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Fyodor Dostoevsky to Alexander Blagonravov, 1880

Six weeks before his death, Dostoevsky thanks a physician for confirming that a hallucination scene in The Brothers Karamazov is psychologically accurate, and explains why he believes Russia's future depends on educated society rejoining the religious faith of ordinary people.

PETERSBURG, December 19, 1880.

HONOURED ALEXANDER FYODOROVITCH,

I thank you for your letter. You judge very rightly when you opine that I hold all evil to be grounded upon disbelief, and maintain that he who abjures nationalism, abjures faith also. That applies especially to Russia, for with us national consciousness is based on Christianity. "A Christian peasant-people"; "believing Russia": these are our fundamental conceptions. A Russian who abjures nationalism (and there are many such) is either an atheist or indifferent to religious questions. And the converse: an atheist or indifferentist cannot possibly understand the Russian people and Russian nationalism. The essential problem of our day is: How are we to persuade our educated classes of this principle? If one but utters a word in such a sense, one will either be devoured alive, or denounced as a traitor. And whom shall one have betrayed?

Truly, naught but a party which has lost touch with reality, and for which not even a label can be found, for they know not themselves what to call themselves. Or is it the people whom one shall have betrayed? No; for I desire with the people to abide, for only from the people is anything worth while to be looked for — not from the educated class, which abjures the people, and is not even "educated."

But a new generation is on the way, which will desire union with the people. The first sign of true fellowship with the people is veneration and love for that which the great mass of the people loves and venerates — that is to say, for its God and its faith.

This new Russian intelligence is beginning, as it seems to me, to lift its head, and precisely now is its co-operation in the common task essential; and this it is coming, itself, to perceive.

Because I preach faith in God and in the people, the gentry here would like to see me disappear from the face of the earth. Because of that chapter in the "Karamazovs" (of the hallucination) with which you, as a physician, are so pleased, it has already been sought to stamp me as a reactionary and fanatic, who has come to believe in the Devil. The gentlemen here, in their simplicity, imagine that the public will cry out with one voice: "What? Dostoevsky has begun to write about the Devil now, has he? How obsolete and borne he is!" But I believe that they will find themselves mistaken. I thank you for having, as a physician, attested for me the authenticity of my description of the psychical sickness of my hero.

The opinion of one who is an expert in the matter is very valuable to me; you will, I doubt not, allow that Ivan Karamazov, in the given circumstances, could have had no different hallucination. I mean to give, in the very next number of the Diary, some of the critical pronouncements on that particular chapter.

With the assurance of my sincere respect, I remain

Yours most faithfully FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY.

Why this letter

Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote this letter less than two months before his death in early 1881, to a doctor who had written to praise the psychological accuracy of a hallucination scene in The Brothers Karamazov, his last novel. Dostoevsky uses the occasion to defend the religious argument running through his late work: that Russia's educated class had cut itself off from the Christian faith of ordinary Russians, and that reconciling the two was the country's most urgent task. He was already being attacked by some critics as reactionary for the novel's treatment of faith and doubt, an accusation this letter answers directly.

Provenance

Author
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881)
To
Dr. Alexander Blagonravov
Written
19 December 1880, St. Petersburg
Source
Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to His Family and Friends, tr. Ethel Colburn Mayne (1914), via Internet Archive
Rights
Public domain — Fyodor Dostoevsky died in 1881; the text follows Ethel Colburn Mayne's 1914 English translation of his letters.
Translation
From Russian by Ethel Colburn Mayne, 1914
Formatting
Paragraph breaks added for readability; the wording is unchanged.

From Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to His Family and Friends, translated by Ethel Colburn Mayne (1914); this text follows that translation as reproduced by the Internet Archive. The editor's letter number and heading are not reproduced.

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