This article was published in the Winter 2025 edition of our print Journal. To read for free online, please Subscribe. If you would like to receive future editions of the print Journal, become a Basic or Solidarity Member today.
As the news of the passing of the assisted suicide bill in the U.K. echoed through news outlets and social media platforms, many Christians voiced their disappointment, frustration, and even horror at such a development. Civilized societies do not kill their weak and elderly, some said. Others posted and reposted Stanley Hauerwas' famous words that if in 100 years Christians do not kill their children and elderly, we will have done well. Ross Douthat delivered his usual blistering and elegant critique, to which even Dostoevsky would have nodded approvingly if he had a chance to read these lines:
They envision assisted suicide as an expansion of human agency, even form of liberal dynamism. But it's not a coincidence where and how it's coming in: Amid bureaucratized stagnation, expressing the spiritual logic of societies that lack confidence, optimism, (or) the will to live.
Dostoevsky, of course, thought a lot about modern society, its ills, and its projected path. Some even say that he was a prophet of sorts. It is also not a coincidence that suicide plays a major role in his writing. His novel The Possessed (also translated as The Demons) is the prime example of Dostoevsky's contemplation about the fate of modern society and his prophetic gift.
The novel is set in a provincial Russian town on the fringes of Russian society, and it revolves around a group of wannabe revolutionaries who seek to disrupt the social and moral order of 19th-century Russia. A side note to a prospective reader: The novel is dark, even diabolical at times. The events move fast and chaotically as if hurled forward by a malevolent invisible force. However, the grim tones and the chaos are not incidental. They are at the heart of Dostoevsky's vision and critique of the modern world.
In the novel, two suicides occur at crucial points in the narrative. The first is committed by Kirillov, a radical atheist who wishes to prove that he has become god by taking his own life. The second suicide is committed at the end of the story by the main character–Nikolay Stavrogin, a local aristocrat, whose life of dissipation left him hallowed out and utterly lifeless.
Importantly, both suicides vary drastically from each other, both in the mode of death, as well as the reasons that drove each man to take their life. Dostoevsky's commitment to personalism prevents him from making crude generalizations. Each of them is highly educated and intelligent in their own way. It would seem that each of them has everything they need to live a good life. And yet, both are unable or unwilling to do so.
In his book Dostoyevsky: Interpretation, Nikolai Berdyaev suggests that Stavrogin and Kirillov (along with a handful of other Dostoyevsky tragic heroes) are quintessentially modern men. They have freed themselves from the bonds of family, tradition, religion, and God himself; they have turned to the dark side of freedom–self-centered and self-positing liberty.
Berdyaev intimates that Dostoevsky was deeply concerned with the question of freedom. Indeed, he was one of the strongest proponents of it, best illustrated by The Grand Inquisitor poem in The Brothers Karamazov. The poem is set in 16th-century Spanish city of Seville at the height of the Inquisition. Christ visits the city in person, drawing crowds of people to Himself. The Grand Inquisitor arrests Jesus for undermining his authority. In the dark cell where Christ is held, the Grand Inquisitor confronts Him in a long monologue accusing Christ of thinking too highly of people and placing an unbearable burden of freedom on humanity. Humans are weak and feeble, the Inquisitor says. People want order, miracles, and a sense of security, which is what the Inquisitor gives them instead of freedom.
Berdyaev insists that despite the great writer’s dedication to human freedom, it has an inherent danger for him. Dostoevsky explores the dynamic of freedom once the person assumes the license to wilful self-positing. There is a dark logic at play in his novels: When a society kills its God, it will also kill the man.
In The Possessed, the loss of life in each suicide is only part of the tragedy. Dostoevsky is absolutely ruthless in his depiction of people gripped by godlessness, nihilism, and moral ambiguity. He also tears into a humanistic naivete which assumes that the human freedom to choose one’s manner of dying somehow dignifies people or gives them more power.
This is what Kirillov set out to prove. However, Dostoevsky will not allow simplistic resolutions because human actions are always open to multiple outcomes, and people can never control the results. In his commentary on Dostoevsky, Rowan Williams called it "indeterminacy of each moment." Kirillov's suicide, however noble and pure in his intentions, became the pawn in the killing of an innocent man and a chance for the perpetrator to get away with murder.
What's worse is that Kirillov knew of the murderous plan and that his suicide would let the murderer off the hook and failed to take responsibility. All his high words about human freedom and destiny could not hide his disdain for human life. Once again, Dostoevsky will not allow the false pretense. The real hate and disregard for human life shows its ugly face.
Stavrogin's suicide is the expression of the loss of will to live. It represents the flip side of the same malady that afflicts modern society. The desire to assert one's own destiny, take power over one's life, and loss of will to live are the results of the same dark logic of freedom. The unchecked personal freedom with which Stavrogin lived his life was a dead end and left him in a stupor. By plumbing the depths of false knowledge, vice, and self-indulgence, Stavrogin has extinguished in himself any fire of life. It incapacitated him and turned him into a living ghost, neither dead nor fully alive. Nothing arouses any desire in him, he is no longer capable of love or hate. He is utterly indifferent to the events around him even though he has the power to avert the tragedy. All that’s left of Stavrogin’s self-positing is self-loathing and a profound sense of failure.
Berdyaev credits Dostoevsky in describing the dialectic of dark freedom. First, freedom turns away from God and turns into human self-positing. Then, self-positing turns into evil necessity and coercion. This results in the destruction of freedom.
If this dialectic is truly at work in our modern societies (as it was in Russia with the arrival of Communism), and if humans in their flight from God are bound to self-destruction, then euthanasia is one of the collective outworkings of this dark logic.
Some have accused Dostoevsky of being unnecessarily cruel and brutal in his depiction of modernity. But it is precisely the severity with which the great writer describes the savagery of self-emptying and self-destruction of modern man that can prepare us for the real-life savagery the modern society could inflict upon itself.
