Exploring the role of pain and struggle in the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky

Suffering, mostly, has been annotated as an ailment, sickness and disease that grips people in its snares. Victims of it are believed to have a cynical perspective towards everything. But for writers, this suffering turns out artistic and corroborates them to contribute masterpieces to the literary world.
Fyodor Dostoevsky is no exception. He delved deep into this suffering and gathered pearls in terms of his novels that amazed the world due to their virtuosity. Inevitability of suffering and pain fills his novels. It has acted as an antidote to the existentialist crises that he suffered from. Perceiving life spitefully to punish its absurdity surfaces as a fundamental theme dealt in his famous novel ‘Notes from Underground”.
“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth,” he maintains. Alienation and suffering are irrigated by intelligence and comprehension that one attains of life and its subtleties. Distancing life from suffering allows absurdity to overwhelm and dim the remnant shreds of meaning. Life devoid of suffering is a delusion. Dostoevsky amalgamated the two in such a way that one cannot survive sans another. Life poured into literature has long been a vogue in the literary world. Undergoing a multiplicity of tortures since his birth, he accommodated himself in suffering in such a way that he could not imagine it missing from his life. He calls it a fact that man is sometimes extraordinarily and passionately in love with suffering. But this love is born out of the hate and abomination for life that is malignant due to corruption, bureaucracy, and meaninglessness.
Being a social and solipsist, the narrator of Notes From Underground isolates himself to the underground compartment and dwells there as a retired civil servant full of bitterness and resentment for the society he had lived in and noted the degenerated behavior of people around him. Suffering is not something that delights, but Dostoevsky intertwined it with his life to an extent that it gives him joy. It sustains him. It reminisces him that he is alive and has a purpose to live, to suffer. Suffering as an inheritance descending from jails, tortures, servitude, and challenging the settled norms has doubled itself in the novels of Dostoevsky. He lost his parents at an early age, underwent incarcerations due to his iconoclastic views and opinions, he served in an army inadvertently and encountered corruption everywhere while being in his profession. Imposing isolation on oneself resulted from this deteriorated society. When life itself has become suffering, pain relieves. Toothache for Dostoevsky gives pleasure. It loses its intensity due to its abundance. Being conscious of life and other things around it uncovers the inherent degradation and chaos carried in these things.
Consciousness breeds suffering as the anonymous narrator of Notes from Underground highlights. Knowing the truth about life despairs him. Questioning and analyzing everything reveals the irrationalities that prevail and beat the struggles of meaning and logic of life. Although various inferences surface from the Notes from underground about the reasons for suffering, the dominant one appears to be the European cultural onslaught over the indigenous Russian culture. Dostoevsky mourns this cultural takeover and resists its promotion by reverting to isolation and resignation from the job. This suffering has led to non-communicability. The native voice has lost its impinges. It is throttled by the diffusion of Eurocentric ideas and the encroachment of native convention and established values.
Dostoevsky has poured suffering into his novels in such a way that it appears normal to readers. It has normalized itself in his novels. The dread and horror fitted into his novels. Murder of Alyona and Lizaveta shook readers but for Raskolnikov it was normal and vindicated. Reasons that are offered by him and by others ultimately turn out sham and fallacious. Post-murder, he underwent psychological pangs that kept him disturbed throughout his life. Suffering grasped him extensively and restrained him from timely confessions. His indecision ensued from his suffering.
The novel Crime and Punishment earned immense popularity due to its psychological portrayal of Raskolnikov. He is shown mulling every time about a deed that he has made his mind for. Various times he foils to execute it but after gathering enough courage and motivation, he materializes it, believing that it will exonerate the world from suffering driven by poverty and squalor. Things worsen instead of improve after this deed. Nothing changes except the addition of more suffering to Raskolnikov in particular and other characters in general. A significant element in the novel is the article ‘On Crime’, in which the protagonist justifies the rights of a few to murder others for the betterment of society. The pawnbroker has heaped a huge amount of wealth that instead should have been distributed among penurious people to pacify their starvation and pathetic condition. Poverty-ridden psyche haunts Raskolnikov and he dreams of a mare being whipped to death. This dream connotes the depraved and nadir circumstances of the peasants.
Like in other novels, Dostoevsky gives reasons for suffering. The protagonist of the novel is haughty and arrogant. His confession and repentance sway under his arrogance. Even after being incarcerated, he does not let his pride down and firmly believes that he did nothing wrong in killing Alyona and her sister. His emotional derangement descended from this haughtiness. Dostoevsky himself nullifies the facticity of his novels but through them, he depicts the Russian type that the common public would need to know. The guilt-ridden psyche of common people is portrayed through these novels. Self-abasement is the result of this guilt and crime that changes characters into diffidence and fragility. The ideas of happiness based on the Western idea of progress undergo a strict critique. The rebellious characters drawn into his novels resent this version of progress and prosperity. They know the fallacies of this progress and resign from it and shelter themselves in underground apartments. It is out of these false values that conflicts and contradictions are prevalent in his novels.
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Fida Hussain Bhat