|
Quotations
"Dostoevsky is
finished. He will no longer write anything important."
-- Nekrasov
(1859)
“a sick, cruel talent” -- Nikolay Mikhailovsky (1882)
“a
prophet of God,” a “mystical seer.” -- Vladimir Solvyov
(1883)
“He
lived in literature.” -- Konstantin Mochulsky
“the
Shakespeare of the lunatic asylum” -- Count Melchoir de
Vogue (1848-1910)
“Dostoevsky
preaches the morality of the pariah, the morality of the slave.”
-- Georg Brandes (1889)
“Russia’s
evil genius,” -- Maxim Gorky (1905)
Thomas
Mann described
Dostoyevsky as “an author whose Christian sympathy is ordinarily
devoted to human misery, sin, vice, the depths of lust and
crime, rather than to nobility of body and soul” and Notes
from Underground as “an awe- and terror-inspiring example
of this sympathy.”
Turgenev
once
described Dostoyevsky as “the nastiest Christian he had ever
met”.
Nietzsche
was
scornful of Dostoyevsky’s Christian stand and held him in
contempt for his “morbid moral tortures,” his rejection of
“proper pride”. He accused him of “sinning to enjoy the luxury
of confession,” which Nietzsche considered a “degrading
prostration.” Dostoyevsky was, in Nietzsche’s words,
one of the victims of the “conscience-vivisection and self-crucifixion
of two thousand years” of Christianity.
However,
Nietzsche also described Dostoevsky as “the only psychologist
from whom he had anything to learn.” (1887)
Edwin
Muir states
that “Dostoyevsky wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious;
that is in reality the reason why his characters seem ‘pathological’,
while they are only visualized more clearly than any other
figures in imaginative literature... He was in the rank in
which we set Dante,
Shakespeare and Goethe.”
Henry
James described
Dostoevsky’s works as “baggy monsters” and “fluid puddings”,
with a profound “lack of composition” and a “defiance of economy
and architecture.
Joseph
Conrad called
The Brothers Karamazov “... 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.”
Nikolay
Berdyaev
(Prague, 1923) states matter-of-factly: “So great is the worth
of Dostoevsky that to have produced him is by itself sufficient
justification for the existence of the Russian people in the
world: and he will bear witness for his country-men at the
last judgement of the nations.”
Kenneth
Rexroth
describes Dostoyevsky as a “man of many messages, a man in
whom the flesh was always troubled and sick and whose head
was full of dying ideologies--at last the sun in the sky,
the hot smell of a woman, the grass on the earth, the human
meat on the bone, the farce of death” -- from his book
Classics Revisited.
Henry
Miller writes
“When it comes to Emerson,
Dostoievsky, Maeterlinck, Knut Hamsun, G.
A. Henty, I know I shall never say my last word about
them. A subject like The Grand Inquisator, for
example, or The Eternal Husband--my favorite of all
Dostoievsky’s works--would seem to demand separate books in
themselves.” -- from his book The Books in my Life
Miller
goes
on to say that “Dostoievsky was human in that “all too human”
sense of Nietzsche. He wrings our withers when he unrolls
his scroll of life.” and “Dostoievsky had virtually to create
God-- and what a Herculean task that was! Dostoievsky rose
from the depths and, reaching the summit, retained something
of the depths about him still.” and “Dostoievsky is chaos
and fecundity. Humanity, with him, is but a vortex in the
bubbling maelstrom.”
D.
H. Lawrence:
“He who gets nearer the sun is leader, the aristocrat of aristocrats,
or he who, like Dostoievsky, gets nearest the moon of our
non-being.”
D.
H. Lawrence:
“I don’t like Dostoevsky. He is like the rat, slithering along
in hate, in the shadows, and in order to belong to the light,
professing love, all love.” He also thinks that Dostoevsky,
“mixing God and Sadism,” is “foul.”
Hermann
Hesse in
1920, professed his fear of Dostoevsky’s “slavic murkiness.”
Walter
Kaufman
refers to Notes From Underground, published in 1864,
as one of the “most revolutionary and original works of world
literature.” “The man whom Dostoevsky has created in this
book [Notes From Underground] holds out for what traditional
Christianity has called depravity; but he believes neither
in original sin nor in God, and for him man’s self-will is
not depravity: it is only perverse from the point of view
of rationalists and others who value neat schemes above the
rich texture of individuality.”
“To
Dostoevsky belongs a place beside the Great Christian writers
of world literature: Dante, Cervantes, Milton,
Pascal. Like Dante, he passed through all the
circles of human hell, one more terrible than the mediaeval
hell of the Divine Comedy, and was not consumed in
hell’s flame: his duca e maestro was not Virgil, but
the “radiant image” of the Christ, love for whom was the greatest
love of his whole life.” -- Konstantin Mochulsky
"Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more
than Gauss!" -- Einstein
"Notes from the Underground is the best overture for existentialism
ever written." -- Walter Kaufmann, "Existentialism
from Dostoevsky to Sartre" (1956)
"Just as I have no ear for music, I have to my regret
no ear for Dostoevsky the Prophet. The very best thing he
ever wrote seems to me to be THE DOUBLE. It is [a] story...
told very elaborately, in great, almost Joycean detail...,
and in style intensely saturated with phonetic and rhythmical
expressiveness... It is a perfect work of art, that story,
but it hardly exists for the followers of Dostoevsky the Prophet,
because it was written in the 1840s, long before his so-called
great novels..." -- Vladimir Nabokov on "THE DOUBLE"
Some
reactions to "THE DOUBLE" when it was first published...
"It is apparent at first glance that in The Double there
is more creative talent and depth of thought than in Poor
Folk. But meanwhile the consensus of St. Petersburg readers
is that this novel is intolerably long-winded and therefore
terribly boring..." -- Vissarion Belinsky
"In The Double, Dostoevsky's method and his love for psychological
analysis are revealed in all their fullness and originality.
In this work he has penetrated so deep into the human soul,
has gazed so fearlessly and feelingly into the innermost workings
of human emotions, thoughts, and affairs that the impression
produced by reading The Double may be compared only with the
experience of a man of inquiring mind who has penetrated into
the chemical composition of matter." -- Valerian Maikov
"We do not understand how the author of Poor Folk, a tale
that is nevertheless remarkable, could write The Double. It
is a sin against artistic conscience, without which there
cannot be true talent." -- S.P Shevyrev
"In this tale we now see not the influence of Gogol, but
an imitation of him... In speaking of Mr. Dostoevsky's tale
The Double, one can repeat the words which his Mr. Golyadkin
often repeats: 'Dear, it's bad, bad! Dear, my case is pretty
bad now! Oh, dear, so that's the turn my case has taken now!'
Yes, indeed, it's bad and it's taken a bad turn." A.A. Grigor'ev:
"The Double, in our humanly imperfect opinion, is a work that
is pathological and therapeutic but by no means literary:
it is a story of madness, analyzed, it is true, to the extreme,
but, nevertheless, as repulsive as a dead body." -- K.S.
Aksakov
And to
"NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND" when it was first published...
"The
hero tortures because he wants to, he likes to torture. There
is neither reason nor purpose here, and, in the opinion of
the author, they are not at all necessary, for absolute cruelty,
cruelty an und fur sich (in and of itself) is interesting."
--
Nikolai Mikhailovsky (on the underground man's treatment of
Liza)
The
underground man, through solitary observation of human nature
and criticism of the utopian rationalists, attained a deep
understanding of human imperfection as a law of nature and
of history and became convinced that man, by his very essence,
is an irrational, incomprehensible being, endowed in the act
of creation with the capacity for suffering and rejoicing,
and for profound emotional experience of his vicissitudes,
but whose intellect has not been given the possibility of
understanding and explaining the essence of man. In their
reliance on reason, all rational sciences are equally powerless
to unravel the secret of man. The understanding of man can
come only through irrational, mystical penetration into the
essence of things, that is, through religion. --
Vasily Rozanov (summary of views)
"[the
author's very tormenting and barren... writing] clarifies
nothing, does not exalt the positive in life, but, dwelling
on the negative aspects only, fixes them in mind of man, always
depicts him as helpless amid a chaos of dark forces, and can
lead him to pessimism, mysticism, etc.... With the triumph
of one who is insatiably taking vengeance for his personal
misfortunes and sufferings and for the enthusiasms of his
youth, Dostoevsky showed in the person of his hero to what
lengths the individualists in the class of young people cut
off from life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can
go in their whining baseness..." --
Maxim Gorky
"Why
part two is entitled 'Concerning Wet Snow' is a question that
can be settled only in the light of journalistic innuendoes
of the 1860s by writers who liked symbols, allusions to allusions,
that kind of thing. The symbol perhaps is of purity becoming
damp and dingy... After the great chapter 4... a false note
is introduced with the appearance of that favorite figure
of sentimental fiction, the noble prostitute, the fallen girl
with the lofty heart. Liza, the young lady from Riga, is a
literary dummy." --
Vladimir Nabokov
And to "CRIME & PUNISHMENT"...
"Raskolnikov lived his true life when he was lying on the
sofa in his room, deliberating not at all about the old woman,
nor even as to whether it is or is not permissible at the
will of one man to wipe from the face of the earth another,
unnecessary and harmful, man, but whether he ought to live
in Petersburg or not, whether he ought to accept money from
his mother or not, and on other questions not at all relating
to the old woman. And then -- in that region quite independent
of animal activities -- the question of whether he would or
would not kill the old woman was decided. The question was
decided... when he was doing nothing and was only thinking,
when only his consciousness was active: and in that consciousness
tiny, tiny alterations were taking place. It is at such times
that one needs the greatest clearness to decide correctly
the questions that have arisen, and it is just then that one
glass of beer, or one cigarette, may prevent the solution
of the question, may postpone the decision, stifle the voice
of conscience and prompt a decision of the question in favor
of the lower, animal nature -- as was the case with Raskolnikov.
Tiny, tiny alterations -- but on them depend the most immense
and terrible consequences." -- Leo Tolstoy on Dostoevsky's
Raskolnikov
|
