Dostoyevsky, After His Death Sentence Was Revoked, On Life – The Marginalian

“I mean to work very hard,” the youth Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) decided to consider his future in literature, begging his poor mother to buy him books. At the age of twenty-seven, he was arrested for being part of a literary society that distributed books considered dangerous by the tsarist regime. He was sentenced to death. On December 22, 1849, he was taken to a public square in Saint Petersburg, along with a number of other prisoners, where they were to be executed as a warning to the mob. They were read their death sentence, put into their white-shirted execution robes, and were allowed to kiss the cross. Traditional shawls were broken over their heads. Three times at a time, they were put on stakes where they were to be executed. Dostoyevsky, the sixth in line, was acutely aware that he had few moments to live.

And then, at the last minute, a grand announcement was made that the tsar was pardoning their lives – the whole spectacle was organized as a cruel publicity stunt to show the emperor as a benevolent ruler. Then the actual sentence was read: Dostoyevsky would spend four years in a Siberian concentration camp, followed by several years of compulsory military service in the tsar's armed forces, in exile. He would be nearly forty when he picked up the pen again to pursue his literary ambitions. But now, in the unripe moments after he had escaped death, he was very happy, reborn and enjoying a new life.

He expressed his joy in a magnificent letter to his brother Mikhail, which he wrote a few hours after the execution and which was found in the first volume of the out-of-print collection of his complete book, the treasure of 1988. Dostoevsky's books (public library).

A century before Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl gave his hard-earned assurance that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the ultimate freedom of man – to choose one's attitude in any situation,” wrote Dostoyevsky:

Brother! I'm not depressed and I'm not discouraged. Life is everywhere, life is within us, not outside. There will be people around me, and there will be a a person among men and remain one forever, no matter what the circumstances, never lose heart and never lose heart—that's what life is, that's its job. I have seen that. The mind has entered into my flesh and blood… The head that created, lived a high artistic life, realized and adapted to the higher needs of the spirit, that head has already been cut off from my shoulders…

Yet, even with this joy, his life force – who he is as a writer – makes him despair. “Is it possible that I will never hold a pen in my hand?” he asks wistfully, anticipating the next four years in the labor camp. “If I can't write, I'll perish. I'd rather be imprisoned for fifteen years with a pen in my hand!” But he quickly recovers his electric gratitude for the mere fact that he is alive and, assuring his brother not to feel sorry for him, he continues:

I have never lost heart, remember that I have not lost hope… After all, I was at the door of death today, I sat with that thought for three hours, I faced the last moment, and now I am alive again!

In a beautiful testimony to the fundamental truth that when all our forms of self-righteousness die, all that remains among righteous people is love, he writes:

If someone remembers me badly, and if I have a quarrel with anyone, if I make a bad impression on anyone – tell him to forget about that if you can see him. There is no bitterness or resentment in my soul, I want to love and hug at least someone who left this moment long ago.

[…]

When I look back at the past and think how much time was wasted, how much was lost in error, in mistakes, in laziness, in not being able to live; how I have failed to appreciate you, how many times I have sinned my heart and soul – and my heart contracts with pain. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every moment could be an eternity of happiness. Thank you! [If youth knew!]

Half a century before Oscar Wilde wrote his extraordinary book about suffering as a revolutionary force and his escape from prison, where he was imprisoned for loving the one he loved, Dostoyevsky adds:

Now, by changing my life, I am renewed in a new state. Brother! I swear to you that I will not lose hope and I will keep my heart and spirit pure. I will be reborn for the better. That is my whole hope, my whole comfort.

Life in a casemate was already sufficiently fatal to me for fleshly needs which were not entirely clean; before that I didn't take care of myself. Now poverty does not bother me at all, so don't be afraid that material difficulties will kill me.

After spending years in material poverty – though never, mercifully, nearly to the extent that Dostoyevsky endured – and always grateful for how those times made me angry, how they made me less afraid of poverty and hardship, I'm more willing to take risks that others wouldn't, to take materially insecure paths in life (one leading to the birth Choice Brain), I can't help but wonder how much this disturbing experience instilled Dostoyevsky's extraordinary endurance as an artist against the tides of convention and the persistent perception of poverty. It certainly repeats itself everywhere Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishmentand especially Brothers Karamazov; it certainly informed his views on the meaning of life, expressed decades later in the form of a dream, and inspired his insistence on the work that exists to see the beauty in people “despite the multitude of all kinds of tyranny.”

Complete with a young neurosurgeon on the meaning of life as he faces his mortality and Walt Whitman on what makes life successful, then revisit Anna – the love of Dostoyevsky's life, who saved him from poverty and debtors' prison – in the mystery of a happy marriage.