Chapter 9 Purification of Fear and Compassion

Purification of Fear and Compassion - "The Brothers Karamazov" The period of university study is probably the most prosperous period in a person's life in which he seeks the meaning of life and yearns for spiritual life.If you are lucky enough to read a good book at this time, this book may affect the mental journey of a person's life. When I was in college, among the Western literature books I read, perhaps Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov novel had the greatest impact and inspiration on me.I read it when I was studying at the University of Iowa. I remember it was a snowy night in winter. I finished reading this book in the dormitory. It was already dawn. I looked out the window and saw a vast white land. A strange feeling suddenly surged in my heart. I am not a Christian, nor do I have any religious beliefs, but at that moment I did believe that there is a supreme master in the universe who is silently taking pity on all living beings in the world.It was Dostoevsky's soul-stirring masterpiece that aroused my almost mysterious religious emotion for a moment. Suddenly, I seemed to hear the Gregorian hymn coming from the medieval church, and I couldn't help There was a burst of embarrassment.

"The Brothers Karamazov" is Tuo's masterpiece in his later years, and enjoys a high reputation. It is as famous as Tolstoy, and it is a pair of treasures in the golden age of Russian literature.Tuoshi and Toon were the same age, on the eve of the great change between the old and the new in Russia in the 19th century. He suffered from political, psychological and spiritual difficulties repeatedly. When he was young, he was arrested and imprisoned for participating in the political activities of the Radical Party. He was shot and exiled to Siberia for ten years. After regaining his freedom, he lashed out at the left-wing nihilists. Dolce believed that only the Greek Orthodox Church could save the Russian nation, while the left-wingers could only drag Russia to an end.His fable was right, Russia later indeed produced Stalin's regime of terror.All his life, he devoted himself to studying the relationship between man and God, often swinging between heaven and hell, shuttling between the poles of divinity and demonity, until he was sixty years old, and finally wrote "The Brothers Karamazov", which is in the human spirit. In the field, a peak was erected.

This novel tells the story of four half-brothers of the Karamazov family. The four brothers respectively represent the four possibilities in the human nature of love, reason, sage, and devil. A fundamental conflict that cannot be resolved.Tuoshi said in this novel: "This is a war between God and the devil, and the battlefield is in the hearts of people." Tuoshi is the novelist who studies the conflict between good and evil in the human heart most profoundly. In this book, Du Shi's examination of the good and evil of human beings has been raised to the level of religion.In another novel, he wrote: "If God does not exist, then anything can happen." Indeed, if there is no God who represents moral force, then patricide can happen at any time. "Paricide," the most unethical crime, is the subject of this novel.From the tragedy "Oedipus the King" by Sophocles in ancient Greece to "The Brothers Karamazov" by Dolce, many masterpieces of Western literature are exploring this chilling human taboo, which is proved by the Freudian school In the study of modern psychology, we have to be stunned that the human heart is in danger. Under the pressure of religion, ethics, and morality, the most primitive impulse of bloodthirsty and incest is still waiting for an opportunity.The profundity of Western literature lies in the courage to face up to the evils of human beings, so they pursue the root cause and persevere.After watching "The Brothers Karamazov", "fear and pity" can't help but arise spontaneously.Fear, because we are also aware of our own possibility of sin; compassion, because we see how imperfect human beings are, and we become humbled, thus arousing mutual sympathy.The greatest function of literature is probably to arouse the compassion of human beings that are often dormant.