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The Martyr Made Podcast
The Prodigal Sons - Nietzsche and Dostoevsky (Novitate Conference, Nov 2023)
01:25:55
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Luke Burgess
Foreign.
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Darrell Cooper
Hey everybody, this is Darrell Cooper and I thought I'd bring you a little Martyrmaid bonus.
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Luke Burgess
This is a talk I gave last.
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Darrell Cooper
Year about Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky at the Novitate Conference in Washington, dc. The Novitate Conference was created by Luke Burgess, author of the book the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, to explore and celebrate the work of French scholar Rene Girard, of whom you've heard me speak a few times in the past. Much of the material here will be familiar to those of you who have listened to the Underground Spirit, which was episode 20 of the Martyr Maid podcast, but here you get it in a condensed 90 minutes that you can send to your mom without asking her to listen to some dude she's never heard of for five hours.
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Luke Burgess
Although I admit cutting it down to.
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Darrell Cooper
This length felt like choosing which fingers.
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Luke Burgess
And toes I wanted to chop off.
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Darrell Cooper
There's a lot more stuff like this on the Martyrmaid substack. I am currently and this is January 31, 2024. I'm currently working on a series of essays on the history of slavery and the lead up to the US Civil War. I just released the third essay in that series and there are many, many.
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Luke Burgess
Other essays, all of which have audio.
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Darrell Cooper
Versions on a podcast feed if you prefer to listen to them, as well as interviews and podcasts that are only available to subscribers on the sub stack. This is a 100% listener supported outfit. I don't run ads and I'm able to keep doing this for one reason.
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Luke Burgess
It's because you guys choose to support.
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Darrell Cooper
Me by becoming paid subscribers at the Substack.
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Luke Burgess
That's it.
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Darrell Cooper
You can find the sub stack@martyrmaid.substack.com and it's just five bucks a month or.
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Luke Burgess
50 bucks a year.
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Darrell Cooper
And subscribers get a discount on Martyr made gear along with the exclusive content. I always feel self conscious asking for money, but I am eternally grateful that you guys have allowed me to do this and I hope to keep doing it for a long time. So again, the podcast the substack can be found@martyrmaid.substack.com even if you can't become a paid subscriber, I encourage you to go become an unpaid subscriber because there's still content that you'll have access to as well as free previews of exclusive content as well. So check it out, Head over to itunes, Spotify, give me a good review. And again, thank you, thank you, thank you.
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Luke Burgess
Here we go. I'll be the enforcer up here. How's it going everybody? My name is Darrell Cooper and I'm just a podcast host. Thanks for coming to hear me give this presentation. This talk is about Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky viewed through a lens that's been furnished to us by Rene Girard. I did a long four or five hour podcast on this topic, but fortunately for all of you, and unfortunately for me, Luke denied my request for a five hour speaking slot. So I will do my best to get through through this in the time we have. If it seems like I'm rushing, it's because I haven't had a chance to practice this in its final form because I was still fiddling with it at my table. So if we reach the hour and you guys need to go, I won't hold it against you. I'll finish up for the camera, but I'll try to get it done in time Winston Churchill has been quoted saying that if you're not a liberal at 25, then you have no heart, but if you're not a conservative by 35, then you have no brain. It turns out, unfortunately, that Churchill never said that, and since the attribution is false, I feel liberated to reappropriate the quote for my own purpose in my version. You have no heart if you're not reading Nietzsche at 25, but if you haven't moved on to Dostoevsky by 35, you know the rest. I'm pulling your leg. I still Enjoy Nietzsche Despite 35 quickly fading to the horizon in my rear view mirror, but my appreciation for both the German philosopher and the Russian novelist has been profoundly enriched by reading each author through a lens furnished by the other and reading both of them through a lens provided to us by Professor Girard. By applying his unique insight into the dynamics of desire and mimesis, Rene Girard was able to recognize that rarely have two authors been in such deep dialogue over the same questions. The correspondences one finds in the work of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky are so plentiful and so specific that over the years some Nietzsche scholars have mistakenly assumed that he must have been paraphrasing or responding to a passage that he had read in Dostoevsky, when in fact we know that both men had completed all of their major works before Nietzsche ever discovered him. Dostoevsky was 23 years older than Nietzsche. Nietzsche didn't discover Dostoevsky until years after the Russian's death. Yet despite the generational and geographic distance separating the two men, they shared many common experiences, and the trajectory of their personal lives was Uncannily similar, at least the first half. Both were sensitive children of stern, conservative fathers. Both boys were introduced early to reading and took refuge in books at an early age. Both boys lost their father under circumstances that involved them personally and traumatically. And as adults, they both labored under the shadow of the patriarch. In their early twenties, both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky had a brief, very negative experience in the military. And around the same age, they even both had a traumatic experience with a horse that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. At exactly age 24, each man was recognized for his talent and elevated into elite company, only to be disillusioned after a year or two, and then to slide into a decade of unproductive obscurity. Each man emerged from exile in his mid-30s. Only now they were headed down radically divergent paths that would lead one to redemption and the other to destruction. Many of us have had experiences reading novels where we think that the author must have been writing this as a personal letter to us. It gets us so well, or some aspect of us. It may even be something that we didn't see or understand about ourselves before, or something we vaguely felt but hadn't been able to articulate. Onietzche had no problem articulating himself. But even the most clear thinking and articulate among us are often unclear and inarticulate when thinking or talking about ourselves, at least when we're trying to be honest. A good novel can give us deep insight into ourselves precisely because we're often not honest with ourselves about ourselves. Early in Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky writes that quote, every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and then only in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell, even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind. Notes from the Underground was the first book by Dostoevsky that Nietzsche discovered after a chain of unlikely coincidences that grabbed his attention. Actually, the volume was titled the Underground Spirit, and it contained both Notes from the Underground and a short story from earlier in Dostoevsky's career called the Landlady. Nietzsche had found it in January 1887 at a bookshop in southern France, where he'd stopped in to take a break from a long day of searching for a new apartment. Nietzsche had never heard of Dostoevsky, and we can only guess what drew his attention to the underground spirit. But it is an educated guess. You see, the most recent piece of writing that Nietzsche had completed was a new preface for his earlier book, dawn, in which the very first sentence began, in this book, you will find an underground man at work. The narrator and protagonist from Notes from the Underground is never assigned a name in the book and has come down to us, even today, simply as the Underground Man. Well, by this point in his life, Nietzsche was not much of a believer in coincidences. He'd become increasingly superstitious, detecting hidden meanings in mundane daily events, and even wrote to a friend that there's no longer any element of chance in my life. The coincidence of finding a book about another underground man was enough for Nietzsche to put off his apartment search and dig a little more deeply. The landlady was the first of the two stories presented sequentially in the Underground Spirit. And so, assuming Nietzsche turned to the first page upon picking the book up, the very first line he would have read was, ordonov. It's the protagonist of the landlady had finally decided to change his apartment to a man like Nietzsche. The unlikely coincidence of finding both another apartment seeker and a fellow underground man at work within the first few moments of picking up the underground spirit would have been irresistible, especially as the correspondences continue to pile up. Nietzsche's most important book, as far as he was concerned, a book he considered to be a text of almost sacred knowledge, which would one day have entire universities dedicated to plumbing the depths of his teachings, was thus spake Zarathustra. In it, Nietzsche has his avatar, Zarathustra come down to the world of men in his 40th year to share the wisdom that he has accumulated after 10 years of isolation up in the mountains. Nietzsche was himself in his early 40s when he wrote Zarathustra, and like Zarathustra, he had spent much of the last decade in relative isolation and obscurity. Dostoevsky, too, was 40 years old when he wrote Notes from the Underground, and he too had only just emerged from a decade of exile. The underground man is Dostoevsky's avatar, just as Zarathustra is Nietzsche's. But Notes from the Underground is a dark mirror of Nietzsche's magnum opus. When Zarathustra made the decision to descend from his mountain redoubt, he first addressed the sun, saying, thou, great star, what would be thy happiness if thou hadst not those for whom thou shinest? He says he's like a bee who's gathered too much honey and now must give it into the waiting, outstretched hands of humanity. Like Zarathustra, Dostoevsky's underground man is exactly 40 years old when he makes his appearance in the world of men, but he is crawling up out of his hole rather than descending from the mountaintop. Dostoevsky's character has none of Zarathustra's pretensions regarding the value of his wisdom, and early in his story he says, we underground folk, though we may sit 40 years underground without speaking, when we do come out into the light of day and break out, we talk and talk and talk. You must excuse me for being overly philosophical. It's just the result of 40 years underground. Nietzsche, Zarathustra has come down to humanity to preach the Ubermensch, the overman or superman, the radically free individual who has cast off the fetters of social convention and in his freedom and outlook is as different from men as men are from apes. Dostoevsky's underground man has come up to humanity to expose the true nature of this radically free individual. Practically, chapter by chapter and line by line, Dostoevsky responds to the major ideas with which Nietzsche had been grappling in books he'd written over the past several years. The parallels to Nietzsche's biography, his personal biography, only set the hook more firmly. Nietzsche had suffered since childhood from chronic illnesses, an experience he held in common with Dostoevsky, and by that day in the bookstore, his health was in terminal collapse. The first line he would read in Notes from the Underground was, I am a sick man. Nietzsche, by this point, had given up trying to track or improve his health through medicine and took pride in his ability to push through illness and chronic pain, famously boasting that what doesn't kill me makes me stronger. Dostoevsky's underground man too, takes a sort of pride in his infirmities, and he too refuses to consult a doctor about what ails him. In the same chapter, Nietzsche would read that the underground man, like himself, survived on a modest fixed income after retiring early from work. He would read that the underground man, again, like himself, had withdrawn from the social world and had no strong connections to friends or family. The underground man was a more sensitive and intelligent person than most of the people around him. Yet he was unsuccessful in his life and attributed the success of others to their stupidity and to their willingness to play social games to which he would not lower himself. All this Nietzsche would have found darkly familiar. Nietzsche would spend the next two years, the last two years before he went insane, seeking out translations of any Dostoevsky books he could find. He called the Russian, the only psychologist from whom I had something to learn. And yet, though Nietzsche was, quote, grateful to Dostoevsky in a very special way, he constantly offends my most basic instincts. You see, if you only read Nietzsche's books, you might think they were the work of a warrior poet, as if Beowulf or Siegfried had taken up the pen and decided to tell us about Schopenhauer. But Nietzsche the man was very different from Nietzsche the author, who would have considered the real man to be exactly the kind of weak, sickly timid and unsuccessful person Nietzsche condemned to the social Darwinian dustbin in his later works. When viewed alongside his rather pathetic personal biography, those later works appear as a kind of special pleading on the part of Nietzsche. And it was his encounter with Dostoevsky, I believe, that finally forced Nietzsche to confront the discrepancy between his life and the values that he professed. It was a confrontation that would have tragically devastating consequences. Many of you will have read Notes from the Underground, but I imagine somewhat fewer of you have worked your way through Dostoevsky's all the way down to the landlady. Dostoevsky wrote it during his earlier period, and while it is not a masterpiece like Notes, it may have had as much to do with grabbing Nietzsche's attention as Notes. The the uncanny correspondences to Nietzsche's biography went far beyond the main character seeking a new apartment, as Nietzsche had been doing when he happened across the book. In fact, the plot had many parallels with a very significant and formative event in his own life, namely his relationship and eventual falling out with the famous composer Richard Wagner. Nietzsche and Wagner met in the late 1860s while Nietzsche was still a student at Leipzig. Wagner was already very famous, towering over the German cultural scene, and he kept a circle of reverent admirers and hangers on, including many who were culture figures in their own right. At the time of Nietzsche's introduction, Germany had not yet been unified into a single country, but mass enthusiasm for Germanic nationalism was thick in the air. Wagner and his circle saw themselves as historic figures, self consciously involved in forging a shared cultural heritage for this emerging Germanic nation. So Wagner's soirees were charged with the sense of being involved in a great task, and those invited to participate were expected to bring their a game. Nietzsche had come well recommended. He had recently accepted the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, making him the youngest full professor at 24 in in the history of the Swiss university system and perhaps in all of Europe at the time. Despite the fact that he had not even yet completed his doctorate. Apparently, the men overseeing his program at the University of Leipzig felt they had seen enough, because they waived the required thesis and examination, awarded Nietzsche his doctorate, and sent him on his way. Nietzsche was brilliant enough to stand out among Wagner's many brilliant friends and and soon was elevated into the composer's inner circle. Wagner's charisma was legendary and he had tremendous pull over everyone around him. Once, after a scandal involving an affair between Wagner and the wife of his friend and follower, Hans von Bulow, courtiers who were jealous of the influence Wagner had over King Ludwig II pressured the King to make Wagner leave Bavaria. Wagner agreed to relocate, but not before having to personally talk Ludwig out of abdicating his throne to move away with him. Nietzsche was not immune to Wagner's pull, and he was intoxicated by the rarefied air into which he had been swept up. The most important figure in this circle was, of course, Richard Wagner himself. But at the center of the circle stood a woman named Cosima, the sun around which Wagner and several of his closest friends orbited. Cosimo was Wagner's mistress and the wife of Hans von Bulow, a member of Wagner's inner circle. Hans von Bulow had been the most prominent student of her father, the famous pianist and composer Franz Liszt, who was also a member of Wagner's inner circle. Therefore, when Nietzsche was welcomed into the club, the three most important figures, Liszt, von Bulow and Wagner himself, all had a solicitous love relationship to this woman, Liszt obviously only as her father, but she was at the center of everyone's affectionate attention. To put it in a manner more appropriate for today's topic, Cosima was the object of everyone's mimetic desire. And so you will not be surprised to learn that before long, Nietzsche too falls in love with Cosima. 20 years had passed since he'd been introduced to ricardo Cosima Wagner, 10 Since a catastrophic falling out with the couple. That the disastrous end to their relationship was still an open wound for Nietzsche is evidenced by the fact that most of the books he'd written in the years since criticized Wagner, either directly or indirectly. Although Nietzsche had not spoken to Cosima in many years, one of the very first things he did in the days after losing his mind in 1889 was to write her a love letter. A detail that suggests the whole experience was never far from the surface of Nietzsche's mind. So let us return to the bookstore in southern France. Nietzsche notices a book called the Underground Spirit and picks it up on account of having written in his most recent essay that it was the work of an underground man, one of the two stories contained therein. Notes from the Underground is also described as the work of an underground man, and seems to be in direct dialogue with much of Nietzsche's work over the last many years. The other story, the Landlady, begins with the line Ordonov had finally decided to get a new apartment, just as Nietzsche had been out searching for an apartment when he stopped into the bookstore. So Nietzsche finds a corner, settles in and reads a story about a young, reclusive scholar, Ordonov, who has been invited into the home of a couple, a young, lovely woman named Katerina and a mysterious older man named Muren, who holds Katarina in thrall. Ordonov, of course, soon falls in love with Katarina and the two become very close. The two of them are much closer in age than she and Miron, just as Nietzsche and Cosima were much closer in age than she and Wagner. But it soon becomes clear that the older man has too much power over Katarina for Ordonov to pry her away. People often spoke of Richard Wagner as holding people under some kind of trance or spell. Hans von Bulow, when his wife's affair with Wagner became a public scandal and she asked him for a divorce, took the matter in stride and simply deferred to his master. He famously invoked the story of Theseus, Dionysus and Ariadne, in which Theseus, a human, is married to Ariadne but gives her up to Dionysus, a God, after the God stakes his claim. According to one version of events, von Bulow said, when a woman is torn between a man and a God, meaning between himself and Wagner, it is excusable for her to choose the God. Cosima was every bit as enraptured by her husband as everyone else. She held him in awe and was utterly devoted and subject to him. Years earlier, not long after they had first met and she was still married to von Bulow, she and Wagner were alone in a room and Cosima literally fell at his feet, weeping, practically worshipping him. She would spend the remainder of her life after Wagner's death working to increase his fame and spread his work. In other words, like Ordonov in Dostoevsky's story, Nietzsche had fallen in love with a married woman who was intensely devoted to her husband. There's a part in the landlady where Ordonov tries to stand up to Murin, the old man, but he wilts at the critical moment, and then Caterina falls at Muren's feet, weeping. It's also hinted that Murin may have originally been the lover of Caterina's mother, and that he and Caterina ran off together after Murin had killed her father. Nietzsche had wandered into Wagner's circle, where Cosima was at the time still married to von Bulow, even though she had already had children with Wagner, whose work was being promoted by Cosima's father, Franz Liszt, who who was the teacher of her cuckold husband, von Bulow. Two of Wagner's children with Cosima carried von Bulow's surname because they were born when she was still married to him. Now, obviously the details are different, but suffice to say that both Ordonov and Nietzsche found themselves involved in a strange, pseudo incestuous situation and fallen in love with a young woman who was enthralled to a powerful older man who seemed to hold everyone around him under a spell. Nietzsche never did make an open play for the hand of Cosima while Wagner was still alive, and as far as we know, the rivalry never broke out into the open. In a way, the plot of the landlady plays out in a similar way. Ordonov does confess his feelings for Katerina and finally determines to kill Murin in order to free Katarina by force. In the climactic scene, Ordonov is holding the knife and has the advantage over Murin. But at the last moment he breaks down to the old man's gaze. He drops the knife and Katharina falls weeping at Murin's feet. When the police arrive, the old man tells them that the young woman requires a strong master like himself. And that Ordonov, he's no danger to anyone, given that he could not kill a stronger man even when he had every means to do so. After Cosima Wagner, Nietzsche never made a move on another woman until 1876, many years later, after he began to publicly criticize Wagner's work and broke with the couple. In that instance, he asked a friend to propose to the woman on his behalf, but she said no and ended up going off with his friend instead. He went another six years before trying again and experienced a similar humiliation with a very close friend and the woman with whom he was smitten. That one left a deep scar, but we'll talk about that a little later. After Nietzsche read the Underground Spirit, he began writing to acquaintances to find out more about this Russian author and sought out every translation of Dostoevsky he could turn up. As he worked through more of the Russian's work, he would find many more stories centered around love triangles. The love triangle is, of course, a common device to generate literary conflict, but few authors mastered the motif as completely as Dostoevsky. And what stands out in Dostoevsky's love triangles is that the protagonist of his stories turns out to be the loser. In almost every case, it's significant that all three women Nietzsche fell in love with over the course of his life were involved with somebody he knew. The meat of his philosophy was all about the centrality of the will, about the emerging man of the future having the courage and the strength to shuck off the pull of the crowd and create his own values, never apologizing for his desires or his demands. And yet, it's as if Nietzsche couldn't desire a woman on his own, not without his desire being validated by someone else. In each case, he was the one who ended up alone, and in each case, he never really put up much of a fight. There's a story from his time with the Wagners that I think would have made a great scene in an early Dostoevsky novel. In 1870, when Nietzsche was just starting out, Richard and Cosima, Wagner invited him to spend Christmas with them, just the three of them, at Wagner's mansion in Lucerne. Nietzsche had been drummed out of the army medical corps due to illness, but they didn't care about that. He had gone to serve and so they welcomed him back as a hero. But it's a little awkward. Nietzsche loved Cosima and must have been disappointed when she and Wagner had been married just a few months before. Not that it was a surprise or that anyone imagined any other outcome, but still, like Ordonov and the landlady, Nietzsche had gone to stay for a while with a woman he loved and the old man who held her in thrall. Like Ordonov, he became very close with the woman, but was never able to break into the circle reserved for her and her husband. Like Ordonov, he was already having ambivalent feelings for the old man. And those feelings would grow darker over time. And yet, just as the old man Murin in the story could dominate Ordonov with a look for all Nietzsche the philosophers warrior bravado, Wagner was still Wagner. So when Nietzsche arrived for Christmas that year, his first time seeing Cosima since she'd married his rival, Nietzsche brought gifts that can only make me think of a male animal who comes up short in a mating competition and makes cringing Signs of submission to the dominant alpha. To Wagner, he gave an engraving by Durer called the Night, Death and the Devil. It had for many years been an important German nationalist rallying point, a symbol of German fierceness and courage in adversity. It shows a German knight riding a horse through a corrupted land, with skulls on the ground and monsters surrounding him. Wagner loved it, of course, and understood Nietzsche's gift as depicting himself, Wagner riding the horse, to save German culture from the foreign, mainly French and Jewish influences that were corrupting it. If you take Nietzsche at his later word, he was already filling with mounting disgust for exactly that kind of German chauvinism and becoming disillusioned with Wagner himself for indulging in it. And yet that's the gift that he got. And his gift for Cosima was arguably worse. For her, he brought an early transcript of the book he was working on, which would become his first the Birth of Tragedy. In the book, he describes Greek tragedy as developing out of a musical base and says that the great age of Greek drama was the result of a synthesis between the non rational Dionysian musical impulse and the rational Apollonian narrative structure imposed on it, and that the two came into balance in the plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus before being thrown off kilter and eventually ruined by the overly critical influence of men like Socrates in and Euripides. He concludes by suggesting that after many centuries of dormancy, a new great age was now bringing up the curtain on the German fusion of music and drama, most significantly in the work of Richard Wagner, who was, even, as he wrote, said Nietzsche, pushing toward a similar peak as Aeschylus and Sophocles and all the great Greek tragedians. Now, perhaps I'm being too hard on Nietzsche here, but it seems like a guy with his ego, and his ego was intergalactic, that if you're in love with another man's wife, a man who's kind of your patron, the alpha of your most significant social circle, at least you get invited to stay with them for Christmas just months after they get married. What do you get them for Christmas? Maybe some flowers, A sequined angel for the top of the tree. Given Nietzsche's negative feelings about German nationalism, getting Wagner that juror print would be like someone who's a hardcore liberal democrat, but who falls in love with Ivanka Trump for some reason, and she and Jared Kushner invite you for Christmas. Or Hanukkah, I guess it would be now. And you hate Jared's politics, you hate Donald Trump. You just can't stomach any of it. And for Jared's present, you bring him a painting of him writing a Humvee to go save the country from BLM and Antifa. And for Ivanka, you give her a book you wrote about politics that ends by predicting her husband will be America's salvation. What would have to be going through your mind? This is different than telling yourself, look, she's married. Just forget about it. Be cool, we're all friends here. There we go. In that case, you get them the angel for the Christmas tree or some other nice neutral gift, right? I don't think I'm nuts. Especially since, as we'll see, he never got over Cosima. And his rivalry with Wagner would become one of the central obsessions of Nietzsche's life, all the way up to the very end. After that Christmas, Nietzsche went back to teach at Basel and stayed in touch with the Wagners. He published the Birth of tragedy in 1872, but although the Wagners did their best to defend him, it got a terrible reception. It didn't fit into any established categories. So other scholars didn't really know what to do with it. A few hated it so much that some of his students parents tried to have him run out of the university. He was very bitter over this experience and disenchanted with the field of philology, which he was actually on the brink of leaving for a scientific field when he'd gotten the offer to teach at Basel. So after his rapid initial rise into the company of the great at age 24, he sort of settled in as a rather conventional professor of philology, publishing a handful of essays and other pieces that nobody really considers among his important works and nobody really read except his students. Scholars and casual readers have long recognized that Dostoevsky's career can be cleanly divided into two parts, separated by a decade long purgatory. But it was Professor Girard who most clearly described the fundamental difference between pre exilic and post exilic Dostoevsky. The tendencies that dominated his earlier career were were already evident in his first book, Porfolk, which made him the next big thing in Russian literature at age 24, the same age as Nietzsche when he was made the youngest ever professor at Basel. Like the landlady, Porfolk centers around a love triangle in which the protagonist comes out the loser. His name is Devushkin and life is not great. He's a low ranking bureaucrat without much going for him. He's poor, living in a room that's just a sectioned off part of someone's kitchen, people at work treat him badly, and the only light in his life comes from his correspondence with a woman down the street whose existence is equally miserable. He's in love with her, but he never actually goes to see her in person for fear of creating a scandal. Nevertheless, they become very close through the letters. They write back and forth. He he gives her advice, buys her gifts with any extra money he manages to scrape together and makes himself an important part of her everyday routine through his letters. But their correspondence is not the center of her life in quite the same way it is for him, and she eventually agrees to marry another man. An old man and a brute, but a rich old brute, and by the time the novel ends, she has gone a long way toward becoming accustomed to her new status and lifestyle. In her letters she's already starting to speak casually about her new luxuries and privileges, and her responses to his letters become shorter and rarer. He writes begging her to respond, and she writes back telling him all is over, but even then leaves a drop of poison by asking him not to forget about her. He writes back finally after all this time, to confess his love for her, but she never writes back. And that's the end of the story. So yay anyone out there who's always heard about Dostoevsky but never gotten around to reading him, try to contain yourself from rushing off to the bookstore to get all his books. We can detect a motif similar to that employed in the Landlady right from the beginning, with a protagonist in a love triangle with a rival who is older, stronger, and more assertive, and who in the end overpowers the protagonist and gets the girl that he wants. In Porfolk, as the woman's new relationship develops, she tells Dvushkin that the man who had proposed to her is a tyrant and a brute. But what does he do? He doesn't tell her to cancel the wedding immediately. He doesn't confront the old bastard or make a gallant play to steal her away. You'd like to say he didn't do anything, but it's actually worse than that. Instead, he tries to make himself useful to the couple, helping to prepare the wedding between the woman he loves and this other man who he doesn't like, scurrying around looking for new humiliations as an excuse to remain in her orbit and signaling his non threateningness to her fiance so as not to be ordered out of the picture by him or by her. Many of Dostoevsky's early works are a variation on this theme. In a weak heart. The protagonist introduces his fiance to his best friend, who promptly declares himself in love with her. As the title implies, the protagonist does not have the heart to compete with his friend, so he beats a retreat and instead asks his friend to make just a small place for him in their lives. The plot of White Knights is practically a repetition of this exercise. The desired woman has chosen another man and tells the protagonist, when we get married, we will remain friends. We will be as brother and sister, or even something more. I will love you almost as much as him. Every man loves hearing that Again, the protagonist does everything he can to ensure the success of his rival, delivering letters and arranging rendezvous for the couple. Throughout all of these stories, and this is really the key to understanding Dostoevsky's career, the weakness, fear, and indecision of the protagonist is always described in terms of generosity and devotion and a spirit of self sacrifice. They might show how the Beta behavior causes the protagonist to suffer, but it's the suffering of a martyr. Their supposedly pure motives are just taken at face value, as if it isn't all a cover for a roiling ocean of resentment and humiliation for being rejected in the most fundamental way that one can be rejected. White Nights was the last story Dostoevsky wrote before the rupture in his career. His time in the sun had lasted less than two years, and before long he had so offended the fickle critics of the Petersburg literary world that he was cast out and made an object of mockery and scorn. He developed a terrible gambling addiction and fell in with a crowd of wannabe revolutionaries who'd orbited the literary scene. Soon after White Nights was written, he and his friends were arrested and soon sentenced to death. At the final moment, with the blindfold tied and firing squad in place, the czar commuted the sentence to four years of hard labor in Siberia. And that was as miserable as it sounds. About his barracks, he wrote, quote, in summer, intolerable closeness. In winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick, one could slip and fall. We were packed like herrings in a barrel. There was no room to turn around from dusk to dawn. It was impossible not to behave like pigs, fleas, lice and black beetles by the bushel. End quote. There was to be no literature in prison for four years, Dostoevsky had nothing to read but the New Testament, and judgment was not finished with him. After four years, when his sentence was complete, he was conscripted into the army and sent to an outpost in the empty middle of the Russian Empire when he was young, he and his father. When he was young, Dostoevsky's father had sent him and his brother to a military academy to study engineering. He hated it, and he hated his father for making him go. Even as he was consumed with feelings of guilt and inadequacy and a sense of being a great disappointment to his father. He fled from the life his father had prepared for him to make his own way, taking up with a literary crowd who openly scorned men like his father, who had been a military doctor, an ardent supporter of the Czar, and a strong orthodox Christian. Well, just like Jonah, his flight had landed him right back at the place he had been trying to escape in the army. Now, with no choice to leave, further than ever from everywhere. And there he would remain in unproductive exile for another six years. During that time he got married after a romance that began with a love triangle and played out the themes of his early novels with such fidelity that it would be funny if it wasn't so tragic. He was a terrible husband and an unfaithful husband who gambled away money his family needed for food and shelter again and again so that his poor wife had to work to pay the bills. He even sold her jewelry and other possessions to pay his gambling debts. So his experience in prison had not made him a saint overnight, not even close. Prison was just the bucket of ice water thrown over his head to wake him up in the gutter. But he was still in the gutter. His first post exilic book was the Insulted and Injured, which was more ambitious than any of his previous works and shows more insight into the true underground motives of. Of characters whose actions are outwardly motivated by compassion and selflessness. Professor Girard commented, quote, the obsessions that reappear in this novel more pressing, more worrying, more intolerable than ever. With time, the structural lines of this obsession stand out and become more definite and simplify themselves, like the features of a face in the hands of a caricaturist. In in all the writings of this period, Dostoevsky multiplies the obsessional situations and marks them out in such relief that it is nearly impossible to mistake their character. All the characters of the insulted and Injured take a painful pleasure, quite intense, at the spectacle of an amorous disaster to which they contributed their best collaboration. End quote. The characters hurt and betray one another or encourage the others to hurt and betray them. They bathe in a sense of martyrdom and magnanimous self sacrifice while wielding their forgiveness as a moral cudgel and taking sadistic pleasure in the groveling apologies of the ones who hurt them. These characters don't dominate each other. They manipulate and control through covert means. The identity of every character and the source of all power they wield over each other is drawn from the insults and injuries they suffer and and nurture. And each holds the others, enthralled by their victimhood. In this first post exilic novel, Dostoevsky comes very close to facing the truth about himself and his characters, but unfortunately fumbles the ball at the goal line. He still cannot admit the fact that this way of being must inevitably lead to disaster. Instead, he tacks on an embarrassingly sentimental ending that has all the rivals who have been torturing each other throughout the book reconciled and redeemed without ever facing up to what they've been doing. It's a pathetic and unsatisfying way to end the book, and it feels artificial, like Dostoevsky didn't believe it himself and yet covers his doubt with layers of gratuitous emotion. It's the work of a man whose lies to himself are wearing thin and whose fantasies for where his life is headed are no longer holding up. In 1862, he published the House of the Dead, a novel based on his experiences in prison, and that brought him back to the attention of the literary world. His debts and continued gambling meant that this book's success didn't help their financial situation much. In 1863, he traveled to Western Europe and started an affair with a younger woman there. All the underground mechanisms, as Girard said, immediately kicked in. At first he was this older, wiser man, a writer of high esteem, and she was smitten with him even as he refused to divorce his wife, Maria, and played the part of the aloof one. But then she fell for a young Spanish medical student, and Dostoevsky became insanely jealous and obsessive. Suddenly he's possessed by this cosmic passion now that she's moving away from him. And she did move away and go with the Spanish student. Dostoevsky gambled and lost all the money he had while he was in France and was forced to write to relatives to beg for money just to get home. While he was on that trip, Maria, his wife, came down sick, and not long after he returned, she died. Very soon after, Dostoevsky's brother Mikhail, to whom he was very close, also died, and he found himself the sole parent of Maria's son, his stepson, as well as the only responsible provider for his brother's family. This moment in Dostoevsky's biography feels like a make or break moment. The way Girard put it was if Dostoevsky had simply gone mad in 1863 instead of starting to write Notes from the Underground, future critics, to the extent that they paid any attention to him at all, would have found clear premonitions of the rupture in his work up to that point. Girard writes that perhaps there was no other outcome for the Dostoevsky of 1863 than madness or genius. And fortunately for all of us, he chose genius. His next book was Notes from the Underground, maybe my favorite novel, certainly the one I've read the most times. If his earlier works were apologia's for his underground personality and be behavior, Notes reads more like a confessional. He lays it out in all its sordidness, hides nothing, holds nothing back on account of his pride, and the result was his first masterpiece. Insight alone doesn't necessarily transform bad habits overnight, and Dostoevsky still had work to do on himself. His experience in prison and with Maria was just rock bottom. It would be a few years before he climbed out of it. But the honesty and courage on display in Notes from the Underground in his subsequent works show that he was well on the path to redemption. The famous line from Paradise Lost that the mind is its own place and can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven, comes to mind when I think about this parallel period in the lives of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. By all appearances, Nietzsche's exile was certainly more comfortable than Dostoevsky's and not so traumatic. Nine years as an unknown professor at a university in Switzerland certainly beats a decade in Siberia. And yet Nietzsche was miserable and increasingly so. He wrote nothing of importance during what should have been the productive years of his life. He felt trapped in a place without ever really remembering making a firm decision to end up there. But that describes much of Nietzsche's life. Nietzsche lost his father when he was not quite five years old. His father had been a Lutheran minister, appointed to his ministry by the king himself. Both of Nietzsche's grandfathers had also been pastors, and it was expected that little Friedrich would take up the tradition when it was time. As a boy, he seemed headed down that path. His father wrote in a letter that little Friedrich, he calls him Fritz, is a wild boy who can sometimes be controlled only by his papa, inasmuch as the rod is never far from him. But now someone else helps more powerfully, and that is the dear Holy Christ, who has already taken hold of even little Fritz by head and heart. So that he wants to hear and speak of nothing but the Holy Spirit. It's something very sweet. When Nietzsche was a little older, the other children called him Little Pastor because of his undeviating focus on his growing faith. Dostoevsky too, incidentally, was nicknamed Monk Photius by his classmates for the same reason, after the orthodox saint Photius the Great. Nietzsche's father was only 36 years old when he died. Very suddenly and unexpectedly. I suppose when you're five years old everything is sudden and unexpected. Nietzsche was just old enough to be traumatized by his father's death and his two younger siblings, a sister three and an infant brother, were too young to commiserate with. Years later, when Nietzsche was 13, he wrote that he still could not quiet the sad sound of his father's funeral bells from ringing in his ears. Well, about six months after the funeral, little five year old Friedrich had a terrible dream which he shared with his mother the next morning and, and wrote down later. I heard the church organ playing as at a funeral. When I looked to see what was going on, a grave opened suddenly and father arose out of it in a shroud. He hurries into the church and soon comes back with a small child in his arms. The mound on the grave reopens. He climbs back in and the gravestone sinks back over the opening. The swelling noise of the organ stops it once. And I wake up in the morning. I tell the dream to my dear mother. Soon after that, little Joseph, his baby brother, is suddenly taken ill. He goes into convulsions and dies within hours. End quote. So the very day after dreaming of his father coming up out of the grave to retrieve a baby boy, his infant brother dies in a horrible fashion. And to make matters even more psychologically fraught, his father's body was then exhumed so that baby Joseph's body could be placed in his arms and the two buried together. A touching gesture perhaps, but I don't know how a five year old boy even begins to process that. Nietzsche's mother moved him and his little sister in with his grandmother and two unmarried aunts from his father's side. And he was raised in a house with five women and no other boys or men, save for the overpowering presence of his father's ghost. Putting aside the gender politics of a household like that, it put a tremendous pressure on the boy. His father had been a respected minister, patronized by the King. He was a pillar of his community and his family. Little Friedrich was his father's only son. Now that he'd taken Little Joseph to the grave with him. And he was expected by the women in the house to take his father's place. Contrary to modern conceit, it's the things we don't choose that really make us who we are. And Nietzsche's father represented, just as Dostoevsky's czarist, orthodox, military doctor father represented to him all of those unchosen things against which both men emerged from adolescence in open rebellion. Dostoevsky's rebellion led him to prison in a mock execution and thenceforth to redemption once his mechanisms for self deception had worn thin. After notes, he published Crime and punishment, followed by two novellas and then the Idiot in 1869, another of his great books. Dostoevsky died in 1881, still six years before Nietzsche would discover him. The year of Dostoevsky's death was the worst year of Nietzsche's life. By his account, through through most of the year, he was the same age his father had been when he suddenly died. And Nietzsche's long held suspicion that he'd follow his father into madness or early death was at the front of his mind. His health had collapsed to the point where he couldn't even maintain a light teaching schedule, and he was forced to retire from the university. His daily suffering was such that he wrote, I had 200 days of torment in the year. My specialty was to endure extreme pain with perfect clarity for two or three consecutive days, accompanied by constant vomiting. Over the years, Nietzsche had become progressively alienated from most of his friends, his academic peers, and from people and society in general. He had broken bitterly with the Wagners, ostensibly over his disapproval of Wagner's presentation of Parsifal. But more. But I think it was probably something a long time coming when he introduced his friend Paul Ray to Wagner. To Wagner, he had to embarrassingly ask Ray not to tell Wagner that he was Jewish for fear of Wagner's reaction. Nietzsche's contempt for Wagner had festered for years. He was about to enter his explosive period and he had to get out from under Richard Wagner before it could begin. Their split left a scar on the soul of both men. As I said, Nietzsche directly or indirectly criticizes Wagner in almost every one of the books he would publish in the 1880s. And Wagner was so upset that he would not allow Nietzsche's name to be spoken in his presence for the rest of his life. After he quit teaching, Nietzsche's doctors ordered him to strictly limit his reading and writing to save what was left of his eyesight and because it contributed to his worsening daily migraines. But of course he ignored them. When it became too difficult, he started working with an early typewriter so that he could close his eyes and write without vision. He learned the keyboard and would close his eyes and type as colorful swirls and sparkles flashed behind his eyelids. As the migraines fired off his synapses, he told a friend that he saw a profusion of fantastic flowers twining around each other and constantly growing, changing in shape and color with exotic opulence. With disturbing urgency in his soft voice, he asked, don't you think this is a symptom of incipient madness? Nearly every day of the next 10 years, Nietzsche was fighting through near blindness, near total exhaustion, extreme physical pain, overwhelming migraines, and taking frequent breaks for vomiting and diarrhea. But Nietzsche was entering his great period. Over the next decade, he would churn out a book a year, sometimes more, that are still read and taught today. The same year he quit the university, he published Human, All Too Human, the first book of his great period. The style was influenced by French writers, and he dedicated it to Voltaire, something many critics interpret as a deliberate thumb in the eye of Wagner, whose anti French chauvinism was such that he refused to be addressed or to receive letters in the French language, despite speaking it fluently, and who had specific contempt for Voltaire. A section of the book grapples with some implications of Darwin's theory, which was now about 20 years old, and it swept the European intellectual world. Nietzsche was influenced by Darwin's discoveries a great deal, both directly and in reaction against certain aspects of them. Nietzsche would end up promoting social Darwinism of a certain type. As the idea emerged and developed from the 1870s on social Darwinism, theorists focused on the health of a whole society. The idea basically is that societies are subject to the same laws of natural selection as biological organisms, and that we march ourselves willingly down the road to ruin when we interfere with that process. Society should be a competition, and the losers of that competition should not be helped along, but left behind, they would say. It might sound cruel, but science can't be cruel. What would be cruel is allowing society to degenerate out of sentimentality, which would lead to suffering for everyone rather than just for the unfit. Nietzsche would put a somewhat different spin on it. He was never concerned with the general welfare. For Nietzsche, the purpose of a society should be to produce great individuals, and the greatness of a society is measured by the greatness of the individuals it produces. He doesn't mean the average individual in society a is better than the average individual in Society B. Society B could consist of a population that is 98% degraded slaves. But if that other 2% is producing caesars and Shakespeare's and Napoleon's, then that's the one to be preferred. Nietzsche denounced pity as the morality of the slave resentful of his. Oh, I'm sorry. Nietzsche denounced pity as the morality of a slave who's resentful of his slavery, but too weak to be anything else, a subversive idea meant to cripple the strong by making them ashamed of their strength in a work. A few years later, he began in the first lines by addressing his readers, of whom there were only a few dozen, mostly acquaintances, who read his book out of politeness. He said, let us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans. We know well enough how remote our position is. Neither by land nor water will you find the road to the Hyperboreans. Even Pindar in his day knew that much about us. After the introduction, he shares his thoughts and these are the first lines of the what is good? Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is evil? Whatever springs from weakness? What is happiness? The feeling that power increases, that resistance is overcome. Not contentment, but more power. Not peace at any price, but war, not virtue, but efficiency. Virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue free of moral acid. The weak and the botched shall perish. First principle of our charity, and one should help them along to it. What is more harmful than any vice? Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak. Christianity. Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction. It fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned by life. By maintaining life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself a gloomy and dubious aspect. The problem that I set here is not what shall replace mankind in the order of living creatures. Man is an end. But what type of man must be bred, must be willed as being the most valuable, the most worthy of life, the most secure guarantee of the future. This more valuable type has appeared often enough in the past, but always as a happy accident, as an exception, never as deliberately willed. Very often it has been precisely the most feared. Hitherto it has been almost the terror of terrors, and out of that terror the contrary type has been willed, cultivated, and attained. The domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick brute man, the Christian. In 1881 he published dawn or Daybreak in it he writes medical kit for the soul. What is the best healing application? Victory. In his notes that made up the will to power, he wrote, what is it we combat in Christianity that it wants to break the strong, that it wants to discourage their courage, exploit their bad hours and occasional wariness, convert their proud assurance into unease and distress of conscience, that it knows how to poison and sicken the noble instincts until their strength, their will to power, turns backwards against itself, until the strong perish through orgies of self contempt and self abuse. That gruesome way of perishing which Pascal provides the most famous example. Is it unfair to point out that it was not Pascal but Nietzsche who soon went insane? Lou Salame, who knew Nietzsche intimately for a time, wrote that suffering and loneliness are the two great lines of fate in Nietzsche's biography, which become more pronounced the nearer one comes to the end. Nietzsche had met Salome in 1882 through his friend Paul Ray, and she was the third and final woman with whom Friedrich Nietzsche would fall in love. The first was Cosima Wagner. The second, I believe I mentioned, was in 1876, the year he broke with the Wagners. She was 21 years old and apparently captivating. In addition to Nietzsche and Ray, she is supposed to have entranced Sigmund Freud a few years later and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke sometime after that. She had met Nietzsche's friend Paul Ray at a literary salon in rome early in 1882, and Ray immediately fell in love and proposed to her. She turned him down and instead suggested that the two live and study together as brothers, brother and sister. She also suggested that they bring another man into the arrangement and start up a literary commune. And so Ray introduces her to Nietzsche, and he immediately falls in love with her as well. She said she was interested. He asks Ray to propose to her on his behalf, and Ray does this, but she rejects Nietzsche as well. She said she was interested in him as a friend, but not as a husband. But Nietzsche suppressed his disappointment and agreed to be the third man in their commune. The three traveled around Switzerland and Italy making grand plans for their commune, calling themselves the Holy Trinity, and decided they would set it up in an abandoned monastery once they found one. About a month after his initial proposal, Nietzsche proposed to Salame again, this time more earnestly and with better planning. Yet again, she rejected him. And yet still Nietzsche stayed with them. While passing through Lucerne, Switzerland, the town where he'd spent Christmas with Richard and Cosima Wagner, Nietzsche and the rest of the Holy Trinity stopped into a photographer's shop to have their picture taken together. Salome told the men to stand by while she looked at the props in the photographer's studio and staged the picture herself. When she was ready, they were called into the studio and it's a famous picture. Salome is seated in the back of a two wheeled cart holding a whip. Ray and Nietzsche are in front of the cart with ropes around their arms binding them to the wagon, pretending to be the horses she was whipping to pull her along. Oh boy. All right. The three summered near Nietzsche's mother and sister and they did not approve of Lou Salame. She and Nietzsche spent a lot of time together walking and talking and discussing plans, Nietzsche trying to change her feelings for him. But most of their time together was under the supervision of Nietzsche's sister, his younger sister who insisted on acting as a chaperone. Why did Nietzsche, a 38 year old man, allow his little sister to act as his chaperone? I don't know. Why did he allow himself to be photographed as a whipped horse by a woman who twice rejected him along with his friend whom she'd also rejected? The answer to those questions might have something to do with why she rejected him. In the fall of that year, Nietzsche proposed to Salameh again and again she rejected him. And now things were just getting awkward. Ray and Salameh ditched Nietzsche in Leipzig, leaving for Poland with no plans to meet up again. Nietzsche sank into a deep depression. He wrote letters to Ray imploring we will see each other again, won't we? He was sad and he was bitter. He blamed Ray for subverting his chances with Salome. Then he blamed Salome herself and especially he blamed his sister. He'd fallen out with his mother as well. David Farrell Krell, an author and philosophy professor at DePaul, wrote a novel about Nietzsche that uses a lot of his real letters in notes as material in the text. Those writings are used in their unaltered form to carry the reader through the events in his life and in between his commentary in the form of Nietzsche's own thoughts to himself. Over the course of the novel, as Nietzsche suffers and experiences failure and frustration, the voice of those thoughts becomes increasingly separate from the one they're directed toward. His thoughts to himself take on a life of their own and turn on him and begin to attack him. Quote to take up with a woman half your age, a sordid Russian without morals. Oh, I know you're the grand immoralist, but she was probably already engaged to your common Israelite friend. Didn't you think of infection, contamination, disease, invalidism, canker blindness, prostration. Didn't you think of the filth, the stench? Didn't you think of your mother? Boy, you're a shame upon your family. You have desecrated your father's grave. God forgive you. I cannot. She stood up to you in Berlin, served you right, kept you cooling your heels all day long and groomed, walled, forlorn under dappled sunlight on the walking paths by the lake. The next day you crept back home, crestfallen, just like a little boy who lost his way. End quote. Now, this is followed by an actual letter that he wrote Paul Ray at the time. To Paul Ray Nomberg, Sunday, sunny weather. In spite of everything, I am full of confidence in this year and its enigmatic toss of the dice for my fate. I won't travel to Berchtesgaden, and in general am no longer in any condition to undertake anything. Alone in Berlin I was like a lost penny which I myself had dropped, but, thanks to my eyes, couldn't find, although it lay right at my feet, so that all the passersby laughed at me. Heartfelt greetings, your friend. N the year that all this was happening, 1882, Nietzsche published the Joyous Science. In it, he raises a question that would become central to his outlook. What if, some day or night, he asks, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness, and say to you, this life as you now live it and have live it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more. Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, you are a God, and never have I heard anything more divine? Nietzsche wrote those lines during this period of intense frustration, humiliation and physical suffering. He finished it in a deep depression. In this state, he's posing the question, how would you feel if you learned that life was an eternal recurrence, that you would reincarnate not as someone else, but as yourself, and not to make different choices, but to go through the exact same life again and again, so that every moment of your life, everything you do, is not an ephemeral thing that happens once and fades away like a ripple on the ocean, but instead everything and everything you do is set in stone for all eternity. It is the life you will experience again and again, forever. How does a man answer that question when the two main lines in his life are, as Salome wrote about him, loneliness and suffering. Nietzsche had some answers. He wrote, he who is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge. And others will be his victims, if only in having always to endure his ugly sight. For the sight of the ugly makes one bad and gloomy. It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it. Every complaint already contains its revenge. Our self respect depends on our ability to make requital for good or evil. A small revenge is more human than no revenge at all. Now the Nietzsche fans, when I bring up that point, scream at me that he's not talking about himself here. And that's correct. He would never admit that about himself. He's talking about the botched and the weak, the losers, the people who resent their position in life but are unable to do anything about it. Well, what you hate in yourself, you hate when you see in other people. One of the great insights into the narcissistic personality came from the psychologist Melanie Klein, or at least came to me that way. She describes how the narcissist is capable of short lived outbursts of mania and depression, but has trouble sustaining the intensity and quickly retreats into a feeling of numbness and deadness inside. And the insight is that this is their way of defending against rage, a raging desire for revenge on the world that is refusing to give them what they need from it. The rage feels overwhelming and. And so they suppress it. And it takes tremendous psychological energy to suppress real rage. And that just leaves them numb and exhausted and unable to generate enthusiasm for normal everyday things in life. But revenge on who? I'll try to wrap this up, but revenge on who? And how? This is a man who participated in his own humiliation in that photographer's studio. A man who can't stand up to his own little sister and instead writes of his hatred for her in notes and letters to other people. His health had made him more or less an invalid. He usually had very few friends or people close to him. He never had a wife, he never had a girlfriend. He never had a woman, period. Except for maybe a trip or two to a brothel. All three of the women he ever loved in his life chose a rival over him. He published books that nobody read, and those who did read them weren't overly impressed. Even to the end of his life, he never got out from under a cloud of narcissistic abuse from his mother and sister. After his split with Ray and Salome, for which he blamed his sister, he wrote in a letter, there was a real hatred of my sister who has cheated me of my best acts of self conquest for a Whole year, so that I have finally become the victim of a relentless desire for vengeance. Precisely when my inmost thinking has renounced all schemes of vengeance and punishment, this conflict is bringing me, step by step, closer to madness. I feel this in the most frightening way. Strange thing to write about your little sister. That place Dostoyevsky called the underground. Nietzsche had another name for it, pulling from a French concept passing around at the time, ressentiment. Only he never would have attributed that attitude to himself. Ressentiment is like resentment, but more specific, and there are more layers to it. To keep it simple, it is the state of a person in an inferior position who wishes revenge on those above him, that lacks either the will or the ability to take that revenge. This state, resenting your inferiority, objecting to it in principle, but unable to disprove it in reality, without recourse. The soul rots in this condition, Nietzsche says, and begins to seek other ways to find revenge. So again, revenge on who? Well, start close and work your way out. The most famous passage in the Joyous Science is the rant of a madman proclaiming that God is dead, a tremendous thing for the son of a pastor and the grandson of two pastors and one who grew up known as the little pastor himself, to write his deeply religious mother, who'd always been upset by Nietzsche's decision not to become a minister like his d dad, read the passage and told her son to his face that he was a disgrace to his father's grave. A long time afterward, Nietzsche wrote that he had not for one instant been able to get the sound of her voice saying those words out of his mind. But then he must have known what her reaction would be. He begins mounting increasingly grandiose and vitriolic attacks on specifically those things that were valued and admired in his past. His work becomes increasingly hostile, even hateful, toward Christianity, and he hammers home his contempt for Wagner with screeds against Germany and the German people. He called Germans stupid, cultureless, vulgar, tasteless, the spoilers of Europe, and extolled the virtues of the French and the Jews, for whom his appreciation was sincere enough. But it's the way he belabors the point that betrays his motive. He attacks Arthur Schopenhauer, one of his early philosophical influences as well as Wagner's. He attacks Kant and Hegel and says that polluted blood makes it all but impossible for a German to create anything of value. He even invents a genealogy for himself that made him a descendant of Poles so as to free himself from his German heritage. Contrast this to Dostoevsky. Like Nietzsche, Dostoevsky had set out in rebellion against his origins, against everything a powerful father still represents to an immature son. Unmoored, Nietzsche drifted around Europe looking for a climate that might help ease his mounting illness. Alienated from his family, with Ray and Salameh gone, depressed, in pain, and increasingly taking heavy doses of opium and other drugs to get through the day, in 1883, he applies for a minor teaching post at at the University of Leipzig, where he had previously impressed his professors so much that they'd waived his doctoral requirements to give him an early start on his academic career. But they didn't want him. The same year, he managed to publish the first part of the book he considered to be his most important. Thus spake Zarathustra. He begins that book with a sort of invocation, setting the scene with his character Zarathustra, who speaks for Nietzsche himself, descending to share his wisdom with benighted man. When he encounters man, he takes his place and announces, I teach you the Ubermensch. Now, Ubermensch means overman or superman. It doesn't mean a man with superpowers, but the being that will supersede man as man superseded the apes. Zarathustra proceeds through many speeches to tell people how to follow him on the road to superhumanity. Nietzsche published the book in parts over the next few years. In 1885, he published Part 4 and only printed 40 copies, most of which were distributed to acquaintances by Nietzsche himself and may have even been read by some of them. Well, what's a man to do in this situation? What do you do when you're a half blind, hobbled, sickly man who believes that the weak and the botched should perish and in fact should be helped along their way? When you preach victory is the only good medicine for the soul, and of the soul rotting effects of continual defeat and frustration. And yet you have no victories when you think the world is one way, but all the evidence of your senses tells you something else. Nietzsche and Dostoevsky represent two answers to these questions, namely, that you can surrender or you can fight on to the bitter end, whether the cause is lost or not. Dostoevsky still had one foot in the underground. After emerging from prison, his gambling habit continued to plague everyone around him. He wrote a novella called the Gambler to pay off debts he'd incurred by gambling. And during the course of the writing, he fell in love with the stenographer to whom he dictated it. They were married, had children, and Dostoevsky seemed to be pulling himself together. And then in 1871, he lost gambling again, and they had to sell all of their possessions. And who can really say why people do what they do? Who knows why? This time was different, but it was. He promised his wife he was done. And that was it. He was done. The next year, he wrote a masterpiece called Demons or Devils or the Possessed that drew on his experience with the political radicals that got him thrown into prison. He started up a literary journal, started making some money for the family, and by now, Russians were reading Dostoyevsky and starting to realize that they had something special on their hands. He went abroad for a while on doctor's orders to recuperate from an illness. And when he returned, the czar of Russia invited Fyodor Dostoevsky, who had previously been set for execution on account of his sedition. He was invited to the Russian court and asked by the czar to educate the czar's own sons. In the 1870s, he accepted an invitation to serve as president of the board for the All Slavic Benevolent association. And he wrote lyrically about the Russian people and the Orthodox faith. As his health failed in 1880 and 81, he pulled together his strength and wrote the Brothers Karamazov, a historic masterpiece at the top of many lists as the greatest novel ever written. I doubt it's out of anyone's top five. When Dostoevsky died in 1881, he was a recognized master of letters. But he had also become a man, a husband and a beloved father whose widow and children revered his memory. A proud Russian and a man of whom Russians were proud, and an Orthodox Christian who had found his way back from the wilderness. A whole people grieved when he passed. His funeral procession was said to have been the largest in Russian history up to that point. I forgive you guys if you want to go. It's okay. I just have a few more minutes. On his deathbed, when he knew the end was very close, Dostoevsky asked for his children to be brought in one final time. He knew it was the final time. That was his decision, and he knew this experience would stick with his children, and he had considered what he wanted to leave them with. Now, this is an educated, eloquent, widely read man who could have drawn from a deep well to make his final message count. When his children were in the room with him, he asked that the parable of the prodigal son be read to them in his dying presence. And Jesus said, there was a man who had two sons. The younger son said to his father, Father, give me a portion of the inheritance that I might put it to use. And his father therefore gave him his portion. The younger son took his inheritance and departed for a far country. And there wasted his father's gift on riotous and dissolute living. When he had spent it all, a terrible famine set upon the land and he had no food. Therefore he hired himself to a citizen of that foreign land who sent the younger son into his fields to feed swine. Yet still no citizen of that land would give unto him until he fell before the trough and shared husks with the swine. And in this lowly state he said to himself, even the hired servants of my father have bread to spare. Yet here I perish in hunger. I will arise and go to my father and say unto him, father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee and am no more worthy to be called thy son. Yeah. Sorry. No, it's okay. Only make me one of thy hired servants. And he arose and came to his father. But he was seen while yet far away off. And his father was overjoyed and embraced his son and kissed him. His son said, father, I have betrayed heaven and thee and I am not worthy to be called thy son. But his father turned to his servants and said, bring forth my best robe and put it on my son. Put a ring on his hand and bring shoes for his feet. Bring hither the fattened calf and prepare for a feast. Tonight we celebrate. For this my son was dead. And he's returned to us alive. He was lost and has been found. And so they celebrated. Now his older son was in the field. And as he returned from his duties, he heard music and revelry. He called to a servant and asked what was the meaning of it all. And the servant said, thy brother has come, and thy father hath killed the fattened calf. For the joy of finding him safe and sound. The older brother was angry. He refused to go in. Therefore his father came out and pleaded with him. And he answering, said to his father, father, all these years I have served thee. Neither transgressed I at any time thy commandments. Yet thou never gavest me a feast or make merry on my behalf. But as soon as this thy younger son is come with which has devoured his inheritance with harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted calf. And his father said unto him, my son, thou art always with me, and all that I have belongs to you. Therefore let us celebrate together. For your brother who was dead is now alive and who was Lost to us has now been. Man, I swear I've been reading that story my whole life and I can't stop, I can't fail to get emotional every time I do it. It's ridiculous. Of this episode, Dostoevsky biographer Joseph Frank wrote, it was this parable of transgression, repentance and forgiveness that he wished to leave as a last heritage to his children. And it may well be seen as his own ultimate understanding of the meaning of his life and the message of his work. Dostoevsky had left his father's house, literally and figuratively. And then he realized that forsaking his home did not make him free, it just made him homeless. He didn't want the responsibilities of a son, and so instead he ended up as a slave. And when he hit rock bottom, he went back humbled to all the things he'd left his family, his country, his people and his faith. And instead of rejecting him, they celebrated that one of their sons has come home. Alright, we're literally almost done. You guys are very kind. Thank you. By the summer and fall of 1888, Nietzsche's behavior was becoming erratic. His landlord reported hearing him talk to himself loudly in his room. Once he was caught shredding currency and throwing it in his wastepaper basket. And he demanded that the paintings be removed from his room in order to make it more resemble a temple, a home for a God like himself. He told people in person that he had arrived to take the place of God, now that the old one had gone away. He approached strangers on the street and asked them what they thought of his creation. In Nietzsche's last stretch of sanity, in late 1888 and early 1889, he wrote and spoke frequently of coincidences he'd been experiencing and of the feeling that fate was now drawing him on. To a friend, he wrote that there is no longer any element of chance in my life. To another, he wrote, nothing happens by chance anymore. In the closing words of his autobiography, which he wrote in his last 10 weeks of sanity, he wrote that the formula for greatness in human life was to learn to love one's fate. Nine days after he wrote nothing happens by chance, I swear. Five more minutes. Nietzsche was out walking the streets of Turin, Italy, when the friend with whom he'd been staying was called to retrieve him. He found Nietzsche on the ground, surrounded by a gawking crowd and some policemen, weeping, with his arms thrown around the neck of a horse. It's his friend we have these details from. A policeman told him that Nietzsche had seen a man beating a horse. And he ran and threw his arms around the horse to protect it from further blows, and then collapsed, hysterical and weeping. It was a scene reminiscent of the most famous scene from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, in which a mob beats a tired old cart horse to death. As the protagonist, a child tries in vain to protect it from their wrath. It was a scene that affects everyone who reads it, and one which Nietzsche copied into his notebooks verbatim over and over again. Friedrich Nietzsche went insane that day and never came back. The the next day, after he'd been brought back and put to bed, he wrote a note, Sing me a new song, the world is transfigured and all the heavens are full of joy. And he signed it the Crucified. A few days later, perhaps for the first and only time, he wrote a letter to Cosima Wagner to express his love. It read, ariadne, I love you, Dionysus. He signed all letters he wrote from then on as either the Crucified or Dionysus. Having associated madness with the death of God in his writings, he identified himself as a God who had been killed after he himself went mad. At times, he would fall into spells where he would simply repeat the same phrases over and over. I am dead because I am stupid. I am stupid because I am dead. Or I have a fine feeling for things, or I do not like horses. Nietzsche knew that he was fighting a lost cause. In his autobiography, he wrote, I attack only causes that are victorious. I attack only causes against which I cannot expect to find allies. I attack only causes against which I shall stand alone. Maybe that would be an interesting variation on the parable of the prodigal son. And here we'll wrap it up. If there were two prodigal sons traveling together, living it up, and ending by eating together with the people pigs. When one of the two has an awakening and says, look, we've been foolish and arrogant, why did we think we knew better than our fathers, than our big brother, everyone we grew up with? Enough. Let's go home. They'll take us back. The other son pulls his head out of the pig trough. He's covered in slop and sores and no longer even notices the flies on his face. But underneath the filth is an unmistakable look of contempt for his friend, who's been broken by his conditions and wants to go home. His humbled friend says, don't you understand what will happen if we continue this way? And for what? Our families will welcome us. They'll be overjoyed when we return and the other says, I know perfectly well where my path leads. And I know they'd throw a feast if I returned. Now go back to your daddy. Coward. The thing is, all humans break. That's what it means to be human. The difference between humans and gods is that gods can break humans. The meaning of our various hell myths, whether we mean hell or the misery of Job, or the wasteland of the prodigal son, or the eagle plucking out the liver of Prometheus or Sisyphus with his rock, is that if you go up against final things, you will lose one day. In 1889, Nietzsche's war ended in defeat, just as Dostoevsky's did. But they both achieved glory in their own way. Nietzsche's greatness lies not in the fact that he was right, but that he paid his bill down to the last cent for being wrong. And there is greatness in that, too. Thank you very much, guys. I'm sorry. You guys are very generous with your time. I appreciate it. Thank you. And I am sorry. Hopefully I didn't interfere with your lunch too much.