In Brothers Karamazov Book 1, Chapter 5, Alyosha, the youngest Karamazov, has decided to enter a monastery.

“He entered upon this path only because, at that time, it alone struck his imagination and presented itself to him as offering an ideal means of escape for his soul from darkness to light.”

To me, the most important phrase from the preceding sentence is at that time.

Alyosha is young when he makes this decision. Young and virtuous and maybe a bit impetuous.

William Shatner as Alyosha in Hollywood’s 1958 version of Brothers Karamazov.

Dostoevsky, nearing the end of his life when he wrote Brothers Karamazov, described Alyosha in a way that’s meant to describe the entire generation of Russian young adults circa 1860.

Honest in nature, desiring the truth, seeking for it and believing in it, and seeking to serve it at once with all the strength of his soul, seeking for immediate action, and ready to sacrifice everything, life itself, for it.

One gets the sense that Dostoevsky may be describing his own youth as he describes Alyosha.

Then, from the perspective of a wisened, hardened old man, Dostoevsky drops some wisdom on any young people who might be reading.

“Though these young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply ten-fold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set before them as their goal — such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of them.”

What an incredible sentence. What an incredible sentiment.

Going off to fight, and even die, for whatever passion carries you forward in your youth is easy, Dostoevsky says. Reflecting deeply on exactly what it is you should be so passionate about is hard.

But if you choose to take the time to reflect, if you are willing to dive deep into the abyss of introspection and come out the other side having found some truth, you will be ten times more powerful than the impulsive youth who chased the first offer of glory presented to him.

Brothers Karamazov “Fan Art” by theophilia.deviantart.com

In Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha’s decision to enter a monastery is made with haste, but the decision forces him into the kind of serious reflection that Dostoevsky encourages young people to engage in.

“As soon as he reflected seriously he was convinced of the existence of God and immortality, and at once he instinctively said to himself: “I want to live for immortality, and I will accept no compromise.””

Alyosha is an ethical young man, and remember that Dostoevsky has already described this entire generation of Russian youth as being full of young men who are honest in nature, desiring the truth.

It’s clear to me that Dostoevsky wants us to see that Alyosha’s decision to aim his ethics at religion is a pivotal moment for the character.

Because he could have aimed those same virtuous ethics at more earthly concerns.

“In the same way, if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and a socialist.”

And now, with the table set, we get this monumental sentence from Brothers Karamazov, Book 1, Chapter 5, a sentence where Dostoevsky shouts to his readers and the world a statement of his own belief:

“For socialism is not merely the labour question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism today, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to Heaven from earth but to set up Heaven on earth.”

Wow.

In unpacking that weighty sentence, first, we should take a minute to disassociate our 21st century minds from the political terms. When you hear “socialism” you might think of social democracy, communist Russia, Bernie Sanders, or anything in between. The word itself might be a trigger for emotions that well forth from a hundred cantankerous political conversations you’ve had over the past ten years.

Forget all that. In this context, Dostoevsky is talking about a socialism that hasn’t yet been realized anywhere in the world. He is talking about the idealistic youths of the 19th century who gathered, sometimes in secret (as he did as a member of Petrashevsky’s Circle), to talk in general terms about a new social order that wasn’t like Russian feudalism.

When Dostoevsky speaks of a youthful socialist, he is talking about young people who were enamored with Hegel and Kant as well as Marx, people who were still trying to figure out what came next after feudalism, and the “socialism” of a Russian novel written in the mid 19th century covers a wide range of still loosely defined thought, from liberalism to social democracy to communism.

And Dostoevsky, genius that he is, sidesteps all the political debates about labor and capital and property and government. He says, quite plainly for all the budding revolutionaries in Russia who are as radical now as he was once: Start with a more basic question.

He says: Before you can decide the best way to structure the societies in which people live, you need to be clear on what everyone is living for.

While youthful radicals, riled up and ready to die for something, were talking about the bourgeois and the proletariat, Dostoevsky was warning them that spiritually, the socialists and the feudalist monarchs were the same.

Read this quote from a letter Dostoevsky wrote in 1876.

“The present socialism, in Europe and here in Russia, removes Christ everywhere and cares foremost about bread, summons science and asserts that the reason for all human calamities is one — poverty, the struggle for existence, ‘society.’ These socialists, in my observation, in their expectation of a future arrangement of society without personal property, love money terribly in the meantime and value it even to the extreme, but namely in accordance with the idea they attach to it.”

He was writing fifty years before the breadlines and mass famines of the Soviet Union came to pass, yet it’s clear he saw it all coming, and spent the end of his life warning his fellow intellectuals that the utopia they sought would fail.

Because it was the utopia of senseless, youthful passion ungoverned by the kind of deep introspection that Dostoevsky was convinced was the foundation of an ethical society.