Feodor Dostoevsky: EIE with an accent on EII

"I felt that heaven had descended to earth and swallowed me. I really attained God and was permeated by him. All of you healthy people don't even suspect what happiness is, that happiness that we epileptics experience for a second before a seizure."

"Compassion is the most important and, perhaps, the only law of existence for all humanity." – Prince Myshkin

"I believe only in my main idea. It is precisely this: people, by the law of nature, are generally divided into two categories: the lower (ordinary), that is, so to speak, the material that serves solely for the generation of their own kind, and the people proper, that is, those who have the gift or talent to say something new in their midst... The first category is always the master of the present, the second category the master of the future." – Raskolnikov

Some of this description is going to be inspired by arguments from Talanov and Parf (cogsocionics), although I'm not quoting them directly here. And yes, it's another "opposite quadra" typing, albeit here the main type is fairly clear. 

The first quote is Dostoevsky (1821-1881) describing his ecstatic aura – the few seconds of rapture that preceded his seizures. He was a man for whom the peak of being alive was an inundation of emotional-spiritual intensity so total that he "attained God," and who pitied the merely healthy for never knowing it (no valuation of Si-style homeostasis here). Even in his actual writing, an awful lot of Dostoevsky's characters spend their time in the grip of overwhelming passion. Aushra, however, was not completely wrong in assigning him as the nickname for the EII type, since he indeed had a strong accent on this, too. 

Everything about Dostoevsky's life and work runs hot. His characters being prone to ethical obsessions fits both "constructivists" EIE and EII, but his creations usually arrive to the page already at the boiling point and escalate from there, confessing, raving, delivering lengthy monologues on the themes of their ideological fixation. According to his own description of his technique, Dostoevsky subjected any idea – whether Christian charity in The Idiot, nihilism in Demons, or the dilemma of faith in Brothers Karamazov – to extreme emotional and dramatic pressure, putting it into "the crucible of contemporary Russian society" to see whether or not it could withstand such treatment. For him, it wasn't the question of ideas as theoretical concepts but rather of emotions and actions connected with them; it is through people who express them loudly that these passions are transmitted to readers, who can't help but catch an "infection." To read Dostoevsky is to be drawn, often even against one's will, into a state of heightened emotional agitation, which is exactly what the EIE type wants to do to a room, scaled up to the novel.

His mock execution in 1849 – marched out before a firing squad, reprieved at the last possible instant – is the kind of maximal existential drama that seems almost to have been arranged by his own temperament. He returned to it obsessively for the rest of his life as a defining revelation. He was, infamously, quite a gambler, which is another EIE trait, given that the type is the least rational among all rationals. It was a compulsion toward a heightened state: he described himself as a "dissolute, low, petty gambler," and could not stop, because the casino delivered the same all-or-nothing emotional totality his nervous system craved. His chain-smoking, heavy drinking, working through the night from 10:30 to 5:00 fueled on tea and sherry, the affair with a likely SLE Apollinaria Suslova (who demanded he leave his dying first wife, this relationship invovled intense power dynamic and sadomasochistic games) conducted at operatic pitch were quite Fe minus Si. At least, his eventual third marriage was happy (I've seen both LSI and LSE typings for his third wife Anna Snitkina). 

The EIE's appetite for romantic global significance shows in Dostoevsky's late turn into prophet of Russian Orthodox messianism. He made the stage the destiny of nations and the salvation of mankind. Notably, his slavophilism hardened out of emotional encounters – the "complacence and arrogance" he felt radiating off the European bourgeoisie on his travels — rather than out of analysis. Yes, your type influences your politics, but far from the only thing defining it, and the "aristocratic" content isn't outirght disqualifying for EII, anyway (even if your typical EIE is definitely more "aristocratic"): a value-driven type can certainly arrive at religious traditionalism. If Dostoevsky's reaction had stayed in a quiet, inward register, it would plausibly read EII, but it's messianic and collective rather than personal-moral: not "let me keep my own faith" but the Russian people as a chosen, Christ-bearing nation with a world-redeeming destiny. That scaling-up of a moral intuition into a grand national-historical mission is the EIE needing the stage to be cosmic. And it ran hot and polemical – the Diary of a Writer is combative, prophetic, often chauvinistic (the antisemitic streak included), broadcast to a public he wanted to inflame and lead.

The EII accent lies in figures that he brings his initial attention to, who are "canonical" EII's – Sonya the prostitute who reads the Gospel, Prince Myshkin the "idiot" whose only weapon is undefended goodness, Alyosha the gentle brother, the humiliated poor of his earliest fiction. The Idiot is described, rightly, as the book in which he tested "his most intimate, cherished, and sacred convictions" – Christlike love loosed into the real world to see whether it would survive, and the answer the novel reaches is closer to "no" than he wanted. That willingness to put one's own moral commitment on trial is typical EII scrupulous interiority. He clearly identifies, in some degree, with his EII characters. In particular, he hands Myshkin his single most defining experience, the speculation on what a man feels in the minutes after being reprieved from execution. However, his novels are also populated with EIE's, with whom he also seems to have a "dark" identification, which sometimes eclipses his initial attention to the EII's: Raskolnikov, an introverted EIE in the Nietzsche-wannabe key, intoxicated by a theory until it drives him to murder and then oscillating between grandiosity and collapse (in fact, while the author clearly loves Sonya, too, her purpose is basically to redeem Raskolnikov); Stavrogin, EIE with an SLE accent, the magnetic dead center of Demons whose charisma has outlived its conscience and curdled into cold volitional experiment on other people; the nihilistic Ivan Karamazov, likely a Schopenhauer-style intermediate ILI/EIE.

"Man is a mystery. It must be solved, and if you spend your whole life solving it, do not say you have wasted time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man."

He wrote this at eighteen, in a letter to his brother, and it is the program of his life: the EIE's grand romantic framing ("man is a mystery," the vast vocation) fused to the EII's moral-psychological vocation ("because I want to be a man," the inward labor of conscience). 


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