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Dostoyevsky: The Man and the Writer
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13226 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1987 |
2,596 Words |
| Author
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Edward Wasiolek
Edward Wasiolek is the author of books on Dostoyevsky and
Tolstoy, and the editor and translator of five volumes of
Dostoyevsky's notebooks. |
Dostoyevsky the writer and Dostoyevsky the man are not the same. The distance between man and work in Hemingway is small. Hemingway boozed, fished, hunted, thumped his chest, and haunted the bull rings, and so did his characters. F. Scott Fitzgerald envied the rich, regretted the past, and dreamed of women who would never grow old and moments that would never go stale, and so did his characters. The universe for Joseph Conrad, and for his characters, was immense, inscrutable, and indifferent. Not so with Dostoyevsky. The man was one thing, the writer another, and we have always had a hard time putting them together. The man was not that likable: he was irritable, hot-headed, dogmatic, hypochondriacal, and prejudiced. He hated Germans and Poles with a passion and had very few good things to say about the French, the English, the Swiss, and, when he bothered to refer to them, the Americans.
He thought Russian Orthodoxy was the preserver of pure Christianity, and that Roman Catholicism was a corruption of it. He believed to the end of his days that the pope would someday make his peace, for cynical reasons and earthly power, with the socialists and march with them under the banner of world conquest. He adored the czar, carried on a warm correspondence with court official K.P. Pobedonostsev, the czar's hatchet man, exalted the purity of Russian arms and wrote an article entitled. "Constantinople Must be Ours." He was an imperialist and a jingoist, and in one of the letters in this volume, he wrote about the virtues of war. It could be argued that these are improbable traits and views for the making of a writer.
Yet he is one of the great writers of the Western world. Freud called The Brothers Karamazov, along with Oedipus Rex and
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