Word: dostoevsky
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...Kierkegaard, who died in 1855, is slowly being excavated from the Danish. Had this philosopher and mystic not written in a minor language, his fame would have resounded with that of Carlyle, Nietzsche, Dostoevski. It was upon Kierkegaard's assertion of romantic individualism that Scandinavian literature in the last century rose to world-famed greatness and influence. He was the prototype of Ibsen's gloomy cleric, Brand. Profound also was his influence on Spain's late, great Catholic scholar, Miguel de Unamuno. Yet only in the last five years has more than an inkling of Kierkegaard been...
...Chicago, 24-year-old Lawrence Yehling stole $75 from a former employer, gave himself up to the police. If they sent him to jail, said he, he could write a prison novel better than Dostoevski's The House of the Dead. After two weeks in the bridewell, Novelist Yehling changed his literary plans: "I think I'll join the Army and try to write a better book than Tolstoi's War and Peace...
...autopsies are risky. French Scholar Denis Saurat enraged the high-minded by "demonstrating" that blind John Milton (like deaf Ludwig van Beethoven) suffered from hereditary syphilis. Diagnostician Moorman finds Milton tuberculous. Other famous consumptives: Pope, Dr. Johnson, Shelley, Goethe, Schiller, Descartes, Balzac, Rousseau, Spinoza, Kant, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Chekhov, Dostoevski, a brow-wrinkling list of other writers and thinkers. Doctors suspect that tuberculosis develops genius because 1) apprehension of death inspires a burning awareness of life's beauty, significance, transience, 2) the bacillus breeds restlessness and an intoxicated hypersensitiveness...
With this view Ernest Simmons, onetime Harvard professor and biographer (1937) of Byronic Poet Alexander Pushkin, has little patience. Simmons denies the widespread notion that Siberian exile altered the thought and method of "one of the most original novelists in world literature." Dostoevski's originality combined 1) his distrust for Western European culture; 2) his belief in feeling against reason; 3) his expert, unprecedented child psychology; 4) his caustic satire, especially of radicals in The Possessed; 5) his great character types-the Meek, the Double, the Self-Willed...
...They call me a psychologist," pro tested Dostoevski. "It is not true. I am merely a realist 'in the higher sense of the word, that is, I depict all the depths of the human soul...