John T. Noonan Jr. the reflections of Prince Myshkin, is "the most important, perhaps the sole law of human existence." Feodor Dostoevsky, "The Idiot", 292 (Alan Myers, trans.) (1991). In the vernacular, compassion is trumps. No one can read the accounts of the sufferings of the deceased plaintiffs supplied by their declarations, or the accounts of the sufferings of their patients supplied by the physicians, without being moved by them. No one would inflict such sufferings on another or want them inflicted on himself; and since the horrors recounted are those that could attend the end of life anyone who reads of them must
Demons (Dostoevsky novel) take up within this struggle. Dostoevsky saw atheism as the root cause of Russia's deepening social problems. He further wrote to Maykov: "a man who loses his people and his national roots also loses the faith of his fathers and his God." It is in this letter that he speaks, referring primarily to Stavrogin and secondarily to Stepan Verkhovensky, of the 'Russian Man' as comparable to the man possessed by demons who is healed by Jesus in the parable of the swine. In "Demons" the Russian man has lost his true national identity (inextricably linked, for Dostoevsky, with the Orthodox