Chapter 5 Three speeches read at the Old Dovecote Theater

A few years ago the number of admirers of Dostoyevsky was small, but as always, each time the first admirers were absorbed from the elite, their numbers grew.Today the old loft theater is too small to accommodate them.I want to explore first how some people remain indifferent to Dostoyevsky's great work: the best way to overcome incomprehension is to take it as sincere and try to understand it. I think most people blame Dostoevsky with our Western logic, mainly because his characters are irrational, indecisive, and often have little sense of responsibility; life, but a nightmare.This statement, I think, is entirely false, but accept it for the moment, and do not be content with quoting Freud and replying that we are more sincere in our dreams than in our acts of life.Or listen to what Dostoevsky himself said about dreams: "Our dreams are full of absurdities and obvious impossibilities, but in them you recognize them with little surprise, and besides On the other hand, your intellect is uncommonly developed. When you wake up and return to the real world, why do you almost always feel, and sometimes very vividly, that the dream leaves you with a mystery that you have not yet figured out? The absurdity of the dream makes you laugh, but at the same time you feel that this series of absurdities contains an idea, a real idea, an idea that really exists, and has always existed in your mind, as if you got your dream from a dream. The long-awaited prophecy..." ("Idiot" Vol. 2, p. 185)

We might as well apply Dostoevsky's view of dreams to his own works. It's not that I want to equate Dostoyevsky's narrative with some absurd things in dreams, there is no such thing at all, It's because we also feel like waking up from a dream after reading his book: Although our reason refuses to fully agree, we feel that the author has touched a secret that "belongs to our real life".I think this is the starting point for explaining why some intellectual elites shut out Dostoevsky's genius in the name of Western culture, because I soon noticed that in all our Western literature, not only French Literature, like the novel, deals, with very rare exceptions, only with human intercourse, with emotional or spiritual ties, with family relations, with relations between social classes, but never, almost never, with individuals with themselves or with themselves. God, and in Dostoevsky this relationship takes precedence over any other.To see what I mean, I think it is best to quote a Russian from Mrs. Hoffman's biography of Dostoevsky (the best biography I know, But unfortunately not translated), she asserts that this sentence can make us feel a feature of Russian life.When the Russian heard that he was criticized for not being punctual, he retorted very seriously: "Indeed, life is so hard! There are moments to be lived well, which are much more important than being late for an appointment." Relationships are more important.Come to think of it, this is Dostoevsky's secret that makes him so great and important to some and so outrageous to many others.

I do not arbitrarily say that Westerners, Frenchmen, are nothing but well-dressed social creatures: Pascal's Penses are there, and, besides, these books are solemn and isolated, and after all belong to the French literature.A certain category of problems, anxieties, passions, relationships seems to be left to the ethicist, theologian, poet, and the novel does not need these things to fill.Of all Balzac's books, "Louis Lambert" is probably the least successful, and it is nothing more than a one-man show.The miracle achieved by Dostoevsky is to shape each character into a family. First of all, each character exists according to its own essence, and at the same time it is an inner man, holding on to its own special secrets, but presenting itself to us. In front of us, there are many and complicated problems, and the miracle lies in the fact that many problems haunt each character alive, I should say, haunt each character, collide with each other in front of us, until they make each character die. , or die.

No problem is more sublime than what Dostoyevsky deals with.But having said this, I must add at once: he never talked about these questions in vain, his thought always existed only in terms of the individual, which makes his thought permanent relative and therefore powerful.In the beginning, so-and-so realized God, gods and eternal life only because he knew that he would die within a few days or hours, such as Hippolyte in "The Idiot".Then someone, such as in Zhong, established a whole set of metaphysical teachings based on his suicide, which has revealed the seeds of Nietzsche, saying that this person should commit suicide in a quarter of an hour: listen to his words, we don’t know whether he should commit suicide To think like this, or because of thinking like this, you should kill yourself.And so-and-so, like Myshkin, had the most extraordinary and wonderful intuitions only when he was on the verge of an epileptic fit.Having said this opinion, I just want to come to the following conclusion at the moment: Dostoevsky's novels are the most thoughtful novels, I would say the most thoughtful books, while never abstract, but also the most thoughtful books I read. The liveliest and most exciting novel ever written.

Thus, Dostoevsky's characters, although representative, are never detached from humanity, never symbolized, never again the type of characters in our classic plays, they are individuals, like Dickens The most peculiar characters are as peculiar as any character in any literature can be depicted.Listen to the following passage: "For some people, it is difficult to make it clear at first when the most obvious features of their features are introduced, and that is what is usually called the 'common' people, or the 'masses', but they actually make up the vast majority of the human race. We Several characters in the story belong to this human being, especially Gabriel Adalionovich."

This is precisely a character that is particularly difficult to characterize.See how the author describes it. "Almost from the time he was a teenager, Gabriel Adalionovic was plagued by a sense of his own mediocrity, accompanied by an unquenchable desire to convince himself that he was something special. He had a burning desire, so to speak, born fiery temper; he believes his desires are powerful because of fanatical impulses. His impatience to get ahead sometimes drives him to a whim and recklessness, but always at the last moment our hero becomes too reasonable and doesn't work out Stop it. It's too much for him." (The Idiot, Vol. II, pp. 193-194)

This is the most ordinary portrayal of a character.It should be added that other characters, such as the chief ones, are not depicted directly by the author, so to speak, but are left to present themselves in portraits which, as the story progresses, are constantly changing and become never-ending portraits.His main characters are always in the making, always struggling to emerge from the shadows.By the way, Dostoevsky is so different from Balzac in this respect that Bass's main concern always seems to be the complete ending of the characters.In conception, Balzac is like David, Dostoevsky like Rembrandt, and the figures are of great artistic appeal, often flawless, and seem to be behind them and behind them. No longer can such profound thoughts be sketched and dyed around the world, and I am sure that Dostoevsky will remain the greatest novelist.