A Tale of Two Revolutionaries

I recall being somewhat bored reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in my AP English class in high school the first time I read that great work, the first time I also read anything by Dostoevsky. I likewise remember being bored watching Doctor Zhivago as a teenager for the first time. The length of both works were off putting, even to an “exceptional” student of A-quality work who prided himself on being a modest connoisseur of classic films even when in high school. Now, a little older and hopefully a bit wiser, Crime and Punishment and Pasternak’s novel—alongside that once boring and long film—are among my favorite artistic works. Indeed, the entire tradition of Russian tragic realism is among my favorite genres of artistic literature.

There are many iconic revolutionary characters in Russian literature. War and Peace is my favorite work of literature, and it includes nihilist beginnings for two of its principal characters. Looking over the horizon of Russian revolutionary characters we find, among the most recognizable, Pierre Bezukhov, Andrei Bolkonsky, Pavel (Pasha) Antipov (later Strelnikov), Raskolnikov, alongside many others. Here, however, I wish to focus on two: Raskolnikov and Pasha since they encapsulate the best and worst of the Russian revolutionary ideal including romance, idealism, tragedy, and redemption.

Mid-nineteenth century Russia was a turbulent time, especially intellectually. The intelligentsia was breaking away from the rigid social norms of their aristocratic heritage and most came to reject the ritualism and spirituality of the Russian Orthodox Church (with a few notable exceptions). In their rejection of the old order, they embraced egoistic nihilism emanating out of the post-Hegelian philosophies of Germany, especially as promoted by Ludwig Feuerbach and Max Stirner.

The essence of Russian nihilism wasn’t the absence of values or an assertion of the meaninglessness of life. Far from it. Russian nihilism was a philosophy of individualist liberation and progress. In the emptiness of the cosmos and the socially constructed morality imposed upon Europe by Christianity, the nihilists were arguing that once humans realized the meaninglessness of life and the social construction of all values, revolutionary progress could create a new meaning of life and a new moral and social and political order that would exceed the darkness, superstition, and oppression of the prior system. Nihilism in its intellectual credo asserted two things: the intrinsic meaningless of life but also that all values are man-made, socially created, without reference to Transcendence or Divinity. It was the latter which preoccupied the minds of the nihilist intellectuals and writers—the belief that a new world could be made out of the ash-heap of the old by those courageous enough to build from nothing.

What Russian nihilism entailed, then, was the heroic (revolutionary) concept of man. Man, as an individual, would liberate himself from the system that oppressed him and kept his creative and erotic ambitions and desires from manifesting itself. In this heroic liberation of the self out of the old order, the liberation of the self would necessitate the destruction of the older order and begin the process of ushering in a new creation. “Heaven on earth,” if you will. Individuals, in this process of liberative struggle, would be able to create their own world and their own happiness and become man-gods in the process. It was the dream of Adam and Eve without the Fall.

Once this reality of Russian nihilism (as part of the broader German-European nihilist tradition of philosophy) is understood, the Russian nihilist tradition is immediately seen as the backdrop to many of Russia’s classic characters in literature. Andrei and Pierre in War and Peace are, for instance, nihilistic grandees with large ambitions at the beginning of the novel; so too are Raskolnikov and Kirill in Dostoevsky’s works; so too is Pasha Antipov in Doctor Zhivago as I’ve already implied. This doesn’t even begin to include the myriad of other characters who dot the literary creations of mid-nineteenth century Russian literature. One can think of Rakhmetov or Vera Pavlovna in Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done? as a couple of other examples.

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As previously mentioned, I will focus on Raskolnikov and Pasha/Strelnikov because I think their examples are illustrative in understanding the tension within Russian literary culture and their universalism to us—readers of a non-Russian heritage—and what these characters and their stories teach us. Though these characters are quintessentially Russian, part of a Russian intellectual and cultural debate that ruffled through the land of the Tsar and Vladimir Lenin, their construction and literary lives nevertheless speak to the universal soul of what it means to be human. There is also the relevant fact that today’s readers and wandering pilgrims are still living in the ashes of the old world burned by the revolutionary fire—intellectually, physically, and spiritually—of the nihilist onslaught of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the nihilist fire that Raskolnikov and Pasha/Strelnikov flamed in Crime and Punishment and Doctor Zhivago.

Raskolnikov as revolutionary nihilist is now easy to see once the culture of nihilism is revealed. He is a young university student enamored with the possibility of liberation and creating a better world. He has read European philosophy and is up to date on the trends therein, especially as emanating from the supposedly more enlightened places of Europe. He believes himself capable of becoming the man-god, the hero who will destroy the old world and help lead the suffering masses into a newer, better, tomorrow. As we know, he fails miserably.

Pasha Antipov as revolutionary nihilist is also instantly recognizable once the long shadow of Russian nihilism is brought to light. He is also a young university student enamored with the possibility of liberation and creating a better world. He is well-read in European ideas and engaged in the political activism of pre-revolutionary Russia. He is a liberal and reformer, though not yet a Bolshevik, but such technicalities obscure the fact that liberalism and Bolshevism both believed similar views concerning man, nature, and morality: individualism, self-made creationism, and the belief in socially constructed values and laws. Pasha, moreover, believes himself capable of helping those who cannot help themselves; he believes that a newer, better, tomorrow can be built with the intellectual elite leading the way. Pasha, therefore, already adheres to a soft Leninism—the party vanguard blazing the way to a new world in the form of the intellectual experts who know what is best for society and the world. While in some sense he also fails like Raskolnikov, Pasternak’s metamorphosis of Pasha Antipov into Strelnikov is Pasha’s success—of sorts—in transcending himself into the man-god, the heroic individual who will violently tear down the old edifice to usher in the new world in a way that Raskolnikov never did. Pasha-turned-Strelnikov is the Russian nihilist in his transfiguration from mere man to man-god on the order of Napoleon, Lenin, and Trotsky. But far from an angelic and messianic figure, the nihilist turned man-god is a brutal monster. In this regard, the man-god is far from the Christ whom the nihilists reject and more akin to the capricious anthropomorphic deities of antiquity raping women and casting thunderbolts upon any who oppose them, slaying any and all at whim and will.

Dostoevsky and Pasternak were not nihilists. This helps explain their longer endurance unlike other nihilist writers, such as Chernyshevskii, who have now all but been forgotten except among a few quixotic professors of Russian literature and culture. Dostoevsky and Pasternak both engage with the intellectual thrust of the nihilist dream that intoxicated and enslaved the hearts and minds of most of their intellectual contemporaries. Both reveal, through their nihilist “heroes,” the limitation of the nihilist mind and the cold, dark, emptiness of the nihilist heart. Dostoevsky and Pasternak are, in fact, engaged in a remarkable deconstruction of the nihilist lie and expose the nihilist lie through the failure of Raskolnikov to become the man-god and in Pasha-to-Strelnikov’s murderous brutality when it is revealed Strelnikov is Pasha.

That Dostoevsky doesn’t offer a metamorphosized nihilist is explainable by his historical situatedness. The nihilist maelstrom he feared hadn’t yet occurred on the magnitude of the Bolshevik Revolution which forever stunted Russia’s cultural and political future. Pasternak, by comparison, writing in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution and whose heroes—though self-identifying as Marxists—were the image of nihilist hope, had the historical veracity to compose a character who not only dreamt the nihilist dream but lived it to his own demise. This makes the contrast between Raskolnikov and Pasha even more intense as it shows the two faces of the nihilist demon: the weak nihilist intoxicated by the ideas of nihilist utopia who, though committing murder, is personally ruined in the process (Raskolnikov) and the nihilist revolutionary par excellence who, in becoming the man-god, reveals himself as a butcher and ruins the lives of others in the process (Pasha/Strelnikov). In short, there is no nihilist liberator with a benevolent face.

What Dostoevsky and Pasternak both show in their tales of nihilistic, revolutionary, heroes turned failures is how the nihilist aspiration destroys love itself. Both also reveal to readers that love is the only thing that can serve as the antidote to the nihilist bloodlust, whether the bloodlust of Raskolnikov’s one day outburst or the many years of brutal murder by Pasha/Strelnikov. The absence of love is power, and power begets death as Raskolnikov admits to Sonia:

‘Then I figured out, Sonia,’ he continued triumphantly, ‘that power is given only to him who dares to stoop and seize it. There’s only one thing that matters, just one thing, you have to dare!’

Later on, after being berated by Sonia for having abandoned God—who is Love—meaning Raskolnikov has forsaken love in his daring lust for power, Raskolnikov acknowledges why he killed, ‘I simply killed; I killed for myself, for myself alone.’” Raskolnikov is honest in this confession unlike the many other butchers who kill for some “greater good” as Raskolnikov deceived himself into arguing at the beginning of the novel.

This is not far off from Pasha’s realization of what he had become toward the end of Doctor Zhivago. Meeting Yuri while being hunted by Bolshevik assassins, the once proud and daring Strelnikov has become Pasha again, the somewhat weak and feeble soul who was in love with Lara before the Great War. (There is something remarkable, here, in both Dostoevsky and Pasternak having weak, feeble, intellectual individuals as their archetypal nihilist revolutionary.) Pasha pleads and pleads and pleads with Yuri not to abandon him until he finishes his confession of how he took advantage of having been listed “killed in action,” reinvented himself as the butcher of the Bolsheviks, had become a true believer in communism, but that his actions had also been done to return home to Lara:

Forgive me, I realize that I am touching on things that are dear and holy to you. But I should like to ask you more questions, if you’ll let me. Only please don’t go away. Don’t leave me alone. I’ll be going soon myself. Just think—six years of separation, six years of inconceivable self-restraint. But I kept thinking that freedom was not yet wholly won. When I’d won it, I thought, my hands would be untied and I could belong to my family. And now, all my calculations have come to nothing.

After this confession, Pasha blows his brains out. Yuri sees the dead body in the morning after he wakes up, the crimson blood having stained the crystal white snow.

Raskolnikov was saved by love. Pasha was killed by the pursuit of power. Pasha, though, had asked for forgiveness. Although in the context of the novel Pasha is asking Yuri for forgiveness, as readers this moment is also a pleading for forgiveness to the reader. Pasternak is giving us, the reader, that opportunity to let go of the grudges, let go of the animosity, let go of the hate that grips our heart so that we do not become Strelnikov. In the two we see a stark contrast of the destinies of the two revolutionaries. If we embrace suffering love and forgiveness as Raskolnikov did, we can be transformed by the healing reality of love and forgiveness if we also have the conversion to accept Love’s forgiving and merciful hand (as Raskolnikov does in finally accepting Sonia’s generous mercy). If we embrace the pursuit of power and the negation of love as Pasha did, we end up as Strelnikov: isolated, alone, alienated; a soul full of anger and hatred turning to revolutionary bloodlust.

In the end, Dostoevsky and Pasternak end their novels with hope: hope in love, hope that love brings new life, hope that murder and the pursuit of power is not all that defines us. For Raskolnikov and Sonia, love entailed suffering—suffering together. Sonia waits for Raskolnikov’s prison sentence to end so the two can be together. The same is true for Yuri and Lara, the two principal characters of Doctor Zhivago, for they had suffered together and their suffering together gave them the strength to persevere and endure, to survive the revolution and civil war. The dark shadow of Strelnikov has passed. Yuri and Lara’s suffering together in love led to the birth of a child, Tania, the great gift and testimony of love itself. Even though Yuri and Lara are separated, their love begat new life and with that new life hope for the future. Yuri and Lara stand in contrast to Strelnikov and his dark revolutionary shadow.

The real revolution isn’t seizing power as Marx and all his disciples endorsed, enacting lofty ideals that quickly degenerate into “crude materialism,” or fighting enemies and smashing their skulls into oblivion. The real revolution is found in love. Love redeemed Raskolnikov. Love sanctified Sonia and revealed her saintliness. Love saved Yuri and Lara through the fires of destruction and the bloodlust of murder and political retribution. The personal love of lover and beloved, the faces and hearts that bring smiles and tender comfort, is what the world needs. Dostoevsky and Pasternak remind us of this truth so profoundly and so powerfully in their stories. Had I known that when I first encountered their works, be it in a classroom or on the TV, I may have enjoyed them more than I did. But I am happy I have come to enjoy them now; it is never too late to be transformed by love. All around us we see nihilists embracing the fantasy of “heroic” struggle who, in doing so, slip further and further down the abyss of alienation and loneliness who, at any moment, might become a Strelnikov.

Here we must recognize the wisdom of Dostoevsky. Sonia could have abandoned Raskolnikov. She didn’t. She was holy wisdom and love incarnate. She stayed with Raskolnikov in his darkest hours. Raskolnikov could have rejected Sonia, as he did for most of the novel, until he—at long last—accepted her love, her compassion, her mercy. We must do the same. We must be Sonia to the many Raskolnikov’s of the world crying out for help; we mustn’t allow those agonizing souls, like Pasha, to become Strelnikov, and we must also reach out for the hand of love to be redeemed and sanctified by it if we are in the pit of despair like Raskolnikov. Dostoevsky tells us that true heroism is to embrace the love that souls need to keep them from that dark abyss which will consume them and the world once love evaporates from our lives. For that reason, Dostoevsky is the greatest writer of modernity—he saw through its web of lies and recognized the only solution to combat the spirit of lies leading to the spirit of death: love.

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