"Pride" in Dostoevsky's Fiction Predrag Cicovacki, in his essay, "Searching for the Abandoned Soul: Dostoyevsky on the Suffering of Humanity," argues that, for Dostoevsky, the roots of evil do not lie in "unfavorable social environments or inappropriate upbringing," but in "humanity's proud nature, in man's "enormous pride. "In his post-Siberian years Dostoyevsky was very opposed to the then popular view that the roots of evil are social. Under the influence of Rousseau and the spreading ideals of Fourier's utopian socialism, the young Dostoyevsky was disgusted by the horrifying social injustices in Russia. Even his first novel, Poor People, revealed his grievous sympathies for "the insulted and the injured." A member of the revolutionary "Petrashevsky's circle," the young Dostoyevsky was persuaded that evil was introduced into the world by a historical process, and that it could also be eradicated in the same way. "During his years of Siberian exile, he came to believe that the roots of evil go far deeper. It is not that he suddenly forgot about poverty and the helplessness of the desperately poor. They continued to crowd his novels, and he himself lived frequently at the very edge of the social abyss. Although Dostoyevsky remained entirely absorbed by contemporary humanity and its miserable social and spiritual conditions, he nevertheless turned with great fervor, not always justly, against all those who were preoccupied with designing social or religious utopias for the future happiness of mankind. He showed little patience for those reformers of humanity who believed that man's nature is essentially good, but that it got distorted through unfavorable social environments or inappropriate upbringing. Instead of equally distributed social goods, or depersonalized and autonomous human rights, Dostoyevsky could only focus on the complex and contradictory character of man. In that character, more than in any miserable and unjust social condition, Dostoyevsky saw the real danger for humanity. "The monster that Dostoyevsky recognized in Siberia, which turned him against his own earlier convictions, was humanity's proud nature. The sinners, the poor, and the innocent are the victims of mindlessness, misery, and injustice, but the wicked ones are victimized by a greater evil: pride. Ignorance can be removed, poverty eliminated, injustice corrected. But pride? How can we fight pride? "Dostoyevsky was firmly convinced that the true sickness of man is rooted in his enormous pride. All of his great late novels center on the problem of pride and its destructive effects. The underground man, Raskolnikov, Kirilov, and Stavrogin, Nastassya Filipovna and Aglaya Yepanchina, Versilov and Arkady Dolgoruky, Ivan and Dmitry Karamazov, and numerous lesser characters find themselves arrested in the whirlwind of their lonely pride. They have to deal with its horrifying destructive consequences for themselves and others, especially those they love the most. "Why did Dostoyevsky see pride as the ultimate root of evil? He associated pride in its milder forms with self-centeredness, in its extreme manifestations ("titanic pride," "satanic pride," "Promethean pride") with self-deification. Pride is man's obsession with himself, which leads to denying reality to anything else and anybody else; pride begins with the elevation of one's self over others, leads to fragmentation of that self, and concludes with its spiritual or physical self-destruction. In his first true confrontation with the ugly side of pride, when he created the underground man, Dostoyevsky was both shocked and fascinated by what he found. By penetrating inward, he could see how pride is based on insecure and unworthy foundations, but also how powerfully attractive it is and how difficult it would be to shake off. Like a true pioneer, Dostoyevsky must have been surprised by his own findings, and his first journey did not go very far; it began with a miserable, isolated, and empty creature and ended up with an equally miserable, lonely, and pathetic wretch [Ivan Karamazov]. The underground man turns inward to find an Archimedean point on which to base his egotistical ambitions, but all he uncovers is a bottomless pit. The more he searches, the more fully isolated he feels, as if there is a "stone wall" between himself and other human beings. This wall is so high that not even a sympathetic character of the fallen women [sic], Lisa, who suffers so deeply and understands the pain of lonely separation from other human beings, can extend her hands over that wall." Sin, Pride & Self-Acceptance Bernard J. Paris: The Withdrawn Man: Notes from Underground Predrag Cicovacki (2005). Searching For the Abandoned Soul: Dostoevsky on the Suffering of Humanity. In A.T. Tymeiniecka (ed.), The Enigma of Good and Evil: The Moral Senti-ment in Literature. Lancaster, UK: Springer.

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