Mark and Louise Zwick, Houston Catholic Worker, Vol. XX, No. 3, May-June 2000, excerpt.

“You ape, you assent to get the better of me. Hold your tongue… If there is no God, then I am God!” – — Fyodor Doestoevsky, The Demons

“…It was Dostoevsky among the Russian novelists who struck the deepest chord with Dorothy during her adolescence, long before she became a Catholic, as well as throughout her life at the Catholic Worker. William Miller named some of the Russian authors she read in his biography of Dorothy: “She read the novels of Artsybashev, Turgenev, Gorki, Chekhov and above all Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.” Miller especially stressed the influence of Dostoevsky:

“She would, in fact, throughout her life, be a passionate devotee of Russian literature, and in time the genius of Dostoevsky recommended itself to her so strongly that his effect on her was oracular and remained so all of her life (Dorothy Day, a Biography,Harper and Row, 1982, p. 36).

In fact, William Miller recounted how Stanley Vishnewski, who spent his life at the Worker, remembered telling another Worker, Gerry Griffin, that “the only way he would ever understand the Catholic Worker was by reading Dostoevsky” (Miller, p. 326). As late as May 1973 Dorothy Day wrote in The Catholic Worker, “I do not think I could have carried on with a loving heart all these years without Dostoevsky’s understanding of poverty, suffering, and drunkenness.”

In The Long Loneliness Dorothy wrote about her early reading of the Russian authors and her trouble in finding Christians who lived the great insights she found there:

“The Russian writers appealed to me too, and I read everything of Dostoevsky, as well as the stories of Gorki and Tolstoy. Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy made me cling to a faith in God, and yet I could not endure feeling an alien in it. I felt that my faith had nothing in common with that of Christians around me” (The Long Loneliness, HarperSanFrancisco, 1952, 1997, pp. 42-43).

Her writing brings out her passionate response to Dostoevsky: “I could not hear of Sonya’s reading the Gospel to Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment without turning to it myself with love. I could not read Ippolyte’s rejection of his ebbing life and defiance of God in The Idiot without being filled with an immense sense of gratitude to God for life and a desire to make some return” (The Long Loneliness, p. 108).

Miller adds to her quotes from her earlier reading of the great novelist: “The characters, Alyosha and The Idiot, testified to Christ in us. I was moved to the depths of my being by the reading of these books during my early twenties when I, too, was tasting the bitterness and the dregs of life and shuddered at its hardness and cruelty” (Miller, p. 154).

Some of the passages that Dorothy quoted often from Dostoevsky are very well known; many who never read Dostoevsky became familiar with some of the themes of his writings through her. A number of these came from The Brothers Karamazov. She quoted the book so often that sometimes she simply refers to it as The Brothers.

Less well known even to those who love Dorothy Day’s writing is her emphasis on the passages from The Brothers Karamazov on monasticism, and even on fasting. Her interest in monasticism and in profound spirituality is reflected in her choice of this passage to present to readers as a model. In her book On Pilgrimage, she declares that on fasting she will not quote Father Lacouture or Father Hugo (her retreat masters), but rather the monk, Father Zossima:

‘”The world says, You have desires, and so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the most rich and powerful. Don’t be afraid of satisfying them and even multiply your desires… I knew one “champion of freedom” who told me himself that, when he was deprived of tobacco in prison, he was so wretched at the privation that he almost went and betrayed his cause for the sake of getting tobacco again! And such a man says, “I am fighting for the cause of humanity.”

”How can such a one fight, what is he fit for? He is capable perhaps of some action quickly over, but he cannot hold out long. And it is no wonder that the people instead of gaining freedom have sunk to slavery and instead of serving the cause of brotherly love and the union of humanity have fallen on the contrary, into dissension and isolation. The monastic way is different. Obedience, fasting and prayer are laughed at, yet only through them lies the way to real, true freedom‘” (Dorothy Day, On Pilgrimage, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1999, pp. 102-103).

In February 1942 when Dorothy was under attack for her pacifist stand, she spoke of love, the love of Christ which was so different from the starving of whole populations or the bombardment of open cities. She insisted that “love is not killing, it is the laying down of one’s life for one’s friend.” And then she quoted at length from Dostoevsky’s monk, Fr. Zossima. She said she quoted him because the accusation “holier than thou” was also made against the Catholic Workers, who must, like everyone else, admit guilt, participation in the social order which had resulted in the monstrous crime of war.

“Hear Fr. Zossima, in the Brothers Karamazov:

‘Love one another, Fathers,’ he said, speaking to his monks. ‘Love God’s people. Because we have come here and shut ourselves within these walls, we are no holier than those that are outside, but on the contrary, from the very fact of coming here, each of us has confessed to himself that he is worse than others, than all men on earth… And the longer the monk lives in his seclusion, the more keenly he must recognize that. Else he would have no reason to come here.

‘When he realizes that he is not only worse than others, but that he is responsible to all men for all and everything, for all human sins, national and individual, only then the aim of our seclusion is attained. For know, dear ones, that every one of us is undoubtedly responsible for all men and everything on earth, not merely through the general sinfulness of creation, but each one personally for all mankind and every individual man. For monks are not a special sort of man, but only what all men ought to be. Only through that knowledge, our heart grows soft with infinite, universal, inexhaustible love. Then every one of you will have the power to win over the whole world by love and to wash away the sins of the world with your tears… Each of you keep watch over your heart and confess your sins to yourself unceasingly… Hate not the atheists, the teachers of evil, the materialists, and I mean not only the good ones-for there are many good ones among them, especially in our day-hate not even the wickedness. Remember them in your prayers thus: Save, O Lord, all those who have none to pray for them, save too all those who will not pray. And add, it is not in pride that I make this prayer, O Lord, for I am lower than all men…’”

One of the best known quotes from Dorothy Day is, “All my life I have been haunted by God.” Those who see the play written and presented about her called Haunted by God may not know that the quote comes from Dostoevsky’s The Possessed.

In the book she wrote about her conversion, From Union Square to Rome, Dorothy reflects on her reading of Dostoevsky and shares some passages:

Through those years I read all of Dostoevsky’s novels and it was, as Berdyaev says, a profound spiritual experience. The scene in Crime and Punishment where the young prostitute reads from The New Testament to Raskolnikov, sensing sin more profound than her own, which weighed upon him; that story The Honest Thief; those passages in The Brothers Karamazov; the sayings of Father Zossima, Mitya’s conversion in jail, the very legend of the Grand Inquisitor, all this helped to lead me on…”

This reflection includes an unforgettable story:

“Do you remember that little story that Grushenka tells in The Brothers Karamazov? “Once upon a time there was a peasant woman, and a very wicked woman she was. And she died and did not leave a single good deed behind. The devils caught her and plunged her into a lake of fire. So her guardian angel stood and wondered what good deed of hers he could remember to tell God. ‘She once pulled up an onion in her garden,’ said he, and gave it to a beggar woman. And God answered, ‘You take that onion then, hold it out to her on the lake, and let her take hold and be pulled out. And if you pull her out of the lake, let her come to Paradise, but if the onion breaks, then the woman must stay where she is.’ The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her. ‘Come,” said he, “catch hold and I’ll pull you out.’ And he began cautiously pulling her out. He had just pulled her out when the other sinners in the lake, seeing how she was being drawn out, began catching hold of her so as to be pulled out with her. But she was a very wicked woman and she began kicking them. ‘I’m to be pulled out, not you. It’s my onion, not yours.’ As soon as she said that, the onion broke. And the woman fell into the lake and she is there to this day. So the angel wept and went away.’”

Dorothy added her comment, “Sometimes in thinking and wondering at God’s goodness to me, I have thought that it was because I gave away an onion. Because I sincerely loved His poor, He taught me to know Him. And when I think of the little I ever did, I am filled with hope and love for all those others devoted to the cause of social justice” (Robert Ellsberg, ed., Selected Writings of Dorothy Day, 1983, 1992, pp. 5-6).

Later references to the onion story include Dorothy’s article, “Love is the Measure,” in the June 1946 CW, where she faces the host of problems in the world and how a person can respond to them, how it might be possible to make a better world. Her solution includes giving away an onion:

“What we would like to do is change the world-make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And to a certain extent, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute-the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor in other words, we can to a certain extent change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We can give away an onion.”

In May 1939 Dorothy wrote a reflection called: “Hell is Not to Love Any More.” Dorothy sometimes quoted Bernanos when she mentioned this phrase; it appears in The Diary of a Country Priest. Miller points out that the original source for this line is Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “Fathers and teachers,” says Dostoevsky’s Father Zossima in a conversation with his fellow monks just before his death, ‘What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love’” (Miller, p. 326).

Her serious study of Dostoevsky is clear from Miller’s commentary: “In September she noted that she had just finished Dostoevsky’s The Raw Youth. She made a brief comment: “Many of the ideas of The Possessed and The Brothers [Karamozov] are in that early novel. Versiloff a more mature Stavragin, Berdyaev said. I wish I had his [Berdyaev’s] book on Dostoevsky. I have only a defective copy with 50 pages missing” (Miller, p. 334). Another example of her awareness of intellectual currents of thought, especially as regarding Dostoevsky, appeared in her October 1953 “On Pilgrimage” column where she brought to readers’ attention “Henri de Lubac’s (S.J.) The Drama of Atheist Humanism which treats of the writings of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Comte and the answer which Dostoevsky gives to their disbelief.”

In concrete situations, Dorothy’s reflections included Dostoevky’s characters and their experiences. For example, when Peter Maurin was beginning to become ill and was not able to think so clearly and the noise in the house, the constant talking by guests with their problems was overwhelming to him. He was unable to think, but he never complained. Miller shows how Dorothy relates this to her reading:

Thinking of Peter, Dorothy then thought of Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, who, like Maurin, “is described as entirely passive, [who] willingly accepts suffering, is easily put upon, answers offense by begging forgiveness, and exaggerates the good in others while constantly overlooking evil.” Dostoevsky, she said, described this “submissiveness” as “the most fearful force that can exist in the world” (Miller, p. 373). She referred in May 1974 to the character of Myshkin, especially in terms of the term “Holy Fools,” which she said had a “special significance in Russian literature and is used to describe Myshkin in The Idiot, a truly Christ-like figure.

Dorothy noted here as she had on other occasions that so many at the Catholic Worker considered “holy fools in the eyes of our friends and readers.” However, in this column she mentioned how it was used again in relation to Solzhenitsyn in an article in Newsweek.

Through many of Dorothy’s experiences she was able to relate to Dostoevsky. Having been jailed on several occasions for her principles, she understood the despair and suffering of prisoners and the difficulty of maintaining one’s faith and hope in prison. She quoted Dostoevsky in the September 1940 CW as saying in several of his books that “it is possible for a man to lead a perfect life even in jail.” In January 1974 she said she had a “goodly selection of books about prisons and prisoners, beginning with Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead.”

In difficult time Dorothy often remembered the scene of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov. She included that scene in a recommended reading list in her early book, House of Hospitality. In that same book in chapter nine she described how she felt low and oppressed about discouraged Catholic Workers who were weary of the idea of freedom and personal responsibility. She related this problem to the passage: “Today I just happened to light on Dostoevsky’s ‘Grand Inquisitor’ which was most apropos. Freedom–how men hate and chafe under it, how unhappy they are with it.”

Reflecting on the worst violence of war, Dorothy turned to the Grand Inquisitor scene. In the March 1966 CW, during the Vietnam War she wrote,

“Of course, there were, and always will be, great gaps in my understanding of such questions as the problem of evil in the world and God’s permission of it. I cringe still at Ivan Karamazov’s portrayal of ‘a God that permits’ the torture of children, such torture as is going on today in the burning alive of babies in Vietnam. Theologians debate situation ethics and the new morality (leaving out of account the problem of means and ends) while the screams of the flaming human torches, civilians and soldiers, rise high to heaven. The only conclusion I have ever been able to reach is that we must pray to God to increase our faith, a faith without which one cannot love or hope. ‘Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief.’”

Her own identification as a writer with Dostoevsky is apparent in the chapter in her book,Loaves and Fishes, “The Insulted and the Injured.” It begins:

“Last week, stopping to browse as I passed a second-hand bookstore on Fourth Avenue I came across a battered old copy of Dostoevsky’s The Insulted and the Injured, a story which I had not read for many years. It was only twenty-five cents. I got it, and started reading it that very evening.

“It is the story of a young author-it might be Dostoevsky himself-of the success of his first book, and of how he read it aloud to his foster father. The father said, “It’s simply a little story, but it wrings your heart. What’s happening all around you grows easier to understand and to remember, and you learn that the most downtrodden, humblest man is a man, too, and a brother.” I thought as I read these words, “That is why I write” (Loaves and Fishes, Orbis Books, 1963, 1997, p. 75).

A few of the lines which Dorothy quoted frequently from Dostoevsky are sometimes attributed to her instead of to the great Russian author. One of these is “The World will be Saved by Beauty.” Her January 1973 “On Pilgrimage” column explains the deeper meaning of the phrase and why she quoted it so frequently:

“Beauty will save the world,” Dostoevsky wrote. I just looked up this quotation in Konstantin Mochulsky’s Dostoevsky, His Life and Work…In a paragraph on page 224, in speaking of art, Dostoevsky is quoted as saying, “It has its own integral organic life and it answers man’s innate need of beauty without which, perhaps he might not want to live upon earth.”

When a man is in discord with reality, conflict…the thirst for beauty and harmony appears in him with its greatest force. Art is useful here because it pours in energy, sustains the forces, strengthens our feeling of life… Man accepts beauty without any conditions and so, simply because it is beauty, with veneration he bows down before it, not asking why it is useful and what one can buy with it… Beauty is more useful than the simply useful, for it is the ultimate goal of being. On this height, the way of art meets with the way of religion…

It was Jack English [Catholic Worker from Cleveland] who, in one of his letters from the Trappist Monastery in Georgia, wrote to me that line from Dostoevsky’s notebook, ‘Beauty will save the world.’

Dorothy’s reflections on beauty and Dostoevsky’s phrase on other occasions included her appreciation of the beauty of nature and her ability to see beauty even in those who were suffering. In the September 1974 CW she wrote:

The world will be saved by beauty, Dostoevsky wrote, and Solzhenitsyn quoted it in his Nobel talk. I look back on my childhood and remember beauty. The smell of sweet clover in a vacant lot, a hopeful clump of grass growing up through the cracks of a city pavement. A feather dropped from some pigeon. A stalking cat. Ruskin wrote of “the duty of delight,” and told us to lift up our heads and see the cloud formations in the sky. I have seen sunrises at the foot of a New York street, coming up over the East River. I have always found a strange beauty in the suffering faces which surround us in the city. Black, brown and grey heads bent over those bowls of food, that so necessary food which is always there at St. Joseph’s House on First St., prepared each morning by Ed Forand or some of the young volunteers. We all enter into the act of hospitality, one way or another. So many of those who come in to eat return to serve, to become part of the “family.”

Dorothy was sometimes able to create beauty in simplicity and even poverty and appreciated the gift of others who did so. She told the story of what happened when one family joined a Catholic Worker farm and destroyed the beauty in the name of looking poor:

Another family moving in with us, on one of our Catholic Worker farms, felt that the beautifying which had made the farmhouse and its surroundings a charming spot was not consistent with a profession of poverty. They broke up the rustic benches and fence, built by one of the men from the Bowery who had stayed with us, and used them for firewood. The garden surrounding the statue of the Blessed Virgin, where we used to say the rosary, was trampled down and made into a woodyard filled with chips and scraps left from the axe which chopped the family wood. It was the same with the house: the curtains were taken down, the floor remained bare, there were no pictures-the place became a scene of stark poverty, and a visiting bishop was appalled at the “poverty.” It had looked quite comfortable before, and one did not think of the crowded bedrooms or the outhouse down the hill, or the outdoor cistern and well where water had to be pumped and put on the wood stove in the kitchen to heat. Not all these hardships were evident. (Dorothy Day, “Reflections During Advent, Part Two: The Meaning of Poverty,” Ave Maria, December 3, 1966, p. 21).

Peter Maurin’s program had three aspects: cult, culture and cultivation. The culture part was related to many aspects of culture, including beauty and to folk art, expressions of the exuberance and joy and thankfulness for life. The Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality were not all works of mercy and worship, important as these were. Worship (cult) was complemented at times by “culture.” In an article on “Education and Work” in the September 1953 CW Dorothy wrote:
If we had this good foundation of productive work, culture would grow from it. Folk songs, folk art, folk dancing, are expression of the exuberance and joy and thankfulness for life. Cultivation and culture are based on Cult, which is our Holy Faith.

We have had two and three Masses a day at Peter Maurin farm for the past month. There is the rosary, prime, compline, vespers at Maryfarm. There is culture, which is the drawing which little Mac Smith does, and all the children love to do, and the reading and the listening to music, and the making of it. At Maryfarm Hector Black gave us a wonderful concert this summer on our old piano which he tuned. At Peter Maurin farm, we all joined in singing, Michael with Russian songs, Fr. Wencelaus with Polish, Stanley with Lithuanian, Fr. Pinet and the three seminarians who were visiting with French songs, and the Smith children with calypso!

A reflection on beauty which illustrates this theme so well was written by Dorothy in her “On Pilgrimage” column in the February 1955 CW:

“There is a poor little church down in that section, a frame building and painted a bright swampy green. It was light and warm inside and had the feeling of a much loved place. There was a shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe and no matter how garish the decorations, this presentation of Our Lady is always of unutterable beauty. She is the patroness of the Americas and I love to visit her in the shrines, and make special requests there. They are usually in the neighborhoods of the poor.”

In the midst of busy houses of hospitality, Dorothy sometimes found time to listen to beautiful music. In the October 1945 CW she described one such occasion:

“I went out to the kitchen to make fudge…Gerry wanted to mail it to Jack Thornton for Christmas and the package had to get off before Monday and there was no time Friday or Saturday. . . we listened to the symphony while the fudge, made of brown sugar and milk, boiled on the stove. The symphony was Tschaikovsky’s Fifth, the Pathetique, the same one my brother and I listened to while we waited for his wife to have her first baby. Such music to accompany our thoughts of life and death.”

A passage from Dostoevsky which has become closely associated with Dorothy because she quoted it so often comes from The Brothers Karamazov. A society woman goes to Fr. Zossima to speak about her lack of faith and how to achieve immortality. The woman says she likes to love, but wants an immediate reward. Fr. Zossima’s response is, “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.” This phrase sustained Workers through difficult moments in Houses of Hospitality when the problems were overwhelming and guests were often anything but grateful. The rush of romantic emotion often associated with helping the poor faded after a few days or weeks in a House of Hospitality and Workers had to be sustained by something much deeper. In the postcript to The Long Loneliness, Dorothy wrote: “…the final word is love. At times it has been, in the words of Father Zossima, a harsh and dreadful thing, and our very faith in love has been tried through fire” (The Long Loneliness, p. 285).
In her Spring Appeal in the April 1958 CW Dorothy explained how it was possible to go on even when love in practice might be harsh and dreadful:

“We are called to be saints, St. Paul said, and Peter Maurin called on us to make that kind of society where it was easier for men to be saints. Nothing less will work. Nothing less is powerful enough to combat war and the all-encroaching state.

“To be a saint is to be a lover, ready to leave all, to give all. Dostoevsky said that love in practice was a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams, but if ‘we see only Jesus’ in all who come to us: the lame, the halt and the blind, who come to help and to ask for help, then it is easier.”

Writing in the Houston Catholic Worker about Dorothy Day and Dostoevsky in September-October 1966, Joe Peabody described very well the attitude toward the poor in both the Catholic Worker Movement and in Dostoevsky: “The same respectful, yet realistic, attitude toward people is implied in the Catholic worker philosophy. Neither tries to unravel the mystery of God’s presence in the poor. Neither idealizes them. But both realize that the poor are icons of Jesus.”

Writing late in her life on May Day of 1976 Dorothy reflected on the beginnings of the Catholic Worker movement, the philosophers with whom Peter kept the Workers in touch, and the suffering of the poor served by the Catholic Worker. Again, she brought in the famous phrase from The Brothers Karamazov:

“Sometimes life is so hard, we foolishly look upon ourselves as martyrs, because it is almost as though we were literally sharing in the sufferings of those we serve. It is good to remember-to clutch to our aching hearts those sayings of Fr. Zossima–‘Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.’”

Mark and Louise Zwick, Houston Catholic Worker, Vol. XX, No. 3, May-June 2000.