Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 23, 2025
His utter harmlessness and incapacity to hurt occasion scenes of extraordinary humour, scenes that make the reader suddenly laugh out loud, and love him all the more ardently. Dostoevski loved children and animals, and so-called simple folk; what is more, he not only loved them, he looked upon them as his greatest teachers. It is a delight to hear this Idiot talk:
The life of Dostoevski contrasts harshly with the luxurious ease and steady level seen in the outward existence of his two great contemporaries, Turgenev and Tolstoi. From beginning to end he lived in the very heart of storms, in the midst of mortal coil.
He had read his Dostoevski and Turgenev; he had looked at those books of Russian impressions that deal in nothing but snow, ikons, and the sublime simplicity of the Russian peasant. He was a man whose circumstances had led him to believe profoundly in his own incapacity, unpopularity, ignorance. For a moment his love had given him a new confidence but now how was that same love deserting him?
No one but Dostoevski would ever have conceived of such a character, or have imagined such ideas. If one reads "Poor Folk," "Crime and Punishment," "Memoirs of the House of the Dead," "The Idiot," and "The Karamazov Brothers," one will have a complete idea of Dostoevski's genius and of his faults as a writer, and will see clearly his attitude toward life.
It is interesting to compare the world-wide appeal made by the novels of Turgenev, Dostoevski, and Tolstoi with that made by Thackeray and George Eliot, not to mention Mr. Hardy or the late Mr. Meredith. The combination of the great age of Russia with its recent intellectual birth produces a maturity of character, with a wonderful freshness of consciousness.
The books of Dostoevski and Tolstoi point directly to the Gospel, and although Russia is theoretically a Christian nation, no country needs real Christianity more than she.
Then came four years in the Siberian prison, followed by a few years of enforced military service. His health actually grew better under the cruel regime of the prison, which is not difficult to understand, for even a cruel regime is better than none at all, and Dostoevski never had the slightest notion of how to take care of himself.
Besides, the author is in such a hurry that he seems never to have had the time himself to read over his novels before sending them to the printer. And, worst of all, every one of the heroes of Dostoevski, especially in his novels of the later period, is a person suffering from some psychical disease or from moral perversion.
This was the occasion where Turgenev vainly tried to persuade Tolstoi to appear and participate. Dostoevski paid his youthful debt to the ever living poet in a magnificent manner. He made a wonderful oration on Russian literature and the future of the Russian people, an address that thrilled the hearts of his hearers, and inspired his countrymen everywhere.
Then the idiotic and epileptic Smerdakov for Dostoevski must have his idiot and his fits, and they make an effective combination is an absolutely original character out of whose mouth come from time to time the words of truth and soberness.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking