My thoughts about Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov resurface as I read Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground. Human nature revels in his novels; revels in the candid display of monstrosity and hideousness, subterfuge and all embracing love. As a critic has remarked Dostoyevsky’s characters possess a dialogic imagination. They are very near to the ideal realization of life’s intricacies and secrets. Even Jesus Christ is capable of folly; even the noblest soul may have some skeleton in his cupboard for has there been a saint who has not been a sinner? God certainly loves a sinner who is frank and just than a hypocritical worshipper. On religion, the father Ferapont and father Zosima episode in the Brothers Karamazov grandly foregrounds the idea that religion is not what ritual has made it out to be. Religion is the communicating of experience that belongs purely to the spirit.
In my thirties Dostoyevsky made a profound impression on me. The impression was not out of any understanding or insight that I had of his work. It was a sense of bewilderment at the sad magnificence and searching agony of his novels that I call here impression. I have read Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Karamazov Brothers.
Turgenev and Tolstoy have been my favorite Russian writers. They are lyrical and touching. Turgenev’s depiction of Bazarov, the ironic intellectual who is far ahead of his times has a special significance even today as he is proposed as the symbol of the enlightened intellectual in the novel. The character is effective as an excellent portrait sketch especially for the way it touches the other characters in the novel and the reader.
The last scene in Fathers and Sons where the old parents of Bazarov sit beside the grave of their son and caress the flowers there, reminiscing the sad imprints left by Bazarov is a masterpiece. It depicts the wasting of a noble human being. Even Tolstoy, more so in his stories has a propensity to make the readers shed tears as in
“God sees the truth but waits”
Unlike them Dostoyevsky is not easily accessible. What I find puzzling is the denseness of Dostoyevsky’s works; the denseness of thought as well as language which includes the philosophical debate. Even the characterization is not synchronic or harmonious. Dostoyevsky presses his characters, squeezing intrigue and complexity out of them. They exist in many planes and behave in different manners. They respond to instinct and not to reason. They are impulsive whether for good or bad and repeatedly confront society in support of their cause: not the society of the novel but society as such.
In Dostoyevsky’s novels, the characters are in conflict over ideals, or concepts or on Truth itself. The atmosphere is one of abstruseness and intellectuality which germinates out of the commonplace. The tragic and the comic, the grotesque and the beautiful do not simply coexist, but frequently supplement and impinge; which is why I call the aura to be one of bewilderment or wild fascination.
As in Hardy there is no hint of a malignant fate. There is no hint of any malignant villain. There is no hint of any vile social system. In Dostoyevsky there is only one reality, a social reality which compelling and active.
Dostoyevsky’s novels do not fall into a pattern. They are comprehensible and incomprehensible. They reverberate and resonate. They are also profoundly silent. They are calamitous and polyphonic. The display of emotion is riotous, and human behavior is stripped free of hypocrisy. Everybody suffers: the author, his characters and the readers. But the suffering does not entail catharsis. On the other hand it leaves a feeling of emptiness and agitation.
He is the master of fiction, the grand canvas which encompasses all of human life. Dostoyevsky stands out and oversees all the others, accompanied only by William Shakespeare.
Of all the masters of fiction, what makes Fyodor Dostoyevsky so special or extraordinary?
The concepts or the central themes of Dostoyevsky’s novels viz the corruption of a beautiful soul, the outstanding kindness of a degenerate individual, the madness of reason and the nobility of intuition, the primal force of beauty and the absolute, boundless compassion that pervades a noble soul, have been dear to my heart. The narrative of Dostoyevsky reminds me of Milton and Shakespeare, welded into an indivisible whole. He can be prolix and lyrical at the same time. I also like Dostoyevsky’s preoccupation with the grand arguments, as he tries to establish the primacy of impulse over reason, or the essentiality of reason infused by mercy and kindness. Reading a Dostoyevsky novel is a grand task. The tragedy of Dostoyevsky’s characters is both philosophical and also psychological. They reflect indecisiveness, in his evaluation of Christianity and nihilism as regenerators of a society that is depraved and depraving. Yet his characters Alyosha in the Brothers Karamazov for example are capable of pure and simple love shorn of egotism and high reason. He is the harbinger of hope, for a new society devoid of selfishness created out of reason and want.