ŷ������

��I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind.��

I have always loved reading Dostoevsky. While I do have him inked on my right arm, that love for him goes further than just skin deep, and there are so many moments where his writing and ideas seem to fit into the grooves of my brain like a key into a lock, opening up trails of thought where I realize with pleasure “yes, this is exactly what I want to be thinking about and oh how my entire being seems to dance to his rhythm.�� Trails of thought like the most lush forest path during blissful early-autumn weather. Because, sure, it can be rather dark, but it is always in a way that gives hope too and pleads for empathy. Such is the case in his 1877 short work The Dream of A Ridiculous Man, a tale of a self-declared ridiculous man (surprise) spiraling into a sense of nihilism. After a brief encounter with a suffering girl, his desire to commit suicide is thwarted by a dream (surprise!) as if it were a Christmas eve with Dickens. Plunging us into a surreal dreamscape of a paradise as it succumbs to corruption and fractures into waring entities valuing individuality over love, and that ��the consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness.�� Described by Mikhail Bakhtin as ��practically a complete encyclopedia of Dostoevsky’s most important themes,�� this is a brief but intense story delving into many of Dostoevksy’s signature themes such as grappling with nihilism, questioning utopias, and the meaning of suffering.

��I suddenly felt that it made no difference to me whether the world existed or whether nothing existed anywhere at all.��

Our narrator begins in a state of ��terrible anguish,�� finding the world lacking in meaning and already preparing to commit suicide with a gun previously purchased for such an occassion. We can read him not unlike Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, who’s opening self analysis ��"I am a sick man ... I am a wicked man�� is mirrored by ��I am a ridiculous person. Now they call me a madman.�� (All quotes taken from my copy using the Constance Garnett translation). The opening spoke strongly to me, for who hasn’t been frustrated by the world and all its absurdities, finding oneself ridiculous for participating in trading our irreplaceable hours of our one wild and precious life to endless labor, or wondering if there is meaning to anything at all. Especially when considering how one’s own demise would be insignificant in the long scheme of things, unless we adopt a solipsistic notion that the world vanishes without us. When he says ��the more I learned, the more thoroughly I understood that I was ridiculous,�� I couldn’t help but think of this meme and how often learning not only makes you feel the world is absurd but also recognizing how little you know and understand about anything makes you indeed feel ridiculous.

Yet how can one go on in this state of mind, which, as we see here, tends to bend the mind towards suicide-- something he would like to do if he can even see any meaning in doing so:

��I was so utterly indifferent to everything that I was anxious to wait for the moment when I would not be so indifferent and then kill myself.��

His brief encounter with a girl, suffering from some issue he thinks must be related to her mother, he finds his conscience biting him for not aiding her. This is thematic in Dostoevsky’s works, which often are a resistance to ideas of nihilism influenced by his own rejection of the during his time. We see a similar issue in Crime and Punishment with Raskolnikov’s resolve towards nihilism shaken by his guilty conscience.

��if I had really decided to do away with myself that night, everything in the world should have been more indifferent to me than ever…It was clear to me that so long as I was still a human being and not a meaningless zero, and till I became a zero, I was alive, and consequently able to suffer, be angry, and feel shame at my actions. Very well. But if, on the other hand, I were going to kill myself in, say, two hours, what did that little girl matter to me and what did I care for shame or anything else in the world?��

Wrestling with his own conscience has him contemplating ideas that he is not as nihilistic as he thinks but how this is a waste if he is about to become nothingness, however the line of thought drags him to sleep.

��Dreams apparently proceed not from reason but from desire, not from the head but from the heart.��

I’m really hit or miss on dreams being used as essential to a plot, but Dostoevsky pulls it off quite effectively here. I appreciate the way he almost anticipates this, discussing how his mention of the dream brought ridicule (though this is also tied in with the idea that preaching religion—there is certainly a God element to this as in most of his works—is met with mockery) and that surely he couldn’t have dreamed such vivid details. Well played. The dream brings us to a world that is a sort of paradise or utopia, styled like the as in Greek mythology, particularly from Hesiod. But his presence corrupts them as he teaches them to lie and ��they learned to lie and began to love the lie and knew the beauty of the lie.�� The idea that deceit is a powerful impulse takes over and we see the history of humanity play out as the lie starts a chain reaction of corruption.

��They began to struggle for separation, for isolation, for individuality, for mine and thine. They began to talk in different languages. They became acquainted with sorrow and loved sorrow; they thirsted for suffering, and said that truth could only be attained through suffering. Then science appeared. As they became wicked they began talking of brotherhood and humanitarianism, and understood those ideas. As they became criminal, they invented justice and drew up whole legal codes in order to observe it, and to ensure their being kept, set up a guillotine. They hardly remembered what they had lost, in fact refused to believe that they had ever been happy and innocent. They even laughed at the possibility of this happiness in the past, and called it a dream.��

What stands out is the idea that in their downfall and loss of innocence, they believe knowledge of happiness is greater than happiness. They define existence against suffering, and ideas of humanitarianism or brotherhood exist in opposition to suffering instead of simply living at peace. The irony becomes that they percieve paradise as impossibility, yet the narrator has seen that it is indeed possible. There are some interesting observations here, such as creating different temples of worship for the sake of dividing into faction that deep down know their gods are fiction (which, knowing Dostoevsky, is less a rejection of religion and more a kind of rejection of any religion aside from his as “false gods�� sort of deal), as well as the idea of desiring individual rights or a sense of individualism is a root cause of humanity’s downfall.


Yet this dream suddenly reverses his nihilism, and upon awakening, he has purpose again. ��I made up my mind to preach from that very moment and, of course, to go on preaching all my life,�� he says and sees this dream as proof paradise is possible and that the key is empathy, compassion, and unity not just as various groups but encompassing everyone everywhere all at once. We also see, however, that in a world of suffering we also have choice, and that we should choose wisely. The lesson of the shame he felt was that, no, we are not indifferent and should not attempt to be, but should lean into compassion. His final line lets us know he has tracked down the girl and we can see this as the start of his ministry, as it were.

��Sorrow compressed my heart, and I felt I would die, and then... Well, then I woke up.��

This tiny tale of a man’s transformation is such a succinct distillation of many of Dostoevsky’s primary themes and characterizations. As always, it is a rebuttal to nihilism, and the characters used to represent the idea are often shown as weak, naive, and hurting those around them due to their insistence on the belief. For a story that begins with suicide, it ends with hope and a call for love, one that is lovely to process regardless of its intended religious aims. Direct and beautifully emotive in its intensity, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man is pure Dostoevsky and a brief but lasting joy.

��

��The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness--that is what one must contend against. And I shall. If only everyone wants it, it can be arranged at once.��