"The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" - A Short Story by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Stephen Alexander Beach 

(2293 Words) 

I have to say that many aspects of this plot remind me of Camus' novel, The Fall, which I have already written about. It seems to me, without getting into a comparison here, that Camus took Dostoyevsky's story, inverted the moral of the story and dressed it in new clothes. I will have to write more about this in the future, but for now enjoy the original story by Dostoyevsky. 

Part I - Gripped by Nihilism
The Dream of a Ridiculous Man is a short story about a young man who has been struck with a bout of nihilism since his childhood. His mind was, for some reason, pulled from the cares of other children to a sense that the world had no meaning to it. Not the past, not the present, and not the future. And so he became a man of pure indifference, not really letting anything bother or affect him, given this realization. And yet, others did not seem to have this enlightenment, and so to a degree he considered himself better than others since this truth had come to him. This pride was the one thing he held on to and thus would not confess his nihilistic discovery to others. 

"Perhaps it was because I was becoming terribly disheartened owing to one circumstance which was beyond my power to control, namely, the conviction which was gaining upon me that nothing in the whole world made any difference. I had long felt it dawning upon me, but I was fully convinced of it only last year, and that, too, all of a sudden, as it were. I suddenly felt that it made no difference to me whether the world existed or whether nothing existed anywhere at all. I began to be acutely conscious that nothing existed in my own lifetime. At first I couldn't help feeling that at any rate in the past many things had existed; but later on I came to the conclusion that there had not been anything even in the past, but that for some reason it had merely seemed to have been. Little by little I became convinced that there would be nothing in the future, either."

Then one day as a grown man he was at a gathering of friends on a dreary Russian night. His friends were bickering over something about engineering, a conversation to which he did not contribute in the slightest, for he did not care. He even eventually said as much to them. And this night, walking home, a star in the sky triggered in him a final realization that he should simply kill himself. He had been pondering the decision for months, and even had bought a revolver and loaded it, but in all his indifference was indifferent to when he should actually go through with it. But now it was decided in his mind. 

Just then, as he was walking, a little girl ran up to him distraught. She was crying about her mother, to which the man interpreted that the girl's mother was nearby and in need of some type of assistance. He yelled at the girl and drove her off. Continuing on to his apartment, he proceeded to light a candle and sit in his recliner with his gun on the table. But he could not stop himself from thinking ... if everything was truly meaningless and indifferent, then why had this little girl inspired in him a sense of pity and a a need to help her (though he did not). Shouldn't such feelings die in the face of his impending suicide in a few hours? 

Part II - Why Does He Care About the Girl?

Indeed, could it also not be the case that in killing his own consciousness so too would the whole world go with it? Indeed what would some moral failure mean if everything was gone? 

"It was clear to me that so long as I was still a human being and not a meaningless cipher, and till I became a cipher, I was alive, and consequently able to suffer, be angry, and feel shame at my actions. Very well. But if, on the other hand, I were going to kill myself in, say, two hours, what did that little girl matter to me and what did I care for shame or anything else in the world? I was going to turn into a cipher, into an absolute cipher. And surely the realization that I should soon cease to exist altogether, and hence everything would cease to exist, ought to have had some slight effect on my feeling of pity for the little girl or on my feeling of shame after so mean an action. Why after all did I stamp and shout so fiercely at the little girl? I did it because I thought that not only did I feel no pity, but that it wouldn't matter now if I were guilty of the most inhuman baseness, since in another two hours everything would become extinct." 

"... If I were to shoot myself, the world would cease to exist - for me at any rate. To say nothing of the possibility that nothing would in fact exist for anyone after me and the whole world would dissolve as soon as my consciousness became extinct, would disappear in a twinkling like a phantom, like some integral part of my consciousness, and vanish without leaving a trace behind, for all this world and all these people exist perhaps only in my consciousness." 

And he continues to ponder, thinking about how if he was from a civilization on Mars or the moon and had committed some unspeakable moral crime, but left and came to earth, never having to go back or speak of it again, whether or not he should be bothered by his crime. In all of this thinking he actually fell asleep, something rare as apparently he would sit up all night awake for months now. It is then that he began to dream ...

Part III - Beginning to Dream

In his dream he shot himself in the chest with the revolver. While his body died, he mind and consciousness remained in which he could still think and feel things. He was buried and there his consciousness remained in the quiet of his coffin. Water begins to drip onto his eye over and over again, and annoyed he yells out to God to stop torturing him, and even if he did torture him that he will never end his contempt. Then he is pulled out from his coffin and into the sky by some type of "dark and unknown being". This being brought him to the star that he saw in the sky that night. And yet he remained angry that he had not ceased to exist, but continued to live after his fatal shot. 

The being impressed a seriousness on the man and they continued to fly through space, leaving our galaxy behind, until they came to what seemed an exact replica of earth's sun. ... But if it was a replica, was there too another earth? But why go to another earth? Even with all its problems it was the original earth that he cared for. "Is there suffering on this new earth? On our earth we can truly love only with suffering and through suffering! We know not how to love otherwise. We know no other love. I want suffering in order to love. I want and thirst this very minute to kiss, with tearing streaming down my cheeks, the one and only earth I have left behind." 

And yet he is sent down to this earth and finds himself on a beach shore. It is like our earth except that everything has a warm embracing feel to it. And in meeting the people of this earth he realized that they were a people who had not sinned. They had not fallen like our earth had, and so in them he saw a beauty, purity, and peace that is only glimpsed in the very best of our fallen humanity. They welcomed him in and sought to bring his mind to a state of peace. 

Part IV - Meeting an Unfallen Race

The love that the man experienced stayed with him outside of his dream. He also wondered why we on this earth had more technology than they. And yet they have no desires and are content with life. They operated with a knowledge higher than science. They communed in love with all of nature. Their love was enough to even change the heart of the man and to cause him not to fall into his previous pride again. They knew not cruelty or jealousy, but loved each other in sincere community. They did die but not in a violent way, but rather as falling asleep. And yet they could still communicate with the dead. 

"They praised nature, the earth, the sea, and the woods. They were also fond of composing songs about one another, and they praised each other like children. Their songs were very simple, but they sprang straight from the heart and they touched the heart. And not only in their songs alone, but they seemed to spend their lives in a perpetual praise of one another. It seemed to be a universal and all-embracing love for each other. Some of their songs were solemn and ecstatic, and I was scarcely able to understand them at all. While understanding the words, I could never tell entirely fathom their meaning. It remained somehow beyond the grasp of my reason, and yet it sank unconsciously deeper and deeper into my heart."

In speaking with them, the man admits that on our earth he had felt deep longings in his heart of the ways of this place, and yet he had so much hatred for his fellow man. But in their presence he was beginning to become pure like them. But a secret remained, one which verified to the dreamer that it was not something of his own imagination, but had roots in reality. The secret was that he ended up corrupting that innocent people. 

Part V - The Fall and His Redemption

Like a germ infecting a host and beginning to multiply and spread, so did his presence among those people bring a love for sin in them. Beginning small enough, but continuing to grow, spread, and infect. Soon there is the first murder. "Recriminations began, re-proaches. They came to know shame, and they made shame into a virtue. The conception of honour was born, and every alliance raised its own standard. They began torturing animals, and the animals ran away from them into the forests and became their enemies. A struggle began for separation, for isolation, for personality, for mine and thine. They began talking in different languages.

They came to know sorrow, and they loved sorrow. They thirsted for suffering, and they said that Truth could only be attained through suffering. It was then that science made its appearance among them. When they became wicked, they began talking of brotherhood and humanity and understood the meaning of those ideas. When they became guilty of crimes, they invented justice, and drew up whole codes of law, and to ensure the carrying out of their laws they erected a guillotine.

They only vaguely remembered what they had lost, and they would not believe that they ever were happy and innocent. They even laughed at the possibility of their former happiness and called it a dream. They could not even imagine it in any definite shape or form, but the strange and wonderful thing was that though they had lost faith in their former state of happiness and called it a fairy-tale, they longed so much to be happy and innocent once more that, like children, they succumbed to the desire of their hearts, glorifed this desire, built temples, and began offering up prayers to their own idea, their own "desire," and at the same time firmly believed that it could not be realised and brought about, though they still worshipped it and adored it with tears. And yet if they could have in one way or another returned to the state of happy innocence they had lost, and if someone had shown it to them again and had asked them whether they desired to go back to it, they would certainly have refused."

The man had caused another "Fall" for this other earth. Dostoyevsky proceeds to describe the rise of civilization as we know it on this earth, with wars and governments, laws, and religions. The man ultimately confesses his guilt in corrupting this people, and wants them to crucify him in punishment, but they don't want to. This world was what they wanted and they didn't want it to change. 

Upon waking up from his dream, the man has been fundamentally changed. He no longer is a nihilist or wants to kill himself, but has a passion now to speak truth. "Oh, how I longed for life, life! I lifted up my hands and called upon Eternal Truth - no, not called upon it, but wept." He firmly believes that man can live together without evil, and will continue to proclaim this message even if he is called crazy. How could this be done? How could Heaven be brought to earth? He says to love thy neighbor as thyself, not just as an idea, but in practice at this moment. The man goes back and helps the little girl and continues on with his life, fueled by this new message. 
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1 - Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Dream of a Ridiculous Man from Great Short Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1968.