Before Starbucks took over the world, I spent my youth in the kind of coffee shops that played Ella Fitzgerald, talking over the finer points of existential angst with my cohorts. Dostoevsky’s work, filled with all the big questions of God and madness and free will and exile, was pressing stuff. So pressing, indeed, that we stayed up half the night at Chez Cappuccino, mulling over Notes from the Underground. You couldn’t be literary; you couldn’t be a writer, if you didn’t dissect every minutiae of meaning (or meaninglessness, as it were) from the Russian writers. I recall that one of my colleagues, an African, shook his head wistfully over Crime and Punishment. “Dostoevsky ruins it for all the other novelists,” he said. “How can you read anyone else’s work after these masterpieces?”
Well, maybe Tolstoy would make the cut- the two Russian writers are widely considered the best novelists of all time. Intellectuals have been gathering at cafes the world over to discuss Dostoevsky’s notions of suffering or suicide or freedom of expression for a hundred years. “The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture,” Virginia Woolf wrote. James Joyce said the writer had “created modern prose, and intensified it to its present-day pitch. It was his explosive power which shattered the Victorian novel with its simpering maidens…”
Indeed, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s dark whirlpool changed the face of literature irrevocably. His themes of human suffering, madness, sin, exile, guilt, redemption, evil, God, corruption, power, poverty, and the limits of human nature resonated deeply in circles far and wide, and every generation to follow. Inside the volatile thunderstorm of man’s search for meaning was truly “something for everyone.” From pop reading groups to the highest academia, Fyodor’s novels are on the ‘best of all time’ lists- at least one of The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov- and usually all three. Every oeuvre painstakingly pries apart the soul and mind of humanity, swimming into the furthest depths of human behaviour. The writer’s explorations and explanations analyze human psychology brilliantly from every angle. Nietzsche would later call him “the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn.”
But Fyodor didn’t become the bulwark of world literature by dropping a few well-mapped characters into winning plot formulas. He earned his bragging rights the hard way- through Russian political repression and oppression, through imprisonment and torture for defending freedom of expression, through a volatile relationship with his father who was murdered, and through madness, which he cherished above all else.
It was 1821 when Fyodor was born in Moscow. His father was a famously temperamental alcoholic, a retired military surgeon. Work doing gruesome amputations was not exactly ideal for a man prone to depressions and rage, and most biographers note that Mikhail was also exceedingly religious- likely to the point of delusion, as he was certain he was a special chosen one of God, and that his tribulations had special significance, like those of Job. Though Dad was a harsh master and jealous husband, his relationship with his children was not loveless. And Fyodor’s Mom was very nurturing and quite the opposite of her spouse- she was cheerful and loving. She taught Fyodor how to read early on, sharing stories from the Bible with her sons.
Fyodor’s environment was influential, of course, to the work he would do later on, contrasting human temperaments and beliefs. He was drawn to people’s stories early on, devouring the strange and beautiful and gory Biblical narratives. Contemporary struggles were even more fascinating- the boy prowled outside and spent hours listening to the stories of the poor and sick. There was plenty of fodder in his neighbourhood, among the worst in Moscow, located near a criminal cemetery, a lunatic asylum, an orphanage and so on. The boy was forbidden these travels, but more often than not failed to heed the rules. His curiousity got the best of him, and he craved sunlight instead of being indoors at all times.
In any event, both senior and junior Dostoevsky may have had more in common with the poor and crazy than Senior cared to admit. Exactly the nature of Dad’s headaches, rages, addiction and depression are unknown, but Junior had epilepsy and was prone to seizures and religious visions from his youth.
Though the hospital neighbourhood was squalid, the family was not poor. Far from it. Indeed, Fyodor was around ten years old when his father bought a hamlet and a village. This was the era of Russian serfdom, when rich landowners owned the peasants who lived there. Mikhail was a brutal landowner, but Fyodor did not take after him. Instead, as in the city, he listened eagerly to the stories of the lives at the lower rung of society’s echelon, and concluded that the poor were the truly nobility.
Country life was a short stint, however, as Maria died of consumption when Fyodor was fifteen, leaving dad to fend for a handful of young children and his broken heart. He sent Fyodor and his favourite brother, Mikhail, to boarding school, and took out his grief on his peasants, beating them whenever he wished.
And so it was that the motherless became fatherless a few years later- Dad was found dead on the path between his two villages. His horse and driver were reportedly missing, as were several of his serfs. The seemingly obvious explanation that he met his fate at the hands of his furious underlings has never been proven, though it is widely believed. It may have been a stroke. Some reports suggest suffocation by the carriage cushion, and still others suggest a bizarre murder method: drowning by enforced vodka administration. The latter derives, perhaps, from our insistence at reading Dostoyevsky’s work literally, for it appears in Notes from the Underground. Regardless, murder is very likely, for motivations abound, including reports that Dad was diddling the prettiest young peasants, sadly common among those with power then and now.
In any event, Fyodor was an orphan at sixteen. His troubles had just begun.
He completed studies at an academy of military engineering, but was far more interested in reading and writing. He was a lieutenant but escaped his work by reading obsessively, and obsessing about death. Both would be lifelong fixations. It’s not hard to imagine Fyodor, hunched over Pushkin in the late light of afternoon. He left the army in 1844 to write fiction and hang around literary and intellectual circles, including the St. Petersburg Petrashevsky Circle. Mikhail Petrashevsky was a follower of utopian socialism and organized a discussion group of writers and poets and other free thinkers, and they talked about books and politics. Most were opponents of the tsarist autocracy.
Fyodor was 24 when his first novel, Poor Folk, was published. Somewhat unexpectedly, he was hailed as the “new Gogol”- Gogol being a writer who satirized the corrupt Russian bureaucracy. And so the writer became a minor celebrity and he began to bravely publish political essays, even though he knew it was dangerous and illegal. He also decided to establish an underground press. He spoke out loud against censorship. Perhaps he was certain he could effect change, or perhaps he believed he should suffer for his art. And suffer he did. In 1849, Fyodor was arrested, along with other members of the circle, and taken to a maximum-security prison reserved for the most dangerous criminals. He was charged with owning an illegal printing press, and plotting to murder the tsar, among other things. The murder plot was outrageous- Dostoevsky was a revolutionary of ideas only. But his pleas fell on deaf ears. The writer was sentenced to death.
It was October 1849 when Dostoevsky and his partners in crime were marched toward the gallows, where they would stand in shooting range of soldiers. An order was given to lower the hoods over their faces. After an excruciating silence, the soldiers were commanded to shoot.
By now we all know that nothing happened- this mock execution is one of the most famous in history. A staged execution is among the most effective methods of psychological torture. While torture in general is, well, torture, this particular form usually makes you a basket case for life. Indeed, at least one and reportedly two of Fyodor’s friends went stark raving mad. Fyodor felt he’d been given another chance at life, and praised God for it. The torment led to later religious experiences while serving the next eight years of his sentence. Half of the sentence was spent doing hard labour in exile in Siberia, and the other half in the army.
Of his experiences in prison, Fyodor wrote, “I consider those four years as a time during which I was buried alive and shut up in a coffin. Just how horrible that time was I have not the strength to tell you…it was an indescribable, unending agony, because each hour, each minute weighed upon my soul like a stone.”
Yet Dostoevsky had never before felt so alive. He wrote in a letter to his brother, “When I look back on my past and think how much time I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul – then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness.”
In those moments before he was to be shot to death, Fyodor had a revelation that “unconditional love” was the only salvation for humanity, something God had for the world, manifest in the gift of Jesus Christ. The writer committed to spending his life sharing this kind of love. These thoughts brought him tremendous strength through the continual hardships of his life, yet in eventuality, he despaired at the fruitlessness of convincing others of life’s joy.
We’ve all had the writing teacher who tells us, “Write about what you know.” And Dostoevsky did- so much so that we too often surmise it happened exactly as it had in his novels. Nonetheless, the events and emotions the writer described, sometimes decades later, often came from his personal suffering and redemption stories. Following his release from prison, he wrote The Insulted and the Humiliated, followed by House of the Dead and Notes from the Underground. House of the Dead showcased tales of murder and suffering among hardened criminals in a labour camp, for example. It was nearly a decade after Fyodor’s release that his masterpiece, Crime and Punishment, was manifest, in 1866.
Fyodor had married- during his army sentence, he courted a married woman who was miserable with her abusive husband. She didn’t marry him until her husband passed away. Their happiness was brief- Maria took ill and died a few short years later, in 1864. The profound emptiness and despair Fyodor felt was multiplied when his life’s anchor, brother Mikhail, died shortly after.
Fyodor descended into a deep pit of depression and crippling debts. In honour, he committed to caring for his brother’s widow and children, yet he didn’t have two dimes to rub together. This deadly combination of debt and despair led him to become a hopeless gambling addict. Anything he earned, he’d throw on the tables, hoping his luck would change. It did not. When he was penniless and in danger to his debtors, his publisher came to his aid and promised to give him a formidable advance if he could produce a brilliant novel in a month. And so, we have The Gambler.
Crime and Punishment was also to be generated quickly to meet insurmountable debts. It began as a short story, and then took on a life of its own. Though Fyodor had to deliver by January, he wrote to a friend confessing he’d burned the novel the previous November. “I didn’t like it myself. A new form, a new plan excited me, and I started all over again.” Fyodor’s unyielding perfectionism paid off, and Crime and Punishment turned out to be one of the greatest books ever written.
But Fyodor’s punishments were not over yet. In his mid-forties, he fell in love with a 21-year-old stenographer, and they married. With Anna, he had four children. The first died a few months after birth, and the fourth, his favourite, was three when he died during an epileptic seizure. Dostoevsky’s misery was now at its absolute peak, for he believed he had killed his beloved child by passing on his disease.
For throughout all of these trials, Dostoevsky was also ill. Since boyhood, he also had epilepsy. He had to endure humiliating fits, seizures and headaches. He was haunted for life by horrifying dreams of evil and terror. Yet the transcendence he experienced in the seconds prior to the attacks fueled his writing and his will to live. (The writer reported that the fits began after the staged execution. Many historians believe he’d had similar issues since childhood, age nine specifically, when he had some kind of seizure.)
“For several instants I experience a happiness that is impossible in an ordinary state, and of which other people have no conception. I feel full harmony in myself and in the whole world, and the feeling is so strong and sweet that for a few seconds of such bliss one could give up ten years of life, perhaps all of life. I felt that heaven descended to earth and swallowed me. I really attained god and was imbued with him. All of you healthy people don’t even suspect what happiness is, that happiness that we epileptics experience for a second before an attack.”
The writer records similar passages in The Idiot and his other works that feature visionary spiritual people- epileptics. These brief splashes of paradise in the grisly
misery of existence were understandably cherished. Dostoevsky seemed certain that God was really coming through him. In fact, he referred controversially to the prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, as epileptic.
Scientist Clifford Pickover writes: “Dostoevsky, another famous epileptic whose works are filled with ecstatic visions of universal love (and terrible nightmares of uncanny fear and radical evil), thought it was obvious that Mohammad’s visions of God were triggered by epilepsy. “Mohammad assures us in this Koran that he had seen Paradise,” Dostoevsky notes. “He did not lie. He had indeed been in Paradise – during an attack of epilepsy, from which he suffered, as I do.””
What’s fascinating is that Dostoevsky knew that his visions and ecstasies were caused by his illness. And yet he was still dead certain that the symptoms revealed something real. It’s also interesting to note how interwoven religious delusions are in mental illness. Though human beings are hardwired to faith- atheism is rare and always has been- it’s undeniable that extreme religiosity and visions, delusions, voices, and so on are linked with schizophrenia. It’s common for mental health patients to report, and to believe in, messages from angels, Jesus, God. These messages are often beautiful and sometimes terrible, and they may come out of a hair dryer or out of the words of the newscaster or show up in a wallpaper pattern. It’s also a fact that most cult leaders are enigmatic, charismatic visionaries.
There are arguments over organic mental illness- epilepsy, for example, which produces electrical impulses that push against the brain- versus “mental” mental illness, or emotional instability. But the body is the mind is the spirit. Indeed, science knows that schizophrenia and depression are in fact imbalances of brain chemistry that CAUSE emotional problems, just as weak bones might cause knee problems. Are they the same as epilepsy, a seizure disorder? They aren’t the same, yet effective treatments for schizophrenia and bipolar are the same medications used for epileptic patients.
When big shot headshrinker Sigmund Freud came along, he lambasted Dostoevsky’s work as simpering sentimentality and wrote at length about how the writer’s particular form of epilepsy was hysterical, not organic. It was caused by his hatred of Dad, apparently, and that’s why it showed up most after stressor situations like a mock execution. (To be fair to the good doctor, he was certain that organic epilepsy was incompatible with razor sharp intellectual faculties, and so he assumed Dostoevsky had something else. Today we know that mental illness is often arm in arm with brilliance and creativity.)
Today we are coming closer to understanding that chemical and emotional are two sides of the same coin- each is causal of the other. We also know that high stress situations understandably involve severe emotional response- and that the cascade of motion in the brain’s network can ignite dreams, visions, fit, episodes, depressions, hallucinations, ecstasies, manias, whatever you want to call them. Sex, drugs, physical pain, and other triggers of emotions and endorphins can indeed incite a range of pleasant or terrifying effects, often both.
As modern science delves further into the unknown reaches of the brain, things get more and more astounding. The link between epilepsy, mental illness, religiosity, and creativity grows, as we enter the age of the God machine. Neurobiologist Michael Persinger has created a helmet and various scans and probes that are causing and examining religious experience networks in the brain. The science is in its infancy, but there’s already considerable evidence to show that déjà vu, ghosts, and other similar spiritual phenomenon goes hand in hand with electrical seizures in the brain- and diminishing oxygen brings on the white tunnel of near death experience. It’s the same reason kids hold their breath to get high and why some people prefer the strange practice of asphyxiation, by which they apparently experience visionary sex.
Atheists are quick to jump here on proof that God is all in our heads. Yet this “sickness” fueled the brilliance of Dostoevsky’s work, and gave him courage to endure unbelievable hardship. And he, for one, perceived it as God within us- is that the same thing? For millennia, the visionary was doped up and caged, or else he was the special shaman of society. The world over, humans ingest all manner of plant and pill in order to glimpse this world of paradise Dostoevsky describes- and then we wonder why it’s hard for the addict to give up drugs? Recall that the writer would give ten years of his life for that slim second of peace and harmony before his seizures.
And so, it can be understood why so many schizophrenic and bipolar patients prefer to avoid medication, the single biggest obstacle to treatment. But the light may disappear with the dark. Many schizophrenia patients report that they like the voices, feel close to or comforted by them, or of course, they are dead certain it’s ‘real’ and that they are afforded special insights that others can’t see.
The religious or supernatural connection to these kinds of visions extends way beyond Dostoevsky and his opinion about Mohammed. Fyodor writes in The Idiot about epileptic Myshkin, who is a Christ-like figure. But what about Jesus himself? What about Oral Roberts, who saw a 900-foot Jesus in the sky, who believes he raised people from the dead? What of The Book of Revelation, just one of hundreds of apocalyptic books that didn’t make it into the Biblical canon, all describing wonderful and terrible religious visions? What about Ezekiel and the chariot of fire? And what of Saint Paul, and the vision that inspired his conversion?
St. Paul spoke of a bodily affliction, a thorn in his flesh. Theories on this have abounded- was he gay? Deformed? Migraines? It was common before we had cures for infections for high fevers to damage the brain, and Paul had had malaria.
Of course, one accepts the prophecies and miracles of their own faith as God manifest, but prophecies and miracles of other faiths are surely mere insanity at best, and at worst, the devil incarnate. Joseph Smith receiving the golden tablets that only he could interpret is sheer lunacy to most of the world- yet millions of extraordinarily intelligent people called Mormons base their faith on this idea. Many Christians or Muslims would consider reincarnation beliefs heresy, yet millions of Buddhists are convinced and comforted when their leaders recount visions of their past lives. Yet paradise is sometimes hell- children are more often than not murdered by well-meaning parents, not by pedophiles- God was telling them to do it, to rid the child of demons or some such parallel.
Alien abductions and astral projection are an historically consistent fascination. Then there’s déjà vu, and jamais vu- the feeling you’ve never before been in your own house or yard. What gives?
Molecular biochemist Dr. Clifford Pickover says, “Temporal lobe epilepsy is caused by unusual electrical activity in the brain’s temporal lobes A significant proportion of people with TLE report that their seizures often bring on extraordinary experiences of transcendent wonder, luminous insight — or, at times, harrowing, uncanny fear.”
In The Vision of the Chariot: Transcendent Experience and Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, he says, “(Alien) abductees feel mild, epileptic-like symptoms just before they are ‘captured.’ Some abductees feel heat on one side of their faces, hear a ringing in their ears, and see flashes of light prior to an abduction. Others report a cessation of sound and feeling, or an overwhelming feeling of apprehension. All of this is typical of certain kinds of epileptic seizures.”
Whitley Strieber is arguably the most famous alien abductee in history, and he has written several books about his experience, most famously, Communion. He runs a website called Unknown Country, a support group for abductees. Pickover observes that Strieber documents TLE symptoms when describing the abduction- jamais vu, formication (crawling bugs on skin), “vivid smells, hallucinations, rapid heartbeats, the sensation of rising and falling, and partial amnesia.” Strieber was in fact diagnosed with epilepsy, but he refutes the diagnosis because polygraph and brain tests show that he isn’t lying- yet you’re not lying if you believe it was true! Just like others who have had visionary experiences, Strieber cannot be convinced the experience didn’t happen. In his case, it was not just a ‘window’ to the other world, but literally took place.
Mohammed shared the alien abduction theme in his vision, particularly the medical experiments that most abductees report. “Two men in white raiment came and threw me down and opened up my belly and searched inside for I don’t know what,” the prophet told his foster parents when he was five years old.
In Varieties of Religious Experience, psychologist William James warns us not to dismiss mystical events just because they came from electrical impulses. He reminds us that every single thought, however rational, anyone has, comes from the body.
Indeed, about a third of us have had religious experiences- can this be accounted for by some misfiring of the brain? Or is this exalted state actually the real deal, the divine, whereas the normal states are earthly ones, just as the visionaries profess?
September 7th, 1880, Dostoevsky’s journal reads: “This morning at 8.45, interruption of my thoughts, transported into other years, dreams, dreamy states, dreaminess…” It was the same year that his favourite child died, the final burden the writer would have to bear. The novel The Brothers Karamazov was underway, and much of it examined epilepsy, though the work was overall a culmination of the great psychological questions Dostoevsky wrestled with. Reason versus faith, doubt, the spiritual struggle, the question of free will, belonging, murder, family, fate -and indeed, the validity of epileptic experience, whether spiritual or organic- all the questions that science and psychology is examining today.
Dostoevsky said he’d be happy if he finished his book before he died, having great difficulty in writing it after the tragedy of losing his son. However, he wrote his son into the book by naming the hero after Alyosha.
A few months after The Brothers Karamazov was published, Fyodor Dostoevsky died of epileptic hemorrhaging. It was 1881. The novel was a supreme masterpiece, the writer’s crowning achievement.
It’s a gorgeous spring day, 128 years after Dostoevsky’s death, thousands of miles from political oppression and turmoil. Sitting on a Starbucks patio with The Brothers Karamazov and a friend, I wish the great writer were here today. We’d like to discuss a few things with Fyodor- one of them my central belief that mental illness isn’t mental illness, but what I like to call mental is-ness. Anger, delusion, sorrow, fear- just because something is unpleasant, doesn’t mean it’s sick. And conversely, the deep religious convictions we’ve had, and indeed the deep psychedelic experiences we’ve embarked on, are not sick just because joy doesn’t usually extend so far.
I’ve long believed that the chemical soup of which we are made is not a reduction of the human spirit or soul, but that it IS the human spirit or soul. My own bipolar life means torrential creativity even as it means frustration for idea cascades that never see completion. As a writer, I am, like Dostoevsky was, attached to my experiences of beauty, and accept the dark damnation that often follows in long depressions. Like most manic-depressives, I fear losing the exalted states and though the despair is hell, it teaches me the truth about the world.
Moreover, my benign and delightful belief in the magic of objects and the presence of spirits gives me profound connectivity. My grief is assuaged toward certain losses, when I feel my dead friend’s presence through an object he has left for me. How could I be a writer at all if it weren’t for my beautiful unquiet mind? I can’t shake the feeling that the meaning of life is indeed imbedded in the mystery of the mind, and the most intimate contact I have with a mind is with my own.
Dostoevsky suffered to show us a mirror to ourselves, to those sleepless nights inside us where the heart cries out to God for love, where we struggle with the big questions on the nature of man. And yet, sometimes, we glimpse the heartbeat of beauty and love and it keeps us going, whether or not it is a delusion.
If you like art, literature, madness and interesting people, you’ll love Lorette C. Luzajic’s books. Her first book is “The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos.” Her second is “Weird Monologues for a Rainy Life (Irreverent Ramblings from the End of the World.)” Her poetry and her collected blogs, musings, reviews, memoirs, notes, eulogies, requiems, interviews, profiles and more both devastating and hilarious romps through one woman’s wild mood swings- proving there’s life after death, even for manic depressives. “Think Courtney Love meets Margaret Atwood,” says Donnarama, Toronto’s premiere performance artist.
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But now I have a huge respect for Steel’s particular madness and the healing touch her syrup is for her minions who down it with hunger and thirst. She is a woman who lived wildly and met her fate head on, while I’m still terrified of mine, and what it might bring.
