By DONALD DeMARCO
Our appreciation for anything we love is greatly intensified when it is on the verge of being lost. This is especially true about life itself. Under ordinary circumstances, we take life for granted and assume it will be indefinitely extended into the future. But when death is imminent, we come to cherish life more than ever and wish that we had not taken it so lightly in the past.
Perhaps no one understood this better and profited from it more than Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821-1881). His life, fraught with a series of excruciating difficulties as it was, is nonetheless an example and inspiration for everyone.
His first novel, Poor Folk (1844), received the highest praise from the esteemed critic, Vissarion Belinsky: “The truth has been revealed and announced to you as an artist, it has been brought as a gift; value this gift and remain faithful to it, and you will be a great writer.”
Belinsky was both right and prophetic. Dostoyevsky would become a great writer. But his career would be delayed for several years while his life was plunged into prolonged suffering.
In 1847 he was a member of a socialist group consisting of like-minded young men who met secretly to discuss their radical ideas. It was perhaps inevitable that Dostoyevsky, an atheist at that time, and his fourteen comrades were arrested and sentenced to death.
After being imprisoned for eight months, all the members of the group were taken to the site where they were to be executed on the direct order of Tsar Nicholas I. The death sentence was read aloud. Three were placed against the posts. One of them went mad. Dostoyevsky was to be included in the second group.
What is it like to be young, strong, healthy, and yet minutes away from losing one’s life? He tells us in his novel, The Idiot. He divided the five minutes he had remaining to him into three segments. He set aside two minutes to say farewell to his comrades, two minutes to think about how he could be alive one moment and how it would be in the next. He used his final minute to look about for the last time. It was a meticulous use of the final five minutes he had on Earth.
But then the thought occurred to him that nearly drove him out of his mind: “What if I were not to die! What if I could go back to life — what eternity! And it would be all mine! I would turn every minute into an age; I would lose nothing, I would count every minute as it passed, I would not waste one!”
It was all a cruel hoax, a mock sentence. An officer appeared on the scene announcing that the Tsar had canceled the executions. Instead, Dostoyevsky would be exiled to four years of penal servitude in Siberia followed by an indefinite period as a common soldier. One book was allowed the prisoners. Fortunately, it was the Bible.
Under harrowing conditions, the teachings of Christ and the spirituality of the Russian Orthodox Church took deeper meaning for Dostoyevsky. He came to understand his misfortunes as an opportunity to gain salvation through suffering. His tenure in prison provided him with rich material that he would later use in his novels. “The only thing I fear is that I will not be worthy of my own suffering” became his enduring maxim.
Dostoyevsky treasured the life he thought he was about to lose. He conversed with prisoners who had nothing to talk about except their humanity. His grasp of the human soul, its fears, anxieties, hopes, and dreams was deepened immensely. He combined what he had learned through imprisonment with his natural genius, for, as Clifton Fadiman has said about Dostoyevsky, he is “just about as clear a case of genius as has ever existed.”
At the same time, his period in Siberia brought his latent epilepsy to the fore. The violent seizures this malady brought about plagued him for the rest of his life. He lived in constant fear that his next attack would leave him either insane or dead. His proximity to death, therefore, continued to intensify his appreciation of life.
There is a second sense in which Dostoyevsky had come to cherish life. He came to value every minute of his own life, but also to honor the life, however wretched, of others. In his most popular work, Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov comes to realize that his neighbor, no matter how loathsome that person may appear to be, is a human being and therefore infinitely more valuable than an abstract idea. That is the Christian concept and also Dostoyevsky’s.
Raskolnikov, whose mind had been infected by incomplete ideas that float in the air, embraced the notion that some people can be done away with for the sake of a better future. His journey to the realization of the sacredness of life, through the help of his girlfriend, Sonya, is the fundamental lesson that the novel teaches.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky died on January 28, 1881 of complications related to his epilepsy. Nikolai Berdyaev, in his book about the great writer, paid tribute to Dostoyevsky in terms that could hardly be surpassed:
“So great is the work of Dostoyevsky that to have produced him is by itself sufficient for the existence of the Russian people in the world; and he will bear witness for his countrymen at the last judgment.”
Yet this eulogy does not seem excessively extravagant, given the fact that when Dostoyevsky passed away, his coffin was followed to the grave by forty thousand of his countrymen. His epitaph reads as follows: “Verily, verily, I say to you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and dies, it abideth alone: but if it dies, it bringeth forth much fruit,” which is the quotation Dostoyevsky chose for the preface of his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov.
(Dr. Donald DeMarco’s latest book is Why I Am Pro-Life and Not Politically Correct, available at Amazon.com.)
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