Nietzsche and Dostoevsky: On the Verge of Nihilism 3034316704, 9783034316705

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Nietzsche and Dostoevsky

LISBON PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES uses of language in interdisciplinary fields A P ub lic ation from the Ins t it ut e o f Philo s o phy o f L a ngu ag e at t h e N e w U n i v e r s i t y o f Li s b o n edited b y Antón io Marq ues (Ge ne ra l E dit o r ) Nu no Ventu rin ha (Ex e cut ive E dit o r ) E ditorial Board : Gab riele De A ng elis, Hum be r t o B r it o, J o ã o Fo ns e ca , Fra n c k Li h o r e au , A n t ó n i o M ar q u e s, Maria Filomen a Molde r, Dio go Pir e s Aur é lio, E r ich R a st , J o ão S àág u a, Nu n o Ve n t u r i n h a Advisory Board: Je an- P ierre Cometti ( Unive r sit é de Pr o ve nce ), Lynn Do b s o n ( U n i v e r s i t y o f Ed i n b u r g h ) , E rnest L epore (Ru tge r s Unive r s it y), R e na t o L e ssa ( IUPE- R i o d e Jan e i r o ) , A n d r e w Lu g g (Un iversity of Ottawa ), S t e f a n M a je t s cha k ( Unive r sit ä t K as s e l ) , J e s ú s Pad i l l a Gál v e z (Un iversidad de Cas t illa - L a M a ncha ), J o a chim S chult e ( U n i v e r s i t ät Zü r i c h )

PETER LANG Bern · Berlin · Bruxelles · Frankfurt am Main · New York · Oxford · Wien

Paolo Stellino

Nietzsche and Dostoevsky On the Verge of Nihilism

PETER LANG Bern · Berlin · Bruxelles · Frankfurt am Main · New York · Oxford · Wien

Bibliographic information published by die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at ‹http://dnb.d-nb.de›. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library, Great Britain Library of Congress Control Number: 2015944282

ISSN 1663-7674 pb. ISBN 978-3-0343-1670-5 pb.

ISSN 2235-641X eBook ISBN 978-3-0351-0860-6 eBook

This publication has been peer reviewed. © Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2015 Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland [email protected], www.peterlang.com All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

Dedicated to the memory of my beloved grandfather, Giovanni.

Acknowledgments

This work is a completely revised version of my doctoral thesis completed at the University of Valencia, Spain, in July, 2010. The thesis was supervised by Jesús Conill and Juan Carlos Siurana Aparisi. My gratitude goes to both of them for having been encouraging and enthusiastic guides. Joan B. Llinares’ help was, as well, important and valuable. To him, I am greatly indebted for shared knowledge and generous support. My thanks also go to Giuliano Campioni, Adela Cortina, Luis Enrique de Santiago Guervós, and Diego Sánchez Meca for providing helpful comments as examiners.­ I am especially grateful to Volker Gerhardt, Paolo D’Iorio, Karin Bauer, and Werner Stegmaier for welcoming me as visiting scholar at Humboldt University of Berlin, Maison Française d’Oxford, McGill University, and Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald, respectively. I also express gratitude to all the persons who have been helpful by providing me with useful material, discussing specific aspects of my work or reading part of the manuscript and making several critical comments. Those persons are Christian Benne, Andrea Bertino, Ken Gemes, Marie-Luise Haase, Enrico Müller, Nicola Nicodemo, Ekaterina Poljakova, Mattia Riccardi, John Richardson, Beat Röllin, Andreas Urs Sommer and Yannick Souladié. Special thanks go to João Constâncio, Maria Cristina Fornari, Pietro Gori, Luca Lupo and Maria João Mayer Branco for their insightful comments on a previous version of this work. During the last years, I have had the chance to discuss several aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy with the members of SPN (Seminario Permanente Nietzscheano, Centro “Colli-Montinari”) and NIL (Nietzsche International Lab, New University of Lisbon). To all of them go my sincere thanks. I should also like to thank the directors of the series Antonio Marques and Nuno Venturinha for their willingness to publish this

study and Angelica Scholze for her help and support during the publication process. This book would have not been possible without the loving support of my family, especially my mother Anna, my companion Audrey and my friends Luca Giancristofaro and Pietro Gori.

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Contents

Note on Translations and Abbreviations..............................................11 Preface.................................................................................................15

Part I. Nietzsche Discovers and Reads Dostoevsky 1. Nietzsche’s Discovery of Dostoevsky............................................23 2. L’esprit souterrain (Katia, The Landlady).....................................29 3. L’esprit souterrain (Lisa, Notes from Underground).....................37 4. Resentment....................................................................................45 5. Notes from the House of the Dead.................................................57 6. The Insulted and Injured...............................................................67 7. A Heated Debate...........................................................................75 8. A “Subterranean” at Work.............................................................83 9. Petersburg-Style Nihilism.............................................................89 10. Further Readings...........................................................................93 11. On the Possible Reading of Crime and Punishment......................99 12. Jesus as Idiot................................................................................107 13. Demons........................................................................................119 14. Dostoevsky as Artist. Russian Pessimism and Décadence..........131 15. An Unexpected Silence? A Recapitulation of Nietzsche’s Discovery and Reading of Dostoevsky....................139

Part II. If God Does not Exist, Is Everything Permitted? Contextualization of the Problem......................................................145

1. The Brothers Karamazov.............................................................153 1.1 The Plot.................................................................................153 1.2 The Reason – Faith Conflict..................................................155 1.3 Ivan’s Idea .............................................................................158 1.4 The Crisis of the Idea............................................................163 2. Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted....................................169 2.1 Zarathustra’s Shadow.............................................................170 2.2 The Order of Assassins..........................................................173 2.3 The Posthumous Fragments..................................................176 2.4 The Variant............................................................................179 2.5 Conclusion.............................................................................183 3. Dostoevsky contra Nietzsche?....................................................189 3.1 Raskolnikov’s Extraordinary Man and Nietzsche’s Overman.............................................................190 3.2 Kirillov’s Man-God as Overman?.........................................203 3.3 Ivan as Nietzsche’s Forerunner?............................................214 4. Conclusive Remarks: Rethinking the Relation between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky............................................225 Bibliography.......................................................................................231 Name Index........................................................................................243

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Note on Translations and Abbreviations

Nietzsche’s writings: The English translations of Nietzsche’s works are from the Cambridge Edition. An exception is made for Duncan Large’s translation of Twilight of the Idols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) which seems to me to be more faithful to the original text. Nietzsche’s works are cited by abbreviation, chapter (when applicable) and section number. Nietzsche’s late posthumous fragments have not yet been fully translated into English. Some of them are collected in the following works: Writings from the Late Notebooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); The Will to Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1967). I have directly translated from German those posthumous fragments not included in the aforementioned works. The abbreviation PF refers to “Posthumous Fragments”. I specify the reference number of every posthumous fragment quoted (as in the KGW [=Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe] or KSA [=Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe] editions) and the estimated period of composition (Colli and Montinari’s chronology). Nietzsche’s letters as well have been only partially translated into English. The following editions are available: Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969); Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1921). I have directly translated from German those letters which are not included in the aforementioned works. In the KGB [=Briefwechsel, Kritische Gesamtausgabe] or KSB [=Sämtliche Briefe, Kritische Studienausgabe] editions, Nietzsche’s letters are always marked with a number. When I quote a letter, I use the symbol # plus the reference number of the letter. When necessary, I have partially rectified or modified the translations following the Digital Critical Edition of the Complete Works and Letters of Nietzsche edited by Paolo D’Iorio. See Nietzsche Source:

The abbreviations used are the following: A = The Anti-Christ BGE = Beyond Good and Evil BT = The Birth of Tragedy CW = The Case of Wagner D = Daybreak DD = Dithyrambs of Dionysus EH = Ecce Homo GM = On the Genealogy of Morality GS = The Gay Science HH = Human, All Too Human NW = Nietzsche contra Wagner TI = Twilight of the Idols TL = On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense WS = The Wanderer and His Shadow Z = Thus Spoke Zarathustra Dostoevsky’s writings: With the exception of the volume Erzählungen von F. M. Dostojewskij (Leipzig: Reclam, 1886), Nietzsche read Dostoevsky in the French translations published by Plon (Paris). As will be shown, these translations played a pivotal role in Nietzsche’s understanding and interpretation of Dostoevsky’s writings. To ease the reading, without sacrificing philological accuracy, in the first part of this volume I cite the English translation of Dostoevsky’s writings in the body of the text and then the corresponding French translation in the footnotes. For the English translations, when available, I have used the Pevear and Valokhonsky translations. For Notes from the House of the Dead and The Insulted and Injured, I have used B. Jakim’s new translations. The Landlady is contained in the volume Poor Folk and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 1988), translated by D. McDuff. The Complete letters are available in five volumes (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1988–91). A Writer’s Diary has been translated by K. Lantz (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1994, 2 Vols.).

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The abbreviations used are the following: Ad = The Adolescent BK = The Brothers Karamazov CL = Complete letters CP = Crime and Punishment De = Demons Er = Erzählungen von F. M. Dostojewskij ES = L’esprit souterrain FK = Les frères Karamazov HO = Humiliés et offensés I&I = The Insulted and Injured Id = The Idiot L = The Landlady NHD = Notes from the House of the Dead NU = Notes from Underground P = Les possédés SMM = Souvenirs de la maison des morts WD = A Writer’s Diary Other abbreviations used: JdD = Journal des débats (a French newspaper Nietzsche used to read. It was first published in 1789 and during the nineteenth century exerted a major influence on French culture and literature).



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Preface

“They arrive in compact, deep lines. It is the revenge of 1812.1 They will not set fire to Paris; we do not need any help to do that. They will drown it under printer’s ink. Throughout the summer they have furtively proliferated, they have come out of the press. […] I search for a volume of Voltaire: it has disappeared under a stack of Tolstoy’s books. My Racine has disappeared under those of Dostoevsky.”

With these words, which introduce one of several articles on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky published in the French newspapers during the 1880s, the literary critic Eugène Melchior de Vogüé (1886b: 824) alludes to the increasingly widespread diffusion of Russian novels within the Western Europe cultural world at the time. It is precisely within this historical and cultural context that Nietzsche’s discovery of Dostoevsky has to be set. It is the winter of 1886–87. Nietzsche arrives in Nice around the 20th of October. He stays some months, taking advantage of the mild weather of the Mediterranean coast. While browsing in a bookshop, the volume L’esprit souterrain catches his attention. If we trust Nietzsche’s own account, he does not even know the name of the author. Nonetheless, he instinctively feels a sense of affinity and familiarity with him. Nietzsche buys the volume and reads it very carefully. From then on, in his last two years of lucidity, the philosopher conducts a deep inner dialogue with Dostoevsky. It is no surprise that Dostoevsky’s novels fascinated Nietzsche. Without denying the considerable differences that make their respective worldviews diverge from each other, one could easily find several similarities between the novelist and the philosopher. Both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were great psychologists, able to explore the depths of the human soul and to grasp both its complexity and its more problematic and immoral aspects. They also understood and diagnosed the phenomenon of nihilism probably better than any other intellectuals 1



The allusion is here to the battle of Borodino, fought on 7 September 1812, in which Napoleon’s Grande Armée attacked the Russian army of General Kutuzov. Tolstoy relates this battle in his masterpiece War and Peace.

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of the nineteenth century, providing an excellent and essential analysis of this multifaceted phenomenon. Moreover, they sought to give an answer to similar moral and philosophical problems. Their answers clearly differed, but what characterized them both was their same depth of approach. European intellectuals soon realized that the paths of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were destined to merge. Strictly speaking, it was Georg Brandes, the Danish critic and scholar, who first connected the works of Dostoevsky with Nietzsche’s philosophy in his book Impressions from Russia.2 In a chapter dedicated to Dostoevsky, Brandes applied Nietzsche’s categories to the novelist, interpreting him as a particular example of the man of ressentiment, while his morality was precisely the same slave morality described by Nietzsche in his Genealogy of Morality. Besides this brief comparison, however, there is little doubt that the first to draw attention to the relationship between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were Russian intellectuals. The peculiarity of this first reception was the identification between Nietzsche’s overman with some of the main nihilistic characters (such as Raskolnikov, Kirillov or Ivan Karamazov) in the great Dostoevsky novels. This “mythopoem”, to use Grillaert’s expression (2008: 41), was generally accepted and turned into a sort of unquestioned dogma, enduring throughout the years. It is precisely in this early period that Merezhkovsky’s L. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (1901) appeared.3 Merezhkovsky’s work was particularly important for his approach, which undoubtedly wielded a strong influence over several later studies. In his view, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were the mouthpieces of two different and opposite cultures: the Western, which was atheist and preached the arrival of the man-god, and the Eastern, which defended the orthodoxy and stood for the God-man, that is, Christ. In this way, the relation between Nietzsche and Dosteovsky was conceived as irreconcilable opposition. Merezhkovsky’s study was also very significant because it consolidated a reading that later became a sort of cliché in Nietzsche-Dostoevsky studies, that is, the 2

3

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Brandes was an admirer of Nietzsche and in 1888 he lectured on Nietzsche. These lectures were published a year later under the title Aristocratic Radicalism. An Essay on Friedrich Nietzsche. Even if Merezhkovsky mainly focuses on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, nonetheless, Nietzsche is introduced as a third interlocutor.

reading according to which Dostoevsky had foretold and anticipated Nietzsche’s philosophy. While Berdyaev published in Russia his well-known book on Dostoevsky (1923), several thinkers and writers of Western Europe also began to examine the relationship between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. From the 1920s on, intellectuals such as Kracauer (1921), Gide (1923), Schubart (1939), von Balthasar (1939) and de Lubac (1944), among others, focused more or less directly on this subject. Thomas Mann also wrote a brief essay on this theme in 1945, although there is little doubt that Nietzsche and Dostoevsky had already exerted their influence on his artistic creation many years before. Parallel to these studies, however, another kind of literature emerged in Western Europe, which took a different approach. Works such as those of Andler (1930), and later of Benz (1956: 92–103) and Gesemann (1961), moved the focus of attention from the speculative comparison between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky to the philological (in its wider sense) analysis of Nietzsche’s discovery and reading of Dostoevsky’s works. These contributions aimed to provide a more solid and grounded basis (hence, for instance, the reference to the correspondence) to the study of the relationship between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky by addressing the following three concerns: when Nietzsche discovered Dostoevsky, which of his novels he read, and how he interpreted them. A significant divide in what we may call “Nietzsche-Dostoevsky studies” came undoubtedly in the 1970s with the three papers published by Miller (1973, 1975 and 1978) in Nietzsche-Studien. Among others, Miller had the following merits: first, he proposed a precise reconstruction of Nietzsche’s discovery and engagement with Dostoevsky, establishing a reliable chronology of both; second, his analysis relied on a strict methodology based, for instance, on the reference to the original French translations read by Nietzsche; third, given his deep knowledge of the works of both the philosopher and the novelist, he was able to propose a fine interpretative reading of Nietzsche’s understanding and evaluation of Dostoevsky. Following Miller’s example, scholars have continued over the years to investigate the different aspects of the relation between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. Recent contributions such as those of Pacini (2001), Müller-Buck (2002), Ebersbach (2006), Pfeuffer (2008), Souladié (2008), Llinares (2009a), Santos Sena (2010), 

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Morillas (2012) and Poljakova (2013), clearly demonstrate that scholars the world over feel the need to ponder the questions and problems that the works of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky still pose. With the help of this very brief overview, which in no way claims to be complete or exhaustive, it is now possible to explain the aim and scope of the present work. Despite the great number of studies dedicated to the relation between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, three main considerations can be put forward: (1) There is as yet no book that provides a full and complete analysis of Nietzsche’s discovery and reading of Dostoevsky. (2) Despite the great emphasis put by Nietzsche on the importance of his late discovery and reading of Dostoevsky, several Nietzsche scholars and interpreters still tend to ignore the real significance of this reading. This tendency is more pronounced in Anglophone countries where, despite the ever-increasing interest in Nietzsche’s philosophy, surprisingly, Nietzsche’s reception of Dostoevsky still lacks adequate scrutiny. (3) Comparative interpretations of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky have usually tended, and still tend, to read the latter as foretelling and providing a critique of the former’s philosophy. As will be shown, this reading is often the consequence of a reductive and simplified, if not not even unfaithful and misleading, interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy. The main purpose of this book is to address these three concerns. Accordingly, the first part focuses on Nietzsche’s discovery and reading of Dostoevsky, providing a complete and thorough analysis of both aspects. Attention is therefore mostly directed to the following questions: When did Nietzsche discover Dostoevsky? Which of his novels did he read? How did he interpret them? To which aspects was Nietzsche’s attention called? How did these aspects influence his thought? And, where is this influence to be found? The approach assumed throughout the first part of this book is, therefore, mostly historical and philological. The pursuit of this approach serves the hermeneutic aim of clarifying and explaining Nietzsche’s understanding and philosophical interpretation of Dostoevsky’s works. The published works, the posthumous fragments and the correspondence, as well as other indirect sources, have been taken into consideration in order to reconstruct the genetic history of Nietzsche’s discovery and reading of Dostoevsky. Particular attention has been paid 18 

to what German Nietzsche-scholars call Quellenforschung, that is, the research concerning the primary sources of Nietzsche’s thought. In this sense, the focus has been directed towards those readings which either actually or potentially informed Nietzsche’s comprehension of Dostoevsky or simply created the context in which he himself set his discovery of the novelist. Moreover, Nietzsche read Dostoevsky in French translations. As will be shown, these translations sometimes played a pivotal role in the former’s understanding and interpretation of the latter. To ease the reading, without sacrificing philological accuracy, in the first part of this volume the English translation of Dostoevsky’s writings has been cited in the body of the text, whereas the corresponding French translation in the footnotes. The second part of the present work is dedicated to what can be considered as a problematic aspect of the reception of the relation between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and to which I have already referred as a cliché: the idea that, in his novels, Dostoevsky foretold and anticipated the most dangerous ideas of Nietzsche’s philosophy, providing at the same time a critique ante litteram of them. Defenders of this reading usually tend to identify Nietzsche’s philosophy with the theories of the main nihilistic characters of Dostoevsky’s great novels. So, for instance, the maxim “nothing is true, everything is permitted”, which appears both in Nietzsche’s oeuvre and posthumous fragments, is interpreted as analogous to Ivan Karamazov’s idea, according to which if there is no God and no immortality of the soul, everything is permitted. Before this analogy can be accepted as valid, the following basic questions, which are generally overlooked, need to be answered: is Nietzsche really affirming that nothing is true and, therefore, everything permitted? If so, in what sense? And, on a more general level, can Nietzsche’s moral position be identified with that of Ivan? As will be shown, a deeper analysis of Nietzsche’s use of the maxim shows that the analogy is deceptive on several levels. Over the years, another comparison has been frequently made between, on the one hand, Nietzsche’s overman, and on the other hand, Raskolnikov’s extraordinary man or Kirillov’s man-god. Although this comparison seems to be prima facie plausible and reasonable, once again, a deeper analysis shows that between Nietzsche’s philosophy and the theories of Raskolnikov and Kirillov, there exist irreducible and 

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radical differences. So, for instance, Nietzsche certainly ascribes special rights to those individuals whom he considers superior or higher, but does he goes so far as to claim that these individual have a right to commit crime and shed blood, as Raskolnikov does? And does he think that, after the death of God, the new man can be considered a kind of new god (Kirillov’s and Ivan’s man-god), for whom there are no longer moral laws to respect? Such questions, not easy to answer, reveal a deeper and more complex interpretative and philosophical problem, which concerns the possibility or impossibility of defining the boundaries of moral permissibility once the belief in God has been annihilated. This study seeks to show how differently Nietzsche and Dostoevsky tackled this problem, shedding light on what can be considered one of the most fascinating questions of moral philosophy: if God does not exist, is everything permitted?

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Part I Nietzsche Discovers and Reads Dostoevsky

1.  Nietzsche’s Discovery of Dostoevsky

The first mention of Dostoevsky in Nietzsche’s correspondence can be found in a letter that Nietzsche sent to his friend Franz Overbeck on 12 February, 1887. This letter contained the following postscript: “Did I write you of H. Taine? And that he finds me ‘infiniment suggestif’? And of Dostoevsky?” (#798) This first brief mention is followed by a second reference in a letter sent the following day to Peter Gast: “Do you know Dostoevsky? With the exception of Stendhal, no one has given me so much pleasure and astonishment: a psychologist whom ‘I agree with’.” (#800) Although brief, this passage contains two important elements that Nietzsche will often repeat when speaking of Dostoevsky: the comparison with the French novelist Stendhal and the definition of Dostoevsky as a psychologist. Peter Gast, who was living in Venice at that time, answered Nietzsche’s question with a letter dated 20 February, 1887. Gast confessed to his friend that he did not even know the name of the Russian writer: “I do not know anything about Dostoevsky who, on the contrary, is certainly a Pole;4 yes, I hear this name from you for the first time. Since you seem to care so much for him, I will note his name and take it to my bosom.” (#434) Gast’s ignorance of Dostoevsky, who was not Polish at all, should not surprise us: these are precisely the years in which Dostoevsky’s works began to be widely circulated in Europe. These brief and fleeting mentions in the correspondence are followed by an exhaustive passage, contained in the letter to Overbeck of 23 February, 1887 in which Nietzsche describes his discovery of Dostoevsky: “I knew nothing about Dostoevsky, not even his name, until a few weeks ago – uncultivated person that I am, reading no ‘periodicals’! In a bookshop my hand accidentally came to rest on L’esprit souterrain, just recently translated into French (the same kind of chance brought me in acquaintance with Schopenhauer when I was 21, and with Stendhal when I was 35). The instinct of affinity (or what 4



In a previous passage, Gast alludes to Boscovich, whom Nietzsche thought was Polish.

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shall I call it?) spoke to me instantaneously – my joy was beyond bounds; not since my first encounter with Stendhal’s Rouge et Noir have I known such joy. (The book consists of two short stories, the first really a piece of music, very foreign, very un-German music; the second a stroke of genius in psychology, a sort of self-ridicule of γνωθι σαυτόν). Incidentally, these Greeks have a great deal on their conscience – falsification was their real trade; the whole of European psychology is sick with Greek superficialities, and without the modicum of Judaism, and so on, and so on.” (#804)

According to what Nietzsche wrote in his correspondence, his discovery of Dostoevsky in a bookshop was merely accidental. While browsing the books, he became aware of L’esprit souterrain, a volume recently translated into French. The author of that book was Dostoevsky. Nietzsche instinctively sensed a possible affinity, a sort of a spiritual kinship. As we will see, his instinct did not betray him. After reading the volume, his enthusiasm for his recent discovery was immense. Nietzsche went as far as to compare it to two of the most important spiritual experiences of his life: the purchase of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation in an antique store in Leipzig in 1867, and the reading of Stendhal’s masterpiece The Red and the Black at the age of 35.5 The expression “until a few weeks ago” that Nietzsche used in the letter to Overbeck is quite vague. But before joining the heated debate concerning the exact chronology of Nietzsche’s discovery of Dostoevsky, which has exercised scholars in the past, let us first follow the path opened up by the correspondence. In a second letter addressed to Gast on 7 March, 1887 Nietzsche, who was still living in Nice, gave his friend more detailed information about his reading and appreciation of Dostoevsky, adding some biographical notes on him. He repeated the comparison with Stendhal, emphasizing once more the accidental nature of his discovery (zufälligs­te Berührung), for which he credited his instinct: 5

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As Miller (1973: 203) points out, in a postcard to Overbeck of 30 July, 1881 Nietzsche described his discovery of Spinoza in similar terms: “I am entirely amazed, entirely enraptured! I have a precursor and what a one! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I yearned for him was an ‘act of instinct’.” (#135) The word Instinkt­ handlung (“act of instinct”) recalls indeed the expression Instinkt der Verwandt­ schaft (“instinct of affinity”) used by Nietzsche in the quoted letter to Overbeck of 23 February, 1887.

“The same thing happened to me with Dostoevsky as with Stendhal; the most haphazard encounter, a book that one opens casually on a book stall, unfamiliarity even with the name:6 and then suddenly one’s instinct speaks and one knows one has met a kinsman. Up to the present I have learnt little concerning his position, his reputation, his history; he died in 1881. In his youth things were pretty bad with him; illness and poverty, although he came of distinguished stock. At the age of 27 he was sentenced to death, but was reprieved on the very steps of the scaffold, then four years Siberia, chained, among hardened criminals. This period was decisive: he discovered the power of his psychological intuition, nay more; his heart was mellowed and deepened by the experience. His book of recollections from these years La maison des morts is one of the most human books ever written. What I got to know first, also published in French translation, is called L’esprit souterrain, containing two short novels: the first a kind of unknown music, the second a true stroke of genius in psychology – a frightening and cruel piece of mockery of γνωθι σαυτόν, but done with such a light audacity and joy in his superior power, that I was drunk with delight. Meanwhile, on the recommendation of Overbeck, whom I asked about the matter in my last letter, I have read Humiliés et offensés (the only one that O[verbeck] knew) with the greatest respect for the artist Dostoevsky. I have also noted how completely the youngest generation of Parisian novelists is tyrannized over by the influence of Dostoevsky, and by their jealousy of him (Paul Bourget, for instance).” (#814)

The most important information contained in this letter is that Nietzsche went on reading Dostoevsky. The haphazard encounter with the volume L’esprit souterrain in a Nice bookshop motivated him to further explore the Russian author’s work. But, what did Nietzsche read exactly? The reader already familiar with Dostoevsky may be tempted to identify the volume L’esprit souterrain with the short novel Notes from Underground, but this would be a mistake. Indeed, L’esprit souterrain, edited by Plon in 1886, comprised two very different novels: The Landlady, an early short novel from 1847, and Notes from Underground, published in 1864 in the journal The Epoch. As indicated in the cover, L’esprit souterrain was a (very free) adaptation of both novels. A quite faithful translation of The Landlady composed the first part of the volume, 6



Concerning this passage, Miller (1973: 205) points out how semantically ambiguous the German expression “Unbekanntschaft bis auf den Namen” is, an expression that could be translated as “unfamiliarity beyond the mere name” or as “unfamiliarity even with the name.” Actually, this ambiguity disappears if we only consider the letter of 23 February to Overbeck, in which Nietzsche confessed that until a few weeks before he knew nothing about Dostoevsky, “not even his name.” (#804)

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entitled “Katia”, the main female character of Dostoevsky’s story. The second part, whose title “Lisa” was also derived from the female character of the novel, consisted of a mutilated and very free translation of Notes from Underground. With no respect for Dostoevsky’s intentions, the Plon publishing house and the translators Halpérine and Morice decided to combine the two novels, not only ignoring the two decades that divided the works, but also deliberately ignoring the stylistic, thematic, and contextual differences that drastically distinguished one novel from the other. By so doing, Ordynov, the romantic dreamer of The Landlady, became the cynical main character of the Notes. Besides this incongruity, in order to homogenize both works the translators added a brief introduction to the second part, written by them and modeled on Dostoevsky’s preface to Notes from the House of the Dead. In this apocryphal introduction an anonymous narrator presented Notes from Underground as Ordynov’s manuscript, in which the reader would discover a second romantic affair (velléité d’amour, ES: 154) involving the main character of the previous story.7 In his paper Dostoyevski in France of the 1880’s, Teitelbaum (1946: 100) explains what could have led the translators to such a radical and arbitrary adaptation of both works: “Because the translators were afraid that the French public would not understand Dostoyevski, they abridged and mutilated the translations. Thus, e.g., a number of chapters were cut out of The Brothers Karamazov to form a supplementary volume. The volume was published in 1889 under the title of Les précoces. The name Karamazov was changed to Shestomazov.”

As one can see, in order to analyse Nietzsche’s discovery of Dostoevsky, it is very important to consider not only the fact that Nietzsche read Dostoevsky in French, but also that sometimes these translations were very free and unfaithful. It is precisely for this reason that, in the 7

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In order to understand the whole arbitrariness of this editorial choice it is important to recall that in Notes from Underground the author of the memories has no name. Indeed, as stated in the Author’s note, Dostoevsky’s intention was to depict a representative of a generation still living at that time and thus, by giving no name to his character, to allow for a possible identification of the reader with the underground man.

first part of the present study, I will refer to the editions that Nietzsche actually used; for, as I will show, these translations on occasion played a very important role in his comprehension and understanding of Dostoevsky. Although mutilated, the reading of L’esprit souterrain left a very positive impression of Dostoevsky on Nietzsche, who described the first part (The Landlady) as an unknown, unfamiliar, and very un-German-like music, while he saw in the second part (Notes from Underground) “a true stroke of genius in psychology.” (#814) It was precisely the reading of this second part that led Nietzsche to his characterization of Dostoevsky as a psychologist, a characterization that, as will be shown, the philosopher would later repeat. The next two sections will thus focus on an extended analysis of Nietzsche’s reading and understanding of both novels.



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2.  L’esprit souterrain (Katia, The Landlady)

Concerning the first part of L’esprit souterrain, what has surprised scholars the most is the positive opinion that Nietzsche expressed of The Landlady. The Russian literary critic Belinsky, who had hailed Dostoevsky’s first novel Poor Folk with great enthusiasm, strongly criticized his later work, arguing that: “[Dostoevsky] wished to try to reconcile Marlinsky and Hoffmann, adding to this mixture a little humor in the latest fashion, and thickly covering all this with the varnish of a Russian folk-style. […] Throughout the whole of this story there is not a single simple or living word or expression: everything is far-fetched, exaggerated, stilted, spurious and false.” (quoted in Frank 1976: 179)

Dostoevsky himself changed his attitude towards The Landlady after the critics’ negative evaluation. In the letter of 1 February, 1849 to Kraevsky, he wrote: “In order to keep my word and deliver on time, I pushed myself, wrote, by the way, such bad things or (in the singular) – such a bad thing as ‘The Landlady,’ as a result of which I gave way to bewilderment and self-deprecation and for a long time afterward could not get down to writing anything serious and decent.” (CL 1: 161)

Among other nineteenth century critics, Terras (1969: 231) confirmed Belinsky’s negative judgment and described Dostoevsky’s long story as a complete failure: “The style of expression in The Landlady is outré in almost every conceivable way, featuring accumulation, repetition, exclamatory rhetoric, extravagant imagery, unrestrained emotionality, and outright overstatement.”8 Why did Nietzsche praise a story that, beginning with the second scene, turned “into a steady flow of unabashed romantic colportage” 8



See also Terras (1998: 24): “‘The Landlady’ is perhaps the only outright failure Dostoevsky ever produced. Belinsky was right for once in his negative judgment of this story.”

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(Terras 1998: 25), if in the preface to Daybreak (§4) he had declared himself an enemy of Romanticism? Nietzsche’s definition of The Landlady as a very un-German music seems to be even more unaccountable if we compare it to section 370 of The Gay Science.9 Here Nietzsche recognizes romanticism as the distinctive character of German music and mentions Wagner as one of the most famous and pronounced romantics of the time. We can reasonably assume that Nietzsche did not fail to recognize the romantic character of The Landlady; so why did he define this story as a piece of un-German music? Before analyzing the reasons that could have led Nietzsche to express a positive opinion of The Landlady, it is important to note that not all critics have rejected Dostoevsky’s long story as a complete failure. When speaking of The Landlady, Pascal (1970: 51f.) refers to “un retour au romantisme le plus démodé”, but also points out that the story offered the reader something more than a mere fantasy or a stylistic exercise. Frank (1976: 337), who partially justifies Belinsky’s negative judgment, is nonetheless able to discover important themes in The Landlady that also appeared in the later novels, while Grossman expresses a similar opinion in his biography of Dostoevsky. The question of Nietzsche’s positive judgment of The Landlady thus has to be reformulated in the following way: was Nietzsche able to discover some aspect of the story that was hidden under the superficial romantic veil and had been ignored by the critics of his time? It is difficult to say if The Landlady sounded to Nietzsche’s ears like Russian music.10 The only thing we can be sure of is that Dostoevsky’s story 9

It is important to recall that section 370 belongs to the fifth book of The Gay Science. Nietzsche worked on this book at the end of 1886, i.e., in the same winter he discovered Dostoevsky. 10 In July-August 1888, Nietzsche wrote in his notebook: “Russian music brings to the light with a touching innocence the soul of the muzhik, of the low people. Nothing more speaks to the heart as their serene wise men, who are all sad men. I would swap the happiness of the whole West for the Russian way to be sad. But how is it that the ruling classes of Russia are not represented in their music? Does it suffice to say ‘Evil men have no songs’?” (PF 18[9], July-August 1888) Nietzsche hints here at the following passage of J. G. Seume’s poem Die Gesänge: “Wo man singet, laß dich ruhig nieder, / Ohne Furcht, was man im Lande glaubt; / Wo man singet wird kein Mensch beraubt: / Bösewichte haben keine Lieder.” From the quoted posthumous fragment Nietzsche derived the following maxim of

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sounded to him like an unknown and un-German music, i.e. despite his romantic rhetoric, an unromantic music. In the above-mentioned essay, Miller, and more recently, Llinares (2009a) have thoroughly tried to explain the reasons that could have led Nietzsche to express a positive opinion on the first part of L’esprit souterrain. They both stress that Nietzsche could have identified with Ordynov, the main character of The Landlady. Actually, at that time, the philosopher was in Nice and after having rented a very cold north-facing room, was looking for better accommodation.11 Dostoevsky’s story begins precisely with Ordynov being compelled to leave his old room and wandering the streets of St. Petersburg like a flâneur in search of cheap lodgings. Moreover, Nietzsche lived a rather solitary life, dedicated to philosophy and supported by his modest pension. In a similar way, Ordynov “led a quiet and completely solitary existence” (L: 134),12 he lived on a small inheritance and had a strong passion for science, to which he dedicated all his energies. Beyond these and more “striking parallels” that, according to Miller (1973: 225), “go far toward explaining his [Nietzsche’s] positive response to ‘Katia’”, more relevant seem to be the topics of the weak or faint heart and the psychology of the priest. Concerning the former, Miller’s explanation (ibid: 227) is without a doubt very clear: “The ‘weak heart’ is a general theory of moral weakness conceived of as a failure of self-determination derived from a specifically ‘feminine’ impulsiveness and inconstancy of will. The ‘weak heart,’ that is, is not only a metaphor for the woman’s identity in the love relationship, but a formula for an inner weakness of ‘will’ that manifests itself as a fundamental incapacity for ‘freedom.’”

In The Landlady, the metaphor of the weak heart refers to Katia’s inability to claim her freedom and break the chains of her slavery. Regarding this point, a brief summary of the plot of this story, one of Dostoevsky’s lesser-known works, will help the reader follow the analysis. Twilight of the Idols: “‘Wicked people have no songs’ – How come the Russians have songs?” (TI, Maxims and Barbs, 22) For an extended interpretation of this maxim, see Poljakova (2006). 11 See the letters to his mother Franziska of 22 December, 1886 (#782) and to Franz Overbeck of 25 December, 1886 (#783). 12 See ES: 3: “Il menait une existence monotone et solitaire.” 

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The Landlady narrates the story of a young man, Ordynov, who, while searching for new accommodation, ends up in a church. There he sees an attractive girl, Katia, in the company of an old man named Murin. Struck by the beauty of the girl, Ordynov decides to follow the couple. By chance, the young man discovers that there is a room for rent in the apartment where the couple lives. Very much against Murin’s will, Ordynov moves into the apartment. Ordynov soon falls in love with Katia, who is troubled by her past. Later, the young man becomes ill and, as in a dream, Katia tells him her story. The girl feels guilty about living with the man who killed her father and was her mother’s lover. She also believes that she is Murin’s illegitimate daughter. For these reasons, Katia lives as a slave to her sin under the control of Murin who, like a sorcerer, reminds her ceaselessly of the sin she once committed. Ordynov is not powerful enough to free Katia from her slavery and, unable to break Murin’s control over her soul, has to part from her. Consequently, the young man falls sick again. In this story, the two themes of the weak heart and the psychology of the priest are strictly connected. The psychological mechanism described by Dostoevsky is the following: having killed Katia’s parents and kidnapped her, Murin lays the blame on the young girl, persuading her that he has ruined himself for her sake.13 The old man is thus able to convince the girl of her sin, but at the same time he pretends to be her protector and her spiritual guide by reading her the books of the Old Believers and by showing her the way to redemption.14 By the use of a “perverted hermeneutics” (Llinares 2009a: 84), Murin makes Katia responsible for what happened. Though still young, the girl feels irreparably damned. Her sin is so great and her will so weak, that Katia will never be able to break her chains. These are the premises upon which her submission to Murin is based.

13 See L: 179: “Lead me away from misfortune, as previously you led me to it; I have ruined my soul for your sake.” (ES: 90: “Sauve-moi, puisque c’est toi qui m’as perdu. Je me suis damné pour toi !”) 14 See L: 174: “All I do know is that he keeps telling me: ‘Pray, pray!’ Sometimes I get up in the dead of night and pray for a long time, several hours.” (ES: 78: “Il me dit : Prie ! prie ! Et je me lève, dans le noir de la nuit, et je prie longtemps, longtemps, des heures entières.”)

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A similar psychological mechanism is described by Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morality, i.e., in the work that “contains the first psychology of the priest” (EH, The Genealogy of Morality), and partially also in The Anti-Christ. According to Nietzsche’s interpretation, the ascetic priest controls the herd of the sick, the sufferers, and the weak. He must be strong, master of himself with an intact will to power, to be both needed and feared by the sick. The ascetic priest is the support and the tyrant of the herd: support, because he soothes their pain; tyrant, because he poisons the weak, making them more sick so that they do not stop asking for his help.15 Through a false interpretation of physiological pain, the ascetic priest makes the sufferers take the blame for their pain. In order to achieve this goal, he uses “such paradoxical and paralogical concepts as ‘guilt’, ‘sin’, ‘sinfulness’, ‘corruption’, ‘damnation.’” (GM, III, 16). A physiological cause is explained through a false moral and religious interpretation. The following passage from the Genealogy of Morality, can be easily applied to The Landlady and read as an explanation for what happened to Katia: “Man, suffering from himself in some way, at all events physiologically, rather like an animal imprisoned in a cage, unclear as to why? what for? And yearning for reasons – reasons bring relief –, yearning for cures and narcotics as well, finally consults someone who knows hidden things too – and lo and behold! from this magician, the ascetic priest, he receives the first tip as to the ‘cause’ of his suffering: he should look for it within himself, in guilt, in a piece of the past, he should understand his suffering itself as a condition of punishment. . .” (GM, III, 20)

As Miller (1973: 247) points out, the ascetic priest of the Genealogy of Morality, described by Nietzsche as a sorcerer and a “herald and mouthpiece of more mysterious powers” (GM, III, 15) has his prototype in Murin, the old man who can predict the future and who also appears as a master of the dark arts.16 At the same time, Katia’s complete submission 15 See A, 49: “People should not look to the outside, they should look within; and being learners, they should not be too clever or careful at looking into things, they should not look at anything at all: they should suffer… And they should suffer so that they are always in need of a priest.” 16 See L: 193 [Katia is speaking to Murin]: “Tell me my fortune, old man! Tell it for me, father, tell it before you drink your mind away; here is my white palm! After all, it is not for nothing that people call you a sorcerer. You have learned from books, and know the black lore inside out!” (ES: 116: “Dis-moi l’avenir, 

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to Murin recalls the way in which the ascetic priest tyrannizes and manipulates the herd of the weak and sick. Moreover, like Nietzsche’s sufferer who is like a hen imprisoned by a chalk line (see GM, III, 20), Katia is unable to step out of the circle of sinfulness traced by Murin. But what is worse, is that her sin has become a source of pleasure for her, as she admits in the following passage: “What grieves me and tears at my heart is that I am his degraded slave, that my shame and my degradation are sweet to me, […] that my greedy heart finds it sweet to remember my suffering as though it were joy and happiness.” (L: 182)17 This psychology of masochism (Frank 1976: 341), which also plays a pivotal role in the second part of L’esprit souterrain, recalls the sinner of the Genealogy of Morality who seeks martyrdom with excitement: “everywhere, the sinner breaking himself on the cruel wheel of a restless and morbidly lustful conscience; everywhere, dumb torment, the most extreme fear, the agony of the tortured heart, the paroxysms of unknown happiness, the cry for ‘redemption.’” (GM, III, 20) The similarities between Dostoevsky’s and Nietzsche’s psychological analysis are evident. As a deep reader, Nietzsche was able to discover, under the superficial veil of a romantic story, the psychological, moral, and religious dynamics of power and slavery, of control and submission, described in The Landlady. These dynamics are not only present in the submissive relationship between Murin and Katia, but also in the triangle that involves the couple and Ordynov. In fact, despite his young age and Katia’s infatuation with him, Ordynov is unable to break the chains that bind the girl to the old man: like Katia’s heart, Ordynov’s personality is weak, unable to compete with Murin.18 Love relationships vieillard, dis-moi mon avenir avant d’avoir noyé ton esprit dans le vin. Voici ma main blanche… Ce n’est pas pour rien qu’on t’appelle sorcier. Tu as étudiés dans les livres et tu connais toutes les sciences diaboliques.”) 17 See ES: 96: “Mon plus grand chagrin, celui qui me rend l’âme amère, c’est que je suis l’esclave enchantée de ma honte, c’est que j’aime mon opprobre, c’est que je me complais comme en un bonheur au souvenir de mon déshonneur !” 18 See L: 208 [Murin is speaking to Ordynov]: “You may grab hold of a knife in irritation, or your enemy, unarmed, may set about you with his bare hands as if you were a sheep and tear open your throat with his teeth. But just let them put the knife in your hand, and let your enemy bare his broad chest before you – and sure as anything you’ll step back!” (ES: 142: “Vous le savez vous-même, dans un moment de colère on prend un poignard ! Ou encore, on attaque son ennemi dans

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are power relationships and the weak heart needs to be guided and commanded by a strong personality: that is the truth of Dostoevsky’s novel, a truth ignored by Ordynov because of his youth and inexperience.19 Nietzsche’s attention was thus drawn to Dostoevsky’s psychological analysis of human relationships. However, what the novelist denounces as perversion and distortion, constitutes for Nietzsche the core of love and social relationships, which in his opinion are naturally based on will to power dynamics. It is therefore safe to assume that, beneath the romantic veil of the novel, Nietzsche recognized in The Landlady the presence of a refined psychological analysis that, in a certain way, accorded with his own idiosyncratic view of the human soul. If we take into consideration these aspects, together with the reiteration of musical elements (see Llinares 2009a: 89f.) and “the folklore aspect of the story and its evocation of the Old Russian past” (Frank 1976: 339), Nietzsche’s definition of The Landlady as an unknown and un-German music should no longer surprise.20

son sommeil et on lui déchire la gorge avec les dents ! Mais si alors on te mettait le poignard entre les mains et si ton ennemi t’ouvrait de lui-même sa poitrine, va ! tu reculerais !…”) 19 See ibid.: “Oh, master, you’re awfully young! Your heart’s still as passionate as that of a maiden wiping her tears away with her sleeve because she’s been forsaken! You know, master, a weak man cannot control himself on his own. Give him everything, and he’ll come of his own accord and give it all back to you; give him half the world, just try it, and what do you think he’ll do? He’ll hide himself in your shoe immediately, that small will he make himself. Give a weak man freedom and he’ll fetter it himself and give it back to you. A foolish heart has no use for freedom!” (ES: 141f.: “Hé! Barine, vous êtes trop jeune, vous avez le cœur trop chaud : vous voilà comme une fille abandonnée qui essuie ses larmes avec sa manche. Oui, vous n’avez pas d’expérience, vous ne savez pas qu’un cœur faible est incapable de se conduire. Donnez-lui tout : il viendra et vous le rendra. Donnezlui un royaume : il viendra se cacher dans votre bottine… Oui, il se fera assez petit pour cela. Donnez-lui la liberté, il se forgera lui-même des nouvelles chaînes. La liberté n’est pas faite pour les cœurs faibles…”) 20 For a wider analysis of Nietzsche’s reading of The Landlady, see the aforementioned works of Miller (1973) and Llinares (2009a). For a further analysis of Nietzsche’s position towards romanticism, see the section “Dostoevsky as Artist. Russian Pessimism and Décadence” in the first part of this work. 

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3. L’esprit souterrain (Lisa, Notes from Underground)

If The Landlady caught Nietzsche’s attention, the French adaptation of Notes from Underground definitively proved to him that he had found in Dostoevsky a kindred spirit. Indeed, let us recall, Nietzsche described the second part of L’esprit souterrain as “a stroke of genius in psychology, a sort of self-ridicule of γνωθι σαυτόν” in the letter to Overbeck of 23 February, 1887 and as “a true stroke of genius in psychology – a frightening and cruel piece of mockery of γνωθι σαυτόν, but done with such a light audacity and joy in his superior power, that I was drunk with delight” in the letter to Gast of 7 March, 1887. It is immediately clear that Nietzsche’s attention was mainly drawn to two strictly related themes: psychology and self-knowledge. In what follows, I will begin my analysis by focusing on the latter issue. The first question we need to ask is: why did Nietzsche define the Notes as a “self-ridicule” and “mockery” of γνωθι σαυτόν? Curiously, Nietzsche’s definition derives from an interpolation of the translators.21 Indeed, in the apocryphal introduction to the second part of L’esprit souterrain, an anonymous narrator (added by translators Halpérine and Morice) describes the story of the underground man as a sad response to the Delphic maxim “know thyself ” and concludes that it is no good for man to know himself: “Car cet homme se vit et se connut, et son destin est une triste réponse à l’antique maxime  : «connais-toi. » – Non, il n’est pas bon à l’homme de se connaître lui-même.” (ES: 156) 21 When analyzing Nietzsche’s reading of the second part of L’esprit souterrain, it is essential to take into consideration that the translation of Notes from Underground was mutilated and unfaithful. As Miller (1973: 207) points out, “A comparison of the Halpérine-Morice text with Dostoevsky’s Russian reveals that the French translators give a reasonably faithful version of the ‘Landlady,’ while ‘adapting’ the Notes as a sequel to ‘Katia’ by inserting a series of fabricated passages which refer back to the ‘Katia’ episode […] and by deleting substantial sections of the original, particularly in the first part of the Notes, ‘Подполье’ (Underground).” 

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Precisely this interpolation afforded Nietzsche the key for reading the Notes. Provided with a hypertrophic conscience, the underground man sounds the depths of his darkest thoughts.22 Introspection is carried out meticulously, but the result is not positive. Ill-will, cowardice, narrow-mindedness, selfishness, mistrust, laziness, and lack of selfesteem: among others, these characteristics clearly emerge from the unmerciful self-analysis of Dostoevsky’s anti-hero. Instead of helping the underground man find a way out of his paralyzing situation, the pursuit of self-knowledge leads him to recognize that what poured out of him was only an “eternal and ironic negation.”23 Nietzsche did not fail to notice this paradoxical aspect of Dostoevsky’s novel, as the following passage from a letter to Overbeck on 13 May, 1887 clearly shows: “That the sharpest psychological analysis and insight still do not add anything more to the value of a man, this is precisely the problem that interests Dostoevsky the most: probably because he has experienced it so often very closely in Russian relationships! (By the way, concerning this topic, I suggest D.[ostoevsky]’s short work ‘l’esprit souterrain’, recently translated into French, the second part of which illustrates that very real paradox in an all but dreadful way).” (#847)

The paradox that, according to Nietzsche, the Notes illustrates, consists in the fact that self-knowledge is essentially ineffectual: although the underground man pursues a sharp analysis of the psychological motives of his action, still, he cannot help acting as he does, that is, in a cynical and unmoral way. Far from being a positive quality, a hypertrophic conscience rather confers a disadvantage on the man who possesses it, as the underground man tells us in plain words: “I swear to you, gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness. For man’s everyday use, ordinary human consciousness would be

22 See ES: 155 (the following passage is an interpolation): “Toujours agitant d’obs­ curs problèmes, toujours sondant les ténèbres de sa pensée, toujours creusant plus avant et plus profond dans les mystères de sa conscience.” 23 See ES: 188f. (interpolation): “Mon passé est une perpétuelle et ironique négation. Hélas ! j’ai rêvé, je n’ai pas vécu !”

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more than enough; that is, a half, a quarter of the portion that falls to the lot of a developed man in our unfortunate nineteenth century.” (NU: 8)24

Another problematic aspect of self-knowledge which seems to emerge from the underground man’s confession, is that self-knowledge is not easily attainable. As Gary Saul Morson (1994: 24) points out in his Introductory Study to Dostoevsky’s A Writer’s Diary, “Dostoevsky’s novels are filled with characters’ apparently true but actually false confessions, in which the very spirit of the revelation conflicts with its ostensible purpose. Those novels repeatedly dramatize the ways in which the dynamics of self-deceit and self-justification distort efforts at self-knowledge.” Notes from Underground offers a typical example of these dynamics. Although the underground man’s aim is to present an honest and trustworthy picture of his life and soul, he cannot avoid lying and distorting reality, as he himself confesses in a moment of frankness: “If I myself believed at least something of all I’ve just written. For I swear to you, gentlemen, that I do not believe a word, not one little word, of all I’ve just scribbled! That is, I do believe, perhaps, but at the same time, who knows why, I sense and suspect that I’m lying like a cobbler.” (NU: 35)25 The underground man’s wounded pride and vanity, which lead him to present a somewhat falsified picture of reality, conflicts with his genuine effort to be honest and frank. The result of this conflict is a partial and unavoidable distortion of his self-knowledge. Nietzsche’s enthusiastic response to the Notes will not surprise those who are familiar with his critical attitude towards self-knowledge and his profound scepticism about it. This scepticism, which is undoubtedly 24 See ES: 162: “C’est une maladie que d’avoir une conscience trop aiguë de ses pensées et de ses actions, une vraie maladie. Une conscience ordinaire, médiocre, suffirait, et au-delà, aux besoins quotidiens de l’humanité ; ce serait assez de la moitié, du quart de la conscience commune aux hommes cultivés de notre malheureux dix-neuvième siècle.” The underground man goes as far as to state that not only a hypertrophic conscience, but even conscience in itself is a disease. See NU: 8: “I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.” (ES: 163: “Il n’est pas moins vrai que non-seulement un excès de conscience est maladif, mais que la conscience ellemême, en soi et en principe, est une maladie, je le soutiens…”) 25 See ES: 189: “Je vous jure, messieurs, que je ne crois pas un traître mot de tout ce que je viens d’écrire, - c’est-à-dire, peut-être bien au contraire j’y crois très-vivement, – et pourtant quelque chose me dit que je mens comme un cordonnier.” 

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patent in the works of the late period, can be traced back at least to the period of Human, All Too Human, if not to the unpublished writing On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense, written in 1873.26 It would be, therefore, hardly wrong to say that throughout his work Nietzsche’s attitude towards self-knowledge has been (almost)27 always critical. If we take into consideration this context, part of Nietzsche’s positive response to the second part of L’esprit souterrain becomes fully clear. Concerning this point, Müller-Buck (2002: 95–99) has drawn attention to the influence that the reading of L’esprit souterrain had on Nietzsche. In particular, in the song Amid Birds of Prey from the Dionysus-Dithyrambs (composed in 1888), Zarathustra is defined as a self-hangman precisely for having dug and crept into himself: “Now – / alone with yourself, / twofold in self- knowledge, / amid a hundred mirrors / false before yourself, / amid a hundred memories / uncertain, / wearied by 26 See the following passage from TL, 1: “What do human beings really know about themselves? Are they even capable of perceiving themselves in their entirety just once, stretched out as in an illuminated glass case? […] Nature has thrown away the key, and woe betide fateful curiosity should it ever succeed in peering through a crack in the chamber of consciousness, out and down into the depths, and thus gain an intimation of the fact that humanity, in the indifference of its ignorance, rests on the pitiless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous – clinging in dreams, as it were, to the back of a tiger.” It is, however, from the period of Human, All Too Human on, that Nietzsche visibly assumes a critical stance towards self-knowledge (see HH, I, 32 and 491, and HH, II, 223). On Nietzsche’s attitude towards self-knowledge, see Schlimgen (1998: 134–138), Lupo (2006: 225–232), Katsafanas (forth.) and Stellino (forth.). 27 In The Birth of Tragedy, Apollo appears as “the magnificent divine image (Götterbild) of the principium individuationis” (BT, 1), the deification of the same principle which “knows just one law: the individual, which is to say, respect for the limits of the individual, measure in the Hellenic sense.” (BT 4) Opposing every kind of excess and exaggeration, Apollo exacts measure from his disciples and, in order to maintain it, he requires self-knowledge. It is in this sense that Nietzsche defines him as an “ethical deity” who demands his disciples to know themselves. In On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life the Delphic maxim has a positive connotation: as the ancient Greeks learned through it to organize the chaos of forms and concepts inherited by foreign cultures (they concentrated on themselves, that is, on their genuine needs and let the pseudo-needs die out), similarly, in Nietzsche’s view, in order to recover from his historical disease, the modern man should recall to his mind the Delphic imperative and learn to organize the chaos within him.

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every wound, / frozen by every frost, / chocked in your own net, / self-knower! / self-hangman!”28

Müller-Buck’s hypothesis (2002: 98) is that the “unconquerable distrust in the possibility of self-knowledge” shown by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil (§281) became a deep-rooted conviction after his reading of the Notes. Müller-Buck is certainly right in stressing that reading the Notes strengthened even more Nietzsche’s critical attitude towards self-knowledge. As shown, however, Nietzsche’s scepticism was already a prominent feature of his philosophy at the time of his discovery of Dostoevsky. In this sense, it would probably be safer to say that part of Nietzsche’s enthusiastic reaction to the reading of the Notes can be explained by his previous scepticism towards self-knowledge. Let us now focus on the other aspect that caught Nietzsche’s attention: psychology. One of the peculiar aspects of Nietzsche’s conception of psychology is that in order to gain an insight into “the human soul and its limits” (BGE, 45), the psychologist must have previously liberated from morality. Indeed, according to Nietzsche, it is precisely because of the inhibiting and distorting function operated by morality that “all psychology so far […] has not ventured into the depths.” (BGE, 23) The result is that psychologists have all stopped at the surface of psychological phenomena, giving a superficial interpretation of them: as Nietzsche puts it, “the power of moral prejudice has deeply affected the most spiritual world […] and the effect has been manifestly harmful, hindering, dazzling, and distorting.” (ibid.)29 Seeking to reverse this tendency and to free psychology from the moral prejudice, Nietzsche emphasizes the importance of relying on physiology for a proper understanding of the human soul,30 and exhorts psychologists to destroy any

28 As Müller-Buck (2002: 98) points out, hangman (bourreau) is precisely how the underground man calls his servant Apollon, a name that evidently recalls the Greek god Apollo. 29 See also EH, Why I Write such Good Books, 5: “Morality, the Circe of humanity, has fundamental falsified – moralified – all psychologica.” For a wider analysis of Nietzsche’s understanding of psychology, see particularly Wotling (1997) and Pippin (2010). 30 In BGE, 23, Nietzsche famously presents his conception of psychology as a “physio-psychology”. According to Nietzsche, any correct interpretation of the 

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remnants of morality and to sail “straight over and away from morality.” (ibid.) Nietzsche’s definition of the French adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground as a stroke of genius in psychology must be read in the context of this critique of traditional, i.e. moralized psychology. As we have already seen, in the Notes, the underground man attempts to present a truthful memoir of his miserable life. The introspective and psychological analysis plumbs the most inner depths of the human soul, i.e. the same depths into which, in Nietzsche’s opinion, the moralized psychologists had not dared to descend. As mentioned, this effort at self-knowledge is distorted by dynamics of self-deceit and self-justification. Nevertheless, the confession of the underground man neither hides the most selfish and immoral aspects of his personality, nor conceals the true causes of his behaviour, that is, precisely those “affects of hatred, envy, greed, and power-lust” which Nietzsche recognized in Beyond Good and Evil as “the conditioning affects of life.” (BGE, 23) Most probably, it was the union of these two apparently contradictory elements (that is, the scepticism towards pure self-knowledge and the mastery in psychological examination) that led Nietzsche to understand Dostoevsky as a great psychologist. Indeed, on the one hand, Dostoevsky knew that the first problem one is faced with when trying to know the self is precisely an unconscious resistance, which takes the shape of a dynamics of self-deceit and self-justification, and which makes pure self-knowledge unattainable. However, on the other hand, Dostoevsky was also aware that self-observation has more chances to be successful if the psychological examination is pursued in depth, bypassing, as it were, morality. In this sense, the Notes can be taken to represent a clear example of Dostoevsky’s “depth-psychology”. Using the fictitious character of the underground man, the novelist was able to dig and descend into the depths of the human soul, describing its most obscure aspects without hiding them under a veil of moral hypocrisy. From a Nietzschean perspective, Dostoevsky had successfully followed the footsteps of those French moralists such as Montaigne, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld and Chamfort, whom Nietzsche esteemed to such a psychological processes cannot avoid referring to the physiological substratum of the psyche, i.e. the body.

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degree as to describe them in Human, All Too Human as “masters of psychical examination [Meister der Seelenprüfung].” (HH, I, 36) Their mastery consisted precisely in their ability to dissect human actions, suspiciously probing their apparent motives and searching for the complexity hidden behind the illusory simplicity. In a similar way, the underground man had dissected his soul with great mastery, although, as we know, the result was far from being positive. Nietzsche appreciated the second part of L’esprit souterrain not only because it represented a paradigmatic example of psychological introspection, but also because in this part, more than in the first one, Dostoevsky had succeeded to understand and describe with great mastery the fundamental psychological mechanism of the ever-growing feeling of resentment caused by a frustrated vengeance. As I will show in the following section, this aspect is central to Nietzsche’s reception of Dostoevsky’s works.



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4. Resentment

In order to explain how the feeling of resentment originates and develops, the underground man distinguishes between two rather different types of man who react to an offense in opposite ways. On the one hand, there is “the real, normal man” who, once he is possessed by the feeling of revenge, simply dashes straight for his object like a raging bull. No time is left for reflection and hesitation, so that the reaction is here spontaneous and immediate. On the other hand, there is “the man of the heightened consciousness” who represents the antithesis of the normal man. This type of man feels so inferior to the normal man, that he regards himself as a mouse. How does this mouse act, if he feels offended? Even if his desire of paying the offender back is more intense than that of the normal man, the man of the heightened consciousness is unable to avenge himself because of his hypertrophic consciousness. Instead of reacting spontaneously, this man is paralysed by doubts, thoughts and anxieties, so that having missed his opportunity to retaliate against the injurer, he has no other choice than “to wave the whole thing aside with its little paw and, with a smile of feigned contempt, in which it does not believe itself, slip back shamefacedly into its crack.” (NU: 12)31 It is precisely in this moment that the feeling of resentment originates and develops. Dostoevsky describes this mechanism of psychic self-poisoning with absolute mastery: “There, in its loathsome, stinking underground, our offended, beaten-down, and derided mouse at once immerses itself in cold, venomous, and, above all, everlasting spite. For forty years on end it will recall its offense to the last, most shameful details, each time adding even more shameful details of its own, spitefully taunting and chafing itself with its fantasies. It will be ashamed of its fantasies, but all the same it will recall everything, go over everything, heap all sorts of figments on itself, under the pretext that they, too, could have happened, and forgive nothing. It may even begin to take revenge, but somehow in snatches, with piddling things, 31 See ES: 169: “Il ne lui reste évidemment qu’à faire, de sa petite patte, un geste dédaigneux, et à se dérober honteusement dans son trou avec un sourire de mépris artificiel auquel il ne croit pas lui-même.” 

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from behind the stove, incognito, believing neither in its right to revenge itself nor in the success of its vengeance, and knowing beforehand that it will suffer a hundred times more from all its attempts at revenge than will the object of its vengeance, who will perhaps not even scratch at the bite.” (NU: 12f.)32

Curiously, if the result of this process of self-poisoning is the ever-growing feeling of resentment, this situation paradoxically produces in the offended a subtle pleasure of a very strange sort: “But it is precisely in this cold, loathsome half-despair, half-belief, in this conscious burying oneself alive from grief for forty years in the underground, in this assiduously produced and yet somewhat dubious hopelessness of one’s position, in all this poison of unsatisfied desires penetrating inward, in all this fever of hesitations, of decisions taken forever, and repentances coming again a moment later, that the very sap of that strange pleasure I was talking about consists.” (NU: 13)33

If we compare this analysis with the one provided by Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morality, we observe several, striking similarities between Dostoevsky’s spiteful underground man and Nietzsche’s man of ressentiment. Recall that, according to Nietzsche’s well-known genealogical hypothesis, unable to overthrow the masters’ supremacy, the slaves, “rankled with poisonous and hostile feelings” (GM, I, 10), take revenge of their oppressors by a “revolt in morality.” (GM, I, 7) These powerless, but clever men, “who, denied the proper response of action, compensate for it only with imaginary revenge” (GM, I, 10), triumph 32 See ibid.: “Là, dans son souterrain infect et sale, notre rat offensé et raillé se cache aussitôt dans sa méchanceté froide, empoisonné, éternelle. Quarante années de suite il va se rappeler jusqu’aux plus honteux détails de son offense et, chaque fois il ajoutera des détails plus honteux encore, en s’irritant de sa perverse fantaisie, inventant des circonstances aggravantes sous prétextes qu’elles auraient pu avoir lieu, et ne se pardonnant rien. Il essayera même, peut-être, de se venger, mais d’une manière intermittente, par des petitesses, de derrière le poêle, incognito, sans croire ni à la justice de sa cause, ni à son succès, car il sait d’avance que de tous ces essais de vengeance il souffrira lui-même cent fois plus que son ennemi.” 33 See ES: 170: “Mais c’est précisément en ce dernier désespoir, en cette foi boiteuse, en ce conscient ensevelissement de quarante ans dans le souterrain, en ce poison des désirs inassouvis, en cette turbulence fiévreuse des décisions prises pour l’éternité et en un moment revisées que consiste l’essence de ce plaisir étrange dont je parlais.” This is another, clear example of Dostoevsky’s psychology of masochism.

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by reversing the noble method of valuation. According to Nietzsche, the driving force of this reversal of values is the slaves’ resentment: this is precisely why he defines them in the Genealogy as “men of ressentiment.” A brief comparison between this type and the underground man reveals how deeply indebted to Dostoevsky Nietzsche’s characterization of the man of ressentiment is. In the same way in which Dostoevsky distinguishes between the normal man, who acts spontaneously, and the man of the heightened consciousness, whose action is blocked by his hypertrophic consciousness, Nietzsche introduces in the Genealogy the antithesis between the noble man and the man of ressentiment.34 The former is described as “the active, aggressive, over-reaching man” (GM, II, 11). He is bold and powerful. Action and active affects, which are in Nietzsche’s opinion of great biological value and a pointer of a “powerful physicality, a blossoming, rich, even effervescent good health” (GM, I, 7), are what characterizes him. On the contrary, the man of ressentiment is physiologically weak and sick. This physiological condition causes a radical inability to act. The typical features of this type of man are, therefore, reactive affects and resentful feelings.35 One of the main characteristics that distinguishes Nietzsche’s man of ressentiment is without doubt his predisposition for holding a grudge and avenging himself, as the following passages from the Genealogy clearly show: “These worm-eaten physiological casualties are all men of ressentiment, a whole, vibrating realm of subterranean [unterirdisches; my italics] revenge, inexhaustible and insatiable in its eruptions against the happy, and likewise in masquerades of revenge and pretexts for revenge.” (GM, III, 14) “The sufferers, one and all, are frighteningly willing and inventive in their pretexts for painful emotions; they even enjoy being mistrustful and dwelling on wrongs and imagined slights: they rummage through the bowels of their past and present for obscure, questionable stories that will allow them to wallow in tortured 34 Notice that although Nietzsche had already described the conceptual pair of master type/slave type in Beyond Good and Evil (IX, 260), he first introduced the pair active man/reactive man (or man of ressentiment) in the Genealogy. 35 As Stegmaier (1994: 120) points out, Nietzsche’s “extreme typecasting of opposites [Gegensatz-Typisierung]” is a strategy used to make his critique of the slave morality more effective. 

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suspicion, and intoxicate themselves with their own poisonous wickedness – they rip open the oldest wounds and make themselves bleed to death from scars longsince healed, they make evil-doers out of friend, wife, child and anyone else near to them.” (GM, III, 15) 36

As can be noticed, the psychic mechanism of self-poisoning described by Nietzsche is very similar to the one analyzed by Dostoevsky in the Notes. The sick physiological condition makes the weak feel envy and a burning desire for revenge against the well-born. This unsatisfied desire gives rise to the feeling of resentment which, like a worm, begins to gnaw at the psyche. Resentment poisons the soul, but at the same time a strange phenomenon appears: the sufferer enjoys his suffering, his pain turns into a source of pleasure. The insulted is tormented by suspicions, he looks for pretexts for revenge, ponders possible outrages: in short, he intoxicates himself with the poison of resentment and at the same time enjoys the pain he inflicts upon himself. Several more pieces of textual evidence can be found that prove the influence exerted by Dostoevsky’s portrayal of the underground man on Nietzsche’s characterization of the man of ressentiment. For instance, a typical characteristic of the underground man is his preference for dark, subterranean, and hidden places. Like a mouse, he lives in a dark underground place, a poor and miserable corner on the edge of St. Petersburg. Likewise, the man of ressentiment “loves dark corners [Schlupfwinkel]37, secret paths and back-doors, everything secretive appeals to him as being his world, his security, his comfort.” (GM, I, 10) A life passed in seclusion has had a negative impact on the underground man. His preference for dark places reveals a spiritual condition or, to use the expression of the French translators, an “underground spirit.”38 36 It is no coincidence that in a footnote to his translation of the Genealogy, Kaufmann writes that, “the most striking illustration of this sentence is found in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground.” See W. Kaufmann (ed. and trans.), Basic Writings of Nietzsche. New York: Random House, 2000, p. 564. 37 The German word Schlupfwinkel (Winkel means “corner”) recalls the French substantive “coin” which is repeated several times in the French translation. 38 See ES: 155 (the following passage is a part of the apocryphal introduction and is therefore an interpolation): “Il se considérait, et n’avait pas tort, comme exilé du monde en soi-même, loin du mouvement et de la lumière, loin de la vie. Aussi retrouvera-t-on souvent dans ces notes le mot ‘souterrain’. Il vivait, en effet, en une sorte de souterrain spirituel, il avait un ESPRIT SOUTERRAIN…”

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In his turn, Nietzsche’s man of ressentiment is “neither upright nor naïve, nor honest and straight with himself.” (ibid.) The workshop where he fabricates his ideals “stink[s] of lies.” (GM, I, 14). Further evidence of how strongly the reading of the second part of L’esprit souterrain influenced Nietzsche can be easily found in the Genealogy of Morality.39 It is also probable that, as Müller-Buck (2002: 99) points out, the influence of Dostoevsky on the Genealogy was so evident that Nietzsche decided to avoid explicitly mentioning his name or even hinting at him in this work. Indeed, the passage from the third essay “here nothing flourishes or grows any more, except, perhaps, for St Petersburg metapolitics and Tolstoi’s ‘compassion’” (GM, III, 26) originally appeared in the drafts as “Petersburg metaphysics and Dostoevsky.”40 On the other hand, Pfeuffer (2008: 45) is also right in stressing that the modification may be explained by the fact that Nietzsche could have also decided to give a different nuance to the final version. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that the reading of the French adaptation of the Notes left a deep impression on Nietzsche’s mind and influenced 39 In GM, I, 14 Nietzsche describes the weak as “cellar rats full of revenge and hatred.” The German expression Kellerthiere, explicitly referred to the men of ressentiment mentioned a few lines later, leaves no doubt that Nietzsche had Dostoevsky’s novel on his mind here. See also the following passage from GM, I, 10: “He [the man of ressentiment] knows all about keeping quiet, not forgetting, waiting, temporarily humbling and abasing himself.” In the two following passages from The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche also uses a terminology that clearly recalls that of the Notes: “Nonetheless, the God of the ‘great numbers’, the democrat among Gods, did not become a proud, heathen God: he stayed Jewish, he was still the cranny God [Gott der Winkel], the God of all dark nooks and corners, of unhealthy districts the world over!… His empire is as it ever was, an empire of the underworld, a hospital, a basement-kingdom [Souterrain-Reich], a ghetto-kingdom…” (A, 17); “There is no sense of a public presence; the hide-away [Versteck], the unlit room [dunkle Raum] is Christian.” (A, 21) Concerning the expression “Souterrain-Reich” used by Nietzsche in section 17 of The Anti-Christ, however, Sommer (2000: 191f) points out that the metaphor of the “subterranean” can also be found in the first sentence of the Introduction of Renan’s Vie de Jesus (a work which, as we will see, Nietzsche read and later criticized in The Anti-Christ). See Renan (1863: III): “Une histoire des «  Origines du Christianisme  » devrait embrasser toute la période obscure, et, si j’ose le dire, souterraine, qui s’étend depuis les premiers commencements de cette religion jusqu’au moment où son existence devient un fait public, notoire, évident aux yeux de tous.” 40 See KSA 14: 382. 

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his analysis of resentment and his characterization of the man of ressentiment. Although this influence was already recognized by Halévy, (1944: 437 f.) and later examined in detail by Orsucci (2001:60–63) and Müller-Buck (2002: 100–104), unfortunately Nietzsche-scholars still tend to ignore the enormous importance that the reading of the second part of L’esprit souterrain had on Nietzsche’s understanding and characterization of resentment. Within this context, it is now possible to understand the process of change that the concept “resentment” underwent. When Dostoevsky decided to write the Notes, one of his main purposes was to give a critical response to the utopian socialism and rational egoism that Chernyshevsky had illustrated in his novel What Is to Be Done?, first published in 1863 in the journal The Contemporary.41 This work was partially a response to Turgenev’s famous novel Fathers and Sons, which had appeared the previous year. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground was published in 1864 in the journal The Epoch, and, as we know, the first French translation dates from 1886. Nietzsche read the French adaptation of Dostoevsky’s novel during the winter of 1886–87. The characterization of the underground man caught his interest so much that he decided to take it as a model for his man of ressentiment. It was precisely in the French translation that he found the key word (ressentiment) for the characterization of this type.42 From this point onwards (end 1886spring 1887), this word became very important in Nietzsche’s philosophy, being frequently repeated in the Genealogy of Morality, Twilight of the Idols, The Anti-Christ and Ecce Homo, as well as in many posthumous fragments.43 Why this sudden interest? The answer is unequivocal: 41 On this, see Scanlan (2002: 57–80). 42 The word “ressentiment” appears four times in L’esprit souterrain: twice in the first part (ES: 106 and 143) and twice in the second (ES: 168 and 288). Unlike in the Notes, the resentment of Ordynov (ES: 106) and Murin (ES: 143) in The Landlady is not a permanent psychic attitude, but only momentary hatred between two rivals in love. On the contrary, in the Notes resentment plays a basic role in the economy of the novel and is a major feature of the underground man’s character. Although Dostoevsky does not explicitly use the word “ressentiment”, he nevertheless describes the psychological mechanism of self-poisoning which is now commonly known as resentment. 43 The word “Ressentiment” very seldom appears in Nietzsche’s Nachlass before the winter of 1886/87. The first occurrence of the word can be found in PF 9[1],

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during the winter of 1886/87 Nietzsche discovered and read the volume L’esprit souterrain. Thus, the “spiritually limited man” of section 219 of Beyond Good and Evil became, after the reading of the French adaptation of the Notes, the “man of ressentiment” of the Genealogy of Morality. In this work, Nietzsche developed Dostoevsky’s analysis of resentment and made this feeling play a prominent role in the history of Christian morality. Thanks to Nietzsche, this word acquired the status of terminus technicus (see Scheler 1972 [1915]: 39) and became a philosophical concept. After Nietzsche’s analysis, the attention of intellectuals such as Max Scheler, Jean Améry and René Girard, among others, was drawn to this concept. Before passing to the next point, it might do well to dwell briefly on the final question of the end of resentment in Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. Following Dostoevsky’s distinction between the normal man and the man of heightened consciousness, Nietzsche distinguishes between the opposite attitude that the noble man and the man of ressentiment have towards resentment. In the first essay of the Genealogy, Nietzsche writes, “When ressentiment does occur in the noble man himself, it is consumed and exhausted in an immediate reaction, and therefore it does not poison.” (GM, I, 10) Sometimes resentment even fails to appear in the noble man: “To be unable to take his enemies, his misfortunes and even his misdeeds seriously for long – that is the sign of strong, rounded natures with a superabundance of a power which is flexible, formative, healing and can make one forget.” (ibid.) It is the consciousness of his superiority (the aristocratic pathos of distance) that explains, together with a powerful nature, the ease with which the noble man gets rid of any feeling of resentment: “A man like this shakes from him, with one shrug, many worms which would have burrowed into another man.” (ibid.) summer 1875, which is actually a summary of Eugen Dühring’s Der Werth des Lebens, a summary which Nietzsche made in the summer of 1975 (see Stellino 2011: 120). The word reappears in the very brief posthumous fragment 2[171], autumn 1885 – autumn 1886. For what concerns the correspondence, the only two occurrences before the winter of 1886/87 can be found in the letter to Gast of 16 August, 1883 and in the letter to Reinhart von Seydlitz of 17 August, 1886. After the winter of 1886/87, the word is mentioned 32 times in the Genealogy, 7 in The Anti-Christ, 3 in the Twilight of the Idols, 8 in Ecce Homo and several times in the posthumous fragments. 

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It is precisely the absence of the aforementioned power in the weak and sick person and a sort of inferiority complex that provide the ground from which the plant of resentment can bloom. According to Nietzsche, the man of ressentiment can hardly defend himself against the rise of this feeling which is, however, not to be fought, because “any sort of reaction wears you out too quickly”, and “nothing burns you up more quickly than the affects of ressentiment.” (EH, Why I Am so Wise, 6) Instead of reacting, the sick person has only one remedy: Russian fatalism, the fatalism without revolt that Nietzsche found in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.44 Nietzsche refers to this kind of fatalism for the first time in the following passage from the Genealogy, where the allusion is to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead: “For millennia, wrongdoers overtaken by punishment have felt no different than Spinoza with regard to their ‘offence’: ‘something has gone unexpectedly wrong here’, not ‘I ought not to have done that’ –, they submitted to punishment as you submit to illness or misfortune or death, with that brave, unrebellious fatalism that still gives the Russians, for example, an advantage over us Westerners in the way they handle life.” (GM, II, 15)45

In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche explains the logic of this fatalism: “Not taking anything else on or in, – not reacting at all any more…” (EH, Why I Am so Wise, 6) Since resentment and similar feelings are the most dangerous and therefore forbidden affects for the sick, they are not to be fought at all in order to avoid the “rapid consumption of nervous energy.” (ibid.) This is also what prescribed the Buddha’s “hygiene”, whose “effectiveness […] depends on conquering ressentiment.” (ibid.)46 As a physiologist, Nietzsche believed that the only means the sick had of healing from resentment was to avoid any reaction. To this, however, one could object that resentment might also be overcome through forgiveness – an evangelical virtue dismissed by Nietzsche in the Genealogy as “not-being-able-to-take-revenge” (GM,  I,  14) – sympathy or 44 See Poljakova (2007: 179). 45 As Theo Meyer (2000: 886) points out, Russian fatalism was, therefore, for Nietzsche “a fatalism of strength, of the ability to endure the suffering – and to draw new forces out of the suffering.” 46 See A, 20: “there is nothing his [the Buddha’s] teachings resist more than feelings of revenge, aversion, ressentiment.”

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pity. Even love, as Dostoevsky’s novel clearly shows, might detonate this explosive.47 To see how this could be possible, let us go back to L’esprit souterrain. In this volume, the word “ressentiment” appears for the fourth and last time in relation to Lisa, the prostitute whom the underground man encounters on the night of the farewell dinner organized for Zverkov, an officer in the army. The underground man and Lisa spend a night together, during which he shows her a compassionate and sentimental attitude. A few days after this encounter, Lisa decides to pay a visit to the man who has been so kind to her. The underground man’s reaction is, however, unexpected: feeling embarrassed that the girl has discovered his poverty and has seen how disrespectfully his servant Apollon is towards him, the underground man takes his revenge on the poor prostitute by humiliating her. With great cynicism, he reveals that his compassionate attitude towards her was deceptive and that he was laughing at her. The day of their encounter he had been humiliated, so he needed to unload the offense onto someone else, which happened to be Lisa: “Power, power, that’s what I wanted then, the game was what I wanted, I wanted to achieve your tears, your humiliation, your hysterics – that’s what I wanted then!” (NU: 111)48 Lisa turns initially pale and begins trembling in fear, but then something unexpected occurs. She understands that the underground man himself feels unhappy. “The frightened and insulted feeling” disappears and gives way to compassion and forgiveness. Dostoevsky explicitly mentions the reason for this sudden change: Lisa genuinely and sincerely loves the underground man. Within this context, it is important to note that the word used by Halpérine and Morice (the French translators of L’esprit souterrain) to indicate Lisa’s “insulted feeling” is “ressentiment”. (ES: 288) Thus, when reading the French adaptation of the Notes, Nietzsche most probably did not fail to notice the important distinction between the underground man and Lisa with respect to resentment. Indeed, whereas in the case of the former we have a radical inability to get rid of this feeling which grows and poisons the soul, in the case of the latter resentment is 47 Similar to Dostoevsky, Scheler conceives of forgiveness and agape as remedies against resentment. See Wyman (2007: 121f.). 48 See ES: 285: “Prouver ma force ! prouver ma force ! Voilà ce qu’il me fallait alors. Tes larmes, ton humiliation, ton hystérie, voilà ce qu’il me fallait !” 

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a momentary feeling, the development and growth of which is inhibited by Lisa’s love.49 Nietzsche understood the importance of love in avoiding resentment.50 This aspect is already patent in the Genealogy, when Nietzsche, comparing the noble man and the man of ressentiment, claims that one of the signs of strong natures is their inability to take their enemies seriously for long: “actual ‘love of your enemies’ is also possible here and here alone.” (GM, I, 10) It is, however, with his late portrait of Jesus that Nietzsche clearly appears to be aware of the key role played by love in 49 See Wyman (2007: 137f.). At this point, it is easy to understand why the underground man cannot get rid of his hatred and resentment towards Lisa: he is unable to love her sincerely, since to him love only means domination, possession, and tyranny. The underground man himself confesses this sad truth in his notes: “For me to love meant to tyrannize and to preponderize morally. All my life I’ve been incapable even of picturing any other love, and I’ve reached the point now of sometimes thinking that love consists precisely in the right, voluntarily granted by the beloved object, to be tyrannized over. In my underground dreams as well, I never pictured love to myself otherwise than as a struggle; for me it always started from hatred and ended with moral subjugation, and afterwards I couldn’t even picture to myself what to do with the subjugated object” (NU: 115; ES: 292: “Aimer, pour moi, ne signifiait plus que tyranniser et dominer moralement. Je n’ai même jamais pu concevoir un autre amour, et je suis allé si loin en ce sens qu’aujourd’hui je crois fermement que l’amour consiste en ce droit de tyrannie concédé par l’être aimé. Même dans mes rêves souterrains, je ne me représentais l’amour que comme un duel commencé par la haine et fini par un asservissement moral : mais après ? Je n’aurais su que faire de l’objet asservi !”) It is not difficult to guess how interesting Nietzsche might have found this passage for expressing a similar conception of love to the one he described, for instance, in Z, I, On Little Old and Young Women: “The happiness of the man is: I will. The happiness of woman is: he wills. ‘Behold, just now the world became perfect!’ – thus thinks every woman when she obeys out of entire love.” Also in his late works, the philosopher kept criticizing the moralized conception of love. In section 153 of Beyond Good and Evil he wrote: “Whatever is done out of love takes place beyond good and evil.” Nietzsche thus advocated a “love translated back into nature”, that is, “love as fate, as fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel – and that is precisely what makes it nature! Love, whose method is war, whose basis is the deadly heatred between the sexes!” (CW 2) Nietzsche repeats this definition in EH, Why I Write such Good Books, 5. For a wider analysis of love in Nietzsche’s philosophy, see Thiele (1991), Ries (1995) and Piazzesi (2010). 50 This is an important aspect which Wyman (2007: 136–139) fails to notice in the last section of her paper dedicated to agape as a remedy against resentment.

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overcoming resentment. In The Anti-Christ, Jesus’ “extreme over-sensitivity and capacity for suffering” leads him to an “instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all hostility, all boundaries and distances in feelings.” (A, 30) Love is, therefore, perceived “as the only, the final possibility for life.” (ibid.) Jesus’ doctrine is a “religion of love” (ibid.), whose message is “not to defend yourself, not to get angry, not to lay blame […] But not to resist evil either, – to love it…” (A, 35). Such a non-belligerent man accepts his death in an exemplary way, by showing “the freedom, the superiority over every feeling of ressentiment.” (A, 40)51 It should now be clear that the fact that Nietzsche discovered Dostoevsky through the volume L’esprit souterrain, played an essential role in his understanding of the novelist as a psychologist.52 Ever since his discovery of Dostoevsky, Nietzsche regarded the writer as a great connoisseur of the human soul. In a letter addressed to Emily Finn of 4 March, 1887 he wrote, “This winter I have given much thought to the soul qualities of the Russian people thanks to the eminent psychologist Dostoevsky to whom even the most modern Paris has no one to compare when it comes to acuteness of analysis.” (#812) This opinion did not change with the passage of time. On the contrary, later readings confirmed his first impression. In the letter to Georg Brandes of 20 November, 1888 Nietzsche defined Dostoevsky as “the most valuable psychological material known to me” (#1151), whereas in the Twilight of the Idols (Reconnaissance Raids of an Untimely Man, 45) he confessed that Dostoevsky had been the only psychologist from whom he had anything to learn.

51 It is no coincidence that Frank (1995: 318), referring to Prince Myshkin (the main character in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot upon whose model Nietzsche formed his portrayal of Jesus, as we will see later), speaks about a “complete lack of resentment.” On this, see also Poljakova (2013: 465–498). 52 Curiously, in a note from in his last notebook Dostoevsky wrote, “They call me a psychologist: it’s not true, I am a realist in a higher sense, that is, I depict all the depths of the human soul.” (quoted by Frank 2002: 739) Paradoxically, Nietzsche understood Dostoevsky as a psychologist precisely for his ability in depicting all the depths of the human soul. 

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5.  Notes from the House of the Dead

During the night of 22 April, 1849 in Saint Petersburg, twenty-eight members of the Petrashevsky circle were arrested and brought to the Peter and Paul Fortress. Petrashevsky and the other members of his circle were charged with crimes against the government. Among the convicts was a young writer by the name of F. Dostoevsky. The novelist was charged with the public reading of a letter to Gogol written in 1847 by Russian literary critic Belinsky in response to Gogol’s Selected Passages from My Correspondence with Friends. In the letter, Belinsky manifestly expressed his desire to see a feeling of self-awareness awaken in the Russian people, believing that this would be the catalyst that would lead the government to carry out social and legal reforms. Exactly eight months later, on 22 December, the convicts were brought to Saint Petersburg’s Semenovsky Square, where, having all received death sentences, their executions were to be carried out. The prisoners were separated and the sentence was read out. Dostoevsky was in the second line, waiting for his turn.53 With only a few minutes to go before the writer was to be shot dead, the order was rescinded. Tsar Nicholas I had decided to commute the death sentence to different punishments. Dostoevsky was instead sentenced to four years hard labour and deportation to Siberia (katorga). From 23 January, 1850 to 15 February, 1854 the novelist served his punishment in the Omsk prison camp. The work Notes from the House of the Dead offers a truthful portrayal and personal report of those years (although, in order to avoid censorship, Dostoevsky used a fictitious narrator) and represents a historically and sociologically unique document that served as a model for later works such as Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man. Neyroud’s French translation of Dostoevsky’s Notes first appeared in 1886 under the title Souvenirs de la maison des morts. An Avertissement

53 Dostoevsky was to portray this moment in his novel The Idiot (I, 5). 

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written by de Vogüé (SMM: I-XVI) introduced the work.54 Precisely from this Avertissement Nietzsche got the information about Dostoevsky’s life which he communicated to Gast in the aforementioned letter of 7 March, 1887.55 In the same letter, Nietzsche defined Dostoevsky’s work as “one of the most human books ever written.” (#814) Nietzsche’s positive reaction to the reading of the Notes should not surprise. In fact, it must be recognized that Dostoevsky had been able to present 54

Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé was a French writer and literary critic who, as it will be shown, played a pivotal role in the diffusion of Russian literature in late nineteenth century Europe. The Plon publishing house released Souvenirs de la maison des morts for public sale in the month of June, 1886. However, Souvenirs de la maison des morts had already appeared some time before in the Journal des débats (which Nietzsche used to read), published in thirty instalments from 22 April to 12 June of the same year. In the Journal, Neyroud’s translation was partially modified and many (more or less extended) passages, even some chapters, were cut out in order to please public taste. 55 Nietzsche wrote the following: “Up to the present I have learnt little concerning his position, his reputation, his history; he died in 1881. In his youth things were pretty bad with him; illness and poverty, although he came of distinguished stock. At the age of 27 he was sentenced to death, but was reprieved on the very steps of the scaffold, then four years Siberia, chained, among hardened criminals. This period was decisive: he discovered the power of his psychological intuition, nay more; his heart was mellowed and deepened by the experience.” (#814) Compare this with the following passage from de Vogüé’s Avertissement: “Il avait vingtsept ans en 1848 […] Sa vie, pauvre et solitaire, allait par de mauvais chemins ; misère, maladie, tout lui donnait sur le monde des vues noires […] condamné à mort, gracié sur l’échafaud, conduit en Sibérie; il y purgea quatre ans de fers dans la ‘ section réservée ’, celle des criminels d’État […] Mais je ne crois pas risquer un paradoxe en disant que son talent bénéficia de ses souffrances, qu’elles développèrent en lui le sens de l’analyse psychologique. C’était l’opinion de l’écrivain lui-même, non-seulement au point de vue de son talent, mais de toute la suite de sa vie morale. Il parlait toujours avec gratitude de cette épreuve, où il disait avoir tout appris.” (SMM: III-VI) These similarities prove that Nietzsche had Dostoevsky’s work in his hands. The hypothesis that Nietzsche read only a synthesis of Notes from the House of the Dead (like the one that appeared in de Vogüé’s Les écrivains russes contemporaines or Le roman russe) has therefore to be rejected. Moreover, neither the article de Vogüé published in the Revue des deux mondes, nor the chapter dedicated to Dostoevsky in his book Le roman russe, mention how seldom Dostoevsky had witnessed a sting of conscience among the Russian convicts: however, this is precisely the element to which Nietzsche paid the most attention. See Stellino (2009: 223f).

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nineteenth century Russian readers with the most hidden side of convicts, i.e., their human side. The prisoners were not just criminals. Even the most cruel and violent of them had feelings and hopes, and these hopes existed despite the hard rules of the dead house, the prison camp where the convicts were transformed through the harsh routine and the cruelty of the officers into the “living dead.” The letter Dostoevsky wrote from Omsk to his brother Mikhail on 22 February, 1854, after the end of his detention, shows how deeply the experience enriched his soul: “What a wonderful people. All in all, the time hasn’t been lost for me. If I have come to know not Russia, then the Russian people well, and as well as perhaps few people know them.” (CL I: 190) Nietzsche appreciated Dostoevsky’s sympathetic point of view. His attention was drawn to two major, different elements: the anthropological aspect (the portrayal of the prisoners as the strongest and best portion of the Russian people) and the psychological aspect (the lack of remorse among the convicts). What is more, he found in Dostoevsky, that is, in someone who had experienced first-hand the life of penitentiaries and knew the real nature of the delinquents, a confirmation of his theory of the criminal type. Since this theory constitutes the context within which Nietzsche’s positive appreciation of Souvenirs de la maison des morts can be fully appreciated, in what follows I will first briefly recall the salient points of what can be defined as Nietzsche’s transvaluation of the criminal type. In Twilight of the Idols (Reconnaissance Raids of an Untimely Man,56 45), Nietzsche offers his reader one of the clearest explanations of what he means by “criminal”. “The criminal type”, Nietzsche writes in this section entitled The Criminal and What is Related to Him, “is the type of the strong person under unfavourable conditions, a strong person made sick.” In Nietzsche’s view, the delinquent, bearer of active, powerful and healthy instincts, is the prototype of the strong person. Instead of making the type proliferate, “our tame, mediocre, castrated society” considers “his virtues” as dangerous and therefore exiles and ostracizes him. Consequently, the criminal begins to consider his instincts reprehensible and despise them: this marks the beginning of the psychological mechanism, described by Nietzsche in the second essay 56 From now on, Raids. 

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of the Genealogy, which gives rise to the feelings of guilt and bad conscience. The criminal turns pale because he is unable to bear the burden of his guilt (see Z I, The Pale Criminal). Against this practice, which converts the criminal type into a sick one, against this “recipe for physiological degeneration” (TI, Raids, 45), Nietzsche’s aim is to rehabilitate the bearers of strong instincts through a reversal of society’s traditional evaluation of the delinquent (what I have called Nietzsche’s transvaluation of the criminal type).57 In order to support his theory of the criminal as the bearer of strong, vital, and healthy instincts, Nietzsche mentions Dostoevsky’s own experience with the Siberian criminals: “For the problem at issue here the testimony of Dostoevsky is significant – Dostoevsky, the only psychologist, incidentally, from whom I had anything to learn: he was one of the most splendid strokes of luck in my life, even more than my discovery of Stendhal. This profound person, who was right ten times over in his scant regard for the superficial Germans, had a very different experience of the Siberian convicts in whose midst he lived for a long time – nothing but hardened criminals for whom there was no way back to society left – to what he himself had expected: roughly, that they were made of the best, sternest, and most precious stuff ever produced by Russian soil.” (TI, Raids, 45)

As we see, in the quoted passage Nietzsche repeats two elements that have already emerged in the analysis of the correspondence and that are typical of his approach to the Russian novelist: the definition of Dostoevsky as a psychologist and the comparison with his previous discovery of Stendhal. Nevertheless, this time the focus of Nietzsche’s attention is Dostoevsky’s positive impression of the Siberian prisoners, shown, for instance, in the following passages: “There were a few genuinely strong personalities” (NHD: 13)58 “I repeat, even among them there were some strong characters, hardened and fearless, men who all their lives had been accustomed to commanding and crushing others.” (NHD: 14)59

57 For a further analysis of the criminal type in Nietzsche, see Balke (2003). 58 See SMM: 13 : “Il y avait quelques hommes vraiment forts.” 59 See SMM: 15: “Comme je l’ai dit plus haut, parmi eux se trouvaient des hommes au caractère de fer, endurcis et intrépides, habitués à se commander.”

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Nietzsche probably had these passages in mind, even if partially placed out of context,60 as he wrote in a notebook of autumn, 1887 the following note: “Not unjustly, Dostoevsky said of the inmates of the Siberian prisons that they made up the strongest and most valuable component of the Russian people.” (PF 10[50], autumn 1887) Nietzsche alludes again to Dostoevsky in a later posthumous fragment entitled Religion as Décadence. This fragment is particularly interesting for the convergence of what I have called the anthropological element (the prisoners as the best portion of the Russian people) and the psychological one (the lack of remorse among the convicts): “Previous practice […] held a man to be cured when he abased himself before the cross and swore to be a good man… But a criminal who with a certain sombre seriousness cleaves to his fate and does not slander his deed after it is done has more health of soul… The criminals among whom D lived in prison were one and all unbroken natures, – are they not worth a hundred times more than a ‘broken’ Christian?” (PF 14[155], spring 1888)

In the quoted note, Nietzsche refers to those passages of Souvenirs de la maison des morts in which Dostoevsky recalls the absolute lack of remorse he experienced among most of his fellow prisoners.61 Nietzsche 60 If we read the whole of the first passage, we see that Dostoevsky also described the less remarkable qualities of his fellow prisoners: “There were a few genuinely strong personalities; these men were simple and unaffected. But here’s a strange fact: among these truly strong personalities there were some who were vain to an extreme degree, almost to the point where it was a disease. In general, vanity and outward appearance took the center stage. The majority were corrupt and horribly depraved. Slander and backbiting went on continuously: this was hell, the outer darkness” (NHD: 13; see SMM: 13: “Il y avait quelques hommes vraiment forts : ceux-là étaient naturels et sincères, mais, chose étrange ! ils étaient le plus souvent d’une vanité excessive et maladive. C’était toujours la vanité qui était au premier plan. La majorité des détenus était dépravée et pervertie, aussi les calomnies et les commérages pleuvaient-ils comme grêle.”) 61 See, for instance, the following passage: “I even knew murderers among them who were so cheerful and carefree that one would have wagered that their consciences never bothered them.” (NHD: 11; SMM: 12: “Parmi mes camarades de chaîne j’ai connu des meurtriers qui étaient si gais et si insouciants qu’on pouvait parier à coup sûr que jamais leur conscience ne leur avait fait le moindre reproche.”) See also NHD: 15: “I’ve already said that in the course of several years I never saw among these men the slightest sign of repentance, the slightest trace of despondent brooding over their crimes, and I observed that the majority 

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probably read these passages as a confirmation of what he had already written some years earlier in Daybreak: “Those who frequent prisons and penitentiaries are astonished at how rarely an unmistakable ‘pang of conscience’ is to be met with in them: what is found much more frequently is homesickness for the old, beloved, wicked crime.” (D, 366) Thus, it is safe to assume that the reading of Souvenirs de la maison des morts not only confirmed, but even reinforced the opinions Nietzsche had expressed on this issue. In the second essay of the Genealogy, specifically dedicated to the question of guilt and bad conscience, Nietzsche returned to the theme of the lack of remorse in prisons and penitentiaries and wrote: “The real pang of conscience, precisely amongst criminals and convicts, is something extremely rare, prisons and gaols are not nurseries where this type of gnawing pang chooses to thrive: – on this, all conscientious observers are agreed, in many cases reaching such a conclusion reluctantly and against their personal inclinations.” (GM, II, 14)62 of them inwardly regarded themselves to be totally in the right.” (SMM: 17: “J’ai déjà dit que pendant plusieurs années je n’ai pas remarqué le moindre signe de repentance, pas le plus petit malaise du crime commis, et que la plupart des forçats s’estimaient dans leur for intérieur en droit d’agir comme bon leur semblait.”) 62 In the same section, Nietzsche criticizes the prison system. His referent is most likely once again Dostoevsky’s Souvernirs and, more particularly, the following passage: “Yes, it seems that crime can’t be understood on the basis of preconceived and ready-made notions, and that its philosophy is a little more complicated than people suppose. There’s no doubt, of course, that prisons and the system of forced labor don’t reform criminals; they only punish them and protect society against further attempts of these criminals to threaten its tranquillity. Prison and severe penal labor instill in criminals only hatred, a thirst for forbidden pleasures, and a terrible irresponsibility. And I’m firmly convinced that even the much-vaunted single-cell system yields only false, deceptive, and external results. It sucks the living sap out of a man, enervates his soul, weakens it, terrorizes it, and then holds up the morally desiccated mummy, half-demented, as a model of reform and repentance” (NHD: 16; see SMM: 17f.: “On ne saurait juger le crime avec des opinions toutes faites, et sa philosophie est un peu plus compliquée qu’on ne le croit. Il est avéré que ni les maisons de force, ni les bagnes, ni le système de travaux forcés, ne corrigent le criminel ; ces châtiments ne peuvent que le punir et rassurer la société contre les attentats qu’il pourrait commettre. La réclusion et les travaux excessifs ne font que développer chez ses hommes une haine profonde, la soif des jouissances défendues et une effroyable insouciance. D’autre parte, je suis certain que le célèbre système cellulaire n’atteint qu’un but apparent et trompeur.

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As Müller-Buck (2002: 106f.) points out, the allusion to Dostoevsky is evident. In fact, as Nietzsche knew, the novelist had observed how rare the sting of conscience among his fellow prisoners was, despite its being contrary to his inclinations. Whereas Nietzsche had previously written that “the bite of conscience, like the bite of a dog into a stone, is a stupidity”63 (WS, 38), and years later still denounced the need to return the good conscience to the criminal,64 Dostoevsky had a completely different opinion on the issue. The sting of conscience played a basic role for the latter, since it opened the way to the sinner’s moral resurrection and at the same time gave rise to a process of spiritual growth which led the criminal to a new life. The fictitious narrator describes a similar feeling in the final pages of Souvenirs de la maison des morts, a feeling that will lead to his resurrection among the dead, the convicts of the prison camp: “I remember that only a passionate desire for resurrection, for renewal, for a new life gave me the strength to wait and hope […] Solitary in my soul, I surveyed the whole of my past life, sifted through everything down to the last trifling detail, pondered my past, judged myself mercilessly and severely, and even sometimes blessed fate for sending me this solitude without which neither this judgment upon Il soutire du criminel toute sa force et son énergie, énerve son âme qu’il affaiblit et effraye, et montre enfin une momie desséchée et à moitié folle comme un modèle d’amendement et de repentir.”) We can assume that Nietzsche had these considerations in mind when he wrote, a few months after reading Souvenirs de la maison des morts, the following passage of the Genealogy: “On the whole, punishment makes men harder and colder, it concentrates, it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power to resist. If it does happen that a man’s vigour is broken, resulting in his wretched prostration and self-abasement, a result of this sort is certainly less edifying than the average effect of punishment: as characterised by a dry, morose solemnity.” (GM, II, 14) Indeed, as Orsucci (2001: 79) points out, the imagery (common to both authors) of the destruction of vital energy, the desiccated mummy (recalled by Nietzsche’s “dry [trocknen], morose solemnity”), the prostration and self-abasement of the criminal, clearly prove the influence Dostoevsky’s words exerted upon Nietzsche. 63 Kaufmann’s translation; see W. Kaufmann (ed. and trans.), The Portable Nietzsche. London: Penguin, 1976, p. 68. 64 See PF 7[6], end of 1886-spring 1887: “NB! To return the good conscience to the evil person – it has been this my involuntary effort? And precisely to the evil person insofar he is the strong person? (Here one should bring in Dostoevsky’s judgment about the criminals of the prisons).” 

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myself nor this severe survey of my past life would have been possible. And with what hopes my heart would start beating then! I thought, I made the resolution, I vowed to myself that in my future life I would not repeat the mistakes and lapses of the past.”65

From this point of view, Nietzsche’s and Dostoevsky’s perspectives radically differ. In fact, when the novelist described the convicts as the strongest and best part of the Russian people, he did not refer to those moraline-free virtues and qualities which, in Nietzsche’s opinion, “a man should not lack.” (PF 10[50], autumn 1887) Dostoevsky appreciated the naturalness and genuineness of his fellow prisoners. In a place such as the dead house, a breeding ground of hate and rage, the prisoners in the camp showed incredible vitality and fortitude. Most of them were even kind and magnanimous. These were the qualities that Dostoevsky discovered and appreciated, not the strong instincts praised by Nietzsche which, in the opinion of the Russian novelist, turned a human being into a monster, a “moral Quasimodo.” (NHD: 78; SMM: 93) Only from this perspective we can understand the opinion the fictitious narrator expresses of his fellow prisoners in one of the most touching passages of Souvenirs de la maison des morts: “And how much youth had been buried in vain within those walls, how much power and strength had perished here for nothing! When all is said and done, there’s no avoiding the truth: when all is said and done, these men were extraordinary men. When all is said and done, they may have been the most gifted and strongest of all our men. But mighty powers have perished in vain; they have perished abnormally, illegitimately, irretrievably. And who is to blame? That is the question: Who is to blame?” (NHD: 307f.)66

65 See SMM: 339: “Je me rappelle aussi un ardent désir de ressusciter, de renaître dans une vie nouvelle qui me donnât la force de résister, d’attendre et d’espérer. […] Isolé au milieu de la foule des forçats, je repassais ma vie antérieure, je l’analysais dans les moindres détails, j’y réfléchissais et je me jugeais impitoyablement; quelquefois même je remerciais la destinée qui m’avait octroyé cette so­litude, sans laquelle je n’aurai pu ni me juger ni me replonger dans ma vie passée. Quelles espérances germaient alors dans mon cœur ! Je pensais, je décidais, je me jurais de ne plus commettre les fautes que j’avais commises, et d’éviter les chutes qui m‘avaient brisé.” 66 See SMM: 356: “Combien de jeunesse, de forces inutiles étaient enterrées et perdues dans ces murailles, sans profit pour personne ! Il faut bien le dire : tout ces

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In conclusion, the reading of Souvenirs de la maison des morts confirmed in Nietzsche’s mind that he had discovered a great psychologist. Thanks to the power of his psychological intuition, Dostoevsky had been able not only to see the most human side of his fellow prisoners, but also to penetrate and, consequently to describe, their psychology. He understood that the prison system did not turn the criminal into a better person, but only fuelled his hatred and deprived him of his vital force and energy. He also grasped that the sting of conscience was encountered very rarely in penitentiaries. Nietzsche read Dostoevsky’s recollections with great interest and found in them a confirmation of what he had written years earlier about the criminals and the prison system. In the Genealogy he alluded to Dostoevsky, whereas in the Twilight of the Idols he mentioned his name explicitly. He referred to Dostoevsky’s testimony in order to support his thesis, although he omitted those aspects of Dostoevsky’s perspective which contrasted with his own. For all these reasons, it is not surprising that after his enthusiastic reaction to reading L’esprit souterrain and Souvenirs de la maison des morts, Nietzsche continued discovering the work of the Russian novelist.

gens-là étaient peut-être les mieux doués, les plus forts de notre peuple. Mais ces forces puissantes étaient perdues sans retour. À qui la faute ? Oui, à qui la faute ?” 

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6.  The Insulted and Injured

After the positive response to the reading of L’esprit souterrain and Souvenirs de la maison des morts, on the recommendation of Overbeck67 Nietzsche read Dostoevsky’s The Insulted and Injured, translated into French with the title Humiliés et offensés and published by Plon in 1884. Once again, Nietzsche’s reaction was positive. As we already know, in the letter to Gast of 7 March, 1887 Nietzsche wrote to his friend that he had read the novel “with the greatest respect for the artist Dostoevsky.” (#814) To this brief remark, which does not provide much information, we can add the testimony of Meta von Salis-Marschlins who, in her work dedicated to Nietzsche Philosoph und Edelmensch, recalls an evening walk at Silvaplana Lake during which the conversation turned to Dostoevsky’s The Insulted and Injured: “As he told me during an evening walk at Silvaplana Lake, Nietzsche was reduced to tears as he read Humiliés et offensés, a deeper, more humble, abasing work [Meta von Salis refers previously to Adalbert Stifter’s novel Indian Summer], almost unbearable for proud men because of its heroes being persecuted and beaten. He – this is the salient point – condemned a whole range of feelings in their culmination not because he did not have them, but on the contrary, because he did have them and understood their danger.” (quoted in Gilman 1981: 581)

According to Meta von Salis’ account, Nietzsche abhorred the feelings that the reading of Dostoevsky’s novel aroused in the reader. Nevertheless, as we know from the letter to Gast, he praised the artistic qualities expressed in it. For Nietzsche scholars, this positive judgement poses a similar question to the one raised above with regard to the first part of L’esprit souterrain, that is: why did Nietzsche appreciate a novel that abounded in clichés typical of sentimental romantic novels? The Insulted and Injured was published in 1861 in the journal Time and was a popular success. Nonetheless, Dostoevsky was far from displaying in the novel the artistic maturity achieved in the later works 67 See the aforementioned letter to Gast of 7 March 1887 (#814). Overbeck’s letter has got lost (see KGB Abt. III, Bd. 7/3, 1, p. 83). 

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and one can easily agree with Frank (1986: 110) when he claims that The Insulted and Injured is “by far the weakest of Dostoevsky’s six major post-Siberian novels.” According to Frank (ibid.: 113), Dostoevsky makes “use of the tritest material […] All these motifs are the most threadbare ingredients of the roman-feuilleton, and Dostoevsky exploits them unashamedly for their maximum capacity to pluck the heartstrings.” Pity, tears, martyrdom, physical and nervous sickness, philanthropy, sentimentalism, morality, Christian faith and forgiveness: all these elements are contained in The Insulted and Injured and one would expect them to lead Nietzsche to criticize Dostoevsky’s work. However, Nietzsche claimed to have read the novel “with the greatest respect for the artist Dostoevsky.” Why is this so? Nietzsche scholars have given different answers to this question. Andler (1972 [1930]: 5), for instance, acknowledges that one can find in Dostoevsky, as in Nietzsche, “a natural hierarchy of men and a theory of domination methods.” However, having mentioned Prince Valkovsky (the cynical character in The Insulted and Injured), he then poses the following question: “What do these insolent virtuous ones have in common with the great blond barbarians of whom Nietzsche wants the aristocrats of today to be the generous descendants?” For his part, Gesemann (1961: 150) also refers to Prince Valkovsky in order to explain why Nietzsche came under the spell of Dostoevsky’s novel. More specifically, Gesemman alludes to Prince Valkovsky’s cynical philosophy, his critique of sentimental humanism and his demonism, which, in Gesemann’s opinion, would elevate him “above the vulgarity of his philosophical materialism.” (ibid.) On the other hand, a number of Dostoevsky scholars have tried to look beyond the romantic façade of The Insulted and Injured. Mochulsky (1967 [1947]: 199), for instance, recognizes Dostoevsky’s evident dependence on the melodramatic adventure novels of Frédéric Soulié, Eugène Sue, Victor Hugo, and Dickens, but he also points out that “into the old forms the author has inserted a new psychological and ideological content.” Even Frank, despite his critique of Dostoevsky’s novel, recognizes that The Insulted and Injured anticipates several themes of the later masterpieces:

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“What we can glimpse in The Insulted and Injured, through the interstices of the clichés, is a premature novel about a young writer who represents the ‘philanthropic’ ideology of the 1840s, and whose world and life are shattered because his convictions prove inadequate to cope with the deeper forces of human passion and egoism that overwhelm his well-meaning innocence.” (Frank 1986: 118)

Should we not assume, therefore, that once again, as in the case of The Landlady, Nietzsche was able to go beyond the romantic and sentimental veil of Dostoevsky’s novel? Was his attention drawn to that “psychological and ideological content” to which Mochulsky refers? In what follows, I will try to give an answer to these questions, focusing on those motifs, which, in my opinion, could have aroused Nietzsche’s interest and may explain his positive response to the reading of Humiliés et offensés. Without doubt, one of the most relevant themes of the novel is love, the analysis of which proved Dostoevsky to be, once again, a great psychologist. In The Insulted and Injured, love is, above all, immoral and selfish.68 As in The Landlady, it involves (strong or weak) will and domination. Indeed, the motif of Aliosha’s weak will figures several times in the novel and his faible cœur recalls that of Katerina, the heroine of the first part of L’esprit souterrain.69 There is also the motif of the love triangle, a typical feature of Dostoevsky’s novels.70 Jealousy constitutes an essential part of these triangles and contributes to keeping love alive. 68 Natasha, the female protagonist of the novel, is aware of Vania’s love for her, but she prefers to spend her time with Aliosha. The same occurs later in the novel when the naive egoist Aliosha, who has promised to marry Natasha, wishes to stay with Katya rather than with his fiancée. Even paternal love is selfish: old Ikhmenyev, Natasha’s father, decides to leave Saint Petersburg, even though he knows that his daughter will miss her beloved Vania. 69 However, in The Insulted and Injured the roles are reversed. It is Natasha who occupies a dominant position within the couple and Aliosha is commanded by Natasha’s strong will. Katia, Natasha’s rival, also possesses a strong personality and Aliosha has no problem transferring his love from the old to the new lover. In his turn, Vania (another male character in the novel) has a weak will as well: he openly confesses his faiblesse and pusillanimity while having a conversation with Prince Valkovsky. For this reason, he plays a passive role in the triangle that involves Natasha, Aliosha, and himself and even if he feels rivalry towards Aliosha – a rivalry that is well known to Natasha – he is unable to regain Natasha’s love. 70 Here, three main triangles must be mentioned: Vania-Natasha-Aliosha, Natasha-Aliosha-Katia and Natasha-Vania-Nelly, to which we can add the triangle 

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Sometimes the feelings of love and jealousy are so strong that they combine with a sort of masochism. Natasha is willing to suffer and to be Aliosha’s voluntary slave so as not to lose him. But this suffering becomes a strange source of pleasure, as Natasha confesses to Vania,71 and the sufferer torments herself in order to achieve more pleasure.72 This psychology of masochism, already described in the chapters dedicated to The Landlady and Notes from Underground, relates not only to unrequited love, but also to the wounded pride of the insulted and injured. It is Prince Valkovsky who clearly makes this point and explains the joy of being completely miserable. During his conversation with Vania, the Prince talks about a woman (actually, Nelly’s mother) whom he seduced, robbed, and finally abandoned. Valkovsky decided not to give her her money back, because this would have meant making her unhappy: “I reflected that by giving her back the money, I would perhaps make her unhappy. I would have deprived her of the pleasure of being unhappy entirely owing to me, and of cursing me for it all her life.” (I&I: 246)73 The Prince is obviously lying, but what is interesting is his psychological analysis: “Believe me, my friend, in this kind of unhappiness there’s even a sort of lofty ecstasy in being conscious of oneself as absolutely right and magnanimous, and in having every right to call one’s offender a scoundrel.” (ibid.)74 That is how noble hearts made up of Ikhmenyev (the father), Natasha (the daughter) and Vania or Aliosha (the daughter’s lovers). 71 See I&I: 42: “But what is to be done if even torment from him is happiness?” (HO: 45: “Qu’y puis-je, si les tourments qui me viennent de lui sont du bonheur pour moi ?”) 72 See I&I: 287f.: “It seemed to me that she was lacerating her own wounds on purpose, feeling a need to do so – feeling a need for despair and suffering… And how often this happens with a heart that has suffered great loss!” (HO: 306: “Je pensai qu’elle s’efforçait elle-même d’envenimer sa blessure, qu’elle sentait le besoin de se désespérer, de souffrir…comme cela arrive souvent lorsque le cœur est cruellement éprouvé.”) 73 See HO: 259: “Je réfléchis que lui rendre cet argent serait faire son malheur. Je lui enlèverais la jouissance d’être complément malheureuse à cause de moi et de me maudire sa vie durant.” 74 See ibid.: “Croyez-moi, mon ami, il y a dans un malheur de ce genre une certaine ivresse qui ne manque pas de grandeur ; c’est celle de se sentir innocent, généreux, et d’avoir sans aucune ressource le droit de traiter d’infâme et de lâche celui qui vous a offensé.”

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act: they prefer to starve and beg rather than to ask for help or simply for what belongs to them – the story of Nelly and her mother probably offers the most lucid example of this. Dostoevsky defines this psychological mechanism as the egoism of suffering: “It was as if she [Nelly] took pleasure in her own pain, in this egoism of suffering, if I may so express it. This aggravation of one’s pain and this pleasure taken in it I could understand: it’s a pleasure felt by many of the insulted and injured, by those who are oppressed by fate and conscious of its injustice.” (I&I: 269)75

Mochulsky’s (1967 [1947]: 218) comment on this point is very appropriate and clearly recalls the masochistic attitude of the underground man: “In suffering there is egoism, a rapture of malice, contempt toward the persecutor, pleasure in shame, vengeance against an unjust fate, delight in one’s own nobility, a defiance of the world. The ‘humiliated and wronged’ are really not so unhappy; there are subtle pleasures known to them which they would not exchange for any well-being.”76

The egoism of suffering leads us to the cynical character of Prince Valkovsky who, in his conversation with Vania, mocks the humanitarian and philanthropic pretensions of those young romantics who are too ready to sacrifice themselves for tout ce qui est beau et grand. As we have seen, Gesemman refers to Valkovsky in order to explain Nietzsche’s positive opinion of Dostoevsky’s novel. The Prince is described as a good-looking man who hides his selfishness and nastiness behind a mask of polite manners. He wants his son Aliosha (whom he does not love and considers to be weak and naive) to marry the rich Katia in order to administer her money. During his conversation with 75 See HO: 286: “Elle [Nelly] semblait se complaire dans sa douleur, dans l’égoïsme de ses souffrances, s’il m’est permis de m’exprimer ainsi. Ce besoin d’envenimer sa douleur, et la jouissance qu’on peut y trouver, étaient des choses compréhensibles pour moi : c’est la jouissance de beaucoup de cœurs humiliés et offensés qui se sentent victimes du destin et qui ont conscience de son injustice.” 76 According to Frank (1995: 323), Nastasya Filippovna (a female character in The Idiot) represents “the supreme example in Dostoevsky’s work of what he called ‘the egoism of suffering,’ that is, the egoism of the insulted and injured, who revenge themselves on the world by masochistically refusing all attempts to assuage their sense of injury.” 

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Vania, he reveals himself as he is, a cynical man, making this confession merely for the pleasure of shocking and showing his scorn for his romantic and Schillerian friend. As Valkovsky relates, many years before he himself had been par caprice a metaphysician and philanthropist, but he soon grew bored and began “to search for stronger stimulants”, as Frank (1986: 124) puts it, turning himself into an immoral and debauched libertine. The Prince does not, however, feel ashamed of this, for he has a sort of philosophical justification of his immoral behaviour: “At the root of all human virtues lies the profoundest egoism” (I&I: 244)77, this is the premise of Valkovsky’s immorality. Indeed, according to the Prince, by acting in a moral (i.e., comfortable)78 way, one simply repays the favour the other person has done for one. Life is nothing but a commercial transaction. However, according to this logic, Valkovsky asks, why does one have to pay? Is it not better not to pay one’s neighbour and make him work for free? One could happily live without any ideals and obligations: it is a simple question of taste (goût) rather than of morals. The prince confesses to having undergone a process of emancipation from moral prejudices and valuations: “I, for instance, have long since freed myself from all shackles and even obligations. I only recognize obligations when I see I have something to gain by them.” (I&I: 244)79 To his Schillerian friend, who cannot share his viewpoint, the Prince says: “Your legs are in fetters, and your taste is morbid.” (ibid.)80 It is interesting to note that, if, on the one hand, Dostoevsky is here denouncing nihilistic ideas derived from Western egoism and individualism, then on the other hand, he partially shares Valkovsky’s critique of the naive and superficial Schillerism. In fact, Aliosha’s enthusiasm for humanitarian and philanthropic ideals, sarcastically portrayed by Dostoevsky, seems to be more a whim of his inconstant nature than any real 77 See HO: 256: “l’égoïsme est la base de toute vertu humaine.” 78 According to Valkovsky, “morality is in essence the same thing as comfort – that is, it’s invented solely for the sake of comfort” (I&I: 240; HO: 252: “la moralité est au fond la même chose que le confort, et qu’elle a été inventée uniquement en vue du confort.”) 79 See HO: 256: “Il y a longtemps que je me suis affranchi de toute entrave, de toute obligation. Pour moi, le devoir n’existe qu’en tant qu’il peut me rapporter un profit quelconque.” 80 See ibid.: “Vous avez des entraves aux pieds, et votre goût est malade.”

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commitment to help the hurt and injured. Moreover, the story related by Vania (the Schillerian par excellence in Dostoevsky’s novel) leaves a bitter taste in the mouth of the reader: he, who has always sacrificed himself for the benefit of his neighbours, ends up in hospital, abandoned by all he loved, while the cynical Prince Valkovsky has achieved his goal. Now, if we go back to Nietzsche, it is unlikely that all of the aforementioned themes passed him by. It is very likely that the representation of a selfish and immoral love, together with its relations of domination and enslavement, drew the attention of Nietzsche, who, as we already know, conceived of love as war and tyranny, that is, as “beyond good and evil.” Moreover, the correlation between, on the one hand, the strong will of Prince Valkovsky and his immorality and, on the other hand, the weak will of Vania and his Schillerian philanthropy, probably aroused Nietzsche’s interest. It is most likely that Nietzsche read the passage of the conversation between the Prince and Vania, where the former expounds his personal view about selfishness as the base of all human virtues and strongly criticizes the humanitarian and romantic pretensions of naive people, with great attention. Nietzsche, who was an enemy of romanticism, had already found the critique of tout ce qui est beau et grand in his previous reading of the French adaptation of Notes from Underground81 and had probably already noted this critique of romanticism while reading the Notes. We can therefore assume that he noticed that The Insulted and Injured persisted on this point. If to these aspects we also add themes such as the psychology of masochism and the selfishness of suffering, Nietzsche’s positive 81 See the following passage, in which the underground man describes sarcastically the peculiarities of Russian romanticism: “Not to be reconciled with anyone or anything, but at the same time not to spurn anything […] never to lose sight of the useful, practical goal […] to keep an eye on this goal through all enthusiasms and little volumes of lyrical verses, and at the same time also to preserve ‘the beautiful and lofty’ inviolate in himself […] like some little piece of jewelry, if only, shall we say, for the benefit of that same ‘beautiful and lofty.’” (NU: 44f.; ES: 195: “Ne faire de compromis avec rien ni personne, ni rien dédaigner ; ne jamais perdre de vue l’utile et le pratique […] ne voir que ce but à travers tous les enthousiasmes et tous les lyrismes, tout en conservant par devers soi intact – come soi-même ! – l’idéal du beau et du grand, précieux bijou de joaillier  : voilà les lois de notre romantisme…”) 

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response to the reading of Humiliés et offenses, despite the romantic veil and the sympathetic character of this novel, becomes understandable. However, Nietzsche’s allusion to the artist Dostoevsky in the letter to Gast requires a further analysis, which must necessarily take into account Nietzsche’s conception of art and the artist, as well as his view of pessimism and décadence. Since this analysis concerns Nietzsche’s later overview of Dostoevsky, expressed a few months before his nervous breakdown, I will postpone it. For the moment, I will continue to follow the chronological thread offered by the correspondence.

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7.  A Heated Debate

Peter Gast replied to Nietzsche’s letter of 7 March, 1887 with a letter on 18 March, 1887 in which he wrote: “I found the news on Dostoevsky also interesting. Moreover, do you know that the inappropriate motto in Widmann’s article in ‘Bund’ came from Dostoevsky’s novel A Raw Youth (Leipzig, W. Friedrich 1886)? Up to now I still do not know anything about this Pole: recently, I found a little book of his short stories mentioned in Reclam’s Universal-Bibliothek; I ordered it.” (#444)

In this passage, Gast (who still believed that Dostoevsky was a Pole) refers to the review of Beyond Good and Evil that the editor and critic Joseph Viktor Widmann had published in the newspaper Der Bund in September, 1886 with the title Nietzsches gefährliches Buch (Nietzsche’s dangerous book). The review, which strongly criticized Nietzsche’s latest work for expressing dangerous ideas, opened with the following quote from Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent: “With your permission, sir: I had a friend, Lambert, who at the age of sixteen said to me that when he was rich, his greatest pleasure would be to feed dogs bread and meat, while the children of the poor were dying of hunger, and when they had no wood for their stoves, he would buy a whole lumberyard, stack it up in a field, and burn it there, and give not a stick to the poor. Those were his feelings! Tell me, what answer should I give this purebred scoundrel when he asks, ‘Why should I necessarily be noble?’” (Ad: 56f.)82

Widmann’s intention was to denounce the cynicism of Lambert (a character in the novel) as a possible result of Nietzsche’s immoralism. As the letter to Overbeck of 12 October, 1886 (#761) shows, Nietzsche read Widmann’s review but, surprisingly, it seems that he did not pay great attention to the quote, which was followed by precise bibliographical references to the quoted passage. Nietzsche even commented upon the review in several letters, in which he sometimes added some 82 See F. M. Dostojewskij, Junger Nachwuchs. Leipzig: Reclam, 1886, vol. I, p. 81. 

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passages quoted directly from Der Bund.83 Should we really believe that Nietzsche did not notice the quote from Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent? Müller-Buck (2002: 91) stresses the “most particular attention” Nietzsche paid to Widmann’s review. She even doubts that Nietzsche was unaware of Dostoevsky’s name before he discovered the book L’esprit souterrain “by chance”. Müller-Buck draws attention, for instance, to the new preface to Human, All Too human, dating from the spring of 1886, in which Nietzsche raises en passant the following question: “But where today are there psychologists? In France, certainly; perhaps in Russia; definitely not in Germany.” (HH, Preface, 8) All these clues have made Müller-Buck doubt the supposed randomness of Nietzsche’s discovery of Dostoevsky, which may not have been completely accidental. Undeniably, it is most likely that previous readings sensitized Nietzsche to nineteenth century Russian literature, but can we assume that Dostoevsky’s name was not completely unknown to him? A heated debate about the precise moment Nietzsche discovered Dostoevsky started long ago among scholars who have studied the relationship between the two, but no definitive conclusion has yet been reached. In early essays, a certain (if not complete) ignorance of the correct chronology of Nietzsche’s discovery and reading of Dostoevsky’s works is evident.84 It was only with the contributions of Benz (1956: 92–103), Gesemann (1961) and Miller (1973) that a more precise and accurate chronology of Nietzsche’s engagement with Dostoevsky was 83 See the following letters: to Naumann (19 September 1886), to Fritzsch and Malwida von Meysenbug (24 September 1886), and to Peter Gast (31 October 1886). Curiously, in some of these letters Nietzsche, on the one hand, complained about Widmann’s words, while on the other hand, was delighted at the fact that Widmann’s review had somehow advertised his work. 84 Thomas Mann (1945: viii), for instance, wrote in his short essay Dostoevsky – in Moderation: “‘The Pale Criminal’ – whenever I read this chapter heading in Zarathustra, a morbidly inspired work of genius if ever there was one, the eerily grief-ridden features of Dostoevsky, as we know them from a number of good pictures, stand before me. Moreover, I suspect that they were in the mind of the drunken migrainist of Sils Maria when he wrote it.” This hypothesis is clearly to be rejected, since the first book of Zarathustra was written in 1883, while, as we know, Nietzsche discovered Dostoevsky in the winter of 1886–87. Fifteen years before Mann wrote his essay, Andler (1972 [1930]: 1) had already warned against the temptation to explain the many similarities between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky as the result of a direct influence of the latter upon the former.

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established. In his paper, Miller (1973: 205) refers to the multiple hypotheses put forward until that moment and finally concludes that, “there is […] no direct evidence in the oeuvre that Nietzsche knew of Dostoevsky before he chanced upon l’Esprit souterrain.” As I will show in the following analysis, there are several reasons to agree with Miller’s conclusion. In his work on Nietzsche, Lavrin (1948: 134) suggests that: “Nietzsche may have been further initiated into the world of his [Dostoevsky’s] characters by the Russian-born Lou Salomé who, later on – as Frau Andreas-Salomé, introduced also the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to certain deeper aspects of Russian mentality, so poignantly recorded in Stundenbuch (The Book of Hours).” Lavrin’s hypothesis is without doubt more than plausible. Indeed, it seems reasonable to suppose that Lou Salomé, the young Russian who Nietzsche met in Rome through his friend Malwida von Meysenbug85 in April, 1882 and with whom he felt in love, talked with him about Russian literature (and perhaps also about Dostoevsky) during one of their several meetings.86 Unfortunately, no evidence of this can be found neither in the monograph that Lou Salomé dedicated to Nietzsche’s thought, nor in her memories of the encounter with Nietzsche and Paul Rée.87 It is also possible that Nietzsche could have heard of Dostoevsky through an indirect source. In the notes of the French translation of the Nietzsche-Gast correspondence, Schaeffner (1981 [1957]: 667) suggests that Nietzsche could have read the article on Dostoevsky’s Demons that appeared in the edition of 9 November, 1886 of Gil Blas,

85 We should not forget that Malwida von Meysenbug had attended to the education of Olga and Natalie Herzen, the daughters of the Russian writer Alexander Herzen. Nietzsche not only knew both of them, but it was also suggested that he marry Natalie, as he himself confessed to his sister Elisabeth in the letter of 31 March, 1877 (#603). In this context, it is possible that Nietzsche was introduced to the world of Dostoevsky’s novels, even if only briefly and superficially. 86 Before her mother took her to Zurich and then to Rome, Lou lived in St. Petersburg until the autumn of 1880 and undoubtedly had an opportunity to become familiar with the novels of Dostoevsky, who was already well-known in the Russian cultural world before his death in 1881. 87 See Salomé (2001 [1894]) and Andreas-Salomé (1951: 93–116). 

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a literary journal.88 In his essay Nietzsche et Dostoievski, de Schloezer (1967: 169) identifies Paul Ginisty as the author of this article, that is, the same author of the theatrical adaptation of Crime and Punishment to which, as we will see later, Nietzsche referred to in the correspondence. As a letter from Gast of 2 February, 1887 (#431) proves, we may legitimately suppose that Nietzsche used to read this journal in this period. How regularly, however, we do not know. Schaeffner’s hypothesis cannot therefore be rejected, even though, once again, there is no evidence to confirm it. As Miller (1973: 204) suggested, a different indirect source of Nietzsche’s discovery of Dostoevsky could have been de Vogüé’s work (or essays). The great role played by the French writer and literary critic Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé in the diffusion of Russian literature in late nineteenth century Europe is sufficiently important to merit particular attention in the present study. De Vogüé actually started his career as a diplomat. After having served in the embassies of Constantinople and Cairo, in 1877 he arrived in St. Petersburg where he became familiar with Russian literature. From 1879 onwards, de Vogüé published more than fifteen articles about Russia and Russian literature in the Revue des deux mondes, some of which were later collected in his book Le roman russe (1886a). This work, which does not claim to be a history of Russian literature, but simply offers a portrait of the most famous Russian writers (see ibid.: VIIf.), caused a great stir in France and started the fashion for Russian literature that precisely forms the context in which Nietzsche’s discovery of Dostoevsky has to be set. Le roman russe was published in June, 1886 and it may be that Nietzsche read the chapter dedicated to Dostoevsky titled La religion de la souffrance – Dostoievsky (ibid.: 203–277). It is also possible that Nietzsche, a reader of the Revue des deux mondes, discovered Dostoevsky through one of the two articles about the novelist published by de Vogüé in this journal (de Vogüé 1885 and 1886b).89 Moreover, De 88 Schaeffner specifies that the article developed an analysis of Demons and that three other titles of Dostoevsky’s novels were mentioned in it. 89 The first article, entitled Les écrivains russes contemporains. F.-M Dostoïevsky and published on 15 January, 1885 summarized Dostoevsky’s biography and work and was later included, partially modified, in the book Le roman russe. The second, entitled Les livres russes en France and published on 15 December, 1886

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Vogüé’s name was also mentioned by the French writer Paul Bourget who, in his Nouveaux essais de psychologie contemporaine, evaluated de Vogüé’s essay on Turgenev very positively (see Bourget 1885: 203).90 As Kuhn (1992: 43) shows, Nietzsche read Bourget’s work (at the latest) at the beginning of December, 1885 and it may well be that the allusion to de Vogüé stimulated his curiosity. The allusion to “la religion de la souffrance humaine” in section 21 of Beyond Good and Evil and the one to “la religion de la souffrance” in the Genealogy (III, 26) seem to offer the final proof that Nietzsche read the chapter de Vogüé dedicated to Dostoevsky in his Le roman russe. However, as Campioni (2001: 209) points out, the expression “la religion de la souffrance humaine” is precisely the one that ends Bourget’s novel Un crime d’amour (1886).91 As the letter to Overbeck of 10 April, 1886 shows (#684), Nietzsche read this novel while writing Beyond Good and Evil. Now, if we set the quoted expression in its context, it is easy to understand that in both passages Nietzsche is referring to Bourget’s novel. Therefore, this expression cannot be used as proof of Nietzsche reading de Vogüé. On the other hand, one should notice that Nietzsche’s claim to be an “uncultivated person […] reading no ‘periodicals’” (#804) is not to be taken seriously. On the contrary, when possible, Nietzsche used to inform himself of the literary tastes of his time through journals and periodicals. Thus, the hypothesis that he read at least one of the articles written by de Vogüé is plausible, although difficult to prove. The only thing we can be sure of is that Nietzsche at least knew de Vogüé’s name, given that, as already mentioned, an

introduced the reader, in a more general way, to the new French translations of Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s novels. 90 In the chapter dedicated to Turgenev, Bourget (1885: 203) writes the following: “Des écrivains, familiers avec les choses de la Russie ont donné d’Ivan Serguiévitch Tourguéniev des portraits d’une saisissante réalité.” He then adds in a footnote what follows: “Il faut citer en première ligne l’éloquent essai de M. Melchior de Vogué, paru en tête des œuvres posthumes de Tourguéniev.” 91 See Bourget (1886: 300): “Et il éprouva qu’une chose venait de naître en lui, avec laquelle il pourrait toujours trouver une raison de vivre et d’agir : le respect, la pitié, la religion de la souffrance humaine.” 

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Avertissement written by him introduced the French translation of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead.92 Finally, as Campioni (2001: 78) points out, it is worth mentioning the article by André Mori, simply entitled Dostoïevski, which appeared in the issue of Journal des débats from 14 January, 1885. After providing some biographical details of Dostoevsky and explaining the reception of his work in Russia, Mori (1885) lingered over an extensive analysis of Crime and Punishment, defining the novel as a psychological drama and as an “œuvre à la fois puissante et compliquée.” Unfortunately, also in this case, if Nietzsche read Mori’s article, there is no evidence to prove it.93 With regard to the Journal des débats, an important digression should be made here. As we already know, Nietzsche used to read this newspaper. In the letter of 14 December, 1888 (#627) Hyppolite Taine recommended Jean Bourdeau (a contributor to the Journal des débats) to Nietzsche as a possible French translator of Twilight of the Idols. Nietzsche quickly wrote to Bourdeau around the 17 December and confessed to him of being “an old reader of J d D.” (#1196, draft version) Even in Ecce Homo he reasserted his preference for this newspaper: “For my own part, I only read the Journal des Débats.” (EH, Why I Write such Good Books, 1) If we take into consideration how such a devoted reader of this journal Nietzsche was, it is surprising that he did not notice how famous and popular Dostoevsky had become in France already by 1886. Precisely during this year, the Journal had published several articles on the novelist. As already mentioned, a mutilated version of Souvenirs de la maison des morts appeared in thirty instalments from 22 April to 12 June. In the issue of 26 June of the same year, the publication of de Vogüé’s Le 92

See also PF 25[4], December 1888-beginning 1889: “petits faits vrais / Fromentin / De Vogüé.” 93 Mori closed his article by comparing Dostoevsky to Zola and Stendhal: according to him, Dostoevsky had both Zola’s power of evocation and Stendhal’s power of analysis. In his Avertissement to the French translation of Notes from the House of the Dead, de Vogüé explicitly quotes this passage: “On a beaucoup parlé de Dostoïevsky, depuis un an ; un critique a expliqué en deux mots la supériorité du romancier russe. – « Il possède deux facultés qui sont rarement réunies chez nos écrivains : la faculté d’évoquer et celle d’analyser ».” (SMM: II)

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roman russe was announced with great enthusiasm.94 In the issues of 19 and 21 July, under the title Une visite chez Mme Dostoiewski, the Journal published Maria Lvovna’s account of her visit to Anna Grigorievna, Dostoevsky’s second wife, in Saint Petersburg (the main theme of conversation was obviously the novelist). Moreover, the issue of 22 November announced the publication of Derély’s French translation of Demons, while the issue of 6 December presented L’esprit souterrain as a book in two episodes, “les plus étranges productions peut-être qui soient dues à la plume de l’auteur, le célèbre romancier, Dostoïevski.” These few examples clearly show that already before the winter of 1886/87, that is, before Nietzsche’s discovery of L’esprit souterrain in a Nice bookshop, Russian literature and, more specifically, Dostoevsky had become a favourite subject of both Journal des débats and Revue des deux mondes. Nietzsche, who was a reader of these publications, could have easily heard of Dostoevsky through one of the several articles dedicated to the novelist. He could also have become acquainted with Dostoevsky’s novels through de Vogüé’s Le roman russe or, many years before, by means of Lou Salomé. Undoubtedly, all these suppositions are legitimate. However, we must remember that there is no ultimate evidence to prove that Nietzsche knew of Dostoevsky before his discovery of L’esprit souterrain. Without any further evidence, although plausible, these suppositions remain conjectures.

94 See JdD of 26 June, 1886: “La librairie Plon publie une œuvre de premier ordre appelée à un grand retentissement dans le monde littéraire : le Roman russe, par le vicomte E. Melchior de Vogüé, étude sur les écrivains moscovites Gogol, Tourguéneff, Tolstoï, Dostoïevski, Gontcharof, etc. Par son style sobre et puissant, la netteté de son observation psychologique, ses idées neuves et originales, l’auteur se montre toujours égal et souvent supérieur à son sujet.” 

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8.  A “Subterranean” at Work

Ruta is a very small village located near Camogli on the Mediterranean coast of northern Italy. It was here during the autumn of 1886, that Nietzsche wrote the preface to the new edition of Daybreak, which begins as follows: “In this book you will discover a ‘subterranean man’ at work, one who tunnels and mines and undermines. You will see him – presupposing you have eyes capable of seeing this work in the depths – going forward slowly, cautiously, gently inexorable, without betraying very much of the distress which any protracted deprivation of light and air must entail; you might even call him contented, working there in the dark. Does it not seem as though some faith were leading him on, some consolation offering him compensation? As though he perhaps desires this prolonged obscurity, desires to be incomprehensible, concealed, enigmatic, because he knows what he will thereby also acquire: his own morning, his own redemption, his own daybreak?… He will return, that is certain: do not ask him what he is looking for down there, he will tell you himself of his own accord, this seeming Trophonius and subterranean, as soon as he has ‘become a man’ again. Being silent is something one completely unlearns if, like him, one has been for so long a solitary mole – – –” (D, Preface, 1)

Even if the preface dates back to the autumn of 1886, Nietzsche sent the final draft to Gast with a letter dated 22 December, 1886 (#781). Stressing the striking similarity between the symbolism of the underground used by Dostoevsky in the Notes and the “subterranean man” at work that Nietzsche refers to in the quoted passage, Schaeffner (1981 [1957]: 667f.) claims that Dostoevsky’s influence is already present in the preface to Daybreak.95 Indeed, as clearly indicated on the verso of its title, L’esprit souterrain was legally deposited and released for public sale on 20 November, 1886. It is thus possible, as suggested by Schaeffner, that Nietzsche read the French adaptation of the Notes and consequently made some changes to the preface of Daybreak before sending 95 Schaeffner maintains that the name Trophonius may have come to Nietzsche’s mind in assonance with Trofimovich (Stepan Trofimovich, a character in Demons) or with Trudolyubov (a character in the Notes from Underground). 

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it, through Gast, to the publisher Fritzsch. If this hypothesis were confirmed, we would be able to place Nietzsche’s discovery of Dostoevsky between 20 November, 1886 and 22 December of the same year. On the basis of Schaeffner’s analysis and beyond the semantic similarity between the German word unterirdisch and the French souterrain, Miller (1973: 210f.) points out some (more or less) textual parallel passages comparing the French translation of the Notes to Nietzsche’s preface.96 Nevertheless, despite these similarities, Miller hesitates to confirm Schaeffner’s hypothesis. On the contrary, he points out that the unterirdisch imagery contained in the new preface of Daybreak corresponds to several passages of the work itself which Nietzsche was working on between 1880 and 1881.97 Thus, Miller (ibid.: 212) concludes that not only is it difficult to distinguish Nietzsche’s own “subterranean” imagery from Dostoevsky’s “underground” metaphor, but that the title L’esprit souterrain could have also possibly drawn Nietzsche’s

96 According to Miller, the expression “any protracted deprivation of light and air” recalls the words of the apocryphal introduction “loin du mouvement et de la lumière, loin de la vie.” (ES: 155) Nietzsche’s “You will see him […] going forward slowly, cautiously, gently inexorable” evokes the passage “toujours creusant plus avant et plus profond dans les mystères de sa conscience.” (ibid.) Moreover, the expressions “working there in the dark” and “prolonged obscurity” recall the sentence “toujours agitant d’obscurs problèmes, toujours sondant les ténèbres de sa pensée.” (ibid.) Finally, the conclusion of the preface “Being silent is something one completely unlearns if, like him, one has been for so long a solitary mole – – –” clearly brings to mind the following words written by the underground man: “Nous autres, habitants du souterrain, il faut nous tenir en bride. Nous pouvons garder un silence de quarante ans. Mais, si nous ouvrons la bouche, nous parlons, parlons, parlons…” (ES: 188) 97 As Vivarelli (2009: XVIII) points out, the image of the mole already appears in a letter to Rodhe of 20 November, 1868 (#601) in which Nietzsche criticizes the “mole-like efforts [das ganze Maulwurfstreiben]” of the philologists, as well as in the inaugural lecture Homer and Classical Philology. However, as stressed by Vivarelli (ibid.), in the preface to Daybreak, the philologist-mole metaphor carries a positive connotation: “Instead of using the philosophy and the music of his time to analyze the ancient world – as he will also do with Schopenhauer in his lectures on pre-Platonic philosophers – Nietzsche uses the classical philologist’s instruments to investigate his time. In order to describe this goal, Nietzsche portrays himself as a ‘philological mole’, Trophonius, a subterranean being who tunnels in order to undermine metaphysical constructions and moral prejudices.”

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attention “as a variant of one of his own primary metaphors”, leading him to buy the book. Van der Luft and Stenberg (1991) have developed Miller’s analysis of the similarities between the two texts. In their paper (ibid.: 442), the two scholars claim to “present not only additional evidence that Nietzsche used Dostoevskii in the composition of the preface, but also evidence of a difference – a Dostoevskiian difference – between his predemarcation and postdemarcation writings.” Thus, after an extended work of textual and conceptual comparison (which cannot be reproduced here for obvious reasons), referring to Daybreak’s preface, Luft and Stenberg (ibid.: 460f.) conclude as follows: “What sets part from his [Nietzsche’s] other work, however, is its tone, its images, and its style, much of which can be traced to Dostoevskii. The preface reads as if Nietzsche had all of a sudden discovered in Dostoevskii a new way to say more clearly, more forcefully, and more dramatically the same things he had already been saying for years. He found a new Dostoevskiian bottle in which to pour his vintage 1881 Nietzschean wine. His reading of L’esprit in the late fall of 1886 seems to have linked for him the labor of the mole with the psychological condition of the underground man. In brief Nietzsche saw himself, as the tunneling mole, reflected in Dostoevskii’s image of the subversive and self-destructive underground man.”

In the first instance, one may object that there is a great difference between Nietzsche’s Trophonius – who descends into the depths in order to undermine our faith in morality and then comes back to the light, to his own daybreak – and Dostoevsky’s underground man – who remains physically and psychologically a prisoner of the underground, thus symbolising precisely the opposite of Nietzsche’s Heiterkeit, or light-heartedness and serenity. On the other hand, however, it is also possible that Nietzsche used Dostoevsky’s imagery in order to express himself more powerfully, without identifying himself with the underground man. The recently published fifth volume of KGW’s ninth section could help us to settle the question of whether Nietzsche wrote the preface to Daybreak before or after his discovery of Dostoevsky. This volume contains the typographical reproduction of the notebook W I 8 used by Nietzsche (according to Colli and Montinari’s dating) between the autumn of 1885 and the autumn of 1886 (see KGW, VIII, 2). As usual, Nietzsche began to write his notes from the end of the notebook: 

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this means that the last pages contain those fragments that were written first.98 In the various preliminary drafts (Vorstufen) of Daybreak’s preface, the word unterirdisch (subterranean) appears for the first time on p. 40.99 This variant, which appears after some earlier versions of the preface with which Nietzsche was probably unsatisfied, can be considered the final one, being almost the same as the version Nietzsche decided to publish later.100 Even if this variant is undated, my supposition is that Nietzsche wrote this preliminary draft in the autumn of 1886. In fact, if my chronological reading of the notebook W I 8 is correct, when Nietzsche arrived in Nice around the 22 October, 1886, most of the notebook was already filled with notes and preliminary drafts. Once in Nice, following the opposite order of writing (i.e., from the end to the beginning of the notebook), Nietzsche wrote the rough copy of some letters until he came to those pages which he had already used in Sils-Maria and in Ruta (this time, in the normal order of writing, i.e., from the beginning to the end of the notebook).101 98 If we examine the typographical reproduction, we find the Vorstufen (preliminary drafts) of the following works: 1) Beyond Good and Evil (KGW IX 5: 289–151, 106–103); 2) the preface to the first part of Human, All Too Human (270f., 246); 3) the preface to the second part of Human, All Too Human (126f., 122, 120f., 92f.); 4) An Attempt at Self-Criticism, the introduction to the new edition of The Birth of Tragedy (109–107, 97); 5) the preface to Daybreak (72f., 66f., 60–57, 40f.); 6) the preface and the fifth book of The Gay Science (64f., 41, 33). Finally, the last thirty pages contain the rough copy of letters written by Nietzsche in Sils-Maria, Ruta and Nice, as well as some further preliminary drafts of the preface to the second part of Human, All Too Human and of the preface to the new edition of The Gay Science. In order to follow the analysis, it may be useful to mention some dates. 16 August, 1886: Nietzsche sent Fritzsch the final version of the preface to the first part of Human, All Too Human. 29 August, 1886: Nietzsche sent Fritzsch the final version of An Attempt at Self-Criticism. 13 September, 1886: Nietzsche sent Gast the final version of the preface to the second part of Human, All Too Human. 22 December, 1886: as aforementioned, Nietzsche sent Gast the final version of the preface to Daybreak. End of December, 1886: Nietzsche sent Fritzsch the final version of the preface and the fifth book of The Gay Science. 99 This version of the first section of the Preface to Daybreak is not included in the KGW. 100 Curiously, in order to avoid the repetition of the word unterirdisch, Nietzsche uses here the expression Höhlenbär (cave bear). 101 Here is a detailed description of the first thirty pages of KGW IX 5 [N. B.: places and dates in square brackets are the result of Colli and Montinari’s (reliable)

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In short, it is highly probable that before leaving Ruta for Nice in October, 1886, Nietzsche had already written an almost definitive version of the first section of the preface to Daybreak. This hypothesis seems to be confirmed not only by Colli and Montinari’s dating of the notebook W I 8 between the autumn of 1885 and the autumn of 1886, but also by the fact that the association between the mole and the subterranean already appears in the following passage from Beyond Good and Evil (which was published in August 1886): “‘Aren’t people’s ears already filled with enough bad sounds?’ the skeptic asks, being a friend of peace and almost a type of security police: ‘This subterranean No [unterirdische Nein] is awful! Be quiet already, you pessimistic moles!’” (BGE, 208)102 In conclusion, following the analysis outlined above, it seems reasonable to reject the hypothesis that Dostoevsky’s influence was already at work in the preface to Daybreak, as advanced by Schaeffner, de Schloezer and by Van der Luft and Stenberg. On the contrary, it is most likely that Nietzsche had an almost definitive version of the preface (at speculation]: pp. 29–30, letter to General Simon [Nice, around 20 October, 1886], see #764; pp. 28–29, letter to unknown, [Nice, presumably end of October, 1886], see # 771.; p. 27, letter to Franziska Nietzsche, [Nice, around 26 October, 1886], see #765; letter to Reinhardt von Seydlitz, [Nice, a few days before 26 October, 1886], see #767; pp. 26, 24, 21–22, Vorstufe of the preface to the second part of Human, All Too Human; p. 25, letter to Hyppolite Taine [Sils-Maria, around 20 September, 1886], see #753; p. 23, letter to Gottfried Keller, Ruta Ligure, 14 October, 1886, see #763; pp. 17–20, unwritten; pp. 15–16, Vorstufe of The Gay Science’s preface; p. 13, letter to Elisabeth Förster [Nice, 3 November, 1886], see #773; p. 12, letter to Erwin Rodhe, [Sils-Maria, approximately mid-August, 1886], see #731; p. 11, letter to Franz Overbeck, Ruta Ligure, 12 October, 1886, see #761; pp. 9–10, letter to Ernst Wilhelm Fritzsch, Sils-Maria, 7 August, 1886, see #730; p. 8, final part of the letter to Taine, see #753; pp. 6–7, letter to Paul Lanzky [Sils-Maria, beginning of August, 1886], see #727; p. 6, letter to Jacob Burckhardt, Sils-Maria, 22 September, 1886, see #754; p. 4, letter to Franz Overbeck, Nice, 24 March, 1887, see #820; p. 2, presumably the list of copies of Beyond Good and Evil to be sent, see #726; p. 1, see PF 2 [210], autumn 1885-autumn 1886. 102 In the letter to his sister of 11 November, 1885 Nietzsche defines himself as a “Hamletic mole [hamletische Maulwurf].” (#644) Benne (2005: 237) comments on the expression used by Nietzsche as follows: “The self-identification with Hamlet plays an important role for Nietzsche. For him, Hamlet does not procrastinate due to over-reflection, as tradition states, but due to an excess of discernment and knowledge. Hamlet is ephectic and therefore ‘philologist’.” 

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least, of the first section) before he arrived in Nice and discovered the volume L’esprit souterrain. In this sense, positing a causal connection between the striking similarities of Nietzsche’s preface and the French adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground would be fallacious and therefore cannot help us to solve the question of the precise moment that Nietzsche discovered Dostoevsky.

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9.  Petersburg-Style Nihilism

Although the influence of the reading of L’esprit souterrain is most likely not to be traced to the preface to Daybreak, this does not exclude the possibility that the same influence may have been at work in the fifth book of The Gay Science. The fifth book was written in October 1886,103 while the final draft was sent to the publisher Fritzsch at the end of December. However, Dellinger (2012: 340 f.) has drawn attention to the fact that Nietzsche had the manuscript in his hands once again in February 1887. On this occasion, Nietzsche renumbered the manuscript, added section 358, and sent the manuscript back to Fritzsch on 18 February104 – six days after the first mention of Dostoevsky in the correspondence.105 According to Dellinger, it is plausible that during these days Nietzsche made also some revisions and additions. Given this chronology, and taking into account the similarity between Nietzsche’s account of consciousness as a sickness in section 354 and the underground man’s definition of a pronounced consciousness as a “maladie” (ES: 162), Dellinger concludes that Nietzsche’s allusion to “he who lives among the most conscious Europeans” (GS, 354) could possibly be a reference to Dostoevsky.106 Dellinger’s hypothesis seems to be supported by other possible allusions to Dostoevsky in the fifth book of The Gay Science. As Miller (1973: 212) has already pointed out, section 365 contains the following clear allusion to the “underground” motif: “this entire subterranean, hidden, mute, undiscovered loneliness that we call life but might as 103 104 105 106



See the letter to Gast of 13 February 1887 (#800). See the postcard to Fritzsch of 18 February 1887 (#801). See the letter to Overbeck of 12 February 1887 (#798). The whole passage from GS, 354 reads as follows: “In the end, the growing consciousness is a danger; and he who lives among the most conscious Europeans even knows it is a sickness.” Beyond the possible allusion to Dostoevsky, Dellinger’s paper develops an accurate analysis of the similarities in form and content between section 354 and the second part of L’esprit souterrain. Dellinger’s reading seems plausible and convincing.

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well be called death.” A second, possible and more interesting allusion to Dostoevsky can be found in section 347 of the fifth book. In this section, Nietzsche speaks about those beliefs that attempted to fill the void left by God’s death. Among these “shadows of God”, as the philosopher defines them in section 343, Nietzsche mentions three concrete ways in which people in old Europe discharged their “demand for certainty”: “patriotism (I refer to what the French call chauvinisme and the Germans ‘German’)”, “petty aesthetic creeds such as Parisian naturalism” and finally “Petersburg-style nihilism (meaning faith in unbelief to the point of martyrdom).” (GS, 347)107 Should we take this passage as further allusion to Dostoevsky?108 Moreover, what does the expression “Petersburg-style nihilism” allude to? In reality, the “faith in unbelief to the point of martyrdom” would be a characteristic more proper of Kirillov, the character of Dostoevsky’s Demons, than of the underground man. However, as we will see later, it is hardly likely that Nietzsche read this novel before the winter of 1887–88.109 The allusion to “Petersburg-style nihilism” has therefore to be explained in another way. Kuhn (1992:244) points out that Nietzsche’s source is here once again Paul Bourget. In the chapter dedicated to Baudelaire and contained in his work Essais de psychologie contemporaine (from which, by the way, Nietzsche took many suggestions for his analysis of the décadence phenomenon110), Bourget speaks about those beliefs that attempt to replace the religious credo, and introduces the same tripartition between Slavs, Germans, and Latin peoples (in Nietzsche’s Gay Science, the French) that we find in section 347. Concerning the Slavs, Bourget (1920 [1883]: 13) uses expressions like “nihilisme” and “la rage meurtrière des conspirateurs de Saint-Pétersbourg”, and then adds the following allusion to Turgenev: “Il semble que du sang à demi asiatique des Slaves monte à leur cerveau une vapeur 107 See also GS, 346: “No! No longer with the bitterness and passion of the one who has torn himself away and must turn his unbelief into another faith, a goal, a martyrdom!” 108 So Garelli (2004: 451), quoted by Dellinger who, however, is more careful in reading this passage as an allusion to Dostoevsky. 109 The passages of Demons that Nietzsche transcribed in the notebook W II 3 date back to November 1887–March 1888. 110 The third part of the essay on Baudelaire is entitled Théorie de la décadence. On this, see Campioni (2001: 250–260).

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de mort qui les précipite à la destruction, comme à une sorte d’orgie sacrée. Tourguéniev disait à propos des nihilistes militants  :  «  Ils ne croient à rien, mais ils ont besoin du martyre… ».” (ibid.: 14). Bourget’s essay on Baudelaire and the allusion to Turgenev’s maxim – which could be translated as “They [the militant nihilists] believe in nothing, but they need martyrdom” – may also constitute the context in which the following passage from Beyond Good and Evil should be set: “When a philosopher these days makes it known that he is not a skeptic, – and I hope that this could be detected in the account of the objective spirit just given – everyone gets upset. People look at him apprehensively, they have so many questions, questions…in fact, frightened eavesdroppers (and there are crowds of them these days) will begin to consider him dangerous. It is as if they could hear, in his rejection of skepticism, some sort of evil and ominous sound in the distance, as if a new explosive were being tested somewhere, a dynamite of the spirit, perhaps a newly discovered Russian nihiline111, a pessimism bonae voluntatis that does not just say No or will No, but – the very thought is terrible! – does No.” (BGE, 208)

The allusion to the “newly discovered Russian nihiline” is not to be interpreted as a possible reference to Dostoevsky, but has to be put in the context of the more general analysis developed by Nietzsche on the sickness of the will spread throughout Europe. If at the time France was the country where the will was most seriously sick, in Russia, according to Nietzsche, “the strength to will has been laid aside and stored up over a long time; there, the will is waiting threateningly (uncertain whether as a will of negation or of affirmation), to be discharged (to borrow a favorite term from today’s physicists).” (BGE, 208) In the quoted passage, Nietzsche refers to the huge strength to will which had been preserved in Russia. In those years, this strength waited to be discharged through Russian nihilists as a will to negate, not only in theory (“say No or will No”), but also in praxis (“does No”). What is particularly interesting to note here is that before his discovery of Dostoevsky, and more particularly, the reading of the novel 111 The word “nihiline”, modeled on “nicotine”, has to be understood as a dangerous substance that poisoned the organism of European society, spreading through its body. See also the use of the word “moraline”, especially with relation to the “moraline-free virtue [moralinfreie Tugend]”, in A, 2 and 6, and in EH, Why I Am so Clever, 1. 

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Demons, Nietzsche was already familiar with Russian nihilism. He not only knew the chapter dedicated to Baudelaire in Bourget’s work, but he had also read Turgenev and Brunetière. According to Kuhn (1992: 37), between 1876 and 1880, Nietzsche read a French translation of Turgenev’s masterpiece Fathers and Sons.112 Turgenev’s work portrayed the conflict between the generations of the forties (the fathers) and sixties (the sons) of nineteenth century Russia, and showed through the young characters Arkady and Bazarov how quickly nihilist ideas were infecting the younger generation at that time. Nietzsche also knew Ferdinand Brunètiere’s Le roman naturaliste (1883), which contained a chapter entitled Le roman du nihilisme, carefully read and underlined by Nietzsche.113 This chapter was about Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done?, which, as we have seen, Dostoevsky strongly criticized in his Notes from Underground. According to Brunetière, Chernyshevsky’s novel, “une sorte d’évangile du nihilisme russe” (Brunètiere 1883: 47), was interesting not so much as a (mediocre) work of art but as an expression of Russian radicalism. (see ibid.: 30) This chapter, however, not only offered an analysis of Chernyshevsky’s work, but also provided valuable considerations of a more general nature about Russian nihilism and its evolution. These considerations, together with those of Bourget and Turgenev, undoubtedly contributed to widening Nietzsche’s knowledge of this phenomenon.

112 See I. Tourguenef, Pères et enfants. Paris: Charpentier, 1863. Turgenev’s novel was introduced in the French edition by a letter from Prosper Mérimée to the publisher Charpentier. 113 According to Kuhn (1992: 43), Nietzsche read Brunetière’s work in the spring of 1884.

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10.  Further Readings

After the analysis of Nietzsche’s first readings and the investigation of the heated debate about the chronology of his discovery of Dostoevsky, let us follow again the central thread offered by the correspondence, and explore in which direction Nietzsche’s dialogue with Dostoevsky continued. As already mentioned, in the letter of 18 March, 1887 (#444) Gast told Nietzsche that he had ordered a little book of Dostoevsky’s short stories. Apparently, Gast sent the book to Nietzsche, who thanked his friend with a postcard on 27 March, 1887: “Forgive me for simply using a postcard to thank you for the letter and the received translation of Dostoevsky. I am glad that you seem to have first read the same work of his that I did – ‘The Landlady’ (in French as the first part of the novel L’esprit souterrain). In return, I send you Humiliés et offensés: the French translate more delicately than the awful Jew Goldschmidt (with his synagogue-like rhythm).” (#822)

The Goldschmidt, to whom Nietzsche refers, was the translator of Erzählungen von F. M. Dostojewskij, a volume published in 1886 by Reclam, which contained the following Dostoevsky short stories: Die Wirtin (The Landlady), Christbaum und Hochzeit (A Christmas Tree and a Wedding), Helle Nächte (White Nights), Weihnacht (A Little Boy at Christ’s Christmas Party) and finally Der ehrliche Dieb (An Honest Thief). A brief two-page introduction on Dostoevsky’s biography and bibliography preceded the stories. In the last lines of this introduction, the five great novels of Dostoevsky’s maturity were all mentioned (in German translation).114 Unfortunately, we cannot know whether Nietzsche read the whole volume or just a part of it. However, as the postcard to Gast shows, the philosopher was able to compare Goldschmidt’s German translation with the French and clearly preferred the latter. 114 For Crime and Punishment, at that time known in Germany as Raskolnikow, the reference number of Reclam’s edition was also specified (see Er: 3f.). 

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The fact that Nietzsche preferred the French translations of Dostoevsky depends only in part on their musicality. Indeed, as Llinares (2009b: 5) correctly points out, Nietzsche’s predilection for these translations proves that Nietzsche read Dostoevsky “as if he was a special and extraordinary ingredient of the Parisian culture of that time.” This point is of great importance and should be not overlooked if we aim to understand Nietzsche’s engagement with Dostoevsky in its specificity. From the very first moment, Nietzsche set Dostoevsky’s works in the context of French culture (which at that time was particularly in ferment), that is, he read them as if they were an excellent product of that same culture. This is why, as the aforementioned letter to Emily Finn of 4 March, 1887 shows (#812), it was so obvious for Nietzsche to compare “the eminent psychologist Dostoevsky” with all those modern, Parisian psychologists – such as Paul Bourget, Pierre Loti, Anatole France and Guy de Maupassant, among others – mentioned in Ecce Homo (Why I Am so Clever, 3). Even if Nietzsche did not like Goldschmidt’s translation of Dostoevsky’s short stories, he nonetheless thanked Gast for sending the volume and returned the favour with a copy of a French translation of The Insulted and Injured. A few days later Gast thanked his friend with a postcard of 30 March, 1887 clarifying, however, that the translation had not yet arrived. Gast added the following information: “What I first read was White Nights, which to me is the most rounded piece of writing in the book and, at the same time, the most difficult for the psychologist and artist Dostoevsky. A kind of gloominess and shyness of a single man came over me; I had just come from the fantastic world of war and love in the Orlando furioso.” (#448)

Nietzsche answered this postcard on April 15 with a letter from Cannobbio. He felt sorry about the disappearance of the French translation, but at the same time was ironic about it: “At least there is perhaps a good side to this misfortune: there is no doubt that you put yourself under Ariosto’s sunshine with much more reason than I put myself in this Petersburg winter twilight.” (#832)115 115 Compare with the following passage from the letter to Georg Brandes of 27 March, 1888: “In St. Petersburg I should be a nihilist; here, I believe in the sun as a plant does.” (#1009)

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As the correspondence shows, Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for Dostoevsky was not a momentary or ephemeral interest, but grew as time passed. In a letter to Malwida von Meysenbug of 12 May, 1887 Nietzsche expressed his intellectual kinship with French and Russian culture: “To come to Versailles – oh, if only that might somehow be possible! For I revere the circle of people whom you find there (a curious admission from a German; but I feel myself in Europe today to be related only to the intellectual French and Russians and not at all to my cultivated compatriots, who judge all things by the principle Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles).” (#845)

In a postscript to the same letter, Nietzsche refers to his meeting in Zurich with Resa von Schirnhofer, who was also a friend of Malwida von Meysenbug. Nietzsche shared Schirnhofer’s predilection for Dostoevsky, as the letter shows: “In Zurich I visited the excellent Frl. [Fräulein] von Schirnhofer, just back from Paris, uncertain of her future, aim, prospect but, like me, most enthusiastic about Dostoevsky.” (#845) The meeting, to which Nietzsche so briefly refers, is also described in more detail by Schirnhofer in her memories Vom Menschen Nietzsche.116 The following passage from Schirnhofer’s memories not only confirms a considerable amount of information, which has been already inferred from the analysis of the correspondence, but also gives new, important details about Nietzsche’s engagement with Dostoevsky: “I spoke to Nietzsche for the last time on 6 May 1887, when I had the pleasure of welcoming him into my home that morning. Having come back from Paris the evening before, I found Nietzsche’s note and heard to my regret that he had already asked several times whether I had come back, and that he was now thinking of leaving. After initial pleasantries, I immediately began to tell him about the most interesting books I had just been reading in Paris. The one, which had made a deeper impression than the others, was still in my mind: La Maison des Mortes [sic]. Nietzsche briskly interrupted me and exclaimed with surprise that he also wanted to tell me about his discovery of Dostoevsky and that I had beaten 116 As Diethe (1996: 91) points out, in 1937 von Schirnhofer wrote a brief account of her friendship with Nietzsche on request of Elisabeth, Nietzsche’s sister. The account was not published and was later discovered amongst von Schirnhofer’s papers after her death. It was then published by Hans Lohberger in Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 22 (1969), pp. 250–260 and 441–458, under the title “Friedrich Nietzsche und Resa von Schirnhofer”. 

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him to it. He suggested that I read ‘L’esprit souterrain’, ‘extraordinarily captivating’, and he added that the German translation was rather lacking.117 He had compared the German translation with the French and discovered that in the former precisely the most detailed aperçus and the broader psychological analyses had simply been omitted. He had asked one of his acquaintances to compare the Russian text with both translations: he confirmed the German mutilation of the original text. Then I spoke about a visit that I had paid to Natalie Herzen, someone with an excellent character and spirit, who was a close friend of Turgenev and who also knew Nietzsche. At her place I bumped into Prince M. who, if I am not wrong, personally knew Dostoevsky well. He told me a lot about him, things still completely unknown at that time, which also roused Nietzsche’s interest. In this way, the conversation on rue d’Assas in Paris about Turgenev and Dostoevsky was continued in Zurich through Nietzsche – in that peculiar way of his which allowed every subject to illuminate and scintillate so that I have retained, if not every detail of the conversation, its reflection in the twilight of distant memories.” (quoted in Gilman 1981: 572)

The memories of her conversation with Nietzsche, still fresh in Resa von Schirnhofer’s mind, give us further interesting information. First, these memories confirm two aspects already pointed out in the previous analysis. On the one hand, the account corroborates that Nietzsche was filled with enthusiasm for his discovery of Dostoevsky and for L’esprit souterrain. On the other hand, the words of Schirnhofer, who had just returned from Paris, bear witness to the great vogue for Dostoevsky that began in France during the 1880s and caused a substantial increase in the number of translations of his works. Secondly, the question of the translation of Dostoevsky’s works (in this case, of L’esprit souterrain) clearly played a very important role for Nietzsche. He had not only personally compared the French translation with the German, discovering that in the latter the most fine aperçus and larger psychological analyses were omitted, but, if we trust Schirnhofer’s account, he had even asked an acquaintance of his to compare both translations with the Russian text.118 Finally, Schirnhofer’s memories give us a final, but 117 Notes from Underground firstly appeared translated into German in 1895 with the title Aus dem dunkelsten Winkel der Großstadt. We can therefore assume that Nietzsche referred to the aforementioned Goldschmidt’s German translation of The Landlady, the first part of L’esprit souterrain. 118 Two letters of the correspondence confirm Nietzsche’s particular attention to the translation of Dostoevsky’s works. The first is the one sent to Georg Brandes on 20 October, 1888. The following passage shows that Nietzsche’s predilection for

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very important detail about Nietzsche’s engagement with Dostoevsky: Nietzsche collected information about the Russian writer not only through reading his novels, but also through indirect and secondary sources. In this sense, we should not be mislead by the few mentions of Dostoevsky’s name in Nietzsche’s late works: as the correspondence, the posthumous fragments, and the testimony of Nietzsche’s friends reveal, Nietzsche’s dialogue with Dostoevsky in the year 1887 and ’88 was very intense and productive.

the French translations of Dostoevsky’s works was a constant: “I count any sort of Russian book, above all Dostoevsky (translated into French, for God’s sake, not into German!!) among my greatest reliefs.” (#1134) The second is the letter of 27 November, 1888 addressed to the Swedish playwright August Strindberg. In this letter, Nietzsche wrote the following: “The fact that Zola is not ‘enamoured of abstraction’ reminds me of a German translator of one of Dostoevsky’s novels, who was also not ‘enamoured of abstraction.’ He had simply omitted ‘des raccourcis d’analyse’, they annoyed him…” (#1160) In the Nachbericht of the third section of Nietzsche’s Briefwechsel, Müller-Buck (see KGW III 7/3.1: 457) refers to the supposition of Karl Strecker (the editor of the volume Nietzsche und Strindberg. Mit ihrem Briefwechsel. Munich: Müller, 1921) that the German translator, whom Nietzsche mentions in the letter to Strindberg, is Wilhelm Henkel, who in 1882 had translated Crime and Punishment into German under the title of Raskolnikow (Leipzig: Friedrich, 1882, 3 Vols.). However, the same Henkel, in his prologue to the German edition, stated that he had taken the liberty of making only a few short cuts, for he wanted to avoid any interference with the author’s intentions (see ibid.: Vol. 1, p. VII). In her turn, Müller-Buck (KGW III 7/3.1: 457) suggests that Nietzsche may have spoken by mistake of a German translator, when he actually meant the French translators of L’esprit souterrain. A third option is suggested by Brobjer (1997: 685) who, in his paper on Nietzsche’s late readings and private library, interprets the allusion to the German translator as a reference to Dostoevsky’s A Raw Youth, translated into German by Walfriede Stein in 1886 with the title Junger Nachwuchs. Unfortunately, Brobjer does not explain why he draws such a conclusion. Contrary to these interpretations, my hypothesis is that the German translator to whom Nietzsche refers is simply “the awful Jew Goldschmidt” of the postcard to Gast of 27 March, 1887 (#822), that is, the translator of the volume Erzählungen von F. M. Dostojewskij. As we know from Schirnhofer’s account, Nietzsche compared Goldschmidt’s translation of The Landlady with the French one, realizing that in the former the extended psychological ana­ lyses were omitted. Indeed, as indicated on the cover, Goldschmidt’s translation of The Landlady was a free one and if we compare the German version with the French, it is easy to see that extended passages are often excised in the former. 

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11. On the Possible Reading of Crime and Punishment

By following the thread offered in the correspondence, we face another issue of great importance for the analysis of Nietzsche’s engagement with Dostoevsky: his possible reading of Crime and Punishment. Between the end of April and the beginning of May, 1887 Nietzsche was in Zurich. On 29 April, he sent Overbeck (who was in Basel) a postcard, telling him that he had just arrived in Zurich and he wished to see him. Overbeck paid a visit to his friend the next day and went back to Basel on 1 May. On this occasion, he lent Nietzsche a work by the young Karl Bleibtreu (editor and critic of the Magazin für die Litteratur des In- und Auslandes) entitled Revolution der Litteratur and published the year before. On 4 May, Nietzsche sent a postcard to Overbeck, writing that Bleibtreu had left him with “a bitter feeling.” (#843) Nine days later, the philosopher, filled with indignation, sent the work back to Overbeck: “Lastly, I send you back the ‘Bleibtreu’, which I do not want to be faithful to even for a moment.119 I cannot absolutely assume that his pretensions are based on true qualities […] Byron and Scott in the present Germany! Compatible with the adoration of Zola! What psychological short-sightedness, e.g., in the brief dismissal with which he considers Dostoevsky’s last work!” (#847)

In the quoted passage, Nietzsche specifically refers to the Prologue to the second edition of Bleibtreu’s Revolution der Litteratur, in which Bleibtreu made reference to Crime and Punishment (as already mentioned, in the German translation of that time: Raskolnikow). Bleibtreu (1973 [18873]: VIIf.) defined Dostoevsky’s work as “the novel of conscience” and then added the following considerations: “Never has one so exhaustively shown the universal problem around which human life has revolved since Adam and Eve: the all-dominant power of the unknown god which is inborn in us and is what we call “conscience” – never, with the exception 119 In the German original there is a pun between “Bleibtreu” (the author of the work) and “treu bleiben” (“to be faithful to”). 

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of Shakespeare and Byron […] On the contrary, if we compare such works as Germinal with Raskolnikow, we must acknowledge a finer technical virtuosity in the latter, but a higher ethical and social significance in the former […] If we remove the wonderful psychological analyses from the Russian novel, all that remains is a detective story à la Gaboriau.”120

Crime and Punishment can be considered a bestseller of its time. At the time, Derély’s French translation had already been reprinted for the fourth time,121 while Henkel’s German translation had been available since 1882. We know that Nietzsche already knew of Crime and Punishment,122 but did he have the occasion to read it? Should we take Nietzsche’s critique of Bleibtreu’s “brief dismissal” of Raskolnikow as a proof of Nietzsche’s reading of Crime and Punishment? Is there any other evidence of this reading? Scholars have expressed different views on this matter: some of them have given a positive (but sometimes undocumented)123 response, while others have chosen a more cautious position. In what follows, I will consider and examine the most plausible hypotheses put forward over the years. In his work dedicated to Nietzsche’s breakdown, Verrecchia (1978: 55) links the well know Turin incident with the horse (when Nietzsche, showing the first signs of his imminent psychological disorder, supposedly threw his arms around the neck of a horse that a carriage driver was beating) with Raskolnikov’s dream described in the first part of Crime and Punishment, a dream that bears striking similarities with the Turin episode. Here is a brief summary of the dream: Raskolnikov is seven years old and is out walking with his father one evening while on holiday. Some drunken peasants come out of a tavern. One of them, Mikolka, invites the others to get into his huge cart to which a poor little mare has been harnessed. The mare can scarcely move forward, but nonetheless, Mikolka and the other peasants whip her. The crowd laughs and 120 Émile Gaboriau (1832–1873), French novelist and journalist, was a pioneer of the detective story. 121 The first edition was published in 1884 by Plon. 122 In the first page of his Avertissement to Souvenirs de la maison des morts, de Vogüé mentions Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, defining it as one of Dostoevsky’s most characteristic novels (see SMM: I). 123 De Schloezer (1967: 169), for instance, argues that Nietzsche read Crime et châtiment, but he does not offer any proof to support his thesis.

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Mikolka curses the poor beast, while some peasants whip the mare’s eyes. Little Raskolnikov cries and instinctively runs to the horse. The beast begins to kick, thus provoking the rage of Mikolka who, helped by the others, whips the poor mare to death. When Raskolnikov, having made his way through the crowd, puts his arms round the bleeding head of the mare, she already lies still and dead.124 There is an undeniably strong analogy between the Turin episode and Raskolnikov’s dream. Nietzsche read Dostoevsky’s novel, so the story goes, and when he witnessed the whipping of a horse in Turin in early 1889 he reacted like little Raskolnikov, throwing his arms round the horse’s neck.125 This hypothesis is without doubt attractive, but there is one problem: as Verrecchia (1978: 196–216) exhaustively shows, not all the sources concur regarding the episode of the horse. It is therefore difficult to know whether the incident really occurred and was voluntarily omitted by Overbeck (as well as Elisabeth, Nietzsche’s sister) in order to hide the most embarrassing details of Nietzsche’s breakdown, or if on the contrary, this episode is merely fictitious and has to be considered a legend that has grown up about Nietzsche over the years.126 In 124 Compare with the following passage from Dostoevsky’s A Writer’s Diary (January 1876: 326): “Our children are raised and grow up encountering many disgusting sights. They see a peasant who has grossly overloaded his cart lashing his wretched nag, who gives him his living, across the eyes as she struggles in the mud.” 125 See Ebersbach (2006: 356–361). According to Ebersbach, there are several aspects of Raskolnikov’s character which could have led Nietzsche to identify with Dostoevsky’s hero. 126 As Verrecchia reports, in the letter to Gast of 15 January, 1889 Overbeck, who after the first signs of Nietzsche’s breakdown had rushed to help his friend, simply wrote of a collapse: “On the same afternoon – the afternoon of my arrival, a week ago today – the affair became a public scandal there […] N[ietzsche], who had collapsed in the street on the previous day and had been picked up there, was now in danger of being committed to a private insane asylum.” (see Hoffmann et al. 1998: 205) On the other side, Verrecchia quotes at length Italian articles, partially based on conversations with the Fino family (Davide Fino was Nietzsche’s landlord), which allude to the horse episode. These articles were written, however, many years after the supposed incident had occurred, and in this case some disparity in the sources still remains. A first anonymous article of 16 September 1900 (see Verrecchia 1978: 207) simply reports that the guards found Nietzsche with his arms thrown around a horse’s neck; no mention is made of the carriage driver beating the horse. A second article, written by Ugo Pavia on 22 January, 1932 

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this sense, Janz’s (1981 [1979], Vol. 3: 35) opinion on this subject seems to be more than reasonable: “Nowhere does Nietzsche leave proof (evidence is yet to be found) that he read Dostoevsky’s work [Crime and Punishment] or even knew of the episode [Raskolnikov’s dream]. To make a connection between the Turin incident and the episode requires, however, such knowledge; or on the contrary: such (unproven) knowledge could be assumed from the Turin incident – which would be interesting. But either way, without further evidence the causal chain remains weak.”

With regard to Nietzsche’s possible reading of Crime and Punishment, a more interesting consideration can be found in the following posthumous fragment 14[166] from the spring of 1888, to which Verrecchia (1978: 54) himself draws attention: “Motif for an image. Winter landscape. The carter, with an expression of the most disdainful cynicism, urinates upon his own horse. The poor maltreated creature looks around – grateful, very grateful…” We know that Nietzsche noted down this fragment on 12 May, 1888 since the following day he wrote in a letter to Reinhart von Seydlitz, “Yesterday I dreamt up an image of moralité larmoyante, as Diderot would say” (#1034), and then described the image in almost the same words used in his notebook. The winter landscape, the cynical carter, and the maltreated horse are all elements that clearly recall Raskolnikov’s dream. Once again, however, we should avoid drawing hasty conclusions. Indeed, although the similarities are substantial, a similar image can also be found in Nekrasov’s poem Before Twilight and in Hugo’s Les Misérables (see Catteau 1989 [1978]: 45f.). Dostoevsky himself alludes to Nekrasov in The Brothers Karamazov, in the passage where Ivan describes a similar scene to his brother Alyosha.127 Plon published Les frères Karamazov in May, 1888 i.e., the same (see ibid.: 209) – that is, half a century after the supposed incident! – relates this time an episode similar to the one described in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. 127 See BK: 240f.: “Nekrasov has a poem describing a peasant flogging a horse on its eyes with a knout, ‘on its meek eyes.’ We’ve all seen that; that is Russianism. He describes a weak nag, harnessed with too heavy a load, that gets stuck in the mud with her cart and is unable to pull it out. The peasant beats her, beats her savagely, beats her finally not knowing what he’s doing; drunk with beating, he flogs her painfully, repeatedly: ‘Pull, though you have no strength, pull, though you die!’ The little nag strains, and now he begins flogging her, flogging the defenseless creature on her weeping, her ‘meek eyes.’ Beside herself, she strains and pulls the cart out,

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month as Nietzsche’s aforementioned letter to Heinrich von Seydlitz. Therefore, even if we identify the source of Nietzsche’s dreamed image in Dostoevsky, how can we tell whether this source was Crime and Punishment or The Brother Karamazov? In his edition of The Will to Power, Kaufmann refers to two previous posthumous fragments that, in his opinion, could be a possible comment on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.128 Both fragments belong to the notebook W II 2 and were written in the autumn of 1887: “One should not hold against the criminal his bad manners or the low level of his intelligence. Nothing is more common than that he should misunderstand himself (for often his rebellious instinct, the rancor of the déclassé, has not reached consciousness, faute de lecture), that he should slander and dishonor his deed under the influence of fear and failure – quite apart from those cases in which, psychologically speaking, the criminal surrenders to an uncomprehended drive and by some subsidiary action ascribes a false motive to his deed (perhaps by a robbery when what he wanted was blood).” (PF 10[50], autumn 1887) “There are delicate and sickly inclined natures, so-called idealists, who cannot achieve anything better than a crime, cru, vert129: it is the great justification of their little, pale existences, a payment for protracted cowardice and mendaciousness, a moment at least of strength: afterwards they perish of it.” (PF 10 [148], autumn 1887)

Kaufmann’s suggestion is without doubt reasonable: the second fragment in particular, with its allusion to the delicate and idealist natures that perish under the weight of the crime committed, seems to be a perfect synopsis of Crime and Punishment. On the other hand, however, we must not forget that a similar psychological mechanism (the criminal turned pale by the image of what he has done), together with the same false motive of the deed (the criminal does not want to rob, he wants blood), had already trembling all over, not breathing, moving somehow sideways, with a sort of skipping motion, somehow unnaturally and shamefully–it’s horrible in Nekrasov.” 128 See F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. with commentary by W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1968, p. 390. 129 Nietzsche here hints at the following passage from the letter of 5 September 1772 sent by Abbot Galiani to Madame D’Épinay: “En politique je n’admets que le machiavélisme pur, sans mélange, cru, vert, dans toute sa force, dans toute son âpreté.” On this, see Campioni (2001: 105). See also PF 11[54], November 1887March 1888. 

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been described by Nietzsche in Zarathustra’s speech On the Pale Criminal. This certainly does not mean that Kaufmann’s hypothesis must be discarded. Indeed, it is perfectly possible that Nietzsche, encouraged by the reading of Crime and Punishment, decided to return to the theme of the pale criminal some years after the publication of the first part of Zarathustra. However, the same supposition can be also made with respect to the reading of Souvenirs de la maison des morts. That is, we cannot exclude that it was the reading of Notes from the House of the Dead that led Nietzsche to go back to the theme of the pale criminal. Indeed, this supposition is supported by Nietzsche’s allusion to this work at the end of the first posthumous fragment quoted above (PF 10[50]). Further possible proof of Nietzsche’s reading of Crime and Punishment might be found in the following passage from the letter sent by Nietzsche from Sils-Maria to Hyppolite Taine on 4 July, 1887: “I should also not forget that I was glad to find your name in the dedication of the latest novel by M. Paul Bourget – although I do not like the book; M. B[ourget] will never be able to make a real physiological hole in the chest of a fellow being seem credible (that kind of thing is for him only quelque chose arbitraire, from which, I hope, his delicate good taste will hereafter restrain him. But it seems, does it not, that the spirit of Dostoevsky gives these Parisian novelists no peace?).” (#872)

The novel to which Nietzsche refers in this letter is Bourget’s André Cornélis. Bourget had dedicated his last novel to Taine, in whose house he had met on several occasions Turgenev – who, in his turn, had introduced Bourget to the works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.130 As Gesemann (1961: 138) points out, André (the protagonist of Bourget’s novel) is a character based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet who, having avenged his father’s death, has to face “haunting philosophical and psychological thoughts about the moral justification of the revenge he had carried out against his stepfather […] which make him unmistakably a second, but flattened Raskolnikov.” One can suppose that Nietzsche, having read Crime and Punishment, recognized Dostoevsky’s influence on André Cornélis and stated that the spirit of Dostoevsky gave Bourget no peace.131 Nonetheless, it 130 See Müller-Buck (2002: 111). 131 Bourget had already discovered Dostoevsky around 1882. His Un crime d’amour (a novel which, as we know, Nietzsche read) bears testimony of this influence (see KGB III 7/3, 1: 83).

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should be noted that a similar passage to the one quoted from the letter to Taine can be already found in the previous and aforementioned letter to Gast of 7 March, 1887 (#814). In this letter, Nietzsche alludes more generally to Dostoevsky’s influence on contemporary Parisian novelists, referring to Bourget as a concrete example of this phenomenon.132 It is very unlikely that Nietzsche had already read Crime and Punishment by that time;133 he nonetheless already knew about Dostoevsky’s influence on the Parisian novelists, particularly on Paul Bourget. Thus, it is not possible to tell whether in the letter to Taine, Nietzsche is alluding to Crime and Punishment’s influence on André Cornélis or is simply referring to the impact that Dostoevsky’s novels has had on a whole generation of Parisian writers. Finally, a last letter has to be mentioned in this context. On 14 October, 1888 Nietzsche, who at that time was in Turin, wrote a letter to Gast and informed him en passant that “the French have put a version of Dostoevsky’s principal novel on the stage.” (#1130) The “principal novel” to which Nietzsche referred was Crime and Punishment, an adaptation of which had been staged by Paul Ginisty and Hugues Le Roux at the Paris Odéon on 15 September, 1888. If the French translation of the novel had been a bestseller, the theatre adaptation was a success with critics.134 Müller-Buck (2002: 112) highlights the fact that 132 See the following passage from the letter: “I have also observed how completely the youngest generation of Parisian novelists is tyrannized over by the influence of Dostoevsky, and by their jealousy of him (Paul Bourget, for instance).” 133 In the letter Nietzsche seems to summarize the various steps of his discovery of Dostoevsky and he refers only to L’esprit souterrain, Souvenirs de la maison des morts and Humiliés et offensés. 134 The great importance that the Journal des débats gave to this play proves once more how strong Dostoevsky’s appeal among French readers of the 1880s was. The issue of 15 February, 1888 already announced that Crime et châtiment was going to be staged at the end of the season or the beginning of the following season. On 20 August Ginisty and Le Roux’s adaptation was read at the Odéon and the casting was made (see JdD, 22 August, 1888). On 15 September, the première was publicized (see JdD, 15 September, 1888: “Ce soir, à l’Odéon, première représentation de Crime et Châtiment, drame en sept tableaux tiré du roman de Dostoiewski par MM. Paul Ginisty et Hugues Le Roux, musique de M. Henri Maréchal.”). The next day both authors were congratulated for having succeeded in “une entreprise si délicate et si périlleuse.” (JdD, 16 September, 1888) On 17 September, Jules Lemaitre concluded the section La semaine dramatique referring to the adaptation 

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the news of this adaptation did not escape Nietzsche, who then told Gast about it. In addition, Müller-Buck (ibid.) refers particularly to the following posthumous fragment 7[46], spring 1887, which, in her opinion, would confirm Nietzsche’s reading of Dostoevsky’s novel: “We enjoy our wilder, crazier, more disorderly moments; we would be capable of committing a crime just to see what this talk of the pangs of conscience is about–.” The allusion to Raskolnikov seems clear, although even in this case we cannot exclude the possibility that the reading of Souvenirs de la maison des morts (to which Nietzsche explicitly alludes some fragments earlier, to be precise in the 7[6]) could have led Nietzsche to revisit the theme of the criminal and the pang of conscience, already developed in his previous works. Let us not extend the discussion of this subject any further, but draw conclusions. As we have seen, there are many passages from the correspondence and the posthumous fragments which seem to prove Nietzsche’s reading of Crime and Punishment. Subjected to deeper scrutiny, however, the proofs supposedly contained in these passages can be explained away by reference to different sources. The only thing we can be sure of is that Nietzsche knew that Crime and Punishment was considered at the time Dostoevsky’s “principal novel”. Given the prestige enjoyed by this work, it is certainly highly possible that Nietzsche decided to read it. In a similar way, we cannot exclude the possibility that Nietzsche knew about this novel through one of the articles published by de Vogüé (see de Vogüé 1885: 338–343; 1886a: 246– 255), Mori (see Mori 1885), or Lemaitre (see JdD, 24 September 1888). All these articles thoroughly described the plot and analysed the novel in depth. However, if Nietzsche really read Crime and Punishment or an extended review of it, would it not be surprising that he was only interested in the theme of the pang of conscience and did not comment explicitly in his notebooks on Raskolnikov’s theory of the extraordinary man, which scholars have so often compared to and linked with his overman? of Dostoevsky’s Crime et châtiment and reporting that “le succès a été très grand.” (JdD, 17 September, 1888) A week later, the same Lemaitre dedicated a whole section to an analysis of the drama. (See JdD, 24 September, 1888) Ginisty and Le Roux’s adaptation was published the same year by Ollendorff and Plon. (see JdD, 21 September, 1888)

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12.  Jesus as Idiot

Another subject that has caused heated debate among scholars in past years is Nietzsche’s possible reading of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. This novel was published serially in The Russian Messenger between 1868 and 1869. As Dostoevsky explains in the letter to Apollon Maikov of 12 January, 1868 the idea behind his novel was to depict “an absolutely wonderful person.” (CL II: 297) This concept obviously had a moral nuance and Dostoevsky chose the Nazarene as the main model for his character. Curiously, the result was Prince Myshkin, the main character of The Idiot, a sort of Russian Don Quixote: a young man, about twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, recently awoken from his idiocy, blonde hair and blue eyes, peaceful and meek, epileptic (as Dostoevsky himself was), innocent and naïve, inclined to Christian forgiveness and physiologically like a child. Dostoevsky’s novel was translated into French by Victor Derély and published by Plon for the first time in April, 1887 with an Avertissement from de Vogüé (Id: I–XI), whereas August Scholz’s German translation first appeared in 1889 (published by S. Fischer, Berlin). Neither in Nietzsche’s published works, nor in the posthumous fragments, nor in the correspondence is it possible to find a direct reference to The Idiot. Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s late characterization of Jesus and, more specifically, certain passages from The Anti-Christ and the posthumous fragments of 1887–88 have led many scholars in past years to consider the hypothesis that Nietzsche read The Idiot as the most plausible one.135 To see why until recently this tendency has been so prevalent, 135 In 1930, Andler (1972 [1930]: 3) wrote that the use of certain terminology in Nietzsche’s later works and frequent allusions to forms of degenerate altruism, prove that the philosopher had read The Idiot. On the contrary, Dibelius (1944: 72) considered that it was highly unlikely that Nietzsche knew Dostoevsky’s “Idiot”, since he would have explicitly referred to it in the correspondence, and perhaps also in The Anti-Christ or in the plans for The Will to Power. Gesemann (1961: 143) basically agreed with Benz’s conclusion (1956: 100) that some passages from The Anti-Christ and the posthumous fragments made the assumption of Nietzsche’s 

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let us examine the evidence that scholars have used to support their conclusion. In section 29 of The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche criticizes the way in which the French historian and philosopher Ernest Renan had interpreted the Redeemer in his work Vie de Jésus (1863), the first volume of Histoires des origines du christianisme.136 According to Nietzsche, Renan’s interpretation of the Nazarene was completely mistaken: “Mr Renan, this buffoon in psychologicis, imported the most inappropriate concepts imaginable into his explanation of Jesus’ type: the concept of genius and that of hero (‘héros’).137 But if anything is unevangelical, it is the concept of a hero. The polar opposite of struggle, of any feeling of doing-battle, has become instinct here: an incapacity for resistance has become morality here (‘resist not evil’, the most profound saying of the Gospel, the key to their meaning in a certain sense138), reading of The Idiot quite likely, while in his first article in Nietzsche-Studien, Miller (1973: 203) considered it possible that Nietzsche had read The Idiot in a French translation. Finally, the most recent works on this subject tend to see the similarities between Prince Myshkin’s characterization and Nietzsche’s portrayal of the type Jesus as proof of a direct connection (see Sommer 2000: 317; Pacini 2001: 17, 30–40; Ebersbach 2006: 378; Santos Sena 2010). An exception is represented by Morillas 2012. 136 Nietzsche read Renan’s work during the winter of 1886–87 and copied out several passages in the notebook W II 3 (November 1887-March 1888). On this, see the letter to Overbeck of 23 February, 1887 (#804) – this is the same letter, in which Nietzsche gives some details about his discovery of Dostoevsky. On Nietzsche’s engagement with Renan, see Shapiro (1982: 193–222; pp. 215–220 are dedicated to Nietzsche’s argument against Renan’s interpretation of Jesus as put forward in his Vie de Jésus). 137 See the following passages from Renan’s Vie de Jésus: “Obsédé d’une idée de plus en plus impérieuse et exclusive, Jésus marchera désormais avec une sorte d’impassibilité fatale dans la voie que lui avaient tracée son étonnant génie et les circonstances extraordinaires où il vivait.” (Renan 1863: 130); “Son doux et pénétrant génie lui inspirait, quand il était seul avec ses disciples, des accents pleins de charme.” (ibid.: 348); “Il ne reste que le héros incomparable de la Passion, le fondateur des droits de la conscience libre, le modèle accompli que toutes les âmes souffrantes méditeront pour se fortifier et se consoler.” (ibid.: 379) 138 In 1888, Nietzsche read Tolstoy’s What I believe in French translation (Ma religion). Nietzsche transcribed passages from this book in the notebook W II 3 (November 1887-March 1888). As the following passage clearly shows, according to Tolstoy (1885: 21), the sentence “resist not evil” was the centre and the key to Jesus’ doctrine: “La proposition : « Ne résistez pas au méchant » est le centre de la doctrine ; seulement elle n’est pas une simple sentence, mais une règle dont la

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blessedness in peace, in gentleness, in an inability to be an enemy. […] And to make Jesus into a hero! – Even this word ‘genius’: what a misunderstanding it is! Our whole notion, our cultural notion of ‘spirit’ made absolutely no sense in the world where Jesus lived.” (A, 29)

Opposed to both concepts used by Renan to explain the type of the Nazarene, Nietzsche proposes a completely different definition: “The rigorous language of physiology would use a different word here: the word ‘idiot’.” (ibid.)139 As Sommer (2000: 289) points out, Nietzsche’s intention in The Anti-Christ is not to write a biography of Jesus; his approach is rather “pathographic”. His analysis of the type of the redeemer is therefore, at the same time psychological, physiological and, if we may say so, clinical. The element that, according to Nietzsche characterizes the Nazarene the most, is a morbid physiological habitus: “The instinct of hatred for reality: the consequence of an extreme over-sensitivity and capacity for suffering that does not want to be ‘touched’ at all because it feels every contact too acutely. / The instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all hostility, all boundaries and distances in feelings: the consequence of an extreme over-sensitivity and capacity for suffering that perceives every reluctance, every needing-to-be-reluctanct as itself an unbearable pain (which is to say harmful, proscribed by the instinct of self-preservation) and only experiences bliss (pleasure) when it stops resisting everyone and anything, including evil, – love as the only, the final possibility for life…” (A, 30)

According to Nietzsche, tradition strongly distorted the real psycho-physiological nature of the Nazarene and handed down a false pratique est obligatoire. Elle est véritablement la clef qui ouvre tout, mais à condition que la clef sera poussée jusqu’au fond de la serrure.” As Souladié correctly points out, Nietzsche interprets the saying “resist not evil” as the consequence, not of a pacifist ideology, but of a physiological condition. As Souladié (2007: 100) puts it: “Jésus n’a pas longuement lutté intérieurement pour parvenir à refuser tout conflit extérieur, sa doctrine n’est pas le fruit d’une ascèse, d’un choix éthique, mais une conséquence immédiate de sa réaction épidermique à l’insupportable contact que représente pour lui la moindre forme de résistance. Adoptée dans l’urgence, sa doctrine est un fruit de la maladie.” 139 The last three words of the quoted passage were censored in the first edition of The Anti-Christ (published in 1895). It was Josef Hofmiller who first brought to light the omitted passage in his article “Nietzsche” (Süddeutsche Monatshefte, 29 (1931): 83). 

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image of him. This distortion, originating in the context in which Jesus himself lived, was caused by the fundamental inability of the first disciples to understand the type of the redeemer: “The strange, sick world that the Gospels introduce to us – a world like a Russian novel, where the dregs of society, nerve cases, and ‘childlike’ idiocy all seem to converge – this world, in any case, would have coarsened the type; the first disciples in particular: when faced with a being awash in symbols and incomprehensibilities, they had to translate it into their own crudeness in order to make head or tail of it, – the type did not exist for them until they had reduced it to familiar forms…” (A, 31)

The allusion to “a Russian novel” is a clear reference to Dostoevsky, as the following posthumous fragment entitled My Theory of the Type Jesus (which can be considered a preliminary draft of the quoted passage from The Anti-Christ) shows: “What a pity, that no Dostoevsky lived among this society. Actually, the whole story best belongs to a Russian novel – morbid, touching, single traits of sublime strangeness, among debauchery and dirty vulgarity… (like Mary of Magdala).” (PF 11[378], November 1887-March 1888)140 Indeed, some lines after the above quoted passage from The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche explicitly mentions Dostoevsky: “It is a pity that there was no Dostoevsky living near this most interesting decadent, I mean someone with an eye for the distinctive charm that this sort of mixture of sublimity, sickness, and childishness has to offer.” (A, 31)141 In the past, scholars have interpreted the reference to “a Russian novel” in different ways. Miller (1975: 180) points out that Nietzsche

140 See also the posthumous fragment 11[380], November 1887-March 1888: “The extraordinary company that here gathered around this master-seducer really belongs wholly in a Russian novel: all the neuroses keep a rendezvous in them – the absence of duties, the instinct that everything is really coming to an end, that nothing is worth while any more, contentment in a dolce far niente [sweet doing-nothing].” 141 Sommer (2000: 314) correctly points out that the allusion to Dostoevsky shows once more how Nietzsche’s approach did not pretend to be scientific (in the common sense of the term): the perspicacity and sensibility of a psychologist such as Dostoevsky had proved to be much better suited to the understanding of “a scientifically incomprehensible figure” such as Jesus.

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could have been referring to Kirillov’s theory of “eternal harmony”,142 while Sommer (2000: 316) refers to Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, a book that Nietzsche possessed in his private library in German translation (see Campioni et al. 2003: 358) and which his mother Franziska read to him in 1879. Recently, Antonio and Jordi Morillas (2012: 354) have drawn attention to the fact that the expression “a Russian novel” must not be necessarily interpreted as a reference to a specific Dostoevsky’s novel, but can be understood in a wider sense as an allusion to every Dostoevsky’s novel known to Nietzsche.143 What is more, laying emphasis on the fact that Nietzsche uses the word “idiot” in the same context as “dégénérescence”, A. and J. Morillas (2012: 351) argue that the source of the word “idiot” is not Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, but rather Charles Féré’s Dégénérescence et criminalité.144 142 Miller (1975: 180) claims that, “It seems plausible […] that his [Nietzsche’s] association of the first disciples with the characters in a ‘Russian novel’ and reference to Dostoevsky’s sensitivity to the particular décadence-type personified by the ‘holy idiot’ (heiliger Idiot) Christ actually reflect his understanding of Kirillov’s theory of ‘eternal harmony.’ As ‘psychological symbolist’ of the ‘Epicurean’ or ‘Buddhistic’ interiority Nietzsche conceived of as the moral aspect of Christ’s ‘idiocy’ and the substance of his ‘evangelical ideal,’ Kirillov would document Dostoevsky’s grasp of the proto-theological ‘personality problem’ (Personal-Problem) or psychological reality of this ‘holy Epicurean.’ Specifically Dostoevsky’s association of Kirillov’s ‘sensations of eternal harmony’ with a latent epilepsy would demonstrate his understanding of the ‘physio-psychological’ problem posed by Christ and the first proselytes.” As I pointed out in Stellino 2007: 205, Miller’s hypothesis makes it difficult to explain why, in order to characterize Jesus’ idiocy, Nietzsche precisely used the term “childlike [kindliches]” (A, 31). 143 In the Epilogue to The Case of Wagner, having introduced the contrast between master morality and Christian morality, Nietzsche claims that: “the Gospels present exactly the same physiological types that you find described in Dostoevsky’s novels.” 144 Charles Féré, Dégénérescence et criminalité. Paris: F. Alcan, 1888. Féré’s work was among the books in Nietzsche’s personal library (see Campioni et al. 2003: 225 f.). On Féré’s use of the word “idiot”, see the following passage quoted by A. and J. Morillas (2012: 351): “Au bas de l’échelle des dégénérés on trouve l’idiot, qui avec une déchéance psychique plus profonde présente des caractères somatiques aussi plus nets, dignes d’être mis en parallèle avec les caractères somatiques des plus inférieurs des criminels, ceux qui ont été condamnés à mort pour l’atrocité de leurs forfaits et qui peuvent être considérés comme des idiots moraux.” 

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There is little doubt that A. and J. Morillas are right in stressing the importance of a source such as Féré’s Dégénérescence et criminalité, to which scholars have not paid enough attention in the past. Moreover, it is also very plausible that Nietzsche found the key to reading the morbid and sick world of the Gospels not just in one, but in various Dostoevsky novels. However, it must be noted that what caught Nietzsche’s attention was the fact that Dostoevsky not only understood the milieu (the morbid and sick world of the Gospels), but, more importantly, he “divined” the type of the redeemer, as the following posthumous fragment 15[9], spring 1888, entitled Jesus: Dostoevsky (actually, a preliminary draft of A, 29) clearly shows: “I know only one psychologist, who has lived in the world where Christianity is possible and a Christ can arise at any moment… That is Dostoevsky. He divined Christ: – and instinctively he has been kept sheltered from conceiving this type with the vulgarity of Renan… And they believe in Paris that Renan suffers from too many finesses!… But can one be more wrong than to make out of Christ, who was an idiot, a genius? To mendaciously make out of Christ, who represents the opposite of a heroic feeling, a hero?”145

If Nietzsche believed that the right concept for describing the “type” was not “genius”, nor “hero”, but rather “idiot”, is it not legitimate to suppose that the reason for which he thought that Dostoevsky had divined the type was precisely because the latter had conceived of the type as an idiot, as in fact we know he did? In order to support their reading, A. and J. Morillas (2012: 351) argue that Nietzsche’s understanding of Jesus as an idiot is essentially physiological, not psychological (hence the importance of Nietzsche’s reading of Féré’s work).146 I think this claim is only partially right. Indeed, on the one hand, if it is true that Nietzsche uses the word “idiot” in The Anti-Christ “with the precision of the physiologist”, then on the other hand it must not be 145 According to Sommer (2000: 317), this posthumous fragment definitely proves that Nietzsche had heard about The Idiot and makes every possible speculation on this subject invalid. 146 See A. and J. Morillas (2012: 351): “Aus der Darstellung des Typus des Erlösers als Idiot in AC und im Nachlass geht klar hervor, dass Nietzsche ihn wesentlich physiologisch versteht. Seine Auseinandersetzung mit Jesus erfolgt „mit der Strenge des Physiologen“, nicht der des Psychologen.”

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forgotten that his problem is the “psychology of the redeemer” (A, 28) and that he is concerned with “the psychological type of the redeemer” (A, 29). In other words, the point is not that Nietzsche prefers the physiological explication over the psychological, but rather that he recurs to physiology in order to elucidate the psychology of the type (physiology and psychology are in Nietzsche’s late philosophy, as it were, two sides of the main coin). In this sense, it is perfectly plausible that Nietzsche’s understanding of Jesus was both influenced by Féré and Dostoevsky. Curiously, scholars have generally ignored an indirect source that some time ago could have solved the question of whether Nietzsche moulded his type of Jesus upon Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin or not.147 In the book Philosoph und Edelmensch, Meta von Salis recalls a walk around Sils-Maria with Nietzsche in August, 1888 and relates what follows: “We went for a walk in the area around Sils only a small number of times during those few weeks. The three walks that Nietzsche took with me always led coincidentally to the sawmill. It was during the second one […] that we met all of my close acquaintances from the Alpenrose quite suddenly, young girls in bright clothes full of the joys of life. The contrast between their carefree charm and the portentous matter that the thinker was currently debating could have not been greater: Dostoevsky’s Idiot and the figure of Jesus according to the four Gospels!” (quoted in Gilman 1981: 595)

Unless good reasons are advanced to doubt the truthfulness of Meta von Salis’ account (which, however, fits in with the chronology of Nietzsche’s reading of Dostoevsky), this passage proves definitively that Dostoevky’s Prince Myshkin inspired (at least partially) Nietzsche’s characterization of the Nazarene. Certainly, we cannot know whether Nietzsche read the entire book or whether his source was a critical review of this novel (like the one de Vogüé published in the Journal des Débats in the issue of 2 April, 1887 under the title Un nouveau roman de Dostoievsky).148 However, beyond this difficult question, 147 Ebersbach (2006: 301) has recently drawn attention to this source. 148 This article is almost identical to the prologue that de Vogüé wrote for the French translation of The Idiot. As Campioni (2001: 78) points out, an indirect source could also be de Vogüé’s article Les écrivains russes contemporains, which later appeared in the book Le roman russe (see de Vogüé 1885: 345 f.; 1886a: 257–260). Campioni carefully stresses that, concerning The Idiot, de Vogüé’s 

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what is important to know is that if we want to understand Nietzsche’s psycho-physiological characterization of the Nazarene, then we must necessarily refer, among other sources, to Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. If this conclusion is right, one would expect to find at least some similarities between Dostoevky’s Prince Myshkin and Nietzsche’s Jesus. Precisely such similarities have been recently pointed out by Pacini (2001: 36–40), Murphy (2001: 114–118), Stellino (2007: 206– 210), and Santos Sena (2010: 30–38). The last part of this section will thus be dedicated to a brief comparison between Nietzsche’s Jesus and Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin. As Dibelius (1944: 65) has already pointed out, the word “idiot” in The Anti-Christ cannot obviously be understood in its common sense as an insult alluding to Jesus’ stupidity. Nietzsche considered Jesus an idiot from a psycho-physiological point of view. Of these two, the physiological aspect is probably the most evident in Nietzsche’s work. As we have already seen, Nietzsche describes Jesus as a “mixture of sublimity, sickness, and childishness”. (A, 31) In the posthumous fragment 11[363], November 1887-March 1888, Francis of Assisi, whom Nietzsche defines as a kindred nature of Jesus, is clearly depicted as “neurotic, epileptic […] like Jesus.” The epileptic condition, together with a kind of “degeneration” well-known to physiologists, causes a “delayed puberty [im Organismus unausgebildeten Pubertät]” (A, 32) and a lack of truly manly instincts. As Nietzsche puts it in the posthumous fragment 14[38], spring 1888: “That the actual man-instincts – not only the sexual ones, but also those of doing battle, of pride, of heroism – never arose in him, that he was left behind and remained childlike in the age of puberty: this belongs to the type of certain epilepsoid neuroses.” In a similar way, Prince Myshkin also remains in the age of puberty. From a physiological point of view, he is like a child who, because of his inborn illness, does not know women at all.149 In addition to this physiological condition, the Prince also suffers from epilepsy: indeed, it is precisely an epileptic fit that saves him from being knifed by Rogozhin. In section five of the second part of The Idiot, the narrator describes how Myshkin’s epileptic fit leads him to a sort of religious reading is physiological-psychological and therefore similar to that later proposed by Nietzsche. 149 See Id: 74.

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and mystical state. The Prince is fully conscious that these states are the result of a sickness, but he nonetheless concludes as follows: “‘So what if it is an illness?’ he finally decided. ‘Who cares that it’s an abnormal strain, if the result itself, if the moment of the sensation, remembered and examined in a healthy state, turns out to be the highest degree of harmony, beauty, gives a hitherto unheard-of and unknown feeling of fullness, measure, reconciliation, and an ecstatic, prayerful merging with the highest synthesis of life?’” (Id: 226)150

As Santos Sena (2010: 36) points out, the way in which the Prince recalls his epileptic fits, that lead him to an acme of harmony and beauty and to a feeling of the highest synthesis of life, clearly provides an example of the Prince’s sublime nature. Similarly, Nietzsche emphasises the “sublime” as one of the peculiar aspects of Jesus, “a being awash in symbols and incomprehensibilities” (A, 31), who experiences love as the sole possibility of life. In Nietzsche’s opinion, Jesus’ idiocy is not only physiological, but also psychological. Indeed, from the point of view of his relation to reality, the ultimate consequence of Jesus’ physiological condition – that is, the pathological over-sensitiveness of his sense of touch – is an “instinct of hatred for every reality”, a “flight into the ‘unimaginable’, into the ‘inconceivable’.” (A, 29) Jesus was a “great symbolist” (A, 34) who “accepted only inner realities as realities, as ‘truths’” and understood “everything natural, temporal, spatial, historical to be just a sign, an excuse for a parable.” (A, 34) He was an “anti-realist.” (A, 32) Jesus was, therefore, “out of touch” with reality, as a passage from the following posthumous fragment entitled Type “Jesus” confirms: “Jesus is the opposite of a genius: he is an idiot. One senses his incapacity to understand a reality: he moves in circles around five, six concepts which he previously heard and slowly understood, that is, misunderstood – they constitute his experience, his word, his truth – everything else is alien to him.” (PF 14[38], spring 1888) 150 The Prince’s description of the epileptic fits inevitably recalls Kirillov’s theory of “eternal harmony”, to which, as we will see, Nietzsche paid special attention. As Miller (1975: 175) points out, Kirillov’s sensation of eternal harmony (and we may also add, Myshkin’s highest synthesis of life) is mutatis mutandis the “feeling of the total transfiguration of all things” or “the feeling of eternity, of perfection” (A, 34), which are both expressions of Jesus’ symbolism. 

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As Murphy (2001: 114) points out, in a very similar way Prince Mysh­ kin, “a person lacking in basic know-how”, is also “out of touch” with practical reality and, consequentially, is an ineffective actor in that domain. The similarity between Nietzsche’s Jesus and Dostoevsky’s Idiot is, even on this point, evident. Finally, Dibelius (1944: 65f.) draws attention to the original significance of the word “idiot”, which certainly did not go unnoticed to the philologist Nietzsche. In Ancient Greece, idiótes was “the private man”, that is, precisely the opposite of the man of the polis.151 This nuance can undoubtedly be found in Nietzsche’s characterization of Jesus, a man whose symbolism “is positioned outside all religion, all cult concepts […] all politics.” (A, 32) Only the fanaticism and the coarseness of the first disciples turned the type into “the fanatic of aggression, the mortal enemy of theologians and priests”, into a “judging, quarrelsome, wrathful, malicious, nit-picking theologian.” (A, 31) Jesus was a “holy anarchist” (A, 27), his doctrine did not “brandish ‘the sword’.” (A, 32) In a similar way, Prince Myshkin is a man who, in the words of Lizaveta Prokofyevna, is a “sick idiot […] a fool, who neither knows society nor has any place in society.”152 In conclusion, in Nietzsche’s opinion Jesus was a most interesting décadent. According to him, it was regrettable that a psychologist like Dostoevsky did not live in the neighbourhood of this type, since he would have surely felt the fascination of this “mixture of sublimity, sickness and childishness.” (A, 31) Indeed, as shown, his Prince Myshkin was precisely the result of such a combination. For Nietzsche, Jesus was the exact opposite of the type of the healthy and well-constituted person. In his opinion, it was an absurdity that well-constituted natures such as Raphael eternally paid attention to that “anaemic saint from Nazareth.” (PF 14[90], spring 1888)153 On the contrary, a psychologist

151 For a brief history of the word “idiot”, see Sommer 2010 (pp. 14–17 are dedicated to Nietzsche and Dostoevsky). 152 See Murphy (2001: 114). 153 In this posthumous fragment, entitled The Physiological Falseness in the Paintings of Raphael, Nietzsche affirms that Jesus “belongs to a different species, such as Dostoevsky knows – touching, corrupt and mad abortions with idiotism and rapture, with love…”

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like Dostoevsky, with his perspicacity and sensibility for degenerate natures, was much more able to understand the type of Jesus, a being who felt love as the sole and last possibility of life and was unable to understand the surrounding reality as a consequence of his psycho-physiological idiocy.



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13.  Demons

Dostoevsky’s Demons was published in The Russian Messenger between 1871 and 1872. The following year the novel appeared, extensively revised, in book format. As with Dostoevsky’s other novels, Nietzsche read this work in French translation.154 Since Nietzsche did not mention reading this work in the correspondence, we cannot know exactly when he read Dostoevsky’s novel. However, in notebook W II 3 (November 1887-March 1888, according to Colli and Montinari’s chronology) Nietzsche transcribed and translated several passages from Les possédés into German.155 It is very likely therefore that Nietzsche, having returned to Nice at the end of October 1887, looked for more novels by the psychologist Dostoevsky and then found and read Les possédés. Dostoevsky’s Demons basically describes how the liberal ideas of the generation of the 1840s (that of Turgenev, Herzen, and Belinsky) had turned into the dangerous nihilist theories of the atheist and revolutionary socialism held by the new generation of the 1860s (represented in the novel by Pyotr Verkhovensky and his followers). This metamorphosis constitutes the historical background against which the plot is developed: the nihilist ideas, spread among the younger generation, are the ultimate cause of the tragic ending of the novel. It is interesting to note that Nietzsche’s attention was drawn to several features of this novel, as the selection of the passages he copied into the notebook shows. In the following pages, the attention will be focused on those aspects that seem to have been the most relevant for Nietzsche. The first notes are dedicated to the young Nikolai Stavrogin, the main character in the novel. Stavrogin is at the same time a Byronic type and a tragic, nihilist character who has his predecessors in Pushkin’s Onegin, Lermontov’s Pechorin, and Turgenev’s Bazarov. The young 154 The novel was published by Plon on October 1886, under the title Les possédés and translated by Victor Derély. 155 These passages are under the heading of Bési, the original Russian title that appeared transliterated on the cover of the French edition. 

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nihilist is a mysterious and completely fascinating character. He is a sick person: his sickness is indifference and apathy. He has already experienced everything; he has felt all possible sensations to the highest degree. However, he had such experiences only for the sake of testing his limits. Naturally endowed with great talent, Stavrogin is destined to vainly waste this gift. Having no goal or aim, his strength slowly drains in the search for new, ephemeral sensations. As Frank (1995: 480f.) puts it: “All the spring of human feelings have dried up in Stavrogin; his demonism is that of a total rationalism, which, once having emptied life of all significance and value, can no longer make any direct, instinctive response even to its most primitive solicitations.” In his notebook, Nietzsche precisely transcribed those passages of Stavrogin’s letter to Darya Pavlovna that highlight the apathetic character of the young nihilist: “My desires are far too weak; they cannot guide […] I am as capable now as ever before of wishing to do a good deed, and I take pleasure in that; along with it, I wish for evil and also feel pleasure. But both the one and the other, as always, are too shallow […] I’ve tried great debauchery and exhausted my strength in it; but I don’t like debauchery and I did not want it […] One can argue endlessly about everything, but what poured out of me was only negation, with no magnanimity and no force.” (PF 11[331], November 1887-March 1888)156

In another posthumous fragment, which refers to a previous passage of the novel, Nietzsche shows once again his interest in the young Nikolai’s indifference towards every sensation. In the first part of the novel, the narrator compares Stavrogin to the Decembrist Lunin. As the narrator remarks, Nikolai may have shown the same bravery and audacity as Lunin, but with one great difference: “He would have not felt any sense of enjoyment in this fight; he would have accepted it with indolence and boredom, as one submits to an unpleasant necessity.” (PF 11[344])157 156 As mentioned above, Nietzsche read Dostoevsky’s Demons in French translation. Then, he transcribed several passages in his notebook, translating them into German. In what follows, I quote from Nietzsche’s notebook. However, in order to avoid any possible distortion of Dostoevsky’s original text, when possible, I directly use or adapt Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s English translation. 157 From now on, in order to avoid repetition, I omit the period of composition. Nietzsche’s transcriptions of Dostoevsky’s Demons quoted in the following pages, all belong to the group 11 of November 1887–March 1888.

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Nietzsche explains the logic of Nikolai’s behaviour in a posthumous fragment, which goes under the heading of Toward the Psychology of a Nihilist. Here Nietzsche comments on Stavrogin’s letter to Darya Pavlovna as follows: “At that time, he abandons himself to debauchery. One must not underestimate the logic within it; one has to a philosopher to understand it. The ideas are illusions; sensations are the last reality… It is the supreme hunger for truth, which suggests the debauchery. – It could not be ‘love’: all veils and embellishments, i.e. falsifications must wiped out: therefore, it has to be the debauchery, the pain and the combination of debauchery and pain.” (PF 11[332])

According to Nietzsche’s interpretation, it is the hunger for truth that leads Stavrogin to search for debauchery. Indeed, Nietzsche does not fail to note that Nikolai, as he himself confesses in the letter to Darya Pavlovna, is “jealous even of these négateurs: jealous of their hopes.” (PF 11[331]) The négateurs, to whom Stavrogin alludes, are the nihilists of Verkhovensky’s circle. Unlike Stavrogin, these nihilists believe in something, that is, in their radical ideology. Their nihilism is thus counterbalanced by their belief in this idea, which in every case protects them from the abyss of a meaningless life. In this way, they satisfy that “will to truth”, to which Nietzsche alludes in section 344 of The Gay Science. Unlike these nihilists, Stavrogin “could never believe an idea so passionately” (ibid.), as, for instance, Kirillov does. In Stavrogin, the supreme hunger for truth remains unsatisfied: he must, therefore, search for debauchery in order to supply the lack of faith. However, this subterfuge is revealed in the long term to be useless. At the end of the novel, Stavrogin inevitably commits suicide. Nietzsche also paid special attention to Kirillov as well. With regard to this character, Nietzsche was especially interested in two aspects: Kirillov’s idea of the man-god and his theory of eternal harmony. I will first focus on the former aspect. Kirillov denies God’s existence and wants to affirm his self-will by killing himself, that is, by committing a deed that, in his opinion, would be the highest act of self-will. His denial of God leads him to formulate an argument, which can be found in Nietzsche’s notebook under the heading of The Logic of Atheism: “If there is God, then the will is all his, and I cannot get out of his will. If not, the will is all mine, and it is my duty to proclaim self-will.” (PF 

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11[334]) Since there is no God, man is God – so the reasoning goes – and Kirillov feels compelled to affirm what he considers to be man’s divine attribute: self-will. As he explains to Pyotr Verkhovensky: “To recognize that there is no God, and not to recognize at the same time that you have become God, is an absurdity, otherwise you must necessarily kill yourself […] For three years I have been searching for the attribute of my divinity, and I have found it: self-will. I want to kill myself to show my insubordination and my new fearsome freedom.” (PF 11[336])

Nietzsche summarizes Kirillov’s logic in the following syllogism: “God is necessary, therefore, he must exist. But he does not exist. So one cannot live anymore.” (PF 11[334]) Then, after another few passages from Kirillov’s conversation with Verkhovensky, Nietzsche interrupts the transcription and writes the following note: “The beginning of nihilism / The separation, the break with the soil / it begins like a stranger / it ends like a stranger.” (PF 11[335]) Interestingly, Nietzsche relates the beginning of nihilism to the separation from the native soil. This will not surprise the reader familiar with Dostoevsky. Indeed, according to the novelist, it was precisely the fascination of Western ideas that had led Russian intellectuals to forget their roots and to embrace radical ideas. Kirillov himself, as Frank (1995: 481) points out, represents “the temptation to self-deification logically deriving from the atheistic humanism of Feuerbach.” In this case, the soil symbolizes the Russian Orthodox faith, while the West stands for atheism. By breaking with his soil, that is, by negating the Russian Orthodox faith, Kirillov embraces nihilist ideas, which will later lead him to man’s deification. An important aspect of Kirillov’s theory, which Nietzsche did not fail to notice, concerns its consequences. More concretely, as Miller (1975: 166) points out, Kirillov considers himself as “the promulgator of a temptational ‘anti-gospel’ or ‘atheist soteriology’” which promises not only a spiritual, but also a physical transformation and regeneration of man. As Kirillov puts it: “Only this one thing [Kirillov refers to the need to proclaim his self-will] will save all men and in the next generation transform them physically; for in the present physical aspect [Nietzsche’s italics], so far as I have thought, it is in no way possible for man to be without the former God…” (PF 11[336]) As we will see in the second part of this work, this passage has been often quoted in order 122 

to draw a parallel between Kirillov’s man-god and Nietzsche’s overman. In the same way, scholars have frequently remarked on the similarities that exist between Kirillov’s denial of God and Nietzsche’s death of God. These similarities clearly emerge in the following posthumous fragment, in which Nietzsche summarizes Kirillov’s theory: “The absolute change that occurs with the denial of God – We do not have any lord upon us; the old world of valuations is theological – it has been upset – In short: there is no higher instance upon us: as far as it could be God, now, we ourselves are God… We must ascribe to us those attributes, which we used to ascribe to God…” (PF 11 [333])

I will examine this delicate and most important topic in detail in the second part of the present work in an attempt to understand the extent to which these parallels between Kirillov and Nietzsche are legitimate. For the moment, I will point out that Nietzsche’s attention was also drawn to Kirillov’s theory of eternal harmony: “Five, six seconds and nothing more and you suddenly feel the presence of the eternal harmony. Man cannot endure it in his earthly state. One must change physically or die. The feeling is clear and indisputable. You suddenly sense the whole of nature […] This is not tenderheartedness, but simply joy. You don’t forgive anything, because there’s no longer anything to forgive. You don’t really love – oh, this feeling is higher than love! What’s most frightening is the terrible clearness of its expression, and the joy of its fulfillments. If it’d last longer, the soul couldn’t endure it, it must vanish. – In those five seconds I live my life through, and for them I would give my whole life, it wouldn’t be paid too much. To endure it longer, one would have to change physically.” (PF 11 [337])

As mentioned above, the similarities between Myshkin’s description of his epileptic fits and Kirillov’s theory of eternal harmony are patent. Indeed, as Shatov (another character in Demons) clearly points out, what Kirillov is describing here is precisely the preliminary sensation that precedes an epileptic fit. Myshkin himself depicts this preliminary sensation as a supreme harmony, a serene and joyful tranquillity, using a terminology very similar to that employed by Kirillov. There is no doubt that Nietzsche read the passage wherein Kirillov explains his theory of eternal harmony very carefully. Nietzsche transcribed the most relevant passages into his notebook. When some months later he wrote



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The Anti-Christ, this material undoubtedly helped him to draw a parallel between epilepsy and mystical or religious states.158 Among the other passages Nietzsche transcribed from Les possédés, there is a large excerpt from the conversation between Stavrogin and Pyotr Verkhovensky, the leader of the nihilists, i.e. the demons to which the novel’s title refers.159 During this conversation, Verkhovensky expounds his revolutionary political programme, based on Shigalyov’s theory (one of the demons). The main purpose of this programme is to establish a socialist order of society through confusion and destruction (“this little idea is so captivating!” Verkhovensky tells Stavrogin). Here is a brief selection of the most interesting passages transcribed by Nietzsche: “First, the level of scientific culture and talent are lowered, brought down! A high level of science is accessible only to higher abilities – no need for higher abilities! […] Cicero’s tongue is cut off, Copernicus’s eyes are put out, Shakespeare is stoned […] No need for education, enough of science! […] The thirst for education is already an aristocratic thirst […] we’ll get unheard-of depravity going; we’ll stifle every genius in infancy. ‘Everyone reduced au même dénominateur, complete equality!’” (PF 11[341])

It is not surprising that Nietzsche paid attention to Verkhovensky’s words and underlined expressions such as “equality”, “within a herd there must be equality”160 and “obedience must be set up.” (ibid.) 158 See, for instance, A, 51: “The ‘highest’ conditions that Christianity held up to humanity as the value of all values are forms of epilepsy, – the only people the church has declared holy have been lunatics or enormous frauds in majorem dei honorem...” 159 Dostoevsky based the character of Verkhovensky on the unscrupulous Russian nihilist Sergey Nechaev, who had grounded his revolutionary programme on Machiavellian principles and was initially supported by Bakunin. Nechaev created a secret society named Narodnaya Rasprava (People’s Retribution) and started recruiting members. One of them was the student Ivanov, who later left the group as was unwilling to submit to Nechaev’s authority. On 21 November, 1869 Ivanov was murdered by Nechaev and several comrades, and his body was thrown into a lake. Dostoevsky, shocked at the news of Ivanov’s murder, decided to write a novel-pamphlet based on the Nechaev affair. Thus, Nechaev became the prototype for Pyotr Verkhovensky, the cynical character in Demons. 160 In French, “dans un troupeau doit régner l’égalité.” (P II: 93) The metaphor of the herd (Heerde) is typical of Nietzsche’s critique of the egalitarian pretensions of democratic movements.

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Indeed, it is well known that Nietzsche was a strong enemy of the democratic and socialist fight for equality, which was for him a symbol of a will to diminution and the lowering of man. According to Nietzsche, socialism aimed at the complete annihilation of the individual and intended to erase the natural differences between human beings. In demanding equal rights for all, democrats and socialists sought to prevent any kind of elevation of man. They wanted to level mankind in order to create a single, huge herd of mediocre men. In this sense, Verkhovensky’s political programme, based on a lowering of the cultural level and ostracism of genius (“to level the mountains is a good idea”, Verkhovensky says to Stavrogin), essentially confirmed Nietzsche’s view of socialism.161 By following the reading of the extended passage excerpted from Verkhovensky’s explanation of his programme, one can find several further subjects that may have attracted Nietzsche’s attention. Among them, it is worth mentioning the distinction between masters and slaves (“Slaves must have rulers. Complete obedience, complete impersonality”); boredom as an aristocratic sensation and the absence of desires in socialism (Nietzsche himself stressed both words); the alliance between the socialists and the Pope (“The Pope on top, us around him, and under us – socialism”162); the aristocratic character of Stavrogin (“You’re a terrible aristocrat. An aristocrat, when he goes among democrats, is a charmeur”) and his appeal to Verkhovensky. It is very likely that this last point particularly drew Nietzsche’s attention. In the conversation between Stavrogin and Verkhovensky there is an interesting passage, in which the latter confesses to the former,

161 Interestingly, Verkhovensky’s reference to a recent declaration by English workers (“We’ve learned a trade, and we’re honest people, we don’t need anything else”, PF 11[341]) matches with what Nietzsche had written on British utilitarians two years earlier: “They want, with all the strength they can muster, to prove to themselves that striving for English happiness, I mean for comfort and fashion […] is the proper path to virtue as well […] Not one of these clumsy, conscience-stricken herd animals (who set out to treat egoism as a matter of general welfare –) wants to know or smell anything of the fact that “general welfare” is no ideal, no goal, not a concept that can somehow be grasped, but only an emetic.” (BGE, 228) 162 Nietzsche changed the word “Shigalyovism” to “socialism” (see Pos II: 94). 

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“You’re beautiful!”, and then adds, “I am a nihilist, but I love beauty.163 Do nihilists not love beauty? They just don’t love idols: I love idols! You are my idol!” (ibid.) Once again, the focus is here on the relation between nihilism and faith. As already mentioned, Stavrogin envies the négateurs because, by strongly believing in the radical ideology, they satisfy their need for faith. In the case of Verkhovensky, this character channels his need for faith in the direction of Stavrogin, making a beautiful idol of him, a sun to adore.164 As one can easily notice, the “object” of belief varies, but the psychological mechanism is one and the same: nihilism is counterbalanced by the belief in an idea. The risk of living a life devoid of meaning, as in the case of Stravrogin, is thus avoided. In the last part of the passage excerpted by Nietzsche, Verkhovensky explains to Stavrogin how he wants to put his revolutionary programme into practice. This programme is based not only on those revolutionaries who are ready to “knife and burn”, but also on the common people among whom the new ideas were beginning to spread: “The teacher who laughs with children at their God and at their cradle; the lawyer who defends an educated murderer by saying that he’s more developed than his victim and couldn’t help killing to get money; schoolboys who kill a peasant just to see how it feels; jurors who acquit criminals right and left; the prosecutor who trembles in court for fear of being insufficiently liberal… Administrators, writers – oh, a lot of them are ours!” (ibid.)

All these practices are, however, solidly grounded on the theory: “Do you know, how much we owe to modern theories? When I left Russia, Littré’s thesis that crime is insanity was raging;165 I come back – crime is no longer insanity but precisely bon sens itself.” (ibid.) 163 In Nietzsche’s excerpt this sentence appears first translated into German and then also in the French version “je suis nihiliste, mais j’aime la beauté.” 164 In Verkhovensky’s plans, Stavrogin is supposed to be Ivan the Tsarevich (a figure of Russian folktales), that is, an impostor, the false pretender to the throne of the tsar. Verkhovensky, thus, aims to play on the credulousness of the peasants and on people’s insatiable need for idols. 165 Émile Littré (1801–1881) was a French lexicographer and philosopher. In his private library, Nietzsche possessed Littré’s work La science au point de vue philosophique (see Campioni et al. 2003: 369). However, as Vyleta (2006: 367) points out, “the slogan ‘crime is insanity’ is wrongly attributed to Littré, and may refer to Georget, Esquirol, or possibly Quetelet.”

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Verkhovensky’s portrayal of contemporary Russia easily recalls Nietzsche’s claim in the same notebook that the signs of the inevitable and necessary advent of nihilism are manifest everywhere (see PF 11[119]). In his conversation with Stavrogin, Verkhovensky maintains that: “The Russian God has already lost ground to alcohol. The people are drunk, the churches are empty.” (PF 11[341]) Even if this description is intentionally exaggerated, it is evidence of the increasing diffusion of radical and nihilist ideas among Russian students, intellectuals and workers at the time. It is not surprising, therefore, that Nietzsche, who years before had begun to be interested in the phenomenon of nihilism, excerpted an extended passage from Verkhovensky’s speech. Finally, Nietzsche’s attention was drawn to the conversation between Stavrogin and Shatov, the character who will later be murdered by Verkhovensky and his followers. During this conversation, Shatov (who actually expresses ideas very similar to Dostoevsky’s personal conception of the Russian nation as the only bearer of the true Gospel message) criticizes Roman Catholicism for having betrayed the original Christian message: “Rome proclaimed a Christ who had succumbed to the third temptation of the devil; it announced to the whole world that Christ cannot stand on earth without an earthly kingdom and thereby proclaimed the Antichrist…” (PF 11 [345]) Nietzsche transcribed this passage in his notebook and stressed the word “Antichrist.”166 In the next fragment, entitled God as an Attribute of Nationality, Nietzsche noted those passages in which Shatov reminds Stavrogin of his words about the relation between a nation and his own god. This excerpt is very important since, as I will show, Nietzsche developed a similar conception in The Anti-Christ: “The nation is the body of God. Any nation is a nation only as long as it has its own particular God and rules out all other gods in the world with no conciliation; as long as it believes that through its God it will be victorious and will drive all other gods from the world. Nations are moved by the force of the unquenchable desire to get to the end: it is the force of a ceaseless and tireless confirmation of its own being and a denial of death […] God is the synthetic person of the whole nation, taken from its beginning and to its end. It is a sign of nation’s extinction when there begin to be gods in common. When there are gods in common, they 166 On the possible relevance of the quoted passage in Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ, see Souladié (2007: 114f. and 2008). 

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die along with the belief in them and with the nations themselves. The stronger the nation, the more particular its God. There has never yet been a nation without religion (that is, without an idea of evil and good [Nietzsche’s emphasis]). Every nation has its own idea of evil and good. When many nations start having common ideas of evil and good, then the nations die out and the very distinction between evil and good begins to fade and disappear.” (PF 11 [346])

If we compare this quotation with section 16 of The Anti-Christ, it becomes clear that Nietzsche draws on Shatov’s idea, but with a completely different purpose. Indeed, if Shatov believes that “only one among the nations can have the true God” (De: 252) and that the Russian nation is the only bearer of the true Gospel message,167 Nietzsche’s aim is to criticize the Christian idea of God in its entirety. Thus, in the first part of his argument, Nietzsche borrows Shatov’s idea of God as the synthetic person of the whole nation and claims that: “A people that still believes in itself will still have its own god.” (A, 16) Nietzsche translates Shatov’s idea into his own terminology and affirms that every god is the direct expression of the will to power of his people.168 It is in the second part of his argument that Nietzsche directs Shatov’s idea against Christianity: “Of course: when a people is destroyed, when it feels that its belief in the future, its hope for freedom, is irretrievably fading away, when it becomes conscious of subjugation as its first principle of utility and conscious of the virtues of the subjugated as the conditions of its preservation, then its god will necessarily change as well. He will become modest and full of fear, he will cringe in corners and recommend ‘peace of soul’, forbearance, an end to hatred, and ‘love’ of friends and enemies. He will constantly moralize, he will creep into the crevices of every private virtue, he will be a god for one and all, a private and cosmopolitan god […] In the end, gods have no other choice: either they are the will to power – in which case they will still be the gods of a people – or they are powerless in the face of power – and then they will necessarily become good…” (ibid.) 167 Here Shatov expresses ideas very similar to Dostoevsky’s own personal conception of the historic role of Russia among the nations. See also De: 247: “Do you know which is now the only ‘god-bearing’ nation on the whole earth, come to renew and save the world in the name of a new God, and to whom alone is given the keys of life and of a new world… Do you know which nation it is, and what is its name?” 168 As Sommer (2000: 189f.) points out, Nietzsche also found the correlation between god and people in the first book of Julius Wellhausen’s Skizzen und Vorarbeiten, entitled Abriss der Geschichte Israels und Juda’s (Berlin: Reimer, 1884). Nietzsche bought this book in 1884 (see Campioni et al. 2003: 663).

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Nietzsche’s position is well-defined: the transformation of Yahweh, the “God of Israel”, into the Christian God, the God of the weak and the sick, is a clear sign of the décadence and degeneration of the Jewish people. When everything that is sign of strong and ascending life is eliminated from the concept of God, then the same God “sinks little by little into the symbol of a staff for the weary, a life-preserver for the drowning.” (A, 17) The “kingdom of God” has grown larger, but now God is no longer the image of the eternal “yes” to life. As Nietzsche puts it: “God as the deification of nothingness, the canonization of the will to nothingness!…” (A, 18) In conclusion, as these passages clearly show, Nietzsche first borrowed Shatov’s idea of God as the synthetic person of the whole nation, he then translated it into his own terminology and, finally, he used Shatov’s argumentation against the degenerated concept of the Christian God. Nietzsche’s special interest in Shatov’s idea provides a further confirmation of how carefully and attentively he read the French translation of Dostoevsky’s Demons. He excerpted extended passages in his notebook and added some personal thoughts. In Dostoevsky’s novel he found most interesting psychological considerations on different forms of nihilism, as well as one of the keys to interpreting the birth of Christianity. Nietzsche’s attention was also drawn to Kirillov’s logic of atheism and his theory of eternal harmony. Moreover, Les possédés confirmed his complete distrust of socialist and democratic movements. In short, this novel offered Nietzsche plenty of reasons to strengthen his already positive opinion of Dostoevsky.



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14. Dostoevsky as Artist. Russian Pessimism and Décadence

Nietzsche esteemed Dostoevsky not only as a psychologist but also as an artist. As we have already seen, he defined The Landlady as a piece of music, he considered Notes from Underground a piece of mockery done with “a light audacity and joy in his superior power” (#814), and he read The Insulted and Injured “with the greatest respect for the artist Dostoevsky.” (ibid.) He finally counted any kind of Russian book, above all Dostoevsky, among his “greatest reliefs.” (#1134) Commenting on Nietzsche’s reading of Humiliés et offensés, Mejía (2000: 26) poses the following question: how could Nietzsche consider Dostoevsky to be an artist when his art expresses values that are precisely the opposite of his own? In my opinion, Mejía’s query goes directly to the heart of the matter. In order to find an answer to this question, however, we should first understand what kind of artist Nietzsche thought Dostoevsky was. In the posthumous fragment 9[126], spring-fall 1887, entitled Chief Symptoms of Pessimism, Nietzsche makes a list of different types of pessimism: aesthetic (l’art pour l’art), theoretical (Schopenhauer), and moralistic (Nietzsche himself), among others. Under the category of “Russian pessimism”, Nietzsche mentions the names of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Finally, he concludes the note with the following remark: “Let us distinguish here: / Pessimism as strength – in what? in the energy of its logic, as anarchism and nihilism, as analytic. / Pessimism as decline – in what? as growing effeteness, as a sort of cosmopolitan fingering, as “tout comprendre” and historicism.” (PF 9[126], spring-fall 1887)

This distinction between two opposite kinds of pessimism clearly recalls the opening section of An Attempt at Self-Criticism, the prologue to the new edition of The Birth of Tragedy. In this prologue, Nietzsche tackles the question of the purpose served by Greek art and tragedy, and asks whether pessimism is “necessarily a sign of decline, decay, malformation, of tired and debilitated instincts”, or whether there is 

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also a “pessimism of strength”, that is, “an intellectual preference for the hard, gruesome, malevolent and problematic aspects of existence which comes from a feeling of well-being, from overflowing health, from an abundance of existence.” (BT, An Attempt at Self-Criticism, 1) Similarly, in section 370 of The Gay Science (fifth book), in posing the question “what is romanticism?”, Nietzsche distinguishes between a romantic pessimism (that of Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Wagner’s music) and a classical, Dionysian one, which he calls the “pessimism of the future – for it is coming!” As Meyer (1991: 203) points out, Nietzsche always sets the question of art in the perspective of the art-life relation.169 In his late period, Nietzsche develops a physiology, as well as a psychology of art in which he strongly relates the physiological condition of an artist to the kind of art that the artist produces. This link is patent in section 370 of The Gay Science, where Nietzsche writes that, “those who suffer from a superabundance of life […] want a Dionysian art as well as a tragic outlook and insight into life”, whereas those who suffer from an impoverishment of life prefer romanticism, since they “seek quiet, stillness, calm seas, redemption from themselves through art and insight, or else intoxication, paroxysm, numbness, madness.” Thus, in Nietzsche’s opinion, if classical pessimism is a sign of strength, wealth and superabundance, on the contrary, romantic pessimism reveals physiological weakness and fatigue, impoverishment and décadence. As we have seen, in the posthumous fragment 9[126], spring-fall 1887, quoted above, Nietzsche follows the distinction between classical pessimism (pessimism of strength) and romantic pessimism (decadent pessimism), already proposed in An Attempt at Self-Criticism and in GS 370. However, he does not clarify whether he considers Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to belong to the former or latter kind of pessimism. This doubt is easily resolved by taking into consideration a number of later notes. In the posthumous fragment 11[159], November 1887–March 1888, for instance, Nietzsche distinguishes two different kinds of literature under the headings of “Toward the ‘Great Disgust’” and “Toward 169 See the following posthumous fragment 14[23], spring 1888, on The Birth of Tragedy: “The essential in this conception is the idea of art in relation to life: it is considered, psychologically as well as physiologically, as the great stimulans, as that which forces eternally to life, to eternal life…”

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the ‘Great Pity’.” Under the first category, Nietzsche specifically mentions Flaubert, Zola, Goncourt, Baudelaire and the dîners chez Magny.170 Under the category Toward the “Great Pity”, Nietzsche mentions instead the name of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, together with that of Wagner’s Parsifal. The reason for which these three names are linked together is clearly explained by the following passage from The AntiChrist: “The instincts of life should lead people to try to find a remedy for the sort of pathological and dangerous accumulation of pity you see in the case of Schopenhauer (and, unfortunately, in the case of our whole literary and artistic decadence from St Petersburg to Paris, from Tolstoy to Wagner), to prick it and make it burst… In the middle of our unhealthy modernity, nothing is less healthy than Christian pity.” (A, 7)

Nietzsche’s judgment of Dostoevsky’s pessimism becomes even clearer if we consider two posthumous fragments from spring, 1888 (notebook W II 5). The first (14[25]) belongs to a series of considerations on The Birth of Tragedy. In this note, Nietzsche once again alludes to the distinction between classical and romantic pessimism. As representatives of the latter, in which “the weakness, the fatigue, the décadence of the races find expression in concepts and valuations”, Nietzsche explicitly mentions Schopenhauer, de Vigny, Dostoevsky, Leopardi and Pascal, together with the great nihilistic religions (Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Christianity). In the second posthumous fragment (14[222]), Nietzsche defines the modern pessimists as decadents and mentions Dostoevsky’s name together with that of Schopenhauer, Leopardi, Baudelaire, Mainländer and Goncourt. 170 A letter to Gast of 10 November, 1887 explains the reason for this allusion to the dîners: “The second volume of the Journal des Goncourts has appeared – a most interesting new publication. It concerns the years 1862–65; in it, the famous dîners chez Magny are described in an extremely vivid way, the dinners at which the most intelligent and skeptical troupe of Parisian minds at that time met together (Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, Théophile Gautier, Taine, Renan, the Goncourt brothers, Schérer, Gavarni, sometimes Turgenev, and so on). Exasperated pessimism, cynicism, nihilism, alternating with a lot of joviality and good humor; I would have been quite at home there myself – I know these gentlemen by heart so well that I have actually had enough of them. One should be more radical; at root they all lack the principal thing – ‘la force.’” (#948) 

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The topic of Dostoevsky’s décadence also appears indirectly in the correspondences of October and November 1888 between Nietzsche and the Danish literary critic Georg Brandes.171 In a letter from Copenhagen of 6 October, 1888 Brandes lets Nietzsche know that he has recently written two books (one of them is Impressions of Russia) and that he plans to go to Russia “in the heart of the winter in order to come to life again [aufzuleben].” (#586) Nietzsche answers from Turin with a letter on 20 October in which he hints at the appeal that Russian literature, especially Dostoevsky, has for him: “How industrious you are! And I, alas! Such an idiot that I cannot understand Danish. I perfectly believe it when you say that ‘in Russia one can come to life again;’ I count any sort of Russian book, above all Dostoevsky (translated into French, for God’s sake, not into German!!) among my greatest reliefs.” (#1134)

Brandes replies on 16 November: “It is remarkable how what you have written on Dostoevsky in your letter and in your book [The Case of Wagner] coincides with my impressions on him. I have mentioned you, too, in my work on Russia, where I deal with Dostoevsky. He is a great poet, but a detestable fellow, completely Christian in his emotions, and quite sadistic at the same time. His entire morality is what you have christened ‘slave morality.’” (#606)

Nietzsche answers Brandes with a letter on 20 November in which he summarizes the core of his profound intellectual dialogue with Dostoevsky. These words, written nearly a month and a half before his final breakdown, are the last words that Nietzsche wrote about Dostoevsky and, therefore, can be regarded as Nietzsche’s comprehensive and final 171 In October 1888 Brandes had published a book entitled Indtryk fra Rusland (Engl.: Impressions of Russia) which contained a chapter dedicated to Dostoevsky (see Brandes 1889 [1888]: 301–336). Since Nietzsche did not know Danish, Brandes did not send him his book. However, as the letter to Köselitz of 15 January, 1888 shows (#976), Nietzsche was able to read, among others, Brandes’ Moderne Geister. Literarische Bildnisse aus dem neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Brandes’ Moderne Geister was among the books in Nietzsche’s personal library; see Campioni et al. 2003: 154). In this book, there is a chapter dedicated to Turgenev (see Brandes 1887: 181–202). On p. 184, Brandes explains how Dostoevsky had tried to make fun of Turgenev in his novel Demons through the character of Karmazinov.

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judgment on him. It is precisely for this reason that the following lines acquire so much importance: “I completely believe what you say about Dostoevsky; on the other hand, I prize his work as the most valuable psychological material known to me – I am grateful to him in a remarkable way, however much he goes against my deepest instincts.” (#1151) Nietzsche’s words gave Brandes an opportunity to express some personal thoughts on Dostoevsky and the heroes of his novels in the letter of 23 November, 1888: “Look well at the face of Dostoevsky: half a Russian peasant’s face, half a criminal physiognomy, flat nose, small, penetrating eyes beneath lids that quiver with a nervous affection; look at the forehead, lofty, thoroughly well formed; the expressive mouth, eloquent of numberless torments of abysmal melancholy, of unnatural pleasures, of infinite compassion and passionate envy! An epileptic genius, whose exterior speaks of the mild milk of human kindness, with which his temperament was flooded, of the depth of an almost maniacal acuteness which mounted to his brain; finally of ambition, of monstrous exertion, and of bitter grudges which create pettiness of soul.172 His characters are not only poor and pitiable, but refined simpletons, noble prostitutes, frequently sufferers from hallucinations, gifted epileptics, inspired recruits for martyrdom, exactly the types we can imagine grouped

172 As Antonio and Jordi Morillas (2011: 175) point out, Brandes’ description of Dostoevsky derives from the characterization made by de Vogüé in his book Le roman russe (de Vogüé 1886a: 269f.; see also de Vogüé 1885: 351 f.): “Le visage était celui d’un paysan russe, d’un vrai moujik de Moscou ; le nez écrasé, de petits yeux clignotant sous l’arcade, brillant d’un feu tantôt sombre, tantôt doux ; le front large, bossué de plis et de protubérances, les tempes renfoncées, comme au marteau ; et tout ces traits tirés, convulsés, affaissés sur une bouche douloureuse. Jamais je n’ai vu sur un visage humain pareille expression de souffrance amassée ; toutes les transes de l’âme et de la chair y avaient imprimé leur sceau ; on y lisait, mieux que dans le livre, les souvenirs de la maison des morts, les longues habitudes d’effroi, de méfiance et de martyre. Les paupières, les lèvres, toutes les fibres de cette face tremblaient de tics nerveux. Quand il s’animait de colère sur une idée, on eût juré qu’on avait déjà vu cette tête sur les bancs d’une cour criminelle, ou parmi les vagabonds qui mendient aux portes des prisons. À d’autres moments, elle avait la mansuétude triste des vieux saints sur les images slavonnes.” Brandes had already used the same description in his book Impressions of Russia (in the chapter dedicated to Dostoevsky) without mentioning de Vogüé (see Brandes 1889 [1888]: 301 f.).



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round the apostles and disciples in the first era of Christianity. Undoubtedly no other creatures could be more remote from the Renaissance!” (#612)173

The analysis of the aforementioned posthumous fragments, together with the quoted correspondence between Nietzsche and Brandes clearly shows that Nietzsche considered Dostoevsky to be a typical representative of modern European décadence and romantic pessimism. His novels and the characters in his novels (sick, weak and decadent people) went against Nietzsche’s deepest instincts. Nevertheless, this did not prevent him from having a high opinion of Dostoevsky: according to Nietzsche, the novelist was a psychologist without equal and his remarks and observations were judged by Nietzsche to be the most valuable material on which to work and ponder. In my opinion, these opposite, but non-excluding features (the critique of the décadent and romantic pessimist, on the one hand, and the praise of the psychologist, on the other hand) are two sides of the same coin. They constitute the kernel of Nietzsche’s personal understanding and view of Dostoevsky and it would therefore be wrong to moderate or, even worse, deny one feature in favour of the other. To conclude this section, it is necessary to refer to one, last posthumous fragment of the notebook W II 5 in which Nietzsche seems to renounce the distinction between classical and romantic pessimism and to some extent revaluate Dostoevsky. I here allude to note 14[47], spring 1888, which refers to Nietzsche’s effort to conceive art as a countermovement of nihilism. In this note, Nietzsche questions the possibility of pessimism in art. Since art is for him “essentially affirmation, 173 Brandes’ remarks on Dostoevsky’s heroes and the types of the first Christian communities inevitably recall the aforementioned passage from the Epilogue of The Case of Wagner in which Nietzsche, while contrasting master morality with Christian morality, asserts that, “the Gospels present exactly the same physiological types that you find described in Dostoevsky’s novels.” According to Andler (1972 [1930]: 12f.), it was Brandes who suggested to Nietzsche the comparison between Dostoevsky’s heroes and the types of the first Christian communities. This hypothesis must be rejected. In fact, The Case of Wagner was printed in the summer of 1888. As the letter to Brandes of 13 September, 1888 shows (#1107), Nietzsche sent a copy of his work to the Danish critic. Thus, we can assume precisely the opposite of what Andler affirms: it was Brandes, who, having read The Case of Wagner, developed Nietzsche’s comparison between Dostoevsky’s characters and the types of the first Christian communities.

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blessing, deification of existence”, he asks whether pessimistic art is not actually a contradiction in terms. The conclusion Nietzsche arrives at is that since art affirms, there is no such thing as pessimistic art. From a psychological point of view, the inclination “to represent terrible and questionable things is in itself an instinct for power and magnificence in an artist.” Even the naturalism of Zola and the Goncourt brothers “comes from their pleasure in the ugly.” Surprisingly, Nietzsche ends the fragment with the following exclamation: “How liberating [erlösend] is Dostoevsky!”174 What does this exclamation mean and how should we interpret it? Considering the (above-mentioned) posthumous fragments on Dostoevsky’s pessimism, morality of sympathy, and décadence as “individual notes without central importance”, and judging Nietzsche’s inclusion of Dostoevsky under the category “The modern pessimists as décadents” (PF 14[222], spring 1888) as a “consideration en passant”, Meyer (1991: 678) claims that for Nietzsche the Christian and decadent Dostoevsky was not the real Dostoevsky. On the contrary, according to Meyer, Nietzsche considered Dostoevsky as one who had overcome décadence. In order to support his thesis, Meyer refers to the cited sentence about the liberating function of Dostoevsky. Although interesting, I believe this hypothesis is not tenable. Indeed, there is no particular reason for which we should lay specific emphasis on the single sentence “How liberating is Dostoevsky!” and dismiss the many passages, in which Nietzsche defines Dostoevsky as a decadent and pessimist, as “individual notes without central importance”, as Meyer does. Thus, we need a different explanation for Nietzsche’s sentence. Gesemann’s opinion is worth mentioning here, for it can be of great help in interpreting Nietzsche’s ambivalent attitude towards the artist Dostoevsky. According to Gesemann (1961: 152), Nietzsche not only appreciated the psychologist in Dostoevsky, but also the artist, 174 It is worth noting that the German substantive “Erlösung” can mean either “liberation” or “redemption”. Nietzsche believed that romantic art could have a redemptive function; as a romantic pessimist, Wagner sought redemption from himself through art (see GS, 370). Still, if we take into consideration the context of the posthumous fragment 14[47], it is clear that the meaning of the word “erlösend”, which refers to Dostoevsky, is not “redemptive”, in the sense of “redemption from oneself ”, but clearly “liberating”. 

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whose pessimistic art was the expression of a “bipolar interpretation of life.” In this sense, Gesemann claims, for Nietzsche, the tragic artist Dostoevsky, who was anti-Christian par excellence and who affirmed and justified even the most terrible characters of life, contrasted with the Christian and pessimist Dostoevsky. In the eyes of Nietzsche, the former redeemed the latter. Precisely this “audacious mutation”, Gesemann concludes, would explain why in the end Nietzsche accepted Dostoevsky. Gesemann’s interpretation is undoubtedly very plausible. It is safe to suppose that Nietzsche abhorred the Christian, sympathetic and decadent Dostoevsky, on the one hand, while at the same time esteemed the tragic artist who did not hide the most problematic aspects of existence, on the other hand. With regard to this point, Pareyson’s opinion (1993: 59f.) of Dostoevsky’s supposed pessimism is worth mentioning: “Dostoevsky’s philosophical conception is not optimistic, because it does not minimize the reality of evil. Nor is it pessimistic, because it does not affirm the insuperability of evil. His conception is truly tragic because, even if it affirms the ontological inexistence of evil and the final victory of good over evil, still it puts every man’s life under the sign of the fight between good and evil. This is done to such a degree that man has no choice but to take a painful and suffering route through evil.”

Most probably, in Nietzsche’s view, it was precisely this truly tragic conception that counterbalanced the most decadent aspects of Dostoevsky’s art, consequently reconciling for him the contradiction between the liberating artist and the romantic pessimist.

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15. An Unexpected Silence? A Recapitulation of Nietzsche’s Discovery and Reading of Dostoevsky

With the analysis in the previous section, the examination of Nietzsche’s reception of Dostoevsky comes to an end. Until proven otherwise, Nietzsche discovered Dostoevsky in Nice during the winter of 1886–87, that is, precisely in those years in which the vogue of Dostoevsky was growing in France, largely thanks to de Vogüé’s writings. Perhaps because of an instinct of affinity and kinship, perhaps simply because he had already heard of Dostoevsky, Nietzsche’s attention was drawn in a bookshop to the volume L’esprit souterrain. He read the two pieces that made up the volume (The Landlady and Notes from Underground): his joy was beyond bounds. He had found a kindred spirit, a keen psychologist, whose discovery he compared to that of Schopenhauer and Stendhal. From that moment forth, Nietzsche started a deep and fruitful inner dialogue with Dostoevsky. In the last two years before his breakdown, Nietzsche read L’esprit souterrain, Souvenirs de la maison des morts (Notes from the House of the Dead), Humiliés et offensés (The Insulted and Injured) and Les possédés (Demons). He also may have read Crime and Punishment (presumably in French translation) and most likely L’idiot, even if we cannot dismiss the possibility that he knew both novels from an indirect source (a review or an article). Moreover, Gast sent him the volume Erzählungen von F. M. Dostojewskij which contained five of Dostoevsky’s short stories (The Landlady, A Christmas Tree and a Wedding, White Nights, A Little Boy at Christ’s Christmas Party, and An Honest Thief). Since Nietzsche did not like Goldschmidt’s German translation, we do not know whether he read the whole volume or, more probably, simply a few passages from it.



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In some cases, the French translations (which Nietzsche clearly preferred to the German ones) played an important role in his understanding of Dostoevsky. The example of L’esprit souterrain is paradigmatic. This volume was in fact a free adaptation of two separate and very different short stories linked together by an apocryphal introduction. Moreover, the second part of the volume was a very unfaithful and defective translation. However, the importance of French translations should be considered beyond a philological or hermeneutical point of view. As already mentioned, Nietzsche’s wish to read Dostoevsky in French also shows that he linked the novelist to the Parisian culture of the time, as if his novels were an excellent product of that same culture. In Nietzsche’s opinion, Dostoevsky’s acuteness of analysis had no rival among modern Parisian psychologists – whom he highly esteemed. As proven by several passages in the correspondence, the published works, and the posthumous fragments from the very first moment of his discovery Nietzsche understood Dostoevsky as a psychologist. In his novels Nietzsche found a psychology that plumbed the inner depths of the human soul, revealing the most immoral and selfish aspects of the human being without hiding them under a veil of moral hypocrisy. The acuteness of Dostoevsky’s psychological analysis fascinated him to such a point that in Twilight of the Idols he went as far as to describe the novelist as the only psychologist from whom he had anything to learn. Nietzsche also esteemed Dostoevsky as an artist, although, as shown, he considered him a typical representative of modern European décadence and romantic pessimism. This, however, did not prevent him from valuing his tragic art while, at the same time, abhorring the Christian and decadent aspects of it. Dostoevsky’s novels were, beyond doubt, a great source of inspiration and meditation for Nietzsche. His attention was drawn, among others aspects, to themes such as human relations of domination, the man from the underground’s mockery of self-knowledge, the psychological and sociological analysis of resentment, the description of Russian criminals as unbroken natures, and the interpretation of Jesus as an idiot. Demons, in particular, provided a mine of subjects: in this novel, Nietzsche found interesting considerations on nihilism, atheism, socialism, religion and epilepsy. It is astonishing how wide the range of themes Dostoevsky handled was and how deeply he comprehended and 140 

analysed them. Both elements surely contributed to the high esteem in which Nietzsche held Dostoevsky’s works. It is precisely for this reason that it seems so surprising that Dostoevsky’s name is absent from Ecce Homo, the intellectual biography on which Nietzsche worked during the autumn and winter of 1888, that is, in a period during which his engagement with Dostoevsky had already borne its fruits. Nor does Dostoevsky’s name appear in the facsimile edition of the final manuscript (Druckmanuskript), in which it is possible to see how Nietzsche modified the previous version of Ecce Homo (see Hahn and Montinari 1985). How could it be that Nietzsche did not make any mention of one of the authors whom he most valued at the time? Did the name of Dostoevsky slip his mind during the writing of Ecce Homo, or was he intentionally seeking to hide the influence the novelist had exerted on his late works? If this is the case, however, why did he explicitly mention him in three of his 1888 works (The Case of Wagner, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ)? Andler (1972 [1930]: 1) comments on this unexpected silence as follows: “Ecce Homo should also serve as a warning to us. In this book Nietzsche confides all his spiritual nourishments into us. He does not forget the great Frenchmen of the 17th century, nor Stendhal, Shakespeare or Heine. Dostoevsky is not named. Should we believe this to be a coincidental omission? A distraction? Is it not already a disillusion? Did Nietzsche not realize that Dostoevsky does not belong to his race and that, being [the latter] decadent and Christian, he cannot share his hopes?”

These considerations rest on the absence of Dostoevsky’s name in the version of Ecce Homo published posthumously by the Nietzsche-Archiv. Actually, as Hahn and Montinari (1985: 66) point out in their commentary on the facsimile edition of the final manuscript, before Ecce Homo was published for the first time in 1908, Nietzsche’s mother and sister censored and hid some passages which Nietzsche wanted to be added to the final manuscript, but which they considered inappropriate. Since we cannot exclude the possibility that one of these lost passages explicitly or implicitly referred to Dostoevsky, any further speculation on this subject is superfluous. Moreover, Andler’s argument does not seem very plausible. Indeed, we should not forget that Nietzsche himself had recognized in the aforementioned letter to Brandes of 20 November, 1888 

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(#1151) that he valued Dostoevsky as the most valuable psychological material known to him, however much he went against his deepest instincts. We have no reason to suppose that just before his breakdown Nietzsche suddenly reconsidered his whole encounter with Dostoevsky or changed his opinion on him. On the contrary, one could argue that his early expectations with regard to Dostoevsky were confirmed by further readings, if we consider that in Twilight of the Idols – that is, in one of his last works – he described Dostoevsky as the only psychologist from whom he had anything to learn. Nietzsche discovered Dostoevsky relatively late in life. One can ask oneself whether Nietzsche really understood the novelist or whether, on the contrary, as Dudkin (1972: 10) argues, the real Dostoevsky remained unknown to him. Be that as it may, there is little doubt that Nietzsche’s inner dialogue with the Russian novelist bore many fruits that can be clearly detected in the late works. For all these reasons and on the basis of the analysis presented above it seems safe to conclude with MüllerBuck (2002: 118) that, when considering Nietzsche’s engagement with Dostoevsky, the risk that scholars run is not of overvaluing the influence of the latter on the former – as Janz (see Miller 1978: 150) warned many years ago – but rather of underestimating it. According to a doubtful and romanticized account by Nietzsche’s sister (whose truthfulness is more than questionable), the fascination with Dostoevsky even survived Nietzsche’s breakdown. Indeed, as Elisa­beth relates in her book The Lonely Nietzsche (Förster-Nietzsche 1915 [1914]: 403f.; second volume of The Life of Nietzsche), when she came back from Paraguay in 1890 after her husband’s death, and Nietzsche and their mother picked her up at the station, the subject of conversation was once again Dostoevsky: “I was moved beyond words when he used the old nickname ‘my dear Lama’ at our first meeting in Naumburg. He had come to the station with flowers for me, looked well, and carried himself like a soldier. No one would have taken this active walker for an invalid. He was still able to carry on a regular conversation; thus we talked of Dostoevsky and his House of the Dead, which we had both read in French. I thanked him for having recommended me this author, and added that we had as yet no such psychologist among our German writers.”175 175 It is quite likely that Elisabeth is plagiarizing her brother’s opinion of Dostoevsky here.

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Part II If God Does not Exist, Is Everything Permitted?

Contextualization of the Problem

Non, mon père, dit-il. Je me fais une autre idée de l’amour. Et je refuserai jusqu’à la mort d’aimer cette création où des enfants sont torturés. (A. Camus, La peste)

One of the classic topics, on which Nietzsche and Dostoevsky studies have focused their attention from the end of the nineteenth century until the present day, is the striking similarity between Ivan Karamazov’s idea – according to which, if there is no God and no immortality of the soul, everything is permitted – and the maxim “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” that appears in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, in the Genealogy, as well as in some posthumous fragments of 1884 and ’85. According to Nel Grillaert (2008: 40), it was the Russian philosopher and psychologist Nikolai Grot who in 1893 first affirmed that Nietzsche had repeated Ivan’s idea “without any skepticism and false shame.”176 Grot used Ivan’s idea in order to explain Nietzsche’s overman, who was consequently interpreted as one to whom all was permitted. By so doing, Grillaert (ibid.: 41) points out, Grot gave birth to “a mythopoem that will foster and contribute to the later identification of the Übermensch [overman] with other Dostoevskian nihilistic characters.” This mythopoem had such a wide spread in fin de siècle Russia, that Solovyev and Tolstoy also linked Nietzsche’s philosophy to the idea that “everything is permitted.” One year after Grot’s article, Solovyev, explaining the difference between masters and slaves in Nietzsche’s thought, claimed that for the former all was permitted, while the latter had to serve as an instrument for the former. (see Grillaert 2008: 84) For his part, Tolstoy alluded to the identification between Nietzsche’s philosophy and the idea “everything is permitted” in his novel Resurrection, 176 Grillaert refers to Grot’s article Nravstvennye Idealy nashego Vremeni: Fridrikh Nitsshe i Lev Tolstoi (Moral Ideals of our Time: Friedrich Nietzsche and Lev Tolstoy). 

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as the following passage, in which Tolstoy refers to the Siberian fugitives that lived in the woods and sometimes practiced anthropophagy, clearly shows: “Nothing less than the deliberate cultivation of evil as perpetrated in such institutions could have reduced a Russian citizen to the condition of those tramps, who anticipated Nietzsche in their belief that anything is permissible and nothing is forbidden, and the dissemination of this doctrine first among the prisoners and then the population at large.” (Tolstoy 2009 [1899]: 473)177

In Merezhkovsky’s fundamental study L. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (1995 [1901]), Nietzsche and Dostoevsky became the symbols of the apocalyptic clash between the Western and Eastern Spirit.178 In Merezhkovsky’s view, the future of world culture depended on the resolution of the struggle between the two most primordial religious elements, the idea of the chelovekobog (the man-god, i.e., the man who, having denied God, becomes himself a god) and that of the Bogochelovek (the God-man, i.e., Christ, the incarnated God). While Nietzsche preached the former under the form of the overman, Dostoevsky stood for the latter. In his study, Merezhkovsky associated Nietzsche’s philosophy with the main nihilistic characters in Dostoevsky’s novels (Raskolnikov, Kirillov and Ivan Karamazov) and stated that Dostoevsky had not only foretold Nietzsche, but also that he had expressed similar ideas with a greater destructive power. In this sense, the case of Ivan was paradigmatic. Indeed, according to Merezhkovsky (ibid.: 191), Ivan had “himself understood and foretold [the formula] ‘vsë pozvoleno’ – Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘alles ist erlaubt’ [everything is permitted].” Merezhkovsky’s work was widely known among Russian intellectuals of the period and his particular approach to Nietzsche and Dostoevsky was adopted by several critics.179 Shestov’s (1969 [1903]) interpretation of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky as apostates of idealism was, on the contrary, completely different from Merezhkovsky’s. Nevertheless, Shestov (ibid.: 310) as well alluded to Nietzsche’s formula “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” and remarked that, 177 I thank Joan B. Llinares for having drawn my attention to this passage. 178 Merezhkovsky’s study first appeared serially in the journal Mir Iskusstva and was then published in 1901. 179 On this, see Grillaert (2008: 188–203).

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“moralities of every kind, both aristocratic and democratic, were alien to Nietzsche. His task lay ‘beyond good and evil.’ Like Karamazov, he did not accept a moral interpretation or justification of life.” Merezhkovsky’s focus on the struggle between the God-man and the man-god had, on the contrary, a great influence on Berdyaev’s milestone study Dostoevsky (1966 [1923]). According to Berdyaev, both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky had understood that freedom was a tragic burden for man. Two opposite paths lay before humankind: one led to the God-man, Jesus Christ; the other led to self-deification, that is, to the man-god. Nietzsche chose the second path and turned towards the overman, “that magic idol that devours the men who kneel before him and every other human thing as well.” (ibid.: 64) In Berdyaev’s view, on the grave of the supreme ideas of God and man, Nietzsche set up “a monstrous image – the image of the man who wants to be God, of the overman in action, of Antichrist.” (ibid.) Dostoevsky clearly illustrated the dangers of this conception with the example of Raskolnikov, a “visionary overman” (ibid.: 99) who debases man into an instrument, as Nietzsche and the Marxian ideal did: “In the name of his Magnificence the Overman, in the name of the future happiness of some far-away humanity, in the name of the world-revolution, in the name of unlimited freedom for one or unlimited equality for all, for any or all of these reasons it is henceforth lawful to torture and to kill a man or any numbers of men, to transform all being into a means in the service of some exalted object or grand ideal. Everything is allowable when it is a question of the unbounded freedom of the overman (extreme individualism), or of the unbounded equality of all (extreme collectivism).” (ibid.: 100)

There is little doubt that the interpretive outline of the first Russian studies on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky influenced the way in which European intellectuals approached this subject in the first half of the twentieth century. In many works and essays of this period, one can clearly trace the predisposition to interpret Nietzsche and Dostoevsky as symbols of two opposite cultural and spiritual tendencies. Thus, for instance, in Kracauer’s (1990 [1921]) view, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky represent the struggle between two opposing ideals of mankind, the German and the Russian ethos, whereas Schubart (1939) revisits Merezhkovsky’s idea of the clash between the Western and the Eastern spirit, a struggle 

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between Nietzsche’s atheistic ideal of the overman and Dostoevsky’s idea of the universal man (Allmensch). In France, Gide (1952 [1923]) also related Dostoevsky’s main nihilistic characters to Nietzsche’s philosophy. Focusing on the question, “What can one single man accomplish?”, Gide alluded to the idea “everything is permitted”, which according to him was first formulated by Raskolnikov and then transformed by Nietzsche into his theory of the overman (ibid.: 135). Nevertheless, à propos of the overman theory, Gide (ibid.: 149f.) proposed changing an opinion which was at that time too easily accepted: “Nietzsche’s overman (observe, pray, wherein he differs from the overman of Raskolnikov’s or Kirillov’s vision), though ruthlessness is his motto, is ruthless not to others but to himself. The humanity he aspires to outstrip is his own. In short: to one and the same problem Nietzsche and Dostoevsky propose different, radically opposed solutions. Nietzsche advocates the affirmation of the personality – for him it is the one possible aim in life; Dostoevsky postulates its surrender. Nietzsche presupposes the heights of achievement where Dostoevsky prophesies utter ruin.”

Two decades later, the French theologian de Lubac (1995 [1944]) claimed in his well-known work The Drama of Atheist Humanism, that positivist, Marxist, and Nietzschean humanism shared the same foundation (the rejection of God) and a similar result (the annihilation of the human being). In de Lubac’s view, the drama of these atheist humanisms lay in the fact that they aimed to organize the world without God. De Lubac did not claim that man could not organize the world without God, but rather that without him man could ultimately only organize it against man himself. Atheist humanism is inhuman humanism, de Lubac concluded in the preface, whereas faith in God is “the sole flame in which our hope, human and divine, is kept alive.” (ibid.: 14) It is precisely from these premises that de Lubac interpreted Dostoevsky’s novels as a critique ante litteram of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Although extended, the following passage is worth quoting at length since it offers a clear example of the very same critique against Nietzsche that many intellectuals often formulated before and after De Lubac: “Dostoevsky penetrated, in advance, into the lonely world where Nietzsche was soon to venture. He had the prophetic awareness of the crisis (perhaps the most

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formidable of all) of which Nietzsche was to make himself the herald and the artificer. He lived it. He was present at the ‘death of God.’ He saw the murderer springing into the saddle for a stupendous career. He envisioned both atheism and the ideal of the overman in all their force. Then – despite all the complicities he was aware of harboring he very deliberately, though not without repeated struggles, decided against them. Thus, in a sense, he did more than foreshadow and serve as a rough sketch for his successor. To put the matter succinctly, he forestalled Nietzsche. He overcame the temptation to which Nietzsche was to succumb. That is what gives his work its extraordinary scope. Whoever plunges into it comes out immunized against the Nietzschean poison while aware of the greatness of Nietzsche. Dostoevsky does not compel the reader either to close his eyes or to take fright and shrink away. He does not thrust him back to the hither side of the newly discovered regions; he carries him beyond them.” (ibid.: 284)

A similar opinion was expressed by Lavrin (1948), according to whom Dostoevsky had anticipated and undermined the same conclusions that Nietzsche would shortly reach on the problem of the relation between the human being and God. Dostoevsky had discovered how dangerous the rejection of God and the affirmation of the man-god could be, and showed that humankind had only one path to follow: the one that led to Christ. Hence, having interpreted Nietzsche’s overman from a (very questionable) biological point of view, Lavrin (ibid.: 141) concluded his comparison claiming that, “Dostoevsky thus turned with all his verve and passion against mere ‘biology’ and the ideal of Nietzsche’s overman because at the bottom of it he saw only Death, masquerading in the gorgeous robe of life.” In this brief historiographical digression, that aims to contextualize the problem on which this second part will focus, Camus’s milestone study on rebellion is of particular importance. In the section dedicated to metaphysical rebellion, Camus directed his attention first to Ivan Karamazov and then to Nietzsche. According to Camus, Ivan does not deny God’s existence, he simply puts God on trial in the name of a higher principle – that of justice. The result of this trial is the rejection of God: if truth does exist, it is unacceptable because it is unjust. Having denied the murderous God, Ivan paradoxically affirms the possibility of murder: “Everything is permitted”, he claims, thus taking rebellion to its extreme consequences. But, if God does not exist, Camus asked, what is the foundation for the idea of justice on the basis of which we



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deny God? Morality, as the ultimate aspect of God, had to be destroyed as well, and along came Nietzsche’s philosophy. Actually, according to Camus, Nietzsche did not propose a philosophy of rebellion: he constructed a philosophy on rebellion. Nor did he aim to kill God: he simply found Him dead in the soul of his contemporaries. After God’s death, there was a new space for freedom, but this freedom needed to be regulated: “Absolute domination by the law does not represent liberty, but no more does absolute anarchy. The sum total of every possibility does not amount to liberty, but to attempt the impossible amounts to slavery. Chaos is also a form of servitude. Freedom exists only in a world where what is possible is defined at the same time as what is not possible.” (Camus 1969 [1951]: 71)

Ivan Karamazov’s logic was replaced by a deeper one: if nothing is true, nothing is permitted. As Camus (ibid.) put it: “to deny that one single thing is forbidden in this world amounts to renouncing everything that is permitted. At the point where it is no longer possible to say what is black and what is white, the light is extinguished and freedom becomes a voluntary prison.” Therefore, Camus asked, how could one live free and, at the same time, without law? Nietzsche did not avoid this enigma. He affirmed the innocence of becoming and recognized the absence of an absolute telos. Nevertheless, he was able at the same time to say “yes” to the entire universe and to its fatality. Amor fati replaced the odium fati. By recognizing the absence of every kind of superior aim in the universe, Nietzsche, so Camus argued, opened the path to the deification of man. However, the price to pay for this new reign was the acceptance of evil’s fatality. In Nietzsche’s mind, “the only problem was to see that the human spirit bowed proudly to the inevitable” (ibid.: 74f.); but it is well known that posterity misrepresented his thinking. Without doubt, there was some manipulation. Nevertheless, Camus (ibid.: 76) asked, “is there nothing in his [Nietzsche’s] work that can be used in support of definitive murder?” Camus’s answer was affirmative and very critical: “To say yes to everything supposes that one says yes to murder […] Nietzsche’s responsibility lies in having legitimized, for reasons of method – and even if only for an instant – the opportunity for dishonesty of which Dostoevsky had already

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said that if one offered it to people, one could always be sure of seeing them rushing to seize it.” (ibid.: 76f.)

The idea that Dostoevsky not only anticipated some of Nietzsche’s ideas, but that he also offered a critique ante litteram of Nietzsche’s philosophy, was developed by the Italian philosopher Sergio Givone as well. Givone (1984: 162) distinguished between three different ways of interpreting Dostoevsky in relation to Nietzsche: a Dostoevsky before Nietzsche, a Dostoevsky versus Nietzsche and, finally, a Dostoevsky beyond Nietzsche. According to Givone, in the first place it is possible to interpret Dostoevsky as a forerunner of Nietzsche not only because the former anticipated some of the latter’s positions, but also because Dostoevsky opened the philosophical horizon of epoch-making change within which Nietzsche moved. Second, it is possible to find a Dostoevsky versus Nietzsche to the extent that both thinkers focused their attention on similar problems. For instance, in Givone’s opinion, given the similarity between Dostoevsky’s idea of the superior man and Nietzsche’s overman, the failure of the former revealed the contradiction of the latter. Third and finally, we can identify a Dostoevsky beyond Nietzsche to the extent that Nietzsche was still bound to a “metaphysical will to control and to master what escaped him.” (ibid.: 162) According to Givone, Dostoevsky clearly showed that even if nihilism had rejected God, it still conceived of the divinity as a principle, as the foundation and reason of the world and history (as the case of Ivan Karamazov clearly illustrates), remaining, therefore, imprisoned by an idea that was still metaphysically structured. On the other hand, Dostoevsky was able to “discover in the negation of God the negated God” (ibid.: 164) and at the same time to contemplate the abyss of doubt and the abyss of faith. As this historiographical digression shows, among those philosophers, intellectuals, and scholars who focused in the past on the relation between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, there is a widely held belief that Dostoevsky’s novels anticipated some of Nietzsche’s main ideas. Ivan Karamazov’s idea has been often compared with the maxim “nothing is true, everything is permitted” that appears in Nietzsche’s works and posthumous fragments. Recently, Ebersbach (2006: 387) still claimed that:



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“Nietzsche sympathizes precisely with those characters of Dostoevsky about whom the novelist himself warned […] He [Nietzsche] glorifies exactly that type of man who would kill his equal, his potential executioners, the ‘barbarians of 20th Century,’ who think and act according to the assassins’ creed: ‘nothing is true, everything is permitted.’ They all seem to him to be martyrs of the new ideas: the voice from the underground, Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, Kirillov – and among them Ivan Karamazov, whom he did not know.”180

To what extent is such a comparison justified? Did Nietzsche really affirm that if nothing is true, everything is permitted? In which sense? In what follows, I will try to provide an answer to these questions. To this aim, I will first analyse some aspects of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, paying special attention to Ivan’s idea. Subsequently, I will take into consideration the maxim “nothing is true, everything is permitted” in order to understand its meaning and Nietzsche’s position towards it. Third, I will consider the position according to which Dostoevsky’s novels offered a critique ante litteram of Nietzsche’s philosophy. I will focus on three main characters of Dostoevsky’s late novels: Raskolnikov, Kirillov and Ivan Karamazov. Finally, I will conclude with a brief analysis of Nietzsche’s moral perspectivism and immoralism, showing how Nietzsche and Dostoevsky provided a different answer to the main question that concerns us in this context: if God does not exist, is everything permitted?

180 See also Poljakova (2013: 368f.).

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1.  The Brothers Karamazov

The novel The Brothers Karamazov is undoubtedly one of the masterpieces of not only Russian, but also of world literature. In his analysis of the novel, Joseph Frank (2003: 567) alludes to works such as Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Shakespeare’s King Lear and Goethe’s Faust, in order to give an idea of the stature of The Brothers Karamazov. The novel was published in The Russian Messenger in 1879 and 1880 and was received by Russian readers with great enthusiasm. Dostoevsky planned to write two novels: the first was The Brothers Karamazov and the second was intended to be the main novel, dedicated to the activities of Aliosha,181 the youngest of the three Karamazov brothers. However, Dostoevsky died on 28 January 1881 and the second novel was never written.

1.1  The Plot The Brothers Karamazov is a novel in four parts, which revolves around the three sons of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov: the oldest, Dmitri, child of the first marriage, and Ivan and Aliosha, children of the second marriage. Fyodor Pavlovich, the father, is a libidinous and dissipated man who does not take any interest in his children. Dostoevsky presents this character as a buffoon. Nevertheless, he can also be sentimental and, even in his wickedness, naïve and kind-hearted. Dmitri, the firstborn child, shows the same amplitude of character: his nature is instinctive, passionate and often violent, but at the same time, his soul is capable of undergoing a deep moral metamorphosis. Ivan, the second child, is a typical representative of young Russian radicals of the nineteenth century. He does not believe in God and sets up reason against religious 181 Aliosha is the diminutive of Alexei. 

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faith. However, atheism has not completely conquered his soul. As will be shown, Ivan undergoes a profound crisis. Finally, there is Aliosha, the youngest child, who is actually the hero of the novel. His faith in Christ allows him to have faith in mankind and avoid judging his peers. He is the most serene of the three brothers, even though he also undergoes a spiritual crisis. In addition to the three brothers, there is a fourth illegitimate child, the son of Fyodor Pavlovich and the idiot Lizaveta Smerdyashchaya. When Lizaveta gives birth to the baby, the child is given the patronymic Fyodorovich (although Fyodor Pavlovich never recognizes him as his son) and is named Smerdyakov, after his mother’s nickname.182 After Lizaveta’s death, Fyodor Pavlovich’s servants Grigory and his wife Marfa take care of the illegitimate child. Dostoevsky describes Smerdyakov as a despicable lackey, full of resentment over his social position.183 As will be shown, Smerdyakov does not believe in God. He puts into practice Ivan’s maxim “everything is permitted” and commits the parricide. The starting point of the plot is the serious conflict that develops between the father and Dmitri over an inheritance that should go to the latter, but that the greedy father denies him. This conflict explodes when Dmitri, despite his engagement to Katerina Ivanovna, falls in love with Grushenka, to whom Fyodor Pavlovich has promised three thousand roubles if she pays a visit to him.184 The terrible conflict between father and son makes Dmitri exclaim in the presence of the elder Zosima, Aliosha’s spiritual guide, the following words: “Why is such a man alive! […] No, tell me, can he be allowed to go on dishonoring the earth with himself?” (BK: 74) This exclamation, made by Dmitri in a fit of anger, foretells the later parricide. Simulating an epileptic fit and knowing that all the clues will indicate that Dmitri is the murderer, Smerdyakov kills 182 The verb smerdet’ means “to stink” in Russian. Smerdyakov is therefore “the stinking one.” 183 There is little doubt that Nietzsche could have drawn interesting observations on resentment from this character. 184 As one can notice, Dostoevsky once again builds his novel on the basis of triangular love affairs. In this sense there are two main triangles in The Brothers Karamazov: the first is the one mentioned above, while the second is represented by Dmitri, Katerina Ivanovna, and Ivan. Although Ivan denies his love for his brother’s fiancée, at the end of the novel both Ivan and Katerina recognize this love.

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Fyodor Pavlovich at night and steals his money. That same night Dmitri, fearing that Grushenka could be tempted to take the money offered by Fyodor Pavlovich, creeps into the garden of his father’s house. Grushenka is not there, but the noise wakes the servant Grigory, who recognizes Dmitri and shouts loudly before the oldest brother strikes him with a brass pestle. As predicted by Smerdyakov, suspicion falls upon Dmitri who, believing that he has accidentally killed old Grigory, does nothing to defend himself before the prosecutor. The fourth and last part of the novel is, therefore, dedicated to the investigation and the trial. Dmitri is unjustly convicted of parricide and sentenced to hard labour. Meanwhile, Ivan has three meetings with Smerdyakov during which he slowly realises that he is also responsible for the parricide. Ivan is guilty not only of having left Smerdyakov free to put his murderous plan into practice, but also of having given the servant the moral justification for the parricide. For Ivan’s claim is that, if God does not exist and if there is no immortality of the soul, then everything is permitted. During his brother’s trial, Ivan publicly acknowledges his responsibility, but no one believes his confession since Smerdyakov has already committed suicide and he seems to be delirious. The novel concludes with the touching funeral of the young Ilyusha, son of Captain Snegiryov, whom Dmitri had previously humiliated in public. In the last scene, Aliosha is surrounded by young kids (thus recalling the character of Prince Myshkin) and gives a speech on friendship, on the memory of Ilyusha, and on resurrection.

1.2  The Reason – Faith Conflict As Frank (2003: 567) points out, The Brothers Karamazov “succeeds in achieving a classic expression of the great theme that had preoccupied him [Dostoevsky] since Notes from the Underground: the conflict between reason and Christian faith.” Following Frank’s reading and using the opposition between reason and faith as a starting point, it is possible to construe the conceptual map of The Brothers Karamazov. Thus, on 

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the one hand, we will have the principle of reason, which leans on logic as the basis of its atheism, whereas, on the other hand, there is faith which rests on love in order to defend the belief in God and the immortality of the soul against logic. This love is conceived both as love of life and of one’s neighbour. In the first case, it is Aliosha who, during his conversation with Ivan, sets love for life against logic and gives the primacy to the former. As Aliosha puts it: “I think that everyone should love life before everything else in the world […] love it before logic […] and only then I will also understand its meaning.” (BK: 231) In the second case, it is the elder Zosima who relates faith in God and belief in the immortality of the soul to the experience of active love, the altruistic love in one’s neighbour. When Madame Khokhlakova confesses to have a wavering faith and asks the elder Zosima for proof of God’s existence, the monk answers that, “one cannot prove anything here, but it is possible to be convinced […] By the experience of active love. Try to love your neighbors actively and tirelessly. The more you succeed in loving, the more you’ll be convinced of the existence of God and the immortality of your soul.” (BK: 56) The connection between love for one’s neighbour and faith becomes very important not only from the viewpoint of the believer, but also from that of the atheist. According to the exposition of Ivan’s theory made by Miusov,185 love for one’s neighbour does not derive from a natural law, but rather from mankind’s belief in its immortality. Were this belief to be destroyed, love would dry up in mankind. Love plays, therefore, a pivotal role in The Brothers Karamazov. It is no coincidence that the elder Zosima advises Madame Khokhlakova to avoid all lies and the fear of attaining love (see BK: 58). Thus, if on the one hand Dostoevsky relates faith with concrete, altruistic love without limits (faith is understood as the natural complement of love), then on the other hand, reason is linked to selfishness and the fear of attaining love. In the latter case, love is at best an abstract concept; this is the true meaning of what a doctor reveals to Zosima: “the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate

185 Miusov is a cousin of the first wife of Fyodor Pavlovich. He embodies the “type” of the Russian Westernized liberal of the generation of the 1840s.

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persons.” (BK: 57)186 It is not by chance that the chapter dedicated to Ivan’s rebellion starts exactly with a similar and very revealing admission: “I never could understand,’ – Ivan says to his brother Aliosha – “how it’s possible to love one’s neighbor. In my opinion, it is precisely one’s neighbors that one cannot possibly love […] If we’re to come to love a man, the man himself should stay hidden, because as soon as he shows his face – love vanishes.” (BK: 236f.)187 Loving one’s neighbour is also closely related to the concept of universal responsibility, as revealed by Markel, Zosima’s older brother. On the verge of death and at the age of seventeen, Markel’s spirit undergoes an incredible transition from atheism to belief in God. Even if he does not know how to explain it, Markel understands that “each of us is guilty [vinovat] in everything before everyone, and I most of all.”188 (BK: 289) The older brother passes this message on to the younger brother, who in turn formulates it in the following way: “each of us is undoubtedly guilty on behalf of all and for all on earth, not only because of the common guilt of the world, but personally, each one of us, for all people and for each person on this earth.” (BK: 164) It is very revealing that Dmitri accepts this message at the very moment in which he accepts to carry his guilt.189 On the contrary, Ivan, the atheist who claims that everything is permitted, refuses to recognize his own responsibility in the parricide: it is only after three meetings with Smerdyakov and a deep, spiritual and psychological crisis that Ivan will admit that he is partly responsible and accept his own guilt.

186 See the following passage from the semi-fiction Vlas, written in 1873: “Don’t you see that loving the universal man means surely to scorn and sometimes even to hate the real man standing next to you?” (WD, Vol. I: 158) 187 The theme of the “face”, which will be so relevant in Levinas’ philosophy, is richly explored in this novel by Dostoevsky. 188 Some lines after the quoted passage, Markel reaffirms his idea: “Dear mother, heart of my heart […] you must know that verily each of us is guilty before everyone, for everyone and everything.” For an extended analysis of the concepts of guilt and responsibility in The Brothers Karamazov, see Pfeuffer (2008: 156–176). 189 Before the process begins, during a conversation with his brother Aliosha, Dmitri claims that, “everyone is guilty for everyone else.” (BK: 591) 

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1.3  Ivan’s Idea In his well-known study on Dostoevsky, Bakhtin (1984 [19291, 19632]: 78) points out that in Dostoevsky’s novels “the idea really does become almost the hero of the work.” Following the hermeneutical scheme presented in the previous section, one could claim that there are two main ideas in The Brother Karamazov: Ivan’s idea, which represents the principle of reason, and the Christian idea of love and of universal responsibility, which embodies the principle of faith.190 Although both ideas are equally important, Ivan’s idea is more relevant to the structure of the novel: the parricide can be considered as a consequence of this idea, whereas the novel itself can be regarded as a grandiose response to it. In the novel, Ivan’s idea is elucidated by different characters: Smerdyakov embraces it; Rakitin, the seminarian, partially criticizes it; Dmitri thinks about it carefully. In what follows, I will first piece together Ivan’s idea through the different formulations given in the novel, whereas in the next section I will show how Dostoevsky rejects it. The first exposition of Ivan’s idea is the one given by Miusov who, in the elder Zosima’s presence, introduces it as an “anecdote […] about Ivan Fyodorovich himself, a most typical and interesting one.” (BK: 69) According to Miusov’s reconstruction of Ivan’s view, there is no natural law in the world that would make men love their fellow men. If there has been any love on earth up to now, this has come from humanity’s belief in its immortality. In this sense, were this belief to be destroyed, not only love but also all strength to continue life would dry up. Then, “nothing would be immoral any longer, everything would be permitted, even anthropophagy.” (ibid.) But, there is something more than that, Miusov continues. For he who believes neither in God nor in immortality, the moral law of nature would change into the opposite of the former religious law. Egoism would not only be considered permissible, even to the point of evildoing, but it would also be regarded as necessary and 190 According to Pareyson (1993: 23f.), the word “idea” has two opposite meanings for Dostoevsky: in the first case, the idea means “heavenly seed”; in the second case, the idea is the product of a fallen man. Taken in the latter sense, the idea would rather be a “demonic suggestion”, an artificial idea which should be renamed “ideology”.

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reasonable: this is – Miusov concludes – the eccentric and paradoxical idea of Ivan Karamazov. To the elder Zosima, who asks Ivan if he does truly believe that these are the consequences of the end of humanity’s faith in the immortality of its soul, Ivan simply answers that, “there is no virtue if there is no immortality.” (BK: 70) In his Writer’s Diary (December 1876: 736), Dostoevsky clearly explains the logic on which this claim is grounded: “Immortality, promising eternal life, binds people all the more firmly to earth. This, it would seem, is a contradiction: if there is so much life – that is, if there is an eternal one apart from the earthly – then why place such a value on this earthly life? But it turns out to be just the contrary: for only with faith in his immortality does a person comprehend his whole wise purpose on earth. Without the conviction of his immortality, the links between the person and the earth are broken; they grow more fragile, they decay, and the loss of a higher meaning in life (experienced at least in the form of unconscious anguish) surely brings suicide in its wake […] In short, the idea of immortality is life itself, life in the full sense; it is its final formula and humanity’s principal source of truth and understanding.”191

The second brief exposition of Ivan’s idea is given by the seminarian Rakitin, who summarizes it in the following maxim: “if there is no immortality of the soul, then there is no virtue, and therefore everything is permitted.” (BK: 82) Rakitin criticizes this idea, judging it to be a stupid theory and against the moral void that originates from it, he sets the three principles of the French Revolution: “Mankind will find strength in itself to live for virtue, even without believing in the immortality of the soul! Find it in the love of liberty, equality, fraternity…” (ibid.) Paradoxically, Ivan’s idea will also tempt this ambitious and dishonest seminarian, who will later be revealed as a false believer.192 Indeed, when later in the novel Dmitri asks Rakitin how man will be without God and if everything will be permitted then, Rakitin laughs and answers with 191 On this, Camus (1969 [1951]: 57) gives a complementary explanation: “If there is no immortality, then there is neither reward nor punishment, neither good nor evil.” (Bower’s translation is here incomplete, since the final words “neither good nor evil” are omitted. See the French original (L’homme révolté. Paris: Gallimard, 2008 [1951], p. 82): “S’il n’y a pas d’immortalité, il n’y a ni récompense ni châtiment, ni bien ni mal.”) 192 During his conversation with his brother Aliosha in the fourth part, Dmitri exclaims (BK: 589): “Rakitin doesn’t like God, oof, how he doesn’t!” 

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an allusion to Ivan: “Didn’t you know? […] Everything is permitted to the intelligent man” (BK: 589)193 Awaiting the trial, Dmitri undergoes a spiritual transformation. As he reveals to his brother Aliosha, he is deeply tormented by the problem of God’s existence. In particular, the question on which he is so anxious is, how can man be virtuous if, as Rakitin claims, the idea of God is truly artificial? Rakitin maintains the possibility of loving mankind even if God does not exist: “You’d do better to worry about extending man’s civil rights […] or at least about not letting the price of beef go up; you’d render your love for mankind more simply and directly that way than with any philosophies.” (BK: 592f.) Yet this explanation does not convince the anguished spirit of Dmitri, who in his turn replies as follows: “without God […] you’ll hike up the price of beef yourself, if the chance comes your way, and make a rouble on every kopeck.” (ibid.) So, “What is virtue?”, Dmitri finally asks Aliosha, and then adds, “I have one virtue and a Chinese has another – so it’s a relative thing. Or not? Not relative? Insidious question!” (ibid.) As will be shown, Dostoevsky will answer this question only indirectly, through the profound crisis that Ivan’s idea will undergo. However, before considering this theme, it is necessary to further examine Ivan’s own exposition of his idea. The conversation between Ivan and Aliosha, contained in the second part of the novel, undoubtedly represents the most profound theoretic part of The Brothers Karamazov. Sitting in a tavern, the two brothers talk about eternal problems such as God’s existence and immortality. As Aliosha recognizes, these are first and foremost questions for “real Russians.” (BK: 234) Spurred on by his younger brother, Ivan explains his personal view on these themes. According to him, the human mind is earthly and Euclidian, that is, it has a concept of only three spatial dimensions. To ponder things that are not of this world, such as the problem of God’s existence, makes no sense, since “all such questions are completely unsuitable to a mind created with a concept of only three dimensions.” (BK: 235) In this sense, Ivan does not deny God; on the contrary, he accepts God’s existence (although insincerely). What Ivan does not and cannot accept, is the world created by God, with all 193 “Intelligent man” is the same expression used by Smerdyakov during his conversation with Ivan. With this expression, the former refers to the latter. See chapter 7 of the fifth book, entitled “It’s Always Interesting to Talk with an Intelligent Man.”

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its cruelty and suffering. Even supposing that all the suffering will be healed in the final moment of eternal harmony, and forgiveness will be possible, Ivan refuses to accept this God’s world, for he refuses to forgive the suffering of the many, innocent children: “Do you love children, Alyosha? I know you love them, and you’ll understand why I want to speak only of them now. If they, too, suffer terribly on earth, it is, of course, for their fathers; they are punished for their fathers who ate the apple – but that is reasoning from another world; for the human heart here on earth it is incomprehensible. It is impossible that a blameless one should suffer for another, and such a blameless one!” (ibid.: 238)

Ivan depicts terrible scenes of inhuman suffering based on the records of the time. Turks and Circassians who rape women and children in Bulgaria, the soldier who shatters the head of a nursing infant in front of its trembling mother just for fun, the parents who make their five-yearold daughter eat her own excrement, the general who lets loose a whole pack of wolfhounds on an eight-year-old boy guilty only of having hurt the paw of the general’s favourite hound: how can one forgive the atrocious suffering of these innocents? Ivan’s answer to this question is unambiguous: this suffering cannot be forgiven. As he puts it: “If the suffering of children goes to make up the sum of suffering needed to buy truth, then I assert beforehand that the whole of truth is not worth such a price. I do not, finally, want the mother to embrace the tormentor who let his dogs tear her son to pieces! She dare not to forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she wants to, let her forgive the tormentor her immeasurable maternal suffering; but she has no right to forgive the suffering of her child who was torn to pieces, she dare not forgive the tormentor, even if the child himself were to forgive him!” (BK: 245)

This is Ivan’s promethean rebellion.194 Having asked himself the ancient and recurring question, “Si Deus est, unde malum?” (“If God exists, whence evil?”), Ivan refuses to accept the idea that a just God can preside over the evil of undeserved human suffering.195 If the suffering of 194 ‘Bunt’ (rebellion) is the word used by Aliosha. 195 On this, see Scanlan (2002: 51–53). According to Scanlan (ibid: 42), “Ivan’s passionate indictment of a world that allows the suffering and death of innocent children is one of the most gripping statements of the philosophical ‘problem of evil’ in world literature.” 

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innocent children is the price that one has to pay for eternal harmony, then Ivan refuses to pay this price and hastens to return his ticket. The refusal of the murderous God leads, however, to the possibility of sanctioning any sort of crime: this is the paradoxical conclusion of Ivan’s idea. As Camus (1969 [1951]: 58) puts it: “If all is permitted, he can kill his father or at least allow him to be killed. Long reflection on the condition of mankind as people sentenced to death only leads to the justification of crime.” Having questioned His legitimacy, Ivan dethrones God and replaces Him with the man-god (cheloveko-bog), whose advent is foreshadowed by the devil that appears to a delirious Ivan in the last part of the novel and that represents his vulgar and stupid double: “Once mankind has renounced God, […] then the entire old world view will fall of itself, without anthropophagy, and, above all, the entire former morality, and everything will be new. People will come together in order to take from life all that it can give, but, of course, for happiness and joy in this world only. Man will be exalted with the spirit of divine, titanic pride, and the man-god will appear.” (BK: 648f.)

According to the devil, who repeats Ivan’s thoughts and ideas, humanity will give up its hope in the afterlife and accept death proudly and calmly, like a god. The neighbour will be loved even without any reward and this love will be all the more powerful and strong inasmuch as the awareness of its temporariness will be clearer. Only one element disturbs this idyllic picture: mankind’s stupidity. Maybe it will take humanity a thousand years to understand this. In this sense, anyone who already knows the truth is permitted to settle things exactly as he wishes according to the new principles: to him, the devil claims, plagiarizing Ivan’s idea, everything will be permitted. The new man-god will be allowed “to jump lightheartedly over any former moral obstacle of the former slave-man, if need be. There is no law for God!” (ibid.: 649) As one can see, Ivan’s idea ends up justifying a position of what we may call moral indifferentism (for everything is morally indifferent). One who knows that there is neither God nor immortality of the soul is permitted to act like a God that does not know and respect any law. Ivan’s idea is, however, doubly paradoxical: on the one hand, the divinity is rejected on the grounds of precisely the same morality that Ivan’s

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theory claims to reject,196 while on the other hand, Ivan’s idea ends up justifying the same immorality of which he had accused God. To be more precise, Ivan’s idea is not even immoral, but simply amoral, since it lacks any moral law.197 The scandalised reaction to innocent suffering does not lead Ivan to annihilate the roots of it, but on the contrary, to provide a justification for evildoing. The young Karamazov’s rebellion against an unjust God ends up ratifying injustice: thus, everything is permitted.

1.4  The Crisis of the Idea As Frank (2003: 607) points out, Dostoevsky combats the nihilistic ideas of his characters “by portraying their effects on the lives of his characters, not by attempting to demonstrate their lack of theoretical persuasiveness or rational coherence.” Frank’s claim ties in not only with the plot of Crime and Punishment (Raskolnikov undergoes a spiritual transformation) and of Demons (Kirillov and Stavrogin commit suicide, Verkhovensky the father rejects his Westernized ideas at death’s door, whereas his son escapes), but also with that of The Brothers Karamazov. In Dostoevsky’s last novel, Ivan falls ill, suffers a nervous breakdown and begins to rave, while Smerdyakov, the material executor of the parricide, ends up committing suicide. On the other hand, Dmitri, who has accepted to carry his guilt, undergoes a long and difficult process of moral rebirth, which will purify his soul through suffering. 196 On this, see the next section. 197 In his Analytic Introduction to Ethics, Birnbacher (2007: 9) clarifies this distinction by pointing out that to define something as “immoral” presupposes having a specific moral perspective from which we judge an action as morally reprehensible, whereas the adjective “amoral” describes a way of acting or thinking characterized by the fact that moral norms or duties are considered not to be binding. Understood in this way, to behave amorally means to act following one’s own interests, non-moral self-representations, aesthetic ideals or simply pure arbitrariness. As will be shown, this point will prove to be essential in the comparison between Ivan’s theory and Nietzsche’s philosophy. 

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Throughout the novel, Dostoevsky gives different clues to Ivan’s later spiritual crisis. In the first part, hearing Ivan’s claim that without immortality there is no virtue, the elder Zosima understands that Ivan has still not found any solution to the question of God and that his soul is experiencing a self-lacerating clash between reason and faith: “This idea is not yet resolved in your heart and torments it. But a martyr, too, sometimes likes to toy with his despair, also from despair, as it were. For the time being you, too, are toying, out of despair, with your magazine articles and drawing-room discussions, without believing in your own dialectics and smirking at them with your heart aching inside you…The question is not resolved in you, and there lies your great grief, for it urgently demands resolution…” (BK: 70)

During his conversation with Aliosha it is Ivan himself who, before explaining the reason for his rebellion, confesses in all sincerity to his younger brother: “perhaps I want to be healed by you.” (BK: 236) All through this conversation, there are several symptoms that foreshadow Ivan’s later nervous breakdown: as he speaks, Ivan has “a strange look”, as if he were “in some kind of madness.” (BK: 238) Similarly, after his talk with Smerdyakov, Ivan “moved and walked as if in spasms.” (BK: 274) Aliosha understands that his brother has forgotten about Christ, the one who “can forgive everything, forgive all and for all” (BK: 246), and asks Ivan how he can live and love “with such hell in your heart and in your head.” (BK: 263) The elder Zosima is surely right in thinking that the idea is not yet resolved in Ivan’s heart. However, to Aliosha, who asks him if everything is permitted, Ivan proudly answers: “Yes, perhaps ‘everything is permitted’, since the word has already been spoken.” (ibid.) As we know, it is Smerdyakov who commits the murder. Nevertheless, the guilt of parricide also falls upon the three brothers Karamazov, although not in equal parts. Even if he is not involved in his father’s death, Dmitri nonetheless accepts to carry his guilt for having desired to kill him. Even Aliosha is partly guilty, though in a minor way compared to his brothers, in that before dying, the elder Zosima urges Aliosha to find Dmitri in order to prevent something terrible happening, but Aliosha forgets to follow his advice. Ivan is surely the guiltiest of the three brothers. He not only wants Dmitri to kill his father – “Viper will eat viper, and it would serve them both right!”, he says to Aliosha 164 

(BK: 141) – but knowing what could happen in his absence, he sets off to Moscow and leaves Smerdyakov free to act. Although the guiltiest, Ivan is, however, the least willing to acknowledge his guilt. In this sense, the three meetings with Smerdyakov (Ivan’s double) play a pivotal role in the realization of his responsibility. During his second meeting with the servant, Ivan considers himself the instigator of the parricide, but just for a moment. It is only in the third and last meeting, when Smerdyakov confesses the parricide, that Ivan becomes definitively aware of his responsibility: “I don’t want to lie to you now, because…because if, as I see now, you really didn’t understand anything before this, and weren’t pretending so as to shift your obvious guilt onto me right to my face, still you are guilty of everything, sir, because you knew about the murder, and you told me to kill him, sir, and knowing everything, you left.” (BK: 627)

Having denied God, and following the logical conclusion of Ivan’s theory according to which everything is permitted, Smerdyakov kills his blood father Fyodor Pavlovich and steals the three thousand roubles. Nevertheless, even if earthly justice absolves him of every charge, divine justice, in the form of his conscience, makes him feel guilty.198 Smerdyakov gives Ivan the three thousand roubles back and during the night he hangs himself. Like Smerdyakov, Ivan experiences a profound spiritual crisis that is patent in “the continual fluctuation between the stirrings of his conscience and the amorally nihilistic conclusions that he has drawn from his refusal to accept God and immortality.” (Frank 2003: 678) This inner conflict derives from the fact that, although Ivan believes he freed himself from traditional morality, in reality, he is still a prisoner of it. Indeed, the very logic on which his theory is based is a profoundly moral one. The devil that appears to Ivan in his dream and provides him with an opportunity to know himself,199 brings to light this paradox: “‘everything 198 To Ivan, who fears that the servant is a dream or a ghost, Smerdyakov answers: “There’s no ghost, sir, besides the two of us, sir, and some third one. No doubt he’s here now, that third one, between the two of us […] That third one is God, sir, Providence itself, sir, it’s right here with us now, sir, only don’t look for it, you won’t find it.” (BK: 623) 199 See Martinsen (2004: 53). 

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is permitted,’ and that’s that!” – the devil says ironically – “It’s all very nice; only if one wants to swindle, why, I wonder, should one also need the sanction of truth? But such is the modern little Russian man: without such a sanction, he doesn’t even dare to swindle, so much does he love the truth…” (BK: 649) To use a Nietzschean expression, we could say that there is in Ivan a remnant of morality: if everything is permitted, why does the new man need a moral justification for his amorality?200 Ivan’s conscience interposes itself between the theoretic premises of his idea and its practical application. “What is conscience?” Ivan asks himself, recalling the devil’s words, “Why do I suffer then?” (BK: 653) Conscience derives from a universal habit deeply rooted in humanity for thousands of years, the devil argues, “So let us get out of the habit, and we shall be gods!”201 (ibid.) Obviously, things are not so simple. The power of conscience proves to be stronger than Ivan’s theorizing. The devil knows it and laughs impudently at him: “You’re going to perform a virtuous deed, but you don’t even believe in virtue – that’s what makes you angry and torments you, that’s why you’re so vindictive.” (ibid.) Unable to endure this internal conflict, Ivan begins to rave and becomes seriously ill. Smerdyakov’s suicide and Ivan’s illness mark the complete bankruptcy of the idea. This is the dangerous path, Dostoevsky seems to suggest, on which man is likely to venture once he has abandoned God and succumbed to the temptation of taking His place. The conflict between reason and Christian faith is resolved in favour of the latter and

200 According to Poljakova (2013: 369), Nietzsche was well aware of this problem, as the following, ironical passage from the posthumous fragment 31[51], winter 1884–85, would show: “‘Nothing is true, everything is permitted’, do you say so? Oh! Even if this saying is true, what does it matter, that it is permitted?” As Poljakova points out, Nietzsche’s irony is directed against those who claim that “everything is permitted”, but still need the sanction of truth, that is, a moral permission to justify their amoral behaviour. 201 Compare this with the analysis of the origin of bad conscience (schlechtes Gewissen) developed by Nietzsche in the second essay of the Genealogy of Morality. According to Nietzsche’s genealogical hypothesis, the origin of bad conscience is extramoral, that is, bad conscience originated as a consequence of the internalization of man’s instincts that happened when man “finally found himself imprisoned within the confines of society and peace.” (GM II 16)

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the eleventh book, which contains the three meetings with Smerdyakov and Ivan’s Nightmare, ends with a positive note. Ivan’s spiritual and moral rebirth is prefigured by Aliosha. Similarly, Dostoevsky notes that, “God, in whom he [Ivan] did not believe, and his truth were overcoming his hearth, which still did not want to submit.” (BK: 655)



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2.  Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted

The maxim “nothing is true, everything is permitted” (Nichts ist wahr, Alles ist erlaubt), which was the watchword of the Order of Assassins, an Islamic sect dating from the eleventh to the thirteenth century A.D,202 appears in the fourth part of Zarathustra and in the second essay of the Genealogy of Morality.203 Among the posthumous fragments, this sentence can be found few times in the notebooks of 1884 and ’85.204 As early as 1936, Jaspers (1997 [1936]: 227) warned Nietzsche scholars against the facility with which this maxim could be falsely interpreted: “When removed from context, such a statement – often repeated by Nietzsche – is unintelligible. Taken by itself it expresses complete lack of obligation; it is an invitation to individual caprice, sophistry, and criminality.” In the next sections, I will follow Jaspers’ warning and examine the meaning of Nietzsche’s maxim, inserting it both in its particular (the aphorism and the posthumous fragments in which it appears) and in its wider context (Nietzsche’s philosophy and, more specifically, his position on morality). 202 According to the definition given by the Encyclopædia Britannica (1998 ed., Vol. 1, p. 640), the Order was “known, in its early years, for murdering its enemies as a religious duty. The Arabic name means ‘hashish smoker,’ referring to the Assassins’ alleged practice of taking hashish to induce ecstatic visions of paradise before setting out to face martyrdom. The historical existence of this practice, however, is doubtful.” 203 Most likely, Nietzsche’s source was Joseph von Hammer’s Geschichte der Assassinen aus morgenländischen Quellen (see Joseph von Hammer, Geschichte der Assassinen aus morgenländischen Quellen. Stuttgart/Tübingen: Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1818), although it must be mentioned that Nietzsche had already found a reference to the Assassins in Lange’s History of Materialism. In his work, however, Lange did not mention the maxim (on this, see Kuhn 1994). Danto’s hypothesis that the maxim is a Nietzschean paraphrase of Dostoevsky’s “if God does not exist, everything is permitted” is obviously to be rejected (see Danto 2005:175). On the use and, in particular, on the misuse of this maxim by interpreters, see Niemayer (1998: 196–200). 204 The notebooks in which the maxim appears are the following: W I 1 (spring 1884), W I 2 (summer–autumn 1884), Z II 8 and Z II 9 (winter 1884–85). 

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2.1  Zarathustra’s Shadow The sentence “nothing is true, everything is permitted” appears for the first time in the oeuvre in Zarathustra’s speech The Shadow.205 The protagonist of this speech, Zarathustra’s shadow, is portrayed by Nietzsche as “thin, blackish, hollow and outdated.” (Z IV, The Shadow) To Zarathustra, who asks him who he is, the shadow answers that he is “a wanderer, who has already walked much at your heels; always on my way, but without goal, without home too.” The reference to the wanderer (which inevitably recalls Nietzsche’s 1880 book The Wanderer and His Shadow) and to his Heimatlosigkeit (being homeless) is to be understood in relation with the main topics of the speech: knowledge. Indeed, the shadow has followed Zarathustra in his search for truth, as he himself acknowledges in the following passage: “With you I have haunted the remotest, coldest worlds, like a ghost that runs voluntarily over winter rooftops and snow. With you I strived to enter everything forbidden, worst, remotest; and if anything of mine is a virtue, then it is that I have feared no ban.” (ibid.)206 Nietzsche’s theme of Streben ins Verbotene (to strive after the forbidden), which actually derives from Ovid’s nitimur in vetitum (Amores, III, 4, 17)207, together with the imagery of the winter rooftops and the snow, reappears in the Preface to Ecce Homo. Here Nietzsche describes his very personal way of understanding and living philosophy as “a life lived freely in ice and high mountains – visiting all the strange and questionable aspects of existence, everything banned by morality so far.” (EH, Preface, 3) According to Nietzsche, the seeker of knowledge (der Erkennende) is like a homeless wanderer. Indeed, if the home (Heim) represents the belief (Glauben) or “the absolute standpoint” (Stegmaier 205 This speech belongs to the fourth and final part of Zarathustra, written by Nietzsche early in 1885. 206 A similar symbolism can be found in the first speech of the third part of Zarathustra, entitled The Wanderer. In this speech, Zarathustra defines himself as “a wanderer and a mountain climber”, unable to “sit still for long.” He is also a seeker of knowledge who “wanted to see the ground and background of all things.” 207 The entire sentence reads: “Nitimur in vetitum semper cupimusque negata” (We strive after the forbidden and desire what is denied us).

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1994: 200), the true seeker of knowledge is by definition homeless – a skeptic who calls into question every acquired certainty. His path is difficult and hazardous; there is no rest and no relief for him in these solitary wanderings among ice and high mountains. It is no surprise therefore that the wanderer – in this case, Zarathustra’s shadow – could feel the need to take heart: “‘Nothing is true, all is permitted’: thus I persuaded myself.” confesses the shadow, “I plunged into the coldest waters, with head and heart. Oh how often I paid for it by standing there naked as a red crab!” (Z IV, The Shadow) As Niemeyer (1998: 203) points out, the sentence “nothing is true, all is permitted” fulfils the function of a Mutmacherformel, that is, a formula used by the shadow to gain courage when faced with the coldest waters. The image of the cold baths, which derives from Nietzsche’s personal experience of his baths in Engadine (see ibid.), reappears in section 381 of the fifth book of The Gay Science, entitled On the Question of Being Understandable, in which Nietzsche writes: “For I approach deep problems such as I do cold baths: fast in, fast out. That this is no way to get to the depths, to get deep enough, is the superstition of those who fear water, the enemies of cold water; they speak without experience.”208 The water to which Nietzsche alludes in Zarathustra as well as in the fifth book of The Gay Science is the water of knowledge. This water is extremely cold; to step into it requires courage and sacrifice and it is precisely for this reason that most seekers of knowledge do not dare to bathe in it. Unlike them, Zarathustra’s shadow has been brave and has plunged into the coldest waters, with head and heart, but the result of this courageous act is unexpected. Now the shadow desires to live as he pleases; he has lost his enthusiasm and interest in life. Moreover, having denied the existence of truth, the shadow feels completely disoriented: “‘Where is – my home?’ I asked, and I search and searched for it, but I have not found it. Oh eternal everywhere, oh eternal nowhere, oh eternal – in vain!”209 208 See also the speech On Chastity in the first part of Zarathustra: “Do I speak of dirty things? That is not the worst of it to me. Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow the seeker of knowledge steps reluctantly into its water.” 209 A similar, although more pessimist, attitude is expressed by the soothsayer of the second part of Zarathustra: “And I saw a great sadness descend over humanity. The best became weary of their works. A doctrine circulated, a belief accompanied 

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Zarathustra understands that the tragic situation of the shadow derives from his feeling of disorientation and warns him about the risk he is running: “Your danger is no small one, you free spirit and wanderer! […] To such restless ones as you even a jail ends up looking like bliss. Have you ever seen how captured criminals sleep? They sleep peacefully, they enjoy their new security. Beware that you are not captured in the end by a narrow belief, a harsh, severe delusion! Because now you are seduced and tempted by anything that is narrow and solid.” (ibid)

Being weary and disoriented, the shadow longs for a safe place to rest after his long journey. Paradoxically, even a jail could seem better to him than having no place at all, but this would mean not only exchanging freedom for security and safety, but also once again becoming a prisoner of the same jail (the jail of belief) from which he has freed himself as the result of a long and difficult cognitive process. Metaphors aside, Nietzsche is here portraying the risk run by the seeker of knowledge who has been able to call into question the existence of truth, but is unable to face the consequences of his act. In other words, for this seeker of knowledge, the danger lies either in returning to the starting point (turning, for instance, the denial of truth into a new and fanatical belief: “nothing is true, everything is permitted”) or in succumbing to the temptation of embracing a nihilist attitude, according to which life has no meaning and everything is in vain.210

it: ‘Everything is empty, everything is the same, everything was!’ And from every hilltop it rang out: ‘Everything is empty, everything is the same, everything was!’ We harvested well, but why did all our fruits turn foul and brown? What fell down from the evil moon last night? All work was for naught, our wine has become poison, the evil eye seared yellow our fields and hearts. […] ‘Oh where is there still a sea in which one could drown?’ – thus rings our lament – out across the shallow swamps. Indeed, we have already become too weary to die; now we continue to wake and we live on – in burial chambers!” – (Z II, The Soothsayer) Robert Wicks (2005: 107) defines this attitude as defeatist. 210 On the relation between this attitude and suicide in Nietzsche, see Stellino (2013).

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2.2  The Order of Assassins The sentence “nothing is true, everything is permitted” appears for the second and last time in the oeuvre in the third essay of the Genealogy of Morality, in which Nietzsche focuses on the meaning of ascetic ideals and searches for opponents or counter-idealists of these ideals. In section 24, Nietzsche focuses on the “last idealists of knowledge”, that is, all “these hard, strict, abstinent, heroic minds” (“atheists, Antichrists, immoralists, nihilists, […] sceptics, ephectics, hectics of the mind”) which have something in common – they share a “demand for intellectual rigour [Sauberkeit]”; in them, alone, “intellectual conscience dwells and is embodied in these days.” (GM, III, 24) Because of their intellectual rigour, these “free, very free sprits” believe themselves to be “as liberated as possible from the ascetic ideal.” (ibid.) According to Nietzsche, however, this is not the case. On the contrary, the last idealists of knowledge represent exactly the most intellectualized and most advanced personification of this ideal. They are very far from being free spirits, for, as Nietzsche claims, “they still believe in truth”. (ibid.) In other words, their “unconditional will to truth” is no other thing that “faith in the ascetic ideal itself […] – it is the faith in a metaphysical value, a value as such [an sich] of truth.” (ibid.) Here Nietzsche reintroduces some observations already developed in the fifth book of the Gay Science. In section 344, entitled In What Way We, Too, Are Still Pious, Nietzsche shows that even if we think that in science convictions have no right to citizenship, actually there is no “presuppositionless” science: because the question of the necessary character of truth must be answered beforehand not only affirmatively, but this answer must be so firm as to express the belief that “nothing is more necessary than truth; and in relation to it, everything else has only secondary value.” (GS, 344) But where does this conviction come from? According to Nietzsche, this unconditional will to truth does not rest on utilitarian considerations (truth would be less harmful and dangerous than untruth), but we stand here on moral ground, that is, we follow the moral imperative “I will not deceive, not even myself.” However, why do we refuse to be deceived, if life itself seems to be based on deception and lie? In Nietzsche’s opinion, this quixotic intention, 

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this unconditional will to truth at any price rests upon a “metaphysical faith”: “even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine…” (ibid.) Let us now go back to the third essay of the Genealogy of Morality. To the last idealists of knowledge, who remain so strongly attached to their faith in truth, Nietzsche opposes the Order of Assassins. As Nietzsche points out, the highest ranks of this order lived according to the maxim “nothing is true, everything is permitted.” In that way, according to Nietzsche’s interpretation, the Assassins had given up the belief in truth itself, thereby achieving a complete “freedom of the mind [des Geistes].” (GM, III, 24) It is precisely for this reason that Nietzsche considers this sect as an “order of free spirits par excellence.” Indeed, claiming that nothing was true, the Assassins had definitively succeeded in freeing themselves from every kind of belief or faith.211 The fact that Nietzsche defines the order of Assassins as an order of free spirits could be wrongly taken as an indirect proof of Nietzsche’s positive attitude towards the maxim “nothing is true, everything is permitted”. In reality, an attentive reading of the passage in which Nietzsche refers to the maxim, clearly reveals that Nietzsche is far from naively embracing it. On the contrary, the philosopher seems to be highly conscious of the great complexities that derive from the acceptance of the Assassins’ maxim, as the following passage clearly shows: “Has a European or a Christian free-thinker [Freigeist] ever strayed into this proposition and the labyrinth of its consequences? Does he know the Minotaur of this cave from experience?… I doubt it, indeed, I know otherwise: – nothing is stranger to these people who are absolute in one thing, these so-called ‘free spirits’, than freedom and release in that sense, in no respect are they more firmly

211 Compare this with the following passage von Lange’s History of Materialism: “Dass ein hoher Grad von Freigeisterei sich mit fanatischer Erfassung eines religiösen Grundgedankens verbinden kann, zeigen uns auch die Jesuiten, mit deren ganzem Wesen überhaupt das der Assassinen eine auffallende Aehnlichkeit hat.” (quoted in Kuhn 1994: 272f.) On the connection between Assassins and Je­suitism, see PF 25[340], spring 1884.

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bound; precisely in their faith in truth they are more rigid and more absolute than anyone else.” (GM, III, 24)212

The use of the imagery of the labyrinth and the Minotaur seems to indicate that, contrary to the last idealists of knowledge who are pseudo free-thinkers, Nietzsche is highly conscious of the problematic character of the maxim, particularly for what concerns the termination of the belief in truth. Indeed, as will be shown in the following section, some annotations in the notebooks of 1884–85 clearly show that in this period Nietzsche attentively considered the different meanings and uses of this maxim. Precisely because he had “strayed into this proposition” some years before writing the Genealogy, Nietzsche is far from embracing it light-heartedly. On the contrary, aware of how difficult it is to question both the existence and the value of truth, Nietzsche admits to being all too familiar with “that venerable philosopher’s abstinence” and “that stoicism of the intellect” to which one with faith in truth is committed. (GM, III, 24) In this sense, Nietzsche’s intention is not to subscribe the maxim, but rather to invite the last idealists of knowledge to consider what it really means to systematically suspend the belief in truth.

212 As Jaspers (1997 [1936]: 230ff.) points out, the symbolism of the labyrinth and the Minotaur appears several times in Nietzsche’s works and posthumous fragments, particularly in connection to the theme of truth and knowledge. In the Preface to The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche writes that in spiritual matters one must be “honest to the point of hardness”, “used to living on mountains”, and that one must have “the sort of predilection strength has for questions that require more courage than anyone possesses today; a courage for the forbidden; a predestination for the laby­ rinth.” The images that Nietzsche associates with the task of knowledge in this passage are the same as in his previous works: the harshness of conditions to which the seeker of knowledge has to be accustomed (the symbolism of life on mountains and ice), Ovid’s nitimur in vetitum, intellectual honesty and, lastly, the labyrinth. 

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2.3  The Posthumous Fragments As already mentioned, apart from the published works, the maxim “nothing is true, everything is permitted” appears in few posthumous fragments of 1884–85. The analysis of these posthumous fragments clearly shows that during this period Nietzsche explores the possible meanings and usages of this maxim. Following chronological order, we can see that Nietzsche links the maxim first to Zarathustra (notebook W I 1, spring 1884) and then only afterwards, to the shadow (notebook Z II 9, winter 1884–85). Whereas it is difficult to say what consideration caused Nietzsche to change his mind, it is somewhat easier to identify a common denominator for most of these notes, namely the experimental character of a doctrine that should distinguish the strong from the weak and weary. The first mention of the maxim can be found in the posthumous fragment 25[304], which simply reads, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” In all likelihood, this note must be read together with the note that directly follows in the notebook. This note reads as follows: “Zarathustra ‘I took everything from you: God, duty, – now you must give the greatest proof of a noble nature. For here, the path is open for the nefarious ones – look at it!

– – –

The fight for power; at the end, the herd, more herd and the tyrant, more tyrant as ever. No secret society! The consequences of my doctrine [Lehre] must rage fearsomely: numberless should be those who will perish because of it. We make an experiment with truth! Maybe humankind will perish because of it! Come now!” (PF 25[305], spring 1884)

The meaning of this note becomes clearer if we take into consideration another posthumous fragment of the same notebook, the PF 25[322]: “Zarathustra waiting 1) 2)

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Sign of the greatest confusion. ‘Nothing is true, everything is permitted’ He announces his E R. Indignation, lament: to the point of aggression. Zarathustra laughs, he is happy, because he brings the great crisis.

3) The world-weary ones pull away, the followers decrease in number. He makes them acquainted with his doctrine [Lehre], so that they find the way to the overman and be in good spirits. Cheerful like in the camp. Parades and so on.” (PF 25[322], spring 1884)

The first consideration to be made is that, in both posthumous fragments, Nietzsche is describing the destabilizing effects of Zarathustra’s doctrine (the eternal recurrence). To use a metaphor that Nietzsche employs in this period (PF 27[80], summer-autumn 1884), the doctrine of the eternal recurrence is like a hammer, which, falling on the heads of human beings, should test their spiritual strength. Only those, who are strong enough, will be able to endure the consequences deriving from this doctrine and to find their way to the overman; on the contrary, the weak and weary ones will feel confusion and disorientation, and will eventually perish. In the posthumous fragment 25[322], the maxim “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” seems to be understood by Nietzsche as bearing testimony precisely of this situation of disorientation and “greatest confusion.” If read in conjunction with the note 25[304], the posthumous fragment 25[305] seems to allow for a more radical reading of the maxim. Indeed, one could take Zarathustra’s statement “I took everything from you: God, duty” as a paraphrase of “Nothing is true”, whereas his claim “the path is open for the nefarious ones” could be understood as alluding to the second part of the maxim, “everything is permitted.” However plausible, this reading should not lead to hasty conclusions. For the aim of Zarathustra’s words is not that of justifying any kind of amoral behaviour, but rather that of exhorting the strong ones to take their responsibility (to be tyrants) and of moving them towards the creation of a hierarchical society. Moreover, there is another important aspect that one should not overlook. The maxim “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” seems also to allude to the experimental character of Nietzsche’s philosophy that is particularly patent in the new way in which Nietzsche approaches the problem of truth. Indeed, Zarathustra’s enthusiastic proclamation “We make an experiment [Versuch] with truth!” in the note 25[305] recalls Nietzsche’s attempt to answer the question “to what extent can truth stand to be incorporated?” trough experiment in section 110 of 

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The Gay Science and anticipates Nietzsche’s later claim in the Genealogy, according to which “the value of truth is tentatively (versuchsweise) to be called into question…” (GM, III, 24) Exactly the same link between the experimental character of Nietzsche’s philosophy and the maxim can be found in the posthumous fragment 26[25], summer-autumn 1884, which simply reads, “The advantages of this time. ‘Nothing is true: everything is permitted.’” Similarly to the note 25[304], this fragment must be probably read together with the note that directly follows in Nietzsche’s notebook, that is, the 26[26]: “I consider criminals, punished or not punished, as human beings with which to make experiments [Versuche]. Protection, not healing, not punishment!” (PF 26[26], summer-autumn 1884) Here Nietzsche seems to consider the formula “Nothing is true, everything is permitted”, popular at the time, as advantageous because it goes handin-hand with the experimental character of his philosophy. As a later posthumous fragment shows, however, Nietzsche appears to also be well aware of the paradoxical character of this formula. In winter 1884– 85, he writes down the following note: “‘Nothing is true, everything is permitted’, do you say so? Oh! Even if this saying is true, what does it matter, that it is permitted?” (31[51], winter 1884–85) As already mentioned, Nietzsche’s irony is here directed against those who claim that “everything is permitted”, but still need the sanction of truth, that is, a moral justification of their amoral behaviour.213 The last appearance of the maxim can be found in the posthumous fragment 32[8], winter 1884–85, which is actually a preliminary draft of the speech The Shadow. In this posthumous fragment, Nietzsche makes a list of thirty-nine sentences, among which it is possible to find in a slightly different form all the main themes of the speech The Shadow. This fragment clearly shows that Nietzsche is uncertain between two possible titles of the speech: one is The Homesickness without Home. The Wanderer and the other one is The Good European. The reference to the good European should not surprise. Indeed, in this period, the shadow, the wanderer and the good European are simply different designations of one and the same character. In the variant draft Z II 10 (see KSA, Vol. 14, p. 337), Nietzsche seems to prefer the title The Good 213 See section I.4.

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European. However, as we know, the final title of the speech will be The Shadow.214 It is worth stressing an important aspect of this note. Here, Nietzsche definitively links the maxim to the shadow, who says: “‘Nothing is true! Everything is permitted!’ I committed every crime: the most dangerous thoughts, the most dangerous women.” (PF 32[8], winter 1884–85). Any reference to Zarathustra’s doctrine of the eternal recurrence is, consequently, abandoned. Still, there is an element of continuity with the previous notes: the allusion to the experiment. Indeed, we should not forget that, although different from Zarathustra, the shadow follows him in his seeking of knowledge. Thus, the mention in the note of the criminal and dangerous character of the shadow’s thoughts, which has to be understood as a further allusion to Ovid’s nitimur in vetitum, emphasizes (even clearer than in the published version) the implicit tension existing between what is permitted and what is forbidden or, in other words, the conflict between an attitude open to experiment and free-thinking and the bans imposed by traditional morality.

2.4  The Variant In the notebook W I 1, spring 1884, in addition to the aforementioned notes 25[304] and [322], it is possible to find the variant “Everything is false! Everything is permitted!”, which is contained in the posthumous fragment 25[505]. Actually, the sentence “Everything is false!” already appears in the posthumous fragment 6[6], summer 1875 and in the first part of Zarathustra, in the speech On the Way of the Creator. In both passages, Nietzsche anticipates some aspects that he will develop in the 214 Curiously, in the fourth part of Zarathustra, Nietzsche makes no mention of the good European. However, when the shadow reappears in the speech Among Daughters of Desert, he defines himself as “a European among palm trees.” (Z IV, Among Daughters of Desert 2) Among Daughters of Desert is the only speech of the whole Zarathustra in which Nietzsche uses the words “Europe” and “European.” On the identification of the shadow with the good European, see Brusotti (2006) and Gori and Stellino (2015). 

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note from spring 1884. In the notebook U II 8c, summer 1875, in the context of some considerations on the fight between science and wisdom in the Ancient Greek philosophy, Nietzsche writes down, “Ironic news: everything is false. How man holds on a beam [sich an einen Balken klammert].” (PF 6[6], summer 1875) The sentence “everything is false” alludes to a process, which goes from the pre-Socratic philosophers to Socrates. According to Nietzsche, the ancient philosophers emancipated from myth. This emancipation caused, however, a longing for certainty, expressed by Nietzsche with the metaphor of the man that holds on a beam. The void of meaning was filled with the faith in ultimate knowledge, which reached its highest degree and expression with the Ancient Greeks. Then, precisely in the moment in which truth was nearest, Socrates reversed the situation. According to Nietzsche, “this is particularly ironic.” (PF 6[7])215 The sentence “everything is false” appears again in the speech On the Way of the Creator of the first part of Zarathustra. In this speech, Zarathustra speaks to he who has recently succeeded to cut loose from the herd and wants to go into isolation, seeking the way to himself. Having escaped from the yoke, this free man is on his way to becoming a creator. This, however, requires awareness of one’s strength and rights. For this reason, Zarathustra tests him, asking him whether he is strong enough to give himself his own moral law, and warns him about the difficulties that the creator has to face along the way: “One day solitude will make you weary, one day your pride will cringe and your courage will gnash its teeth. One day you will cry ‘I am alone!’ / One day you will no longer see your high, and your low will be all too near; your sublimity itself will frighten you like a ghost. One day you will cry: ‘Everything is false!’” (Z I, On the Way of the Creator)

Zarathustra’s warnings clearly anticipates the situation of uncertainty, disorientation, and distress that the shadow will face in the fourth part of Zarathustra. However, whereas the cry “Everything is false!” reveals 215 As one can see, these notes already contain the same themes that Nietzsche will develop almost a decade later in a more complete way. The loss of truth creates a void of meaning and causes a longing for certainty. This is, mutatis mutandis, the same situation, which Zarathustra’s shadow has to face and deal with after his denial of truth.

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feelings of despair and anguish, as we have seen, the maxim “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” is rather a positive formula used by the shadow to find courage when faced with the coldest waters. In the posthumous fragment 25[505], spring 1884, the saying “Everything is false! Everything is permitted!” acquires a different meaning from the cry of despair of the speech On the Way of the Creator. In this fragment, Nietzsche shows how our perspectival world proves to be false if compared with that of a being with a much more subtle sense-apparatus. According to Nietzsche, if we refined our senses, we would realize that we ourselves introduced the beauty and the value into the world along with the order of purpose into the historical processes: “The deeper one looks, the more our valuations disappear – meaningless approaches! We have created the world that possesses value! Knowing this, we know, too, that reverence for truth is already the consequence of an illusion which was God – and that one should value more than truth the force that forms, simplifies, shapes, invents. / ‘Everything is false! Everything is permitted!’ / Only with a certain obtuseness of vision, a will to simplicity, does the ‘beautiful’, the ‘valuable’ appear: in itself, it is I know not what.” (PF 25[505], spring 1884)

The reader familiar with Nietzsche will recognize that this posthumous fragment already contains the most important elements of the critique of truth developed by Nietzsche in his late philosophy. According to what we may call Nietzsche’s projectivism, human beings gave value to a meaningless world by applying to it the categories of intelligibility, beauty, and purpose, among others. They thus created a perspectival and anthropomorphic world and then forgot about their creation, believing the world to be beautiful and meaningful in itself and governed by a purpose. This, however, proves to be an illusion as soon as we refine our senses. By so doing, we discover that the beautiful and meaningful world in which we live is false.216 According to Nietzsche, what we revered as truth was an illusion; in its place, we should rather learn to

216 See PF 2[108], autumn 1885-autumn 1886: “The world which matters to us is false, i.e., is not a fact [Thatbestand] but a fictional elaboration and filling out of a meagre store of observations; it is ‘in flux’, as something becoming, as a constantly shifting falsity that never gets any nearer to truth, for – there is no ‘truth’.” 

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value our interpreting force, which, to borrow Hume’s words, guilds and stains the world with colours and makes our life possible.217 The exclamation “Everything is false!” (first part of the variant contained in the PF 25[505]) can be understood as summarizing the conclusion to which Nietzsche’s critique of truth leads. As Nietzsche will later put it in section 354 of The Gay Science, the world we know is shallow and falsified, a “surface- and signworld”; “we simply have no organ for knowing, for ‘truth’: we ‘know’ (or believe or imagine) exactly as much as is useful to the human herd, to the species.” (GS, 354) However, how should we read the whole variant “Everything is false! Everything is permitted!”? What is its meaning and its purpose? One way to interpret the variant would be to read it in continuity with the aforementioned posthumous fragment 25[322] (in which Nietzsche interprets the maxim “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” as sign of disorientation and confusion) and the later note 2[127], autumn 1885-autumn 1886. In this note, Nietzsche examines the phenomenon of nihilism, “this uncanniest of all guests”, and identifies its cause with the crisis of the Christian-moral interpretation of the world. As Nietzsche puts it: “The collapse of Christianity – brought about by its morality (indissoluble from it), which turns against the Christian God (the sense of truthfulness, highly developed by Christianity, is disgusted at the falseness and mendacity of the whole Christian interpretation of the world and history. A backlash from ‘God is truth’218 into the fanatical belief ‘Everything is false.’ Buddhism of the deed…” (PF 2[127], autumn 1885-autumn 1886)219

217 See Hume (1983 [1751]: 88). In the posthumous fragment 9[91], autumn 1887, Nietzsche writes that “truth is thus not something that’s there and must be found out, discovered, but something that must be made [etwas, das zu schaffen ist].” The interpretation of reality is not a passive process, but an active one in which the human will to master the surrounding reality comes to expression. It is the will to power itself that interprets, and in this process, the interpretation is “a means of becoming master of something.” (PF 2[148], autumn 1885-autumn 1886). 218 On the identification of truth with God, see GM, III, 24 (where the maxim “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” precisely reappears in the oeuvre). See also GS 344. 219 On Nietzsche’s interpretation of passive nihilism as new Buddhism for Europeans, see GM, Preface, 5 and also Kuhn (1992: 246f.).

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According to Nietzsche, the end of the Christian-moral interpretation of the world, caused by the sense of truthfulness promoted by the same interpretation, leads to nihilism and to the development of Buddhist tendencies. These tendencies find their expression in a yearning for nothing and in pessimist attitudes, which lead to the conclusion that “everything is false” or “everything is meaningless.” Interestingly, what Nietzsche describes here is precisely the same psychological mechanism that remains implicit in the speech The Shadow. Indeed, in both cases, the denial or the collapse of truth causes a void of faith so intolerable that he, who is not strong enough to endure it, feels the need to replace it with a substitute belief. This belief can take various forms: from the pessimist saying “everything is false” (or meaningless or in vain) to the more radical “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” (or “Everything is false! Everything is permitted!). The other way to interpret the variant would be to read it in the broader context of Nietzsche’s experimental philosophy, that is, in continuity with the aforementioned posthumous fragments 25[304]–[305] and 26[25]–[26]. If read in this way, rather than being a sign of disorientation and confusion, the variant would symbolize a new awareness: thanks to “the force that forms, simplifies, shapes, invents”, man is able to fill the void of meaning deriving from the discovery that “everything is false” through the creation or, more appropriately, projection of a new, earthly, and non-metaphysical meaning onto the world. (PF 25[505], spring 1884) This awareness opens the path to a new, creative freedom for man, synthesized by Nietzsche in the exclamation “Everything is permitted!” (ibid.) As we will see, however, this freedom should not be understood as lack of obligation, but on the contrary, carries with it a new responsibility.

2.5 Conclusion Although the sentence “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” has been frequently understood as a summary of Nietzsche’s thought, a closer reading of both the passages from Zarathustra and the 

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Genealogy shows that such an interpretation is unsupported. In the oeuvre, Nietzsche never affirms the maxim directly. In the fourth part of Zarathustra, it is not Zarathustra (Nietzsche’s alter ego), but the shadow who says, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” As we have seen, this saying fulfils the function of a Mutmacherformula, that is, a formula pronounced by the shadow in order to gain courage when faced with the coldest waters. Following Zarathustra, the shadow denies the existence of truth. This denial has, however, a destabilizing effect on his spirit: the shadow feels indifference and disorientation. Unable to overcome the void left by the denial of truth, he now longs for a new faith and is in danger of turning the non-existence of truth in a new, fanatical belief. The nihilistic attitude of the shadow becomes even more patent if we compare the speech The Shadow with the last section of the first part of Human, All Too Human, entitled The Wanderer. In this section, the wanderer is “he who has attained to only some degree of freedom of mind” and “keep[s] his eyes open to see what is really going on in the world.” (HH, I, 638) According to Nietzsche, this condition is inseparable from an erratic life that “takes pleasure in change and transience.” (ibid.) As in the case of Zarathustra’s shadow, such life can cause distress: the wanderer “will, to be sure, experience bad nights, when he is tired and finds the gate of the town that should offer him rest closed against him.” (ibid.) However, unlike the shadow’s, his distress will only be temporary. As recompense, there will come “joyful mornings”, in which “good and bright things will be thrown down to him […] the gifts of all those free spirits who are at home in mountain, wood and solitude and who, like him, are, in their now joyful, now thoughtful way, wanderers and philosophers.” (ibid.) Whereas in The Wanderer Nietzsche aims to show that the negative aspects of the erratic life of the wanderer are anyway counterbalanced by the company of other free spirits, in the speech The Shadow the emphasis is rather on the destabilizing consequences that the radical emancipation from the prejudices of traditional morality and metaphysics may have. As already mentioned, unable to overcome the disorientation deriving from the denial of truth, the shadow remains prisoner of his feelings of distress and discouragement and embraces a nihilist attitude. From this perspective, the shadow can be considered as a 184 

typical representative of those higher men, portrayed by Nietzsche in the fourth part of Zarathustra, who are “despairing ones” and “not high and strong enough.” (Z IV, The Welcome) In order to satisfy their need for belief, these higher men end up worshipping an ass. To Zarathustra, who stresses the incongruity between freedom of spirit and idolatry, the shadow answers as follows: “you’re right; but what can I do about it? The old God lives again, oh Zarathustra, say what you will.” (Z IV, The Ass Festival I) Even in the case of the Genealogy, an attentive reading of section III, 24 reveals that Nietzsche nowhere directly affirms that nothing is true and, therefore, everything permitted. What Nietzsche does in this section is to show that despite their intellectual rigor, the last idealists of knowledge cannot be considered as true free spirits, for they still believe in truth. To strengthen his point, Nietzsche compares the last idealists with the highest ranks of the Order of Assassins. Living according to the watchword “Nothing is true, everything is permitted”, this order had given up the very belief in truth, thus reaching a true freedom of spirit. Far from simply embracing the Assassins’ maxim, Nietzsche is, on the contrary, highly conscious of the great complexities (symbolized by the metaphors of the labyrinth and the Minotaur) that derive from its acceptance. To support the reading according to which Nietzsche affirmed that nothing is true, and everything permitted, one must therefore necessarily look for textual evidence in the Nachlass. Indeed, as we have seen, some posthumous fragments do seem to go precisely in this direction, stressing the experimental character of Nietzsche’s philosophy (linked to the denial of truth and the call into question of its value) or the radical consequences deriving from Zarathustra’s theory and teachings. On the other hand, however, in other posthumous fragments Nietzsche interprets the maxim as a sign of disorientation and confusion or takes it as a symbol of radical fanaticism. Moreover, he does not hesitate to point out its paradoxical character. Nietzsche’s ambivalent attitude should not come as a surprise. First, it is worth recalling that the notebooks were for Nietzsche a kind of laboratory where he used to examine thoughts and theories. He modified old ideas and explored new possibilities; he refined his rhetoric and found new ways to express old concepts. His thought progressed 

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rapidly through a succession of stages: what seems a contradiction could actually be a change of position. There is, however, no need to suppose that Nietzsche contradicted himself or that he changed his attitude towards the maxim. Indeed, rather than unusual and surprising, Nietzsche’s ambivalence can be considered as a recurrent feature of his philosophy. One simply has to look at the way in which Nietzsche describes the death of God or the eternal recurrence, to get an idea of how, according to Nietzsche, a same phenomenon can give rise to opposing reactions. The questions asked by the madman of The Gay Science (§ 125) after his announcement that God is dead reveal the tragic disorientation he experiences.220 The first and clearest consequence of God’s death is that the ground on which man has hitherto built his existence is now swept away. Man discovers that his existence is similar to a rope fastened over the abyss of nothingness (see Z, Zarathustra’s Prologue, 4). This discovery can, however, lead to a twofold reaction: on the one hand, the awareness that life is meaningless and purposeless can lead one to experience anguish and fear, while on the other hand, this announcement can arouse joy and provoke enthusiasm: now the horizon is again free and infinite.221 The thought of eternal recurrence provokes a similar, ambivalent reaction. The idea that life will return innumerable times and always in the same way can be perceived as the heaviest weight (the thick black snake that, in Zarathustra’s speech On the Vision and the Riddle, hangs from the mouth of the young shepherd and is about to choke him) 220 From this point of view, the madman’s reaction is very similar to that of Zarathustra’s shadow who, having denied the truth, no longer has a goal or direction. 221 Section 124 of The Gay Science is precisely titled In the Horizon of the Infinite. The infinite horizon, to which the title alludes, is the one opened up by the death of God announced in the section that follows (GS, 125): “We have forsaken the land and gone to sea! We have destroyed the bridge behind us – more so, we have demolished the land behind us! Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean […] there will be hours when you realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that has felt free and now strikes against the walls of this cage! Woe, when homesickness for the land overcomes you, as if there had been more freedom there – and there is no more ‘land’!” (GS, 124) The metaphor of the poor bird, which is frightened by its new freedom and feels homesick, clearly anticipates the reaction of the shadow in the fourth part of Zarathustra.

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or as the most divine and sublime thought ever expressed, the extreme form of “yes” to life (GS, 341). This ambivalent reaction precisely depends on the force and strength of the one who faces this possibility or event. Among the posthumous fragments of autumn 1887 is the wellknown note 9[35], which explicates this ambivalence in a very clear way. Having explained the meaning of nihilism (“the highest values are devaluated”) and its consequence (“the goal is lacking; an answer to the ‘Why?’ is lacking”), Nietzsche distinguishes between two different kinds of nihilism: an active and a passive one. The former is a sign of the increased power and strength of the spirit: the previous goals, convictions, and articles of faith are now no longer appropriate and there is a need for new goals. The latter is, on the contrary, a sign of weakness and of the “decline and retreat of the spirit’s power”: again, the previous goals and values no longer seem appropriate, but the force of the spirit is wearied and exhausted. The consequence is disintegration and dissolution; “everything which revives, heals, soothes, benumbs” is sought. (ibid.) Clearly, depending on the force of the spirit, the coming of nihilism can open a new space for the creation of values and give birth to new hopes, or it can cause prostration and exhaustion and lead to degeneration.222 These references to the aforementioned examples help us to understand the different meanings that Nietzsche seems to give to the maxim “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” In the first part of this sentence, nihilism is expressed in its most extreme form, that is, the denial of truth.223 The reaction to the acknowledgment that nothing is true can be, as in the aforementioned cases, twofold. An example of a negative reaction is that of Zarathustra’s shadow: having destroyed everything his heart ever valued, the shadow feels disoriented and loses his enthusiasm and interest in life. He now runs the risk of embracing a nihilist attitude, according to which life is meaningless and everything is in vain, or even worst, of succumbing to the temptation of turning the denial of truth into a fanatical belief. This reaction is, however, not the 222 For a thorough philosophical examination of Nietzsche’s analysis of and attitude towards nihilism, see Reginster (2006). 223 See the final part of the aforementioned posthumous fragment 9[35], autumn 1887: “That there is no truth; that there is no absolute nature of things, no ‘thingin-itself’ – this is itself a nihilism, and indeed the most extreme one.” 

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only one possible: what Nietzsche expects from a strong spirit is rather an affirmative or positive reaction. This reaction consists in overcoming the destabilizing and disorientating consequences deriving from the death of God and the collapse of the Christian-moral interpretation of the world by means of a new interpretation and the creation of new values. Rather than embracing a pessimist or nihilist attitude, the strong spirit celebrates the infinite horizon and the endless possibilities open to humanity after the announcement of God’s death. As already mentioned, this new infinite horizon is, however, not to be understood as a complete lack of obligation. The aim of Nietzsche’s experimental philosophy is not to sanction a moral indifferentism à la Karamazov, but rather to attempt to overcome nihilism through the well-known Umwertung, the transvaluation of values, which constitutes the pars construens of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nietzsche tried to warn against one of the most dangerous mistakes that his contemporaries could make: turning the denial of truth into a new, fanatical belief that could open the way to the dissolution of the force in destructive and unproductive ways. He denounced this nihilistic drift of modernity. If after God’s death human existence had lost its meaning, that is, the meaning given to it by the Christian and moral interpretation of the world, that did not mean that mankind had to embrace alternative beliefs (the aforementioned shadows of God) or that now man was morally justified in breaking every social rule, thus accepting a complete amorality. On the contrary, the new task consisted of replacing the old values with new ones and in so doing, giving these a new foundation. Metaphorically, to affirm that “Everything is permitted!” meant therefore to perceive the rays of a new dawn after God’s death. The awareness of a different phase in human history was beginning to grow. As Nietzsche puts it in section 343 of The Gay Science: “At hearing the news that ‘the old god is dead’, we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel illuminated by a new dawn; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, forebodings, expectation - finally the horizon seems clear again, even if not bright; finally our ships may set out again, set out to face any danger; every daring of the lover of knowledge is allowed [erlaubt] again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; maybe there has never been such an ‘open sea’.”224

224 On Nietzsche’s metaphor of the “open sea”, see Stegmaier (2012: 114–118).

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3. Dostoevsky contra Nietzsche?

One of the recurrent topics in Nietzsche-Dostoevsky studies is the idea that the great novels of Dostoevsky foreshadowed some of Nietzsche’s main thoughts. In order to prove this similarity, scholars have often drawn a parallel between Raskolnikov’s extraordinary man or Kirillov’s man-god and Nietzsche’s overman, or they have linked Ivan’s idea to the maxim “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” Thus, so the reading goes, by portraying the failure of his heroes, and consequently of their ideas, Dostoevsky not only succeeded in launching an attack on the nihilistic ideas of his time, but he also provided a critique ante litteram of Nietzsche’s philosophy, illustrating its inherent contradictions. Therefore, according to this view, plunging into the novels of Dostoevsky would keep us immune from the “Nietzschean poison”, to use de Lubac’s expression (1995 [1944]: 284). As I will try to show in what follows, this kind of reading is usually the consequence of a prejudicial interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy (supporters of such readings tend to look at Nietzsche’s philosophy through the screen of Dostoevsky’s novels). Even worse, sometimes these readings are based on a superficial and incorrect understanding of Nietzsche’s thought: the result is a distortion of the message of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Without denying the several similarities that it is possible to find between the theories of Raskolnikov, Kirillov, and Ivan, on the one side, and Nietzsche’s philosophy on the other side, the following sections aim to emphasize the irreducible and radical differences that exist among the former and the latter. These differences condemn to failure any effort of reducing Nietzsche’s thought to the nihilist ideas that Dostoevsky attacked in his late novels.



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3.1 Raskolnikov’s Extraordinary Man and Nietzsche’s Overman As will also occur later with Ivan’s idea in The Brothers Karamazov, Raskolnikov’s theory of the extraordinary man is illustrated or summarized by different characters in Crime and Punishment. The first allusion to the theory can be found in the scene in the tavern, where, while drinking tea, a student and a young officer have a very interesting conversation about the possibility of justifying a crime in the name of a good deed. Here the reader finds the moral justification of Raskolnikov’s crime anticipated. According to the student, someone can kill without remorse “a stupid, meaningless, worthless, sick old crone, no good to anyone” (CP: 65) and take her money, if he subsequently uses that money in order to help “fresh, young forces that are being wasted for lack of support, and that by the thousands, and that everywhere!” (ibid.) “Kill her and take her money”, the young student affirms, “so that afterwards with its help you can devote yourself to the service of all mankind and the common cause: what do you think, wouldn’t thousands of good deeds make up for one tiny little crime?” What strikes Raskolnikov is that he had previously conceived “exactly the same thoughts.” (CP: 66) Indeed, when the cynical Svidrigailov later reveals to Avdotya Romanovna, Raskolnikov’s sister, that her brother has killed the old woman, he summarizes the moral core of Raskolnikov’s theory as follows: “an isolated evildoing is permissible if the main purpose is good. A single evil and a hundred good deeds!” (CP: 490) We can already see that Raskolnikov’s theory has a clear utilitarian flavour: it focuses on the consequences rather than on the act itself and assesses the same act by reference to the principle of utility. The greater balance of benefits (“a hundred good deeds”) over harms (“an isolated evildoing”) sanctions the moral permissibility of the crime (the killing of an “old crone, no good to anyone”). The first and most complete exposition of Raskolnikov’s idea can be found in the third part of the novel, precisely in the scene of the conversation between the police inspector Porfiry Petrovich and Raskolnikov. Having read the latter’s article “On Crime”, Porfiry tries to summarize its main idea in a few words: “there supposedly exist in the 190 

world certain persons who can…that is, who not only can but are fully entitled to commit all sorts of crimes and excesses and to whom the law supposedly does not apply.” (CP: 258) In the article, the inspector adds, people are also divided into two categories, the “ordinary” (obyknovennye liudi) and the “extraordinary” (neobyknovennye liudi). According to Porfiry’s explanation: “The ordinary must live in obedience and have no right to transgress the law, because they are, after all, ordinary. While the extraordinary have the right to commit all sorts of crimes and in various ways to transgress the law, because in point of fact they are extraordinary.” (CP: 259) Raskolnikov admits Porfiry’s summary to be almost correct, but he rectifies a very important point: extraordinary people do not have the right to deliberately commit every sort of crime. The twenty-three-yearold former law student rather suggests that, “an ‘extraordinary’ man has the right…that is, not an official right, but his own right, to allow his conscience to…step over certain obstacles, and then only in the event that the fulfilment of his idea – sometimes perhaps salutary for the whole mankind – calls for it.” (ibid.) In order to better illustrate his idea, Raskolnikov gives an example: if ten or a hundred people were standing as an obstacle in the path of Kepler or Newton and thus hindering their discoveries, they would both have had the right to remove the obstacle, even to shed blood, in order to make their discoveries known to mankind. It is only in this sense that the student speaks of a “right to crime.” A second and (with regard to our subject) more interesting part of Raskolnikov’s theory, which is strictly connected to the first, concerns the lawgivers of mankind. According to Raskolnikov, people like Lycurgus, Solon, Muhammad and Napoleon, who gave their societies new laws, were forced to violate the old laws, once held sacred, thus becoming criminals. In Raskolnikov’s view, they could not help becoming criminals, otherwise they would not have been able to create new laws. In short, Raskolnikov’s deduction is that “not only great men, but even those who are a tiny bit off the beaten track – that is, who are a tiny bit capable of saying something new – by their very nature cannot fail to be criminals.” (CP: 260) Moreover, those lawgivers were also not afraid to shed blood, if blood happened to help them achieve their goal. If later on their fight was successful, the blood shedding was also forgiven and they were considered benefactors and founders of mankind. 

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Having illustrated his conception of how lawgivers change societies, Raskolnikov returns to his main idea: the division of people into two categories according to the law of nature. What distinguishes extraordinary men from ordinary ones is that the former “have the gift or talent of speaking a new word in their environment” (ibid.), they destroy the present in the name of the better and the future, they move the world and lead it towards a goal. On the contrary, ordinary men serve solely to reproduce their own kind, they are the mass that lives in obedience and likes being obedient. Thus, while ordinary men are by nature conservative, extraordinary men are inclined to transgress or even destroy the law. If one of them needs to shed blood for the sake of his idea, then, in Raskolnikov’s opinion, he is allowed to do so: he has a right to crime. Nevertheless, both categories have exactly the same right to exist.225 Raskolnikov admits that his theory does not present any special new element. Nonetheless, his friend Razumikhin who is also participating in the conversation, stresses the novelty of what we may call the moral argument of the former student’s theory: the justification of blood-shedding. This point is of considerable importance in the comparison between Raskolnikov’s idea and Nietzsche’s philosophy and should not be overlooked. According to Razumikhin, Raskolnikov’s theory is distinguished from other speculations precisely by the fact that it permits “bloodshed in all conscience.” (CP: 263) This is the main point, Razumikhin claims, and this is what makes Raskolnikov’s theory so horrible, even “more horrible than if bloodshed were officially, legally permitted…” (ibid.) From this perspective, Raskolnikov can be seen as an anticipation of Ivan. Indeed, the peculiarity of both characters consists in providing a moral justification of crime: whereas Raskolnikov 225 It is almost superfluous to add that, according to Raskolnikov, extraordinary people, that is, people who are capable of saying something new, are remarkably few. In Raskolnikov’s view, the selection is not accidental, but depends on a yet undiscovered law of nature: “An enormous mass of people, of material, exists in the world only so that finally, through some effort, some as yet mysterious process, through some interbreeding of stocks and races, with great strain it may finally bring into the world, let’s say, at least one somewhat independent man in a thousand.” (CP: 263) An independent man, however, still cannot be considered as a benefactor and founder of mankind: men of genius, the fulfillers of mankind, are born “perhaps after the elapsing of many thousands of millions of people on earth.” (ibid.)

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sanctions the permissibility of bloodshed in order to reach a moral purpose, Ivan denies God because He is unjust and murderous, but at the same time he paradoxically affirms the possibility of murder. After his conversation with the inspector, Raskolnikov’s thoughts return to his theory. What makes him so irritated is specifically the consciousness of his cowardice and weakness. Having tested his own strength, he realizes that he does not belong to the first category of extraordinary men: “No, those people are made differently; the true master, to whom all is permitted [vsë razreshaetsya], sacks Toulon, makes a slaughterhouse of Paris, forgets an army in Egypt, expends half a million men in a Moscow campaign, and gets off with a pun in Vilno; and when he dies they set up monuments to him – and thus everything is permitted [vsë razreshaetsya]. No, obviously such men are made not of flesh but of bronze!” (CP: 274)

The allusion here is obviously to Napoleon, a figure who in the nineteenth century exerted an extreme fascination throughout Europe226 and who, being powerful and authoritarian, is taken by Raskolnikov as the clearest example of an extraordinary man. Napoleon, of whom Nietzsche was also a great admirer, is often mentioned in the novel. Raskolnikov considers the French emperor an authority, a model to follow. “I wanted to become a Napoleon”, he confesses to Sonya,227 “that’s why I killed…” (CP: 415) The core of the question tormenting the young man is therefore: what would Napoleon have done if he had happened to be in his place, that is, if instead of starting his career with Toulon, or Egypt, or the crossing of Mont Blanc, he simply had to kill a meaningless old crone? Would he have shrunk from it or would he have throttled her without any hesitation? Having suffered a long time over this question, Raskolnikov finally realizes not only that Napoleon would not have shrunk from it, but also that he would have done it without a moment’s thought. Thus, following 226 See the revealing passage in which Porfiry precisely alludes to Russian fascination for Napoleon : “But, my goodness, who in our Russia nowadays doesn’t consider himself a Napoleon?” (CP: 265) 227 Sonya is one of the main characters of Crime and Punishment and plays a pivotal role in Raskolnikov’s moral rehabilitation. She prostitutes herself to help her family and embodies the principle of genuine, Christian love (agape) in contraposition to Raskolnikov’s egoism. On this, see Frank (1995: 132). 

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the example of his greatest authority, Dostoevsky’s hero kills the old money­lender. Raskolnikov’s own tragedy lies, however, in the fact that having committed the murder, he realizes that he is not a Napoleon. Even previously, he knew that he was not a Napoleon. Raskolnikov makes this point clear in his confession to Sonya: “And do you really think I didn’t at least know, for example, that since I’d begun questioning and querying myself: do I have the right to have the power? – it meant that I do not have the right to power? […] Because, if I tormented myself for so many days: would Napoleon have gone ahead or not? – it means I must already have felt that I was not a Napoleon…” (CP: 419)228

The real motivation behind the murder is thus not the altruistic concern for the “fresh, young forces that are being wasted for lack of support” (CP: 65), but rather Raskolnikov’s egoistic need to test himself. The former student kills because he wants to prove to himself that he is not a “trembling creature” (CP: 419) and that he does not belong to the mass of ordinary people, but that he is able to cross the line and, therefore, he has the right to kill. However, the result of the test is negative. As Svidrigailov puts it, Raskolnikov “suffered greatly, and suffers still, from the thought that though he knew how to devise the theory, he was unable to step over without hesitation and therefore is not a man of genius.” (CP: 491) Raskolnikov ends up confessing his crime. He admits his faintheartedness to himself. However, he does not renounce his idea (he strongly believes that, if he had succeeded, he would have been crowned); he does not repent at all.229 He only regrets not having been able to endure the crime, to step over the line without indecision, 228 In his study of the role played by Napoleon in Russian literature, Robert L. Jackson (1960: 112) explains the whole significance of Napoleon in Crime and Punishment as follows: “On the one hand, Napoleon, the distant ideal: the supreme measure of a man’s self-mastery and self-determination; and on the other, illness and impotence intensifying the craving for the ideal; and the individual collapsing before that ideal. This is the psychological diagram of Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov’s Napoleon is not so much an historical figure as an idea of power which evokes an anguished confession of impotence.” 229 To his sister Dunya who tells him that by going to suffer he has washed away half of his crime, Raskolnikov answers in a rage: “Crime? What crime? […] I killed a vile, pernicious louse, a little old money-lending crone who was of no use to

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contrary to those extraordinary men who endured the step they took, thus proving that they had the right to permit themselves that step. It is not difficult to recognize that there are several points of contact between Raskolnikov’s theory of the extraordinary man and Nietzsche’s philosophy. Scholars have often interpreted Dostoevsky’s hero as foreshadowing the overman. Indeed, Raskolnikov and Nietzsche seem to share a similar anthropology and an analogous conception of society. They also appear to give special rights to what we may call, to use Nietzsche’s lexicon, the “higher men.” Lastly, they both have a similar theory about lawgivers and how these have always been considered criminals until their new laws were fully accepted. In what follows, I will consider all these analogies in order to understand to what extent Raskolnikov’s “extraordinary man” prefigures Nietzsche’s overman. However, before beginning the analysis, the following consideration has to be kept in mind: Nietzsche carefully distinguishes between the higher man and the overman, the former having to prepare the way for the coming of the latter. Interpreters, who take Raskolnikov as foretelling the overman, usually overlook this distinction. In order to avoid limiting the analysis of the comparison between Nietzsche and Raskolnikov exclusively to the overman, in the following examination I will focus on both concepts, while trying to carefully differentiate between them. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche clarifies that the word “overman” has to be understood “as a designation for a type that has the highest constitutional excellence [höchster Wohlgerathenheit], in contrast to ‘modern’ people, to ‘good’ people, to Christians and other nihilists – a word that really makes you think when it comes from the mouth of a Zarathustra, a destroyer of morals.” (EH, Why I Write Such Good Books, 1) The difficulty of exactly defining the overman derives from the fact that Nietzsche himself, apart this brief passage, does not give any definition of this concept. Nietzsche first introduces this notion in the Prologue of Zarathustra (§ 3). Here, Zarathustra speaks to the people gathered in the market place and says: “I teach you the overman. Human being is something that must be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?” As this passage shows, the overman is presented from the very first as a positive symbol that represents the human need for self-overcoming. anyone, to kill whom is worth forty sins forgiven, who sucked the life-sap from the poor – is that a crime?” (CP: 518) 

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According to Zarathustra, the human being is not a purpose, but a bridge. He has to go under (untergehen) in order to make way for the birth of a new kind of humanity that will be “the meaning of the earth.” (Z, Zarathustra’s Prologue, 3) After God’s death and once all eternal values have been revealed mere fictions without content, the earth yet again becomes the true centre of human existence. Remaining faithful to it, the overman is the one who creates new values, thus filling the void of meaning left by God’s death and by the resulting breakdown of the moral and metaphysical structure that rested upon him.230 With the overman, human history finds a new goal and meaning.231 In this sense, the overman is clearly conceived in opposition to what Nietzsche calls “the last man”, that is, the decadent modern man, the “herd man” who finds joy in small happiness and is satisfied with modest comfort.232 It is important to clarify that the overman remains a goal that has yet to be achieved. Zarathustra makes this point clear when he says to his disciples, “Never yet has there been an overman.” (Z II, On Priests) Nevertheless, Nietzsche refers to a few historical figures whom he considers to be close to the overman. Among these figures, the one who first comes to mind is without doubt, Napoleon. In the first essay of the Genealogy, Nietzsche alludes to the struggle between Rome and Judea, that is, between two opposing value systems, the noble and the priestly one. Nietzsche’s claim is that, apart from the break represented by the Renaissance, the priestly mode of valuation has always been victorious. With the French Revolution, Judea had a profound and decisive triumph, but then a most unexpected thing occurred: “The ancient ideal itself appeared bodily and with unheard-of splendour before the eye and conscience of mankind […] Like a last signpost to the other path, Napoleon appeared as a man more unique and late-born for his times than ever a man had been before, and in him, the problem of the noble ideal itself was made 230 See Z IV, On the Higher Man 2: “God died: now we want – the overman to live.” 231 As Conill (1997: 193) points out, the overman can be understood as a metaphor that symbolizes the endless possibilities that human beings can still achieve and realize. 232 See Z IV, On the Higher Man 3: “Overcome these rulers of today for me, oh my brothers – these little people: they are the overman’s greatest danger!” See also PF 4[171], November 1882-February 1883: “The opposite of the overman is the last man: I created him simultaneously with the former.”

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flesh – just think what a problem that is: Napoleon, this synthesis of Unmensch (brute) and Übermensch (overman) . . .” (GM, I, 16)

Napoleon is, however, not the only historical figure that Nietzsche mentions. In Twilight of the Idols, he also alludes to the Renaissance nobleman Cesare Borgia, defining him “as a ‘higher man’, a kind of overman.” (TI, Raids, 37)233 Scholars have also considered Goethe to be close to the overman. Indeed, Nietzsche depicts him as a bearer of the natural and strongest instincts of the Renaissance, a free spirit and a kind of Dionysian total man. As Nietzsche puts it: “What he wanted was totality; he fought against the disjunction of reason, sensuality, feeling, will (– preached in the most repulsively scholastic way by Kant, Goethe’s antipode), he disciplined himself into a whole, he created himself…” (ibid., 49) Other historical figures praised by Nietzsche for being the most beautiful expression of “those human riddles destined for victory and for seduction” (BGE, 200) are Alcibiades, Caesar, the Hohenstaufen Frederick II and, among artists, Leonardo da Vinci and Shakespeare. This list of names demonstrates a very important point concerning the overman: in order to shed light on this concept, Nietzsche chooses not only great generals and statesmen, but also artists such as Goethe and Leonardo da Vinci. This aspect should be more than sufficient to reject those interpretations that simply identify the overman with “the beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast.”234 (GM, I, 11) Nevertheless, if on the one hand it is necessary to grasp the real and whole meaning of Nietzsche’s concept, then on the other hand it would be misleading to overlook the most (for us) disturbing aspects of his philosophy. In fact, it is undeniable that a certain hardness of heart, malice, and unscrupulousness are all traits that, among others, characterize the overman. In 233 Here is the whole passage: “My concept of ‘beyond good and evil’, as was to be expected, has had levelled against it all the ferocity of moral stultification which in Germany is known to pass for morality itself: I could tell some charming tales about this. Above all I was given to consider the ‘undeniable superiority’ of our time in its moral judgments, the real progress we had made here: I was told that in comparison with us, one could not possibly set up Cesare Borgia as a ‘higher man’, a kind of overman, as I do…” 234 For a clarification of the true meaning of the metaphor “blond beast”, see Wotling (2009 [1995]: 291). 

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this sense, Zarathustra’s words are very revealing: “You highest human beings […] – this is my doubt in you and my secret laughter: I suspect you would call my overman – devil!” (Z II, On Human Prudence)235 Napoleon is close to the overman not despite, but thanks to his being an Unmensch.236 According to Nietzsche, what made Napoleon great was also his consciousness of having certain special rights. The Emperor despised “the ‘Christian virtues’ and the whole moral hypocrisy” (PF 25[175], 235 In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche comments on this passage as follows: “At this point and nowhere else, you need to make an effort to understand what Zarathustra wants: the type of person he conceives of is the type that conceives of reality as it is: his type has the strength to do this –, it is not alienated, removed from reality, it is reality itself, it contains in itself everything terrible and questionable about reality, this is the only way someone can achieve greatness….” (EH, Why I Am a Destiny, 5) 236 According to Kaufmann (1974: 315), who quotes the passage from the Genealogy where Nietzsche portrays Napoleon as a “synthesis of Unmensch (brute) and Übermensch (overman)”, in the end Nietzsche did not consider the Corsican as an overman, “evidently not charmed by Napoleon’s inhuman qualities.” Contrary to this reading, Glenn (2001: 139) has drawn attention to the fact that, “Given his [Nietzsche’s] praise of hardness and cruelty, and his attempt to subvert the ‘humanitarian’ ethics of Christianity, it stands to reason that ‘inhuman’ could be worn as a badge of honor by Nietzsche, as he wore the term ‘immoralist’ with pride.” A posthumous fragment of autumn 1887, makes clear that Kaufmann’s reading must be rejected: “Man is beast [Unthier] and superbeast [Überthier]; the higher man is inhuman [Unmensch] and superhuman [Übermensch]: these belong together. With every increase of greatness and height in man, there is also an increase in depth and terribleness: one ought not to desire the one without the other – or rather: the more radically one desires the one, the more radically one achieves precisely the other.” (PF 9[154], autumn 1887) See also PF 10[5], autumn 1887: “Napoleon: insight that the higher and the terrible man necessarily belong together.” Nietzsche also praised Napoleon because he was “a piece of ‘return to nature’” – which is actually “not a going back but a coming up – up into high, free, even fearful nature and naturalness, the kind which plays – is entitled to play – with great tasks…” (TI, Raids, 48) As Glenn (2001: 133) points out, Nietzsche “characterizes Napoleon as a higher man for who he was, not what he did.” That means that Nietzsche’s admiration for the Corsican was primarily due not to his accomplishments, but to his strong will to power. Accordingly, Nietzsche describes Napoleon as “one of the greatest continuators of the Renaissance” (GS, 362), one “who can issue unconditional commands” (BGE, 199) and as “the heir to a stronger, longer-lasting, older civilization.” (TI, Raids, 44) In short, a true master.

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spring 1884), he regarded them as nonexistent, “he had a right to it.” (PF 25[131], spring 1884). All of this agrees with Nietzsche’s belief that, as in the case of Napoleon, immorality goes hand-in-hand with greatness (see PF 9[157], autumn 1887), and the greatest responsibility with the belief in one’s right. Men who are destined to accomplish great deeds cannot lose this faith: “With natures like Caesar and Napoleon, one gets some notion of ‘disinterested’ work on their marble, whatever the cost in men. On this road lies the future of the highest men: to bear the greatest responsibility and not collapse under it. – Hitherto, the delusions of inspiration were always needed in order not to lose one’s faith in one’s right and one’s hand.” (PF 1[56], spring 1886)

One must understand the quoted passages in the broader context of the relation that Nietzsche establishes between self-overcoming (the symbol that the overman stands for) and aristocracy. Indeed, Nietzsche praises the aristocratic model of society and rejects the democratic one because in his opinion the former model favours the enhancement of the type “man,” thanks to its belief in “a long ladder of rank order and value distinctions between men.” (BGE, 257) Unlike democracy, which, as was mentioned in part one, causes a levelling of humanity, aristocracy develops the pathos of distance in its members, that is, a feeling of one’s radical superiority that derives from the awareness of the existing “gulf between man and man, rank and rank.” (TI, Raids, 37) Without this feeling, “that other, more mysterious pathos could not have grown at all, that demand for new expansions of distance within the soul itself […] in short, the enhancement of the type ‘man,’ the constant ‘self-overcoming of man.’” (BGE, 257) According to Nietzsche, a healthy aristocracy sees itself as the meaning and justification of society and therefore “accepts in good conscience the sacrifice of countless people who have to be pushed down and shrunk into incomplete human beings, into slaves, into tools.” (BGE, 258) Consequently, society has the right to exist “only as the substructure and framework for raising an exceptional type of being up to its higher duty and to a higher state of being.” (ibid.) Nietzsche sympathizes with a morality of dominating types (Moral der Herrschende), based on the principle that, “people have duties only towards their own kind; that when it comes to creatures of a lower rank, to everything 

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alien, people are allowed to act as they see fit or ‘from the heart [wie es das Herz will],’237 and in any event, ‘beyond good and evil’ – : things like pity might have a place here.” (BGE, 260)238 At this point, it is possible to draw some conclusions about the affinities and differences between Raskolnikov’s theory and Nietzsche’s ideas regarding the overman, aristocracy, and the higher man. Let us first start with the affinities. As mentioned, Raskolnikov and Nietzsche share a similar anthropology which is based on the division of humanity into two categories: the extraordinary or higher men and the ordinary or last men. The former are those who are able to speak a new word, to set new goals; they (or at least the best part of them) are the men of genius: Napoleon, under whose spell Raskolnikov and Nietzsche have both fallen, represents a typical example of this category. The latter are the obedient mass whose sole function is to serve as scaffolding and as a foundation for the raising of higher humanity. According to Raskolnikov, both categories have an equal right to exist. On the contrary, Nietzsche thinks that society should exist only for the sake of aristocracy and, in the posthumous fragment 25[343], spring 1884, he goes as far as to claim that: “The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men: I do not yet grant the failures [Mißrathenen] the right.”239

237 Literally, “as the heart desires.” 238 As the following passage shows, Nietzsche seems to justify this kind of behaviour not on the grounds of a moral theory, but on the simple observation of the inner character of life: “Here we must think things through thoroughly, and ward off any sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially a process of appropriating, injuring, overpowering the alien and the weaker, oppressing, being harsh, imposing your own form, incorporating, and at least, the very least, exploiting, – but what is the point of always using words that have been stamped with slanderous intentions from time immemorial? Even a body within which (as we presupposed earlier) particular individuals treat each other as equal (which happens in every healthy aristocracy): if this body is living and not dying, it will have to treat other bodies in just those ways that the individuals it contains refrain from treating each other. It will have to be the embodiment of will to power, it will want to grow, spread, grab, win dominance, – not out of any morality or immorality, but because it is alive, and because life is precisely will to power.” (BGE, 259) 239 In his translation of The Will to Power, Kaufmann (op. cit., p. 467) reminds the reader that this is a private note not intended for publication. Kaufmann’s

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Another striking affinity between Raskolnikov and Nietzsche lies in their interpretation of lawgivers as criminals. According to both, those great men who in the past tried to devise a new law were necessarily forced to break the old one, and were thus considered criminals. If their attempt failed, they were punished and probably also exiled from society. If on the contrary their attempt was successful, their breaking the old law was forgiven and they were considered as benefactors and founders of mankind. This mechanism, also described by Raskolnikov to the police inspector Porfiry Petrovich, is clearly explained by Nietzsche in the following passage from Daybreak: “One has to take back much of the defamation which people have cast upon all those who broke through the spell of a custom by means of a deed – in general, they are called criminals. Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has hitherto always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed; – history treats almost exclusively of these bad man who subsequently became good men!” (D, 20)240

Both Raskolnikov and Nietzsche postulate certain special rights for the higher men. These rights are justified by the ends (the fulfilment of a goal or idea salutary for the whole mankind, on the one hand; the enhancement of the type “man”, on the other hand) and by a kind of matter of fact (the extraordinariness of extraordinary men in the case of Raskolnikov; the will to power as the inner character of life for Nietzsche). How far are these rights extended? Raskolnikov sanctions, under certain conditions, a right to crime as well as a right to kill: this is what Razumikhin defines as “bloodshed in all conscience.” (CP: 263) Anticipating Ivan’s idea, Raskolnikov thinks that for the sake of their ideas, everything is permitted for extraordinary men. Nietzsche also postulates a master morality and allows higher men to behave as they commentary is without doubt appropriate, but the quoted passage is nevertheless revealing of Nietzsche’s uncompassionate attitude towards the so-called failures. 240 See Z III, On Old and New Tablets: “The creator they hate the most; he who breaks tablets and old values, the breaker – him they call the lawbreaker.” According to Nietzsche, as a kind of self-defence system, society has a tendency to expel the breaker of the law of custom. However, the lawbreaker is sometimes stronger than society: in this case, the old law is overthrown and the new one accepted. For Nietzsche, “Napoleon the Corsican is the most famous case.” (TI, Raids, 45) 

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see fit or as their heart desires. Unlike Raskolnikov, however, he does not clarify where the limits lie, or what it means exactly to act beyond good and evil. There is no denying that this master morality appears cruel and pitiless today. It is hard to resist the temptation of reading Nietzsche’s words through the distorting prism of our historically privileged perspective as survivors of twentieth century fascisms and totalitarianisms. Nevertheless, we should not rush to judgment here. It is symptomatic, for instance, that in the same section in which Nietzsche describes how higher men are allowed to act beyond good and evil when it comes to lower individuals, he also claims that, “the noble person helps the unfortunate too, although not (or hardly ever) out of pity, but rather more out of an impulse generated by the over-abundance of power.” (BGE, 260) Nietzsche certainly conceives of the higher men as privileged, but does he also ascribe to them a right to shed blood, to step over blood in all conscience, as Raskolnikov does? The answer to this question largely depends on how we read and interpret those passages in which Nietzsche ascribe special rights to the higher men. Given the fact that Nietzsche does not clarify where the boundaries exactly lie, my suggestion is that, until proven otherwise, a conservative reading is here recommendable.241 Two more, important considerations make the identification between Raskolnikov’s theory and Nietzsche’s philosophy problematic. First of all, the comparison between Raskolnikov and Nietzsche must necessarily take into account the broader context in which Nietzsche developed his ideas on the overman, aristocracy, and the higher man. These ideas are supported by a previous critique of culture and morality and can be adequately understood only if they are taken within the context of this critique.242 Behind these ideas is a broad background made up of a deep meditation on the overall “degeneration and diminution of humanity into the perfect herd animal.” (BGE, 203) Nietzsche deeply felt the need to halt the decadence of modern man and pleaded in his writings for a revaluation of strong and healthy instincts. His defence of the aristocratic model also derived from his battle against the 241 On this, see Stellino (2015b). 242 On this, see Wotling (2009 [1995]), in particular, the chapter dedicated to the overman, pp. 329–352.

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modern tendency towards the levelling of human beings, in opposition to which he defended the need to enhance the type “man.” Considered from this point of view, Nietzsche’s ideas are radically different from those expressed by Raskolnikov: to fail to go beyond the superficial affinity between them would mean to fail to see the complex sociocultural diagnosis on which Nietzsche’s concepts are grounded. A second point to be considered, which is akin to the first, concerns Nietzsche’s notion of the overman. As already mentioned, scholars have often related Raskolnikov’s extraordinary man and Nietzsche’s overman. This comparison, however, does not take into account that the latter concept is much broader and more complex than the former. The notion of the overman derives from Nietzsche’s awareness that modern man needs to be overcome. This notion symbolizes the endless ways that still lays open to human beings after God’s death. The overman, as the one who has freed himself from the old religion, morals, and metaphysics gives a new meaning and goal to the whole of humanity. The creation of new values, the rejection of any metaphysical pretension, the rediscovery of the primary role of the human body, the attempt to fill the void left by God’s death, the joyful “yes” to life, the metamorphosis of the spirit into a child: these are only some of the features which make the “overman” one of the richest and most complex notions in Nietzsche’s philosophy. This richness and complexity unavoidably condemn to failure every attempt to closely identify the overman with Raskolnikov’s extraordinary man; this identification can be maintained only by means of a misleading reduction or exemplification of Nietzsche’s notion.

3.2  Kirillov’s Man-God as Overman? As was shown in the first part of this study, one of the aspects of Les Possédés that caught Nietzsche’s attention was Kirillov’s “logic of atheism.” In his notebook of November 1887-March 1888, Nietzsche copied and commented on various passages from Kirillov’s conversation with Verkhovensky. The special attention Nietzsche paid to this conversation should not surprise if we take into consideration the prima facie 

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similarity existing between Kirillov’s man-god and Nietzsche’s overman. This similarity, stressed in recent years by the studies of Pacini (2001: 52) and Ebersbach (2006: 383),243 has often led several critics and commentators to understand Kirillov’s idea as “Dostoevsky’s anticipation and repudiation of the Nietzschean ‘Übermensch’.” (Miller 1975: 169)244 As in the case of Raskolnikov, with Kirillov, Dostoevsky would have not only prefigured Nietzsche’s overman, but, so the reading goes, also foreshadowed the danger of preaching the deification of man. To what extent is this reading justified? Can we really understand Kirillov’s man-god as a prefiguration of Nietzsche’s overman? In order to answer these questions, in this section I will first present a brief exposition of Kirillov’s theory. Then, following the path already traced by Miller (1975), I will point out analogies and differences between the man-god and the overman. Aliosha Nilych Kirillov is a structural engineer who, having been abroad for four years, has just returned to his motherland. Kirillov has conceived a theory, the seeds of which have been sown by Stavrogin: he wants to prove his self-will and, consequently, mankind’s divinity. Let us begin from the premise of the theory – the non-existence of God. Kirillov’s argument clearly recalls Feuerbach’s interpretation of God as psychological projection. According to Kirillov, man is irrationally afraid of the pain of death. In order to overcome this fear, man has invented God, which represents the embodiment or, to put it with Feuerbach, the anthropomorphic projection of the human fear of the pain of death. Kirillov’s aim is to free mankind from this fear and, consequently, from the belief in God. His way to achieve this aim is to commit suicide, showing, therefore, that there is nothing fearful in death and that man has no reason to be afraid of it. Suicide also has another essential function, namely proving Kirillov’s self-will. Indeed, according to Kirillov, “If there is God, then the 243 Pacini (2001: 50f.) claims that among Dostoevsky’s characters, Kirillov is the one who bears the closest resemblance to Nietzsche’s overman. However, Pacini (ibid.: 52–54) draws attention not only to the similarities, but also to the differences between them. For his part, Ebersbach (2006: 383) maintains that Kirillov’s foundation of atheism is based on thoughts that recall Nietzsche’s overman. 244 Among others, Miller refers to Berdyaev, Camus, Evdokimov, Gide, Guardini, Merezhkovsky, Mochulsky and Schubart.

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will is all his, and I cannot get out of his will. If not, the will is all mine, and it is my duty to proclaim self-will.” (De: 617) Suicide, conceived of as an act of supreme self-affirmation, is precisely the way in which Kirillov intends to proclaim his self-will. As he explains to Verkhovensky, who suggests he demonstrates self-will by killing someone else, “To kill someone else would be the lowest point of my self-will […] I want the highest point, and will kill myself.” (ibid.) Kirillov’s suicide amounts thus to an indirect proof of the non-existence of God. To see why this is so, it is necessary to reconstruct Kirillov’s reasoning in its entirety. As we have seen, according to Kirillov, if there is God, then the will is all his; whereas if there is no God, then the will is all mine. If I can kill myself and commit suicide, then the will is all mine; but if the will is all mine, then there is no God. Once the belief in God has been removed, the path is open to man’s self-deification: “To recognize that there is no God, and not to recognize at the same time that you have become God, is an absurdity.” (De: 619) The affirmation of self-will, the attribute of mankind’s divinity, leads man, through a heroic act of insubordination and rebellion, to take the place of God. In Kirillov’s visionary and utopian conception, a new man will come and his name will be the “man-god”: “There will be a new life, a new man, everything new… Then history will be divided into two parts: from the gorilla to the destruction of God, and from the destruction of God […] to the physical changing of the earth and man. Man will be God and will change physically. And the world will change, and deeds will change, and thoughts, and all feelings.” (De: 115)

Strongly convinced of his ideas, Kirillov feels he has a duty to proclaim his self-will by taking his life. He is willing to sacrifice himself to prove mankind the truth of his theory and to show the path to self-emancipation and to the man-god. The soteriological and redemptive character of Kirillov’s sacrifice, which makes him a modern, Russian Christ, is clearly highlighted in the following passage: “I will begin, and end, and open the door. And save [spasu].” (De: 619) Since “the whole salvation [spasenie] for everyone” (ibid.) depends on the demonstration of his



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thought, Kirillov, although hesitant, accepts his duty, and for the good of the whole of humanity, is ready to sacrifice himself.245 The paradoxical character of Kirillov’s theory lies in the fact that, although he denies God’s existence, in reality he is a strong believer. As he confesses, the thought of God has tormented him all his life. (De: 116). During his conversation with Verkhovensky, Kirillov argues that “God is necessary, and therefore must exist […] But I know that he does not and cannot exist.” (De: 615) Later on, when Verkhovensky waits for Kirillov to commit suicide, the former thinks that, “The swinishness is that he [Kirillov] believes in God worse than any priest…” (De: 623) Having noticed that the icon lamp is lit, Stavrogin says without mockery to him: “I bet when I come the next time you’ll already believe in God.” (De: 238) However, whereas Kirillov’s faith in God is secretly hidden to him, his faith in the Saviour, who is represented in the icon, is undoubtedly explicit. In his final moments, referring to Christ, the engineer confesses to Verkhovensky that: “This man was the highest on all the earth, he constituted what it was to live for. Without this man the whole planet with everything on it is – madness only. There has not been one like Him before or since, not ever, even to the point of miracle. This is the miracle, that there has not been and never will be such a one.” (De: 618)

After the conversation with Verkhovensky and a long period of hesitation, Kirillov kills himself in a last and supreme act of insubordination and of affirmation of his new, fearsome freedom. The poor, structural engineer ends up devoured by the same idea that he has so proudly conceived.246 Dostoevsky dramatically describes the suicide scene in which the character of Kirillov, frightened from the idea of dying, appears in 245 Compare with the following, revealing passage from Dostoevsky’s Writer’s Diary (February 1876: 346): “Our young people want to do heroic deeds and make sacrifices. The young lad of today, about whom so many different things are said, often worships the naivest kind of paradox and is willing to sacrifice everything on earth for it – his fate and his very life; but that is solely because he considers his paradox to be the truth. It is only because he is not enlightened: when the light comes, other points of view will appear of their own accord and the paradoxes will disappear; yet his purity of heart will not vanish; the desire for sacrifices and heroic deeds that now burn so radiantly in him will not die out. And this is our strong point.” 246 Prophetically, Verkhovensky says to Kirillov, “I also know that it was not you who ate the idea, but the idea that ate you.” (De: 558)

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his fragile humanity. Far from being the result of a self-conscious and meditated act, Kirillov’s self-killing happens abruptly, as if in a fit of madness. As Frank (1995: 494) appropriately points out, “Like Raskolnikov’s crime, Kirillov’s suicide is the self-negation and self-refutation of his own grandiose ideas.” Instead of emancipating mankind from deceit and false beliefs, the sacrifice of this great idealist and saviour of humanity only serves to divert suspicion from Verkhovensky and the other demons about Shatov’s murder. Let us now turn to the comparison between Kirillov and Nietzsche. Scholars have usually articulated this comparison by pointing out similarities and differences that exist between the men (Kirillov and Nietzsche) and their theories (the man-god and the overman). In what follows, I will mainly focus my attention on the theoretical comparison between the ideas of the man-god and the overman. Indeed, what should be tested here is the plausibility of the hypothesis that Kirillov’s theory of the man-god can be understood as Dostoevsky’s anticipation and repudiation of Nietzsche’s overman. Before turning to the theoretical analysis, however, we should briefly consider some aspects that make the two theorists of a new humanity so different from each other. Among Dostoevsky’s characters, Kirillov has been seen as the one who bears the most resemblance to a Nietzschean type. Indeed, the denial of God, the assertion of humankind’s self-will and freedom, and the deification of the new humanity seem to be, among others, the characteristic features of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Beyond these seemingly obvious similarities, one could also argue that in their will to emancipate humanity from the belief in God, both Kirillov and Nietzsche share a similar redemptive tendency, or that despite their radical atheism, they have a more or less unconsciously strong Christian faith. Far from being self-evident, such readings are controversial,247 and there is undeniably 247 As we have already seen, the redemptive tendency is patent in Kirillov, who decides to sacrifice himself for the good of humanity. However, can we ascribe this kind of imitatio Christi to Nietzsche as well? Concerning this point, Miller (1975: 167) has highlighted Nietzsche’s definition of himself in Ecce Homo as a “bearer of glad tidings [froher Botschafter]” (EH, Why I Am a Destiny, 1) or the characterization of his projected work Will to Power as a “gospel of the future [Zukunfts-Evangelium].” (PF 11[411], November 1887-March 1888) The patent allusion to Christ and the Gospels must not necessarily be interpreted as revealing Nietzsche’s (hidden?) identification with Christ. Rather, it shows that Nietzsche 

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a certain irony in the fact that despite scholars’ recurrent attempts to stress the similarities that would link Kirillov’s theory and Nietzsche’s philosophy, Nietzsche did not perceive Kirillov as a Dionysian type but rather, as Miller (1975: 170–180) has convincingly demonstrated, as a decadent and Buddhist one. Moreover, Kirillov’s blind faith in his theory, which leads him to martyrdom, makes him a typical representative of that kind of fanaticism, which, as we have seen, Nietzsche criticized in his writings.248 For all these reasons, Miller (ibid.: 225) seems to be right when he concludes that, “Dostoevsky would almost certainly have rejected any analogy between his paradigmatically Russian ‘saint without grace’ or ‘Cyrillic nihilist’ and a German-Swiss ‘hothead…screaming that (Christianity) does harm to life.’ Nor would Nietzsche have accepted any imputation to himself as philosopher of the ‘experimental-temptational ideal’ the ‘theologian’s instinct’ (Theologen-Instinkt)

was well aware of the groundbreaking character of his philosophy, as clearly indicated by the title of Ecce homo’s section. Moreover, in the same section of Ecce Homo, Nietzsche unmistakably makes clear that, “I am not remotely the religion-founding type – religions are the business of the rabble, I need to wash my hands after coming into contact with religious people… I do not want any ‘true believers’, I think I am too malicious to believe in myself, I never speak to the masses… I have a real fear that someday people will consider me holy.” (EH, Why I Am a Destiny, 1) One of the classic debates of the Nietzsche-Forschung concerns the reading that holds that the stronger Nietzsche’s atheism became, the more deep-rooted was his Christian faith. This would obviously support the analogy between Nietzsche and Kirillov, whose atheism is, in reality, a secret theism. It is not my intention to enter into this vast and complex debate. Personally I do not sympathize with these kinds of Christological readings of Nietzsche and I agree with Miller (1975: 225) when he claims that, “to represent Nietzsche as a frustrated Christian ‘God-seeker’ (Gottsucher) or instinctive seeker after Christ is, in fact, to attribute to him speculatively a Christian religiosity which can be neither disproved nor substantiated.” What is sure is that it would be fallacious to reject or invalidate Nietzsche’s critique of Christian religion on the mere basis of a psychological reading of him as a hidden and secret Christian believer. 248 The pattern is one and the same. Instead of a sceptical attitude, the emancipation from the belief leads the emancipated one to take a radically fanatical attitude. From this point of view, Kirillov’s case is akin to that of Zarathustra’s shadow who, having succeed to free himself from the wider belief is at risk of being captured by a narrower one – a risk that seduces all fanatics who “are tempted by anything that is narrow and solid.” (Z IV, The Shadow)

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he conceived of as the peccatum originale of German philosophy and whose manifestations he demonstratively excised from his notebook portrait of Kirillov.”

As one can see, the identification between Kirillov and Nietzsche, which unfortunately has been established too often superficially and without questioning its real basis, is much more problematic than one would initially think. Does the identification between Kirillov’s man-god and Nietzsche’s superman have more chances to be successful? There is little doubt that the theories of both Kirillov and Nietzsche share a same premise: the denial of God. This denial is determined in different ways. Like Feuerbach, Kirillov believes that the divinity is the result of a mere, anthropomorphic projection of the human mind, more precisely, the projection of the fear of death. It is only by overcoming this fear by committing suicide, which represents the highest point of one’s self-will, that Kirillov aims to prove that there is no God. On the other hand, Nietzsche considers the death of God as an unavoidable event and as “the most fateful act of two thousand years of discipline for truth.” (GS, 357) It is the concept of truthfulness cultivated by Christian morality itself and incarnated in European conscience that “in the end forbids itself the lie of faith in God…” (ibid.) Albeit reached through different routes, Kirillov’s and Nietzsche’s conclusion is one and the same: there is no God. The denial of God determines the emancipation of man and opens the way to the coming of a new humanity. This new man, called by Kirillov “man-god” and by Nietzsche “overman”, is conceived of as the goal to be reached – the goal that marks the beginning of a new period in world history. As already mentioned, according to Kirillov, history will be divided into two parts: from the gorilla to the destruction of God, and from the destruction of God to the man-god. Nietzsche also divides human history into two parts and, curiously, he makes the same reference to the ape: “What is the ape to a human? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. And that is precisely what the human shall be to the overman: a laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to human, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now a human is still more ape than any ape.” (Z, Zarathustra’s Prologue, 3)



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The implicit premise of this passage is that the overcoming of man, which opens the way to the overman, is possible only because God is dead, as announced by Zarathustra himself in the previous section of the Prologue. Seen from this perspective, Kirillov and Nietzsche seem thus to predict a similar scenario: the annihilation of God makes possible the overcoming of former humanity and the creation of a new type of man, which is superior not only from a spiritual or psychological point of view, but also from a biological and physiological one. Nevertheless, as Miller (1975: 221 f.) has pointed out, the analogy is deceptive: “While Kirillov’s ‘physically recreated’ man is generically conceived in consonance with Dostoevsky’s Eastern Orthodox soteriology as a metaphor for the ‘salvation of all’ or for the regeneration of the entire ‘next generation,’ […] the ‘Übermensch’ is only figuratively so. In the Nietzschean context the term designates a biologically superior master caste or ‘aristocracy’ (Adel) which ennobles the species by heightening its optimal condition of being. And in this sense the ‘Übermensch’ seems less akin to Kirillov’s ‘independent man’ than to the ruling elite in Shigalov’s system of ‘absolute despotism,’ the absolute masters over the mass of men or (sic) ‘herd.’”

Moreover, notice that there is an undeniable mystical and religious aspect to Kirillov’s conception of man-god, which is not to be found in Nietzsche. As Frank (1995: 482) points out, Kirillov is convinced that the Kingdom of God already exist in this world. Man is unhappy because he does not know that “everything is good.” (De: 237) Once he realizes it, he will become immediately happy: “Everything is good, everything. For all those who know that everything is good. If they knew it was good with them, it would be good with them, but as long as they don’t know it’s good with them, it will not be good with them. That’s the whole thought, the whole, there isn’t any more!” (De: 237f.)

Paradoxically, Kirillov’s conviction that “everything is good” amounts to a denial of the existence of evil. To Stavrogin, who asks him whether even someone’s death from hunger or the abuse of a girl is good, Kirillov reiterates his initial point: “Good. And if someone’s head gets smashed in for the child’s sake, that’s good, too; and if it doesn’t get smashed in, that’s good, too.” (De: 237) However, Kirillov also adds that the abusers are not good “because they don’t know they’re good. When they find out, they won’t violate the girl. They must find out that they’re good, 210 

then they’ll all become good at once, all, to a man.” (De: 238) The mangod is precisely he, who will teach that everything is good and that all men are good. Then, mankind will attain happiness and time will be no more. As one can clearly see, this half-apocalyptic, half-mystical picture is hardly compatible with Nietzsche’s crude and realistic conception of the world as will to power. Of all the analogies that can be established between Kirillov and Nietzsche, the most important for the present study concerns the affirmation of freedom that follows from the annihilation of God. This aspect is central to those readings that understand Kirillov’s idea as an anticipation and repudiation of Nietzsche’s overman and, therefore, must be scrutinized in detail. As Kirillov confesses to Verkhovensky in his final hour, he wants to kill himself to show his insubordination to God and to affirm his “new fearsome freedom.” (De: 619) According to this conception, whereas God’s freedom is unlimited, human freedom is limited by God. Thus, once the existence of God is denied, human freedom becomes unlimited. As we have already seen, a similar conception is implied in the way in which Nietzsche uses the metaphors of the infinite ocean and the open sea in The Gay Science (section 124 and 343, respectively). These metaphors clearly symbolize the new and dangerous freedom that derives from the death of God and that man is now called to seize. There is, however, something more to Kirillov’s conception of human freedom. Indeed, Dostoevsky strictly relates the affirmation of freedom to the temptation to man’s self-deification, which would naturally follow from the denial of God. In establishing this relation, Dostoevsky clearly follows in Feuerbach’s footsteps. In his The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach considers the self-deification of man as the logical consequence of the denial of God. If the qualities and properties, which man has attributed to God, are in reality man’s qualities and properties, then human nature must be regarded as the highest nature to man. The new practical principle is, therefore: “Homo homini deus est.” (Feuerbach 2008 [1841]: 271) Three years after the publication of The Essence of Christianity, in his The Ego and Its Own Max Stirner (1995 [1844]: 158) strongly denounced this new “human religion” as “the last metamorphosis of the Christian religion”. As he put it: 

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“At the entrance of the modern time stands the ‘God-man’. At its exit will only the God in the God-man evaporate? And can the God-man really die if only the God in him dies? They did not think of this question, and thought they were finished when in our days they brought to a victorious end the work of the Enlightenment, the vanquishing of God: they did not notice that man has killed God in order to become now – ‘sole God on high’…” (ibid.: 139)

About thirty years later and with a completely different aim, Dostoevsky criticized in Demons exactly the same temptation to self-deification, using Kirillov, a Feuerbachian character par excellence, to show the concrete risks of this temptation. Would it be safe to say that Nietzsche as well succumbed to the temptation to which, before him, Feuerbach and Kirillov succumbed? In other words, can we consider the overman as a new god that replaces the old God, which now is dead? Scholars that defend such reading tend to refer to the following well-known passage from section 125 of The Gay Science: “God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! […] Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us? Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worth of it?” One can object that the sentence in question is interrogative, not affirmative, or that the questions that the madman poses are sign of great disorientation rather than enthusiastic hubris. Nevertheless, there is no point in denying that the question of whether in Nietzsche there is a will to deify the new man remains key in his philosophy. Although there seems to be textual evidence that supports what we might call the “deification reading”,249 Nietzsche’s opinion is more ambiguous than one may expect. As a proof of this ambiguity, it suffices to compare the following two quotes from the first and second part of Zarathustra, respectively: “‘Dead are all gods: now we want the overman to live.’ – Let this be our last will at the great noon!” (Z I, On the Bestowing Virtue 3)

249 Above all, see the posthumous fragment 4[90], November 1882-February 1883 which seems to be most revealing of Nietzsche’s intentions on this point and suggests a clear connection between Kirillov and Nietzsche: “We no longer need morality, the same way in which we no longer need religion. The ‘I love God’ – the only old form of religious life – is transformed into the love of an ideal – has become creative –: sheer god-men [Gott-Menschen].” See also the posthumous fragment 31[27], Winter 1884–85 and 35[73], May-July 1885.

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“Once people said God when they gazed upon distant seas; but now I have taught you to say: overman. / God is a conjecture, but I want that your conjecturing not reach further than your creating will. / Could you create a god? – Then be silent about any gods! But you could well create the overman.” (Z II, On the Blessed Isles)

Passages like the latter should cause us to hesitate before claiming univocally that Nietzsche conceived of the superman as a new, almighty god on earth. Did Nietzsche carry out a difficult and complex process of deconstruction of the idea of God and of those values founded on it, only to replace the old idol with a new one? As Heidegger (2002 [1943]: 190) points out, those who defend this kind of reading do not take into consideration the different ontological statuses that God and man have: “It is possible, thinking crudely, to believe that Nietzsche’s word [Heidegger refers to the passage from section 125 of The Gay Science quoted above] says that mastery over beings passes from God to man, or, even more crudely, that Nietzsche sets man in the place of God. Those who take it in that way, however, are not thinking very divinely about the essence of the divinity. Man can never be set in God’s place because the essence of man never attains the essential realm of God.”

Beyond the complex philological and philosophical question about whether or not Nietzsche really conceived of his overman as a new god, what should not be overlooked here is the logic underlying the majority of those interpretations, which consider Kirillov’s man-god as a prefiguration of the overman. If having denied God, the new man (Kirillov’s man-god or Nietzsche’s overman) is destined to occupy the place of God upon earth, then he also assumes one of God’s most essential properties, namely, absolute moral freedom. In other words, the temptation to self-deification is directly linked to the temptation to step over conventional moral boundaries. This logic becomes evident in the following passage from the dialogue between the devil and Ivan Karamazov: “Once mankind has renounced God, one and all […] then the entire old world view will fall of itself, without anthropophagy, and, above all, the entire former morality, and everything will be new. […] Man will be exalted with the spirit of divine, titanic pride, and the man-god will appear. […] The question now […] is whether or not it is possible for such a period ever to come. If it does come, then everything will be resolved and mankind will finally be settled. But since, in view 

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of man’s inveterate stupidity, it may not be settled for another thousand years, anyone who already knows the truth is permitted to settle things for himself, absolutely as he wishes, on the new principles. In this sense, ‘everything is permitted’ to him. Moreover, since God and immortality do not exist in any case, even if this period should never come, the new man is allowed to become a man-god, though it be he alone in the whole world, and of course, in this new rank, to jump lightheartedly over any former moral obstacle of the former slave-man, if he need be. There is no law for God!” (BK: 648f.)

The question that should be answered here is, therefore, not whether Nietzsche conceived of his overman as a man-god (as both Kirillov and Ivan do with their new man), but rather whether he ascribed to him absolute moral freedom (as Ivan clearly does). To answer this question it is necessary to consider once again the comparison between Ivan’s idea and Nietzsche’s philosophy.

3.3  Ivan as Nietzsche’s Forerunner? If we were to reduce Ivan’s maxim to a logical formula, we could express it in the following way: If p (there is no God and no immortality), then q (everything is permitted). p Therefore, q.

The questions we need to ask are: Why does Ivan believe that p? And, why does he think that if p, then q? In order to answer the first question, it is necessary to distinguish between the non-existence of God and the non-existence of immortality. Indeed, although God and immortality are strictly connected, Ivan puts forward different arguments depending on whether he is focusing on the former or on the latter. As we have seen, Ivan’s argument for the non-existence of God is not ontological, but rather moral. According to Ivan, since human mind is earthly and Euclidean, it does not make sense for a human being to address the 214 

metaphysical question about the existence of God. In this sense, Ivan is even willing to accept God’s existence. What he does not and cannot accept for moral reasons is the world created by God, where every day thousands of innocent, little children are unjustly abused and humiliated. Christian theology depicts God as benevolent and almighty. How can such a God accept the suffering, which is inflicted upon undefended human creatures? As Scanlan (2002: 52) points out, either God is not benevolent (otherwise He would have wished to create a different world) or He is not almighty (otherwise He would have been able to create such, different world). In any case, the existence of God (at least, of the Christian God) is denied.250 It is more difficult to say what Ivan’s argument for the non-existence of the immortality of the soul exactly consists in. As presented by Miusov, Ivan’s reasoning is based on the premise that “there exists no law of nature that man should love mankind, and that if there is and has been any love on earth up to now, it has come not from natural law but solely from people’s belief in their immortality.” (BK: 69) From that premise, it follows that (1) if there is no immortality, there is no love251 and (2) if there is no love, everything is permitted.252 Notice that the aim of Ivan’s argument is not to demonstrate that there is no immortality, 250 As we have seen, Nietzsche too withdraws his faith in God – not following a metaphysical train of thought, but like Ivan, out of morality. We can thus say that, in this, both Ivan and Nietzsche follow Kant’s statement of the problem: God can be no longer considered from a theoretical point of view, but from a moral one. However, if Ivan’s withdrawal is justified on the grounds of the unacceptability of children’s suffering, Nietzsche focuses instead on the concept of truthfulness cultivated by Christian morality and incarnated in European conscience, as shown in the previous section. 251 See WD, December 1876: 735f.: “I declare […] that love for humanity is even entirely unthinkable, incomprehensible, and utterly impossible without faith in the immortality of the human soul to go along with it. Those who deprived humanity of its faith in its own immortality want to replace that faith, in the sense of the highest purpose of existence, by ‘love for humanity.’ Those people, I say, are raising their hands against themselves; for in place of love for humanity they plant in the heart of one who has lost his faith the seed of hatred for humanity.” 252 As Scanlan (2002: 36) points out, “for Dostoevsky it is axiomatic that without love of others there are no moral standards, since love of others is the sole moral standard; without it, ‘everything is permitted.’ Ivan’s argument, then, presupposes Dostoevsky’s ethical theory and can be no more convincing than that theory.” 

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but rather to show that, if there is no immortality, then everything is permitted. Clearly, we know that Ivan believes that there is no immortality, but strictly speaking, he does not provide any argument for the non-existence of immortality. A reasonable guess would be that, according to Ivan, the belief in immortality is not compatible with a materialistic conception of the world and with the earthly, Euclidean human mind. The consequence, which Ivan draws from the non-existence of God and the immortality of the soul, is that everything is permitted. This conclusion seems to follow from two, different lines of reasoning. In Miusov’s exposition of Ivan’s idea, the focus is on immortality, the belief in which is the sole cause of man’s love on earth. Without this belief, love would dry up. If this would happen, man would lose his source of morality and, therefore, “nothing would be immoral any longer, everything would be permitted, even anthropophagy.” (BK: 69)253 In the devil’s later exposition, the focus is, on the contrary, on God, who is conceived both as the foundation of morality and, as in the case of Kirillov, as He, who limits man’s will. Should mankind renounce God, not only the entire former morality would fall, but then there would be also no limit to man’s will. The new man-god would be allowed “to jump lightheartedly over any former moral obstacle of the former slaveman”; for, as already mentioned, “There is no law for God!” (BK: 649) Although different, both lines of reasoning end up justifying an amoral position, which I have defined as moral indifferentism. There are no moral boundaries to limit those who believe neither in God nor in their own immortality: to them, nothing is immoral any longer, everything is permitted, even the worst crimes and evildoings such as parricide or anthropophagy. Can we legitimately ascribe the same moral position to Nietzsche? We have already seen how problematic the attribution of the motto “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” to Nietzsche is. If we take into consideration the published works, Nietzsche never subscribe to this motto. In both the passages from Zarathustra and the Genealogy of 253 See Cherkasova (2009: 16f.): “For Dostoevsky, an ethical decision must be blessed by the heart; otherwise, it is a mere idea, however ‘sensible,’ intellectually sophisticated, or aesthetically enticing it may be. He eloquently proves that heartless ideas are often a source of immorality: they bring with them destructiveness, hatred, cynicism, and misanthropy.”

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Morality, he rather focuses attention on the difficulties that derive from calling into question the existence of truth or from the abrogation of faith in it. A different interpretation could be put forward if one considers the posthumous fragments. Even in this case, however, Nietzsche’s attitude towards the maxim is far from being univocal and unambiguous. In fact, if on the one hand, in accordance with the experimental character of his philosophy Nietzsche gives the impression of being interested in investigating the philosophical possibilities of this motto, then on the other hand, he also seems to denounce the risk of turning the denial of truth into a new fanatical belief. These difficulties alone should at the very least make one reflect carefully before interpreting Ivan’s argument as an anticipation of Nietzsche’s philosophy. The undeniable existence of this problem is, however, not sufficient to allow us to reject the interpretation of the young Karamazov as a forerunner of Nietzsche. Indeed, there is no point in denying that in Nietzsche, as well as in Ivan, the death of God provokes the fall of the former morality254 and leaves a normative and axiological void, to which the conclusion q (“everything is permitted”) precisely refers. Moreover, as realized by Kirillov, the death of God leaves man in possession of a new and fearsome freedom, which without any moral law to limit it, is at risk of being interpreted as a license for boundless behaviour. Is Nietzsche’s aim to legitimize this boundless behaviour? Is it his intention to leave humanity in a state of normative and axiological void? Nietzsche’s critique of morality often seems directed not against all morality, but rather only against Christian morality. So, for instance, in the Genealogy, despite his claim that “belief in morality, all [my italics] morality, wavers” (GM, Preface, 6), Nietzsche criticizes slave morality, the Christian morality of resentment, while praising the noble, aristocratic morality. The same logic seems to be at work in Ecce Homo. In section 2 of Why I Am a Destiny, Nietzsche defines himself as “the first immoralist”, a “destroyer par excellence.” However, in a later section, he makes clear that he is negating “a type [my italics] of morality that has attained dominance and validity in the form of 254 See PF 39[15], August–September 1885: “Moral interpretation has become superfluous together with religious interpretation: indeed, that is what they do not comprehend, the superficial ones! […] To what extent the hitherto existing morality has together with ‘God’ ceased to be necessary: they depended upon one another.” 

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morality as such, – decadence morality or, to put it plainly, Christian morality.” (EH, Why I Am a Destiny, 4) On the other hand, in the new Preface to Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche makes a different use of the word “immoralist”, which this time is employed as a synonym of “amoralist”, as the following passage shows: “I am […] doing what I have always done, old immoralist and bird-catcher that I am – speaking unmorally, extra-morally, ‘beyond good and evil’.” (HH, Preface, 1) This reading of the immoralist Nietzsche as critic of all morality seems to be supported by section 32 of Beyond Good and Evil in which Nietzsche outlines a brief history of morality, divided in three consecutive periods: the pre-moral, the moral, and the extra-moral one. Nietzsche interprets this history as determined by an improvement in human self-knowledge,255 which finally leads “immoralists” like Nietzsche to suspect that “the decisive value is conferred by what is specifically unintentional about an action.” This discovery makes Nietzsche not only define the previous morality of intentions as a “prejudice […] a thing on about the same level of astrology and alchemy”, but also to express the need to overcome (all) morality (from whence the use of the adjective “extra-moral” to define the new period came). The same call for the overcoming of morality can be found in a well-known passage from Twilight of the Idols, which contains what we can consider the clearest formulation of Nietzsche’s moral perspectivism in the oeuvre.256 Even in this case, the aim of Nietzsche’s critique is not a specific morality, but rather all morality: 255 On this, see Stellino (forth.). 256 When approaching Nietzsche’s perspectivism, scholars mainly focus on what we may call the theoretical aspect of it. In Nietzsche’s philosophy, however, we find not only an epistemological perspectivism, but clearly also a moral or practical one. There are several posthumous fragments, in which Nietzsche explicitly claims the perspectival character of morality. Among them, see PF 26[178], summer-autumn 1884: “Good and evil as perspectives [perspectivisch].”; PF 2[190], autumn 1885-autumn 1886: “What does valuating means itself? […] moral valuating is an interpretation, a way of interpreting.”; PF 2[206], autumn 1885-autumn 1886: “What a sensation of freedom it is to feel, as we freed spirits feel, that we are not harnessed up to a system of ‘ends’! Likewise, that the concepts of ‘reward’ and ‘punishment’ do not have their seat in the nature of existence! Likewise, that the good or evil action is to be called good or evil not in itself but only from the

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“People are familiar with my call for the philosopher to place himself beyond good and evil – to have the illusion of moral judgment beneath him. This call results from an insight which I was the first to formulate: that there are no moral facts at all.257 Moral judgment has this in common with religious judgment, that it believes in realities which do not exist. Morality is merely an interpretation of certain phenomena, more precisely a misinterpretation. Moral judgment pertains, like religious judgment, to a level of ignorance on which the very concept of the real, the distinction between the real and the imaginary, is still lacking: so that ‘truth’, on such a level, designates nothing but what we nowadays call ‘illusions’. In this respect moral judgment should never be taken literally: as such it is only ever an absurdity.” (TI, The ‘Improvers’ of Humanity, 1)258

In this passage, Nietzsche seems to deny the existence of a moral truth and to hold a position that in contemporary metaethics would be defined as anti-realist. There are no moral facts (or phenomena), as well as no moral properties. In Nietzsche’s nihilistic vision of the world, reality is simply amoral. To believe that there exist moral realities is the consequence of an illusion: what we have is the existence of facts or phenomena, to which a moral interpretation is added by us depending on the specific moral perspective from which we judge. According to Nietzsche, the moral character of an action has thus not been found or discovered, but rather introduced in the action by the human being. Here we face the question of the so-called Sinn hineinlegen, i.e. the “introduction of meaning” into the world. This is Nietzsche’s aforementioned projectivism, clearly described in the following passage from section 301 of The Gay Science: “It is we, the thinking-sensing ones, who really and continually make something that is not yet there: the whole perpetually growing world of valuations, colours, perspective of what favours self-preservation among particular kinds of human community!”; PF 10[154], autumn 1887: “My intention: to show the absolute homogeneity in all that happens and the application of the moral distinction as only perspectivally conditioned.” On Nietzsche’s moral perspectivism, see Gori and Stellino (2014). 257 See BGE, 108: “There are absolutely no moral phenomena, only a moral interpretation of the phenomena…” 258 This passage is often quoted in order to support a reading of Nietzsche as a proto-error theorist. On this, see Pigden (2007) and Hussain (2007 and 2013). 

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weights, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations. This poem that we have invented is constantly internalized, drilled, translated into flesh and reality, indeed, into the commonplace, by the so-called practical human beings (our actors). Whatever has value in the present world has it not in itself, according to its nature – nature is always value-less – but has rather been given, granted value, and we were the givers and granters! Only we have created the world that concerns human beings! But precisely this knowledge we lack, and when we catch it for a moment we have forgotten in the next.”259

Human beings have always searched for the meaning of the world or for a meaning in the world. This is a quixotic goal, for at least two reasons: first, the world is meaningless in itself and, second, human beings themselves gave the only meaning the world has. This creation of meaning (including moral meaning) proves to be, however, essential for the preservation of human life. As Zarathustra puts it: “Humans first placed values into things, in order to preserve themselves – they first created meaning for things, a human meaning! […] Esteeming [Schätzen] is creating [Schaffen] […] Only through esteeming is there value, and without esteeming the nut of existence would be hollow.” (Z I, On a Thousand and One Goals) We could summarize the moral conception that emerges so far, in the following four points: (1) According to Nietzsche, the world is in itself morally valueless and meaningless (moral nihilism); (2) Human beings create a moral value and meaning, and project or, to use Nietzsche’s word, introduce it into the world (moral projectivism). X (be it a fact or a property) is thus taken to be morally good or bad, depending on the specific perspective from which one judges (moral perspectivism); (3) Human beings forget about their projection/creation and take x to be morally good or bad in itself (mistaken moral realism); (4) The belief that x is morally good or bad in itself is denounced as

259 See PF 2[149], autumn 1885-autumn 1886: “A ‘thing-in-itself’ just as wrongheaded as a ‘meaning-in-itself’, a ‘significance-in-itself’. There is no ‘fact-initself ’; instead, for there to be a fact, a meaning must always first be projected [hineingelegt] in.”

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the consequence of an illusion (proto error-theory?).260 In reality, x is in itself morally neutral.261 What are the practical consequences following from this picture? One could argue that Nietzsche’s claim about the perspectival character of morality inevitably commits him to a kind of strong relativism, according to which every evaluative perspective is equally valid and justified. In this sense, Nietzsche could be understood as defending a sort of moral indifferentism very similar to that of Ivan Karamazov. Supporters of this reading face a considerable problem: they need to explain why Nietzsche felt so urgently the need to determine an order of rank (Rangordnung) among values, if he thought that every evaluative perspective was equally valid and justified. Why, then, consider the solution of the “problem of values” and the determination of “the rank order of values” as “the future work of the philosopher”? (GM, I, 17)262 Far from being a strong relativist or a moral indifferentist, Nietzsche understood his late philosophical project of transvaluation of values as 260 The error theory combines an ontological thesis (anti-realism) with a semantic thesis (cognitivism). Whereas there seems to be a certain general consensus about Nietzsche’s anti-realism, it is not clear whether we should interpret him as a cognitivist or an anti-cognitivist. According to Leiter (2000: 278 and 2002: 137), there are simply no adequate grounds for ascribing Nietzsche a view on such matters. 261 I have developed the analysis of Nietzsche’s metaethical position at more length in Stellino 2015a. 262 The late Nachlass bears abundant testimony to the fact that Nietzsche sought to establish a rank order among, not only values and valuations, but also men, individuals, types, affects, drives, forces, goods, types of life, societies, and cultures. As Richardson (2004: 68) points out, Nietzsche’s attempt to establish a rank order generates an interpretive puzzle about Nietzsche’s metaethics: how do we reconcile Nietzsche’s “emphatic ‘perspectivizing’ of all values, including his own, with his equally vehement ‘ranking’ of values – a ranking that so clearly purports to some privileged status”? Another way to put the problem is the following: how do we reconcile the metaethics of the values Nietzsche criticizes and the metaethics of the values he defends? As Robertson (2009: 67) puts it, “If Nietzsche denies the objectivity of value upon which morality’s claim to authority rests, he thereby deprives his own positive values of a legitimate claim to objectivity and authority; in that case, the values constitutive of his own positive evaluative outlook are no more objectively justified than or superior to those he rejects; there may then be no objective justification for the claim that we should alter our evaluative commitments or pursue the revaluation through to completion.” I have partly addressed this problem in Stellino 2015a. 

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a countermovement to nihilism. His moral perspectivism, as Nietzsche conceived it, did not lead to a kind of nihilistic position, according to which the fact that there was no moral truth meant that every evaluative perspective (even the Christian one) was equally legitimate or desirable. On the contrary, given the normative and axiological void left by the death of God and the collapse of the Christian-moral interpretation of the world, it was all the more urgent to propose a new set of values by which to orientate human lives; this was precisely the project Nietzsche undertook in his late works. If we accept Nehamas’s (1985: 201) wide definition of morality as “a system of rules and values according to which life is lived”, then it is difficult to defend the hypothesis that Nietzsche is rejecting all morality; the aim of his transvaluation is precisely to provide a new set of values. The problem here is evidently how we define and understand the concept of “morality”. Indeed, as Clark (1994: 16) has pointed out, if “one counts any set of rules or prohibitions as a ‘morality’, Nietzsche is certainly not claiming to reject all morality.” But this is precisely where the main difference between Nietzsche and Ivan Karamazov lies. By asserting that if there is no God and no immortality of the soul, then everything is permitted, the latter rejects any set of rules or prohibitions and justifies any kind of amoral behaviour. Nietzsche, on the contrary, was well aware that nihilism – in both its fanatical and extreme form (“everything is permitted”) or in its passive and Buddhist form (“nothing matters anymore”) – could be overcome only by means of a new interpretation of the world, a new goal for humanity, and a new evaluative perspective.263 As already mentioned, this evaluative perspective, with its special rights to higher men and its conception of the lower class as “substructure and framework for raising an exceptional type of being” (BGE, 258), certainly could appear cruel and pitiless today. Nevertheless, although cruel and pitiless, this perspective contains a clear normative component, which rests on specific values, virtues, and unwritten laws of conduct such as “resourcefulness in consideration, self-control, delicacy, loyalty, pride and friendship” inter pares. (GM, 263 As Kaulbach (1980: 71) and Gerhardt (1989: 268) point out, perspectives function for us as “sinnorientierend”, that is, they give us a meaning according to which we not only interpret and understand the world, but also act and live.

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I, 11)264 Nietzsche’s immoralism can therefore be conflated with a raw amoralism only by means of a superficial and misleading interpretation of his words. Certainly, one could still object that, although Nietzsche is not a supporter of the thesis “everything is permitted”, he still thinks that to the overman or the higher man “everything is permitted” when it comes to the lower class. In other words, the rejection of the identification of Nietzsche’s immoralism with a raw amoralism à la Karamazov does not imply the rejection of the identification of Nietzsche’s immoralism with a double standard morality for superior beings à la Raskolnikov according to which the superior being, while being bound to honour his peers, is allowed to behave amorally when it comes to an inferior being. Indeed, as we have already seen, this seems to be precisely the same kind of morality which Nietzsche defends in the ninth part of Beyond Good and Evil and baptizes with the name of “morality of dominating types.” (BGE, 260) As mentioned, however, when trying to maintain the analogy between Raskolnikov and Nietzsche, we face some difficulties. It is certainly possible to find several similarities between Raskolnikov’s theory of the extraordinary man and Nietzsche’s philosophy. However, under deeper scrutiny some of these similarities appear to be superficial or even deceptive. More importantly, for what concerns the specific analogy between Raskolnikov’s and Nietzsche’s moral position, the main problem that we have to deal with is an asymmetry in the definition of moral boundaries. As shown, Raskolnikov clearly sanctions, under certain conditions, a right to crime as well as a right to kill for extraordinary men. These men are morally allowed to shed blood, to step over blood for the sake of their ideas: to them, everything is permitted. In section 260 of Beyond 264 As Gerhardt (2011: 218) has pointed out, in Nietzsche, and especially in his alter ego Zarathustra, it is possible to find several elements of a doctrine of virtues (Tugendlehre) for free spirits. Nietzsche was well aware of the moral origin of these virtues, as the following passages clearly show: “My assertion: that one must subject moral valuations themselves to a critique. That one must curb the impulse of moral feeling with the question ‘Why?’ That this insistence on a ‘Why?’, on a critique of morality, is itself our present form of morality, as a sublime sense of honesty.” (PF 2[191], autumn 1885-autumn 1886); “What is the search for truth, truthfulness, honesty, if not something moral?” (PF 35[5], May-July 1885). See also PF 25 [447], spring 1884. 

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Good and Evil Nietzsche also shows superior beings as endowed with the right to act as their heart desires and beyond good and evil when it comes to creatures of a lower rank. However, in what does this right precisely consist? Are superior beings allowed to shed and to step over the blood of inferior beings, freely disposing of their lives? Does Nietzsche really think that to them, everything is permitted? Here we have a problem of inadequately defined moral boundaries; for Nietzsche seems not to clarify where the boundaries of what is and what is not morally permissible to people of the superior rank exactly lie. Given such ambiguity, the answers to these questions will largely depend on how we interpret the passages in which Nietzsche ascribes privileged rights to superior individuals. What is beyond doubt is that Nietzsche’s aim is not that of sanctioning amorality for its own sake, nor that of seeking a moral justification for unlawful behaviour. On the contrary, Nietzsche’s preoccupation with the establishment of a hierarchy of higher and lower men is strictly tied to his fight against the decadence of modern man and to his concern for the enhancement and self-overcoming of the type “man”, which he conceives as one of the most important goals for future generations. Only within this context can we fully understand (even if we do not share it) Nietzsche’s condemnation of members of the lower class to mere slaves and tools, whose sole function is to serve as a substructure and framework for the raising of an exceptional type of being.

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4. Conclusive Remarks: Rethinking the Relation between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky

Nietzsche and Dostoevsky can be numbered among the greatest thinkers of nineteenth century Europe. Their ability to grasp all the complexity of the human soul, to understand the social and cultural phenomena of their time and to reflect on philosophical and religious problems was unique. It is no coincidence that their paths crossed. A spiritual affinity linked them, although their views on religion and morality radically diverged. This divergence precisely led several interpreters to understand the relation between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky as strong and radical opposition. The philosopher and the novelist offered two completely different viewpoints on the world: the first, atheist and immoral; the second, Christian and moral. These points of view could not be reconciled: Nietzsche’s philosophy was the very expression of Westernized ideas, while Dostoevsky was the bulwark of Russian orthodoxy. The first Russian interpreters understood Nietzsche’s thought in connection with the nihilistic ideas incarnated in the characters of Dostoevsky’s great novels. Raskolnikov, Kirillov and Ivan Karamazov, in particular, were recognized as forerunners of Nietzsche’s philosophy. In this way, to the extent that Dostoevsky had shown the disastrous results of their nihilistic theorizations, his novels were at the same time understood as providing a critique ante litteram of Nietzsche’s thought. This reading became so predominant, that a great number of Western European thinkers accepted it without further questioning. As shown, even if plausible in certain aspects, these comparisons were usually the consequence of a reductive and simplified, when not even unfaithful and misleading reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Above all, these readings were problematic because they tended to look at Nietzsche’s ideas through the screen of Dostoevsky’s critique of contemporary Russian nihilism. By so doing, however, they frequently presented a distorted or prejudicial conception of Nietzsche’s philosophy.



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In the case of the comparison between Ivan Karamazov and Nietzsche, for instance, interpreters have been too easily inclined to take Nietzsche’s moral perspectivism and immoralism as a kind of moral indifferentism à la Karamazov. This kind of reading was clearly encouraged by the apparent similarity between Ivan’s idea (if there is no God and no immortality of the soul, then everything is permitted) and the saying “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” which appears in the fourth part of Zarathustra and in the third treatise of the Genealogy. As we have seen, however, this similarity is deceptive for several reasons. First, in the oeuvre, Nietzsche never affirms the maxim directly. Secondly, the posthumous fragments reveal an ambivalent attitude towards the maxim: on the one hand, Nietzsche seems to link the maxim to the experimental character of his philosophy, while on the other hand, he interprets the maxim as a sign of disorientation and confusion or takes it as a symbol of radical fanaticism. Moreover, he also points out its paradoxical character. Third, even in those cases in which Nietzsche seems to show a sympathetic attitude towards the maxim, we should be careful in interpreting this attitude as the expression of a “complete lack of obligation” and “an invitation to individual caprice, sophistry, and criminality”, as Jaspers (1997 [1936]: 227) already pointed out several years ago. As shown, it would be an error to conflate Nietzsche’s moral position either with a raw amoralism or with a kind of strong relativism according to which, there being no moral truth, every evaluative perspective and, therefore, all kinds of (moral or amoral) behaviour is equally valid and justified. The following passage from Daybreak is, in this sense, very revealing: “It goes without saying that I do not deny – unless I am a fool – that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged – but I think the one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto. We have to learn to think differently – in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently.” (D, 103)

To learn to think and feel differently means for Nietzsche, above all, to free oneself from the several errors and prejudices fostered by the platonic and Christian tradition: from the existence of a free will to all 226 

those concepts, such as “moral responsibility”, “guilt”, and “sin”, which Nietzsche criticizes in the Genealogy as “paradoxical and paralogical.” (GM, III, 16) What derives from the refutation of these concepts is, however, not a lack of (both individual and collective) normative or prescriptive laws. The unavoidable normative and axiological void, which follows from the death of God and the collapse of the Christian-moral interpretation of the world, is far from being Nietzsche’s desired state or goal. On the contrary, particularly through the voice of his alter-ego Zarathustra, Nietzsche encourages humanity not only to create new values and set new goals (in a word, to self-determine), but also, and most importantly, to assume responsibility for this choice. This is a key point, which Heidegger (2002 [1943]: 189) did not fail to notice, as the following passage clearly shows: “It is easy but irresponsible to be outraged by the idea and the figure of the overman, which was designed to be misunderstood; it is easy but irresponsible to pretend that one’s outrage is a refutation. It is difficult but for future thinking unavoidable to attain the high responsibility [hohe Verantwortung; my italics] out of which Nietzsche reflected on the essence of that humanity destined […] to undertake mastery over the earth. The essence of the overman is not a warrant for a fit of capricious frenzy. It is the law, grounded in being itself, of a long chain of the highest selfovercomings.”

As one can see, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky gave two different answer to the question of whether, if God does not exist, everything is permitted. Dostoevsky clearly thought that God’s existence and the immortality of the soul were two essential pillars of the moral edifice. Without them, what we have is a dangerous slope that leads from atheism to self-deification, and to self-deification to the breaking of all moral rules. Certainly, one could object with Feuerbach that the foundation of morality on theology does not constitute per se a guarantee of moral behaviour.265 As a matter of fact, immoral deeds could be also justified in the name 265 See Feuerbach (2008, p. 274): “Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever the right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established. I can found morality on theology only when I myself have already defined the Divine Being by means of morality. In the contrary case, I have no criterion of the moral and immoral, but merely an unmoral, arbitrary basis, from which I may deduce anything I please”. Compare this passage with the well-known Euthyphro Dilemma: “Is the pious loved by the 

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of God, and there is little doubt that we could easily find several historical examples to support Feuerbach’s argument – from the Spanish Inquisition and the colonization of the Americas, to the all too contemporary religious wars. However, the problem remains. For, if God does not exist, how will we determine the boundaries of moral permissibility and human freedom? How will we avoid the risk of arbitrariness and amorality? In his well-known work Existentialism Is a Humanism, JeanPaul Sartre considers Dostoevsky’s belief that if God does not exists, everything is permitted, as the starting point of existentialism. According to Sartre (2007 [1946]: 29), strictly speaking, “everything is permissible if God does not exist, and man is consequently abandoned, for he cannot find anything to rely on – neither within not without.” Thus, “man is free, man is freedom.” (ibid.) As we have already seen, theoretically, this freedom is boundless and unlimited. It is, therefore, no surprise that Kirillov defines it as fearsome, nor that Zarathustra’s shadow perceives it as a tragic burden, being willing to exchange it for safety and security. This new freedom, however, must not be thought necessarily in negative terms. Sartre himself writes that “man is condemned to be free” (ibid.), but he also conceives freedom “as the foundation of all values.” (ibid.: 48) This ambivalence is also distinctive of Nietzsche’s philosophy. For, the new freedom deriving from the death of God can cause disorientation and distress (GS, 125), but it can be also perceived metaphorically as a “new dawn.” (GS, 343) This change of attitude from the third (1882) to the fifth book (1887) of The Gay Science (in between there is the writing of Zarathustra) bears testimony that freedom is for the late Nietzsche, above all, “positive, creative freedom”, as Jaspers (1997 [1936]: 156) puts it. Man is, therefore, in the position to overcome nihilism though the creation of new values and by setting new, higher goals to humanity. We can thus say that for Nietzsche the dichotomy “either God or amorality” is a false dichotomy. Aware that, to put it with Kant (1998 [1786]: 12), “without any law, nothing – not even nonsense – can play its game for long”, Nietzsche is far from being a supporter of the thesis “everything is permitted”, at least when this thesis is understood as an gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” (Plato, Euthyphro 10a)

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absolute lack of laws and values. On the contrary, Nietzsche shows a clear preference for an aristocratic model of society, in which to a ruling group, there corresponds a specific morality, what Nietzsche calls a “master morality” or “morality of dominating types”. This morality is composed of certain privileges and unspecified “special” rights, but also of virtues of moral origin and unwritten laws of conduct. Still, one could object that Nietzsche’s double-standard morality for superior beings allows for higher men’s amoral behaviour towards members of the lower class. In this sense, to superior beings, everything would be permitted when it comes to an inferior being. As we have seen, however, this reading is problematic, first and foremost because of the difficulty of clarifying where the boundaries of moral permissibility exactly lie for superior beings. Much depends, therefore, on how we interpret the passages in which Nietzsche ascribes privileged rights to superior individuals. In any case, what we should avoid is the temptation to read these passages through the distorting prism of the later appropriation of Nietzsche’s thought by twentieth Century Fascism and Nazism, failing, for instance, to set the same passages in the wider context of Nietzsche’s diagnosis and critique of the decadence of modern man, culture, and society. To do justice to Nietzsche’s thought does not mean, on the other hand, to hide the harshness and crudeness of some of his formulations. Seen from this perspective, one can hardly imagine a bigger opposition than that between Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power, in which there is no room for pity and compassion, and Dostoevsky’s Christian philosophia cordis, the philosophy of the heart, which, as Cherkasova (2009: 11) puts it, “acknowledges the primary role of the heart in moral conduct, expresses skepticism concerning the moral worth of speculative reason, and passionately searches for the harmonious communion of human hearts flourishing in love.” As already mentioned, throughout the decades the divergence between these two perspectives has led most of the commentators to understand the relation between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky as a radically irreconcilable opposition. This excessive emphasis on the divergent aspects of Nietzsche’s and Dostoevsky’s worldviews has, however, overshadowed the many similarities and affinities that can be found between them (and that Nietzsche himself partly sensed after his reading of L’esprit souterrain): from their ability 

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to dig and descend into the depths of the human soul, to their sceptic attitude towards the possibility of human self-knowledge; from their acute analysis and diagnosis of nineteenth century nihilism, to their critique of socialism, which, in their opinion, aimed to the annihilation of the human being’s individuality; from the many prophetic aspects of their writings to the vast influence they exercised over the generations succeeding them. Even with regard to the main philosophical question that constitutes the focus of the second part of this book (namely, if there is no God, is everything permitted?) the answers given by Nietzsche and Dostoevsky must not necessarily be thought of as irreconcilable. We are not forced to side either with the atheist Nietzsche or with the Christian Dostoevsky. There is no aut-aut. On the contrary, Nietzsche’s and Dostoevsky’s teachings can be more fruitful if understood as complementary. Indeed, on the one hand, Nietzsche’s philosophy shows that the affirmation of the non-existence of God does not lead per se to an absolute lack of moral laws and values: the normative and axiological void deriving from the death of God and the collapse of the Christian-moral interpretation of the world can be filled with a transvaluation of values. The old values can and must be replaced with new ones, and for these, a new foundation should be provided. On the other hand, Dostoevsky warn us about the disastrous consequences that inevitably arise when we allow higher men privileged rights or when we lose contact with the “living life” and unlearn to feel pity and sorrow for our neighbours.266 In this sense, any attempt to handle the new fearsome freedom opened up by the death of God may only succeed if we never forget Dostoevsky’s warning which, after a century and a half, still needs to be heeded.

266 The concept of “living life” (zhivaya zhizn’), so central in Notes from Underground, is a key theme in Dostoevsky’s thought. Its importance is patent in Dostoevsky’s claim that no society can live and no land can endure without “the so-called living force, the vital sense of existence.” (WD, May 1876: 496)

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Name Index

Alcibiades 197 Améry, J. 51 Andler, C. 17, 68, 76, 107, 136, 141 Apollo 40, 41 Ariosto, L. 94 Bakhtin, M. 158 Bakunin, M. 124 Balke, F. 60 Baudelaire, C. 90–92, 133 Belinsky, V. 29, 30, 57, 119 Benne, C. 87 Benz, E. 17, 76, 107 Berdyaev, N. 17, 147, 204 Birnbacher, D. 163 Bleibtreu, K. 99, 100 Borgia, C. 197 Boscovich, R. J. 23 Bourdeau, J. 80 Bourget, P. 25, 79, 90–92, 94, 104, 105 Brandes, G. 16, 55, 94, 96, 134–136, 141 Brobjer, T. 97 Brunetière, F. 92 Brusotti, M. 179 Buddha 52 Burckhardt, J. 87 Byron (Lord) 99, 100 Caesar 197, 199 Campioni, G. 79, 80, 90, 103, 111, 113, 126, 128, 134 Camus, A. 145, 149, 150, 159, 162, 204 

Catteau, J. 102 Chamfort, S.-R. N. 42 Cherkasova, E. 216, 229 Chernyshevsky, N. 50, 92 Cicero, M. T. 124 Clark, M. 222 Colli, G. 11, 85–87, 119 Conill, J. 196 Copernicus, N. 124 D’Épinay, L. 103 Dante, A. 153 Danto, A. 169 De Lubac, H. 17, 148, 189 De Maupassant, G. 94 De Schloezer, B. 78, 87, 100 De Vigny, A. 133 De Vogüé, E.-M. 15, 58, 78–81, 100, 106, 107, 113, 135, 139 Dellinger, J. 89, 90 Derély, V. 81, 100, 107, 119 Dibelius, M. 107, 114, 116 Dickens, C. 68 Diderot, D. 102 Diethe, C. 95 Dostoevskaya, A. 81 Dostoevsky, M. 59 Dudkin, V. 142 Dühring, E. 51 Ebersbach, V. 17, 101, 108, 113, 151, 204 Esquirol, J.-E. D. 126 Evdokimov, P. 204

243

Féré, C. 111–113 Feuerbach, L. 122, 204, 209, 211, 212, 227, 228 Finn, E. 55, 94 Fino, D. 101 Fischer, S. 107 Flaubert, G. 133 France, A. 94 Francis of Assisi 114 Frank, J. 29, 30, 34, 35, 55, 68, 69, 71, 72, 120, 122, 153, 155, 163, 165, 193, 207, 210 Frederick II (Hohenstaufen) 197 Fritzsch, E. W. 76, 84, 86, 87, 89 Fromentin, E. 80 Gaboriau, E. 100 Galiani, F. (Abbot) 103 Garelli, G. 90 Gast, P. (H. Köselitz) 23, 24, 37, 51, 58, 67, 74–78, 83, 84, 86, 89, 93, 94, 97, 101, 105, 106, 133, 139 Gautier, T. 133 Gavarni, P. 133 Georget, E.-J. 126 Gerhardt, V. 222, 223 Gesemann, W. 17, 68, 76, 104, 107, 137, 138 Gide, A. 17, 148, 204 Ginisty, P. 78, 105, 106 Girard, R. 51 Givone, S. 151 Glenn, P. F. 198 Goethe, J. W. 153, 197 Gogol, N. 57, 81 Goldschmidt, W. 93, 94, 96, 97, 139 Goncourt, E. and J. 133, 137 Goncharov, I. 81

244 

Gori, P. 179, 219 Grillaert, N. 16, 145, 146 Grossman, L. 30 Grot, N. 145 Guardini, R. 204 Hahn, K.-H. 141 Halévy, D. 50 Halpérine, E. 26, 37, 53 Heidegger, M. 213, 227 Heine, H. 141 Henkel, W. 97, 100 Herzen, A. 77, 119 Herzen, N. 77, 96 Herzen, O. 77 Hoffmann, D. M. 101 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 29 Hofmiller, J. 109 Hugo, V. 68, 102 Hume, D. 182 Hussain, N. J. Z. 219 Jackson, R. L. 194 Janz, C. P. 102, 142 Jaspers, K. 169, 175, 226, 228 Jesus of Nazareth 16, 54, 55, 107–117, 127, 140, 146, 147, 149, 154, 164, 205–208 Kant, I. 197, 215, 228 Katsafanas, P. 40 Kaufmann, W. 48, 63, 103, 104, 198, 200 Kaulbach, F. 222 Keller, G. 87 Kepler, J. 191 Kracauer, S. 17, 147 Kraevsky, A. 29 Kuhn, E. 79, 90, 92, 169, 174, 182 Kutuzov, M. 15

Ivanov, I. 124 La Rochefoucauld, F. 42 Lange, F. A. 169, 174 Lanzky, P. 87 Lavrin, J. 77, 149 Le Roux, H. 105, 106 Leiter, B. 221 Lemaitre, J. 105, 106 Leonardo (da Vinci) 197 Leopardi, G. 133 Lermontov, M. 111, 119 Levi, P. 57 Levinas, E. 157 Littré, E. 126 Llinares, J. B. 17, 31, 32, 35, 94, 146 Lohberger, H. 95 Loti, P. 94 Lunin, M. 120 Lupo, L. 40 Lvovna, M. 81 Lycurgus 191 Maikov, A. 107 Mainländer, P. 133 Mann, T. 17, 76 Maréchal, H. 105 Marlinsky (A. Bestuzhev) 29 Martinsen, D. A. 165 Mary of Magdala 110 Mejía, J. M. 131 Merezhkovsky, D. 16, 146, 147, 204 Mérimée, P. 92 Meyer, T. 52, 132, 137 Miller, C. A. 17, 24, 25, 31, 33, 35, 37, 76–78, 84, 85, 89, 108, 110, 111, 115, 122, 142, 204, 207, 208, 210 

Milton, J. 153 Mochulsky, K. 68, 69, 71, 204 Montaigne, M. 42 Montinari, M. 11, 85–87, 119, 141 Mori, A. 80, 106 Morice, C. 26, 37, 53 Morillas, A. and J. 18, 108, 111, 112, 135 Morson, G. S. 39 Muhammad 191 Müller-Buck, R. 17, 40, 41, 49, 50, 63, 76, 97, 104–106, 142 Murphy, T. 114, 116 Napoleon (Bonaparte) 15, 191, 193, 194, 196–201 Naumann, C. G. 76 Nechaev, S. 124 Nehamas, A. 222 Nekrasov, N. 102, 103 Newton, I. 191 Neyroud, M. 57, 58 Nicholas I (the czar) 57 Niemayer, C. 169 Nietzsche, E. 77, 87, 95, 101, 142 Nietzsche, F. 31, 87, 111 Orsucci, A. 50, 63 Overbeck, F. 23–25, 31, 37, 38, 67, 75, 79, 87, 89, 99, 101, 108 Ovid 170, 175, 179 Pacini, G. 17, 108, 114, 204 Pareyson, L. 138, 158 Pascal, B. 42, 133 Pascal, P. 30 Pavia, U. 101 Petrashevsky, M. 57

245

Pfeuffer, S. 17, 49, 157 Piazzesi, C. 54 Pigden, C. R. 219 Pippin, R. 41 Plato 174, 228 Poljakova, E. 18, 31, 52, 55, 152, 166 Pushkin, A. 119 Quetelet, A. 126 Racine, J. 15 Raphael (Sanzio) 116 Rée, P. 77 Reginster, B. 187 Renan, E. 49, 108, 109, 112, 133 Richardson, J. 221 Ries, W. 54 Rilke, R. M. 77 Robertson, S. 221 Rodhe, E. 84, 87 Sainte-Beuve, C.-A. 133 Salomé, L. 77, 81 Santos Sena, A. D. 17, 108, 114, 115 Sartre, J.-P. 228 Scanlan, J. 50, 161, 215 Schaeffner, A. 77, 78, 83, 84, 87 Scheler, M. 51, 53 Schérer, E. H. A. 133 Schlimgen, E. 40 Scholz, A. 107 Schopenhauer, A. 23, 24, 84, 131–133, 139 Schubart, W. 17, 147, 204 Scott, W. 99 Seume, J. G. 30 Shakespeare, W. 100, 104, 124, 141, 153, 197

246 

Shapiro, G. 108 Shestov, L. 146 Socrates 180 Solon 191 Solovyev, V. 145 Solzhenitsyn, A. 57 Sommer, A. U. 49, 108–112, 116, 128 Souladié, Y. 17, 109, 127 Soulié, F. 68 Spinoza, B. 24, 52 Stegmaier, W. 47, 170, 188 Stein, W. 97 Stellino, P. 40, 51, 58, 111, 114, 172, 179, 202, 218, 219, 221 Stenberg, D. G. 85, 87 Stendhal 23–25, 60, 80, 139, 141 Stifter, A. 67 Stirner, M. 211 Strecker, K. 97 Strindberg, A. 97 Sue, E. 68 Taine, H. 23, 80, 87, 104, 105, 133 Teitelbaum, S. M. 26 Terras, V. 29, 30 Thiele, L. P. 54 Tolstoy, L. 15, 16, 49, 52, 79, 81, 104, 108, 131–133, 145, 146 Turgenev, I. 50, 79, 81, 90–92, 96, 104, 119, 133, 134 Van der Luft, E. 85, 87 Verrecchia, A. 100–102 Vivarelli, V. 84 Voltaire 15 Von Balthasar, H. U. 17 Von Hammer, J. 169 Von Meysenbug, M. 76, 77, 95

Von Salis-Marschlins, M. 67, 113 Von Schirnhofer, R. 95–97 Von Seydlitz, R. 51, 87, 102, 103 Vyleta, D. M. 126

Wicks, R. 172 Widmann, J. V. 75, 76 Wotling, P. 41, 197, 202 Wyman, A. 53, 54

Wagner, R. 30, 132, 133, 137 Wellhausen, J. 128

Zola, E. 80, 97, 99, 133, 137



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LISBON PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES uses of language in interdisciplinary fields A Pub lic ation from th e Inst it ut e o f Philo s o phy o f L a nguag e at t h e N e w U n i v e r s i t y o f Li s b o n

Lisbon Philosophical Studies – Uses of Language in Interdisciplinary Fields i s t h e b o o k seri es of the In stitute o f Philo s o phy o f L a ngua ge a t t he N e w U n i v e r s i t y o f Li s b o n . It s aim is th e pu blic at io n o f high- qua lit y m o no gra phs, e d i t e d c o l l e c t i o n s an d c o n f e r e n c e pr oceed in gs in areas r e la t e d t o t he philo so phy o f la nguag e, s u c h as ae s t h e t i c s, a rgumentation th eory, e pist e m o lo gy, e t hics, lo gic, philo s o p h y o f m i n d an d p o l i t i c al phi losoph y. The p urp o se o f t he se r ie s is t o r e fle ct t he a c t i v i t i e s o f t h e I n s t i t u t e as we l l a s c ontemporary rese a r ch in t he se a r e a s, e nco ura ging t h e i n t e r c h an g e o f ar g u m e n t s a nd ideas between p hilo s o phy a nd o t he r discipline s. Add ress for Correspo nde nce : Institu to de Filosofia da L ingua ge m Faculdad e de Ciênc ias S o cia is e Hum a na s U ni versid ade Nova d e L is bo a Av. de Berna, 26- C 1069- 061 L isb oa Portug al w w w.ifl.pt

Vol. 1

António Marques & Nuno Venturinha (eds) Wittgenstein on Forms of Life and the Nature of Experience. 2010. ISBN 978-3-0343-0491-7.

Vol.

2 Luca Baptista & Erich Rast (eds) Meaning and Context. 2010. ISBN 978-3-0343-0574-7.

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3 Maria Filomena Molder, Diana Soeiro and Nuno Fonseca (eds) Morphology. Questions on Method and Language. 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-1376-6.

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6 Paolo Stellino Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. On the Verge of Nihilism. 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-1670-5.

The first time that Nietzsche crossed the path of Dostoevsky was in the winter of 1886–87. While in Nice, Nietzsche discovered in a bookshop the volume L’esprit souterrain. Two years later, he defined Dostoevsky as the only psychologist from whom he had anything to learn. The second, metaphorical encounter between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky happened on the verge of nihilism. Nietzsche announced the death of God, whereas Dostoevsky warned against the danger of atheism. This book describes the double encounter between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. Following the chronological thread offered by Nietzsche’s correspondence, the author provides a detailed analysis of Nietzsche’s engagement with Dostoevsky from the very beginning of his discovery to the last days before his mental breakdown. The second part of this book aims to dismiss the wide-spread and stereotypical reading according to which Dostoevsky foretold and criticized in his major novels some of Nietzsche’s most dangerous and nihilistic theories. In order to reject such reading, the author focuses on the following moral dilemma: If God does not exist, is everything permitted? Paolo Stellino is a postdoctoral fellow at the Nova Institute of Philosophy (IFILNOVA), New University of Lisbon. He is a member of the Nietzsche International Lab (NIL). His publications mainly focus on Nietzsche’s philosophy. On this topic, he has co-edited two books and published several articles in international journals.