When I was in my early-teens my reading habits began change; I began moving away from the science-fiction and fantasy literature that had occupied my imagination and furnished the many mansions of my dreams. Just when I was beginning to lift my face from the acid-washed pages of my comic-book-worlds, I looked past the American authors that were being taught in school…Lewis, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, I looked past Kerouac, Salinger, Vonnegut and Bratigan and found Dostoyevsky resting on the shelf…through his work a whole new dimension of literature opened up for me.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky lived and wrote at the crossroads where literature becomes philosophy; he exposed the human condition at that juncture, he depicted our raw nature, its powers and its frailties, he demonstrated their features to us in both those possessed by guilt, and in the pure hearted idiots who are able to survive the cruelties of the world only because they are loved.
Dostoyevsky was a novelist, and through him I came to understand the power of narrative to convey certain truths that touch all human beings; there are no authors more adept at this function than the Russians, with Dostoyevsky being the foremost practitioner among them…his influence on me was profound.
From Crime and Punishment and Notes from the Underground, to The Idiot and the Brothers Karamozov, I spent years reading the body of his work, from my mid-teens through my twenties and into my thirties. I tracked down his cannon until all that was left were translations of his notebooks…which I also read.
I purchased the notebook for A Raw Youth at a bookstore in Minneapolis (Majors and Quinn); I was in the Navy, but home on leave; my friend Lucy was with me at the time. In those pages I could see the way Dostoyevsky constructed the arc of his narrative, how he developed his characters from ego to id, from false-self to true-self, from privilege to despair and back again...as if he were describing the movements of the soul. The book was used and I was delighted to find an imperial ruble tucked into its pages, like an overlooked bookmark left to me by whoever was last to read it.
I discovered in Dostoyevsky the founder of existentialist philosophy, and through him I learned to admire Charles Dickens, whom Dostoyevsky considered to be the greatest author of all time.
It has been one hundred and forty-five years since Dostoyevsky went into the dirt; his influence has not waned…I think, because human beings have not changed, and his insight into the dilemma of existence remains sound…and well-suited to the digital age.
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