Alexander the Great

I was disappointed years ago when I found that Mary Renault, one of my favorite authors, was writing not only one book about Alexander the Great, but three. I was less interested in him than in her retelling of the Theseus legend, and was fascinated by the Mycenaen period of which we know far less than of classical Greece.

But on rereading the series now, I find that her treatment of Alexander the Great is perfectly in line with her other earlier novels about ancient Greece. Among her concerns is not only good government, but how humans can be better than we usually are. Theseus was her early exemplar of these concerns; it only made sense for her to treat Socrates and Plato, as well as Plato’s friend and disciple Dion of Syracuse, who tried, despite the tragic flaws which caused his failure, to bring good government to Syracuse. Alexander could be seen as a more successful attempt to give what most people wanted at that time–and possibly even at this.

He was Macedonian, and looked down on for that. The Macedonians seem to have been related to the Greeks (Renault depicts their speech as a Doric Greek dialect), but living far to the north of the famous Greek cities they had neither stable government nor intellectual development–until King Philip came along.

He was the first of the kings to not only manage to stay in his position for enough time to accomplish some things, but to also have a vision of what he wanted to accomplish: uniting Macedonia and preventing their neighbors from molesting them, to begin with. Not only that, but to be chosen, by a more or less united Greece, to free the Greek cities on the coast of what is now Turkey. These cities had been conquered during or after the Peloponessian war, and Greeks in general wanted them to be free again–but not to be freed by Philip.

The Greeks had tried most of the possible forms of government: monarchies, tyrannies (a tyrant was roughly the same as a dictator now), oligarchies, and democracies. All had become corrupt.

Alexander was born at the same time a general of his father’s won an important battle, his father’s horse won an important race, and someone burned down an important temple in Ephesus. Lots of omens there, along with dreams of a fire exiting Philip’s wife’s womb. That was almost equivalent to his being of divine birth, something he later claimed. Renault says, in an afterword, that we know very little about his early life, since the memoirs of his friends didn’t survive. We do know, however, that his mother and father didn’t get along.

His mother, Olympias, seems to have been known (with some excuse) as a witch. Renault has a very Freudian scene at the beginning of the novel, in which Alexander gets into his mother’s room at night, and is found there by his father who has come to join her. He is only four or five, but tells his father his mother doesn’t love him, and will marry HIM instead. But it later becomes clear he loves and admires his father TOO. His mother does not, and his father ceases to visit her bedroom.

Instead, Philip finds sex elsewhere, both from women and men (bisexuality is readily accepted in Macedonia, as in southern Greece), and when he is on campaign (frequently) he often takes a wife, even going so far as to go through the marriage rituals, though the connection generally ends after the campaign. These are usually women from barbaric tribes of the general area, and aren’t taken too seriously–except by Olympias. She is perpetually resentful, and her conflicts with Philip repeatedly wound Alexander, as do his own conflicts with his father.

Perhaps this is why he is so appreciative of love when he receives it, why he tries so hard to be better than all the rest so he deserves love, and why he so hates disloyalty. He is practically worshiped by the soldiers who follow him to Asia, where he stays the rest of his life. Eventually the soldiers get tired of continuing conquest, and refuse to go further, but that takes more than a decade.

Renault didn’t believe that he set out to conquer the world, only to free the Greek cities in what is now Turkey. But when, at the battle of Issos, the Persian Great King Darius turned and fled the battlefield leaving behind his wife, mother, and children, Renault has Alexander say he believed he could give the Persians better leadership.

He has been brought up not only with the example of his father, a very able politician as well as military man, but with the examples of Homer’s Iliad, and especially the example of Achilles, whom his family believed to be an ancestor. He readily criticized the high king Agamemnon for his conduct at Troy, which had instigated the events making Homer’s story. He saw that leaders who are seen to be unjust cause terrible trouble, and tried very hard to be just himself. Sparing the Persian royal family was unusual in a war leader of those times, but typical of Alexander’s behavior. It seems possible to say that he almost never killed in anger, and when he did he found it hard to forgive himself. War was a kind of problem for him to solve, and he was extremely talented and inventive in doing so. It was that aspect he loved, not the violence, though of course he was also an excellent fighter, frequently taking terrible risks.

The first of Renault’s novels, Fire From Heaven, is told by an omniscient narrator. The ancient legends are there, but Renault has to infer his early personality from his later. She sees him as a busy active boy, pursuing accomplishment very early, and refusing to allow fear a hold on him.

She has him kill his first man at age 12, without any documentary evidence (killing a man was a way to assert one’s manhood in Macedonian culture), but notes that he was a commander in the Macedonian army at age 16, and has troops following him without objection, strongly suggesting that they already knew he was competent at that age. He also served as regent while Philip was fighting at Byzantion, repelled rebel forces during that time, and founded a city. When Philip went south to fight against Athens and Thebes, who objected to his growing power, Alexander went with him as a commander and his cavalry did much to win the battle–at age 18. Two years later, after Philip was assassinated, Alexander became king, and entered Asia.

Renault’s second novel in the series, The Persian Boy, is told by the “boy” of the title, Bagoas, who is historical. Renault surmises that he was of noble blood.  As he a slave he would thus have commanded a high price, and have been that much more acceptable to Darius who becomes his owner until his defeat by Alexander. Bagoas then becomes Alexander’s lover. Renault portrays him as having been forced, after being castrated, into prostitution, citing the example of Phaedo, one of Socrates’ students (who apparently was freed at least partly through the influence of Socrates). It seems Persian nobility were particularly known for good looks, which made someone like Bagoas particularly desirable as a bedmate. He describes himself, however, as loving Alexander first for his qualities rather than his attractiveness.

Alexander, as was common in both Greece and Macedonia, was bisexual. His first lover was Hephaistion, also of noble blood, and almost his exact age. Renault remarks that ancient sources say Alexander was extremely moderate sexually, which suggests a low sex drive. It may well also reflect how active he was in other arenas almost all his life. As Renault portrays it, Alexander’s initial attraction to Hephaistion is mainly as an understanding friend. The sexual aspect of the relationship comes later. It’s also worth noting that despite his taking Bagoas as a lover, his bond with Hephaistion remained powerful. He was upset to the point almost of madness when Hephaistion died in Babylon. In the novel Bagoas frequently expresses jealousy to the reader, but not to Alexander, who would not have tolerated it.

It’s amazing how much ground Alexander covered. Genghis Khan conquered more territory, but few others came even close. He reached Afghanistan, what is now Pakistan, the area north of Iran known generally as Turkestan, and India. Some traders might have been that far, but probably few others.

One effect of his conquests was to make Greek the lingua franca of the Middle East for some centuries to come. One thing he TRIED to do, but with mixed success, was to encourage his men to accept the Persians and other peoples as their equals. One method was trying to get the Macedonians to prostrate themselves in his presence, as Persians did to the Great KIng. The experiment wasn’t successful. King was an elective office in Macedonia, so his soldiers weren’t going to accept a practice that put them in an inferior position. They were allowed to bluntly express their opinions to their king. Nor were they amenable to accepting the more sophisticated Persians as equals. They resented his having married first a noblewoman of Bactria (somewhere in the vicinity of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Turkestan today), then a daughter of the Great King he had conquered. They wanted him to marry a Macedonian, though Macedonia was far away, but Alexander suited himself in marriage.

Only slightly more successful was his arranging eighty Macedonian soldiers to marry Persian women at the same time he married the daughter of Darius, whom he had defeated. No doubt some couples were happy, but a number got rid of their Persian wives. Some Macedonians were open-minded, but on the whole the culture was xenophobic. One of Alexander’s virtues was being able to assess the worth of men of different cultures.

But Greeks would be mixing with Middle Eastern peoples for centuries to come. Alexander’s empire didn’t last as a whole, but in three major segments until the Romans took over: Macedonia, Seleucia, and Egypt. And even after the Romans became overlords the government of the eastern empire, which survived the fall of the western empire and became known as Byzantine, centered on what is now Turkey, was predominantly Greek. I think it would be fair to say that Greeks never again had a leader as famous or influential as Alexander, though.

Renault points out that the one area in his life that Alexander didn’t manage well was acquiring an heir, which he did nothing about until the last year of his life. His first marriage was to Roxane, the Bactrian heiress, and seems to have been based on attraction to her, so it wasn’t because of indifference to women. Far more plausible is the influence of his parents’ marriage, in which they repeatedly wounded each other. He also married Stateira, a Persian princess, and left her and Roxane both pregnant before he died rather suddenly in Babylon. Though he was still full of plans for the future, Renault believes he was indulging in self-destructive behavior, like drinking too much. This was a common habit for Macedonians, though Alexander wasn’t usually very inclined. But Hephaistion had died two months before, which had had a huge impact on him.

George Gurdjieff, a spiritual teacher, referred to Alexander as “the arch-vainglorious Greek” because his invasion interfered with the teachings of a man (supposedly based partly on an historical figure) he called Ashiata Shiemash in his novel, All and Everything. This is a valid criticism, but Renault points out that Alexander would never have heard that idea: that there was something wrong with war was an uncommon notion until well after his death. Pursuing glory by military means was very acceptable in Greek culture, and Alexander fulfilled that ideal about as well as anyone could.

But, as much as anything, it was his charisma that held his empire together. After his death it came apart quickly. Stateira, poisoned by Roxane, was among the first victims. Among the last were his mother and his son by Roxane. In between, a lot of generals.

Ptolemy had been one of the most successful of these, and had almost immediately decided he wanted Egypt for his kingdom. He got there as quickly as he could, organized an army for defense, and was so successful his dynasty still controlled the country almost 300 years later. Other generals weren’t so skillful or so lucky. Renault sees them as reverting to the Macedonian pattern of civil war after the death of a king. I think it’s something more than that.

Alexander’s charisma was based on his excellence in not only war but government. He wasn’t as successful at the latter, but there too he tried to be just. Macedonians didn’t appreciate Persians (with some exceptions), but Persians in particular appreciated Alexander, who was willing to learn from them and recognize their virtues. It wasn’t just the Macedonian habit of civil war that recurred after his death, but the absence of his charisma challenging each person to be better than he thought he could be–something usually, but not always, greatly appreciated. The army which had loved him reverted to lazier sloppier ways in his absence and the absence of generals who knew how to discipline them. It took more than a decade for the chaos following his death to subside.

It seems usual that a great leader like Alexander may inspire behavior from his followers they would ordinarily not exhibit. Nor does the inspiration commonly last. Perhaps a few of Alexander’s generals (Ptolemy seems to be the best example) continued to follow Alexander’s influence, but many did not. Most tried to fill the leadership vacuum left by Alexander, and were simply unable–which didn’t prevent them from trying. This may have been, as much as anything, part of the mores of the time, or perhaps it was simply part of masculine DNA.

The Greeks in general were less than expert at constructing stable governments. Athens had a blaze of glory in the fifth century BC, but unwisely overreached, and had a long period of degeneration when they became far less than admirable. Sparta was perhaps the most stable Greek state, at the expense of change, but during and after the Peloponessian war, when money entered the country, so did corruption, and Sparta lost its position as the most potent military in Greece. Macedonia had a long history of volatile behavior. Maybe it’s as simple as that. But for whatever reason, the Romans were more skilled at constructing and maintaining stable government, despite periodic civil wars.

The last of Renault’s novels about Alexander (though it’s really about the absence of Alexander) ends with Ptolemy looking back decades after Alexander’s death. Most of Alexander’s relatives and generals are dead. His mother has been stoned to death by survivors of her murders while she acted as regent in Macedonia, but not before she has had Alexander’s retarded brother and his wife killed. Kassandros, who hated Alexander, and was cordially disliked in return, has succeeded her, and has poisoned Alexander’s son by Roxane, an echo of Roxane’s poisoning of Stateira. He has also given an alternate version of Alexander’s behavior to a historian in Athens to try (unsuccessfully) to blacken his name.

But Kassandros hasn’t enjoyed what revenge he has accomplished long. He has died of a disease in which worms ate his flesh while he still lived, another echo, this of King Herod hundreds of years later. His sons are less successful than he, and have also been forgotten. Greek government doesn’t become notable again until the Byzantine empire.

Fyodor Dostoievsky

Looking into the past shows that many old problems recur frequently. Fyodor Dostoievsky was born about 200 years ago in Russia at a time when modern technology had only begun to emerge, but modern problems were already here, if not with the severity they would exhibit later.

His father was a doctor, and the family lived outside a hospital in Moscow. One of Fyodor’s early traumas was the discovery that a little girl with whom he played had been raped and murdered at the age of nine, her body discovered near the hospital.  Dostoievsky would always be concerned about child abuse, and also feel he could have committed the crimes some of his characters do.

Dr. Dostoievsky worried about poverty, but wasn’t too badly paid. He bought a village in rural Russia to achieve financial security, but keeping the farms working during a drought was extremely stressful. Dostoievsky’s mother died of tuberculosis at 37; his father two years later. He was 16 at his mother’s death, 18 at his father’s. There’s a legend that Dostoievsky hated his father for his brutality, and that at his death was first smitten with epilepsy. The other legend was that his father was killed by his serfs. Neither story turns out to be true: Dostoievsky’s father died of a stroke, the peasants immediately sent for the nearest doctor (who couldn’t certify the death), and Dostoievsky never had a seizure until he was in Siberia years later. He later wrote that his childhood had been filled with love, and it seems to have been overall a very positive experience. His father may have been severe, but was also loving and concerned about his family’s future.

His father had put him and his brother in an army engineering school, thinking this would give them occupations with which they could support themselves. But Fyodor had writing talent, and immediately became successful on publishing his first novel, Poor Folk in 1845. He had been influenced by the German ETA Hoffman, the French Balzac, Sir Walter Scott, and the Russians Pushkin and Gogol, but showed enough originality that to the end of his life he was remembered as the author of Poor Folk. One of his early friends, the critic Valerian Maikov, saw him much as he saw himself: as a writer who saw the fantastic being part of real life, and that the depiction of life wasn’t realistic without the fantastic element.

Russia had been a backward country by European standards until the time of Peter the Great, who forced the country to learn new skills. This began a recurring conflict between the “Westernizers”, who looked for inspiration to Europe, and the Slavophiles, who were suspicious of European ideas and trends. Dostoievsky began his career as a “Westernizer”, but circumstances caused him to change orientation.

He became friends with a man named Petrashevsky who had regular gathering that played at liberalism, then began to make more radical noises. Mikhail Bakunin, a revolutionary, didn’t take them seriously, but the Czarist secret police did. The group didn’t agree on everything, but did agree that serfdom was an evil, and should be ended. The author notes that Dostoievsky probably thought liberation of the serfs should come from the Czar, but if it did not, “Then let it happen through rebellion,” he is alleged to have said. An informer had entered the circle, and in April of 1849 Dostoievsky was arrested, with 23 others. (Serfdom actually was ended by the Czar in 1861, earlier than slavery was ended in this country).

The next incident was to become famous too. Dostoievsky and the others were held until late in December, when they were taken out to be executed. Unknown to them, the Czar had decided to pardon each from death, but to condemn them to prison, and for some to lose their civil rights. Dostoievsky was to enter the army after four years of prison, which, the author comments, was actually very lenient compared to usual Czarist practice. The drama was to continue until a firing squad was aiming at the prisoners before they would be told their actual fates. After Dostoievsky was reprieved he later wrote that he sang loudly in his cell from gladness. He was fitted with ten pound shackles to arms and legs that would remain until the end of his prison sentence, and was sent to Omsk, north of Khazakstan.

Probably few would have expected him to live to complete his sentence; he was small, and his health wasn’t very good. He had to labor outside with the other convicts, standing in the river Irtysh to help unload barges in winter. The prisoners didn’t like him, though he often pitied them, so he kept his distance from them too. He felt as if he were being buried alive in prison, but was stubbornly determined to stay alive. He managed to get onto good terms with a number of people who would help him become rehabilitated, meeting many of them in the hospital, where he often was taken.

He felt very isolated most of the time he was in prison, which led him to reevalutate his former attitudes. Lower class prisoners told him and others that in the outer world the political prisoners had wanted nothing to do with peasants and other poor people. “Now you’re in here, you want to be our friends.” Thinking this over, he decided the criminals were fully justified. That led him to think about the “Westernizers” (of which he had been one) who wanted to “enlighten” the peasants without really knowing them, what their virtues and faults were, what they needed and wanted. While he still thought serfdom to be an evil, he began to believe that the Russian peasant was more virtuous (though hardly perfect) than the bourgeoisie because of their humility and willingness to repent, as well as being better than what he considered the inauthentic life of Europe.

After four years he was released from prison and inducted into the army in Semipalatinsk, a pretty dreary army outpost north of Kazakhstan, but at least more free than prison, especially after he was allowed to live by himself. He busied himself making friends who could help him be discharged from the army and eventually be allowed to return to Russia, but only to Tver, which didn’t suit him. He needed to be in St. Petersburg, the center of literary activity. With the help of friends, including the governor of the area, he was able to accomplish this too, returning to St. Petersburg, publishing novels and stories, and starting a magazine with his brother.

The first book he published was The House of the Dead, a story about his imprisonment, which was a sensation. But at the same time as he’d moved back to European Russia he had married. The marriage was an unhappy one. His wife was ill and didn’t get along with him. She had tuberculosis and died from it within three years.

The magazine he started with his brother was quite successful, but its attempt to comment on the Polish rebellion against Russia, suggesting Polish culture was superior to Russian (Dostoievsky did not agree), was more than the censor could tolerate, and the magazine was shut down.

In this time period he had made a potentially disastrous deal in which he had to finish Crime and Punishment in a month (he had had most of a year to work on it, but had made little progress) or a man who had loaned him money would have the right to publish his work for nine years without paying him. He tried dictating to a stenographer, which worked: he finished the novel in time, and he also fell in love with the stenographer and married her, greatly to his benefit. She not only took dictation, but also took charge of his business affairs and took care of him very competently.

But he upset his family when he married, instigating a lot of fighting about money: after the magazine he and his brother started had ended his brother had died, and he now was responsible for supporting his brother’s family. He also had many debts, and creditors hounded him continuously, preventing him from working. Accordingly, he and his wife escaped to Europe in search of places he could write in peace.

But peace was difficult to find. Dostoievsky didn’t like western Europe. He was xenophobic and thought western culture immoral. He also didn’t like what he saw of various national cultures, thinking the Germans arrogant and the Swiss smug.

Besides that, he became addicted to gambling, with disastrous effect to his finances, but which stimulated his writing. It seems to have been a masochistic sort of mechanism, in which he was not only addicted to the thrill of gambling, but to the guilt that resulted from losing all his money. Legend has had it he found the determination to stop gambling, but the biographer doesn’t think so: he says Dostoievsky quit because Germany closed all gambling houses, not to reopen them until Hitler’s regime. But he was able to finish The Idiot in Europe; unfortunately it didn’t sell well.

Crime and Punishment is the first of the novels everyone considers great. It describes horrifying living conditions in the slums of St. Petersburg (Dostoievsky had seen these at first hand), and a university student who has dropped out, and is trying to survive. He wants to help his mother and sister, and decides an effective way would be to murder an old woman pawn broker and steal from her. He reasons that the old woman is both stupid and cruel, so the world would be better off without her, arrogantly believing he’s competent to make such decisions. But he discovers that his conscience won’t allow him to get away with murder, and he feels forced to confess, which then gives him the opportunity to suffer in atonement for his crime.

This is Dostoievsky’s portrayal of what he calls nihilism, something other writers were also treating. Nihilism could be considered the loss of belief in morality, apparently caused by loss of Christian belief, also happening elsewhere in the western world, perhaps in part because of the conflict between science and official Christianity. If one believes in nothing, any kind of behavior could be permissible.

This was also the period in which resentment of the Czarist regime was building, which manifested in terrorist incidents. Such an incident would inspire his novel The Possessed later on.

Meanwhile, as he worked on The Idiot, a novel with a main character based on Jesus, his wife bore him two children, the first of which died very young, to the sorrow of both. Dostoievsky particularly loved children. His own especially, but children in general. He often watched them in playgrounds and struck up conversations with them.

The Idiot’s main character is Russian, coming home after a stay in a sanatorium in Switzerland (where Dostoievsky was living at the time). He is thus a contrast to the Russians bringing western European attitudes back to Russia. He’s also a contrast because he’s not jealous, and is very forgiving, finding excuses for numerous bad behaviors. In this he is much like Jesus, but not in the sense of performing miracles. He is a stranger to the people he meets, and his qualities prompt people to confess to him. That he is unable to make people’s lives better in any other way apparently doesn’t bother Dostoievsky. His empathy is what attracts people (Dostoievsky thought empathy to be perhaps the most important element of Christianity) and his attitude towards the people he interacts with is what may help them. He doesn’t have miraculous powers to do things for them.

This, the biographer explains, is one of the differences in Dostoievsky’s view of Christianity. He is more concerned with attitudes than with actions. Actions follow from attitudes, he believes, and bad actions leading to degeneration provide a sort of fertilizer for remorse and regeneration. This is the opposite of the belief that it’s impossible to recover from any mistake, even if made unconsciously, but wrong attitudes make forgiveness less possible than merely bad behavior, if one is sincerely remorseful and seeks forgiveness.

Dostoievsky and his wife had intended to stay in Europe three months, but stayed there four years longer. They suffered a good deal there between his gambling, which left them chronically short of cash, and fairly often of food; and the loss of their child. Because Dostoievsky also didn’t like Europe he wanted to return to Russia, but couldn’t before he made some money. He did this with his next novel, The Possessed.

This was about nihilism again, and the characters were mostly revolutionaries, revolutionaries who denied the truths of Christianity, and thus were parallels for the apocalyptic events described in the Book of the Revelation. He saw socialism as being prophesied in the Revelation, though his perspective was more Christian than capitalistic. And, whatever the virtues of socialism, The Possessed WAS prophetic about what was to happen in Russia within about forty years.

One of the inspirations of the novel was the murder by Sergei Nichaev, an associate of Mikhail Bakunin, of a student who had refused to cooperate with him. This was exactly the sort of thing Dostoievsky had predicted nihilism would lead to, and affected him especially strongly since he knew the student slightly. Bakunin had said, “As long as God exists, man is a slave. Man is rational, just, free–consequently there is no God.” Irrespective of the logic or illogic of these sentiments, such a sentiment is opposed to that of Dostoievsky at every point. Bakunin’s words are words of rage, underlined by the Catechism of a Revolutionary (probably prepared with help from Nichaev), which calls for either liquidation or exploitation of the ruling classes in every possible way, so they end enslaved if not killed. No evidence of empathy or mercy there, and to Dostoievsky that meant they had lost all the Russian virtues and been possessed, if not by Western atheistic ideas, then perhaps literally by Satanic powers. Certainly the words of Bakunin and the actions of Nichaev presage some of the most terrible actions of the twentieth century. And yet the picture of Nichaev in the biography shows a mild-looking young man. His face seems to show nothing of his will to terrible crimes.

It’s easy to condemn nihilism as amoral, if not immoral, but it’s also true that horrible things have frequently been done in the name of religion. Dostoievsky in fact addresses this later, in his last novel. Of course it’s easy to call for revolution in the name of the people, who will ostensibly benefit from a change in regime. Sometimes that even happens, but those calling for revolution are often only interested in power, and might as easily be found within government.

In the last ten years of his life Dostoievsky wrote A Raw Youth about a young man’s relationship to his father and to someone more a father to him, but perhaps more significantly was his publication of The Diary of a Writer in magazines, which spread his name around the country and gave him the chance to express opinions about a wide range of subjects. It was also during this period his wife undertook the publication of his works, which contributed to paying the family’s debts and putting them on a much sounder financial basis.

But most significant was the publication of Dostoievsky’s last novel, The Brothers Karamazov. This took the form of a mystery: the murder of a father of four sons, and the question of who did it and why.

The old man is known to have been violent and lustful, and is disliked if not hated by most of the brothers. Ivan is the rationalist brother who doesn’t deny the existence of God, but refuses to follow him because of the suffering of children, in particular. He can see no reason for children to suffer, and denies God’s goodness because of that, to the distress of his brother Alyosha, follower of a monk named Father Zosima. Another brother, Dmitri, is a sensualist, and he is blamed for the murder, tried and condemned, even though Ivan rises in court to take responsibility for having at least inspired the act. But Dmitri accepts his sentence because he knows that he too desired his father’s death.

The actual murderer turns out to be an illegitimate brother, son of a mute woman possibly raped by the elder Karamazov. Smerdyakov is a servant of the older Karamazov, and the others may not even know he’s their brother. It is Ivan’s ideas that have freed him to do the killing, but he then commits suicide.

The author points out that Dostoievsky’s view of sin and guilt is much different from much of western religion. He has two different characters speak eloquently of their views of life: Ivan Karamazov and Father Zosima.

Ivan reads a story he has written to Alyosha: About 1500, in Spain, Jesus returns, and roams the country preaching and healing. He is duly brought to the Inquisition and confronted by the Grand Inquisitor, some 90 years old, who tells him that he has done wrong to expect so much of humans. The Roman Catholic church, he tells Jesus, is correcting his doctrine by giving people security and food, and not expecting more of them than they can possibly give. The Inquisitor, the author explains, is really an atheist, though he wishes he could believe in humans as Jesus does. The same is true of modern critics of Dostoievsky’s parable: they wish humans had the strength Dostoievsky credits them with, but are unable to believe it. But Dostoievsky returns to his view that commission of evil can prepare a person for regeneration.

He has Father Zosima say, in his last talk before he dies, that contrite love is the way to approach anyone who has offended, and that no one should look down on anyone, even if they’ve behaved criminally. If YOU had behaved better, he says, maybe your example would have kept them from doing evil.

Father Zosima has two basic beliefs: We live in paradise, but don’t want to believe it. If we truly did, we would directly experience it. And, that all of us are guilty, before all, and of everything.

This latter is like the concept of original sin: if we are ALL sinners, none of us has the right to feel superior to anyone else. It connects also to the quote from Julian of Norwich: “God said, It is necessary that sin should exist, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and every manner of thing shall be well.” The reason sin (or evil) must exist is so each can make his choice. If God controlled all, forcing each person to be good, humans would be unable to make choices, which would exclude from them the possibility of transformation.

This makes the statements of mystics like Father Zosima (who says he came to his conversion because of his own bad behavior for which he felt bound to seek atonement) a matter of consciousness. Like science, which can only measure phenomena available to either the senses or to instruments, rationalists can only acknowledge phenomena they are able to perceive, not realizing that they have the potential to perceive far more, and angrily denying this may be possible. If there is no validity to religion, why are they angry at it, and why do they wish to copy its worst deeds? As the Communists in Russia discovered, attacking religious institutions doesn’t destroy religion.

The Brothers Karamazov cemented Dostoievsky’s reputation in Russia, with the aid of A Writer’s Diary. He was in the public eye the rest of his life, spending time with the nobility and other public figures, giving public readings of his own work, as well as Pushkin’s poetry, and so on. People were moved by his readings to such an extent they called him a prophet (He used to read Pushkin’s poem The Prophet). He still had many ambitions, but was running out of energy.

He died early in 1881, possibly of tuberculosis (his mother had died of that, as had his first wife), but more likely of emphysema since he was a heavy smoker most of his life. He was never wealthy, but the government gave his wife a pension supporting her and their children.

I’ve always found it difficult to understand what Dostoievsky was saying. His work was psychological, but I have found it murky, and needed a good biography to try to unravel his meaning. Henry Miller, in his book about Arthur Rimbaud, Time of the Assassins, includes Dostoievsky with others of the same period who sensed that things were wrong, and called for reformation and regeneration. Nietzsche was another such figure, as was van Gogh. All were religious in some form, though hardly in orthodox ways (Dostoievsky might be considered an exception in this respect).

The biographer says that one thing that makes his work difficult to understand is that he allowed different characters in his novels to debate without manipulating what they say to indicate his own beliefs. Thus, Ivan Karamazov’s legend of the Grand Inquisitor is powerful, and Dostoievsky doesn’t try to undermine its power. Instead, he tries to balance it with the speech by Father Zosima. Of course Father Zosima’s approach to life is much different from the worldly approach. It contradicts the Grand Inquisitor’s use of power to control his world with its emphasis on acknowledgment of guilt and embracing the suffering from it.

The Brothers Karamazov was Dostoievsky’s most powerful novel, as he treated his usual themes of rebellion and criminality even more profoundly than before. He became famous throughout Russia because of it, as well as his Diary of a Writer, and his public speeches and readings. He is said to have read powerfully. With his fame came more money and many more public appearances. He was even invited to meet the Czar, but died before he could.

After more than a hundred years he still has things to say to humans in general. I don’t care for his Russo-centrism and xenophobia, but perhaps these are understandable as a contrast to too much respect for European ideas which, as we see from our present vantage point, were not always very healthy. Russia paid a huge price, at least partly foreseen by Dostoievsky, for accepting ideas that led to Communism. Dostoievsky’s ideas may not have been so wrong.