Rev Left Radio - Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Great Russian Novelist and Proto-Existentialist

Episode Date: January 15, 2022

In this episode, Corey Mohler (from Existential Comics) returns to the show, this time to discuss the life, religion, politics, art, and psychology of the 19th century Russian literary giant Fyodor Dostoevsky - one of the greatest novelists of all time and the author of Crime and Punishment, The Brother Karamazov, The Idiot, Notes from the Underground, and many more!  Check out Kung Fu Chess here: https://kungfuchess.org/ Outro Music: "Lotus Flower" by Radiohead ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Christian, in his view, is someone who totally dissolves power. And it's like, he almost thought through Christian enlightenment you would achieve a sort of communism because Christians, the monk, gives up all his worldly possessions and treats all of humanity as a brotherhood, right? So he thought almost you would dissolve power structures through Christianity, not through socialism. So I think his critique of the right would be sort of, yeah, this kind of might makes right power worshipping people are

he says those are not Christians those are real conservatives and those those don't have the best interest of the people at heart so yeah I mean then the fascism would be the absolute culmination of that but I don't think he had critiques of that because you don't really he didn't really see that kind of thing I mean he was a nationalist

so more more close to the fascists in a lot of ways but just not that kind of nationalist he was a pacifist as well he thought war was anti-Christian obviously which I mean it should be, you would think, but obviously not in the real

world, but yeah. I would love to get his take on modern day U.S. white evangelical Christians. Yeah, it's amazing to think, I think this is one of the reasons why you read Dostoevsky and these older conservatives is because the right today is so intellectually bankrupt. You know, you want to like study your enemies and understand what they think. It's like,

who do you even read? Exactly, I know. It's hard to get a grip on conservative. They're just totally reactionary idiots, most of them, the big ones. So it's like, it's nice to go back and read these people who actually had a deep understanding of human psychology and society and had a much different view, you know. 100%. Like, yeah, who's a conservative intellectual, fucking Ross Duth out? I literally wouldn't even know. Yeah, exactly.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have back on the show, a friend of the show, friend of mine, Corey Moller from existential comics, this time to talk about the life, work, politics, and legacy. of Fyodor Dostoevsky. This is a really interesting one, and actually it was started because a listener reached out to me, and I really apologized to this listener because I copied what they sent me, but I left out their name. So I would give you a shout out.

I will in the future if you reach out to me and let me know it was you. But the message from our listener said, I always love to see Rev Left foray into philosophical territory. I know Corey was just on for the free will conversation, but I think it would be fascinating to hear him come on and talk about Dostoevsky sometimes since he has brought it up on several episodes. I think Corey would be perfect person to tackle this, as

the topic of Dostoyevsky obviously doesn't seem to be on the surface very revolutionary. I mean, hell, he even wrote an entire book to satirize early Russian revolutionaries, but I think he would be able to do a good job showing the profound breadth of Dostoevsky's life and work, such as the

deeply existential themes, his early involvement with utopian socialist circles, and his association with other revolutionary intellectuals like Bakunin, Nekrosov, Balinski, his own grassroots tendencies, etc. In my own experience, one does not have to necessarily agree with Dostoevsky's message in order to appreciate both his writing style and his work. So I actually copy-pasted that, sent that to Corey after I received it, and Corey immediately said, let's do it.

So this is that episode, and I'm really proud of it. It's really fun and different, and you rarely hear a conversation on Dostoevsky from an explicitly left-wing perspective that tries honestly to wrestle with the contradictions of Dostoevsky's politics and his writing what the left can and can't take from him, what his critiques of the left and the right and liberal capitalists were, et cetera. And I think we made a unique contribution in that regard with this episode. Another thing I didn't get to mention the episode that I really wanted to because it hits close to home to me for obvious reasons was that in 1868,

Dostoevsky and his wife lost their three-month-old daughter, Sonia. And his wife said about Dostoevsky's reaction to that. Quote, I was terribly afraid for my unhappy husband. His despair was stormy. He wept and sobbed like a woman as he stood before the cold body of his darling and covered her pale little face and little hands with ardent kisses. Such stormy despair I have never seen. That was his wife commenting.

on his reaction to the loss of their three-month-old daughter. So as you hear in this episode, Dostoevsky suffered in numerous, intense ways throughout his life, psychologically, punitively with regard to the Tsar estate and his time in prison, just forced time in the military, the loss of his three-month-old daughter, which had to be absolutely devastating, and the degeneral turmoil of his inner life throughout his entire existence. but that spoke to me very deeply as someone who lost not a three-month-old but a pregnancy and the very unique sort of despair that comes with losing a child.

Something Karl Marx also went through. I would urge people if they're interested in that to check out. I think the book's called Love and Capital, where they talk about Carl Marx's reaction to the loss of his, in one case, his young son and how people had to hold Carl back from jumping into the grave that, you know, know, with the coffin of his son, because he was so distraught, so overwhelmed with despair and sadness. And as a parent, I deeply relate to that stuff and it stands out to me. But, yeah, I'm very, very happy with this episode.

I think you'll like it as well, whether or not you have an intimate understanding of Dostoevsky and his work. I think it's really interesting because it's also taking place in the mid to late 1800s in Russia, right? A few decades before the Bolshevik Revolution. So that adds a very interesting element, a historical element, to the entire life of Dostoevsky. And, of course, he was also a contemporary with Karl Marx. He knew Bakunin personally.

He was a contemporary of Nietzsche. And although he did not read Nietzsche, Nietzsche did read him because Nietzsche really wasn't famous until after his death, whereas Dostoevsky was famous during his life. And so that allows for translations to be made and shipped across the continent, etc. So for that and so many other reasons. this is a really wonderful episode. I'm really excited to share it. Now, we do mention his critique of utopian socialism, right? And we mention a little bit this difference between Marxism and utopian socialism. If you're interested in that, the first ever read Menace episode we did

was on the text by angles, socialism, utopian, and scientific, which really is a Marxist reaction to the utopian socialists that Dostoevsky was criticizing as well. Obviously, the lines of criticism are very different, but to flesh out that historical and political theory element of utopian socialism, definitely check out the first ever episode of Red Menace. And as we mentioned in this episode, Corey was on Partially Examine Life, a great podcast, one of the instrumental podcasts for me, one of the first ones I ever got into. It's all about philosophy. He was on specifically just to talk about the idiot, the book by Dostoevsky.

So if you want to deep dive into that text in particular, go hunt down that episode. And of course, Corey's been on Rave Left many times. The last time was a couple months ago to discuss free will, but he's been on several times before that. So if you like Corey, as you should, as we all do, you can go and search for his name in our lips and feet or whatever. And all the episodes we've done with Corey will come up. And I highly recommend that. So without further ado, here is my wonderful conversation with Corey Moller from Existential Comics on the Life, Work, and Legacy of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Enjoy.

All right, well, I'm Corey Muller, best known as the guy who makes existential comics, and I'm here to talk about Dostoevsky. Welcome back, Corey. I think the last conversation we had was on the question of free will, and in the wake of that conversation, an audience member reached out and said, you know, Corey constantly mentions Dostoevsky. Maybe you should have a full episode on him, and that's what we're here to do. So shout out to that listener.

And yeah, let's kind of dive into it. It's really an interesting historical character, obviously a giant in literary fiction, and some interesting politics, which aren't always examined when you go through regular documentaries or attempts to cover Dostoevsky and his life. So I guess first and foremost, just to start out, who was Dostoevsky, and why is he so well known and respected as a literary giant? Yeah, well, right, like you said, I guess we're having this episode because I can't shut up about it, talking about anything else. But, well, he was a Russian author. Obviously, I'm sure most people have at least heard his name. He's a giant in literature, as, you know, most people know, along with Tolstoy. He's the, you know, particularly in Russian literature, it's like those two who were contemporaries. They were writing around the same time are the biggest figures in Russian literature and two of the biggest figures in the world. He was massively influential in literature.

And most people know him as a literature person or, you know, people kind of maybe kind of know he was famous writing these existentialist novels. but he did write political novels as well. Demons was one of the most important political novels of the era. It's kind of of his four major novels, probably one of the more forgotten ones today. None of them are forgotten. People still read them all. And this was like his major works were getting completed

like in the 1860s, 1870s. They were deeply psychological. He would examine the psyches of, you know, sometimes deranged people, but often very normal people as well, to explain sort of the human condition and how we live our lives. I would say that's probably the,

you know, the most surface level summary of him. Yeah, absolutely. And he was, as you said, active in the mid to late 1800s, particularly. So he was a contemporary of people like Marx, like Nietzsche and others, although we'll get into later the difference politics and the differing philosophies. There's a lot to cover on that front. But I think maybe we should just move into just a general discussion about his biography, which is, you know, aside from his works, his biography in and of itself is absolutely

fascinating and twisted and at certain times dark and terrifying. So can you talk about his biography, his personal life, maybe his personality, and you can take that question in whatever direction you want. Sure. Yeah. I mean, his biography is more dramatic than most of his novels. A lot of his novels, actually, there's not that much going on. A lot of them are kind of psychological and examining people talking. It's like his biography was pretty wild. So he was born in 1821 to a kind of, you know, Russia at that time was divided into like the aristocracy and the serfs. Obviously, he was a member of the aristocracy, but a poor member of the aristocracy. Not like a lot of these other authors were much more influential. and rich. His family owned, his father was like a country doctor, and they owned like eight serps. His father was like a super old school domineering, strict man, very cruel, an alcoholic. You know, that's kind of a picture you can get from that. His mother, on their other hand, despite living what was probably a pretty terrible life, was constantly cheerful, loving. I guess he kept a penant of her all the time after she died that said,

I have a heart full of love. When will you have it at your turn? Like that was a quote that she would say. And she died when he was 15 years old of like typhus or something. So he was left with just his father. He wanted to become a writer, of course, early on. But they were a little too poor to kind of, you know, be a writer. He wanted his, he wanted Dostoevsky to become an engineer.

He forced him in engineering school. But about six months. into his degree, his father died, and, like, there was rumors around, or it's like a myth, or I don't know if it's true, but that he was murdered by his own serfs. And apparently, like, he was such a bastard that the neighbors were like, eh, fair enough, you know, but, like, they didn't even really investigate the matter. Right. They're like, sure. That sounds like, because he was particularly cruel to his serfs. Right. And didn't he basically use his authority to sexually take advantage of the women's serfs that he was under his tutelage?

Yeah, I mean, we don't really know, I think, much because it's not, nobody was writing stuff like that down, you know, like, it's not documented. But, yeah, he was very cruel. And that's why, like, I said, imagine getting killed by your serfs and having the neighbor aristocracy, be like, yeah, he deserved it. Fair and fair play to the serfs. You know, like, that's the kind of reputation he had. So we don't know exactly what he was doing to the serfs. But, you know, he was a very cruel man, we'll just say that. And from Dostoevsky's journal, by the way, he wasn't that resentful.

towards his father, which is kind of curious. But he filled, he owed it to his father still to finish his engineering degree. And he actually did finish the engineering degree. During school, at this time, his epilepsy began. And that's something, epilepsy back then was even a lot worse than it is now. Like, they have some drugs that can control it. It was like a horrible disease back then. You could die at any time like that.

And you would have these horrible seizures that would go on and on. But he did start, like on the side writing novels. and he managed to, through some kind of connections, get some important people to read his novel, and then they got an even more important person to read his novel, which is Balinski, who was like the most important literary critic at the time in Russia. And this was a novel called Poor Folk.

It was like a correspondence novel between like a young woman and an older man, and she needed help, and he was going to kind of help her, but it was maybe he was looking for other things too. and Balinski read it and immediately declared Dostoevsky, the new Gugol, he's a genius. He breaks into Dostoevsky's dorm room, I guess, or whatever at the university, kisses him on one cheek and then the other and says, you're a genius, right? And Dostoevsky is a person who has a very extreme personality and very, so this just absolutely goes to his head. He believes he's the second coming of Shakespeare, which actually kind of turned out to be true,

you know, in history, but you can imagine a young person who believes this extremely obnoxious. He's anointed the greatest genius in Russia in his mind by this great man. And then he writes his second novel called The Double, which is about a schizophrenic person who's seeing a sort of a doppelganger following them around town. Maybe it's real, maybe it's not kind of thing. It's sort of like an experimental psychological novel. Balinski hates it. He thinks he's moving into psychological.

Balinski is sort of like represents the Russian intellectuals at the time where he's just kind of this liberal thinker, high-minded European ideals, which ends up being the sort of thing that Dostoevsky is going to turn against later in his life. But he thought Dostoevsky should write more political novels about liberalism and how we should be enlightened. And he didn't like this cycle. He's reading this novel like about this schizophrenic. And he's like, what the hell am I reading? you know so again dasu esky is one of these people that can be massively egotistical but also massively fragile at the same time because of his extreme personality so he takes this very badly um so he more or less gets ostracized from the or ostracizes himself from the russian

liberal intellectual uh circles and you know also another thing about is like those liberals are kind of boring and datsue eskis finds him too boring uh but he gets uh At this point, he falls in with what's called the Pesteroshevsky Circle, which is some kind of utopian socialists. It's like an underground circle. They may be running underground printing presses and printing illegal pamphlets and stuff like that. But it's like pretty mild stuff. They're not Bakunin.

Bakunin was also around at this time, more important than Marx. He was a contemporary Bakunin because that's what was happening in Russia. They're not trying to like assassinate the Zon. or like overthrow this world violently, but there is possibly some talk of that. You know, there are possibly a few people in there who are thinking like,

look, we are going to need violence realistically. So there's like discussions of this and stuff. And the czar, you know, had had an assassination attempt on him, so he's very nervous about stuff like this. There's a, you know, a government

person infiltrates it and they're all arrested. He's arrested and he's taken to St. Petersburg and put it in this prison called the Peter and Paul Fortress. And this is like a Bikunin was actually in the same prison at one point. And there was one commentator that said, you know, the czars throughout history always like to give all this money away for social causes to like support the arts, you know, like support authors and Russian culture. And he said that prison created more artistic geniuses than all the social programs combined.

And Dostoevsky believed definitely that human suffering would cause the ability to become a genius in some ways or to see the human condition more clearly. But the conditions in the prison are pretty just unreal. So he was in there for eight months in solitary confinement and was physically tortured, supposedly didn't give up information. I don't know what they were really looking for, but he was physically tortured for a while and then psychologically tortured extremely, being in. solitary confinement and to the point where they even like when the guards came to give his food they put like silk wrapping over

their shoes so their shoes wouldn't make any noises so that way he had to live in total silence for the entire eight months like as a kind of mental torture so this is the kind of prisons of the czar was running you know then eight months into the

prison stay he is suddenly grabbed pulled out into the cold September Russian air at night. So it's extremely cold. They just have shawls on. Some of them are naked even. And they're pulled out and told it's time you're going to be executed.

They're by firing squad. They're lined up. There's not enough spots to execute them all at once. Dostoevsky's like in the second group. And he talks about this in The Idiot. He says, oh, there was a monk I knew who was part of a mock execution. So if you want to read about his account of this, it's in the idiot. So he's in the second group, and he looks at his comrades who are about to be shot.

He figures he has about five minutes to live. And he thinks, oh, what should I do with my final five minutes? He spends two minutes saying goodbye to his comrades, two minutes to make his peace with God, and then one minute to think about his life. That was his plan. And then he sort of famously looks up at the cathedral. and there's like light reflecting off the cathedral and he thinks he's just minutes away

from going up like through the light to be with God or whatever, you know. I should say also like he was kind of a liberal utopian socialist himself at this time, but he was still a Christian his whole life, although he had severe doubts about Christianity. So he thinks he's about to die.

This was just further psychological torture. The czar has a messenger right up. Right is that they raise the rifles to shoot the people, you know, and the messenger rides up and says, the czar and his infinite wisdom and has given you charity and your sentence is commuted to five years

in penal servitude, which is not a great sentence either, but he goes up now to a Siberian prison, which is even worse than probably the one in Petersburg, and he writes about that in the notes from the house of the dead. It's sort of a novel, but it's clearly about himself living this Russian prison describing the conditions

very vividly of Russian prison and you know prisons those days were like he didn't get this punishment but most of the actually the reason he didn't is because he was kind of considered a sense of intellectual and wouldn't be able to stand it they thought he would die but like most of the sentences were like five years in hard labor prison in Siberia and 1,500 lashes you know

so they would beat them sometimes to death and he witnessed this but he only serves four years of the sentence and then he has to go to military service, also in Siberia, in the cold parts of Siberians and fortress after his prison sentence. And just really quickly, just so you can get a sense of how old he was, when he was in the Siberian labor prison camps, so he's like roughly 28 to 32.

So this is like a crucial period of time. I'm 32 right now. So like looking back over the last four years, imagine being in like the worst fucking part of the world. Yeah, the worst for, so he was in eight months solitary confinement, four years in penal servitude, and then five years in military service, which was also horrible.

So that's like the 10 years of his 20s were lost to this, you know? So you can imagine, yeah, you can imagine the psychological torture this took on him, especially, and you know, like I said, it knows from the House of Dead. He's going to describe it pretty vividly having witnessed this. But for his political development, though, this is also an important part because this is the time when he leaves kind of the elite, liberal, intellectual, aristocratic circles and gets to meet the real Russians in prison.

Like in the penal quality, he sees real, you know, quote unquote, real Russians, like the peasants. He mingles with all classes and all of the most underclass part of society. He gets to talk with these people really understand them, which is, of course, something he thought none of the utopian socialists ever did. So he meets his wife while he's serving in the military. but she's going to die a few years after and this is again just this one thing on top of the other

like on his wedding night he had a horrible epileptic seizure that's how he began his married life he was genuinely in love with her but she dies of consumption which is tuberculosis which was very common back then

there were periods in Russia where 25% of the population their cause of death was tuberculosis and now we get to the point where he starts writing his real famous works starting with notes from the underground, which is a novel about, you know,

a horrible man who's spiteful and lashing out about society. And he's literally writing this novel with the corpse of his wife on the, like, on the table. It was like the custom of that time when you died, they would leave the corpse on the table for three days. And he was writing notes from the underground. So if you think about how nasty this character is in the novel, you can see the psychological state that he was in writing it.

After going through all this suffering, having a little glimpse of maybe this wife that he was going to, you know, have a new life with, and then she dies. And he writes notes from the underground, which is totally changed literature. And the novel after that is, again, he's going to write crime and punishment, which really cements him as a rising celebrity or, like, his, cements his status within Russian society as a great author, really. He's now becoming very popular.

But so him and his brother started this kind of publishing company or something like that. and then his brother died and at this point he's going to become in horrible financial ruin essentially he owes all kinds of debts a publisher says to get him out of it he'll pay off all his debts he'll pay his living wages

for two years he'll get out of the two years debt free all he has to do is write a novel of a certain length give it to the guy he would get all the profits for that novel and own the rights But he says, you have to give it to me within 48 months, within two years, or, you know, within two years, I should say. Right. And if you don't give it to me within two years, I will own the copyrights to all your past works and all your future works, right? Because he knows Dostoyevsky.

People know what he's like. You can make deals with him, and he's not going to follow through, right? So he says, you have to do it. So what does Dostoevsky do? Right. He has two years to write this novel. Well, one year and 11 months go by, and not a single word has been written. And so he's in a panic, right?

His whole life is going to be, you know, he's not going to be able to be a writer anymore. This guy's going to own everything. And you can't write a novel in one month of that length. So he's asking people what to do, and he hears of this French author that supposedly would dictate his novels and could write 40 pages a day dictating novels to a stenographer. So he goes and finds the stenographer. for a young woman, and it works out. He writes the gambler, and he turns it on the very last day,

and then he essentially proposes to his stenographer, and they get married, and she's a big force in his life and settling him down and allowing him to write his real greater novels later on. But he still is in debt. He now becomes, he just finished writing the gambler. That was already based off his own experiences, as being addicted to gambling, but it's only going to get worse

when he travels to Europe and he goes to Switzerland and starts really gambling. He loses all his money. He loses all his wife's money, his new wife. They contact her brother and send us some money so we can at least get back to Russia

and I can start writing again. He gambles all that way too. He loses all the money. It's just a disaster. At some point, he sees this famous painting called the body of the Christ in the dead tomb and he's which is like a the it's like a realistic painting of Christ with his body decomposing in the tomb and this affected Dostoevsky very much

because it was like a depiction of Christ as a human being rather than a God and then that kind of caused in the idea of to write the idiot which is his most religious novel about sort of a Christ-like figure in modern Russia and it's a disaster because modern Russia can't handle the idea of unconditional love. But at that point, he just suddenly wakes up one day and never gambles again, moves back to Russia and begins to write again. Was there any explanation for why that shift happened? There was not.

He just wakes up one day and says, it's out of my system. I'm done with it. It's bizarre. But yeah, never gambled again. And there's no reason really given. But then he starts to write, when he's back in Russia, he writes the devils, which is his most political novel. It's like a novel about, I mean, kind of Bakunin kind of people and

revolutionaries. We'll talk a little more about the themes later. But then towards the end of his life, he's going to write his real ideas down and get everything out. And that's going to be the Brothers Karamazov, which is kind of a 900-page book, but it's like a 900-page introduction to the idea he really had, which is how to solve the problem of suffering, solve the problem of being religious without being naive, while fully understanding science and forming a good society. He dies before he writes books two and three,

but nonetheless, the brothers Karamazov is often considered one of the greatest novels ever written and is read by a wide, wide section of society. It's his crowning achievement, his masterpiece? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And right before he dies, he also gives this commemorative a speech to Pushkin that's like does kind of out where he finally gets to have a great moment in Russia where everybody's listening and he gets to outline sort of his vision for society and then he dies shortly after that partly because he got so aggravated at the people criticizing his speech that his health deteriorated but yeah that's that's basically his biography fascinating yeah so a couple of things to add to that when you did a great job

the mental psychology of him cannot be you know understated because it was the sort of impetus and force behind his penetrating writing he was like hypochondriatic right like in the in the prison cell he would write about you know he felt as if the floor was moving strange feelings in his chest constantly feeling himself to be sick or getting sicker and that comes up in like notes of the underground when the protagonist is talking about his liver but refusing to go address it he obviously had this addictive compulsive element to his personality at least in the first half of his life this spiritual and psychological suffering and this this hyper sort of of sensitivity as a human being, which, you know, all sort of puts together this stormy, moody person who could be capable of writing such in-depth psychological works. You did say notes from the underground changed literature, and it was really his first great, you know, work. Can you talk just quickly about how notes of the underground, or notes from the underground specifically changed literature, what made it different, and then we'll get into the rest of his works and their themes? Right. Well, part of it is certainly that it was the first time.

you have a psychological examination of a protagonist that is so horrible and that everybody hates. It's like it's written as a spiteful, heinous person that's disagreeable, who ruins all his friendships, ruins all his own chances of happiness on purpose just to prove how free he is. So it is considered the first existentialist novel and it's the first by, you know, like a certain Beauvoir were like 100 years after this or whatever. yeah and it's also he's giving long philosophical speeches in the middle the characteristic of dostoesky he often put his own ideas in the in the mouth of the worst character in the novel either by bumbling idiots or nasty people he's often speaking

that's when you know if ever a heinous character starts giving a long monologue you know dostoesky's telling his real ideas but yeah so it was an immensely influential novel you know not maybe as even important as it was it was And it's more like a novella. It's like 90 pages. Very short. It's just a little pamphlet that he got out, like I said, when his wife was, dead wife was on the table and he writes this nasty book.

And like you said, he's a very moody person. Like, I mean, in Brothers Karamazov, he has that line where I say inside all of us is both the ideal of the Madonna, you know, like the perfect loving Christian and the lowest low of the insect, you know? And it's like, that was Dostoevsky's reality. And by the insect, he means like a nasty brute who's just. driven by their sensual pleasures and capable of murder, you know, that kind of thing. And it's like that was him in reality.

He literally had both of those inside of him battling at all times. All times, yeah. And it's also just worth talking about that fake execution and how serious that was in his life followed by, you know, four years of prison and then five years or whatever of military service. I mean, just try to put yourself in the position of being in solitary confinement for eight months in a terrible Russian prison in the 1800s and then be walked. out, you know, watching your comrades kneeled down, you are convinced that you're about to die. He talks about, like, some of his friends' comrades in that moment, like, went crazy, some

never recovered. For him, it was probably this strange, spiritual, psychological impetus that later was manifested in his work, but just try to put yourself in the shoes of somebody who went through that in the core years of your life, your 20s and 30s, and that's also helpful in understanding just how powerful of a psychology and personality. ultimate writer that he was. And I also want to mention the Christianity part because it's going to come up throughout this conversation. It's just worth noting that, you know, there's the Eastern Orthodox Church, and there's the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church had the Protestant

Reformation over in Europe, and there was never an analogous Protestant Reformation for the Eastern Orthodox Church. So am I right in saying that his Christianity was this Eastern Orthodox Christianity, not Roman Catholicism or Protestantism? I mean, yeah, he would be incredibly at to that idea. And there were some actually reforms in the church in the 1650s in Russia that he was against and wanted to go back to the even older version. I don't know the details of those reforms. He talks about them a ton and brothers Karamazov and I can't quite even really follow like what the difference is between. So he's like a real old school. And not only that, but he thinks Catholicism is like the Antichrist literally. He thinks it's got infected by the Roman

empire because it became adopted by the state of Rome and turned into, a conquest machine. Like the popes were waging war. He says this is the Catholicism is worse than atheism. It's further away from Christianity than atheism. It's like the Antichrist. And it's something you have to think about like maybe you don't think about the Catholic Church today because they don't really do that anymore. But at, you know, in the 1600s, they were waging wars and particularly with the Holy Roman Empire. So his view of Catholicism was that this is nothing close to Russian Orthodox. We often think of those Catholicism, Russian Orthodox is like kind of the same. The Pope is on one side.

They don't have the Pope on the other side. It's like to Dostoevsky, they were totally different things. Right. And in his writings, in brothers, for example, when he's putting in the mouth of his characters, like really deep arguments in favor of atheism and against it, like this is a Christian who was obviously a deep intellectual thinker and really fleshed out the atheist side of the argument. He didn't hide from it at all. So that's worth noting as well. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Let's talk. about some more of his main works. I know you touched on them in his biography section, but maybe you can cover them again and go a little bit more in depth with their major themes and the

ideas that were explored throughout his work. Yeah, and obviously we don't have, you know, 12 hours on the podcast to talk about. These novels are like 900 pages long. They're mostly fantastically complex, but we'll talk about a few of them briefly, of course, and maybe just sort of cherry pick what we're interested today that would be related to politics or the topics. but like I said his next novel that he wrote was crime and punishment and this is sort of about a character who is going to be like an existential hero and at the time that was like Napoleon and he's going to and again this is about the character is convinced of these liberal high-minded ideals European ideals utilitarianism in particular he's attacking I think he attacks utilitarianism more than socialism even and atheism sometimes notes from the underground also was viciously attacking utilitarianism saying if we made a perfect world the guy from notes on the underground says if we made a perfect world humanity would reject it because we don't want happiness like and this is almost like from plato too like plato says if you're educated enough you will be happy and your freedom will correspond to happiness and nobody will ever do evil dostoesky says look if you educate everyone and everyone's getting their maximum utility and you have a perfect society, humanity will reject it. Right? And it's actually, you know, it's funny as like this was done, the Wachoski's based the

matrix off Dostoevsky explicitly. And Agent Smith actually gives this argument. It's from Dostoevsky. They say it's explicitly. When Agent Smith says, we built the matrix the first time as a paradise, an earthly paradise, and humanity hated it, you know? Whole crops failed because everybody rejected it. This is Dostoevsky's argument against utilitarianism. and stared at it, marveled that its beauty is genius. Billions of people just living out their lives. Oblivious. Did you know that the first Matrix

was designed to be a perfect human world none suffered, or everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world, but I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world The dream that your primitive cerebrum

kept trying to wake up from Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this The peak of your civilization I say you're a civilization Because as soon as we started thinking for you It really became our civilization Which is of course what this is all about

Evolution Morpheus Evolution But in crime and punishment The character is going to create He's going to be a great man like Napoleon Remake society And he does this through

He's convinced of his own good Because in his view Napoleon Can leave corpses in his wake Right He can kill I mean how many people did Napoleon kill Right

But it's all justified retroactively And this is going to be like Important later For the socialist revolutionaries too Right It's justified retroactively through his greatness because Napoleon

remade Europe so yeah he was justified in killing all those people and the character and crime and punishment thinks he's Napoleon but he's not Napoleon and that's a question

how do you know you're Napoleon or maybe for a socialist how do you know you know you're not just an asshole it's like so he kills an old woman a money lender

and steals 10,000 roubles which is like well I don't know how much money is maybe $50,000 or something And he thinks he's going to use this money as a seed money to start like a publisher and become a great man or something. But it totally collapses because he has this kind of Dostoevsky's sensitive nerves. You know, Dostoevsky is not like a, like Tolstoy, was kind of a manly man who could stare down the barrel of a gun. You know what I mean?

This giant, he's like six, six and it's served in wars. Dostoevsky's not like this. He's extremely sensitive, neurotic, nervous person whose nerves are very delicate, you know. That's the character in the novel, too. and he, you know, starts having health problems. One thing in Dostoevsky, like you were saying, he's a hypochondriac, but it's like he was very interested in the symbiotic nature between your health and your mental state and your ideas.

So the characters often get what's called brain fever. I don't know what disease that exactly corresponds to, but it was very popular in the novels. They're always getting brain fever when they have psychological crises at the same time. So the character's feeling guilt over his psychology of killing this old woman, And at the same time has brain fever and is collapsing mentally and finally sort of admits to the crime. And actually, you know, it's like a common thing in Daswesky's thought that he goes off to prison and then becomes a saint. And this is sort of a funny idea because he thought prisons were necessary.

He agreed again with Plato on this. Like Plato, there's a platonic dialogue where Socrates argues that it's in the best interest of the criminal to get punished to go to prison and become punished because it heals your like psychology. And Dostoevsky totally agrees with this. He says, like, you need to be punished to balance out your soul or whatever. Even though in notes from the House of the Dead, he readily admits that he never witnessed this happening a single time. He said, all these hardened criminals came into prison. They were brutally tortured, and they came out worse people, almost 100% of the time. And part of it is that none of them admitted to their crimes.

Like, in the sense that they admitted they were guilty. They admitted they did the crime. but all of them had a little story like a causal chain story that explained the crime so like and probably a lot of them were probably true

my father beat me when I was young I was angry my woman cheated on me so I got angry and it's like the cause and effect in the criminal's brain caused the crime they never took responsibility for it I guess

so despite the fact that empirically he admits this never actually works in reality the prisons are that they don't do that he thought prison as a concept that would cure you of the crime, of the guilt of the crime, and you could possibly come out a good person at the end, which in crime and punishment at the end is kind of written like,

and then he became a saint at the end. They don't really explain it. It's a problem that he was supposed to deal with in Karamazov, but it kind of didn't. But yeah, that would be the main theme of crime and punishment. And then after that, he wrote The Idiot, which is the most religious novel. It's about like if Jesus Christ arrived today

in the modern, cynical St. Petersburg, right? Like, if we read it today, it'd be like if Jesus Christ arrived in L.A. Actually, like, you know, have you ever seen that movie Blasped in the past? I have not, no. It's like a movie about someone whose family, like, is in a bomb shelter for 40 years. And then they're raised, like, in the perfect cheeseball Americana way, like, as a perfect person.

And then they wake up and they're in L.A. in the 90s. And it's, like, totally the plot of the idiot. It's a great movie, actually. Totally underappreciated like Colt Possack. I don't know why I never got popular. But it's the plot of the idiot, quite obviously. I don't know if they had it in mind, but it is anyway. Anyway, it's a massive disaster, as you can imagine.

This person is too naive. They give love to everybody equally, like a Christ-like love, and everybody just is cynical and it ruins everything, right? And this is the end of the novel. And you're like, okay. So what does he think about religion? This is the kind of religion he thinks is necessary, but he thinks you have to have the Christ-like love,

you have to have something else, today, especially. You have to have the Christ-like love while fully understanding science and rationality and fully understanding the psychology of other human beings, which is the key that was missing. Sometimes you can't love a person, like the character tries to love two women at once, right? Right.

Because he loves everyone, and it's like, you can't actually do that. It's going to be bad for both of them. Yeah. As an aside, really quick, just to mention this, you went on partially examined life to talk about the idiot in more detail, correct?

Yeah, that's right. So if you're interested in the idiot specifically, you can go check that out. Cool. And then in The Gambler, he writes about sort of the psychology of a gambler. So again, it's a short novel. But I think the most interesting part that I would pick out of that is where he describes, this is sort of his criticism of, I mean, it's tied in with his criticism of socialism. How he thinks of socialism is kind of a pre-Marx socialism where it's like a utilitarian, perfect world,

utopian socialism I guess and it's very economizing right like everything is just going to be turned into the economy we're going to get rid of religion and the happiness is what Rousseau said where like happiness is doing what you want all the time right

or freedom is doing what you want all the time and Doskis he says this is totally naive not only do people not want to be happy largely he says if the goal of humanity is happiness then all of human history has been a mistake right because if you just look at history and you look at people's actions like they're not trying to be. They're not trying to maximize their own happiness. So why should

society try to maximize everybody's happiness? It's like a human life is something more than just maximizing happiness and minimizing pain. But he says it would be more honest and better to become a millionaire by gambling off one rule of the roulette table than it would like the normal way. And it's sort of like almost, this is more of a criticism of like America or the American dream, even though I don't think he had that at mind. It sounds more like it to certainly to people reading it today, I would think he talks about like a family who is going to like a Protestant work ethic kind of family who's going to work hard 70 hours a week gain a little bit, a little bit of money, put it away, send their kids to college so they can

become an engineer and then their kids are going to work hard 70 hours a week, maybe buy a couple properties on the side, start renting, building and building and building and then their kids are going to buy maybe a business, build, build, build, and then four five generations down the line, they're going to be millionaires, right? And he says, this is the normal way of becoming rich, and it's absolutely pathetic. What a horrible waste of a human life to just slave away 70 hours a week so your kids can have a little more money. Like, this is all that life is? He says, this is worse than being a gambler. I would rather get it knowing that I got it for no reason, right? I just got it by chance and being a millionaire. That's more honest than living

this kind of pathetic, empty lives where you just do nothing but accumulate money and then die, right? So it's like this kind of banality of what he's thinking of socialism or even capitalism, you know, all his criticisms of socialism pretty much apply to capitalism, too, are just, it's really about the economizing of life. Turning all of human life into an economy is a mistake for him. Yeah. All right. And then we're going to get into the novel Demons, which is his most important political novel for sure. And it's against you know, it's about a group of revolutionary socialists

and this is based on a real thing that happened to some followers of Bakunin, I guess, where they murdered someone, I mean, it's not really based on them, it's more like inspired by them, but they murdered someone who they thought was going to snitch to the police who was the character

who had been a socialist and then was sort of turning towards nationalism which is like Dostoevsky's ideas at the time, Slavophilia or whatever, like people who love Russia more than they love socialism. It's a lot of It's kind of a lot like Turgeneb's fathers and sons, too, which is kind of the novel that Dostoevsky says, invented nihilism, meaning popularized the term nihilism. And it's more, like, when people write about it, they say it's not really criticizing socialism proper.

It's like more criticizing nihilism. I mean, it's both. They're the same thing in Dostovsky's mind. And people were calling themselves nihilists in Russia at this time, like positively. Like, I'm a revolutionary nihilist. People have that description about themselves, meaning nihilists. meaning they're going to destroy all the old values and often build this kind of, you know, again, this economized life where everything is just, you know, people are living in communal societies

and just building the economy and that's it, right? The socialists in the novel were going to burn down the entire town and then rebuild it as a socialist utopia, which didn't sound that great, you know? Exactly. But yeah, that's the novel to really hear about the politics and the criticism of these, socialist. And it's also kind of like time back into crime and punishment. It's like these people were willing to do anything to see the revolution succeed, like the means justify the end kind of thing, where they're willing to lie, murder, cheat, become horrendous people. And then at the end,

what they want to do is burn the town down, you know, and build a socialist society where they are the ones in charge of society. So if you're that kind of horrible person, what society are you going to get, right? If the guy who was willing to do absolutely anyone, murder anyone, kill anyone, lie to anyone, kill his own comrades to see his vision succeeded. And then he says, okay, trust me, I'm the enlightened socialist. I know how to run society. You're not going to get a good society at the end of it, right? Even if these socialists have succeeded in the novel, it's like Dasoesky's opinion is that they're not going to get, you're not going to get anything good out of it. Yeah, and then the last novel he wrote was the brothers Karamazov, which, you know,

I don't know how much we can really talk about because it kind of ties absolutely everything together. Yeah, it's a novel about now the main character, Alyosha is, I guess he's the main character. Dostoevsky just declares he's the main character. By volume, probably not. But he is sort of like Prince Michigan and the idiot where he has this naive love,

but he's going to lose the naivety. And actually in book two and three, he's going to become a socialist revolutionary, lose faith in God. And then in book three, maybe regain faith. in God and have all of it wrapped up where he totally loses his naivity, becomes a full human person who understands suffering, and returns to religion, I guess. That would be the plot of the two and three that were from his notes that we don't really know. But yeah. Yeah, that's

fascinating. And some things stand out. One thing, we're definitely, you know, we're laying a lot in the table. We're going to get to the politics and the philosophy and the influences after him, for sure that we're sort of hinting at throughout. But just to reiterate, you know, his critiques of economicistic utopian socialism, do you think that they apply to Marxism proper? Or was this a sort of different type of socialism that he was critiquing? Or do you think faced with the full understanding of Marxism, he would reject it for similar reasons? Well, I think a lot of his critiques don't apply to Marxism. But I don't think he would probably, like he's criticizing utilitarianism, utopian socialism, and the kind of vulgar socialism where it's

like, we're going to get rid of the bourgeoisie and we're going to have a little bit more money because of that, right? And then we're going to organize everything through the economy rationally, and that'll be a utopia. That kind of thing doesn't really appear in Marx. So most of his criticisms kind of miss Marx, but, you know, if he read Marx, I don't think he would see it as much different. I think he would see Marx still as obsessed with the economy.

He would see Marx still wanting to abolish religion, which is he viewed religion as the soul of a nation, and he thought you couldn't have nations without religion. and one nation is one religion and those are tied together that's like the speech he gives the character gives in demons about Russian nationalism and so I don't think he would really view Marx

like if I don't think if he read Marx he would see a big distinction but it is important to keep in mind he's criticizing earlier utopian socialists and utilitarians which Marx is neither he's neither utopian nor utilitarian Right and in fact criticize that Most of his criticisms don't apply

But again, he's not going to be like, if he read Marx, he's not going to be like, oh, wow, now we can do socialism, right? Because he ultimately cannot get rid of the religious question. He wants society to be based around religion. That's obviously not going to fly with Marx. Correct, yeah. And we'll get into him and Bakunin in a bit as well, talk more about this. Before we move on, though, you know, this is just important to point out. And we'll talk about it more when we think about the thinkers that were influenced by him.

But in all of these novels, there is this really in-depth. pre-Froidian examination of human psychology and its neuroticisms and its blind spots, etc. It did not have the language of Freud, the unconscious, etc., but was certainly pre-Froidian, and insofar as Dostoevsky went on to influence Nietzsche, who went on to influence Freud, you could pretty much draw a straight line through those three thinkers. So it's just worth pointing out, and that's really new, right? That's one of the newest aspects, this existentialist pre-Froydian examination of the intensity and complications and nuances of human psychology. Yeah, absolutely.

Although you don't need Nietzsche, Freud read him directly. Oh, really? I don't know that. And Freud was also extremely interested in Dostoevsky's personal psychology because he thought the epileptic seizures were part of the psychological suffering. Oh, wow. In particular, that's when Dostoevsky was in prison, the epilepsy almost disappeared. Interesting.

And Freud thought that was a very interesting fact, whether this is true, probably physically, not really, but like Freud read Karamazov himself and Dostoevsky himself and was interested in his biography as well. Really cool. I did not know that. All right. Well, yeah, we'll pick back up on that thread in a bit. I guess I want to sort of focus on the religious part of it because it's this orthodox religious belief for sure, but it was infused with this sort of, you know, the spirituality, which, you know, there's something different than mere religious belief there is like this experiential dimension that we, you know, call maybe half-heartedly spiritual. or whatever you want to call it. But can you talk a little bit more about his relationship with religion and this element of his religion that was felt as well as believed in and thought through? Sure, yeah.

I mean, he was mostly interested in, like you said, this orthodox religion that he thought had retreated from Roman Catholicism into the desert. So it were like these monks. He was particularly interested in the monastery. He didn't much like priests. He didn't much like some of the governmental organized religion. But the monasteries are where it was at. And he liked this idea of monks that are ascetic, would go into the, you know, into the forest and suffer for themselves.

And he was particularly obsessed about the concept of the sacred, which he thought had disappeared from society, which is like in Nietzsche's definition, that in a society which cannot be laughed at, right? So it's like, God is the most obvious example. You can't make jokes about God in societies that take it seriously. And he thought one thing is that with this Europeanism, this westernization, and this economizing, is that it's going to destroy, when you do the nihilists who want to destroy all values are going to destroy the concept of the sacred. And he thought that was going to be a big disaster because it's one of the things that gives humanity ability to live an authentic life. And like to give one example, and I think it was in the idiot, he gives this example of this monk who spends his last 20 years of his life going up to Siberia. And just kind of showing kindness and having discussions with the prisoners who are in these prison camps like he was. And just showing them kind of love and caring and reading to them because they were mostly illiterate.

And he spent 20 years doing this. And the character in the novel is saying, oh, I know all you enlightened European liberals will laugh at this because he could have spent that 20 years accomplishing something better according to the tenets of utilitarianism. right? Like he didn't really accomplish much. He could have worked, for example, and spent the money on the poor and saved people's lives or whatever. From a utilitarian point of view, this is kind of a useless activity. But he says from a psychological point of view, if you want to be secular about it, or from a aspect of their soul, like he says, but you know what is different about it is that some of these hardened prisoners who never have love in their life, even 20 years after the monk dies, will think back fondly about the one time that someone showed them love. And he thought, this kind of thing can, can sort of spread, right? When you show people kindness, it sort of resonates. And when you are nasty to people, it also resonates through psychology, even through generations, like what today we would call generational trauma, right?

That's something Dostoevsky talked about a ton. It's like, if you beat your child, he's going to beat his child and they're going to be, it's like nastiness will spread through society. Whereas if you show people love, this kind of spiritual monk kind of love, I mean, could be more ordinary than that too, it's going to cause people to become more loving, which will cause it more loving, good society. So this kind of Christian love, he thought, could spread, today you can secularize the idea and just say, you know, psychological well-being or psychological health or whatever.

This kind of thing is the only way to create a good society, because no matter how you organize society, if people are nasty, brutish people, society is going to be bad. In order to have a good society, you have to have good people. And in order to make good people, you have to show other people love and kindness. Right. And in our modern society of hyper individualist competition, we're pitted against one another. We see the other as a competitor, as an enemy, as somebody to be, you know, beat out for that job or pushed out of the marketplace, etc. So in the modern capitalist American society, many of his critiques still land with 100% efficiency and accuracy. Yeah, there's no doubt he would be horrified by consumer capitalism where, I mean, consumerism, where every,

everything is based on buying stuff. It would be the end point of his nightmare, not even worse than utopian socialism, I think. Yeah, there's a sort of empty nihilism inherent in consumerism. Yeah, inherent. Yeah, absolutely. Before we move deeper into politics, I'm just kind of interested in your personal relationship with Astoyevsky. How'd you come to get interested in, and what about his work has resonated most with you, or at least at a crucial point in your intellectual development? Yeah, I mean, I think Notes from the Underground is the first real serious novel I read, and really was my introduction to philosophy. So it is personally very important to me. Like, this is, I read it when I was young and it was kind of something totally different. You know, I had only read like fantasy novels and stuff up until that point, or maybe some more literature, but nothing too serious. So it's really what got me started on thinking about life and stuff more deeply. And then moving on to stuff like Brothers Karamazov, it's like it explains so much about how we relate to each other and the human condition that I think it's just, I mean, it's a deeply impactful novel for, a ton of people. Cameras of in particular, like you can see a social impact that's read

all over, you know, by everybody of different opinions and it affects them all in different ways. So. Yeah. How old were you when you came across them? Like 20 years old, probably. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, that late teen, early 20 period of anybody's life. Yeah, yeah. I developed a little late. Some people would start reading that stuff when they're 16. I was still

reading Conan the barbarian. I feel you. I was doing drugs, so I didn't start reading again. Yeah. So let's move into the politics part of this. Obviously, we've touched on a lot of it, but I love this and I love to dive deeper and this is often, you know, sort of maybe ignored in some accounts of Dostoevsky and his life, at least not in the way that we're going to cover it. So can you just kind of talk about his, particularly his political evolution over

time? Because we talk about his early years, you know, getting entangled in like revolutionary organizations and being punished by the state for it. But that obviously changed and evolved over time. And it was all seen through the prism of his religion and spirituality. Like, I think it's fair to say politics were judged through that lens for him. And it's also worth noting that this is a few decades before the Bolshevik revolution. So there's this cultural thing within Russia that is happening. And that's going to be at least illuminated or cast light upon this later thing that happens, which Dostoevsky wrestled with to some extent in his criticisms of socialism, et cetera. So can you just kind of talk about that political evolution over time and what really

drove that change for him. Sure. I mean, there's no question. Like, I mean, he grew up as a young intellectual. He joined the young intellectual circles of the time, which was a, you know, people reading these new, exciting European authors. You know, keep in mind that Russia was largely a much more backwards state in every sense of the word. They were economically far behind Europe, like Germany and France, but also from a cultural point of view, they were getting all their ideas from, you know, they were importing all these European ideas. And he was reading these new things. People like, you know, John Stuart Mill kind of, well, I don't know if you read John

and Sir, no, that was maybe later, but Furrier and stuff like that, utopian socialism, utilitarianism, the big moments in Dostoevsky's life and the big political struggle that he was particularly interested in was the abolition of serpdom, which occurred during his life. And that was part of the reason why he joined these utopian socialists, because he was a Christian, a lot of them, of course, wanted to abolish religion even at the time. He was still a Christian when he was a young man. But he was interested in abolishing the serfdom and improving the lives of the serfs.

He saw this enlightened European ideals as the way to do that, as of course everybody else did. But there's no question that prison and the experience of the mock execution and everything really changed him to massively deepen his view on religion as this kind of deeply personal, existential way of being where you can go through enormous amounts of suffering and through like, the love of Jesus Christ or whatever, you can still have love for humanity and universal brotherhood. He talked a lot about universal brotherhood. He thought that was what made Russia unique, is that they had an ability to love all human beings, unlike these Europeans. So he moved more and more, of course, against these European ideals.

He was very much against the westernization of Russia, which was happening all the time. They were always trying to westernize to catch up to Europe. partly for political power reasons. They needed European science to compete, you know, militarily and stuff. And he was fully on board, actually, all his life with, we need to import as much as the science as you can. You need to fully understand the world. So he wanted that part of westernization.

He said, we have everything to learn from the Europeans in regards to science. But in regards to how to run Russia, no, we should still be Russians. He wanted to resist this westernization more and more and more. And that became more and more powerful force within Europe. All the intellectuals wanted to westernize. Only a few, most notably him and Tolstoy were the two most important authors who were kind of conservatives working against the mainstream Russian kind of liberal intellectual circles. Yeah. And that split in Russia between the European, you know, looking gaze of like liberal intellectual elite and that slavophile, actually let's do it our own way.

you know, reject some of what Europe has. We don't need to become European. We can take what's useful and leave behind what's not. That split is huge in Russian culture and history and society over the last several hundred years and it even manifested to varying degrees within the later Bolshevik movement, right? Like this idea between socialism in one country advocated by Stalin and export the revolution to Europe advocated by Trotsky, that tension that is a long-running tension through culture, through politics, through religion, and all throughout history.

I think it sort of helps to frame a Tolstoy and a Dostoevsky and their role and their importance in Russia with that light in mind because there was that conflict and that tension all throughout their lives. And still to this day, I think that that tension exists. We can see it most in the Russian and Ukraine situation. And do we go with NATO or do we turn toward Russia and we're taking over Crimea? Like, you know, these tensions still exist. And I think it's really important if you want to understand Russian politics to have some grasp on that split and how. how it's shaped culture, but... Yeah, absolutely.

It's still today is big in Russia. It's part of why Putin is popular is because he's a, you know... Slavophile. Anti-Slavafal. Yeah, exactly. So, as I said earlier,

Dostoevsky was, you know, born a couple years after Marx and died a couple years before he died. He also had a personal relationship, as we mentioned, with the Russian anarchist Bakunan. So did Dostoyevsky know or say anything at all

about Karl Marx in his life? And more importantly, perhaps, because I don't think there's much there. What were his feelings about Bakunan in particular? particular. Yeah, I've never seen any evidence that he read Marx. I think it's one of these things where Marx was writing at the same time, but it takes a little while to become popular, and it takes a little while to become popular in Europe to move over to Russia. So, yeah, I don't think he

ever read Marx, or if he did, he never commented on it. Maybe he just saw it as the same as the other things. And, but he was most interested in Bakunin, and there was this other guy, Sergei, Nechenev, who wrote Cataclosives of a Revolution that was directly parodied or not parodied, but like directly written in two demons. The gist of it is basically that the ends justify the means and he gave this kind of handbook to the revolutionaries, do anything and do anything wide, everybody, kill anybody,

and we'll bring about the revolution. And, you know, he ended up falling out with Bakunin himself because Bakunin said, you're more like a Jesuit than us than like a socialist, you know, you're like a fanatic. And then Marx and Engels ended up criticizing him saying And he wants barracks, socialism, what they called it, which is like, not like a military barracks, but like everybody living in a communal work society, just working.

And it's like, nobody wants to do this. And then the central committee essentially would just make all the decisions because they were enlightened. And anyone who disagreed would be cast out of society and starve. It was like totally brutal, which matched again, it matched his brutality and achieving the revolution, and his vision of the post society was equally brutal. And you're like, these are the people he's reading. And Bakunin, some people, say, introduced this kind of revolutionary nihilism to Russia.

I don't know if Bakunin himself ever called himself a nihilist, but he spawned a lot of people who did who say, look, we're going to destroy all values, you know, and remake society completely from new enlightened values. All the old values will be destroyed. So obviously for someone who loves Russia and loves history, you know, the Russian history and the Russian people, this is just totally, totally opposed to the Slavophiles where they don't even want to bring in stuff from Europe, much less destroy every single human value that we have and remake society from scratch. You know, it's just, so that's kind of how he saw socialism, I think, that kind of thing. Yeah. As well as the economizing aspect that we've covered, yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And as you said, we did cover that objection to socialism in particular. you laid out the objections overall. You can touch on any more if you failed to cover one or two, but I am interested in this reactionary trope that you hear quite often. In fact, I heard it in prep for this. It was Paul Stra Thurn's 90-minute philosophy or literature. You know, just one of the things I used to prep with. And that trope was repeated as well, that, you know, Dostoevsky and his criticisms of socialism predicted the horrors of the Soviet Union and the Bolshevik Revolution, etc. So I'm just wondering what your, what you're,

your thoughts are on that particular trope because it's so popular and so overused? Yeah, I mean, if you get a lecture on Dostesky, you'll hear them say this. Almost everybody. It's repeated and repeated and repeated. And it's one, well, first I guess I'll read this quote from Karamazov where he says, for

socialism is not merely the labor question. It is before all things, the atheistic question. The question of the form taken by atheism today. The question of the Tower of Babel built without God, not to mount heaven from earth, but to set up heaven on earth. right and like i talked about in notes from the underground he thought up building a heaven on earth

was like a category mistake you can't do it uh by restructuring society you have to do it through christian love or whatever um so again when we're talking about socialism he's mainly concerned with atheism and nihilism he's not so worried about who owns the means of production right he's like i don't really care it's like that's the wrong question to ask for him and honestly i bet if you had to pin him down he would probably take Tolstoy's view, which is that the worker should own the means of production. He was always very cynical about these aristocrats who were living off the labor of the peasants. He would talk about this directly.

Like, these hypocrites are living off the labor of the peasants and want to enlighten the peasants and be their masters. It's like, you know, fuck you. So the actual socialism question, it's like, I don't think he cares so much, but he would be horrified by the Soviet Union. He predicted the horrors of the Soviet Union. But what horrors? a lot of people will say oh look he predicted the gulags and it's is really like oh look at these horrors they had all these gulags and i'm like that is the absolute weirdest thing to say because he was supporting the czar he thought the czarist regime should continue so if he's predicting the horrors of the gulags it's like the gulags were not even close to as brutal as the prisons of the czar the prisons that he was in so how can he if he's going to look at the soviet union the last thing he would say is like, oh my God, they have horrible prisons.

I was right. It's like, he, he was supporting the Tsarist regime. He thought the Tsar should continue forever. He was a royalist, right? So the horrors of the Soviet Union that he would predict are maybe the economist of Stalin, right? The biggest one that would be the abolishment of religion. Like they're trying to get rid of religion out of society and have a completely

scientifically organized rational society. And he would look at the people like in the factories and saying they're living Bain lives. They're not having a true existence, right? He wouldn't be horrified by the, you know, the things that the liberals think he would be horrified, I think are completely opposite. And again, if he were to look at America, did he predict the horrors of capitalism, right? They're equally this exact same thing. Right. And I like to talk about like, sometimes it's like people always like to talk about overly dramatic things. Like they pick the worst things out of society to talk about it's like to give an illustrative example it's better to give small examples right

so like one of the things that happened a lot in america and maybe it happened in the soviet union too it sort of seems like the kind of thing that soviet union would do but in america in the early 1900s when we were very influenced by these rationalists by creating a totally rational society is that they try to eliminate left-handedness right like maybe people were taught about this in school like in the 1900s everybody was forced to write with their right hand and The explanation was often an economic one, is that if we get rid of left-handedness, we won't have to build like left-handed scissors or whatever, like left-handed. Everything can be built the same because all the people will be the same.

So it would be much cheaper on the manufacturing end, if everybody's right-handed. It'll be very convenient for society. So they eliminated left-handedness. This is the kind of thing that Dostoevsky was talking about with a totally rational society. And it ended up causing like stutters and stuff, like psychological problems for these people. And eventually they realized it. But in the early 1900s, the kind of period that he was predicting, that was the kind of rationalism that Dostoevsky was horrified by, is elimination of individualism and self-expression and economic freedom for economic purposes. So one thing in the Soviet Union that they did is they had forced migrations, right?

They would take large groups of people and they say, look, for economic reasons, it would make more sense if you all lived here. that would be a kind of thing that Dostoevsky would say because it was the destruction of cultures and you would move from your native land that would be like a psychological tearing for some people and for the purpose of like oh there's a bunch of copper mines up here there's a lot of copper we want to get we need workers you know and that kind of thing forced migrations happened of course in capitalist societies every since all these societies in the 19th century or the 20th century started doing stuff like that and then of course you know like another example would be like when the british empire would go and colonize places or like in Ireland you know they would force people to

speak English and they did this for a lot of reasons but let's just pretend they were doing it just solely for economic reasons which is one of the reasons if everybody speaks English right or Esperanto was the dream that emerged that was like a kind of rationalist dream that Daswesky would have hated if everybody speaks the same language boy will it be more economically efficient right think how much easier the world would be if everybody spoke the same language. But what happens when you force everybody to speak the same language, especially not as a second language, but as a first language was some of the people in Esperanto wanted to do, you're going to destroy entire cultures. Cultural genocide. Yeah, yeah, cultural genocide. They're

going to get demolished by your need, your inconvenience of having a translator. It's totally stupid, you know. But this kind of thinking was very popular. And of course, the, you know, the end of it is eugenics, right? Yeah. Yeah. Let's change a human. genome, which is very, very popular on the left at that time, right? Eugenics, hey, why not? Let's improve society. Think how much better society will be if we say eliminate nearsightedness, right? Let's eliminate nearsightedness. They'll say these rationalists and these intellectuals would be, you know, drinking their whiskey. Wouldn't it be better if everybody, we could eliminate nearsitist? Think of the economy. We won't have to build glasses. Everybody could see. It'll be so nice.

But then it's like, okay, good, fine gentleman, write down how you're going to do it. on a piece of paper. How do you eliminate nearsightedness, right? You have to force people to not have children. It's like any means of doing it is absolutely horrendous. There's no way it could ever justify the result because you have to basically say, hey, you're nearsighted so you're not allowed to have children. We, the rational society, have dictated this to you because we see a higher goal. So no children for you. So either you force sterilize them or you kill them, right? Those are the only two ways to eliminate near sidonness, mass forced sterilization, or, you know, just killing people. So these rational forces that he saw that he was predicting about the Soviet Union

were equally true in Europe in the capitalist countries. It's just this kind of rationalization of everything. He did absolutely see that. And it happened in the early 1900s and early 20, 2000, or yeah, early 1900s, I would say, was when it peaked. And society as a whole, I would say, leftists have learned from these lessons and actually resolved a lot of dostoes these critiques. We no longer want to do cultural genocides, right? The left is the one trying to protect small cultures from the dominating forces of rationality. Yeah. It's actually like the people that it's kind of funny, like if you look at his criticisms and you look at the people who he would be criticizing today, it's probably mostly the neoliberals, particularly that strain of neoliberal

that's like the new atheists, right? Like Sam Harris will talk about, we want to want to make the world fully rational. And we're going to do it through a market economy, but it's the same thing as these utopian socialists. Before they wanted to do it with the planned economy, now they want to do it with a market economy. Either way, they want to forcibly remove religions. They want to kill all the Muslims possibly just because they're irrational.

He talked about these liberals trying to impose it on Russia. And the salavu flowers would simply say, well, the peasants are never going to go for this plan. They don't want to do it. And so the enlightened liberal would say, well, then we'll eliminate the peasants. And what does that mean? You're going to kill 90% of the population to form a rational society. And I don't think these people were that serious because they're sort of wishy-washy liberals.

But that was the kind of enlightened philosophy that they were having at the time. And that's the kind of thing. Yeah, like people like Sam Harris have that idea today. I think the left has actually evolved away from a lot of these, this kind of hyper rationalization of society. And we're going to form a perfectly rational society by destroying all cultures. That kind of thing just doesn't exist in the left anymore because we've learned from critiques like this. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the horrors of rationalism, as part of the

critique that, you know, and explored in his book that these rationalist liberal intellectuals or just, you know, revolutionaries or whatever, that they're in their own heads, neurotic and psychologically unequipped to see this thing through in anything like a reasonable, you know, way. And that so these people that want to, like, you know, technocratic neoliberals today, they want to stand back and sort of manage a system, but they themselves, when you get into their own minds and their own psychologies, are not some superhuman people capable of doing wonderful things, but they are themselves often broken, blind, myopic individuals. And so that's another reason why they could never, you know, take over the reins of human society and direct it at will, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And you see it in, you know, in leftist spaces too. There are horrible, nasty people who believe they're the ones that should run society. And it's like, I like to joke, you see these people on Twitter or whatever who are just nasty 24-7. And it's like, I wouldn't trust your ass to run a Super Bowl party. Exactly. Much less be in the central committee to run the entire economy of the world. It's like, fuck off, dude. Exactly right.

Well, we know about the revolutionary socialist. We know about the technocratic liberals. I am wondering, and this obviously completely applies to the horrors of fascism and Nazi Germany. Was there ever any critique on his part of, I mean, I guess fascism hadn't really arose as a proper thing. but did he have a critique of the right as a conservative? Yeah, he certainly had critiques of parts of the right who were domineering.

You know, like a lot of times we think of the right today as, you know, like the American right. It's like they worship power. It's like whoever has the, it's like might makes right kind of thing. You know, the capitalists are great because they're the ones in power. The great nations are great because they're the ones in power. And that culminates in Hitler. Like, we're the ones in power. We're going to just go kill everyone.

one else and be the greatest country on earth by, you know, that kind of thing he thought was the opposite of his version of conservativeism, where the Christian, in his view, is someone who totally dissolves power. And it's like, he almost thought through Christian enlightenment, you would achieve a sort of communism because Christians, the monk, gives up all his worldly possessions and treats all of humanity as a brotherhood, right? So he thought almost you would dissolve power structures through Christianity, not through socialism. So I think his critique of the right would be sort of, yeah, this kind of might makes right power worshipping people are, he says, those are not Christians.

Those are not real conservatives and those are, those don't have the best interest of the people at heart. So yeah, I mean, the fascism would be the absolute culmination of that, but I don't think he had critiques of that because you don't really, he didn't really see that kind of thing. I mean, he was a nationalist, so more, more close to the. fascists in a lot of ways, but just not that kind of nationalist. You know, he was a pacifist as well.

He thought war was anti-Christian, obviously, which, I mean, it should be, you would think, but obviously not in the real world, but yeah. I would love to get his take on modern-day U.S. white evangelical Christians. Yeah, it's amazing to think. I think this is one of the reasons why you read Dostoevsky and these older conservatives is because the right today is so intellectually bankrupt. You know, you want to like study your enemies and understand what they think. It's like, who do you even read?

Exactly, I know. You know, it's hard to get a grip on conservative. They're just totally reactionary idiots, most of them, the big ones. So it's like, it's nice to go back and read these people who actually had a deep understanding of human psychology and society and had a much different view, you know. 100%. Like, yeah, who's a conservative intellectual fucking Ross Duth out? I literally wouldn't even know. Yeah, exactly.

Was Tolstoy as a side note, wasn't he an anarcho pacifist? Yeah, something like that. He was, so he's very close to Dostoevsky and temperament. and politics, and he was also a monarchist, you know. He wanted the monarchy to stay, too, but he was like an anarchist. He thought there should be no difference between people, you know, and how they run society. Everyone should be working together peacefully. And I think Dostoevsky, honestly, would be very sympathetic to that view.

You know, Dastroes, he says, we shouldn't build the Tower of Babel on Earth. The Tower of Babel is where they tried to build a stairway up to heaven to get into heaven. He says, they're trying to build heaven on Earth, right? And he thought that was kind of a mistake. but if he did think you were going to build heaven on earth I think he would agree 100% with Tolstoy that it would be a kind of anarcho-monarchism where you keep the monarchy

for the spiritual center of the nation so the church and the monarchy are tied together to give a soul to the nation or something like that but otherwise you don't have capitalist lording over serps. He was totally against that. So he didn't ever want to admit that

or like go in that direction but I think he would be pretty close to Tolstoy with some kind of weird anarchism. Yeah, it's really funny. Which is a weird view. Jared Tolkien also was like that. Huh, that's interesting. So I guess it's fair to say that even in his conservatism,

there are elements of egalitarianism and elements of like, you know, like you said earlier, Christian love, universal brotherhood, an appreciation in love and of the importance of science. These are elements that could easily be, you know, married to a left-wing political project. Yeah, and, you know, actually the other closest one I, would say that if you want to be a leftist and read Dostoevsky, you can read another novel that could have been a Dostoevsky novel that Dostoevsky read over and over again, supposedly

in his life, and that's Lémyzerob. Victor Hugo had, again, almost identical ideas to Dostoevsky, where a kind of Christian brotherly love, if you look at Jean Valjean, is like going to spread through society and cause a good society, except he was a socialist, right? He's sort of like Tulsa. He thinks, also, by the way, while we're living on Earth, let's create socialism. and help the poor. Das Torski was always very sympathetic to the poor. He wanted to raise the life of the Serbs. But he thought socialism was the wrong way because it was atheistic, which maybe Victor Hugo would agree with because he was also a Christian. But he didn't see a kind of Christian socialism. There was no Christian socialism in Russia. It wasn't really a movement. So if there had been

a large Christian socialist movement in Russia, maybe things would have turned out differently in his ideas and said, this is the way to go. Like Victor Hugo wanted a Christian socialist nation for sure yeah yeah that's really fascinating and i would just say that you know the the hyper atheism of the early socialists obviously in reaction to like monarchies and religious oppressiveness etc but that's even kind of been resolved on the left like if you go on any left space and start doing new atheist shit you'll immediately be called out and dunked on etc so we've even worked through that that complication and it's the left that's now more tolerant you know it's like we want to protect the rights of people to to have spiritual beliefs

like the Muslims or what have you. Yeah. So a lot of that stuff has been resolved. It's like Dostoevsky's criticisms, I think, do fall a little empty on Marx, but they fall even more empty on if you look at the modern left. A lot of it has been resolved. Now, that kind of bleeds into a question I was going to ask a couple questions later, which is what contemporary socialist can learn from Dostoevsky's critiques.

Has that pretty much answered that, or do you have anything else to say on that front? Yeah, I would say, you know, we probably have covered that. I think mostly like, I think we have learned the lesson. You can't form a rational society and have everyone speak Esperanto and just have everyone be the same. Everyone be left, right-handed and super rational and perfect. That kind of thing is never going to work, right? And you have like, yeah, like we talked about neoliberals, but there are some, maybe you put it in air quotes if we're on this podcast. But like Peter Singer would certainly consider himself a leftist.

Yeah. Right? And he says he's a, what do they call it like a utilitarian where it's just you add up states of happiness in the world? And it's like, and then look at his beliefs. He's openly eugenicist. He wants to eliminate disability by killing all the disabled people. Yeah, true. And, you know, it's like people get on him for that, but it's like, it's perfectly follows from all his other beliefs.

Of course we should do it. And the reason he gives is an economic reason. If you have one disabled person in society, he's like, oh, think how much economic energy is spent taking care of them. They're not working, you know, like a severely disabled person. And they have to have like caretakers. He says, if we could eliminate the disabled person, all those, that economic activity could go to other needy people, but instead of to one person, it would be like to 10. So that's his rationality, but it's like, as soon as you take that on board, horrible things happen in society. And nobody wants to live in that kind of society.

That's the actually, the funny thing. Like I was saying with the peasants in Dostoevsky, it's the same thing with utilitarianism. The reputation of utilitarianism every time is to simply describe it. And everybody is horrified by what they have. have. Like reputations of utilitarianism will be like, oh, there's one guy and you go and split his throat and you collect his organs and you save five lives, utilitarianism. And that's just describing utilitarianism.

It's not an argument. It's just a description of the facts. And everyone's like, Jesus Christ, I don't want to live in that society. Yeah, 100%. So that kind of thing has to be weeded out. And at large it has. Like, there's not many leftists who are really utilitarianism in that sense. Yeah, I agree.

But you have to be wary of that kind of thinking, that kind of totalitarian. And I was thinking of, like, for the greater good of humanity, we're going to just trample everybody's rights, you know. Right. And as you said earlier, really in a hilarious way, that being suspicious of people, even on the left, who are egomaniacs, who are cruel to everyone they talk to, who just concern themselves with being right as if they're going to be the leaders of a better world. Like, you have to always be suspicious of that. In yourself as well as in others, because that's fanaticism. Yeah, and yourself more than anybody, really. Agreed. And the protagonist in crime and punishment also would use utilitarian. arguments to justify his murder of the old lady and her sister. Yeah, because he would use the 10,000 rupils to do something better.

He was going to give it to charity or whatever delusion he told himself. That's the other thing about utilitarianism is you can easily delude yourself into doing anything. Yeah, literally. Now, when the famous Russian poet Alexander Pushkin died, as you mentioned earlier, Dostoevsky gave a famous speech where he actually kind of outlined his positive vision for Russia, not just to critique of other vision. So can you talk about that positive vision and that speech in general? Sure. He thought Pushkin was a, you know, a great literary genius, but had a distinct Russianness difference about him from Shakespeare or Savantes or some of these European geniuses, which is that he had the concept of, the most important concept for Dostoevsky is universal brotherhood.

So Pushkin would go among the people. He would go to circuses and see bear fights and stuff. He mingled among the peasants. And Dostoevsky did this as well. And he thought this was something uniquely Russian where you can have universal brotherhood of the whole society. And this was what was great about Russia is this concept of universal brotherhood that was missing from the Europeans and certainly missing from the European liberals

within Russia. Right. He criticizes one, at one point he criticizes like, these European liberals are, sitting away in rich areas all by themselves, they're living entirely off the backs of the peasants, right, off the labor of the peasants, and they're intellectually living off the work of Europeans. So they're parasites in two cents. There are parasites off the labor of the peasants and they're parasites off European ideas, which they also receive for nothing. These people have contributed nothing to society, these westernizers. He says, the path for Russia is to take

on all the things that are great about Europe, the science. We want to learn everything about Western science, and that's what they were calling enlightenment. But he says, what do you mean by enlightenment? Do you mean scientific enlightenment, or do you mean spiritual enlightenment? If you mean scientific enlightenment, then we need the Europeans. It's going to be a thousand years before Russia catches up to their scientific enlightenment.

You know, he says, all the people who think, oh, Russia's going to catch up to Europe. Actually, he talks about that, like the Soviet Union tried to do that. And he's like, you're deluded. It's never going to happen. we're too far behind. What we need out of Russia, though, is spiritual enlightenment, the way to live our lives. We should be left alone to decide that for ourselves.

We shouldn't have these Europeans who, just because you understand about electricity, doesn't mean you understand how the Russian peasants want to live. And even more, like, we should remember that all, he loved Russia, right? He didn't really care what was going on. Like, if the French wanted to do a socialist revolution, go for it. He thought the European socialists actually stood on behalf of their people,

at least rhetorically. like they were wanting to benefit the peasants whereas he saw this kind of horrible thing like I said these you're these Russian socialists were like well let's kill all the peasants because they're unenlightened we know what's best for them so he thought in particular the Russian socialists and they were all aristocrats for one they were all living off the backs of the peasants he's like well why don't you start you know it's one of these like hypocritical things why don't you start by liberating your own serps asshole you're a parasite yourself you know yeah and it's like they won't even walk among the peasants. He talked about this government official that he

witnessed who was like a member of the aristocracy. And when he would drive to deliver messages for the czar or whatever, he would just whip the peasants out of the way and shout at them. We would even use Russian, wouldn't even use English or whatever, like language. He would just, the only way of communicating with the peasants was with his whip. And he says, certainly this is a European person with all the great new European ideals, but he cares more about his uniform than the peasants getting if he gets mud on his uniform that'll be more important than the peasant you know right so it's like these are the people who are going to liberate us i don't think so and like i said they're yeah they're living off the backs of the peasants economically and then he also

talks about like the one big event in his life was the abolition of the serfs that was the great triumph and the liberals the enlightened europeans would use it like look what we great liberals did because they were the drivers of that and he says yeah look what you did it wasn't that great liberation of the serfs was a disaster actually it's a really interesting thing what happens when you have liberation from above from the enlightened aristocrats who still want to live off the backs of the serps by the way oh we liberated you but by the way we still are living off your labor like the government paid landlords to liberate their serfs and then often the serfs end up in worse conditions where they had to like they had smaller areas of land they had and they had to pay rent to do farming on lands that they used to do for free so a lot of the serfs were confused at why this was even better. Like, they could now leave their feudal lord and go work for someone else. But the reality was they were poor after being liberated. And there were like hundreds of peasants' rights after the liberation of the serfs.

So while he wanted to liberate the serfs, he says, when it actually came down to the details, you guys all made a deal with the aristocrats where the aristocrats ended up richer. The serfs ended up poorer. And so the whole execution of the thing was awful because none of the people doing it ever had spoken to a serf. they had no idea of the economic reality of how they live their lives or any of it. They just had these enlightened European

ideals, oh, we're going to liberate the serfs and really nothing good even ever came from. I mean, it was in the long run obviously a good thing to do legally to liberate them, but the execution was totally botched by these enlightened Europeans. Right. And all that was left after

the end of feudalism across Europe and North America was capitalism and so you just ushered into the factory next. Yeah, it is sort of analogous like you know the civil war was happening at the same time yeah exactly he was writing and what happened after the civil war i mean it was certainly better off to free the slaves but again they just went into these jim crow laws because these people liberated them but they made deals with all the people who owned the farms and stuff and they ended up in dire poverty anyway so it's like

did you really liberate them fully like it's almost like you should have done a more full job yeah yeah absolutely yeah so that's incredibly interesting what was the reception to to that speech? Well, obviously the intellectual community in Russia was of course dominated by these Europeanizers, not the Slavophiles. So he was brutally critiqued.

Like I said, his health deteriorated immediately after, possibly because he takes these critiques so seriously and personally, and he died shortly after. Brutal. Moving into the sort of last few questions of

this episode, and it's absolutely been fascinating and I've learned so much. I'm glad we did this episode, which is not an obvious topic for a show like this, but I think we did it justice. What thinkers or writers after him did he influence? We talked a little bit about Freud. You showed a little suspicion about the line going through Nietzsche, but maybe that was just in terms of it then going on to Freud. So can you take that question in whatever direction? I mean, yeah, Nietzsche was magnificently influenced him by him. He called him the greatest psychologist who ever lived. He said he learned more from reading Dostovsky's novels than from every

scientific psychologist of his era, you know, so Nietzsche was, and you can see a lot of Nietzsche's work in him. Of course, Nietzsche is funny because he takes on Dostoevsky fully, but he is an atheist, right? So he's very, very close to Dostoevsky in all his opinions, but he is an atheist, and he is, in fact, an Antichrist, right? He believes in creating value without, not a nihilist, of course. He's against the nihilus as well, but creating a secular version of Dostoevsky's meaning of life. Yeah, Freud, I mean, Brother Cameron. Sorry, really quick before we move on to other thinkers, I just wanted to mention a few

things about Nietzsche. Obviously, there's this critique on Dostoevsky's part of socialism from a Christian perspective, whereas Nietzsche really bundled those two things together and said, actually socialism is a grotesque outgrowth of the worst elements of Christianity, right? So that's a little difference, but they both... That's actually from Dostreski, too. Oh, really?

So, like I said, Catholicism. Dostoevsky thought was wrapped up into the Roman Empire and absorbed by it. And that caused a kind of legalistic state Christianity that he thought was evolving these days the same forces into secular atheism and socialism, the Catholic Church. So, and so Nietzsche was like right there, Dostoevsky was already talking about those ideas, like that Christianity had actually been the seed of secular, social. socialism, particularly Catholicism. That was not the true Orthodox religion, which he thought was totally different. That's really interesting. Yeah. And of course, there's the warning of nihilism and the standing against it in both works. The will to power and the ubermensch in Nietzsche's work, you could trace their prototypes in the protagonist in crime and punishment, if not other

protagonists. And so that's very much there. But, you know, unlike Dostoevsky, Nietzsche really got more fame after he died. So is it fair to say that Dostoevsky? Dostoevsky never read Nietzsche, but Nietzsche read Dostoevsky? I don't think Dostoevsky read Nietzsche. Again, it's a timing issue where Nietzsche would have to be dead and then translated into Russian. It's just you don't have time to do it, even though they might have been writing at the same time. I see. Yeah, because Nietzsche died in 1889, so only a few years.

Dostoevsky is not one of these novels that got popular after he died. He was very popular during his life. So his novels were getting translated into German right away. I see. Okay. But yeah, go on with other thinkers? Right. Well, obviously, he influenced the existentialists.

And he's one of those authors that gets read by just a huge variety of people. That's what's really interesting is like, so socialists, you know, we'll read him. And, you know, Sartrevoir were communists. They were very influenced by Dostoevsky. Nietzsche, obviously, very influenced. And then people like Albert Einstein read him. Ludwig Wittgenstein kept a copy of a Father Zossima speeches, apparently in his pocket. Pope John Paul II said he was his favorite author.

Sigmund Freud said, Brothers Karmerz, I was. the most magnificent novel ever written. The Tsars of Russia read him. The preceding next czars read him. Stalin read Brothers Karamazov several times, apparently. Wow. They didn't ban, they only banned demons because it was anti-socialists, even though they also declared that it was anti-capolis, the official state. They said, this is an anti-capitalist novel, but it's also anti-communists, so we're banning it.

The rest of them were fine, though. So the communists were generally fine with him, even though he was an anti-sic, you know, because most of the novels don't really deal with it. Sure. And then, of course, on literature, he's one of the most influential people to ever live. Like, his influence on literature of the next century was vast. People like Kafka, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Hemingway, the modernist in general. Particularly in Europe, it's kind of interesting because he was actually so popular in Russia,

the next generation of Russia, sometimes you have this thing where it's like the young people have to rebel against the last generation. And a lot of the next generation of Russian authors, like particularly Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov, like, hated Dostoevsky. They all loathed him. He was so overrated, you know. But in Europe, the next generation of European authors were massively influenced by him. But, yeah, in literature, I mean, Keremov and Dostoevsky in general is one of the most

influential literary minds ever to live, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned his proto-existentialism. It's also, you know, Kierkegaard is put up as another one of these proto-existentialists, but interestingly, they were both very religious and later existentialism. would be more humanist and atheistic, but it's worth mentioning. Yeah, he's very close to Kirkland. I'm trying to find evidence if he's ever read Kirkegaard, and I never could find it.

That would be interesting. Meeting of the Minds. I don't know if he did, but he's really obviously close to Kirkegaard and a lot of his ideas. Absolutely. Fascinating. So if someone wanted to get into Dostoevsky and his work, which book would you recommend as a good gateway? And then if somebody could only read one book by him, which one, which single book would you recommend? Yeah, as a gateway.

I mean, you could, of course, read. notes from the underground is very short, but it's also really weird. Yeah, it is. I don't know if everyone's going to like it. I think crime and punishment, like, as a novel, is the most interesting, which is probably why it's the one that they assign in school the most, like for young people, because it's more readable and kind of dramatic and has all these interesting things happen and gets into this psychology that introduces you to Dostoevsky, I think.

As far as one, I mean, there's no question. The last book you wrote Brothers Cameras of is the one that ties everything together the most and the one that was most influential on thought in the world. You know, like I said, all these people said Brothers Camerasoff, you know, all these people were reading it multiple times. Yeah, that one is really his masterpiece by far and ties everything together. All the other novels are much more thematic, like Demons is about politics, the idiot is about religion, crime and punishment is about this kind of existentialism.

It's like Brothers Caramersov has all the novels and all the themes all tied together. So that's the one. And he wrote one with the hope of writing three but died before two and three, huh? Yeah, two and three were going to come out. You mentioned earlier, Wittgenstein, being a fan, that's also a very sensitive, very moody, very temperamental personality as well. So that's kind of funny to think about it. Yeah, in particular he liked the, in Karamazov, there was the character of Father Zasama, who was the monk and represented for Dostoevsky what religion should be. and Wittgenstein would read it over and over and over.

Because he was like, we think of Wittgenstein as this kind of logisticists sometimes, you know, but he was very spiritual and sensitive, like you said, as well. Absolutely. Well, Corey, another great episode. I always love having you on, man. It's fascinating. I'm really glad we got to cover this topic together. Before I let you go, where can listeners find you and your work online?

Well, I am, you know, I'm existential comics, but I'm actually not here to promote existential comics. What would you say, here's a question for you, what is the one thing that you hate about chess? That I hate about chess? Yeah. That I don't fucking know how to play it. What do you hate about chess? Well, then I don't fucking know how to play it, but what's the right answer?

The answer is that you have to wait for the other guys to play his turn. Okay. So there was this old game called Kung Fu Chess that I played in the early 2000s. That's like real-time chess. You move all the pieces at once, and then they have to recharge. I had a super fun time with it, and I recreated that game. So check out Kungfetchess.org

Yeah, I'd had no clue That's fucking awesome Yeah It's a little beta project It's still in beta But I'm going to watch it soon Beautiful All right man

Well thank you so much We'll definitely do it again All right cool man thanks I'll shake Do all you want I was shinking I would disappear I was slip into the groove And cut me off

And curve me out There's a lifted space inside my heart And I'll send you free I'll save you free There's a lifted space in the summer With a week's day So now I set you free I set you free

Slowly we offer As low as flies Because all the one is a month We're going to stay Just to see what in just to see what is I can't kick your head just to feel your face

and learn and hate listen to your eyes I'm Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh

Oh Oh She can let me quiet as mine While the cat is a way Do what we want Do what we want We want We're living in

Two empty space Inside my eye When we're reached in So now I stay free I stay free Because all Just to see what is Just to see what is

Just to see what it Oh Birdlights floating to my room Slowly we are from as long as flowers As long as we move upon a stay Against a rounder pain The darkness is beneath I can't kick your heart

Just to feed your fast polluted head It's sincere Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh

So You know, Thank you.