{"id":150410,"date":"2020-01-06T12:00:09","date_gmt":"2020-01-06T12:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=150410"},"modified":"2019-12-23T08:50:39","modified_gmt":"2019-12-23T08:50:39","slug":"dostoyevsky-just-after-his-death-sentence-was-repealed-on-the-meaning-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/01\/dostoyevsky-just-after-his-death-sentence-was-repealed-on-the-meaning-of-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Dostoyevsky, Just After His Death Sentence Was Repealed, on the Meaning of Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cTo be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart \u2014 that\u2019s what life is all about, that\u2019s its task.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u201cI mean to work tremendously hard,\u201d the young Fyodor Dostoyevsky<\/strong> (November 11, 1821\u2013February 9, 1881) resolved in contemplating his literary future<\/a>, beseeching his impoverished mother to buy him books. At the age of twenty-seven, he was arrested for belonging to a literary society that circulated books deemed dangerous by the tsarist regime. He was sentenced to death. On December 22, 1849, he was taken to a public square in Saint Petersburg, alongside a handful of other inmates, where they were to be executed as a warning to the masses. They were read their death sentence, put into their execution attire of white shirts, and allowed to kiss the cross. Ritualistic sabers were broken over their heads. Three at a time, they were stood against the stakes where the execution was to be carried out. Dostoyevsky, the sixth in line, grew acutely aware that he had only moments to live.<\/p>\n

And then, at the last minute, a pompous announcement was made that the tsar was pardoning their lives \u2014 the whole spectacle had been orchestrated as a cruel publicity stunt to depict the despot as a benevolent ruler. The real sentence was then read: Dostoyevsky was to spend four years in a Siberian labor camp, followed by several years of compulsory military service in the tsar\u2019s armed forces, in exile. He would be nearly forty by the time he picked up the pen again to resume his literary ambitions. But now, in the raw moments following his close escape from death, he was elated with relief, reborn into a new cherishment of life.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, 1871<\/p><\/div>\n

He poured his exultation into a stunning letter to his brother Mikhail, penned hours after the staged execution and found in the first volume of the out-of-print collection of his complete correspondence, the 1988 treasure Dostoevsky Letters<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n

A century before Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl offered his hard-won assurance that \u201ceverything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms \u2014 to choose one\u2019s attitude in any given set of circumstances,\u201d<\/a> Dostoyevsky writes:<\/p>\n

Brother! I\u2019m not despondent and I haven\u2019t lost heart. Life is everywhere, life is in us ourselves, not outside. There will be people by my side, and to be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart \u2014 that\u2019s what life is all about, that\u2019s its task. I have come to recognize that. The idea has entered my flesh and blood\u2026 The head that created, lived the higher life of art, that recognized and grew accustomed to the higher demands of the spirit, that head has already been cut from my shoulders\u2026 But there remain in me a heart and the same flesh and blood that can also love, and suffer, and pity, and remember, and that\u2019s life, too!<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Still, even through this elation, the animating force of his being \u2014 his identity as a writer \u2014 grounds him into a depth of despair. \u201cCan it be that I\u2019ll never take pen in hand?\u201d he asks in sullen anticipation of the next four years at the labor camp. \u201cIf I won\u2019t be able to write, I\u2019ll perish. Better fifteen years of imprisonment and a pen in hand!\u201d But he quickly recovers his electric gratitude for the mere fact of being alive and, reassuring his brother not to grieve for him, continues:<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t lost heart, remember that hope has not abandoned me\u2026 After all I was at death\u2019s door today, I lived with that thought for three-quarters of an hour, I faced the last moment, and now I\u2019m alive again!<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In a beautiful testament to the elemental fact that when all the static of our self-righteousness dies down, what remains between good people is only love, he writes:<\/p>\n

If anyone remembers me with malice, and if I quarreled with anyone, if I made a bad impression on anyone \u2014 tell them to forget about that if you manage to see them. There is no bile or spite in my soul, I would like to so love and embrace at least someone out of the past at this moment.<\/em><\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/em><\/p>\n

When I look back at the past and think how much time was spent in vain, how much of it was lost in delusions, in errors, in idleness, in the inability to live; how I failed to value it, how many times I sinned against my heart and spirit \u2014 then my heart contracts in pain. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each moment could have been an eternity of happiness. Si jeunesse savait! [If youth knew!]<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Half a century before Oscar Wilde penned his extraordinary letter about suffering as a force of transformation and transcendence<\/a> from prison, where he was interned for having loved whom he loved, Dostoyevsky adds:<\/p>\n

Now, changing my life, I\u2019m being regenerated into a new form. Brother! I swear to you that I won\u2019t lose hope and will preserve my heart and spirit in purity. I\u2019ll be reborn for the better. That\u2019s my entire hope, my entire consolation.<\/em><\/p>\n

Life in the casemate has already sufficiently killed off in me the needs of the flesh that were not completely pure; before that I took little care of myself. Now deprivations no longer bother me in the slightest, and therefore don\u2019t be afraid that material hardship will kill me.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Having spent years in material privation myself \u2014 though never, mercifully, nearly to the extent Dostoyevsky endured \u2014 and being always grateful for how those times annealed me, how they made me less afraid of poverty and hardship, more willing to take risks others might not, to take less materially secure paths in life (one resulting in the birth of Brain Pickings<\/em>), I can\u2019t help but wonder how much this harrowing experience fomented Dostoyevsky\u2019s extraordinary perseverance as an artist against the tides of convention and the constant specter of poverty. It certainly reverberates throughout Notes from the Underground<\/em>, Crime and Punishment<\/em>, and especially The Brothers Karamazov<\/em>; it certainly informed his ideas about the meaning of life<\/a>, set forth decades later in the guise of a dream, and inspired his insistence upon the existential duty of seeing the goodness in people<\/a> \u201cdespite the abundance of all sorts of wretches.\u201d<\/p>\n

***********<\/p>\n

Complement with a young neurosurgeon on the meaning of life as he faces his death<\/a> and Walt Whitman on what makes life worth living<\/a>, then revisit Anna \u2014 the love of Dostoyevsky\u2019s life, who saved him from poverty and debtor\u2019s prison \u2014 on the secret to a happy marriage<\/a>.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Brain Pickings<\/em> is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large obsessed with combinatorial creativity who also writes for <\/em>Wired<\/em> UK and <\/em>The Atlantic<\/em>, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She has gotten occasional help from a handful of guest contributors<\/a>. Email: brainpicker@brainpickings.org<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 brainpickings.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cTo be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart \u2014 that\u2019s what life is all about, that\u2019s its task.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":150411,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[1736,1177,1100],"class_list":["post-150410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspirational","tag-fyodor-dostoyevsky","tag-inspirational","tag-maria-popova"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150410\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}