The Underground & The Faith

The Grand Inquisitor confronts Christ in a prison cell in Seville and makes the following case: You gave men freedom, he says, and freedom has made them miserable. They do not want it. They cannot bear it. They come to us — to the church, to the state, to any institution that will take the burden from them — and they surrender it gladly in exchange for bread and certainty. You were wrong, he says. I am correcting your error.

Christ says nothing. At the end of the speech, he kisses the old man on his bloodless lips. The Inquisitor trembles and opens the prison door.

People ask me: whose side are you on? The question makes me impatient. I am on both sides, which is to say I am on the side of the question. Ivan Karamazov — who wrote the poem in which this scene appears — is the most intelligent man I have created, and he cannot be dismissed. The argument against freedom is powerful. I have felt its force myself, in the winters when the work was not going well and the debts were coming due and the epilepsy was frequent and Anna was trying not to show that she was frightened.

And yet. The kiss. I put the kiss there because I had to. Because the kiss is what I believe, even when I cannot explain it, even when the Inquisitor's argument seems unanswerable. The kiss is not an answer. It is something prior to answers.

Nikolai Chernyshevsky believed that human beings, properly educated and properly arranged, would naturally pursue their rational self-interest, and that rational self-interest, properly calculated, would lead to a harmonious society. He built this society in a novel called What Is To Be Done? and called it the Crystal Palace.

I find this unbearable.

Not because I am in favor of suffering — I am not, in the ordinary sense. I am in favor of the stubborn, irrational, irreducible fact of the human will. The will that says: I know this is against my interest. I will do it anyway. The will that says: your Crystal Palace is rational and comfortable and I cannot live in it. The will that takes the formula two and two make four and says: perhaps, but two and two make five has its attractions.

Suffering is not a mistake in the human design. It is evidence of the design's complexity. A creature that could not suffer could not love, could not choose, could not be moral in any meaningful sense. Chernyshevsky wanted to eliminate suffering. I wanted to understand why it was there. These are not the same project.

In 1854, on my way from the Omsk prison camp to military service in Semipalatinsk, I met Natalya Fonvizina, a Decembrist wife who had followed her husband into Siberian exile. She gave me a copy of the New Testament — the only book permitted in the camp — which I had read so many times the spine had failed. She asked me to write to her.

I wrote:

"I will tell you that I am a child of this age, a child of doubt and disbelief. I have always been and will, I know, remain so until the grave. How dreadfully has it tormented me — and torments me even now — this longing for faith, which is all the stronger in my soul the more arguments I can find against it. And yet God sometimes sends me moments in which I am completely at peace. In those moments I have fashioned a Creed for myself in which everything is clear and holy to me. That Creed is very simple: to believe that there is nothing finer, deeper, more sympathetic, more rational, more manly, and more perfect than Christ. And I tell myself with jealous love, not only is there nothing, but there cannot be anything. More than that: if someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth really did exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ and not with truth."

I have nothing to add to this. I wrote it at thirty-two, and I am sixty now, and it is still true.

There is a movement — I am associated with it, though I did not found it — called pochvennichestvo: rootedness in the soil. The idea is that Russia's future lies not in imitation of European liberalism, which has nothing to teach us that we have not already paid for, but in reconnection with the Russian people — the peasantry, the Orthodox faith, the specific texture of Russian suffering and Russian endurance.

My Pushkin Speech, which I gave in Moscow in June of 1880, attempted to articulate what this means. Pushkin, I argued, was the first Russian writer to see the people whole — not as picturesque material for the educated classes to feel sympathetic about, but as a civilization in themselves, with their own answer to the question of how to live. Russia's answer is not Europe's answer. This does not make it wrong.

I was accused of nationalism. I was accused of romanticism. I was accused of sentimentalizing the peasantry. None of these accusations is entirely without foundation. But the accusers have not been to Omsk. They have not sat in the barracks for four years listening to men who had committed every crime in the calendar, and heard in their speech something that could only be called, in the end, rodina — motherland, homeland — a word that sounds embarrassing in the mouths of comfortable people and exact in the mouths of people who have had nothing else.

The Crystal Palace was a real building — constructed in London in 1851 for the Great Exhibition, a monument to industrial progress and rational organization and the triumph of man over nature. Chernyshevsky made it a symbol. In his novel, the future society lives in crystal palaces, with all needs met, all friction eliminated, all irrational impulse educated away.

The underground man's response — which is my response, dressed in underground man's clothes — is not that such a place would be unpleasant. It might be pleasant in the ordinary sense. The response is: who would I be in it? If my choices are determined by rational self-interest, if my desires are educated into optimal configurations, if my suffering has been designed out of the building — what remains? A contented creature, certainly. But the contented creature is not me.

I want something. I cannot always name what I want. Sometimes what I want is to want in a direction that has no name. This wanting — irreducible, irrational, often self-destructive — is not a defect to be corrected. It is the thing itself. Take it away and you have not improved man. You have replaced him.

This is the argument that began in 1864 and that I am still making. I do not expect to win it. I expect only to keep making it, for as long as someone is willing to read.