Authors

Discussion

Dostoevsky’s interest in the question of happiness, money and utilitarianism permeates much of his fiction and journalistic writings. As an ethical and socio-economic problem, the debate on happiness arose in Russian thought only in the nineteenth century, much later than in the West where it had been part of philosophical discourse since antiquity, evolving over time in response to the crucial shifts in the conception of man and society that occurred in Western intellectual tradition. Once the ideas of British utilitarians Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill reached the Russian audience in the 1860s, the debate on happiness, hitherto sporadic and slow, began to heat up in Russia, attracting many prominent thinkers, including Dostoevsky’s friend N. N. Strakhov and their mutual opponent from the ranks of the radical intelligentsia, N.K. Mikhailovsky. At the center of the debate were the age-old yet ever contentious questions of what it means to be happy and which ethical principles are permissible in pursuing personal happiness. In the age of capitalist modernity, which arrived in Russia with greater abruptness and intellectual disruptiveness than in the West, these timeless questions proved particularly divisive and controversial.

While there is no comprehensive study of Dostoevsky’s reflections on happiness in current scholarship, it is widely believed that the writer detested the utilitarian ethics of cost-benefit analysis and “saw money … in a very negative light … as an aspect of decadent Western culture which was threatening the integrity of the Russian ethnic tradition of brotherhood and spirituality.”(B. Christa, “Dostoevsky and Money,” 2002) As a writer who acquired the reputation of a public moralist already in his lifetime, Dostoevsky indeed promoted these ideas in his literary and journalistic writings, presenting the Western bourgeois culture and its underlying utilitarian morality as antithetical to the Russian Idea. “There is no happiness in comfort, happiness is acquired through suffering,” he wrote in Notebooks for The Crime and Punishment (PSS, 7: 154) However, looking closely at his private letters, Dostoevsky’s personal recipe for happiness appears more bourgeois and utilitarian than is common to believe.