The Weekly Eudemon

The Weekly Eudemon


Episode 90: Dostoyevsky and Flannery O'Connor Reveal Something Ironic about Our Modern World

May 02, 2021

In one of his last works before his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.The DreamIn this story, the narrator goes to another solar system and lands on a planet where the inhabitants are people just like us, but untainted by the Fall in the Garden of Eden. They live, the narrator tells us:“In the same paradise as that in which . . . our parents lived before they sinned.”But the narrator, being a fallen man, corrupts the inhabitants:“Like the germ of a plague infecting whole kingdoms, I corrupted them all.”They then begin to act like us on earth. In the words of Russian literature professor Arthur Trace:“They invent morality because now there was immorality; they make a virtue of shame, whereas before they had no need for shame; they invent the concept of honor because now there is such a thing as dishonor; they invent justice because now there is injustice; and they invent brotherhood and friendship because there is hatred.”Arthur Trace, Furnace of Doubt (1988), 24.In short, on the unfallen planet, there was no virtue or morality because there was no vice or immorality in contrast. There was no distinction between bad and good.