Dostoevsky: The Great 19th Century Russian Author

I am not a scholar of Dostoevsky, the great 19th Century Russian author.

All I can say is that when I had finished reading about the tragic character, Marie, in his great novel, The Idiot, I had to hold the book to my chest and simply weep for a while. 

It had moved me profoundly. 

That is the power of Dostoevsky, and of all great art: it is not for those in the academic ivory tower to pick apart, but for an honest soul to honestly encounter. 

The key that unlocks his work is a capacity for love, attention, mystery, and the wells of human angst, nobility, despair, and hope. 

It is not for those who think much but rather for those who can throw open one’s being to a visceral experience of both the noble heights and miserable depths of the human story, swirling around the backdrop of unseen divine mystery and grace.

Reading his work with an open heart and mind is an often life-changing encounter with rich reality and depth: the truth of the human experience, but also the mystery of grace bubbling up through the perceptive characters and storyline.

In The Idiot, we meet Prince Myshkin, a Christ figure who encapsulates in many ways the strange tradition in Russian Christian spirituality of the holy fool. The main story arc follows his pure and complicated love for the other tragic figure, Natasha Filipovna, a beautiful woman who continuously falls into the hands of her treacherous, abusive lover.

Marie, from earlier in the novel, is the rejected, single mother whose child dies, leaving her to die alone in a hut outside the town—this is to whom, notably, only the children along with the childlike main character go before her death. She will die mostly ungrieved. 

Dostoevsky never recoils from all that must be said and experienced, writing into generous pages the intricacies of his characters and their own unique storylines—always expressing the extremes of possibility, with both the holiest characters as well as the most confirmed in evil. In between, we also see the indifferent, the miserable, the victimized, the bored, the quietly envious, the seemingly inconsequential—everyone with complex inner lives interacting via the life-like drama contained in an author’s story.

In a life now lived mostly online, with speed, thin ideology, and false depth for engagement constantly rewarded, both the medium—usually a long, gratuitous novel—and the author—a man of suffering, perspicuity, and depth—come as a balm to those who embark on any of his great works. 

Once you begin, you must commit, however: with so many characters and so much complexity, a daily trod—even if just 10 minutes—where connection to the story is maintained is critical to the experience. 

But it is always a commitment and an investment that pays off in spades. Dostoevsky’s world will live inside you forever as a reference point for your own human story.