The Dostoevsky Paradigm

Stavrogin's Ghost

He was a very handsome young man, about twenty-five years old, and I confess I found him striking. I expected to see some dirty ragamuffin, wasted away from depravity and stinking of vodka. On the contrary, this was the most elegant gentleman of any I had ever happened to meet[....] I was also struck by his face: his hair was somehow too black, his light eyes were somehow too calm and clear, his complexion was somehow too delicate and white, his color somehow too bright and clean, his teeth like pearls, his lips like coral—the very image of beauty, it would seem, and at the same time repulsive, as it were.

The analogy that Dostoevsky implicitly suggests in this presentation is difficult to miss. The resemblance between Stavrogin and Lucifer is only too obvious. Like the highest fallen angel, Stavrogin is endowed with all the contrasting qualities that make him not only the greatest of the damned, but also the most magnificent. Dazzling and statuesque, even his beauty hides the power of a demonic charm that attracts and repels at the same time. Too full of himself to love anyone else, too smart to be a fanatic, too disillusioned not to be aware of his own faults, everything about him is hallmarked by excess. And, as many Dostoevsky critics have suggested, with Stavrogin what barges in is more than just the most disturbing protagonist of the novel. Along with him comes the ghost of the next century: the specter of nihilism makes its appearance, in all its multiple facets. In Dostoevsky's view, nihilism was the last era of humanity when Nothingness insinuated itself into history to take the place of God, whose place had already been usurped by man, deified in his turn by positivist optimism.

With this young man who grew up without roots, with no father and no fatherland, the writer dramatizes the extreme consequences of what he saw as the ultimate fate stemming from the loss of meaning. Conceived by Dostoevsky as the main character of the novel, he is the point toward which all the other characters converge and, at the same time, the hub from which the force of negation radiates out along all its possible trajectories. His reason has gone beyond all bounds and touched on nothingness; his senses have run the gamut of excesses and plumbed the void. Stavrogin is not, therefore, simply a well-crafted synthesis of Dostoevsky's remarkable psychological acuity. The writer's intention is much more ambitious: to condense a philosophical vision into a credible phenomenology of the human subject. Indeed, he already knows what Nietzsche would later make clear: nihilism goes far beyond the suppression of traditional moral values and their religious foundation. For this reason, Dostoevsky's writing also seeks to come to terms with the ontological rupture that has imprinted itself on the human realm and history. Beginning with Notes from Underground (whose protagonist he develops and puts into action as Stavrogin), all of Dostoevsky's characters bear the signs of a "revolution of the spirit."

Now, this is not to take sides in the age-old debate on the philosophical status of the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky: that is, whether it represents, for philosophy as well, the final victory of a profound, authentic form of Christianity over the persistence of sin and guilt; or whether his work is instead perpetually dominated by an irrevocably tragic vision. Nor am I interested in taking sides for or against those who, from Lev Shestov to Sergio Givone, through the masterful interpretation of Luigi Pareyson, see the Russian author as the great thinker who anticipated Nietzsche, in some ways even "bypassing him" and successfully avoiding Heidegger's deviations. It suffices to recall in this connection that the young Georg Lukács had already noted "the smallness of Nietzsche" compared to the stature of Stavrogin. What the Hungarian critic saw in this character, and in Demons generally, was a decisive step without which the West would never have gained full self-awareness. All this is to say that there are many influential thinkers who have shared, and continue to share, the emphatic view expressed by Nicolas Berdyaev: "We now philosophize about the last things under the aegis of Dostoevsky. Philosophizing about the next-to-last things alone is the task of traditional philosophy."

But even leaving these questions open for discussion, without getting caught up in the interpretative conundrums about Dostoevsky's work that challenge its most philosophically demanding readers, there is no doubt that it marks a crucial change. Precisely for this reason, I think it legitimate to transpose the literary fictions that it has given voice to into philosophical categories, categories that, I believe, helped to reformulate the question of evil in European culture by linking it in two ways to the problem of nihilism. Going well beyond the traditional conception of the doctrine of original sin, Dostoevsky's radical position not only made an impact on ethics and religion, it also "ontologically" tied together evil and nothingness, freedom and will, into a single node. This is why "Stavrogin's ghost," pars pro toto, continued to waft around philosophy for a long time. Even today, it continues to inspire evocative, albeit impressionistic, interpretations of Islamic terrorism in the vein of Demons.

In the second part of this book, I will explain why we need to let go of the one-sidedness of this approach in order to understand our present times; why, as a hermeneutic lens, in some ways it is still too dependent on a theological vision of the relationship between evil and freedom. For now, however, let us stick to one of its truths that can hardly be disputed: the figures that allowed philosophy, from Nietzsche on, to venture into the unexplored territory of evil took form from Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin, his thoughts, his actions, and his "friends." When expressed as concepts, these figures formed the horizon in which much of the philosophical culture of the twentieth century believed it could reveal something about the idea of evil in its connection with power that the earlier tradition had passed over. For this reason I believe that we can talk quite confidently of a genuine Dostoevsky paradigm: that is, an arrangement of concepts, a relation between categories, aligned according to a clear nexus, that for a long time was established as a condition of conceivability for evil—though never directly and explicitly. It is a paradigm that Nietzsche and Freud participated in no less...