Suicide in Dostoevsky
The concept of suicide is frequently discussed in both Fyodor Dostoevsky’s journalism and novels.
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Suicide as a Russian Problem
In the 1870s, the regular coverage of suicide in St. Petersburg's press exposed the Russian public to this perplexing sensation - a suicide epidemic (Paperno, 76). By the 1880s, suicide has been “a fact of daily life in the capital city (St. Petersburg)” (Morrisey, 204). Social scientists diagnosed the phenomenon as both a predictor and a result of the public welfare, judicial, and intellectual reforms, for how they dissipated previous moral orders. The statistics also suggested a correlation between the density of suicide and the area’s level of Westernization/civilization (Morrisey, 204).
Suicide in Dostoevsky’s writing
Dostoevsky’s writing approaches this nation-wide self-annihilation frenzy not to be simply a consequence of individual anguish or psychopathology, but rather a philosophical and spiritual crisis rooted in the characters’ disrupted relationships with society and God. In A Writer’s Diary, Dostoevsky claims the importance of the “conviction that the human soul is immortal”, as it is the only way to prevent people from resorting “logical suicide” (732-733).
The typical self-destructive character in Dostoevsky's writings is a determinist who traps himself in the “laws of nature” and solipsism, and therefore renders free will and immortality as illusory. Dostoevsky’s rationale of suicide negates rationalistic ideologies and secular intellectual revolution, since they threatened christian faith (Desmond, 27) and led individuals to materialistic strivings, until their solipsism “[intensifies] isolation…and [deepens] alienation of the self” from their broader circumstances (34).
Journalism
In A Writer’s Diary, inspired by suicide cases reported in the newspaper, Dostoevsky wrote extensively about self-destruction. The atheist “daughter of an Emigré” poisoned herself with chloroform, and “the meek one” threw herself out of the window holding an icon (A Writer’s Diary, 652-653). In the conversion story of the “ridiculous man”, his egoistic suicide is intervened by the development of a love for humanity and God. Moreover, "The Sentence", a rewrite of the confession of a atheist's cry of "injustice" for being sentenced to a fatal existence without consent (Paperno 170):
"What right did this nature have to being me into the world as a result of some eternal laws of hers? I was created with consciousness, and I was conscious of this nature: what right did she have to produce me, a conscious being, without my willing it?" (Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, 653)
"...in my incontrovertible capacity as plantiff and defendant, judge and the accused, I condemn this nature, which has so brazenly and unceremoniously inflicted this suffering, to annihilation along with me...Since I am unable to destroy nature, I am destroying only myself, solely out of the weariness of enduring a tyranny in which there is no guilty party." (Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, 656)
Fictions
Many of Dostoevsky’s fictional characters die by self-annihilation. Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment (1866), Kirilov in Demons (1872), Ippolit in The Idiot (1869), and Kraft in The Adolescent (1875) pulled the revolver up against themselves; Stavrogin, Olya, and Smerdyakov hung themselves.
Just like the “ridiculous man” who believed in his exclusive accessibility to “The Truth”, the consumptive atheist Ippolit, too, insists on humanity’s doomed termination in oblivion. Ippolit despises those who grumble over their healthy life and feels distant from the beauty of the world that everyone praises. The naturalistic, nihilistic, and solipsistic beliefs bring Ippolit to depart from the faithful and God and plunges into despair. Kirilov, in Demons, goes one step further with his self-inflicted demise, through which he proclaims that human’s will can replace the will of God; his death borns the “new man” who “overcomes pain and fear [of death] and will himself be a God” (Demons, 115), a “man-god” (238).
"If there is no God, then I am God...It is my duty to shoot myself because the fullest point of my self-will is—for me to kill myself" (Demons, 617)
Dostoevsky’s characters assert their authorial control by choosing death to overcome death itself (Paperno, 8), insisting on and despairing over the faithless emptiness of humanity without God.
References
- Desmond, John F. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy, and the Age of Suicide. Catholic University of America Press, 2019.
- Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage Classics, 1995.
- Dostoevsky, Fyodor. “Two Suicides.” A Writer’s Diary, trans. Kenneth Lantz, vol. 1, Northwestern University Press, pp. 650-653.
- Dostoevsky, Fyodor. “The Sentence.” A Writer’s Diary, trans. Kenneth Lantz, vol. 1, Northwestern University Press, pp. 653-656.
- Dostoevsky, Fyodor. “The Meek One: A Fantastical Story.” A Writer’s Diary, trans. Kenneth Lantz, vol. 1, Northwestern University Press, pp. 677-714.
- Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Idiot, trans. Anna Brailovsky, Modern Library, 2003.
- Morrissey, Susan K. "Suicide and civilization in late Imperial Russia." Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas H. 2, 1995, pp. 201-217.
- Paperno, Irina. Suicide as a cultural institution in Dostoevsky's Russia. Cornell University Press, 1997.