It was a cold, clear December morning in St. Petersburg, 1849, and Fyoder Dostoevsky was minutes away from certain death. Though he would soon become one of Russia’s most influential novelists, at the moment he was reduced to only “mystic terror.”
He stood among a group of bedraggled and cold prisoners — members of an anti-government club. All of them had been condemned to death.
The first three men were seized and put in front of the firing squad. The soldiers raised their rifles and took aim.
Dostoevsky, next in line, knew his death was but a few moments away.
A signal sounded, and the soldiers lowered their rifles. A moment of confusion, and then a man appeared and read the prisoners’ real sentences: hard labor in a prison camp. Dostoevsky’s life had been spared.
Such was Dostoevsky’s mock execution, as recounted by one of his biographers, Joseph Frank.
Dostoevsky would go on to serve his sentence of hard labor, and in due time would author some of the greatest novels ever written, including “Crime and Punishment,” “The Brothers Karamazov” and “The Idiot” (in which one character recounts the experience of a mock execution).
Dostoevsky’s novels are, at bottom, a clash of worldviews. Often, he pits his own doubtful and even tortured Christian faith against the rational skepticism sweeping through 19th-century Russia, carrying with it the tools for the dismantling of the old Christian superstitions.
Dostoevsky, ever brilliant, shows tremendous aptitude for articulating his opponents’ anti-Christian positions and making them as strong as possible. The characters who embody his opponents’ beliefs are intelligent and admirable. Their worldviews are compelling and rationally sound. If an argument arises, they are bound to win it.
Dostoevsky’s true genius, however, comes in his storytelling and in his psychological evaluation of these same characters as he puts them — and their worldviews — into the arena of human experience.
For instance, take Raskolnikov, a poor student in St. Petersburg and the protagonist of “Crime and Punishment.” Raskolnikov, operating on the utilitarian principles of maximizing good, decides it is morally permissible to take the life of a wretched old woman if her resources can then be used to lift dozens, even hundreds, out of poverty and misery.
His argument is rational, his train of thought unimpeachable. And yet, can this cold, calculating view of morality be implemented in the real world?
This is the question Dostoevsky raises, as Raskolnikov goes down the path of murder and finds himself tormented by his ultimately foolish and misguided calculations.
Raskolnikov’s tortured rationality is contrasted against a character like Sonya (or Alyosha, in “The Brothers Karamazov”). Young and somewhat naive, Sonya nonetheless believes in her Christian faith with simplicity and sincerity. In the end, it’s her faith — the bedrock to her life — that gives her strength to endure in a harsh world. Ironically, by the end of the book, it becomes obvious that her faith is also the last possibility for Raskalnikov’s redemption.
In the end, Dostoevsky levels a harsh critique against those people who — however sincerely — foolishly wish to liberate mankind by cold reason alone.
His alternative to this is caught up in the terrifying moments of his mock execution. It is this: when you’re facing the firing squad, will you have any hope left? Is there some hope you can rely on, both in the moments before the gunshot and during long years of cold and misery? Dostoevsky remained thoroughly convinced that the Christian faith gives this hope, while the alternatives — however glamorous and convincing — fall utterly short.
