Tagged: Dostoevsky

Reflections On The War

Of war and worms.– I have taught a Russian girl whose serious beau, whom she hoped to marry, was a Ukrainian fighting on the front lines to defend his homeland against Vladimir Putin’s — not “Russia’s,” so let us please put that lie away for good, but Putin’s — brutal and unprovoked assault on her boyfriend’s country. He had already been wounded and...

Crime and Punishment

A serious student whose enthusiasm for classic literature decidedly tends toward Jane Austen and Plato — toward a reality in which life’s dark shadows eventually give way to the bright sunlight of understanding, or at least to the enlightening glow of irony — wrote to me to express her frustration at being unable to find the greatness in Dostoevsky, in spite of having...

We, Being Pure: Part One

Fyodor Dostoevsky is one of the unquestionable giants of world literature: essential to the development of the nineteenth century anti-romantic novel; one of his century’s two great prophets and critics (Nietzsche being the other) of the then-growing nihilism that was devouring European intellectual life, and has since — as he (like Nietzsche) predicted — settled like volcanic ash over the entire civilized world;...

“The whole secret of life in two pages of print!”

Here is an enthusiastic rant about socialists by Razumihin, Dostoevsky’s crystallization of the good-natured man of common sense, in Crime and Punishment: I’ll show you their pamphlets. Everything with them is ‘the influence of environment,’ and nothing else. Their favourite phrase! From which it follows that, if society is normally organised, all crime will cease at once, since there will be nothing to...