If you read a lot of Dostoevsky, you will notice that one of themes is that the bad guys tend to win and the good guys tend to lose.
In other words, evil wins and good loses. The world is evil and it rewards evil. The Christians are basically the revolutionaries against the Evil Order who live self-sacrificing lives of good and denial in order not to succumb to the demands of the Evil Order. The Christians typically suffer greatly or are punished for being good, while Evil is rewarded as it conforms to the demands, requirements and tastes of the Evil Order.
What you find often in Dostoevsky is that the Christians all fail. Everyone who tries to be good fails.
You also see this in de Sade, if you have read any Sade. People are punished for being good and rewarded for being evil in Sade. However, Sade was celebrating evil apparently and attacking the good.
Some say he was simply turning the world upside down. And this was the great philosophical statement he was making.
Personally, I do not think that Sade was a good person. Actually, he was a very bad person, his books are very bad, in fact evil (I have read some of them and they are definitely terrible) and Sade should not be celebrated as some sort of genius. He was just another sick fuck trying to justify his evil ways by attacking religion and everything good in society.
It’s true that Sade never killed anyone, and it’s doubtful if he seriously hurt anyone, but his books are full of homicides, especially of erotic homicides of beautiful young females committed by sadistic males in the midst of orgiastic sex. Sade’s books are manuals for serial killers and hardcore sadists and not much good for anything good. I honestly do not see why people celebrate or elevate him as some sort of transgressive hero.
People are either good or bad, pretty much. And Sade was a very, very bad man.
Dostoevsky is quite different, but he is typical of the Russian tradition, which is morbid, depressive, self-sacrificing, self-denying, even self-punishing and death-loving.
They do not love death via the orgiastic pleasure of outwards-death of the psychopath but more as the inwards-death of the good person who suffers due to the evils of society.
Sociopaths love death by attacking others.
Dostoevsky’s heroes love death by attacking themselves because the world is evil and they are good.
There is a long tradition of this sort of self-flagellation in Christianity. The Catholics are full of it.
Because in Dostoevsky, the good people tend to fail and the evil people tend to win, critics have accused Dostoevsky of being evil himself, celebrating evil and punishing good as many depraved people do. But this is a total error in reading Dostoevsky. If the world is evil, then those who do evil will tend to be rewarded, and they are acting in accordance with the demands of society. An evil society will tend to reward evil and punish good.
In such a world, the Christian can only fail.
If by being good, the evil society will only tend to oppress, attack and discriminate against you, I would argue that it would be perfectly natural for the Christian to fail in an evil society.
Indeed, I would go even further and argue that the true Christian can only fail in an evil society, and that Christian failure in an evil society itself is a sign of good, since success would tend to be suspect and would brand one as possibly in with the evil folks.
Anyway, that is just my take on Dostoevsky.
He isn’t a bad man or a devil worshiper or anything like that. Instead, he is a champion of the good. He champions it so much in fact that his heroes are willing to lay down their lives, careers and happiness for the good in a rebellion against the Evil Order.
