Dostoevsky vs. the Marquis de Sade

Modern Age, Fall, 2004 by John Attarian

Madame Hohlakov's malicious daughter Lise completes The Brothers Karamazov's gallery of Sadeans. As is clear to anyone familiar with Sade, Lise is a montage of the female libertines of Juliette. Her side of the conversation during Alyosha's final visit to the Hohlakovs is a condensation of their outpourings and deeds:

  I would like someone to torture me.... I want disorder. I keep wanting
  to set fire to the house.... And how bored I am!.... Let me be rich
  and all the rest poor. I'll eat cake and drink cream and won't give
  any to anyone else.... If I am ever poor, I will murder somebody, and
  even if I am rich, I may murder someone.... I want to do evil.... So
  that everything will be destroyed. Oh, how nice it would be if
  everything were destroyed! ... Everyone loves crime .... secretly they
  all love [evil]....[She tells of a man who crucified a four-year-old
  boy.] He said that the child moaned, kept on moaning and he stood
  admiring it. That's nice! ... I sometimes imagine that it was I who
  crucified him. He would hang there moaning and I would sit opposite
  him eating pineapple jam [Juliette's libertines sometimes feast while
  children are tortured, impaled, etc. in their presence].... I hate
  everything! I don't want to live, because I hate everything.... I
  don't love anyone. (34)

The elder Zossima's life and teachings (Book VI, "The Russian Monk"), which Dostoevsky wrote to refute atheism and deemed his work's culmination, (35) present Dostoevsky's fullest Christian answer to Sade. Zossima's own story is of conversion from Sadean egoism to Christian saintliness. In youth, he was a rich army officer who saw his men as "cattle"; a drunken, dissolute rake bent on gratifying his appetites; conceited and self-absorbed. He provoked a duel with a man who had married a woman he wanted, and the night before the duel cruelly smote his orderly in the face. The next morning the beauty of Creation, the memory of his brother Markel, who died a saintly death during Eastertide at seventeen, and a powerful remorse (a sentiment which Sade excoriated) combined to work a metanoia on Zossima. He begged his orderly's forgiveness, refused to shoot back in the duel, and left his regiment to become a monk.

Through Zossima's mysterious visitor and the elder's teachings, Dostoevsky repudiates Sade's radical individualism and freedom as peddling empty promises. The extreme individualist achieves not "fullness of life but self-destruction," for he ends up not in self-realization but in solitude and "self-destructive impotence," isolated and fearful of adversity. Construed as liberation to multiply and gratify desires, freedom only enslaves us to our appetites.

Point by point, Dostoevsky answers Sade with polar opposites. Sade preaches impiety towards God and others; Zossima preaches piety towards both. Sade sets each against all; Zossima preaches the spiritual brotherhood of mutual respect and benevolence. Sade propounds radical, self-absorbed isolation; Zossima preaches that we are one another's keepers. Sade's libertines' ceaseless self-assertion leads to frustration; Zossima gives witnesses to the peace that flows from piety. The libertines' bustling, frenetic, self-absorbed lives shut out divine grace; Zossima's calm and contemplation let it in. Indeed Sade ferociously rejects grace; Zossima stresses openness to grace and conversion through it.