Scenes of happiness in the novels of Dostoevsky

This article presents Dostoevsky to readers as the author praising happiness and felicity. Having lived though deep sorrows, he gained an insight into another dimension of life. Tike a longing pathfinder, he states the unfeigned grace of life. "Tife is a gift, life is mercy, and any minute may be the age of happiness," — these are the essentials of his great novels. People are not lonesome on Earth; they are bound by invisible threads. A loner may not exist. One heart or one consciousness draws another one like a magnet, as if claiming: thou art... Christ, with his Tove and his Sacrifice, is the greatest miracle on Earth. It is impossible to be aware of Christ's existence and not to be joyful. Dostoevsky reveals one of the main principles of life: when you love someone and sacrifice yourself to this person, you satisfy your aspiration for beau ideal and feel like in heaven. In this article the author analyzes selected scenes of happiness in Dostoevsky's novels: Arkady and his sister Tiza's admiration for the sacrifice of their father Versilov; Alyosha and Grushenka, saving each other instead of committing sins and transgressing moral standards; Alyosha's dream about the Christ's first miracle in Cana of Galilee; Stavrogin's dream of the Golden Age of the blessed mankind... In Dostoevskys tragic novel The Possessed (Demons) a reader faces an image of love — mutual, sacrificial, fulfilling, and blithe. It is most probably without equal in the history of the world literature. One can eminently feel the interconnectedness of Dostoevsky's heroes with another, higher world, that penetrates into every aspect of their lives. All of his creatures are illumed by the light of other worlds. It is clear that there cannot be darkness, despair, or hopelessness in Dostoevsky's work, because even in the hell full of demons there is place for righteous people, luminous (as Nikolai Berdyaev called them) and capable of love and personal sacrifice, which means that the light is still shining in the darkness, and the evil darkness did not comprehend it.