Imagine standing against a wall, blindfolded, waiting for the gunfire that will end your life any second… but suddenly, you're told your life is spared, and instead of being executed you're now being exiled. You’re sent to Siberia for ten years, with four years of hard labor among murderers, and another six years of forced military service.
This is exactly what happened to the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, after he was arrested and sentenced to death for his involvement with the Petrashevsky Circle, a group that was critical of Tsarist Russia's autocracy and serfdom.
This intense encounter with existential terror changed Dostoevsky's life. It made him meditate deeply on suffering, sorrow, redemption, and the human condition. These ideas poured into his books, making him one of the most thoughtful and real writers about what it means to be human and to search for hope amidst despair.
In "Memoirs from the House of the Dead", Dostoevsky provides a fictionalized account of his experiences in the Siberian penal colony. Written as a semi-autobiographical account, this work captures the brutal conditions of prison life and the often tragic lives of the convicts. He explores the capacity for human resilience and the potential for psychological rebirth even in the darkest circumstances. He teaches us the transformative power of suffering, but not as some unreachable master: as a fellow wretch doing his best to be redeemed.
Perhaps no other writer understands Dostoevsky’s heart as well as Herman Hesse, himself a titan of compassionate guidance through the human condition. In "My Belief: Essays on Life and Art," Hesse tells us the secret to truly grasping the essence of Dostoevsky’s work:
"Staring from afar into life, bereft and crippled by misery and no longer able to understand life in its wild, beautiful cruelty, wishing to have no more to do with it, then we are open to the music of this terrifying and magnificent writer.
Then we are no longer onlookers, no longer epicures and judges; we are fellow creatures among all the poor devils of Dostoevsky’s creation, then we suffer their woes, and we stare fascinated and breathless with them into the hurly-burly of life, into the eternally grinding mill of death.
But at the same time we can also catch Dostoevsky’s music, his comfort, his love, and then we can first experience the marvelous meaning of his terrifying and so often hellish world."
This is the power of Dostoevsky’s writing. He plunges with us right into the depths of despair, and offers glimpses of redemption and hope. His works remind us that even in our bleakest moments, there is a profound beauty to the human experience. To be able to huddle and commiserate in the dark, and rejoice together in the light — there is grace in both. Even in moments when you feel like you have no one to share these experiences with, no one who could possibly understand what you’re going through, remember that Dostoevksy’s works await you.
Love,
Yepi