Fyodor Dostoyevsky...

Topic started by Vishvesh (@ port113.net98.bignet.net) on Mon Jul 10 19:19:54 .
All times in EST +10:30 for IST.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky is perhaps the most complex writer that the world has ever seen. Great works of art, as T.S.Eliot somewhere observed, do have the tendency of hurting the reader's sensibility, for they are in their very essense " a criticism of life" itself and make one self aware and conscious of the falsities one is involved with. But with Dostoyevsky, this feeling reaches enormous proportions that it even creates the level of creating a feeling of nausea and strong feelings of pain.

Russian Literature is fascinating from Pushkin. We see the country in a profound intellectual turmoil from his times. Russia seems to have been intensely religious those times but the revolution in social thinking created by the European writers puts everything in jeapordy. We see a nihilistic trait of thought from Pushkin continuing later with Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Gorky and Checkov. It doesn't even spare Tolstoy. Everything, including the values of religion is jeered at. This sense of oblivion, which is charactarestic of the Russian thought of that time, which is so repulsive to read, is found at its peak in Dostoyevsky.

But then, one has to admit the content of realism that such a nihilistic trend of thought could bring in Russian Literature. Man as a social animal is dissected to the core. Dostoyevsky's works are all outwardly concerned with Man as an invidual against the society with its acquired values but in their essence with its real inward values. He tries to give psychological answers to socialogical issues and hence he becomes very complex and repulsive. Religion is one thing that baffles him often. He is intensely religious but at the same time as a great artist he is, he is clearly able to see how Man lost his inward freedom and his deeper sense of life from the beginning of christianity. He cannot help criticizing Jesus Christ himself for the vital life he took away from Mankind in the name of offering a better life here in earth. His well-known chapter from the "Brothers Karamazov" titled "The Grand Inquisitor" is a shattering piece of criticism of the long era of christianity. He raises the vital issues of Man's psyche in relation to the society. When does he get internally satisified? What are the two governing forces of it? Didn't he always had that internal craving that someone (not from the religious point of view) who was so physically and emotionally above to him to whom he could so willingly slave himself to? And is it not a great sense of wonder which could be created in such a feeling that has sustained his life? And didn't Jesus Christ killed that sense of wonder in his religion of false love? Ivan Karamazov from that great work questions Jesus Christ who comes again to the earth and that is one chapter of the book which would forever remain a kind of enigma.

Now this double stand is so striking in all of his works. But behind them, there is a portrayal of realism of life capable to be experienced only by such a passionate and intense soul as Dostoyevsky only had.

Hope to continue if someone else also could take interest in the subject....

vishvesh


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