Dostoievsky: An Interpretation

DOSTOIEVSKY has played a decisive part in my spiritual life. While I was still a youth a slip from him, so to say, was grafted upon me. He stirred and lifted up my soul more than any other writer or philosopher has done, and for me people are always divided into “dostoievskyites” and those to whom his spirit is foreign. It is undoubtedly due to his “cursed questioning” that philosophical problems were present to my consciousness at so early an age, and some new aspect of him is revealed to me every time I read him. The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, in particular, made such an impression on my young mind that when I turned to Jesus Christ for the first time I saw him under the appearance that he bears in the Legend. At the base of my notion of the world as I see it there has always lain the idea of liberty, and in this fundamental intuition of liberty I found Dostoievsky as it were on his own special ground. Accordingly, I long wanted to devote a book to him but was able to realize my wish only to the extent of a few articles. Finally, the lectures which I delivered on him at the seminar I directed during the winter of 1920-21 determined me to bring together my thoughts on the subject, and so this book came to be written. In it I have not only tried to display Dostoievsky’s own conception of the world, but also to set down a considerable part of what constitutes my own.—Nicholas Alexandrovitch Berdyaev