The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review

A Note on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky

Author(s): Janko Lavrin
Source: Russian Review, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Apr., 1969), pp. 160-170
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review
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Note

on

Nietzsche

and

Dostoevsky

By Janko Lavrin
THE frequent mention of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky together is still topical for the very reason that both of them
were among the acutest anatomists of our cultural, social, and
moral crisis, the symptoms of which were already so prominent
in the second half of the nineteenth century, let alone the
century that followed. The character of their writing may have
been conditioned also by their own bad health, since Dostoevsky was racked by attacks of epilepsy, while Nietzsche had to
fight a long and painful illness which ended in progressive
paralysis and a complete mental collapse. Yet their very ailments
fostered in a way their psychological insight as well as their
belief in the value of hypersensitive or extraordinary states of
mind and body. Anti-rationalisticin their approach to the fundamental problems of man's existence, they were both keen questioners and doubters. They were also inwardly torn between a
strong religious temperament and that strong anti-religious
attitude which was so frequent a phenomenon of the age they
lived in. Finally, both were "underworldminds" unable to come
to terms either with other people or with the conditions they
saw around them.
It is almost sure that Dostoevsky, who died in 1881, had never
even heard the name of Nietzsche. Nietzsche, on the other hand,
not only knew some of Dostoevsky's principal works, but
actually acknowledged (in The Twilight of the Idols) that he
regarded him as the only psychologist from whom he had anything to learn and who belonged among the "happiest windfalls"
of his life. He greatly admired The House of the Dead. He was
also familiar with that formidable document of human frustra160

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A Note on Dostoevskyand Nietzsche

161

tion, Notes from the Underworld, in which individual selfassertion (or "will to power") is proclaimed to be the mainspring of our actions-even amidst the greatest mishaps and
humiliations. In his Theory of Individual Psychology, Alfred
Adler, the champion of ego-libido in contrast to Freud's sexual
libido, contends that "anyone who has felt to what degree
Dostoevsky has recognized the tendency to despotism implanted
in the human soul, will admit that Dostoevsky must be regarded
as our teacher even today, as the teacher Nietzsche hailed him
to be."
Nietzsche must have been further familiar with Crime and
Punishment; the more so because in this novel Dostoevsky explored one of Nietzsche's basic themes quite a few years before
it was tackled in all seriousness by Nietzsche himself. To what
extent the German philosopher had a first-hand knowledge of

The Idiot, The Possessed,The Adolescent,and The Brothers

Karamazovis a matter of conjecture.'The fact remains that most
of the vital problems which Dostoevsky had projected into the
charactersof his own novels were also probed by the philosopher
Nietzsche, however different his final conclusions may have
been. Another feature which both of them shared was the fact
that the Tiefenpsychologie (depth-psychology) in their works
was largely a result of the inner war each had to wage against
the "complexes"and contradictionsin his self-divided consciousness. If Nietzsche was a decadent fighting first of all his own
decadence, Dostoevsky was a skeptic and a secret unbeliever
passionately fighting his own unbelief in the name of a religious
acceptance of life. In short, their psychological and spiritual
findings were due to their personal experience in the world they
lived in. And as far as the general characterof their work is concerned, it entitles them to a prominentplace among the pioneers
of existentialism, although they represent two of its opposite
poles.
1 It is not excluded that, during her friendly relations with Nietzsche, in
1882, Lou Salom6 had initiated him, as she did later Rainer Maria Rilke,
into certainaspectsof Russianliterature.

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What mattered, and vitally so, to Nietzsche and Dostoevsky,

was the ultimate significance of man in the world and the universe. Does man's existence also contain transcendence, or is he
nothing more than a specimen of the forlornness or Geworfenheit (to use Heidegger's expression) without any sense or meaning in an equally senseless and meaningless universe? But if
there is a deep significance in it all, where does it come from and
in what does it consist? Which brings one invariably to the
problem of God's existence, to begin with. For if God as a transcendental intelligence ruling the universe does exist, then there
must be a higher sense and purpose in it all. On the other hand,
if "God is dead," then the whole of the universe is but an absurd
casual play of casual blind forces, a "vaudeville of the devils"as one of Dostoevsky's characters put it. In this case the general
nullity of existence makes one realize sooner or later the nullity
of one's own personal life, however much one tries to force upon
it all sorts of emergency exits or else engagements a la Sartre.
Moreover, our moral values, which have been based on God's
existence, become obsolete, and the anarchic formula that "all
things are lawful" may eventually lead to universal anarchy,
chaos and destruction.
The problem becomes particularly crucial for a highly developed consciousness insofar as the ubiquitous presence of suffering, of ineradicable evil, makes such a world utterly unacceptable. "If I had the power to destroy the world),I would do
so out of protest and indignation; but since I cannot do so, I
will show my protest at least by destroying myself." Such is the
reasoning of some of Dostoevsky's characters who mean what
they say. Whereas Nietzsche devised his own idea of the superman in order to impose upon life a man-made sense or meaning;
to Dostoevsky's Hippolyte (in The Idiot) and Kirillov (in The
Possessed) this would be camouflaged delusion. No wonder
they both saw the only decent reaction to it all in suicide out of
protest.
But supposing that one takes the existence of God for granted

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A Note on Dostoevsky and Nietzsche

163

in spite of all, an uncompromising consciousness may yet reject

the world created by Him, since it is so full of injustice, suffering
and evil. At a certain level of inner development one may repudiate such a God even for moral reasons, unless a convincing
justification for all the evils is provided. As Ivan Karamazov
argues in his talk with Alyosha: "It is not that I don't accept
God. It is the world created by Him I don't and cannot accept. . . . From love of humanity I don't want it. .. ." Nor is Ivan
anxious to contemplate a compensation in the shape of some
promised harmony or paradise after death. Clamoring for justice
here on earth, he refuses such a compensation. 'I would rather
remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied [moral]
indignation even if I were wrong. Besides too high a price is
asked for harmony; it is beyond our means to pay so much to
enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and
if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It is not God that I don't accept, only
I most respectfully return H-imthe ticket."2
In his passionate wish for religion Dostoevsky had to explore
the problem of God from the angle of a believer and an unbeliever. Yet in contrast to the pious young Nietzsche (who,
despite his subsequent denial of everything religious and
Christian, at first studied theology at Bonn University in order
to become a pastor), Dostoevsky's youth was marked by skepticism which tormented him to the end of his life. In his twenties
he not only became a follower of the atheist Belinsky, but also
joined the revolutionary Petrashevsky circle on account of which
he was sent (for eight years) to Siberia. It was in Siberia that
he underwent a profound inner change. But even during that
process he wrote, in 1854, his pathetic letter to Mime.Fonvizina
in which he confessed: "I am a child of the age, a child of unfaith and skepticism and probably-indeed I know it-shall remain so to the end of my life. How dreadfully it has tormented
2

The Brothers Karamazov, trans. by Constance Garnett (Heinemann).

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The RussianReview

ne-and torments me even now-the longing for faith, which is

all the stronger for proofs I have against it."3
This position between the neant or the universal vacuum on
the one hand, and a religious affirmation of existence on the
other, turned Dostoevsky into an inveterate fighter for that very
view of life which the grown-up Nietzsche kept struggling
against with might and main. The direction of man's self-will became here of paramount importance. In his Notes from the
Underworld,as well as his previous narrative The Double,
Dostoevsky examined this problem from the standpoint of the
individual's social frustration;but by the middle of the 1860s he
broached the same dilemma on the plane of the "Nietzschean"9
will to power, without knowing anything about Nietzsche. He
did this in his Crime and Punishment, where he grappled with
some of the most paradoxical mazes of the Nietzschean "beyond
good and evil."
Raskolnikov,the hero of this novel, was a Russian intellectual
of the positivist and irreligious 1860s. So Nietzsche's notorious
"death of God" would have been taken by him for granted. It
was a scientific dogma which Raskolnikov shared with the
vanguard intelligentsia of that period. By repudiating God he
was, however, logically compelled to reject also those moral
values which are rooted in man's belief in God. In this respect
he was certainly "beyond good and evil" -an attitude which
entitled him to commit even crimes if these were required by
some sufficiently plausible pretext or other. But as he realized
full well that, if everybody adopted such a standpoint, universal
anarchy would be sure to ensue, he had to conclude that a truth
of this kind was only for those few individuals who were ripe
for it. This was why he divided (again several years before
Nietzsche) mankind into two categories: into an elate of masterful men strong enough to be a law unto themselves; and into
the great herd of common people whose function is to be ordered
about and to obey.
3Letters of M. F. Dostoevsky, trans. by ColburnMayne (Chatto & Windus).

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A NoteonDostoevskyandNietzsche

165

himselfwasanxiousto be one of the elite,one of

Raskolnikov
thosewhohavediscardedandleft behindthe oldvaluesof good
and evil with a good conscience.But as he was not quitesure
whetheror not he wasreallyentitledto be in thatcategory,he
decided to prove "worthy">
of it by committinga murder (or as
it happened two murders), prompted by the slogan that if God
is dead then "all things are lawful." In short, according to his
Weltanschauung there was not and could not be crime as such.
Yet no sooner had the murder been committed than an unexpected kind of inner punishment or reaction set in. It came
neither from his conscience nor from his logic (which, anyway,
regarded crime as but a fiction). What he experienced was the
feeling of being drowned in an endless inner void which cut
him off from all human beings without any hope of ever finding
an outlet from this cosmic isolation. "Did I murder the old
woman?"he wondered. "I murdered myself, not her. I murdered
myself forever." The nightmare became so crushing indeed that
in the end it compelled him to surrender to the authorities and
to confess his crime, even though he was still convinced that
crime as such did not exist at all.
It was this aspect of the "beyond good and evil" in practice
that evaded even the perspicacity of Nietzsche. True enough, in
the chapter "On the Pale Criminal" (in the first book of Thus
Spake Zarathustra) he seems to hmit at Raskolnikov by making
a distinction between crime and the reminiscence of the same
crime. Yet Raskolnlikov'sinner punishment, which emanated
from what might be called man's transmoral spiritual plane,
could not be tackled by Nietzsche for the simple reason that lhe
did not (or did not want to) believe in it. Dostoevsky, on the
other hand, explored Raskolnikov'scase of "all things are lawful">
also in Stavrogin (The Possessed) and in Ivan Karamazov. The
spiritually devastated nihilist Stavrogin did not believe in any
moral principles. In spite of this he too was inwardly so much
impelled to confess his heinous crime (the rape of a little girl
who afterwards hanged herself) that he intended to publish a

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The Russian Review

printed avowal of it all. He probably would have done so, had

he not suddenly "wiped himself out like a nasty insect."
Another conspicuous case is that of Ivan Karamazov. By convincing "his ape"-the flunkey Smerdyakov-that "all things are
lawful," he had only indirectly induced him to murder the hated
old Karamazov. Yet during the court proceedings after the
crime the delirious Ivan decided to go to the law-court and give
himself up as the actual culprit, even though he knew that no
one would believe him. Hence the sardonic jeering of his nightmare devil: "You are going to perform an act of heroic virtue
and you don't believe in virtue, that is what tortues you and
makes you vindictive.... Why do you want to go on meddling,
if your sacrifice is of no use to anyone? Because you don't know
yourself why you go! Oh, you'd give a great deal to know yourself why you go.... That's the riddle for you." Not a bad piece
of reasoning on the part of a devil who appeared to be only a
nightmare apparition. Still, the riddle remained.
Neither Nietzsche nor Dostoevsky provided a satisfactory
solution to the riddle itself. Dostoevsky at least did not stop here,
but investigated (as far as he could) man's consciousness facing
the universal neant devoid of God. An obvious warning was of
course Stavrogin. But so also were the shallow nihilists around
him who wanted to become usurpers of power for power's and
destruction's sake, "starting with absolute freedom and ending
with absolute tyranny." Kirillov again, in the same novel, is another complex case anticipating as it were Nietzsche's "'superman," but from an angle of his own. Like Nietzsche the crazy
Kirillov, who does not believe in any transcendental order of
the universe, makes the logical conclusion that if there is no
God, then man is the only divinity on earth: he becomes manGod. But whereas Nietzsche's Zarathustrafound in such a position the highest tragic exaltation of man and of his self-imposed
task or obligation here on earth, Kiillov saw plainly that in a
meaningless universe all such obligations are as meaningless as

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A Note on Dostoevskyand Nietzsche

167

is man's existence itself. All is delusion and self-delusion. The

only way in which he could assert himself was fearlessly (as it
behooves a "divinity") to commit suicide in protest against such
a universe. The highest act of his self-assertion thus coincided
with his self-destruction.
It is known that Nietzsche (with his strong but repressed religious temperament) was on the look-out for adequate compensations for the sacrifices he had made to his "biological"outlook. Whereas in the irrational Dionysiac element he found a
kind of substitute for the brotherhood of man, his conception of
the idea of Eternal Recurrence (die ewige Wiederkunft) served
him as a substitute for eternity. But Dostoevsky, who was
familiar with this idea, made Ivan's devil-again independently
of Nietzsche-poke fun at the theory that our earth may have
repeated itself a billion times, become extinct, broken up,
disintegrated, and then-the sun once more, the planets, the
earth.... All this, "an endless number of times, and always the
same to the smallest detail. Unseemliest tedium, the whole of it."
Dostoevsky of course did not know that this was a parody of
Nietzsche's subsequent ewige WViederkunft.
But in The Brothers Karamazov he anticipated, in a much
more cruel parody, even Nietzsche's system of human community based upon a strict order of rank. He did this in Ivan's
Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. His Grand Inquisitor, like
Nietzsche's Zarathustra,is a formidable tragic figure. He, too,
is aware of the universal void, yet he is strong enough to face it
without flinching. He is equally aware of all the weakness and
meanness of human beings whom he thoroughly despises and
at the same time is also full of pity for them. Prompted by both
scorn and pity, he wants to set up a social order plausible enough
to save them from their inner and outer misery. This is why
Dostoevsky divides humanity into an elite of "supermen" (who
can bear the horrid truth of existence) on the one hand, and on
the other, the vast herd of ordinary human beings who could
not bear the truth. What he wants to do is to lower the con-

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sciousness of the masses to that infantile level where no problems

arise and where, in any case, comforting prefabricated "truths"
are provided for. "There will be thousands of millions of happy
babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon
themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil. . .
But we shall keep the secret, and for the sake of their happiness
we shall lure them with the reward of heaven and eternity. For
if there were anything in the other world, it certainly would not
be for such as they."
Both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky saw, each in his own way,
the threat of nihilism and they gave unmistakable warnings to
the whole of their age, but in opposite directions. Nietzsche did
it in the name of an anti-religious and anti-Christian outlook
which, but for his aristocratic valuations (obligatory for the
elite) was not very far removed from the Grand Inquisitor. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, saw the only possible final solution
in those religious-ethical values which he derived from his own
conception of Christ. Having started with the same dilemma,
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky thus reached, whatever their point of
contact, diametrically opposite conclusions. The divergence
between the two is of further interest insofar as it leads, socially
speaking, to two entirely different conceptions of human community, one of them taking the direction of mankind as a social
organism, and the other as a mere organization.
In the first case the association of human beings takes place
above all from within. It is not a compulsory but a free association by means of that kind of sympathy which alone can achieve
unity through diversity. This requires, however, according to
Dostoevsky, a spiritual or religious-ethical basis without which
one cannot speak convincingly of human love and sympathy,
and least of all human brotherhood as such. Hence he clung
all the more to a religious conception of life the more deeply he
realized that its actual alternative was homo hominilupus,however much it be camouflaged by all sorts of legal systems and ar-

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A Note on Dostoevskyand Nietzsche

169

rangements.Preciselybecausehe was still tormentedby the old

doubteror skeptic in him, he clung fervently to Christ (as he
understoodHim), to Slavophilism,and to that kind of rootedness in the native soil which (in his opinion) ought to bringthe
estrangedintelligentsiaback to the people and to the inherited
spiritualrealm of the people. That realm may have had some
distortedaspects of its own, but even so he preferredit to the
pathologic lust for power of some Shigalkv or other (The
Possessed), or to the penny-pamphletliberalismof a Rakitin
(The BrothersKaramazov).
Nietzsche, however, who arrived at the opposite pole from
Dostoevsky,could think of human society only in terms of a
rigorousorganization,a kind of militarycommunityset up accordingto the strictestorderof rank.Regulatedfrom outside,it
aimed at disciplined uniformityrather than unity, with the
heroicallyaloof supermenon top of it all. Nietzsche indulgedin
his "Caristocratic
radicalism"(a label given to it by Brandes) to
the verge of absurdityprecisely because of his incrediblylow
assessmentof averagehumanbeings. Anyhow,his orderof rank
demanded the unconditional submission of the "many-toomany"to those chosen few entitled to use power in their own
right. In contrast to Dostoevsky the Christian,Nietzsche regardedhimself-alreadyon the brinkof his mentalbreakdownas the great Antichristwhose "transvaluation
of all values"was
going to changethe courseof humanhistoryin the directionlaid
downby himself.
In his capacityof a first-ratepsychologistDostoevskyhad no
high opinionof averagehumanspecimenseither. But although
aware of their weakness and their miserable condition (so
scornfullyenumeratedby the GrandInquisitor), he yet added
to his sincere striving for religion and equally strong wish
for universalsympathyfor the very reasonthat outsideit he saw
either totalitariantyranny, or else chaos and destruction.Believing at least in the potentialspiritualpossibilitiesof man, he
did his best to retainthis faith in spite of all. Hence he came to

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the Utopia of mankind as an organism on the plane of God-man

(or Christ) -the very antipodes of Nietzsche's self-appointed
man-God.
What Dostoevsky meant by his final conception of Christianity is best shown by the starets Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov. Zosima's teaching has nothing to do with the gloomy
and ascetic tradition. On the contrary: it is an affirmation of joy
and beauty through all-embracing sympathy and love. He
would have had nothing to learn from Zarathustra'sdictum
Bleibt der Erde treu (Be faithful to the earth). For instead of
repudiating the earth, he accepts it most fervently, but on a
plane entirely different from that of Nietzsche's Zarathustra.To
repeat Zosima's simple words: "Love all God's creation and
every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's
light. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery of things."
Nietzsche, who had to fight all the time for his own health,
came to regard strife and struggle as essential for the growth of
life in general. Dostoevsky, too, demanded a continuous striving
effort, but in the direction of that religious affirmation of life in
which alone he saw a future worthy of human beings. Not long
before his death he noted in his private diary that the moment
would come when the God-man would meet the man-God.
Dostoevsky called that encounter the most critical moment in
mankind's history. What he meant was really the difference between humanity as an organism on the one hand, and humanity
as a mere totalitarianorganization (whether from the left or from
the right) on the other. The whole of mankind's future may
depend on which of these two possibilities will prevail.

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