Reporter | Chen Jiajing Edit | Yellow Moon
November 11 this year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of the Russian writer Dostoevsky, and the recent publication of The Biography of Dostoevsky, written by the German scholar Andreas Gusky, may give us an opportunity to re-acquaint ourselves with The Dostoevsky and its works. In contrast to the many Tuoshi biographies already on the market, Gusky's version is not only a new translation, but also inevitably uses his German perspective to unearth the unknown side of the writer. The tense images and constant interrogation of human nature in Dostoevsky's novels are also clearly presented in this new biography, revealing the essence of Dostoevsky as a writer of "crisis".
At the sharing meeting of the new book "Dostoevsky's Biography", translator Liu Wenfei and Hou Weihong, director of the Russian Literature Research Office of the Institute of Foreign Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, discussed the important differences between this work and the biography of Toss in Russia, and the significance of our reading of Toss's biography and works today. As the two guests pointed out, Dostoevsky reflected the national character of the Russians, and his whole life was concerned with the struggle between good and evil of mankind, the relationship between freedom and faith, and the fate of the Russian nation, and the contradictions in his personality and the division of ideas can be found in Gusky's biography.
Among the many biographies of Toshi on the market, Gusky's "Biography of Dostoevsky" is not very long, about 200,000-300,000 words, but Liu Wenfei said that he spent more time reading and gained a lot of freshness, which he summarized into three "new". The first "new" refers to the author, and Gusky is a fresh name for both Liu Wenfei himself and russian literary researchers in mainland Russia. Liu Also notes that the preface to the book was written in November 2017, meaning that it is a work that has just been translated into China after it was completed in recent years, which means that for the reader, it will involve more information about Tuoshi than previous biographies.
The second "new" is that this biography is a biography of Toshi created in the 21st century. Liu Wenfei introduced that compared with other Russian writers, Tuoshi's biography is rare 30 or 40 years ago, and it is significantly less than Pushkin's biography and Tolstoy's biography in Russian, because throughout the Soviet period, people did not have a very high evaluation of Toshi, some people said that he was a cruel genius, and some people said that he was a counter-activist. But on the other hand, there are many research works on Tuoshi, and Liu Wenfei believes that the strange phenomenon of "more research and less biography" may be due to the fact that biographers are embarrassed about how to evaluate Tuoshi.
Nevertheless, in the 1960s and 1970s, the first biography of Toshi in the former Soviet Union, written by Grossman, was translated into China by foreign literary publishers in 1987. Later, in 2011, the People's Literature Publishing House published Sereznev's Biography of Dostoevsky, a biography written by Russians who are more referenced by domestic scholars. Another important biography of Torstein is the five-volume Dostoevsky by Princeton University professor Joseph Frank in the United States, which set a record for the largest length of Dostoev's biography. In addition, the more well-known biography of Dows includes the American Slavic scholar Slonim's "Three Loves of Dostoevsky", as well as the diaries and memoirs written by Mrs. Dostovsky.
Most of the biographies mentioned above have been translated into Chinese, but Liu Wenfei noticed that they were all translated from Russian or English without exception, but Gusky's Biography of Dostoevsky was translated from German, and the German perspective presented in the book also made Liu Wenfei feel particularly "new". "Relatively speaking, it focuses more on the understanding of Dostoevsky's philosophical level and the level of intellectual history, for example, as we can see in the book, he [Dors] was influenced by many philosophers such as Kant, Kierkegaard, Schellinger and so on." In other words, Gusky, as a writer who grew up in the context of German culture, has a thorough understanding of the history of German philosophy and an understanding of German philosophers far exceeds that of scholars from other countries, which is the advantage of his writing this biography. In addition, Liu Wenfei found that Gusky's German perspective was also manifested in a relatively shallow level of life, for example, he would pay special attention to the years that Dostoevsky spent abroad, and pay attention to where he went in Germany - we later learned that many of Dowski's works were written in Dresden and Paris, equivalent to "diaspora literature".
Hou Weihong also noticed the novelty and contemporaneity of Gusky's biography, and she was also impressed by the way the writer narrated it. "When he narrates, he has a sense of cinematic picture, time and space, very similar to the rocker arm during shooting, one moment shaking to the era of Toshi, the other shaking to the contemporary, so that you have a feeling of contrasting with each other." Hou Weihong remembers that shortly before Toshi's death, when the Pushkin Monument was inaugurated, Gusky described Tuoshi and Turgenev's speech at the inauguration ceremony as a duel between the two. "Turgenev is an aristocratic, arrogant, confident and narcissistic figure, but Dostoevsky is a sick-faced, neurotic, sympathetic image of a medieval monk." She believes that this vivid portrayal of details certainly has a deductive part, but it is indeed surprising that the author can integrate interpretation, imagination and historical materials, works and characters in a particularly natural way.
From the point of view of literary studies, Gusky's German perspective also contrasts interestingly with the local perspective of Russia. Liu Wenfei mentioned that Russians who read Toshi's biography would think of him as a saint, until now, Russian scholars, including Saraskina,' biographies of Toshi are basically upward-looking, and rarely speculate on Toshi's psychology or views on certain controversial issues when narrating, because they think it is a deconstruction of literary saints. In Gusky's new biography, there happens to be a chapter entitled "Canonization", which talks about Dostoevsky's funeral setting a precedent for the Russian people to canonize a writer - after the death of a writer, he would carry his coffin down the street and let thousands of people mourn him. Beginning with Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Mayakovsky, and Pasternak all underwent similar funeral rites. "The canonization of writers seems normal to the Russians, but it is always a little ridiculous and deconstructed by foreigners, let alone in such a new book. Western intellectuals also have a tradition and mentality of deconstruction, and they don't want to write a writer as a saint," Liu wenfei said.
Another difference between russian and external writers is their different interpretations of the national character represented by toss. Liu Wenfei pointed out that Russians pay more attention to the Russian national consciousness embodied in Tuoshi, while people outside Russia regard him as the most typical Russian, such as his moodiness, extreme arbitrariness, and his wisdom, through cracking him to understand Russianness. Although both are meant to understand the Russians, in this respect the two are exactly opposite: the former is supportive, the latter is critical. Especially in the former Soviet Union, when the Soviet authorities slightly belittled Dostoevsky, the West would elevate his modern consciousness even more; when the Soviet Union collapsed, the Soviet Union officially regarded him as an ideological representative, and the West actually belittled him.
On the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Toshi's birth, the two guests also talked about the significance of people reading Toshi's writings and biographies today. In Liu Wenfei's view, if you want to understand Russian culture and literature, understand the Russian way of thinking and their nationality, reading Dostoevsky may be a shortcut. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, is probably the writer of his contemporaries who intervenes the deepest in the heart of man with literature, so reading his works will make people more aware of the complexity of man. As Gusky mentioned in his biography analysis of Toshi's novel "Basement Notes", Toschi divided people into two categories, one is the contented, that is, ordinary people, and the other is the "basement people", who are suspicious of everything. This spirit of doubt and denial in the face of the world like the "basement man" can help people realize their personality more fully in a sense.
Gusky's biography also places special emphasis on the divisiveness of Dostoevsky. Those familiar with Toshi know that the years of exile in Siberia played a key role in the formation of his later thoughts, and since then the divisive moments of the desire for secular life and the desire for new life in the religious sense have been intertwined in his thinking. Liu Wenfei believes that Tuoshi has been concerned with the struggle between good and evil in human beings, the relationship between freedom and faith, and the problems of Russia and Europe. In his later years, he proposed the "Russian idea", arguing that the West had lost the purity of faith because of the selfishness of capitalism, and that only Russians who adhered to the Orthodox tradition were still on a mission to save the world by transforming their faith. "For the individual, he allows us to see the profundity and complexity of man himself, while for a country he shows the difficulty and prudence of the development of The Russian nation."
Hou Weihong summarized the contradictions in Dostoevsky as three aspects of the individual, the national/epoch, and the human race, and the essential problem of these three aspects is the sense of belonging of the person, that is, the settlement of the body and the settlement of the soul. Physically, Toshi was troubled by health all his life, and Gusky mentioned the diseases he had suffered, including epilepsy, respiratory diseases, dizziness, paranoia, anxiety, etc.; mentally, he not only had various ambitions and desires for literary achievements, but also always held an attitude of faith that wanted to believe and constantly doubt. "I think he reflects the culmination of all the contradictions as a person, all the spiritual difficulties, contradictions, and quests, and in the big way, it is the future of the country, the fate of the nation, and the problem of mankind, which is a bit like our Confucian self-cultivation and family rule the country and the world."
Liu Wenfei also mentioned that the writing and reading of literature has undergone earth-shaking changes since the 19th century, but people are actually reading more classical literature. Dostoevsky may constitute a turning point and continuation of our reading of literature, because the modernity of fiction writing began in Doshi, and he made people realize that the story itself is not necessarily important, the way of writing is also important, and it can appear stream of consciousness, there is doubt about life. Hou Weihong also believes that Tuoshi's influence is permeated in the blood of contemporary writers, specific to literary creation, and the two most typical writers who fully inherit Tuoshi's critical realist tradition are Makhanin and Oleg Pavlov. Therefore, whether reading modernist literature or postmodern literature, readers can find the source in Toshi, which is why we read him in the present.