This paper by Dr. Elizabeth Blake was presented at the Krakow Conferences of Russian Philosophy: Nicolas Berdyaev and Russian Philosophy in the West in Krakow, 2024.
As a prisoner, Nikolai Berdyaev, like Fedor Dostoevsky before him and Mikhail Bakhtin after him, was protected by his status as a member of the intelligentsia from the violence with which the Russian and Soviet regimes treated those they confined to their prisons and stockades. Berdyaev’s discussion of his own prison experience consciously addresses the limited way in which the incarceration of an intellectual of the nobility, who enjoyed early release through paternal connections, resembled the confinements of professional revolutionaries, whom he describes as suffering “immeasurably more.”[1] He juxtaposes the tsarist prisons, in which the patriarchal system shaped the guards’ perception of inmates as enemies of the government, with the “dictatorship” and “terror” of the Soviet prison, where he was interrogated by the first Soviet leader of the secret police Feliks Dzierżyński for his suspected participation in the underground “Tactical Center” (1920) before he had to sign a document recognizing his permanent deportation. Indeed, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn proudly recounts in Gulag Archipelago that the legal system could not make a puppet of Berdyaev, who held firmly to “his religious and spiritual principles” through two arrests and the nighttime interrogation by Dzierżyński.[2] Although Berdyaev is more circumspect in his description of the revolution than Bulgakov in the 1918 collection From the Depths [Из глубины], there appears a general reference to the capital city in Berdyaev’s Dostoevsky’s Weltanschauung [Миросозерцание Достоевского] alluding to the fact that “designs for crimes matured in which the borders of human nature are transgressed.”[3] Dostoevsky’s portrayal of punishment in Notes from the House of the Dead resembles Berdyaev’s insofar as even the censorship committee articulated concerns about Dostoevsky’s insufficiently severe depictions of punishment in the Omsk stockade despite the fact that, as Leonid Grossman observes in 1915, Dostoevsky returned from Siberia with an experience of hard labor that introduced him to “sensualists, who slaughter children and gauntlets turning human backs into pus and blood.”[4] Nevertheless, only Stalin’s Russia produced Gulag victims like Varlam Shalamov, the son of a priest who spent more than fifteen years in confinement and was assigned to some of the harshest labor sites, including mining in the remote region of Kolyma.
Despite his early contact with the Merezhkovsky group esteeming Dionysiac mysticism over the moralism of Lev Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the aforementioned novelists contributed to Berdyaev’s spiritual development, and he turned to Dostoevsky after both the 1905 and Bolshevik revolutions with the publications The New Religious Consciousness and Society (Новое религиозное сознание и общественность, 1907) and Dostoevsky’s Weltanschauung (1919-22).[5] All the same, Anatoly Luncharsky’s rejection of what he describes as the idealistic “Berdyaev-Bulgakov trend” among the “intense” intellectual discussions of political exiles dominated by Berdyaev in Vologda (1901-2) during their shared exile attests to the latter’s reputation for idealism owing to its fusion of spirituality and Marxism that this future People’s Commissar of Education faulted for its neglect of realism.[6] In his examination of Dostoevsky’s rebels and revolutionaries, i.e., the Underground Man, the Grand Inquisitor, Nikolai Stavrogin, Ivan Karamazov, and Rodion Raskolnikov, Berdyaev dwells on the bifurcation or fragmentation of the personality that can arise when it is confronted with the problem of evil, because he maintains that “No one was so wounded by the endless suffering of humanity. […] It was given to him [Dostoevsky] to know katorga, to live amid convicts, and his whole life he prostrated himself before God for man.”[7] The narrative of Notes from the House of the Dead reveals such observations about criminal personalities to be a component of the author’s katorga when the narrator maintains that a criminal risks everything in willful displays of irrational behavior even though “almost every voluntary appearance of personality in a prisoner is considered a crime” about which Berdyaev posits “The rationality of this irrationality is always the tyranny of society over the personality” (4:67).[8] Unlike Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, who observed insanity in House of the Dead and cites the passage from the eighth chapter of the Gospel of Luke about the expulsion of the Gerasene demons as an epigraph to his novel about revolutionaries (i.e., Demons), accepts that insanity can be healed and therefore, for him, personality may be reconstituted to fullness. By the time he wrote Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky decided to impart to his famous anti-hero an insistence on the free will to pursue desire, in contradistinction to reason, in affirmation of personality with a will operating according to human nature (натура человеческая) that “acts entirely with all that is in it, consciously and unconsciously” rather than scientifically calculated “laws of nature” (5:112, 115).[9] With the Underground Man, Berdyaev emphasizes that Dostoevsky examines the tragic depths of the human spirit as this antihero struggles to preserve “the integrity [tsel’nost’]” of his personality in the underground to avoid the bifurcation characteristic of the author’s later protagonists like Rodion Raskol’nikov and Ivan Karamazov (5: 115), but, whereas Dostoevsky refers to an individual’s personality when confined (in the examples of the prisoner, the Underground Man, and Christ), Berdyaev (with a noted indebtedness to Jacques Maritain) envisions personality as a corporeal realization of spiritual wholeness indicative of eternity (20:172).[10] Hence, today’s paper focuses on the confrontation of personality with punitive confinement and revolutionary terror, particularly as it is understood by twentieth-century intellectuals whose writings engage Dostoevsky’s writings.
The circle of Russian émigrés arriving in Berlin after their mass deportation in 1922 that included Sergii Bulgakov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Lev Karsavin, Semën Frank, and Nikolai Lossky expected a readership sympathetic to their depictions of Bolshevik authoritarianism.[11] For instance, Berdyaev discloses that he began writing his Philosophy of Inequality on the anniversary of the revolution before exploring the revolution’s social impact on Russia, and the theme of revolution permeates his Dostoevsky’s Weltanschauung.[12] By the time of their arrival, the second and much expanded edition of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth’s commentary on Romans, with its appreciation for Dostoevsky’s rejection of the Grand Inquisitor’s theocracy, had been published and Barth had been established in a professorship in Göttingen.[13] Barth engaged religious circles sympathetic to socialism owing to reservations about capitalism before the outbreak of the first world war, and his 1919 lectures on Bolshevism that raised concerns on behalf of democracy over the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia betray a timely political dimension to his discussion of The Brothers Karamazov in his commentary on Romans, in which he likens revolutionaries not to its Christological figure but to the Grand Inquisitor, who illegally usurps an authority “that we have experienced trembling at Bolshevism” that “will not long hesitate to reveal its true character of tyranny.”[14] Here, his analysis coincides with Berdyaev’s, who cites from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Romans 13: 1-2) to demonstrate that authority emanates from God in an attempt to discredit an association of Christianity with anarchy, since in contradistinction to the citizen who voluntary submits to the state (according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau) or to the “will of the proletariat” deified by Karl Marx, Berdyaev maintains that the individual by the state is saved “from a collectivism, which devours the personality.”[15] For this reason, he situates Russian humanists (Dostoevsky, Vladimir Solovyov, Lev Tolstoi, and Ivan Turgenev) within a tradition of objection to capital punishment, although Dostoevsky controversially defended the benefit of punishment for the moral rehabilitation of offenders.[16]
By contrast, Barth’s opposition to ecclesiastical support for the German war effort during WWI led him to conclude that no human being retains an objective right over another, not even the Grand Inquisitor’s prisoner, because God is both in the question and answer for God represents in a single identity both the “Deus absconditus” and the one who “raised Christ from the dead.”[17] Although, as Caryl Emerson discovers, Mikhail Bakhtin attributes a similar “outsideness” to God and an “inner infinity” signifying God in me, in Dostoevsky’s oeuvre, only the incarnate Christ becomes the most authoritative voice that crowns and organizes the polyphonic world.[18] Barth’s invocation of resurrection, however, also betrays the influence of Eduard Thurneysen on his reception of Dostoevsky, since Thurneysen maintains that desire for the infinite defines humankind’s essence so that “The ultimate word of his novel is resurrection.”[19] Moreover, Thurneysen and Berdyaev share an emphasis on Dostoevsky’s metaphysics with Thurneysen advancing the premise that Dostoevsky’s preoccupation with higher reality necessarily requires him to move beyond psychology toward “a transcendental metaphysics” without consideration for “materialist principles,” while Berdyaev concludes that chronologically Dostoevsky is “a psychologist” and “humanist full of compassion for “poor folk,” for “the insulted and injured,” and for the heroes of ‘the dead house'” before the publication of Notes from the Underground that marks his transition into a metaphysician.[20] Stefan Zweig’s research on Dostoevsky in Drei Meister (1920) not only appealed to Thurneysen but also to Sigmund Freud, whose fascination with the novelist is attested already in a 1920 letter to Zweig, who sent him a copy of the aforementioned study.[21] Here, Berdyaev attempts to situate Dostoevsky on the side of the oppressed, because, in the wake of the 1905 revolution, he apprehended that the Grand Inquisitor implicated Christ in an elitist spirituality because of his conviction in the “dignity of a person” that enables one “to obtain eternity” but only by imparting to the personality a freedom that can generate unbearable suffering.[22] At the same time, for Berdyaev there exists an aristocratic dimension to personality because of the “ontological inequality” arising from human traits, such as talent, on which is based “the equality of difference, not equality according to qualities of being,” thereby attesting to a tension more fundamental for Berdyaev–that is the “eternal metaphysical conflict of personality and society”– than the singular model of class conflict in Russian society advanced by the Bolsheviks.[23]
Ultimately, Berdyaev concludes that Dostoevsky’s depiction of Russianness reflects “a popular messianic consciousness” that rejected the bourgeois culture of Western Europe before Marxism gained popularity in Russia and that his novel Demons for his depiction of political conspiracies should be regarded as prophetic, although Dostoevsky failed to appreciate how effectively the socialist and atheist views of the intelligentsia would convince the masses to abandon both the imperial state and church, despite his intense examination of “the fateful consequences of the rebelling rationalism for human consciousness.”[24] In Bulgakov’s At the Feast of the Gods: Pro et Contra [На пиру богов: Pro и contra], composed in the aftermath of the revolution, Dostoevsky is directly implicated in the revolutionary unrest by the diplomat for having conveyed a false image of the Russian people as God-bearing, when their bestial actions were motivated primarily by hunger.[25] However, Dostoevsky offered some forewarning regarding popular discontent instigated by deprivation of food in Notes from the House of the Dead, when the political prisoners and peasant convicts inform the narrator of the nobility Aleksandr Gorianchikov that his presence was not welcome at a mass prison protest against the quality of prison fare, when he had independent resources enabling him to procure surplus food (Pss, 4:199-206).
Because in a discussion of Ivan Karamazov’s invocation of Euclidean reason Berdyaev defines freedom as the truth of the fourth dimension, everything associated with revolt is circumscribed by the three dimensions that blocks movement into other worlds, so the rebel remains immersed in the “devilishness” of rebellion that “strikes at personality” leading to its loss by paralyzing “its freedom and its moral responsibility.”[26] As Berdyaev understands that an individual must actively safeguard the personality from the meddling of another, he accepts that one can be disturbed by a revolutionary environment that endorses a despotism that deprives an individual of autonomy in the midst of a faceless collective, for which reason Dostoevsky in supporting personality opposes political upheaval.[27] Whereas for Bulgakov, egocentrism owing to its reliance on the self with no reference to memory can destroy identity, for Dostoevsky this represents an assertion of personality, as Robert Jackson discovers in his discussion of Prince Valkovsky’s Sadean philosophy: “It is not nonsense—this is personality, this is I myself. Everything for me, and the entire world is created for me” (3:365).[28] However, the prince represents a profanation of nature, since, for Dostoevsky, Christ is “the highest, final development of personality” as the “ideal man in the flesh,” owing to the fact that “All of Christ entered into humanity, and man strives to transform himself in the ‘I’ of Christ as his own ideal” (Pss, 20:172 ,174).
This would necessarily signify that in Dostoevsky’s estimation personality is more resilient than in Berdyaev’s conception, since, as Dostoevsky knew well from the New Testament gifted to him in Tobolsk, all four gospel accounts depict the torture of his “ideal man” Jesus–that is his beating and the crucifixion–and Dostoevsky’s Ippolit Terentyev notes about Hans Holbein the Younger’s “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb” that “on the face of the deceased suffering is even perceptible, as though still even now it is sensed by him” (Pss, 8: 339). Holbein’s Christ displays the posthumous wound Jesus received from a soldier’s blade (John 19:34) as well as the nail marks from the crucifixion, which according to the Gospel of John remain unhealed [“Подай перст твой сюда; посмотри на руки Мои; подай руку твою, и вложи в бок,” 20:27], thereby advancing Barth’s metaphor of God as question “which in the Church bursts like an open festering wound of human society” but also provides the answer of the resurrected Christ whose unhealed wound is offered to Thomas to assuage his doubts.[29] Dostoevsky’s Aleksei Kirillov offers a more cynical interpretation of the pain associated with the human condition before his suicide when he exegetes the incarnation: “the laws of nature did not pity […] its own miracle” and “forced Him to live amid a lie and to die for a lie” so that “it came to be that the laws of the planet themselves are a vaudeville of the devil” (Pss, 10:471). Out of this disillusionment with the efficacy of miracle–on brilliant display at the beginning of Ivan’s poem–arises the Grand Inquisitor’s illusory “miracle, mystery, and authority” offered to the citizens of Seville, but this regime requires either the torture and destruction or the deportation of the miracle-performing visitor, whose presence endangers the status quo (Pss, 14:234). Kirillov’s tragic end attests to Dostoevsky’s endorsement of Ivan’s advocacy for the tragic dimension to his suffering servant, despite the skepticism of his interlocutor, his younger brother Alësha, whose protestations Ivan engages with unexpected gravitas in contradistinction to his adversarial exchange with the devil. Before Viacheslav Ivanov and Stephen Zweig explored the tragic dimension to Dostoevsky’s art, Konstantin Leontiev, as Berdyaev notes, links Dostoevsky’s oeuvre to tragedy [tragism] but prefers the “sober” tragedy in War and Peace to the tragedy in Dostoevsky that he associates with “rooming houses, houses of ill repute and […] Preobrazhenskaya hospital.”[30]
Dostoevsky’s imagination and Berdyaev’s discussion of personality approach a limit when the subject of torture appears, because Berdyaev does not include it among those conditions impacting personality. Dostoevsky knew flogging victims but offers only testimonial about a single character’s impression of the experience in House of the Dead when the personage based on Aleksandr Miretski (who had run the gauntlet once) states directly that “it burns like fire,” and the narrator adds: “He replied somewhat abruptly, as though with some inner pain while trying to not exactly look at me, and his face blushed; in a half minute he looked at me and in his eyes flashed a fire of hatred, and his lips began to quiver from indignation” (Pss, 4:154, 144).[31] This suggests that Dostoevsky–celebrated by Berdyaev and Freud in the twentieth century for the psychological dimension to his novels–missed an opportunity to impart to his readership the effects of torture on the mind with both Józef Żochowski, who was flogged in Omsk before his arrival, and Szymon Tokarzewski who records the experience in his memoir Seven Years of Katorga (Siedem lat katorgi, 1918) that relates (1) that he was unable to remember the words to a prayer under the blows; (2) that everything around him, including his tormentors, disappeared from sight; (3) that his mouth became parched; (4) that his “body from neck to heels was one bleeding wound”; and 5) that, presumably referring to himself, a man during religious and patriotic ecstasy does not feel physical pain.[32] Tokarzewski’s compatriot in Ust-Kamenogorsk and Omsk Józef Bogusławski’s depiction of the results of a beating he witnessed in Siberia are as graphic as Tokarzewski’s but without the benefit of interiority: “I had to listen to the complaining and moaning of the one beaten until the moment when the voice, growing weaker and weaker, had almost already wasted away in his chest, when his face looked as though it were covered with a solution of soot, and he was all drenched with coagulated blood from the shoulder blades to the knees.”[33] However, in House of the Dead, as Linda Ivanits illustrates in Dostoevsky and the Russian People, in his “disquisition on flogging” Dostoevsky centers the narrative on the tormentors as he poetically depicts Smekalov’s incorporation of Lord’s prayer into the ritual and the playful banter between the executioner Zherebiatnikov and his victim before the first blow (Pss, 4:147-51).[34]
All the same, Dostoevsky, himself, underwent the torment of believing in his imminent demise, about which he wrote his brother upon his return to the Peter-Paul fortress on that twenty-second of December: “That head, which was creating and living in the highest life of art, which was conscious of and used to the exalted demands of the spirit, that head was already cut from my shoulders. There remained my memory and images, created and still not embodied by me” (Pss, 28.1: 162). Unlike a similar passage of recollection in The Idiot (in which it is noted only that the victim was dying as a healthy, strong twenty-seven-year-old; 8:52), Dostoevsky alluded twice within a single paragraph to “flesh and blood [плот и кровь]” as he had come to appreciate the identity as “a man among men,” ideas not yet enfleshed, and not just his heart but also his flesh and blood (Pss, 28.1:162). In other words, in what were to be his final moments, he did not prepare for eternity but contemplated his own corporeal personality and chose like Primo Levi to pose a question centered around embodied identity (If this is a man). The one-time zek Andrei Siniavsky perspicaciously recognizes in Dostoevsky a frailty derived from “the experience of passing through death” and “of death in the presence of life” that Siniavsky, himself, encountered as a result of his arrest, confinement, and deportation: “The theme of man (those ‘poor people,’ with whom he began his literary profession) was revealed to him like an abyss, into which he jumped then in order to derive from it a knowledge, accessible to no one, about human nature.”[35]
Notwithstanding his sensational mock execution, Dostoevsky owes his literary reputation to his witness to the effects of confinement on convicts, not for his moments at the scaffold, as is evident from references to House of the Dead in Sergei Maksimov’s Siberia and Hard Labor (1871), Nikolai Iadrintsev’s Russian Community in Prison and Exile (1872), and George Kennan’s Siberia and the Exile System (1891).[36] For example, a “fundamental conclusion” on the passage located on the second page of Gorianchikov’s manuscript, that is “Man is a being that becomes accustomed to anything, and I think that this is his best definition [Человек есть существо ко всему привыкающее, и, я думаю, это самое лучшее его определение]” resonates with Shalamov, who agrees that Kolyma taught him that there is no limit to this accommodation to “degradation and mockery” so that: “Physical and moral suffering endured by people is many times more than that which Dostoevsky succeeded in seeing” (Pss, 4:10).[37] Based on a similar quotation in Crime and Punishment (6:25), Robert Jackson perceives in House of the Dead and Brothers Karamazov a “motif of ‘adaptation'” to the human capacity either for “suffering, oppression, injustice, [and] unfreedom” or “endurance” and “will to survive.”[38] This process of accommodation or adaptation suggests a less fragile personality in Dostoevsky than that conceived by Berdyaev, who envisions fragmentation resulting from adversity. Dostoevsky was cognizant that the experience of the four years in the stockade impacted his psyche, since he wrote into a letter a month after his release an apology for his incoherence owing to a brokenness whose “anguish” ate away at him as he ached in “soul and body” (28.1:175).[39] Similarly, Shalamov links incarceration to a disorienting befuddlement resulting in a loss of words: “in the brain suddenly a strange word is resurrected […] and you by exertion and with an almost physical sensation of the transference of something in the brain, with a headache you repeat, not yet having realized, not yet having understood the word.”[40]
Jean Améry’s Beyond Blame and Atonement (Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne), with a nod to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (Jenseits von Gut und Böse) for its discussion of ressentiment, addresses the enduring impact of torture when the physical barrier of the self–that is skin–is breached by the blows of the torturer who with them forces with his own “corporeality” on the victim by extending into “the body of his neighbor” in order to extinguish his spirit.[41] The former Soviet prisoner Walter Ciszek, S.J., also alludes an “almost physical” sense of betrayal, resentment, and disbelief after having been drugged and confronted by his interrogator’s eyes blazing “like evil incarnate.”[42] Just as Améry maintains that “Yet, together with the first blow is broken trust in the world,” Ciszek discloses that following this final session with Sedov he subsequently avoided trusting anyone further and relied instead on spontaneous prayers to God.[43] Shalamov’s almost fatal term in a labor camp caused him to recognize that survival can result in perpetual alienation: “I would not want now to return to my family [….] That which seems important to them I know is a trifle. That, which is important to me, that little that has been left to me, it will not be given for them to feel or understand.”[44] For Améry, an intense horror persists in the victim owing to an encounter with such antihuman behavior that it is impossible to join “in complete unison in the cry for peace,” because he explains: “I cannot possibly accept a parallelism by which my way would alongside run that of the guys who flogged me with a horsewhip.”[45] Hence, the tortured may resist the “compassion and pity” proffered by Berdyaev’s Christians so that, invaded physically by malevolent predators, they seek to protect the remnants of personality remaining after the torture or to guard their faculties against destabilizing trauma arising from a confrontation with the antihumans.[46]
Since Berdyaev associates Marxism with а destructive objectification of personality, the concept (requiring a relationship with “a superpersonality [сверхличность]”) appears more metaphysical than Dostoevsky’s, whose experience of confinement in the Peter-Paul fortress and katorga better approximate Nazi and Soviet torture, so that Dostoevsky views personality in conjunction with “the law of personality that binds on earth” (Pss, 20:172). Although Améry situates suffering more in the physical realm, Berdyaev cites Dostoevsky to demonstrate that they converge on the point that suffering is the natural reason for consciousness. However, Dostoevsky’s observation that human beings readily adapt themselves to traumatic situations appears to reach its limit with the experience of torture, which is described as an aberration and often treated as a unique event–either in the life of a person or in the history of a nation.
Elizabeth A. Blake is Coordinator and Associate Professor of Russian at Saint Louis University and author of the monograph Dostoevsky and the Catholic Underground (2013) as well as of a collection of annotated translations, Travels from Dostoevsky’s Siberia (2019). Her articles have appeared in edited collections, Slavic and East European Journal, Polish Review, and Dostoevsky Studies and focus on nineteenth-century Polish literature and Dostoevsky or Tolstoy studies as they often explore the dialogue of literary works with Christian traditions, especially Roman Catholicism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Protestantism. She is currently working on two monographs– Dostoevsky, the Siberian that traces the impact of confinement on his creative process (expected completion 2025) and The Faithful Reading Dostoevsky that investigates the author’s appeal to a Christian readership.
Image: Nikolai Yaroshenko, The Prisoner 1878
[1] Nikolai Berdiaev, Samopoznanie. Opyt filosofskoi avtobiografii (Paris: YMCA Press, 1949), 126.
[2]Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag gulag (Saint Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Azbuka, 2017), 106.
[3] Nikolai Berdiaev, Russkaia ideia. Mirosozertsanie Dostoevskogo (Moscow: Biblioteka vsemirnoi literatury, 2016), 338.
[4] Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 29; Leonid Grossman, “Dostoevskii i Evropa,” Russkaia Mysl’ 36 (November 1915), 58.
[5] Donald Lowrie, Rebellious Prophet: A Life of Nicolai Berdyaev (New York, Harper & Bros., 1960), 89-90.
[6] A. V. Lunacharskii, Vospominaniia i vpechatleniia (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Sovetskaia Rossiia,” 1968), 29.
[7] Berdiaev, Russkaia ideia. Mirosozertsanie Dostoevskogo, 399-401.
[8] Nikolai Berdiaev, Ia i mir ob”ektov (Paris: YMCA Press, ND), 172.
[9] This antihero imagines his presence in a Siberian stockade to persist in a grievance against a rival, as a result of which the Underground Man expresses a sentiment, similar to one expressed by Dostoevsky after his release from the Omsk stockade, with the following words of the Underground Man in the indicative rather than the subjunctive: “After fifteen years I will make my way to him[….]I will say, ‘Look, fiend, look at my hollow cheeks and work coat! I lost everything—career, fortune, art, science, favorite woman, and everything because of you” (5:115,150).
[10] Berdiaev, Russkaia ideia. Mirosozertsanie Dostoevskogo, 328. 401; Berdiaev, Ia i mir ob”ektov 146,147, and 149.
[11] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag gulag (Saint Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Azbuka, 2017), 106.
[12] Nikolai Berdiaev, Filosofiia neravenstva: pis’ma k nedrugam po sotsial’noi filosofii (Berlin: Obelinsk, 1923), 7; Tamara Klépinine, comp., Bibliographie des oeuvres de Nicolas Berdiaev (Paris: Institute d’études slaves, 1978), 17.
[13] Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1975), 92-138.
[14] Busch, Karl Barth, 78-80; Karl Barth, Vorträge und kleinere arbeiten 1914-1921 (Theologischer verlag Zürich, 2012), 481-502; Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief (Zurich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1947), 464.
[15] Berdiaev, Filosofiia neravenstva, 54, 58.
[16] Nikolai Berdiaev, Russkaia ideia. Mirosozertsanie Dostoevskogo (Moscow 2016), 187.
[17] Barth, Der Römerbrief, 378.
[18] Caryl Emerson, “Mikhail Bakhtin,” in The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); M. M. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, t. 6 (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 2002), 110.
[19] Eduard Thurneysen, Dostojewski (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, Verlag, 1922), 35, 39.
[20] Nikolai Berdiaev, Russkaia ideia. Mirosozertsanie Dostoevskogo (Moscow 2016), 327. In a sense, Berdyaev’s assessment of the autobiographical novel agrees with Peter Kropotkin’s conclusions from In Russian and French Prisons (Montreal and New York: Black Rose Books, 1991) that “those who wish to know the real influence of Russian lock-ups and prisons on their inmates” should “peruse the remarkable psychological studies by Dostoevsky, M M. Maximoff, Lvoff, and so many others” (162).
[21] Thurneysen cites Zwieg’s study in Dostojewski (3, 5), and in Kaleidoscope: F. M. Dostoevsky and Early Dialectical Theology (Boston: Brill, 2013) Katya Tolstaya notes a reference to the work in an unpublished letter to Barth on March 14, 1921 (236). Joseph Frank describes the correspondence between Freud and Zweig before summarizing Freud’s depiction of Dostoevsky’s “masochistic submission” to a “father-tsar-authority” and an “outraged rebellion against it” in his chapter “Freud’s Case History of Dostoevsky” in Through the Russian Prism: Essays on Literature and Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 109-12.
[22] N. A. Berdiaev, “Velikii inkvizitor,” in O velikom inkvizitore (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1991), 221-222. In fact, Berdyaev subsequently concludes in Ia i mir ob”ektov that “Personality is pain, and many agree to the loss of personality in themselves, since they cannot endure this pain” (145).
[23] Nikolai Berdiaev, Ia i mir ob”ektov, 156, 174.
[24] Berdiaev, Russkaia ideia. Mirosozertsanie Dostoevskogo, 380, 460, 462, 472.
[25] Sergei Bulgakov, Na piru bogov: Pro i contra (Sofia: Rossiisko-Bolgarskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1920), 51.
[26] Berdiaev, Russkaia ideia. Mirosozertsanie Dostoevskogo, 380, 438.
[27] Berdiaev, Ia i mir ob”ektov, 154; Berdiaev, Russkaia ideia. Mirosozertsanie Dostoevskogo, 438-39.
[28] Berdiaev, Ia i mir ob”ektov, 153; Robert L. Jackson, “Dostoevsky and the Marquis de Sade: The Final Encounter,” in Dialogues with Dostoevsky: The Overwhelming Questions (Stanford UP, 1993), 157-58.
[29] Gospoda nashego Iisusa Khrista Novyi zavet (Saint Petersburg: V Tipografii Rossiiskago Bibleiskago Obshchestva, 1823), 275; Barth, Der Römerbrief, 378.
[30] Stephen Zweig, Drei Meister: Balzac, Dickens, Dostojewski at gutenburg.org at https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/36389/pg36389-images.html (accessed June 3, 2024); Nikolai Berdyaev, Konstantin Leont’ev: Ocherk iz istorii russkoi religioznoi mysli (Paris: YMCA Press, 1926), 168-69. This tragic viewpoint is mentioned in Leont’ev’s “O vsemirnoi liubvi: Rech’ F. M. Dostoevskogo na Pushkinskom prazdnike” at Vologodskaia oblastnaia universal’naia nauchnaia biblioteka at https://www.booksite.ru/fulltext/0/001/001/033/26.htm (accessed June 3, 2024).
[31] Glavnoe upravlenie Zapadnoi Sibiri f. 3, op. 13, d.18343, Gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv Omskoi oblasti.
[32] Szymon Tokarzewski, Siedem lat katorgi (Warsaw: Gebether i Wolff, 1918), 61-62.
[33] Blake, Travels from Dostoevsky’s Siberia: Encounters with Polish Literary Exiles (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019), 85.
[34] Linda Ivanits, Dostoevsky and the Russian People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 27.
[35] Hedrick Smith, “Sinyavsky Is Said to Be Living Quietly in Moscow” New York Times (January 18, 1972): 8. Andrei Siniavskii, Literaturnyi protsess v Rossii (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennii gumantarnyi universitet, 2003), 334-35. Andrei Siniavskii mistakenly believes that Dostoevsky was tied to a post, awaiting execution.
[36] Maksimov, Sibir’ i katorga: Politicheskie i gosudarstvennye prestupniki (Saint Petersburg: Tipografiia A. Transhelia, 1871), III:384; Nikolai Iadrintsev, Russkaya obshchina v tiur’me i ssylke (Moscow: Institut russkoi tsivilizatsii, 2015), 152; George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System (Century Company, 1891), I:143-44.
[37] Shalamov, “Dostoevskii,” in Ėsse i zametki. Zapisnye knizhki 1954-1979, vol. 5 of Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Knizhnyi Klub Knigovek, 2013), 209.
[38] Robert L. Jackson, “Philosophical Pro and Contra in Part One of Crime and Punishment,” in Raskolnikov and Svidrigialov (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2004), 23
[39] Dostoevsky separates the prison experience from the encounter at the scaffold in Prince Myshkin’s narrative, when he starts by describing a former prisoner who was being healed by his professor and then changes his narrative to recall a meeting the previous year with a man who had been under sentence of death (Pss,8:51-52).
[40] V. T. Shalamov, “Stikhi v lagere,” in Ėsse i zametki. Zapisnye knizhki 1954-1979, vol. 5 of Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Knizhnyi Klub Knigovek, 2005), 78. Despite her chapter on Shalamov, Leona Toker in Return form the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000) concludes that Gulag poetry and prose history do not coincide, since poetry was often composed in the GULAG whereas prose was written after release (8).
[41] Jean Améry, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (Munich: Szczesny Verlag, 1966), 52, 63.
[42] Walter Ciszek, S.J. and Daniel Flaherty, S.J. With God in Russia (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1986), 103-4.
[43] Améry, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne, 52; Ciszek, S.J. and Flaherty, S.J. With God in Russia, 104.
[44] V. T. Shalamov, “Nadgrobnoe slovo,” in Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrex tomax, vol. 1 (Moscow: Vagrius, 1998), 380-81. shalamov. ru, accessed 7/1/2020: https://shalamov.ru/library/1/2.html.
[45] Améry, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne, 111.
[46] N. Berdiaev, Dukh i real’nost’, 108.