Even more than other authors, Fyodor Dostoevsky's writing reflects his own personal experiences. His writing is filled with the mystery of suffering and the search for meaning and redemption in pain. Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821. His mother died in 1837 and he was admitted to the St. Petersburg's Academy of Military Engineers the next year. His father died the following year, probably murdered by his own serfs. Dostoevsky graduated from the academy in 1843 but resigned his commission and began writing, publishing several works between 1846 and 1849. He was arrested in 1849 for alleged political crimes and sentenced to death; although the prisoners had already been granted a reprieve, the activities of the death sentence were carried out to the last possible moment in a cruel mock execution, and only then were the terrified prisoners were informed that there had been a reprieve. Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years hard labor in Siberia, followed by four years compulsory military service. During this time, his periodic epileptic seizures began. He married in 1857 and was allowed to return to European Russia two years later, moving to St. Petersburg. The year 1864 marks the beginning of the final and climactic phase of his personal and literary life, seventeen years of torment, some of it from without, some of it from within, as well as unbelievable artistic output. Dostoevsky's wife and his brother both died that year, leaving him with considerable debts from his brother, which he proceeded to compound through an addiction to gambling that lasted at least seven more years. Notes from Underground, the first of his most famous works, was also published that year. Crime and Punishment and The Gambler were published two years later, and Dostoevsky married his young stenographer, Anna Grigorievna Snitkin, the following year. She was a woman of greater sense and solidity than he, and she brought a measure of stability to his troubled life, though their life together was also filled with pain, as all four of their children died in infancy. In 1868 he published The Idiot, The Devils (or The Possessed) in serial form between 1871 and 1872, and his masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov in serial form between 1879 and 1880. He died in 1881.

Notes from Underground is divided into two parts, both autobiographical of the fictitious narrator. The first is the narrator's theoretical account of his life and philosophy. Here Dostoevsky creates one of the great anti-heroes of all time in a disarmingly honest first person narrative that begins: "I am a sick man...I am a spiteful man." The narrator, whose name is never revealed, is neither a villain nor a hero, he is just barely a protagonist, as he doesn't do much of anything, nor is he capable of much, as he admits early on: "I could not become malicious. In fact, I could not become anything: neither good nor bad, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect." He may have a disease, or he may be imagining it, but the effect would be the same: to paralyze him with thinking about it. He imagines himself living a loathsome life in a dirty, stinking, damp "underground," as he names his memoirs, when in fact we learn from his description that his apartment is on the second floor. He claims extreme intelligence, but evinces none even to us, his private audience, and of course none to the other characters in the book, whom he despises and yet desperately needs: he would not deign to act intelligent in front of them, for they don't deserve to see intelligence and could not understand it, according to him. He claims he has "excessive consciousness," which causes him to become obsessed with and then over-analyze every situation: every gibe is a crushing, mortal insult to his very being, every offhand remark must really have been carefully thought out to inflict the maximum damage to him, every triviality is fraught with meaning and malice directed at him. He is the most neurotic, narcissistic character conceived before George Castanza of Seinfeld, but unlike George, there is nothing funny about the underground man: "a man of heightened consciousness who has, surely, not emerged from the lap of nature but from a retort (that is almost mystical, gentlemen, but I suspect that too), this retort-man often gives up so completely in the face of his antithesis that he honestly feels himself, with all his heightened consciousness, to be a mouse, not a man. . . . And there, in its loathsome, stinking underground hole, our mouse, insulted, crushed, destroyed by ridicule, immediately settles into cold, venomous, and, worst of all, lifelong malice. For forty years on end it will recall its humiliation, to the last and shameful detail, each time embellishing the recollection with still more shameful details, spitefully teasing and whipping itself up with its own fantasies. . . . on its very deathbed the mouse will remember everything again, with all the interest accrued throughout the years." The image would vie with Dante for shear hellishness and hopelessness. The underground man's paranoid fantasies do not end with a laugh at his own expense or someone else's, they don't even end with violent rage, but only with a moan of pain, or a stifled wheeze of suffocation, and this pain and suffocation can and do go on forever in his self-created hell.

All right, so the underground man is a masterpiece of characterization: we believe in him and we are fascinated by his ugliness. Like George Castanza, he is more extreme than anyone we know, but he is completely believable, as we all would acknowledge that we can hold grudges and petty insecurities just like he does, only not as extremely. His life is like a hellish version of the movie Groundhog Day: just imagine the worst day of your life played over and over, and you know it will be played over, but you can't bring yourself to change it. But what is the point of this character? We believe he could exist, we sympathize with him to some small degree, as we acknowledge our limited similarity to him, but what are we to learn from this most deranged and untrustworthy of narrators?

As the underground man rants to us in this first part of the novella, he reveals what are to Dostoevsky fundamental truths of human existence, fundamental questions that Dostoevsky is beginning to formulate and that will recur throughout his great works, finding more complete answers than they do here. These questions come down to stripping away everything until we can consider what a human being really is, and what is the purpose of human life. Human nature and human purpose are first laid bare by the underground man as they will be later by Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov. Consider this passage: "If people prove to you, for example, that you're descended from an ape, there is no point in making a sour face about it; accept it as it is. If they will prove to you that, when you come down to it, one drop of your own fat is bound to be more precious to you than the lives of a hundred thousand fellow humans, and that this will in the end determine all the so-called virtues and duties and all the rest of that rot and nonsense, you have no choice but to accept it - there's nothing to be done about it, because two times two is mathematics. Try and object to that. For goodness sake, they'll cry, you cannot argue against it - two times two is four! Nature doesn't consult you; it doesn't give a damn for your wishes or whether its laws please or do not please you. You must accept it as it is, and hence accept all consequences. A wall is indeed a wall. . . . Good God, what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if, for one reason or another, I don't like these laws, including the two times two is four? Of course, I cannot break through this wall with my head if I don't have the strength to break through it, but neither will I accept it simply because I face a stone wall and am not strong enough." In George Orwell's 1984 it is one of the ultimate, dehumanizing tyrannies of the state that they can mandate that two plus two is five. But Dostoevsky is here asking us to consider whether the tyranny of our reason is any less dehumanizing: if reason tells us that we are not made in the image of God, and we are not responsible for anything we do, then reason has destroyed both human dignity and responsibility and reduced us to animals or robots much more completely than any police state ever did. But Dostoevsky's pillorying of the idolatrous and dehumanizing glorification of reason goes an extra step in the twisted mind of his narrator, from the one extreme of never questioning reason to the other extreme of always denying it. This makes the underground man insane and unhappy, but it does not make him wrong: he has seen clearly that human purpose does not - can not - lie only in the right exercise of reason, and that understanding the human person can not consist only in dissecting an animal or disassembling a machine.

Having blasted the enlightenment ideal of humans as reasoning animals, Dostoevsky's mad spokesman now takes on another fetish of the western mind: that people must pursue their self-interest, and that self-interest can be equated with the good: "Oh, tell me who was the first to declare, to proclaim, that man does vile things only because he does not realize his true interests; that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his true, normal interests, he would immediately cease committing abominations but would immediately become good and noble, because, being enlightened and understanding his true advantage, he would inevitably see that only goodness is to his advantage, and everybody knows that no man will knowingly act against his own interests. Consequently, he would of necessity, as it were, begin to do good. Oh, child! Oh, pure, innocent babe! Who has ever, in all these millennia, seen men acting solely for the sake of advantage? What's to be done with the millions of facts that attest to their knowingly - that is, with full awareness of their true interests - dismissing these interests as secondary and rushing off in another direction, at risk, at hazard, without anyone or anything compelling them to do so, but as if solely in order to reject the designated road, and stubbornly, willfully carving out another - a difficult, absurd one - seeking it out virtually in the dark? Evidently, then, this stubbornness and willfullness has really pleased them more than any advantage. . . Advantage! What is advantage? Would you take it upon yourself to define with absolute precision where exactly man's advantage lies? And what if his advantage on a given occasion not only may, but must, lie exactly in choosing for himself the harmful rather than the advantageous? And if this is so, if there can be such an occasion, then the entire rule is shattered to smithereens. . . . have man's advantages been calculated with absolute certainty? Are there, perhaps, advantages which not only don't fit, but cannot be fitted, into any classification?" The underground man's thought has broadened: now not only is reason to be denied, but so too is anything positive or beneficial, whether arrived at by reason, or pursued using reason. As with the total abandonment of reason, the insane aspect of his thought is clear here also: he has gone from the extreme of asserting that all human behavior stems from self-interest to the personal rule that all his behavior must be against self-interest, he must be as self-destructive and despicable as possible. And again, the element of truth in the narrator's madness is clear: if humans only pursue their own self-interest, then there is nothing left in them that is mysterious, and gone too will be all the categories based on mystery: good and evil, ugly and beautiful, true and false. Dostoevsky is profoundly Augustinian here: the pear tree incident in the Confessions, in which Augustine chooses evil knowing it to be evil, knowing it to be disadvantageous and unpleasant, fits the underground man's description of human action perfectly. But the narrator is not only defending Christianity, but humanity. If the explanation for all human behavior is the same - self-interest - then people are not just incapable of being Christian, they are incapable of being human in any distinct, non-animal, non-mechanistic way, they are reduced to machines.

The underground man has again seen the truth that humans are not machines, but he also sees the terrible possibility that it might be possible to convince them that they are machines, and they will thereby increasingly resemble them: "you say that then science itself will teach man... that he really does not possess, and never did possess, either a will or a whim of his own; that he is, in fact, no more than a kind of a piano key or an organ stop; and that, besides, there is such a thing in the world as the laws of nature; so that everything that is done by man isn't in the least a matter of his own will, but happens of itself, according to these laws." In his climactic tirade against the dehumanizing forces of the modern world, the underground man makes his mad stand: "man, whoever he might be, has always and everywhere preferred to act according to his own wishes rather than according to the dictates of reason and advantage. And his wishes may well be contrary to his advantage; indeed, sometimes they positively should be .... One's own free, untrammeled desires, one's own whim, no matter how extravagant, one's own fancy, be it wrought up at times to the point of madness - all of this is precisely that most advantageous of advantages which is omitted, which fits into no classification, and which is constantly knocking all systems and theories to hell.... it preserves for us the most important and most precious thing - our personality, our individuality." But again, his stand is surely mad, but it is not wrong, for he has stripped away the distractions of reason and advantage and gotten to the essential core that is human. What is most essential for human beings is not that they reason, nor that they feel, but that they will, and that this will trumps any claims made by the reason or the emotions. To be what it is, the will need not decide between right and wrong, pleasant and unpleasant, it just has to be able to will anything, for unless it is free and limitless it is not human will: it would just be the limited, prescribed directives of a machine's programming.

To summarize: by the end of the first half of Notes from Underground, the narrator has formulated the truth of what human beings are: humans find their dignity and meaning in what they will, not what they think or feel. Where his deranged mind has jumped the tracks is in his further conclusion that everything he wills must therefore go against what he thinks and feels.

The second half of the novella describes a series of incidents in the narrator's life in which he shows how he has lived according to his philosophy. It consists of three incidents of increasing intensity and depth. First, he tells of how he once felt insulted by some unknown man. He then proceeded to stalk this man for years, looking for the opportunity to gain back his self-respect. He finally decided this could be done through a game of pedestrian "chicken": he would walk down the sidewalk straight at this man, not swerving the least bit to either side, and the man would have to step aside for him. He tries this several times unsuccessfully, but finally he gets it right, plowing straight ahead and wham - they collide, then walk away, the other man of course not even knowing that he had insulted the underground man in the first place, nor that he had just now been chastened by this strange collision. But the victory can provide no real consolation or self-respect to the underground man, for even he has to see when it is all over that the whole scene is merely ridiculous and pathetic and he just crawls back into his "underground" to nurse the wounds of more imagined hurts and to hatch more plans for their reprisals.

One gets the impression that a scene such as this was repeated numerous times in the underground man's life. But the second two scenes seem to hold a special fascination for him: they were unique and definitive in his life. First he recalls a time when he invites himself to a dinner party with four acquaintances whom he despises and who likewise despise him. In what is perhaps the most painful part of the book, he insults them, then goes to the other side of the room and sulks for three hours, as if this will hurt their feelings, but all the while knowing that he is only hurting and humiliating himself: "I recall with shuddering humiliation these dirtiest, most ludicrous, most terrible minutes of my entire life. No one could possibly inflict upon himself a more unconscionable, more voluntary humiliation, and I fully realized this, yet I continued to pace from table to stove and back." The underground man despises others, yet intensely needs them around. He has no inner resources, yet he holds the resources of others in contempt. Again, his neurotic extreme holds some truth about human relationships: it isn't much fun being by ourselves, but if each of us has an infinite will that strives to go beyond all limits, then it's really hard to be around others in a meaningful and healthful way, because the temptation will always be either to subject and tyrannize over other people, or, at the other extreme, just to give in and be bullied by them, either to treat others as objects, or to let oneself be treated as one, when the truth, which the underground man understands for himself, is that human beings are NOT objects. The underground man's acquaintances are happy because they are vain and shallow, and this allows them to be either a rather casual, undemanding bully like Zverkov, or satisfied toadies like the other three. But the underground man is vain and deep, and this means he is absurdly ineffective at either bullying or toadying, and yet wildly oscillates between the two extremes of behavior, challenging men to duels one minute, throwing himself in tears at their feet the next.

The final climactic incident begins immediately following this. The four acquaintances go off to a brothel and the underground man tags along, further humiliating himself by having to ask to borrow money to do so. His mood swings back in the direction of grandiosity and he imagines challenging Zverkov to a duel, but of course, when he gets to the brothel, everyone has gone off to separate rooms, and nothing comes of his heroic plans. Instead he has sex with one of the prostitutes, Liza, and then a long conversation with her. He tries to shame and frighten her with what he thinks are insightful and vivid images of the shamefulness of prostitution and the beauty of real love. But her first reaction surprises him: "You somehow, it's like out of a book," she said, and something mocking seemed again to come into her voice. Her remark stung me to the quick. It wasn't what I had expected." Again, he tries to treat her as an object whose feelings can be manipulated, but as a real human being she does not play the role as expected: she sees his sentimentality for the shallow, vicarious imitation of real life that it is. So he tries a different tactic, he talks about things that he knows very intimately and that he really can describe with great honesty and real feeling - despair, loneliness, death. The sincerity of this tirade finally does get through to her, and it reduces Liza to tears. But as perverse as the underground man is, he really doesn't have the heart for cruelty: when he succeeds at making her cry, it disturbs him even more, "having achieved my effect, I was suddenly unnerved." Or perhaps it is not just niceness on his part: seeing his own pain reflected in another person makes him realize exactly how miserable he himself is.

The underground man runs off, but Liza looks him up a few days later and forces him to confront her and himself one last time. He doesn't know what to do, so he seeks to drive her away by humiliating her to the point where (he thinks) she could never forgive him and would run off. He tells her that the whole scene was a lie: "It was power, power that I needed then; I had to play with you, reduce you to tears, humble you, make you hysterical, that's what I needed." But rather than running off, Liza does something quite different: "And what happened was this: Liza, insulted and humiliated by me, understood a great deal more than I had imagined. She understood out of all this what a woman, if she loves sincerely, will always understand before all else. She understood that I was myself unhappy. . . . She clung to me, embraced me, and remained motionless in that embrace. Still, the trouble was that the fit of hysteria had to pass in the end. And then (I am, after all, writing the loathsome truth), lying prone on the sofa, pressing my face into the wretched leather cushion, I gradually, involuntarily, distantly at first, but irresistibly began to feel how embarrassing it would be for me now to raise my head and look straight into Liza's eyes. What was I ashamed of? I don't know, but I was ashamed. It also flashed through my overwrought mind that now our roles had been completely reversed, that she was now the heroine and I was as humbled and broken a creature as she had been that night, four days ago. . . . And then - I'm sure of it to this day - precisely because I

was ashamed to look at her, another feeling suddenly flared up within me. . . the need to dominate and possess." His shame, which is another way to say his absurd and self-destructive sense of self-worth, is so great that he can never face her in a redemptive way, never let her forgive him, never let himself be vulnerable to her again: he can only twist his shame into a destructive loathing of her and of himself. Letting oneself be forgiven makes oneself more humbled and vulnerable than feeling shame, for it puts oneself completely in the other's power: while the other person does not have complete control over whether one feels or does not feel shame, the other does have total control over whether one is forgiven or not. And it is sometimes too painful and frightening to let another have this control: the pain of shame and loneliness might be preferable to the risk and vulnerability of asking for forgiveness. He drives Liza away, and lives the rest of his miserable life with the terrible memory of how once he almost let another human being touch him, change him, love him.

What finally can be said about the underground man? In a way, his life is a lie based on the truth. He has seen the truth of human nature, that humans must be completely free, and that all their worth and purpose must lie in freely willing their lives. But when he sees the embodiment of these ideals in Liza, all he can do is deny it, degrade it, destroy it. Her act of loving him is an act of shear will: she chose to love him and forgive him, no matter how unreasonable and disadvantageous this might seem at the moment. All he had to do was something similar: will himself to submit to her, rather than dominate her. But he was incapable of this, and the novella ends with him knowing the truth, but unable to believe it or live it.

The interplay - sometimes terrible, sometimes beautiful - between freewill as the essence of human nature, and love and redemption as the ultimate goals of human life continues in The Brothers Karamazov. Three (possibly four) half brothers enact a terrible drama amongst themselves in which it is never finally clear what happened, and even less clear why, but it is clear that one of them killed their father, and all of them wanted him dead. The ambiguity of what has happened is reflected in the ambiguous end of the novel, in which one of the brothers is dead, another may be dying, and another is to be exiled, though possibly to escape. And although Alyosha gets three cheers at the end, I never feel sure about what he has learned, or whether he will be happy.

As ambiguous as Alyosha's redemption may be at the end, the negative side seems more clear in the novel. Smerdyakov embodies everything that could possibly be wrong with a human being: physically repulsive, he is described as both smelling bad and smelling too good; an excellent cook, he himself does not enjoy food; physically sick, he doesn't even excite our sympathy, because he has a diabolical power to make himself ill on command; morally empty, he doesn't even have the fascination that real evil might hold; spiritually apathetic, non-physical things are as unattractive to him as the delicious food he prepares but cannot enjoy. His final frame of mind is vividly described: "But why, why, asks the prosecutor, did Smerdyakov not confess in his last letter? Why did his conscience prompt him to one step and not to both? But, excuse me, conscience implies penitence, and the suicide may not have felt penitence, but only despair. Despair and penitence are two very different things. Despair may be vindictive and irreconcilable, and the suicide, laying his hands on himself, may well have felt redoubled hatred for those whom he had envied all his life." Even worse than the underground man, who at least regretted the things he despaired over, Smerdyakov is completely lost, feeling despair without remorse.

If despair without remorse is the negative target that one is to try to aim at missing, then remorse without despair should be the spiritual ideal. Some idea of this is given in the middle of the novel, in the chapters around Alyosha's interview with his brother Ivan and then his reflections on the life of father Zossima. Ivan first describes his own agony at how he sees people behave. He recounts numerous horrible stories about the abuse, torture, and murder of children. His point goes beyond theodicy, though, beyond merely questioning God's justice, to questioning how it would be possible to achieve happiness in a world where such misery occurs. At both ends, Ivan attacks the easy answers that Christianity sometimes gives. To the idea that there is a hell in which abusers would be punished, Ivan responds: "It's not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them? Is it possible? By their being avenged? But what do I care for avenging them? What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured? And what becomes of harmony, if there is hell? I want to forgive, I want to embrace." But just a few lines later, Ivan also rejects the idea of forgiveness: "I don't want harmony. From love for humanity I don't want it. I would rather be left with unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong." Neither punishment nor forgiveness is enough for Ivan, for neither really repairs the damage that has been done to the creation of God (in whom Ivan never expresses doubt, despite his supposed atheism): the one just increases the amount of suffering in the universe and the other just overlooks it. Ivan needs something that will fix what is wrong with human beings, and he can see no possibility of it.

It is at this point that Alyosha rises to the bait and offers the Christian answer: Christ's sacrifice fixes what is wrong with human beings. Aha, says Ivan, I'm glad you mentioned that, because I've thought about how Christ might be the solution to this problem, and I've come up with a little story. Ivan then tells the story of the Grand Inquisitor. In the story, the Grand inquisitor runs Seville with complete, unswerving brutality and certainty. People are burnt every day, and those who remain live in fear, obedience, and peace. Christ returns to earth and roams around Seville, and the grand inquisitor has him arrested. He then harangues Christ, blaming him for the terrible freedom he gave people: "We have corrected thy work and have founded it upon miracle, mystery, and authority. And men rejoiced that they were again led like sheep, and that the terrible gift that had brought them such suffering, was, at last, lifted from their hearts. Were we right teaching them this? Speak! Did we not love mankind, so meekly acknowledging their feebleness, lovingly lightening their burden, and permitting their weak nature even sin with our sanction." Humans are pathetic and evil: take away their freedom, and at least they will only be pathetic, and might even learn to be happy and harmless. Although the grand inquisitor doesn't follow through on his threat to burn Christ, he banishes him and continues to run his ecclesiastical police state for the betterment of humanity.

So Alyosha's pious answer turns out not to answer things as neatly as he would have liked. Christ's sacrifice, in which people are totally free to believe, disbelieve, ignore, or deny, only armed this race of "impotent rebels" with the terrible weapon of freedom, with which they have been considerably less impotent, but infinitely more evil, destructive, and miserable. Ivan has painted two hellish worlds, one in which there is freedom, and children are routinely raped, tortured, and murdered, and another world in which there is no freedom, and people live the harmless lives of sheep. Though much less neurotic than the underground man, Ivan also has caught himself in an unhappy paradox, in which he refuses to accept either scenario, but cannot see any alternative: freedom and goodness remain incompatible in his mind, and probably remain so to the end of the novel, when it is unclear what will happen to him, as he lies, probably dying, of a dramatically convenient case of acute "brain fever."

After this, as Alyosha remembers the life and teachings of his beloved teacher father Zossima, Dostoevsky's paradoxical answer to Ivan's question begins to emerge. Father Zossima remembers that as his brother was dying, he began to say strange things: "Mother darling," he would say, "there must be servants and masters, but if so I will be the servant of my servants. And another thing, mother, every one of us has sinned against all men, and I more than any.... "You take too many sins on yourself," mother used to say, weeping. "Mother darling, it's for joy, not for grief I am crying. Though I can't explain it to you, I like to humble myself, for I don't know how to love enough. If I have sinned against everyone, yet all forgive me, too, and that's heaven. Am I not in heaven now?" Universal guilt - freely taken upon oneself - mysteriously becomes the answer to individual guilt and unhappiness. A small child is not guilty of much of anything, but as his brother makes himself feel more responsible for more and more things he hasn't done, he feels increasing happiness and well-being. This lesson gets repeated throughout father Zossima's life, in the incident of the duel, and the mysterious stranger, and in his final exhortation to his friends and students at his deathbed: "My friends, pray to God for gladness. Be glad as children, as the birds of heaven. And let not the sin of men confound you in your doings. Fear not that it will wear away your work and hinder its being accomplished. Do not say, "Sin is mighty, wickedness is mighty, evil environment is mighty, and we are lonely and helpless. Evil environment is wearing us away and hindering our good work from being done." Fly from that dejection! There is only one means of salvation. Make yourself responsible for all men's sins. As soon as you sincerely make yourself responsible for everything and for all men, you will see at once that you have found salvation. On the other hand by throwing your indolence and impotence on others you will end by sharing the pride of Satan and murmuring against God." We all have the freedom, which we often avail ourselves of, to deny responsibility for things we have done: father Zossima raises the possibility at the opposite extreme, of taking responsibility for things we have not done. And paradoxically, the more things one feels guilty for, the less despair one feels, for it is the mutuality and interconnectedness that we have between ourselves, and between ourselves and God, that makes this thought liberating and not oppressive. By focusing on our own sins individually, we destroy ourselves with despair, and by focusing on the sins of others, we destroy ourselves with pride and self-righteousness, and it is significant that father Zossima is also the least judgmental man imaginable. When a woman approaches him for advice, she tells him that she has been unable to stop grieving over the death of her son. He tells her that enough time has passed and she should stop weeping. She then tells him that this is impossible, she just cannot bring herself to do it, to which he responds, "Weep and be not consoled, but weep.... A long while yet will you keep that great mother's grief, but it will turn in the end into quiet joy." Here is a complete acceptance of human weakness, but it is through this acceptance, not judgment or despair, that sin and misery are undone. It is only by focusing on the power of God's forgiveness, as well as the connection and even the identity between the sins of others and our own, that we can be forgiven, liberated, and loved.

So what emerges from these two works on the human person? The idea that human life and purpose is found in the will and not in the mind or the emotions remains consistent throughout: despite, or because of, his madness, the underground man eloquently defended this premise, and in the Brothers Karamazov, Ivan stands as the self-destructive extreme of reason, and Dmitri and Fyodor as the self-destructive extreme of sensuality, for their wills are enslaved to what should be lesser faculties. In terms of development between the earlier and the later work, I think the answer to how one could accomplish human fulfillment becomes clearer in the later novel. The underground man had all the right questions, some of the right answers, but could not live this truth, he could only miserably observe it from afar, as he lived a lie based on the truth. But with father Zossima, and possibly Alyosha, this has been turned on its head, as father Zossima counsels that one should live a life of truth and love based on what is fundamentally untrue, or at least, an absurdity, the absurd statement that one is responsible for the sins of the whole human race. Clearly at some level this is not an accurate statement, but it can be willed to be a true statement: father Zossima does not say that one really is responsible for all humanity's sins, but only that one can make oneself so, if one so wishes, "Make yourself responsible for all men's sins." Responsibility, like love, is not thought, proven, or felt, it is willed, and these two acts of will become the basis of all human meaning and happiness for Dostoevsky, and they can overcome all that is ugly, brutal, and false.