Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky died on February 9, 1881. By this time, the writer predicted almost all the most important events that would occur in the 20th century. And many contemporaries called him a prophet even then.
Raskolnikov's vision
The great Russian satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin put it this way about the works of Dostoevsky: “In terms of the depth of his conception, the breadth of the tasks of the moral world developed by him, this writer stands completely apart;.
Fedor Mikhailovich was one of the first to notice that in the middle of the 19th century, many young people thought like Raskolnikov: you can kill and thereby make the world happy.
“What, what,” he reasoned through the lips of Raskolnikov, “was my thought more stupid than other thoughts and theories, swarming and colliding with one another in the world, since this light has stood? One has only to look at the matter with a completely independent, broad and free from ordinary influences look, then, of course, my thought will not be so … strange. Oh, deniers and sages in a patch of silver, why did you stop halfway!"
No, Rodion Romanovich is not right, and half a century after him “deniers and wise men” did not stop. Dostoevsky foresaw this. Here is another quote from the epilogue of the novel Crime and Punishment: “He dreamed in his illness that the whole world was condemned as a sacrifice to some terrible, unheard-of and unprecedented pestilence that was going from the depths of Asia to Europe. All were to perish, except a few, very few, a select few. Some new trichinas appeared, microscopic creatures that infest human bodies.
But these creatures were spirits, gifted with intelligence and will. People who took them into themselves immediately became possessed and insane. But never, never did people consider themselves as intelligent and unshakable in truth as the infected thought. They have never considered their sentences, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions and beliefs more unshakable. Whole villages, entire cities and peoples became infected and maddened. All were in anxiety and did not understand each other, everyone thought that in him alone was the truth."
Promotional video:
Rogue Verhovensky
The main ideological inspirer of the revolutionary cell, Pyotr Verkhovensky, from the novel The Demons, drew up an action plan for the future “overthrowers of the foundations”: “We will kill desires; we will let drunkenness, gossip, denunciation; we will allow unheard-of debauchery; we will extinguish any genius in infancy. All to the same denominator, complete equality … Complete obedience, complete impersonality, but once every thirty years they start to convulse, and everyone suddenly begins to eat each other, only so that it is not boring … But one or two generations of debauchery is necessary; unheard of, despicable depravity, when a person turns into a nasty, cowardly, cruel, selfish scum, that's what you need!"
However, Verkhovensky, whose prototype was the pseudo-socialist Sergei Nechaev, is still not so simple. After all, he tied his like-minded people in blood, which Comrade Stalin adopted several decades later.
Let's go further. Here is a quote from The Brothers Karamazov: "They sometimes express themselves about the 'brutal' cruelty of man, but this is terribly unfair and insulting for animals: an animal can never be as cruel as a man, so artistically and so artistically cruel." And now let us recall the words of the Bolsheviks' favorite of the Bolsheviks Nikolai Bukharin: “Proletarian coercion in all its forms, from executions to labor service, is, paradoxical as it may sound, a method of developing a communist man from a man of the material of the capitalist era.”
Errors of youth
Dostoevsky was himself a socialist in his youth. In any case, the writer thought so. He was a member of the Petrashevsky circle, where socialist ideas were discussed. Nothing dangerous for the state happened in the "salon". Well, we got together, drank tea, discussed the utopians Fourier, Owen, Feuerbach's materialism … At one of the sessions, Dostoevsky read Belinsky's famous letter to Gogol. That's all. But Emperor Nicholas I still remembered the speech of the Decembrists, and as a result, according to the denunciation of the "sent Cossack", everyone was arrested. The first sentence is the death penalty. Then the royal mercy - hard labor. However, Fyodor Mikhailovich became disillusioned with the "ideals of socialism" not because he suffered (although some researchers still call him a Christian socialist), but because in hard labor he found other values for himself, or rather, returned to them.
Dostoevsky's hero Raskolnikov in hard labor recalls the past: “And what is it - all these torments of the past! Everything, even his crime, even his sentence and exile, seemed to him now, in the first impulse, as some external, strange, as if not even happened to him fact … Under his pillow lay the Gospel …"
After hard labor
Oddly enough, it was hard labor that prompted Dostoevsky to predict the future. Almost all of his novels are prophetic. Raskolnikov's dream has already been mentioned. But in "Demons" even the period for which the revolution would cover the country was indicated - five months. True, Peter Verkhovensky planned to start it in May, and finish it by October. In reality, the dates have shifted somewhat: the Soviet government "firmly stood on its feet" from October 1917 to March 1918.
Why did the Russians like socialism? According to Dostoevsky, it arose as an amendment to Christianity "and improvement of the latter, in accordance with the age and civilization," therefore it captured "the hearts and minds of many in the name of some kind of generosity." And it became: instead of a cross - a five-pointed star; instead of Christ - Lenin, Stalin and so on … Indeed, Marxism in Russia was perceived as a new religion, and not only by the common people. In 1922, Lenin wrote about the members of the Politburo as Bolsheviks who did not understand Marxism.
Not without human pride. “An evil spirit,” wrote Fyodor Mikhailovich, “carries with it a passionate faith, and, therefore, acts not only by the paralysis of denial and the temptation of the most positive promises: it brings a new anti-Christian faith, therefore, new moral principles to society, assures forces to build the whole world anew, make everyone equal and happy, and finish the Tower of Babel forever, put the last keystone of it. Among the admirers of this faith there are people of the highest intelligentsia; all the “little ones and the orphaned,” working and burdened, who are tired of waiting for the Kingdom of Christ, also believe in it; all rejected from the blessings of the earth, all those who have not … "And again:" Once having rejected Christ, the human mind can reach amazing results."
Like all Russian prophets, Fyodor Mikhailovich singled out Russia from the general row. Karen Stepanyan, a researcher of Dostoevsky's work on the relationship between Europe and Russia, commented on what the classic wrote: “Dostoevsky hoped that the triumph of the material principle and the arrival of an“evil spirit”would take place in the West, that the Russian people would resist the destructive effect of these processes. The merger of the estates is accomplished and will be accomplished in our country “peacefully”, for “if there are disagreements, they are only external, temporary, accidental, easily removable and have no roots in our soil … without a fight and without blood, without hatred and evil … " Dostoevsky foresaw the future development of historical processes: a series of bloody cataclysms would take place that would cover the whole of Europe. “But never, maybe- Dostoevsky writes, - Europe was not closer precisely to such a coup and reorganization of territories, as in our time … Then everything will collapse on Russia, then we must be whole and put Orthodoxy."
Source: "Secrets of the XX century."