The Brothers Karamazov, War & Peace, and the Meaning of Russia

"This star will shine forth from the East." -Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Brothers Karamazov

Dec 20, 2024

I have wanted to understand Russia, especially Russian art and culture, since I first saw a picture of St. Basil Cathedral at seven. Two years later, I read a school library book about Anastasia Romanov. At that time Anastasia’s1 bones remained undiscovered and there was a possibility, however remote, that she had survived the execution that killed the rest of her family.2

In the years that followed, I read many more books and felt entranced by many other places and cultures. Still, no country has captured my fascination like Russia.

I think this is because I grew up in the U.S. before Catholicism became so culturally and politically mainstream. Catholicism was widespread but highly tied to ethnicity, or at least that’s how it felt in my Irish-American enclave outside of Boston. Back then there was still a tinge of cultural distrust about “outsiders” and comments that Catholics weren’t welcome in elite - or perhaps elitist - circles. When I was in college, a well-known and much older Irish Catholic personality told me that the major media companies in the U.S. still did not like or understand Catholicism. That was fewer than ten years ago.

This sense of ethnic and religious solidarity likely shaped my view of Russia, though I didn’t know it then. As Russians saw themselves as outsiders in Europe, my Irish-American forbears still imagined themselves outsiders in America. Twenty years on, in the present day, Catholicism is so mainstream that public figures are converting, and we are about to have a (practicing) Catholic as vice president. (Unlike Kennedy, J.D. Vance likely won’t have to answer questions about his loyalty to the Pope.) Still, I think American Catholics, especially those with strong ethnic traditions like the Irish and the Polish, will always feel slightly out of place here in the land of the Protestant work ethic.

All of this brings me to my point, which is that by young adulthood I adored both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. It wasn’t only their fiction that I appreciated - I also enjoyed reading their nonfictional perspectives on Russia and Orthodoxy.

Dostoevsky, as I have written before, was an aggressive Russian nationalist. He viewed Russia as a sacred bulwark against the poisonous decadence and godlessness of the West, especially Communism, Catholicism, and Protestantism, which he identified as more or less the same fruit of one poisonous tree.

To Dostoevsky, Russia’s unique geography and culture suggested a kind of supernatural election for a nation and its people. Dostoevsky felt that Russia would one day be the last moral place on earth and that it would have to save the West. Dostoevsky’s perception of Russia’s soteriological significance is best articulated in his masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov, in which he anticipated the day when “the State turns into the Church, it rises up to the Church and becomes the Church all over the earth which […] is simply the great destiny of Orthodoxy on Earth. This star will shine forth from the East.”3

Dostoevsky elaborated through the saintly monk Father Zosima on a crucial piece of his ideology, which was that Russia’s election was due to the goodness of its people, not its leaders - even its religious leaders:4

“The salvation of Russia is from the people. And the Russian monastery has been with the people from time immemorial. The people believe as we do, but the unbelieving leader will accomplish nothing in our Russia, even though he be of sincere heart and brilliant mind. Remember that. The people will confront the atheist and overcome him, and there will be one Orthodox Russia.” […] “Yet the Lord will save Russia, as He has saved her many times before. Salvation will come from the people, from their faith and their humility.”

Dostoevsky distilled his so-called “Russian idea” in an essay for The Citizen written in 1873:5

And does not Orthodoxy comprise everything, indeed everything, which [Catholics and Protestants] are seeking? Isn’t there in Orthodoxy alone both the truth and the salvation of the Russian people and—in the forthcoming centuries—of mankind as a whole? […] And, perhaps, the most momentous preordained destiny of the Russian people, within the destinies of mankind at large, consists in the preservation in their midst of the Divine image of Christ, in all its purity, and, when the time comes, in the revelation this image to the world which has lost its way!

These sentiments are striking to a Catholic, not least because many of us also believe in Russia’s pivotal role in salvation history. Most Catholics are familiar with the legendary Marian Fatima apparitions, in which Mother Mary is said to have appeared to three Portuguese shepherd children beginning in 1917 and revealed, among other things, that Russia would spread its ideological errors, i.e. Communism and atheism (how this would have horrified Dostoevsky!).6 The Vatican, for its part, has stated:7

Fatima is undoubtedly the most prophetic of modern apparitions. The first and second parts of the secret…refer especially to the frightening vision of hell, devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the Second World War, and finally the prediction of the immense damage that Russia would do to humanity by abandoning the Christian faith and embracing Communist totalitarianism.

So Catholics and Dostoevsky can at least agree that Russia plays a significant role in the drama of human history.

Dostoevsky’s conviction in Russia’s righteousness is extreme, and it presages Russia’s current politics. The following from Dostoevsky’s diary, written 149 years before the Russian war in Ukraine, is chilling:8

“From the standpoint of Europe, it is of no consequence that at present we are not going to seize any countries and that we promise not to conquer anyone…by helping the Slavs, we are thereby continuing to affirm and consolidate the Slavs’ faith in Russia and her might, and we are accustoming them more and more to look on Russia as their sun, as the center of the whole Slavdom and even the entire East. And the consolidation of this idea, in Europe’s opinion, is worth all the conquests, despite all concessions with Russia, honestly and faithfully, is ready to make for the pacification of Europe.

Dostoevsky’s vision for Russia is at best simplistic and naïve and at worst reflects a dangerous jingoism that paved the way for years of violence.

Tolstoy provides a useful counterweight to Dosteovsky’s errors. True, Tolstoy had some confidence in Russian moral superiority. He wrote of Napolean’s invasion of Russia in War and Peace:9

The moral force of the attacking French army was exhausted. Not that sort of victory which is defined by the capture of pieces of material fastened to sticks, called standards, and of the ground on which the troops had stood and were standing, but a moral victory that convinces the enemy of the moral superiority of his opponent and of his own impotence was gained by the Russians at Borodinó.

However, Tolstoy was disturbed by the non-defensive violence his motherland waged under the banner of Orthodoxy. As he reflected in an essay:10

When I turned my attention to what is done in the name of religion I was horrified and very nearly withdrew from the Orthodox Church entirely. […] During this time [in Tolstoy’s life] Russia was at war. And in the name of Christian love Russians were killing their brothers. There was no way to avoid thinking about this. There was no way to ignore the fact that murder was evil and contrary to the most fundamental tenets of any faith.

Tolstoy was particularly troubled by how the Church encouraged the kind of nationalist conquest that Dostoevsky supported:11

Nonetheless, in the churches they were praying for the success of our weapons, and the teachers of faith looked upon this murder as the outcome of faith. And not only was the murder that came with the war sanctioned, but during the disturbances that followed the war I saw members of the Church, its teachers, monks, and ascetics, condoning the murder of straying, helpless youths. I turned my attention to everything that was done by people who claimed to be Christians, I was horrified.

Unlike Dostoevsky, Tolstoy understood how the symbiotic relationship between the Church and State compelled the Russian Orthodox Church to justify nationalist violence. He continued:12

I was living by it [Orthodoxy] and could feel that this was indeed the truth; but in these teachings there was also a lie. […] Both the lie and the truth came from what was known as the Church. Both the lie and the truth were part of a tradition, part of a so-called sacred tradition, part of the Scriptures.

Tolstoy’s nuanced view of Russian nationalism and Orthodoxy is far more prescient than Dostoevsky’s. Even still, I must say I prefer Dostoevsky’s writing - and I view Dostoevsky’s life as a far better model than Tolstoy’s, which could fill another essay.

What is there to say about the meaning of Russia? In some ways I am no closer to an answer than the nine-year-old who wept over Anastasia Romanov twenty years ago. I was too young to experience the Cold War and 2022 was the first time I really saw Russia take center stage in global politics, and the war in Ukraine has made assessing Russia more difficult than ever.

Perhaps the takeaway is this. Russia is unique, set apart from Europe by geography and culture. It is a kind of outsider in the world. In a way the United States is too, but we have the advantage of general approval, at least on the surface. I think of America almost like a beloved and extroverted younger brother to Russia’s dour, introverted elder brother (not like the Brothers Karamazov, by the way, who are all fundamental pieces of the Russian psyche). America is, I think, easier to like, and in some ways easier to understand. But Russia is worth understanding, too.

Russia benefits from its isolation in a sense. Russia has preserved many cultural and religious traditions that most of the West is sorely lacking. Nevertheless, I fear Russia is even more blinded than America by a belief in fundamental superiority. This is tragic, because too much of the world has seen only one side of Russia - not the side I have seen, the one of writers who had endured the deepest winter of the human soul and survived with their convictions intact.

The Brothers Karamazov, War & Peace, and the Meaning of Russia

"This star will shine forth from the East." -Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Brothers Karamazov

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