I love Dostoevsky too much and am quite happy in my bias and echo chamber of that—he was one of the writers that I read in my early days, and to date, I feel that he changed a lot in me or resonated so much that I can't explain.
I believe Nietzche said this about him "the only psychologist from whom I had something to learn."
And one of my favorite quotes by him:
For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!”
My favorite course I took in college was a Russian Literature elective my first semester. I fell in love with Dostoevsky when we read Crime and Punishment and I ended up writing my 25 page term paper on him and his role in the proto-existentialist vs nihilism movement in Russia in the 1860s. There will always be a part of me that wishes I had taken my career in that direction instead of computers :)
Reminds me of an interview with Fields Medalist Laurent Lafforgue, where he mentioned that at one point, he had only been interested in literature, particularly Dostoevsky, and couldn't understand how anyone could bother with mathematics, but that he later realized that mathematics could also convey profound truths.
> "[...] Reading him simply makes one realize that stream of consciousness springs not from consciousness but from a word which alters or redirects one’s consciousness."
This has a slight ring of Derrida and/but I find it a very interesting point. The "stream of consciousness" really does seem like a stream of the words themselves, each one in reflection of the previous and anticipation of the next. The flowing is not just in the writer's mind but the reader's as well.
I perceive this thread in the same way as the praise of Hanns Johst.
With the perceived potential of separating work from its author being inversely proportional to the amount of attention devoted to both (Raskolnikov attitude towards Poles as something on the surface, though it's infiltrated with Russian chauvinism at a much deeper level).
With overlooking the fact that it is being used as a weapon (together with the unified Russian language created by Pushkin) for erasure of entire cultures. I'd stress this out: this is not a weapon in a museum. We are talking active phase. And the more obscure the relations above are, the higher the penetration rate.
Sounds good but doesn't add up. I think his writing's legacy is due more to the time it was published, it's translations into other languages and boosters like Freud who thought BK what the greatest novel ever written. That opinion gets echoed a lot, but thinking about literature in a ordinal sense is a little absurd. For me, the ruble ammouts in BK were almost meaningless. I just assumed 3,000 or 5,000 rubles was a shit ton of money, but def less than a million dollars today.
“Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment—by this reader anyway.” V. Nabokov, [0]
I really recommend Nabokov's full lecture on Dostoyevsky [1], plus obvs all the of the lectures in the series are brilliant.
Nabokov is the proof that being a genius writer doesn't always imply having good taste. For example, see his opinion on Henry James, Faulkner or Camus.
The man wrote what he wanted to read and hated everything else.
Not by a long shot. War and peace is the classic long read, but outside of Russian literature you also get authors like Victor Hugo and Les Miserables.
Also, depending on your tastes, Charlotte Bronte and other similar period writers were equally bland or significant.
I read Crime and Punishment as a teenager and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Raskolnikov’s misadventures are not ‘fun’ but as a psychological exploration of guilt (or lack thereof), it was very interesting.
I like Notes from the Underground and his other short stories (like the Double) even more.
This criticism is all the more poignant given that it comes from Nabokov. He is one of the few authors for whose works the Russian and English versions are almost equivalent; he was bilingual and did the translation himself.
A dissing with two of my favourite authors as protagonists, thank you!
A small extract of “Transparent Things" by Nabokov that I love so much: how a Caran d’Ache pencil is built. An incredible travel through space and time!
His works will live on regardless of the culture or the time it was written. As long as there is Poverty, Guilt consciousness, Morality his works would be relevent.
I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.
> a writer's financial situation does not make art immortal.
That was not the point of the article. The point was that the narrowness of circumstance - living between riches and poverty and what type of person can handle that (not to mention the unique problems that might come up with that) - requires someone that can balance that sort of situation.
Like most literary analysis, GP's remarks ("narrowness of circumstance")
are bullshit. The title "What Made His Work Immortal" was completely
off-topic.
Dostoyevsky was truly great and could see the true and important things about the world, while Nabokov's contribution to literature will not be remembered past this century. One foresaw what the death of absolute good would do to the world—the casual mass murders of millions in places such as Germany, Cambodia, Stalinist Russia. The other is famous for Lolita.
“Don’t be afraid of anything, ever. And do not grieve. As long as your repentance does not weaken, God will forgive everything. There is not—there cannot be—a sin on earth that God will not forgive the truly repentant. Why, a man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. How could there be a sin that would surpass the love of God?
Think only of repentance, all the time, and drive away all fear. Have faith that God loves you more than you can ever imagine. He loves you, sinful as you are and, indeed, because of your sin. It was said long ago that there is more joy in heaven over one repentant sinner than over ten righteous men. Go now, and fear nothing. Do not be offended if people treat you badly. Do not hold it against them. And forgive your departed husband all the harm he did you. Become truly reconciled with him. For if you repent, you love, and if you love, you are with God. Love redeems and saves everything.
If I, a sinner like yourself, am moved and feel compassion for you, how infinitely much more will God! Love is such an infinite treasure it can buy the whole world and can redeem not only your sins, but the sins of all people. So go and fear no more.”
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov (pp. 64-65). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
There was no shortage of casual mass murder before the 20th century, not infrequently perpetrated by religious orders. The Mongol invasions in the 13th century, An Lushan rebellion in China in 750, Albigensian Crusade in the 12th century... it´s a long list I´m afraid - we are not a tame species.
The quote is truly the quintessence of Dostoevsky's works. A classic orthodox christian hodgepodge base, served with heaviest spicing of obligatory suffering of all kinds - both physical and mental, all perversely portrayed as a virtue.
It's kinda like alcohol, and if we go with this comparison - Dostoevsky promotes drowning in it as a salvation. Put bluntly, that shit ruins lives, not mends them. But Dostoevsky does not just write about it, he carefully designs the whole narrative to make it look like the only logical choice and wholeheartedly promotes it. And that's why I just can't stand his works, despite all their psychological, artistic and linguistic/literary merits. This insane cultural gap is simply too big to cross for me.
It all makes sense in historical and cultural context, of course, but that's exactly what puts an expiration date on Dostoevsky's works. They're a product or a very specific culture, and thus will no longer be relevant when their parent culture will finally wither away (and, personally, I sincerely hope it naturally does, for I see it as way more harmful than positive).
There are literature works that would remain relevant for a long while, but Dostoevsky is not one of those.
It's a good quote for orthodox christians, I'm not sure it would make anyone else want to read dostoevsky though. I'm a dostoevsky liker and orthodox christian myself so this isn't an issue for me but in this venue I feel like you could have made a better choice for representing him.
It's interesting what people take from this passage. I was primed by alangau's statement that Dostoevsky predicted the death of absolute good, and the mass slaughter of millions, when I read
> There is not—there cannot be—a sin on earth that God will not forgive the truly repentant.
To me, this sends a horrifying message. A self-righteous individual can kill millions, wake up to the terrible reality of their act, repent, and be bathed in the joy of a loving god's forgiveness. They need suffer only a moment's guilt, before proceeding fearlessly back into the world.
And yet, according to alangau's sibling comment, the passage was deeply moving to him. Perhaps my horrified response is a deep motion of sorts, but that isn't a typical usage of the phrase "deeply moved."
That is an interesting view of it. I mentioned this elsewhere but I happen to share a religion with dostoevsky so this idea is familiar to me and no longer jarring. It does violate a certain idea of fairness or consequence that most people subscribe to, and that contradiction is all over the gospels so it really is one of the original ideas of christianity.
And ultimately this view of repentance is kind of unhelpful in a practical way when dealing with incredibly damaging behavior. We can't really judge the sincerity of someone's repentance, ultimately it is between them and god. We can restrain them from being in a situation where they could commit that act again though, just in case.
Something I think about often is an event that occurred in my home town when I was a young adult. A child, 12 or 13, old enough to know better, was playing with the stove and set the house on fire. One of their siblings died in the fire.
How do you react to that as a parent? You love the child, have to go on raising them. No punishment even makes sense, the idea of taking away the nintendo or whatever is simply grotesque, and what could be accomplished by anything proportional to the consequence? The only thing left is forgiveness. I think this is how it is with god and your hypothetical monster.
> They need suffer only a moment's guilt, before proceeding fearlessly back into the world.
Well, maybe not. Dostoevsky was Orthodox, so I don't know how he would think about this...
From a Catholic perspective sin has both temporal and eternal consequences. God can forgive a truly repentant person any sin, ordinarily through the ministry of the Church by the power and authority of Christ, establishing or returning a person to the life of divine grace in their soul, but the temporal consequences of their sin/s may remain to be repaired.
By analogy, suppose my neighbor became unreasonably angry with me, becoming so incensed that he threw a rock at one of my windows causing it to shatter. Then, after a day of cooling off, he apologized and asked forgiveness. Now suppose I granted him forgiveness, moved by his sincerity and a mutual desire to repair the relationship. The shattered window remains — the glass needs to be cleaned up, and a new window must be purchased and installed. Maybe my neighbor has the resources and skill to do the repair himself; or maybe he can pay directly or reimburse me for contract labor; or maybe he can't afford the repair but promises to pay me back; or maybe one of his family members pays me instead. One way or another, the window will be repaired and my neighbor bears responsibility for it.
So sin, generally, is like this, from the Catholic POV. If the forgiven sinner is not able to make repair before their life ends, then they will suffer in purgatory after death before enjoying the beatific vision. The purification will be more severe depending on the number and gravity of sins. Some mystics claim to have been informed about souls that will suffer in purgatory flames hotter than those of damnation until the last moment before the general judgment, so terrible were their sins and unrepaired consequences of the same.
I think it's important you choose what affects you most. I was deeply moved reading this when I was atheist, so who am I to say what will and will not move others?
I'm not sure, I think the strength of his writing isn't well captured in quotes. But it seems like this one resonates with more people than I expected so I concede I was wrong about this.
If you're going to write a book, for other people to read, you ultimately want people to understand and recognize your ideas/the point of your work. It has nothing to do with morality.
I'm talking of the poster, judging the Lolita author for being famous for Lolita. Thinking that judgement is through fame is a morally depraved, evil outlook
If I write a cautionary tale about the seductive evils of fascism,
with an unreliable narrator who's a cog in the evil machine, and obviously deluded about it,
and deeply unpleasant detailed descriptions of the awful cruelty perpetuated by the nazi regime,
and some fascists really like my book, because detailed descriptions of awful nazi cruelty are their jam, and they really identify with my evil, unreliable, deluded narrator
and a lot of people haven't read my book, but they know the kind of person who like my book - fascists
should I be judged by the popular reception of my work?
@kristjankaim is correct - this sure isn't Nabokov. Example: "Immortality of Dostoevsky’s art is unquestionable; his art will likely continue to live on."
Dostoevsky's books, at least their English translations, are absolute
shit. CaP was just tolerable. TBK and Idiot were sheer torture. He
bests Tolstoy only insofar he didn't drag it out as long (although drag
out he did).
Not only English translations :) And the man was a real nazi. Hated Poles, Jews, French, Germans - anyone not Russian. This is where Dugin, Putin and other modern vampires draw inspiration from.
I think Dostoevsky is due a critical reevaluation from the POV of anticolonialism. He's most famous book is basically "don't read western philosophy cause you'll start murdering people - and if you did - don't worry, forced labour camp and unconditional surrender to orthodox christianity and tzar will cure you".
He's a Russian Kipling, just worse and sucking the emperor's dick much harder.
Not everyone evaluates books from the point of view of politics. Kim was a great novel that basically earned Kipling the Nobel prize at a crazy young age, and it reads like a love letter to India (until the end, when it becomes a dumb spy novel). Was Kipling jingoistic? Sometimes extremely so. That doesn't mean he didn't write anything worth reading.
Luckily, it seems like the common folk have more sense than this. Recall (pun totally intended) the reaction of SF residents to funding renaming of schools to erase the specter of colonialism instead of funding math programs.
> Luckily, it seems like the common folk have more sense than this.
Not sure about that, honestly. As reading of longform text has declined with the rise of the smartphone and other distractions, and the literary-fiction publishing market is converging internationally, a significant amount of people who still read fiction represent demographics that like to view art through a contemporary political lens, often specifically North American-centric notions of race, gender, and power even if the reader hails from somewhere else.
> He's most famous book is basically "don't read western philosophy cause you'll start murdering people
huh? Isn't anticolonialism usually not a big fan of western philosophy? I mean it seems to me quite a reasonable conclusion of some anticolonialist theories that Western Philosophy supports murder if not actually forcing it.
To a degree I see a point to this, but it's more of "I see why you feel this way, but I don't agree".
Still, it is important to mention how imperialistic Russians were - you know Pushkin, for example, right? If a public figure espoused publicly such views on any nationality as he on Poles, they'd be cancelled right away.
Piłsudski said in early 20th century that "in Russia even anarchists are imperialists" and he was basically right. And remains so to this day.
Russia managed to somehow do imperialism/colonialism and get away with it without reevaluating their past. Probably because they colonized white people.
Better to say that they colonized non-African or non-American indigenous people who could not be conveniently attached to vehement Trans-Atlantic chattel slavery or Catholic-conquistador narratives, because the Khanty, Buryats, Yakut, etc. have an appearance that is hardly what most people using race-based terminology would associate with “white people”.
I think this is an abuse of terminology. Colonial empires generally maintained a clear separation between the colonizers and the colonized. Russia usually tried to turn the conquered peoples into Russians. It's a different kind of oppression, and one which almost every nation state is guilty of.
Plenty of other empires have attempted to assimilate the colonized population to some degree. It's not even an unusual aspect of colonization; historically it's been a ubiquitious aspect, in fact.
This is a long discussion, if you want to have it I have LOTS of thoughts about it.
But short answer is - Russians absolutely have separation between colonizers and colonized. To this day.
In modern Russia the usual word to describe immigrants and non-ethnic Russians is "chorni" which basically means "blacks" and is used as a slur. There's discrimination, there's police raids on people hiring them in European part of Russia. They are overwhelmingly sent to die in Ukraine instead of "proper" Russians from the European part of the country.
> The BBC found that six of the 10 Russian regions with the highest mortality rates in Ukraine are located in Siberia and the far east. And that men from Buryatia, a Russian republic whose residents are descended from Mongols, are 75 times more likely to die than men from Moscow.
Even Ukrainians before the current war weren't treated as "proper" Russians - they were "smallrussians" - the country bumpkin stupid childish version of a "proper" Russian that have to be ruled by the Mother Rossiya or they will have a failed state forever. Basically the Russian version of "the burden of the white man".
Also let's not forget Stalin took food from the most fertile part of USSR - Ukraine - and distributed it to the rest of USSR/exported it, leaving millions of Ukrainians to die of starvation in Hlodomor. And then sent "proper" ethnic Russian colonists to replace the dead Ukrainians.
Russia did the same with Crimean Tartars, just using mass murder and expulsion instead of famine.
There were also other ethnic cleansing done by NKVD. They took adress/phone books, looked at the surnames, and arrested/murdered people based on the surname endings.
Russia absolutely was and still is a colonial empire.
I'm Pole so I am biased, but... What was Soviet Union but another colonial project?
And not to even say of countries they annexed. If Baltic states were not in Europe, everyone would agree that it was plain colonial arrangement.
"We give them coal, and in return they take sugar from us."
Pushkin was extremist and nationalist, he was also seen as such. That is why he was propped up by the regime later on.
There is a reason why Ukrainians demolished specifically his monuments and why Russians are building them. It has zero to do with quality of prose and a lot to do with ... his extremism.
Well the problem from my POV is that that exact empire he defended was persecuting millions of people, banning their languages, sending their people to forced labour camps, exterminating native people in Siberia, and keeping about 90% of the whole Russian society in serfdom (which in Russia was basically slavery).
You keep being "open-minded" about that, I prefer modernism and liberalism, thank you.
Nabokov's recommendations: http://wmjas.wikidot.com/nabokov-s-recommendations
I love Dostoevsky too much and am quite happy in my bias and echo chamber of that—he was one of the writers that I read in my early days, and to date, I feel that he changed a lot in me or resonated so much that I can't explain.
I believe Nietzche said this about him "the only psychologist from whom I had something to learn."
And one of my favorite quotes by him:
For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!”
And in song:
https://youtu.be/eKfvXBDSiU4?feature=shared
to point out what you probably intended, this is appropriately an english version of an early twentieth century russian song.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Those_Were_the_Days_%28song%29
hahah love it, thank you for sharing!
So he was a computer enthusiast?
Obviously a Hemingway fan.
This Substack post is a summary of an essay by Joseph Brodsky about Dostoevsky — but the post does not link or name the essay.
The essay is named "The Power of the Elements" and it can be read here on Google Books:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Less_Than_One/N5Nzm2uih...
The author mentioned the name of the book in the very first paragraph.
Yes, it seems the essay inspired the post and it quotes excerpts from the essay but also has also some nice additional commentary.
The book in which they read the essay but not it seems the essay itself.
My favorite course I took in college was a Russian Literature elective my first semester. I fell in love with Dostoevsky when we read Crime and Punishment and I ended up writing my 25 page term paper on him and his role in the proto-existentialist vs nihilism movement in Russia in the 1860s. There will always be a part of me that wishes I had taken my career in that direction instead of computers :)
Please consider an advice: try using some of your spare time on that interest. You never know.
Reminds me of an interview with Fields Medalist Laurent Lafforgue, where he mentioned that at one point, he had only been interested in literature, particularly Dostoevsky, and couldn't understand how anyone could bother with mathematics, but that he later realized that mathematics could also convey profound truths.
> "[...] Reading him simply makes one realize that stream of consciousness springs not from consciousness but from a word which alters or redirects one’s consciousness."
This has a slight ring of Derrida and/but I find it a very interesting point. The "stream of consciousness" really does seem like a stream of the words themselves, each one in reflection of the previous and anticipation of the next. The flowing is not just in the writer's mind but the reader's as well.
Dostoevsky is one of those authors whose works absolutely require deconstructive double reading. :-)
I perceive this thread in the same way as the praise of Hanns Johst.
With the perceived potential of separating work from its author being inversely proportional to the amount of attention devoted to both (Raskolnikov attitude towards Poles as something on the surface, though it's infiltrated with Russian chauvinism at a much deeper level).
With overlooking the fact that it is being used as a weapon (together with the unified Russian language created by Pushkin) for erasure of entire cultures. I'd stress this out: this is not a weapon in a museum. We are talking active phase. And the more obscure the relations above are, the higher the penetration rate.
Disappointing.
Sounds good but doesn't add up. I think his writing's legacy is due more to the time it was published, it's translations into other languages and boosters like Freud who thought BK what the greatest novel ever written. That opinion gets echoed a lot, but thinking about literature in a ordinal sense is a little absurd. For me, the ruble ammouts in BK were almost meaningless. I just assumed 3,000 or 5,000 rubles was a shit ton of money, but def less than a million dollars today.
I think his idea in Crime and Punishment of there being a class of 'special' humans is pretty interesting and enduring.
“Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment—by this reader anyway.” V. Nabokov, [0]
I really recommend Nabokov's full lecture on Dostoyevsky [1], plus obvs all the of the lectures in the series are brilliant.
[0] https://lithub.com/on-dostoevskys-199th-birthday-heres-nabok...
[1] Lectures on Russian Literature, Vladimir Nabokov, https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/lectures-on-rus...
Nabokov is the proof that being a genius writer doesn't always imply having good taste. For example, see his opinion on Henry James, Faulkner or Camus.
The man wrote what he wanted to read and hated everything else.
Dostoyevsky wrote the most boring unpalatable stuff i had the misfortunate to read in school. Nabokov’s assessment was 100% correct.
Not by a long shot. War and peace is the classic long read, but outside of Russian literature you also get authors like Victor Hugo and Les Miserables.
Also, depending on your tastes, Charlotte Bronte and other similar period writers were equally bland or significant.
Or Proust’s seven volumes.
I read Crime and Punishment as a teenager and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Raskolnikov’s misadventures are not ‘fun’ but as a psychological exploration of guilt (or lack thereof), it was very interesting.
I like Notes from the Underground and his other short stories (like the Double) even more.
> Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do,
This is probably true. But Russians' opinion shouldn't matter the slightest about him for the rest of us.
Of course. But it’s worth recognizing that you like a translation of D, not his original works.
This criticism is all the more poignant given that it comes from Nabokov. He is one of the few authors for whose works the Russian and English versions are almost equivalent; he was bilingual and did the translation himself.
He is highly worshipped in the nationalistic/antisemitic circles.
A dissing with two of my favourite authors as protagonists, thank you!
A small extract of “Transparent Things" by Nabokov that I love so much: how a Caran d’Ache pencil is built. An incredible travel through space and time!
https://thenabokovian.org/node/53398
> slapdash comedian
> extraordinarily amusing
Nabokov is a genius but not once did i get this vibe ever, much darker, almost hopeless.
His works will live on regardless of the culture or the time it was written. As long as there is Poverty, Guilt consciousness, Morality his works would be relevent.
I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.
This cannot be put an expiry at..
a writer's financial situation does not make art immortal.
it cites faulkner, too, and he famously wrote "as i lay dying" while he was broke and working at the university electric plant.
> a writer's financial situation does not make art immortal.
That was not the point of the article. The point was that the narrowness of circumstance - living between riches and poverty and what type of person can handle that (not to mention the unique problems that might come up with that) - requires someone that can balance that sort of situation.
how is that not "a writer's financial situation"?
Because that's a manifestation of the struggle, not the struggle itself.
so am i struggling with my art or my financial situation? genuinely trying to understand what you're saying.
Like most literary analysis, GP's remarks ("narrowness of circumstance") are bullshit. The title "What Made His Work Immortal" was completely off-topic.
I don't find his work to be immortal, in fact I find his writing full of all the worst late 19th century writing cliches, and thus extremely dated.
Dostoyevsky was truly great and could see the true and important things about the world, while Nabokov's contribution to literature will not be remembered past this century. One foresaw what the death of absolute good would do to the world—the casual mass murders of millions in places such as Germany, Cambodia, Stalinist Russia. The other is famous for Lolita.
“Don’t be afraid of anything, ever. And do not grieve. As long as your repentance does not weaken, God will forgive everything. There is not—there cannot be—a sin on earth that God will not forgive the truly repentant. Why, a man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. How could there be a sin that would surpass the love of God?
Think only of repentance, all the time, and drive away all fear. Have faith that God loves you more than you can ever imagine. He loves you, sinful as you are and, indeed, because of your sin. It was said long ago that there is more joy in heaven over one repentant sinner than over ten righteous men. Go now, and fear nothing. Do not be offended if people treat you badly. Do not hold it against them. And forgive your departed husband all the harm he did you. Become truly reconciled with him. For if you repent, you love, and if you love, you are with God. Love redeems and saves everything.
If I, a sinner like yourself, am moved and feel compassion for you, how infinitely much more will God! Love is such an infinite treasure it can buy the whole world and can redeem not only your sins, but the sins of all people. So go and fear no more.”
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov (pp. 64-65). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
There was no shortage of casual mass murder before the 20th century, not infrequently perpetrated by religious orders. The Mongol invasions in the 13th century, An Lushan rebellion in China in 750, Albigensian Crusade in the 12th century... it´s a long list I´m afraid - we are not a tame species.
Wow. Your quote was the first time I’ve read any Dostoyevsky and it had tears welling in my eyes. I will absolutely find more to read. Thank you.
The quote is truly the quintessence of Dostoevsky's works. A classic orthodox christian hodgepodge base, served with heaviest spicing of obligatory suffering of all kinds - both physical and mental, all perversely portrayed as a virtue.
It's kinda like alcohol, and if we go with this comparison - Dostoevsky promotes drowning in it as a salvation. Put bluntly, that shit ruins lives, not mends them. But Dostoevsky does not just write about it, he carefully designs the whole narrative to make it look like the only logical choice and wholeheartedly promotes it. And that's why I just can't stand his works, despite all their psychological, artistic and linguistic/literary merits. This insane cultural gap is simply too big to cross for me.
It all makes sense in historical and cultural context, of course, but that's exactly what puts an expiration date on Dostoevsky's works. They're a product or a very specific culture, and thus will no longer be relevant when their parent culture will finally wither away (and, personally, I sincerely hope it naturally does, for I see it as way more harmful than positive).
There are literature works that would remain relevant for a long while, but Dostoevsky is not one of those.
Just my own personal opinion.
It's a good quote for orthodox christians, I'm not sure it would make anyone else want to read dostoevsky though. I'm a dostoevsky liker and orthodox christian myself so this isn't an issue for me but in this venue I feel like you could have made a better choice for representing him.
It's interesting what people take from this passage. I was primed by alangau's statement that Dostoevsky predicted the death of absolute good, and the mass slaughter of millions, when I read
> There is not—there cannot be—a sin on earth that God will not forgive the truly repentant.
To me, this sends a horrifying message. A self-righteous individual can kill millions, wake up to the terrible reality of their act, repent, and be bathed in the joy of a loving god's forgiveness. They need suffer only a moment's guilt, before proceeding fearlessly back into the world.
And yet, according to alangau's sibling comment, the passage was deeply moving to him. Perhaps my horrified response is a deep motion of sorts, but that isn't a typical usage of the phrase "deeply moved."
* They need suffer only a moment's guilt, before proceeding fearlessly back into the world.
It is not a true repentance if one can wash off their guilt in a moment. True repentance is eternal burn.
That is an interesting view of it. I mentioned this elsewhere but I happen to share a religion with dostoevsky so this idea is familiar to me and no longer jarring. It does violate a certain idea of fairness or consequence that most people subscribe to, and that contradiction is all over the gospels so it really is one of the original ideas of christianity.
And ultimately this view of repentance is kind of unhelpful in a practical way when dealing with incredibly damaging behavior. We can't really judge the sincerity of someone's repentance, ultimately it is between them and god. We can restrain them from being in a situation where they could commit that act again though, just in case.
Something I think about often is an event that occurred in my home town when I was a young adult. A child, 12 or 13, old enough to know better, was playing with the stove and set the house on fire. One of their siblings died in the fire.
How do you react to that as a parent? You love the child, have to go on raising them. No punishment even makes sense, the idea of taking away the nintendo or whatever is simply grotesque, and what could be accomplished by anything proportional to the consequence? The only thing left is forgiveness. I think this is how it is with god and your hypothetical monster.
> They need suffer only a moment's guilt, before proceeding fearlessly back into the world.
Well, maybe not. Dostoevsky was Orthodox, so I don't know how he would think about this...
From a Catholic perspective sin has both temporal and eternal consequences. God can forgive a truly repentant person any sin, ordinarily through the ministry of the Church by the power and authority of Christ, establishing or returning a person to the life of divine grace in their soul, but the temporal consequences of their sin/s may remain to be repaired.
By analogy, suppose my neighbor became unreasonably angry with me, becoming so incensed that he threw a rock at one of my windows causing it to shatter. Then, after a day of cooling off, he apologized and asked forgiveness. Now suppose I granted him forgiveness, moved by his sincerity and a mutual desire to repair the relationship. The shattered window remains — the glass needs to be cleaned up, and a new window must be purchased and installed. Maybe my neighbor has the resources and skill to do the repair himself; or maybe he can pay directly or reimburse me for contract labor; or maybe he can't afford the repair but promises to pay me back; or maybe one of his family members pays me instead. One way or another, the window will be repaired and my neighbor bears responsibility for it.
So sin, generally, is like this, from the Catholic POV. If the forgiven sinner is not able to make repair before their life ends, then they will suffer in purgatory after death before enjoying the beatific vision. The purification will be more severe depending on the number and gravity of sins. Some mystics claim to have been informed about souls that will suffer in purgatory flames hotter than those of damnation until the last moment before the general judgment, so terrible were their sins and unrepaired consequences of the same.
What would you have chosen to represent him?
I think it's important you choose what affects you most. I was deeply moved reading this when I was atheist, so who am I to say what will and will not move others?
I'm not sure, I think the strength of his writing isn't well captured in quotes. But it seems like this one resonates with more people than I expected so I concede I was wrong about this.
If you think the point of your work is what you end up being famous for, then you have no moral ground to stand on
How should one decide what to read?
Huh?
If you're going to write a book, for other people to read, you ultimately want people to understand and recognize your ideas/the point of your work. It has nothing to do with morality.
I'm talking of the poster, judging the Lolita author for being famous for Lolita. Thinking that judgement is through fame is a morally depraved, evil outlook
How should one judge a writer if not by the body of their work?
If I write a cautionary tale about the seductive evils of fascism,
with an unreliable narrator who's a cog in the evil machine, and obviously deluded about it,
and deeply unpleasant detailed descriptions of the awful cruelty perpetuated by the nazi regime,
and some fascists really like my book, because detailed descriptions of awful nazi cruelty are their jam, and they really identify with my evil, unreliable, deluded narrator
and a lot of people haven't read my book, but they know the kind of person who like my book - fascists
should I be judged by the popular reception of my work?
You didn't judge the writer by their body of work. You judged the author by which works are famous.
@kristjankaim is correct - this sure isn't Nabokov. Example: "Immortality of Dostoevsky’s art is unquestionable; his art will likely continue to live on."
Wait... which is it?
Dostoevsky's books, at least their English translations, are absolute shit. CaP was just tolerable. TBK and Idiot were sheer torture. He bests Tolstoy only insofar he didn't drag it out as long (although drag out he did).
Not only English translations :) And the man was a real nazi. Hated Poles, Jews, French, Germans - anyone not Russian. This is where Dugin, Putin and other modern vampires draw inspiration from.
Hated Poles, Jews, French, Germans - anyone not Russian.
But that does not make one a Nazi.
Thinking that it does dilutes the discussion.
I think Dostoevsky is due a critical reevaluation from the POV of anticolonialism. He's most famous book is basically "don't read western philosophy cause you'll start murdering people - and if you did - don't worry, forced labour camp and unconditional surrender to orthodox christianity and tzar will cure you".
He's a Russian Kipling, just worse and sucking the emperor's dick much harder.
Not everyone evaluates books from the point of view of politics. Kim was a great novel that basically earned Kipling the Nobel prize at a crazy young age, and it reads like a love letter to India (until the end, when it becomes a dumb spy novel). Was Kipling jingoistic? Sometimes extremely so. That doesn't mean he didn't write anything worth reading.
Life is complicated.
In the event that happens, and I'd not be surprised, I'd still expect him to remain just as popular with readers.
Luckily, it seems like the common folk have more sense than this. Recall (pun totally intended) the reaction of SF residents to funding renaming of schools to erase the specter of colonialism instead of funding math programs.
> Luckily, it seems like the common folk have more sense than this.
Not sure about that, honestly. As reading of longform text has declined with the rise of the smartphone and other distractions, and the literary-fiction publishing market is converging internationally, a significant amount of people who still read fiction represent demographics that like to view art through a contemporary political lens, often specifically North American-centric notions of race, gender, and power even if the reader hails from somewhere else.
Which book would this be? His catalog, the great bulk of it anyway, is quite prolific.
Crime and Punishment, obviously.
But he was a russian empire/orthodoxy apologist through and through, except for a brief period early on (which earned him the gulag).
Wow, I got something completely different from that book. It's crazy how two people can read the same thing and have drastically different takeaways.
Two movies, one screen.
Just think: if that's what he took away, he probably thinks killing old ladies is good enlightened capitalism.
I think presenting the philosophy you disagree with as leading to murdering innocent people is bad writing.
> He's most famous book is basically "don't read western philosophy cause you'll start murdering people
huh? Isn't anticolonialism usually not a big fan of western philosophy? I mean it seems to me quite a reasonable conclusion of some anticolonialist theories that Western Philosophy supports murder if not actually forcing it.
Western philosophy at the time ended slavery, serfdom and challanged religion and god-given right to rule.
All of which Dostoyevsky tried to defend.
Don't get me wrong - early western democracies weren't perfect or even close. But it was still an enormous improvement over what came before.
To a degree I see a point to this, but it's more of "I see why you feel this way, but I don't agree".
Still, it is important to mention how imperialistic Russians were - you know Pushkin, for example, right? If a public figure espoused publicly such views on any nationality as he on Poles, they'd be cancelled right away.
Piłsudski said in early 20th century that "in Russia even anarchists are imperialists" and he was basically right. And remains so to this day.
Russia managed to somehow do imperialism/colonialism and get away with it without reevaluating their past. Probably because they colonized white people.
> Probably because they colonized white people.
Better to say that they colonized non-African or non-American indigenous people who could not be conveniently attached to vehement Trans-Atlantic chattel slavery or Catholic-conquistador narratives, because the Khanty, Buryats, Yakut, etc. have an appearance that is hardly what most people using race-based terminology would associate with “white people”.
They also colonized Finns, Balts, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, etc.
I think this is an abuse of terminology. Colonial empires generally maintained a clear separation between the colonizers and the colonized. Russia usually tried to turn the conquered peoples into Russians. It's a different kind of oppression, and one which almost every nation state is guilty of.
No, it's just a different flavor of colonization.
Plenty of other empires have attempted to assimilate the colonized population to some degree. It's not even an unusual aspect of colonization; historically it's been a ubiquitious aspect, in fact.
This is a long discussion, if you want to have it I have LOTS of thoughts about it.
But short answer is - Russians absolutely have separation between colonizers and colonized. To this day.
In modern Russia the usual word to describe immigrants and non-ethnic Russians is "chorni" which basically means "blacks" and is used as a slur. There's discrimination, there's police raids on people hiring them in European part of Russia. They are overwhelmingly sent to die in Ukraine instead of "proper" Russians from the European part of the country.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/russias-ethnic-minorities-...
> The BBC found that six of the 10 Russian regions with the highest mortality rates in Ukraine are located in Siberia and the far east. And that men from Buryatia, a Russian republic whose residents are descended from Mongols, are 75 times more likely to die than men from Moscow.
Even Ukrainians before the current war weren't treated as "proper" Russians - they were "smallrussians" - the country bumpkin stupid childish version of a "proper" Russian that have to be ruled by the Mother Rossiya or they will have a failed state forever. Basically the Russian version of "the burden of the white man".
Also let's not forget Stalin took food from the most fertile part of USSR - Ukraine - and distributed it to the rest of USSR/exported it, leaving millions of Ukrainians to die of starvation in Hlodomor. And then sent "proper" ethnic Russian colonists to replace the dead Ukrainians.
Russia did the same with Crimean Tartars, just using mass murder and expulsion instead of famine.
There were also other ethnic cleansing done by NKVD. They took adress/phone books, looked at the surnames, and arrested/murdered people based on the surname endings.
Russia absolutely was and still is a colonial empire.
I'm Pole so I am biased, but... What was Soviet Union but another colonial project? And not to even say of countries they annexed. If Baltic states were not in Europe, everyone would agree that it was plain colonial arrangement.
"We give them coal, and in return they take sugar from us."
Pushkin was extremist and nationalist, he was also seen as such. That is why he was propped up by the regime later on.
There is a reason why Ukrainians demolished specifically his monuments and why Russians are building them. It has zero to do with quality of prose and a lot to do with ... his extremism.
> unconditional surrender to orthodox christianity and tzar will cure you".
While I don't personally lean that way myself, I'm also not close-minded enough to dismiss the possibility outright.
Well the problem from my POV is that that exact empire he defended was persecuting millions of people, banning their languages, sending their people to forced labour camps, exterminating native people in Siberia, and keeping about 90% of the whole Russian society in serfdom (which in Russia was basically slavery).
You keep being "open-minded" about that, I prefer modernism and liberalism, thank you.
Kipling is one of the greatest authors in the English language. His work is acclaimed, universally, by anyone with taste.
So to compare Dostoevsky to Kipling is high praise!