Dostoiefsky and the Sense of Guilt

While psychologizing on the dead is admittedly ghoulish work, it is at least defensible in the case of a writer as subjective as Dostoiefsky. That he was essentially autobiographic has been admitted by all competent critics, but with the publication of new biographic material it is becoming more and more evident that he was one of the most exquisitely subjective of the great writers. This trait increases the value of biographic material in critically estimating his works and conversely, his writings serve to illuminate his life. In this brief study, I am taking only one element in his personality and tracing its elusive course through both life and letters. Without an appreciation of this particular characteristic many things in his life and works remain enigmatic. It is this lack of psychological insight that has led to much shrugging of critical shoulders and refuge in such meaningless ethnological cliches as “peculiarly Russian” or “the Slavic soul.” Similarly it has became the fashion among his biographers to refer things in his life that did not conform to their fastidious canons, to his Epilepsy and to infer that parts of his life were passed under the cloud of a sort of imbecility.

The particular trend that I wish to consider is a strong sense of guilt and a concomitant need for punishment. This sense of un-worthiness which was felt unclearly and was, in many of its important manifestations, totally unconscious, caused him to subject himself to countless humiliations and punishments. He committed many acts to supply a rational basis for his need of punishment. This mechanism is quite familiar to psychopathology being seen in particular clarity in the Compulsion Neuroses where the sense of guilt and dirtiness calls for the most elaborate ritualistic cleansing and frequently to the commission of unconsciously conditioned acts to bring about punishment and even actual physical injury by way of atonement.

The origin of this sense of guilt is to be sought in his rel