Where Tolstoy Departs from Dostoevsky

“Tolstoy was not naïve in thinking that social and political reform would end all forms of evil in human life. Like Dostoevsky, he was very well aware that much wickedness flowed from the pride and vanity of men like Napoleon or the Russian tsars.”

Introduction

A few weeks ago, I published an article in Merion West entitled “Dostoevsky’s Extremely Thoughtful Critique of the Left.”  My argument in this piece was that, though Dostoevsky made many very salient critiques of the progressive personality, he and his contemporary disciples underestimate the importance of political agitation for social change.  At the conclusion, I invoked Dostoevsky’s contemporary Leo Tolstoy as a counterpart to the former’s more conservative outlook on the topic. The article generated a reasonable number of comments, most of them very thoughtful, along with some criticism. The most frequent critique was that I had misunderstood Dostoevsky’s position in arguing that there are very good reasons to engage in political agitation for social change, since the Russian novelist was famous for insisting that true improvement can only take place at the individual level within the depth’s of each person’s soul. More specifically, some questioned whether any efforts to engage in such macro-level agitation can ever be motivated by a genuine desire to do good, since truly loving acts can only be directed at specific and particular individuals—never humanity as a whole.

There is something to this argument since I do believe these critics have accurately stated Dostoevsky’s position on the possibility and moral worth of political agitation. In general, he was extremely skeptical of reformers and their benevolent sounding platforms, seeing them as little more than masks hiding more insidious motives. Indeed, my article spent quite a bit of time discussing his numerous observations on these issues. Unfortunately, the critics also missed a key element of my position. It is not that I think Dostoevsky can or should be reinterpreted along progressive lines to support political agitation. It is that I feel Dostoevsky is wrong to take such a pessimistic and conservative stance on the issue. While love and an orientation to do good may begin at the individual level through our concrete relations with those closest to us, we have duties to continuously extend our moral outlook further. Indeed, as political liberals like Will Kymlicka observe, one of the thrusts of Western moral theory and religion since at least the advent of modernity (and arguably even further back) has been to gradually extend the horizon of our moral outlook more and more broadly. We gradually moved from regarding only our lives and perhaps those closest to us as being of moral concern  to eventually recognizing that all people’s lives are equally important.  At least in principle. This is a point figures like St. Augustine knew quite well, as did Tolstoy. In the remainder of this essay, I will draw upon the latter figure to explain why this is the correct approach to moral reasoning—and how it demands we take political steps to improve the lot of those less fortunate than ourselves.

Dostoevsky’s conclusion was that true fulfillment could only really be found through personal spiritual development and a commitment to private acts of love and grace.

The Limits of Dostoevsky’s Critique of Progressivism

Dostoevsky was initially attracted to reform and even socialism, and his early novels like Poor Folk compare admirably with figures like Dickens in their scathing denunciation of inequality and impoverishment. However, after his long imprisonment in Siberia, Dostoevsky’s work became far more relentlessly pessimistic about the possibility of just social change. In novels like The Devils, he satirizes the progressive impulse to create the kingdom of God on earth, for both religious and psychological reasons. Progressive reformers never recognize that life is defined by suffering and that people will even seek it out in order to find meaning and struggle in their transient existence. Moreover, those who wish to establish the kingdom of God on earth are often simply masking their resentment and anger at existence. Those who demand social change often conceal a darker impulse to obtain power and take revenge against all those who have allegedly wronged them, from the rich, to politicians and so on.