A Third Testament: A modern writer explores the spiritual wanderings of Augustine, Blake, Pascal, Tolstoy, Bonhoeffer,Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky by Malcolm Muggeridge

Author:Malcolm Muggeridge [Muggeridge, Malcolm]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: religion and spirituality
Publisher: Plough Publishing House
Published: 2011-10-24T22:00:00+00:00

fyodor dostoevsky 1821 – 1881

When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in the October Revolution of 1917, one of the first administrative acts of the new revolutionary government was to transfer the capital from St. Petersburg, whose spirit, like its elegant architecture, belonged to Western Europe, to Moscow, at the heart of Russia and of Russian history. At the time there was every reason – strategic, economic and political – for doing this, but it also settled a controversy that had agitated and divided the Russian intelligentsia for years past – between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles. Though the triumphant Bolsheviks looked to a German Jew, Karl Marx, for their ideology, and to the Twentieth Century’s most successful exponent of capitalism, America, for their technology, their regime was to be, in its aspirations, its strategy and its character, essentially and insistently Russian.

In October 1821, a second child was born to the resident doctor of a Moscow hospital then known as the Mariinskaya Hospital for the Poor. The baby who thus came into the world in an obscure enough way was destined to become one of the most famous writers of his time, not just in Russia but throughout the world. The doctor’s name was Dostoevsky, and he christened his new son Fyodor.

Like so many of my generation, I first read Dostoevsky’s novel, Crime and Punishment, when I was very young. I read it like a thriller, with mounting excitement. Later, when I came to read Dostoevsky’s other works, especially his great masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, I realized that he was not just a writer with a superlative gift for storytelling, but that he had a special insight into what life is about, and into man’s relationship with his Creator, making him a prophetic voice looking into and illumining the future. I came to see that the essential theme of all his writing is Good and Evil, the two points around which the drama of our mortal existence is enacted.

The Dostoevsky family’s own circumstances were decidedly somber. His father seems to have had a harsh and irascible temperament, made worse by a growing tendency to drink too much; and his mother, naturally a cheerful soul, succumbed to tuberculosis during her ninth pregnancy, when Fyodor was fifteen. It was the end of family life for Dostoevsky; along with his brother Michael, he was sent off to St. Petersburg to prepare for early entry into the Military Engineering College there.

When Dostoevsky had been only some six months at the Engineering Academy, he heard that his father had died, allegedly murdered by some serfs on his estate in revenge for his admittedly drunken, incalculable and lecherous ways. For obvious reasons the family kept the details to themselves – even assuming they knew them with any certitude; the authorities, too, were anxious that such murders – apparently rather common at the time –should not be widely publicized. The death of his father, in circumstances so mysterious and so sinister, cannot but have affected Dostoevsky profoundly.

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