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Lavrin - A Note On Nietzsche and Dostoevsky
Lavrin - A Note On Nietzsche and Dostoevsky
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Note
on
Nietzsche
and
Dostoevsky
By Janko Lavrin
THE frequent mention of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky together is still topical for the very reason that both of them
were among the acutest anatomists of our cultural, social, and
moral crisis, the symptoms of which were already so prominent
in the second half of the nineteenth century, let alone the
century that followed. The character of their writing may have
been conditioned also by their own bad health, since Dostoevsky was racked by attacks of epilepsy, while Nietzsche had to
fight a long and painful illness which ended in progressive
paralysis and a complete mental collapse. Yet their very ailments
fostered in a way their psychological insight as well as their
belief in the value of hypersensitive or extraordinary states of
mind and body. Anti-rationalisticin their approach to the fundamental problems of man's existence, they were both keen questioners and doubters. They were also inwardly torn between a
strong religious temperament and that strong anti-religious
attitude which was so frequent a phenomenon of the age they
lived in. Finally, both were "underworldminds" unable to come
to terms either with other people or with the conditions they
saw around them.
It is almost sure that Dostoevsky, who died in 1881, had never
even heard the name of Nietzsche. Nietzsche, on the other hand,
not only knew some of Dostoevsky's principal works, but
actually acknowledged (in The Twilight of the Idols) that he
regarded him as the only psychologist from whom he had anything to learn and who belonged among the "happiest windfalls"
of his life. He greatly admired The House of the Dead. He was
also familiar with that formidable document of human frustra160
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tion, Notes from the Underworld, in which individual selfassertion (or "will to power") is proclaimed to be the mainspring of our actions-even amidst the greatest mishaps and
humiliations. In his Theory of Individual Psychology, Alfred
Adler, the champion of ego-libido in contrast to Freud's sexual
libido, contends that "anyone who has felt to what degree
Dostoevsky has recognized the tendency to despotism implanted
in the human soul, will admit that Dostoevsky must be regarded
as our teacher even today, as the teacher Nietzsche hailed him
to be."
Nietzsche must have been further familiar with Crime and
Punishment; the more so because in this novel Dostoevsky explored one of Nietzsche's basic themes quite a few years before
it was tackled in all seriousness by Nietzsche himself. To what
extent the German philosopher had a first-hand knowledge of
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