Most scholars believe that this near-death experience prompted Dostoevsky to turn to the Bible. A last-minute reprieve spared them, though it exacerbated Dostoevsky’s epilepsy. As a young man he belonged to a revolutionary organization, for which he and his comrades were sentenced to death by a firing squad. The greater good, he believed, would emerge as everyone achieves individual fulfillment.Īs you may know, Dostoevsky was a passionate nationalist, rabid anti-Semite, and fervent Orthodox Christian who believed that the Russian people had a messianic calling to spread the Gospel of Christ. In a socialist version of the utilitarianism proposed by Jeremy Bentham, Chernyshevskii had argued that every individual needed to pursue her rational and enlightened self-interest. In many respects, Notes from Underground is also a fervent rejection of nihilist values as represented in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and What Is to Be Done?, Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s 1863 novel that inspired a generation of Russian revolutionaries, including Lenin. Indeed, his novel The Demons is based on the life of Sergei Nechaev, a self-professed nihilist of the 1860s who advocated political terror in the service of revolution. We doubt we are giving away anything worthy of a spoiler alert when we state from the outset that Dostoevsky despised the nihilists. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, and the Rejection of Rationalism
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