Natasha's Dance полностью

For Dostoevsky, in particular, this turning towards 'Russia' became his defining credo. He was a repentant nihilist, as he described himself, an unhappy atheist who longed to find a Russian faith. In the early 1860s he mapped out a series of novels to be called 'The Life of a Great Sinner'. It would chart the spiritual journey of a Western-educated Russian man who had lost his faith and led a life of sin. He would go in search of truth to a monastery, become a Slavophile, join the Khlysty sect, and at the end he would find 'both Christ and the Russian land, the Russian Christ and the Russian God'. It was to be a 'gigantic novel', Dostoevsky wrote to the poet Apollon Maikov in December 1868: 'please don't tell anyone, but this is how it is for me: to write this last novel, even if it kills me - and I'll get it all out'.⁷⁸ Dostoevsky never wrote 'The Life of a Great Sinner'. But his four great novels - Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils and The Brothers Karamazov - were all variations on its theme.

Like his sinner, Dostoevsky struggled over faith. 'I am a child of the age', he wrote in 1854, 'a child of unbelief and scepticism.'⁷⁹ His novels are filled with figures, like himself, who yearn for a religion in the face of their own doubts and reasoning. Even the believers, such as Shatov in The Devils (1871), can never quite commit to an unambiguous belief in God. 'I believe in Russia,' Shatov tells Stavrogin.

'I believe in the Greek Orthodox Church. I - I believe in the body of Christ -I believe that the second coming will take place in Russia - I believe,' he murmured in a frenzy.

'But in God? In God?'

'I - I shall believe in God.'⁸⁰

Dostoevsky's novels can be read as an open discourse between reason and belief in which the tension between the two is never quite resolved.⁸¹ According to Dostoevsky, truth is contained in reason and belief - one cannot be undermined by the other - and all true belief must be maintained in the face of all reason. There is no rational answer to Ivan's arguments against a God that allows little children to suffer. Nor is there a reasonable response to the arguments of the Grand Inquisitor, the subject of Ivan's poetic fantasy in The Brothers

Karamazov, who arrests Christ when he reappears in Counter-reformation Spain. Interrogating his prisoner, the Grand Inquisitor argues that the only way to prevent human suffering is, not by Christ's example, which ordinary mortals are too weak to follow, but by the construction of a rational order which can secure, by force if necessary, the peace and happiness that people really want. But Dostoevsky's faith was not of the sort that could be reached by any reasoning. He condemned as 'Western' all faiths which sought a reasoned understanding of Divinity or which had to be enforced by papal laws and hierarchies (and in this sense the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor was itself intended by Dostoevsky as an argument against the Roman Church). The 'Russian God' in which Dostoevsky believed could only be arrived at by a leap of faith: it was a mystical belief outside of all reasoning. As he wrote in 1854, in one of the rare statements of his own religious credo, 'if someone proved to me that Christ was outside the truth, and it really was that the truth lay outside Christ, I would prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth'.⁸²

In Dostoevsky's view, the ability to continue to believe in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence was a peculiarly Russian gift. There is a scene in The Brothers Karamazov where Karamazov's servant Smerdyakov is holding forth on the question of God at a family dinner. In a confused effort to refute the Gospels, Smerdyakov says that nobody can move a mountain to the sea - except 'perhaps two hermits in the desert'.

'One moment!' screamed Karamazov in a transport of delight. 'So you think there are two men who can move mountains, do you? Ivan, make a note of this extraordinary fact, write it down. There you have the Russian all over!'⁸³

Like Karamazov, Dostoevsky took delight in this 'Russian faith', this strange capacity to believe in miracles. It was the root of his nationalism and his messianic vision of the 'Russian soul' as the spiritual saviour of the rationalistic West, which ultimately led him, in the 1870s, to write in the nationalist press about the 'holy mission' of 'our great Russia' to build a Christian empire on the continent. The simple Russian people, Dostoevsky claimed, had found the solution to the intellectual's torment over faith. They needed their belief, it was central