Review: The drama of Dostoyevsky

The last novel we read in my honors English class in high school was Crime and Punishment. I was a voracious reader then—entranced by the existential questions of Camus and the declarations of Nietzsche. I snuck Thus Spoke Zarathustra under the chemistry lab table when I probably should have been memorizing the periodic table. “God is dead,” Nietzsche declared, and I—like many an angsty teen—listened.

If you’re picturing the goth-leaning, bookish kids who didn’t quite fit in anywhere else, that’s where you’d have found me: at the lunch table where quirky ideas mattered more than football scores.

But somehow, Dostoyevsky saved me—not from the lunch table where I had good friends but from the deeper temptation to believe that life was meaningless. Our teacher had us act out the trial at the heart of Crime and Punishment, in which Raskolnikov, the tormented protagonist, murders a pawnbroker and her sister. He believes he can justify the crime by doing greater good with the stolen money, convincing himself that some people—“louses,” as he calls them—can be sacrificed for others.

We debated whether he was guilty, not just legally but morally and spiritually. For teenagers—particularly those who sometimes thought they knew better than the football players, or even their teachers—the drama of the book, and the drama we enacted, hit home.

I don’t remember what part I played. But I remember feeling my heart shift. It wasn’t a grand conversion. Just a recognition that I had been more selfish than I realized, and that a part of me—a part I no longer liked—had sympathized with Raskolnikov’s logic. I didn’t say anything then. But the book and that trial—which felt, in some ways, like a trial of my teenage soul—stayed with me.

Years later, I found language for what happened in that classroom, not just psychologically but spiritually. Despite teaching at a Catholic university and holding a doctorate in literature, I only recently encountered the work of Józef Tischner (1931–2000), thanks to Artur Rosman’s excellent 2024 translation of The Philosophy of Drama. I wish now that my high school teacher (who I most certainly was not smarter than) and I had known his name. I wish I’d had his books to hide under the chemistry lab table.

Tischner—philosopher, priest, key figure in Poland’s 1980s Solidarity movement, as well as a friend and intellectual colleague of John Paul II—remains virtually unknown in Western classrooms, despite being one of the pre-eminent voices in 20th-century Catholic thought. While contemporaries like Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger and Husserl are required reading in literary studies programs (including the ones I teach), Tischner is often absent. That won’t be the case in my future syllabi.

Part of this neglect stems from the intellectual isolation imposed by communist regimes. Independent thinkers in Eastern Europe, especially those aligned with religious institutions, were often suppressed or ignored. Tischner wrote from within that context, openly challenging Marxist orthodoxy while wrestling with evil, freedom and conscience. The Philosophy of Drama is a monumental work of philosophical theology. And one of its clearest influences is the very novelist who shaped my own thinking: Dostoyevsky.

As Cyril O’Regan notes in the book’s foreword, “Dostoyevsky is a stand-alone influence [on] The Philosophy of Drama, one who gives us some hope that in modernity we can look into the abyss and come out the other side.” Tischner’s dialogue with Crime and Punishment is particularly striking in his meditation on why people lie or, as he titles his third chapter, why they “go astray.” “Raskolnikov lies,” Tischner writes. “With the lie, he attempts to hide objective reality.”

At first glance, the lie seems internal, intellectual, perhaps even justifiable. But Tischner shows that a lie is always relational—and theological. Raskolnikov goes astray because he sees only himself. (No wonder I needed Dostoyevsky as a teenager.)

And yet, Tischner reminds us, the real moral drama begins with seeking the other. When we look at another human being, we are meant to see the divine. To lie to another—and then to lie about them, and to oneself, as Raskolnikov does—is to obscure not only the truth but also conscience and reality. Ultimately, it is to obscure God.

This is the drama of Dostoyevsky’s novel, and as Tischner suggests, it is also the drama of everyday life. It plays out in governments, workplaces, parishes and homes. When we reveal truth in our encounters, what changes? When we obscure it—when we lie—what changes?

Raskolnikov’s story shows us what happens when truth is denied. The faces he tries to forget—those that confront him with objective reality—remain ever-present, both in the novel’s drama and in his inner turmoil. The pawnbroker. Her sister. They knock at his conscience, refusing to be silenced. Eventually he confesses, not because he is forced but because he cannot hold up the burdensome weight of his lie. Deep down, he longs for punishment, not as retribution but as the first step toward restoration.

But it isn’t until he’s sent to prison in Siberia—through the long work of suffering and repentance—that Raskolnikov learns to love again. He confesses not only to the authorities but finally to God. And only then does he begin to see others rightly: to love others, to love God, to speak truth. That truth is not merely factual. It is spiritual—a revelation that both implicates and elevates the whole person.

Tischner reminds us that our decisions are never neutral. They shape our souls and affect even those we might dismiss as “usable,” as Raskolnikov dismissed the pawnbroker. The lie he tells is not a mere moral failure; it is a refusal to recognize the dignity of the other. In this way, The Philosophy of Drama is not simply about personal ethics. It is about salvation history holistically. It insists that “our drama” is never just our own. We are always on God’s stage, always in relationship with one another.

Tischner’s central claim is deceptively simple: “Human existence is dramatic existence.” Drama, for him, is not confined to the stage or to moments of crisis; it is the substance of life. “To be a dramatic being,” he writes, “means living through a given time surrounded by other people while having the heart under one’s feet as a stage.” He names three conditions that make drama possible: openness to others, to the world and to time. A coffee shop conversation, a child’s soccer game, a walk through a crowd: These are all dramatic events. Not because they are unusual but because they bind us in time and space and ask us to respond. “Dramatic time ties me to you, you to me, and ties us to the stage where our drama takes place,” he writes.

But for Tischner—and this matters—the drama does not end with human contact alone. “Among the many opinions and assumptions,” he writes, “one is especially worthy of attention: there is really only one drama—the drama with God.” At the heart of this drama is what he calls “the event of the encounter.”

This is not simply realizing someone is nearby, or passing someone in a crowd. No. “The one who encounters goes beyond—transcends—himself,” Tischner writes, “toward the one to whom he can give witness (the other), and toward the One before whom he can submit his witness (before Him—the One who demands a witness).” In other words, ethics begins not in theory but in relationship. In how we face one another. In how we account for that face before God.

This is what makes Raskolnikov’s lie—and his crime—so spiritually disturbing. He refuses transcendence. He places himself above the other. He neglects the truth of the face before him and treats it as a thing, not a person, not as an image-bearer.

And this is what gives The Philosophy of Drama its power, too, especially for those drawn to Catholic personalism and the theology of human dignity. Tischner reminds us our lives are not just private. They are testimonies. Every moment reveals what we believe about the human person, about freedom, about grace. We are always giving witness to God, whether we mean to or not.

Reading Tischner, I kept returning to that classroom and our makeshift trial of Raskolnikov—and to the grace that began there. Back then, I thought we were just acting. I didn’t yet realize I was being drawn into the very philosophy of drama Tischner describes: a drama where freedom means taking responsibility for how we act toward others and where truth is never neutral. Where to lie is not merely to deceive but to fracture the bond between self and God. Where ethics begins not in theory but in the courage to face one another.

Tischner reminded me that the drama of life is not staged in courtrooms or classrooms but in every moment we choose: to tell the truth or obscure it, to take responsibility or avoid it, to bless or to condemn. He reminded me that the heart’s small shifts—like the one I felt as a teenager, unsettled by Raskolnikov’s logic—are not incidental.

They are the first rehearsals of conscience.

We are not actors reciting lines. We are image-bearers of God, called into relationship, into witness, into truth—enacting, day by day, through our choices and encounters, the drama of salvation history.

This article appears in December 2025.

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