(Aho2019)
Heidegger’s connection to Dostoevsky is well known (cf. Gerigk 2017). Dostoevsky is one of the few non-German figures that he consistently cites as an influence on Being and Time, and he kept a portrait of the Russian prominently displayed in his office. Indeed, after taking over Husserl’s chair at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger personally oversaw the university library purchasing the complete works of Dostoevsky (Schmid 2011). But his most revealing references come in letters to his wife, Elfride. In one, written from the battlefields of Lorraine in 1918, Heidegger asks for two items to give him some comfort, a wedding-day photograph of Elfride “standing by the sunflower in [her] Worpswede dress [and a] copy of The Brothers Karamazov” (LW, 48, my emphasis). And in a revealing note from 1920, he tells Elfride that it was through the writings of Dostoevsky that he learned with it meant to have a “homeland” (Heimat) and to have one’s “roots in the soil.” He goes on to encourage her to read Dostoevsky’s political writings in order to properly understand his own critique of modernity (LW, 72-73). But what does it mean to have one’s roots in the soil, and how might the modem experience of uprootedness contribute to our explosions of rage?
The experience of being uprooted and homeless for both Dostoevsky and Heidegger is informed by the nihilistic mood that was washing over Europe and Russia in the mid to late nineteenth century. Nietzsche famously refers to the predicament in terms of the “death of God,” describing nihilism as the historical moment when “the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; ‘why?’ finds no answer” (1968, 2). Without a shared conception of the sacred, there are no binding values or moral absolutes that we can turn to for guidance and inspiration. In Nietzsche’s words,
We have left the land behind and boarded the ship! We have burned our bridges—more than that, we have demolished the land behind us! Now, little ship, watch out! . . . The hours are coming when you will recognize that it is infinite, and that there is nothing more terrifying than infinity. Alas, — when [108] homesickness for the land comes over you . . . there is no longer any “land.” (2001,141, my emphasis)