Dostoevsky without frills

American scholar Robert Jackson called Dostoevsky "an icon of self-consciousness." When you read Dostoevsky''s novels, you sense that he is a man who has grasped the mysteries of existence with such depth and penetrating intensity, as one does in a temple while standing before an icon during prayer. But if you see in the themes of icons and faces the reality transformed by the light of the world, then in Dostoevsky''s novels, you perceive the divine essence of creation imprinted on the body of earthly appearance."It seems that human thought has reached its limit within itself and has appeared in a world beyond the limit... It seems that someone has stopped the hand of the great writer and prevented him from finishing the last novel, disturbing him with its tremendous prophetic power. This was the most that was permissible for humans to do. Thanks to Dostoevsky, humans have been able to know so much about themselves, and that which they were not yet ready to comprehend," wrote Valentin Rasputin a hundred years later.Dostoevsky''s personality arouses interest with such power, as does his creativity. The life history of this man cannot be comprehended in the mind. Over the course of sixty years, he suffered as much as the Dostoevskys of the past five hundred (including the violent twentieth century). Sometimes it seems that fate has played with him in all the variations of human biographies, conscious and unconscious. Take any subject, and you will find it, in one form or another, present in Dostoevsky''s life. Today, too, Dostoevsky remains the figure in whom "God presented riddles." Here, the shores meet. Here, all contradictions coexist... Here, the devil wrestles with God, and the battlefield is the human heart. - Paul Fokin