If God is dead, then everything is permitted.”3
Nietzsche pronounced it second: “God is dead. God remains dead. And
we have killed him.”4 In the wake of these two famous pronouncements,
the entire modern world can be said to have come into being—a world
dominated and defined by crisis and uncertainty, after the “death of
God.”
There is also the famous fact that Nietzsche referred on more
than one occasion to Dostoevsky with open praise and with acid
criticism.5 There is no mention by Dostoevsky of Nietzsche, so the
historical record remains one-way. However, there are an extraordinary
number of coincidences and divergences on identical themes and there
is the eerie truth that Dostoevsky actually prefigured Nietzsche in
the creation of several fictional characters. From the Underground
Man and Raskolnikov to Kirilov and Ivan Karamazov, elements of
Nietzsche’s own biography and personality were peculiarly anticipated
and articulated, quite independent of his historical existence. Even the
xii Against Nihilism

bizarre catatonic end of Nietzsche’s life is prefigured at the close of

The Idiot, the one novel by Dostoevsky that Nietzsche singled out as
typical of “that queer and sick world” of the New Testament that he
came to loathe so much. As Henri de Lubac once said,

Nietzsche was convinced that faith in God was disappearing

forever. That sun was sinking on our horizon never to rise again.
[. . . ] Yet the sun did not cease to rise!. . . Nietzsche had not
yet written his most searing books, when another man, another
disturbing but more truly prophetic genius, announced the
victory of God in the human soul, and his eternal resurrection.6

This man was Dostoevsky.

In his reflections on Dostoevsky, Nicolas Zernov could have been
describing Nietzsche:
[he] had never been strong, and his letters. . . contain frequent
references to his bad health. . . He was practically unknown
outside his country during his lifetime and his fame really began
to spread in the western world only in the twentieth century.
There are several descriptions of him made by his contemporaries.
None of them are neutral. He was either admired or attacked.
All his writings can be treated as an autobiography, for his
heroes debate the problems which preoccupied his mind and
live through the passions, fears, and hopes so familiar to the
author himself. But he saw himself with such lucidity that his
books became, like the Greek classical tragedies, monuments of
the eternal drama of the human spirit.7

Nietzsche and Dostoevsky represent two distinct windows on the world

which have yet to coincide within the pages of a sustained up-to-date
study. Some preliminary works have investigated the connection be-
tween them, such as Lev Shestov’s landmark study Dostoevsky and
Nietzsche 8 as well as some speculative chapters in Richard Elliott
Friedman’s The Disappearance of God.9 Henri de Lubac has probably
penned the most comprehensive account of their relationship in the
context of a still larger story that he called The Drama of Atheist
Humanism.10 There is also a handful of correspondences cited between
them for an occasional Festschrift in French.11 But the vast majority of
books on either Nietzsche or Dostoevsky, past or present, generally tend
to ignore any cross references that genuinely exist between them. There
was a time, after World War II, when “the Nietzschean-Dostoyevskean
worlds were often compared and contrasted” in the service of “a moral-
istic Christian Kulturkritik”—to show, in other words, “Dostoevsky
acting as the positive counterfoil to the religious faith that Nietzsche
had so brutally smashed.”12 But that time of moral urgency has long
since passed—and the issues underlying both “worlds” are perhaps far
less Manichean than originally supposed.13
 Introduction xiii

The present book is an attempt to address this gap in scholarship.

My aim is to illuminate the parallel paths that Nietzsche and Dosto-
evsky walked, independently of each other and beyond all question of
mutual influence, towards a deeper and more complete understanding
of both. For the books of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky resemble trains,
hurtling down tracks side by side which then diverge. And like trains,
their writings rush from one station to the next, picking up speed
and intensity as they go. Even the way that they sound is similar:
breathless, urgent, muscular. The story of their journey can be said to
have begun with great brilliance and promise, only to have ended in a
spectacular derailment for one of them. No one could say that their
trajectories were easy ones—plagued as both men were by illness and
doubt. But their impact on the whole western world was enormous in
their own time, and continues to be felt today.
There are at least six different themes to which each man obsessively
returns, as “stations” or stopping places in their writings. These are:
the liberating allure of criminality; the existentialist crisis of meaning;
the saving grace of purity; the pagan dream of the Golden Age; the
terrible disease of nihilism; and the life-or-death question of God/Christ.
In their grappling with these themes, both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky
begin from the same place of clearly-identified crisis—crisis in social
and moral values in their own time—only to end in diametrically
opposed positions.
The thematic “stations” in both men’s writings all have to do with
a sense of the authentic, as lived and felt by the individual alone against
the world—a personal and compelling discovery of the need to become
authentic, as a liberating truth and a disruptive force. Nietzsche and
Dostoevsky were each deeply involved in the philosophical question of
authenticity, so this book follows a framework dedicated to exploring
the impact of this question on their writing. The idea of authenticity
may be said to include four constitutive elements—audacity, intensity,
purity, and totality—which, like the four cardinal points on a compass,
serve as guides across philosophical terrain that still remains largely
uncharted.14 In this book, these four elements are proposed as loose
organizing principles for determining the extent to which Nietzsche
and Dostoevsky fundamentally agreed and disagreed. For in the elusive
quest for authenticity, both men were drawn to the lonely values
of audacity, intensity, and purity.15 And as self-styled “apostles” of
authenticity, each urging his readers to embrace a “truth that would
make them free,” Nietzsche and Dostoevsky are nowhere more powerful
in their persuasion than when they are moved to speak in terms of
totality. At the same time, however, they are nowhere more distant
from each other since totality must answer the final question of man’s
relationship to God.
The story of the relationship between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky
begins with a consideration of their earlier books and how they eerily
xiv Against Nihilism

mirror each other. Their curious kinship is first demonstrated through a

deep similarity in outlook on the question of crime and exile. Erupting
out of a substratum of discontent with society, which expresses itself
first as “the call of the criminal”—the freedom from petty social
constraints that are all fake—this idea leads to the claim to a higher
morality justifying the criminal’s rebellion. Thus, from The Birth of
Tragedy to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche praises the criminal as
a romantic revolutionary force for the overall betterment of society,
unlocking positive but potent energies that he calls “Dionysian.” As for
Dostoevsky, he immortalizes the glamour of the criminal in his brooding
creation of Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment, as
well as in the conclusion of his memoir of real-life prison experience
that he called Notes from the Dead House. Both men’s agreement
on the need for audacity to transform human society is striking and
longstanding, but they do not stop here. For although they both refer
specifically to the “criminal” daring of Napoleon as the paramount
example of “greatness” taking society to another higher level, they are
each equally aware of a still larger danger. This is nihilism: a creeping
reality that Nietzsche and Dostoevsky recognized as a kind of cultural
black hole, steadily consuming all human aspirations to greatness and
leaving only nothing (nihil) in its wake.
Against this dissolving force of nothingness known as nihilism, both
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky identify an existentialist crisis of meaning
that—in intensely private, personal, and individual terms—invites the
spectre of criminality. With his famous madman’s speech about the
“death of God” in The Gay Science, Nietzsche delivers the first fully-
articulated proclamation of existentialist angst since Kierkegaard—thus
definitively paving the way for all the later twentieth-century schools
of existentialism that followed. In a similar fashion, Dostoevsky thor-
oughly diagnosed the rot of existentialist “bad faith” in his famous
“Underground Man” diatribe in Notes from the Underground—thus an-
ticipating and informing all of Jean-Paul Sartre’s own later existentialist
characterizations.
From this urgently-felt statement of the colossal threat of nihilism,
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky next move to propose a solution. Both Crime
and Punishment and Thus Spoke Zarathustra place the protagonist
with criminal tendencies at the center, but Nietzsche pushes from
there toward an unknown periphery while Dostoevsky shows that “the
center cannot hold.” Nietzsche’s Zarathustra will be the incarnation
of some brave new value still in the making, rising out of the ashes of
all of humanity’s dead gods, whereas Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov will
be broken down and reintegrated into the same humble human society
that he had so proudly renounced, under the sign of the very God he
had disdained. In different ways and for different ends, Nietzsche and
Dostoevsky appeal to the same value of purity as either a way beyond
God or as a way back to God.
 Introduction xv

The division between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky deepens when

the same tempting picture of human perfection—an actual painting
by Claude Lorrain that both men knew—leads them to draw very
different conclusions about the value of the painting’s subject. For
Nietzsche the specter of nihilism is actually banished by the dream of
“the Golden Age,” one of humanity’s highest mythical expressions of
idyllic happiness. Nietzsche argues in The Gay Science that a return to
the pagan bosom of civilization, as imagined in this Lorrain painting,
is just the remedy that mankind requires because—even though it
too is but a beautiful illusion—it is the only illusion that mankind
needs. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, rejects Lorrain’s image of a
pagan paradise as completely untenable since it ignores the central
human fact of suffering, the only true precondition for happiness. In A
Funny Man’s Dream, The Possessed, and The Adolescent, Dostoevsky
repeatedly asserts the moral bankruptcy of “the Golden Age” vision.
But it is not an image of paradise that corresponds best to both
Nietzsche’s and Dostoevsky’s strengths and insights so much as a
feeling of calamity. Now both of them warn explicitly of the advent of
nihilism as a prelude to the Apocalypse, or “the end of time” in our own
time. They appear to coincide in their gloomy prognoses for mankind
in both The Possessed on the one hand, and Twilight of the Idols and
The Antichrist on the other. Both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky express
a definite pessimism about human nature in its totality. However, in
The Brothers Karamazov—Dostoevsky’s crowning achievement and the
only book by Dostoevsky that Nietzsche never knew—the theme of
religious salvation is triumphant in spite of (or perhaps because of) all
the crime and suffering that preceded it.
And so the last word in this dialogue belongs to Dostoevsky: he
lived to complete at least the first part of his last novel and “died happy,”
as he said, because he had “expressed himself completely” there.16
However, the question remains open of whether his message has been
fully received in the world that came after him, as he himself had
anticipated. Nietzsche, for his part, did not live to fulfil his own project.
Having only intuited fragments of all that he saw and understood as the
fiery fate of the century to come, Nietzsche indeed became “dynamite”
that finally “expressed itself completely” in an extraordinary range of
active interpretations and applications of his works not long after his
own death.17
After Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, we as modern individuals have
all entered a philosophical no-man’s-land and passed a point of no
return. We have all inherited this place with no more obvious or fixed
bearings of any kind—a world of tremendous moral uncertainty. After
the “death of God” that both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky felt and
announced with such urgency well over a century ago, we are all left
adrift in a landscape of moral chaos and moral loss. Only Nietzsche
and Dostoevsky recognized that their two positions—of godlessness or
xvi Against Nihilism

godliness—are the only two positions left in the modern world. The
other may indeed be judged valid but erroneous, yet it is still the
only other point of view that can truly exist. Today in the twenty-
first century there are only two choices to be made—Nietzsche’s or
Dostoevsky’s—and there’s no going back: and you can’t not choose.

Notes
1 See “Dostoevsky—in Moderation,” Thomas Mann’s introductory essay to the

Constance Garnett translation of The Short Novels of Dostoevsky (New York: Dial
Press, 1945) viii.
2 Stern’s whole sentence is worth noting: “The great Christian mystic Dostoevsky

who was at the same time a vulgar pan-Slav politician, and the noble cosmopolitan
Nietzsche who at the same time ‘finished’ Christianity in pamphlets which overflow
with a unique form of tawdry arrogance, were twin brothers of the nineteenth
century.” See his luminous book The Pillar of Fire (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
Company, 1951) 92.
3 See Chapter 7 of Book Two in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, first

published in 1880.
4 See Section 125 of Book Three in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, first published

in 1882.
5 For the praise, see section 45 of Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols: “Dostoevsky,

the only psychologist from whom I had something to learn,” is declared “this
profound human being” (emphasis in the original). For the acid, see Section 31 of
Nietzsche’s The Antichrist: “It is regrettable that a Dostoevsky did not live near
this most interesting of all decadents (Christ)—I mean someone who would have
known how to sense the very stirring charm of such a mixture of the sublime, the
sickly, and the childlike.”
6 Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995)

13.
7 See Three Russian Prophets: Khomiakov, Dostoevsky, Soloviev (Gulf Breeze,

FL: Academic International Press, 1973) 86; 87.

8 Shestov’s study (“Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy”),

translated by Spencer Roberts, was published in a larger work called Dostoevsky,

Tolstoy and Nietzsche by Ohio University Press in 1969.
9 Subtitled A Divine Mystery (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1995), Fried-

man’s book examines Nietzsche’s first encounters with Dostoevsky in Chapters 7–9
(“Nietzsche in Turin”).
10 See Parts Three and Four (“Dostoevsky as Prophet” and “Mystical Confronta-

tions”) in Lubac’s still unparalleled work from the 1940s that analyzes the links
between Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Comte, Marx, and Dostoevsky (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995 rpt.).
11 See, for example, Charles Andler’s very brief article “Nietzsche et Dostoievski”

in Mélanges offerts à Fernand Baldensperger (Champion: 1930) 1–4. See also

J. Korvin-Piotrowski, H. Hartmann, & A. Quinot, “Nietzsche et Dostoeivski” in
La Revue des Lettres modernes (1962–63:76–77) 25–38. More recently, there is a
similarly brief analysis offered by Jean-Louis Backès (“Ce que Nietzsche a reconnu
et méconnu”) in “Le Dossier Dostoievski” published by Le Magazine littéraire
(mars 2010, no. 495).
12 According to Stephen Aschheim, examples of these kinds of studies include

Nicolas Berdyaev’s The Fate of Man in the Modern World, trans. Donald A. Lowrie
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961) and Walter Schubart’s Dostojewski
und Nietzsche: Symbolik ihres Lebens (Luzern: Vita Nova, 1939). See Aschheim’s
The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1994) 283.
 Introduction xvii

13 A 1986 study by the Colombian scholar Jorge Mario Mejia, called Nietzsche

y Dostoievski: sobre el nihilismo (reissued in 2000 as Nietzsche y Dostoievski:

Filosofia y novela) offers a series of loose reflections rather than a systematic
analysis of an active relationship.
Similarly, a 2016 collection of essays edited by a pair of American academics
is more punctilious and certainly more ambitious in scope, but it suffers from a
certain moribund “MLA-ese” (the jargon-cluttered discourse of professional academe
favoured by the Modern Language Association). All the original vitality of “the
series of questions” raised by Nietzsche and Dostoevsky thus ultimately dies under
the weight of one earnestly overwritten essay after another. See Nietzsche and
Dostoevsky: Philosophy, Morality, Tragedy, eds. Jeff Love and Jeffrey Metzger
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press).
14 See Maya Zorya Johnson, Myths and Metaphors of Authenticity: Perceptions

of Friedrich Nietzsche in the Writings of André Gide and Volodymyr Vynnychenko

(unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Centre for Comparative Literature, University of
Toronto, 1999).
15 The general consensus of all scholarship on the subject of authenticity is that a

basic division occurs between the demands and aspirations of the individual against
those of society. See, for example, Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity,
Marshall Berman’s The Politics of Authenticity, Charles Taylor’s The Ethics of
Authenticity, Jacob Golomb’s In Search of Authenticity, etc.
16 See Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (Norton Critical Edition) for the

letter expressing the author’s relief at achieving this partial completion.

17 See Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo (specifically the famous opening paragraph of

“Why I Am A Destiny”, which declares: “I know my fate. [. . . ] I am no man, I am

dynamite.”
Chapter 1

Exile and Criminality

We begin with some biographical background for both men, in the light
of the first organizing theme: audacity as an expression of and aspi-
ration towards the elusive value of authenticity. A consideration of
Nietzsche’s experience of exile is presented, in tandem with Nietzsche’s
relationship to the idea of criminality, since both Nietzsche’s life and
work reveal a close link between these two notions of audacity. Some
analysis is offered of the Nietzschean duality of Apollo versus Dionysus
in Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, where the complemen-
tary ideas of both the exile and the criminal may be said to converge.
Then Dostoevsky’s experience of exile is considered, together with his
relationship to the idea of criminality (especially as interpreted through
Dostoevsky’s portrait painted by Vasily Perov in 1872 and several related
statements by well-known commentators describing his genius being
specifically “criminal”). A brief examination follows of Dostoevsky’s
early book Notes From the House of the Dead and his novel The Idiot—
the latter clearly revealing the Dostoevskian penchant for the double
(Myshkin versus Rogozhin), explained here as a parallel expression of
convergence between the criminal and the exile. The idea of grandeur
is explored as a dangerous concomitant to the Nietzschean and Dos-
toevskian idea of audacity as privilege (expanded further in Appendix I).

What does it mean to live in exile? Whether self-imposed (freely chosen)

or imposed from outside (experienced as punishment), the state of
exile implies something psychological or spiritual, an interior sense
of conflict or protest, which goes well beyond the physical situation.
Anyone can be forcibly removed from the familiar for any number
of reasons (such as politics), but to consent to this removal is to
become a “defector” or a “dissident”: it means becoming someone
who claims a position antagonistic to the society s/he is consciously
leaving. There are no accidental exiles: one always knows when one
is going into retreat: and whether or not the fact of dislocation can
be altered or appealed, the aftereffect of this dislocation is invariably
profound. Such was the path taken by Nietzsche and Dostoevsky: the
path of exile. The related question of criminality emerges for both of
2 Against Nihilism

them on this same path, although it will result in different answers

according to each. Their answers will equally turn on the first defining
point of audacity because their quests for authenticity cannot begin
without it. Audacity represents the starting point of all searching for
the authentic headwaters of experience: the necessary dissatisfaction,
the insurrectionary itch, the restless sense of chafing and longing and
daring. . . . And if an exile is always already a criminal of a certain
kind,1 then Nietzsche and Dostoevsky present a perfect confluence of
thinking from different angles on this same phenomenon.

Nietzsche’s Experience of Exile

For Nietzsche, it was an internal state that he imposed on himself for

the length of his working life: really only a brief decade, starting from
his 1879 resignation as a professor at Basel University until his mental
collapse in 1889. In that brief span of time, burgeoning with books,
Nietzsche was a wandering scholar who, for reasons of increasingly
declining health, sought writing refuges in the clear mountain air
that Switzerland, France, and Italy afforded him. Literally a man
without a country, “he had given up his Prussian citizenship but never
finished acquiring Swiss citizenship.”2 He never felt at home among
Germans, although he continued to write all his principal works in
his native German.3 He would always keenly feel the split within
himself between the accidents of biography (language and birthplace—
arbitrarily decided) and the prerogatives of personality (pride and
mastery of universal culture—individually cultivated). Any narrow
national affiliation was at direct odds with his desire to become a
citizen of the world, transcending the petty particulars in order to
embrace and explore the mysterious overarching multiplicities of truths
(as he saw them) binding on us all.
Nietzsche bore witness to his own sense of rootlessness throughout
his life. Early on he wrote, “For it is, to be sure, a life full of torment and
shame, to be a homeless wanderer in a world to which one nonetheless
has to speak and of which one has to make demands, which one despises
and yet is unable to do without—it is the actual predicament of the
artist of the future . . . .”4 Later he again admitted, “But home I found
nowhere; a fugitive I am in all cities and a departure at all gates. [. . . ]
I am driven out of fatherlands and motherlands. Thus I now love only
my children’s land, yet undiscovered, in the farthest sea: for this I bid
my sails search and search.”5 Toward the end of his productive years,
he concluded that “at length I had a country of my own, a soil of my
own, an entire, discrete, thriving, flourishing world, like a secret garden
the existence of which no one suspected.”6
The sense of a world that Nietzsche possessed unto himself, inde-
pendent of his environment, is conveyed beautifully by the famous
Norwegian expressionist painter Edvard Munch (1863–1944), in one
 Exile and Criminality 3

Figure 1: Friedrich Nietzsche (1906) by Edvard Munch

of several portraits that he painted of Nietzsche (see Figure 1). The

exuberant rough swathes of colour seem to emanate in waves from the
solitary figure on a bridge overlooking a landscape. The red mass above
him suggests the fiery quality of his writing, seeking to set the world on
fire with his insights. The bright yellow uppermost around his head is
almost like a halo of pure intellectual energy, while the rich blue band
4 Against Nihilism

directly underneath it recalls the high Swiss mountains he so loved

to explore on foot. Finally, the lowest bands of green could stand for
the valleys of civilization below him (such as his fictional town for his
Zarathustra of “the Motley Cow”). One can easily recognize Nietzsche’s
lofty self-contained character from Munch’s bold and robust depiction
of him here.
That he himself was later claimed by Germany as an Aryan prophet
of Nazi ideology is another irony of his personal history: the lonely
philosopher-poet writing in obscurity will find himself posthumously
transformed into “the isolated individual who in the period of hope-
less liberal decline alone embodied the spirit of true Germanness. . . .
[Moreover,] only a conscious National Socialist can fully comprehend
Nietzsche.”7 Such a “translation” of Nietzsche’s poetic purposes is thus
perhaps the inevitable outcome of so much carefully placed distance:
in the end, the exile comes home to roost. Even if Nietzsche recognized
his small non-German readership as somehow inevitable (“My natu-
ral readers and listeners are even now Russians, Scandinavians, and
Frenchmen—will it always be that way?”8 ), it will be the German stain
of association that will forever follow him.9 And this is probably not as
outrageous or as unreasonable as it seems, because Nietzsche’s many
protests against German heaviness, obtuseness, etc. only make of him
that much more of a German, especially to German ears. Who after all,
other than a German, would care so much about Teutonic stupidity?
It may be that Thomas Wolfe was right: “You can’t go home again.”
But, by the same token, you can never completely leave behind your
original home either, because it’s always part of you—it goes where
you go. And this duality was something Nietzsche fully appreciated as
constantly operative for everyone; how or why, then, could he ever be
the exception to his own discovered rule?
Nietzsche’s solitariness as an itinerant writer and philosopher placed
him on the margins of whatever society he happened to be passing
through. Paul Lanzky records in 1884 how Nietzsche “crept [between]
dark rooms and sunny streets, not knowing the local language, unknown,
perhaps considered to be a morose scholar, although he was carrying
a bright new world inside his head.”10 Such a cloistered existence in
service to his work certainly compounded Nietzsche’s loneliness, but it
also pointed to his proud preference to remain aloof and apart because
his work itself would be built on this principle and this perspective of
the isolated and misunderstood individual. This is why Georg Brandes
recognized and hailed Nietzsche early on as an “aristocratic radical,”
and why Nietzsche subtitled his most accessible and enduring creation
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85) “a book for all and none”: there is, at
practically every step, some clear renunciation of “the herd mentality”
in favour of the rebellious loner and his right to disagree. In book after
book, Nietzsche builds his entire philosophical edifice on the axiom
that any truth or value to be had will be found only by walking on
 Exile and Criminality 5

the wild side. Stability is stagnation, or death; volatility is vitality, or

life. And the degree to which the outsider is vouchsafed this vitality
is in direct proportion to his distance from the safe and placid center:
living vision and true freedom depend on a willingness to embrace the
criminal knife edge of existence.

Nietzsche’s Relationship to the Idea of Criminality

The question of criminality fascinated Nietzsche as much as the fact

of marginality defined him. The relationship of outside to inside, like
that between good and evil or between beauty and ugliness, was
something he saw as an oscillating tension with no absolute anchor.
Yet a prevailing cultural prejudice such as Christian morality (among
other “slave moralities”, as Nietzsche would put it) will often distort
this objective relationship by arbitrarily assigning more value to one
pole relative to the other. Anything that departs from the “groupthink”
of Christian morality is considered a threat and labelled “evil” because
the moral majority cannot tolerate subversive individuals who want
to elevate themselves above the group.11 Since the pursuit of a brave
new authenticity and freedom is the goal of his project, Nietzsche
will become the sworn self-appointed enemy of Christian morality and
devote all his writing to different ways of waging war against it. Thus
Toward a Genealogy of Morals (1887) will seek to explain the history
of this cowardly group feeling of ressentiment harboured and justified
against the noble freethinking individual, just as The Twilight of the
Idols, or How to Philosophize with the Hammer (1888) will seek to
finish off Christianity once and for all, since Nietzsche called it “my
philosophy in nuce—radical to the point of criminality . . . .”12
But the criminal nub is most clearly pronounced in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra in the sixth speech of Part I called “On the Pale Criminal.”
In this approving yet ambiguous portrait of a nameless murderer-thief,
Nietzsche invites us to sympathize with the renegade who (we are
told twice) was in thrall to “the bliss of the knife.” As he stands
before his judges, he stares and speaks insolently back at them with
“the great contempt” (again emphasized twice). But “madness” is the
true leitmotif uniting this whole speech, since it recurs no less than
six times: disease, sickness, and other allusions to pathology cluster
around this remorseless individual who expelled himself from genteel
society, as a means of simultaneously explaining and excusing his crime.
The danger is thus mitigated because it is confined to this one lonely
figure, sick and singled out because he is hopelessly outnumbered and
overpowered by “good people” and their narrow prejudices. The passage
ends with a rousing defense of the will to individual insurrection, which
can be attributed back to either the pale criminal or to Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra with equal poetic justice: “I am a railing by the torrent:
let those who can, grasp me! Your crutch, however, I am not.—Thus
6 Against Nihilism

spoke Zarathustra.”13 Again, in this way the danger of crime is adroitly

defused in order to enhance the overall impression of lyrical, lonely
heroism. This speech is perhaps the closest Nietzsche ever came to
painting his own idealized self-portrait, truly and succinctly reflecting
his own pained solitude in service to his idea of taking down the whole
of Christian culture, one brick at a time.
However, Nietzsche himself was certainly no criminal. He broke no
law in his lifetime which was, after all, so uneventful as to be practically
monastic in its seclusion from the world. He had no practical knowledge
of either work or women beyond the walls of the university, and he had
only a fleeting engagement with the military (serving very briefly in
1870 as a medical orderly) during the Franco-Prussian War. But even
if his life experience was narrow and frequently cramped by chronic
illnesses as well, his interest in the life of the wider world around him
was always extraordinarily intense. His many friendships were often
stormy, and he proposed marriage at least twice. He was, by his own
admission, an incurable romantic and optimist who was disappointed
by all the paths of conventional opportunity and thus forced to accept
his lonely calling. His whole life was sublimated into his books because,
as he himself said, “I always wrote my books with my whole body and
life. I am speaking only of things I have experienced and do not present
only processes in the head.”14

Nietzsche’s Dualism of Apollo versus Dionysus

In Nietzsche’s life of the mind that became transmuted into his own
books, polarities are constantly presented as signposts for exploring
vital questions or problems. Deliberate juxtapositions of light versus
shadow, life versus death, or stability versus volatility are standard Ni-
etzschean devices for stimulating fresh thinking on old conundrums. So
Nietzsche’s penchant for dualities is already naturally present in his first
published book, The Birth of Tragedy, or Hellenism and Pessimism.15
Already he begins exploiting the dynamic tension to be found in the
dichotomy (the first of many in his later works to come) between Apollo
and Dionysus. These two Greek gods—one representing order and the
other representing chaos, with both relating intimately to human cre-
ativity (as in “Apollonian sculpture” versus “Dionysian music”)—these
are identified by Nietzsche as “artistic energies which burst forth from
nature herself [. . . ] first in the image world of dreams. . . and then
as intoxicated reality.”16 In fact, the dichotomy here of Apollonian
“dreams” (or the ideas of reason, civilization, and controlled contem-
plation) versus Dionysian “intoxication” (or the dissolving forces of
passion, savagery, and unconscious instinct) are only the springboards
for Nietzsche’s discourse, not its centre. The dichotomy is merely the
occasion for the exploration of related or opposed ideas since, for
 Exile and Criminality 7

Nietzsche, any binary opposition serves to signal the existence of an in-

teresting philosophical problem. The real story in The Birth of Tragedy
is thus the fact of tragedy in human life—not only as it was perhaps
imagined and performed as theatre by the ancient Greeks (and here
Nietzsche shows his skill and style in highly informed speculation),
but as it continues to dominate individual human psychology (and
Nietzsche always takes himself as his best test subject). It is probably
for this unflinching self-analysis, so thorough and so unprecedented,
that Sigmund Freud would later remark of his discovery of Nietzsche’s
writings that Nietzsche “had a more penetrating knowledge of himself
than any other man who ever lived or was ever likely to live.”17 Tragedy,
in other words, haunted Nietzsche’s life: the concept affected everything
he would subsequently write and feel. So tragedy is naturally the formal
subject of his first book, as it would also be the backdrop to all his
later books, reflecting as they do on “the tragedy of all thinking.”18
The Birth of Tragedy is essentially a rambling collection of pro-
nouncements on the general state of art as we have inherited it—
ostensibly exploring the differences between Sophocles and Euripides,
but practically designed to alienate all his fellow classics scholars in-
stead. With this debut in print Nietzsche fired a volley against academe
and paved the way toward his own exit from his academic career (which
only lasted seven years). Such puckish perversity is another hallmark
of his writing, of course: he realized early on the potent philosophical
potential to be found in playing with fire of all kinds, but perhaps
most particularly with Manicheanism (the heretical idea of the equality
between God and the Devil) because it was this thought that first fired
his philosophical imagination. “When I was twelve years old,” Nietzsche
once confided to a friend in a letter,
I conjured up for myself a marvelous trinity: God the Father,
God the Son, and God the Devil. My deduction was that God,
thinking himself, created the second person of the Godhead, but
that to be able to think himself he had to think his opposite, and
thus had to create it.—That is how I began to philosophize.19

When forced to choose between the Devil and the deep blue sea of Chris-
tianity, however, Nietzsche would always opt for the first possibility.
Favouring the dark horse meant incurring a certain amount of risk, and
Nietzsche always seemed completely aware of the high stakes involved
in such a risk since he consistently claimed to be equal to the demands
of “living dangerously.”20 So it was also with the Apollonian-Dionysian
division: Nietzsche is unmistakably sympathetic to the Dionysian side
that “wants truth and nature in their most forceful form.”21 For in the
face of art’s decline, due to the ascendance of the insipid Apollonian
principle, Nietzsche appeals to us to “believe with [him] in Dionysian
life and the rebirth of tragedy.”22 Only the vital powers of primordial
myth can correct our current degeneration of art and restore “the
8 Against Nihilism

healthy natural power of. . . creativity” more closely in tune with the
Dionysian, now sacrificed or held in suspicion.23 Although Nietzsche
acknowledges that human violence can be simply spiteful and negative,
he consistently seeks to rescue the idea that it can also be transfor-
mative and positive—because “the desire for destruction, change, and
becoming can be an expression of an overflowing energy that is preg-
nant with future (my term for this is. . . ‘Dionysian’).”24 The violence
of this destructive impulse or “desire” is the necessary price to pay
for attaining the elusive value that is the authentic. Even the built-in
limitations of the Dionysian path—its brutality and bestiality—become
part of its glamour, its tragedy, and its misunderstood heroism. The
human will to audacity has probably never been given a more alluring
form than in the romanticizing raptures of Nietzsche, which begin here
with his praise for the Dionysian.

Dostoevsky’s Experience of Exile

The state of exile for Dostoevsky was even more pronounced than it
was for Nietzsche. Between 1849 and 1859, Dostoevsky was forcibly
expelled from Russia and not allowed to return until he had served
his four years of imprisonment and hard labour in Omsk, Western
Siberia, followed by six more years of compulsory military service in
Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. Unlike Nietzsche, Dostoevsky was actually
branded a criminal and did time for it. His crime was clandestine
political activity, at first punishable by death for the threat it posed to
the Tsarist state, but it was then commuted at the last minute to penal
servitude instead. 21 of the 33 members of the Petrashevsky Circle25
were thus rounded up and sent to Siberia, including Dostoevsky. It was
Tsar Nicholas I himself who decided to spare their lives. But it was
his son Alexander II (“the Tsar-Liberator”) who decided to enact the
very reform that the Petrashevtsy and other revolutionaries desired
when, shortly after inheriting the throne from his father, he declared
in 1855 that “it would be better to begin to abolish serfdom from
above [rather] than to wait until it would begin to abolish itself from
below.”26 Six years later, Alexander II made legal the emancipation
of the serfs; ironically, however, twenty years later almost to the day,
Alexander II was assassinated by a group of revolutionary terrorists
called “The People’s Will” (Narodnaya Volya) demanding still greater
reforms.27 The Russian government’s harsh treatment of even mild
political agitators like Dostoevsky is thus understandable, since the
most extreme consequence of such agitation (i.e. the violent removal of
the head of the government) indeed came to pass.
Dostoevsky did not live to witness this assassination, this fulfilment
of his radical past association: he died of a long illness merely two
months earlier; had he survived, though, Dostoevsky would have con-
demned the act as the worst possible desecration since he had certainly
 Exile and Criminality 9

renounced all his enthusiasms for socialism by the time he had finished
his prison sentence.28 This disavowal did not, however, prevent the
Tsar’s secret police from keeping him under surveillance until 1875, just
to make sure he was truly reformed; Dostoevsky’s own impression of
being watched by the state authorities was actually not relieved until
1880, one year before he died; and the degree to which his repentance is
genuine can be seen in the following remark, remembered and recorded
by his wife in the 1870s (a time, it must be said, of singular unrest in
Russian society): “Look at all the evil-intentioned people they let slip
through their fingers, but they suspect me and keep watch over me, a
man devoted with all his heart and mind to Tsar and fatherland: that
is wounding!”29

Dostoevsky’s Concept of Criminality

It was doubtless for this jailbird fact in Dostoevsky’s biography—

the part of his past that he could never overcome, nor ever fail to
acknowledge for the transformative impact it left on him30 —that
inspired one of the most famous contemporaneous descriptions of
Dostoevsky, second in fame only to the painting of him on which the
description was based. The great Dane Georg Brandes is once again the
direct link to Dostoevsky (as he is also the living witness to Nietzsche):
reflecting on the portrait in oils of Dostoevsky painted by Vasily Perov,
Brandes wrote the following:
Look at this countenance! Half the face of a Russian peasant, half
the physiognomy of a criminal, with flattened nose, small, piercing
eyes, under eyelashes which tremble with nervousness, long, thick,
and untidy beard, and light hair; add to this the forehead of a
thinker and a poet, large and shapely, and the expressive mouth,
which, even when closed, speaks of tortures without number, of
engulfing sadness, of unhealthy desires, enduring pity, sympathy,
passionate envy, anxiety, torture! Look at his body, which is
nothing but nerves, small and slender, round-shouldered, and
tenacious of life, from his youth up subject to epileptic fits and
hallucinations! This exterior, at first sight plain and vulgar, on
closer examination stamped with weird genius, thoroughly morbid
and wholly extraordinary, speaks of Dostoevsky’s epileptic genius,
of the depths of mildness which filled his soul, of the billows
of almost insane acuteness which frequently mounted into his
head. . . .31

The strange split in Dostoevsky’s face, as Brandes saw it, is consistent

with the complexity of his personality. Although he appears ordinary
(nothing even remarkable: a common “Russian peasant”), he is also
the artist who Belinsky prophesied would inherit the literary mantle of
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809–52).32 But before Brandes could see
Dostoevsky as “a thinker and poet,” he insists on his “criminal” aspect.
10 Against Nihilism

Figure 2: Dostoevsky in 1872, by Vasily Perov

He is not deemed a sunny colossus so much as a dark and suffering

one; “torture” (what every caught criminal undergoes) is stamped on
his features; and so the “genius” of Dostoevsky is composed of (if
not indebted to) the same qualities of illness identified in Nietzsche’s
“Pale Criminal” portrait: “unhealthy desires. . . fits and hallucinations. . .
insan[ity].” The illness, moreover, is named: epilepsy. But this unfortu-
nate fact of Dostoevsky’s life leads too often to a confusion of author
and subject: many critics in and since Dostoevsky’s own time tended
to assume that his epilepsy stained his whole oeuvre with abnormality,
as if the normal range of human experience was necessarily closed to
him. In a famously influential essay called “Dostoevsky and Parricide”
 Exile and Criminality 11

(1928), Sigmund Freud went so far as to label Dostoevsky “a sado-

masochist or a criminal” whose “so-called epilepsy” only served as a
complicated pretext for his “severe hysteria” or “neurosis,” without
which his creative artistry would not have been possible.33 Even a
brilliant fellow writer, the Nobel Prize-winning Thomas Mann, fell
into this trap of conflating Dostoevsky the man (and all his physical
frailties) with Dostoevsky the artist (who transcends those categories)
when he likewise perceived in “the profound, criminal, saintly face of
Dostoevsky. . . the. . . genius of disease and the disease of genius.”34
Of course, epilepsy and imprisonment marked Dostoevsky’s life deeply,
as equally oppressive examples of misfortune.35 But it is surely an
oversimplification and misperception to state that Dostoevsky’s art
completely depended on this misfortune. In the cases of Brandes, Freud,
and Mann, one is tempted to say that the remarks they make about
Dostoevsky reveal more about themselves and their own pathological
preoccupations than anything else!
Nevertheless, the clear centrality of the criminal in all of Dosto-
evsky’s writings speaks for itself. In Reading Dostoevsky, Victor Terras
observes that
Dostoevsky’s main characters are exceptional human beings in
extreme situations. . . [surrounded] by crowds of ordinary people
leading ordinary lives. [. . . ] The plots of these novels are built
around capital crimes perpetrated under unusual circumstances.36

This consistent choice of subject for his fiction is what leads Brandes
to conclude that Dostoevsky’s “chief characteristic. . . of psychological
clairvoyance” is what enables him to masterfully “depict the intellectual
dizziness which makes men rush headlong into a gulf of crime or sac-
rifice.”37 Freud likewise finds Dostoevsky’s “choice of material, which
singles out from all others violent, murderous and egoistic characters,”
the single greatest justification for “reckoning Dostoevsky among the
criminals.”38 This criminal element, understood from the inside and
conveyed with such persuasive power, is certainly what defines Dosto-
evsky’s four great murder novels: Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie
i nakazanie, 1866), The Idiot (Idiot, 1868), The Possessed (Besy, 1872),
and The Brothers Karamazov (Brat’ia Karamazovy, 1880).
In his fine “human portrait” of Dostoevsky, Robert Payne wrote
that Dostoevsky’s preoccupation with the criminal mind is entirely
in keeping with his particular theological temperament. “He made a
profound study of crime, because crime was the visible sign of God’s
absence; and since crime was ever-present, and seemed indeed to be
endemic, threatening the entire social structure, he determined to follow
it to its hidden roots even if it meant following it through labyrinthine
darkness. No one [else] ever understood crime so clearly, with such
frightening clairvoyance. There exist whole territories of crime which
remained unmapped until he surveyed them. He was among those rare
12 Against Nihilism

men who dare to enter uncharted regions of the spirit, and in this sense
he was the forerunner, for his own dilemmas proved to be the dilemmas
of subsequent generations. He was the first modern man.”39
Dostoevsky’s most memorable villains form a trio of S’s: Svidrigailov
(Crime and Punishment), Stavrogin (The Possessed), and Smerdiakov
(The Brothers Karamazov).40 All three men are “exceptional,” with
decidedly sordid sexual proclivities; they are also all murderers. They
function in each narrative as the direct nightmarish reflection of one or
more of the other protagonists, thereby suggesting a strong psychic link
and shadowy propensity waiting to be actualized. Like a vortex, each
threatens to consume the other characters by sucking them down into
their orbit. So Raskolnikov, the idealist-axe murderer hero of Crime
and Punishment, finds his sunny counterpart in his loyal and sensible
friend Razumikhin, but his eerie evil twin in the still more degraded
and violent Svidrigailov (who will commit suicide in the end, unable to
endure his own corruption—thereby vouchsafing Raskolnikov’s survival).
Similarly, Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov understands his half-brother
Smerdiakov to be his mirror and his agent of destruction (but the
latter hanging himself will not prevent the former from going mad—a
fate worse than death for that proudly intellectual character). And
in another variation of this doubling theme, the vices of Stavrogin
will drive his fellow revolutionaries Kirillov and Shatov into fatal
tailspins in The Possessed, including finally himself. The symmetries
are consistently developed and delicately deployed: readers of these
novels come away with a sense of balance and justice naturally restored,
no matter how terrifyingly disruptive the crimes in them might have
been. In short, the evil is never allowed to persist: it may indeed be
bleak and terrible the way many of these criminal protagonists destroy
themselves but this is, after all, the Dostoevskian language of tragedy.
By creating this narrative scheme of criminal doubles for the novel’s
hero to define himself against, Dostoevsky pioneered a new genre which
one perceptive critic has called “the novel-tragedy.”41

Dostoevsky’s Theme of the Double in The Idiot

But the novel that shows the clearest and deepest connection between
the hero and his criminal double must be Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. The
odd villain out (whose name does not start with an “S”) is even more
compelling here because of his practically symbiotic relationship to
the novel’s hero. Unlike any other Dostoevskian scenario,42 Rogozhin
and Myshkin crucially complete one another: they are spiritually fused.
The otherworldly goodness of Prince Leo Nikolayevich Myshkin finds
its precise counterpart in the earthy darkness of Parfyon Rogozhin,
and their love for the same woman (Nastasya Filippovna) creates the
occasion for realizing this nexus between them.43
 Exile and Criminality 13

Dostoevsky introduces this deep connection between Myshkin and

Rogozhin in the very first chapter of the novel, when they meet each
other by chance in the same train compartment and fall into con-
versation. Myshkin is returning to St. Petersburg from Switzerland
where he had spent more than four years undergoing treatment for
his epilepsy; Rogozhin is returning to St. Petersburg from Pskov to
claim his rich inheritance unexpectedly left to him by his stingy father.
Nastasya Filippovna is already announced as the future link between
them since it was on her account that Rogozhin became estranged from
his strict father. Although they appear so different from each other—
Myshin speaks gently and candidly while Rogozhin speaks crudely
and sarcastically; the first is fair-haired and delicate and cultured,
while the second is dark-haired and robust and uneducated—they are
both “about twenty-six or twenty-seven,” and they are both about to
come into large sums of money. What unites them still further is how
each will use his monetary windfall in a socially subversive way: all of
Rogozhin’s money will not mitigate his fundamental brutality, just as
Myshkin’s sudden fortune will not hide his unfortunate naivety. In fact,
each man’s money will be his ticket to undermining the immediate
society in which he finds himself. This is because both Rogozhin and
Myshkin are committed to the idea of destabilizing everything around
them, in their own way and for their own reasons. For Rogozhin, his
subversion is conscious: he returns to society in spite of his family’s
disapproval of his dissipation, using his family’s money to wallow still
deeper in his excesses with Nastasya Filippovna. But for Myshkin his
subversion is involuntary: he returns to society after his illness seems to
have abated, yet everything he does or says ostracizes him as if he were
still in some quarantine. None of Myshkin’s money can prevent people
from pitying him or feeling uncomfortable in his presence because his
fortune is not of this world: “Myshkin is the pure spirit of innocence. . .
[and c]ontact with Myshkin is lightning contact with the eternal.”44
By the beginning of Part II, Myshkin has been uneasily feeling a
pair of malevolent eyes following him lately which he recognizes as
belonging to Rogozhin. For his part, Rogozhhin openly acknowledges
his simultaneous murderous and tender feelings for both Myshkin and
Nastasya Filippovna, since he feels caught in an intrigue between them.
He explains it thus to Myshkin (and delivers a general plot summary
of the novel at the same time):
I know it’s impossible to regard us as equals, you and me. [. . . ]
That’s been decided without us. You see, the way we love is
different. I mean, everything’s different. You say you love her
because you pity her. Well, there ain’t no such pity for her in me.
[. . . ] Why, she’s marrying me just because she knows for certain
that I’m going to kill her! [. . . ] By drowning or the knife! [. . . ]
The same as I love her, she loves another man. And do you know
who the other man is? It’s you!. . . You. She’s loved you ever since
14 Against Nihilism

that evening of her birthday party. Only she thinks she can’t
marry you because you’re too good for her and because she’d ruin
your life. “Everyone knows”, she says, “the sort of woman I am.”
Aye, she keeps on saying that to this day. She told me so straight
to my face, she did. She’s afraid of disgracing and ruining you,
but, you see, I’m different—she can marry me! [. . . ] She don’t
drown herself, because I’m perhaps a hundred times worse than
the river. It’s out of spite she’s marrying me—aye, if she marries
me, she’ll do it out of spite.45

Rogozhin’s despair and frustration are palpable: his insight into the
truth of their situation is much sharper than Myshkin’s, and yet his
passionate nature does not allow him to accept or renounce anything
in order to resolve it. The only way he can relieve the pressure is to
either kill Myshkin or to kill Nastasya Filippovna. He will eventually
follow through with the latter (using “the knife” to do it) but he will be
unable to carry out the former—perhaps because killing Myshkin would
be tantamount to killing himself—the spiritualized part of himself
that Rogozhin never allows to triumph over his sensualist core. It
is doubtless for this reason, the sense of relentless association, that
Rogozhin spontaneously exchanges crosses with Myshkin and introduces
him to his senile old mother. But these gestures cannot conceal the
basic enmity between them: “the prince noticed with painful surprise
that the old mistrust, the old bitter and almost sardonic smile still
lingered on the face of his newly-adopted brother.”46
Myshkin and Rogozhin continue their fatal lockstep around Nasta-
sya Filippovna until the end, when they face each other over her dead
body in Rogozhin’s apartment. The horror of her corpse is invisible:
she is completely covered by a white sheet, so it is the stillness and
cleanness of her body in the wake of the violence that is so eerie and
terrible because, as Rogozhin tells Myshkin, “the knife only went in
three or four inches—just under the left breast—and no more than
half a tablespoonful of blood came out on her chemise—not a drop
more.”47 Their vigil at her bedside all through the night after her death
finds them equally stunned, withdrawing into their respective forms
of catatonia; finally each is consigned to his own oblivion as Myshkin
is sent back to the Swiss asylum while Rogozhin is sent to prison in
Siberia.
But all this horror of dissolution was already prefigured in another
pivotal scene when Myshkin saw another dead body with Rogozhin in
his apartment—this time in a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger
which “showed our Savior, who had just been taken from the cross”48
(see Figure 3).
In this painting, which is long and thin like the outstretched corpse
itself, one sees how the clinically accurate level of decomposition in
the gangrenous wounds left by the nails is supposed to reflect Christ’s
body three days after death. Now the horror of the dead body is all too
 Exile and Criminality 15

Figure 3: Hans Holbein, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521)
visible: the German painter’s grotesque emphasis on Christ’s fleshly
decay seems designed to undermine the miracle of the Resurrection,49
and Myshkin is surprised to learn that Rogozhin “likes looking at that
picture”:
“At that picture!” the prince exclaimed. . . “At that picture! Why,
some people may lose their faith by looking at that picture!”
“Aye, that also may be lost,” Rogozhin assented unexpectedly.50
Whatever else is lost, finally, is thus deliberate and inevitable. The
drive to destabilization that both Rogozhin and Myshkin embody leads
to the ultimate implosion: absolutely nothing is left for anyone in the
novel at the end. The progressive collapse of every scene where either
Myshkin or Rogozhin are present prior to this, like the progressive
emptying of every other character, shows—like Holbein’s Dead Christ
in the Tomb—the extreme challenge not only to faith but to any sense
of goodness or order at all. Myshkin too “is a dead Christ whose
world is a tomb and whose epilepsy is the stigma of a tortured, broken
body”—because with “Rogozhin’s murder of Nastasya, it is Myshkin
who is also murdered.”51
The peculiar tension between Myshkin and Rogozhin depends on
the sense of acute rootlessness that both share. Neither of them clearly
belongs anywhere, and their disturbing social effect—which will finally
culminate in Nastasya Filippovna’s murder, perpetrated by Rogozhin
and not prevented by Myshkin—makes both of them criminals (one
directly, the other tacitly) because they were social exiles first. While
he was composing The Idiot Dostoevsky himself was living abroad,
fleeing like a fugitive from Russian creditors back home, and this state
of unrest certainly bled into the writing of this novel—which went
through eight excruciating versions in seven different cities before he
felt he could finally stop working on it.52 His unprecedented sense of
dissatisfaction with the manuscript had surely something to do with
his alienated circumstances, wandering through Europe because he felt
he could not go home again. The final lines of the novel attest to his
uncomfortable state of second exile, which ended up lasting four years
(1867–1871):
16 Against Nihilism

And all this, all this life abroad, and all this Europe of yours is
just a delusion, and all of us abroad are a delusion. Mark my
words, you’ll see it for yourself!53

In other words, there is something about this deliberate self-exile that

is tinged with fatality and suspicion—a “delusion” that will give the
lie to the need for any self-removal in the first place. Myshkin’s flight
to Switzerland became his final undoing, the first and last scene in
his unfolding personal tragedy. Similarly, Switzerland was the site for
both the completion and publication of The Idiot as well as the birth
of Dostoevsky’s first child who, however, died at the age of only three
months. Dostoevsky and his wife could no longer bear to stay in Geneva
once they had buried their little Sonya there; thus the Swiss stain of
tragedy extended not only to Myshkin but to Dostoevsky also.
Moreover, it is the guilt complex of the survivor who chooses exile
that Dostoevsky fearlessly explored here in his own most personal
creation that is Prince Myshkin. Like Dostoevsky, Myshkin recounts
his near-death experience when a firing squad gives way to a last-
minute reprieve; like Dostoevsky, Myshkin suffers from epilepsy; and
like Dostoevsky, Myshkin is childlike and trusting.54 But also like
Dostoevsky, Rogozhin is of simple peasant stock; like Dostoevsky,
Rogozhin somehow needs to keep looking at that horrible Holbein
painting; and like Dostoevsky, Rogozhin is jealous and possessive.55 By
juxtaposing Rogozhin to Myshkin as such a menacing and implacable
alter ego, Dostoevsky presents his own dual self-portrait: two aspects
of his own psyche in perpetual warfare with each other, as he must
have seen and understood himself.

The Exile-Criminal as an Apostle of Audacity

The dualism of Myshkin and Rogozhin in Dostoevsky is reminiscent

of the dualism of Apollo and Dionysus in Nietzsche: the same concern
with the human capacity for criminality emerges in both because some
state of willful exile critically precedes it. Not just any kind of criminal
interests Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, after all. Freud, who appreciated
both writers in equal measure, illuminates an important aspect of the
relationship of criminality to exile when he observed that “Dostoevsky’s
sympathy for the criminal is, in fact, boundless. . . a criminal is to
him almost a Redeemer.”56 The criminal profile of Nietzschean and
Dostoevskian interest does indeed turn on the potential redeemer
aspect. Only the example of the Savior justifies breaking the law for
a higher salvific purpose that most of us might not yet comprehend;
and certainly the New Testament shows the consistent extent to which
Christ appeared willing to remain misunderstood by most people and
therefore content with His various forms of increasing banishment.57
Christ Himself was perceived to be a dangerous criminal in the eyes of
 Exile and Criminality 17

His society, but only because Christ Himself first consented to embrace
a state of exile. In this respect He consciously brought His tragedy
upon Himself, and it is this tragic quality of the conscious renegade
that fascinated Nietzsche and Dostoevsky equally.
The theme of doubling or dualism in both Nietzsche and Dosto-
evsky therefore serves to explore this relationship between exile and
criminality as a binding complex of human forces that aspire towards
idealism but often fall short of their own vision. Both writers advocate
the idea of disruption and destabilization that they see as intrinsic
to the exile turned criminal and his modus operandi because both
recognize a profound inauthenticity in their society that only this type
of criminal can help to blast away.58 The difference lies in the fact that
Nietzsche prescribes (and predicts) the breakdown of society through
criminal acts by people in some form of rebellious self-exile, while
Dostoevsky describes (and bemoans) the breakdown of society at the
hands of criminal-exiles as a false “New Jerusalem” that fails too much
to honour the original religious vision of same.
The difference between them of position on the value of audacity
in and of itself is seen perhaps most clearly in their respective deaths.
Nietzsche remained out in the cold all his life, and his star only started
to rise after his death in Weimar amidst the bizarre hagiographic pomp
prepared by his unscrupulous sister; never in his own lifetime did he
experience a true audience for his credo of audacity for audacity’s sake.
Like Prince Myshkin, Nietzsche descended into a state of catatonia
from which he never recovered—at a terrible remove from everything
he once strived so passionately to communicate. Dostoevsky, however,
achieved the kind of fame and adulation in the last year of his life that
Nietzsche only dreamed of; a throng of thirty thousand followed him to
his grave in St. Petersburg. The funeral procession was so impressive
that other on-lookers were surprised when they were told it was all for
a “katorzhnik” (an exiled convict) and not for “some important general
or other”: now Dostoevsky’s prison past had become “one of his badges
of honour.”59 His years of exile and sin by audacious association were
now definitely ended, absorbed into the lionizing mythos of history.

Exile, Criminality, and the Idea of Grandeur

When Nietzsche first discovered Dostoevsky by chance in French trans-

lation, he was struck by their uncanny coincidence of thinking about
the psychology of the criminal. It was in February of 1887 that he
found and read Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground; he later
went on to read Crime and Punishment, which was already known in
Germany since its translation in 1882.60 Many of his thoughts seemed
to have found their strange echo in the pages of this Russian’s books,
almost as if they were telepathically linked—one reading the mind of
the other, or one anticipating and extending the same idea of the other.
18 Against Nihilism

Who had conceived of the concept first, that “good” and “evil” no
longer existed? Who was the original author of the unsettling notion
that “ordinariness” and “extraordinariness” were the new aesthetic
measure replacing moral meaning? On the one hand, it would seem that
Dostoevsky was the pioneer with Crime and Punishment, which was
published “wh[ile] Nietzsche was still a student dreaming of lofty ideals”:
Dostoevsky was “alone in the entire world” when he had Raskolnikov
attribute the motivation for his crime to “env[y of] the moral grandeur
of the criminal.”61 But on the other hand, Nietzsche had thoroughly
imagined and rehearsed all the possible ramifications of such a claim
of criminal genius or superiority, in his own way and on his own time:
Dostoevsky’s fiction only confirmed what he already knew. It was out
of deference and gratitude to this unknown (and already dead) kindred
spirit that Nietzsche acknowledged Dostoevsky:
Dostoevski. . . [t]his profound human being, who was ten times
right in his low estimate of the superficial Germans, lived for
a long time among the convicts of Siberia—hardened criminals
for whom there [often] was no way back to society—and found
them very different from what he himself had expected: they were
carved out of just about the best, hardest, and most valuable
wood that grows anywhere on Russian soil.62

In addition to Nietzsche typically distancing himself from his fellow

Germans, he reveals in this éloge a more than passing acquaintance
with the famous closing paragraphs of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the
Dead House (Zapiski iz mertvogo doma, 1860–62),63 written after his
return from exile in Siberia and openly romanticizing the convicts that
are now being left behind, both for the narrator and for the reader:
How much youth was needlessly buried within these walls; what
mighty powers were wasted there to no purpose! After all, the
whole truth must be told: those men were exceptional men. They
were perhaps the most talented, the strongest representatives of
all our people. But their mighty strength went to waste; it went
to waste abnormally, unjustly, and irretrievably.64

Throughout the nineteenth century, Notes From the Dead House was
the only Dostoevsky novel to be available in more than one English
translation (e.g., Buried Alive)65 and it later continued to be seen
as a source of accurate first-hand information about Siberia and, by
extension, Russia.66 Given the particularly enduring popularity of this
Dostoevsky text, it is reasonable to assume that Nietzsche knew and
referred to it in his praise of Dostoevsky and the convicts he came
to apparently appreciate.67 It is also more than probable that both
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky would have agreed that “many. . . prisoners
are criminals by choice, and, moreover, that there is such a thing as a
criminal mentality.”68 But if “choice” is the key word for both of them,
then their quests to plumb the depths of the rebellious human soul
 Exile and Criminality 19

part company in the following way: for Nietzsche the exile-criminal

represents a dynamic potentiality that is continually in motion and
definition, while for Dostoevsky the exile-criminal represents a constant
condition that lives in hope of homecoming and restitution. One evades
a state of rest while the other seeks it out; one remains a wanderer
while the other remains a pilgrim. It turns on the same question of
will, but proceeds to different end points.
So who penned the following phrase, so richly resonant with this
exultant theme of the freedom and audacity of the criminal?
. . . as though he had crossed some fatal line and was elated to
find that nothing was sacred anymore. . . .

It was, in fact, Dostoevsky69 —but the substance of it is classically and

essentially Nietzsche.70 It therefore does not matter who actually wrote
it first: what matters is that both felt the disturbing truth of it and
broadcast their understanding of its importance, with equal urgency.
Both valued the will to transgression for the same reason: to learn
more about the secrets of the human heart on their fearless and direct
expeditions, through their writings, down to the nub of the restless
criminal impetus of human existence.

Notes
1 Is an exile in some sense also a criminal? Is there not something suspect

in such a blatant disavowal of law or country—something treacherous in such a

renunciation? Is not this marginality enjoyed by the exile—the privilege and luxury
of distance, of release from the normal range of activities or expectations—is it not
an ambiguous gift stained with sadness? For with the freedom of the exile or the
criminal to transgress or go beyond the boundary of their choice—whether it is
the geographical border or the letter of the law—a certain bitterness accompanies
their added knowledge. That sadness or bitterness derives from the restlessness
foisted upon each—never quite at home in the one case, or hunted by the law in
the other case—which is again due to a sense of relentless nostalgia, of unbidden
but insistent memory, which is what both exile and criminal share: the inability to
forget the reason for their current state of flight.
2 Richard Elliott Friedman, The Disappearance of God: A Divine Mystery

(Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1995) 148. Chapters 7–9 (“Nietzsche At Turin”)
explore the eerie coincidences between the lives and works of both Nietzsche and
Dostoevsky.
3 The ambivalence of Nietzsche’s relationship to his own language perhaps

explains why he so seldom found a sympathetic “home crowd” audience in his

lifetime. Indeed, it was a Danish scholar (Georg Brandes) who first delivered
a series of lectures on Nietzsche at the University of Copenhagen in 1888, just
before Nietzsche began to lose all his lucidity and thus was still aware of the
first glimmerings of his fame, in translation. In fact—for all Nietzsche’s several
well-documented and consistent complaints about Germans—Nietzsche was no
master of any other modern European language aside from German, except for
an excellent reading knowledge of French. See David Farrell Krell & Donald L.
Bates, The Good European: Nietzsche’s Work Sites in Word & Image (University
of Chicago Press, 1997) 1.
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge

UP, 1997) 247 (# 4, “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” Section 10).

20 Against Nihilism

5 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The

Portable Nietzsche, ed. & trans. W. Kaufmann (Markham: Penguin Books Canada,
1982) 233. See Part 2, Speech 14, “On the Land of Education;” emphases in the
original.
6 Freidrich Nietzsche, Preface to On the Genealogy of Morals, in On the Ge-

nealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random
House, Inc., 1989) 17.
7 Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1994) 237.

8 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is [1888]

in Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. & ed. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1989) 321.
9 Nietzsche himself recognized this, in one of the very last of his lucid productions,

when he ruefully concluded, “I have always been sentenced to Germans” (emphasis

in the original). See Nietzsche Contra Wagner: Out of the Files of a Psychologist
in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. & trans. Walter Kaufmann (Markham: Penguin
Books Canada, 1983) 676.
10 Conversations with Nietzsche: A Life in the Words of His Contemporaries, ed.

Sander L. Gilman & trans. David J. Parent (Oxford University Press, 1987) 174.
11 See Laurence Gane, Introducing Nietzsche (Toronto: Penguin Books Canada,

2007) 107.
12 Letter of October 20, 1888 (less than a week after Nietzsche’s last lucid

[44th] birthday) to Georg Brandes in Brandes, Friedrich Nietzsche (New York: The
MacMillan Company, 1915) 92.
13 See The Portable Nietzsche 149–152.
14 Nietzsche, Gesammette Werke XXI (Munich, 1922–29) 81. The seventh speech

in Part I of Thus Spoke Zarathustra called “On Reading and Writing,” which
immediately follows the speech “On the Pale Criminal,” is a memorable poetic
invocation of this same injunction which Nietzsche always sought to uphold, since
it urges all would-be writers to “write with blood” and “courage” and “love of life.”
15 According to Walter Kaufmann (every anglophone’s indispensable companion

to Nietzsche in English), this subtitle was an 1886 revision of the original first 1872
edition which was entitled The Birth of Tragedy Out of The Spirit of Music. The
revision is accurate and helpful since it serves to announce more clearly Nietzsche’s
now famous distinction between the Apollonian (ordered) and Dionysian (chaotic)
forces at work in the world. See Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of
Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967) 15.
16 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 33; 38.
17 See Walter Kaufmann’s “Introduction” to Existentialism from Dostoevsky to

Sartre (Toronto: Penguin Books Canada, 1975) 20. See also pages 103 and 497 for
specific appreciations of Nietzschean insights into psychology in The Basic Writings
of Sigmund Freud, trans. A.A. Brill (New York: Modern Library/Random House,
1938).
18 Krell & Bates, The Good European, 81.
19 Krell & Bates, The Good European, 25.

Such irreverence on the pubescent Nietzsche’s part is akin to a limerick of

uncertain origin:
Il y avait un jeune homme de Dijon
Qui n’avait qu’un peu de religion
Il a dit, “Quant à moi
Je déteste tous les trois
Le Père, le Fils, et le Pigeon.”
Nietzsche’s sin of omission against the Holy Spirit (the true third person of the
Christian Trinity) may be said to carry within itself its own retaliation, since he
who sins against the Holy Spirit incurs the greatest wrath from God (see Matthew
12:31–32: “All manner of sin or blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the
blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. . . neither in this
world, neither in the world to come”). Might this stubborn refusal of Nietzsche to
 Exile and Criminality 21

acknowledge the existence of the Holy Spirit thus account for his mental breakdown—
as if God had poignantly and appropriately punished the philosopher in the worst
possible way, by depriving him of his one indispensable tool as a philosopher—his
mind?
Which calls up, in turn, another witticism (an anonymous piece of graffiti
which has since become a popular art poster for the college crowd): “God is
dead.”—Nietzsche. “Nietzsche is dead.”—God.
20 Nietzsche exhorts us to “live dangerously!” in The Gay Science (Book IV,

Section 283) because “being honest in evil is still better than losing oneself to the
morality of tradition” (Book II, Section 99). See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans.
Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974) 228 & 156.
21 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 62.
22 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 124.
23 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 135 (Section 23).
24 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 329 (Book V, Section 370: “What is romanti-

cism?”); emphasis in the original.

25 The “Petrashevtsy” were “a Christian socialist study group which secretly

advocated a constitutional monarchy.” See Baron Aleksandr E. Vrangel’s account of

“Kazan’ Dostoevskogo” (“Dostoevsky’s Execution”) in Eyewitness: Selections from
Russian Memoirs, ed. D. Barton Johnson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Inc., 1971) 252.
Although this group of young St. Petersburg intellectuals met rather informally
every Friday to read and discuss papers on social, philosophical, and literary
topics at the apartment of one M.V. Butashevich-Petrashevsky (1821–1866), their
activities were not considered innocuous by the Tsarist government. One or two
police informers insinuated themselves into the Circle and thus led to its undoing.
26 Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, Fourth Edition (Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1984) 370–371. Nicholas I reigned from 1825 to 1855, and Alexander
II reigned from 1855 to 1881. Serfdom was a barbaric practice of white slavery
that inspired many outside commentators to conclude that Russia was a backward
country compared to the rest of Europe. Serfdom also inspired many a lament of
inhuman inequality, of which the most famous and possibly most pathetic example is
Nikolai Karamzin’s novella Bednaya Liza (Poor Liza, 1792). Serfdom was declared
illegal in 1861.
27 The liberation proclamation was on March 3, 1861; the successful assassination

(after many earlier attempts in what historians called “an emperor hunt”) was on
March 13, 1881.
28 The crux of Dostoevsky’s connection to socialism lies in his complicated rela-

tionship to Vissarion Belinsky (1811–1848), the first professional Russian critic and
champion of social values in literature. Not only did Belinsky hail Dostoevsky’s
first novel Poor Folk (Bednie Liudi, 1845) as a work of genius, thereby crucially
confirming Dostoevsky’s artistic vocation—but Belinsky was also indirectly respon-
sible for Dostoevsky’s arrest, because “it was for a reading of [Belinsky’s] prohibited
1847 letter to Gogol, castigating him for betraying both literature and the Russian
people, that Dostoevsky was arrested, together with his listeners, at a meeting of
the Petrashevsky Circle.” See “Belinsky” in Handbook of Russian Literature, ed.
Victor Terras (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) 44.
Although Dostoevsky would try to shrug off Belinsky’s shadow for its smell of
“noxious atheist socialism,” he could not help but remember Belinsky with gratitude
because that formative impression of his first praise always fortified and inspired
him: Belinsky’s dubbing him “a new Gogol” so early in his writing career was,
Dostoevsky said, “the most exquisite moment in all my life. When I thought about
it in prison camp in Siberia, I was strengthened in spirit.” See Anna Dostoevsky,
Dostoevsky: Reminiscences, trans. Beatrice Stillman (New York: Liveright, 1975)
418–419.
29 Anna Dostoevsky, Reminiscences, 249; see also 401.

Dostoevsky did live to see Vera Zasulich’s spectacular and unprecedented

attempt (as a woman) on the life of the military governor of St. Petersburg in
22 Against Nihilism

1878, for which she was acquitted. Ironically, it was another one of Alexander II’s
sweeping reforms—this time of the Russian judiciary system, introducing trial by
jury in the 1860s—that made this acquittal possible. The rise of conspiratorial
revolutionary terrorism increased in the wake of this incident, which is doubtless
what Dostoevsky meant when he referred to “all the evil-intentioned people” who
got away with the attempted murder of various state authorities, not only the Tsar.
30 It was thanks to his Siberian prison camp experience that Dostoevsky came to

truly understand his own Russian people, suffering through so many indignities and
hardships alongside him, and revealing in the process their essentially “enlightened”
character. “Our people were enlightened long ago, when they took Christ and His
teachings as their very essence. [. . . ] I lived with them for some years, shared meals
with them, slept alongside them, and was myself numbered among the transgressors:
I worked with them at real, backbreaking labour. . . .So don’t tell me that I don’t
know the people! I know them: it was from them I accepted Christ into my soul
again, Christ, whom I had known while still a child in my parents’ home and whom
I was about to lose when I, in my turn, transformed myself into a ‘European liberal’.”
See Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881 (Princeton
University Press, 2002) 541.
31 “Dostoevsky” in Georg Brandes, Impressions of Russia, trans. Samuel C.

Eastman (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1889) 301. Emphases added.
32 Later, towards the end of his life, Dostoevsky would also lay triumphant

claim to the inheritance of the great grandfather of Russian literature and Russia’s
national poet, Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin (1799–1837). See Joseph Frank’s
thrillingly thorough reconstruction of Dostoevsky’s experience of delivering his
famous speech at the 1880 Moscow Pushkin Festival, which absolutely conferred
upon him “the mantle of Pushkin,” in Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet
497–532, especially 529.
33 Dostoevsky: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. René Wellek (Englewood

Cliffs, NT: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965) 99; 100.

34 Thomas Mann, “Preface: Dostoevsky—In Moderation,” in The Short Novels

of Dostoevsky, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: The Dial Press, 1945) vii; viii.
35 In Russian, the literal word for “criminal” (prestupnik) is less often favoured

in common parlance compared to the more colloquial “unfortunate” (neschastnyi),

which Dostoevsky himself observes as current usage both within and without the
convict community. “It is not for nothing that the common people throughout
Russia call a crime a misfortune, and criminals ‘unfortunates’. This definition
is of profound significance. It is even more important because it is formulated
unconsciously, instinctively.” Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead, trans. David
McDuff (Markham: Penguin Books Canada, 1987) 80.
Likewise, Vrangel’s memoir of Dostoevsky’s being prepared for execution refers
to the condemned men as “unfortunates,” not just “criminals” (see Eyewitness,
257).
36 Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998: 7; 38.
37 “Dostoevsky” in Impressions of Russia 328; 329.
38 “Dostoevsky and Parricide,” in Dostoevsky: A Collection of Critical Essays

99.
39 See Robert Payne, Dostoevsky: A Human Portrait (New York: Knopf, 1961)

295.
40 An entire separate study could be devoted to the significance of the names

Dostoevsky gave to his principal protagonists, since the meanings or etymologies of

these names closely coincide with the revelation of their characters. For example,
Raskolnikov derives from the word raskol (“split” or “schism”); Razumikhin from
razum (“mind” or “reason”); and Svidrigailov from vidit’ (“to see”) and riga (an
Old Church Slavonic word for “sorrow”). In every instance the novel demonstrates
how the name is a well-chosen fit with the name-bearer’s essential psychological
profile. What’s in a name, indeed!. . . .
41 See Vyacheslav Ivanov’s brilliant study Dostoevsky: Freedom and the Tragic

Life, trans. Norman Cameron (New York: The Noonday Press, 1957).
 Exile and Criminality 23

42 Dostoevsky’s novella The Eternal Husband (1870) is another text that revisits

this theme of the love triangle—but the drama is more between the two men
(Velchaninov and Trusotsky); the woman is incidental. There is also no crime to
distinguish them in their passion for her. Similarly, Dostoevsky’s novel A Raw
Youth (1875) turns on the issue of sexual rivalry and jealousy between a father and
a son for the same woman, but there is again no crime that critically clarifies the
nature of their relationship.
43 Again, the names are important: Myshkin derives from mysh (“mouse”), which

is an accurate summation of his gentle and usually timid character—although

it is also offset by his first name (Lev means “lion”); Parfyon is from the Greek
parthenos meaning “virginal”, which attests to his own particular purity of intent
and character; and Nastasya is a variation of Anastasia from the Greek word
anastasis meaning “resurrection,” which is a hope that seems denied to her as an
infamous fallen woman. However, her maiden name Barashkova, from the Russian
barashek which means “lamb,” also suggests that her willingness to embrace her
murder by Rogozhin’s hand at the end is in keeping with the truth about her
character: she sacrificed herself consciously, like a sacrificial lamb, on the altar of
Rogozhin’s obsessive desire to possess all of her.
44 George A. Panichas, Dostoevsky’s Spiritual Art: The Burden of Vision (New

Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2005) 57.

45 Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. David Magarshack (Markham: Penguin Books

Canada Ltd., 1981) 240; 247–248. This corresponds to Part Two, Chapter 3 in the
novel. Emphases in the original.
46 Ibid, 254.
47 Dostoevsky, The Idiot, 655.
48 Ibid, 250.
49 Like Nietzsche, Holbein the Younger was a German who desired (but finally

acquired) Swiss citizenship. When Dostoevsky was on his way to Geneva in 1867,
he and his wife stopped in Basel to see this Holbein painting of The Dead Christ
and his viewing of it “struck him with terrible force. . . he said to [her] then, ‘A
painting like that can make you lose your faith’” (Anna Dostoevsky, Reminiscences
393 & 134).
50 The Idiot, 251.
51 Panichas, Dostoevsky’s Spiritual Art 63; 86.
52 The Idiot was composed in transit between Berlin, Dresden, Baden-Baden,

Geneva, Vevey, Milan, and Florence. See David Magarshack’s introduction to his
translation of The Idiot for details on the extremely difficult financial circumstances
under which the novel was written (7–25).
53 The Idiot, 661.
54 Dostoevsky’s widow Anna Dostoevsky repeatedly notes in her Reminiscences

how her husband was prone to over trusting strangers asking him for money, of
which unscrupulous people were all too willing to take advantage. In fact, their
very reason for remaining abroad as a recently married couple for longer than a
honeymoon trip was due to their fear of being thrown into debtor’s prison upon their
return, thanks to these “fictitious debts” incurred through Dostoevsky’s “completely
childlike impracticality, his excessive credulousness, and his sensitivity” (181; 183).
55 Again, Anna Dostoevsky records many instances of her husband’s always

unfounded but passionately felt jealousy, since she was in fact twenty-five years his
junior. See, for example, 260–264 of her Reminiscences.
56 “Dostoevsky and Parricide,” 108.
57 Examples of this self-exile-towards-criminality abound in the New Testament.

For example, Christ comments that “foxes have holes, birds have nests, but the
Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head” (Matthew 8:20); “a prophet is always
a stranger in his own country” (Mark 6:5); “I have come not to bring peace, but
the sword” (Luke 12:51). His homelessness is poignant because it is aligned with
a revolutionary mission. What home could contain or empower such a mission,
if indeed all must henceforth renounce their homes and possessions and become
“salted with fire”? (Mark 9:49)
24 Against Nihilism

58 See Appendix below, “Why Kids Shoot Up Schools: For Nietzschean and

Dostoevskian Reasons.”
59 Frank, The Mantle of the Prophet, 755. Brandes claims forty thousand attended

the funeral (335).

60 René Wellek, “Introduction” to Dostoevsky: A Collection of Critical Essays

3. Wellek concludes his review of Nietzsche’s relationship to Dostoevsky with the

following sentence: “But Nietzsche was soon to lose his reason: his discovery of
Dostoevsky had come too late to make any discernible impression on his thinking.”
The aim of the present study is not to refute this remark, but to illuminate the
parallel lines that Nietzsche and Dostoevsky walked, independently of each other
and beyond all question of mutual influence.
61 Shestov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche 213.
62 This is from Section 45 of Twilight of the Idols (1888–89), called “The Criminal

and What Is Related to Him.” See The Portable Nietzsche 549–550. Emphasis in
the original.
63 In this book—his first work to be published after his return to Russia from

Siberia—Dostoevsky completely absents himself from this series of anecdotes re-

membered and retold about his fellow inmates. He adopts the dispassionate style of
a documentary and allows a huge mosaic of individual voices and stories to emerge,
over the course of a loose calendar year. A narrator frames the whole, like a camera,
beginning to record all his inmates when his own term of prison begins and then,
when the term is up, the recording ends. The book enjoyed an immediate success;
even the Tsar was reputed to have been moved to tears by its pages.
64 Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead, trans. David McDuff (Markham: Penguin

Books Canada, 1987) 356.

65 See Helen Muchnic, Dostoevsky’s English Reputation (1881–1936) (New York:

Octagon Books, 1969) 64–65.

66 See Maria Bloshteyn, The Prophet and the Pornographers, Ph.D. diss. York

University, 1998: 20.

Dostoevsky’s Dead House inspired Soviet “gulag literature” in the late twentieth
century, of which two of the most notable examples are Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s A
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales; both
of these definitely go beyond the derivative Tolstoyesque quality still present in
this Dostoevsky novel. That Tolstoy himself expressed admiration for Dostoevsky’s
Dead House in particular is easily explained, since “of all of Dostoevsky’s major
books [it is] the [only] one that in its detailed, objective description of milieu is
closest to [Tolstoy’s] own literary manner” (Frank 562; see also Shestov 208).
Like Nietzsche, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828–1910), the great lion of nineteenth-
century Russian letters, never met Dostoevsky either. However, Tolstoy and Dos-
toevsky were once in the same room (in 1878, during a public lecture given by
the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov), but they were not aware of each other’s pres-
ence. Their mutual acquaintance N.N. Strakhov appeared to be instrumental in
keeping them apart because he desired to monopolize his relationship to Tolstoy,
which he esteemed above his relationship to Dostoevsky. See Anna Dostoevsky’s
Reminiscences 290–91.
67 Shestov suggests that “all the ordeals that Dostoevsky underwent in Siberia

were trivial in comparison with the horrible necessity of bowing down before convicts”
(211). Certainly it is doubtful that even Nietzsche would have found that necessity
less harrowing, had it been his fate to experience it also—all his enthusiasms for the
criminal’s strength and self-sufficiency notwithstanding (see, for example, Beyond
Good and Evil 154; 145).
68 Terras, Reading Dostoevsky 33.
69 Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead 140 (Chapter 8 of Part I: “Desperate Men:

Luka”).
70 All of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil can stand as an adumbration of this

one line from Dostoevsky. There he defines “audacity,” the first key to the free and
full pursuit of authenticity “beyond good and evil” (where nothing is no longer
sacred or profane) as a movement “to pull oneself up into existence by the hair,
out of the swamps of nothingness” (28).
Chapter 2

Existentialism and the

Disease of Nihilism
Now we begin to investigate the second theme: intensity as often fol-
lowing audacity, on the road to authenticity. A very short history of
existentialism is given to contextualize the true drama of Nietzsche’s
existentialist announcement of freedom in The Gay Science, with his
famous Madman’s speech on the “death of God.” A close exegesis of
this text is then provided, confirming the centrality of intensity as an
organizing Nietzschean principle. The argument then turns to include
Dostoevsky and his famous existentialist drama of alienation, Notes
From the Underground, which reflects so terribly on the misery of
freedom. Intensity in this Dostoevskian text is shown to be the con-
dition of the same anguished questioning as in the Nietzschean text,
ending in the same unbearable suspension. The chapter concludes with
a short meditation on the value of suffering for both Nietzsche and
Dostoevsky, here understood as the intense intervals that both men
needed to overcome in their own lives as much as the source that both
men acknowledged for the peculiar power and insight of their writing.

What is the meaning of life? Why must there be suffering in the world?
These are haunting, eternal questions that every human being is forced
to confront as soon as the nature of their mortality is revealed to them.
Wedded with the fact of birth is the fact of death, and this agonizing
truth has inspired all of human philosophy and religion to seek out
some larger meaning for our distress. Do we live and die in vain? What
awaits us on the other side of the grave? Since no one human being
can offer a complete answer that satisfies everyone, the pain of human
uncertainty is perhaps the one universal fact that defines the human
condition.
“Religion,” Martin Amis said, “is what we have constructed as a
way to cope with this void at the end of our lives because death by itself
is too complex, too final, and too frightening for us to contemplate.”1
Religion thus offers some explicit form of comfort against the unknown
(the fate of the human individual after death) by appealing to the
26 Against Nihilism

unknowable (the greatness and goodness of God). The promise of

revelation through faith may not be a certain enough form of knowledge,
but it is an appeal to divine clemency that fundamentally recognizes
(and purportedly rewards) the frailty of man in relation to God.
Then there is the philosophy of existentialism, which Albert Camus
defined in terms of “the absurd man.” This man “demands of himself. . .
to live solely with what he knows, to accommodate himself to what is,
and to bring in nothing that is not certain. He is told that nothing is.
But this at least is a certainty. And it is with this that he is concerned:
he wants to find out if it is possible to live without appeal.”2
Between these two points on the curve may be found Nietzsche
and Dostoevsky. They are equally precursors of the twentieth-century
existentialist movement as much as they are also throwbacks to a
practically medieval preoccupation with genuine religiosity. And in
the wake of their exile-criminal characters and their disruptions of all
sense of value and stability in society, both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky
confirmed that no single stable source of ultimate meaning exists
anymore, anywhere, for everyone. They defined this crisis as the absence
or “death of God.” They also recommended a clear plan of action in
the wake of this crisis, albeit for different reasons: Dostoevsky seemed
to favour the religious form of resolution while Nietzsche advocated
the existentialist one.

What Was Existentialism?

Defined in The Oxford Dictionary as “a philosophical theory emphasiz-

ing the existence of the individual as a free and responsible agent deter-
mining his own development,” existentialism involves both phenomenol-
ogy (the experience of the individual human being is paramount) and
ethics (freedom constitutes the ultimate value for the existentialists,
just as authenticity is the primary virtue).3
Since its heyday in the France of the 1940s, rising out of the ashes
of World War II to make fresh sense of the fascist heart of darkness,
existentialism is no longer the same idea with true moral force that
it once was. The urgency and intensity of its questioning has faded
with time, although its particular emphasis on individual freedom and
responsibility often still continues to reverberate. In her 1972 study
of Camus and Sartre: Crisis and Commitment, Germaine Brée writes
that

as late as 1944, Simone de Beauvoir could ask the philosopher

Gabriel Marcel, in all good faith, a question with a future:
“What is existentialism?” Today the question has been answered.
We have learned what existentialism is. Around the cradle of
the child Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche,
Bergson are now gathered. The Pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aris-
totle are its distant but recognizable relatives.4
 Existentialism and the Disease of Nihilism 27

In his introduction to his landmark 1975 study Existentialism from

Dostoevsky to Sartre, Walter Kaufmann provides an excellent working
definition of the term:

Existentialism is a timeless sensibility that can be discerned

here and there in the past; but it is only in recent times that it
has hardened into a sustained protest and preoccupation. [. . . ]
[R]eligion has always been existentialist: it has always insisted
that mere schools of thought and bodies of belief are not enough,
that too much of our thinking is remote from that which truly
matters, and that we must change our lives. It has always been
preoccupied with suffering, death, and dread, with care, guilt,
and despair. What is new is that this preoccupation has since
Kierkegaard entered philosophy as well as poetry and fiction,
severed from its earlier religious context.5

Aside from the new secular wrinkle, then, existentialism acquired a par-
ticular imaginative force that went beyond philosophy into literature.
Moreover, Kaufmann identifies the poetic quality of secular existential-
ism as “tragic. . . without, however, being pessimistic” because “even in
guilt and failure man can retain his integrity and defy the world.”6 This
qualified optimism owes its energy to what the indomitable Jean-Paul
Sartre (1905–1980) called existentialism’s essential humanism—not a
faith in God, but a faith in man instead. Unlike Kierkegaard, Sartre was
not perturbed by the removal of God from the existentialist equation:
“nothing,” Sartre claimed, “will be changed if God does not exist; we
shall re-discover the same norms of honesty, progress, and humanity,
and we shall have disposed of God as an out-of-date hypothesis which
will die away quietly of itself.”7
But perhaps most curiously, the existentialist condition of creating
individual identity and meaning out of the nothingness of an inhuman
universe is often compared to a kind of sickness from which none of us
can ever fully recover. The great Dane Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855),
often dubbed “the first existentialist” or “the father of existentialism,”
coined an unforgettable phrase for the angst-ridden experience of our
lonely existentialist reality with the title of his 1849 book The Sickness
unto Death (also known as “Despair”). Sartre continued this theme
with his own novel dramatizing the experience of existentialism called
La Nausée (Nausea, 1938). In between, Nietzsche anticipated Sartre in
Speech 13 (“The Convalescent”) of Thus Spoke Zarathustra when he
expressed Zarathustra’s “disgust with all existence. . . Nausea! Nausea!
Nausea!” The cumulative depressive effect from Kierkegaard to Sartre
may thus be briefly summarized as follows: “Starkly put, this is the
modern situation. God is dead. The everyday world is a lie. The self is
meaningless.”8 Stomach-turning stuff, indeed!
The definitive Bible of existentialism (if one could be said to exist)
was penned by Sartre in 1943 and titled L’Être et le néant (Being
28 Against Nihilism

and Nothingness). In France after 1945, the existentialists recognized

Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard as the Christian forerunners of their new
humanist ethic, just as they saw Nietzsche as their pagan ancestor.9
The influence of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky on French existentialist
thinking in particular has been well documented.10 But there is another
crucial aspect to what all these existentialists had in common, and it
is the striking fact that all of them lost their fathers early in life. Like
Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre, and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty were raised by widowed mothers.11 The rift left in the
universe by the early deaths of their fathers surely prepared the ground
for all of these men to turn to existentialism for answers.
The spectre of nihilism (or the fear that human existence is mean-
ingless, reducible to nothing) is what every existentialist is determined
to defeat. But confronting the “nothingness” of human life consciously
may well prove too difficult to sustain; Camus understood the existen-
tialist struggle as something lurking at the back of the mind that is
often sensed but seldom acted upon. Unlike Sartre, who insisted on
the individual going into open battle against the dissolving forces of
nihilism, Camus proposed the subtler image of “the man sentenced
to death,” with still some time and energy left to him to tackle the
question of meaning.12 Dostoevsky had developed an earlier variant
of this “theme of the condemned man, as an allegory of the human
condition,” specifically in his novel The Idiot,13 which Camus certainly
knew and integrated into his own thinking about the absurd.

The “Death of God” and the Advent of Nihilism:

Nietzsche’s Announcement of Freedom

The full force of our existentialist anguish as a species has probably

never been revealed more effectively than in the famous “madman”
passage in the middle of Book III (Section 125) of Nietzsche’s The
Gay Science. Here the awful extent of nihilism is unleashed as a potent
and irrevocable fact of human existence that we have willfully brought
on ourselves. The intensity of this revelation of nothingness, together
with our responsibility in creating it, still carries a strong punch: in
a very real sense, we are all still unmoored in the ontological space
that Nietzsche described here, just as Nietzsche himself came to eerily
embody his own creation as he too collapsed into madness not so long
after delivering his extended message to a similarly deaf audience.
The passage begins with an invitation for us to enter immediately
into a narrative situation:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the
bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried inces-
santly: “I seek God! I seek God!”—As many of those who did
not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked
 Existentialism and the Disease of Nihilism 29

much laughter. “Has he got lost?” asked one. “Did he lose his
way like a child?” asked another. “Or is he hiding? Is he afraid
of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Emigrated?”—Thus they yelled
and laughed.14

First, an ancient Greek reference point is useful here for showing

the larger and richer sense of the idea of madness with which the
classically-trained philologist Nietzsche was more than familiar. In
Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates declared that “madness comes from God,
whereas sober sense is merely human.” He went on to distinguish
“four kinds of divine madness” inspired by four separate divinities: the
prophetic from Apollo, the mystic from Dionysus, the poetic from
the Muses, and the erotic from Aphrodite. Of these four, Socrates
pronounced “the madness of the lover. . . the best.”15 Knowing Nietzsche
as one already does from The Birth of Tragedy onwards, however, one
can safely surmise that Nietzsche probably preferred the Dionysian
form of madness over the others. After all, Dionysus was “‘the liberator’
[who] offered freedom. . . the god who. . . enables you for a short time
to stop being yourself and thereby sets you free. [. . . ] The aim of his
cult was ecstasis—which. . . could mean anything from ‘taking you
out of yourself’ to a profound alteration of character.”16 The beauty
of Nietzsche’s madman characterization here is how he suggests at
least three forms of divine madness simultaneously, since he appears
“possessed” with a message he is driven to discharge with poetic power,
prophetic authority, and mystic assurance.
Second, Nietzsche’s detail of lighting a lamp during the day has
another ancient Greek echo: the philosopher and most famous of the
Cynics named Diogenes (400–325 BCE) was said to have gone out
looking for an honest man with a torch in the daytime, and the extra
light was supposed to emphasize the difficulty of his coming across
such a rare being. Since Diogenes lived in Athens in extreme poverty
and asceticism, showing by his example the need for self-sufficiency
and natural, uninhibited behaviour, the parallel between Diogenes and
Nietzsche is certainly not accidental.17 Twice later on in the same
madman monologue, Nietzsche repeats this Diogenes-lamp motif as
a means of reinforcing the idea of the scarcity of honesty and the
preponderance of darkness in his own time, culminating in a gesture of
frustration (breaking the lamp and extinguishing the light): no one is
honest enough yet to digest the madman’s news, which was broadcast
prematurely.18
Now the passage continues with an impassioned speech from the
madman that silences all the hecklers and keeps them spellbound. In
fact, his courage and eloquence in the face of their scorn is no longer
laughable but impressive, as if his madness is now suddenly transformed
(perhaps inspired by some god) to chasten and instruct all his godless
listeners around him.
30 Against Nihilism

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with
his eyes.19 “Whither is God?” he cried. “I will tell you. We have
killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did
we do this?”20

The new authority of his voice only continues to build and ring out from
here. His inclusion of himself in this crime, the ultimate murder of which
all humans are capable, underlines the horror for his listeners because
he is not only castigating them but also, painfully and poignantly,
himself.21 The guilt is universally shared and universally inescapable.
After he names the terrible fact of God’s absence, he develops a string
of no less than sixteen questions as a way of trying to understand both
the origins and the consequences of this act for all of us:

How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to

wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we
unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now?
Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plung-
ing continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions?
Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an
infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has
it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?
Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear
nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying
God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition?

What is transpiring here is his naming into existence 22 the reality of

our existentialist situation:

We are born biological beings but we must become existential

individuals by accepting responsibility for our actions. [. . . ] Many
people never do acknowledge such responsibility but rather flee
their existential individuality into the comfort of the faceless
crowd.23

This is precisely what the madman does not permit his listeners to do:
melt back into the crowd’s indifference to the problem and denial of
their responsibility for it. Indeed, we as readers of this text are forced
into the uncomfortable situation of facing our individual and collective
collusion in the killing of the idea of God within us.
The overarching point of the madman’s speech is not just a matter
of the Judaeo-Christian conception of God becoming increasingly irrel-
evant to the modern secular western world, as many commentators are
content to suggest. For example, Thomas Flynn equates Nietzsche’s
announcement of “the ‘death of God’. . . with the increasing irrelevance
of the idea of the Judaeo-Christian God,” nothing more.24 Similarly,
Henry Edmundson identifies “the ‘death of God’” simply with “the
waning authority of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.”25 Even a Nietzsche
 Existentialism and the Disease of Nihilism 31

scholar like Peter Frizsche will inexplicably insist on only the positive
outcomes of such an announcement, thereby completely disregarding
all the tragic depths so integral to the character of all of Nietzsche’s
writings. “He wants readers to see themselves as murderers [of God],”
Fritzsche says of Nietzsche, “because such a recognition would enable
them to see themselves as a people. . . who are strong and creative
and have taken control of every aspect of their lives. . . [. . . ] so for
Nietzsche the death of God is always a gain, not a loss.”26 It would
therefore seem that the negative doctrine of nihilism is still resisted
by the sunny American sensibility on display in these three separate
contemporary scholars in the United States.
The Greek scholar Christos Yannaras is much closer to revealing
the full dimensions of the nihilist problem when he observes that “the
‘death of God,’ the testimony to his absence, is a fact only for those
who have not given up seeking him” because the concept of God is
immeasurably rich and large: “‘God is the name for the [whole] realm
of [human] ideas and ideals,” as Martin Heidegger once said, so his
absence points to much more than just “the unprecedented fact in
human history of religious apathy on the part of the masses.”27 The
true subject at the heart of Nietzsche’s madman’s speech is thus the
spectre of nihilism rising up in the wake of God’s absence, or the total
rejection of all sense of any binding or transcendent value. This is
why his series of rhetorical questions invoke in so many images the
nothingness left in the place of God: first in its sheer enormity of scale
(“the sea” and “the entire horizon” are equally eliminated with this
one murder, together with the earth now reeling through an infinite
nothing since it was “unchained from its sun”); then in our stubborn
obliviousness to the erasure of all meaning with this one act (which is
why our senses have now become duller: we cannot “feel the breath of
empty space” anymore with its new coldness and new darkness—nor
can we see, hear, or smell as sharply as before, because it is all of a
piece with our desire for denial). We should be able to register this
enormous change simply and directly with our eyes and ears and noses,
but we won’t. “Gods, too, decompose,” the madman reminds us—and
that decay of decomposition will inevitably follow into other human
domains as well.28 “God is dead,” he repeats. “God remains dead. And
we have killed him.”
The madman’s monologue next launches into another stream of
speculative questions about our new Godless future:

How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?

What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet
owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this
blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?29
What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have
to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?
Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of
32 Against Nihilism

it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born
after us—for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher
history than all history hitherto.

It is the last question in this series that is the most pivotal one, since it
admits that the human need for value still persists, even (or especially)
in this terrible new fact of moral freefall. And yet the question of
whether or not man can rise to the occasion and fill these impossibly
huge shoes with all his meagre passions and limitations—does it not
present a picture that is futile and ridiculous? It may well be that, on
the one hand, “for Nietzsche to kill God is to become god oneself; it is
to realize on this earth the eternal life of which the Gospel speaks.”30
On the other hand, Nietzsche is deliberately borrowing the voice of
a madman here—so for a clinician more interested in literal real-life
applications, to kill God may also indicate some megalomania or “moral
insanity” for the rest of us.31
When the madman stops speaking, we see the effect of his rhetoric
on his audience:

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners;
and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment.
At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into
pieces and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my
time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still
wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and
thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds,
though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed
is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and
yet they have done it themselves.” 32

This sorrowful conclusion preserves an incantational force of repetition

as it compares a cosmic sense of power at a distance (stars, lightning,
thunder) with a psychological sense of individual power up close (doing
it [to] themselves). But the best poetic effect is still reserved for the
last:

It has been related further that on the same day the madman
forced his way into several churches and there struck up his
requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said
always to have replied nothing but: “What after all are these
churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchres of God?”

The very word “sepulchre” is redolent with meaning in both ancient

Greek and early Christian terms, both of which Nietzsche knew in-
timately. Plato called the human body “the walking sepulchre. . . to
which we are bound like an oyster to its shell.”33 In Matthew 23:27,
“Christ mocked at the ‘whited sepulchres’ and fixed that phrase for-
ever,”34 since He saw the sepulchre as a metaphor for human hypocrisy:
 Existentialism and the Disease of Nihilism 33

outwardly it may appear beautiful, but inwardly it is full of dead bones

and corruption. Another way of interpreting the madman’s last ques-
tion could thus be, “Are hymn-singing hypocrites the only churchgoers
left now?” The madman’s insistence on this new refrain (that he “is said
always to have replied” when asked what he was doing, “forcing his way
into several churches”) underlines the tragic but heroic quality of his
persistence. No one else is aware of the full import of his announcement,
since it does not even excite a single comment. Similarly, no one else is
mourning the result of the announcement, since the madman conducts
his memorial services in solitude. There is nothing left to do or say
beyond this point: the madman has delivered his message, but no one
is mad enough to join him in understanding it.
All of Book III of The Gay Science is an argument developing
this “death of God” theme. The opening paragraph (Section 108, “New
Struggles”) sets the tone and actually announces “God is dead” first,
long before the madman does. Nietzsche refers here to the custom
of projecting the Buddha’s huge shadow in a cave for centuries after
the Buddha’s death, as a way of perpetuating his memory and his
religious following. Nietzsche then comments that, since the Buddhist
god’s death, “there may still be caves for thousands of years in which
his shadow will be shown—and we—we still have to vanquish his
shadow, too.”35 As a means of liberating ourselves from the shadow
and illusion, Nietzsche advocates towards the end of Book III (Section
270) the cultivation of a brave new existentialist freedom of conscience:
“You shall become the person you are.”36 Finally, Nietzsche calls his
own statement “‘God is dead’. . . the greatest recent event. . . [that] is
already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.” Moreover,

We philosophers and “free spirits” feel, when we hear the news

that “the old god is dead,” as if. . . the horizon appears free to
us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships
may venture out again. . . to face any danger; all the daring of
the lover of knowledge is permitted again; perhaps there has
never yet been such an “open sea.”37

This celebration of phoenix-like possibility—this “fearless” embrace of

“joyful wisdom” forged in the absence of God—this is the poetic and
individual solution, the intense and dizzying invitation, that Nietzsche
proposes as a way out of the nihilistic morass. The process may indeed
require “a little intoxication and madness”38 but the aim is a healing
of the existentialist wound, by existentialist means. As the inheritors
of Nietzsche’s writings today, any of us can easily

come to reject the strict moral categories of religious or philo-

sophical tradition [and] end up rejecting any ultimate values
at all, a position called “nihilism.” But those [of us], on the
contrary, who feel the joy of existence and assume its gratuity
34 Against Nihilism

(that is, those who joyfully embrace their contingency). . . will

weather the nihilistic storm brought on by Nietzsche’s ‘death of
God.’39

As for Dostoevsky, existentialism per se will not satisfy him as an

answer to the problem of Nietzschean moral freefall. If God is still alive,
then everything is still meaningful—but if God is dead, then everything
is thrown into moral question. “Dostoevsky resembled Nietzsche both
in being deeply religious by temperament and in being apprehensive
about the consequences of nihilism.”40 However, there may not even
be any reason for calling Dostoevsky an existentialist at all—except
for the fact that he independently anticipated and explored every post-
Christian theme that Nietzsche ever wrote. In the works of Nietzsche
that were translated and disseminated in Russia in the first decade of
the twentieth century, “Russian philosophers heard the tragic cry of a
human soul crucified in a world devoid of God. The intensity of this cry,
audible even earlier in the works of Dostoevsky, helped them to become
aware of the existence of the human soul.”41 The Russian sympathy
for Nietzsche appearing to crucify himself in the madman’s speech and
elsewhere is indeed ironic, given all the energy that Nietzsche directed
against Christianity; it was only at the very end of his lucid life that
Nietzsche signed three of his last letters “The Crucified.”
Another reason for counting Dostoevsky among the existentialists
is his authorship of Notes from the Underground, which the esteemed
Walter Kaufmann considers “the best overture for existentialism ever
written.”42 Dostoevsky is thus best understood as a precursor to all
the secular modern-day existentialists who followed him.

The Underground Man and the Misery of Freedom:

Dostoevsky’s Drama of Alienation

Zapiski iz podpol’ia (Notes from the Underground, 1864) represented a

turning point in Dostoevsky’s writing. With this strange small book,
Dostoevsky exponentially increased his powers of narrative mastery and
completely inhabited the nineteenth-century idea of existentialism that
only Kierkegaard had intimated before him.43 As with Nietzsche, we
are invited to eavesdrop on another monologue—but the voice in this
case is anything but mad: now the impassioned flood of words belongs
to a lonely, embittered, and long unemployed clerk who describes his
life as “forty years [spent] in a dark cellar.” Like Nietzsche’s madman,
he is nameless; but unlike Nietzsche’s madman, he is a completely
unreliable narrator. Instead of the madman’s gravitas, the Underground
Man indulges in pathos. Nevertheless, both characters draw the same
conclusion: the desert of human existence is revealed as something
humans have consciously “done [to] themselves.”
 Existentialism and the Disease of Nihilism 35

In Part I (“Underground”), the opening words of the anonymous

Underground Man are justifiably famous for their pitch-perfect setting
of the tone for the remainder of the text: “I am a sick man. . . I am
a spiteful man. No, I am not a pleasant man at all. I believe there
is something wrong with my liver.”44 Immediately the registers of
seething and sickly resentment are sounded, which the character will
continually cherish as much as his own life. His next signature statement
soon follows, which explains why he sees himself as suffering from a
particular illness: “I assure you, gentlemen, that to be too acutely
conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease.”45
Of what is this man overabundantly aware, then, that tortures him
so? He tells us (his wholly imaginary audience, since “such confessions
which I am now about to make are not printed, nor given to other people
to read”46 ) that a whole host of ideas and impressions assail and oppress
him. But he constantly undermines everything he says, thus making
the truth of his confession uncertain. Although the Underground Man
claims that the whole purpose of writing his “notes” is “to see whether
I can be absolutely frank with myself and not be afraid of the whole
truth,”47 this text is a veritable tissue of evasions and duplicities. Lying
has become so second-nature to him that he could not stop lying even
if he tried: “I assure you most solemnly, gentlemen, that there is not a
word I’ve just written I believe in! What I mean is that perhaps I do
believe, but at the same time I cannot help feeling and suspecting for
some unknown reason that I’m lying like a cobbler.”48 Why, then, is
the Underground Man such an inveterate liar? And what, if anything,
is the reader supposed to believe?
One clue to Dostoevsky’s purpose in creating such a character can
be found in the very nakedness of the Underground Man’s anguish.
Although the details of his statements may conflict or contradict
each other, his general cynicism, misanthropy, and malignant inertia
are all too clear. He suffers alternately from delusions of grandeur
(“I have always considered myself cleverer than anyone else in the
world”49 ), self-defeatism (“an intelligent man cannot possibly become
anything in particular [because] only a fool succeeds in becoming
anything”50 ), and masochism (“the feeling of delight was there just
because I was so intensely aware of my own degradation”51 ). But
it is his garrulousness that gives away the full scope of his misery:
it matters little what is its name or cause. What emerges from the
Underground Man’s speech most resoundingly is his despair. In this
sense, the Underground Man is Everyman and his name is Legion
because “the basic experience of everyone is the experience of human
limitation. . . a poverty fundamental to man.”52
All of the Underground Man’s sufferings reinforce each other,
so his current miserable stalemate is the result of his circular logic
(“the whole purposelessness of your pain. . . is so humiliating to your
consciousness”—because “be[ing] acutely conscious of the hopelessness
36 Against Nihilism

of your position [is]. . . in accordance with the normal and fundamental

laws of intensified consciousness”).53 There is nowhere for him to go,
and no intellectual point in his even trying. Long before Sartre said
there was “no exit” from our existentialist situation,54 Dostoevsky’s
Underground Man felt the full futility of his experience of existentialist
freedom. “What freedom will there be left to me,” he asks, “especially if
I happen to be a scholar and have taken my degree at a university?”55
In other words: freedom for what, if nothing is worth pursuing? The
Underground Man confronts head-on the existentialist spectre of ni-
hilism, or the fear that human existence is meaningless. More than that:
he takes the threat of nihilism further and actually ingests it, becoming
its very incarnation. He therefore very naturally concludes that human
freedom is good for exactly nothing (even if it is all humans ultimately
have):

Man has always and everywhere—whoever he may be—preferred

to do as he chose, and not in the least as his reason or advantage
dictated. [. . . ] All man wants is an absolutely free choice, however
dear that freedom may cost him and wherever it may lead him.
Well, of course, if it is a matter of choice, then the devil only
knows . . . 56

What price did the Underground Man pay for his own sovereign but
sterile freedom of choice? It would seem that he traded all possibility
of human companionship in exchange for it, as told in the whole of
Part II (“À Propos of the Wet Snow”: no longer a monologue but
a series of narratives recounting the Underground Man’s singularly
aborted relationships to other people). He claims to prefer his personal
perverted style of reasoning to everything else (“Is the world to go
to rack and ruin or am I to have my cup of tea? Well, so far as I’m
concerned, blow up the world so long as I can have my cup of tea”).57
No one, if they are honest with themselves, actually feels any differently
because “we have all lost touch with life, we are all cripples, every one of
us—more or less.”58 Such is the true state of human nature, according
to the Underground Man. What possible joy or occupation is thus left
to him, other than skewering himself on his own cleverness (that is, his
own hyperawareness of his existential insignificance)? Indeed, Sartre
created nothing new with his Roquentin, choking with disgust at the
useless material excess of the universe in La Nausée: he is merely the
flip side of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man in these Notes, choking
on his own bile of rage and impotence against the indifferent human
universe from which he has abdicated himself.59
Nevertheless, the Underground Man wants human acknowledgment,
even human companionship: he cannot simply ignore human society.
Indeed, the salt continually rubbed into his existentialist wound comes
from how much he feels others are ignoring him. Whether real or
imagined, the affronts to his dignity that he recounts in Part II are
 Existentialism and the Disease of Nihilism 37

increasingly unbearable to him because he realizes more and more

acutely that he is not only “treated like a fly” but actually amounts,
in social terms, to nothing more than “an obscene fly. . . a fly that
was always making way for everyone, a fly insulted and humiliated by
everyone.”60 Small wonder, then, that he wants to “crush” others as
often as he himself feels “crushed” (a word which recurs in Part II with
obsessive frequency, at least a dozen times). By the time he arrives at
his last painful memory of social disgrace, he remembers and recounts
it as the worst moment of all because it still “lies like a crime on his
conscience” even fifteen years afterwards. This is when shortly before
meeting the young prostitute Liza, he is stung beyond endurance by a
public humiliation he once again absurdly and openly courted: “No one
could have gone out of his way to degrade himself more shamelessly,
and I fully realized it, fully, and yet I went on. . . I stood as though
spat upon.”61 He is now more than ready to lash back.
And yet—this is the same man who poignantly cries out:

Why then am I made with such desires? Surely, I have not been
made for the sole purpose of drawing the conclusion that the
way I am made is a piece of rank deceit? Can this be the sole
purpose? I don’t believe it.62

Deceit rears its head again, like all the compulsive lying that this
man indulged in before: what is the truth now, outside himself, the
Underground Man wants to know? Socially and existentially invisible
for so long now, the Underground Man is suddenly surprised by Liza
seeing him—not as a fly or as a mouse, but as another vulnerable and
suffering human being. This same man—breaking down in the presence
of a genuinely sympathetic soul at last, “sobbing as I had never in
my life sobbed before”—stammers out between his tears, “They—they
won’t let me—I—I can’t be good!”63 What is the meaning of his despair
now? Has it not qualitatively changed from the narrow stagnation and
self-deception of self-pity before?
At this critical moment, it seems the Underground Man has a truly
free choice that is open to him: finally, for once, he can embrace dignity
instead of degradation. He can experience existential renewal. With the
possibility of achieving self-respect (or dignity) comes the possibility of
authenticity, a meaningful form of freedom that anyone can act upon.
But the problem is that he has always chosen the opposite: he identifies
with humiliation (or degradation) because, for all its dissatisfactions,
it has been his one avenue to at least some form of self-worth. Even an
exaggerated sense of worthlessness is still better than nothing.

Either to be a hero or to grovel in the mud—there was nothing

in between. That was my ruin, for when I was in the mud I
comforted myself with the thought that at other times I was
a hero, and the hero was a cloak for the mud: for an ordinary
38 Against Nihilism

man it was shameful to defile himself, but a hero was too lofty
to be utterly defiled, and so he might defile himself.64

This has been the Underground Man’s experience: either mockery or

dismissal. “I have no self-respect,” he says—and in self-defence he
immediately adds, “But can a man [any man at all] of acute sensibility
respect himself at all?”65
Notes from the Underground thus ends as it begins: the opportunity
for connection to another human being is lost, and the Underground
Man remains in his “dark cellar” or “corner.” According to him, only
his way of life is the authentic way—“carrying the underground in his
soul”—because it is self-consciously tragic. He would not want his life
to be any different and neither, he suggests, should you!
But the censor altered much of the content of the story before it
went to press, so we can never know how much of the final published
version departed from Dostoevsky’s original manuscript. In his letters
Dostoevsky complained about the perversity of the censor who “passed
everything in the story that was blasphemous and destroyed the reso-
lution at the end because it was religious.”66 In lieu of the lost ending
to this story, then, which Dostoevsky intended but was thwarted from
preserving, another text that survives in its entirety from this same
period can shed light on Dostoevsky’s relationship to his own creation
of the Underground Man.
One month after the publication of Part I of Notes from the Un-
derground, Dostoevsky’s first wife Maria (Masha) Dmitrievna Isaeva
died of a long struggle with tuberculosis. Their seven years of marriage
had not been happy; Dostoevsky had sought solace in the adulterous
arms of Polina Suslova (an experience he translated into his 1866 story
The Gambler). Now Dostoevsky was a widower, and as he kept vigil at
his dead wife’s bedside before her burial, he wrote down a remarkable
series of private reflections in a notebook. These reflections have come
to be known simply as “Keeping Vigil Over Masha,” and Dostoevsky’s
opening three sentences convey all the intensity of religious existential-
ist questioning as few other sentences can: “16 April. Masha is lying
on the table. Will Masha and I see each other again?”67
The connection between Dostoevsky and his character of the Un-
derground Man emerges as Dostoevsky recognizes and records his own
feelings of degradation in relation to his dead wife. Although it is
couched in an abstract theological discussion, Dostoevsky’s guilt and
hope both clearly come through in this document. In his own eyes, he
failed her contemptibly—but according to the tenets of his faith, his
penitence should open the door to their mutual forgiveness.
In the course of several pages, Dostoevsky interrogates the meaning
of separate human ego-identities (“The I is an obstacle”), the sacra-
ment of marriage as an imperfect reflection of the ideal union of the
bridegroom Christ and His bride, and the meaning of divine nature
 Existentialism and the Disease of Nihilism 39

(“The nature of God is directly opposite to the nature of man”). Twice

he reflects on the practical “impossibility” of the Christian command-
ment to love others as oneself, because the ideal of a future mystical
state of oneness (non-differentiation from God or others) is radically
removed from the present “real time” state of individual strife and
alienation on earth. (Dostoevsky’s own strained relationship to his
spouse surely prompted this observation.) Nevertheless, he maintains
that “the law of our ideal (love everything as yourself)” is not only
possible but universally binding, since “the law of striving for an ideal”
is accessible to everyone: it only requires us to “sacrifice, through love,
our I to people or to another being.” (He and Masha, Dostoevsky notes,
failed to sacrifice enough of themselves to each other while she was
alive.) When we choose not to sacrifice or strive for anything through
love (like the Underground Man), then we “feel suffering.” (Suffering is
the price the Underground Man is willing to pay for his freedom, even
if it is sterile.) This sadder and self-enclosed path taken by “the mate-
rialists, the general inertia and mechanism of matter, means death.” In
other words: existentialism is a nihilism without issue, for Dostoevsky,
because it does not offer enough of a conduit outside of the prison
house of the self, back towards the “true philosophy” of “life without
end.”
For a religious sensibility such as Dostoevsky’s, what existentialism
fails to take into sufficient account is the role of mystery in man’s
abjection. Our position on this earth, for example, can be appreciated
as a mystery; the concrete world of sense experience is another mystery;
and freedom is perhaps the greatest mystery of all because “freedom
cannot be conceived simply. . . free will does not mean one will, but
many wills conflicting in one man.”68 This recalls the Underground
Man’s question: “Why am I made [this way,] with such desires?” The
very terms of the question demand satisfaction from some divine quarter
of intention, even if divinity is mute or remote or no longer believable.
And this kind of human question will never go away.
“Dostoyevsky once wrote ‘If God did not exist, everything would
be permitted’; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point.”69
But such a negation is not tenable, not even in purely human terms.
Dostoevsky’s Underground Man cannot ultimately tolerate such a
wasteland any more than Nietzsche’s madman can. The Dostoevskian
difference lies in the acknowledgment of human failure as a weakness
to be atoned for, not a strength to be celebrated. And the idea(l) of
God is hardly a default: for Dostoevsky “the main question,” as he put
it once in a letter to a friend, “. . . that very question with which I have
consciously and unconsciously tormented myself all through my life,”
is first and foremost “the existence of God.”70 More absorbing than
the existence of man, Dostoevsky finds the question mark of God’s
existence in relation to man the true existentialist subject—for the
inclusion of God (however tenuous or unproven an idea) still rescues
man from the dead end of materialism.
40 Against Nihilism

Illness as Insight: The Value of Suffering

As “brothers in spirit, tragically grotesque companions in misfortune,

in spite of fundamental differences in heredity and tradition,” both
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky—“the two great invalids”—were equally
obsessed with both the idea and the experience of “disease as a means
to knowledge.”71 Both men used their own illnesses as “an instrument
of perception” in their writings, so in this crucial aspect “the com-
parison [between them] is justified.”72 Unlike most people, they felt
indebted to their infirmities for enlarging their angle of creative vision,
welcoming their suffering instead of resenting it. Convalescence was
directly translated into creativity.
Nietzsche saw his severe and painfully debilitating illness “which
began in his thirty-second year and long made him a recluse” as the
source of his mental power: “this illness made a philosopher of him
in a strict sense.”73 A kind of apprenticeship to suffering enabled him
to leave his young and still unformed personality behind in exchange
for the breadth and depth of maturity. This included shedding the
dominant influence of the famous German composer Richard Wagner,
whom Nietzsche called “merely one of my sicknesses” survived.74 In a
letter to Georg Brandes, Nietzsche confided that “my illness has been
of the greatest use to me: it has released me, it has restored to me the
courage to be myself. . . .”75
Dostoevsky expressed a similar gratitude for his epilepsy, since he
understood it to vouchsafe him a sudden mystic glimpse of some pow-
erful transcendence. “While he was serving his exile in Semipalatinsk,”
Kenneth Lantz writes, “Dostoevsky had epileptic seizures every three
months,” and these fits “continued for the rest of his life. By Dosto-
evsky’s own calculation, made in 1870, he had suffered seizures on
average every three weeks since the age of twenty-six.”76 In The Idiot,
Prince Myshkin acknowledged how intensely desirable the strange ex-
perience was for him of wholeness and harmony before the actual fit
began:

. . . there was a moment or two in his epileptic condition almost

before the fit itself (if it occurred during his waking hours) when
suddenly amid the sadness, spiritual darkness and depression,
his brain seemed to catch fire at brief moments, and with an
extraordinary momentum his vital forces were strained to the
utmost all at once. His sensation of being alive and his aware-
ness increased tenfold at those moments which flashed by like
lightning. His mind and heart were flooded by a dazzling light.
All his agitation, all his doubts and worries, seemed composed
in a twinkling, culminating in a great calm, full of serene and
harmonious joy and hope, full of understanding and the knowl-
edge of the final cause. [. . . ] “What if it is a disease?” he decided
at last. [. . . ] If in that second—that is to say, at the last con-
scious moment before the fit—he had time to say to himself,
 Existentialism and the Disease of Nihilism 41

consciously and clearly, “Yes, I could give my whole life for this
moment,” then this moment by itself was, of course, worth the
whole of life.77

In Evelyn Underhill’s magisterial 1911 study called Mysticism, the vi-

sionary experience preceding the epileptic fit that Dostoevsky described
represents a definite phase of the mystical life known as “illumination.”
The role of pain in this expansion of mystical consciousness is im-
portant, Underhill claims, because it provides a form of purification
that prepares the human frame for receiving mystical insight. For this
reason, the pain and effort of “purgation” is the phase that necessarily
precedes “illumination.”78

Pain, then, which plunges like a sword through creation, leaving

on the one side cringing and degraded animals and on the
other side heroes and saints, is one of those facts of universal
experience which are peculiarly intractable from the point of
view of a merely materialistic philosophy.79

The mystery of human pain thus simultaneously offers the lowest

possible form of degradation (“cringing and degraded animals”) and
the highest possible form of exaltation (“heroes and saints”). The
question is how one chooses to respond to it.
Nietzsche’s and Dostoevsky’s agreement on the paradoxical eleva-
tion to be found in the midst of being brought low is related to this
question of “the deliberate embrace of active suffering.” Illness is a
preparation for transcendence, and the more completely and consciously
one surrenders to one’s affliction (which is irrational and arbitrary,
deriving as it does from some larger unknown source), the more possi-
ble one’s capacity for mystical insight becomes. Revelations descend
unbidden for the person prepared to accept and undergo “a pruning of
the human plant” or increasing degrees of deprivation, in order to “kill
the human instinct for personal happiness;” a timebound quantity is
thus exchanged for the lucid bliss of pure union with God (the true
and timeless goal of the mystic quest).80 This is why Prince Myshkin
concludes his reflections on the value of his visions as intimating the
reality of God’s transcendence of time: “At that moment [before the fit]
the extraordinary saying that ‘there shall be time no longer’ becomes,
somehow, comprehensible to me.”81 The Russian writer and religious
philosopher Dmitri Merezhkovsky identified Nietzsche’s madness and
Dostoevsky’s epilepsy (“the holy sickness”) as part of the same pain of
birth, a travail of suffering that will lead to the ultimate liberation of
the human spirit.82
Intensity is a reflection and extension of the existentialist feeling of
crisis. It offers a way to assuage our existentialist ache (“the more you
do not know, the worse the ache”83 ). It is a blind but definite response.
Like descending into the extreme limit situation of the suffering body
42 Against Nihilism

during illness, the point is not to recover but to endure—and to see—

more than one would normally if one were merely healthy. Suffering is a
stripping away and emptying of the self that enables new vision, which
is what both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky valued as an experience and
sought to translate into their art. “For to live intensely is to triumph
over time in opening up to eternity.” (“Car vivre intensément, c’est
triompher du temps tout en s’ouvrant à l’éternité.”)84

Notes
1 Argentine television broadcast of “26 Personas para salvar el mundo,” inter-

views by Jorge Lanata. Encuentro Channel, January 12, 2012.

2 The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York:

Random House, 1955) 39. Emphases in the original.

3 Thomas R. Flynn, Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 2006) 79.

4 New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc.: 33.
5 Toronto: Penguin Books Canada Ltd., 12; 49–50.
6 Ibid., 47.
7 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet (London:

Methuen, 1980): 33.

8 Jeffrey Reid, Great Philosophers: A Brief Story of the Self and Its Worlds

(Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2009) 111.

9 Terras, “Dostoevsky,” in Handbook of Russian Literature, op. cit., 107.
10 For example, Sartre’s play Les Mouches (The Flies) is directly inspired by

Nietzsche while Camus wrote “Essay on Music” in response to Nietzsche’s The Birth
of Tragedy (see Jacob Golomb’s In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to
Camus (New York: Routledge, 1995). Sartre and Camus also examined the impact
of Dostoevsky in their essays (What is Literature? and The Myth of Sisyphus).
11 Kierkegaard had a devastating family history: he lost not only both his parents

at a young age, but all of his several siblings as well (save one). Dostoevsky’s
mother and father died (the latter violently, murdered by the serfs on the family
estate) when Dostoevsky was sixteen and eighteen respectively. Nietzsche’s father
died of what physicians at the time called “softening of the brain” when Nietzsche
was only four; not long afterwards Nietzsche’s only brother Josef also died.
12 Brée, Camus and Sartre, 199. The emphasis on a conscious confrontation of

nothingness is Brée’s.
13 Victor Terras, Reading Dostoevsky, op. cit., 75–76.
14 Nietzsche knows his Old Testament: the tone of the crowd’s derision here is

identical to the mocking tone of the prophet Elijah, in one of the most memorable
showdowns between deities ever recorded in all of literature. When the priests call
on the name of Ba’al from morning until noon but receive no answer, it is Elijah’s
turn to call on Jehovah and win the contest. Elijah’s comment on the absence of
divine competition is cutting: “Either he [Ba’al] is musing, or he has gone aside,
or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.” See I Kings
20:27.
All citations of Section 125 from Book III are drawn from Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Gay Science with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. & ed.
Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House Inc., 1974) 181–82. An alternative
translation of the title that sounds closer to the German original (Die fröhliche
Wissenschaft) is The Joyful Wisdom.
15 Plato, Phaedrus and the Seventh and Eighth Letters, trans. Walter Hamilton

(Markham: Penguin Books Canada Ltd., 1988) 47; 81. Phaedrus was composed
between 411 and 404 BCE.
 Existentialism and the Disease of Nihilism 43

16 See E.R. Dodds’ magnificent study The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1951) 76; 77; emphases in the original.

17 Walter Kaufmann notes that “unlike many of his readers, Nietzsche never

loses sight of the fact that he himself was an ascetic” (see The Gay Science [a.k.a.
The Joyful Wisdom] and his note on page 258).
18 “Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?” is one repetition; “at last

he threw his lantern on the ground and it broke into pieces and went out” is the
other repetition.
19 This hypnotic effect commanding respect is exactly like Samuel Taylor Co-

leridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), whose narrator resorts to “holding. . .
with his glittering eye” the wedding guest on his way to lighter entertainment, thus
overpowering him with his intense stare and urgent voice, until he has finished
telling his whole terrible story in one fell swoop.
20 Emphases in the original.
21 This is certainly a deliberate departure on Nietzsche’s part from the style of

the Old Testament prophets, who perfected the art of one-sided harangue as much
as they no doubt despaired of anyone listening to them in time (not for nothing does
jeremiad or “tiresome diatribe” derive from the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah,
for example). Nietzsche appreciated the drama of the Old Testament, but perhaps
only as a foil for his distaste for the New Testament. If anything, Nietzsche is again
emulating the ancient Greeks and their understanding of human tragedy as both
intensely, individually felt (by the protagonist on stage) and intensely, collectively
discharged (by the audience as katharsis). Sophocles’ Oedipus is one of the most
powerful examples of this dramatic movement to both emphasize the acute solitude
of the suffering hero (especially at the height of his agony, when the full extent of
his crime is revealed to him) and the acute empathy of the audience alongside him
(which is powerless to avert the tragedy).
22 Part of the successful rhetorical effect of this text is surely due to Nietzsche’s

conscious imitation of Adam in Genesis, naming the animals for the first time
and thus bringing them into existence in humanly intelligible terms: in a similar
movement, his madman both conjures and contains the threat of nihilism by
expressing it, for the first time, in words. The Protestant emphasis on the word is
part of Nietzsche’s unshakeable heritage, since he was descended from Lutheran
pastors on both sides of the family.
23 Flynn, Existentialism, ii (“Preface”).
24 Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction, 42.
25 See his study Flannery O’Connor’s Response to Nihilism (Lanham, MD:

Lexinton Books, 2002) 26.

26 See his slim and unsatisfying volume Nietzsche and the Death of God (Boston:

Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2007) 9.

27 See his illuminating study On the Absence and Unknowability of God, ed.

Andrew Louth and trans. Haralambos Ventis (London: T & T Clark International,
2005) 50; 42.
28 As Christos Yannaras put it in his chapter “Nihilism as a Presupposition

of the Absence and Unknowability of God,” “The proclamation of the ‘death of

God’. . . makes clear the whole theological development of western Christianity. . .
Intellectual certainty [trumps] ecclesial experience. . . Rationalism [overcomes]
scholasticism. . . [which in turn gives rise to] an empiricism centered on the individual
[. . . ] the ‘open door’ at which nihilism appears” (46). Nietzsche never relinquished
the terrible thought of nihilism and its proximity. The opening line of his last book
Der Wille zur Macht (The Will to Power) declares “He [the personification of
nihilism], more alarming than the visitors, stands outside the door. . . .”
29 Nietzsche’s invocation of the futility of forgiveness here echoes the indelible

guilt of Lady Macbeth (the accessory to her husband’s homicides)—but even more
pertinently, this detail also recalls the eternal guilt of Pontius Pilate (the accessory
to the mob’s clamouring for Christ’s execution).
30 Albert Camus, “Absurd Creation,” in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays,

trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Random House, 1955) 80.

44 Against Nihilism

31 Max Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993) 469.

He devotes a whole (very unflattering) chapter to Nietzsche in this famous and

influential 1892 book. Among other inflammatory but entertaining things, Nordau
advanced the claim that neurosis may be a necessary precondition of art (well
before Freud) but that his own fin-de-siècle Zeitgeist was lamentably overloaded
with artists of the neurotic type.
32 Emphases in the original.
33 Phaedrus, 57.
34 This is Oscar Wilde’s opinion from “De Profundis;” see The Complete Works

of Oscar Wilde (London: Collins, 1990) 932.

35 The Gay Science, 167. Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” is a clear intertext here,

since we are exhorted by the ancient Greek philosopher to throw off the shackles
of illusion (the shadows projected on the walls of a cave) in favour of perceiving
the direct light of truth instead—even if “the process would be a painful one.” See
Plato, The Republic, 2nd and revised edition translated by Desmond Lee (Markham:
Penguin Books Canada Ltd., 1983) 318.
36 In Book IV of The Gay Science Nietzsche develops more explicitly this same

idea borrowed from the ancient Greek poet Pindar (518–438 BCE): “We. . . want
to become those we are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who
give themselves laws, who create themselves” (266; emphases in the original).
37 The Gay Science, 279; 280 (Book V, Section 343: “The meaning of our

cheerfulness”).
38 The Gay Science, 144 (Book II, Section 89).
39 Flynn, Existentialism, 79; emphases added to underscore The Joyful Wisdom

connection. As Sartre explained in his novel Nausea, “gratuity” of existence means

randomness and superfluity (the non-necessity of human life on earth), and “con-
tingency” means “the arbitrariness of existence enjoyed by all existing things” (see
Brian Fitch, Reflections in the Mind’s Eye, University of Toronto Press, 1991: 38).
40 Ronald Hayman, Nietzsche’s Voices (London: Orion, 1997) 15.
41 Mihajlo Mihajlov, “The Great Catalyzer: Nietzsche and Russian Neo-Idealism,”

from Nietzsche in Russia, ed. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (Princeton University

Press, 1986) 131.
42 Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, 14.
43 Not only that: “How strange Kierkegaard is when he speaks of himself,”

notes Walter Kaufmann, “and how similar to Dostoevsky’s underground man—in

contents, style, and sensibility! [. . . ] It is as if Kierkegaard had stepped right out of
Dostoevsky’s pen” (Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, 15).
44 All citations of Notes from the Underground here are from David Magarshack’s

translation in Great Short Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, ed. Ronald Hingley (New
York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1968) 263.
45 Notes, 266. Another translation of this line is “I swear to you that to think

too much is a disease, a real, actual disease.” See Dostoevsky, Notes from the
Underground and The Double, trans. Jessie Coulson (Markham: Penguin Books
Canada Ltd., 1982) 17.
46 Notes, 295.
47 Ibid, 296.
48 Ibid, 294.
49 Notes, 268–269.
50 Notes, 265.
51 Notes, 268.
52 Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus and

Giroux, 1980) 131.

53 Notes, 273; 268.
54 Huis Clos (No Exit) was a play written by Sartre in 1944 that is still successfully

staged today. The misanthropy at the heart of this atheist-existentialist conception

of Hell is distinctly reminiscent of the misanthropy of Dostoevsky’s Underground
Man (Sartre’s most famous line “L’enfer, c’est les autres” is a direct descendant of
Dostoevsky’s “The blockheads will be forced at last to see the tragedy of it all!”).
 Existentialism and the Disease of Nihilism 45

55 Notes, 285; emphasis in the original.

56 Notes, 283; 284; emphasis in the original. Another translation of this last
line, which catches better the emptying of all moral content from the idea of free
will, is “And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.” See Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground, trans. Constance Garnett (New York:
Dover Publications, Inc., 1992) 18.
57 Notes, 370.
58 Ibid, 376.
59 Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground has inspired scores of imitations in

as many idioms. For example, the quirkily brilliant and provocative 1927 novel Envy
by Yuri Olesha would have been unthinkable without it, just as the ugly anti-hero of
Martin Scorsese’s 1981 film Taxi Driver is a complete translation of this story into
twentieth-century American terms. Even a song lyric from the 1990s band Smashing
Pumpkins (“Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage!”) is evidence of
another echo. For more discussion of the specifically American reception of this
extremely influential Dostoevsky text, see Chapter 7 (“Writing the Underground”)
of Maria Bloshteyn’s landmark study The Making of a Counter-Culture Icon:
Henry Miller’s Dostoevsky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).
60 Notes, 304; 306–307. References to insects proliferate throughout but gain

momentum in Part II, extending not only to how the Underground Man sees himself
but to how he sees others as well. The fly identification is a marked devolution
from his self-description as “a mouse and not a man” in Part I (270).
61 Again, the Constance Garnett translation is more bitterly evocative (see Notes

from The Underground, 55 and 56).

62 Notes, 293.
63 Notes, 371.
64 Once more, the Constance Garnett translation succeeds best in conveying this

convoluted masochistic logic (see her Notes from the Underground, 39).
65 Notes, 275. In a similar vein he says, “I was a coward and a slave. . . [but]

Every decent man of our age must be a coward and a slave. That is his normal
condition” (Garnett translation, 30; 31).
66 See Terras, Handbook of Russian Literature, op. cit., 105.
67 “Keeping Vigil Over Masha” is reproduced in a chapter called “Belief is Ideal”

from Steven Cassedy’s 2005 Stanford University Press study called Dostoevsky’s
Religion (116–118). All citations here are drawn from this source. All emphases are
in the original; see F.M. Dostoevskii, Tom dvadtsatyi: Stat’i i zametki, 1862–1865
in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo “Nauka,”
1980) 172–175.
68 Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 124; 125; 115.
69 Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, 33. The source of the Dostoevsky

quotation is The Brothers Karamazov.

70 Letter to Apollon Nikolayevich Maikov, March 25, 1870; cited in Anna Dosto-

evsky, Reminiscences, 396.

71 Thomas Mann, “Dostoevsky: In Moderation,” op. cit., viii; xiv; xii.
72 George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (New York: Knopf, 1959) 17.
73 Georg Brandes, Friedrich Nietzsche, op. cit., 21.
74 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans.

Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, Inc., 1967) 155.

75 The letter was dated April 10, 1888, in the twilight before Nietzsche’s mental

breakdown. See Brandes, Nietzsche, 82.

76 See Kenneth Lantz’s masterful work The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia (Westport,

CT: Greenwood Press, 2004) 200 (under the entry “Illness”).

77 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot, op. cit., 258; 259 (Part II, Chapter 5).
78 New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1990: 169–170.
79 Underhill, Mysticism, 20.
80 Ibid, 221; 170.
81 Dostoyevsky, The Idiot, 259.
46 Against Nihilism

82 Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, “Stages of Nietzscheanism: Merezhkovsky’s Intel-

lectual Evolution,” from Nietzsche in Russia, op. cit., 88.

83 Notes, Garnett transkation, 9.
84 Alexis Klimov, Dostoievski ou la connaissance périlleuse (Paris: Éditions

Seghers, 1971) 19; emphasis added.

Chapter 3

Purity and Prophecy

We proceed now to examine Nietzsche and Dostoevsky in the light of the
idea(l) of purity, arguably the third stage in the quest for authenticity.
Close readings of two texts once again develop the point of purity in
common, but with varying emphases and purposes. In Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s vision of the value of purity is first repre-
sented by the atheistic prophet Zarathustra’s refuge in a pristine pagan
alpine retreat; then it moves to embrace the idea of the achievement
of purity as a revealed mission; and finally it is enlarged to include a
state of purity that is no longer solitary but messianic in scope, pre-
figuring the future fulfillment of the entire human race in the birth
of the Übermensch. In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky’s vision
of the value of purity is quite different: meekness and humility (or
strength in weakness) is the paradox that is contained in the character
of Sonia, the spiritual virgin forced by poverty into a life of physical
degradation. Other feminine paragons of purity in Dostoevsky’s work
are briefly considered. The spiritual marriage of Sonia and Raskolnikov
is explained as a counterpart to an ancient apocryphal work of unknown
origin ( Joseph and Aseneth: A Romance), which similarly insists on the
healing and regenerative potential of purity regained. The Dostoevskian
sense of purity thus differs crucially from the Nietzschean one, in that
it seeks to emulate and enact the selfless example of Christ, one fallen
soul at a time, for the eventual benefit of the entire human community.

Audacity, as seen in Chapter I, finds its expression in a lonely rebellious

impulse towards exile and criminality: the inauthenticity of society
in general is the enemy, so the individual must define himself against
it in order to begin to become more authentic. Intensity continues
the individual’s war against society by picking up speed, raising all
the stakes and confronting head-on the existentialist crisis of meaning
that is created by the threat of nihilism. The inauthenticity of other
individuals (their incomprehension and their unthinking, automatic
conformity, including their allegiance to God) is now the enemy: the
individual must discover how to “stand out” against other individuals
in order to genuinely exist. But this fresh and more focused degree of
48 Against Nihilism

dissatisfaction—its fever pitch—cannot be sustained indefinitely, any

more than the original desire for revolt could have been. Thus the
initial stages in the struggle to achieve the elusive cumulative value
of authenticity always repeats in this way: first in a burst of audacity,
followed by a descent into intensity. The movement to embrace intensity
confirms the choice of audacity, building on it and taking it as far as it
is energetically possible to take it.
As seen in Nietzsche’s madman and Dostoevsky’s Underground
Man in the previous chapter, the pursuit of intensity reaches its own
saturation point. Once the message is delivered (“God is dead” and
“We are all dead inside”1 respectively), the impasse is revealed in its
wake; where else now are these characters in search of authenticity
supposed to go?
The next stop is necessarily purity. Now the pressure of the indi-
vidual being against society is unsustainable and the claims of society
reassert themselves. In their later writings, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky
each recast their earlier rebels in terms that consistently emphasize the
idea of purity opening the door to their social inclusion again. Purity
gives their later characters prophetic authority, coming back in from
the cold of their own self-banishment, back to the fold again. Purity
also emerges as a central theme in both Nietzsche’s and Dostoevsky’s
writings, since both men saw themselves as prophets with a particular
mission.2 But where purity for Nietzsche will be defined in relation to
a particular kind of power (strength, hardness, and courage), purity for
Dostoevsky will be defined in relation to a particular kind of powerless-
ness (humility and meekness). Pity will become the principal point of
division, since Nietzsche seeks to extirpate it while Dostoevsky wants
to rehabilitate it. Georg Brandes observed that, as a rival preacher
to Nietzsche, Dostoevsky promoted “perhaps the purest expression
of the morality of the slave. . . pity is a kind of religion with him.”3
This was in direct contrast to Nietzsche’s celebration of the master
morality, or the morality of cruelty in “this [other] warlike mystic,
poet and thinker. . . who is never tired of preaching.”4 Yet Nietzsche
did not let this affect his appreciation of Dostoevsky’s insights into
the same questions that haunted him: “I esteem him (Dostoevsky)
as the most valuable psychological material I know—I am grateful to
him in an extraordinary way, however antagonistic he may be to my
deepest instincts.”5 Here indeed begins the first great parting of the
ways between them, because “the truth that sets you free”6 will vary
dramatically in each case.

Will the Real Nietzsche (or Dostoevsky) Please

Stand Up?

Nietzsche’s appreciation for the idea of purity is actually hard to see,

since he more often than not devoted his energies to railing against
 Purity and Prophecy 49

the preponderance of impurity as he saw it. A combative tone and

inflammatory language are what increasingly dominate Nietzsche’s
style of argument the closer he approached his lucid end. Of his last
five books (all produced in the space of one year), one critic said that
Nietzsche’s “lack of measure destroys [his own] intended effect; one
can’t convince while foaming at the mouth.”7 This “rabid” tone perhaps
reflects a breathless, breakneck sense of urgency and recklessness, as if
the author knew that his time for writing was running out.
But Nietzsche could also be lyrical and gentle, seeking for the poetic
form to best catch his dream of an ideal. Like Dostoevsky, Nietzsche
was a master ventriloquist who moved easily between many voices in
order to actually inhabit the position of the speaker, often diametrically
opposed to his own.8 It is thus difficult to assign a categorical pre-
eminence to one voice over another, given the proliferation of “the
Nietzsches” (voices that frequently contradict or argue with each other
in virtually every text he wrote).9 But this penchant for speaking
through masks is not just a philosopher’s pose, giving fuller imaginative
play to the argument—it is also the essence of the poet’s craft. As
Nietzsche liked to say, “the poets lie too much”—but at the same time,
such lying is unavoidable because illusion is a fundamental condition
of human existence: “Truth is ugly; we possess art lest we perish of
the truth.” 10
As both a poet and a philosopher, Nietzsche was abundantly aware
of the contradiction between always distrusting the poets and resorting
to poetry so often himself.11 Amidst all the shifting perspectives so
evident throughout all of his writings, Nietzsche’s desire to poeticize
his speech remains constant. Whether he is appealing to metaphor,
peppering with hyperbole, or injecting drama with various personae,
he is still manifesting this same desire to be an artist himself, and this
desire yields the single greatest clue to a unifying intention. Henry
Staten suggests “a ‘nostalgia for a lost unity’” impelling him to create
with so much conscious multiplicity, while Philip Grundlehner suggests
a desire on Nietzsche’s part “to experiment with repressed selves.”12
Still other critics identify an all-consuming spirit of competition in
Nietzsche to appropriate and dominate “all the names in history,”
including Socrates and Jesus Christ and Saul of Tarsus.13 But again,
at the bottom of all this is a poetic ambition. If the American poet
Walt Whitman could jubilantly sing in 1855 “I am large; I contain
multitudes” in his Song of Myself, then Nietzsche could sing his own
song in 1883 as well, which turned out to be his virtuoso performance in
one sustained voice over four volumes: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, his own
life testament and grand synthesis of life distilled into his own poetry.14
“Considering that the multiplicity of inward states is exceptionally large
in my case,” Nietzsche averred, “I have many stylistic possibilities—the
most multifarious art of style that has ever been at the disposal of one
man.”15
50 Against Nihilism

Nietzsche’s Poetic Quest for Purity: Thus Spoke

Zarathustra

Whatever Nietzschean voice one chooses to follow, certain poetic im-

ages of purity recur with a certain regularity. For example, Thus Spoke
Zarathustra “is permeated with images and metaphors of heights and
mountains” that reveal its author’s preoccupation with both the pur-
suit and the preservation of purity, in a highly idiosyncratic way.16
Beyond Good and Evil concludes with an “Aftersong” called “From
High Mountains,” which claims only a fellow “hunter” of pure and
unsullied truth can follow the author up “among distant fields of ice and
rock.”17 The Gay Science begins with a “Prelude in German Rhymes”
that is similarly replete with playful admonitions to “ascend” and
“climb” with the author towards the closing “command”: “be pure!”18
All of these examples have a poetic imperative in common: they are
all written in verse, and they are all concerned with the genesis of
Nietzsche’s poetic creation of Zarathustra. It is thus possible to weave
one’s way through all the opacity and bombast of the later Nietzsche
(especially his only open attempt at autobiography, Ecce Homo, which
gives his Zarathustra pride of place among all his other writings) and
discern the quiet, passionate heart of an all too lonely man, longing
and dreaming to share the very marrow of his life with someone—a life
crucially concerned with discovering for humanity a new definition of
purity untainted by the idea of God. Walter Kaufmann states (twice)
in the preface to his translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra that “the
most important single clue to [understanding] Zarathustra is that it
is the work of an utterly lonely man. . . a thoroughly lonely man.”19
Of himself, Nietzsche lamented that “one has neither heard nor even
seen me”—and yet “every great philosophy so far [in addition to his
own] has been. . . the personal confession of its author and a kind of
involuntary and unconscious memoir,” if one only took the time and
care to notice.20
Purity for Nietzsche is thus inescapably impregnated by melancholy.
And for his mountain-top prophet Zarathustra, purity is defined as
purity of soul, but of a very elevated and rarefied kind: it is profoundly
solitary, as the author himself was, since Nietzsche was always a seeker
after his own ideal. It is simultaneously a refuge (a place of rest and
refreshment); an achievement (a state of unprecedented higher being);
and a springboard to something still higher (if one so chooses). It is
a precious, irreplaceable human quality that must be earned through
effort, and deep solitude is the gateway to this revelation. A cluster of
personal qualities accompany these stages—strength, beauty, courage,
hardness, and cleanliness—which then function as concrete markers of
a Zarathustrian seeker’s progress towards attaining the difficult but
rewarding goal of purity.
 Purity and Prophecy 51

Purity as Pristine Pagan Alpine Retreat

Those who can breathe the air of my writings know that it is
an air of the heights, a strong air. One must be made for it.
Otherwise there is no small danger that one may catch cold in
it. The ice is near, the solitude tremendous—but how calmly all
things lie in the light! How freely one breathes! How much one
feels beneath oneself!
Philosophy, as I have so far understood and lived it, means
living voluntarily among ice and high mountains—seeking out
everything strange and questionable in existence, everything so
far placed under a ban by morality. [. . . ]
Every attainment, every step forward in knowledge, follows
from courage, from hardness against oneself, from cleanliness in
relation to oneself.21

In this summation that Nietzsche offers of his life and work, the brash
defence of his “maverick” raison d’être turns on Zarathustrian imagery
of “ice and high mountains.” Together with the bracing mountaineering
atmosphere that he declares his writing to create for the reader, he
models the very traits he would exhort his fellow mountain climbers
to follow: an appreciation for and a cultivation of strength, danger,
solitude, and serenity (in the first paragraph); strangeness and fearless
questioning (in the second paragraph); and finally courage, hardness,
and cleanliness (in the third paragraph). This is a straightforward chain
of associations for anyone with real mountain-climbing experience,
although not all of them need be equivalent or necessary while scaling
an actual mountain.
It is also quite literally how he lived and wrote, in between hikes
in the Swiss Alps. Nietzsche became emotionally attached to the
natural beauty of certain isolated and elevated spots (such as the
Upper Engadine), and attributed to them his inspiration for specific
philosophical insights—such as “the powerful pyramidal rock” by the
shore of Lake Silvaplana that “gave” him his “idea of the eternal
recurrence.”22 He even went so far as to call Sils-Maria (the general
Alpine area where he liked to hike) “the holy spot” because it inspired
the writing of the first half of his Zarathustra, “the greatest present
that has ever been made to [mankind] so far.”23 The manuscript had
been “written in a trance, as if from inner dictation,” in only ten days
for the first part and another ten days for the second.24 Nietzsche, the
self-proclaimed “disciple of the philosopher Dionysus,”25 had come a
long way since The Birth of Tragedy: now he was subject to full-blown
fits of pagan rapture that guided his pen and expanded his soul.

Whoever writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be

read but to be learned by heart. In the mountains the shortest
way is from peak to peak: but for that one must have long legs.
52 Against Nihilism

Aphorisms should be peaks—and those who are addressed, tall

and lofty. The air thin and pure, danger near, and the spirit full
of gay sarcasm: these go well together. I want to have goblins
around me, for I am courageous. Courage that puts ghosts to
flight creates goblins for itself: courage wants to laugh. [. . . ]
You look up when you feel the need for elevation. And I look
down because I am elevated. Who among you can laugh and
be elevated at the same time? Whoever climbs the highest
mountains laughs at all tragic plays and tragic seriousness.26

In this rousing speech near the beginning of Thus Spoke Zarathustra,

the mountain motif of purity is reiterated: height is again announced
as both the precondition and the essence of all pure and true “reading
and writing” (such as Nietzsche’s own) that is ultimately worth doing.
But like all significant religious sages, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra does
not himself write anything down; instead he leaves his teaching to be
recorded by the scribes (disciples who “want” first to “learn it by heart”).
The disciples worthy of receiving the teaching (“tall and lofty”) are
like the readers capable of entering into Nietzsche’s writing (“one must
be made for it”): both must be prepared again to embrace “danger”
with “courage.” But now another element is introduced: “laughter”
is not only the response one should learn to make in the presence
of “ghosts and goblins,” but the means of conquering “tragedy” and
achieving “elevation.” Only laughter can “kill the spirit of gravity”;
thus Zarathustra “pronounces laughter holy; you higher men, learn to
laugh!”27

Achievement: Purity as Revealed Mission

But even Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, a self-described “wanderer and moun-

tain climber,” who does not like the plains and cannot sit still for long,
will eventually face his “final peak” on his way to greatness.28 Like
the Old Testament prophet Elijah hearing “the still small voice” of
God in his own mountain cave in order to receive and carry out his
divine mission,29 Nietzsche’s “godless” prophet Zarathustra is urged
by one “speaking without voice” to achieve one last new dimension of
his pagan mission that he has still not attempted:

It is the stillest words that bring on the storm. Thoughts that

come on doves’ feet guide the world. O Zarathustra, you shall go
as a shadow of that which must come: thus, you will command
and, commanding, lead the way.30

Like Moses, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra tries to avoid his fate of leadership

(“I lack the lion’s voice for commanding. . . As yet my words have not
moved mountains”),31 and so he flees abroad. He recognizes that he is
called to make “what was gentlest” in him “the hardest” instead.32 He
 Purity and Prophecy 53

feels unequal to the challenge; however, he experiences a vision that

dispels his doubts: “the vision of the loneliest” containing his “abysmal
thought”—the eternal recurrence—which will be his unique bequeathal
as teacher to the world.33
He rediscovers within himself the “courage” he had demanded of
others, but with a difference: now he knows that “courage is the best
slayer. . . which slays even death itself, for it says, ‘Was that life? Well
then! Once more!’”34
Laughter returns as a motif associated with the ongoing drama
of purity on the mountain peaks. “Alas, how this laughter tore my
entrails and slit open my heart!”: he felt crushed and exposed by his
own cowardice because he had not yet risen to the prophetic occasion,
and the laughter of the soundless voice knew it.35 But then in the vision
of the eternal recurrence, Zarathustra sees a triumphantly transfigured
person jump up,

no longer human—one changed, radiant, laughing! Never yet on

earth has a human being laughed as he laughed! O my brothers,
I heard a laughter that was no human laughter, and now a thirst
gnaws at me, a longing that never grows still. My longing for
this laughter gnaws at me; oh, how do I bear to go on living!
And how could I bear to die now!36

The mystical transports that he feels in the presence of that strange

affirmative laughter stay with him, steeling his resolve to “unriddle”
it against the scornful other laughter he heard earlier. It is as if the
character of laughter has subtly expanded, just like the character of
courage: both are now amplified by some supernatural charge, like the
sudden and silent appearance of lightning. If “it is the stillest words
that bring on the storm,” then Zarathustra has been made still. He
“longs” to come into closer proximity to the unearthly source of both
the stillness and the laughter that haunt him. The next act in the
ongoing drama of purity pursued and preserved on the mountain peaks
is about to begin.

“At Once Holy and Horrible”: The Dionysian

Descent and Ascent

Lightning is another metaphor especially dear to Nietzsche, since its

sudden flash of silent power gives the strongest immediate visible
testimony to the kind of transcendence Nietzsche would like us to
understand anew. Already at fifteen he exulted in storms “as liberat-
ing rites of inner purification and intoxication” because the lightning
and the hail impressed him as “happy” and “mighty”—“free powers,
without ethics”—“pure will, without the turbidity imposed by the in-
tellect!”37 So it comes as no surprise that at forty he is still singing the
54 Against Nihilism

praises of lightning. His Zarathustra frequently lauds the state of being

“pregnant with soothsaying lightning bolts,” since he in fact introduces
himself as “a herald of the lightning. . . called ‘Overman’ (Übermensch)”
because “he is this lightning. . . to lick you with its tongue” and “he
is this frenzy. . . with which you should be inoculated.”38 Nietzsche’s
association of lightning with his own adolescent feelings of “purifica-
tion and intoxication” thus dies hard. The spectacle of violence in
lightning that Nietzsche found so religiously and poetically suggestive
depends on the feelings of awe and vigour that it aroused in him. This
“frenzy that inoculates” is more specifically linked to an intoxication
and a purification combined—which brings in the very large and vital
dimension for Nietzsche of the pagan god Dionysus.
The pagans of ancient Greece paid homage to Dionysus as the god
of wine as well as to its most extreme effect, the “bacchanal.” During
this drunken revelry occurring once every two years, this god would
descend and join his mountain dancers (the maenads or Bacchantes
celebrating his cult) and be eaten by them in the form of bulls, fawns,
goats, or vipers that they freshly killed and dismembered in an orgy or
“frenzy.” The Dionysian rite was “at once holy and horrible, fulfilment
and uncleanness, a sacrament and a pollution.”39 The sharp collision of
opposite sensations was supposed to have served as a ritual purification
for the celebrants. That same collision of opposites was what appealed
to Nietzsche as well, fascinated as he always was by the rich wellsprings
of intellectual vivacity at the root of every opposition or contradiction.
According to the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, “the
tragic sense of life” belongs to “men burdened with wisdom rather
than with knowledge”—men like Marcus Aurelius, Blaise Pascal, and
Søren Kierkegaard.40 Nietzsche too is marked by “that mysterious
unknown called tragedy,” which he seeks to resolve “in the pursuit of
Dionysian wisdom.”41 “The horror [and] dissolution brought about by
Dionysian forces” haunted all of Nietzsche’s writing and thinking about
“the tragic sense of life,” especially his poetry.42 His poems reveal “a
confessional aspect not found in his other writings” because Nietzsche
resorts to “verse instead of prose [when] he is no longer able to distance
himself from his inner experience.”43 This is why he said he found “the
only parable and parallel in history for [his] own inmost experience”
in “that wonderful phenomenon which bears the name of Dionysus,”
which “is explicable only in terms of an excess of force.”44
In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche declares his Zarathustra “Dionysian” be-
cause of his “excess of strength”: before his creation of Zarathustra
“nothing like this has ever been written, felt, or suffered: thus suffers
a god, a Dionysus.”45 Our joyous affirmation of everything that may
befall a human being (including all the cruelty and suffering of life) is
what Nietzsche has come to understand as “Dionysian.”46
 Purity and Prophecy 55

“Creation By Man—That is the Great Redemption

from Suffering”

“To redeem those who lived in the past and to recreate all ‘it was’
into a ‘thus I willed it’,” Nietzsche wrote, “that alone should I call
redemption.”47 We may all be prisoners of time, in an irreversible lock-
step towards the forces of death and dissolution, but we can translate
all the terms of our experience, including the painful things out of
our control (“it was”) into something we fully own and desire (“thus
I willed it”). Only in this way—the Dionysian way of embracing the
eternal recurrence—can we vanquish time and laugh in the face of our
own destruction (“laughing lions must come!”).48

A Goethe, a Shakespeare, would be unable to breathe even

for a moment in this tremendous passion and height. . . [. . . ]
Zarathustra possesses an eternal right to say: ‘I draw circles
around me and sacred boundaries; fewer and fewer men climb
with me on even higher mountains: I am building a mountain
range out of ever more sacred mountains.’49

According to Nietzsche, this is only the beginning—and there is no

turning back. A new godless epoch has already been born, swallowing
and recycling all the old religious remnants in its wake.

The Birth of the Übermensch

The human being is plastic; he is capable of transcending himself,
of realizing fresh possibilities; and he needs a vision, a goal, a
sense of direction. [. . . ] [M]an (or Nietzsche himself) may take
the place of God as legislator and creator of values. . . to prove to
himself his inner strength, his ability to live without God. [. . . ]
In general. . . what Nietzsche looks for is the highest possible
integration of all aspects of human nature. [. . . ] It is a question
of integration as an expression of strength.50

From the acceptance of “the eternal recurrence of the same” (Nietzsche’s

idea of human redemption without God), Nietzsche imagined the rise
of a new human being who would incarnate his solitary ideal of purity—
strength, courage, hardness, cleanliness, and beauty—which he called
“the Overman” (der Übermensch, Nietzsche’s idea of transcendence
without God). With this new poetic mythos Nietzsche extended his
argument: purity, always threatened or in short supply, will now one
day transcend all impurity. The noble or higher type of man (a private
ideal state) will prevail over the common or lower type (the public
and all too human reality) by virtue of hard spiritual work and self-
discipline. Some new mysterious form of regeneration will triumph over
the old forces of degeneration.
56 Against Nihilism

This ideal being is what Zarathustra dreams of one day witnessing

in his lifetime, for “never yet has there been an overman.”51 Indeed, his
Messiah is so fantastic that Zarathustra’s first public pronouncement
in the book, announcing himself as “teacher of the overman,” is not
immediately comprehensible. Like the madman in the marketplace
encountering hostility or indifference in The Gay Science, Zarathustra
in the marketplace also reveals himself to be “a voice crying in the
wilderness,”52 since his urging Dionysian “frenzy” in the place of
Judaeo-Christian “poison” falls on similarly deaf ears.

I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be over-

come. What have you done to overcome him? [. . . ] Behold, I
teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the
earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of
the earth!53

His appeal to the future tense (“shall”) is classically in keeping with

the language of prophecy: Zarathustra speaks as he walks, “among men
as among fragments of the future—that future which I envisage.”54
His language is cryptic. Metaphors fill the gap between present reality
and future potential: man is compared to “a rope over an abyss” that
is “tied between beast and overman,” as well as to “the ugliest stone”
that the sculptor “wants to perfect” according to his intimation of “the
stillest and lightest of all things. . . the beauty of the overman.”55
If rope and stone fail to convince as poetic comparisons, then one
can always still resort to an apophatic argument: describing what the
overman is not (“the most contemptible,” “the last man”), or explaining
how perception of the overman is obscured by “fear of that which has
hitherto been called devil” and is thus confused with the devil.56 After
all, any sensible modern person can recognize with Zarathustra that
“there is no devil and no hell”—we need “fear nothing” because we are
all mercifully free of those old fables.57
. . . Or are we?. . . .

Romantic Rebellion

When Nietzsche’s Zarathustra muses to himself about the “death of

God” (“Could it be possible? This old saint in the forest has not
yet heard anything of this, that God is dead!”58 ), he is manifesting
another source of indebtedness—as one poet among others. This is
the Romantic strain in his Zarathustrian creation, arguably due to
an earlier Romantic response to “the disappearance of God.”59 For
the Nietzschean pose of proud and lonely heroic defiance is essentially
Romantic in origin.60 “That soaring—or searing of the spirit that we
call Romanticism”61 is what continues to define Nietzsche’s defiance
as quintessentially modern. And the Romantic, as Mario Praz pointed
 Purity and Prophecy 57

out in his landmark 1933 study called The Romantic Agony, is funda-
mentally a radical reaction to a conservative “balance of forces”—a
“resentment” that is steeped in a “spirit” or an “emotion” of sacrilege
and erotic excess. Artists as diverse as Hölderlin, Keats, Byron, and
Baudelaire all share a profoundly rebellious sensibility that, for Praz,
borders on the pathological.62 As Matei Calinescu explains in his superb
book Five Faces of Modernity, “long before Nietzsche. . . the Romantics
were the first to conceive the death of God and to incorporate in their
works this essentially modern theme. . . this new feeling of modernity,
derived from the notion of a dying Christianity.”63 This is because, as
Octavio Paz observed, “the death of God is a Romantic theme.”

It is not philosophical, but religious: as far as the reason is

concerned, God either exists or does not exist. If He exists,
He cannot die; if not, how can someone who has never existed
die? But this reasoning is only valid from the point of view
of monotheism and the rectilinear and irreversible time of the
West. The ancients knew that gods were mortal; they were
manifestations of cyclical time and as such would come to life
again and die again. . . But Christ came to earth only once,
for each event in the sacred history of Christianity is unique
and will not be repeated. If someone says “God is dead,” he is
announcing an unrepeatable fact: God is dead forever. Within
the concept of time as a linear and irreversible progression, the
death of God is unthinkable, for the death of God opens the gates
of contingency and unreason. There is a double reply to this:
irony, humour, intellectual paradox; and also the poetic paradox,
the image. Both appear in all the Romantics. . . Although the
source of each of these attitudes is religious, it is a strange and
contradictory sort of religion since it consists of the awareness
that religion is hollow. Romantic religiosity is irreligious, ironic;
Romantic irreligion is religious, anguished.64

Like many of his Romantic predecessors, Nietzsche tied his denial

of Christ to a denial of Christ’s historic significance, most explicitly
with his announcement of “the Eternal Return of the Same” in Thus
Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche sought to completely cancel out Christian
eschatology by way of Zarathustra’s counter-teaching of “the Eternal
Recurrence,” since only this “most abysmal thought”—this “dissolution
of the self” through the acceptance of nihilism—promises “deliverance
from the complex of guilt, revenge, and responsibility in which all
human beings are generally caught.”65 “That which has happened is
that which was to be fulfilled”: this sums up the continuous fabric or
ring of becoming, with no more distinction between good and evil, or
time and eternity, or the one and the many.66 According to Nietzsche,
looking into “the abyss” of the Eternal Recurrence can be joyous rather
than terrifying if we surrender the search for a ground (Grund) where
there is none (Abgrundliche: abysmal, groundless).
58 Against Nihilism

Nietzsche’s inheritance of the Romantic mantle of “anguished irre-

ligiosity” is perhaps best captured by the German Romantic painter
Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). In Friedrich’s canvas Wanderer
Above the Sea of Fog, one easily discerns the Romantic notion of the
“true, underlying, creative, spontaneous individual self” as “a part or an
emanation of the energy or life or world-soul of nature as a whole”67
(see Figure 4). Selected as a representative image of European Ro-
manticism: A Brief History With Documents, Warren Breckman calls
this German painting a paradigmatic expression of “the Romantic
ideal of individualism and the Romantic yearning for connection with
God and the cosmos.”68 For eminently appropriate Romantic reasons,
this same painting was also selected for the cover of the 2007 edition
of Introducing Nietzsche (the cultural history comic book that was
previously known as Nietzsche For Beginners). For if “Romanticism
lived and died with the great age of revolutions stretching from 1789
to 1848,” then Nietzsche is among the most influential of latter day
Romantic revolutionaries thanks to his perpetuation of the same “fun-
damental and closely related features of Romanticism: a commitment
to self-expression; a desire to unite the liberated individual with a
greater whole; and a dynamic style of thought.”69

Dostoevsky’s Vision of Strength in Weakness70

In the fictional worlds of Dostoevsky, purity represents a definite ideal.

Purity here means “purity of heart” which bestows vision of God, and
the prerequisite for this special form of spiritual access is meekness.71
Male and female embodiments of meekness and humility abound in
Dostoevsky’s fiction, from Prince Myshkin (The Idiot) to Alyosha (The
Brothers Karamazov) on the male side, and from Sonia Marmeladova
(Crime and Punishment) to, on the female side, the young suicide who
was A Gentle Creature. With these characters, Dostoevsky explores
the role of purity in the world—what it can do to alter the course of
events, first of all, in the text (on a mundane interpersonal level), and
by extension what it can also do to change the face of history (on a
more significant impersonal scale) outside the text. The ground for
Dostoevsky’s investigation is the question of Christ, who in His person
contains the ultimate purity that is God—which begs in turn another
question: how the purity of Christ could have coexisted with the fallen,
corrupted, and corrupting world of man. This is an agonizing question
because it throws into doubt the whole possibility of the Incarnation.
As the germ of doubt, Dostoevsky consistently introduces into his
texts a distinct male character type: the proud, lonely, and impotent
intellectual dreamer. Examples of younger versions of this type (in
their twenties) are the protagonists of White Nights and Crime and
Punishment; older versions of this type (in their forties) are the “anti-
heroes” of Notes from the Underground and A Gentle Creature. All of
 Purity and Prophecy 59

Figure 4: Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818)
these variations are equally closed (egotistical and introverted), thus
representing a direct antithesis to Christ’s open and selfless example.
This is why Dostoevsky has them function as counterpoints to his
meek Christlike characters, challenging and often dominating them as
a means of fully testing and interrogating what goodness may actually
be good for.

Crime and Punishment as the Underground Revisited

With Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, the tortured protagonist of

Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky creates a direct extension of the
Underground Man and so “continues the revolt begun by the man
from the underground.”72 Raskolnikov is again a man at war with the
60 Against Nihilism

hypocrisy and injustice of a society that he believes prevents him from

finding his rightful place within it: he is another loner who “sits in
his room like a spider” and broods on whether he is actually “a louse
like everybody else or a man.”73 The insect parallel is an insistent
reminder of the spite both men have in common, which now sours
into homicidal contempt. They both also experience a relationship
with a prostitute as an initiation into spiritual renewal. Indeed, it
is essentially the same story retold: how intensity (in the person of
these two frustrated men, Raskolnikov and the Underground Man)
encounters purity (in the person of these two suffering women, Sonia
and Liza).74 But while the Underground Man has only himself to fall
back upon when he spurns the love Liza offers him, Raskolnikov is
nourished by many more sources of support. There is his friendship
with Razumikhin, the affection of his sister and his mother, and the
solicitude of the police detective Porfiry Petrovich in addition to the
love Sonia feels for him. This enlarged scope of human contact will
make all the saving difference in Raskolnikov’s case, even though his
grudge against society is so much greater and actually more destructive
than the Underground Man’s grudge ever was.
The Czech expressionist painter Emil Filla (1882–1953) captured all
the ambiguity and anguish of both Raskolnikov and the Underground
Man in his 1907 painting A Reader of Dostoevsky (Figure 5). The
peculiar torpor of the gentleman slumped back in the chair seems
to be due to his having “fallen into a trance while reading the book
he still holds in his grey hand.”75 But which book could this have
been? The book on the table bears Dostoevsky’s name, while the
book in his hand remains unidentified but is surely the cause of his
strange swoon. Perhaps he has been “poisoned by a book,” in the same
way that Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray said he had been overcome by
Huysmanns’ À Rebours (titled in English “Against the Grain”). The
bookish introvert has seldom been portrayed with greater sympathy
and power of suggestion than by this little-known Czech artist.
What is it that both the Underground Man and Raskolnikov want
to achieve through their twin assaults on the establishment? Might
their frustration not stem from a sense of their own innocence and
goodness irrevocably lost and wasted? It certainly seems that their
ideas of their own gifts gone fallow are what dominate and define
them the most. Why else does the Underground Man conclude that
everyone is stillborn? Or why Raskolnikov commits his murders like a
somnambulist? Whatever potential they may have precociously shown
before, they now know enough to suppress it. They collude in their
own self-destruction because their relentless lucidity only lets them
see and understand despair. For the Underground Man he says we
are all undone by bookishness, while for Raskolnikov he attributes his
undoing to fate. Either way, they are equally blind to how much their
essential passivity is in fact due to their pride—and it is principally
 Purity and Prophecy 61

Figure 5: Emil Filla, A Reader of Dostoevsky (1907)

the women that Dostoevsky places in opposition to them, as virtuosos

of humility, who reveal this deficiency in them.

Feminine Paragons of Purity in Dostoevsky

Unlike the Underground Man, Liza enacts and embodies the innocence
and goodness that she intuitively understands as virtues that are open
to everyone. “She had not come to listen to my pathetic speeches at
all,” the Underground Man realizes, “but to love me, for it is only in
love that a woman can find her true resurrection, her true salvation
from any sort of calamity, and her moral regeneration, and she cannot
possibly find it in anything else.”76 She may be the stereotyped “fallen
62 Against Nihilism

woman,” the stock character of nineteenth-century literature, but she

is also entirely believable.

Her reality and truth reveal the hollowness of the underground

man and the falsity of his ideas; when she walks steadily and
undramatically away. . . there is nothing left for him but to go
back to “decaying morally in a corner.” [. . . ] It is Liza who goes
on: the novel without a hero has acquired a heroine, and its end
is her vindication, almost her triumph.77

Liza prepares the way for Sonia, who again with her love becomes the
crucial catalyst in Raskolnikov’s “moral resurrection.”78 But Sonia is an
even more exalted variation on Liza because she not only succeeds where
Liza fails (her “triumph” at the end of the Epilogue is unqualified), but
she possesses attributes of saintliness besides.79 The whole of Crime
and Punishment is structured around Sonia’s role in eventually rescuing
Raskolnikov from himself, which is why Dostoevsky “introduces at least
one significant encounter between Sonia and all four [major] characters
whose views oppose hers,” the better to test her salvific mettle.80 As
Ernest J. Simmons once put it, “Sonia is a kind of living universal
symbol of crushed and suffering humanity that bears within itself the
undying seed of joyous resurrection.”81 But more needs to be said about
the particularly female form that this symbolism takes, especially in
terms of Dostoevsky’s Russian Orthodox understanding of the central
Christian mystery of the Resurrection.
If the male principle of purity is ultimately represented for Dos-
toevsky by the mysterious figure of Christ, then the female principle
of purity is ultimately represented by the Mother of God (the Virgin
Mary)—with Her perpetual virginity and compassionate intercession
on behalf of Her Son. Rather than directly emulate the Virgin Mary,
however, Dostoevsky’s Sonia will instead aspire to imitate Mary Mag-
dalene (the woman Christ healed of seven demons).82 This second
Mary represents a crucial variation which allows for the recovery of
virginity, in spiritual terms, without denying the loss of physical vir-
ginity. According to the tradition of the early desert fathers, “virginity
is restored by tears” because “all are sinners, alienated from God, no
one having virginity either by nature or by works;” therefore the tears
of repentance restore “the only virginity [which]. . . is Christ.”83 In the
noli me tangere scene of Mary Magdalene encountering the resurrected
Christ and mistaking him for a gardener,84

[this] figure of a woman who was a sinner greeted by the new

Adam in a garden is. . . the perfect balance to that story of grief
in a garden in the beginning, when the first man and woman
sinned and experienced death and division. [. . . ] [Thus] Mary
Magdalene. . . is not just a historical character. . . she is the new
Eve, the first sign of the reversal of the fall of Adam. She is also,
 Purity and Prophecy 63

because of her great love, the woman in the Song of Songs, and
she is, for the same reason, the Church as well as the individual
soul redeemed from sin.85

Thanks to the example of the repentant Magdalene, any other human

being (man or woman alike) can approach the ideal of spiritual perfec-
tion that only the Virgin Mary can completely embody. This is also why
Dostoevsky’s Sonia is a complete character and not a mere caricature:
she partakes of the classic Mary Magdalene archetype described in
the New Testament, simultaneously fallen and raised up, polluted and
purified. If Christ is a paradox as the omnipotence of God contained in
the frailty of man, and the Virgin Mary is a paradox as both a mother
and a virgin at the same time, then Mary Magdalene is also a paradox
as the whore and the virgin combined.
The female experience of the idea(l) of purity is distinct from the
male one since it is defined by interiority and vulnerability; virginity is
likewise a much more freighted concept for the same biologically-driven
reasons. Indeed, most if not all of Dostoevsky’s female characters find
their virtue either compromised or at risk: they are de facto defined
by their sexuality, even if they are still children. Many critics have
commented on the peculiar preponderance of (often nameless) pre-
pubescent girls in Dostoevsky’s fiction who are threatened by male
desire.86 This penchant for including “little girls lost” as a recurrent
theme can be seen in Dostoevsky’s first full-length novel Netochka
Nezvanova, left unfinished in 1849, which openly explores the eroticism
of a ten-year-old girl. It can also be seen in the several anonymous
female children who are abused or compromised by Svidrigailov and
Stavrogin in the later novels. This has led in turn to charges against
Dostoevsky of salacious sadism,87 as if he used his “cruel talent” to
unsavoury ends.88 Even a close friend of the Dostoevsky family, the
philosopher and critic N.N. Strakhov, found it necessary to produce a
piece of posthumous slander that he called The Biography of Dostoevsky
which insisted on exactly this “wicked” aspect of Dostoevsky’s alleged
“access” once to a little girl in a bathhouse (“he was drawn to nasty
acts and he bragged about them. . . all his novels are self-justification
[that show how] every variety of loathsomeness can live side by side
with nobility in the same human being”).89
But if one can stop sexualizing the female child for a moment, then
one can also see the representation of maidenhood in other terms—such
as a particular form of purity that should be honoured and not ravaged.
When it is not honoured, Dostoevsky makes it clear in every case
that the loss of female innocence is especially to be mourned, precisely
because it represents such a particularly heinous betrayal of moral prin-
ciple. And in the whole gallery of Dostoevskian women compromised
by Dostoevskian men, there is probably no more compelling proof of
Dostoevsky’s sensitivity to the special sacredness of female purity than
64 Against Nihilism

his portrait of Sofia (Sonia) Semyonovna Marmeladova in Crime and

Punishment.

Sonia the Spiritual Virgin

Although she is no longer a child (already eighteen years old), Sonia is

consistently described as childlike. Diminutives abound: she has “a little
voice” and “a little face” and “little shoulders”; she even sleeps in “a
little bed.”90 When Raskolnikov first has a chance to really examine her,
he sees “a modestly and poorly-dressed young girl, very young, indeed
almost like a child, with a modest and refined manner, with a candid
but somewhat frightened face.”91 Youth and modesty are emphasized
twice, in keeping with her essentially chaste character. Later, when
Raskolnikov first companionably takes her by the hand, he notices how
thin she is and how “transparent, like a dead hand” her physical contact
with him is (“‘I have always been like that,’ she said”).92 This second
detail confirms her ethereal and non-corporeal nature. As a prostitute,
Sonia does not present the typically voluptuous or lascivious picture of
availability that most clients would expect, which also explains her lack
of financial success at her trade (she is “not paid every day,” so the
threat of prostitution may engulf her little stepsisters Polenka and Lida
as well). But the actual work of prostitution is never described, just
as Raskolnikov and Sonia never actually kiss: Dostoevsky appeared
determined to keep all textual detail pertaining to Sonia as chaste as
her character.
Raskolnikov was once betrothed to his landlady’s daughter, “that
strange girl who had wanted to be a nun. . . [but] who had died of
fever.”93 Aside from his chance meeting in a tavern with Semyon
Zakharovich Marmeladov, which created the occasion for Raskolnikov
learning of Sonia’s existence, Raskolnikov is already predisposed to
feeling attracted to the nun-like type. Now, given his first opportunity
to observe Sonia more closely and at length, Raskolnikov examines her
“with eager curiosity” because she presents such a strange intellectual
enigma which he enjoys trying to puzzle over:

What held her up—surely not depravity? All that infamy had ob-
viously touched her mechanically; not one drop of real depravity
had penetrated to her heart; he saw that. [. . . ]
“There are three ways before her,” he thought, “the canal, the
madhouse, or. . . at last to sink into depravity which obscures
the mind and turns the heart to stone.”
The last idea was the most revolting, but he was a sceptic; he
was young, abstract, and therefore cruel, and so he could not
help believing that the last end was the most likely.
“But can that be true?” he cried to himself. “Can that creature
who has still preserved the purity of her spirit be consciously
 Purity and Prophecy 65

drawn at last into that sink of filth and iniquity? Can the process
already have begun? [. . . ]
“No, what has kept her from the canal ‘til now is the idea of sin
and they, the children. . . And if she has not gone out of her
mind. . . but who says she has not gone out of her mind? Is she
in her senses? [. . . ] Does she expect a miracle? No doubt she
does. Doesn’t that all mean madness?”
He stayed obstinately at that thought. He liked that explanation
indeed better than any other. [. . . ]
“So you pray to God a great deal, Sonia?” he asked her.
Sonia did not speak; he stood beside her waiting for an answer.
“What should I be without God?” she whispered rapidly, forcibly,
glancing at him with suddenly flashing eyes, and squeezing his
hand.
“Ah, so that is it!” he thought.94

In this key passage that explains the riddle of Sonia to himself, Raskol-
nikov concludes that the young prostitute before him has chosen the
path of “religious mania” as a means of coping with the terrible unten-
ability of her situation. The fact that Sonia has somehow preserved
her virginity in the one profession that is dedicated to depriving her of
it piques his intellectual interest: how is this contradiction possible? Is
not her “purity” in these circumstances just as bizarre as the Virgin
giving birth? And if she is waiting for a miracle, then is her spiritual
virginity in the midst of “the stinking pit” of physical depravity95 not
already a kind of miracle? He sees the evidence as she stands before
him, but he cannot believe his eyes: can her “madness” really continue
to save her from becoming corrupted? It all seems too fantastic,96 so
he presses the one religious point that seems to hold her whole mad
reasoning together—“the idea of sin”:

“You are a great sinner, that’s true,” he [tells Sonia] almost

solemnly, “and your worst sin is that you have destroyed and
betrayed yourself for nothing. Isn’t that fearful? Isn’t it fearful
that you are living in this filth which you loathe so, and at the
same time you know yourself (you’ve only to open your eyes)
that you are not helping anyone by it, not saving anyone from
anything! Tell me,” he went on almost in a frenzy, “how this
shame and degradation can exist in you side by side with other,
opposite, holy feelings? It would be better, a thousand times
better and wiser to leap into the water and end it all!”
“But what would become of them?” Sonia asked faintly, gazing
at him with eyes of anguish, but not seeming surprised at his
suggestion.97
66 Against Nihilism

Since Dostoevsky consistently portrays Raskolnikov as an atheist—

a conviction entirely in keeping with his “progressive” intellectual
view98 —it is natural and necessary for the godless Raskolnikov to try
to hunt down and intellectually corner the godfearing Sonia. And he
uses an appeal to the common-sense recognition of the omnipresence of
nihilism to do it: there is nothing to support her faith, and no one who
will be saved by her self-sacrifice, so why not choose suicide instead?
The temptation to kill oneself and remove oneself from all the point-
less experience of endless suffering is also what Christ confronted.99
Raskolnikov derives “a new, strange, almost morbid feeling” in playing
the Devil’s advocate (“But, perhaps, there is no God at all”) and
watching Sonia wrestle with the same despair-driven questions that
he has, since he too has very frequently and seriously considered the
idea of suicide.100 Indeed, the naysaying bane of nihilism has so much
to do with this idea that, seventy-six years after Dostoevsky wrote
Crime and Punishment, Albert Camus wrote The Myth of Sisyphus as
an attempt to resolve the problem of suicide, specifically in the still
persistent shadow of nihilism:

It is legitimate and necessary to wonder whether life has a

meaning, therefore it is legitimate to meet the problem of suicide
face to face. The answer, underlying and appearing through the
paradoxes which cover it, is this: even if one does not believe in
God, suicide is not legitimate. [. . . ] [T]his book [The Myth of
Sisyphus] declares that even within the limits of nihilism it is
possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism.101

Sonia too has already thought of committing suicide (“perhaps many

times”), as Raskolnikov himself can discern in her reaction to his
questions: “she scarcely wondered at his suggestion [and] she had not
even noticed the cruelty of his words.”102 But she cannot dismiss her
sacrifice as futile because she believes Christ’s own sacrifice could not
have been futile either. The suffering of prostitution is the cross she
has chosen for her own imitation of Christ’s sufferings. In fact, she sees
her own personality and example as unimportant to explain or justify
to anyone; what matters most to her is the truth of the resurrection
of Christ in the Gospels, because this for her transcends all accidents
and limitations of human experience and personality. In what is surely
the strangest seduction scene in all of literature, Sonia reads aloud the
eleventh chapter of the Gospel of St. John—at Raskolnikov’s petulant
request—and reveals her true self more nakedly to him than she ever
could have done for any paying client, as Raskolnikov clearly recognizes:

Raskolnikov saw in part why Sonia could not bring herself to

read to him and the more he saw this, the more roughly and
irritably he insisted on her doing so. He understood only too
well how painful it was for her to betray and unveil all that
 Purity and Prophecy 67

was her own. He understood that these feelings really were her
secret treasure, which she had kept perhaps for years, perhaps
from childhood. . . [. . . ] But at the same time, he knew now
and knew for certain that, although it filled her with dread and
suffering, yet she had a tormenting desire to read and to read
to him that he might hear it, and to read now whatever might
come of it!. . . He read this in her eyes; he could see it in her
intense emotion.103

“The Resurrection of the Dead. . . is Sown in

Corruption [and] Raised in Purity”

As Sonia reads how Christ miraculously revived a corpse, she indeed

appears to expect the miracle of Raskolnikov’s conversion (“‘And he,
he—too, is blinded and unbelieving, he, too, will hear, he, too, will
believe, yes, yes! At once, now,’ was what she was dreaming, and she
was quivering with happy anticipation”).104 But as she reaches the part
about Lazarus being dead already four days (and “she laid emphasis on
the word four”), she could not have known that Raskolnikov happened
to have murdered two defenceless women (the pawnbroker Alyona
Ivanovna and her half-sister Lizaveta) exactly four days ago. The
coincidence adds to the uncanniness of her performance, because not
only were Sonia and Lizaveta friends but the very Bible from which
she is reading was a gift from Lizaveta as well. Raskolnikov thus hears
an eerie doubling of the names of Lazarus and Lizaveta, just as he sees
a blurring between the faces of both Sonia and Lizaveta.105
This confusion of women with a nightmarish resurrection theme
had already occurred earlier for Raskolnikov, after he concluded his
first dramatic interview with the police detective Porfiry Petrovich. He
falls asleep in a misogynist delirium, lumping together in his mind the
old pawnbroker woman with his mother and sister (“I feel a physical
hatred for them”) as well as Lizaveta and Sonia (“poor gentle things,
with gentle eyes. . . Dear women! Why don’t they weep? Why don’t
they moan? They give up everything. . . their eyes are soft and gentle. . .
Sonia, Sonia! Gentle Sonia!”).106 The haunting gentleness of both
women’s eyes recalls Raskolnikov’s first pre-homicidal nightmare of a
mare being beaten to death (Part I, Chapter 5): the horror of other
people’s cruelty leaves him unable to do anything besides kiss the dead
horse’s eyes. But now he dreams repeatedly of killing the old woman
all over again, and in this first post-homicidal nightmare the victim
refuses to die and stubbornly laughs at him instead. For Raskolnikov,
the ghoulish image of a corpse coming back to life (and mocking him)
is hardly the stuff of religious peace and comfort that it is for Sonia.
And yet it is specifically the story of Lazarus that he wants to hear
from Sonia’s lips, for its similarly ghoulish content (“Lord, by this time
68 Against Nihilism

he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days”). No other Gospel story
(such as “The Sermon on the Mount” or “The Parable of the Prodigal
Son”) possesses the same strong salvific potential for him;107 only
the riddle of Lazarus holds the key to dispelling his own guilt-driven
nightmares as he begins to recognize and accept that he, too, is “a
great sinner” but perhaps, alongside Sonia, he can hope to believe with
her that “he who endureth to the end shall be saved.”108
Indeed, the fundamental Christian mystery of the Resurrection
depends crucially on the interrelationship between purity and corrup-
tion, which is why Sonia becomes the perfect vehicle for conveying
this mystery to Raskolnikov. For example, the language of paradox
completely permeates St. Paul’s poetic explanation of the Resurrection:

The resurrection of the dead. . . is sown in corruption; it is raised

in incorruption: it is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it
is sown in weakness; it is raised in power: it is sown a natural
body; it is raised a spiritual body.109

A walking contradiction herself, Sonia is at home with these contradic-

tions in a way that Raskolnikov is not. She accepts the omnipresence
of corruption as a given of human existence that can also give rise to
its own transcendence—which is why she gives no answer to Raskol-
nikov’s charge (so reminiscent of Strakhov’s accusation of Dostoevsky
himself) that “loathsomeness and nobility should not exist side by side
in the same human being.” For both Sonia and Dostoevsky, all people
are a combination of divine and human nature which it is in their
power to mould more in one direction rather than another.110 But for
Raskolnikov, it takes a spell in Siberia and a final nightmare to finally
convince him of the reality of his own corruption.111

The Spiritual Marriage of Sonia and Raskolnikov:

Purity Regained

Now “the murderer and the harlot who had so strangely been reading
together the eternal book” are henceforth united, in a kind of spiritual
marriage. This is why the first thing Raskolnikov tells Sonia, after
she finishes reading to him, is “I have only you now. . . Let us go
together. . . I’ve come to you, we are both accursed, let us go our way
together!”112 He pledges himself to her as a fellow damned creature,
with no hope yet in anything that could save either of them. But Sonia’s
attitude to their new bond is different: although it is her turn now to
suspect him of some madness, “she only knew that he was terribly,
infinitely unhappy”—an intuition that is confirmed and reiterated one
day later when the first thing she tells him, in response to Raskolnikov’s
confession of his murders to her, is “There is no one—no one in the
whole world now so unhappy as you!”113 She then pledges herself to
 Purity and Prophecy 69

him as a fellow sinner who will “follow him everywhere.” But before
she can consent to become his spiritual bride, Raskolnikov must first
acknowledge the full force of his own sin which she calls a “defilement”:

“Go at once, this very minute, stand at the cross-roads, bow

down, first kiss the earth which you have defiled and then bow
down to all the world and say to all men aloud, ‘I am a murderer!’
Then God will send you life again. Will you go, will you go?” she
asked him, trembling all over, snatching his two hands, squeezing
them in hers and gazing at him with eyes full of fire.
He was amazed at her sudden ecstasy.114

Raskolnikov is a reluctant bridegroom: he does not relish the idea of

embracing imprisonment and “expiating his sin” (thus undergoing a
critical purification), especially since he has successfully evaded the
authorities so far (“they will certainly arrest me. . . but. . . they’ll let me
out again. . . for, they can’t convict a man on what they have against
me”).115 When he does at last attempt to make his atonement public
in the way Sonia recommended, however, it is botched and mistaken
for a display of drunkenness. Sonia witnesses this failure from a discreet
and supportive distance and follows him again silently to the police
station where Raskolnikov finally lets himself be arrested. From here
on in, they are inseparable: their pact is sealed. Raskolnikov is still
loathe to accept the full import of it until the end of the Epilogue,
which now represents “the beginning of a new story—the story of the
gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of
his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new
unknown life.”116 In other words: “moral resurrection.” With these
famous penultimate words of the novel, Raskolnikov and Sonia are
finally and fully wed.
As a bride, Dostoevsky’s Sonia can be traced back to an Apoc-
ryphal Old Testament bride named Aseneth whose purity and wisdom
were similarly peerless. In an intriguing ancient text called Joseph
and Aseneth: A Romance, which scholars speculate may have been
penned by either Hellenistic Jews from Alexandria or by a third cen-
tury Christian monk from Syria,117 Aseneth voluntarily undergoes a
strenuous penitence in order to make herself worthy of her bridegroom,
the equally virginal and virtuous Joseph. Like Sonia, Aseneth under-
stands that humility to the point of mortification is essential to her
own resurrection, and her prayer on the eighth day of continual fasting
(before Joseph is due to return and marry her) bears such a strong
resemblance to Sonia’s heartfelt simplicity and sincerity that it could
really be called “Sonia’s Psalm.”118 Of course, Sonia is no Egyptian
queen and Raskolnikov is no “mighty man of God,” but the point of
Aseneth’s resemblance to Sonia lies in the same religious desire to
prepare herself for a mystical marriage, by a process of stripping away
and emptying herself of everything not worthy of or wholly devoted to
70 Against Nihilism

God. And in a very real sense, “Joseph” (in the terms of this parallel)
represents the divine and idealized self that Sonia wants Raskolnikov
to become. All of Sonia’s steadfastness in trying to heal Raskolnikov
of his sickness (including his Underground resentments against society
and his atheist-socialist convictions) stem from this desire to see him
raise himself up and honour the divinity inside him. According to her
faith, Sonia could not in fact see Raskolnikov in any other way; this
“romance” is borne out by the ending of Crime and Punishment which
finds her transformed (as Aseneth also was, by an angel) into a true
“City of Refuge” for her beloved.119
But once the romance is over—what could be the fruit of this
union, once Raskolnikov’s prison term of seven years is served? It
seems reasonable to predict that, given the strong discrepancies in their
characters, the marriage (both physical and spiritual) might very well
not last. In A Gentle Creature, a novella written a decade after Crime
and Punishment, one is tempted to imagine that the nameless sixteen-
year-old girl who is “the meek one” of the title could very well be Sonia’s
and Raskolnikov’s daughter, now orphaned and impoverished and thus
forced to marry a much older (Raskolnikov-like) pawnbroker. The fact
that this character was inspired by a true story in the newspaper, about
a young girl jumping to her death out of a window while clutching an
icon, only confirms the Sonia-like line of genealogy: rather than allow
herself to be corrupted by the twisted pawnbroker, who is ready to
surrender himself to her after he thinks he has finally broken her spirit,
she prefers to “commend her spirit to God.” Like Dostoevksy beholding
his dead wife laid out on the table and writing “Keeping Vigil Over
Masha,” the pawnbroker tells the story of A Gentle Creature as an
accompaniment to her corpse. He begins and ends in exactly the same
way: “. . . they’ll take her away tomorrow, and what will I do all alone
then? [. . . ] Listen, I mean it, they’ll take her away tomorrow, but what
about me?” His anguish and bewilderment are poignant: without her,
everything and everyone around him is likewise dead:

They say the sun gives life to the universe. But the sun rises and—
look—isn’t it dead? Everything is dead, the dead lie everywhere.
Just solitary people, and all about—silence. That’s the kind of
world we live in. “People, love one another”—who said that?
Whose commandment is it? The pendulum is clicking unfeelingly,
horridly. Her shoes are standing beside her bed, as though
waiting for her. . . 120

This is the same conclusion of the Underground Man: no pure woman’s

heart was able to save him either because he, like everyone else, is born
already dead. Purity is futile; there is no resurrection; death is the
only ultimate human reality. Christ came to save us in vain. “Whose
commandment is it?” Indeed!121
 Purity and Prophecy 71

Notes
1 The last words from Notes from the Underground: “We are oppressed at being

men—men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it
a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man. We are
stillborn. . . . Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough;
I don’t want to write more from ‘Underground’.” (opus cit., Garnett translation,
91)
2 Both Nietzsche’s and Dostoevsky’s prophet-like pronouncements about the

future (specifically for Europe) have been widely documented and commented upon
in the voluminous scholarly literature dedicated to each. See, for example, Chapter
2 (“Prophecy’s Voice/Voicing Prophecy”) in Bernd Magnus, Stanley Stewart &
Jean-Pierre Mileur’s collaboration Nietzsche’s Case: Philosophy as/and Literature
(New York: Routledge, 1993); and “Dostoevsky and Europe” in Georges Florovsky,
Theology and Literature (Volume 11, Collected Works), ed. Richard S. Haugh
(Belmont, MA: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1989).
3 Brandes, Impressions of Russia, op. cit., 308; 333.
4 Brandes, Friedrich Nietzsche, op. cit., 26; 29; 51. The antidote to the slave

morality (“a continual Nay, a Thou shalt not, a negation”) was, according to
Nietzsche, the master morality (“a continual yea-saying”). However, “to the morality
of cruelty has succeeded that of pity”—and more’s the pity for all noble-minded
souls like Nietzsche!
5 Letter of Nietzsche to Brandes dated November 20, 1888, in Brandes, Nietzsche,

op. cit., 94–95.

6 “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32).
7 Eugen Fink, Nietzsches Philosophie (Stuttgart, 1960) 34; cited by Shapiro,

125.
8 Mikhail Bakhtin’s 1929 study Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo (translated as

Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics by R.W. Rotsel in 1973) advanced the influential

idea that Dostoevsky’s stylistic trademark was “polyphony” (a chorus of many
conflicting character voices harmonized by the author). An example of the degree
to which Dostoevsky could empathize with a contrary character is Ivan Karamazov,
who upstaged the spotlight he wanted to keep on Alyosha: the latter’s pieties
required three months of effort to write, whereas the former’s “blasphemies” were
written in only three weeks because, as Dostoevsky observed of his creation, “The
devil take it—he’s partly right!” See Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, op. cit.,
82.
9 See the comments of both Jacques Derrida and Henry Staten on this difficulty,

as discussed by Ronald Hayman in his helpful monograph Nietzsche’s Voices, op.

cit., 9–15.
10 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Toronto:

Penguin Books Canada Ltd., 1978) 86 and 126 (from the Second Part, Speech
2 [“Upon the Blessed Isles”] and Speech 17 [“On Poets”]). See also Nietzsche’s
1873 essay “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” for more on the human
preference for falsehood over truth; the second quoted fragment is from an 1888
note (cited by Hayman, 10; emphases in the original).
11 See Philip Grundlehner’s luminous study, The Poetry of Friedrich Nietzsche

(Oxford University Press, 1986) 5.

12 Ibid., 311; the name of Staten’s book is Nietzsche’s Voice (see Hayman 13).
13 In a letter to Jakob Burckhardt dated January 6, 1889 (after his collapse

on the street in Turin on January 3), Nietzsche wrote that “the unpleasant thing
which offends my modesty is that fundamentally I am every name in history” (see
Hayman 55).
14 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: Bantam Books, 1983) 72.
15 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is. In On the

Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ed. & trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Random House, Inc., 1989): “Why I Write Such Good Books,” Section 4, p. 265.
72 Against Nihilism

16 Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1994) 35.

17 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, op. cit., 243.
18 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, op. cit., 41–69 (see, for example, “Up” (Section

16), “My Hardness” (Section 26), “Ice” (Section 35), “Higher Men” (Section 60),
etc.). The last line comes from “Star Morals” (Section 63).
19 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, “Translator’s Preface,” xiii & xv.
20 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 217 (“Preface,” Section 1); see also Nietzsche, Beyond

Good and Evil, op. cit., 13 (Section 6: opening sentence).

21 Ecce Homo, “Preface,” Section 3, 218; emphases in the original.
22 Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books”: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Section

1, page 295. See also Graham Parkes’ elegant introduction to his translation of
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Oxford University Press, 2005): “Given what we know
about Nietzsche’s hiking habits in the Sils-Maria area, he would have been walking
briskly for at least forty-five minutes before coming upon this place [with the
inspiring rock]. . . Under such conditions on an August day, in such a place, resolute
pessimists could be subject to affirmative thoughts” (xv)!
23 Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books”: Zarathustra, Section 4, page

302; see also “Preface,” Section 4, page 219.

24 Rudolph Binion, Frau Lou: Nietzsche’s Wayward Disciple (Princeton University

Press, 1974) 102. Nietzsche owed the genesis of his masterpiece to his meeting of
Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937) in 1882; “just nine months after meeting her, he
delivered the first [part] of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. . . his son by Lou, beyond his
begetting” (102). She refused his offer of marriage; she was his only beloved.
25 Ecce Homo, “Preface,” Section 2, page 217.
26 Zarathustra, Part I, Speech 7 (“On Reading and Writing”), 40–41.
27 Ibid., Part IV, Speech 13 (“On the Higher Man”), 295–296; emphasis in the

original.
28 Zarathustra, Part III, Speech 1 (“The Wanderer”). 152.
29 See 1 Kings 19:9–18.
30 Zarathustra, Part II, Speech 22 (“The Stillest Hour”), 146–7; emphases added.
31 See Exodus 4:10–17 (“I am not eloquent. . . I am slow of speech and tongue”);

Zarathustra, ibid., 146.

32 Zarathustra, Part III, Speech 1, 153.
33 See Ibid., Part III, Speech 13 (“The Convalescent”), 220: “behold, you are the

teacher of the eternal recurrence—that is your destiny!. . . [Y]ou as the first must
teach this doctrine. . . ”
Ecclesiastes 3:15 may be said to have arrived at Nietzsche’s insight considerably
earlier (“Whatever happens or can happen has already happened before; God makes
the same thing happen again and again”). Perhaps Nietzsche’s only innovation was
to have removed “God” from the sentence.
34 Ibid., Part III, Speech 2 (“On the Vision and the Riddle”), 157; see also 159.
35 Zarathustra, 147.
36 Ibid., 160.
37 Grundlehner, The Poetry of Nietzsche, op. cit., 9.
38 Zarathustra, Part III, Speech 12 (“On Old and New Tablets”) 214 and “Pro-

logue,” Section 4 (p. 16) and Section 3 (page 14). “O blessed hour of lightning!” is
another typical evocation (Part III, Speech 5: “On Virtue That Makes Small”) 172.
39 Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, op. cit., 277.
40 The Tragic Sense of Life, trans. J.E. Crawford-Flitch (Mineola, NY: Dover

Publications, Inc., 1954) 18.

41 Lev Shestov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche, 319; Grundlehner, The Poetry

of Nietzsche, 213.
42 Grundlehner, The Poetry of Nietzsche, op. cit. 85.
43 Grundlehner, The Poetry of Nietzsche, xvii.
44 Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books”: The Birth of Tragedy, Section

2, pp. 271–2; see also Twilight of the Idols in The Portable Nietzsche, op. cit., 560;
emphasis in the original.
 Purity and Prophecy 73

45 Ibid., “Why I Write Such Good Books”: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Sections 6

(p. 304) & 8 (308); emphasis in the original.

46 See Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Volume 2: Modern Phi-

losophy, Part II—Schopenhauer to Nietzsche (Garden City, NY: Doubleday &

Company, Inc., 1965) 172: “[T]riumphantly affirming and embracing existence in
all its darkness and horror. . . is the Dionysian attitude,” as opposed to the “the
Apollonian way. . . [that] draw[s] an aesthetic veil over reality.”
47 Zarathustra, Part II, Speech 2 (“Upon the Blessed Isles”) 87; Part III, Speech

20 (“On Redemption”) 139.

48 Ibid., Part IV, Speech 11 (“The Welcome”), 283; emphases in the original.
49 Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books: Zarathustra,” Section 6, page

304; the quotation is from Zarathustra, Part III, Speech 12 (“On Old and New
Tablets”), 208.
50 Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Volume 7, op. cit., 174; 179; 177.
51 Zarathustra, op. cit., 93 (Part II, Speech 4, “On Priests”).
52 See Isaiah 40. 3 and John 1.23.
53 Zarathustra, 12 (“Prologue,” Section 3); emphases in the original.
54 Ibid., 139 (Part II, Speech 20: “On Redemption”).
55 Ibid., 14 (“Prologue,” Section 4) and 87–88 (Part II, Speech 2, “On the Blessed

Isles”).
56 Ibid., 17–18 (“Prologue,” Section 5) and 144 (Part II, Speech 21: “On Human

Prudence”): “What is great is so alien to your souls that. . . I guess that you would
call my overman—devil.”
57 Ibid., 20 (“Prologue,” Section 6).
58 Ibid., 124 (“Prologue,” Section 2); emphases in the original.
59 See Joseph Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century

Writers [not including Nietzsche] (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University, 1963).
60 See an early and still complete analysis of this from 1905: Nietzsche und die

Romantik by Karl Joel (a second edition was published in Jena in 1923).

61 Jean H. Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility (University of Chicago Press, 1980) 58.
62 Praz claimed to have been the first to see a Sadeian-Romantic “pattern” across

French, English, and Italian literatures in particular. Parenthetically, Praz refers

to both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky as further examples of Romantics inspired by
the Marquis de Sade, as part of his larger study of “a whole culture and its health.”
See the 1970 Second Edition, translated by Angus Davidson, published by Oxford
University Press (1983 rpt.): “Author’s Preface” (xv-xxiii) and “Introduction:
‘Romantic’: An Approximate Term” (1–22).
63 The subtitle is Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism

(Durham: Duke University Press, 1987 [pb.] Rpt. 1996]). See page 61.
64 See Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire, trans. Rachel Philips (Harvard UP,

1974) 45–46.
65 See Gary Shapiro, Nietzschean Narratives, op. cit., 86 and 91.
66 See Bernd Magnus et al, Nietzsche’s Case, op. cit., 26–34.
67 Robert B. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (Oxford: Basil

Blackwell Ltd., 1991) 62.

68 Published by Bedford/St. Martin’s Press in 2008; see pages 12–13.
69 Breckman, European Romanticism, 39; 3.
70 St. Paul records Christ telling him that “My strength is made perfect in

weakness” (II Corinthians 12:9).

71 Christ’s Sermon on the Mount calls for the cultivation of both purity of heart

and meekness (Matthew 5:8 and 5:5).

72 This is how Georgy Chulkov and Konstantin Mochulsky perceive the links

between these two works; see Feodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment: A Norton
(Third) Critical Edition, ed. George Gibian (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
1989) 495 and 509.
74 Against Nihilism

73 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Constance Garnett (New

York: Random House, 1978) 375; 377. These insect comparisons occur in Part V,
chapter 4 of the novel.
74 The way the Underground Man finally relates to Liza is the more realistic way

one would expect a man like Raskolnikov would relate to Sonia: manipulatively
and brutally, enjoying his superior power. The detail of both either desiring to
kiss or succeeding in kissing the woman’s feet is related to both men’s discomfort
in surrendering their power to her, which is expressed as a profound ambivalence.
Compare the Underground Man (“Would I not hate her fiercely tomorrow perhaps
just because I had been kissing her feet today?”) with Raskolnikov (“I did not bow
down to you; I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity”). See Notes from the
Underground, op. cit. 375 and Crime and Punishment, op. cit., 290.
75 Alberto Manguel comments on the likeness of this figure in the painting to

the famous Czech writer Franz Kafka, in A History of Reading (Toronto: Alfred A.
Knopf Canada, 1996) 92.
76 Notes from the Underground, op. cit. (Magarshack translation), 373.
77 Notes from the Underground, op. cit. (Coulson translation), 12 (“Translator’s

Introduction”).
78 The first announcement of this Dostoevskian theme of “moral resurrection”

occurred in Notes from the House of the Dead, when Dostoevsky’s narrator observed
that in even the worst “moral Quasimodo” there is still a “child-like” capacity “to
escape from. . . convict existence just for an hour or so [and thus undergo]. . . a
moral transformation, even if it lasted for a few moments”; thus often with “[a] few
kind words. . . the convicts experienced something approaching a moral resurrection.”
See The House of the Dead, op. cit., 105; 203; 145.
79 Several textual details confirm this saintly association. Sonia’s full name (Sofia)

means “wisdom” but especially “divine wisdom” in the Russian Orthodox tradition.
There are also a wealth of New Testament citations and allusions that surround
her, some of which will be discussed below. Perhaps most critically, however, in the
Epilogue the convicts in Siberia “even came to her for help in their illnesses” as
though mere contact with her person could heal them.
80 Terras, Reading Dostoevsky, op. cit., 52. Terras notes that the “saintly prosti-

tute” is another subset of the same “fallen woman” stereotype, pioneered by Eugène
Sue in Les Mystères de Paris and very likely the inspiration for Dostoevsky’s
creation of Sonia (53).
81 See Crime and Punishment: A Norton (Third) Critical Edition, op. cit., 520.
82 See Luke 8:2.
83 Benedicta Ward, Harlots of the Desert: A Study of Repentance in Early

Monastic Sources (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications Inc., 1987) 103.

84 See John 20:1–18. Noli me tangere is the Latin translation from St. Jerome’s

Vulgate of Christ’s words to her (after she at last recognizes him) “Touch me not.”
85 Benedicta Ward, Harlots of the Desert, 14.
86 For example, Tennyson described Dostoevsky’s novels as “maiden fancies

wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism.” This was by no means an isolated piece of

Victorian-era disapproval; see Helen Muchnic, Dostoevsky’s English Reputation, op.
cit., 158 and passim.
87 Mario Praz claims that Nietzsche’s “discovery of a twin mind” in Dostoevsky

“derive[s] from the fact that [both] writers were . . . in greater or lesser degree, sadists.”
See his matchless study The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (Oxford
University Press, 1983) 290.
88 N.K. Mikhailovsky coined this phrase (“a cruel talent”) to describe Dostoevsky

in a famous 1882 essay (see his Literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i (Moscow: Gosizdat,

1957)).
89 See Anna Dostoevsky, Reminiscences, op. cit., 372; 373; emphases in the

original. Dostoevsky’s widow was stung by the betrayal and the groundless accu-
sations which she finally attributed to Strakhov’s professional envy: as a fellow
writer, Strakhov fell far short of Dostoevsky’s imaginative powers which did not
need to draw on any immediate or previous experience. “It is obvious that a great
 Purity and Prophecy 75

artist’s talent makes it unnecessary for him to commit the crimes perpetrated by his
characters,” Anna Dostoevsky states in her husband’s defence (379); the incident
in question was very likely invented and related first to I.S. Turgenev “for the
purpose of pulling Turgenev’s leg” (413). Dostoevsky’s relationship to Turgenev is
extremely complex; “it is safe to say that no other living man occupied as important
a place in Dostoevsky’s mind as did Turgenev” (Terras, Reading Dostoevsky, op.
cit., 116). Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818–1883) was arguably the third most
famous nineteenth-century Russian writer, next to his two brilliant coevals Tolstoy
and Dostoevsky.
90 Most English translations honour the Russian original: “golosok,” “lichiko,”

“plechiki,” “postel’ka.” Sonia’s father’s description of her to Raskolnikov (Part I,

Chapter 2) is replete with these affectionate diminutives, which can connote both
intimacy and actual smallness of stature. See F.M. Dostoevskii, Prestuplenie i
nakazanie: Roman v shesti chastiakh s epilogom (Leningrad: “Khudozhestvennaia
literatura,” 1976) 54.
91 Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, Garnett translation, 213–14 (Part II,

Chapter 4).
92 Ibid., 285 (Part IV, Chapter 4).
93 Ibid., 466 (Part VI, Chapter 7); she is first mentioned in Part III, Chapter 3

(“And do you remember, mother, I was in love and wanted to get married? [. . . ]
She was such a sickly girl. . . She was fond of giving alms to the poor, and was
always dreaming of a nunnery. . . I really don’t know what drew me to her then—I
think it was because she was always ill.” (208–09)).
94 Ibid., 293; 292 (Part IV, Chapter 4).
95 Dostoevsky’s literal choice of words to describe the peril of prostitution for

Sonia (reiterated twice in the previous passage: “smerdnaya yama” or “stinking

pit”) will later inspire yet another fatherless intellectual, Alexander Ivanovich
Kuprin (1870–1938), to write the first full-length novel in Russian about the horrors
of prostitution in Russia, called The Pit (Yama, 1908–15).
96 Raskolnikov’s incomprehension of Sonia’s spiritual imperturbability has to do

with his being an unbeliever, or an atheist. The basic difference between them that
Dostoevsky exploits so effectively throughout Part IV, Chapter 4 is summarized in
Titus 1:15: “Unto the pure all things are pure: but unto them that are defiled and
unbelieving is nothing pure, but even their mind and conscience is defiled.”
97 Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, Garnett translation, 291; emphasis in

the original (“po naprasnu”).

98 In his perspicacious article “Dostoevsky and Western Intellectuals,” Czeslaw

Milosz observed that “in Russia atheism is by no means a private affair of the
individual; it is of the highest concern to the authorities, for an atheist, as a rule,
becomes a revolutionary. . . In Crime and Punishment, the crime of Raskolnikov is,
in fact, a kind of substitution [because] he dreams of a great revolutionary deed,
to which history would provide the justification.” See Crime and Punishment: A
Norton (Third) Critical Edition, op. cit., 673.
99 See Matthew 4:5–7; the Devil recommends suicide to Christ in the wilderness,

shortly after His baptism by John.

100 Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, 293; 290.
101 Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, op. cit., “Preface,” i.
102 Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, 291.
103 Ibid., 295; emphases in the original. As Sonia reads to Raskolnikov (actually

from memory, because she is too agitated to see the lines of print), “her intense
emotion” increases even more: she starts “trembling in a real physical fever” midway
and is still “trembling feverishly” at the end, after pronouncing the miraculous
finale, “‘And he that was dead came forth’ (she read loudly, cold and trembling
with ecstasy, as though she were seeing it before her eyes)” (296–97).
104 Ibid., 296; emphases in the original.
105 Dostoevsky preserves the perceived resemblance between both women on

several occasions. When Raskolnikov goes to see Sonia to confess his crime to her,
the primary question on his mind is, “Must I tell her who killed Lizaveta?” (365).
76 Against Nihilism

And when he asks Sonia to “guess” who the murderer of Lizaveta might be, he “all
at once seems to see in her face the face of Lizaveta” (369). Before Raskolnikov
goes finally to confess his crime to the police, Sonia gives him her own wooden
cross to wear while she keeps the copper cross from Lizaveta (380 and 469), once
again cementing the Lizaveta-Sonia connection in Raskolnikov’s mind.
106 Ibid., 249 (Part III, Chapter 6).
107 Lev Shestov writes that “Raskolnikov seeks his hopes solely in Lazarus’s

resurrection” because “he had examined and tried” all the other ethical lessons
from the Gospel and concluded “that when taken separately, when torn from
the general context of the Holy Scripture, it becomes not truth, but a lie.” See
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche, op. cit., 226–227.
108 Matthew 10:22. Raskolnikov’s last nightmare in the Epilogue is probably the

most crucial in the overall scheme of the novel, since his dream about “microbes”
is the first to directly question his motive for the murder (exposing his highflown
rationalizations as so much horrific hubris), thus paving the way for his first real
feelings finally of genuine contrition.
109 I Corinthians 15:42–44. St. Paul (Saul) of Tarsus and his penchant for speaking

in dichotomies for rhetorical effect certainly inspired Nietzsche’s creation of his

Zarathustra.
110 “Man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.” See

Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Schocken
Books, 1984) 9.
111 Significantly, this last nightmare is preceded by an attempt by Raskolnikov’s

fellow convicts to kill him: “‘You’re an infidel! You don’t believe in God!’ they
shouted. ‘You ought to be killed.’” (488). Subtly but surely, the godless aspect of
his character is further revealed in the dream, which parodies his idea of “saving”
humanity with his murder of the pawnbroker: “Only a few men could be saved
[during a plague of strange microbes. . . t]hey were a pure chosen people, destined to
found a new race and a new life, to renew and purify the earth, but no one had seen
these men, no one had heard their words and their voices” (489). The nightmare’s
insistence on “purity” reveals the paucity of Raskolnikov’s proud misanthropic
convictions, which are nothing more than lethal “microbes” dividing and conquering
mankind, for nothing.
112 Crime and Punishment, 297.
113 Crime and Punishment, 298; 370.
114 Ibid., 378. However, he is not amazed for long; a little later on the same page

he dismisses her urging as so much naı̈veté (“Don’t be a child, Sonia”) while she
goes on lamenting (“How, how can he live by himself! What will become of you
now?”).
115 Ibid., 379.
116 Ibid., 492.
117 See Ross Shepard Kraemer, When Joseph Met Aseneth (Oxford University

Press, 1998), especially Chapter 9, “The Authorial Idenitity of Aseneth Reconsidered”

(245–285).
118 See Chapter 12 of “Joseph and Aseneth: A Romance” in H.D.F. Sparks, ed.,

The Apocryphal Old Testament.

119 The Apocryphal Old Testament, Chapter 15, Section 6: the angel accepts

Aseneth’s penitence and tells her, “‘And you shall no more be called Aseneth, but
“City of Refuge” shall be your name; for many nations shall take refuge in you, and
under your wings shall many people find shelter, and within your walls those who
give their allegiance to God in penitence will find security.’”
120 F. Dostoyevsky, “The Meek One: A Fantasy” (1876), from A Funny Man’s

Dream [and Other Stories], trans. Olga Shartse (Moscow: Foreign Languages
Publishing House, n.d.) 68.
121 See Matthew 22:36–40 and John 15:12–13. A direct confrontation with the

pawnbroker’s plaintive question occurs again in The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,

written one year later.
Chapter 4

The Dream of the Golden Age

The question of totality—the fourth and final step in the quest for
authenticity—now complicates and divides Nietzsche’s and Dostoevsky’s
twin pursuits of authenticity. The argument of this chapter begins with
a painting that impressed Nietzsche and Dostoevsky equally: Claude
Lorrain’s pagan picture of human perfection from 1657 called Acis and
Galatea. As an ideal, this painting clearly moved Nietzsche to imagine
an earthly paradise of his own, without God. In his “prelude in rhymes”
to The Gay Science, Nietzsche’s playful culinary language is shown to
equate life with happiness (or life with power), urging us all to embrace
a return with gusto to the pagan model, as the only legitimate “golden”
goal of humanity that remains. As for Dostoevsky, the temptation of
such a return haunts the pages of no less than three of his books: A
Funny Man’s Dream, The Possessed, and The Adolescent. In the course
of analyzing the first Dostoevsky text (also translated as The Dream
of A Ridiculous Man: an ambiguous monologue), the chapter includes
an analysis of Albert Camus’ The Fall (another ambiguous monologue)
and its debt to both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. Whereas Nietzsche ac-
cepts the ancients’ dream of the Golden Age as a total answer to all
the truest longings of the human heart, both morally and aesthetically,
Dostoevsky criticizes and ultimately refutes it.

In all his writings, Nietzsche is a poet who sings the praises of human
happiness as a goal that humanity has not yet reached. Permitting
ourselves to imagine and implement other forms of happiness that we
have never tried could, according to Nietzsche’s thinking, unlock the
key to the single most important value of all: the human experience
of vitality. The life force or “will to power” is not a simple or single
thing but actually a cluster of ideas all crucially related to the quest for
happiness. Whether der Wille zur Macht is the fundamental natural
force that drives human activity or the basic will to meaning, “life” and
“happiness” are understood to be inextricably linked: one is unthinkable,
in Nietzschean terms, without the other.1 Similarly, if der Wille zur
Macht can also be defined as the creative function of Lust (which in
German means both “desire” and “pleasure”), then this follows very
78 Against Nihilism

seamlessly from “the wisdom of the body” which Nietzsche celebrates

as grounded in “life and the earth.”2 The human thirst for power and
plenitude is thus another way of stating an essential unity: “life” and
“happiness” are, in human terms, one and the same thing.3
As the very title suggests, The Joyful Wisdom (a.k.a The Gay
Science) is crucially concerned with defining and exploring the limits
of human happiness. The “joy” of Nietzschean wisdom in this book
is “a new happiness” rediscovered from antiquity, or “a second dan-
gerous innocence in joy” made deeper and bolder—a kind of modern
primitivism—born of “gay science, philosophy that sings and sizzles”
in the pagan key.4 “Joy” (das Glück) is a word that abounds in this
text, especially in Nietzsche’s frankly delightful “Prelude in German
Rhymes” where the reader is playfully invited to partake of a feast
of daring delicacies. For example, Nietzsche begins by cajoling us to
simply sample his wares: “Take a chance and try my fare: it will grow
on you, I swear; soon it will taste good to you. . . ”5 A little later on,
Nietzsche “the cook” addresses the reader squarely as a fellow gour-
mand: “Good teeth, strong stomach with you be! And once you have
got down my book, you should get on with me.”6 Indeed, the pleasure
of savouring and tasting the new or the forbidden fruit that Nietzsche
offers us in the form of this book is the leitmotif of all these lighthearted
verses.7 But the penultimate rhyme combines and condenses all the
running culinary references into a single compelling image that stands
masterfully for the whole:
Yes, I know from where I came!
Ever hungry like a flame,
I consume myself and glow.
Light grows all that I conceive,
Ashes everything I leave:
Flame I am assuredly.8

As a final touch to the promise of more reading and eating pleasures to

come, the invocation of fire is perfect. Like a phoenix, Nietzsche rises
out of his own ashes after performing his own cannibalism—standing
like the figure of danger itself, personified. Confronted by this, the
reader too can, and must, be changed by what was “eaten”—by organic
necessity. What looked light, in other words, turned out to be more
substantial and even unsettling. “Behold the man” (Ecce homo)9 : this
self-conscious reference to Christ makes Nietzsche himself the new
Christ and makes cannibalism the reinterpretation of the Eucharist.
In The Gay Science we come to the meat of the Nietzschean meal:
Book Three.10 Here, of course, is where the famous Madman speech
announcing the “death of God” occurs, as part of a larger discourse in
this Book on all the vexing theological questions of human existence.11
In the wake of God’s “death,” Nietzsche reflects that “the illumination
and the colour of all things [especially happiness] have changed.”12 The
 The Dream of the Golden Age 79

tension between truth and value throws this quest for happiness into
an acute suspension—so that even this highest of human experiences—
this happiness from antiquity which Nietzsche urges us to embrace
as “joyous wisdom”—is finally only a fiction purchased by suffering.
Why suffering? Because, according to the hedonism of Epicurus,13
pain is the only alternative to pleasure and thus the necessary offset,
precondition, and aftertaste. “To have refined senses,” Nietzsche says, is
“to be accustomed to the most exquisite things. . . as if they were simply
the right and most convenient nourishment”—this “most profound
enjoyment of the moment” is what he calls “the happiness of Homer!
The state of him that gave the Greeks their gods—no, who invented
his own gods for himself!” 14 But even this supreme world-making and
world-enjoying power of the godlike Homer is finally, alas, only another
fiction. So Nietzsche asks, with a certain nostalgia and urgency: “What
was joy in ages when one believed in devils and tempters? What was
passion when one saw demons lying in wait nearby?”15 Implied in these
questions is the assumption that no enlightened person sees or believes
in “devils and tempters” or “demons” anymore. Now that “God is
dead,” “joy” and “passion” are given “a new colour”—but, even so,
such a much paler shade “when we hold them against the coloured
splendour of that old master—ancient humanity.”16 For Nietzsche, the
pagan understanding of the world held the most vivid truth and the
most pungent savour.
In Book Four of The Gay Science, Nietzsche relates the return
of his own appetite and will to live as he shares the joy of his own
discovery that “the time is past when the church possessed a monopoly
on reflection”17 —hence “a more virile, warlike age is about to begin,”
based on stronger stomachs steeled by more manly nourishment.18
For this reason, “the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest
fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is—to live dangerously! Build
your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted
seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves!”19 New life and new
happiness are thus sealed in a new union over the grave of the dead god.
But all of this new history of human possibility remains to be lived.
The possibility of recuperation and renewal remains to be seen. The
dizzying magnitude of purely human potential is what fuels Nietzsche’s
language with such euphoria. In truth, we cannot even imagine all the
new ecstasies and new flavours that await us. It is as if the world can
be renamed into existence by us without God, transformed into a new
earthly paradise—if we only dare! “Here are hopes,” Nietzsche writes
a little further on, “but what will you hear and see of them if you have
not experienced splendour, ardour, and dawns in your own souls? I
can only remind you; more I cannot do.”20
The tantalizing taste of brave new “splendours, ardours, and dawns”
beckon throughout the rest of Book Four, but perhaps nowhere with
more breathtaking brilliance than towards the end. There is a kind
80 Against Nihilism

of magic in Nietzsche’s writing here that “can still have a stunning

effect” in spite of (or is it because of?) “how hopeless the ideal that
he delineates is.”21 When Nietzsche envisions the ideal future of hu-
manity, he writes with words like manna—melting and forming in the
air—healing and feeding each individual’s hunger according to each
individual’s taste:

Anyone who manages to experience the history of humanity as

his own history will feel in an enormously generalized way all
the grief of an invalid who thinks of health, of an old man who
thinks of the dreams of his youth, of a lover deprived of his
beloved, of the martyr whose ideal is perishing. . . But if one
endured, if one could endure this immense sum of grief of all
kinds. . . if one could burden one’s soul with all of this—[. . . ] this
would surely have to result in a happiness that humanity has
not known so far: the happiness of a god full of power and love,
full of tears and laughter, a happiness that, like the sun in the
evening, continually bestows its inexhaustible riches, pouring
them into the sea, feeling richest, as the sun does, only when
even the poorest fisherman is still rowing with golden oars! This
godlike feeling would then be called—humaneness.22

Here happiness and life, a wedding of “the most profound enjoyment

of the moment” with the “godlike” secret of life itself, appeals to the
deepest human longing to preserve, impossibly, the present: to become
immortal, to become God—but in human terms. One forgets, as one
is reading this, that this food is perishable. One is caught in the spell
of the words, the illusion of the imperishable. But even manna in
the desert is perishable. Can Nietzsche sustain us on this impossibly
beautiful food any more successfully?

A Picture of Human Perfection

There is an image that catches perfectly Nietzsche’s lofty and nostalgic

aspirations for humanity, which Nietzsche himself often signalled. This
is the French landscape painter Claude Gellée, also known as Le Lorrain
(b. Lorraine 1600, d. Rome 1682). Throughout the last lucid decade of
his life, when Nietzsche travelled between Switzerland and France and
Italy seeking “clear skies” for his health, Nietzsche alluded repeatedly to
the paintings of Claude Lorrain as mirroring his own rapturous feelings
of discovery of a new harmonious vision of humanity. Whether it was
“Claude Lorrainesque delights” moving him to tears while watching a
beautiful sunset,23 or his experience of a perfect autumn that was “a
Claude Lorrain as I never dreamed I would see it,”24 Nietzsche found
that the painter and his paintings “made him think”.25 They evoked
deep correspondences between these idealized landscapes and his own
often romantic writings (for, as he said, “I am afraid I am too much
 The Dream of the Golden Age 81

of a musician not to be a romantic”26 )—and of still deeper longings

to encompass, in his writings, “the same unbridled perfection and
sun-filled plenitude” as a Claude Lorrain painting: to contain, in other
words, the power of Nature itself in his writing and thus to create “a
Claude Lorrain thought into infinity.”27
For Nietzsche there was an exquisite ache in the Lorrain style
of “wistful landscape fantasy” because the goldenness of the light in
these canvases28 was so akin to the perfected “golden moment” that
Nietzsche believed and experienced [w]as possible.29 Indeed, Nietzsche’s
fondness for the poetically suggestive properties of golden light dates
back to his Wagner days, when he compared the emotionally powerful
effect of Wagner’s music to the sun’s golden glow: “From some far
distance we shall believe we hear Siegfried telling of his deeds; into the
touching happiness of recollection there is weaved the profound sadness
of late summer, and all nature lies still in a yellow evening light.”30
Nietzsche’s sense of goldenness is a specifically “autumnal happiness,”
since the gold of joy and fulfilment is always presented in his writing as
already touched by the sorrow of silver and loss.31 As Ernst Bertram
observed in his still unparalleled 1919 study Nietzsche: Attempt at a
Mythology, “That the noblest happiness is an autumnal fruit on the
tree of suffering—this favorite notion of Nietzsche, so redolent of late
antiquity, is also the perfect motto” for his work as a whole.32
One Claude Lorrain painting in particular succeeded perhaps better
than any other in conveying to Nietzsche the idea of “the Golden Age”:
that mythical idealized moment of oneness with Nature and perfect
harmony between men on earth.33 This painting was Claude Lorrain’s
Acis and Galatea.34
The figures of the nymph and the shepherd at the center, under
the makeshift tent by the water, are what hold the eye and tighten
the heart with that sudden surge of emotional recognition. The girl
is kneeling and facing her beloved with a complete purity of virginal
surrender, at once trusting (like a child) and wise (like some higher
form of fantastical being). She combines the sweetness of youth with
the delicacy of innocence; she is simplicity itself: goodness radiates
from all of her features (the uplifted face, the expectant hands). She is
every girl before she becomes a woman. She is strangely and poignantly
perfect—tiny, vulnerable, and all aglow with love. She is on the point
of giving herself. And this is what makes her so irresistible, and so
human.
The man, for his part, is also redolent of goodness since his arms—
poised to embrace her—are extended in tenderness. His face shows an
expression of gentleness and gratitude for the girl’s movement towards
him: his love is also entirely evident, but in a different way because he
is restraining himself for her sake. He is inclined over her, sheltering her
without touching her, in an echo and extension of the image of the tent
above both of them. The fact that there is no physical contact is what
82 Against Nihilism

Figure 6: Acis and Galatea (1657), by Claude Lorrain

charges the composition with so much dramatic tension. Their love is
about to be consummated only now, as suggested by the boat in the
distance (from which they might have recently alighted), the small dove
at their feet (perhaps a fecund promise of children in the future), and
the small cupid witnessing their first tryst (testifying to the purity of
each lover’s intent). It is an idyllic portrait of first love, simultaneously
expanding into the golden light over the water between the windblown
tree on the left and the tall cliffs on the right—and contracting into the
private circle of their encampment on the beach. Both the expansion
and the contraction are perfectly organic—like breathing out and
breathing in. And yet the whole is so deliberately composed, so clearly
artificial, that there is paradoxically nothing natural in this scene at
all. This strange quality is what inspired Goethe to say, “in a tone of
deep admiration,” that Lorrain’s paintings “contain the highest truth
but not a trace of reality.”35
What is fascinating about the subject of this painting is its funda-
mental fragility—its ephemeral fiction—which is somehow that much
more terribly tangible as fiction, in the midst of that obviously idealized
landscape. The meaning of human love is but a moment—so easily
lost or effaced—in the wider expanse of space and time. The cosmos
is surely indifferent to any human drama, on any scale. And yet, in
this picture, the illusion of cosmic and human harmony is preserved:
one can so easily believe in the triumph of romance as it is depicted
here—even as one recognizes its ephemerality, its artificiality.
It is the ideal of romance built into the concept of the Golden Age
in this Claude Lorrain painting that captures Nietzsche’s ambition
 The Dream of the Golden Age 83

so well: to transport the reader to a time and place so far into the
future that it seems like the distant past of myth—and then to imagine
there, with him, the lost (but perhaps still recoverable) space of a
greater epoch. And the myth of the Golden Age is precisely that space,
forgiving and elevating all human desires into noble ends in and of
themselves. Nietzsche understood that every human heart beats first
and last as a romantic, always alive to the claims of the passions:
this surely explains Nietzsche’s perennial and universal appeal as a
“passionate” philosopher.36
As it happens, this particular Claude Lorrain painting also im-
pressed Dostoevsky. In her memoirs, Anna Dostoevsky recorded how
her husband was always going to see the original painting of Acis and
Galatea in a Dresden gallery while they were living abroad in the first
years of their marriage. Upon their return to Russia, Dostoevsky wrote
at length about the sense of a utopia represented in this painting in his
Diary of a Writer.37 It was in an 1877 installment of the Diary that
he published A Funny Man’s Dream (Son smeshnogo cheloveka; also
translated as The Dream of a Ridiculous Man), which was his third
and most sustained attempt to come to grips with this painting that
clearly disturbed him. The dream of a Claude Lorrain-inspired halcyon
interval for Nietzsche (of “a happiness that humanity has not known so
far”) is thus the same dream of no less than three different Dostoevsky
characters (“Here was the earthly paradise. . . a sensation of happiness
I had never known before thrilled my heart till it ached; it was the love
of all humanity”).38 For both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, the Golden
Age represents a moment of intense feeling of contentedness which asks:
“What if this unbelievably perfect happiness were truly possible?”

The Funny Man and The Unreliable Narrator

Unlike any other Dostoevsky text, A Funny Man’s Dream is a pure

monologue: every single word in the text issues only from the mouth
of the “Funny Man.”39 Dramatic monologue can be comic (mock-
testament) or tragic (true confession)—so which dramatic mask best
fits this Dostoevsky character?
Like the Underground Man, the Funny Man has no name, age, or
occupation. He begins by introducing himself as “a funny man; they
call me a madman now. [. . . ] What saddens me is that they do not
know the truth, and I do.”40 We are told that he notices “something
that was infinitely greater than myself: this something was a mounting
conviction that nothing mattered.” 41 So he decides to kill himself. That
evening, on his way home to put a bullet through his head, the Funny
Man is accosted on the street by a little girl begging him to help her
mother. He stamps his feet, shouts at her, and abandons her. As he
returns to his apartment and sits in his chair, he says that “it was
perfectly clear to me that if I was a man and not yet a nought. . . I
84 Against Nihilism

was [still] alive and, consequently, able to. . . feel shame for my actions.
[. . . ] But if I was going to kill myself in a couple of hours . . . [then] why
should I be concerned with the girl and what did I care for shame or
anything else in the world?”42 While he is thus preoccupied, the Funny
Man falls asleep and dreams that he is dead and travelling through
space until:

I do not know how it came about, but suddenly I found myself

upon this other earth in the bright sunlight of a day as lovely
as paradise. I believe I was on one of those islands which on our
earth comprise the Greek Archipelago, or it may have been on
the mainland somewhere, on the shore which the Archipelago
adjoins. Everything was exactly the same as on our earth, but
it all seemed to wear the splendour of a holiday, and shone with
the glory of a great and holy triumph at last attained. [. . . ]
This was an earth undefiled by sin, inhabited by people who
had not sinned; they dwelt in a Garden of Eden just like the
one in which our ancestors, so the legends of all mankind say,
had once dwelt before they knew sin. . . 43

Our hero says that the beings on this world had a science finer and
more profound than the one we normally knew on earth; they had “a
common tongue” (he is “convinced that the trees understood them”);
and they loved everyone. They sang beautiful songs, and their children
were everyone’s children. There were no “signs of that cruel sensuality”
and “they hallowed nature, earth, sea, and woods.”44 But, our hero
admits, there is a truth about his experience on this planet that he
has concealed from us. “I shall disclose this truth. . . The fact is that
I. . . I corrupted them all!”

I spread contamination through all that happy earth, sinless

before I came to it. [. . . ] They learned to lie and came to
love lying, appreciating the beauty of lies. Oh, it may have
begun innocently, with laughter, coquetry, playful love. . . Soon
after, sensuality was born, sensuality conceived jealousy, and
jealousy conceived cruelty. . . [. . . ] When they grew criminal
they invented the idea of justice and in order to maintain it
prescribed for themselves voluminous codes of law, and to add
security to these codes they erected a guillotine. They had but a
vague memory of what they had lost, and even refused to believe
that once they had been innocent and happy. [. . . ] I wept in
pity. I held out my arms to them in despair, accusing, cursing,
and despising myself. I told them that I had done it all, I alone;
that it was I who brought them this germ of corruption, iniquity,
and deceit. [. . . ] But they just laughed at me and finally came
to regard me as a saintly fool. [. . . ] At last they declared that I
was becoming a danger to them, and that they would lock me
up in the madhouse if I did not keep quiet.45
 The Dream of the Golden Age 85

The Funny Man then wakes up in his armchair. “My resolution to

preach came on the instant, to preach now and forever, of course. I
shall preach, I must preach—what? Truth. For I have seen it, seen
it with my own eyes, seen it in all its glory.”46 His final words are a
promise to go and find “that little girl” he failed to help the night
before.
As one reads, one falls under the confiding spell of the single
voice—feeling for the speaker’s pain of being ridiculous all his life, and
believing all the speaker’s initial claims of torment from his hurt pride.
One accepts how a sharp dichotomy is set up immediately between
the Funny Man and everyone else, which (according to him) depends
on his unique possession of “the truth” which no one else knows or
understands. What is the status of this single voice?47 Why is it
talking?48
The cloying nature of the Funny Man’s confiding tone is something
that stands out in another richly ambiguous monologue by Albert
Camus.49 Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the narrator-protagonist of The
Fall (La Chute, 1956), adopts an identically clever and confiding tone
of voice that initially draws the reader in, leading to the expectation
that the whole of the text constitutes a kind of confession. His witty
and urbane style is littered with references to entre nous intimacy,
such as “let us take care not to condemn them” and “I shouldn’t say
their organization; it is ours, after all.”50 He is charmingly evasive
and voluble about himself at the same time. He is, he says, “a judge-
penitent.” But what becomes eventually apparent is a sleight-of-hand
shift: the reader has been subjected to “a confidence trick” by “the
confidence man.” At the end of five days of non-stop speech, Clamence
reveals that he was never fundamentally interested in confessing or
confiding anything at all because his first and last concern is to judge
and condemn instead, “just like everyone else.”

People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.

What do you expect? The idea that comes most naturally to
man, as if from his very nature, is the idea of his innocence.
[. . . ] We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against
something! Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even
if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself. [. . . ]
Moreover, we cannot assert the innocence of anyone, whereas
we can state with certainty the guilt of all. Every man testifies
to the crime of all the others. [. . . ] Therefore it is essential to
begin by extending the condemnation to all, without distinction,
in order to thin it out at the start. No excuses ever, for anyone;
that’s my principle at the outset. [. . . ] With me there is no
giving of absolution or blessing.51

This leaves the reader in an uncomfortable position. “Since the narrator

does not seek to confess but, on the contrary, to accuse, there is no
86 Against Nihilism

longer any reason to believe that he has revealed himself to us at all.”52

The question for the slippery narrator was never about facing his own
personal responsibility for anything, but about forcing the reader to
face his own guiltiness instead. For, just like Dostoevsky’s Funny Man,
Camus’ Clamence has on his conscience an identical failure to come
to the assistance of a girl. In the case of The Fall, it is the girl who
wants to commit suicide and Clamence who fails to help stop her. He
claims to never cross a bridge at night anymore since it reminds him of
that one night when, rather than coming to the suicidal girl’s rescue,
he “felt an irresistible weakness” overcome him and let her drown
instead.53 Such an early confessional detail might appear “penitent” on
Clamence’s part, but at the very end of the monologue it is Clamence
the “judge” who flings it accusingly in the face of the reader:

The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge

you. Even better, I provoke you into judging yourself, and this
relieves me of that much of the burden. Ah, mon cher, we are
odd, wretched creatures, and if we merely look back over our
lives, there’s no lack of occasions to amaze and horrify ourselves.
Just try. I shall listen, you may be sure, to your own confession
with a great feeling of fraternity. [. . . ] Admit, however, that
today you feel less pleased with yourself than you felt five days
ago? [. . . ] Are we not all alike, constantly talking and to no
one, forever up against the same questions although we know
the answers in advance? Then please tell me what happened to
you one night on the quays of the Seine and how you managed
never to risk your life. You yourself utter the words that for
years have never ceased echoing through my nights and that I
shall at last say through your mouth: “O young woman, throw
yourself into the water again so that I may a second time have
the chance of saving both of us!”54

Camus’ The Fall is a textual tour de force that reverses the positions
of the reader and the narrator and leaves the moral content of the
monologue suspended. In a similar fashion, Dostoevsky’s Funny Man
creates a moral vacuum rather than resolving it. For like Clamence, the
Funny Man is not as clearly committed to “the Truth” as he claims; if
anything, he is constantly subverting his own story in order to make
himself sound more important. This can be seen in the frequent con-
tradictions and inconsistencies of his claims, which he airily attributes
to his being “a braggart and a liar.”55
The Dostoevskian dissonance in all of this—the Funny Man’s oily
tone of voice, the Funny Man’s “unconsciously making up and dis-
torting of the details,” the Funny Man’s ecstatic vision of the Golden
Age—is that it all issues from a disordered mind. The Funny Man
is very sensitive to being laughed at (exactly like Camus’ Clamence),
so his pride “swelled” in response to being hurt in this way.56 As he
contemplates suicide, he idly entertains the idea that “the world seemed
 The Dream of the Golden Age 87

to be created for me alone” because “all this world and all these people
exist perhaps only in my consciousness.”57 But all of this is funda-
mentally sick. The Funny Man’s vision that follows his bleak mood
of despair is not so much a reprieve from death as an intimation of
death yet again. For the dream of the Golden Age is a complete denial
of the human reality of affliction. As Simone Weil once wrote, “It is
affliction that reveals, suddenly and to our very great surprise, that we
are totally mistaken” about our assumptions in relation to the universe:
we are not proudly perfectible but terrifyingly, humblingly perishable
and “exposed to affliction” which reminds us of our perishable state.58
Instead of the secular wish for cosmic harmony that can be seen in
the Funny Man’s dream of the Golden Age, Dostoevsky consistently
affirmed that there is the religious truth of cosmic disharmony that is
the result of the Fall. Even if we would want some cosmic harmony to
work, it could not and should not work—given man’s fallen condition
in relation to God.

The Funny Man as a Source of Confusion

When it comes to a particularly complex Dostoevsky text like A Funny

Man’s Dream, where typically Dostoevskian grapplings with religious
questions abound, the lack of insightful exegeses is downright distressing.
Robert L. Belknap will only say that this story “differs from all of
Dostoevsky’s other work for its extreme abstractness” and perhaps
points to “a new direction, an abstract style which he never lived to
elaborate.”59 Robert Louis Jackson offers an account of this same story
by stating “the ridiculous man stands on the threshold of a discovery
of Christ and Christian faith”—although “it is true that he does not
name God directly” and furthermore “has not yet acknowledged Christ”
anywhere in this text!60 Jackson finally concludes that A Funny Man’s
Dream “can be seen as expressing a. . . moral-philosophical point of
view: a belief in a moral order and a transcendent reality” because of
the way Dostoevsky “explores the expanding frontiers of an unbounded
reality and traces the endless cycle of fall and resurrection.”61 But
this is hardly satisfying since it leaves all religious content (like “fall”
and “resurrection”) stubbornly undefined and undeveloped. Joseph
Frank, another renowned Dostoevsky scholar, attributes a simple and
sunny optimism to A Funny Man’s Dream that similarly dismisses any
possible religious intent on the part of Dostoevsky. If one is to trust
Frank’s judgment, then one may conclude with him that the point
of A Funny Man’s Dream is that it represents “Dostoevsky’s most
vibrant and touching depiction of his positive moral-religious ideal,
expressed far more convincingly in this rhapsodic and ‘fantastic’ form
than anywhere else in his work.”62
Much Dostoevsky scholarship fails to grasp the intricacies of Dos-
toevsky’s religious thought, often preferring to impose some other
88 Against Nihilism

ontological framework instead.63 Helen Muchnic has rightly observed

that “Dostoevsky critics. . . have a way of using Dostoevsky as an
excuse for propounding their own philosophies or displaying their as-
tuteness.”64 For example, a Soviet literary critic like V.V. Zenkovsky
sees “ethical maximalism” as Dostoevsky’s expression of “faith in man”
first—because Dostoevsky’s “anthropology” is more important than
his “theology.”65 Dostoevsky’s religious content is thus more often than
not occluded at best or derided at worst, depending on which axe
the Dostoevsky critic is out to grind. The lone exception is Edward
Wasiolek, whose words on The Dream of a Ridiculous Man are few
but perfectly cognizant of the crucial religious dimension. He calls
The Dream “blasphemy, and yet it has been taken universally by Dos-
toevsky’s interpreters as sacrament.” This is because, as Wasiolek
explains, “the Golden Age—without Christ—is atheism; the Golden
Age the Ridiculous Man dreams of is a Golden Age without Christ;
even more, it is a Golden Age by which he attempts to make himself a
Christ.”66
Since A Funny Man’s Dream is so centrally concerned with the
Golden Age, the religious dimension is necessarily engaged. For just
as it is a manifestation of the denial of affliction, the dream of the
Golden Age is just as much a response to guilt. For Nietzsche, guilt is
a Judaeo-Christian mistake—a useless emotion that should not exist.67
Even if the Golden Age is an illusion, it still has more emotional truth
than the obfuscating baggage of guilt. The Funny Man himself denies
that anything truly terrible is happening to the girl he neglects, while
admitting that his guilt—or rather, his failure to help—is what triggers
this dream in the first place. Guilt is what will drive the emergence
of this same dream (almost word for word) for two other Dostoevsky
characters. Unlike for Nietzsche, guilt for Dostoevsky can never be
a mistake because it points to something very crucial that has gone
wrong. And the Golden Age, for Dostoevsky, is a way to attempt to
relieve guilt. It is a beautiful lie that does not, finally, serve or expiate
anything at all. For embedded within this dream is the abstraction
“love for mankind” that prevents the infinitely harder work of particular,
concrete, applied love. As another Dostoevsky character once put it,
“I love mankind, but I find to my amazement that the more I love
mankind as a whole, the less I love individual people. [. . . ] [So] to
make up for it, the more I hate individual people, the more ardent
is my general love for mankind.”68 Such is the Dostoevskian logic of
the Golden Age: the more beguilingly its joys attract us, the more
perversely it fails to deliver on the happiness it promises.
If the dream of the Golden Age is a romantic flight into the idealistic
sunset for Nietzsche, then it is an escapist fantasy from a more sordid
reality for Dostoevsky. The proof of the dubious and virulent nature
of this dream can be seen in the persons of the Dostoevskian dreamers
themselves—for besides the pathetic character of the Funny Man
 The Dream of the Golden Age 89

who fails to commit suicide, there is the more dangerous character

of Stavrogin who succeeds—not only in taking his own life but in
poisoning the lives of many other people in the novel as well.

The Dream as Devilish Denial of Blame: Stavrogin’s

Golden Age Vision

Why and how Stavrogin comes to have his dream of the Golden Age is
significant. It occurs in the famously excised “confession” of Stavrogin
in Part Two of The Possessed, known as “At Tikhon’s.”69 In between
several duels and beddings of women—two games at which he never
loses—Stavrogin has, up to this (mid)point of the novel, remained
aloof from all the other characters while exercising a strange magnetic
charm over them. His whole person is invested with a kind of power
(“he seemed to be a paragon of beauty, yet at the same time there was
something repulsive about him”); four years later his appearance is
even more striking (“he seemed [now] to be decidedly, indisputably
beautiful”).70 Stavrogin is only growing in charismatic strength, at-
tracting men also—men like Shatov and Kirillov, who are completely
devoted to him—and yet he himself remains indifferent. This is why
his sudden confession to the bishop Tikhon comes as a surprise: why
should the unmoved mover now be moved?71
As with the Funny Man and Clamence, everything about Stavrogin’s
confession turns out to be suspect. While it is ostensibly a script where
he acknowledges one wrongdoing in particular—the casual rape of a
defenceless and innocent little girl—it is also clearly a performance for
the benefit of Bishop Tikhon, who alone is deemed capable or worthy
of discerning what all this sordidness is supposed to signify. Initially
Stavrogin claims that “hallucinations” for the past year, “especially
at night,” are what bring him now to the Bishop’s door. But then
he also insists that he has “no need whatsoever” of the Bishop’s help
in dispelling these hallucinations, since Stavrogin already believes
“canonically” in the devil and accepts the devil’s interference as a direct
fact, “not in any allegory.”72 After all,

“Is it really possible to believe in the devil without believing in

God?” Stavrogin asked with a laugh.
“Oh, altogether possible, it happens all the time,” Tikhon replied,
raising his eyes and also smiling.
“And I’m sure you consider such faith more honourable than
complete lack of faith. . . Oh, you priest!” said Stavrogin with a
loud laugh. Tikhon smiled at him again.
“On the contrary, absolute atheism is more honourable than
secular indifference,” he added cheerfully and ingenuously.
“Aha, so that’s what you think.”
90 Against Nihilism

“The absolute atheist stands on the next-to-last rung of the

ladder of perfect faith (whether or not he takes the next step),
but the indifferent man has no faith whatever, except for an evil
fear.”73

Stavrogin, “the indifferent man,” appears stung by Tikhon’s words

and asks him suddenly about a passage from the Book of Revelation
which he “wants to read” out loud to Tikhon. Instead Tikhon recites it
out loud for him, “recalling the passage word for word,” telling about
Heaven’s rejection of “the indifferent”74 :

And to the angel of the church of Laodicea write: These things

saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, who is the begin-
ning of the creation of God; I know thy works, that thou art
neither cold nor hot. I would thou wert cold or hot. But because
thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will begin to
vomit thee out of my mouth. Because thou sayest: I am rich
and made wealthy and have need of nothing: and knowest not
that thou art wretched and miserable and poor and blind and
naked.75

This God’s-eye-view of man, in his true condition of dependence on

God’s mercy, is what so stings Stavrogin: he will not acknowledge his
own frailty or his own dependence. He would sooner stay with his proud
aloof claims to indifference, even if it means Heaven is closed to him. As
in the vision of the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri, the vestibule of
the apathetic—the uncommitted or the indifferent—contains all those
dead souls who never did enough good or evil while alive, so neither
Heaven nor Hell will take them.76 And, as Clamence put it, Stavrogin
recognizes to what extent “we lack the energy of evil as well as the
energy of good. [. . . ] We are [all] in the vestibule, cher ami.” 77
In the light of this Biblical passage, which insists on the rock-bottom
truth of human frailty, Stavrogin’s confession—when it finally comes,
in its polished pre-written form—has, to Tikhon’s ears, “something
ridiculous about it.”78 Certainly Stavrogin’s whole carefully composed
account, which he intends to publish in “all newspapers” in Russia
and “at the same time in translation abroad,”79 screams with the
same self-importance as the Funny Man’s account of his dream. “I’m
always master of myself when I want to be,” Stavrogin insists, with
characteristically icy composure; “I’m in complete control of my own
will, as always.”80 Except for this small question about the little girl
who hanged herself after he raped her—like the question of her true age
(ten or fourteen years old?)—Stavrogin does not appear particularly
troubled by anything. Three years pass, without any twinge to his
conscience, as he travels from Egypt to Iceland. Then one day, while
travelling through Germany, Stavrogin stops to rest in a hotel and has
his dream of the Golden Age:
 The Dream of the Golden Age 91

There’s a painting by Claude Lorrain, called. . . “Acis and

Galatea,” although I’ve always referred to it as “The Golden
Age”. . . It was this picture that appeared to me in my dream,
not as a picture, but as if it were the real thing.
It was some little place in the Greek archipelago. . . [. . . ] of
the earthly paradise. . . What a splendid race lived here! They
woke up and fell asleep happy and innocent. . . [. . . ] The sun
flooded the islands and sea with its rays, taking delight in its
beautiful children. A wonderful dream, a lofty delusion! The most
improbable fantasy ever conceived, to which all mankind has
devoted its strength throughout its life, for which it’s sacrificed
everything, for which men have died on the cross and prophets
been killed, without which people do not wish to live but are
unable even to die. I seemed to experience all these sensations
in this dream; I don’t know what it was that I dreamt precisely,
but the cliffs and the sea, the slanted rays of the setting sun—all
this I still seemed to see, when I woke up and opened my eyes,
for the first time in my life literally awash with tears. A feeling
of happiness as yet unknown to me invaded my heart until it
hurt.81

In this dream of generalized bliss, particular sorrows are erased: every-

thing seems forgiven because there is nothing to forgive.82 There is only
a state of nature where no child could ever have been raped or killed in
the first place. But upon waking in his hotel room, Stavrogin notices
that “the slanting rays of the setting sun were pouring down in the
same way” as that day when the little girl went to hang herself—thus
recalling his guilt and triggering the return of the same hallucination
that always visits him now, of the hanged girl cursing him. His Golden
Age reverie is thus revealed as the screen behind which his conscience
had been hiding. For in the end, Stavrogin will hang himself almost
exactly like his victim: in a closet, without telling anyone, in shame
and self-loathing. It is “evil fear” that triumphs over “the indifferent
man.” The dream of the Golden Age is thus finally an absurdity that
distracts us from the truth as Dostoevsky saw it: that “man is not born
for happiness; man earns his happiness, and always by suffering.”83

Notes
1 Nietzsche equates “life” and “happiness” on multiple occasions. For example,

in Daybreak there is a definition of “happiness, conceived of as the liveliest feeling

of power” (see Part II, Section 113). Similarly, in The Antichrist Nietzsche says
“What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome”
(see Section 2; emphasis in the original). Both are explicitly defined together later
in this same text as “life/nature/will to live” (see Section 18).
2 See Speech # 4 “On the Despisers of the Body” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra,

First Part, op. cit. See also Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche repeats that
“life itself is will to power. . . [. . . ] life simply is will to power” (see p. 21 and p. 203;
emphases in the original).
92 Against Nihilism

3 Nietzsche’s supreme estimation of the value of human life, as the guiding

principle of his philosophy, is also what he hoped would be his personal legacy to
the world as a philosopher. In Book Four, Section 278 (“The thought of death”) in
The Joyful Wisdom, Nietzsche asks himself (in a relatively rare, straightforward
way) how best he would like to be remembered. Given that “men do not want at
all to think the thought of death,” he “should like very much to do something that
would make the thought of life even a hundred times more appealing to them.”
4 See Sections 3 and 4 of Nietzsche’s “Preface for the Second 1886 Edition” of

The Joyful Wisdom and Walter Kaufmann’s “Translator’s Introduction” to The

Gay Science, op. cit., p. 37 and p. 13 respectively.
5 Rhyme # 1 (“Invitation”) from “Joke, Cunning, and Revenge: Prelude in

German Rhymes,” in The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, op. cit., pp. 40–41.
The German originals of all rhymes are also provided. Überglück (“over-bliss”) is
another notable variation (see pp. 60–61).
6 Rhyme # 54 (“To My Reader”) from “Prelude” in The Gay Science, op. cit.,

pp. 62–63.
7 For more reworkings of the culinary metaphor in this “Prelude,” see Rhyme

# 8 (about a very hungry snake), Rhyme # 24 (about a cure for stomach trouble),
Rhyme # 35 (about an aid to digestion), Rhyme # 39 (about a commandment
to drink wine), and Rhyme # 51 (about the stale taste of piety). The other half
of the time, these rhymes are dominated by allusions to heights and stars and
dancing—other equally typical signposts on the Nietzschean landscape.
8 Rhyme # 62 (“Ecce Homo”), “Prelude,” in The Gay Science, op. cit., pp.

66–67.
9 See John 19:5 (“(Jesus therefore came forth, bearing the crown of thorns and

the purple garment.) And he [Pilate] saith to them: Behold the Man”).
10 As might be expected from any complete dining experience, Nietzsche does not

fail to provide an appetizer (the Prelude), a soup (Book One), a salad (Book Two),
two main courses of meat (Book Three) and potatoes (Book Four), followed by a
discrete palate-cleanser (Book Five) and a dessert (“Appendix: Songs of Prince
Vogelfrei”). However, Book One is a thin broth of sketchy preliminaries already
rehearsed in the Prelude, and Book Two is a salad marred by misogyny (and
thus better off not even nibbled). The palate-cleanser of Book Five is similarly
disappointing since it was added later but contributes little that is new, while the
dessert of closing poems is (like all desserts) ultimately dispensable. This leaves,
for the discriminating diner, only Books Three and Four as worthy of digestion.
Appropriately, then, it is in Book Three (the meat highlight) that Nietzsche
discourses disparagingly on the diet of the meatless. See, for example, Section 134
(“Pessimists as victims”) and Section 145 (“Danger for vegetarians”) for injunctions
against those too timid to partake of stronger fare.
11 Section 125 (“The Madman”) of Book Three is discussed in Chapter II above.
12 See Section 152 (“The greatest change”) in Book Three of The Gay Science,

op. cit., p. 197.

13 Of Epicurus Nietzsche said, “Yes, I am proud of the fact that I experience the

character of Epicurus quite differently from perhaps everybody else. Whatever I

hear or read of him, I enjoy the happiness of the afternoon of antiquity.” But he is
quick to qualify this bliss: “Such happiness could be invented only by a man who
was suffering continually. [. . . ] Never before has voluptuousness been so modest.”
See Book One, Section 45 (“Epicurus”) in The Gay Science, op. cit., p. 110.
14 See Book Four, Section 302 (“The danger of the happiest”), p. 242; emphases

in the original. Again, immediately after this acknowledgment of Homer’s happiness,

Nietzsche cautions that “we should not overlook this: With this Homeric happiness
in one’s soul one is also more capable of suffering than any other creature under
the sun.”
15 Book Three, Section 152 (“The greatest change”), p. 197.
16 Ibid.
17 Book Four, Section 280 (“Architecture for the search for knowledge”), p. 227.
18 Book Four, Section 283 (“Preparatory human beings”), p. 228.
 The Dream of the Golden Age 93

19 Ibid.; emphases in the original.

20 Book Four, Section 286 (“Interruption”), p. 230.
21 See Michael Tanner, Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2000)
99.
22 Book Four, Section 337 (“The ‘humaneness’ of the future”), pp. 268–69;

emphases in the original.

23 See Nietzsche’s Notebooks, July-August 1879.
24 See Nietzsche’s letter to Peter Gast (a.k.a. Heinrich Köselitz, Nietzsche’s

musician friend and personal secretary), written from Turin on October 20, 1888.
25 See Nietzsche’s letter to Franz Overbeck, written from Rome on May 20, 1883.
26 See Nietzsche’s letter to Georg Brandes, written from Nice on March 27, 1888.
27 See Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo (discussion of Twilight of the Idols in “Why I

Write Such Good Books”), p. 316.

28 Claude Lorrain was famous for his mastery of the appearance of natural golden

light emanating from his paintings, according to different times of the day (such as
in his paintings Morning and Evening). He achieved this “shimmering” effect by
direct observation, often lying outside in the fields “before daylight and into the
night,” in order to learn how “to depict the morning and the evening glow with
great naturalness.” See Encyclopedia of Painting, ed. Bernard S. Myers (New York:
Crown Publishers, Inc., 1955) pp. 309–310.
29 Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra is replete with imagery of goldenness,

especially in relation to the effects of sunlight. For example, there is the golden
water reflected by the “overrich star” that is the sun (see Section 1 of the Prologue
of the First Part). Another example is “All joy wants the eternity of all things,
wants honey. . . wants gilded evening glow” (see Section 11 of Speech # 19, “The
Drunken Song,” from the Fourth Part).
30 See Friedrich Nietzsche, Meditation No. 4 (“Richard Wagner in Bayreuth”),

end of Section 8, in Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge

University Press, 1997) 236.
31 At the beginning of his autobiography Ecce Homo, Nietzsche offers the following

summation of his life: “On this perfect day when everything is ripening and not
only the grape is turning brown, I look back and see that I have squeezed a perfect
golden drop that is my work. . . How could I not be grateful to my entire life?” (p.
221)
32 Finally available in an English translation by Robert E. Norton, published by

the University of Illinois Press in 2009; see pp. 210–11. Bertram provides luminous
analyses of Nietzsche’s relationships to practically every significant thematic that
emerges from his writing: starting with Dürer and Heraclitus, then moving to
Wagner and Goethe, and finishing with Napoleon, Socrates, and. . . Claude Lorrain!
33 In Works and Days the Greek pastoral poet Hesiod (circa 735 BC) spoke of

“the happy Golden Age,” when the gods made first “a golden race” of men who
“lived like gods without sorrow of heart, far from toil and pain; the cornland of itself
bore fruit abundantly.” See Edith Hamilton, Mythology (Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1942) 86. According to other accounts, “the Golden Age” was both a
time in the distant idealized past (“when all men lived in Golden Age conditions”),
and a place in a distant idealized future (“where divinely favoured humans live
on instead of dying” in Elysium or the Isles of the Blessed). See G.S. Kirk, The
Nature of Greek Myths (Markham: Penguin Books Canada Ltd., 1974) 132.
34 The Greek myth telling the story behind this scene is as follows: the ugly

cyclops Polyphemus suffers from unrequited love for the capricious and lovely
nymph Galatea, who prefers the charms and attentions of the shepherd Acis instead.
So, in a rage of jealousy and frustration, the cyclops kills the shepherd. However,
the gods take pity on Acis and transform him into a river god, thereby enabling
the lovers to live happily ever after.
35 Bertram, Nietzsche, p. 217.
36 By far the best book about Nietzsche’s eerily universal appeal, being all things

to all people (from Anarchists to Zionists) is Steven Aschheim’s The Nietzsche

Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
94 Against Nihilism

37 See Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences, op. cit., p. 119 and p. 390.
38 Earlier treatments of “the Golden Age” as represented in this specific Claude
Lorrain painting occur in The Possessed (Besy, 1872)—as discussed in Chapter
Five below—and in The Adolescent (Podrostok, 1875). The quotation is from
Chapter 7 of Part III of the latter novel (also translated as A Raw Youth). Andrei
Petrovich Versilov is speaking rapturously here to his son Arkady (the protagonist
and “adolescent” of the novel’s title). But it is the other father figure of Makar
who has the last word.
39 The two very brief lines attributed in this story to the little girl and to the

being that carries the narrator are not significant enough to alter the fact that
the ridiculous man is essentially performing a monologue. Even Notes from the
Underground has moments of reported speech (other speaking parts are assigned all
throughout the second part); likewise, The Meek One tends toward a monologue
overall but lapses periodically into dialogue (the words of the dead wife, the servant,
and the rival suitor are among others recalled in the bereaved husband’s story).
Thus, while other Dostoevsky texts may tend towards the monologue, only The
Dream of a Ridiculous Man is a monologue.
40 F.M. Dostoevsky, A Funny Man’s Dream, trans. Olga Shartse (Moscow:

Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.), p. 71.

41 Ibid., p. 72; emphases in the original.
42 Ibid., p. 77.
43 Ibid., p. 83. The details about the Greek location and the quality of the light

emphasize the link to the Lorrain painting Acis and Galatea that Dostoevsky found,
for him, the epitome of “the Golden Age.”
44 Ibid., p. 84; p. 85; p. 86. Emphasis in the original.
45 Ibid., p. 88; p. 89; pp. 90–91. Emphasis in the original.
46 Ibid., p. 91.
47 This technique of destabilizing the reader’s expectations and calling into

question the authority of the narrator has been called “the unreliable narrator
effect,” and dates back to the first novels in the Western tradition: for example,
Sidi Hamid Benengeli in Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote and the omniscient
narrator of Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. As a literary device, this effect
forces the reader to actively interpret the truth value of the text since it is not
automatically given but instead held in a kind of critical suspension: the reader
must navigate between jokes, digressions, and even deliberate put-downs of the
hero by the narrator in order to determine who (if anyone) is telling the truth in
the story. Only the individual reader’s judgment can assign a finally stable meaning
to the ambiguity of the reading situation. For more on “the unreliable narrator,”
see Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988) pp. 142–151.
48 “Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.” See

Epigram # 169 from “Epigrams and Interludes” in Nietzsche, Beyond Good and
Evil, op. cit., p. 42.
49 Of Camus’ La Chute, it has been said “Nul n’est plus dostoievskien” (see

Jacques Madaule, “Camus et Dostoievski” in Table Ronde, No. 146 (février 1960)
127–36. In Roy Davison’s 1997 study Camus: The Challenge of Dostoevsky, Camus’
character Clamence has been compared to a whole host of Dostoevsky characters,
ranging from Goliadkin in The Double and the romantic narrator of White Nights
to Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment and the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers
Karamazov. But none of these offers a satisfying reading of the opaque complexity
of Clamence, which is best mirrored in the self-serving subterfuges of A Funny
Man’s Dream.
50 Albert Camus, The Fall, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Random House,

1956) p. 6; p. 8. Emphases in the original.

51 Ibid., pp. 80-81; p. 110; p. 131.
52 Brian T. Fitch, Reflections in the Mind’s Eye: Reference and Its Problemati-

zation in Twentieth-Century French Fiction (University of Toronto Press, 1991) p.

123.
 The Dream of the Golden Age 95

53 Camus, The Fall, p. 15 and p. 70.

54 Camus, The Fall, p. 140; p. 141; p. 147.
55 Dostoevsky, A Funny Man’s Dream, p. 85. Examples of inconsistencies include

how he intends to shoot himself in the head, but he feels that he shoots himself
in the heart instead; how he was tempted to “doubt the truth of his own words”
because it was “perhaps a thousand times better, brighter, and happier” than he
is telling it; and how he slyly lets slip, “Do you know, I shall tell you a secret: it
may not have been a dream at all!” (p. 87) See also the contradiction of the Funny
Man’s conclusion on p. 92: “Truth whispered in my ear that I was lying” (emphasis
in the original).
56 Ibid., p. 72. Clamence is always suspecting that other people are laughing at

him (see, for example, pp. 38–39 and p. 80 of The Fall).

57 A Funny Man’s Dream, p. 77. The Funny Man’s conviction that “nothing

mattered” finds its exact echo again in Clamence, who asserts casually but cuttingly
that “Fundamentally, nothing mattered” (p. 49 in The Fall).
58 See “The Love of God and Affliction” in On Science, Necessity, and the Love

of God, ed. and trans. Richard Rees (London, 1968) p. 193.

59 See the “Dostoevsky” entry in Handbook of Russian Literature, op. cit., page

105.
60 See Chapter 11, “The Ridiculous Man—Beyond Don Quixote” and Chapter

12, “Some Considerations on The Dream of a Ridiculous Man and Bobok, from
the Aesthetic Point of View” in The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes
(Princeton University Press, 1981) 283 & 284 (emphasis in the original). Jackson
also asserts that “as a type, the ridiculous man certainly belongs in the category
of. . . iurodivyi Khrista (‘fool for Christ’s sake’).” But this is a completely untenable
assertion. For a bona fide example of a iurodiviyi in Dostoevsky’s writing, see
the character of Marya Timofeevna Lebyadkina in Devils (specifically in Part I,
Chapter 5, where she is expressly designated as “a holy fool”).
61 Ibid., p. 303.
62 Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, op. cit., 358.
63 There is a positive dearth of decent Dostoevsky commentary that is adequately

informed or even minimally sensitive to the writer’s religious preoccupations. Hence

a not untypical dismissal of Dostoevsky’s thinking on religious subjects can be
found in the following remark: “Fyodor came back [from Siberia] to spout the
most appalling rubbish and mystic twaddle about the Divine Spark, the Christian
Morality-of-the-Slave, the infallibility of Orthodoxy—because it was Russian. No
wonder so much drivel has been written about the Slavic Soul!” See Bernard
Guilbert Guerney, ed. & trans. of The Portable Russian Reader (New York: The
Viking Press, 1947) 143.
64 See Russian Writers: Notes and Essays (New York: Random House, Inc.,

1971) 173–74.
65 See Dostoevsky: A Collection of Critical Essays, op. cit., pp. 138 and 139. All

this sophistry masks a secular socialist reading that is typical of much Soviet-era
scholarship.
66 See pp. 144–148 of Wasiolek’s Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction (Cambridge,

MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1964); emphases in the original.

67 In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche saw “the exploitation of the sense of

guilt” by the priest, “that artist in guilt feelings,” as “a piece of animal psychology, no
more” (see the Third Essay, Section 20; emphases in the original). In a similar vein,
Nietzsche called all of Christianity “a stupid salvation mechanism of guilt” intent
on “poisoning” all of human existence “with the worm of conscience,” otherwise
known as guilt (see Sections 25 and 26 of The Antichrist).
68 F.M. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Andrew H. MacAndrew

(New York: Bantam Books, Inc., 1970) pp. 65; 66.

69 “The Editor of the Russian Messenger refused to publish it when the novel

was being serialized in his journal. Dostoevsky later tried to revise it, but finally
decided to omit it from the first edition of the novel in 1873. It was discovered in
1921 among the papers left by Dostoevsky’s wife and first published separately in
96 Against Nihilism

1922.” See Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Devils, trans. David Magarshack (Markham:
Penguin Books Canada Ltd., 1982), note to p. 671.
70 See Fyodor Dostoevsky, Devils, trans. Michael R. Katz (Oxford UP, 2008), p.

49 and p. 192.
71 Earlier, Shatov had suggested to Stavrogin to “go and see Tikhon” because

“people come to see him. You should go. Why not? Well, why not?” Stavrogin
appears to agree (“It’s the first I’ve heard of him and. . . I’ve never met that sort
of person before; thank you, I will go”). See Devils, p. 270.
72 Dostoevsky, Devils, p. 455 and p. 456.
73 Ibid., p. 457.
74 Ibid., p. 458.
75 From the Apocalypse of St. John the Apostle (also translated as the Book of

Revelation) 3:14–17.
76 See Inferno III.56–57 & 62–64: “It never would have entered in my head/

There were so many men whom death had slain. . . Here was that rabble, here
without a doubt, / Whom God and whom His enemies despised;/ This scum, who’d
never lived, now fled about. . . ” Dante, The Divine Comedy I: Hell, trans. Dorothy
Sayers (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1968) 86–87.
77 Camus, The Fall, p. 83; p. 84.
78 Dostoevsky, Devils, p. 478. Emphasis added.
79 Ibid., p. 473.
80 Ibid., p. 463; p. 473.
81 Ibid., pp. 471–72.
82 Kirillov experiences a similar “moment” of “simply. . . happiness. You don’t

have to forgive anything because there’s no longer anything to forgive.” See Dosto-
evsky, Devils, p. 663.
83 From Dostoevsky’s Notebooks to Crime and Punishment; see Dostoevsky,

Crime and Punishment, ed. George Gibian (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
1989) p. 474.
 Chapter 5

Against Nihilism
The rhetoric of totality and its implications continues in this chapter,
which examines the appearance of coincidence between Nietzsche and
Dostoevsky on the subject of nihilism that in fact masks a deeper diver-
gence. Both men agree about the dangers of nihilism and labour mightily
to define them, but they disagree profoundly about the possibility of a
remedy. In Nietzsche’s last lucid year, nihilism was the focus of his final
five books; this chapter examines three of them. Twilight of the Idols and
The Antichrist are analyzed as two carefully composed musical composi-
tions, with the increasing threat of nihilism uniting them at the center.
Ecce Homo is explained as the musical coda that recapitulates—with still
greater force and urgency—the imminent global calamity. At Dostoevsky’s
own height of creative maturity, nihilism too was a crowning concern. In
The Possessed, Dostoevsky warns against the nihilism poised to engulf
the world in apocalyptic terms. In the Russia of his time, Dostoevsky
understood how secular socialism was transforming nihilism into a politi-
cized terrorism and anarchy—an understanding that eventually found its
complete fulfillment in the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. Dostoevsky’s com-
plex character of Kirillov in this novel is examined as an eerily accurate
mirror of Nietzsche himself, bien avant la lettre.

Nietzsche’s last lucid year in Turin was crammed with unprecedented

productivity. Instead of publishing one book per year, which had been his
rhythm of writing over the past decade since he had left the University
of Basel, now he finished five books and left copious notes for a sixth.1
First came The Case of Wagner: A Musicians’ Problem in May of 1888,
which he claimed to have written out of “wrath, concern, and love of
art.”2 Next came Twilight of the Idols, or How One Philosophizes With
A Hammer 3 together with The Antichrist: Attempt At A Critique Of
Christianity, both completed in September of 1888: twin volleys in “a
great declaration of war.”4 Finally there was Nietzsche’s last will and
testament to the world which he called Ecce Homo, or How One Becomes
What One Is (where he declares “I am no man, I am dynamite”),5 as
well as Nietzsche Contra Wagner: Out of the Files of A Psychologist (a
compilation of selections from earlier published writings revisiting The
 98 Against Nihilism

Wagner Case). The latter two were both finished by Christmas of 1888.
Ten days later, Nietzsche collapsed in the streets of Turin—never to
speak or to write again.
All five of Nietzsche’s last works share a theme of urgent warning and
dramatic summation. There is a drive in all of them towards totality—an
aspiration to contain and combine all earlier statements into a still larger
movement, an expansion further outwards—to take the world by storm.
Taken together, all five of these final writings function as a kind of fugue:
the voice of each text builds on the other and develops the main “melody”
of the unifying theme into a larger polyphonic composition. Understood
musically this way, the subject of Nietzsche’s last five texts is clear:
cultural crisis and the potential for cultural renewal.
Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist form a natural unity through
their complementary concerns: the first is about what can rise out of the
ashes of culture, while the second is about what has brought culture to its
present state of ruin. Stated differently: Twilight of the Idols announces
the theme of the forces of life, at all costs, against the dissolving threat of
nihilism announced in The Antichrist. Then Ecce Homo introduces the
theme of recovery: Nietzsche announces how he has diagnosed all of our
cultural ills and proposes a way to cure them. Finally, The Case of Wagner
and Nietzsche Contra Wagner—which again form another natural whole,
treating as they do the same theme—unmask the German composer
Richard Wagner as both the source and the symptom of cultural decay.
The finale is classically, operatically, and even theologically appropriate:
Nietzsche, the prophet of nihilism and the composer of this five-part
opus, dies in the end after delivering his revelations about the fate of
culture to the audience.
If crisis, decay, and ruin are the last Nietzschean notes to dominate in
this last larger composition, then the focus of Nietzsche’s final five books
may be truly said to center on nihilism. But, in keeping with Nietzsche’s
own playful self-description in Ecce Homo, nihilism in Nietzschean terms
must be, like Nietzsche himself, “a Doppelgänger” and “have a ‘second’
face in addition to the first; and perhaps also a third.”6 In other words,
nihilism for Nietzsche bears both a negative and a positive aspect.
On the negative side, nihilism may be defined as the rush of annihilat-
ing forces into the vacuum left by the “death of God.” In the wake of this
“tremendous event,”7 Nietzsche prophesied that humanity is inexorably
heading towards “catastrophe”—for after the death of our highest and
greatest idea(l), our own wilful self-extinction is sure to follow. This is so
because, as Daniel Ahern explained in his insightful study of Nietzsche
as Cultural Physician,
For Nietzsche, nihilism is the secret death wish of a culture. In
the haunted soul of a coward contemplating suicide, killing another
human being, taking another’s life “with” one into death, may be an
easy step. Within the ravages of nihilism, Nietzsche sees us seeking
not only our own destruction but, in despairing rage, that of the
very cosmos itself.8
 Against Nihilism 99

In this terrifying space of nothingness, then, all that we can finally know
about our existence is that “the world is the veil we spin to hide the void”
from ourselves.9
But on the positive side, nihilism may also be defined as our greatest
moment of opportunity: out of this “will to nothingness” human greatness
might finally be born, in complete and terrible freedom from everything
previously held to be sacred. It is the experience of nihilism that allows
for Nietzsche’s “revaluation of all values,” his lifelong project of which
The Antichrist was supposed to serve finally as the first volume.10 For,
as Philip Grundlehner helpfully reminds us, “it is important to stress. . .
that Nietzsche believed in the value of nihilism as a pre-condition for
self-overcoming” and “a harsh but necessary attitude which must be
realized in order to clear away all obstructive prejudices and create new
values.”11 Instead of consenting to the tyranny of other people’s values,
Nietzsche urges us to strike out and “for once be your own accuser and
executioner. . . and look down into the deep and unfathomable depths!”12
Once this “raising of yourself” is accomplished, we can leave our weakness
behind (“the exhaustion and failure of all culture”—the negative side of
nihilism) and enact the strength of nihilism (by exposing and withdrawing
“all traditional values from circulation”).13 This is the double-movement
of “revaluation”: recognizing the rock-bottom nothingness of values in
our bones, in order to forge new values with new “steel” and new “bronze.”
Nietzsche thus aspired to “reverse the values of nihilism in favour of an
affirmation of life”14 —a kind of death-defying stunt on the high wire
that Nietzsche suspended over his own experience of the abyss.

A Matter of Life or Death: Twilight of the Idols

and the Antichrist

Nietzsche’s final “symphony” begins with Twilight of the Idols, which

may be likened to a lonely trumpet call to consciousness. The clarion
call is also a battle cry, which the preface confirms immediately as the
proud and “prankish” warrior theme:
Nothing succeeds if prankishness has no part in it. [. . . ] A revaluation
of all values, this question mark, so black, so tremendous that it
casts shadows upon the man who puts it down—such a destiny of a
task compels one to run into the sun every moment to shake off a
heavy, all-too-heavy seriousness. Every means is proper for this. . .
Especially, war. War has always been the great wisdom of all spirits
who have become too inward, too profound; even in a wound there
is the power to heal.15

Given the “heavy seriousness” of his subject, Nietzsche avoids the plaintive
minor key in favour of the assertive major key instead—in keeping with his
bright, hard, martial emphasis on “war” as “wisdom,” and his optimism
about “healing” through “wounding.” As “the first modernist at the same
 100 Against Nihilism

time that he is the last romantic,”16 Nietzsche proclaims himself the first
man ready to single-handedly deal the death blow to all the old “puffed-up
and hollow ideals” and behold the shining new face of humanity’s future,
released from the crippling illusions of the past. Nietzsche himself insists
on the musical quality of this “destiny of a task” he has taken on—this
confrontation and conflict between the old values and the new—when he
calls this book a “sounding out of idols. . . not just idols of the age, but
eternal idols. . . touched with a hammer as with a tuning fork.”17
Twilight of the Idols begins with a bravura performance of “Maxims
and Arrows,” showcasing some of Nietzsche’s most justifiably famous
aphorisms (such as “Out of life’s school of war: What does not destroy
me, makes me stronger,” and “Without music, life would be an error; the
German imagines even God singing songs”).18 Next follows a sprightly se-
ries of capriccios—lively short musical interludes, each bearing the name
of an idol that Nietzsche exposes as ringing false—where the larger unify-
ing theme is articulated early: “the value of life cannot be estimated.”19
Essentially, the many idols or illusions cluttering and confounding human
existence may be reduced to two: (1) the whole western philosophical
tradition, beginning with Socrates and Plato, and (2) the whole western
world’s experience of Christianity (what Nietzsche calls “Morality as
Anti-Nature”). This is because, according to Nietzsche, philosophers
“threaten the life of everything they worship” just as much as priests
“attack the roots of passion, [which] means an attack on the roots of
life.”20 The concerted efforts of philosophy and religion have thus resulted
in the nearly complete extirpation of the human being’s natural sense of
goodness and happiness, which Nietzsche identifies as “instinct.” “All that
is good is instinct and hence easy, necessary, free. [. . . ] As long as life is
ascending, happiness equals instinct.”21 Moreover, all progress in human
culture depends on a recognition and celebration of the instinctual side
of man: “If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and
seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy.”22 Ultimately,
“the right place is the body. . . the rest follows from that.”23 But this
basic wisdom is just what we as a species have talked ourselves into
rejecting—much to our own detriment. Twilight of the Idols then ends
with three playful flourishes that restate this call to reclaim our bodily
selves, in three different ways: first with a sly dig at his own tone-deaf
audience (“What the Germans Lack”), second with an open homage to
Dionysus (“What I Owe to the Ancients”), and last with the voice of his
own prophetic creation, Zarathustra (“The Hammer Speaks”), urging us
to “become hard” in the face of the task of creating new values—“harder
than bronze, nobler than bronze,” because “only the noblest is altogether
hard.”24 One practically hears the triumphant clash of bronze cymbals
as the finale to this rousing display of heroic élan.
But all of this is only the prelude to the sharper antagonistic feeling
of The Antichrist, which sweeps in now like a menacing drumroll. If
Twilight of the Idols held up life as the one banner worth defending
 Against Nihilism 101

in this heroic battle, then The Antichrist unmasks the enemy in this
battle as Christianity, the religion of death. Now Nietzsche rallies all his
forces and charges against this clearly identified foe, which he assaults
with relentless thunder and cannon fire. As a musical composition, The
Antichrist is stridently one-note and rhythmic—very akin to an actual
march into battle itself—single-mindedly intent on total annihilation of
the enemy.
In his Preface to The Antichrist, Nietzsche directly continues where
The Twilight of the Idols left off by warning the reader that “[t]his book
belongs to the very few. Perhaps not one of them is even living yet. [. . . ]
One must be honest in matters of the spirit to the point of hardness
before one can even endure my seriousness and my passion.”25 In other
words, the preparatory stage of “hardness” declared at the end of Twilight
of the Idols is now reiterated as the very condition for receiving more of
the Nietzschean word in The Antichrist, building as it does on the same
subject of “seriousness” as before. Indeed, without this prior attainment
of hardness, much of what Nietzsche goes on to say here will not even
register: he openly acknowledges the unlikelihood of this text being
understood by anyone in his own time when he reflects, “How could I
mistake myself for one of those for whom there are ears even now? Only
the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously.”26
In due time, Nietzsche predicts that his “right” and “predestined” readers
will come—with “new ears for new music.”27
But many a reader has objected to the tone of The Antichrist, finding
it more a matter of cacophony than of music. Nietzsche’s “shrillness” here
appears the very proof of incipient madness; Nietzsche’s “unrelievedly
vituperative” tone grates on the ear; “now he gives his thoughts an
exorbitant, violent edge and wants to insult, to strike the [Christian]
tradition in the face.”28 As one other Nietzsche scholar put it, “Nietzsche
is at his most Nietzschean, spewing out venom in The Antichrist—[. . . ]
indeed, especially then—as he calls for the criminalization of Christianity
and the razing of its temples.”29 What has all this “noise” to do with
music?30
It seems that all of these aesthetic complaints only attest to the
profound modernity of Nietzsche’s purposes (not to mention the acuity of
his predictions). One need only recall Igor Stravinsky’s pagan primitivist
ballet Le Sacre du printemps from 191331 , or Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal
orchestral piece Pierrot lunaire from 1912,32 to recognize how much of
modern music was no longer seeking to please any sensibility so much
as to assault all sense of tradition. Artistically, Nietzsche stands as the
unquestionable forerunner to all later movements and revolutions in
the twentieth century.33 As Frederick Karl writes in his wide-ranging
study Modern and Modernism: The Sovereignty of the Artist, 1885–1925,
what links Nietzsche to “the energies of Modernism, its trafficking with
negation, death, nil” is “his profound sense of bankruptcy.” It is thanks
to Nietzsche’s relentless “honesty”—something that is often seen or felt
 102 Against Nihilism

to be ugly or unwelcome (certainly not harmonious!)—that “whatever

we call Modernism or define as ‘the modern spirit’ finds Nietzsche in
attendance.”34
Certainly an extreme negativity is evident on virtually every page
of The Antichrist. From the first sentence to the last, there are not
too many variations from the basic theme that “nihilistic values are
lording it under the holiest names,” known today as Christianity; now
“the will to nothingness” is “pronounced holy!”35 “This was done by a
[Christian] philosophy that was nihilistic and inscribed the negation of
life upon its shield.”36 There is a consistent logic to this monotonous
drive to crush the Christian opponent—indeed, a musical logic which, like
a driving beat in its grinding insistence, is explicitly pitched so as not to
appeal to every taste. Even a fellow musician may dislike hearing it. As
Stravinsky observed of Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony (“Symphony
of a Thousand”) from 1911, “Imagine that during two hours you are made
to understand that two times two is four”. . . 37 For most people, reading
Nietzsche’s Antichrist might very well be akin to hearing Mahler’s Eighth
Symphony: just a bit too much of the same thing:
[Christianity is] the practice of nihilism [that] persuades men to
nothingness! Of course, one does not say “nothingness” but “beyond”
or “God,”. . . [. . . ] When one places life’s center of gravity not in
life but in the “beyond”—in nothingness—one deprives life of its
center of gravity altogether. [. . . ] Nihilism and Christianism: that
rhymes, that does not only rhyme.38

But for those who listen closely with “new ears,” subtleties and echoes
of the earlier Nietzsche emerge to confirm consistency and stringency
of method. For example, there is the “we” that Nietzsche employs as
a conscious conceit, continued from his other writings (“(I say ‘we’ for
politeness’ sake),” Nietzsche admits).39 Addressing his imagined future
readers, Nietzsche begins The Antichrist by stating,
Let us face ourselves. We are Hyperboreans; we know very well
how far off we live. “Neither by land nor by sea will you find the
way to the Hyperboreans”—Pindar already knew this about us.
Beyond the north, ice, and death—our life, our happiness. We have
discovered happiness, we know the way, we have found the exit out
of the labyrinth of thousands of years. Who else has found it? [. . . ]
We were intrepid enough, we spared neither ourselves nor others;
but for a long time we did not know where to turn. . . We became
gloomy. . . We thirsted for lightning and deeds and were most remote
from the happiness of the weakling, “resignation.” In our atmosphere
was a thunderstorm; the nature we are became dark—for we saw
no way.40

In this remarkable opening, Nietzsche sounds several notes associated

with his previous works. The naming of the Hyperboreans hearkens back
to the Golden Age mythologized in The Gay Science, with the same
 Against Nihilism 103

equation of “life” and “happiness” in the eternal pagan here-and-now,

“beyond ice and death.”41 The “thirsting for lightning” is straight out of
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, evoking the immediate and elemental forces of
nature as extensions of one’s own personality.42 The “happiness of the
weakling” is recycled from identical disparagements of “the ‘tame man,’
the hopelessly mediocre and insipid man” in The Genealogy of Morals.43
In short, the path has already been amply prepared for the entrance of
The Antichrist, which seeks to destroy Christianity in order to affirm
paganism in its place (for “(pagans are all those who say Yes to life, for
whom ‘god’ is the word for the great Yes to all things)”).44 With his
imagined future readers, Nietzsche will march with war drums against
“the conscious advocate of nothingness and negation” that is the whole
Christian priestly establishment.45 And he fully expects to win, for he
knows his enemy to be nothing more than a phantom. “In truth, there
was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. [. . . ] In fact, there have
been no Christians at all!”46
Slashing his way through these ghosts of Jesus Christ and Saint Paul
in particular (the two principal targets of Nietzsche’s attack), Nietzsche
pauses to ask: why and how has God become reduced as an idea? “God”
as an idea expresses the vitality of a people, its will to power—so “the evil
god is needed no less than the good god.” But the Christian god is only
good; God’s power is thus incapacitated; with the advent of Christianity
man now understands “God as a spider.” Now the servant of God—the
priest, the active Christian agent in the world of man—is no more than
a spider also, if not “the real poison-spider of life.”47 At the bottom of
Nietzsche’s quarrel with Christianity is what he sees as its fundamental
investment in deceit, which he claims began as a hoax perpetrated by
the priestly caste in order to found the religion. “Priestly misreading and
fraud is to be found in the editing of the Old Testament” as much as in the
writing of the New Testament—so if there is to be a true “transvaluation of
values” in the wake of Christianity, then “a new reading of that which has
been misread” must be offered.48 Nietzsche’s Antichrist offers just such
a radical rereading. In a bold challenge to all the Scriptural descriptions
of Christ healing the blind, Nietzsche throws down the gauntlet and
says, “This eternal indictment of Christianity I will write on all walls,
wherever there are walls—I have letters to make even the blind see. I call
Christianity the one great curse. . . the one immortal blemish on mankind.”
From here The Antichrist swiftly concludes—with a proposal to begin
recording a new epoch of human history with a new understanding of
Christianity’s bankruptcy and insignificance—not “after the first day
of Christianity” but “Why not rather after its last day? After today?
Revaluation of all values!”49 Rumbling and thundering, Nietzsche aspires
with these final lines to recreate the sound of the veil covering the Jewish
Temple being (again) rent in two—the roar of Christendom’s definitive
collapse into rubble. Thus the music of uncompromising combat ends,
with a violent and dissonant crash. Today one can still say of Nietzsche’s
 104 Against Nihilism

The Antichrist what one critic said of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring
over a century ago: “This is the most discordant composition ever written.
Never has the cult of the wrong note been applied with such industry,
zeal, and ferocity.”50

Nihilism and the Apocalyptic Vision: Dostoevsky’s

The Possessed

Dostoevsky too made nihilism the focus of his later writings since he
felt it to be the pre-eminent threat facing his society. In the context
of nineteenth-century Russia, nihilism meant a revolutionary impetus
against the old Tsarist order. According to the great Russian historian
Nicholas Riasanovsky, nihilism “meant above all else a fundamental
rebellion against accepted values and standards: against abstract thought
and family control, against lyric poetry and school discipline, against
religion and rhetoric.”51 Nihilists, male and female,52 were reacting to
at least two things that they were inheriting as they came of age in the
1860s in Tsarist Russia: (1) the Emancipation of the Serfs Declaration in
1861, which changed the face of Russian society by finally making a 400-
year-old institution of peasant slavery illegal;53 and (2) the publication
of two immensely influential novels that popularized the generational
divide between radical “nihilist” youth and their conservative reactionary
parents. The first novel was Fathers and Sons (Otsy i deti) written by Ivan
Turgenev and published in 1862. The main character (Yevgeny Bazarov)
is a young “nihilist” medical student who challenges all the values dear to
the “fathers”—calling for the destruction of everything without a tangible,
materialist, “scientific” basis—but dies before he can get any serious
insurrections started. In the storm of controversy that accompanied
the appearance of this novel, readers could not decide if Turgenev was
“insulting” or “grovelling before” the younger generation with this book,
and often charged Turgenev with being “a nihilist himself” for choosing
to treat such a topic in the first place.54 The second novel was much
less ambiguous: What Is to Be Done? (Chto delat’?) written by Nikolai
Chernyshevsky (while in prison for fomenting anti-Tsarist disturbances)
and published in 1863. Subtitled A Tale of New People, this is a rather
plodding Bildungsroman that follows the growth of a young “nihilist”
woman (Vera Pavlovna) and her circle of like-minded acquaintances.
Chernyshevsky’s novel has been called “witty and hortatory,” exercising
“an enormous inspirational effect on three generations of Russian radicals;”
incredibly, Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov (Lenin) himself said “he was converted
to the revolution by reading it!”55
In 1866, Dmitri Karakozov (described as “an emotionally unbalanced
student”) attempted to assassinate Tsar Alexander II.56 This unprece-
dented act of violence coincided with the publication of Catechism of a
Revolutionary (Katekhizis revoliutsionera), written and published abroad
by two Russian radicals: the elder Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (who
 Against Nihilism 105

had met Karl Marx in Paris in 1848 but was denied entry into the
First International in 1864, on the basis of his reputation as “founder of
nihilism and apostle of anarchy” in Russia);57 and the younger Sergei
Gennadievich Nechaev (a man described as “fanatical and frightening,”
who saw “anything that served the revolution as moral. . . Nechaev, who
would blackmail anyone, shocked even Bakunin, far from a purist himself
in these matters”).58 An excerpt from Catechism of a Revolutionary
reveals the new streak in Russian nihilism, leading directly to terrorism:
“Day and night [the revolutionary] must have one thought, one aim only:
pitiless destruction. He pursues his aim coldly and relentlessly, and must
be prepared to perish himself, as well as to destroy with his own hands
anyone who stands in his way.”59
When Nechaev returned to Russia in 1869 and founded a terrorist
secret society called “People’s Vengeance” (Narodnaia Rasprava), he
soon became a lurid celebrity. Nechaev accused one of the secret society
members (a blameless student named Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov) of being a
police informer. He then incited the remaining secret society members
to join him in murdering the innocent Ivanov. He next abandoned his
co-conspirators to the Tsarist police and escaped alone, abroad. He was
finally extradited and put in prison in 1872, where he died a decade later.
It was the Nechaev case that stimulated Dostoevsky to join in the
public debate about Russian nihilism. Unlike Turgenev, who back in 1862
had dramatized in Fathers and Sons the clash between generations as the
new nihilist disruption of society by the youth, Dostoevsky now in 1872
was intent on revealing the continuity of nihilist corruption from one
generation to the next in his own novel The Possessed. For Dostoevsky,
terrorism was the logical extension of nihilism: the “father” Bakunin was
still all too recognizable in the “son” Nechaev. When Dostoevsky sent
a copy of The Possessed to the future Tsar Alexander III, he explained
that “it’s almost a historical study, in which I’ve sought to account for
the possibility of such monstrous phenomena as the Nechaev movement
occurring in our strange society.” He further emphasized that “it’s this
kinship of ideas and their transmission from fathers to sons that I’ve tried
to show in my work.”60 In his Diary of a Writer, Dostoevsky explained
further these same purposes:
In my novel The Devils, I attempted to depict the complex and
heterogeneous motives which may prompt even the purest of heart
and the most naı̈ve people to take part in an absolutely monstrous
crime. The horror lies precisely in the fact that the most vicious and
terrible crime may be committed by someone who is not a villain at
all.61

Dostoevsky’s view of nihilism as the road to Russia’s perdition is signalled

very clearly in the novel’s epigraph, a quotation from Luke 8:32–5.62
Dostoevsky said that he aimed to show “how the devils entered into the
herd of swine” which is “the theme of my novel in essence,” because
 106 Against Nihilism

“exactly the same thing happened in our country: the devils went out
of the Russian man and entered into a herd of swine, that is, into the
Nechaevs. . . et al. These are drowned or will be drowned, and the healed
man. . . sits at the feet of Jesus. It couldn’t have been otherwise.”63 As a
study of the process of bedevilment, wherein different individuals consent
to being dominated by different devils and thus consign themselves to
death and damnation, The Possessed is matched only by Dante’s Inferno
for the sheer depth, breadth, and utterly believable humanity of so many
characters wilfully embracing their doom. But in this Dostoevsky novel,
no one is saved: there is no “healed man” at the end who accepts the
salvation of Christ. There is only the terrible storm of judgment finally
descending and sweeping all the sinners off the cliff with fatal inevitability:
“It couldn’t have been otherwise.”
A call to divine judgment is sounded increasingly throughout the
novel by several references to the Revelation of Saint John the Divine—
more than in any other Dostoevsky text.64 At least five “possessed”
characters call attention to this last book of the Bible as a means of
justifying themselves as revolutionaries or as underlining their sense of
moral urgency. First there is the character of Kirillov, who considers
the cessation of time at the end of the world65 “a very true thought”
that confirms his elaborately rationalized plan to kill himself.66 Kirillov
actually contemplates many nihilist ideas like a Nietzschean avant la
lettre, so that Nietzsche himself seems strangely prefigured (even pre-
empted) by this Dostoevsky character. For example, when Nietzsche
wrote in Twilight of the Idols, “We have invented the concept of ‘end’: in
reality there is no end,” he finds his echo in Kirillov’s assertion that “life
exists, but there’s no such thing as death.”67 Similarly, when Nietzsche
claims “We deny God, we deny the responsibility in God: only thereby
do we redeem the world,” Kirillov says “Man-God, that’s the difference. . .
He who teaches that everyone is good, will bring about the end of the
world. . . He will come and his name will be man-God.”68 Kirillov admits,
with truly Nietzschean single-mindedness, that “I don’t know how it is
with others, but I feel I can’t be like them. [. . . ] I can’t think about
anything else; all my life I’ve been thinking about one thing. God has
been tormenting me all my life.”69 Even Nietzsche’s cutting dismissal
of “God as a spider” in The Antichrist finds its (parodic) parallel in
Kirillov stating, “I pray to everything. Do you see that spider crawling
along the wall? I look at it and feel grateful it’s crawling.”70 Perhaps
most astonishingly of all, Nietzsche’s most famous pronouncement that
“God is dead” is already anticipated by Kirillov, who boasts that “there’s
no idea greater than the fact that God doesn’t exist. [. . . ] During the
entire course of global history, I alone am the first person who doesn’t
want to invent God. Let everyone know this once and for all.”71 Kirillov’s
combination of madness, gentleness, and strength is what strikes such
an eerie Nietzschean chord. One is tempted to say the same thing of
Nietzsche that Shatov said of Kirillov: “If. . . if only you’d renounce your
 Against Nihilism 107

terrible fantasies and stop your atheistic ravings. . . oh, what a fine person
you’d be, Kirillov!”72
Secondly there is the character of Shatov, who takes to heart the
warning of the end of the world73 but feels powerless to convince anyone
else to reform and repent in favour of another, truer “revolution of the
spirit” away from Antichrist and back to Christ. Shatov argues in favour
of “the spirit of life, ‘rivers of living water’ as the Scriptures call it, the
drying-up of which is threatened in Revelation” because he believes “the
goal of every national movement, in every nation at every period of its
existence, is solely the search for God, for their God, for their very own
God, and belief in Him as the only true God.” Opposed to this “force”
is socialism, which “by its very nature must be atheism,” which Shatov
(and Dostoevsky) decides is the mortal enemy.74
Then there is the third character of Fedka the convict, who—probably
as a result of Kirillov housing him and “reading to him from Revelation”
while they drink tea together75 —roundly curses Peter Stepanovich for
being “a heathen idol” who persists in ignoring “the meaning of the
true God, the real Creator, the creation of the world, our future fate,
and the transformation of all creatures and every beast in the Book
of Revelation”76 —because, as Fedka complains to Stavrogin, “Peter
Stepanovich don’t give a damn about the Heavenly Creator—he says it
was nature alone what made us.”77 But this fourth character, Stavrogin,
has his own relationship to the Book of Revelation which keeps him
restless and aloof from all of Peter Stepanovich’s machinations.78 It is
the passage in Revelation about indifference damning one to hell that
haunts Stavrogin during his interview with Bishop Tikhon—and it is this
identical passage that strikes the fifth character of Peter Stepanovich’s
father, Stepan Trofimovich, as he hears it read out loud to him on his
deathbed. “I never, never knew that wonderful passage! Hear that: better
cold, cold, than lukewarm, than only lukewarm. Oh, I’ll prove it. But
don’t leave me, don’t leave me alone! We’ll prove it, we’ll prove it!”79
Stepan Trofimovich is shaken by the Revelation passage about luke-
warm souls being damned because only now, in a feverish delirium in
the last days of his life, has he come to recognize how much of a shallow
egotist and compulsive liar he has always been. He had found himself at
the center of “a hotbed of free-thinking, depravity, and atheism” in the
town of Skvoreshniki;80 “little by little a circle of acquaintances [had]
formed around him,” meeting twice a week to discuss “‘higher liberalism’
and the ‘higher liberal,’ that is, a liberal without goals. . . possible only
in Russia.”
Stepan Trofimovich, like every witty man, needed an audience;
besides that, he needed the sense that he was fulfilling some higher
obligation in propagating ideas. Finally, he needed someone to drink
champagne with and someone with whom, over a glass of wine,
he could exchange pleasant ideas of a certain kind about Russia
and “the Russian spirit,” about God in general and the “Russian
 108 Against Nihilism

God” in particular; to repeat for the hundredth time the same

scandalous little anecdotes known to everyone and repeated over
and over again.81

Stepan Trofimovich believed in God, “mais distinguons,” he said,

I believe in Him as a being who is conscious of Himself only through
me. I can’t believe as my servant does, or as some gentleman
landowner does, “just in case,” or as our dear Shatov does. . . Shatov
makes himself believe. . . [. . . ] And as far as Christianity is concerned,
in spite of my sincere respect for it, I’m not a Christian. I’m more
like an ancient pagan, like the great Goethe or a classical Greek.82
But now, close to death, Stepan Trofimovich becomes aware of his own
bankruptcy. “I’ve lied my whole life. Even when I was telling the truth.
I’ve never spoken for the sake of truth, only for my own sake. I knew
that before, but only now do I see. . . [. . . ] In life the hardest thing of all
is to live and not tell lies. . . and. . . not believe in one’s own lies, yes, yes,
precisely that!”83 Stepan Trofimovich’s last words likewise concern his
feeling of illumination about another Biblical passage, the one “about
the swine” that already served as the novel’s epigraph:
These devils who go out of the sick man and enter the swine—they’re
all the plagues, all the miasmas, all the filth, all the devils, and
all the demons who have accumulated in our great, our dear, sick
Russia for centuries, for centuries! Oui, cette Russie, que j’aimais
toujours. [. . . ]
It’s we, we and they, and Petrusha. . . et les autres avec lui, and
I, perhaps, first of all, at the head of them; we’ll cast ourelves, all
the insane and possessed, from the cliffs into the sea and we’ll all
drown, and it’ll serve us right, because that’s all we’re really good
for. But the sick man will be healed and “will sit at the feet of
Jesus”. . . and everyone will look upon him in astonishment. . . My
dear, vous comprendrez après, meanwhile it excites me greatly. . .
Vous comprendrez après. . . Nous comprendrons ensemble.84

Stepan Trofimovich is vouchsafed an insight into the epigraph and whole

“essence” of the novel that none of the other characters have had. He
alone recognized himself as one of “the swine” who must perish, which is
why he “attacked the nihilists and the ‘new people’ with even greater
passion and spite”85 (including his own son, Peter Stepanovich): it is his
one moment of truth before he died, his single epiphany gained from the
summing up of a useless lifetime.
The slickly successful character of the writer Karmazinov is a thinly-
veiled portrait of Ivan Turgenev.86 He showcases even more dramatically
everything to which Dostoevsky objects regarding the nihilism question.
As a cultural leader for Russian youth, Karmazinov has even less au-
thority and integrity than Stepan Trofimovich. Karmazinov represents
for Dostoevsky that most insidious of evils, the casuist “Westernizer.”87
As he candidly admits to Peter Stepanovich, Karmazinov plans to live
 Against Nihilism 109

abroad permanently because Russia holds no more interest for him—and,

in any event, as he puts it,
there’s really nothing to come crashing down here in Russia, compar-
atively speaking. We have no stones to fall; everything will merely
dissolve into dust. Holy Russia is less capable of offering resistance
than any place on earth. Simple people still manage to carry on
with their Russian God; but this Russian God, according to latest
accounts, is extremely unreliable and has barely survived the eman-
cipation of the serfs; He was badly shaken up, at least. And now
there’re railways, and here you are. . . I don’t believe in the Russian
God any more. [. . . ] I don’t believe in any god. [. . . ] Everything’s
been going downhill for some time now, and everyone knows there’s
nothing to grab hold of.88

The horror of this character lies in his facile dismissal of “the Russian
God,” and for Dostoevsky this amounts to the dismissal of all truth
and value. It is the modern, secular, Westernizing force of such denial
that has possessed and corrupted not only Karmazinov but a whole
generation after him. “Oh, just wait until this generation grows up!”
Peter Stepanovich gloats gleefully. “We’ll proclaim destruction. . . why,
why again is this little idea so fascinating?. . . We’ll spread fires. . . We’ll
spread legends. . . [. . . ] The Russian God Himself must be helping us!”89
Dostoevsky had aligned himself with the philosophical current in
Russia of Slavophilism90 in order to unmask and do battle with Western-
izers like Turgenev and Bakunin, who had introduced so many damaging
nihilist ideas (“all the plagues, miasmas, filth, devils”) leading to atheism
and anarchism in Russia. “In many respects I hold Slavophile convictions,”
Dostoevsky wrote in his Diary of a Writer, because “I belong to this
group of the convinced and the believing” in “the Slavic genius, pre-
eminently from the spirit of the great Russian people who have suffered
so long. . . but who have always possessed great powers for clarifying
and settling many bitter and fatal misunderstandings of Western Eu-
ropean civilization.”91 Among those “misunderstandings” is the secular
socialism exported from Europe, which Dostoevsky himself had once
accepted in the 1840s (before his arrest), but then learned to reject in
the 1860s (after his return from Siberia). “Evil is both the real cause
and the real product of the rationalistic, scientific outlook” brought in
from Western Europe—and this evil is “not the mere negation of good
but is positively, actively antagonistic to it.”92 The Possessed is thus
Dostoevsky’s sobering testament to the inevitable consequences of pur-
suing the nihilist-terrorist-anarchist path. For the call to destroy Family,
Marriage, and Church, “lies of the past that keep us slaves,”93 will not
deliver on its exhilarating promise of liberation after all. There will only
be bones and ashes.
Dostoevsky suggests that it is the simple faith of Fedka and of Shatov
in “the Russian God” that will save Russia. But both Fedka and Shatov
 110 Against Nihilism

are brutally murdered by Peter Stepanovich, the nihilist cell’s ringleader.

Where then is the ultimate healing and salvation to be found?
The answer to this question—along with the fullest and most un-
canny expression of Nietzsche as a Dostoevskian character—appears in
Dostoevsky’s last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, as shall be seen in the
next chapter.

Notes
1 The scholarly consensus is that the sixth book in question, The Will to Power,

is a discredited text due to the interference of Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth. Until her
own death in 1935, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche maintained control of her brother’s
archive, assuming sole custodianship as early as 1894. Besides forgeries of Nietzsche’s
letters, Elisabeth as executor of her brother’s estate published between 1901 and 1904
a suspicious “biography” out of Nietzsche’s uncollected notes which later came to be
known as his last (posthumous) book, The Will to Power.
2 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans.

Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967) 180.

3 According to Walter Kaufmann, “This was the last work Nietzsche himself

published: when it came out in January 1889, he was insane and no longer aware of
any of his works. The Antichrist and Nietzsche Contra Wagner were not published
until 1895; Ecce Homo only in 1908.” See The Portable Nietzsche, op. cit., 464.
4 The Portable Nietzsche, 466.
5 From “Why I Am A Destiny” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, op. cit., 326.
6 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 225; emphasis in the original.
7 Already announced six years earlier; see The Gay Science, op. cit., p. 182 of the

Kaufmann translation.
8 Published by Pennsylvania State University Press in 1995; see page 10. Nietzsche’s

note of despair about his own species is unmistakably sounded in the very last line of
his Genealogy of Morals: “Man would sooner have the void for his purpose than be
void of purpose. . . “
9 Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (New York: Random House, 1966) 261. This

psychoanalyst’s debt to Nietzsche is made clear on the bookjacket, which states he

has written “a modern Thus Spake Zarathustra.”
10 This “revaluation of all values” (the sentiment, if not the phrase) is certainly

in evidence in earlier books, such as “On Old and New Tablets” in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra and “Natural History of Morals” in Beyond Good and Evil. The latter
offers perhaps the most succinct working definition of what Nietzsche means by this
phrase: “a revaluation of values under whose new pressure and hammer a conscience
would be steeled, a heart turned to bronze, in order to endure the weight of such
responsibility” (see Section 203, page 117 of the Kaufmann translation).
11 See The Poetry of Friedrich Nietzsche, op. cit., 185.
12 Nietzsche, Daybreak, op. cit., 114.
13 See Ivo Frenzel, Friedrich Nietzsche: An Illustrated Biography, trans. Joachim

Neugroschel (New York: Pegasus, 1967) 109.

14 Ofelia Schutte, Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche Without Masks (University of Chicago

Press, 1989) 3.
15 Nietzsche, “Preface” to Twilight of the Idols in The Portable Nietzsche, op. cit.,

465; emphases in the original.

16 Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Harvard UP, 1985) 234. Of

this link between the modern and the romantic, Arnold Hauser writes that “There
is. . . no product. . . impression or mood of the modern man which does not owe [its
existence] to. . . romanticism.” See Romanticism: Problems of Definition, Explanation,
and Evaluation, ed. John B. Halsted (Boston: D.C. Heath & Company, 1965) 68–69.
17 “Preface” to Twilight of the Idols, 466.
 Against Nihilism 111

18 Aphorisms # 8 and # 33 in “Maxims and Arrows” in Twilight of the Idols,

467; 471. As a clue to understanding Nietzsche’s own “unsystematic” and often

contradictory writing and thinking method, Aphorism # 26 is clarifying: “I mistrust
all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”
19 From Section 2 of “The Problem of Socrates” (a.k.a. Idol Number One) in

Twilight of the Idols, 474; emphases in the original.

20 See Section 1 of “‘Reason’ in Philosophy” and Section 1 of “Morality as Anti-

Nature” in Twilight of the Idols, 479 and 487.

21 See Section 11 of “The Problem of Socrates” and Section 2 of “The Four Great

Errors” in Twilight of the Idols, 479 and 494; emphasis in the original.
22 See Section 8 of “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man” in Twilight of the Idols, 518;

emphases added.
23 See Section 47 of “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,” 552.
24 Twilight of the Idols, 563. Here Nietzsche repeats word-for-word Section 29

of Speech # 12 (“On Old and New Tablets”) from the Third Part of Thus Spoke
Zarathustra.
25 Nietzsche, “Preface” to The Antichrist in The Portable Nietzsche, op. cit., 568;

emphases added.
26 Ibid., 568; emphases in the original.
27 Ibid., 569; 568.
28 See Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (4 th

Edition) (Princeton UP, 1974) 66; Arthur Danto’s Nietzsche As Philosopher (New
York: Macmillan, 1965); Eugen Fink’s Nietzsches Philosophie (Stuttgart, 1960) 34.
29 Bernd Magnus, Stanley Stewart & Jean-Pierre Mileur, Nietzsche’s Case: Philos-

ophy As/And Literature (New York: Routledge, 1993) 51.

30 See Gary Shapiro’s study Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gifts, Noise, and Women (Al-

bany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991) for a perceptive interpretation of Nietzsche’s relationship
to “noise.”
31 For an excellent analysis of the unsettling impact that Stravinsky’s “violent” and

“dissonant” music had, not only on the audience during its Paris debut but on the
entire Zeitgeist leading up to both World Wars, see Modris Eksteins’ unparalleled
Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Toronto: Bantam
Press/Transworld Publishers Ltd., 1989), especially “Act One” pp. 9–35.
32 “Rather than blending, the instruments seem to play against each other. [. . . ]

[Schoenberg’s atonal compositions] shocked most of their listeners, who heard only
dissonance and missed the emotional intensity of the music. [. . . ] The Berlin audience
that heard [Pierre Lunaire]. . . did not like it any more than the Paris audience
liked Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in the following year.” See “Schoenberg, Arnold” in
Normon Lloyd, The Golden Encyclopedia of Music (New York: Golden Press, 1968)
509–10.
33 See John Burt Foster, Jr., Heirs to Dionysus (Princeton UP, 1985) for one

example of Nietzsche inspiring many generations of modernist artists across Europe.

34 This book was published in New York by Atheneum (a division of Macmillan

Publishing Company) in 1988; unfortunately, it has long gone out of print. See pages
84 and 82.
35 See Sections 6 and 18 of Nietzsche’s The Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche,

op. cit., 572; 586. Emphasis in the original.

36 See Section 7 of The Antichrist, 573; emphases in the original.
37 See Karl, Modern and Modernism, 205. The difference in taste, Karl suggests, is

due to the fact that “Stravinsky was forging a new musical language as a minimalist
and Mahler was blasting out the last of the nineteenth century.”
38 See Sections 7 and 43 and 58 of The Antichrist, 573; 618; 650. Emphases in the

original.
39 This parenthetical remark comes from Section 5 (“‘Reason’ in Philosophy”) in

Twilight of the Idols, 482. What Nietzsche appears to toss off parenthetically is often
very revealing; for instance, when he adds in parentheses “(I obviously do everything
to be ‘hard to understand’ myself!)”, he is being both candid and clarifying (see
Section 27 of Part Two, “The Free Spirit,” in Beyond Good and Evil).
 112 Against Nihilism

The Nietzschean “we” has included a large range of imaginary fellow travellers,
such as “we psychologists,” “we immoralists,” and “we physiologists” (in Twilight of
the Idols alone). In The Gay Science one finds “we philosophers,” “we convalescents,”
“we knowing ones,” “we argonauts of the ideal,” “we incomprehensible ones,” “we who
are homeless,” “we premature births of an as yet unproven future” (and this is just
a sampling). Probably the most succinct summation of this Nietzschean “royal we”
(pace Queen Victoria) is “we free spirits,” which may be best paraphrased as “we who
think differently expose ourselves to our own deserts, swamps, and icy mountains”
(see Book IV, Section 343 of Daybreak).
40 See Section 1 of The Antichrist, 569; 570. Emphases in the original.
41 The Hyperboreans were a fabled race believed to dwell in “a land of sunshine

and plenty beyond the north wind,” who had no knowledge or experience of “sickness
and deathly old age.” See Edith Hamilton, Mythology, 84.
Nietzsche does not linger in this golden Hyperborean space; he alludes to it only
once more when—again in explicit rivalry with Christian claims to the Incarnation—he
says that “we ourselves, we free spirits, are nothing less than a ‘revaluation of all
values,’ an incarnate description of war and triumph over all the ancient conceptions of
‘true’ and ‘untrue.’” See Section 13 of The Antichrist, 579 (emphases in the original).
42 See Speech 12 (“On Old and New Tablets”) from the Third Part of Thus Spoke

Zarathustra.
43 See Section 1 of Nietzsche’s First Essay (“‘Good and Evil,’ ‘Good and Bad’”) in

On the Genealogy of Morals.

44 See Section 55 of The Antichrist, 641.
45 See Section 8 of The Antichrist, 575.
46 See Section 39 of The Antichrist, 612; 613. Emphases in the original.
47 See Sections 16 through 18 of The Antichrist, 583–585.
48 Gary Shapiro, Nietzschean Narratives (Indiana UP, 1989) 128.
49 See Section 62 of The Antichrist, 656. Emphases in the original.
50 Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 50–51.
51 Riasanovksy, A History of Russia, 4 th Edition (Oxford UP, 1984) 381.
52 According to Richard Stites, “nihilism was the only intellectual movement which

emphatically included women in its idea of emancipation.” The phenomenon of “the

nigilistka” insisting on total personal emancipation gave rise to many a caricature of
a “more angular and more dramatic” type of Russian feminist, such as the character
of Kukshina in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. See The Women’s Liberation Movement
in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton UP, 1978)
100–101.
53 According to Richard Pipes, the process of “enserfing” the population took 200

years, starting in the middle of the fifteenth century and ending in the middle of
the seventeenth, at which point “the tsars of Russia ruled over the largest state in
the world.” This expansion was made possible by the exploitation of slave labour,
according to “the model of an appanage domain;” by the time “Appanage Russia”
evolved into “Muscovite Russia,” serfdom became firmly established. See Russia
Under the Old Regime (Markham: Penguin Books Canada Ltd., 1984) 85–86.
54 Although Turgenev was an artist first and foremost, with normally nothing

resembling a political agenda to be found in any of his other writings, Turgenev’s

ambivalence about this particular fictional creation left him open to such a charge,
since it remained unclear whether he saw Bazarov “as a fruitful force for the future,
or as a disgusting boil on the body of a hollow civilizaiton, to be removed as rapidly
as possible.” See Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Second Norton Critical Edition (New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989) 172 and 262.
55 See the “Chernyshevsky” entry in Handbook of Russian Literature, op. cit., 81–82.

In his “Preface,” Chernyshevsky modestly warned the reader that “you will find in my
novel neither talent nor art, only the truth.” See Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky,
What Is To Be Done?, trans. Benjamin R. Tucker; ed. Ludmilla B. Turkevich (New
York: Random House, 1961) 12.
56 See Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 380.
57 See again Riasanovsky for this memorable moniker, 369.
 Against Nihilism 113

58 See Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia, 122; 123. See

also 124: Bakunin once complained of his disciple Nechaev that “if you introduce him
to your friend, his first aim will be to sow dissension, scandal and intrigue between
you and make you quarrel. If your friend has a wife or daughter, he will do his
best to seduce her and get her with child, in order to snatch her from the power
of conventional morality and involve her, despite herself, in a revolutionary protest
against society.”
59 See Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences (“Biographical Glossary”), op.

cit., 426.
60 From a letter of Dostoevsky dated February 1873, addressed to the penultimate

Romanov Tsar (then aged twenty-seven). Alexander III would begin to reign eight
years later, after the successful assassination of his father (Alexander II) in 1881.
Cited in “Introduction” by Michael R. Katz to Dostoevsky, Devils, op. cit., ix.
61 See Entry # 50 for the year 1873 in Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer, op. cit.;

emphases in the original.

62 “And there was a herd of many swine feeding on the mountain; and they besought

him that he would suffer them to enter into them. And he suffered them. Then went
the devils out of the man, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently
down a steep place into the lake, and were choked. When they that fed them saw
what was done, they fled, and went and told of it in the city and in the country. Then
they went out to see what was done; and came to Jesus, and found the man, out of
whom the devils were departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right
mind: and they were afraid.”
63 Letter of October 1870 from Dostoevsky to A.N. Maikov in Selected Letters

of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, ed. Joseph Frank & David I. Goldstein; trans. Andrew R.
MacAndrew (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987).
64 A significant monograph could be written on the larger meanings behind the

clear obsession that Dostoevsky had with this last Book of the New Testament, since
it occupies an important space not only in The Possessed but in The Idiot and The
Brothers Karamazov as well.
65 The specific reference is to Revelation 10:5–7 (“And the angel which I saw stand

upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, And sware by him
that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are,
and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which
are therein, that there should be time no longer; But in the days of the voice of the
seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished,
as he hath declared to his servants the prophets”).
66 Dostoevsky, Devils, 249. Kirillov is in conversation with Stavrogin, who is

interested in hearing how Kirillov “hopes to attain such a moment. . . when all of a
sudden time stops and becomes eternal” by conquering his fear of death in the act of
taking his own life.
67 Twilight of the Idols, 500; Devils, 249.
68 Twilight of the Idols, 501; Devils, 251.
69 Devils, 122.
70 Ibid., 251.
71 Ibid., 692.
72 Ibid., 642.
73 The specific reference is to Revelation 8:10–11 (“And the third angel sounded,

and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon
the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the
star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood, and
many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter”). Since Chernobyl
literally means “Wormwood,” many saw the 1986 meltdown in the Ukrainian nuclear
reactor of the same name as a fulfilment of this particular prophecy. Another specific
reference is to Revelation 16:4 (“And the third angel poured out his vial upon the
rivers and fountains of waters; and they became blood”).
74 Dostoevsky, Devils, 264; 263.
 114 Against Nihilism

75 Kirillov reports this habit very casually and matter-of-factly to Peter Stepanovich

(see Devils 399).

76 See Dostoevsky, Devils, 630.
77 Dostoevsky, Devils, 296.
78 As discussed in Chapter IV above; the specific reference is to Revelation 3:14–17.
79 Dostoevsky, Devils, 730; emphasis in the original. Since Stavrogin’s confession

containing this same reference to the Book of Revelation was censored in Dostoevsky’s
lifetime, Dostoevsky made certain to reinstate the reference in Stepan Trofimovich’s
swan song scene.
80 Dostoevsky, Devils, 33. The name of the town is related to the Russian word

skverno (which means “sour” and is often applied to a sense of smell, as in skverno
pakhnut’—“to smell bad”). The name of the town in The Brothers Karamazov will
also be suggestive of man’s lower nature: Skotoprigonyevsk (which roughly translated
means “Cattletown”).
81 Dostoevsky, Devils, 27; 33.
82 Dostoevsky, Devils, 37; emphasis in the original. Again, the resemblance to Niet-

zsche in such an unapologetically “pagan-and-proud” self-description is remarkable.

Recourse to French was a common affectation of the Russian upper classes.
Many members of the Russian aristocracy spoke French between themselves rather
than Russian. Tolstoy’s historical novel War and Peace is exemplary in this regard,
recording the fashion between 1805 and 1812 to favour French in this way (during a
famous Frenchman’s invasion of Russia).
83 Dostoevsky, Devils, 729. One former student of Stepan Trofimovich remembers

“how well he told me those lies. . . it was almost better than the truth!” (112)
84 Dostoevsky, Devils, 732.
85 Ibid., 726.
86 In Reading Dostoevsky, Victor Terras writes that Turgenev was the one man

“who, in one way or another, accompanied Dostoevsky through virtually all of his
adult life. . . It is safe to say that no other living man occupied as important a place
in Dostoevsky’s mind as did Turgenev” (116)—a claim which is corroborated, in a
footnote on the same page, by references to three scholars from the 1920s examining
the Dostoevsky-Turgenev connection.
87 As opposed to the Slavophiles, the Westernizers represented the one other large

tendency in Russian philosophy; both arose at the same time (1840–60) in response to
new pressures to define the place of Russia in history. Westernism “was never a simple
worship of all things Western, nor a simple rejection of Russia, but a positive movement
based on the view that Russia was a European nation which had unfortunately been
retarded by the long Mongol subjugation and had now to mature as a nation, to
transform itself, and to take its place in Europe. In this sense, Westernism is a
continuation of certain tendencies in Russian thought that date from the time of Peter
the Great and Catherine II.” See Russian Philosophy, Volume I, eds. James M. Edie
et al (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, Inc., 1969) 274.
88 Dostoevsky, Devils, 391; 392.
89 Ibid., 445; 446; 402. Sounding eerily like Nietzsche at the end of Ecce Homo

predicting in his wake “wars the world has never seen,” Peter Stepanovich predicts
for Russia that “there’ll be an upheaval such as the world has never seen” (447).
90 To Slavophiles, “Russia was neither Asiatic nor European; it was Russian, and

by turning to the soil of Russia, to the institutions it had unconsciously developed by

itself, to the tradition of Orthodoxy, they believed it would be possible to understand
the true place of Russia in history.. [. . . ] They believed that Western Europe had lost
or was losing all spiritual values and that Russia alone remained emotionally open
and honest, capable of love, capable of bringing salvation to the West. ” See Russian
Philosophy, Volume I, op. cit., 161; emphasis in the original.
91 Dostoevsky, The Diary of a Writer, trans. Boris Brasol (New York: Farrar. Straus

& Giroux, 1973) 779–80.

92 See Russian Philosophy, Volume II, 237.
93 Dostoevsky, Devils, 372. These lines parody a real poem called “The Student”

that was written by N.P. Ogaryov, the co-editor with Alexander Herzen of a radical
Russian journal called Kolokol (The Bell), where it was published (abroad) in 1868.
Chapter 6

Freedom or Christ?
Nietzsche’s and Dostoevsky’s concern with totality is concluded in this
chapter, which charts how and where Nietzsche and Dostoevsky in-
evitably and ultimately go their separate ways. The argument begins
by discerning the tension between the “truth” and faith that beset Dos-
toevsky throughout his life. The discussion then deepens around this
same tension as it is elaborated, with consummate mastery and clarity,
in Dostoevsky’s last novel The Brothers Karamazov (the only novel by
Dostoevsky that Nietzsche never knew or read), which centers on man’s
freedom to believe—or disbelieve—in a higher truth. Ivan Karamazov,
another complex character created by Dostoevsky, is examined as an-
other prophetic proxy for Nietzsche, whose Zarathustra finally added
nothing new to Dostoevsky’s earlier statement on the common and
the uncommon experience and exercise of freedom. Dmitri Karamazov
incarnates Dostoevsky’s approval of the freedom to accept humiliation
as atonement, just as Alyosha Karamazov is the embodiment of Dos-
toevsky’s conviction that the freedom of self-sacrifice is the highest
freedom of all. In the end, it is not a question of freedom or Christ, as
Nietzsche would have it, since this is a false opposition. Instead, it is
a question of freedom and Christ—an abiding if paradoxical truth—as
Dostoevsky lived and communicated it.

Dostoevsky wrote from the convict prison in Omsk a long letter before
he was due to begin compulsory military service in Semipalatinsk. The
prospect of soon wearing “a soldier’s uniform” made him feel “just
as much a prisoner as before,” so he wondered when he would be
“completely free, at least as free as other people are.” He chose as his
confidante Natalia Dmitrievna Fonvizina (née Apukhtina). She was
the widow of another man sentenced to Siberian exile for his part in
the 1825 Decembrist uprising against the Tsarist government;1 her
husband, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Fonvizin, died as a free man back in
Russia after completing his twenty-five year sentence (sadly, all of the
Fonvizins’ children had also died during that time). Natalia Dmitrievna
(or “N.D.”, as Dostoevsky addressed her in this letter) had followed
her husband into exile and, along with other “Decembrist wives,” had
116 Against Nihilism

helped Dostoevsky and his fellow Petrashevtsy2 adapt to their new

Siberian environment.
Dostoevsky recognized “N.D.” as “a very religious woman”—“not
because you are religious,” he told her, “but because I myself have
experienced and felt it”—because “at such a time one thirsts for faith
as ‘the withered grass’ thirsts for water, and one actually finds it,
because in misfortune the truth shines through.” His letter to her then
continued with his own remarkable confession of religious faith:

I can tell you about myself that I am a child of this century, a

child of doubt and disbelief, I have always been and shall ever
be (that I know), until they close the lid of my coffin. What
terrible torment this thirst to believe has cost me and is still
costing me, and the stronger it becomes in my soul, the stronger
are the arguments against it. And despite all this, God sends
me moments of great tranquility, moments during which I love
and find I am loved by others; and it was during such a moment
that I formed within myself a symbol of faith in which all is
clear and sacred for me. This symbol is very simple, and here is
what it is: to believe that there is nothing more beautiful, more
profound, more sympathetic, more reasonable, more courageous,
and more perfect than Christ; and there not only isn’t, but I tell
myself with a jealous love, there cannot be. More than that—if
someone succeeded in proving to me that Christ was outside
the truth, and if, indeed, the truth was outside Christ, I would
sooner remain with Christ than with the truth.
But it is better to stop talking about this.3

When Christ is arrested and taken to Pontius Pilate, He declares “For

this was I born, and for this came I into the world: that I should give
testimony to the truth; every one that is of the truth heareth my voice”
(John 19:37). Pilate replies with his famous rhetorical question (“What
is truth?”), which Christ does not answer. Pilate is not “one that is of
the truth,” and so he fails to understand what Christ is saying. Earlier
Christ says to his disciples, “And you shall know the truth, and the
truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). Christ refers repeatedly to
truth as the meaning and motive of his mission (as “the true light,”
“the true vine,” and “the way, the truth, and the life”).4
The tension between “truth” and faith was something that returned
as a theme in Dostoevsky’s writing over and over again. In his Diary of
a Writer, Dostoevsky reflected on the mad faith of Don Quixote in the
tall tales of chivalry, which were patently false but absolutely necessary
to his life as a knight. One day, Dostoevsky noted, Don Quixote’s
faith in chivalry is shaken when he questions how a single knight could
vanquish thousands of combatants in a single swift battle: would not the
effort of repeatedly raising one’s sword and running through so many
bodies in fact take much more time than the chivalric legends record?
 Freedom or Christ? 117

The plain fact of physical resistance and fatigue, which Don Quixote
himself can observe, begins to seriously undermine his whole allegiance
to the idea(l) of chivalry. But then, Dostoevsky said, Don Quixote
rescues his faith by concocting a still more fantastic scenario which
would explain the speed of victory: Don Quixote reasons that, instead
of flesh-and-blood bodies, the foes must surely have been phantoms
with “mollusk bodies.” And so, armed with this rationalization, Don
Quixote continues his knightly adventures.5
As it is with Don Quixote, then, so it is with Christ: some deeper
core of human meaning is apprehended as not merely “truth”—a
matter of facts or abstractions, as Pilate would see them—but truth
as perfection—a direct experience of life-altering beauty and power,
as both Don Quixote and Dostoevsky would see them. Of his ideal
woman Dulcinea, to whom he dedicates all that he does as a knight,
Don Quixote says, “In me she does battle and conquers, and in her I
live and breathe and have my being.”6 His “symbol of faith” turns on
the same perception that Dostoevsky described of “the most beautiful;
the most profound; the most sympathetic; the most reasonable; the
most courageous; the most perfect”—all the ideal values that he saw in
Christ. In other words—like any other fully feeling human person—Don
Quixote is moved by a supreme value, an archetype. And once one has
seen and recognized this supreme value, one defends it “with a jealous
love” that is often hard to define and understand but that remains
that much more real and compelling, as an intimately lived experience.
In Dostoevsky’s last novel The Brothers Karamazov, the three
brothers in the title are each oppressed by that most supreme value
of all, God. In this novel more than any other, “‘God torments’ all of
Dostoevsky’s heroes; all of them decide the question of God’s existence;
their fate is wholly determined by their religious consciousness.”7 Each
of the brothers is dominated by different character traits: Dmitri by the
carnal, Ivan by the intellectual, and Alyosha by the spiritual—although
“the whole problem” with the Karamazov family is that it is made up of
“sensualists, money-grubbers, and God’s fools”8 —conflicting qualities
that define all three brothers in different proportions, at different times.
And all three brothers will be implicated in the murder of their father,
the “wretched and depraved” Fyodor Karamazov.

Dmitri’s Pro: Faith in a Higher Truth

Of the three, Dmitri Karamazov becomes the focal point of the novel.
At the age of four, Dmitri was disgracefully disowned by his father
and raised by distant relatives of his dead mother. As soon as he is
an adult, Dmitri confronts his father about the inheritance his mother
had left him. But he is tricked by his shrewd father into accepting
several small installments over four years until the entire inheritance is
already gone, without his even knowing it. Worse still, his lecherous
118 Against Nihilism

old father is intent on bedding a woman who is Dmitri’s age—a woman

who obsesses and possesses Dmitri—a woman who requires money, and
plenty of it. “I. . . knew that she was greedy for money . . . that she was
a sharp and merciless bitch;” but, Dmitri says, “it’s that curve she has;
Grushenka’s whole body has a particular curve that can be recognized
even in her foot, even in the little toe of her left foot!”9 These two sore
points—his mother’s money and his father’s woman, both of which
Dmitri feels his father stole from him—drive Dmitri into an increasing
rage and frenzy.
All he needs is three thousand rubles to elope with Grushenka—a
sum which his father has already sealed in an envelope addressed “To
my angel Grushenka, if she comes to me”—and so far Grushenka has
eluded both men’s hopes of conquering her. Dmitri is so desperate to
best his father that he feels ready to kill him, simply out of “a direct,
spontaneous loathing.” But at the same time he says that he “believes
in miracles” because “God knows what’s in my heart; He can see my
despair; He sees the whole thing, so surely He won’t allow something
horrible to happen?”10 Dmitri hopes against hope that this mad love
he feels for Grushenka will be returned because something in him has
completely surrendered to her (“I’ll go on as I am now—try to hang
around her, be the janitor in her yard, if I can”)—because now nothing
else in his life matters to him (“I don’t care about anything else”)—
because even though he is already engaged to another honourable
woman, it is this dishonourable woman that he is burning to marry “if
she wants me. . . right away.”11 Nothing else now can alter his fate:

No—because I’m a Karamazov, because if I must plunge into

the abyss, I’ll go head first, feet in air. I’ll even find a certain
pleasure in falling in such a humiliating way. I’ll even think that
it’s a beautiful exit for a man like me. And so, in the very midst
of my degradation, I suddenly intone a hymn. Even if I must be
damned, even if I am low and despicable, I must still be allowed
to kiss the hem of the veil in which my God is shrouded; and
even if I may be following in the devil’s footsteps, I am still Your
son, O Lord, and I love You, and feel the joy without which the
world cannot be.12

In this remarkable passage, Dmitri reveals in embryo his whole later

growth as a character. As Nadejda Gorodetzky writes in The Humiliated
Christ in Modern Russian Thought, Dmitri showcases here the quality of
humility so necessary to the development of Dostoevsky’s protagonists:
“There was hope for all of [them] because there was in them conviction
of their unworthiness. The way of repentance was opened to them. All
Dostoevsky’s characters knew this school of repentance and the test of
tears.”13
When Dmitri is taken into police custody before the trial, his new
life begins. He accepts the injustice of his incarceration—since he did
 Freedom or Christ? 119

not, in fact, murder his father—because of the deeper justice that he

feels is at work. Before they take him away, Dmitri explains how he
has finally “risen” and become a different person at last:
Every day of my life I have beaten my breast and promised
myself to change, but then every day I have done the same vile
things again. I understand now that men like me must be struck
down by life; they must be caught as in a lassoo and bound
by an outside force. Without that, I would have never risen
by myself! But lightning has struck and I accept the ordeal of
the accusation and my public disgrace; I want to suffer and
to cleanse myself by suffering! For I may be cleansed someday,
may I not, gentlemen? But I want to tell you for the last time:
I am not guilty of my father’s murder! I accept punishment,
not because I killed him, but because I wanted to kill him, and
because perhaps I might have killed him if. . . 14

In His Sermon on the Mount, Christ explains how criminal intent is a

kind of criminal act. “You have heard that it was said to them of old:
Thou shalt not commit adultery. But I say to you that whosoever shall
look on a woman to lust after her hath already committed adultery
with her in his heart.”15 Dmitri knows that he is guilty of having killed
his father in his heart many times already, so he feels that his burden
of responsibility for Fyodor’s death is equal to that of the actual killer.
His dream of “the Babe” is what begins to crucially reorient him: he
“felt a new, unknown fervour welling up in his heart; he felt like weeping;
he longed to do something. . . to stop all tears forever and ever, and he
wanted to do it now, right now, without delay, regardless of everything;
he wanted it with all the unrestrained passion of a Karamazov.”16

Ivan’s Contra: Against Faith in a Higher Truth

But Dmitri’s decision to accept his imprisonment is undermined by

his brother Ivan, who wants to help him escape. Ivan shares none of
Dmitri’s illusions. Old Fyodor observed that “Ivan doesn’t love anyone;
Ivan is not like us. He’s different. He’s like a cloud of dust: the wind
will blow and he’ll be gone. . . ”17 Ivan maintains that cold hard facts
trump faith in anything fuzzy like God because, as he puts it,
. . . my brain is an earthly, Euclidean brain, and. . . therefore
I’m not properly equipped to deal with matters that are not of
this world. [And]. . . in the final analysis, I do not accept this
God-made world, the sordid invention of a puny, microscopic,
Euclidean, human brain. [. . . ]
What is so strange and extraordinary is not that God really
exists but that such a thought—the very idea of the necessity of
God—should have occurred to a vicious wild animal like man,
for that concept is so holy, so touching, and so wise that it does
man too much honour.18
120 Against Nihilism

Ivan then proceeds to recite his “poem” called “The Grand Inquisitor,”
as a way of clarifying his refusal to believe in God. It is here, in this
bravura performance of unapologetic atheism, that one can imagine
Nietzsche speaking through Ivan’s mask. Ivan, the passionate intellec-
tual who has something “crooked” about him,19 would have agreed
with Nietzsche’s charge that “God is a thought that makes crooked all
that is straight, and makes turn whatever stands.”20
Ivan imagines Christ returning to fifteenth-century Spain “during
the grimmest days of the Inquisition. . . where the fires were crackling
under the heretics.”21 As Christ begins to quietly perform miracles and
the crowd begins to recognize Him, Ivan’s “Grand Inquisitor” appears:
“a man of almost ninety, tall and erect,” whose “face darkens” as “he
sees everything”: he orders Christ’s arrest.22 The remainder of Ivan’s
poem is a long and impassioned monologue by the Grand Inquisitor,
to which Christ does not once reply.

Do You think You have the right to reveal even a single mystery
of the world from which You come?. . . No, You do not, for You
may not add anything to what has been said before and You
may not deprive men of the freedom You defended so strongly
when You were on earth. Anything new that You might reveal
to them now would encroach upon the freedom of their faith,
for it would come to them as a miracle, and fifteen centuries
ago it was freely given faith that was most important to You.
Didn’t You often tell them then that You wanted to make them
free? Well, then. . . so now You have seen free men. Yes, that
business cost us a great deal. . . but at last, in Your name, we
saw it through. For fifteen hundred years we were pestered by
that notion of freedom, but in the end we succeeded in getting
rid of it, and now we are rid of it for good. You don’t believe
that we got rid of it, do You? You look at me so gently, and
You do not even consider me worthy of Your anger? I want
You to know, though, that on this very day men are convinced
that they are freer than they have ever been, although they
themselves brought us their freedom and put it meekly at our
feet. This is what we have achieved, but was it really what You
wanted, was this the freedom that You wanted to bring them?23

Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor rejects Christ for his failure to understand

human nature. Christ’s expectations of humanity had been too high
since man’s lower nature is too strong and can never really follow
Christ’s higher example. If anyone has ever understood human nature,
the Grand Inquisitor claims, then it’s the Devil—“the wise and dreaded
spirit of self-destruction and non-existence.”24 “Do You really believe,”
the Grand Inquisitor says to Christ, “that the combined wisdom of the
earth could produce anything comparable in strength and depth to
those three questions that the wise and powerful spirit asked You that
 Freedom or Christ? 121

day in the desert?. . . Judge for Yourself, then: who was right, You or
the one who questioned You?”25
Religiously, Nietzsche completely concurs with Ivan because he too
is always giving the Devil his due. In the Second Part of Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, Zarathustra either approves of the Devil or exceeds the
Devil in eloquence. He begins with a diabolical interlude: Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra dreams of a child who holds up a mirror to him, and instead
of his own reflection he sees “a devil’s grimace.” But instead of feeling
disturbed by this devilish likeness, Zarathustra exults in it: “Let my
enemies believe that the evil one rages over their heads!” Zarathustra
is “grateful” to his enemies for challenging him because now, through
their undermining of his “teaching,” he will be able to test his disciples’
loyalty to him.26 “Indeed, you too will be frightened, my friends, by
my wild wisdom, and perhaps you will flee from it, together with my
enemies! [. . . ] To him who is possessed by the devil I whisper this word:
‘Better for you to rear up your devil! Even for you there is still a way
to greatness!’” Since Zarathustra has overcome his fear of the devil,
the rebellion that the devil prompts is simply another way to cultivate
one’s individuality—perhaps “even” to the point of “greatness.” Then
the Devil whispers back to him, as Zarathustra reports: “Thus spoke
the devil to me once: ‘God too has his hell: that is his love of man.’
And most recently I heard him say this: ‘God is dead; God died of
his pity for man.’”27 The devil’s superiority to God is advanced as
a straightforward fact, exactly in the same manner as Ivan with his
Grand Inquisitor. For Nietzsche too, “the wise and dreaded spirit” that
commands respect is the Devil because, after the “death of God,” the
Devil is all that remains.
Zarathustra continues reflecting on the meaning of the Devil to him
by identifying it as “the spirit of gravity”—“my supreme and most
powerful devil, of whom they say that he is ‘the master of the world’.”28
He then composes “a dancing and mocking song on the spirit of gravity”
which demonstrates his refusal to bow to it. Naming his devil frees
him from his sense of oppression by it—and dancing is his means of
keeping this devil at a distance.29 “In my language: light feet are the
first attribute of divinity,” Nietzsche writes elsewhere—and “only in
the dance do I know how to tell the parable of the highest things.” For
“the dance of gods and the prankishness of gods” is “where gods in their
dances are ashamed of all clothes”—and “whoever approaches his goal
dances.”30 Later Nietzsche merges the joy of dancing with the image
of the Devil when his Zarathustra sings, “My foot is a cloven foot. . . I
am happy as the devil. . . ”31
From all these sustained flirtations with the Devil, Nietzsche through
his Zarathustra indeed appears “equal to all accidents,” as he claims—
successfully maneouvering his way to a new idea of heaven which, in his
terms, is “a dance floor for divine accidents.”32 For Nietzsche, freedom
is the rock on which he builds his whole Zarathustrian edifice—but
122 Against Nihilism

not freedom for just anyone. True freedom is the privilege of the few
to discover and enact, unlike the illusion of freedom that most people
experience. “Freedom is what all of you like best to bellow,” Zarathustra
chastises the fire hound and his minions in hell. But “the earth is free
even now for great souls,” he tells his disciples; “a free life is still free
for great souls. [. . . ] O my brothers. . . break the windows and leap to
freedom!”33
Ivan would agree with Nietzsche’s distinction between the common
and the uncommon experience of freedom, since his Inquisitor speaks
on behalf of an elite managing and manipulating the majority. “Only
three forces on this earth can overcome and capture once and for all
the conscience of these feeble undisciplined creatures, so as to give
them happiness: miracle, mystery, and authority.”34 According to Ivan’s
Grand Inquisitor, most human beings would rather surrender their
freedom than endure suffering, as a fair and equal exchange. Most
of them are also too cowardly to kill themselves, preferring even the
meanest life full of mendacity and enslavement to no life at all. And
so, Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor concludes, most “men rejoice at being led
like cattle again, with the terrible gift of freedom that brought them
so much suffering removed from them.” This conclusion is in keeping
with the Devil’s view of humanity as “weak and despicable. . . nothing
but unrest, confusion, and unhappiness.”35 Freedom will be excised
completely from the human body one day, like some vestigial organ
that has fallen into disuse, because human beings “are certainly nothing
but slaves, although they were created rebels by nature.”36 Only the
few like Ivan and his Inquisitor will continue to exercise their freedom
over the masses, for their own good.
Ivan’s poem about the Grand Inquisitor plays the Devil’s advocate
in order to show that, if anyone is in charge of the world, it is not
God but the Devil. The poem directly prepares the way for Ivan’s
later hallucination that he is conversing with the Devil. But unlike his
poem, this conversation unnerves Ivan because he is not in control of
the situation. Instead, he is unpleasantly aware of a certain truthful
resemblance between the Devil and himself: “You are an incarnation
of myself, I mean of one aspect of me only, the personification of my
worst and most stupid thoughts and feelings.” Ivan rages against his
“unheralded visitor” but he is powerless to “get rid of him.” He oscillates
between insisting that “I don’t want to believe, and there’s nothing
that will make me believe, in you!” and “actually, I would really have
liked to believe in you.”37 When “the visitor” eventually mocks Ivan as
“the promising author of a poem called ‘The Grand Inquisitor,’” this
is the worst imaginable torture of all for Ivan as his “cleverness” is
reduced to “stupidity.” In the end, Ivan collapses from brain fever and
is feared to have become insane. His eclipse is a direct response to his
complete feeling of moral bankruptcy, which includes guilt for his own
part in his father’s death.
 Freedom or Christ? 123

Alyosha’s Faith in a Higher Truth Redux

In his notebooks to The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky wrote that

he had intended Alyosha to be the principal protagonist, continuing
his story into a sequel. But “death interrupted the Karamazovs”; Dos-
toevsky’s plan for Alyosha “to pass through the period of rebellion and
participation in the revolutionary movement. . . [and] still come back
to the purified vision of Christ” was left unrealized.38 Nevertheless,
Alyosha’s presence in the novel remains central since he alone serves as
the bridge between his two very different brothers. As the trusted confi-
dante to everyone (including the shadowy fourth brother Smerdyakov),
“Alyosha functions as the discursive fulcrum of the novel. . . lead[ing]
lengthy confidential conversations with all of them.”39
Alyosha also carries the seed of faith implanted in him by the Elder
Zosima, which counters Ivan’s cynicism that “without God everything
is permitted.”40 As he listens to the dying Zosima, surrounded by
monks from the monastery, Alyosha receives the teaching of God’s love
that sustains the world:

For I want you to know, my beloved ones, that every one of us

is responsible for all men and for everything on earth, not only
responsible through the universal responsibility of mankind, but
responsible personally—every man for all people and for each
individual man who lives on earth. Such an awareness is the
crown of a monk’s life and, indeed, the crown of any human life
on earth. For monks are no different from other men, and they
must be what other men ought to strive to become. Only then
will our hearts be moved by a love that is infinite and universal,
and knows no surfeit.41

This source of all love—“the love that moves the sun and the other
stars”42 —demands to be lived out in the real world. According to Father
Zosima, the “awareness” of this love becomes something that must
be enacted specifically in relation to other people. Indeed, the source
of Father Zosima’s appeal to remember our universal and personal
responsibility to each other is Christ’s exhortation “to forgive us our
debts, as we forgive our debtors.”43
It has been said that Christian faith “never takes man out of his
concrete worldly existence. On the contrary, faith calls him into it with
unique sobriety. . . For the salvation of man happens only within it
and nowhere else.”44 This quality of direct “worldly” engagement also
explains why Father Zosima insists on Alyosha leaving the monastery
and “going out into the world.”45 And this “worldliness” is further
in keeping with the mystery of the Incarnation—“the only dogma of
Christianity, to which all the rest is only commentary”46 —because, if
God entered the world of nature and became man, then man is now
henceforth called to remember the godliness of his origins by aspiring
124 Against Nihilism

to nothing less than godliness in his works. That godliness, for Zosima,
is what he called the day-to-day worldly enactments of “responsibility.”
Many forces in the world naturally militate against such aspirations,
and Father Paisii—another monk in the monastery—acknowledges
them as he too speaks to Alyosha and makes “a strong and unexpected
impression on him”:

Secular science, which has grown into a great force, has inves-
tigated. . . everything that has been handed down to us in the
sacred books. [. . . ] After their thorough, merciless analysis, there
was nothing sacred left in the hands of those secular scholars.
That was because they analyzed only the parts and failed to
study the whole, showing thereby a truly astonishing blind-
ness. And the whole still stands today, firm and unassailable
before their eyes, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against
it. Hasn’t it survived nineteen centuries and isn’t its existence
apparent today in the spiritual emotions experienced equally
by individual men and by masses of people? And in the hearts
of the very atheists who are trying to destroy everything, that
spiritual emotion lives on to this day. This is so because even
those who have renounced Christianity, even those who rebel
against it—even they, in their essence, were created in the im-
age of Christ and have remained in His image. Their combined
wisdom and their desperate efforts to create a nobler man with
greater dignity, the ideal set by Christ, have come to naught.
From all their attempts, only freaks have resulted. I want you
to remember that, young man, because your dying elder has
decided that you shall live in this secular world.47

With these words, Father Paisii sought to warn Alyosha against the
doubts that will assail his faith and to remind him of “the whole” which
will always endure in spite of them. “The spiritual emotion”—another
way of expressing the sense of “the whole”—is what remains open to
“individual men” and “masses of people” alike, as one acknowledges
indebtedness to the other. Father Paisii essentially reframes here Father
Zosima’s commandment to be cognizant of responsibility by reminding
Alyosha of the realities of the world outside the monastery, which seek
more and more to leave “nothing sacred left.” For Alyosha to “leave
these walls, but in the world outside [to] still be like a monk,” he must
“strive to become”—as much as possible—“the ideal set by Christ” for
all men. He must consent to become a kind of Don Quixote, “a fool
for Christ,” because there is “no nobler man with greater dignity” to
emulate than Christ. “And the gates of hell shall not prevail against
it.”
But Alyosha does not grow into a character of heroic dimensions
like Don Quixote; he remains unfinished. Only glimpses of his greater
stature are given, as at the very end of the novel in the Epilogue.
His true role is to act as a catalyst to the other characters’ insights
 Freedom or Christ? 125

into themselves; his own personality is sketchy and secondary. Thus

Alyosha’s pivotal role as a compassionate listener is what enables
Dmitri to arrive at his own startling declaration of faith, which closely
approximates Dostoevsky’s own credo from twenty-five years before.
From behind different walls—“these leprous walls” of prison—Dmitri
discovers the same ideal of Christ sustaining him because, as he tells
his brother, in the past two months of his imprisonment,

it’s as if I’d found a new man in myself, as if a new man had

arisen in me! That man was locked inside me, but he would
never have come out if it hadn’t been for this terrible blow of
fate. It’s frightening! What does it matter if I spend the next
twenty years in the mines, knocking out the ore with a hammer?
That’s not what I’m afraid of. What I’m terribly afraid of is
that this new man within me may desert me! I’m sure I could
find, underground in the mines there, a true human heart within
another convict, a murderer working next to me, and I could
befriend him, for in the mines, too, people can live and love and
suffer! It would be possible to bring back to life a heart that
had long been dead and frozen. I could work on it for years, and
finally, out of that infernal den, a soul would emerge that was
noble for having known suffering. Thus I might restore an angel
to life and bring back a hero! There are many of them, and we
all bear the responsibility for them! [. . . ] And so I will go to
Siberia. . . since every one of us is responsible for everyone else.
[. . . ] I’ll go and suffer for all of them, because someone, after all,
has to pay for all the others. I didn’t kill father, but I accept
the guilt and I must suffer.48

In his book The New Man: An Interpretation of Some Parables and

Miracles of Christ, Maurice Nicoll explains that “the new man” is the
result of “re-birth or second birth,” which means “a higher psychology, a
higher possible level of understanding.” But “no one can change, no one
can become different, no one can evolve and reach this higher possible
level and so be re-born, unless he knows, hears, and follows a teaching
about it.”49 For Dmitri, the teaching is from Father Zosima (“every one
of us is responsible for everyone else”), as he received it from his brother
Alyosha. Dmitri can see that “the new man” within him is in danger of
disappearing unless he remains vigilant in his surrender to God, as he
understands Him. As Father Zosima told Alyosha, “Christ is with you;
do not abandon Him, and He will not abandon you.” Dmitri recognizes
the need to embrace and undergo his own kenosis or self-emptying,
after the example of Christ, who “emptied Himself, taking the form
of a servant” and “humbled Himself”50 —because, as Dmitri put it,
“someone has to pay for all the others” through suffering. And as Christ
was exalted for surrendering in His suffering to God’s will, so too will
Dmitri be exalted as “noble”: his suffering will not have been in vain
because he, together with the other convicts, “shall arise again and
126 Against Nihilism

know the joy without which a man cannot live and God cannot exist,
because God gives us joy and giving it is His great privilege.” Dmitri
“cries out of the depths” to God,51 for he pledges to “sing from the
entrails of the earth a tragic hymn to God, God in whom there is
joy!”52
But Dmitri’s resolve is shaken by Ivan’s plan for Dmitri to escape
from prison, of which Alyosha had not been aware. Dmitri is torn
by the temptation since, on the one hand, running away to America
would allow him to marry Grushenka and not be buried alive—but, on
the other hand, running away would also be “ignoring the message to
take the road to salvation. . . And I’d be the man who had run away
from his crucifixion!”53 Like Christ, Dmitri freely and consciously takes
upon himself the sins of others, since he too is innocent. This “doom”
explains Father Zosima’s curiously sudden bow down to the ground
to Dmitri when he first meets him: “It was to his future great ordeal
that I bowed,” Father Zosima explains to Alyosha. But “everything
and all our destinies are in the hands of God. ‘Except a corn of wheat
fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth
forth much fruit.’ You must remember that.”54 The reader of the novel
is similarly urged to remember this one saying of Christ55 since it
serves as the novel’s epigraph and is cited once more by Father Zosima
before he dies.56 Significantly, this same saying was also chosen to be
engraved on Dostoevsky’s tombstone, a scant seventeen months after
Dostoevsky penned and published this section of the novel.57
In the Gospel of John, the saying occurs after Christ’s entrance into
Jerusalem when His Passion before the Crucifixion is about to begin.
It is immediately preceded by the words “The hour is come that the
Son of man should be glorified” (John 12:23) and immediately followed
by the words “He that loveth his life shall lose it and he that hateth
his life in this world keepeth it unto life eternal” (John 12:25). By this
paradox Christ points to the promise He came to fulfil (“for this cause
I came unto this hour”): “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will
draw all things to myself.”58 Through His death, innocent and freely
chosen, Christ opens the gateway for all to follow Him to “life eternal.”
For, as Father Zosima says, “The righteous man passes away, but his
light remains. Men are always saved, even if only after the death of the
one who saves them. The human race does not accept its prophets and
its prophets are slain, but men love their martyrs and honour those
who have been slain.”59
The theme of the slain innocent is reiterated with greatest force at
the very end of the novel, with Alyosha serving again as the stabilizing
center. Ilyusha is a blameless child of ten, fatally stricken down by an
incurable disease. When he is buried, another boy tells Alyosha, “I
would give anything in the world to bring him back to life!”60 As they
all gather sorrowfully around the grave, Alyosha finds the words to
console the band of boys there who were Ilyusha’s friends. He tells them
 Freedom or Christ? 127

that their love for Ilyusha today will stay with them for their whole
lives because they are “united by a good and decent feeling”—not only
a feeling of love for the dead boy, but a feeling of love for each other “at
this moment.” Remembering Ilyusha now—“how he died, how we loved
him, how united we all were by this big stone”—will always remain,
Alyosha insists, “a beautiful, holy memory” that may be “enough to
save us one day.”61
All the boys listen to Alyosha “with great emotion. . . and tears
glistened in their eyes.” The eldest boy among them suddenly asks,
“Can it be true, as our religion claims, that we shall all rise from the
dead, come back to life, and meet again, Ilyusha too?” This is the
fourteen-year-old Kolya, an up-and-coming intellectual successor to
Ivan Karamazov, who poses Ivan’s own question about the existence of
“the immortality of the soul” which, if it is absent, means “everything
is permitted.”
Alyosha’s reply is immediate, emphatic, and joyful: “We shall
certainly rise and we shall certainly all meet again and tell each other
happily and joyfully everything that has happened to us. . . But now,
enough talking. . . ”62 This profession of faith dissolves into reticence
before the greater mystery, exactly like Dostoevsky’s own credo in his
1854 letter. The legacy of Christ is now transposed onto the “brave
and generous” person Ilyusha, whose legacy unites those who love him
in an identical way. Thus the movements of crime and crucifixion (the
murder of old Fyodor and the atonement of Dmitri) are completed
by resurrection (“the age of the life to come” in which the boys and
Alyosha believe). Ilyusha’s death, like Dmitri’s punishment, betoken the
same sacrifice towards “saving” others; of both it may be said equally,
“by his bruises we are healed.”63 And so The Brothers Karamazov is not
just a novel of ideas about God, but a whole theodicy that defends the
justice, love, and wisdom of God against all the evils that exist in the
world.64 “The rascals teased me with my ‘uncivilized’ and reactionary
faith in God,” Dostoevsky wrote in his 1880 notebooks. “But those
idiots never dreamt of such power of denial of God as there is in the
Inquisitor and in the preceding chapter, the answer to which lies in all
the novel.” 65
Small wonder, then, that Nietzsche’s Inquisitor-like works in Rus-
sian translation were experienced by Russians as already familiar to
them. “Nietzsche. . . echoed what Russian philosophy in the person
of Dostoevsky had already grasped. . . [so that] absolutely all of the
ideas that are frequently attributed to Nietzsche’s influence [in Russia]
came. . . via Dostoevsky, not Nietzsche.”66 When Nietzsche in The
Antichrist defines Christianity as “the corruption of souls by the con-
cepts of guilt, punishment, and immortality,”67 he is paraphrasing
Ivan Karamazov’s refusal to subscribe to “the immortality of the soul”
and all the rest that goes with it. If anything, Nietzsche as a famous
European philosopher only set the seal on Dostoevsky’s earlier work,
thereby “confirming” it as “correct.”
128 Against Nihilism

But for Dostoevsky, these same terms of “guilt, punishment, and

immortality” so reviled by Nietzsche are absolutely indispensable to
human growth and salvation. Guilt and punishment are relative to
man’s deepening experience of himself as basically and inescapably
fallen—corrupt—and so in need of God’s grace. And what God’s grace
serves to illuminate to His fallen and suffering creature, Man, is none
other than the immortality of man’s soul. In his Diary of a Writer,
Dostoevsky could not have made his position on this question any
clearer: “Without a sovereign idea,” he wrote, “neither man nor nation
can exist. And there is but one sovereign idea in this world: namely,
the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all the rest of life’s
‘sovereign’ ideas that man can live by derive solely from it.”68 According
to Dostoevsky, this human hunger for meaning—the ultimate, higher
reason for “why one lives”—is so strong that human beings cannot live
without it, for “without a clear idea of what to live for a man will not
consent to live and will rather destroy himself than remain on earth,
though he were surrounded by loaves of bread.”69 And for Dostoevsky,
the clearest idea of “what to live for”—in universal human terms—can
only be the “one sovereign idea” that Christ brought to the world: “He
that believeth in me hath everlasting life.”70
The question of Christ for Nietzsche and Dostoevsky turns on the
knife edge of the same burning concern for both of them: the question
of freedom versus enslavement. Nietzsche will ultimately never consent
to relinquish what he understands to be the most precious and the
most constitutive of his personal and philosophical identity: his sense
of freedom. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, will consent to surrender
his freedom because he deeply intuited that freedom cannot be fully
lived or understood by human beings without some form of allegiance
to Christ. As Jacques Ellul endeavoured to explain in The Ethics of
Freedom, “we are freed only by love of God” because “God does his
work through man, and man’s work can be done only through God.
[. . . ] For freedom has already been lived out by Jesus Christ on earth.
It has been planted. It is part of our history.”71 As far as Nietzsche
is concerned, the antithesis of freedom or Christ will forever stand.
But for Dostoevsky, it is a false antithesis because the only freedom
possible for human beings to fully and responsibly exercise is a freedom
through surrender, to Christ.
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky can thus be said to resemble the two
field labourers that the Gospel tells us perform the same earthly work
but are compensated differently.72
This is. . . what happens to the two who work together, and
are both alike acknowledged, as liberators: but the one is truly
engaged in the task of liberation, whilst the other is forging
the chains of slavery; and of the two, who are both alike ac-
knowledged as builders, the one is building and the other is
destroying.
 Freedom or Christ? 129

Notes
1 “The first Russian revolutionary group. . . came to be known after its unsuccess-

ful uprising in December 1825 as the Decembrists.” When the guard regiments were
supposed to swear allegiance to the newly-crowned Tsar Nicholas I in December,
three thousand men rebelled. The Tsar decided to open fire on his own officers,
killing sixty of them and arresting the remainder. “Most of the Decembrists were
army officers, often from aristocratic families and elite regiments, who had received
a good education, learned French . . . and obtained a first-hand knowledge of the
West during and immediately after the campaigns against Napoleon. Essentially the
Decembrists were liberals. . . who wanted to establish constitutionalism . . . and to
abolish serfdom.” See Nicholas Riasanovksy, A History of Russia, op. cit., 319–22.
2 See Chapter I above.
3 Letter of Dostoevsky from Omsk to N.D. Fonvizina, February 15–March 2,

1854, in Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, eds. Joseph Frank & David I.
Goldstein; trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1987), p. 68. Emphasis in the original.
Many Dostoevsky commentators, when citing this letter, choose to excerpt
what supports a more “anguished” interpretation of Dostoevsky as an irreligious
Romantic (i.e., “a child of this century, a child of doubt and disbelief”) and ignore
completely the religious resolution that he himself proposes.
4 See John 1:9; 15:1; 14:6.
5 See Dostoevsky’s September 1877 entry (“A Lie is Saved by Another Lie”) in

Volume II of his Diary of a Writer, op. cit., 835–838.

6 See Part I, Chapter XXX of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s The Ingenious

Hidalgo Don Quixote de La Mancha, trans. John Rutherford (Toronto: Penguin

Books Canada Ltd., 2003) 276.
7 Konstantin Mochulsky, “Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov,” in The

Brothers Karamazov, trans. Andrew MacAndrew (Toronto: Bantam Books Inc.,

1981), p. xiii.
8 This is Rakitin’s observation in Chapter 7 (“A Career-Conscious Divinity

Student”) in Book II of Part One of The Brothers Karamazov, op. cit., p. 93. All
quotations will be from this MacAndrew translation.
9 From Chapter 5 (“The Confession of an Ardent Heart: Head over Heels”) in

Book III of Part One of The Brothers Karamazov; see p. 140 and p. 141.
10 Ibid., p. 144; see also p. 145.
11 Ibid., p. 141; p. 142.
12 From Chapter 3 (“The Confession of an Ardent Heart in Verse”) in Book III

of Part One; see p. 125.

13 Published simultaneously by the MacMillan Company in New York and the

Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in London in 1938; see page 63 (from
Chapter II, “The Ideal of Holiness in Russian Fiction”; pp. 57–69 are devoted
specifically to Dostoevsky).
14 See Chapter 9 (“They Take Him Away”) from Book IX of Part Three of The

Brothers Karamazov, p. 613.

15 See Matthew 5:27. “Thou shalt not commit adultery” is the seventh of the

Ten Commandments (see Exodus 20:14).

16 See Chapter 8 (“The Testimony of the Witnesses; The Babe”) from Book XI

of Part Three, p. 611.

17 See Chapter 2 (“Alyosha in His Father’s House”) from Book IV of Part Two,

p. 209.
18 See Chapter 3 (“The Brothers Get Acquainted”) from Book 5 (“Pro and

Contra”) of Part Two, pp. 281–83.

19 Ivan is repeatedly described as wearing a crooked grin, or walking with a

crooked gait. Of himself he observes, “Intelligence is crooked” (283). He also calls

Smerdyakov, the fourth brother and his other darker self, “a terrible crooked
monster” (329).
130 Against Nihilism

20 See Speech 2 (“Upon the Blessed Isles”) from the Second Part of Thus Spoke

Zarathustra.
21 Spain’s Catholic King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella sanctioned the fifteenth-

century Inquisition, an ecclesiastical tribunal for the suppression of heresy, which

was led by the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada between 1478 and 1484. The same
royal couple also sanctioned Christopher Columbus sailing in search of America in
1492.
22 See Chapter 5 (“The Grand Inquisitor”) from Book 5 of Part 2 of The Brothers

Karamazov, op. cit., 299–301.

23 Ibid., 302. Emphasis in the original.
24 Ibid., 303.
25 Ibid., 303–4. See Matthew 4:1–11, which describes Christ’s fast of forty days

in the desert and the devil “tempting” Him there with three challenges to “prove”
He is the Son of God: to turn stones into bread; to throw himself off a high tower
for the angels to catch Him; and to receive all worldly goods and power in exchange
for worshipping the devil alone.
26 All citations are from Speech 1 (“The Child with the Mirror”) in the Second

Part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

27 All citations are from Speech 3 (“On the Pitying”) in the Second Part of Thus

Spoke Zarathustra. “God’s death out of pity for man” is later repeated twice in the
Fourth Part: by “the last Pope” in Speech 6 (“Retired”) and by “the Ugliest Man”
in Speech 7 (of the same name).
28 See John 12:31 where the Devil is called “the prince of this world” (see also

John 14:30 and John 16:11).

29 All citations are from Speech 10 (“The Dancing Song”) in the Second Part of

Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Later, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra will again encounter “the
spirit of gravity” as a “lamefoot” dwarf, who is his “devil and archenemy” because
he thwarts his will to dance (see Speech 2 “On the Vision and the Riddle” in the
Third Part).
30 See Twilight of the Idols (end of Section 2 of “The Four Great Errors”); Speech

11 (“The Tomb Song”) from the Second Part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Section
2 of Speech 12 (“On Old and New Tablets”) from the Third Part of Zarathustra;
Speech 12 (“The Last Supper”) from the Fourth Part of Zarathustra.
31 See Section 1 of Speech 11 (“On the Spirit of Gravity”) from the Third Part

of Zarathustra.
32 See Speech 4 (“Before Sunrise”) from the Third Part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
33 See Speech 11 (“On the New Idol”) from the First Part of Thus Spoke

Zarathustra.
34 The Brothers Karamazov, 309. According to Victor Terras, the Grand Inquisitor

does not mean “miracle, mystery, and authority” in the way that Christ taught
them but “magic, deception, and tyranny” instead—more in line with the Devil’s
classically despotic and mendacious style. See Reading Dostoevsky, op. cit., 123.
35 See Chapter 5 of Book V in Book Two of The Brothers Karamazov, p. 309.
36 Ibid., 308.
37 See Chapter 9 (“Ivan’s Nightmare and the Devil”) from Book XI of Part Four

of The Brothers Karamazov, pp. 766; 771; 777; 781.

38 Gorodetzky, The Humiliated Christ in Modern Russian Thought, op. cit.,

69. According to Gorodetzky, the character of Shatov in The Possessed is a clear

precursor to the religious-revolutionary character that Dostoevsky had intended to
develop further in Alyosha in a subsequent volume.
39 See Ulrich Schmid’s essay called “Split Consciousness and Characterization

in The Brothers Karamazov” in the (Second) Norton Critical Edition of Fyodor

Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett and ed. Susan
McReynolds Oddo (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2011), p. 782.
40 The first instance of Ivan’s dictum occurs when Rakitin tells Alyosha about

Ivan’s “idiotic theory that if there is no immortality of the soul, there can be
no virtue and therefore everything is permissible. [. . . ] His whole theory is vile!
Mankind can find enough strength within itself to live for virtue’s sake, even without
 Freedom or Christ? 131

believing in the immortality of the soul. In the love of freedom, of equality, and
the brotherhood of man, it will find it. . . ” See Chapter 7 (“A Career-Conscious
Divinity Student”) in Book II of Part One of The Brothers Karamazov, op. cit., p.
95.
41 See Chapter 1 (“Father Ferapont”) in Book IV of Part Two of The Brothers

Karamazov, p. 196.
42 This is the famous closing line of Dante’s Divine Comedy (line 145 of Canto

XXXIII of Paradise).
43 See Matthew 6:12 (Christ’s instruction on how to pray from the Sermon on

the Mount).
44 Rudolf Bultmann, The Presence of Eternity: History and Eschatology (New

York: Harper & Brothers, 1957) 154.

45 Father Zosima tells Alyosha, “When God decides the time has come for me to

die, you must leave the monastery, leave it for good. [. . . ] No, this isn’t the place
for you, at least not yet. I am sending you out into the world with my blessings,
and you will be of great service there. [. . . ] But I have no doubts about you. That
is why I am sending you. Christ is with you. Do not abandon Him and He will
not abandon you.” See again Chapter 7 in Book II of Part One of The Brothers
Karamazov, p. 89.
46 Bishop Alexander Mileant, personal communication to Daniel Stepenberg,

December 2003, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

47 See again Chapter 1 in Book IV of Part Two of The Brothers Karamazov, pp.

204–05; emphases added.

48 From Chapter 4 (“A Hymn and a Secret”) in Book XI of Part Four of The

Brothers Karamazov, 710–11.

49 Published by Shambhala Publications, Inc. (Boulder and London 1984); see

pages 6 and 8.
50 See Philippians 2:7 and 8.
51 This is how Psalm 130 begins.
52 The Brothers Karamazov, 711.
53 See again Chapter 4 in Book XI of Part Four of The Brothers Karamazov, p.

716.
54 See Chapter 2 (“From the Life of the Deceased Monk and Priest, the Elder

Zosima, as Taken Down from His Own Words by Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov”)
in Book VI of Part Two of The Brothers Karamazov, p. 342.
55 See John 12:24–25.
56 See Section D (“The Mysterious Visitor”) from Chapter 2 in Book VI of Part

Two of The Brothers Karamazov, p. 373.

57 In his essay “The Poetics of Serial Publication,” William Mills Todd III

provides a monthly breakdown of each installment of The Brothers Karamazov as

it was published in The Russian Herald between January of 1879 and November of
1880. Book VI was published in August of 1879, and Dostoevsky died in January
of 1881. See The Second Norton Critical Edition of The Brothers Karamazov, op.
cit., 695–6.
58 See John 12:27 and John 12:32.
59 See Section H (“Can a Man Judge His Fellow Men? Of Faith to the End”) of

Chapter 2 in Book VI of Part Two of The Brothers Karamazov, p. 389.

60 See Chapter 3 (“Ilyusha’s Funeral; The Speech by the Stone”) in the Epilogue

of The Brothers Karamazov, p. 932.

61 Ibid., p. 934.
62 Ibid., p. 936.
63 See Isaiah 53:5. The entirety of Isaiah 53 constitutes an Old Testament

prophecy of Christ.
64 See Victor Terras, A Karamazov Companion: Commentary on the Genesis,

Language, and Style of Dostoevsky’s Novel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

1981) for his matchless chapter-by-chapter analyses and extraordinarily thorough
introduction, which includes a consideration of Dostoevsky’s novel specifically in
132 Against Nihilism

terms of a theodicy (that is: a vindication of divine providence in view of the

existence of evil).
65 Cited by Gorodetzky, p. 58. Emphases in the original. See also p. 769 (“From

the Notebooks”) for another translation of this same statement in the first Norton
Critical Edition from 1976 of The Brothers Karamazov.
66 See Mihajlo Mihajlov’s essay “The Great Catalyzer: Nietzsche and Russian

Neo-Idealism” in Nietzsche in Russia, ed. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (Princeton

UP, 1986), pp. 140 and 141.
67 See Section 58 of The Antichrist in The Portable Nietzsche, op. cit., p. 649.
68 A Writer’s Diary, Volume One (1873–1876), trans. Kenneth Lantz (Evanston:

Northwestern University Press, 1993) 734. Emphases in the original. This famous
statement is taken from section #3 of the December 1876 entry called “Unsubstan-
tiated Statements.”
69 Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Volume I, trans. David Magarshack

(Markham: Penguin Books Canada Ltd., 1981) 298 (Book Five, Chapter Five: “The
Grand Inquisitor”).
Nietzsche would still concur completely with Dostoevsky on this point, since
he too stated that “If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost
any how.” See Number 12 of “Maxims and Arrows” from Twilight of the Idols
(emphases in the original).
70 John 6:47.
71 Translated and edited by Geoffrey W. Bromiley; published by William B.

Eerdmans Publishing Company (Grand Rapids, MI, 1976). See pp. 248; 223; 224.
72 See Matthew 2: 1–16.
Conclusion
This chapter reflects the way in which Nietzsche’s impact on the twen-
tieth century continues to linger and expand into the twenty-first in
ways that Dostoevsky’s impact has not. Some later literary revisionings
of both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky are examined as proofs of ongoing
relevance, alongside a cryptic spiritual portrait of Nietzsche in a 1513
engraving by Albrecht Dürer.

It is not in how one soul approaches another but in how it

distances itself from it that I recognize their affinity and relat-
edness.
—Nietzsche, Human All Too Human 1

In his last novel, the great Carlos Fuentes imagined a dialogue between
himself and Nietzsche in contemporary Mexico. Federico en su balcón
(2012) is a series of vignettes centering on a dozen other characters’
evolving fortunes, in which Nietzsche and the narrator (Fuentes himself)
offer a running commentary from their respective “balconies.” Graphic
sex and violence permeates the narrative, as extensions of the central
Nietzschean theme of power—in this case, before and after a bloody
revolution—where leaders rise and fall (literally) from “the balcony”
to address the masses. There is a pervasive ugliness and brutality
in Fuentes’ story that translates, with sobering accuracy, some of
the unadorned core of Nietzsche’s doctrine. “Democracy,” Fuentes’
Nietzsche says, “prevents extraordinary men from being different. If
they are different, then they are only ‘eccentric,’ or in other words,
ridiculous. A free man is extraordinary and an extraordinary man is
free.” Fuentes’ narrator then asks, “And the majority, Friedrich?” To
which Fuentes’ Nietzsche replies, “They’re just cattle.”2
There is also in this novel a pitch-perfect summation of the ambi-
tion of Fuentes’ own book to assert a vital correspondence between
the nineteenth-century German and the twenty-first century Mexican.
“Can we really be the contemporaries of any other human beings?”
Fuentes’ Nietzsche asks. Fuentes’ narrator answers that we can, thanks
to the power of thought or of a work of art or of literature to transcend
time and space: “When I look at a painting by Velázquez, I become
a contemporary of Velázquez.” Fuentes’ Nietzsche then asks, “Does
134 Against Nihilism

Velázquez know it?” Of course not. “Then your sense of being a con-
temporary to him is all truncated. You feel you’re his contemporary,
but Velázquez is no contemporary of yours.”3
Herein lies the rub for any hoped-for proximity to Dostoevsky as
well. The illusion of contemporaneity, or the one-sided love affair of
the living writer with the dead one, more often than not betrays a
fundamental ignorance. The pattern of enthusiastic misunderstanding
of Dostoevsky started very early—beginning with the publication of
a malicious memoir by a longstanding family friend not long after
Dostoevsky’s death,4 and continuing through an obsessive admirer’s
sexual liaison with Dostoevsky’s surviving mistress in order to gain
some insight into Dostoevsky’s genius.5 If, for example, the writer is
a secular and cultured European like Stefan Zweig, his Dostoevsky
is just another variation of Zweig himself, intellectually adventurous
and fundamentally secular in spirit.6 Or if the writer is a Soviet Jew
like Leonid Tsypkin, his Dostoevsky will be a tangle of personally-
felt snubs and emotional nastiness, because that reflects Tsypkin’s
experience of exclusion from the classical Russian canon.7 Perhaps
most slanderously of all, if the writer is as randy as a goat like the
South African novelist J.M. Coetzee, then it only stands to reason that
his imagined Dostoevsky is ruled by compulsive sexuality as well—with
plenty of Coetzee’s own ambivalence about being a successful father
thrown in for good measure.8 Indeed, so much blatant misinformation
has been promulgated at Dostoevsky’s expense in the guise of paying
tribute to him that Fuentes’ Nietzsche asks the question that still
pertains now, more than ever, to both of them (since, as is well known,
Nietzsche has inspired his own share of monstrous distortions9 ): namely,
how can Nietzsche and Dostoevsky still be our contemporaries today?
The relevance of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky to our own time is
rooted in “our religion,” as one contemporary American commentator
put it, “of very comfortable nihilism. [. . . ] As modern men and women—
to the degree that we are modern—we believe in nothing.”10 Indeed,
this American continues, “it would be a willful and culpable blindness
for us to refuse to recognize how aesthetically arid, culturally worthless,
and spiritually depraved our society has become”—with individuals
“increasingly” experiencing “a world. . . devoid of merit, wit, kindness,
imagination, or charity.”11 Nihilism has permeated virtually all of
modern western culture in the form of narcissism (“a sordid service of
the self”) and secularism (“post-Christian sensibility and conviction”).
In other words, it is a worldwide malaise—not just a specific American
phenomenon. Nietzsche and Dostoevsky understood in the 1800s how
nihilism was a threat that “stands outside the door.”12 Now, a scant
hundred or so years later, nihilism is a force that has definitely landed
all over the world: politically, socially, technologically.
Robert Pippin writes,
 Freedom or Christ? 135

According to Nietzsche, we are in a position of tremendous

collapse, flux, and uncertainty because of the failure of desire
that he calls nihilism, and he clearly thinks there must be some—
even if very indirect, unusual—way to address that failure. [. . . ]
Many times. . . Nietzsche suggests that a good deal of the answer
depends on him. . . He offers himself as a unique individual
possibility, not an instance of a universal rule but a possible
paradigm instance to be imitated. Looked at broadly, of course,
the historical answer to Nietzsche’s question was clearly negative;
the experiment with him at the center did not take, his ‘truth’
could not be successfully incorporated. He did not become a
new Socrates, and his cultural and historical impact has been
much more as a kind of ‘dissolving fluid,’ a value-debunker, an
immoralist, than as any prophet for a new form of life.13

At the beginning of this book, there was a discussion of a famous

portrait painted of Dostoevsky. Now, at the close of this book, it is only
fitting to devote some concluding remarks to an analogous portrait of
Nietzsche—albeit a veiled and spiritual one. For there is much about
the fate of Nietzsche and his own experience of nihilism that is revealed
in this image (Figure 7). And it is not, sadly, much related to how
Nietzsche optimistically saw himself. “The ideal of the teacher, in which
the priest, the artist and the physician, the man of knowledge, and
the man of wisdom, are fused with one another. . . this is my vision,”
Nietzsche said of his wandering self, after he had left the academic
world behind him.14 The miles he would have to go before he could
sleep are more martial than anything, as the history of the twentieth
century has shown.
In this strange picture one may recognize all the perils of the
solitary traveller that Nietzsche remained, straying bravely through the
Dantean “dark wood” and facing down demons on every side. Martin
Luther in one of his sermons called on Christians to see themselves
specifically as knights “armed and prepared to do battle with the devil
and death”—a call to arms that Dürer (who has been called “the first
and greatest Protestant artist”) captured perfectly in this engraving,
which has been called “the most ‘Protestant’ of Dürer’s prints.” There is
a peculiar personal attachment that Nietzsche felt towards this picture
for the majority of his working intellectual life. “An inconsolably lonely
man could choose no better symbol than the Knight with Death and
Devil, as Dürer has drawn him for us,” Nietzsche wrote towards the
conclusion of his Birth of Tragedy.15 Not only did Nietzsche give this
Dürer print as a Christmas present to Richard Wagner in 1870, but he
also offered it as a wedding gift to his sister in 1885. In a remarkable
chapter dedicated to exploring the significance that this particular
Dürer picture held for Nietzsche, Ernst Bertram observed that “it
is the knight of truth (be it Christian or un-Christian), the truth
of the brave man, the truth at any price, above all at the price of
136 Against Nihilism

Figure 7: Knight, Death, and Devil by Albrecht Dürer (1513)

one’s own happiness.” He went on to see how “Nietzsche’s ideal” as

reflected in this picture was “a reformatory, virile one. . . Nietzsche, like
Dürer, could see and give only his best in masculine types.” But what,
Bertram asked, “within the German development” could be “more
‘Protestant’ in this sense than the ‘always joyfully protesting’ spirit of
Nietzsche? Who would have ever inwardly ‘got over’ Christianity less
among Germans than this most radical and fearless atheist?”16
Here again one sees the fateful coincidence between Nietzsche and
Dostoevsky, in terms of their unflinching embrace of “radical atheist
fearlessness.” In the words of Nicolas Zernov,
 Freedom or Christ? 137

Dostoevsky was the first writer to describe the outlook of the

militant atheist, a man who hates God, and who treats Christ as
his personal enemy. He discovered these godless fanatics among
his Russian contemporaries, but he was aware that they were
heralds of a new epoch when religious problems once more would
rise to pre-eminence. He contrasted these ardent atheists with
the type of indifferent agnostic so common among the people of
Western Europe in the nineteenth century.17

Today, “indifferent agnosticism” has won out—if, as modern people

in the twenty-first century, we are more often than not content to
“believe in nothing.” But the great costs of continuing to do so are as
incalculable as they are unfathomable—for the will to believe and to
value is pre-eminent in human beings, as Nietzsche himself only too
clearly and soberly recognized: “And, to repeat in conclusion what I
said at the beginning: man would rather will nothingness than not
will.”18 To which Dostoevsky might well answer, “Not my will, but
Thine”—for it was he and not Nietzsche who emerged, in the end,
from the dark Dantean and Dürerean wood—with his “hosanna having
crossed the purgatory of doubt and become purified in the chalice of
temptation.”19 As Nicholas Berdyaev concluded long ago, in his Paris
lectures on “l’esprit de Dostoievski” in the winter of 1920–21, “So
great is the worth of Dostoevsky that to have produced him is by itself
sufficient justification for the existence of the Russian people in the
world; and he will bear witness for his countrymen at the last judgment
of the nations.”20

Notes
1 See # 251 (Assorted Opinions and Maxims) from Friedrich Nietzsche, Human,

All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge UP,
1993).
2 Carlos Fuentes, Federico en su balcón (Mexico: Alfaguara, 2012) 234. Transla-

tion from the Spanish by the author.

3 Ibid., 80. Translation from the Spanish by the author.
4 Nikolai Nikolayevich Strakhov published, in 1913, a letter to Count Leo Tolstoy

that he wrote in 1883, a letter which “so shabbily reveals the vengefulness he had
striven over decades to cover up [and] is itself a study in psychopathology worthy
of Dostoevsky’s pen, had the latter been alive to make creative use of it” (see the
Biographical Glossary to Anna Dostoevsky, Reminiscences, op. cit., 432).
5 Vasily Vasilyevich Rozanov had a six-year relationship with Polina Suslova;

“his fascination with Dostoevsky’s work and thought was so intense that at the age
of twenty-four he married Dostoevsky’s former mistress (seventeen years older than
himself), partly as a link with the man he had never managed to meet” (see Anna
Dostoevsky again, 430).
6 See Stefan Zweig, Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoeffsky, trans. Eden

& Cedar Paul (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1930; orig. pub. Insel Verlag
in Leipzig as Drei Meister in 1920).
Zweig has written more sympathetically and insightfully about Nietzsche. See
Le Combat avec le démon: Kleist—Hölderlin—Nietzsche, trad. Alzir Hella (Pierre
138 Against Nihilism

Belfond/Le Livre de Poche, 1983; orig. pub. S. Fischer Verlag as Der Kampf mit
dem Dämon in 1951).
7 See Leonid Tsypkin, Summer in Baden-Baden (originally published as Leto v

Badene). Trans. Roger & Angela Keys (New York: New Directions, 2001). Written
between 1977 and 1980 and published abroad in 1982, one week before the author
died in Russia.
8 See J.M. Coetzee, The Master of Petersburg (Toronto: Penguin Books Canada

Ltd., 1994).
9 “The fact that Nietzsche was used by the Nazis does not make him only or

primarily a proto-Nazi thinker. And yet the uses that texts are put to cannot be
ignored, no matter how opposite those uses might be to the explicit intentions
of their author. . . The uses and abuses of texts become part of their history and
thus must be taken seriously, especially if the texts have as a part of their legacy
an important totalitarian or racist phase. [. . . ] No matter how partial, dishonest,
absurd, or grotesque their references to and uses of the name of Nietzsche were, Nazi
ideologues were able to find and exploit within Nietzsche’s texts elements essential
to Nazi ideology—even if Nietzsche’s satire and critique of German nationalism
and his attacks on anti-Semitism, among many other things, had to be ignored or
censored.” See David Carroll, French Literary Fascism (Princeton UP, 1995) 43;
emphasis added.
10 See David B. Hart’s article “Christ and Nothing” in First Things (October

2003, No. 136) 47.

11 Ibid., 54.
12 Nietzsche’s enigmatic opening line to his last book The Will to Power was this

personification of nihilism: “He, more alarming than the visitors, stands outside
the door.”
13 See Robert Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy (University

of Chicago, 2010) 58 and 64–65; emphases in the original.

14 See # 180 (“A Vision”) from Assorted Maxims and Opinions in Nietzsche’s

Human, All Too Human, p. 257.

15 See Section 20 of The Birth of Tragedy, op. cit.
16 See Chapter 2, “Knight, Death, and Devil” in Bertram’s Nietzsche, op. cit.,

38–40; 50; 53.

17 See Three Russian Prophets: Khomiakov, Dostoevsky, Soloviev (Gulf Breeze,

FL: Academic International Press, 1975) 113.

18 This is the last line of Section 28 of the Third Essay from On the Genealogy

of Morals, op. cit.

19 See p. 770 “From the Notebooks” to the 1976 Norton Critical Edition of The

Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett & ed. Ralph Matlaw.

20 Nicholas Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, trans. Donald Attwater (New York: the World

Publishing Company/Meridian Books, 1969) 227.

Appendix A

Why Kids Shoot Up Schools: For

Nietzschean and Dostoevskian Reasons
This is a record of the genesis and development of the first Nietzsche
and Dostoevsky courses, designed and taught by the author, at Dawson
College in Montreal in the wake of the 2006 shooting at the college.

I was on my way to Dawson College for an interview with the hiring

committee for the Humanities Department. As a new teacher with just
one year’s experience teaching in an Argentine high school, I was looking
forward to what promised to be an exciting teaching opportunity in
another school environment which I’d actually never known, since I’m
not from Quebec but from British Columbia, where CÉGEPS (Collèges
d’éducation générale et practique) do not exist. “Halfway houses between
high school and university” is what one teaching colleague calls them—
and she turned out to be absolutely right.
As I walked in the general direction of the building downtown,
however, something appeared to be wrong: the streets were increasingly
full of people the closer I got to the building, and traffic was at a
standstill. I waded into the stranded crowds (because most of the
pedestrians seemed inclined to hover in the vicinity of the College
itself) and perceived that most of the quiet and worried young faces
belonged to students. As I slowly continued to try to make my way
towards what I thought was still my appointment, I was suddenly
blocked by policemen: no one was permitted to advance beyond a
block’s radius from the College entrance. I had never seen the building
before, so I was uncertain initially just how far away from the doors I
really was.
“What’s happened?” I asked one person next to me, after the police
ignored this same question. “Why can’t anyone pass any further?”
“There was a shooter,” the person replied, and looked away.
At first I didn’t understand the words—perhaps because my first
association, now that I was surrounded by students again, was with
the shot glasses filled with rum or vodka called “shooters” that I drank
in my undergraduate days. In a variation of how Thomas Jefferson
once described himself, I may be an old student but I am still a young
140 Against Nihilism

teacher. . . 1 I actually associated all of Montreal with my time spent

there as an undergraduate at McGill and Concordia universities, and
this was the first time I was back again in. . . Yes, can it really be?
Already sixteen years? Yes, I’d finished those university studies in 1990
and left the city, shortly after. . .
Suddenly the memory of that visceral shock returned to me, seven-
teen years ago in 1989, at the University of Montreal: another “shooter”
had systematically singled out fourteen female engineering students
and shot them all before shooting himself. The vicious misogyny of it
had affected me so much that it was the main reason I couldn’t bear
to stay in Montreal any longer, even though I had come to see it as
my adopted city. I felt like I could have been one of those women; I
couldn’t understand why anyone would do something so deliberately
hateful. Later, one of my students at Dawson College would share with
me her copy of Monique Lépine’s memoir Aftermath, which helped me
begin to understand more. . . But the enormity of that act certainly
continued to haunt me; even at a distance (since I had learned the
news from across town), that day and that fact marked me more than
any other in the whole of my life so far. It was the greatest proof of
the problem of evil I had ever known, the most direct experience of the
depths of human depravity I had ever encountered. I couldn’t accept
that such a thing could have happened, so suddenly and so irrationally,
right in my own city.
And now it had happened again—exactly when I had finally chosen
to come back—and almost right where I was supposed to be, only this
time as a teacher and not as a student! And of all the casualties this
time, it had come down again to the female factor: one young woman
was killed. Scores of others were wounded and traumatized.
When I realized the way that history was repeating itself, I felt
all over again the same numb incomprehension as before. I wondered
why I had bothered to come back at all, when the worst things never
seemed to change; that professor shooting his colleagues at Concordia
in between was something I remembered noting as another good reason
not to ever return to Montreal. All those English-French language-
politics headaches were, of course, another cause for alienation and
disgust. So many fellow students I had known never ended up settling
in Montreal because they couldn’t find satisfying careers if they weren’t
francophones. I was another one of those unwelcome anglophones, “to
blame for everything,” as John Ralston Saul once wittily observed.2
What was I doing back here anyway? What had I been thinking?
But a few months later, I was still in Montreal. My interview was
rescheduled, and I was offered a part-time teaching position. I still
wasn’t sure I even wanted the job now, in the wake of the shooting,
but I decided to take it on a trial basis. After all, I still didn’t really
know what I was doing back here, and I figured that teaching again in
the meantime couldn’t hurt.
 Appendix Why Kids Shoot Up Schools 141

***

Ten years passed. Montreal once again became my adopted home,

in no small part due to the tremendous privilege I have enjoyed as
a teacher at Dawson College, sharing the classic books closest to my
heart with one perceptive and gifted group of students after another.
It is only now, as I work on a book manuscript based on a course
that I created and taught at Dawson College called “Nietzsche and
Dostoevsky”, that I have come to see a deep connection between my
favourite teaching material and the violence that ripped apart “the quiet
still air of delightful study.”3 It has to do with the distinction that both
men simultaneously pioneered in their writings between the “ordinary”
and the “extraordinary” as a means of contesting and escaping the
distinction between “good” and “evil.” The public imagination of the
nineteenth century was ready to accept this idea, as surely as we went
with it in the twentieth century—and we in the twenty-first century
are still the inheritors of this idea as well.
The course “Nietzsche and Dostoevsky” was initially based on
manageable excerpts from principally two texts: Thus Spoke Zarathustra
and Crime and Punishment. The idea of the course was to introduce two
distinct world views as reflected in these two writers’ and philosophers’
most accessible and famous books. Students always responded more
enthusiastically to one over the other, spontaneously generating strong
discussions with their “position papers,” and I liked to think that my
own balanced handling of both authors’ virtues and deficiencies as
writers and thinkers had something to do with their positive experience
of the class as a whole. Students often asked me which of the two
writers I myself preferred, and I always truthfully answered that I loved
both of them equally. More than this I would never disclose, in order
not to bias their engagements with the texts in any way.
But if the truth were known, my own life has been a complete
trajectory between these two poles: I started off decidedly as a Niet-
zschean (making Nietzsche the focus of my doctoral dissertation, given
my atheistic upbringing) but then, through a series of curious twists
of fate—fate, that word so central to both Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov
and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra—I chose to embrace a thoroughly Dos-
toevskian position (after I was received, as an adult convert into the
Russian Orthodox Church in Exile). This strange and circuitous path
is the subtext I always bring to the study of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky,
for myself: it is a work of integration as well as a labour of love—a
means for me to understand how I began one way but then found it
necessary to follow another way. It is much more than a mere exercise
of comparison and contrast: it is also much more than the history
of my graduate school friendship (where my best friend working on
her Dostoevsky dissertation helped me finetune and finish my own
dissertation on Nietzsche). It is, strangely but indubitably, the story of
my life.
142 Against Nihilism

And so it is with a certain amount of horror that I have come

to realize that both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky are not as innocent
as I have always thought, as two writers of equally persuasive poetic
power. They are clearly guilty of romanticizing the renegade in all
of us, to ambiguous moral ends. After all, wasn’t that what initially
appealed to me as an adolescent reader, and what continues to draw all
of my students: this lonely maverick quality, in both Nietzsche’s and
Dostoevsky’s writings? Don’t we all sometimes feel entitled or even
compelled to be the outsider, critically standing apart and assessing
the mediocre masses, with whom none of us (if we are honest with
ourselves) wants to be identified? That punk pose of defiance is so
perennially enlivening and seductive: what normal human being doesn’t
feel the need to rebel and “live dangerously” at least once in his or her
life? And it is just this siren song of daring and of passion that both
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky excelled in conveying. You don’t have to be
under twenty-one to really feel what they were saying, but of course it
certainly doesn’t hurt if you are.
In both Crime and Punishment and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, one
is directly confronted with the glamour of the misunderstood criminal—
the suffering exception to the mindless rule. . . Both Dostoevsky’s
Raskolnikov and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra are entirely invested in their
particular rights, as extraordinary individuals, to supersede the com-
mon law. The whole idea of “good” and “evil” is thus replaced with
the concept of “ordinary” and “extraordinary”—which is actually the
devil’s bargain, since it proposes we simply trade all our moral bag-
gage for the freedom of an aesthetic value instead. The reason we
are tempted to exchange the moral for the aesthetic here is because
the distinction between both has been eroded: why not substitute or
switch the confusing or contradictory moral law (which we may not
genuinely feel or even like) for the glamour and force of violence (for
which we all feel some degree of fascination or, normally, disturbance)?
According to these Nietzschean and Dostoevskian terms of imagining
and understanding the world, most of us are defeated and resigned to
staying within the status quo; a nation of Napoleons would naturally
be a disaster, so for this reason “a people is a detour of nature to get
to six or seven great men—yes, and then to get around them!”4 For
this reason, one would think that Raskolnikov and Zarathustra are
addressing a very select few with their calls to break away from “the
present” in favour of “the future” (Raskolnikov) or from “the Motley
Cow” towards the Übermensch (Zarathustra). After all, most of us
can intuitively understand the gist of the esoteric imperative here:
even if we are not sympathetic to Raskolnikov’s and Zarathustra’s
observations about the thrill of going “beyond good and evil,” we can
still accept that it might justifiably appeal to others because we may
have remembered hearing somewhere (in a completely different context)
how “many are called, but few are chosen.”5
 Appendix Why Kids Shoot Up Schools 143

And there are many who can identify with the lonely voice at the
centre of these texts, which has certainly been the cause of many a
creative misunderstanding of the author’s character or original intention.
As a teacher I felt it incumbent upon me to navigate this tricky terrain
with my students, who generally tended to assume (like most readers)
that Nietzsche and Dostoevsky must share their characters’ sentiments
or statements. Towards the end of every semester, I would invite
the students to reflect on an essay entitled “What Makes Dangerous
Philosophies Dangerous”6 and then draw their own conclusions: could
they, for example, imagine Nietzsche’s Zarathustra actually hurting
anyone? What echoes of Raskolnikov’s arrogance and idealism could
they hear in Zarathustra also? To what extent is any author responsible
for “dangerous misreadings” of his or her work?
Well, I thought that answered all the thorny questions: most stu-
dents invariably reported that no author should be tarred with any
ignorant reader’s brush, and that Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were basi-
cally geniuses. Yes, the fictional voices may both come off sounding
insufferably arrogant, but they strike enough of a chord to make them
tolerable and comprehensible. And no, the idea of Zarathustra coming
to physical blows with anyone was always completely dismissed as a
possibility, even as a remote one.
But that is not the end of it, as I have come to see. The problem
of Dostoevsky’s and Nietzsche’s focus on the criminal is that it is
speculative and laudatory. Although it is true that Raskolnikov does not
get away with his crime and ends up mystically on the road to becoming
repentant and reformed—just as Zarathustra concludes his tireless
tirades against society by embracing an undefined mystical moment of
insight—the fact remains for many readers that the experiences of both
Raskolnikov and Zarathustra remain too open and unresolved. There is
so much insistence on the outsider who cannot abide the petit bourgeois
and will sacrifice personal freedom and comfort in order to defend
something felt to be real. . . how, then, can it simply dissolve into this
collapse of an allusive and unsatisfying ending? What happened to all
the angst that drove them out of the fold into the social and spiritual
wilderness in the first place?
It would seem that the lack of a resolution in the case of each text
points to the deeply problematic relationship between the rebel and
“the herd mentality.” On the one hand, Raskolnikov and Zarathustra
show the way to the truer, freer, and fuller life choice that they believe
is worth following (if we only had the nerve to listen to them). On the
other hand, they need “the herd” as both antagonist and audience for
their lonely heroism (because what would all their noise matter in a
vacuum, if none of us were listening?). It is a simultaneous movement,
a push and pull. This double-edged relationship is further hardened
by the essential content of what both Raskolnikov and Zarathustra
are saying: “I won’t be fake like you bourgeois; I’ll do what I need
144 Against Nihilism

to do because I have to be true to myself.” And far from solipsism,

this criminal urge to authenticity has a ripple effect: this audacity is
designed to be infectious: the surrounding society is forced to listen.
Ye shall know your society by what is expelled from it. But what’s
expelled never goes away: it comes back. And the self-expelled see
themselves as the most authentic in an inauthentic world because, in
order to exist, they have to ultimately destroy everything inauthentic
that they see around them.
In this sense, the rhetoric of authenticity that both Raskolnikov and
Zarathustra employ so effectively is what is so alluring, and therefore
so dangerous. Anyone can easily feel alienated and ostracized, with
complete justification. The sense of offence or injustice is so ingrained in
human nature that we all seek to preserve our dignity and self-respect
as much as we can. . . But the arguments that justify a response to
that offence or injustice: are they not often flawed, driven more by the
same spirit of ressentiment that Nietzsche saw as all too prevalent in
human nature?7 Raskolnikov may be right: “What [are] men. . . most
afraid of[?] Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear
most.”8 Choosing to act audaciously, not caring what others think, is
of course appealing up to a point—but what if Nietzsche too is right
when he proposes that “fear is. . . the mother of morals”?9 Are all our
institutions of law and order just depending on our massive and mutual
fear and loathing in order to function? Is audacity the royal road to
authenticity not taken often enough by most of us? But then, to what
end? Where is a reader of these texts to go next with these sorts of
open-ended endorsements and ruminations?
The problem, in short, is that Nietzsche and Dostoevsky successfully
introduced the substitution of an aesthetic idea (the “ordinary” versus
“the extraordinary”) for a moral idea (the distinction between “good”
and “evil”). The contempt of the superior few for the inferior many is
actually aesthetically driven: it turns on a perception of value that is
emptied of moral content. Although this sounds like a contradiction, the
new value turns on more objective concerns like the future (Raskolnikov)
and the authentic (Zarathustra) which are themselves obscure and
suggestive but universally acknowledged as intrinsic to our individual
and collective existence. No one is immune from experiencing the
weight of these categories in their own lives. Moreover, Nietzsche and
Dostoevsky both suggest that we are ruled by these discriminating
impulses that recognize difference and hierarchy more often than we
might like to admit, especially since everything in our apparently
pluralist and inclusive society today insists that we all subscribe to
equality and accessibility instead. Not much has changed in the 150
years since Nietzsche and Dostoevsky aired their exploratory views: the
ordinary-extraordinary distinction caught on in the nineteenth century
and certainly bore strange fruit in the twentieth century, if we can see
all of fascism as a kind of cultural flowering on this aesthetic soil: it
 Appendix Why Kids Shoot Up Schools 145

was not a moral imperative that drove the fascist movements across
Spain, Italy, and Germany so much as an aesthetic program: “how to
conceive of and practice a pure, unrestrained aesthetics of violence.” 10
This is where the Dawson shooter comes in. By all accounts that
I heard at a conference dedicated to examining the fallout from this
event,11 the individual felt entitled to repair his damaged self-esteem
by showing his power with a firearm to the same individuals who
had slighted him. This sense of being deeply offended and alienated
has recognizably Nietzschean and Dostoevskian roots. Of course, the
shooter did not seek a classically open and artistic resolution to his
angst in the style of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, but he definitely shared
the initially clarifying and even possibly redemptive quality of violence12
that both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky took as their imaginative starting
points. More than that: the Dawson shooter felt he was extraordinary
in relation to the rest of the (ordinary) students, and thus entitled to
do what he wanted with them. His resorting to violence was his means
of asserting his true dignity and rescuing his real self-respect, which
everyone around him had (in his perception and experience) continually
undermined. Psychologically, he is very close to the profile of the École
Polytechnique killer Marc Lépine: only a total, aesthetic statement
could serve as the solution to his deep sense of being personally “erased”
or wounded. This, then, is the violence of the authentic:13 the call to
embrace audacity as a first absolute value, for want of all others, in
the forging and rescuing of some real meaning. Any revolution requires
no less of a complete commitment; whether it is a public or a private
war, the terms of engagement are total and uncompromising, and they
must first turn on the axis of audacity. You do not consult the eggs
for their permission before breaking them, just as you can’t make an
omelette without breaking eggs. . . 14
Reflecting on all this, I now know I could not teach Nietzsche and
Dostoevsky again the same way as I had taught them before. From now
on, I would make this strangely coincident observation between them
about the “ordinary” and the “extraordinary” eclipsing and replacing
“good” and “evil” a cornerstone of the course instead of a footnote to
it, and have students actively engage the problem—helping them to
recognize its stubborn resurgence in all the forms of new media around
us (not just news, television, or movies)—and then to brainstorm
different ways of eradicating or defusing it. The cultural footprint
of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky looms very large indeed, and it is my
conviction that it is only through new attempts like this, to understand
it from the inside, that we can hope to prevent future tragedies in our
schools.
146 Against Nihilism

Notes
1 “I may be an old man, but I am still a young gardener.”
2 “Anglo-Saxon note to author: do you mean anglophones?: A racial group
composed mainly of Celts, Chinese, Germans, Italians, Ukrainians, French and other
peoples who have been conquered by or immigrated to the English-speaking world.
To blame for everything.” The Doubter’s Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive
Common Sense (Toronto: Penguin, 1994) 23.
3 This is a line emblazoned on the outside wall of McGill University’s Redpath

Library, which I always loved reading as I walked by while I was a student there.
The source of the quotation (which begins “Beholding the bright countenance of
truth. . . ”) is from John Milton’s The Reason of Church Government, Introduction,
Book II.
4 Epigram # 126 from Part IV of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil:

Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random
House, 1966) 87.
5 Matthew 22:14.
6 I excerpted sections from Chapter 2 of Sander L. Gilman’s remarkable book,

Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1985) about the true 1924 “Nietzsche murder case” of
Leopold and Loeb. For good measure, I had students watch a clip from Alfred
Hitchcock’s 1948 film Rope which was inspired by this legal case and mentions
Nietzsche only once.
7 See Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic (1887), trans. Walter

Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1989) 38: “A race of. . . men of ressentiment
is bound to become eventually cleverer than any noble race” (emphasis in the
original); this preponderance is otherwise known as “the maggot ‘man’. . . the ‘tame
man,’ the hopelessly mediocre and insipid man” (43).
8 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (1866), trans. Constance Garnett

(New York: The Modern Library, 1978) 2.

9 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil 113.
10 See David Carroll’s magisterial study French Literary Fascism: Nationalism,

Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture (Princeton University Press, 1995) 205
and passim (especially Chapter 8: “The Art of Anti-Semitic Rage: Lucien Rebatet’s
Aesthetics of Violence”); emphases in the original.
11 Dawson College/ACCC Conference: “Youth and Violence—The Role of Edu-

cation, Inspiring Solutions.” September 29 to October 1, 2011, Montreal, Canada.

Although well-meaning and well-attended (albeit mostly by women), the vast ma-
jority of the presentations ignored or obscured the fact that violence is as intrinsic
to male experience as sexuality is intrinsic to female experience. Men were thus left
out of the discourse, unless they were sufficiently apologetic or “neutered” for the
occasion of participating in the discussion of “their” problem. Only one voice stood
out as both unapologetic and clear about male experience, and that was Lt. Col.
Dave Grossman.
12 In his defence of his article “On Crime,” the lapsed law student Raskolnikov

carefully adds a proviso to his sweeping claims of “extraordinariness” trumping

the old categories of “good” and “evil”: “An ‘extraordinary’ man has the right. . .
that is not an official right, but an inner right to decide in his own conscience
to overstep. . . certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical
fulfilment of his idea (sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole of humanity).”
See Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment 234, emphases added.
13 See my Myths and Metaphors of Authenticity, unpub. Ph.D. diss., University

of Toronto, 1999.
14 On ne fait pas d’omelette sans casser des oeufs was what Robespierre was

reputed to have said in an Epigram from 1790, but it has also been attributed
to Napoleon. According to The Home Book of Quotations, Classic and Modern,
“both were merely repeating an old saying: You can’t unscramble eggs” (New York:
Dodd, Mead & Co., 1967) 532.
Appendix B

Selections from Students’

Scripts Imagining Nietzsche
and Dostoevsky in Dialogue
This features ten fine excerpts from original student work, submitted
for various versions of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky courses taught by the
author at Dawson College.

One of the great pleasures and privileges of teaching Nietzsche and

Dostoevsky to a college-age audience has been the perpetual experience
of rediscovery. Students were often reading these thinkers for the first
time and were thus drawing connections, as they saw them, between the
texts and their own lives. Many of their observations are original and
arresting. Thanks to their generosity of involvement, which not only
enriched the understanding of their fellow classmates but enhanced
my own understanding as a teacher as well, these students deserve
acknowledgment
A research essay topic that I regularly assign in my Dawson College
“World Views” course on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky asks students to
imagine a sustained and serious dialogue, circa 1880, somewhere in
Switzerland (because Nietzsche and Dostoevsky might very well have
met this way). The assignment requires students to clearly declare,
describe, and defend both writers’ world views, with direct quotations
from each writer’s work to support their statements. A third person
(such a waiter or a passerby) is recommended as a mediator. Most
students excel at this exercise. The following represents a cross-section
of some of the best scripts produced by students for this research
assignment over a span of five years.

Citations are from Walter Kaufmann’s translation of Thus Spoke

Zarathustra and from David McDuff’s translation of Crime and Pun-
ishment (both Penguin editions)

***
148 Against Nihilism

“There’s no need for the Bible. To become the overman, one must free
himself from the old faith and start all over again. Life is an individual
path and we must overcome it through suffering, and it is important to
embrace this life even while you suffer. Not like Jesus, who gave himself
up all too soon without even a fight. To become the overman, one must
alienate oneself from the rest of the mob.” Thus spoke Nietzsche.
“Your story of alienation from the mob makes me think of the time
Jesus went out into the wilderness for forty days, got tempted by the
devil, and never gave in,” mused Dostoevsky. “Are you sure you’ve
never read the Bible?”
“I never said I didn’t read the Bible; I’ve read that story of Jesus
where he gets tempted by the devil, but I don’t believe it. Nature is
a beautiful thing that will enlighten your soul; the longer you spend
away from the herd, the better it is for your spirit. There’s no devil
that will interrupt your progress.”
“But Jesus still sounds like your overman: Jesus also tries to lead
people away from the herd.”
“Yes, but Jesus was a herdsman who wanted people to follow him,
whereas the overman wants people to follow him only in order to be
able to follow themselves—understand?”
“I understand. [. . . ] OK, OK, enough talk about philosophy for a
second. I’m curious about your personal life: how’s life in the romantic
department?”
“Oh boy! To tell you the truth, I’m a hopeless romantic. I fell in
love with this younger woman, but she doesn’t seem to be interested. . .
How about you?”
“Well, I was married but my wife passed away back in ’64. Then I
remarried, and now I have three children. I’m wondering about you,
though: how can you only like one woman when there are so many fish
in the sea? Don’t you see there’s a woman right there, sitting near the
exit of this restaurant? Why don’t you go talk to her?”
“No, I’m very shy; I don’t like to approach women in that manner.”
“Now I’m really starting to wonder about you; do you even like
women?”
“What kind of a question is that!?” Nietzsche bristled. “What do
you take me for!? I love women, everything about them, especially
the way they dance; it’s the ultimate representation of life, beauty,
intelligence.”
“What in God’s name are you talking about, Friedrich!?”

Author: Mr. Anthony Zavaglia (Winter 2007)

***

[Nietzsche and Dostoevsky meet on the shores of Lake Zurich, along

with the devilish Professor Woland from Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The
Master and Margarita. . . .]
 Appendix Selections from Students’ Scripts 149

The morning was promising, the sun was shining, and the sky was a
baby-blue colour. Despite the fact that the weather was perfect, there
were not a lot of pedestrians and strangely only one boat with a lonely
man drifting not far from the beach. You could see his vacant stare.
Suddenly in the sky appeared an enormous leaden cloud which
covered the sun. The man in the boat took a look at the sky, crossed
himself, and cried, “Jesus, forgive me!” and abruptly tipped the boat
over. The boat was reeling from side to side just for a few moments,
but very quickly regained its balance and stopped as if it was empty,
for an eternity.
A man who had watched this scene remained sedentary on the bench.
He was looking attentively at the water surface but when it became
clear that the jumper was gone forever, he pronounced something
strange, without any trace of pity for the poor man: “Die at the right
time!. . . But I hear only slow death preached. . . Verily, that Hebrew
died too early whom the preachers of slow death honour. . . .” (TSZ,
First Part)
As he was used to speaking only to himself and hadn’t expected any
audience, he got a little bit surprised when he heard behind his back
a voice, “speaking with a foreign accent but without distorting the
words, ‘Excuse me, please. . . if, not being your acquaintance, I allow
myself. . . but the subject of your learned conversation is so interesting
that. . . ’
“Here he politely took off his beret” (The Master and Margarita,
First Chapter) and Nietzsche had no choice but to invite the foreigner
to take a place next to him.
“So you were saying that Jesus died too soon to have the right idea
about life?” asked the foreigner.
“Yes, this is exactly what I said.”
“‘Ah, how interesting!’ exclaimed the foreigner.” (M & M, ibid.)
“‘Could it be possible?” exclaimed Nietzsche, springing to his feet.
“‘That [you have] not yet heard anything of this, that God is dead!’”
(TSZ, Prologue)
“‘Amazing!’ exclaimed the uninvited interlocutor and, casting a
thievish glance around and muffling his low voice for some reason,
he said: ‘Forgive my importunity, but, as I understand, along with
everything else, you also do not believe in God?’ He made frightened
eyes and added: ‘I swear I won’t tell anyone!. . . You are—an atheist?’”
(M & M, ibid.)
“No, I am not,” responded Nietzsche more calmly and resumed his
seat. At that precise moment the sun appeared in the sky even brighter
than before and lit up the chestnut tree alley leading to the shores of
the lake. Not far away from the bench Nietzsche noticed a man, whose
figure was embraced by the sudden rays of the sun.
“And you can say this to everyone if you wish,” continued Nietzsche.
“Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and
150 Against Nihilism

these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most
dreadful thing.’ But I am not an atheist. I believe in the overman. ‘I
have the overman at heart, that is my first and only concern. . . God
died: now we want the overman to live.’” (TSZ, First Part)
“‘But, allow me to ask you,’ the foreign visitor spoke after some
anxious reflection. ‘. . . But here is a question that is troubling me: if
there is no God, then, one may ask, who governs human life and, in
general, the whole order of things on earth?’” (M & M, 1st chapter)
[. . . ]
“Excuse me,” came a voice from the man who had been walking in
the sun’s rays. “My name is Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. . . Would
you allow me to get involved in your conversation? Its subject is a great
interest of mine. [. . . ] You know. . . sometimes I too doubted my own
faith in God. But as the years passed, I started to believe that ‘there is
nothing lovelier, deeper, more sympathetic, more rational, more manly,
and more perfect than the Saviour. . . If anyone could prove to me that
Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth really did exclude Christ,
I should prefer to stay with Christ and not the truth.’” (Letters of D.)
Every time he pronounced the word “Christ,” the foreign visitor’s
face became paler and paler. At the end of Dostoevsky’s speech, the
foreign visitor got up, looked carefully at Nietzsche only, and “suddenly
began with passion: ‘But please—as a farewell request—at least say
you believe in the devil! I won’t ask anything more of you.’” (M & M,
1st chapter) As he said this, he remained gazing at Nietzsche.

Author: Miss Tatiana Dudca (Summer 2007)

***

Nietzsche: “Haven’t you heard? God is dead!”

Dostoevsky: “Ha ha! Brilliant! So you think God is dead? If God is
dead, then what becomes of man? [. . . ] God, dead or not, is a cultural
phenomenon that defines and rules the order of society and morality.”
Nietzsche: “Why must this tired tradition define our morality,
when man can define his own morality for himself? A time and an
opportunity for change is upon us, and here is where I present to you
the Übermensch: he who is capable of redefining what God once stood
for.”
Dostoevsky: “Certainly we can look towards a future of moral
rebirth, perhaps the direct result of the cultural ‘death of God’, as you
say.”
Nietzsche: “My friend, we have produced the hardest possible
thought (the death of God)—now let us create the creature who
will accept it lightheartedly and blissfully: this new race of man.”
Dostoevsky: “New man, new life, new everything. . . But alas, my
friend, I fear that we are still divergent on our ideas on the question of
 Appendix Selections from Students’ Scripts 151

God, and this may not be resolved simply in one sitting. May I end
with a plea for you to read the resurrection of Lazarus over again, as I
know you yourself were a Christian scholar, and take into your mind
the idea of this overcoming, and you may still see that religion is an
equal to your path of humanism. Lazarus overcomes himself with the
aid of religion.”
Nietzsche: “You most certainly may not have the last word, sir! You
have completely perverted my ideas to fit into your religious ideologies!
If I may say so, sir, the path of Lazarus is one in which he is pitied
at every turn; even in death he is pitied. Christianity is the religion
of pity. Pity stands opposed to the tonic emotions which heighten our
vitality: it has a depressing effect. We are deprived of strength when
we feel pity. That loss of strength which suffering as such inflicts on
life is still more increased and multiplied by pity. Pity makes suffering
contagious.” (TSZ )
Dostoevsky: “Is this to say that you do not allow pity to enter into
your daily emotions? I pity those who cannot pity. Did not Sonya take
pity on Raskolnikov? Did the jury not pity him to alleviate some of
his sentence? What say you to this?”

Authors: Miss Catherine Anne Lafontaine, Mr. William Fletcher, and

Miss Roya Manuel-Nekouei (with Mr. Jeff Gallant and Mr. Jesse
Michaels playing Nietzsche and Dostoevsky in a short film of this
script, shot on the West Island, Fall 2009)

***

Dostoevsky: “Believing is one thing, but trusting is another. You

cannot begin to trust others; take my advice, we are on a much higher
ground.”
Nietzsche: “Actually, I often envision myself looking downwards
from the top of a very steep abyss.”
Dostoevsky: “I have envisioned myself many a time standing on
the edge of a bridge. Maybe this is the same, in retrospect, or maybe
a completely different place.”
Nietzsche: “Well yes, it’s quite possible that we’re not very far from
each other. I believe you may have started a conclusion that I was
already headed for, although I did it without any idea of what others
call God.”

Author: Miss Myriam Galarneau (Winter 2010)

***

“Mr. Nietzsche! God is alive. I believe in faith and redemption

that no one is excluded. So, all men are equally called to pursue their
salvation. . . With the presence of God anything is possible. Because
152 Against Nihilism

freedom is only meaningful when it is surrendered to the higher will of

God.”
“I do not think so! Well, for me, freedom is only meaningful when
you work to free yourself from religious dogma.”
“Very well, I will not even try to defend that argument against
someone who thinks ‘God is dead.’”
“I am a doubter who wants to believe but just cannot.”
“Oddly, I am a believer who is oppressed by doubt.”
“Very interesting. . . “

[In the course of their discussion, Dostoevsky succeeds in persuading

Nietzsche to accompany him into a church “just for a minute,” after
which they part as friends.]

Author: Miss Katrina Samson (Winter 2011)

***

[Nietzsche and Dostoevsky are both brought back from the dead in a
laboratory.]

Zach couldn’t believe it. Here he was, standing over one of the greatest
philosophers of all time. . . He had just witnessed history in the making:
Fyodor Dostoevsky, after being dead for over a hundred years, had just
woken up. The gruelling months of work had been worth it.
“God,” Dostoevsky murmured, “is that you?”
“Oh my God!” said Zach in disbelief, his eyes opening wide. “Guys,
guys come quickly! Dostoevsky just called me God!”
[. . . ]
Next, Nietzsche’s eyes snapped open to see a man dressed in white
standing over him.
“Is that you, God? Damn it, you’re supposed to be dead!” Nietzsche
said indignantly.
Dostoevsky chuckled. “Well, I’m not God, but I was dead until
these people decided to bring me back. Now you’re back in the land of
the living too.”
“Imagine,” said Zach excitedly. “Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, in the
same room together!”
[. . . ]
“Hey guys, I have a question before we really start falling off topic,”
intervened Julian over the loudspeakers. “So, Nietzsche, Zarathustra
believes in the Dionysian style of living, correct?”
“Why, yes. We must relish every moment and truly capture the
essence of life before it escapes us.”
“OK. Dostoevsky, your characters on the contrary believe in a more
Apollonian style of life?”
 Appendix Selections from Students’ Scripts 153

“My characters believe in self-preservation and patience in order to

prepare themselves for the next step.”
“Right. So the question always comes up for me: Why is it then
that the characters in Crime and Punishment seem to live for the
moment and are always drunk? Zarathustra, on the other hand, shuts
himself away patiently in a bunch of mountains!”
“Well, I don’t know about Fyodor’s characters, but that is Zarathus-
tra’s way of cherishing life.”
“I think he’s just wallowing away in his own misery for what he
believes is a pitiful society,” said Dostoevsky.
“There was contemplation in those mountains!”
“As there was at the bottom of those glasses!”
[. . . ]
The next morning, Dostoevsky went to visit Nietzsche in his room.
He was sitting upright in his bed, looking out the window. He had
grown paler. . . Slowly he turned around and met Dostoevsky’s gaze
with a sad smile.
“Hello, Fyodor.”
“Friedrich, how are you feeling?”
“I am dying. They can’t keep me going like you; my body is giving
up slowly. I am condemned to this bed, to watch world developments
idly, a mind without a voice.”
“To know what you are going towards should lift your spirit; you
are destined for pearly white gates. . . You shall be at peace at last,
my brother.”
“You don’t actually believe that, do you?. . . Look around you,
Fyodor: your Earth is dying; your Church is dying; your Father in
heaven must surely be dead.”
[In the end Dostoevsky assists Nietzsche with exiting the experiment
and “dying with dignity”, out of respect for his friend.]

Author: Miss Charley Quéraud (Winter 2011)

***

[Nietzsche and Dostoevsky meet on top of a cliff above a Swiss cemetery,

during a funeral, in the rain.]

“May God take pity on his soul,” said the mourning man [Dostoevsky].
Just then a stealthy man [Nietzsche] walked up beside the mourning
man and, still looking at the ceremony below, said, “Ah! But what can
be more selfish and terrible of God than to pity? [. . . ] Can’t you see
that there is no holy redemption, only brave, innovative recurrence?
Don’t you see that there is only one earthly redemption and it is the
eternal recurrence? Don’t you see that man must make and remake
himself, over and over again, to hope for a better life or a simpler
one?. . . ”
154 Against Nihilism

“You are mad! That is the biggest contradiction of all! Don’t you
see that?”
This answer excited the arrogant one for he could see the indecision
in the heart of a man wounded and open for the entire world to see.
The stealthy man began to peer into his soul.
“To reinvent himself, to break free from the mob and to continue
climbing higher no matter what the cost—this is the overman, this is
the new God!”
The mourning man could not restrain himself any longer, since the
stealthy man had infiltrated too far into his emotions already. Just as
he was about to rebuke him, the mourning man stopped suddenly as
if by some kind of divine intervention. After some deep thought, he
began to realize that he could not win this battle through brute force
of will alone. He had to remain collected and speak with the same
tongue as the serpent, for he wanted to become the snake charmer.
“To recognize that there is no God, and not to recognize at the
same time that you have become God, is an absurdity: otherwise you
must necessarily kill yourself. Once you recognize it, you are king [the
name “Kirillov” is related to korol’, which means king]. But the one
who is first must necessarily kill himself—otherwise who will begin and
prove it? (The Demons, 619) Do you believe you are the first, brother?
Have you become God? Are you strong enough to prove it?”
For once, the stealthy man did not have a quick answer. He knew
the mourning man had met all his expectations. He knew he had gotten
what he had come for and there was no need to sing his drunken song
any longer. He finally spoke thus:
“Alas, friend, I cherish life too much. She is the maiden with whom
I dance and sing, and love as my lover, and this is why I must leave
you now. Too long have I stayed, already, in the company of the dead.
You have given me life where I have taken it. Our meeting was no
coincidence. I have climbed higher today. Thank you.”
“Leave,” answered the mourning man in disgust.
And as he turned away to once again pay his respects to the friend
that now lay safely in the ground, he was able to catch a subtle smirk
from the stealthy man. Had he been concealing it all along? Had he
smiled because he had climbed higher? Or was it because he had also
climbed over? A chilling wind struck the mourning man as he suddenly
stopped believing in accidents. It started to snow. The snake was gone.

Author: Mr. Massimo Barbieri (Winter 2011)

***

The year was 1880, on a snowy day in central Switzerland. A great

man was taking a break in his travels to have a few drinks at the
local bar. Inside, it was dark and gloomy, and smelled so vile it stung
 Appendix Selections from Students’ Scripts 155

Nietzsche’s nostrils, like the combination of bile, urine, and cheap beer.
But Nietzsche did not mind it: secretly, he loved it. It embodied chaos
to him. The lowest forms of filth came here: they had perhaps what it
would take to become an overman. Nietzsche smiled at this thought,
but was immediately distracted by the fact that he did not have a
drink in his hand, so he beckoned for the nearest waitress. As she
approached, she noticed how the great man looked. He had a gigantic
bushy moustache and wore a fancy black suit with a white shirt and
a black tie. Nietzsche asked for a beer and the waitress walked away,
leaving Nietzsche to his own thoughts.
He began reflecting on one of his latest works The Gay Science,
which he had not yet completed. Going through a couple of papers
that he had brought along with him, he began writing some notes
down. He started by writing on the paper, in bold, “GOD IS DEAD.”
He smiled and chuckled at this, and then kept writing underneath his
bold statement his thoughts on existentialism. He began writing about
a new topic, eternal recurrence, when he was interrupted by the noise
of the door to the bar slamming shut. There was an old large man in
the doorway, with a giant brown overcoat and a large fur cap above a
massive bushy beard. The newcomer walked to a nearby table and sat
down. . . He pulled out a book, some paper, and a pen. . . then began
writing furiously and hastily on the paper while taking short breaks to
read from the book for some form of reference. Nietzsche was intrigued.
[. . . ]
Fyodor, interested, began looking over at Nietzsche’s paper, trying
to see what was written there, and discerned the giant bold letters:
“GOD IS DEAD.” Fyodor’s eyes widened, and as he leaned back into
his chair, he looked hard at Nietzsche and said, “Good sir, what is it
you are writing about, anyway?”
Nietzsche looked up from his paper to see Fyodor’s intense gaze
and felt a little uneasy. “Oh, well, I’m discussing a couple of theories
of mine. . . ”
Fyodor kept his gaze fixed on him and said, “And what exactly are
those theories about?”
Nietzsche shrugged. “Well, eternal recurrence is the basic concept
that the universe has been recurring and will continue to recur, in an
identical form an infinite number of times across infinite time and/or
infinite space. Then there’s the will to power, an understanding about
the basis of human behaviour, in which. . . the struggle to survive is. . .
less important than the desire to expand one’s power.”
Fyodor nodded, keeping his hard stare on Nietzsche. “I see. . . Well, I
do not think that is possible, since it is God who created the world only
once: bam—seven days—done. No recurring universes, just this one
that was created by Him. You can be reborn in the same life, however;
if you have repented for your sins, then you can gain His forgiveness.
156 Against Nihilism

But your idea about this will to power, I have a similar theory about
it. There is an example in my book Crime and Punishment.”
Nietzsche was baffled by this Holy Roller sitting in front of him. He
took a deep breath.

Author: Mr. William Gray (Winter 2011)

A Select List of Consulted
Readings

Primary Sources

I. Dostoevsky’s Works in English Translation

Dostoevsky, F.M. The Short Novels of Dostoevsky. Trans. Constance Garnett.
New York: Dial Press, 1945. Includes The Gambler; Notes from the
Underground; Uncle’s Dream; The Eternal Husband; The Double; The
Friend of the Family. With a Preface (“Dostoevsky—in Moderation”) by
Thomas Mann.
———. A Funny Man’s Dream [and Other Stories]. Trans. Olga Shartse.
Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d. Includes Our Man
Marei; The Meek One—A Fantasy; A Funny Man’s Dream—A Fantasy;
Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants.
———. Crime and Punishment. Trans. Constance Garnett. New York: Ran-
dom House, Inc. (The Modern Library), 1950 (rpt. 1978).
———. The Devils. Trans. David Magarshack. Markham: Penguin Books
Canada Ltd., 1953 (rpt. 1982).
———. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. David Magarshack. Markham: Pen-
guin Books Canada Ltd., 1958.
———. The Gambler; Bobok; A Nasty Story. Trans. Jessie Coulson. Markham:
Penguin Books Canada Ltd., 1966 (rpt. 1981).
———. Great Short Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Trans. George Bird, Con-
stance Garnett, Nora Gottlieb, David Magarshack. New York: Harper &
Row, Publishers, Inc. (Perennial Library), 1968. Includes The Double;
White Nights; A Disgraceful Affair; Notes from the Underground; The
Gambler; The Eternal Husband; A Gentle Creature; The Dream of a
Ridiculous Man. With an Introduction by Ronald Hingley.
———. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Andrew H. MacAndrew. Toronto:
Bantam Books, Inc., 1970. With an introductory essay (“Dostoevsky and
the Brothers Karamazov”) by Konstantin Mochulsky.
———. Notes from the Underground and The Double. Trans. Jessie Coulson.
Markham: Penguin Books Canada Ltd., 1972 (rpt. 1982).
———. The Diary of a Writer, Volumes One and Two. Trans. & ed. Boris
Brasol. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux (Octagon Books), 1973.
158 Against Nihilism

———. The Insulted and the Humiliated. Trans. Olga Shartse. Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1976.
———. The Idiot. Trans. David Magarshack. Penguin Books Canada Ltd.,
1981.
———. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Constance Garnett & ed. Ralph
E. Matlaw. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc. (A Norton Critical
Edition), 1976.
———. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. Trans. Kyril FitzLyon. London:
Quartet Books Ltd., 1985.
———. The House of the Dead. Trans. David McDuff. Markham: Penguin
Books Canada Ltd., 1985 (rpt. 1987).
———. Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Eds. Joseph Frank & David
I. Goldstein; trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew. New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1987.
———. Crime and Punishment. Trans. Jessie Coulson; ed. George Gibian. New
York: W.W. Norton & Company Ltd. (Third Edition: Norton Critical
Edition), 1989.
———. Crime and Punishment. Trans. David McDuff. Toronto: Penguin
Books Canada Ltd., 1991 (rpt. 2003).
———. Notes from the Underground. Trans. Constance Garnett. New York:
Dover Publications, Inc., 1992.
———. Devils. Trans. Michael R. Katz. New York: Oxford University Press
(Oxford World’s Classics), 1992 (rpt. 2008).
———. A Writer’s Diary, Volumes One and Two, trans. & ed. Kenneth Lantz.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993.
———. The Idiot. Trans. David McDuff. Penguin Books Canada Ltd., 2004.
———. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Constance Garnett & ed. Susan
McReynolds Oddo. (Second) Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W.
Norton & Co., Inc., 2011.

II. Nietzsche’s Works in English Translation

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. Walter Kaufmann.
Markham: Penguin Books Canada, Ltd. 1954 (rpt. 1983). Includes ex-
cerpts from “Letters [3] to His Sister [1865; 1885; 1887];” excerpts from
“Letters [5] to Overbeck [1879; 1884; 1885; 1887; 1889];” “Postcard to
Overbeck [1881];” excerpt from “Draft of a Letter to Paul Rée [1882];”
“Letter to Peter Gast [1889];” “Letter to Jacob Burckhardt [1889];” ex-
cerpts from “Fragment of a Critique of Schopenhauer” and “On Ethics;”
excerpts from “Notes” (1870–71; 1873; 1874; 1875; 1880–81; 1884; 1887;
1888); excerpts from “Notes About Wagner;” excerpts from “Homer’s
Contest;” “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense;” Human, All-
Too Human; “Mixed Opinions and Maxims;” “The Wanderer and His
Shadow;” The Dawn; The Gay Science; Beyond Good and Evil; Toward
a Genealogy of Morals; The Wagner Case; Ecce Homo. Contains the
entirety of Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Twilight of the Idols; The Antichrist;
Nietzsche Contra Wagner.
———. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Trans. Marianne Cowan.
South Bend, IN: Gateway Editions, 1962.
 A Select List of Consulted Readings 159

———. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Trans.
Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, Inc., 1966.
———. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Trans. Walter Kauf-
mann. New York: Random House, Inc., 1967.
———. Nietzsche: A Self-Portrait from His Letters. Trans. & ed. Peter Fuss
& Henry Shapiro. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.
———. The Gay Science, With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of
Songs. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, Inc., 1974.
———. A Nietzsche Reader. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Toronto: Penguin Books
Canada, Ltd., 1977. Includes selections from The Antichrist; Assorted
Opinions and Maxims; Beyond Good and Evil; Daybreak; Ecce Homo;
On the Genealogy of Morals; The Gay Science; Human, All Too Human;
Twilight of the Idols; The Wagner Case; The Wanderer and His Shadow;
Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
———. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None and All. Trans. Walter
Kaufmann. Toronto: Penguin Books Canada, Ltd., 1978.
———. Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the
early 1870s. Trans. & ed. Daniel Breazeale. New Jersey: Humanities
Press, 1979.
———. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Trans. Walter Kaufmann.
New York: Random House, Inc., 1989.
———. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Trans. R.J. Holling-
dale. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
———. Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Trans. R.J. Holling-
dale. Cambridge University Press, 1997.
———. Untimely Meditations. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge University
Press, 1997. Contains “David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer;”
“On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life;” “Schopenhauer as
Educator;” “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth.”
———. Writings from the Late Notebooks (April 1885–August 1888). Ed.
Rüdiger Bittner & trans. Kate Sturge. Cambrige University Press, 2003.
———. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody. Trans.
Graham Parkes. New York: Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s
Classics), 2005.
———. Nietzsche and the Death of God: Selected Writings. Trans. & ed. Peter
Fritzsche. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. Includes excerpts
from “On Truths and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense;” “On the Uses
and Disadvantages of History for Life;” Human, All Too Human; The
Gay Science; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; On the
Genealogy of Morals.
———. Writings from the Early Notebooks (October 1867–November 1879). Ed.
Raymond Geuss & Alexander Nehamas; trans. Ladislaus Löb. Cambridge
University Press, 2009.

Secondary Sources

I. General Studies of Dostoevsky’s Life and Work

Berdyaev, Nicholas. Dostoevsky. Trans. Donald Attwater. New York: The
World Publishing Company (Meridian Books), 1969.
160 Against Nihilism

Cassedy, Steven. Dostoevsky’s Religion. Stanford University Press, 2005.

Dostoevsky, Anna. Dostoevsky: Reminiscences. Trans. & ed. Beatrice Still-
man. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1975. [Originally
Vospominaniya by A.G. Dostoyevskaya, published by Mezhkniga, Moscow,
U.S.S.R., 1971.]
Dolenc, I. Dostoevsky and Christ. Toronto: 1978.
Flath, Carol & Fitzpatrick, Joseph. The New Russian Dostoevsky: Readings
For the Twenty-First Century. Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2010.
Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002.
Ivanov, Vyacheslav. Freedom and the Tragic Life: A Study in Dostoevsky.
Trans. Norman Cameron. New York: The Noonday Press, 1957.
Jackson, Robert Louis. The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981.
Klimov, Alexis. Dostoı̈evksi ou la connaissance périlleuse: Présentation,
choix de textes, bibliographie. Paris: Éditions Seghers, 1971.
Lantz, Kenneth. The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 2004.
Muchnic, Helen. Dostoevsky’s English Reputation, 1881–1936. New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux (Octagon Books), 1969.
Panichas, George A. Dostoevsky’s Spiritual Art: The Burden of Vision. New
Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2005.
Payne, Robert. Dostoevsky: A Human Portrait. New York: Knopf, 1961.
Steiner, George. Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. New York: Knopf, 1959.
Terras, Victor. Reading Dostoevsky. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1998.
———. A Karamazov Companion. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1981.
Vrangel, Baron Aleksandr E. “Kazn’ Dostoevskogo [Dostoevsky’s Execution].”
Eyewitness: Selections from Russian Memoirs, ed. D. Barton Johnson.
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. 247–259.
Wasiolek, Edward. Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction. Cambridge, MA: The
M.I.T. Press, 1964.
Wellek, René, ed. Dostoevsky: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962 (rpt. 1965).
Zernov, Nicolas. Three Russian Prophets: Khomiakov, Dostoevsky, Soloviev.
New York: Academic International Press, 1973.

II. General Studies of Nietzsche’s Life and Work

Ahern, Daniel. Nietzsche as Cultural Physician. University Park, PA: Penn-
sylvania State University Press, 1995.
Aschheim, Steven. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994.
Bertram, Ernst. Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology. Trans. Robert E. Norton.
Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009.
Brandes, Georg. Friedrich Nietzsche. Trans. A.G. Chater. New York: The
MacMillan Company, 1915.
Ferry, Luc, and Renaut, Alain, eds. Why We Are Not Nietzscheans. Trans.
Robert De Loaiza. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
 A Select List of Consulted Readings 161

Fraser, Giles. Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief. London: Rout-

ledge, 2002.
Frenzel, Ivo. Friedrich Nietzsche: An Illustrated Biography. Trans. Joachim
Neugroschel. New York: Pegasus, 1967.
Gane, Laurence, and Piero (illus.). Introducing Nietzsche. Thriplow, Cam-
bridge, U.K.: Icon Books Ltd., 2005 (Penguin Books Canada rpt. 2007).
Gilman, Sander, ed. Conversations with Nietzsche: A Life in the Words of
His Contemporaries. Trans. David J. Parent. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1987.
———. Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Mad-
ness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. (Chapter 3: “The Nietzsche
Murder Case; or, What Makes Dangerous Philosophies Dangerous”)
Grimm, Reinhold, et al, eds. Nietzsche: Literature and Values. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.
Grundlehner, Philip. The Poetry of Friedrich Nietzsche. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986.
Hayman, Ronald. Nietzsche’s Voices. London: Orion Publishing Group Ltd.,
1997 (rpt. 1999).
Irigaray, Luce. Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche. Trans. Gillian C. Gill.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
Krell, David Farrell, and Bates, Donald L. The Good European: Nietzsche’s
Work Sites in Word and Image. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1997.
Magnus, Bernd; Stewart, Stanley; and Mileur, Jean-Pierre. Nietzsche’s Case:
Philosophy As/And Literature. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1985.
Oliver, Kelly. Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy’s Relation to the “Feminine.”
New York: Routledge, 1995.
Pippin, Robert. Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2010.
Salomé, Lou Andréas. Frédéric Nietzsche. Trad. Jacques Benoist-Méchin.
Paris: Gordon & Breach Sciences Humaines et Philosophie, 1970 rpt.
(orig. 1932).
Schutte, Ofelia. Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche Without Masks. University of
Chicago Press, 1989.
Shapiro, Gary. Nietzschean Narratives. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indi-
ana University Press, 1989.
———. Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gifts, Noise, and Women. Albany, NY: SUNY
Press, 1991.
Tanner, Michael. Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994 (rpt. 2000).
Williams, W.D. Nietzsche and the French: A Study of the Influence of
Nietzsche’s French Reading on His Thought and Writing. Oxford: 1952.

III. Comparative Studies: Dostoevsky’s Impact on Other Writers

Bloshteyn, Maria. The Making of a Counter-Culture Icon: Henry Miller’s
Dostoevsky. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2007.
162 Against Nihilism

Davison, Ray. Camus: The Challenge of Dostoevsky. University of Exeter

Press, 1997.
Tounimanov, Vladimir A. “Camus et Dostoı̈evski: Un dialogue.” F.M. Dostoı̈evski,
Les Grands Romans: Les Possédés et Les Frères Karamazov, trad. Thierry
Marignac. Paris: Omnibus (Place des éditeurs), 2010. 7–11.
Zweig, Stefan. Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoeffsky. Trans. Eden
and Cedar Paul. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1930 (orig. pub.
by Insel Verlag in Leipzig as Drei Meister in 1920).

IV. Comparative Studies: Nietzsche’s Impact on Other Writers

Bianquis, Geneviève. Nietzsche en France. Paris: Librairie Félix-Alcan, 1929.
Binion, Rudolph. Frau Lou: Nietzsche’s Wayward Disciple. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1968 (rpt. 1974). With a Foreword by Walter
Kaufmann.
Foster, John Burt, Jr. Heirs to Dionysus: A Nietzschean Current in Literary
Modernism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981.
Glatzer Rosenthal, Bernice, ed. Nietzsche in Russia. Princeton, N.J.: Prince-
ton University Press, 1986.
Karl, Frederick. Modern and Modernism: The Sovereignty of the Artist,
1885–1925. New York: The Macmillan Publishing Company (Atheneum),
1988.
Nordau, Max. Degeneration. Trans. unknown. Lincoln and London: Univer-
sity of Nebraska Press, 1993 (orig. pub. 1892). See Chapter V (“Frederick
Nietzsche”) in Book III (“Ego-Mania”).
Norris, Margot. Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka,
Ernst, and Lawrence. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1985.
Zweig, Stefan. Le Combat avec le démon: Kleist—Hölderlin—Nietzsche. Trad.
Alzir Hella. Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1983 (orig. pub. by S. Fischer Verlag
as Der Kampf mit dem Damon in 1951).

V. Comparative Studies: Nietzsche and Dostoevsky

Andler, Ch. Nietzsche et Dostoievski. Mélanges offerts à Fernand Baldensperger.
Champion, 1930. 1–4.
Backès, Jean-Louis. “Ce que Nietzsche a reconnu et méconnu.” Le Magazine
littéraire: le Dossier Dostoievski (mars 2010) 495: 82–83.
Friedman, Richard Elliott. The Disappearance of God: A Divine Mystery.
Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Company, 1995. Chapters 7, 8, and 9
(“Nietzsche in Turin”) discuss “an elaborate mosaic of elements” between
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky.
Korvin-Piotrowski, J., Hartmann, H., et Quinot, A. Nietzsche et Dostoievski.
La Revue des lettres modernes (hiver 1962–63) 76–77: 25–38.
Love, Jeff & Metzger, Jeffrey, eds. Nietzsche and Dostoevsky: Philosophy,
Morality, Tragedy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016.
Lubac, Henri de. The Drama of Atheist Humanism. San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1995.
Mejia, Jorge Mario. Nietzsche y Dostoievski: Filosofia y Novela. Medellin:
Universidad de Antioquia, 2000.
 A Select List of Consulted Readings 163

Reisberg, Jacob. “Redemption for Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: A Comparative

Analysis.” Vestnik, The Journal of Russian and Asian Studies, 20.10.2011.
Shestov, Lev. Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy. In Lev
Shestov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche. Trans. Spencer Roberts.
Ohio University Press, 1969.

Tertiary Sources

VI. Russian Cultural History

Berlin, Isaiah. Russian Thinkers. Eds. Henry Hardy & Aileen Kelly. New
York: The Viking Press, 1978.
Brandes, Georg. Impressions of Russia. Trans. Samuel C. Eastman. New
York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1889.
Edie, James M., and Scanlan, James P., and Zeldin, Mary-Barbara, eds.
Russian Philosophy: Volume I—The Beginnings of Russian Philosophy;
The Slavophiles; The Westernizers. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, Inc.,
1965 (rpt. 1969).
———. Russian Philosophy: Volume II—The Nihilists; The Populists; Critics
of Religion and Culture. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, Inc., 1965 (rpt.
1969).
Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1946.
Glatzer Rosenthal, Bernice, and Bohachevsky-Chomiak, Martha, eds. A
Revolution of the Spirit: Crisis of Value in Russia, 1890–1924. New York:
Fordham University Press, 1990.
Gorodetzky, Nadejda. The Humiliated Christ in Modern Russian Thought.
New York: The MacMillan Company, 1938.
Graham, Stephen. The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary. New York:
The MacMillan Company, 1915.
Muchnic, Helen. Russian Writers: Notes and Essays. New York: Random
House, Inc., 1971.
Terras, Victor, ed. Handbook of Russian Literature. New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1985.
Wodzinski, Cezary. Saint Idiot: Projet d’anthropologie apophatique. Trad.
Erik Veaux. Paris: SNELA La Différence, 2012.

VII. Studies in Philosophy

Bultmann, Rudolf. The Presence of Eternity: History and Eschatology. New
York: Harper Brothers, 1957.
Copleston, Frederick. A History of Philosophy, Volume 7: Modern Philosophy,
Part II: Schopenhauer to Nietzsche. Garden City, NY: Doubleday &
Company, Inc., 1965. (Chapters 21 & 22: “Nietzsche (1) and (2)”)
Ellul, Jacques. The Ethics of Freedom. Trans. G.W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids,
MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1976.
Hart, David B. “Christ and Nothing.” First Things (2003) 136:47–56.
———. The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. Grand
Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004.
164 Against Nihilism

Kaufmann, Walter, ed. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. Toronto:

Penguin Books Canada, Ltd., 1975. Includes Part One of Notes from the
Underground and excerpts from Untimely Meditations; The Dawn; The
Gay Science; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Ecce Homo.
Pippin, Robert B. Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissat-
isfactions of European High Culture. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell,
Inc., 1991. (Chapter Four: “‘Nihilism Stands at the Door’: Nietzsche”)
Reid, Jeffrey. Great Philosophers: A Brief Story of the Self and Its Worlds.
Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2009. (Chapter 11: “Nietzsche”)
Stern, Karl. The Pillar of Fire. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company,
Inc. (Image Books), 1951 (rpt. 1959).
Weil, Simone. On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God. Ed. and trans.
Richard Rees. London: 1968.
Yannaras, Christos. On The Absence and Unknowability of God: Heideg-
ger and the Areopagite. Ed. Andrew Louth. Trans. Haralambos Ventis.
London/New York: T & T Clark International (A Continuum Imprint),
2005.
———. The Freedom of Morality. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary
Press, 1984.
Yovel, Yirmiyahu. Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Adventures of Imma-
nence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1989. (Chapter 5: “Spinoza and
Nietzsche: amor dei and amor fati”)
 Index

Acis and Galatea, 81–83; 93 n. 34 Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of

Adolescent, The (Dostoevsky), 94 n. Music, The (Nietzsche), 21 n. 21–
38 23; publication of, 6; themes of, 7;
Alexander II (Tsar), 22 n. 29; 113 n. 135
60 Bloshteyn, Maria, 24 n. 66; 45 n. 59
Alighieri, Dante, 90; 96 n. 76; 106; Book of Revelation, (Saint John). See
131 n. 42; 135; 137 Apocalypse
Amis, Martin, 25 Brandes, Georg, 4; 9–10; 19 n. 3; 40;
Andreas-Salomé, Lou, 72 n. 24 45 n. 73; 71 n. 3–4
Antichrist, The (Nietzsche), 97–101; Brothers Karamazov, The (Dosto-
91 n. 1; 111 n. 25–27 evsky), 11; 12; characters as pre-
Apocalypse (Saint John; New Testa- cursors of Nietzschean ideal, 121–
ment), xv; 90; 96 n. 75; 106–108; as 122; existence of God as theme in,
leitmotif in Dostoevsky’s writings, 117; 125–127; 130 n. 40; Legend of
113 n. 64–65 & n. 73 Grand Inquisitor, 120–122; resur-
Apollo, 6–7; 16; 29 rection as theme in, 125–128; writ-
Aurelius, Marcus, 54 ing of, 131 n. 57
Authenticity, xiii; xvii n. 15; 8; 37; Brown, Norman O., 110 n. 9
aesthetic versus moral, 144–145; Buddha, 33
audacity as first organizing element Bultmann, Rudolf, 131 n. 44
of, 2; 24 n. 70; 47; 143–145; inten- Burkhardt, Jakob, 71 n. 13
sity as second directional tendency
of, 41–42; 47–48; purity as third Calinescu, Matei, 57
essential ingredient of, 48; totality Camus, Albert, 26, 28, 42 n. 2; 66; 71
as fourth and final expression of, 98 n. 8; 94 n. 49; 94–95 n. 50–56. See
also The Fall; The Myth of Sisy-
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 71 n. 8 phus
Bakunin, Mikhail Alexandrovich, Carroll, David, 138 n. 9; 146 n. 10
104; 109 Catechism of a Revolutionary
Belinsky, Vissarion, 21 n. 28 (Bakunin & Nechaev), 104
Belknap, Robert, 87 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 104; 112 n.
Berdyaev, Nicholas, 137 55
Bertram, Ernst, 81; 93 n. 32; 135–136; Christ, 14–17; 23 n. 57; 32; 66–68;
138 n. 16 118; 119; 123; 124; 126–128;
Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), Chute, La (Camus). See Fall, The
24 n. 70; 72 n. 17; 91 n. 2; 94 n. 48; Coetzee, J.M., 134; 138 n. 8
110 n. 10; 111 n. 39; 146 n. 9 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 43 n. 19
 166 Against Nihilism
Copleston, Frederick, 73 n. 46 & n. Dostoevsky’s Spiritual Art
50 (Panichas), 23 n. 44 & n. 51
Crime and Punishment (Dosto- Dream of a Ridiculous Man, The
evsky), 11; 12; 59–69; 142–144; 146 (Dostoevsky). See Funny Man’
n. 8 & n. 12; 147; dualism and sym- Dream, A
bolism of, 67; 75 n. 105; existence Dürer, Albrecht, 135–137
of God as theme in, 77 n. 98; res-
urrection and virginity as themes Ecce Homo (Nietzsche), 20 n. 8; 50;
in, 62–70 54; 72 n. 23 & n. 25; 73 n. 49; 93
Criminality, xiii-xiv; 5–7; 9–12 n. 31; 97; 110 n. 5–6
Ecclesiastes (Old Testament), 72 n.
Daybreak (Nietzsche), 91 n. 1; 110 n. 33
12; 112 n. 39 Eksteins, Modris, 111 n. 31
Dawn, The (Nietzsche). See Day- Elijah, 42 n. 14; 54
break, The Ellul, Jacques, 128
“Death of God,” 26; 57 Epicurus, 79; 92 n. 13
Decembrists, 115; 129 n. 1 Esprit souterrain, L’ (Dostoevsky).
Devils, The (Dostoevsky). See Pos- See Notes From Underground
sessed, The Eternal Husband, The (Dostoevsky),
Diary of a Writer (Dostoevsky), 83; 23 n. 42
105; 109; 116 Exile, 1; 19 n. 1
Diogenes, 29 Existentialism, 26–34; 38–39
Dionysus, 6–8; 16; 29; 54–56; 100 Existentialism and Humanism
Dodds, E.R., 42 n. 16; 72 n. 39 (Sartre), 42 n. 7; 45 n. 69
Don Quixote (Cervantes), 94 n. 47; Existentialism From Dostoevsky to
116–117; 124 Sartre (Kaufmann), 27
Doppelgänger, 98
Dostoevskaia, Anna Grigorievna (née Fall, The (Camus), 85–87; 89; 90; 94
Snitkina), 16; 23 n. 54; 74 n. 89; 83; n. 49
94 n. 37 Filla, Emil, 60–61
Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich, on Frank, Joseph, 22 n. 30 & n. 32; 87
Christ, 22 n. 30; 58–59; 66–67; 116; Freud, Sigmund, 7; 11; 16; 20 n. 17
dualism and symbolism in charac- Friedman, Richard Elliott, xii; xvi n.
ters of, 12–16; 58–61; and epilepsy 9; 19 n. 2
in himself and characters, 10–11; Friedrich, Caspar David, 58–59
16; 40–41; on existence of God, 38– Fuentes, Carlos, 133–134; 137 n. 2–3
39; genius of, xii; 9–11; 21 n. 28; Funny Man’ Dream, A (Dostoevsky),
109; and “man-God” type of athe- 94 n. 40–46; and Camus, 85–89;
ism, 106; Nietzsche compared to, critics on, 87–88; 95 n. 63–66; and
xi; on nihilism, 36; 110; on resurrec- utopia, 84; 87
tion and rebirth, 61–67; 125–127;
on Russia, future of, 109. See also Garnett, Constance, 45 n. 56 & n. 61
individual titles of works by Dos- & n. 64
toevsky. Gast, Peter, 93 n. 24
Dostoevsky: Freedom and the Tragic Gay Science, The (Nietzsche), 21 n.
Life (Ivanov), 22 n. 41 24; and the “death of God,” 28–34;
Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the 44 n. 35–38; and the Golden Age,
Prophet (Frank), 22 n. 30 77–81; 92 n. 3–12; and nihilism, 31;
Dostoevsky and Nietzsche (Shestov), 34
xii; xvi n. 8; 24 n. 61 & n. 67; 72 n. Gilman, Sander, 146 n. 6
41; 76 n. 107 Goethe, Johann, 55; 82
 Index 167

Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich, 9; 21 n. 28 Lantz, Kenneth, 40; 45 n. 76

Golden Age, The, xv; 81–83; 93 n. 33 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (Ulyanov), 104
Good European, The (Krell & Bates), Lépine, Marc, 145
20 n. 3 & n. 18–19 Lépine, Monique, 140
Gorodetzky, Nadejda, 118; 130 n. 38 Levi, Primo, 76 n. 110
Grundlehner, Philip, 71 n. 11; 72 n. Lorrain, Claude Gellée, xiv-xv; 80–83;
42–43; 99 93 n. 28
Guilt, 30; 39; 57; 88; 91; 95 n. 67; Lubac, Henri de, xii; xvi n. 6 & n. 10
127–128 Luther, Martin, 43 n. 22; 135

Hagstrum, Jean, 73 n. 61 Mahler, Gustav, 102

Hart, David B., 138 n. 10 Manguel, Alberto, 74 n. 75
Heidegger, Martin, 31 Manicheanism, xii; 7
Herzen, Aleksandr Ivanovich, 114 n. Mann, Thomas, xi; xvi n. 1; 11; 22 n.
93 34; 45 n. 71
Hesiod, 93 n. 33 Mary Magdalene, 62–64
Hitchcock, Alfred, 146 n. 6 Merezhkovsky, Dmitri, 41
Holbein, Hans (the Younger), 14–15 Milosz, Czeslaw, 75 n. 98
Homelessness, 2; 15 Moral resurrection, 62; 74 n. 78
Homer, 79; 92 n. 14 Moses, 52; 72 n. 31
Human, All Too Human (Nietzsche), Muchnic, Helen, 24 n. 66; 74 n. 86;
133 88
Hyperboreans, 112 n. 41 Munch, Edvard, 2–4
Mythe de Sisyphe, Le (Camus), 66;
Idiot, The (Dostoevsky), xii; 11; 12– 71 n. 8
16; 23 n. 45–53; 28; 40–41; dualism
and symbolism in, 14–15; existence Nechaev, Sergei Gennadievich, 105;
of God as theme in, 12–13; resur- 106
rection as theme in, 15 Netochka Nezvanova (Dostoevsky),
63
Jackson, Robert Louis, 87; 95 n. 60 Nicholas I (Tsar), 21 n. 26; 129 n. 1
Jefferson, Thomas, 139 Nicoll, Maurice, 125
Jeremiah, 43 n. 21 Nietzsche, Elisabeth, 17; 110 n. 1; 135
Jesus Christ. See Christ Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, on
Joseph and Aseneth: A Romance, 69– Christ, 34; 57; and Christianity,
70; 76 n. 117–119 aversion to, 5–6; 98–101; on cre-
Joyful Wisdom, The (Nietzsche). See ating new values and actions, 21
Gay Science, The n. 20; 99; 110 n. 10; on the “death
of God,” 28–34; on Dostoevsky, xi;
Kafka, Franz, 74 n. 75 18; 48; earth philosophy of, 77–80;
Karamzin, Nikolai, 21 n. 26 92 n. 3; Eternal Return as old idea,
Karl, Frederick, 101 72 n. 33; as inspirer of National So-
Kaufmann, Walter, 20 n. 15; 27; 34; cialism, 3; 138 n. 9; madness of, 17;
43 n. 17; 110 n. 3 28; 98; on nihilism, 28; 34; 98–99.
Kierkegaard, Søren, xiv; 27; 28; 34; See also individual titles of works
42 n. 11; 44 n. 43; 54 by Nietzsche.
Klimov, Alexis, 42; 46 n. 84 Nietzsche Contra Wagner (Niet-
Kuprin, Alexander Ivanovich, 75 n. zsche), 20 n. 9; 97–98
95 Nietzsche as Cultural Physician (Ah-
ern), 98
 168 Against Nihilism

Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, The Raw Youth, A (Dostoevsky). See

(Aschheim), xvi n. 12; 20 n. 7; 72 Adolescent, The
n. 16; 93 n. 36 Revelation. See Apocalypse
Nietzsche’s Case (Magnus, Stewart, Riasanovksy, Nicholas V., 21 n. 26;
& Mileur), 71 n. 2; 73 n. 66; 111 n. 104
29 Romanticism, 56–58; 110 n. 16; 129
Nietzsche’s Voices (Hayman), 44 n. n. 3
40; 71 n. 9 Rozanov, Vasily Vasilyevich, 137 n.
Nihilism, xiv; 28; 34; 66; 112 n. 52; 5
135
Nordau, Max, 43 n. 31
Salomé, Lou. See Andreas-Salomé,
Notes From The Dead House (Dosto-
Lou
evsky), 18; 22 n. 35; 24 n. 64–65
Sartre, Jean-Paul, xiv; 27; 28; 36;
Notes From the Underground (Dos-
Huis clos, 36; 44 n. 54; L’Être et le
toevsky), 34–39; 44 n. 44–51; 45 n.
néant, 28; Les Mouches, 42 n. 10;
55–65; symbolism in, 37; 45 n. 60;
La Nausée, 27; 36
irrational soul as theme in, 35–38;
Schoenberg, Arnold, 101; 111 n. 32
and “Keeping Vigil Over Masha,”
Serfdom, 21 n. 26; 112 n. 53
38–39
Shakespeare, William, 55
Shapiro, Gary, 73 n. 65; 111 n. 30;
O’Connor, Flannery, 44 n. 52 & 45 n.
112 n. 48
68
On The Genealogy of Morals (Niet- Simmons, Ernest J., 62
zsche), 5; 95 n. 67; 103; 110 n. 8; Slavophile, 109; 114 n. 90
112 n. 43; 138 n. 18 Socialism, 21 n. 28
Socrates, 29; 32; 49; 100; 111 n. 19
Pascal, Blaise, 54 & n. 21; 135
Paul (Saint; a.k.a. Saul of Tarsus), Sophocles, 7; 43 n. 21
49; 73 n. 70; 76 n. 109; 103 Steiner, George, 45 n. 72
Payne, Robert, 11; 22 n. 39 Stern, Karl, xi; xvi n. 2
Paz, Octavio, 57; 73 n. 64 Stites, Richard, 112 n. 52 & 113 n.
Perov, Vasily, 9–10 58
Petrashevsky, M.V., 8; 21 n. 25 Strakhov, N.N., 63; 74 n. 89; 137 n.
Pilate, Pontius, 43 n. 29; 92 n. 9; 116; 4
117 Stravinsky, Igor, 101; 102; 104; 111
Pipes, Richard, 112 n. 53 n. 31–32 & n. 37
Pippin, Robert, 73 n. 67; 134; 138 n. Suicide, 66; 70; 75 n. 99; 83–84; 90;
13 91; 106; 113 n. 66; 122
Plato, 29; 32; 42 n. 15; 44 n. 35; 100
Possessed, The (Dostoevsky), 11; 12; Tennyson, Alfred (Lord), 74 n. 86
characters as precursors of Niet- Terras, Victor, 11; 74 n. 80; 130 n.
zschean ideal, 106–107; 114 n. 89; 34; 131 n. 64
existence of God as theme in, 105– Thoughts Out of Season (Nietzsche).
106; and prophecy of revolution, See Untimely Meditations
109–110; writing of, 104–106 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche),
Praz, Mario, 73 n. 62; 74 n. 87 5–6; 20 n. 5 & n. 14; 27; 49–56; 93 n.
Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich, 22 29; 103; 121–122; 142–144; 147; be-
n. 32 lievers versus atheists in, 121–122;
“death of God” in, 56; earth philoso-
Ralston Saul, John, 140; 146 n. 2 phy in, 50–54; eternity as theme in,
 Index 169

53; 55; mystic vision as inspiration Vrangel, Aleksandr E. (Baron), 22 n.

for, 51; writing of, 51; 72 n. 22 35
Tolstoy, Lev Nikolayevich (Count),
24 n. 66; 137 n. 4 Wagner, Richard, 40; 81; 98; 135
Tsypkin, Leonid, 134; 138 n. 7 War, 99; 112 n. 41; 114 n. 89
Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich, 74 n. 89; Ward, Benedicta, 74 n. 83 & n. 85
104; 108; 109; 112 n. 54; 114 n. 86 Wasiolek, Edward, 88
Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche), 5; Weil, Simone, 87
24 n. 63; 97; 99–101; 111 n. 17–24; Whitman, Walt, 49; 71 n. 14
132 n. 69 Wilde, Oscar, 44 n. 34; 60
Will to power, 77–78; 110 n. 1
Übermensch, 54; 55; 56; 142 Wolfe, Thomas, 3
Unamuno, Miguel de, 54
Underhill, Evelyn, 41 Yannaras, Christos, 31; 43 n. 28
Untimely Meditations (Nietzsche), 20
n. 4; 93 n. 30 Zasulich, Vera, 22 n. 29
Zernov, Nicolas, xii; 136
Virginity, 62–64 Zweig, Stefan, 134; 137 n. 6
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