Perennial Relevance of Dostoevsky

What makes Dostoevsky forever relevant is his dialectical approach to the most pressing issues of human predicament.

Only in the eyes of the extremely naïve thinkers — doesn’t matter if they come from the right, left or center the issues that face modern day materialistic capitalist societies can be quantified, computerized, and resolved.

For the likes of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Ayn Rand, or Francis Fukuyama, things take care of themselves, once we apply enough science, mathematics, liberal democracy, or the greed, unbridled and unfettered by the state. Not so for Dostoevsky, for whom, as for his Dmitry Karamazov, everything meaningful on earth is shrouded in mystery, enigmas, and riddles.

Dostoevsky applies his most sophisticated dialectical thinking to all pressing questions of modernity, be it the relevance of western culture, capitalism, alienation, individualism, social obligations and so on. Already at the age of nineteen, Dostoevsky set a very clear task for himself: “Man is a mystery. It must be unraveled, and if you give your life to the task, do not think that you wasted it; I devote myself to this mystery, because I wish to be a man.”

This intuition that to become a man, one needs to unravel the mystery of what constitutes a human being, can be as old as Oedipus, and as current as the latest issue of biological, psychological, or philosophical journal. Anyone partaking of humanity, sooner or later needs to come to terms with his place within universe, and there is no better guide to tackle it, than Dostoevsky.

Because Dostoevsky contemplated all sorts of material, spiritual, cultural, and social forces that shape human beings, his answers continue to attract people from all over the globe.

Slavophiles and Westernizers, liberals and conservatives, fathers and sons, atheists and believers, nihilists and idealists — all find in Dostoevsky both the questions posed in the most original and provocative way, and the answers, which are dynamic, inspiring, and profound.

While Russians find revealing and rewarding his musings on Orthodoxy and atheism, on Russian political and social structures and revolutions, the readers in the west can’t take their eyes off Dostoevsky’s depiction of alienation, insecurity, paranoia, doubling of consciousness and other ills of modern urban life.

Dostoevsky’s openness to the most fundamental issues of human existence, his willingness to explore them to the utmost, his mode of “pro et contra,” appeals to both believers and non-believers, skeptics and nihilists.

Furthermore, with his combination of fascination and mockery, of embrace and rejection, cynicism and enthusiasm vis a vis the most sacred western institutions, Dostoevsky appeals to the readers of other cultural traditions, who are inevitably forced to come to terms with the West. Not only Russians, but any thinker in China, India or Japan, would find Dostoevsky’s writings on individualism, capitalism, alienation, and urbanization extremely enlightening.

In short, anyone in today’s globalized universe who confronts the issues of human identity and human responsibility toward oneself and others, would look provincial, myopic, and bigoted, without first consulting Dostoevsky.