Why do people read Dostoevsky?

All my life I tried to understand others before I could even understand myself. It’s easy to assume about me what I like and don’t. It’s fun to be in my mind and see how every word I’ve ever said is interconnected with a memory or a slice of knowledge.

People know that I read. I love reading all kinds of books and comics and novellas and essays. In my entirety, a word can destroy and mutilate a philosophy. Reading is an unconscious act we perform daily. The newspaper adds, the Instagram descriptions, TikTok comments. We read.

November is a great time to slow down before the cold season and look back at who you are. You are what you consume and chose to read. You are, what you subconsciously remember. So, I want to break the essay and thank you for reading this. For spending a bit of your day on something that I created.

If you read this, I assume you liked the title. (or you just know me) But in truth, there is little I can add, on the memory of someone that died long ago, before the world could change. Many people before me, maybe more qualified, wrote his biography, analyzed his works and spent years developing their opinion on him. I can’t offer you that. Though I can tell you about him.

 He is someone that believed in the beautiful, yet saw only the ugly around him. As Lev Shestov said “if Darwin had seen in life what Dostoevsky saw, he would not have talked about the law of preservation of species, but of its destruction.” It is an art, to be able to depict the beautiful in ugly.

I was 11 years old when I first picked up a book by Dostoevsky. In fifth grade there is little you understand about life, and yet there I was, in a sea of “Matilda’s web” and “Charlie and the chocolate fabric” reading “crime and punishment”. I picked the book from the school library and Miss Parascovia allowed me to take it for the fun of it.  No one could predict that this book would impregnate itself deep into my consciousness. It formed my depiction of right and wrong and showed me what guild can do to a weak mind.

Since, I’ve reread the book six times. I’ve tried different translations; I even listened the Russian versions. I started thinking about philosophy.
Dostoevsky opens a world for himself and his literature. From him, yes it’s a big jump, but you find tangencies to Camus, Chekov and Tolstoy.  I myself don’t recommend  starting philosophy with Dostoevsky, but he is truly beautiful.

Trying to find something similar in the vast sea of modern literature is hard, because we forgot how to accept the ugly. We see a sad movie, cry about it and move on with our life. We believe that if it isn’t happening to us, we shouldn’t suffer. And yet…

 

Dostoevsky described hell as perhaps nothing more than a room with  a chair in it. This room has several chairs. A young man sits in one. 

                                                                 Bruce Robinson

 I started celebrating his birthday three years ago. At first I only went out for a walk. Then I started telling people about him, for two years I  started going to Bacovia’s statue to think about Dostoevsky, and this year I’m writing this. My memoir on him.

I believe he would love my mother’s pancakes with cherries and chocolate. His wife, mentions in her memories of him, that he hid sweets in his library and always went for dried fruits, nuts and a good cup of tea.

 

Is it possible that the world could fall down, or should I not drink tea?

                                                     Dostoevsky F.M.

 

My favorite book of him is the adolescent. The novel chronicles the life of 19-year-old intellectual, Arkady Dolgoruky, illegitimate child of the controversial and womanizing landowner Versilov. A focus of the novel is the recurring conflict between father and son, particularly in ideology, which represents the battles between the conventional "old" way of thinking in the 1840s and the new nihilistic point of view of the youth of 1860s Russia. The young of Arkady's time embraced a very negative opinion of Russian culture in contrast to Western or European culture. The novel was written and serially published while Leo Tolstoy was publishing Anna Karenina. Dostoevsky's novel about the "accidental family" stands in contrast to Tolstoy's novel about the aristocratic Russian family.

Ronald Hingley, author of Russians and Society and a specialist in Dostoevsky's works, thought this novel a bad one, whereas Richard Pevear , famous translator of his works, vigorously defended its worth.

So, am I a bad fan for enjoying his most controversial novel?

Above all, do not be ashamed of yourself, because that is the root of your troubles

                                                             Dostoevsky F.M.

 

In 2019, a new York journalist and author, was sent to Russian to be the bridge of exchange between the literary works of us and classic eastern European authors. On his way there he stopped in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities. He took the opportunity to ask people about their opinion on an author he was flying to represent in the us markets.

“It was explained to me that nobody in Ukraine wanted to think about Dostoyevsky at the moment, because his novels contained the same expansionist rhetoric as was used in propaganda justifying Russian military aggression. ’’

I saw a big difference in libraries. Where great books of Russian authors, hard cover, a collection piece, now costed less than a dollar. But since, the war started, I started feeling the people’s opinion on my interests. I wasn’t allowed to write essays about Russian literature anymore. I couldn’t say out land that I even liked it. Talking with my grandma about Russian history, felt like spreading propaganda.

” Why should I be studying whatever literature happened to have been produced by my ancestors? I was reading Russian literature from a human perspective, not a national one. I had chosen these books precisely for the universal quality of the works.”

But wasn’t that why we didn’t admire Dostoyevsky for his political commentary? The thing he was good at was novels. Anyone in a Dostoyevsky novel who went on an unreadable rant was bound to be contradicted, in a matter of pages, by another ranting character holding the opposite view: a technique known as dialogism, which features prominently both in Russian novels and in my own thinking.

In a classical Socrates style of thinking, I started beating why we hate with association. Is it not enough to dislike the main cause? Here I think it’s mean to be the root of all evil.  In our mentality, it’s  easy to say, the powerful people are in charge, and change the subject, but that is the same as staying in a house that’s on fire and do nothing, because you aren’t the one that ignited the fire in the first place.

I deeply and truthfully respect Dostoevsky. In my perception of reality, I still see his characters roaming the streets of the world. In pain and full of sorrow.

 

I protest! Dostoevsky is immortal!

-Master and Margarita