By Michael K. Makrakis
Although Dostoevsky was born in Moscow (30 October 1821), he spent his life in St. Petersburg since May 1837 changing many times his place of abode. His last address was on Kuznechny Lane, near the Church of Vladimirskaya. This is where he received the invitation of the Society of the Friends of Russian Literature to attend the unveiling of the Pushkin bust in Moscow and give a speech. It was April-May of 1880. Dostoevsky was then writing his last book "The Brothers Karamazov". Although he did not want to interrupt his work, his huge love for Pushkin made him finally decide to travel to Moscow.
He left on 22 May. His wife, Anna Grigoryevna, who accompanied him to the station, begged him to write to her every day describing all the details. This is why he composed the letters covering the period he stayed in Moscow: from the next day of his arrival (23-24 May) until the 8th of June, 1880, the day he gave the speech for Pushkin. This speech caused so much upheaval that it was characterised as a true "historical fact". As he writes in one of his letters (13 June 1880) after his speech "the people started sobbing and embracing one another swearing to be better in the future."
Dostoevsky met Kasatkin exactly a week prior to his Pushkin speech. His letter, though, to his wife was written the next day, 2-3 June, late at night, after two o' clock. Although it is quite big, only in the end there is a reference to his meeting with Kasatkin whom he mentions as Yaponski (Japanese) naming him after the country where he had been working as a missionary. This is the relevant excerpt:
"Yesterday morning I met Metropolitans Alexey and Nicholas (Yaponski). I was extremely pleased with their acquaintance. I stayed with them for almost an hour until some countess was announced and I left. While I was there, I had a sincere discussion with both of them. They told me that my visit was an honor for them and it gave them great pleasure. They have read my books. This is why they appreciate me; because I defend God. When I prepared to leave, Alexey blessed me with much love and gave me the Holy Bread."
Let's see now how Nicholas Kasatkin (Yaponski) describes this meeting with Dostoevsky from his own point of view. Note that this description in his Diary is dated 1st of June 1880, the day he met him. That morning (it was a Sunday), Kasatkin attended, as he writes, the Divine Liturgy, at the church which is a glebe of Saint Savvas Monastery. His Eminence Alexey officiated and he ordained, amongst others, a deacon for Makovo of Asia Minor. After the Divine Liturgy, Kasatkin went, according to his writings, to meet Trapeznikov who had promised to make a donation for the Mission of Japan:
"Going back to His Eminence Alexey," writes Kasatkin, "I met the famous writer Fyodor Dostoevsky. He believes that nihilists are soon to be converted into religious people. They have already crossed the boundaries of material economy and have arrived at a moral field. He said to me about Japan: They belong to the yellow race. I wonder whether there are special characteristics during their proselytisation to Christianity. Dostoevsky is an intense, typical person with proud eyes, a husky voice and he has a cough. He looks as if he is suffering from tuberculosis."
Kasatkin finishes his description with the arrival of the countess...
The Subject of Nihilism
In the beginning, the discussion of Dostoevsky with the Metropolitans Alexey and Nicholas was about the subject of nihilists which was a crucial issue for the Church. It was a subject that seems to have excited Kasatkin's interest.
The term "nihilism" (nihilismus) was first used by Ivan Turgenev in his novel "Fathers and Sons" (1862). This term is used by the author to characterize the main hero of the novel, Bazarov, who denies everything. Taking Turgenev's hero as an opportunity, the reactionaries and the bourgeois liberals characterised the revolutionaries belonging to Chernyshevsky's side as nihilists. This Russian radical supported in his work "What Is to Be Done?" that only revolutionary violence could open the way to a new life. This new radical group, therefore, broke away from the group of the old utopian socialists, supporters of Petrashevsky, who had made their appearance in the 1840s and believed in a social change through peaceful means.
The conflict between these two groups was mortal. Dostoevsky wrote an article about it in his magazine "Epoch" with the title "Split (Raskol) in the Nihilists". The name of the central character in "Crime and Punishment" (1866), "Raskolnikov" derived from Raskol. Raskolnikov, contrary to the utopian socialist Lebeziatnikov, in the book, is according to Joseph Frank the nihilist revolutionary. This is why he does not hesitate to kill the old woman moneylender whom he considers a parasite, "a louse", (Part Five, Chapter four). If Raskolnikov, as his name shows, symbolizes revolution, the old moneylender, on the other hand, symbolizes the bourgeoisie which exploits the sweat of the laborer. Boris Litvinov writes: "For Marx, the moneylender killed by Raskolnikov incorporates the evil." For Dostoevsky, though, as Jean-Marie Benoist says, "There is no - there cannot be - historical justification for the revolution. Because as regards the evil, the moneylender (that is the bourgeoisie) is less evil than the means adopted for its abolition - that is violence."
Dostoevsky also described other types of nihilists, apart from Raskolnikov, in his book "The Possessed" which is a prophetic anatomy of Russian nihilism, perhaps the most systematic research on the absence of God in this kind of nihilism. Because when someone denies everything, every value of life, it is logical that in the end they will deny the highest value which is God. All nihilists in Dostoevsky's works - Raskolnikov, Kirillov, Stavrogin - do not believe in God. According to Dostoevsky's axiom, everything is allowed for the ones that do not believe in God. From this point of view, the main issue in most of his books is, as he writes in one of his letters (25 March 1870), whether there is a God.
The above mentioned are related to the period that Dostoevsky was still writing "The Possessed", a book which is the perfect expression of nihilism in relation to the rejection of God, mutiny, revolution. It seems, though, that after this book his attention was arrested by the phenomenon of the conversion of many atheists.
As he said to his friend Aleksei Sergeyevich Suvorin, not only "The Possessed" did not decrease his popularity, as he was afraid in the beginning, but on the contrary, there was much response in the public, and, more specifically, among young people, who would run in his wake to listen to him, to put forward various questions. He received many letters and confessions from young people during that period. Amongst them there was an atheist student of the Theological Academy of St. Petersburg, A. A. Zelenetski, who after confessing to Dostoevsky, found again his faith to God. According to Ivan Ivanovich Popov, who belonged to the left wing, Dostoevsky was appreciated by many of them that would warmly greet him whenever he appeared at literary nights.
The change in the youth's relationship with Dostoevsky was more obvious during the last year of his life. This was also evident by the large number of young people that attended his funeral. The viscount Eugène-Melchior de Vogue, ambassador of France in Moscow, who attended this funeral, characterized it as a real "apotheosis". As he writes in his book "Le Roman russe", among the thousands of young people following the funeral procession, there were the "nihilists recognised by their strange clothes and strange behavior - the men with the coats over their shoulders and the women with the glasses and the hair cut very short."
This conversion of the youth is obvious in the vigil of the students near the dead in the night prior to the funeral. The Metropolitan of St. Petersburg who saw all these young people praying sobbing on their knees said after a few days to Dostoevsky's wife and daughter: "They had told me that these young people were atheists and hated our Church. What magical power must Dostoevsky have had in order to manage to bring them so close to God!"
Dostoevsky himself had felt this love and devotion of the young people amongst whom there must surely have been many nihilists. This perhaps urged him to say to Nicholas Kasatkin when he met him in Moscow how the nihilists would very soon convert to religious individuals and how from even now they overstepped the limits of their interests in material welfare and entered "moral territory."
According to Dostoevsky, atheism is the last step before someone finds their faith in God. It is possible that many nihilists in this position found God through Dostoevsky's works. The biggest part of nihilism, though, seems to have followed its natural course resulting in the revolution. This revolution was predicted by Dostoevsky in "The Possessed". Perhaps another of his predictions in this book may come true. The return of his country to Orthodoxy after the ordeal with the various "demons" that entered it making it like those who were possessed at Gadarene. Aas Dostoevsky believed, this was because the Divine Power watches over it and it will finally cure it in order to sit "clothed and in its right mind at the feet of Jesus" (Part Three, Chapter VII, § 2).
The Mission in Japan
Apart from the subject of nihilists discussed by Dostoevsky and Kasatkin, they also talked about the mission in Japan, an issue of special interest for Kasatkin. From what the latter mentioned from his experience in this country, Dostoevsky remarked that there must be many difficulties in the proselytization to Christianity of the people there since they belong to the yellow race.
In the speech about Pushkin given by the famous writer a week after his meeting with Kasatkin, he talked about a universal union in the name of Christ, a union, therefore, that would include the Asian countries, such as Japan, but he mainly referred to the European communion within which the speaker distinguished his own people. "Amongst all the European peoples," he said, "the Russian one is perhaps the one destined to achieve the universal union of people; their union within brotherhood through the virtues of their hearts" ("The Diary of a Writer", August 1880, chapter II). Asian Russia may be near Japan, and even nearer China, but its people belong to a different race. Perhaps this is the difference that makes the communication of these countries with Russia more difficult. This is why, although Dostoevsky was much loved both in Japan as well as in China, they could not understand him to the degree he was understood in Europe.
An example is the great contemporary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. In his film "The Idiot" (1951), based on Dostoevsky's book with the same title, he distorts the main idea of the book, despite his huge admiration for the Russian writer (Dostoevsky is the writer he loves most). This happens because there are not the necessary conditions for his religious faith. In the book, when Rogozhin asks Prince Myshkin: "Do you believe in God?" Prince Myshkin answers: "The essence of religious feeling has nothing to do with reason or atheism" (Part II, chapter IV). In Kurosawa's film, Rogozhin (Akama) who perhaps belongs to Shintoism with a number of "gods" asks Myshkin (Kamenta): "Do you believe in gods?" Myshkin answers: "Not really" without discussing the subject further. Kurosawa who is also the scriptwriter of the film closes the subject about God in the same way he opened it. In this way, though, he destroys the deeper meaning of the book which is expressed by the title as well. Kurosawa, of course, stresses the meaning of the title with the frequent repetition of the characterization "idiot" for the hero of his movie, giving thus the idea of the society about the naive and pure person who is vilified as an "idiot", about idiocy, in general, as nonsense. He gives, though, no symbolical meaning in this nonsense as "irrational" with the religious meaning; the irrational, or better the incomprehensible ("the element exceeding reason") expressed by Prince Myshkin with his faith to God. A hero like that, who with his coming from another world and his return to the same world, to his transcendental world, is the "Russian Christian" for Dostoevsky.
Perhaps Dostoevsky's works, such as "The Idiot", are the best way to propagate Orthodoxy in the East, and especially Japan that loved the great writer so much. But not always. The necessary conditions are needed and these are created through the correct preparation and personal contact with the people; through a systematic Mission, such as the one of Nicholas Kasatkin, the missionary and Archbishop of Japan.
A Piece of Information About Dostoevsky
After the discussion with Dostoevsky about his missionary work in Japan, Kasatkin describes the famous author as "an intense, typical person with proud eyes." He finishes noting the husky voice and the cough that gave him the impression of a person suffering from tuberculosis.
The truth is that Dostoevsky was ill. He was not suffering from tuberculosis, as Kasatkin thought, though, and as J. A. Myers believes in his book "Fighters of Fate". His true disease was of cardiac aetiology. He must have been suffering, in order to use modern terminology, from cardiopulmonary deficiency. This was the disease that finally caused his death. When the first haemorrhage occurred, feeling his impending end, he asked his wife to call a priest so that he could confess and receive the Eucharist. Father Megorski came in half an hour and Dostoevsky, as his wife writes in her Memoirs, "received him with peace and quiet." He kept this peace until the very last moment. He died on 28 January 1881, eight months after his meeting with Kasatkin.
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