But not all Western Europeans of Dostoevsky’s time were without compassion for the poor. The best of the Europeans were against modern bourgeois capitalist culture, as was Dostoevsky, but Dostoevsky by the time he wrote of Raskolnikov had abandoned the solution Europeans had found for the problem, socialism. They had really no answer for the sufferings of “the people” driven to poverty and despair by the bourgeoisie except some new form of society that would force all to become brotherly by working together collectively for common economic benefits. Dostoevsky grew to despise modern Europeans and their modern culture based exclusively on rationality and selfishness. He never ceases throughout his works to invent odd characters like Raskolnikov who have evolved into strange aberrations from everything normal in life except that they usually do not abandon rationality but instead transform it to new, strange expressions. Many of the European socialists saw clearly as did Dostoevsky the decadence of late-nineteenth-century capitalism, but Dostoevsky had given up the socialistic views of his youth and grew to hate all liberal and socialist based thoughts designed to solve Russia’s suffering.
Dostoevsky had been a member of a radical group when he was twenty-seven that was inspired by liberal and socialist ideas. Some members of the group met secretly, obtained a printing press, and planned to publish their radical notions for changing society for the better. Dostoevsky was arrested along with others and condemned by the government to be shot by a firing squad. The young writer stood on a platform on a cold December morning waiting for the bullets that would end all his radical thoughts and along with them all his regular human thoughts of whatever kind forever. In those seconds before his death Dostoevsky, to borrow Lev Shestov’s expression, received “a new pair of eyes”. Never again after he received his new eyes, both during the few seconds that remained to him before his death and in the millions of seconds that remained to him because the Tsar unexpectedly stopped his execution – – never again did he look at anything only with regular, normal eyes. But what changed the sight that came forth from his eyes was what the nearness of death had done to his soul. He would never again look at anything except with the new vision that the eyes of the soul gave him. We can not know ourselves what he experienced in those deadly seconds when his death was certain and about to arrive instantly and certainly. We see it with our normal eyes but our eyes are guided by our minds and not by our soul so we do not see what Dostoevsky suddenly saw and continued to see. We think he gained his new eyes because of some kind of religious experience and since we think of religion as being something above and beyond our normal life, we think that Dostoevsky must have begun looking beyond his merely human life to something divine and spiritual in some hidden world above and beyond the human world. Dostoevsky was a Christian but his Christianity did not change his purely human actions and instead taught him he should not change, that his human nature itself, insulted, injured and suffering, was the only temple in which the true God could be met truly. All types of religious experience that were based on seeking some divine experience achieved through some type of mental discipline became alien to him. He grew to hate all doctrines that tried to separate a human being from his authentic self. Liberal ideas, socialist ideas, even some Christian ideas – – he threw them all away onto the same garbage heap where the experience of facing death had thrown away his old eyes. He despised all Western European thought because it was all based on elevated forms of reasoning that did little more than alienate a human being from his own being. European critics experienced his despite and contempt for them and lashed back at him. The German bourgeois novelist Thomas Mann said that Dostoevsky’s works were full of “religious prating”. A Russian critic despised him as someone always “looking for buried treasure”. In his greatest novel,