/lit/ - Literature

>It is better to have faith in some unknowable entity and be happy than to know the truth and be nihlistic
He was literally Cipher

Here in Russia dostoyevsky is only read by nihilistic middle schoolers or middle school arthoes.

Putting him on any pedestal here gets you laughed out as an immature kid

The Joy Division of books

>If there is no god, then everything is allowed.
Atheists BTFO

Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is the best book ever written, and the reason Dostoevsky could even write it is because he was a Christian. No non-Christian could ever write something as valuble as Crime and Punishment.

>The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.
What did he mean by this?

what was Dostoevsky's IQ?

>>12357854

What makes a man so heart-warming?

This stupid Russian motherfucker, living in Russia in the mid-19th century, observed and criticized the breakdown of traditional Russian values, simple peasant ways of living and the Eastern Orthodox faith, by people rushing to be modernized and copy everything the West was doing. There was a fascination with the science and technology of the Western world and desire to imitate them. The new-found growth of deterministic ideas in science was also perceived by Dostoevsky as a crisis.

In “Notes from the Underground,” Dostoevsky paints one hypothetical result of this growth of deterministic ideas in science, painting man as merely a machine. The embittered narrator rants against these deterministic ideas, because he feels they rob humanity of its dignity. He even suggests that some of humanity will always be perverse and act in bizarre ways just so they can’t be predicted. The narrator is a guy trying to struggle against nihilism, but he doesn’t really have a way to fight against it without just being bitter and eccentric. He tries to assert his freewill by acting like a perverse asshole.

Scientific materialism and determinism is also linked to politics by Dostoevsky. The Underground Man rages against the idea of some scientific utopia (a popular socialist idea in Russia at the time), where all of humanity’s needs are attended to scientifically, everything easily laid out and predicted beforehand, no spiritual values or anything etc.

This leads to Dostoevsky’s political views. He made the connection between a breakdown in traditional religious and spiritual values, and in the belief humanity has freewill, to “mob psychology”, people becoming herd animals, caught up in violent and unthinking crowds, etc. On one hand, this is represented as the violent revolutionary insurrection in his book “Demons”, surprisingly prophetic of the future Communist takeover of Russia, where people, breaking away from old values and having no higher spiritual faith, feel the most important thing to do is to violently try to change the world for the better through revolution., even if people have to be terrorized for it.

On the other hand, it’s also shown in the classic Grand Inquisitor scene in The Brothers Karamazov, where a hypothetical future church keeps humanity peacefully enslaved under a false Christianity, not teaching them to struggle against themselves but instead just supplying them with all their needs like food etc and keeping them peacefully asleep. In this vision, even the highest members of the Church have lost their religious values, see no point in teaching people actual religion, and instead just try to placate them with soothing ideas. Now I move on to the heavy influence on Nietzsche and his very similar ideas, although different remedy. (Dostoevsky, as you know already, advocated Christ as the solution.)

>>11738189
>christians have good mental heal-

>>11458552
NH3T.
Fuck posers.