If you could only read the works of one writer in your lifetime, who would you read?
If you could only read one novel in your lifetime, which one would you read?
It's a very subjective question, and everyone has their own answers and their own preferences. I, on the other hand, would have chosen Dostoevsky without hesitation, his pinnacle of "The Brothers Karamazov."
Someone once questioned whether we deserved to talk about Dostoevsky, about his profanity? I'm equally skeptical.
Because one of the themes that surrounds his life, and throughout his novels, is suffering. Is a man who has not suffered so much qualified to talk about him?
Maybe I'm just easily peeking into the pain of others. Even he himself exclaimed, "May I be worthy of my suffering."
Dostoevsky had a rough life, he was born in 1821, at the age of 9 began to have seizures, followed by a lifetime of illness, at the age of 16 lost his father, 18 years old lost his mother. At the age of 24, he wrote his first short story " The Poor " and became a literary celebrity.
In 1849, he was arrested and sentenced to death on suspicion of opposing the rule of the Tsar for his participation in the Petrashevsky group, and was commuted to hard labor immediately before the execution, thus beginning his painful journey of 4 years of hard labor and 6 years of military service.
After his release, he married and lost his wife, and died only 3 months after a gap of only 3 months with his closest brother, and has been in debt ever since. Then he ushered in a second marriage, went abroad to avoid debts, gambled, lost his son, until his death at the age of 60, such an ill-fated life, perhaps because of this set the tone of his literature.
He once said that if he had the writing environment of Turgenev and Tolstoy, then he would write better, because his writing time was always tight.
Due to the death of his brother, he took over the magazine "Time" founded by his brother and took care of his widow's orphans, as well as inheriting the debts of the press, which he used to pay off his debts, and he had no other work income. So he often had to hand over a dozen seal manuscripts in a matter of months. It can also be seen from the collection of letters that he has been paying in advance and is unable to make ends meet.
Dostoevsky's most important 7 novels and 4 novellas, several of which have a fairly high reading threshold, the main reason is religion, Russia believes in Orthodox Christianity, and our country receives an atheist education, so there will be some obstacles to understanding. The second is pain, which is accompanied by pain in almost every work, and some people may feel like having nightmares.
My personal recommended reading order for his writings is:
1. The Crypt Notes, which is very helpful in looking at Dostoevsky's thought;
2. "Poor Man" and "White Night", short in length, strong in story, with almost no threshold for reading;
3. "The Dead House Notes" and "The Gambler" are not very long;
4. "The Insulted and the Damaged", "Crime and Punishment", "Juvenile", "Idiot", "Group of Demons" these novels do not have a certain reading order, first look at any one;
5. The most difficult to read "The Brothers Karamazov" can be saved for the end.
Of course, the above order is only my personal feelings, in fact, any order of reading is OK. I will introduce a few representative works next.
Basement Notes
The reason why I first recommended reading "Basement Notes" is because from this one it can represent the ideological nature of Dostoevsky's later works, which is also his first philosophical novel.
The protagonist of the novel is a bada pin civilian official, a superfluous person, with a gloomy and lonely personality, poor and ill-fated, and as a strong individualist, he believes that people should do as they please and deny moral principles.
This basement man, who can realize the flaws in his personality, the distortion of his psychology, is his confession throughout the book, telling the reader about three of his own experiences, the first sentence of the opening sentence is: "I am a patient... I'm a fierce person. I'm an unlikable person. ”
At the same time, he was seeking an identity. After being blocked by an officer, the officer moved him aside, and he was so angry that he spied on the officer every day, just to bump into the officer on a chance narrow road encounter, and the result was that the people did not notice it at all.
Dostoevsky himself wrote: "I am the only one who has written the tragedy of the basement, the tragedy of suffering, the masochism, the awareness of the good but the inability to achieve it." "It reminds me of Kafka's Metamorphosis, the tragic Beetle protagonist.
The Insulted and the Damaged
This is the author's first novel since his return from exile, the first social novel to criticize the bourgeoisie.
The events depicted in the novel take place in Petersburg, the heroine Natasha falls in love with Alyosha, she dares to leave the family for love, but Alyosha seems innocent and romantic, but in fact, she is frivolous and selfish, just a giant baby. He oscillates between Natasha and another noblewoman, and clearly chooses the latter, as this choice would be more beneficial to himself.
Alyosha's father is a representative of evil, a complete villain, an unashamed egoist, a hedonist eager to have pleasure in time, for whom money is the master of human destiny.
The book ends with the theme of forgiveness, and morally depraved hypocrites can only be cursed by good people without actual punishment? Do they live well for a hundred years? This may be a question left for the reader to ponder.
Crime and Punishment
This one is probably Dostoevsky's most famous one.
The male protagonist, Raskonnikov, is a college student, poor, and he has a set of superhuman thoughts: human beings are divided into two kinds, most of them are ordinary people who are only responsible for passing on the generations, like insects, and a few people are high-ranking people, they are superior in intelligence, and they are strong above the law.
He killed an old woman who was usury in order to get money to save his sister, but after the killing he was deeply tormented by conscience, and the psychology after the killing and the killing was very well written! For example, he is also hesitant in the process of killing people, do he want to kill or not?
Tuo's depiction always gives people a sense of suspense on the string, and after the killing, the male protagonist has been having a high fever and nightmares, through nightmares to show the male protagonist's evil psychology, and the reader is tormented along with them.
In the end, the male protagonist surrenders himself and demands punishment morally. He knelt down on the cross street to confess in public, and a stream of consciousness depiction of him wandering in the haymarket before he fell to his knees was quite ahead of its time.
Crime and Punishment reflects the plight of the urban poor, is anti-nihilistic, and it explores the question of how, in the face of the rapid development of capitalism, civilian intellectuals like Raskolnikov, in the face of temptation and danger, should be liberated from the path of individualism and anarchism, that is, the crime of superhuman consciousness? The book gives the answer.
The Brothers Karamazov
Another work that can wash the soul, and the most important one, Dostoevsky's masterpiece, is the "Brothers Karamazov" mentioned at the beginning.
This is an encyclopedic masterpiece, and I will only make a brief recommendation here, because a book review of this book can be written several more books, and so many scholars have already studied it.
The book, which is more than 900 pages in fourteen volumes, tells the story of the family conflicts between the Karamazov family, including the elder Karamazov and his three sons, who were hostile to their fathers and killed their fathers for women and property.
The description of the murder case reminds me of "Crime and Punishment", the same unresolved, wonderful, the author hangs the reader's appetite like a marionette, and does not give an answer, so that the reader can see the end with suspense. There is also the famous chapter "Religious Justices", the debate between the prosecution and the prosecution, the author's logic is full of points, which may also extend some of the subject matter of the future trial debate.
Throughout the book is the religious idea, "Does God exist?" This was also a problem that plagued Dostoevsky all his life.
At the end of the book, it ends with the funeral of a small friend, and the author also tells us through the mouth of the third brother Alyosha, a pious and kind monk: "After death we will be able to rise again, and we will meet happily and tell each other everything about the past." ”
The Collected Letters
This book is very helpful for understanding the writer, can be read with a slightly relaxed and pleasant mood, and is highly recommended for readers who want to know About Dostoevsky.
Through the collection of letters, we can better understand Dostoevsky's thought and his writings, and better understand his personality.
For example, Dostoevsky often went into debt and mortgaged his works in advance, and if he lived in modern times, he must be a kanu! He wrote letters to editors on all kinds of borrowed money, all kinds of Amway's own unborn works; he wrote back to readers, talking about social current affairs and analyzing the current state of society; he wrote letters to his family, talking about his artistic ideas, his preferences for contemporary literature.
Through the collection of letters we will also know some gossip, such as he hated Turgenev, did not understand why the other people's manuscript fees could be thousands of rubles and he only had one or two hundred; how he borrowed money to gamble; he had ambiguous relations with other female writers, and so on.
In short, if you like Dostoevsky, don't miss this "Collection of Letters"!
This set was published by Hebei Education Publishing House, translated by liu Wenfei, Zang Zhonglun, Li Gang and other famous translators, and the editions are relatively scarce, especially the "Collection of Letters".
Dostoevsky's Complete Works are 7 in 12 volumes
It brings together short and medium stories such as "The Basement Notes", "Insulted and Damaged", "Crime and Punishment", "Idiot", "Teenager", "Brother Karamazov" and other long classics, as well as the first Chinese edition of "Epistles".
Each work has an expert write a detailed solution, which comprehensively explains the entire process of the author from the beginning of conceiving the work to the completion of the creation, as well as the social repercussions and related comments after the publication of the work. Readers who love Russian literature and Tovon are not to be missed!
This article is submitted by a book friend of Zhongtu Network
Contributor: Boiled hippopotamus
Photo taken by Junjun