On Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Though I would not call my reading experience thorough, I have read a fair share of books. Through all my reading I have not encountered an author so stimulating as Dostoyevsky (please note that his name can be transliterated in a number of ways). Fyodor Dostoevsky is one of my all-time favorite novelists.

Though Dostoyevsky's books are sometimes too imaginative for my imagination, and though his cast of characters is often too large for me to keep track of (in a single novel), and though he wrote his books many years ago, in a different culture, country, and language, I still hold Dostoyevsky as one of the greats of the literary world, for the following reasons:

I love the way that Dostoyevsky writes his characters. They are both believable, yet over-the-top; both real, yet caricatures. It is poetic how the virtues, vices, and ideas of each of the characters either catch up with them or vindicate them. Perhaps it is this very quality of his writing that caused seven prominent dissidents of the former USSR to rave of Dostoyevsky's prophetic story-telling in their book From Under the Rubble (1974).

Prominent North American pastor Eugene Peterson even found a "mentor" in Dostoyevsky, as he wrote in his book Under the Unpredictable Plant (1992). I too have found a sort of mentor in Dostoyevsky and in several of his characters, especially Alyosha Karamazov.

Plato himself would find an intelligent and insightful dialogue partner in Dostoyevsky, as both thinkers have brought attention to the three types of people: The gain-lover, the victory-lover, and the wisdom-lover. At least, that is how they are referred to in Plato's Republic. Dostoyevsky would later give these types flesh, bones, and names in The brothers Karamazov: Dmitry Karamazov (the sensualist), Ivan Karamazov (the intellectual), and Alyosha Karamazov (the mystic).

Few have argued more brilliantly for belief in God and the rejection of nihilistic, death-seeking ideologies than Dostoyevsky (in fact, nihilist pamphlets in the USSR would later take some of Dostoyevsky's quotes as their own, as shown in Under the Rubble). Like Friedrich Nietzsche, he shows the logical conclusions to beliefs that people are rarely willing to live out in real life. Nietzsche said of Dostoyevsky, "[he is] the only psychologist from whom I have something to learn."(Wikipedia see section on Dostoyevsky and Existentialism). Dostyevsky doesn't buy nihilism, but dispels it as an ideology of death. In contrast, he views Christianity as a life-giving belief system. This is interesting, and should cause us to ask, "If nihilists were borrowing from Dostoyevsky, that probably means that he understood their position at least as well, if not better than they did, so why didn't they read his novels more thoroughly, and end up with Life?"

If there is one novelist I would like to emulate in insight and writing ability, it is Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky.