The Modern Abyss: Dostoevsky and Nietzsche Confronting the Death of God
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| Dostoyevski and Nietzsche in the style of Chagall. AI image |
Introduction
The crisis of nineteenth-century Europe was not merely political or scientific; it was, above all, spiritual. The erosion of Christian faith, the transformation of moral values, and the emergence of a radically historical consciousness confronted modern thought with an unsettling question: how is one to live when God no longer guarantees meaning?
Within this horizon emerge two central figures, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche, often read side by side and frequently linked through the notion of a supposed direct influence. Yet what binds them is not a relation of dependence but a deeper affinity: a shared confrontation with nihilism and with the responsibility that arises once life must be lived without transcendent foundations. The decisive difference between them lies in how they respond to this condition. While Dostoevsky exposes nihilism as a lived, painful experience without a predetermined exit, Nietzsche attempts to think figures of overcoming, fully aware of the risk involved in taking existence into one’s own hands. As Nietzsche himself writes, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how” (Nietzsche, 2009, p. 74). The existential question thus moves to the center: this is not merely a diagnosis, but a demand to assume responsibility for living.
Dostoevsky and Nihilism as Lived Experience
Notes from Underground occupies a singular place in Dostoevsky’s work. The text recounts neither a fall nor a redemption, but a consciousness trapped within its own lucidity. The narrator understands the mechanisms of morality, progress, and modern rationality, yet this understanding produces no liberation; on the contrary, it paralyzes him.
The claim that “an excessively clear consciousness is a disease” (Dostoevsky, 2009, p. 23) does not function as a clever paradox but as an existential diagnosis. Reflection does not lead to action, but to resentment, self-destruction, and withdrawal. The underground man does not ignore the good; he is simply incapable of desiring it without negating himself.
What is decisive is that Dostoevsky offers no alternative. There is no ethical program, no exemplary human type capable of compensating for the diagnosis. The text functions as a negative experiment: when consciousness is pushed to its limit, when all rational and moral illusions are dismantled, what remains is not freedom but corrosive immobility. Nihilism appears here not as a thesis but as an experience. As Safranski observes, “Dostoevsky places the reader before the abyss without offering ropes of salvation” (Safranski, 2002, p. 98).
Nietzsche: From Diagnosis to the Attempt at Overcoming
Nietzsche shares the underlying diagnosis: the collapse of traditional values and the impossibility of continuing to live within the coordinates of Christianity. The famous proclamation of the death of God is not a rhetorical flourish but the formulation of a cultural catastrophe. Yet where Dostoevsky halts at exposure, Nietzsche advances toward conceptual elaboration.
Nietzsche understands nihilism as an inevitable historical phase, but not as a final destination. He distinguishes between a passive form, dominated by exhaustion and resignation, and an active form in which the destruction of exhausted values opens—without guarantees—the possibility of a revaluation. From this emerge figures such as the free spirit or the overman, not as normative ideals, but as experimental gestures of affirmation.
This wager is condensed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: to live without transcendent foundations requires a radical revaluation. Life is no longer justified by reference to a beyond, but by its own force. Nietzsche offers no assurances, but he does offer orientation: transforming emptiness into creative power. As he famously writes, “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star” (Nietzsche, 2009, p. 110). This sentence functions as a punch line sharply opposed to the stagnation of the underground: where Dostoevsky shows paralysis, Nietzsche rehearses affirmation.
Exposure Without Exit and Proposal Without Guarantee
The difference between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche is not merely thematic but formal. Dostoevsky writes novels; Nietzsche writes aphorisms, genealogies, and prophecies. This difference of genre is not accidental. The novel allows contradiction to be displayed without resolution, tension to be sustained without closure, whereas philosophy—even when fragmented—tends to open possibilities, however uncertain.
Dostoevsky distrusts universal models. Even his most luminous characters, such as Prince Myshkin or Alyosha Karamazov, do not function as exportable solutions. They are fragile figures, exposed to failure, incapable of imposing themselves as norms. Dostoevsky does not prescribe how to live; he forces the reader to confront what happens when no clear exit is available.
Nietzsche, by contrast, risks proposing affirmative figures. This audacity is also his vulnerability. The overman may be read as a necessary provocation or as a dangerous fiction. Yet the difference remains: Nietzsche attempts to push thought beyond diagnosis, while Dostoevsky refuses to close the wound.
Nietzsche as a Reader of Dostoevsky: Late Affinity, Not Influence
The claim of a direct influence of Dostoevsky on Nietzsche has been frequently repeated, but the evidence calls for nuance. Nietzsche read Dostoevsky late, in the 1880s, through French translations, at a point when his fundamental ideas were already in place. In a well-known letter, he referred to Dostoevsky as “the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn.”
The key word is psychologist. Nietzsche does not find in Dostoevsky a system or a doctrine, but a narrative confirmation of what he had already diagnosed philosophically. Something similar occurs in his discovery of Spinoza, whom he describes as a “kindred spirit.” This is not theoretical adoption but retrospective recognition: I am not alone.
Dostoevsky embodies in fiction what Nietzsche thinks in concepts. The underground is the lived experience of passive nihilism; The Brothers Karamazov dramatizes the fracture between reason, faith, and morality. Nietzsche recognizes in these characters the psychological truth of his own historical analysis.
Conclusion
Dostoevsky and Nietzsche do not offer the same response to nihilism, but neither do they pose different questions. One exposes without consolation; the other attempts to create without guarantees. Dostoevsky shows what happens when the absence of God is lived to the end; Nietzsche asks what might emerge from that void. Between them there is no direct line of influence, but a meaningful crossing: literature that incarnates the abyss and philosophy that seeks to traverse it.
Perhaps this is why reading them together remains so fruitful. Where Dostoevsky arrests movement in order to force us to look, Nietzsche invites us to resume the march across the abyss without promising salvation. Modern thought oscillates between these two gestures: lucidity that paralyzes and affirmation that risks. As Nietzsche writes, “Man, the so-called weakest of creatures, can endure more than he imagines” (Nietzsche, 2009, p. 95). This tension—between contemplation and action, between abyss and dancing star—continues to define the experience of living in a world without absolute certainties.
Bibliography
Dostoevsky, F. (2009). Notes from Underground (R. Pevear & L. Volokhonsky, Trans.). Vintage Classics. (Original work published 1864)
Dostoevsky, F. (2004). The Brothers Karamazov (I. Avsey, Trans.). Oxford University Press.
Nietzsche, F. (2001). The Gay Science (J. Nauckhoff & A. Del Caro, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.
Nietzsche, F. (2006). Thus Spoke Zarathustra (A. Del Caro, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.
Safranski, R. (2002). Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (S. Frisch, Trans.). W. W. Norton.
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