Pipelines, Dostoyevsky, Russia and the West
One could argue that the story of modern Russia and the West is a pipeline. Or broadly, a series of pipelines carrying the largest gas reserves in the world from Siberia and the Arctic shelf, to Europe. Russia, after all, holds more natural gas, oil, coal, uranium, nickel, copper, palladium, iron, gold, titanium, etc. than any other place on earth. Our attitudes about their wealth color every thought, every action, every exchange, every feeling we have about the Kremlin. You can admit that, or you can not admit that—depending on your motives—but one thing can’t be argued. Russia is rich. They are possibly richer than us.
To see the future between Russia and the West, you have to divorce yourself of this idea that Russian people have a desire to be like Europe and the United States. Because it’s not true. Let me see if I can explain.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, that greatest of Russian writers, was born on October 30, 1821, in a wing of Moscow’s Foundling Hospital where his father was a resident physician. He was markedly intelligent, literary, from a young age. He attended the School for Engineers in St. Petersburg and then upon graduation, in 1843, he served in the Engineering Corps before resigning to become a writer. His first work was a translation of Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet—and in fact he spent much of his twenties studying and translating France’s great thinkers. In 1849, the thing everyone knows about Dostoyevsky happened. He was part of a group that met periodically to read and discuss the utopian socialist, Fourier. During the reign of Nicholas I, this was forbidden. This innocuous activity was considered subversive. Dostoyevsky was imprisoned for eight months, then on the morning of December 22, he and the other “conspirators” were taken to a public square and sentenced to death. They were lined up to face a firing squad. At the last moment, a horse and rider galloped in with a message from Tsar Nicholas: it was all a joke, a mockery, to scare the wits out of these men. They would live, because the Tsar was merciful. One man went nearly insane. The rest, including Dostoyevsky, were sent to a Siberian prison camp for four years of hard labor, a hellscape which is described in many of his later novels (Notes from House of the Dead, 1861, etc.). He then conscripted for five years. It took Dostoyevsky almost a decade to regain his life, and when he did, he took his first trip to Europe. It’s useful to know the facts of Dostoyevsky’s life, to better understand what he thought, saw, and felt when he traveled.
Was Europe a breath of fresh air? A respite from all that he’d experienced in Mother Russia? Was Dostoyevsky, like the radical liberals of his homeland, enamored with everything he saw as he walked the streets of Paris and London? Was the physical location of reason, rationalism, and ceaseless striving producing better people and a better way of living? Was there visual evidence that “man acting to his own advantage” a form of progress that was absent inside Russia, because Russians were backwards thinkers? Was Europe better?
No. In fact, the opposite.
In Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, which Dostoyevsky wrote upon his return from Europe, he writes about what he saw there. Corruption and decay. These places, these people, the way of life they have chosen is corrupt, Dostoyevsky said. It is corrupt beyond anything he’d ever experienced. The civilizations of Western Europe are in decay, he thought, because corruption leads to decay.
Decay and corruption. That’s what Dostoyevsky said about the West.
Now keep in mind: this point of view won him nothing inside Russia. You may think it won him friends inside Russia, but that is not the case. He was roundly criticized by many respected writers and thinkers of his day. A slashing satire of Dostoyevsky’s views were published and circulated. After a second trip to Europe, he was so enraged and infuriated, he began publishing a journal. His rage drips from the pages of Notes from Underground, 1864. The entire work is a monologue. The narrator spews poison. What does the narrator say? What does he want you to know? He says this fashionable idea— Man is good, Man seeks his own advantage, Man will seek everyone’s communal advantage as he becomes more enlightened—is wrong. Dead wrong. A new golden age is not dawning in Europe. Eden is not around the corner. Man behaving according to scientific principles and only that, is not only a thin idea, it’s a wrong idea. Materialism is the worst form of striving.
And the narrator goes on, and on, and on.
He rails against every notion we have, every tawdry little idea, that we in the West put under that banner of “progress.”
Man is not rational and good. Man is, has always been, irrational, capricious, and desiring of things he can’t name. Dostoyevsky believes that to reduce the work of living to scientific truths like “two plus two equals four” and “the wall” and “the piano key” is a silly way to organize your time, let alone your nation. Dostoyevsky visited the Crystal Palace on one trip to London, and he walked away saying that marvel of materialism, that symbol of perfection and achievement is nothing more than mechanics. Material wealth satisfies Man’s physical needs. It doesn’t satisfy his spiritual needs.
And cities. Dostoyevsky was didactic about cities.
Recall, like Dickens and Balzac, Dostoevsky was a novelist who lived in a city. He visited all the great cities. But what he saw in Europe disgusted him. He believed the pseudo-psychological humanitarian ideas coming out of those diseased urban centers from the likes of Kant, Hegel, Rousseau, etc., formed the basis of much of what was wrong with the human condition. The cause of illness, Dostoyevsky says, is urbanism. Russians are happiest as “pochvenichestva”— or people of the soil. As we’re forced to live on top of each other in cities, as the impingement of society on the individual gets so heavy, so intense there’s nowhere to escape—Man grows miserable. “We have almost reached the point of looking at actual ‘real life’ as an effort,” Dostoyevsky writes, “almost as hard work, and we all privately agree that is it better in books.”
Suffering is the mainstay of Dostoyevsky’s novels. The irony of it is, he believed much of this suffering was coming from Europe. The winds of change were blowing West to East, not the other way around. Russians were being infected with the brain of cities in the West. With the brain of thinkers, living in those cities. Russians were losing themselves, their way of living, to ideals they didn’t hold. Once you crack the surface of Dostoyevsky thought, of his basic disagreement the prevailing ideas of his time—the ideas or our time—you have a glimpse into all of eternity.
This man has been declared one of the greatest writers who ever lived. Whether you agree with Dostoyevsky, or not, is an exercise for you and the librarian. All of his books are available. Grab a pencil and figure out where you disagree. But the point can’t be overlooked. By some accident of history, this Russian writer—who decried our thought, our way of living—is known as one of the best writers who ever lived. He is constantly referenced everywhere you go. It’s worth figuring out why. What’s in these stories that calls to a higher truth? What’s in Dostoyevsky’s words, that is truer than 150 years of so-called history?
It’s about a pipeline now. All we hear about is pipelines. And natural gas. And oil. But there’s a rich history of opposing thought; and it’s worth going there, visiting Dostoyevsky, at least for the view.