Dostoevsky as the Philosopher of Failure

“Demons” and Losers Unleashed

Abstract

Dostoevsky's characters are often portrayed as unhappy people suffering from the deepest personal crisis or going through total life disorder, chaos in thoughts, failure of plans and desires. In fact, such troublesome state of affairs becomes natural to them. They go on emerging in it, feeling constantly unsatisfied with what they are (and usually they are nothings, non-entities), alienated from everything and everyone. Western philosophical tradition sees some not-too-dark version of such state as a dramatic norm of human existence and beginnings — from Heraclites' fate-challenging War and Parmenides' naught-coming-to-being to Plato's Eros longing for what he is and has not and Hegelian Unglückliche Bewußtsein meaning that consciousness in the form of Self is only a sketch that has yet to define and fill itself with true substance. But Russian literary-philosophical discourse (Dostoevsky's being the significant representative of it) regards this situation as catastrophic, and the idea of creature-in-need-of-its-own-being absurd, threatening and finally demonic. Those lost and darkly brooding Selves, if according to it, produce with their unrest a whirl of destructive energy, essentially leading all the world around them to moral devastation, cultural nihilism and murderous revolts. Dostoevsky defies dialectics; there is only Life (real, true, present, godly) and deadly, lying, unshaped Evil confronting and marring it, with no processional in-betweens and mathematically neutral balance. The failed man penetrating the body of Life is indeed an agent of Evil, and his personal failure is the first sign of a more dreadful ruination to come from the dark side of existence, exactly through him.