By Rev. Dr.
Ed & Janice Hird
-an article for the Light Magazine
One of Dostoevsky’s
most brilliant, darkest and least known novels is The Possessed, also
called Demons or The Devils. Dostoevsky, as a devout Christian,
often grounded his novels in particular biblical stories. The opening scripture
in this novel is about the pigs being cast into the ocean (Luke 8:32-37).
Have you ever
wondered what possessed Putin to invade Ukraine, and why he won’t just go back
home to Russia? The Russian people still deeply remember the attacking of Moscow
by Napoleon and Hitler, as if it happened yesterday. They are possessed by the
idea that they are merely defending their fatherland against Western aggression.
Ideologies
(fixed systematic big ideas) can easily become idolatrous and possess a nation.
That is why Dr. Jordan Peterson wrote a chapter in his latest book Beyond
Order entitled “Say No to Ideology”. Ideologies like Marxism, Nazism, and Fascism
have caused over a hundred million people to go over the cliff and die like the
Gadarene pigs. Tragically, some of these far-left and far-right ideologies are
again romantically possessing many young people around the world. The far-left
and far-right, being both totalitarian and haters of democratic freedoms, have
much more in common than most would imagine.
The Possessed
is the most political of all of his Christ-centered novels. In the very year of
1870 that Dostoevsky was writing Possessed, Vladimir Lenin was
born. Lenin sadly refused to read Possessed
as he considered it reactionary garbage. Might the Possessed possess and
transform Putin, who is reportedly a Dostoevsky fan?
Dostoevsky,
like a John the Baptist or a weeping Jeremiah, cried out in this novel to a
younger generation about to go over the edge into socialist chaos and
destruction. He was a former revolutionary socialist sent in 1849 to Siberia
for ten years. Dostoevsky prophetically warned in this book about the destructive
whirlwind of communism that would swallow Russia fifty years later.
The
protagonist in this book is Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, a so-called champagne socialist of the
1840s generation who liked to flirt in secretive artist groups with trendy new
ideas coming from the West. Significantly, he spoke French like a Parisian, giving
him great influence among the nobility. None of Stepan’s obscure writing
projects were ever completed. He was a caricature of
Alexander Herzen, the father of Russian socialism, who had been in exile in
London with his friend Karl Marx.
In the novel, Stepan, a former University instructor, was
exiled for his socialist ideas by the Tsar to the fictitious back-water town of
Skvoreshniki. There, being funded by the bitter and controlling heiress
Varvara, Stepan spends twenty years training up the 1860s generation of younger
revolutionary socialists.
Stepan is shocked when these younger people, including his own
son, Pyotr and Varvara’s son Stavrogin, are swallowed by the ideologies of nihilism,
hedonism, and suicide. Pyotr and Stavrogin are both deeply alienated from their
parents, having being sent away to residential schools in Petersburg. Education trumped family. All the 1840s fathers
were either dead or entirely absent from their sons’ lives. Stepan had only met his son twice in his
entire life. The younger radicals
dismiss Stepan and Varvara as outdated fools.
Pyotr said to Stepan: “I curse you henceforth!”
As hard-core atheists, the young men rejected morality,
church, and family as forms of patriarchal oppression. Stepan had taught the
younger generation that:
marriage is
the moral death of every proud soul, of all independence. Married life will
corrupt me, it will sap my energy, my courage in the service of the (socialist)
cause.
The 1840s champagne socialists were mortified by the violence:
“we first sowed the seed, nurtured it, prepared the way.” Stepan is so appalled by the destructive
fruits of his intellectual labour that he flees on foot from the town. There,
among the peasants, he meets Sofya, a Gospel woman who sells him a bible. In
the midst of the chaotic suffering of his life, Stepan reads the bible for the
first time in over thirty years. He learns from the Sermon on the Mount that “we
must forgive, forgive, and forgive.” He encounters God and turns from his ideological
possession:
I’ve been
telling lies all my life…The worst of it is that I believe myself when I am
lying. The hardest thing in life is to live without telling lies.
He receives communion, and decides to also
become a travelling bible salesman. Dostoevsky noted: “Even fools
are by genuine sorrow turned into wise men.”
In this age of MAID and full-term abortion, it is chilling to
see young people in the novel imagine that death is the solution to life’s
problems: “I am killing myself to prove my independence and my
new terrible freedom.” All
the key young men in this novel foolishly end up dead, either from murder or
suicide. Dostoevsky is fascinated by the biblical themes of wisdom and
foolishness: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:22). Only the women are left to pick up the pieces,
as the town is thrown into chaos by revolutionary arsonists.
After Stepan dies three days later, Sofya is ‘adopted’ by Varvara
who also wants to spread the gospel. Varvara and Sofya remind us of the women who
first saw the resurrected Jesus, becoming the original evangelists. What if
women became the key evangelists in the next coming revival?
Dostoevsky passionately wanted everyone, especially his
Russian people, to experience the love of Jesus Christ:
If anyone
could prove to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth really did
exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ and not with truth.
Thank God
that we don’t have to choose between Christ and the truth. Are you willing to
let go of your ideologies and share the Truth with a younger lost generation?
Rev. Dr. Ed & Janice Hird
Co-authors, God’s Firestarters
