| | 1 | Author: | Shaw, Charles Gray | Add | | | Title: | Dostoievsky's Mystical Terror  | | | | Published: | 1997 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | IT is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God,
but that is what happened to Fydor Dostoievsky. It was not Russia,
vast, fantastic, terrible, but real existence as such which wrung from
his soul his tales of self-inquisition. "Reality has caught me upon a
hook"; this chance expression in one of his romances of reality is the
confessed secret of the anguished author. Dostoievsky is Russia, and
"the Russian soul is a dark place." Having said this of his own land,
Dostoievsky, without playing upon Amiel's pretty epigram, "the landscape
is a state of the soul," proceeds to show us how the outer darkness
pervades his own soul. He knows not why, but at dusk there comes over
him an oppressive and agonizing state of mind difficult to define, but
recognizable in the form of "mystical terror." Because of his
pessimistic realism, Dostoievsky is not to be understood by any attempt
to force his stubborn thought into the pens of conventional literature;
"standard authors" afford us no analogies, so that it is only by
relating the Russian to Job, Ezekiel, and the author of the Apocalypse
that we are able to make headway in reading Dostoievsky. Hoffmann, Poe,
and Baudelaire played with the terrible as a boy plays with toy spiders
and snakes; but their soul-states knew no Siberias, their mental hides
escaped the hooks of reality. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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