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1Author:  Shaw, Charles GrayAdd
 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.
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