Why Read Dostoevsky?

Abstract

Janine Langan Why Read Dostoevsky?? DOSTOEVSKY FASCINATES. I am always surprised at the response ofmy NorthAmerican students to The Karamazov Brothers. Here they are, forced to read eight hundred pages. To get a grade. Logically, this should turn them off and make them hate this novel.Yet, they can't help it: they too, get fascinated, and stick with the book to the bitter end.Why? When Dostoevsky died, a weeklong wake was held in his apartment . So numerous were the delegations from schools and institutions that the candles kept going out for lack ofoxygen. All lectures at university were canceled at the news.A hundred thousand people participated in his three-hour funeral procession—authors and princes, peasants and workers; above all students, pressed around the coffin which they were granted the privilege to carry. "This was not a burial but a triumph of life, the resurrection of life," commented the newspapers. This kind of public response is exactly what Dostoevsky had hoped for.What makes a writer great, he thought, was the sweep of his appeal—how wide, variegated, and empathetic his public. He had LOGOS 3:1 WINTER 2oOO 94 LOGOS a message ofhope, intended to recreate community out ofhis decadent society, and was set on communicating it by any way that worked. Poetry, the word, literature is also a medicine.There is at least some measuring rod to determine what is good in poetry and what is inappropriate for it.This measuring rod is simple:The more sympathy a poet arouses in the masses, the more he justifies his appearance as a poet. This awakening of sympathy is a work of spirit recognizing spirit outside itself, as it was already in the New Testament. It is not rooted in a political stand, but in reciprocity. There is no doubt that, like so many great Western authors from Dante to Mallarmé, Dostoevsky saw himself as extending a project launched thousand ofyears ago byJewishprophets, and refocused by Christ's gospel writers. His novels are thus the least elitist imaginable. Most of them, including The Karamazov Brothers, were published by installment in newspapers. He even created a new form ofjournalism, a regular insert ofhis own Diary, in "the Citizen": he wished to let all Russians participate in his thoughts and plans. For he passionately believed in the prophetic role ofthe writer, a role eventually to be transferred to the reader. In this world oflies and sick fantasies, he wanted to be witness to the truth as it reveals itself, moment by moment, in our daily lives. He wanted to open other eyes to the magnificent mystery throbbing at the core of every human life, even the starkest. His work is training in seeing this truth. And this is why his readers get caught:Truth is, after all, seductive. The power of Dostoevsky's writing resides in its honesty: Dostoevsky never spoke of what he had not lived himself. And he had lived more intensely than most the key experiences ofEveryman. He knew the terror of history in the making: he lived the tail end of Czarist Russia, smelled its decay, and the approach ofthe bloody rev- WHY READ DOSTOEVSKY?9^ olution about to overwhelm the West. But he also experienced a more personal kind of anguish: the panic of the loser, incapable to shed his addictions, unworthy ofhis own vision and dreams. Dostoevsky was a gambler, and never succeeded in shaking offthis obsession , however much he hated making his wife and children suffer. He also suffered from a terrifying mental illness: epilepsy. Dostoevsky was thus an expert in"chaos." He knew by personal experience what it means to feel personally overwhelmed by inside and outside forces. His books are his response to these external and internal challenges. They are hymns to the light which promises to inform that chaos, to the lightwhichmade possible the first creation and can again bring about a new creation out ofthat chaos:The light oiPravda, the light ofTrutil. Pravda Dostoevsky loved that word, so specifically Russian:The word Pravda means reality, but also justice. Truth/Pravcia is a vision of the world that is not abstract idea but also life, an ideal of the...