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Updated: May 3, 2025
I recall having given a friend, who was a journalist, a little book of Nietzsche's to read, which he returned with the remark that he had not been able to get through it, as it was insufferable drivel. I have heard the same opinion, or similar ones, expressed by journalists of Ibsen, Schopenhauer, Dostoievsky, Stendhal and all the most stimulating minds of Europe.
Three of these volumes are translated by Constance Garnett, whose superb translations of Turgenieff and Dostoievsky are well known to American readers.
Dostoïevsky is often melodramatic and violent; his "psychology" vague and tortuous. And in the letters exchanged between Nietzsche and Georg Brandes, the latter writes of Dostoïevsky after his visit to Russia: "He is a great poet but a detestable fellow, altogether Christian in his emotions, and quite sadique at the same time.
At this period of her life she was awakening to the glories of literature and taking a special course in that branch. He talked to her of Gogol, Turgenief, and Dostoievsky, and seated on the log piazza read in excellent French "Dead Souls," "Peres et Enfants," and "The Brothers Karamazoff."
Unamuno is our Dostoievsky, but painfully aware of the strength of the other side within him, and full of misgivings. Nor is it sure that when we speak of East in this connection we really mean East. There is a third country in Europe in which the "Eastern" view is as forcibly put and as deeply understood as the "Western," a third border country England.
"I shall soon be dead," he sadly predicted, "and people will say that Tolstoy taught men to plough and reap and make boots; while the chief thing that I have been trying so hard to say all my life, the thing I believe in the most important of all, they will forget." Let us believe that Gogol, Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Dostoïevsky, Turgenieff, and Tolstoy are classics.
His cardinal doctrine of non-resistance is illustrated in the following anecdote. One evening while walking in St. Petersburg, evidently in meditation a beggar asked for alms. Dostoïevsky did not answer. Enraged by his apparent indifference, the man gave him such a violent blow that he was knocked off his legs.
The only entirely base criminal I can recall in Dostoievsky is Stavrogin's admirer, Peter Stepanovitch, and he is transformed and transfigured at times by the sheer intensity of his worship for his friend.
Dostoievsky has, indeed, a demonic power of revelation in regard to that twilight of the human brain, where lurk the phantoms of unsatisfied desire, and where unspoken lusts stretch forth pitiable hands. There are certain human experiences which the conventional machinery of ordinary novel-writing lacks all language to express.
That their particular methods might be given universal application he does not admit. And when he wrote the above about Dostoïevsky New York was not so full of Russians and Poles and people from southeastern Europe as it is now. Dostoïevsky, if he were alive, would find plenty of material, tragedy and comedy alike, on our East Side.
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