Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 3, 2025
A famous alienist has declared that three-fourths of Dostoïevsky's characters are quite mad. This is an exaggeration, though there are many about whom the aura of madness and melancholy hovers. Dostoïevsky himself was epileptic; poverty and epilepsy were his companions through a life crowded with unhappiness. He tells us that the experience calmed his nerves.
It may, indeed, be said that the strange throb of satisfaction with which we human beings feel ourselves at the bottom, where we cannot fall lower, or be further unmasked, is never more frequent than when we read Dostoievsky.
The practice, too, of dividing into couples was distinctly precious to them, for, though they never failed to start out together, they never failed to come home two by two. In this way did they put to confusion Whitman and Dostoievsky, and all the other thinkers in Hampstead.
Dostoïevsky was a profounder nature, greater than Tolstoy, though he was not the finished literary artist. All that Tolstoy tried to be, Dostoïevsky was. In a word, Dostoïevsky is a profounder psychologist than Tolstoy; his faith was firmer; his attacks of epilepsy gave him glimpses of the underworld of the soul, terrifying visions of his subconscious self, of his subliminal personality.
Thinking of him, you recall what Nietzsche wrote of Christ: "One regrets that a Dostoïevsky did not live in the neighbourhood of this most interesting decadent, I mean some one who knew just how to perceive the thrilling charm of such a mixture of the sublime, the sickly, and the childish."
All this to assure you that when Camille Mauclair assumes that the malady from which Antoine Watteau died was also a determining factor in his art, the French critic is not aping some modern men of science who denounce the writings of Dostoïevsky because he suffered from epileptic fits. But there is a happy mean in this effort to correlate mind and body.
The letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoïevsky came as a revelation to his admirers. We think of him as overflowing with sentiment for his fellow man, a socialist, one who "went to the people" long before Tolstoy dreamed of the adventure, a man four years in prison in Siberia, and six more in that bleak country under official inspection; truly, a martyr to his country, an epileptic and a genius.
Nowhere is there a trace of Hellas, Rome does not exist for him, the Middle Age which allured Hugo has for Tolstoi no glamour. In this he but resembles the Russian writers from Krilov to the present day. It is equally true of Gogol, of Poushkine, of Tourgenieff, of Herzen, of Lermontoff, of Dostoievsky.
Dostoievsky is more than an artist. He is, perhaps who can tell? the founder of a new religion. And yet the religion he "founds" is a religion which has been about us for more years than human history can count. He, more than anyone, makes palpable and near too palpable O Christ!
There are descriptions of woodlands that recall a little scene from Turgenieff's Sportsman's Sketches; there are episodes, such as the bacchanal in the monastery, a moonlit ride in the canoe with a realistic seduction episode, and the several quarrels that would have pleased both Tolstoy and Dostoïevsky; there is an old mujik who seems to have stepped out of Dostoïevsky, yet is evidently a portrait taken from life.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking