Disintegration, Salvation, and/or Madness in Dostoevsky

ABSTRACT Psychological fragmentation and derangement suffuse Dostoevsky's fiction. This paper argues that the madness of Dostoevsky characters derives from intense wounds to the self: humiliating lacerations that impel fugue and disintegration. Such vulnerable, frangible characters seek to escape and deny themselves to avoid being seen for who they are. Some flee into ego inflation and the façades of schizoidal false selves as strategies to escape inferiority, shame, and humiliation. Existence is full of anguish and human depredation. Dostoevsky repeatedly struggles to envisage some kind of religious redemption and salvation. But his protagonists often succumb to deliria and dissociated oblivion, and a psychoanalytic dissection may expose Dostoevsky's visions of religious awakening and deliverance as despair driven fantasies and descents into further madness. Dostoevsky's genius resided in his dissection of the tormenting wounds and maladies of being human, and unveiling the lacerating anguish inspiring our enticing fantasies and mirages of salvation.