Abstract
A strange similarity can be discovered between the first dream of Raskolnikov, the main character in the novel Crime and Punishment written by Dostoyevsky and the well-known, and often cited story of the psychotic breakdown of Friedrich Nietzsche, the most influential philosopher of the 19th century that happened in Turin, 1889. Raskolnikov’s dreams in the novel, especially the first, so-called “horse dream” opens many exciting levels of interpretation of the novel. His first dream enables us to reach more colorful and interesting levels of perspective of Raskolnikov’s personality, empowering the flexibility of interpretation that resembles the methodology of psychoanalytic dream interpretation. In January of 1889 Nietzsche lost his sense of reality permanently, danced naked in his room; the often mentioned incident happened in January 3, 1889, when he, walking through the Piazza Carlo Alberto, witnessed a carter ruthlessly whipping his horse. Nietzsche ran up to the animal and hugged the horse’s neck crying. He collapsed on the street, was referred to the Basel Mental Hospital on January 10, 1889. His condition is referred to as “breakdown” or “eclipse” in the literature of philosophy history. We can interpret the happenings in Turin as Nietzsche’s “last public statement”. Considering the happenings in Turin as the oeuvre’s integrant part, we could make an attempt for re-interpretation and/or psychological understanding of some parts of his oeuvre. According to our thesis, Raskolnikov’s dream, as well as Nietzsche’s oeuvre with the farewell in Turin show the strangely diverse and contradictive nature of the Self.
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Notes
- 1.
It is important to mention, that to our best knowledge, the similarity of the two was first introduced by the great Hungarian poet, János Pilinszky (1921–1981) in a short commentary in 1961.
- 2.
These were the following: (1) general paralysis of the insane (caused by syphilis); (2) bipolar affective disorder, followed by vascular dementia; (3) hereditary frontotemporal dementia; (4) brain tumor; (5) cerebral autosomal dominant arteriopathy with subcortical infarcts and leukoencephalopathy (CADASIL); (6) mitochondrial encephalopathy, lactic acidosis, and stroke-like episodes syndrome (MELAS) (Tényi, 2012).
- 3.
In one of his novels, Milan Kundera approaches this topic with the same witticism by writing, that the philosopher tried to apologize to the horse for Descartes (Kundera, 1984, 290)—for Descartes, who denied the concept that the animals have souls and—through his philosophy—digged the seed of nihilism in the history of thinking of our mankind (Di Santo, 2010).
- 4.
In contrast to Dostoyevsky views on the sense of guilt and punishment, according to Nietzsche: “Forgetting is…rather an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression, that is responsible for the fact what we experience and absorb enters our consciousness as little while we are digesting it…To close the doors and windows of consciousness for a time, to remain undisturbed by the noise and struggle of our underworls of utility organs working with and against one other, a little quitness, a little tabula rasa of the consciousness, to make room for new things, above all for the nobler functions and functionaries, for regulation, foresight, premediation…—that is the purpose of active forgetfulness…The man in whom this apparatus of repression is damaged…may be compared…witha dyspeptic—he cannot “have done” with anything.” (Nietzsche, 1992, 493–494, emphasis in the original).
- 5.
Translated from Hungarian (Krasznahorkai,1990) by the authors of this chapter.
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Tényi, T., Tényi, D. (2019). Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche—The Contradictory Nature of the Self in a Dream of Raskolnikov and in the Breakdown of Nietzsche. In: Mayer, CH., Kovary, Z. (eds) New Trends in Psychobiography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16953-4_16
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