The following post by Austin Benedetto, an undergraduate student at Northwestern University, is the fifth in a new series of posts highlighting exemplary work by undergraduates with interests in Russian Philosophy, Literature, and Religious Thought. The NURPRT Forum welcomes any undergraduate student to submit academic writing related to these fields to be considered for publication.
Trivial transgressions happen daily, but what happens when wrongdoing becomes major? Is one to mercifully forgive or wrathfully punish? And what happens if you are the evildoer? There is no catch-all answer to these questions, but looking at Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and Demons can help. While these works are long, I will focus specifically on their two protagonists, Prince Myshkin and Stavrogin, who represent the dangers of forgiveness and punishment respectively.
Prince Myshkin is all-forgiving. Consequently, to many he appears as a child and an idiot. No matter the wrong done to him, he is the first to forgive. In theory, this disposition seems unambiguously positive. In reality, his “charity” comes off as haughty and leads to faux repentance. Aglaya, a young bachelorette, deftly describes the predicament of the prince:
You’re more honest than all of them, nobler than all of them, better than all of them… Why do you humiliate yourself and place yourself lower than everyone else?[1]
Despite Prince Myshkin’s lofty feelings, he appears silly. In his attempt to be above guilt and wrongdoing, he ends below his fellow humans. By trying to play the role of God, Myshkin becomes a non-bodily anathema and consequently unrelatable.
Myshkin’s behavior is also unfitting and obtuse. He is so lenient that, when someone extends forgiveness to him, he instead forgives them. His interlocutor responds by insisting that Myshkin should simply “accept [his] forgiveness.”[2] Hearing this, Myshkin becomes confused and asks, “How am I guilty before him?”[3] He sees others as guilty but not himself. Myshkin’s refusal to empathize with others on a horizontal plane of existence makes his universally-forgiving nature seem inhuman and deficient.
But the real failure of his forgiveness is that it spoils the wrongdoer. After the depraved Rogozhin, his rival suitor, immorally runs away with the woman both he and Myshkin were wooing, the Prince instantly forgives him. Rogozhin then responds: “Maybe I never once repented of [the offence], and you’ve gone and sent me your brotherly forgiveness.”[4] There is no incentive for repentance when the malefactor does not face any internal or external consequences.
To further explain this point, Jennifer Jacquet’s work, Is Shame Necessary?, will be useful. Jacquet, a University of Miami professor, elucidates the difference between guilt and shame. Guilt is the “internal judgement of yourself” while shame is an external social punishment from others.[5] Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford neuroscientist, summarizes her thesis: “shaming is particularly useful when the powerful show no evidence of feeling guilt and evade punishment.”[6] Here, the utility of shame is aimed at correcting large corporations that act with impunity. But Sapolsky’s maxim could similarly apply to Myshkin’s failures. Recognizing one’s actions have negative consequences is a necessary component to personal and collective transformation, and Myshkin permits people to forego this vital aspect by letting them move on too quickly.
Not only is the wrongdoer unredeemed, but Myshkin, the forgiver, gets hurt as well. At the novel’s end, after Myshkin has lost both the women he pursued, he still holds on to hope that all will be understood and forgiven. Yet, as another character explains: “No Prince, she won’t understand! Agalya Ivanovna loved you as a woman, as a human being, not as… an abstract spirit. You know, my poor Prince, most likely you never loved either of them!”[7] Myshkin has, in effect, punished himself. By acting without regard for his fleshly limitations, he foregoes the chance for human reconciliation and communion.
Now, hopefully the failures of Myshkin are apparent, but this begs the question: is forgiveness even useful? Instead, should we punish wrongdoers so they can internalize the repercussions of their behavior? Guilt and shame may, to some degree, be necessary, but Stavrogin’s excesses exhibit the flip side of the coin. In his character, one sees the hazard of total, caustic punishment.
Stavrogin is physically absent throughout much of Demons, but his presence is always felt. He operates in a similar way to the secret police of the Soviet Union. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes their power as one that “control[s] people’s freedom” and that “everyone feels [the police’s] presence; but it’s as though [they] didn’t exist.”[8] Power is terrifying when it is intangible. There is no way to rebel; instead, a clandestine force tortures its victims through uncertainty. Stavrogin shares many of these qualities. While he is rarely seen, much of the book’s drama unfolds through his indirect command.
Despite Stavrogin’s aura of invincibility and strength, he is internally very weak. While his motives are shrouded in ambiguity, Stavrogin’s cowardice becomes clear as his hometown is overcome by terror and murder. While he does acknowledge that he is at fault, he fails to take real responsibility. Stavrogin writes that he is “afraid of suicide, because [he is] afraid of magnanimity.”[9] Moral value contradicts Stavrogin’s conclusion that everything other than matter is superfluous – and, more than anything, he fears being wrong as that would make him an abhorrence. Thus, despite recognizing his wrongdoing, he feigns indifference to his moral shortcomings. He is trying to trick himself into meaninglessness. Yet, if he really was confident in amorality, he would not be afraid.
However, Stavrogin does kill himself. So, does he overcome his fear of immaterial value? No, this action is dastardly. As the Bishop Tikhon alludes to and Elie Wiesel wrote: “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference” — and while Stavrogin claims to feel nothing, he evidently does.[10] Thus, his suicide serves as an escape from mercy. He avoids the real punishment: living with his actions and being forgiven by those he offended.
Stavrogin is a character trapped between subconsciously feeling meaning while simultaneously wanting it to be false. He is the inverse of the absurd man. Stravrogin feels meaning but wishes there to be none while the absurd man wishes there to be meaning but feels none. When Stavrogin confesses his crime, he is too ashamed to read his writing aloud – yet he also purposefully belittles himself and later admits: “I want to forgive myself, and that is my chief goal, my whole goal!”[11] A longing for forgiveness is at the heart of his actions, but as Tikhon concludes: Stavrogin “will throw [himself] into a new crime as a way out” from reconciliation.[12]
Hopefully, Stavrogin’s failure is clear. Instead of accepting his wrongdoing and possible redemption, he annihilates himself. While he wishes to be forgiven, he believes his actions are so base that they are irreconcilable with the morality he secretly feels. Yet, by renouncing forgiveness in favor of punishment, he is left with only destruction and his “demon” — Stavrogin’s inability to accept moral value.[13] He confesses, but no lesson has been learned.
From the examples of Stavrogin and Myshkin, we might surmise that some form of forgiveness is beneficial, but total exoneration may be impossible. To reference Robert Sapolsky once again: “forgiving someone does not mean you’ve forgotten what they did.”[14] One cannot completely be washed away from guilt. Even the risen body of Jesus continued to carry the wounds his crucifiers had inflicted upon him. In a similar vein, Tikhon proclaims: “In sinning, each man sins against all, and each man is at least partly guilty for another’s sin. There is no isolated sin!”[15] Therefore, we, unlike Myshkin, must recognize both our humanity and our consistent wrongdoing. But how does one go about that?
This is not easy. As Dostoevsky pontificated in “A Lie is Saved by a Lie,” people are great at rationalizing their errors. A more contemporary analysis of this phenomenon has been done by Jonathan Haidt. He calls it “moral dumbfounding” – actions we cannot explain are “followed by clunky post-hoc rationalizing.”[16] As Stalin famously said: “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.” By creating narratives or obscuring the fact that we are harming other dignified people, it becomes easy to rationalize (or at least hide from) our actions. This heuristic also explains why ideology, like that of Stalinist Russia, is so infectious.
As Sapolsky makes clear, on the evolutionary time scale, linguistic metaphor has been around for so little time that our brains have not evolved to deal with symbols. Therefore, humans “are actually pretty lousing at distinguishing between the metaphorical and the literal” (e.g., when we call someone a cockroach, the same part of the brain is activated as if there really was a bug).[17]
Given that these issues are hardcoded into us, finding a path to proper reconciliation will be difficult. How do we get people, unlike Myshkin, to realize our shared human folly, and, unlike Stavrogin, live with guilt and forgiveness? The answer, I believe, can be found by examining Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.
In the gulags, most of the inmates were wrongly imprisoned, and Solzhenitsyn aptly condemns the Soviet Union’s depravity. Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn came to appreciate his time in the gulags from a spiritual perspective. This development is chronicled in the chapter “Ascent,” which I will focus on.
Solzhenitsyn asserts Dostoevsky “who served time himself, was a proponent of punishment!”[18] This is because “the quiet compels profound pondering over [the prisoner’s] own ‘I.’”[19] Discipline allows the punished to feel their action’s consequences and think about their shortcomings without distraction. Instead of using our brains’ quick shortcuts to avoid guilt, we enter a conscious mental space: one where we are able to understand our behavior more thoroughly.
While Solzhenitsyn’s realization came about through hardship, his writings allow the reader to see (though perhaps not act on) this truth more quickly. Solzhenitsyn, after grappling with the idea of “survival at any cost,” declares: “It is not the result—but the spirit! Not what—but how. Not what has been attained—but at what price.”[20] He is actively feeling moral value and shunning pure consequentialism: the belief that only the outcome is important. This is good, but it is not enough. Stavrogin realized that he transgressed but chose to reject the possibility of redemption.
Fortunately, Solzhenitsyn goes one step further. His mind began “to transform [itself] in a direction most unexpected.”[21] Whereas before he “never forgave anyone,” now he has “come to realize [his] own weakness” and “the weakness of others.”[22] This honest reflection is the path to reconciliation that can bring about true togetherness. He both recognizes his guiltiness and others’. He can now live with the consequences of wrongdoing knowing all humanity shares in the guilt.
Self-examination produces this gradual discovery. Solzhenitsyn can actively see the failures of his own mind and the Soviets who wrongly imprisoned him. Yet, he does not begrudge those who persecuted him. He pities evildoers, including himself, knowing they are really damaging themselves. The most famous passage from Solzhenitsyn’s ascension goes as follows:
In my most evil moments I was convinced I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there sitting on rotting prison straw that I sensed myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.[23]
These truths, while discovered in prison, do not require jail time. They require conscious awareness, but this is difficult. It requires less energy to blame others and leave ourselves unexamined than to consciously think about our “human heart.”
Still, one could easily misinterpret Solzhenitsyn’s thinking: if everyone is partially evil, can we just sin and defuse the blame? These are eternal, “accursed” questions, and I do not purport to know the answer in its entirety. Nevertheless, I submit Bahktin’s idea that “there is no alibi for being” is a step in the right direction. We must take personal responsibility for our moral actions. We cannot blame ideology, other people, or even genetics for our behavior.
In his well-known commencement speech, David Foster Wallace says: “there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”[24] This idea of choice lies at the heart of Bakhtin’s non-alibi. We get to choose what we pay attention to – and this includes our actions and our hearts. By grappling with our own responsibility, we practice a form of self-punishment – and this is pedagogically redeeming in a way that Myshkin’s total forgiveness and Stavrogin’s extreme punishment are not. This “punishment,” however, is only useful when coupled with the possibility of reconciliation. After all, as humans, while we do sin and act unjustly, we also possess the capacity for redemption and supreme goodness.
Much of this may seem obvious. Of course, we are all humans and err. However, this realization is often subconscious. In the aforementioned speech, Wallace also says: “this is water,” referring to the banalities people frequently overlook.[25] We rarely think about the commonplace truths learned in childhood and thereby forget them. Thus, it is good to actively remember that what is trite is often true: “there are consequences to your actions.
Image: Taras Shevchenko, Among Robbers 1856-7.
[1] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 342.
[2] Dostoevsky, The Idiot, 341.
[3] Dostoevsky, The Idiot, 341.
[4] Dostoevsky, The Idiot, 365.
[5] Robert Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), 502.
[6] Sapolsky, Behave, 502.
[7] Dostoevsky, The Idiot, 583.
[8] Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn and Edward E. Ericson, The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation [Abridged]. (New York: HarperPerennial, 2007), 69.
[9] Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons, Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 676.
[10] “Elie Wiesel.” Oxford Essential Quotations. Edited by Susan Ratcliffe. (Oxford University Press, 2016): https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780191826719.001.0001/q-oro-ed4-00011516.
[11] Dostoevsky, Demons, 710.
[12] Dostoevsky, Demons, 714.
[13] Dostoevsky, Demons, 712.
[14] Sapolsky, Behave, 641.
[15] Dostoevsky, Demons, 708.
[16] Sapolsky, Behave, 483.
[17] Sapolsky, Behave, 558-559.
[18] Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 304.
[19] Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 304.
[20] Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 309.
[21] Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 308.
[22] Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 309.
[23] Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 312.
[24] David Foster Wallace, This is Water. (FS Blog, 2005): https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
[25] Wallace, This is Water.