On Dostoevsky
Wen 丨 Pamuk
Dostoevsky's terror devil
In my opinion, "The Devil" is the world's greatest novel. At the age of 20, I read this novel for the first time. I was stunned, shocked, frightened, and at the same time deeply convinced. No novel has had such a profound impact on me, no story that has given me such a deep understanding of the human soul—man's desire for power, man's ability to tolerate, man's ability to deceive and deceive others, man's love, hatred and desire for faith, man's indulgence in the sacred and the world. For Dostoevsky, it was all mixed, and he placed it all in a common and complex story of politics, deception, and death. I was blown away!
It's hard to explain why this novel evokes such a huge fear in my heart. I was especially horrified by the horrific suicide scene (cutting off the wick, plunging into darkness, watching everything from another room) and the violence of the murderer (who was full of thoughts out of fear). Perhaps, to my astonishment, the protagonist of the novel is constantly switching between great thinking and small and narrow life, as well as his boldness, at a rapid pace. Thus, when reading this novel, it seems that every small detail of everyday life is associated with great thinking, and this connection takes us into a world of horror full of paranoia and madness. There, all the great thoughts and ideals are related to each other, and people are connected to each other. It is a mask of truth hidden behind all thoughts, and it is also a passage. After this world, there is another world. There we can question man's freedom and the existence of God. In The Crowd of Demons, Dostoevsky creates a protagonist for us who commits suicide to affirm these great thoughts—human freedom and the existence of God. What he did is unforgettable. Few writers in this world can anthropomorphize and dramatize the contradictions between faith, abstract concepts, and philosophy so perfectly as Dostoevsky.
In 1869, Dostoevsky began writing The Group of Demons. At the time, he was 58 years old, living in Europe (Florence and Dresden), had just finished writing and publishing Idiot and was working on another work called The Husband Forever. Two years ago, he came to Europe to avoid creditors writing quietly. By then, he had conceived a novel about faith and the loss of faith (i.e., atheism) called The Life of the Great Sinner. Dostoevsky, who resents nihilists (we might define them as semi-anarchists, semi-liberals), is writing this novel that satirizes their contempt for Russian tradition, their fanatical worship and lack of faith in the West. Soon after, Dostoevsky began to lose some interest in the novel and was accidentally involved in an attack on a political homicide (he learned about it in the Russian newspapers and heard about it all from a friend of his wife' side). That year, a college student named Ivanov was murdered by four of his friends, who was believed to be undercover by a police officer. This internally murderous political group is led by a brilliant, scheming, and vicious Nechayev, a role played by Stefanovich Verhovinsky in the novel. In The Crowd of Demons, verhovinsky, like the real events, is in a park with his friends Tarotchenko, Wilkinsky, and Ramsin, killing Shatov, who is suspected of informing, and throwing his body into the lake.
This murderer led Dostoevsky to re-examine the revolutionary and utopian dreams of Russian nihilists and Westernizers, and to discover a powerful desire for power among these people—one that transcends our husbands or wives, its friends beyond everything around us, and even beyond the whole world. So, when I was a young leftist, I read The Devil and I felt that the story was not written in Russia more than a hundred years ago, but in Turkey, a country mired in a violent radical politics. At that time, I felt that Dostoevsky was whispering to me, teaching me the secret language of the soul, leading me into a society of radicals: these people who were excited about the dream of changing the world, but at the same time imprisoned in a secret organization, deceiving others in the name of revolution, and taking pleasure in cursing and insulting people who did not speak their language and did not conform to their ideas. I remember asking myself, why didn't anyone talk about the truth revealed in this book? "The Devils" does talk about a lot of things of our time, but in the circles of the leftists, all this is ignored.
There is another personal reason why I am afraid. A hundred years after the Nechayev case, or a hundred years after the publication of The Crowd of Demons, a similar murder occurred at the Robert Academy, Turkey at the time. In a revolutionary political group in which my classmates were also involved (which was formed at the instigation of a clever and evil "hero", after which he evaporated from the human world), a man was considered a traitor, so they killed him, smashed his head with a stick, stuffed the body into a box, tried to transport the body across the Bosphorus Sea in a rowing boat, but were caught. "The most dangerous enemy is the one closest to you, that is, the one who is the first to leave." This is the idea that encourages and drives them to become criminals at all costs. Because I've read The Devil before, I can feel it all deep inside. Years later, I asked a friend who had been part of this political group if he had read The Crowd of Demons.
In the grim character of Karamadinov, Dostoev created a comic effect. His prototype was Turgenev. In life, Dostoevsky loved and hated Turgenev. What makes Dostoinovsky hard to let go is that Turgenev was a wealthy landlord who supported nihilists and Westernizers and despised indigenous culture (at least, in Dowon's view). "The Devil" is in a sense a novel that argues with "Father and Son".
I often think of The Devil as a novel about a group of radical intellectuals who live outside the center of the world, on the fringes of Europe, who struggle with their Own Western dreams and are tormented by the agony of doubting the existence of God. What's more important is that they have a shameless secret that they try to hide from people. And "The Devil" reveals all this.
The Brothers Karamazov
I was 18 years old and sitting alone in the house with a bosphorus sea outside the window. This was the first time I read The Brothers Karamazov, and I still remember it vividly. What I read was a 1940 Turkish translation, right in my father's study, with the famous English translation by Constance Old Gurnett. The Brothers Karamazov was the first Dostoevsky I read. The title is unique and powerful, with a strong Russian exotic flavor that beckons me into its world.
The Brothers Karamazov, like all great novels, gave me a quick and contradictory double effect. It made me feel that I was no longer alone in this world, and at the same time made me feel that I was so helpless and far away from all people. The reason why I am not lonely is because I am completely immersed in the picture and world of the novel, and I feel that all the great discoveries in the novel are my discoveries, derived from my own thinking. The reason I was lonely was because the book also showed me the laws behind controlling those shadows, all of which no one had ever talked about. I felt that I was the first person in the world to read this book. I would like to say that I read a book that touched me deeply, and my life changed from then on, as Borges said: "Discovering Dostoevsky was like seeing love or the sea for the first time in my life — it was an important moment in the journey of life." ”
So what secret did Dostoevsky reveal to me in The Brothers Karamazov and in his other great novels? Wasn't it my thirst for God and faith, though in the end we hardly believed anything. Is there a devil in the depths of each of our souls who curses loudly and is hostile to the deepest of beliefs? Or happiness comes not only from deep emotions, admiration, and great ideas that dominate life, but also from something that is the exact opposite of these gorgeous concepts—humility (which I thought about every day at the time). Is it true that humans are inherently animals that oscillate between hope and despair, love and hate, reality and imagination, and that oscillation is more frequent and uncertain than I thought? Is it not what Dostoevsky said when he portrayed the old Karamazov that people are not so religious even when they cry, and that even other parts of their bodies are still playing? Reading Dostoevsky, especially at a young age, is about making one amazing discovery after another.
For some writers, the world is a place of full maturity, a completed nation. Writers like Flaubert and Nabokov are more concerned with the colors, symmetrical shadows, and half-naked jokes of the world than with unearthing the basic laws and structures that govern the world, and they are more concerned with the surface or skin of life and the world than with the laws of life and the world. The joy of reading Flaubert and Nabokov is not in discovering a great idea of the author, but in looking at their attention to detail and their narrative experiments.
But I would like to say that there is another group of writers in the world, and Dostoevsky is one of them. But I cannot say that Dostoevsky is the clearest and most interesting of them, for he is the only one in this group. For writers like Dostoevsky, the world is an ever-changing unfinished, flawed place. The world is similar to the world we live in, it is always changing. So we long to go further: to understand the laws that govern the world, to find out where we are—in a corner like that, where we decide for ourselves what is right and what is wrong. But then we will find that we have almost become part of the world that The Brothers Karamazov is trying to explore, just halfway through. That's why, whenever we read about Dostoevsky, we are so frightened by what we know—because these laws have never been made clear.
In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky vigorously excavated indigenous culture and its humble traditions against modern sacred values such as initiative, power, war, the right to question and rebel. Some of the ideas in "The Idiot" are expressed even more vividly in The Brothers Karamazov, and Dostoevsky tells us through Ivan Karamazov: cleverness leads to humility and sin, and stupidity leads to purity and firmness. The second time I read The Brothers Karamazov, I found that I no longer followed Dostoevsky's guidance to hate the old Karamazov. His vulgar behavior, his fondness for children, his indulgence in pleasure, his penchant for lying, all of this made me laugh. Because I know he's far from our lives and at the same time very close. Interestingly, the three Brothers Karamazov are also three brothers in soul. The reader will choose between them, identify with them, argue about who is better—and eventually, the argument about each Of Karamazov becomes a debate about life itself.
When I was young, I liked Alyosha the most. The purity of his heart, the desire to find a shining point of goodness in everyone, and the effort to understand everything that was happening around him were all in line with the apologist in me. But another soul in me—Duke Myshkin in "The Idiot"—told me that this purity was too difficult to reach. So, later I discovered that Ivan, the dictator obsessed with books and theories, was closer to my soul. In non-Western countries, there is a group of angry young people who have buried their moralized selves in books and ideas. They all have a cruel composure in them, just like Ivan. In The Crowd of Demons, Dostoevsky conducts a study of a group of political conspirators. We can still see the shadow of these people in Ivan, who ruled Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution: in pursuit of a great ideal, people are willing to go to any extreme, even the most severe torture. Ivan, however, was still a Karamazov brother. No matter how angry, fanatical, and extreme he was, his desire for love wounded him, and Moreover, Dostoevsky keenly infused him with a kind of well-intentioned sympathy that lessened his negative effects. The boss, Dmitry, is a strange protagonist to me, which is why I have been observing and thinking about him. He's too sophisticated, much like his father, whose struggle with him for a woman brings him closer to reality, but at the same time is more easily forgotten. The other brother, the boy who was a servant and the illegitimate son Smelgakov, frightened me. His peddling of that horrible idea (in his opinion, each of us might have had a different life and an ending) also awakened the fear of the poor in the middle class—fear of being watched, judged, or cursed. After the killing, he judged everything with honest, ruthless, and precise logic. This behavior is reminiscent of, sometimes, that an insignificant person can ultimately control everything through wisdom and intuition.
When Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov, he was wrestling with the dilemma of political culture, things that haunted him all his life. In those years, Dostoevsky (with Tolstoy) was Russia's greatest novelist. In Dostoevsky's later years, people finally acknowledged this. Dostoevsky was a Westernized left-wing liberal in his youth, but in his later years he began to turn to pan-Slavism, so much so that he finally began to praise the Tsar. The Tsar freed the serfs in 1861 – a wish of Dostoevsky (in 1849 the Tsar pardoned Dostoevsky himself). Dostoevsky was proud of the small relationship he had established with the Tsarist family. In 1877-1878, at the instigation of pan-Slavism, the Russo-Turkish War broke out. When Dostoevsky heard the news, he ran to the church and prayed to the Russian people with tears in his eyes (according to Turkish custom, in various translations of the Brothers Karamazov, some content and words were deleted or replaced here - Dostoevsky accused the Turks of a fanaticism for war). At the age of 70, Dostoevsky had become a weary old man, receiving letters from many readers and admirers every day, and even winning the respect of his enemies. A year after the publication of The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky died. Years later, his wife recalled how his husband had insisted on climbing the four-story staircase to attend a regular literary gathering, exhausted and breathless, only to fill his never-satisfied pride: as soon as he entered the door the whole venue became silent. Despite occasional outbreaks of jaundice caused by liver disease, Dostoevsky refused to give up the joy of writing, writing until dawn, and then, smoking a cigarette and drinking a cup of tea.
Dostoevsky's life was a great literary marvel. In the face of a sharp deterioration in his physical condition, he wrote one of the greatest novels to date. No novel can appear so repeatedly in a person's daily life, no novel has such a great idea, and no novel is as memorable as this novel. Fiction and orchestral music are called the greatest art of Western civilization. Dostoevsky, despite his dislike of the West and Europe, wrote one of the world's greatest novels, which is a huge irony.
Felit Orhan Pamuk is turkey's most famous contemporary novelist. Western literary critics have compared him to Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Calvino, Borges, Amberto Echo, and others, calling him one of the three most central literary figures of contemporary Europe. Published in 1998, My Name Is Red won the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize, as well as the French Literary Prize and the Italian Grizzana Carver Literary Prize. In 2006, Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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