The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Like Flaubert [86] he was the son of a physician. Again like Flaubert he was when young introduced to scenes of suffering, disease, and death, and never forgot them. In his fifteenth year his gentle mother died, and not long afterward, in 1839, his father was either murdered by his own serfs or, more probably, died of apoplexy. Dostoyevsky was left desolate and defense- less. Perhaps from this period stems the epileptic tendency that was to overshadow his whole life, if also perhaps to give him a certain visionary inspiration. In 1849 his connection with a group of dreamy young radicais caused his arrest. He was sentenced to death, but just before the firing squad was about to do its work, his punishment was commuted. This experience marked him deeply. He then spent four years in a Siberian convict camp, enduring inhumanities partially described in his Memoirs from the House of the Dead. Another four years were spent in military service at a remote Asiatic outpost.

His first marriage was to a hysteric, his second to his secre- tary, who seems to have understood his manias and rages. The utopian radicalism of his youth gave way to a religious conver- sion. Dostoyevsky became orthodox, reactionary, Slavophile. Yet none of these labels is fair to him, for his temperament was a contradictory one in which Christ and Satan struggled con- tinually for mastery. At times he seems to talk almost like a good European—but a very Russian one. The latter part of his life was not much happier than the first part had been, though his supremacy as a novelist and interpreter of the Russian tem­perament was generally acknowledged. His epilepsy continued to threaten him; debts worried him; for a time he was a com- pulsive gambler; and there can be little doubt that his sexual nature was unbalanced.

This is the man who wrote some of the most extraordinary novйis of ali time. They anticipated many of the ideas of Nietzsche [97] and Freud [98]; they influenced such non- Russian writers as Mann [107], Camus [127], and Faulkner [118]; and they dramatized the terrorist theory and practice that we associate with Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler. Indeed it may be said that Dostoyevsky had an intuitive sense of what the twentieth century would have to endure; and this sense plays its part in the fascination of his work.

It is hard to pin this strange man down. His central obses- sion was God. The search for God, or the attempt to prove God's existence, dominates his stories. Thus tormented, Dostoyevsky seems to approach a vision of love and peace only after long journeying through universes of pain and evil. In his novйis the worlds of crime, abnormal psychology, and religious mysticism meet and mingle in a manner difficult to define. He is thought of as an apostle of compassion, but of the true saintly qualities he seems to possess few.

The Brothers Karamazov is generally considered his most profound work. However, if you are going to limit yourself to only one novel, there is something to be said for Crime and Punishment. For one thing, The Brothers Karamazov, though it does not leave you up in the air, is nevertheless an unfinished book. Crime and Punishment is a simpler, more unified one, with a strong detective-story plot of great interest. It can be read as a straight thriller. It can be read as a vision. It can be read on planes in between these two. From its murky, gripping, intolerably vivid pages you emerge with the feeling that you have lived and suffered a lifetime. Its action takes nine days.

C.F.

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LEO NIKOLAYEVICH TOLSTOY

1828-1910 War and Peace

War and Peace, more frequently than any other work of fic- tion, has been called "the greatest novel ever written." This need not scare us. However its greatness may be defined, it is not connected with obscurity, with difficulty, or even with pro- fundity. Once a few minor hazards are braved, this vast chroni- cle of Napoleonic times seems to become an open book, as if it had been written in the sunlight. Just as Dostoyevsky [87] is the dramatist of the unconscious and what is called the abnor­mal, so Tolstoy is the epic narrator of the conscious and the normal. His tone is one of almost loving serenity, and his char­acters, though their names are odd and their time is remote, are our brothers and sisters.

Most beginning readers experience three difficulties:

н. The novel is enormously long. As with Don Quixote [38] (though less cogently) some sort of case may be made for an abridged version.

It s hard to follow both the relationships and the movements of the (to us) strangely named, complex cast of characters. Ali I can say is that if you persist in your reading, the characters will sooner or later sort themselves out.