In another passage of the letter to his brother, he defines the ecstatic sense of life that he felt on being pardoned: “Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute could be a lifetime of happiness.” Dostoevsky’s resilience and buoyancy during his lifetime, despite often living in poverty and being afflicted by epilepsy, probably can be traced at least in part to this feeling that simply being alive was something for which one should be thankful. But more central is the emphasis on the importance of the immediate moment, the feeling that every minute of life had an immense value that could be turned into “a lifetime of happiness,” or, of course, its opposite.
—Joseph Frank, Lectures on Dostoevsky, 55
Even though Sonya can be considered a hackneyed character, Dostoevsky manages to raise her to a level of intensity and purity that is unrivaled. The reason is that he is able to present the idea of self-sacrifice with such uncompromising force. Dostoevsky is willing to make this idea totally irrational, in the original Christian sense, with no regard for anything except the immediate effect of the act to ameliorate human suffering. It is as if time itself did not exist —or is totally overlooked. What is important is to respond completely to human suffering at every instant. This is the interim ethics, which many theologians believe is the soul of primitive Christianity.
—Joseph Frank, Lectures on Dostoevsky, 121
[Dostoevsky’s] characters live for the most part in this state of eschatological apprehension, which conditions how they are seen and perceived and the sort of world that Dostoevsky depicts. In this world of eschatological apprehension, every instant takes on a supreme value. Temporal continuity, the time of historical reality and development, has little importance. Each moment of the present is when a decisive choice has to be made, and so for someone who feels this way, long-range social plans, revolutionary ideals for a future humanity would have no significance. It would be the same with individual moral behavior. What would be essential is action at every moment, at this very instant, as if time were about to stop and the world come to an end.
—Joseph Frank, Lectures on Dostoevsky, 55
