Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Author, Philosopher, Hero

When I was early in my teens my reading habits began to move away from science fiction and fantasy literature that occupied my imagination, providing content for my dreams.

Just when I was beginning to lift my face from the acid washed pages of my comic worlds, looking past the American authors they were teaching in school…Lewis, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, I found Dostoyevsky resting on the shelf…and a whole new dimension of literature opened up for me.

Dostoyevsky wrote from the crossroads where literature becomes philosophy; he exposed the human condition at that juncture.

He was a novelist, and through him I came to understand the power that narrative has to convey certain truths that touch all human beings.

There are no authors more adept at this function than the Russians, with Fyodor Dostoyevsky being the foremost practitioner.

His influence on me was profound.

From Crime and Punishment and Notes from the Underground, to The Idiot and the Brothers Karamozov, I spent years reading the body of his work, from my mid-teens through my twenties and into my thirties. I tracked down his cannon until all that was left were translations of his notebooks beginning…which I read.

I purchased the notebook for A Raw Youth at a bookstore in Minneapolis (Majors and Quinn). I was in the Navy, I was home on leave, my friend Lucy was with me.

In those pages I could see the way Dostoyevsky constructed the arc of his narrative, how he developed his characters from ego to id, from false-self to true-self, from privilege to despair and back again...the movements of the soul.

The book was used and there was an imperial ruble tucked into its pages. I think it was serving as a bookmark, left by whoever was last to read to it.

Dostoyevsky I found, was the father of modern existentialism, and through him I learned to admire Charles Dickens, whom Dostoyevsky considered to be the greatest author of all time.

It has been one hundred and forty-three years since Dostoyevsky went into the dirt, his influence has not waned, human beings have not changed and his insight into the dilemma of existence remains sound…I think…it is well suited to the digital age.