Dostoevsky is one of my favorite authors, which feels almost ridiculous to say because reading him is rarely an enjoyable experience in the normal sense of the word. I do not finish one of his books feeling refreshed or particularly optimistic about humanity. Usually I feel like somebody reached into my head, pulled out a thought I had never properly admitted to myself, and then made some miserable Russian man say it two hundred years before I was born. I think that is why I keep coming back to him. There are writers I love because of how beautifully they write, writers I love because of the worlds they create, and then there is Dostoevsky, who I love because he seems almost embarrassingly familiar with the ugliest and most private parts of being a person.
I have always thought he was right about suffering, but not in the dramatic “suffering makes you stronger” way people love to talk about it. I actually think he understood something much more depressing than that. Sometimes suffering does not make you better at all. Sometimes it makes you mean. Sometimes it makes you selfish. Sometimes you become so obsessed with the fact that you have been hurt that you start believing your pain excuses whatever you do next. His characters are constantly doing this. They are wounded, humiliated, ashamed, furious, and instead of becoming enlightened little saints because of it, they become completely fucking unbearable. And somehow I find that more believable than the idea that pain automatically teaches us something. I have known people who suffered and became kinder, and I have known people who suffered and made it everybody else’s problem. I have probably been both people at different points in my life.
The Underground Man might be one of the best examples because he knows exactly what he is doing and still cannot stop. That character drives me insane because there is something almost humiliating about recognizing him. He is aware of his own bitterness. He knows when he is being cruel. He knows when he is acting out of spite. He knows when he is deliberately making himself miserable, and then he does it anyway. There is something so painfully human about knowing yourself and still not being able to control yourself. We put so much value on self-awareness now, as if realizing why you behave badly automatically cures you of behaving badly. It absolutely does not. You can understand your childhood, your patterns, your attachment style, your insecurities, your entire psychological lore, and still catch yourself doing the exact thing you already knew was bad for you. Dostoevsky would have had a field day with us.
I think what I love most about his writing, though, is how lonely everybody is. Not literally lonely either. His characters are always around other people. They are always talking, usually for what feels like forty-seven pages at a time. They argue and confess and scream and explain themselves until they practically collapse from the effort, and somehow they still cannot make another person fully understand what is happening inside them. That is the kind of loneliness I think about more than actually being alone. There are things you can explain perfectly and still feel like the other person did not really get it. You can tell somebody exactly why you are hurt, where it came from, what they did, what you felt, and still walk away thinking, no, that was not it. I did not explain it right. You did not feel what I meant.
I think a lot of us spend our lives doing that. Trying to translate ourselves.
That is what I see in so many of his characters. They want to be understood so badly that they almost become hostile about it. Raskolnikov isolates himself and acts like everybody around him is irritating, but there is something about him that feels desperate to be found out. He wants to disappear and confess at the same time. Ivan Karamazov is constantly trying to turn pain into an intellectual problem because maybe if he can reason through it, he will not have to feel it. The Underground Man insults people before they get the chance to reject him. Nastasya Filippovna seems incapable of accepting the possibility that somebody could see her differently from the way she has learned to see herself. And the worst part is that I understand all of them in different ways.
There is something so embarrassing about wanting to be understood. I think people pretend there is not, but there is. Saying “I do not care what anybody thinks of me” is one of those sentences I have never completely believed when people say it. Maybe you do not care what everybody thinks of you, but there is usually somebody. Somebody whose misunderstanding of you would hurt. Somebody you wish could see the entire context instead of the worst sentence you said or the stupidest thing you did. Somebody you want to grab by the shoulders and say, no, you do not understand, that is not who I am. Or maybe it is who I was for a second, but it is not all of me.
Dostoevsky understood that people want to be seen as more complicated than their worst moment. I think that is part of why his characters feel so alive to me. Nobody is just one thing. Raskolnikov can be arrogant and tender. Dmitri can be selfish and generous. Ivan can be brilliant and completely lost. Myshkin can be good and still fail people. Dostoevsky lets people contradict themselves constantly because people do contradict themselves constantly. I can believe one thing about love and then do something that completely violates it. I can forgive someone and still resent them. I can understand why somebody hurt me and still wish they had not. None of that fits neatly together, but neither do people.
And love in his books is almost never clean. I think that is another reason I love him. There is no pretending that loving someone automatically makes everything noble or beautiful. Sometimes love is ugly. Sometimes it makes you jealous and irrational and possessive. Sometimes it becomes mixed up with pity or guilt or obsession. Sometimes somebody loves you and you still cannot believe them because your opinion of yourself is stronger than theirs. Sometimes being loved almost feels threatening because now somebody has access to the part of you that could actually be hurt.
I think about Nastasya Filippovna a lot for that reason. She is surrounded by people who want her, judge her, pity her, admire her, desire her, try to rescue her, and somehow none of it is enough to change the way she understands herself. That feels devastating to me. There is this idea that if somebody just loves you enough, eventually you will believe you are worthy of it. I do not think that is always true. Somebody can tell you that you are beautiful every day and you can still hate your body. Somebody can tell you they are not leaving and you can still spend the relationship waiting for them to go. Somebody can love you honestly and you can still be suspicious of it because it contradicts whatever ugly thing you already decided about yourself.
Dostoevsky understood shame almost too well. Shame makes his characters act insane. They are humiliated by being poor, by being rejected, by wanting somebody too much, by needing help, by being exposed. And instead of just saying, I am ashamed, they become proud. They get cruel. They become theatrical. They start acting like they never wanted what they very obviously wanted. I recognize that too. There is a certain kind of pride that has absolutely nothing to do with confidence. It is just fear with better posture. It is refusing to admit you are hurt because admitting you are hurt means admitting somebody mattered enough to hurt you.
That might be one of the saddest things about people to me. We can want love more than anything and then make ourselves impossible to love properly. We can want reassurance and instead start a fight. We can want someone to come closer and then punish them for getting too close. We can want somebody to know us and then hide every part of ourselves we think might make them leave. Then we sit there feeling misunderstood, as if we did not personally lock half the doors.
I think Dostoevsky knew that contradiction was at the center of being human. We want freedom and then become terrified when nobody tells us what to do. We want honesty until the truth hurts our feelings. We want to be known but also want control over which version of us somebody knows. We want forgiveness but sometimes refuse to forgive ourselves. We say we want peace and then reopen things we know will disturb us because apparently peace can feel unfamiliar too.
That is why I think his books still feel so current to me. Obviously I am not wandering around nineteenth-century Saint Petersburg in a fever while contemplating murder and God, but emotionally? Unfortunately, some of these people are not that far away from us. We still overthink ourselves into misery. We still create entire philosophies around feelings we do not want to admit are feelings. We still convince ourselves that wanting something less will make it hurt less when we do not get it. We still become cruel when we are ashamed. We still test people instead of telling them what we need. We still mistake being desired for being loved sometimes. We still say “I am fine” with the exact energy of somebody who is absolutely not fine.
The Brothers Karamazov probably makes all of this feel the biggest to me because everybody in that book seems to be trying to answer a different version of the same question: how are we supposed to live knowing what people are capable of? Ivan cannot accept a world where innocent people suffer and then be told there is some divine explanation that will make it all okay. Alyosha keeps choosing love anyway. Dmitri seems to live entirely at the mercy of whatever emotion is loudest in him at the moment. Their father is horrible. Everybody is guilty of something, even if it is not the thing they are technically accused of. And beneath all of it is this uncomfortable idea that maybe we owe something to each other simply because we are here.
I have always found Ivan especially hard to shake because I understand the impulse to think your way out of something unbearable. If you can make it intellectual enough, maybe it stops hurting. If you can turn suffering into philosophy, maybe you do not have to sit with how unfair it actually feels. But Dostoevsky never really lets anybody escape themselves through intelligence. His smartest characters are often the most tortured. Intelligence does not save them. Sometimes it just gives them more elaborate ways to justify their own misery.
Which is, again, rude.
I also do not think Dostoevsky is nearly as hopeless as people make him sound. His books are miserable, yes. Everybody is sick, broke, ashamed, spiritually confused, having a nervous breakdown, or some beautiful combination of the four. But there is always this strange tenderness underneath everything. He seems to believe people can be completely awful and still not be beyond love. That is different from excusing them. He does not make cruelty disappear just because somebody has suffered. But he also does not treat people like they become permanently unworthy of being human the second they fail.
Sonia is probably one of the clearest examples of that for me. She does not erase what Raskolnikov did. She does not tell him it was secretly okay or that his circumstances absolve him. She just stays near him while he finally has to face himself. I find that kind of love much more moving than love that rescues somebody. She cannot rescue him from himself. Nobody can. But she can refuse to reduce him entirely to the worst thing he has done.
Maybe that is what I mean when I say Dostoevsky was right about love too. Love cannot always save you, and sometimes expecting it to is unfair. Another person cannot climb into your brain and rearrange everything for you. They cannot undo your shame or erase your guilt or convince you of your worth if you are committed to believing the opposite. But somebody can witness you. Somebody can stay long enough for you to stop performing. Somebody can know that you are difficult and contradictory and sometimes completely irrational and still not decide that makes you impossible to love.
I think that is also where the loneliness comes back in. There is something deeply lonely about being a person because nobody will ever understand you exactly the way you understand yourself. Actually, sometimes you do not even understand yourself, which makes the whole project kind of doomed from the beginning. There will always be parts of your mind that you cannot explain properly. Memories that feel different inside you than they sound when you tell them. Feelings you reduce to a sentence because there is no language precise enough for the entire thing.
I used to think being understood meant finding somebody who just magically knew. Somebody who would always understand why I reacted the way I did without me having to explain it. The older I get, the less I believe that exists. People misunderstand each other constantly, even when they love each other. Maybe especially when they love each other, because suddenly there is so much more at stake. I think being understood is probably less magical than I wanted it to be. It is somebody asking again. It is somebody letting you correct them. It is somebody saying, okay, I got that wrong, tell me what you meant.
And even then, there will probably always be some part of you they cannot reach.
That is the part of Dostoevsky I keep thinking about. How desperately people want someone else to enter their inner world, and how impossible it is for another person to completely do that. We are all basically walking around with entire universes inside our heads and then getting frustrated when somebody else only sees the weather.
Maybe that is why he is one of my favorite authors. He never makes being human seem prettier than it is. He lets people be selfish and loving at the same time. He lets them be intelligent and ridiculous. He lets them know better and still do worse. He lets people destroy things they wanted, hurt people they loved, crave forgiveness they do not think they deserve, and spend entire lives trying to explain themselves badly.
And I think he was right about suffering, because pain does not always transform us into something beautiful. He was right about love, because loving someone does not mean you will always understand them or know how to keep them. He was right about shame and pride and the stupid things people do when they are afraid of being rejected. He was right that we are capable of knowing exactly what is wrong with us and still repeating it anyway.
Mostly, though, I think he was right about how deeply alone we are in our wanting to be understood.
I do not mean lonely in some dramatic way where nobody can ever know anybody and we are all doomed to die alone. I mean something quieter. I mean that every person has some version of themselves they wish they could hand to somebody else whole. Here. This is what happened. This is what I meant. This is why I acted that way. This is what I was afraid of. This is what I could not say correctly when you asked me.
And we never really get to hand it over whole. We give people pieces and hope they are enough. Dostoevsky seems to understand how badly we want somebody to gather those pieces and say, I see what you were trying to tell me.
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