Obsessed with the ideal

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky did not write novels with a happy ending and happy characters living a boring, prosperous life, from which our and Western passionaries shy away and for which we so vainly and desperately pray to fate. From that very day, October 25, 1917, when this life sank like the Titanic, running into the icebergs of the Ochakov, Potemkin, barricades and Aurora.

140 years ago, the most terrible book of Dostoevsky's "Demons" was written, in which he seems to put an end to his enthusiastic revolutionary youth, which led him to the execution pole, to the imitation of execution on the Semyonovsky parade ground. But behind the coffin of the writer, students and female students, mercilessly ridiculed by him in The Possessed, walked and carried shackles as a token of respect for his cautious past and their cautious future. They did not believe Dostoevsky's verbose remorse, his sugary magazines Epoch and Grazhdanin, his attempts to love the tsar and Pobedonostsev. Because there is no conciliatory volume of "Dead Souls" thrown into the fire in Dostoevsky's work; there is nothing but obsessed idealist climbers falling into the abyss of Evil, going with bare hands and bare hearts to attack the callous state strongholds.

The writer does not favor his prosperous heroes, considering them philistines and philistines. Favorite hero Alyosha Karamazov was to become a member of the People's Will like Mlodetsky, who was hanged on the same Semyonovsky parade ground. Many live at the expense of rich and noble friends, like Stepan Trofimovich, but just try from the position of an involuntary dependent - go nowhere, on foot, and die on the way, without money and without shelter, in an inn! And the imperious Varvara Petrovna will collect her pride in her pocket and go in search of a fugitive friend.

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There is nothing in Dostoevsky's work except obsessed idealist climbers plunging into the abyss of Evil, going with bare hands to attack the callous state strongholds.

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Many bars played pranks with holy fools and even confessed to the terrible sin of pedophilia, like Nikolai Stavrogin, but how many hanged themselves after that, before reaching the canton of Uri, like this “Prince Harry”? Dasha with her sacrificial love is the same Sonechka Marmeladova. Lisa dies because of her fatal love, defying all laws, like Nastasya Filippovna. Even the governor and his progressive wife curry favor with the youth so as not to be branded as retrogrades. Even Governor von Lembke collects proclamations.

Dostoevsky resolutely refuses his disposition only to the hypocrite and egoist Petenka Verkhovensky, a parody of Nechaev, and the terrible fanatic Shigalev, who proposes to destroy talents and introduce an iron equalization in the name of equality. No wonder folklore has preserved the sarcastic proposal to carve on the pedestal of the monument to Dostoevsky the inscription: "From grateful demons." There is a lot of truth in this joke.

All the heroes of The Possessed seek the truth: Shatov in Slavophilism and the people, Kirillov in deadly willfulness, students and female students in leaflets and circles. Instead of the truth, of course, they find their death and the fire in which the settlement burns.

Imagine how honest American pastoralists, people of a practical disposition, had to mock Shatov and Kirillov, who lay hungry on the floor in America in search of the truth! But if you look closely, there are three very important conclusions in The Possessed: the Russian intelligentsia is ready to take on all the sins and filth of society and throw itself off a cliff into the sea, possessing pigs, like once demons, in order to cleanse the country. Art is more important than life, Russia, virtue. The world will be saved by kindness, that very kindness of Shatov to his runaway wife Masha and a child alien to him, and Kirillov's kindness to both of them.

And if we reject this confused, frenetic, ideal-seeking Russia, then we will be left with only smart and prudent, well-fed Putin's electorate.