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Let us begin this chapter by making a biographical observance, by considering an intimate detail of Heidegger's place of dwelling. In his impressive biography Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, Heinrich Petzet reveals an unexpected memento which Heidegger kept on his desk for inspiration, a picture of Dostoevsky.¹ For Heidegger, Dostoevsky's work provides a pause in the inevitable march of modern progress, a reminder of the limitations of rationality—of guilt, death, and suffering—which mark the vestige of darkness never to be eradicated by the light of reason. In commenting on Heidegger's early development, Gadamer writes: "The appropriation of Dostoevsky also plays an immense role at this time. The radicality of this portrayal of human beings, the passionate questioning of society and progress, the intensive fashioning and suggestive conjuring up of human obsessions and labyrinths of the soul—one could continue endlessly."² Yet in this apparent retreat to the "irrational," Dostoevsky's novels prefigure neither existentialism nor contemporary atheism, as is customarily taught. Indeed, neither of these "isms" do justice to the profounder spirituality which prompted the novelist's struggle to locate the precarious place of faith in the modern world. His own conviction of Eastern Orthodoxy reaffirms the individual's need for redemption in a life beset by pathos, cruelty, and arbitrariness.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-9773-9_2

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