My latest book review for The Objective Standard focuses on Kevin Birmingham’s new book about Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s composition of Crime and Punishment. It’s an entertaining and deeply researched book, although its main premise—that Dostoyevsky based the book on a particular 1834 murder—is a little bit gimmicky, because that case was just one of many things that went into the book:
[Crime and Punishment] is not just an exercise in psychology, let alone a reflection on the author’s personal struggles. Its claim to the status of classic arises as much from its philosophical elements. Among the most important of these is Dostoevsky’s portrayal of nihilism, a cultural fashion in his day. Nihilism—the ideological embrace of nothingness—was a movement fostered in part by the Russian government’s intense authoritarianism and in part by rising secularism and capitalism in the West. Politically excluded from the benefits of Western progress, and with their traditional faith shattered by scientific discoveries and cultural revolutions, many young, intelligent Russians opted instead for this anti-ideology—which had important consequences for literature. “Nowadays,” says a character in Ivan Turgenev’s 1862 novel Fathers and Sons, “the most useful thing of all is rejection—we reject.” Nihilists rejected not just religion, but all political, social, and moral ideals—including reason and science. “Being a nihilist meant training your attention on small facts so that you will not lose yourself in bewildering fantasies,” Birmingham writes. But this was also destined to foster a sense of alienation and impotence.
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