Nietzsche and Dostoevsky On the Verge of

Peter Lang
LISBON PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES
us es of l a ngua ge i n i n t e r d i sc i p l i n a r y fi e l d s
Paolo Stellino
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky
On the Verge of Nihilism
The first time that Nietzsche crossed the path of Dostoevsky was in the winter
of 1886–87. While in Nice, Nietzsche discovered in a bookshop the volume
L’esprit souterrain. Two years later, he defined Dostoevsky as the only psychologist from whom he had anything to learn. The second, metaphorical encounter
between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky happened on the verge of nihilism. Nietzsche
announced the death of God, whereas Dostoevsky warned against the danger
of atheism.
This book describes the double encounter between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky.
Following the chronological thread offered by Nietzsche’s correspondence, the
author provides a detailed analysis of Nietzsche’s engagement with Dostoevsky
from the very beginning of his discovery to the last days before his mental
breakdown. The second part of this book aims to dismiss the wide-spread and
stereotypical reading according to which Dostoevsky foretold and criticized in
his major novels some of Nietzsche’s most dangerous and nihilistic theories.
In order to reject such reading, the author focuses on the following moral dilemma: If God does not exist, is everything permitted?
Paolo Stellino is a postdoctoral fellow at the Nova Institute of Philosophy
(IFILNOVA), New University of Lisbon. He is a member of the Nietzsche International Lab (NIL). His publications mainly focus on Nietzsche’s philosophy.
On this topic, he has co-edited two books and published several articles in
international journals.
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky
LISBON PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES
uses of language in interdisciplinary fields
A P ub lic ation from the Ins t it ut e o f Philo s o phy o f L a ngu ag e at t h e N e w U n i v e r s i t y o f Li s b o n
edited b y
Antón io Marq ues (Ge ne ra l E dit o r )
Nu no Ventu rin ha (Ex e cut ive E dit o r )
E ditorial Board :
Gab riele De A ng elis, Hum be r t o B r it o, J o ã o Fo ns e ca , Fra n c k Li h o r e au , A n t ó n i o M ar q u e s,
Maria Filomen a Molde r, Dio go Pir e s Aur é lio, E r ich R a st , J o ão S àág u a, Nu n o Ve n t u r i n h a
Advisory Board:
Je an- P ierre Cometti ( Unive r sit é de Pr o ve nce ), Lynn Do b s o n ( U n i v e r s i t y o f Ed i n b u r g h ) ,
E rnest L epore (Ru tge r s Unive r s it y), R e na t o L e ssa ( IUPE- R i o d e Jan e i r o ) , A n d r e w Lu g g
(Un iversity of Ottawa ), S t e f a n M a je t s cha k ( Unive r sit ä t K as s e l ) , J e s ú s Pad i l l a Gál v e z
(Un iversidad de Cas t illa - L a M a ncha ), J o a chim S chult e ( U n i v e r s i t ät Zü r i c h )
PETER LANG
Bern · Berlin · Bruxelles · Frankfurt am Main · New York · Oxford · Wien
Paolo Stellino
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky
On the Verge of Nihilism
PETER LANG
Bern · Berlin · Bruxelles · Frankfurt am Main · New York · Oxford · Wien
Bibliographic information published by die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet
at ‹http://dnb.d-nb.de›.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available
from The British Library, Great Britain
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015944282
ISSN 1663-7674 pb.
ISBN 978-3-0343-1670-5 pb.
ISSN 2235-641X eBook
ISBN 978-3-0351-0860-6 eBook
This publication has been peer reviewed.
© Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2015
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Contents
Note on Translations and Abbreviations..............................................11
Preface.................................................................................................15
Part I. Nietzsche Discovers and Reads Dostoevsky
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
Nietzsche’s Discovery of Dostoevsky............................................23
L’esprit souterrain (Katia, The Landlady).....................................29
L’esprit souterrain (Lisa, Notes from Underground).....................37
Resentment....................................................................................45
Notes from the House of the Dead.................................................57
The Insulted and Injured...............................................................67
A Heated Debate...........................................................................75
A “Subterranean” at Work.............................................................83
Petersburg-Style Nihilism.............................................................89
Further Readings...........................................................................93
On the Possible Reading of Crime and Punishment......................99
Jesus as Idiot................................................................................107
Demons........................................................................................119
Dostoevsky as Artist. Russian Pessimism and Décadence..........131
An Unexpected Silence? A Recapitulation of
Nietzsche’s Discovery and Reading of Dostoevsky....................139
Part II. If God Does not Exist, Is Everything Permitted?
Contextualization of the Problem......................................................145
1. The Brothers Karamazov.............................................................153
1.1 The Plot.................................................................................153
1.2 The Reason – Faith Conflict..................................................155
1.3 Ivan’s Idea .............................................................................158
1.4 The Crisis of the Idea............................................................163
2. Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted....................................169
2.1 Zarathustra’s Shadow.............................................................170
2.2 The Order of Assassins..........................................................173
2.3 The Posthumous Fragments..................................................176
2.4 The Variant............................................................................179
2.5 Conclusion.............................................................................183
3. Dostoevsky contra Nietzsche?....................................................189
3.1 Raskolnikov’s Extraordinary Man and
Nietzsche’s Overman.............................................................190
3.2 Kirillov’s Man-God as Overman?.........................................203
3.3 Ivan as Nietzsche’s Forerunner?............................................214
4. Conclusive Remarks: Rethinking the Relation
between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky............................................225
Bibliography.......................................................................................231
Name Index........................................................................................243
10 Preface
“They arrive in compact, deep lines. It is the revenge of 1812.1 They will not set
fire to Paris; we do not need any help to do that. They will drown it under printer’s
ink. Throughout the summer they have furtively proliferated, they have come out
of the press. […] I search for a volume of Voltaire: it has disappeared under a stack
of Tolstoy’s books. My Racine has disappeared under those of Dostoevsky.”
With these words, which introduce one of several articles on Tolstoy
and Dostoevsky published in the French newspapers during the 1880s,
the literary critic Eugène Melchior de Vogüé (1886b: 824) alludes to the
increasingly widespread diffusion of Russian novels within the Western
Europe cultural world at the time. It is precisely within this historical
and cultural context that Nietzsche’s discovery of Dostoevsky has to be
set. It is the winter of 1886–87. Nietzsche arrives in Nice around the
20th of October. He stays some months, taking advantage of the mild
weather of the Mediterranean coast. While browsing in a bookshop, the
volume L’esprit souterrain catches his attention. If we trust Nietzsche’s
own account, he does not even know the name of the author. Nonetheless, he instinctively feels a sense of affinity and familiarity with him.
Nietzsche buys the volume and reads it very carefully. From then on,
in his last two years of lucidity, the philosopher conducts a deep inner
dialogue with Dostoevsky.
It is no surprise that Dostoevsky’s novels fascinated Nietzsche.
Without denying the considerable differences that make their respective worldviews diverge from each other, one could easily find several
similarities between the novelist and the philosopher. Both Nietzsche
and Dostoevsky were great psychologists, able to explore the depths
of the human soul and to grasp both its complexity and its more problematic and immoral aspects. They also understood and diagnosed the
phenomenon of nihilism probably better than any other intellectuals
1
The allusion is here to the battle of Borodino, fought on 7 September 1812, in
which Napoleon’s Grande Armée attacked the Russian army of General Kutuzov.
Tolstoy relates this battle in his masterpiece War and Peace.
15
of the nineteenth century, providing an excellent and essential analysis of this multifaceted phenomenon. Moreover, they sought to give
an answer to similar moral and philosophical problems. Their answers
clearly differed, but what characterized them both was their same depth
of approach.
European intellectuals soon realized that the paths of Nietzsche
and Dostoevsky were destined to merge. Strictly speaking, it was Georg
Brandes, the Danish critic and scholar, who first connected the works
of Dostoevsky with Nietzsche’s philosophy in his book Impressions
from Russia.2 In a chapter dedicated to Dostoevsky, Brandes applied
Nietzsche’s categories to the novelist, interpreting him as a particular
example of the man of ressentiment, while his morality was precisely
the same slave morality described by Nietzsche in his Genealogy of
Morality. Besides this brief comparison, however, there is little doubt
that the first to draw attention to the relationship between Nietzsche
and Dostoevsky were Russian intellectuals. The peculiarity of this first
reception was the identification between Nietzsche’s overman with
some of the main nihilistic characters (such as Raskolnikov, Kirillov or
Ivan Karamazov) in the great Dostoevsky novels. This “mythopoem”, to
use Grillaert’s expression (2008: 41), was generally accepted and turned
into a sort of unquestioned dogma, enduring throughout the years.
It is precisely in this early period that Merezhkovsky’s L. Tolstoy
and Dostoevsky (1901) appeared.3 Merezhkovsky’s work was particularly important for his approach, which undoubtedly wielded a strong
influence over several later studies. In his view, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were the mouthpieces of two different and opposite cultures: the
Western, which was atheist and preached the arrival of the man-god, and
the Eastern, which defended the orthodoxy and stood for the God-man,
that is, Christ. In this way, the relation between Nietzsche and Dosteovsky was conceived as irreconcilable opposition. Merezhkovsky’s study
was also very significant because it consolidated a reading that later
became a sort of cliché in Nietzsche-Dostoevsky studies, that is, the
2
3
16 Brandes was an admirer of Nietzsche and in 1888 he lectured on Nietzsche. These
lectures were published a year later under the title Aristocratic Radicalism. An
Essay on Friedrich Nietzsche.
Even if Merezhkovsky mainly focuses on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, nonetheless,
Nietzsche is introduced as a third interlocutor.
reading according to which Dostoevsky had foretold and anticipated
Nietzsche’s philosophy.
While Berdyaev published in Russia his well-known book on Dostoevsky (1923), several thinkers and writers of Western Europe also
began to examine the relationship between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky.
From the 1920s on, intellectuals such as Kracauer (1921), Gide (1923),
Schubart (1939), von Balthasar (1939) and de Lubac (1944), among
others, focused more or less directly on this subject. Thomas Mann also
wrote a brief essay on this theme in 1945, although there is little doubt
that Nietzsche and Dostoevsky had already exerted their influence on
his artistic creation many years before. Parallel to these studies, however, another kind of literature emerged in Western Europe, which took
a different approach. Works such as those of Andler (1930), and later of
Benz (1956: 92–103) and Gesemann (1961), moved the focus of attention from the speculative comparison between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky to the philological (in its wider sense) analysis of Nietzsche’s
discovery and reading of Dostoevsky’s works. These contributions
aimed to provide a more solid and grounded basis (hence, for instance,
the reference to the correspondence) to the study of the relationship
between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky by addressing the following three
concerns: when Nietzsche discovered Dostoevsky, which of his novels
he read, and how he interpreted them.
A significant divide in what we may call “Nietzsche-Dostoevsky
studies” came undoubtedly in the 1970s with the three papers published
by Miller (1973, 1975 and 1978) in Nietzsche-Studien. Among others,
Miller had the following merits: first, he proposed a precise reconstruction of Nietzsche’s discovery and engagement with Dostoevsky, establishing a reliable chronology of both; second, his analysis relied on a
strict methodology based, for instance, on the reference to the original
French translations read by Nietzsche; third, given his deep knowledge
of the works of both the philosopher and the novelist, he was able to
propose a fine interpretative reading of Nietzsche’s understanding and
evaluation of Dostoevsky. Following Miller’s example, scholars have
continued over the years to investigate the different aspects of the relation between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. Recent contributions such
as those of Pacini (2001), Müller-Buck (2002), Ebersbach (2006),
Pfeuffer (2008), Souladié (2008), Llinares (2009a), Santos Sena (2010),
17
Morillas (2012) and Poljakova (2013), clearly demonstrate that scholars
the world over feel the need to ponder the questions and problems that
the works of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky still pose.
With the help of this very brief overview, which in no way claims
to be complete or exhaustive, it is now possible to explain the aim and
scope of the present work. Despite the great number of studies dedicated
to the relation between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, three main considerations can be put forward: (1) There is as yet no book that provides a
full and complete analysis of Nietzsche’s discovery and reading of Dostoevsky. (2) Despite the great emphasis put by Nietzsche on the importance of his late discovery and reading of Dostoevsky, several Nietzsche
scholars and interpreters still tend to ignore the real significance of this
reading. This tendency is more pronounced in Anglophone countries
where, despite the ever-increasing interest in Nietzsche’s philosophy,
surprisingly, Nietzsche’s reception of Dostoevsky still lacks adequate
scrutiny. (3) Comparative interpretations of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky
have usually tended, and still tend, to read the latter as foretelling and
providing a critique of the former’s philosophy. As will be shown, this
reading is often the consequence of a reductive and simplified, if not
not even unfaithful and misleading, interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy.
The main purpose of this book is to address these three concerns.
Accordingly, the first part focuses on Nietzsche’s discovery and reading of Dostoevsky, providing a complete and thorough analysis of both
aspects. Attention is therefore mostly directed to the following questions:
When did Nietzsche discover Dostoevsky? Which of his novels did he
read? How did he interpret them? To which aspects was Nietzsche’s
attention called? How did these aspects influence his thought? And,
where is this influence to be found? The approach assumed throughout the first part of this book is, therefore, mostly historical and philological. The pursuit of this approach serves the hermeneutic aim of
clarifying and explaining Nietzsche’s understanding and philosophical
interpretation of Dostoevsky’s works.
The published works, the posthumous fragments and the correspondence, as well as other indirect sources, have been taken into
consideration in order to reconstruct the genetic history of Nietzsche’s
discovery and reading of Dostoevsky. Particular attention has been paid
18 to what German Nietzsche-scholars call Quellenforschung, that is, the
research concerning the primary sources of Nietzsche’s thought. In this
sense, the focus has been directed towards those readings which either
actually or potentially informed Nietzsche’s comprehension of Dostoevsky or simply created the context in which he himself set his discovery
of the novelist. Moreover, Nietzsche read Dostoevsky in French translations. As will be shown, these translations sometimes played a pivotal
role in the former’s understanding and interpretation of the latter. To
ease the reading, without sacrificing philological accuracy, in the first
part of this volume the English translation of Dostoevsky’s writings has
been cited in the body of the text, whereas the corresponding French
translation in the footnotes.
The second part of the present work is dedicated to what can be
considered as a problematic aspect of the reception of the relation
between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and to which I have already referred
as a cliché: the idea that, in his novels, Dostoevsky foretold and anticipated the most dangerous ideas of Nietzsche’s philosophy, providing at
the same time a critique ante litteram of them. Defenders of this reading
usually tend to identify Nietzsche’s philosophy with the theories of the
main nihilistic characters of Dostoevsky’s great novels. So, for instance,
the maxim “nothing is true, everything is permitted”, which appears
both in Nietzsche’s oeuvre and posthumous fragments, is interpreted as
analogous to Ivan Karamazov’s idea, according to which if there is no
God and no immortality of the soul, everything is permitted. Before this
analogy can be accepted as valid, the following basic questions, which
are generally overlooked, need to be answered: is Nietzsche really
affirming that nothing is true and, therefore, everything permitted? If
so, in what sense? And, on a more general level, can Nietzsche’s moral
position be identified with that of Ivan? As will be shown, a deeper analysis of Nietzsche’s use of the maxim shows that the analogy is deceptive
on several levels.
Over the years, another comparison has been frequently made
between, on the one hand, Nietzsche’s overman, and on the other hand,
Raskolnikov’s extraordinary man or Kirillov’s man-god. Although this
comparison seems to be prima facie plausible and reasonable, once
again, a deeper analysis shows that between Nietzsche’s philosophy
and the theories of Raskolnikov and Kirillov, there exist irreducible and
19
radical differences. So, for instance, Nietzsche certainly ascribes special rights to those individuals whom he considers superior or higher,
but does he goes so far as to claim that these individual have a right
to commit crime and shed blood, as Raskolnikov does? And does he
think that, after the death of God, the new man can be considered a
kind of new god (Kirillov’s and Ivan’s man-god), for whom there are no
longer moral laws to respect? Such questions, not easy to answer, reveal
a deeper and more complex interpretative and philosophical problem,
which concerns the possibility or impossibility of defining the boundaries of moral permissibility once the belief in God has been annihilated.
This study seeks to show how differently Nietzsche and Dostoevsky
tackled this problem, shedding light on what can be considered one of
the most fascinating questions of moral philosophy: if God does not
exist, is everything permitted?
20