Dostoevsky, Baudelaire and Chernyshevsky
Three Perspectives on the Human Being and Modernity
A Reflection on Marshall Berman’s Thought on Modernity
Aydin Areta

YouTube: https://youtu.be/7QooZUhMdRw

In *All That Is Solid Melts into Air*, Marshall Berman examines the different effects of modernity on the city and on modern human beings. Along this path he attempts, through the lens of literature, to study the evolution of contemporary humanity’s understanding of modernity and its relationship to the human spirit. In one section of the book he places the differing views of Baudelaire, Chernyshevsky and Dostoevsky alongside one another, seeking to examine their different, and sometimes contradictory, understandings of modern human life in order to reach a deeper understanding of modernity.

In his reading, Baudelaire, the prominent French poet, celebrates modern life in Paris. He sees Paris, with its broad boulevards, vibrant public space and continuous flow of people, as a symbol of individual freedom and artistic possibility. In his poems Baudelaire draws inspiration from transient moments and the creative energy of the city, where modernity opens a space for experience and artistic creation. The figure of the “flâneur” in his work symbolises the individual who wanders the streets of Paris, finds a kind of repose among anonymous crowds, and draws from the intensity of urban life the power of rebellion, revolution and change.

Berman also turns to Chernyshevsky and his rational, logical utopia. In the novel *What Is to Be Done?*, Chernyshevsky depicts an ideal society in which rationality and technology have answered all human needs. In the Crystal Palace, the building displayed at London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, he sees an embodiment of a world in which everything has been planned precisely and completely through logic and science, evolving toward a perfect and stable order responsive to all humanity’s material and spiritual needs. The Crystal Palace symbolises a society in which conflict and instability have given way to scientific and complete order, and in which human beings live together in peace and harmony.

Dostoevsky, in Berman’s reading, examines modernity from another angle. For him, Saint Petersburg, although at times designed as a magnificent city, becomes a symbol of spiritual confinement and isolation. In Berman’s analysis of Dostoevsky, particularly of his view of Saint Petersburg, the city represents the destructive force of modernity pressing upon the individual and drawing human beings into spiritual and existential crises. Berman argues that, through his treatment of Saint Petersburg’s oppressive atmosphere and social isolation, Dostoevsky revealed another dimension of modernity, one opposed both to Baudelaire’s revolutionary intensity and to Chernyshevsky’s scientific order. Saint Petersburg thus becomes a force that deprives the individual of vitality and traps the person within inner crises.

Across his works, Dostoevsky presents a complex image of the human being as a contradictory creature: someone capable of holding the finest beliefs and presenting themselves as committed to the noblest values, yet in the moment of action suddenly acting entirely against those same beliefs and values. Give such a person the best and most rational world, and they may still destroy it.

This is a human being whose knowledge of the capacities and limitations, the light and darkness, of their own psyche remains profoundly limited and superficial. A person who tries to challenge, simplify and find a stable solution to the irrational and chaotic complexities of the world and human nature through rationality and logical thought; who may even articulate their criticisms and solutions with clarity and brilliant logic; and yet through their actions destroys themselves, the world and the highest ideals in which they believe. This profound Dostoevskian view of human nature recurs throughout his work.

In *Notes from Underground*, *Crime and Punishment*, *The Dream of a Ridiculous Man*, *The Brothers Karamazov*, *The Crocodile* and many of his other short and long works, the analysis of the human psyche and of the relationship between human rationality and our practical rupture from that rationality becomes the central subject of Dostoevsky’s deeply psychological analysis of human nature.

Dostoevsky’s critique of Chernyshevsky’s Crystal Palace is equally significant. Across his work Dostoevsky repeatedly suggests that human beings need the complex and unpredictable dimensions of human nature in order to grow spiritually and ethically. He believes that freedom to choose, even when it leads to suffering, is an essential part of our humanity. Chernyshevsky’s utopian vision, from this perspective, depicts a dry and soulless society in which human beings have become orderly machines without the opportunity to confront difficult and ethical choices.