When I was early in my teens my reading habits began change. I began moving away from the science fiction and fantasy literature that had occupied my imagination and furnished the many mansions oof my dreams.
Just when I was beginning to lift my face from the acid washed pages of my comic book worlds, I looked past the American authors they were teaching in school…Lewis, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, I looked past Kerouac, Salinger, Vonnegut and Bratigan, I looked past them and found Dostoyevsky resting on the shelf…through his pages a whole new dimension of literature opened up for me.
Dostoyevsky lived and wrote at the crossroads where literature becomes philosophy; he exposed the human condition at that juncture, our raw nature, its powers and its frailties, he showed it to us in the possessed and the guilty, in the pure hearted idiots who are able to survive only because they are loved.
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…which I read.
I purchased the notebook for A Raw Youth at a bookstore in Minneapolis (Majors and Quinn). I was in the Navy at the time, but 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...as if he were describing the
movements of the soul.
