Francis Berger
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Dostoevsky: The Literary Line of Demarcation

1/4/2018

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I am not an expert on Fyodor Dostoevsky. Though I have read his major works, I have yet to read most of his short stories, essays, and novellas. When it comes to his life, I know only the basics. My knowledge of that period of history in which he lived is a bit more extensive, but not by much. In short, what I know about Dostoevsky - the man, the author - is equally matched by what I do not know about Dostoevsky. Setting these shortcomings aside, I am firmly convinced that Fyodor Dostoevsky is one of the greatest writers the world has ever known. 

Few writers have ascended the heights he asended or the plumbed depths he plumbed. If I had to categorize him, I could offer only the following: as a writer, Dostoevsky is a  prophet/mystic/demon/saint. Like Shakespeare, he is in a class and category all to himself.  For me, Dostoevsky represents a literary line of demarcation. His work forms a boundary marking the end of something and the beginning of something else entirely; a sharp dividing line separating writing from WRITING.

It has come to my attention that others also view Dostoevsky as a line of demarcation, as the end of something and the beginning of something else, but for these people - a rather surly collection of postmodernist/Marxist theorists, thinkers, writers, and culture warriors - the demarcation line Dostoevsky represents runs closer to the medical definition of the term. For them, Dostoevsky represents a zone of inflammatory reaction separating gangrenous flesh from healthy tissue. I will let you decide which side these thinkers believe they occupy.

Though most of these critics grudgingly admit that there are some aspects of Dostoevsky's work that perhaps deserve a few crumbs of respect or, at the very least, acknowledgement, they scornfully label Dostoevsky a regressive and callously scoff at what they regard as meaningless religious obsessions. For readers such as these, Dostoevsky is passé and archaic, a historical and artisitic footnote, best ignored and forgotten. He has nothing to offer. Nothing to say. Nothing that resonates or supports the world they are trying to conjure into being. 

Whenever I encounter people sporting such attitudes about Dostoevsky, another literary line of demarcation - one that is pragmatic rather than aesthetic in nature - etches through my mind.


2 Comments
William James Tychonievich link
11/9/2019 12:07:10

When I was in college (around the turn of the millennium) and took a few classes in Russian and in Western literature, my professors uniformly favored Dostoevsky over Tolstoy, viewing the former as provocative and "edgy" and the latter as a boring "fundamentalist" (an epithet that often attached itself to Virgil's name as well). They saw Dostoevsky as sufficiently unorthodox and subversive that he could be forgiven for his Christianity, and he was often seen as a forerunner of Existentialism -- Christian in its earliest manifestations but tending naturally towards atheism.

I read Crime and Punishment in school and hated it. Years later I read The Brothers Dostoevsky, of which I hold an opinion closer to your own: undeniably one of the greatest works ever written by anyone in any language. I should really revisit C&P; perhaps I was just too immature to appreciate it all those years ago.

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Francis Berger
11/10/2019 06:38:50

@ Wm - Yes, my experience was similar in college - profs did favor Dostoevsky over Tolstoy and did see him as a forerunner of existentialism. I took courses where D was grouped with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. My profs particularly like The Grand Inquisitor section of Karamazov.

I don't think many current progressive profs, particularly the bat-poop crazy ones, have even attempted D. - it betrays their principles (for much the same reason many profs refuse to read Homer or Shakespeare because they are dead white guys.

Like you, I was quite young when I attempted C and P; I abandoned it after 100 pages. I did not experience this problem when I tried again in my early twenties; so yes, immaturity or perhaps inexperience was a bit of an obstacle for me as well.

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