His works have “questioned the fundamental themes of existence with unsurpassed depth” and the writer is certainly among the most celebrated ever; yet some questions are repeated over time, and without stillness or univocal answer, they have been struggling for a century and more philologists, critics, biographers and readers. Was Fyodor Michajlovič Dostoevsky a great novelist or a thinker? Why is his figure two hundred years after his birth and one hundred and forty years after his death is still debatable? What message did this Russian, now considered one of the greatest writers of all time, leave behind?
These questions and many others are answered by Armando Torno’s essay entitled “Dostoevskij our brother” (Edizioni Ares, pp. 144, euro 14). A book that was created by bringing together the research of a decade, carried out to curate the Italian editions (the only ones with facing text and notebooks) of the great Russian novels and the “Diary of a writer”.
God and evil
These are pages in which we remember that we are in the presence of a narrator of ideas, an exegete of fundamental problems; Dostoevsky continually asks himself questions about God and evil, stubbornly wondering what freedom, guilt or truth are, especially who man is. I note that “his writing, often not edited, most of the time written in a hurry out of desperate need of money” swarms like an anthill of issues that have remained current. Nietzsche considered him a brother, even if he thought the opposite about God.
Dostoevsky’s prose
Dostoevsky’s prose requires special attention. Torno exemplifies the difficulty – one example among many – starting from a famous phrase of his, transformed into a cliché: it is in the novel “The idiot”, finished in Florence in January 1869. We remember it: “Beauty will save the world” . It is also repeated inappropriately, but its meaning is not what is commonly believed. For this reason, it invites you to reread it in Russian: “Mir spasët krasotà”. And here the problems begin. “Mir” can be translated both with “world” and with “peace”. “Krasotà”, on the other hand, is a beauty – like the adjective “krasivyi”, “beautiful” – which goes beyond the meanings used today. Furthermore, the sentence is constructed with an inversion of the order of object and subject, what grammarians call anastrophe. Could it also be translated “The world will save beauty”? Certain. And then Dostoevsky adds others to the question. It is true that in a letter to Sonija Ivanova, her niece, she notes: “All writers who have tried to represent absolute beauty have always failed, because it is an impossible task. Beauty is ideal; and the ideal, both in Italy and in civilized Europe, is still far from being crystallized ”. There is more. He makes Dmitry or Mitja, the eldest son of “The Karamazov Brothers” who hates his father say: “Beauty is a terrible, horrible thing”.
Gave
In short, a book that indicates in-depth paths on the work of a shocking author. Above all, Dostoevsky dwells on God, the central theme of his pages. A God who seems irreconcilable with evil, but also a God who “must” reveal himself. But in “The legend of the Grand Inquisitor”, contained in “The Brothers Karamazov”, Jesus returns to earth and the ecclesiastical authority, after having rebuked him, condemns him again to death.