In this excerpt from Dostoyevsky's novel, The Adolescent, Makar Evanovich Dolgoruky, an old and wise peasant shares his worldview with Arkady, a learned and inquisitive young man. Listen in to their conversation.
“You keep talking about ‘mystery’? What does it mean ‘fulfilling one’s mysterious destiny’?” I asked, looking around toward the door.
I was glad we were alone and surrounded by complete stillness. The sun that had not set yet shone brightly in the window. He spoke somewhat grandiloquently and none too coherently, but with great sincerity and a strange excitement that suggested he was truly glad I was there with him. But I also noticed certain unmistakable signs that he was feverish, very feverish as a matter of fact. But I too was ill and had been feverish myself when I’d come to his room.
Death doesn’t make any difference, for there’s love after death too.
“Perhaps even now, though,” Makar went on with concentration, “I’d be frightened to meet a truly godless man, but let me tell you, Doctor, my friend, I’ve never really met a man like that. What I have met were restless men, for that’s what they should really be called. There are all sorts of people like that and you can’t tell what makes them the way they are: some are important, others are little men; some are ignorant, others are learned; and they come from all classes, even the lowest…but it’s all restlessness. For they keep on reading all their lives, and having filled themselves with bookish wisdom, they talk and talk, although they never find answers to what’s bothering them and remain in the darkness. Some of them throw themselves in so many different directions that they end by losing themselves; the hearts of others turn into stones, although there may still be dreams in them; still others become drained of thoughts and feelings but still go around sneering at everything. Some people pick out from books nothing but the little flowers, and even then only those that suit them, but they still remain restless because they could never make up their minds in the first place. And I can see that there’s too much boredom in them. A poor man may be short of bread, may not have enough to keep his children alive, may sleep on rough straw, may be brutal and sinful, but still his heart may be gay and merry; while a rich man may eat and drink too much and sit on a pile of gold with nothing but gloom in his heart. A man may study all the sciences and never get rid of emptiness and gloom; indeed, I think that the more intelligence he gains, the more his gloom will thicken.
Man cannot live without worshiping something.
Today we amass material things without ever satisfying our greed. But a day will come when there will be no orphans, no beggars; everyone will be like one of my own family, and that is when I will have gained everything and everyone!
I promised him I’d pray, feeling this would please him. And indeed, he beamed with pleasure. But I hasten to note that he never spoke in a lecturing tone, never sounded like a sage talking to an immature youth. Not in the least. In fact, he was interested in what I had to say and at times listened eagerly as I held forth on all sorts of subjects; for, although I was just a “young ’un” (as he said even though he was perfectly aware that the proper word was “youth”), he always remembered that this particular “young ’un” was incomparably better educated than himself.
One thing he was very fond of talking about was “life in the wilderness,” for to him living all alone in the wild was far superior to wandering around the country. I hotly disagreed, arguing that hermits were really egoists who had fled their worldly responsibilities and, instead of trying to be useful to their fellowmen, selfishly sought only their own salvation. At first he couldn’t see what I meant; indeed, I suspect he didn’t understand what I was talking about, and he just went on defending the advantages of being a hermit.
From The Gospel in Dostoyevsky.