Fr. Seraphim of Platina. Gogol and Dostoevsky

Russian Literature

An informal talk by Fr. Seraphim Rose given at the 1979 St. Herman Summer Pilgrimage

Published in Issue #336-337 of The Orthodox Word

EDITORS' INTRODUCTION

THE YEAR 2021 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who was born on November 11, 1821, in Moscow. The occasion has been celebrated with numerous articles on the writer, both in Russia and abroad. With this in mind, we present the following talk by Hieromonk Seraphim (Rose) of blessed memory on Russian literature, in which he speaks at length about Dostoyevsky.

This talk was given in August 1979 at the St. Herman of Alaska Monastery, during the "New Valaam Academy" course that followed the annual St. Herman Summer Pilgrimage. Fr. Seraphim gave the talk from memory, without resorting to notes or books. In places where Fr. Seraphim paraphrases quotations from Dostoyevsky's novels, we have replaced Fr. Seraphim's words with those of Dostoyevsky, specifically from the translations of Constance Garnett. All footnotes are by the editors.

IN TODAY'S LECTURE we will focus on two Russian novelists: Gogol and Dostoyevsky. In another talk we can discuss other authors Pushkin, Turgenev, and so on-in whose writings one can find meaning where one may not have expected it, since there are deep Christian roots in Russian literature.

First I'd like to ask a question: Since we're trying to inform ourselves about Christianity, how to be better Orthodox Christians, why look at literature? Literature does not have creeds, spiritual advice, or Scripture quotes, except incidentally. What's the point of literature? How can we learn to be Christians through literature? Is there in it any benefit whatsoever for our Christian life?

STUDENT: Well, it depends on the author. If you have a good author like Dostoyevsky or Dickens, you can see how they describe the human soul, as well the workings of human souls in various situations, good and bad. You can relate this to your own life.

FR. SERAPHIM: Yes, reading the works of such authors refines you. If you're used to being in the company of people who are just slap-dash, running around, eating hot dogs, and not thinking about much of anything, you will learn from them to be careless and not think about much of anything. But if you're in the company of people who are serious, then you can learn to be more serious. Reading great literature can also help you to acquire a sober outlook on life, because as you read you can absorb the spirit of the book. This is especially true of reading a gripping novel: you get into it and begin to sympathize with certain characters, and so forth.

From Russian literature, one can see that something was afoot in nineteenth-century Russia. Western influences were entering the country, upsetting the whole basis of Russian Christian civilization. When Russian authors were writing in the nineteenth century, they were acting under the influence of both Western thought and Orthodox Christianity. Among these writers, there are several who are most interesting from the Orthodox point of view.

One of these is Nikolai Gogol. He lived a very short time, from 1809 to 1852. His most important works of fiction include the play The Inspector General, the novel Dead Souls, the novella Taras Bulba, and the short story "The Overcoat." In the latter part of his life he became very religious. Usually this part of his life is considered a waste by literary critics; in fact, he even burned some manuscripts of his fictional works so that they would never be printed. During this same period, however, he wrote a book of apology for Orthodox Christianity, for the Tsar, and for the Russian way of life. This book, called Selections from Correspondence with Friends, was written in the 1840s.

At about the same time, Gogol wrote Meditations on the Divine Liturgy.1 This book is not complicated at all; in it, we simply find a believing heart talking about the Liturgy. I've heard a sophisticated critic say of this book that it's very naive, that it doesn't compare with Nicholas Cabasilas' commentary on Liturgy,2 and so forth. But that's not the point. The author's intent was not to present a profound [theological] interpretation. If you consider this in the context of Russian writers of the nineteenth century, it's quite remarkable that someone who is caught up in humanistic values coming from the West would all of a sudden begin to write a commentary on the Divine Liturgy.

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1 Nikolai Gogol, Meditations on the Divine Liturgy, trans. L. Alexieff (Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery/The Printshop of St. Job of Pochaev, 2014).
2 Nicholas Cabasilas, A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, trans. J. M. Hussey, P. A. McNulty (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1997). Cabasilas lived in the fourteenth century and was glorified as a saint of the Orthodox Church in 1983, four years after the present talk was given.


Selections from Correspondence with Friends has been published in English.3 Since the book was an apology for the Orthodox way of life as it was in nineteenth-century Russia, critics have considered it reactionary, backwards, and behind the times. At that time Russia was rather different from the Western world. Although Western influences were present there, they were at first circulating among a very small number of people that is, the intelligentsia, people who owned their own houses, who could travel about, go to Europe in the summer or for years at a time, etc. The simple people, by contrast, just lived according to the Orthodox Faith. There were some among them who got drunk and didn't pay much attention to Orthodoxy, but they too were not engaged in absorbing advanced Western influences.

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3. Nikolai Gogol, Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, trans. Jesse Zeldin (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969).


Gogol is one case of a writer from the intelligentsia who was converted. He didn't publish any works of fiction after his conversion, so you can't see much Orthodox influence in his fictional writings. For his Orthodox thought, we must turn to his non-fiction books, Selected Passages of Correspondence with Friends and Meditations on the Divine Liturgy.

A second writer who in the nineteenth century met Western influences and conquered them was Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Dostoyevsky lived from 1821 to 1881. In the 1840s, at the very time Gogol was being converted, Dostoyevsky was taking part in socialist discussion groups. One of these, called the Petrashevsky Group, was discussing the socialist ideas of the French thinker Charles Fourier (1772-1837). This group was not a seriously revolutionary one. Whenever they talked about [socialist dreams], it was on a very naive level. They had no organization, no thought at all about overthrowing the government or taking over. They just had idealistic notions about how wonderful it would be if everyone were peaceful and harmonious, if there were a perfect government and nobody oppressed anybody else; and Fourier seemed to point to that. Actually, Fourier was just a peddler of crazy ideas that were very much in the spirit of the times. Later on he bequeathed his intellectual legacy to people like Marx, who made socialism appear more serious by advancing a so-called scientific form of it. Fourier was dreaming about paradise with lemonade drinking fountains and all kinds of such images. This spirit of egalitarianism and socialism was in the air in nineteenth-century Russia, having found its way there from Europe.

Already when he was writing novels, Dostoyevsky was discussing socialist ideals and dreaming about a bright future. But then he was caught, that is, his group was found out by the Tsar's police. They broke in and arrested him together with other people from the group, and he was sentenced to death. The authorities thought that, by executing them and those like them, they could cut off the revolution at the root. But the Tsar had something else in mind. Tsar Nicholas I had a very paternal attitude toward his subjects, that is, he had a very personal interest in the fate of each subject. He allowed this death sentence to be given, intending not to carry it through, so that his people would-when they found themselves in front of the executioners and then learned that the sentence was postponed or abrogated-come to their senses and repent. In the case of Dostoyevsky, it had just that effect. (I don't know how the others ended up.) While still a young man in his late twenties, he went through the experience of seeing rifles drawn on him, and his whole life coming to its end. What had he done [with his life]? He had not thought much about religion up until then. Then, all of a sudden, he is told that the Tsar has stayed his execution, and that he is to be exiled for eight years in Siberia instead.

Thus, Dostoyevsky went to Siberia. During his eight years there, he lived a very hard life. (In some of his books he's written about his experiences in Siberia.) He and his fellow exiles slept on hard boards, many people to a room, and the food was poor-although Alexander Solzhenitsyn makes a point of comparing accounts of prisons by Dostoyevsky and his contemporaries with later accounts of Communist prisons. What Dostoyevsky describes may sound terrible to us, but in the light of Solzhenitsyn's analysis, it becomes obvious that the Tsarist prisons were quite "luxurious" compared to the Communist ones. Of course, Dostoyevsky, being of a lower class, did not have a comfortable exile as did many of the upper class, who just lived like free citizens in exile. And yet, having endured eight years in Siberia under very difficult conditions, he came out of exile as an Orthodox Christian and a Tsarist. This indicates that something deep was happening within him. He reformed all his ideas about Christianity, about where he was going, about the meaning of life. That's his philosophical side, from which were born his ideas about the "Grand Inquisitor,"4 the meaning of modern history, and so forth. On the Christian side, it should be emphasized that he went through some kind of special transformation: he was converted to Christianity. He began to write stories [that were different from his those he wrote before his exile]. He was very much influenced by Charles Dickens, whose works he read in Russian translation. Why would Charles Dickens influence or attract Dostoyevsky? He seems so far away. Dostoyevsky's writings are filled with crazy people running in circles and blowing up things. The works of Dickens, by contrast, are comprised of quaint little stories about quaint little people. What's the possible common denominator between Dickens and Dostoyevsky?

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4 "The Grand Inquisitor" is a short story within Dostoyevsky's last novel, The Brothers Karamazov (1880).


STUDENT: They're both realists. They both wrote about people in such a way that their characters were very real.

FR. SERAPHIM: Yes, that was the age of Realism, the mid-nineteenth century. And they wrote down-to-earth stories about real people, without the illusions of Romanticism. That's one thing. What more specifically have you found in Dickens? Yes?

STUDENT: I find like a real Christian ethic there.

FR. SERAPHIM: Aha! What does that mean-a real Christian ethic?

STUDENT: Well, I guess that, like many of Dickens's characters, most of his heroines and heroes are real Christians. They lived the Christian Faith, which undergirds their way of life.

FR. SERAPHIM: Give me an example.

STUDENT: Little Dorrit, the little girl who was raised in prison.

FR. SERAPHIM: How is she a Christian?

STUDENT: She's very self-sacrificing, very meek and humble. She loved her family and was very forgiving. She's like a martyr. I mean, she didn't die, but she sacrificed herself and always put everyone else first, while she herself took the lower seat.

FR. SERAPHIM: Yes. Dostoyevsky especially loved in Dickens the pitiful little characters who are totally abandoned, having no one to help them out.

And so, from this Christian point of view, we see that Dostoyevsky was converted, not simply to some kind of ideology, not to Tsarist ideology nor to Orthodox Christianity as a philosophy. He was converted to Christian love, the whole idea of feeling sorry for the poor, of sacrificing oneself. But how can this exist in Dickens, who was not Orthodox? As you read through his books, where do you even find churches? He only mentions churches when someone dresses up to go to a funeral or something. How can Dickens be considered Christian?

STUDENT: Well, he was from a Christian society, even though it was Protestant and was in the process of changing. Christianity still formed the basis of British society, and laws were still based on that foundation. People still had an understanding that this was right and this was wrong.

FR. SERAPHIM: Yes, you can say that intellectually, theoretically, Dickens did not know too much [about Christianity), although he did write a nice little book for his children called The Life of Our Lord. He might have expressed all kinds of errors in Christian doctrine if someone had pressed him, because he wasn't interested in that; it wasn't a part of his life. Nevertheless, he deeply absorbed the basic Christian attitude toward life and morals, as well as the spirit of Christian love. When he wrote about evil people, they were clearly evil people; and when he wrote about good people, they were quite clearly good people. And there were weak people with all their faults. Dickens's down-toearth descriptions of real people were based on the idea that there's some kind of standard of good and evil, based on Christianity, and that there's such a thing as leading a good life-a life pleasing to God, although he wouldn't have said it in those words.

Dostoyevsky read this and felt this spirit. Of course, Dostoyevsky himself was a passionate man: he was a gambler, and was constantly worrying his wife. He would go to German spas and gamble all his money away, then repent, come back, and make a prostration before her-a typical Russian type of drama.5 Of course, his books are filled with people who are shouting at each other and pounding each other over the head. Dickens doesn't have too much of that; his books reflect the more calm and quiet English temperament. And yet, in Dostoyevsky, we find the same spirit of basic Christian love, sympathy for the underdog, etc. Dostoyevsky sought to portray Christian life in action: life that exhibits specific Christian qualities. By doing this, he sought to counteract the ideas that Westerners had brought into Russia. From the Western perspective, Russia did not have a highly developed culture. The simple people had Orthodox Christianity, Slavonic texts, and not too much else, that is, they had the religion but did not have a whole philosophy explaining the religion. The Russian intelligentsia was fully aware of what Orthodoxy was. There were people in the monasteries whom one could quote,6 but there were very few like that; and most people accepted Christianity in a very simple way. Therefore, it was fairly easy for a foreign ideology to come in and upset the whole thing. This shows, by the way, the entire purpose of apologetics, which is how to identify foreign wisdom that interferes with our Christianity and how to give an answer to it. Since there was not too much of that awareness of how to answer foreign wisdom, many people were very easily converted to Western ways, which promised a totally different view of what man is, rejecting the otherworldliness of Christianity while introducing worldly ideas.

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5 According to Dostoyevsky's wife, Anna, the author gave up gambling after the birth of their second daughter in 1871.
6 Here Fr. Seraphim is referring to members of the intelligentsia who sincerely converted to the Orthodox Faith, much like Nikolai Gogol, and then entered monastic life.

STUDENT: But shouldn't that be its strength, that people accept Christianity in the real sense?

FR. SERAPHIM: On the personal level, yes, that's very good, very noteworthy. Most people are not equipped for philosophy, and that too is very good. However, if there is not within the society some group of people who know about this, then the infection will eventually reach even those simple people. Thus, when Communism came, it took away the basis of the life of simple people, and many became atheists. They didn't know what to do anymore because their entire society was upset. No longer was Christianity accepted as the standard. Of course, many from among the simple people did find strength in their Faith, according to God's grace, but many did not have any way to know how to react when their whole universe was turned upside down. The latter lost their simplicity and became just brainwashed Communists. This was the main reason for the crisis in Russia: that there were here and there individuals, but there was not a powerful element in society that was fully conscious of what Orthodoxy was as against Western ideas and confessions. There were a few people who tried to develop this awareness, like Ivan Kireyevsky (1806-1856)-a great name-who went to Europe, studied philosophy with Hegel and Schelling and all the great minds of the West, and then came back only to find that his wife knew the answers to lots of questions he didn't know the answers to. That was because she had known St. Seraphim of Sarov and had been going to Elder Philaret of Glinsk and Elder Macarius of Optina. She told her husband that all he was trying to get from the West we already have in our Holy Fathers. Finally he woke up and was converted to Orthodoxy, and then wrote several articles on the Orthodox philosophy of life. Kireyevsky lived at the same time as Alexey Khomiakov (1804-1860), another philosopher who was interested in the same themes. Khomiakov's book The Church is One is in English.7 There's an article or two by Kireyevsky in English, too. Fr. Alexey [Young] has already written a series of articles on Kireyevsky, and is now compiling them into a book, which is very good.8

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7 Alexey Khomiakov, The Church Is One (Willits, Calif.: Eastern Orthodox Books, 1988).
8 [Fr.] Alexey Young, A Man Is His Faith: Ivan Kireyevsky and Orthodox Christianity (Mettingham, England: St. George Orthodox Information Service, 1980).


Unfortunately, Kireyevsky's attempt to present the Orthodox philosophy of life as an answer to the West was not successful. He died too young, and those who tried to begin where he left off, like Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900), went so far into non-Orthodox ideas that they lost their way.

Dostoyevsky understood the necessity of providing an Orthodox Christian answer to Western wisdom "falsely so called,"9 which holds to a different idea of what man is, what his fate is, what the meaning of human life is, and how we should think about society and different classes of people. And so he began writing his novels with this purpose in mind.

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9 1 Tim. 6:19-20.


STUDENT: Don't we find that first in Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1833)?

FR. SERAPHIM: Yes, that's right. Eugene Onegin was the first in a way. One can find striking phrases in Pushkin quite early, in the 1820s and '30s, which indicate that he realized the West was not for Russia. This is seen in the character Tatiana. Eugene Onegin himself was supposed to be a sort of sophisticated Western man bringing to the simple Russian Tatiana the new Western wisdom. He's so polite and full of Western ways, but she finally understands that he's just a parody.10 The idea is that Western culture is a parody. It does not fit us; it does not work in Russia. So, already before Dostoyevsky there was awareness that these ways of the West were not for Russia; they were false. Dostoyevsky was the one who most consciously tried to raise this awareness through his novels.

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10 Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, chap. 22. The pertinent passage reads:
What is he?... an imitation
Of foreign whims the impersonation-
A handbook of fashionable phrase
Or a parody of modern ways?


All of Dostoyevsky's works, one can say, are sort of imperfect, incomplete. He only finished the first part of his last great novel, The Brothers Karamazov. He wanted to write two more parts, but he died before he was able to do so. Nevertheless, several of his books are very valuable for us. Of his greatest books, Crime and Punishment was the first to be published. What was this book about?

STUDENT: The Western philosophy of the superman-Nietzsche's idea.

FR. SERAPHIM: Yes.

STUDENT: The main character was named Raskolnikov.

FR. SERAPHIM: His full name was Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov. What does that mean?

STUDENT: Roman comes from Rome, and Raskol means schism.

FR. SERAPHIM: Yes, Dostoyevsky was very aware that Rome was apostate. Therefore, Western wisdom, including modern concepts like socialism, can ultimately be traced to the Schism of Rome. Raskolnikov's patronymic, "Romanovich,” means he is the son of Roman, the son of Rome, and this in turn means he is trying to live by the standards of the West. His last name, "Raskolnikov," which means schism, indicates that he is one who fell into schism, who fell away from his people. Many of the names in Dostoyevsky's writings are symbolical like that.

STUDENT: Also, he was saved by Sonya, which is a nickname for "Sophia."

FR. SERAPHIM: That's right. And "Sophia" means?

STUDENT: Wisdom.

FR. SERAPHIM: That's right. She can be contrasted with the main character, who is supposed to be the wise college student, but who is actually lacking in wisdom. What's the story, briefly?

STUDENT: Well, it portrays the crisis between Russia and the West. Raskolnikov is living this crisis because he tries to be a Western man. He has the idea, found in the writings of Nietzsche, that he is above good and evil, and so he goes and kills an old woman who's a pawnbroker and so is not supposed to be any good. And yet he's Orthodox, because he's in an Orthodox culture-a culture entirely permeated with Orthodoxy. His conscience begins to torment him and continues to build up, causing him to seek repentance throughout the book. There are all kinds of other characters-laborers, poor families, and so onbut the critical point of the book is that Western philosophy is trying to enter Russia; and that Russia, when she tries to adopt it, gets sick from it. The only way she can get out of this is through repentance. So Sonya-who represents the true wisdom found in Orthodoxy-comes to save him.

FR. SERAPHIM: Yes. That's the basic story. A large part of the book is devoted to the time before he kills the woman. He is constantly thinking that he should do it. It's basically Nietzsche's idea that, if there is no God, then everything is permitted. This idea has philosophical and political forms, which I won't discuss too much today; but suffice it to say that, from the Christian point of view, it leads people down the [illusionary] path of "I can do anything."

And so, Raskolnikov keeps thinking of Napoleon. Here's a man who comes from the ranks but becomes the leader of a country. He's allowed to kill whomever he wants, just because he's the head of the country. That means there must be a class of supermen. We can view this in light of the Biblical book of Daniel, wherein we see the kingdoms of this world vs. the kingdom of Christ. According to the kingdom of Christ, we all must humble ourselves before God. On the other hand, according to the philosophy and power of this world, there are some people who are strong, and if you're strong you have the right to trample on others. Such was the philosophy of Machiavelli, who said that government can upset things as long as the prince has the power; or of Nietzsche, who said you can do anything you want as long as you are one of the supermen.

Raskolnikov goes through agonizing dialogues with himself. He visits the old woman. He sees how she behaves. He's casing the joint, seeing how he will do it, where she goes, where she keeps the money. He begins to build in his mind an image that she's hateful, just like an insect.

The un-Christian ideas influencing Raskolnikov were derived from rationalistic ideas coming from the West. What Karl Marx came up with in the West was, again, the idea that you can go and do whatever you want just as long as you take over and make people violent. The scheme behind this idea is that, while the revolution is going on or simply when people kill other people, it makes them violent, and therefore they can be tools for the revolution. In other words, people are to be used as things. This is the exact opposite of Christianity.

However, Raskolnikov has a conscience; he can't help it. Therefore, he keeps hesitating. Shaking like a leaf, he asks himself, "Can it be that I shall really take an axe, that I shall strike her on the head, split her skull open?... Good God, can it be?"11

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11 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Constance Garnett, part 1, chapter 5.


Finally he gets the nerve, and goes and kills the old woman. The woman's younger half-sister then enters the room at the last minute.

STUDENT: He didn't mean to kill the other woman.

FR. SERAPHIM: Yes, he doesn't want to kill her and becomes all upset, but he decides he has to kill her, too. And then he's stuck. He takes hardly any money, but just a small number of items and a small purse. He becomes so hysterical that he goes and hides the stolen goods somewhere. And then begin his torments. If he's superman he should feel absolutely cool and calm. Where were his former ideas that she's just a flea, a louse? His attitude had been that she doesn't need to live, that he is the superman, and that he is to prepare himself by a college education in order to help Western ideas come to enlighten Russia.

STUDENT: He also had the attitude that she, being a pawnbroker, was a bad element of society, and that thus he was actually doing a good deed by killing her.

FR. SERAPHIM: That's right, that's it. But meanwhile his conscience begins to operate and he cannot understand why he's not at peace. Something is happening inside of him, which shows that the conscience, planted by God and developed by the Christian Church, cannot be silenced.

Then begins a terrible duel between Raskolnikov and the interrogator who is investigating the case, Porfiry Petrovich. Raskolnikov never knows whether Petrovich knows he committed the murders, suspects he did it, or suspects someone else. If Raskolnikov didn't have an active conscience, he wouldn't have any problem. In the end, it turns out that this interrogator is just waiting for him to confess. Finally, Raskolnikov asks, "Then ... who then is the murderer?" And Petrovich replies, "Why, you Rodion Romanovich! You are the murderer."12

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12 Crime and Punishment, part 6, chapter 2.


Petrovich explains that, although he could arrest Raskolnikov at that moment, he wants Raskolnikov himself to come to the police station and confess.

Raskolnikov almost goes crazy. What should he do? Should he run away? Meanwhile, he has met this girl Sonya, who is a prostitute, the lowest element of society, supposedly outside Christianity and beyond Christian sympathy. Why is she a prostitute? Because she has to support her mother. She didn't want to be a prostitute; she has Christian faith. But she has to-it's the only way she can get money. In other words, this is an absolutely helpless, pitiful creature. And she's going to be the one who saves this man who is deluded by Western ideas. Raskolnikov begins to talk with her. She shows him the Gospel, reads from it, and talks to him about Jesus Christ.

Gradually, Raskolnikov's heart begins to soften. Finally he confesses the murders to her, and asks, "Well, what am I to do now?"

"What are you to do?" she cries. "Go at once... stand at the crossroads, bow down, first kiss the earth which you have defiled and then bow down to all the world and say to all men aloud, 'I am a murderer!' Then God will send you life again."

Raskolnikov asks, "You mean Siberia,13 Sonya? I must give myself up?"

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13 That is, imprisonment in Siberia.

"We will go to suffer together!" Sonya exclaims.14

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14 Crime and Punishment, part 5, chapter 4.


Raskolnikov wonders how it could be that someone loves him so much that she would come to Siberia to be with him. Finally he is so crushed that he prostrates himself at a crossroads, then goes to the police station and confesses, "It was I who killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister."15

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15 Ibid., part 6, chapter 8.


Such a sense of repentance is a very strong thing, by the way, in the Russian temperament. I had a professor once, Peter Boodberg, who was a Baltic baron. He was Russian, and he was Orthodox in his heart, but he was also a very Western man. He was my Chinese language professor. He overlaid his Orthodox heart with Western sophistication and scholarship, and he married a woman who encouraged that, who wanted to make him famous in the academic world and important in the eyes of the people.

I was eating dinner with him one day, and we were discussing Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. He told me that Dostoyevsky was all right, but that Tolstoy was a universal human artist and was deeper. I had to go back and read War and Peace again to see what he meant, and I found the answer. Tolstoy describes all the different layers of society very calmly and objectively, but he does not have the heart that Dostoyevsky has. When it comes to religion, he mocks it. He doesn't understand at all the motives of religious people, who for him are just some other segment of people. For him the religion of the Russian people is part of the human comedy, which he stands above. Dostoyevsky, on the other hand, went into it with all his heart. He does not describe accurately all the different layers of society, but he describes the Christian element in whatever he discusses. Therefore, in this sense, you can say that Tolstoy is the great Humanist, but Dostoyevsky is the Christian who goes deep.

However, this very professor who said that Tolstoy was greater said, "I can understand how you are infatuated with Dostoyevsky, because I too sometimes think that I should go down to the middle of Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley and get on my knees and confess my sins to everybody." At this his wife said, 'Oh, Petya, if you want to do that, go ahead." It was obvious that she was mocking, but I could see that he meant it, that there was something of Dostoyevsky inside of him, and it was all covered over. This illustrates the conflict between the Christian wisdom that is in Russia-that went very deeply into Russia for a whole thousand years-and the ideas that came from the West. This is a very real conflict even today.

STUDENT: Sophia lived a lowly life, but in her heart she wasn't corrupted.

FR. SERAPHIM: Yes.

STUDENT: And yet, she fell that way not really out of choice, but because she was pushed into it. Raskolnikov, on the other hand, chose to be corrupted.

FR. SERAPHIM: That's right. Well, with her the case was that she preserved her Orthodoxy, her Christianity, even though externally she was a sinner, couldn't receive Communion, and was constantly in a state of sin. But he of his own free will went away from Christianity.

Sophia's purity is actually the purity of Christianity. She knew she was no good, a hopeless case from the dregs of society. And yet she retained Jesus Christ, and therefore she could preach the Gospel to this sophisticated man (although he wasn't too sophisticated, just a student with seemingly high ideas), and eventually melt his heart and convert him. The book ends with Raskolnikov and Sophia going to Siberia. Dostoyevsky begins to describe a little of this, and then he says the rest of the story is a different story. The second story, he tells us, is that of Raskolnikov's conversion and regeneration. Although Dostoyevsky doesn't tell us all that happens in Siberia, we can see a reflection of that story in Dostoyevsky himself, who went to Siberia and came back a converted man.

As a work of art, Crime and Punishment is probably the most perfect of all Dostoyevsky's novels. It's complete in one volume, and he doesn't get in over his head.

He wrote other books, including The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov.16

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16 Together with Crime and Punishment, Fr. Seraphim regarded these as Dostoyevsky's greatest novels. He advised his spiritual children to read them in the order they were written: Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), The Possessed (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880).


On the whole, The Possessed is more on an ideological level. For the most part, the clash [between Russia and the modern West] is viewed from the negative side. The characters who portray Western ideas of revolution are cold and calculating in many different ways. One of them is Pyotr Verkhovensky, a young man who is trying to bring people into his group of five secret revolutionaries. No one knows who else in Russia belongs to these groups, but only the head knows. And we don't quite know whether Pyotr is in contact with anyone else or not, or whether it's all his own fantasy. It's all secret-sh-shhh, they'll catch you! That's one sort of calculating type.

Then there's Shigalyev, the theoretician, who has contrived a system of governing mankind after the revolution. He says, "Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism."17 Ninety percent of society is to be enslaved to the remaining ten percent. Equality of the herd is to be enforced by police state tactics, state terrorism, and destruction of intellectual, artistic, and cultural life. It is estimated that about a hundred million people will have to be killed on the way to the goal. The plan is logically thought out: We can't make everybody happy obviously, but for the sake of the happiness of the few we will enslave or kill off the rest. Solzhenitsyn and others have pointed out the similarities between Shigalyev's plan and what later took place in the Soviet Union. According to Solzhenitsyn's research, a hundred million people have gone missing in Russia over the last sixty years [of Communist rule)]. At least a million can be attributed to the Revolution directly.

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17 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Possessed, trans. Constance Garnett, part 2, chapter 7.


STUDENT: Would you mention what was happening in the West with these secret societies? In the French Revolution, they wanted to kill off a third of the population.

FR. SERAPHIM: That's right, the idea had already been put into practice in France. For example, there was the Babeuf "Conspiracy of the Equals" (1797), which Napoleon squashed. At that time, socialist ideas were already circulating among theoreticians. Here we see the cold, rationalistic modern mind trying to achieve happiness by thinking about it. It's exactly the opposite of Christianity.

In Dostoyevsky's writings, there are many types of such people who are mixed up by revolutionary ideas. Dostoyevsky tries to depict the revolutionary mind. His depictions can seem incredible at first, but if you know more about revolutionary ideas and how they were manifested in nineteenth-century Europe, you see that his account is actually very down-to-earth. That was the way certain people were acting, with the kind of cold mentality that produced the Russian Revolution.

The Brothers Karamazov-which, as we've seen, was Dostoyevsky's last book and the first in an unfinished trilogy-presents all kinds of ideas. In the character of one of the Karamazov brothers, Ivan, we find the same cold, calculating Western mentality we've been discussing. And then there's a low type of character, the half-brother Smerdyakov, who hears what the "great philosopher" Ivan says and then goes out and does it. Ivan theorizes about "the "Grand Inquisitor," and narrates the famous story known by that name. Dostoyevsky makes clear that there's some kind of little man in the stove pipe who keeps coming to Ivan: an image of the devil. This indicates that Ivan is in contact with some other power, who gives him his "wonderful" ideas. He debates with Alyosha, the youngest brother, who's the hero of the novel. Alyosha wants true Christianity, and he sees that his brothers are tormented. They don't have peace; and their father, Fyodor, is an old rascal. Ivan, who has no faith in Christ, can't believe anything Alyosha says about Christ. Therefore, he devises the idea of the "Grand Inquisitor," who is meant to be a kind of antichrist, one who is based on the ideas of the Roman Church-that is, all the bad ideas of the Rome, which produced the Inquisition and relegated the Faith to human calculation, taking over from the true Christianity of the heart. Ivan, through his character of the Grand Inquisitor, comes up with the revolutionary idea of a dictatorship in which people are given bread and circuses, and maybe even given religion, but there's no reality behind it, that is, there's no eternal life, no God. And the people are fooled to in order to keep them quiet.

STUDENT: Why is it that some people say that the book The Brothers Karamazov and I guess Dostoyevsky in general-is too violent? I've talked about Dostoyevsky with some people who aren't Christians, and they said that they didn't like his books because they were too violent.

ANOTHER STUDENT: Maybe not violent, just passionate.

FR. SERAPHIM: Well, passionate, yes. But that's life. One may say that we are very cool and calm in our Western ways, supposedly. But Dostoyevsky's characters have the same passions that we ourselves have; it's just that we don't express them as "violently" as the Russians might do.

STUDENT: In the "Grand Inquisitor" story, there's the pseudo-Christian idea of "loving humanity," while being actually incapable of bringing that down to…

FR. SERAPHIM: ... the individual in front of you. Right. Exactly.

In the story, the Grand Inquisitor says to Christ that people can never be truly free "for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious."18 Man is a rebel by nature, he says, but the burden of freedom is too heavy for him to bear; he is frightened by it, and is ready to give it up in exchange for bread, circuses, and a this-worldly ideology or religion. The Grand Inquisitor understands that Christ gave human beings freedom of choice in order that they would have the capacity to love. Nevertheless, he affirms that it is he, and not Christ, who truly loves humanity, because he and those with him take the burden of freedom from humanity while giving people what they want.

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18 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett, book 5, chapter 5.


STUDENT: The Grand Inquisitor thought he was loving humanity, but he couldn't love one person.

FR. SERAPHIM: Right. And thus it's seen that Christ is the One Who пtruly loves mankind. Christ says nothing in response to the old inquisitor, but only walks over to him and kisses him. With that the story ends.

Then there's Dimitri Karamazov, the oldest of the brothers. Whereas Ivan is the cold, calculating one, Dimitri is the passionate one.

Smerdyakov, who is a lackey of sorts, listens to Ivan talking about advanced Western ideas: that there is no God, and that therefore there is no good and evil, and everything is permitted. This, combined with Ivan's statement that he would like to see his father dead, provides the impetus for Smerdyakov to murder old Fyodor Karamazov.

No one knows who did it at first, and all the blame falls on Dimitri. Dimitry is put on trial, wrongly convicted, and sent to Siberia, as if taking upon himself the sins of his father and family.

Meanwhile, there are lots of religious scenes with Alyosha, who becomes a novice at a monastery that Dostoyevsky modeled after Optina Hermitage. The character of Elder Zosima was modeled after St. Tikhon of Zadonsk, of whose writings Dostoyevsky read quite a bit; and also after Elder Ambrose of Optina, whom Dostoyevsky met and spoke with on a pilgrimage to Optina. Dostoyevsky created a picture of an elder, Zosima, which is a little romanticized. Nevertheless, considering what kind of people he was writing for, it's a very accessible image, one that says we should love everyone, forgive everyone, give all our heart to serving God, and kiss the earth out of love, repentance, and gratitude.

STUDENT: Dostoyevsky used the character of Elder Zosima to speak directly about Holy Russia.

FR. SERAPHIM: Yes. And and the next novel was supposed to be about Alyosha's life, when he finally goes out into the world. He was a novice, but he was to go out into the world as a monk in order to preach Christianity. The book was to end with Alyosha's death.

Although Dostoyevsky wrote no books after The Brothers Karamazov, his notes and outlines provide a canvas showing what the situation of Russia was at the time, and pointing to where the answer lies. The answer is in true Christianity, God-bearing elders, and people who obey the will of God.

In his novel The Idiot, Dostoyevsky attempted to depict someone who's living a Christ-like life, and is regarded as some kind of madman because he does not live according to worldly calculations. This character, Prince Myshkin, stays around characters who are possessed by their passions, while he himself tries to put Christianity into action. In all these books, over and over, you see such individual cases of people who are living Christian life, with a warm, simple faith in God. And this entails preaching the Gospel and giving an answer to false Western wisdom.

In his way, Dickens was doing the same thing. He was not aware of the crisis of the West, but was writing on a simple level in order to touch his readers' hearts, to inspire them to be kind and loving, and to have sympathy for those who are pitiful. Dostoyevsky raised this element to a new level, in which the Christian Faith is portrayed in all its greatness.

I think of the books I was reading in my own childhood. I read Jules Verne, and it's totally lost, with no effect in later life. It was exciting to read the stories of Alexander Dumas at the time, but nothing is left of that, either. And Dickens I remember to this day. I was reading Dickens when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old, and its total impression remains very warm. For example, the Christmas celebration depicted in The Pickwick Papers. People were running around, roasting apples, and so on-just the feeling of that warm, heartfelt season remains with me. There's something there that can help one's Christian life, even though outwardly there's nothing particularly Christian about it. It's the same with Dostoyevsky: if your heart can be warmed by his writings, it's often good for a convert to read them instead of a lot of dogmatic books. These writings can begin to loosen up the cold, Western, calculating rationalism that is in the air and is very much with all of us. It's everywhere: you read the newspapers, you look at the television, and this coldness is right there. Dostoyevsky and Dickens can be an antidote against that. If you read someone like Hemingway, what does it give you? A lot of cold, calculating people stuck in their own juice. That's about all there is to it. And you get depressed. What's the use? You might as well go out and kill yourself. And Hemingway did just that. So, for the soul, I don't see anything there. Maybe he has some warm passages here and there, I don't know; I haven't read that much by him. But in reading literature, if you can't get something for the soul, some kind of warm feeling, then there's not much point, unless it's just to be absorbed.

STUDENT: Are there any other writers now, who may not be Orthodox, but are at least writers [who nourish the soul]?

FR. SERAPHIM: Does anyone know such writers?

STUDENT: What about Steinbeck?19

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19 John Steinbeck (1902-1968).


FR. SERAPHIM: Well, he felt sorry for people, yes. He tried in his own way, I guess.... I know Faulkner20 was trying to get back to life before modern industrialization. He uses symbolism in order to uncover deeper things, but we just don't see much there [to inspire Christians]. Today there's hardly anybody who's ...

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20 William Faulkner (1897-1962).


STUDENT: How about in Russia? Solzhenitsyn.

FR. SERAPHIM: Well, of course, the great literature from Russia [today] is by Solzhenitsyn. His Gulag is a great work of literature because it's based on something real, and is written with great feeling. If you read it you'll weep. The attitude he has toward the whole Communist system is a sort of bitter irony that is actually not angry. He's above that. He makes very clear what the Communists are, but deep down he's peaceful about it. He's been through it and survived it.

STUDENT: It amazes me that Dostoyevsky's experiences in exile turned him into a Christian.

FR. SERAPHIM: Well, the only reason is because his heart began to move, because if he'd gone through those experiences just calculating, he would have come out an enemy, resolved to overthrow the government and join the parties that made way for Lenin's party. Either there was enough left from his youth, or somehow it began to sink into him that real Christianity is the answer.

STUDENT: What kind of connections did Dostoyevsky have with Gogol? I know that some of his early stories were directly inspired by Gogol's writings.

FR. SERAPHIM: All the writers of that time knew of Gogol. I don't know specifically what contact Dostoyevsky had with him.

STUDENT: Were Dostoyevsky's works translated very early in the West?

FR. SERAPHIM: Surely by 1900 quite a few works were translated.

STUDENT: What about Russia, where the sort of thing he was writing against [was gaining momentum]?

FR. SERAPHIM: Well, all the people who were for liberal ideas saw him as enemy number one. "He's a reactionary and a Tsarist," they thought, "and all the things we hate, he's for." They tried to put up a smoke screen to get rid of him, but he had obviously struck the heart of the Russian people. He was writing in newspapers and magazines, as well as in his own diary (published as Diary of a Writer) about Christian love for the poor and suffering. That which he was "for" was from his heart, and therefore had a big effect on people. When he gave his famous Pushkin address toward the end of his life, it made a tremendous impression. Thousands of people attended his funeral. In fact, I think that, prior to the funeral of St. John of Kronstadt (1908), it was the largest funeral Russia ever had.

STUDENT: What's the story behind Tolstoy writing his own Gospel?

FR. SERAPHIM: Yes, well, he didn't like Orthodoxy. He was romanticizing the faith of the simple people, but he himself was a very complicated person. There was always a kind of duality in him. Dostoyevsky was tormented by his own passions, but at least he was single-minded; he knew what he wanted and he had his whole heart in it.

Although Tolstoy was a landowner and an aristocrat, he went around in a peasant's robe. It was all fake. He tried [to be a Christian], but he couldn't do it, he couldn't bring it off. He wrote several blasphemous works against Orthodoxy, and compiled his own Gospel. He said he wanted to renew the Christian Faith. He was excommunicated, quite justly, because he wrote blasphemous works against the Church, and the Church made it known that he was not Orthodox, that he was cut off. He visited Optina, but argued with Elder Ambrose about the Orthodox Faith. The elder said that Tolstoy was "very proud." This can be contrasted with what the same elder said of Dostoyevsky: "This is a man who is repenting."21

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21 Fr. Sergius Chetverikov, Elder Ambrose of Optina (Platina, Calif.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2009), p. 213.


Tolstoy's end was tragic. In 1910 he went to visit the Optina Elders again, but, having arrived at the monastery, he couldn't bring himself to go inside. When the Optina brotherhood heard about this, Elder Barsanuphius was sent to visit Tolstoy22 with the aim of reconciling him to the Church through the Mystery of Confession. Shortly after leaving Optina, Tolstoy came down with pneumonia, and was lodging at a train station. Elder Barsanuphius arrived at the station and asked to see Tolstoy, but was rebuffed by Tolstoy's daughter. A meeting between the elder and author, which might have resulted the latter's return to the Church, was not looked on favorably by his family members and followers, since it would have undermined the religion of "Tolstoyism." Tolstoy died a few days later, without having seen the elder. Elder Barsanuphius said of him, "An iron ring had been forged for the late Tolstoy, and though he was a lion (his name 'Ley' means lion'), he could neither break the chain philosophy prevented him from being nor get free of it."23 His own reconciled to the Church.

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22 By this time Elder Ambrose had reposed.
23 Victor Afanasiev, Elder Barsanuphius of Optina (Platina, Calif: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2000), p. 91.


STUDENT: Going back to Dostoyevsky: it's interesting that he picked up on contemporary ideas and events, and made comments about them; for example, he commented on newspaper articles.

FR. SERAPHIM: Yes, he did the same thing that Ivan M. Andreyev later did. As we printed in The Orthodox Word, Andreyev read a newspaper article about a cold-hearted crime typical of modernity: a woman beat to death her two-month-old son.24 Andreyev gives this as an example of how the world has "progressed" to this point, in which a spirit of coldness and lack of love prevails. Every single evil act that any of us does, in word, deed or thought, adds to the worldwide cup of evil. And when that evil finally overflows the cup, a woman kills her son, or some other terrible thing like that. We're all responsible for this because our own evil adds to the "cosmic evil" which ends up killing people. This was a typical theme that Dostoyevsky was looking at.

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24 The Orthodox Word, no. 73 (March-April 1977), pp. 102-3.