Dostoevsky's Arguments for Immortality

Abstract

Between 1864 and 1880, in fiction and nonfiction alike, Fedor Dostoevsky referred repeatedly to immortality of soul, and on several occasions he wrote of its great importance for spiritual and even material life. The idea of immortality, he proclaimed in 1876, is the fundamental and highest idea of human existence. It is humanity's chief source of truth and correct understanding; all other lofty ideas for which a person might live simnplyflowfrom it alone.' On strength of such assertions, Nicolas Berdyaev concluded that belief in immortality was cornerstone of Dostoevsky's world view.2 Dostoevsky appears to have believed in immortality in some form throughout his life. His Christian upbringing, guided by a devout and demanding father, imbued him with faith in traditional dogmas of Russian Orthodoxy. His reading of liberal Western literature in 1830s and 1840s shook some but not all of religious convictions of his youth; George Sand he knew, as he indicated later, was a true Christian who believed unconditionally in immortality of human person (23:37). In a letter to a skeptic in 1877, Dostoevsky wrote that he was familiar with all arguments against existence of God and immortality by time he was twenty (that is, by 1841); but there is no evidence that he ever succumbed to them, even in socialist-radical phase leading up to his arrest and mock execution in 1849 (29/11:141). Facing what he and other condemned men believed to be imminent death, Dostoevsky reportedly cried out, We shall be with Christ!3 Still, however central and persistent was Dostoevsky's belief in continued existence of soul after physical death, it was not always a confident belief. In his mature years he longed for his Christian faith to be immediate, certain, and unquestionable, as it was in his childhood, but he found that after exposure to critical secular thought he could