Let me do what I don’t usually do: comment on a drab and ridiculous novel from a degenerated aristocrat, with philosophical pretense. But here the target is Dostoevsky, and, differently from, say, the nearly as famous battleship Bismarck, Dostoevsky makes a few valid points, that should be obvious… But are not, apparently as most famous thinkers of the last 150 years missed them. So as to not waste the reader’s time with Dosto, let me point out some of those points I have made in the past: Human beings are thinking machines. And the meaning of life is to live. Remorse binds it all together. This is the essence of what Dosto has his protagonist say in…
The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, Dosto’s penultimate work, is philosophically similar to Dostoyevsky’s 1864 novel Notes from the Underground. Such writings led Nietzsche to claim he found a “fellow soul”. Personally I always found Dostoyevsky’s gloom and doom drably suicidal and not joyously satanic enough to make his novels worth reading. I prefer a more vigorous mix of good and evil, such as authentic stories of people in combat. For example elite Soviet girl sniper shooting down a colt so she and her team can eat for the first time in three days (that particular book of military stories got the Nobel prize, thank Stockholm; but nearly any war book, even written, especially written, by a war criminal, will do better than Dostoevsky). However, most people love a tale, however dismal, and decrepit creeps, however unsavory, probably feeling thus relatively elevated, so Dostoevsky is popular. Nothing like writings by another decadent plutocrat of noble descent, not liking a bit a world were serfdom threatens to disappear…
Dostoevsky: It’s hard to degenerate ever more…
… Except in real life, he became a complete success, even internationally…
Dostoevsky begins his Ridiculous Man with the narrator wandering the streets of St. Petersburg on “a gloomy night, the gloomiest night you can conceive,” obsessing on how others have ridiculed him all his life and haunted with the “terrible anguish” of believing that nothing matters (“nihilism”) [1]. Gazing at a lone star, and he contemplates suicide. Two months earlier, he bought an “excellent revolver”, but the gun had remained in his drawer since. As he is gazing at the star, a little girl of about eight, wearing ragged clothes and clearly in distress, grabs him by the arm and inarticulately begs his help. The protagonist, disenchanted with life and its creatures, shoos her away and returns to the squalid room he shares with a drunken old captain, furnished with “a sofa covered in American cloth, a table with some books, two chairs and an easy-chair, old, incredibly old, but still an easy-chair.”
He sinks into the easy-chair to think about ending his life. Yet, he is haunted by the image of the little girl, leading him to question his nihilism. Dostoyevsky writes:
“I knew for certain that I would shoot myself that night, but how long I would sit by the table — that I did not know. I should certainly have shot myself, but for that little girl.
You see: though it was all the same to me, I felt pain, for instance. If any one were to strike me, I should feel pain. Exactly the same in the moral sense: if anything very pitiful happened, I would feel pity, just as I did before everything in life became all the same to me. I had felt pity just before: surely, I would have helped a child without fail. Why did I not help the little girl, then? [REMORSE IS CAPITAL FOR THINKING] It was because of an idea that came into my mind then. When she was pulling at me and calling to me, suddenly a question arose before me, which I could not answer. The question was an idle one; but it made me angry. [NOT ANSWERING IMPORTANT QUESTIONS IS A GREATEST SOURCE OF THE ULTIMATE PASSION, ANGER] I was angry because of my conclusion, that if I had already made up my mind that I would put an end to myself to-night, then now more than ever before everything in the world should be all the same to me. Why was it that I felt it was not all the same to me, and pitied the little girl? I remember I pitied her very much: so much that I felt a pain that was even strange and incredible in my situation… [REMORSE; FAILURE TO PROTECT The HUMAN SPECIES]
It seemed clear that if I was a man and not a cipher yet, and until I was changed into a cipher, then I was alive and therefore could suffer, be angry and feel shame for my actions. Very well. But if I were to kill myself, for instance, in two hours from now, what is the girl to me, and what have I to do with shame or with anything on earth? I am going to be a cipher, an absolute zero. Could my consciousness that I would soon absolutely cease to exist, and that therefore nothing would exist, have not the least influence on my feeling of pity for the girl or on my sense of shame for the vileness I had committed? [PERSONAL SURVIVAL LESS IMPORTANT THAN SURVIVAL Of The HUMAN SPECIES]
It became clear to me that life and the world, as it were, depended upon me. I might even say that the world had existed for me alone. I should shoot myself, and then there would be no world at all, for me at least. Not to mention that perhaps there will really be nothing for any one after me, and the whole world, as soon as my consciousness is extinguished, will also be extinguished like a phantom, as part of my consciousness only, and be utterly abolished, since perhaps all this world and all these men are myself alone.”
Beholding “these new, thronging questions,” the would-be suicide contemplates free will. And then finds the obvious: what gives meaning to life is life itself:
“One strange consideration suddenly presented itself to me. If I had previously lived on the moon or in Mars, and I had there been dishonored and disgraced so utterly that one can only imagine it sometimes in a dream or a nightmare, and if I afterwards found myself on earth and still preserved a consciousness of what I had done on the other planet, and if I knew besides that I would never by any chance return, then, if I were to look at the moon from the earth — would it be all the same to me or not? Would I feel any shame for my action or not? The questions were idle and useless, for the revolver was already lying before me, and I knew with all my being that this thing would happen for certain: but the questions excited me to rage. I could not die now, without having solved this first. [ULTIMATE RAGE: NOT FIGURING OUT IMPORTANT ISSUES Extremely RELEVANT TO The HUMAN SPECIES SURVIVAL] In a word, that little girl saved me, for my questions made me postpone pulling the trigger.
Then he falls asleep, and mulls upon dreams:
“Dreams are extraordinarily strange. One thing appears with terrifying clarity, with the details finely set like jewels, while you leap over another, as though you did not notice it at all — space and time, for instance. It seems that dreams are the work not of mind but of desire, not of the head but of the heart… In a dream things quite incomprehensible come to pass. For instance, my brother died five years ago. Sometimes I see him in a dream: he takes part in my affairs, and we are very excited, while I, all the time my dream goes on, know and remember perfectly that my brother is dead and buried. Why am I not surprised that he, though dead, is still near me and busied about me? Why does my mind allow all that?”
The protagonist then dreams that he takes his revolver and points it at his heart — not his head, where he had originally intended to shoot himself. After waiting a second or two, his dream pulls the trigger quickly. Then:
“I felt no pain, but it seemed to me that with the report, everything in me was convulsed, and everything suddenly extinguished. It was terribly black all about me. I became as though blind and numb, and I lay on my back on something hard. I could see nothing, neither could I make any sound. People were walking and making a noise about me: the captain’s bass voice, the landlady’s screams… Suddenly there was a break. I am being carried in a closed coffin. I feel the coffin swinging and I think about that, and suddenly for the first time the idea strikes me that I am dead, quite dead. I know it and do not doubt it; I cannot see nor move, yet at the same time I feel and think. But I am soon reconciled to that, and as usual in a dream I accept the reality without a question.
Now I am being buried in the earth. Every one leaves me and I am alone, quite alone. I do not stir… I lay there and — strange to say — I expected nothing, accepting without question that a dead man has nothing to expect. But it was damp. I do not know how long passed — an hour, a few days, or many days. Suddenly, on my left eye which was closed, a drop of water fell, which had leaked through the top of the grave. In a minute fell another, then a third, and so on, every minute. Suddenly, deep indignation kindled in my heart and suddenly in my heart I felt physical pain. ‘It’s my wound,’ I thought. ‘It’s where I shot myself. The bullet is there.’ And all the while the water dripped straight on to my closed eye. Suddenly, I cried out, not with a voice, for I was motionless, but with all my being, to the arbiter of all that was being done to me.”
“Whosoever thou art, if thou art, and if there exists a purpose more intelligent than the things which are now taking place, let it be present here also. But if thou dost take vengeance upon me for my foolish suicide, then know, by the indecency and absurdity of further existence, that no torture whatever that may befall me, can ever be compared to the contempt which I will silently feel, even through millions of years of martyrdom.”
I cried out and was silent. Deep silence lasted a whole minute. One more drop even fell. But I knew and believed, infinitely and steadfastly, that in a moment everything would infallibly change. Suddenly, my grave opened. I do not know whether it had been uncovered and opened, but I was taken by some dark being unknown to me, and we found ourselves in space. Suddenly, I saw. It was deep night; never, never had such darkness been! We were borne through space and were already far from the earth. I asked nothing of him who led me. I was proud and waited. I assured myself that I was not afraid, and my heart melted with rapture at the thought that I was not afraid. I do not remember how long we rushed through space, and I cannot imagine it. It happened as always in a dream when you leap over space and time and the laws of life and mind, and you stop only there where your heart delights.
Through the thick darkness, he sees a star — the same little star he had seen before shooing the girl away. As the dream continues, the protagonist describes a sort of transcendence akin to what is supposedly experienced during psychedelic drug trips or in deep meditation states:
“Suddenly a familiar yet most overwhelming emotion shook me through. I saw our sun. I knew that it could not be our sun, which had begotten our earth, and that we were an infinite distance away, but somehow all through me I recognized that it was exactly the same sun as ours, its copy and double. A sweet and moving delight echoed rapturously through my soul. The dear power of light, of that same light which had given me birth, touched my heart and revived it, and I felt life, the old life, for the first time since my death.”
The dreamer finds himself in another world, Earthlike in every respect, except “everything seemed to be bright with holiday, with a great and sacred triumph, finally achieved” — a world populated by “children of the sun… whose eyes “shone with a bright radiance” and whose faces “gleamed with wisdom, and with a certain consciousness, consummated in tranquility.” The protagonist exclaims:
“Oh, instantly, at the first glimpse of their faces I understood everything, everything!”
Conceding that “it was only a dream,” he nonetheless asserts that “the sensation of the love of those beautiful and innocent people” was very much real and something he carried into wakeful life on Earth. Awaking, he exclaims anew with rekindled gratitude for life:
“Oh, now — life, life! I lifted my hands and called upon the eternal truth, not called, but wept. Rapture, ineffable rapture exalted all my being. Yes, to live…”
Dostoevsky concludes with his protagonist’s reflection on life, our common conquest of happiness and kindness:
“All are tending to one and the same goal, at least all aspire to the same goal, from the wise man to the lowest murderer, but only by different ways. It is an old truth, but there is this new in it: I cannot go far astray. I saw the truth. I saw and know that men could be beautiful and happy, without losing the capacity to live upon the earth. I will not, I cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of men… I saw the truth, I did not invent it with my mind. I saw, saw, and her living image filled my soul for ever. I saw her in such consummate perfection that I cannot possibly believe that she was not among men. How can I then go astray? … The living image of what I saw will be with me always, and will correct and guide me always. Oh, I am strong and fresh, I can go on, go on, even for a thousand years… And it is so simple… The one thing is — love thy neighbor as thyself — that is the one thing. That is all, nothing else is needed. You will instantly find how to live.”
Ah, the Golden Rule, so silly and so hypocritical. Such an excuse for decadent aristocracy, such a change of conversation… So unreal. So this was Dostoevsky. Thank Beelzebub, Nietzsche was not as trivial…
And what of Descartes’ “I think therefore I am”? Well, whatever. Now Amy Robach, a blonde ABC news anchor came out with stunning accusations about plutocrats connected to Epstein, including Prince Harry and Clinton, etc. This was three years ago, and the rapes went on. Fortunately for the plutocracy, Epstein was (probably) assassinated…
Patrice Ayme
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[1] Nihilism is unknown to those fighting off a lion, or chasing dinner. Nihilism, caring about nothing, is what happens when one is not hungry enough and the dishes are too uninteresting. Nihilism is a modern condition, unknown to prehistoric man, the anchor of all our considerations.
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Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 