NATASHA

Dostoevsky, the convicts' ability to preserve any sense of decency, in the dreadful conditions of the camp, seemed little short of miraculous, and the best proof there could be that Christ was alive in the Russian land. On this vision Dostoevsky built his faith. It was not much to build on. From the distant memory of a single peasant's kindness, he made a leap of faith to the belief that all Russian peasants harboured Christ's example somewhere in their souls. Not that he had any illusions about the way the peasants actually lived their lives (his horrific description of 'how a peasant beats his wife' is clear evidence of that). But he saw this barbarism as the 'filth' of centuries of oppression concealing, like a 'diamond', the peasant's Christian soul. 'One must know', he wrote,

how to segregate the beauty in the Russian peasant from the layers of barbarity that have accumulated over it… Judge the Russian people not by the abominations they so frequently commit, but by those great and sacred things for which, even in their abominations, they constantly yearn. Not all the people are villains; there are true saints, and what saints they are: they are radiant and illuminate the way for all!… Do not judge our People by what they are, but by what they would like to become.⁷⁷

Dostoevsky was released and allowed to return to St Petersburg in 1859, three years after Volkonsky was set free by the 'Tsar Liberator' Alexander II. The educated circles of the capital were in a state of high excitement when Dostoevsky arrived from Siberia. The emancipation of the serfs, which was in its final stages of preparation, had given rise to hopes of a national and spiritual rebirth. The landlord and the peasant were to be reconciled on Russian-Christian principles. Dostoevsky compared the Decree to Russia's original conversion to Christi-anity in 988. He belonged at this time to the group of writers known as the 'native soil' movement (pochvennichestvo). They called on the intelligentsia (and on Russia's writers in particular) to turn toward the peasants, not just to discover their own nationality and express it in their art but, more importantly, in that truly 'Russian' spirit of Christian

brotherhood, to bring their Western learning to the backward villages.

For Dostoevsky, in particular, this turning towards 'Russia' became his defining credo. He was a repentant nihilist, as he described himself, an unhappy atheist who longed to find a Russian faith. In the early 1860s he mapped out a series of novels to be called 'The Life of a Great Sinner'. It would chart the spiritual journey of a Western-educated Russian man who had lost his faith and led a life of sin. He would go in search of truth to a monastery, become a Slavophile, join the Khlysty sect, and at the end he would find 'both Christ and the Russian land, the Russian Christ and the Russian God'. It was to be a 'gigantic novel', Dostoevsky wrote to the poet Apollon Maikov in December 1868: 'please don't tell anyone, but this is how it is for me: to write this last novel, even if it kills me - and I'll get it all out'.⁷⁸ Dostoevsky never wrote 'The Life of a Great Sinner'. But his four great novels - Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils and The Brothers Karamazov - were all variations on its theme.

Like his sinner, Dostoevsky struggled over faith. 'I am a child of the age', he wrote in 1854, 'a child of unbelief and scepticism.'⁷⁹ His novels are filled with figures, like himself, who yearn for a religion in the face of their own doubts and reasoning. Even the believers, such as Shatov in The Devils (1871), can never quite commit to an unambiguous belief in God. 'I believe in Russia,' Shatov tells Stavrogin.

'I believe in the Greek Orthodox Church. I - I believe in the body of Christ -I believe that the second coming will take place in Russia - I believe,' he murmured in a frenzy.

'But in God? In God?'

'I - I shall believe in God.'⁸⁰

Dostoevsky's novels can be read as an open discourse between reason and belief in which the tension between the two is never quite resolved.⁸¹ According to Dostoevsky, truth is contained in reason and belief - one cannot be undermined by the other - and all true belief must be maintained in the face of all reason. There is no rational answer to Ivan's arguments against a God that allows little children to suffer. Nor is there a reasonable response to the arguments of the Grand Inquisitor, the subject of Ivan's poetic fantasy in The Brothers

Karamazov, who arrests Christ when he reappears in Counter-reformation Spain. Interrogating his prisoner, the Grand Inquisitor argues that the only way to prevent human suffering is, not by Christ's example, which ordinary mortals are too weak to follow, but by the construction of a rational order which can secure, by force if necessary, the peace and happiness that people really want. But Dostoevsky's faith was not of the sort that could be reached by any reasoning. He condemned as 'Western' all faiths which sought a reasoned understanding of Divinity or which had to be enforced by papal laws and hierarchies (and in this sense the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor was itself intended by Dostoevsky as an argument against the Roman Church). The 'Russian God' in which Dostoevsky believed could only be arrived at by a leap of faith: it was a mystical belief outside of all reasoning. As he wrote in 1854, in one of the rare statements of his own religious credo, 'if someone proved to me that Christ was outside the truth, and it really was that the truth lay outside Christ, I would prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth'.⁸²

In Dostoevsky's view, the ability to continue to believe in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence was a peculiarly Russian gift. There is a scene in The Brothers Karamazov where Karamazov's servant Smerdyakov is holding forth on the question of God at a family dinner. In a confused effort to refute the Gospels, Smerdyakov says that nobody can move a mountain to the sea - except 'perhaps two hermits in the desert'.

'One moment!' screamed Karamazov in a transport of delight. 'So you think there are two men who can move mountains, do you? Ivan, make a note of this extraordinary fact, write it down. There you have the Russian all over!'⁸³

Like Karamazov, Dostoevsky took delight in this 'Russian faith', this strange capacity to believe in miracles. It was the root of his nationalism and his messianic vision of the 'Russian soul' as the spiritual saviour of the rationalistic West, which ultimately led him, in the 1870s, to write in the nationalist press about the 'holy mission' of 'our great Russia' to build a Christian empire on the continent. The simple Russian people, Dostoevsky claimed, had found the solution to the intellectual's torment over faith. They needed their belief, it was central

to their lives, and it gave them strength to go on living and endure their suffering. This was the source of Dostoevsky's faith as well - the urge to go on believing, despite his doubts, because faith was necessary for life; rationalism led only to despair, to murder or to suicide - the fate of all the rationalists in his novels. Dostoevsky's answer to the voice of doubt and reason was a sort of existential 'credo ergo sum' that took its inspiration from those 'Russian types' - hermits, mystics, Holy Fools and simple Russian peasants - imaginary and real, whose faith stood beyond reasoning.

Dostoevsky's Orthodoxy was inseparable from his belief in the redemptive quality of the Russian peasant soul. In all his novels the quest of the 'Great Sinner' for a 'Russian faith' is intimately linked to the idea of salvation through reconciliation with the native soil. Dostoevsky's own salvation came to him in the Siberian prison camp where for the first time he came into close contact with the common Russian people, and this theme of penance and redemption was a leitmotif in all his later works. It is the central theme of Crime and Punishment, a murder novel which conceals a political subplot. Its main protagonist, Raskolnikov, tries to justify his senseless murder of the old pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna using the same utilitarian reasoning as that used by the nihilists and revolutionaries: that the old woman had been 'useless' to society and that he, meanwhile, was poor. He thus persuades himself that he killed the pawnbroker for altruistic reasons, just as the revolutionaries legitimized their crimes, when in fact, as he comes to realize with the help of his lover and spiritual guide, the prostitute Sonya, he killed her to demonstrate his superiority. Like Caesar and Napoleon, he had believed himself exempt from the rules of ordinary morality. Raskolnikov confesses to his crime. He is sentenced to seven years' hard labour in a Siberian prison camp. One warm Easter Day Sonya comes to him. By some strange force, 'as though something had snatched at him', Raskolnikov is hurled to Sonya's feet, and in this act of repentance, she understands that he has learned to love. It is a moment of religious revelation:

Her eyes began to shine with an infinite happiness; she had understood, and now she was in no doubt that he loved her, loved her infinitely, and that at last it had arrived, that moment…

They tried to speak, but were unable to. There were tears in their eyes. Both of them looked pale and thin; but in these ill, pale faces there now gleamed the dawn of a renewed future, a complete recovery to a new life.⁸⁴

Strengthened by Sonya's love, he turns for moral guidance to the copy of the Gospels which she had given him, and resolves to use his time in prison to start on the road to that new life.

The suffering of such convicts had long been seen by Russian writers as a form of spiritual redemption. The