http://jco.usfca.edu/tragic.html and http://jco.usfca.edu/karamazov.html I really enjoyed these two essays about The Possessed and Karmazov, but try to pick up a copy of Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead if you haven’t read it already. I’ve always loved that fictionalized memoir of his time in prison. I loved the way it captures the soul-crushing monotony of prison, its vivid characterizations and its gorgeous writing. Dostoyevsky had become involved in a revolutionary plot and was sentence to death after the plan was easily foiled. They put him before a firing squad, the men raised their rifles, aimed, and then announced they’d just been kidding (?!) and instead gave him a decade of hard labour in a Siberian prison camp. Needless to say this experience made quite an impression on the man the fine novelist Turgenev called ‘the nastiest Christian I ever met.” Turgenev was a less brilliant writer but led a more conventionally ’successful’ life. After many a gambling binge, Dostoyevsky would show up at his house, smelly and disheveled, to ask for a ‘loan.’ Ivan and Fyodor would end up acting out an awkward scene of patho and humiliation worthy of inclusion in a Dostoevsky novel…Joseph Conrad wasn’t as impressed by Karamazov as Joyce Carol Oates. He described it as “an impossible lump of valuable matter. It’s terrifically bad and impressive and exasperating. Moreover, I don’t know what Dostoevsky stands for or reveals, but I do know that he is too Russian for me. It sounds like some fierce mouthings of prehistoric ages.” Meanwhile Albert Einstein said “Dostovesky gives me more than any scientist.”
“You’re a gentleman,” they used to say to him. “You shouldn’t have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that’s no occupation for a gentleman.”
”If it were not for Christ’s Church, indeed there would be no restraint on the criminal in his evildoing, and no punishment for it later, real punishment, that is, not a mechanical one such as has just been mentioned, which only chafes the heart in most cases, but a real punishment, the only real, the only frightening and appeasing punishment, which lies in the acknowledgement of one’s own conscience.”
“Gentlemen, we’re all cruel, we’re all monsters, we all make men weep, and mothers, and babes at the breast, but of all, let it be settled here, now, of all that I am the lowest reptile! I’ve sworn to amend, and every day I’ve done the same filthy things. I understand now that such men as I need a blow, a blow of destiny to catch them as with a noose, and bind them by a force from without. Never, never should I have risen of myself! but the thunderbolt has fallen. I accept the torture of accusation, and my public shame; I want to suffer and by suffering I shall be purified. Perhaps I shall be purified, gentlemen?”
“Is there suffering on this new earth? On our earth we can truly love only with suffering and through suffering! We know not how to love otherwise. We know no other love. I want suffering in order to love.”
