Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born 200 years ago in Moscow and his work, inordinate and pierced by the heartbreaking depth of great words, is still there within the reach of readers of a society like the present one, disbelieving, far from all transcendence, volatile. Have you covered the topics that once obsessed the Russian writer today? Does his fiery style and his eagerness to stage the most diverse issues, always seen from different perspectives, discussed, squeezed to the fullest, have it? Guilt, the lashes of a conscience that cannot find a place in a world that is being transformed, the old questions about the meaning of life, the infinite scourges of injustice, the temptation to play and drink and lose oneself, nihilism Dostoevsky incarnated all these imposing issues in different characters that little by little gained importance due to the enormous tension of the issues to which they were drawn, by the weight of the world that confronted them with their contradictions, pushed them to evil or demanded them. to procure some way of salvation. “Now man loves life because he loves pain and terror, and there is all the deception”, says a character from The demons (Alliance). Now man is not yet what he will be. There will be a new man, happy and proud. That man will not live as well as not live; that will be the new man. He who conquers pain and terror will therefore be God ”.
To live or not to live, to have the courage to kill oneself, to conquer pain: Dostoevsky moved freely there. On December 22, 1849, he was about to be placed in front of a firing squad and had little left to leave the world when the pardon finally granted by Tsar Nicholas I to a group of prisoners sentenced to death arrived. He had been arrested a few months earlier along with other intellectuals from the Petrashevsky Circle: they shared reformist ideas to end injustices in Russia and were close to the ideas of the utopian socialists. Dostoevsky was sent to spend five years in a Siberian prison in Omsk, and then he was assigned another five years to serve in a fortress in Kazakhstan. “Those who, in freedom, had lost all measure and exceeded all limits, came to the prison, to such an extent that they gave the impression of having ended up committing their crimes, not of their own free will, but without knowing why, in a kind of delirium or intoxication; often out of vanity elevated to the highest degree, “he wrote in Memories of the dead house (Sunrise). When he was convicted, he was stripped of his noble title, his military rank as lieutenant of engineers, and his civil rights. Back from that hell he abandoned his eagerness to change everything, he became more conservative, he took refuge in religion and in old Russia.
He was born on November 11, 1821, his father was a doctor, his mother passed on her love of reading. He had an excellent training in Saint Petersburg, but he was not interested in the military and ended up turning to literature. His first novel, Poor people, It appeared in 1846 and was somewhat successful, so he continued to publish and revealed already his interest in psychological conflicts, the social gaze, and philosophical reflection. He spent beyond his means and went into debt frequently. The deep wound caused by his exile to Siberia was one of many in his life. He married Anna Dmitrievna in 1857 when he was just a private in the 7th Battalion in Semipalatinsk, and shortly afterwards he was diagnosed with epilepsy as a chronic disease. He finally returned to St. Petersburg before the 1860s began, and a couple of years later, when his marriage was showing signs of wear and tear, he traveled alone in Europe. He discovered the game, lost large amounts at roulette, fell in love with Apolinaria Suslova, a woman much younger than him with whom he had an explosive relationship. In 1863, at home, he lost his first wife. He remarried in 1867 to Anna Grigorievna, to whom he dictated The player, the novel that collected his previous tumultuous passion. Still other misfortunes struck him: he lost a son from his first marriage, a daughter from his second, his brother Mikhail died in 1864.
It was that man, broken and hardened by so many hardships, who from that moment would give his greatest works, written many times clumsily, carried away by a mighty torrent that pushed him to delve into the subterranean areas of consciousness and made him explode. the dilemmas and fears of the human being. Crime and Punishment, The idiot, the demons and The Karamazov brothers they are novels crossed by characters who are overwhelmed by the enormous weight of being aware of what it means to live.
Dostoevsky died on February 9, 1881. These days, in the 200th anniversary of his birth, some titles have appeared that recover his work or that illuminate it. The biography of the Romanian Virgil Tanase does, Dostoevsky (Ediciones del Subuelo), which knows how to restore with nerve and efficiency the vicissitudes of the writer and the circumstances that fed his works. And so does Tamara Djermanovic in her personal approach that summarizes in Dostoevsky’s universe (Cliff) a long relationship with the writer, and Nicolás Caparrós, in Dostoevsky in the dungeons of the spirit (Misstep). Galaxia Gutenberg has published the second volume of his complete work, which includes Uncle’s Dream, Stepánchikovo’s Village, Humiliated and Offended and Notes from the Dead House, pieces all that are written or conceived in the final phase of his long exile. Yesterday Foam Pages presented the more than 2,000 pages of Diary of a writer.
Without mincing words
It has nothing to do with a newspaper, they are newspaper articles that he began to write under that label because in them he would speak, according to his words, “for myself and for pure pleasure (…) about everything that comes to mind, or about whatever makes me think ”. It is explained by the person in charge of the edition, Paul Viejo, in the previous note that presides over the two volumes that, after all, have ended up bringing together all of Dostoevsky’s journalistic pieces, and not only those that he published under that heading at three different times: in 1873, in 1876 – as a monthly booklet edited, drawn up and financed by the writer himself – and in 1891. It is his last period, and Dostoevsky speaks above all, from the smallest to the largest, with the greatest freedom, without hairs. on the tongue and habitually taking things out of hand. On The player, a British gentleman comments to the protagonist during a conversation: “Only Russians are capable of twinning so many contradictions at the same time. Indeed, that’s right, the man likes to find his best friend humiliated before him. Friendship is largely based on humiliation. It is an old truth that all the intelligent people of the world know ”. Dostovieski turns 200 today, and who knows if this type of observation can still have an echo in a quiet society like this one today, which is unhinged with nuances and wants everything in black and white.
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