Madhavan Palat lectures on Dostoevsky

The Grand Inquisitor and the Holy Fool

Madhavan Palat's lecture on Dostoevsky

The Indian Council for Historical Research Foundation Day

At the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library
27 March 2014 at 5.30 pm

Dostoevsky was a remarkably modern thinker who may seem to have laboured hard to obscure the fact. He grappled with the customary problem of freedom and unfreedom, but not as the three concepts of liberty, of the absence of constraint, of the absence of the possibility of constraint, and of the realization of the self. He defined freedom as the exercise of moral choice, which was always available to all, even to the convict, and unfreedom as abdicating that responsibility. 

These were the positive and negative faces of modernity, the open and closed minds, holy foolishness and crime, the Silent Christ and the Grand Inquisitor. He explored these insights through scenes of searing intensity and overwhelming power which compare with the achievement of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Goethe. The situations are complex, conditions are intolerable, and choices are almost impossible to make: his characters commit suicide and murder, descend into idiocy, or are overtaken by schizophrenia; and nobody attains heaven on earth, for at best they have, after prolonged effort, merely begun their arduous ascent toward the ideal that now shines before them.

In this opposition between the negative and the positive, the negative has always seemed more evident and more obtrusive than all that could be positive, and Dostoevsky has often been accused of or seen as indulging a taste for the dismal and the morbid. Jackson contrasted Tolstoy’s reality, which “strives toward unity” in spite of its immense complexity and openendedness, with Dostoevsky’s, which “strives toward fragmentation.” Many have been uneasy about the never-ending struggle and splintering in the Dostoevskian universe, about his ceaseless burrowing into the darker crevices of being; and the impact of his explorations have been overwhelming and often unsettling. 

But there is a positive logic to his vision and purpose to his creations. In his strategy, he must let his opponent have his full say, he must present the opposite case comprehensively, and he must do so because it is a reality, one that was to be found in the daily newspapers, as he reminded the censor. In the event, that appalling reality was presented often with greater intensity and frequency apparently than the answer to it.. 

Download the full text of the lecture here