Writing
Dostoevsky's Psychohistory
Prediction as real knowledge. Asimov imagined a science that could predict the behavior of large groups. Dostoevsky was doing it. He smelled what was coming in Russia and tried to warn us before the spark arrived.
Psychohistory, in Asimov's Foundation series, is a branch of science that combines history, psychology, sociology, and statistics to make specific predictions about the behavior of large groups. The premise: individuals are unpredictable, but large groups are quite predictable, almost to the point of being deterministic.
Dostoevsky did not know how right he was when he said that Russia was possessed with dangerous ideas. He saw, with devastating clarity, that the old mythos of Russian life was no longer enough to grip the imagination, and that people were beginning to flirt with ideas that would shake the foundations of Russia and, to a large extent, the entire world. Russia was a backward Orthodox monarchy that engaged with Western liberalism only superficially. More importantly, it was under the oppressive regime of the Tsars, where the average Russian was battling poverty. The real needs of the Russian serfs were material. They needed food, clothes, shelter. The elites, however, were out of touch with that reality. In their vanity, they thought that "high culture," a slavish imitation of Western societies, was what the Russian serfs needed.
The society Dostoevsky describes met every precondition for a dangerous idea to shake the foundations of what it means to be Russian, no, what it means to be human, to be moral, what is worth striving for. In such a time of vulnerability, it is no surprise that a Machiavellian opportunist like Pyotr would seize control and lead an organization of rebels without a cause. The average Russian knew that neither God nor Shakespeare understood their plight. It was time for a radical change, a subversive ideology, one that would destroy everything so a new paradigm could rise from the ashes. These sentiments were gunpowder, waiting for the spark. And inevitably, it would be cynical men who would exploit the situation for their own personal gain.
Dostoevsky smelled something in the zeitgeist and gave a stark warning. He perhaps already knew it was too late. It was hope, I think, that made him end the novel with Pyotr's subversive tactics rendered ineffective. He would be appalled, but not surprised, to learn how history unfolded.