Episode #221 ... Dostoevsky - The Idiot

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. So there's a story from Dostoevsky's life that's usually one of the first things you hear about him when you start looking into his work. I personally think the story hits a bit better when you already know a little bit about what he was going for in his work, which at this point we do, this episode being part four in the series we've been doing. That said, the story's about the time in Dostoevsky's life that he almost got shot by a firing squad. Classic story. I'm sure he used to tell around the campfire to all the kids. And one version of the story that we have comes from the main character of the book we're talking about today, another one of the five great novels of Dostoevsky. It's called The Idiot. We'll talk more about the book here in a second. But first, let's hear this story though and understand how some of the intense experiences that Dostoevsky had in his life led to the conclusions in the rest of his work, to what he thinks a good life is, to his views on beauty and love, and more specifically, what he means when he says, a now famous quote that's been associated with this book, The Idiot, what did he mean when he said that he thought that beauty will save the world? There's been a lot of discussion surrounding this particular quote, and we'll be a lot closer to understanding it by the end of the episode here today. See, when Dostoevsky's writing the book Demons we just talked about, and when he talks about a revolutionary cell that's planning stuff to potentially bring down the government in the book, that's not just him sitting around, you know, method acting, what it would be like to be a revolutionary. No. Dostoevsky, early in his writing career, really was a member of what's now known as the Petrochevsky circle. Meaning, he was part of one of these revolutionary groups, which is part of what gives him so much insight into the psychology of these kinds of people. Multiple of which, the characters in the book Demons, are based on people from this Petrochevsky circle that he knew. So like any revolutionary at the time that's living in czarist Russia, a Russia that's trying to maintain the status quo for people as much as they can. Yeah. Turns out, they don't take too kindly to you if you're plotting to overthrow the government every day. So Dostoevsky gets arrested. He gets processed, charged, and then sentenced to death. Then he gets led out into a field. There's stakes driven into the ground, the kind of stakes they tie you to when they're about to get shot by a firing squad. And he and his friends have been dressed up by them in a sort of white uniform that they put people in right before they shoot them. …