Dostoyevsky and Me

 I remember my first encounter with him vividly. I was about fourteen, sitting on a table in the laundry room, reading the end of Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky when I should have been folding laundry. I didn’t have a lot of money then and what I had I used sparingly, but when the book club flyer from school advertised a set of two books by Russian authors for a few dollars, I shelled it out. I think I was still fascinated with everything Russian because of a lingering crush on Dolf Lungren’s character in Rocky IV.

I read One Day in the Live in Ivan Denisovitch by Alexander Solzhenitsyn first and was introduced to the harsh reality and survival power of Russians. Then I started into Crime and Punishment and my life was changed. 

I finished the novel in the laundry room that day after working through roughly 500 pages of tiny print about an ax murder, feverish psychological illness, poverty, political extremism and a woman forced into prostitution who, through her humility has the murderer on his knees at the end of the book. And though I may not have understood the Christian worldview Dostoyevsky was presenting, or what he was showing me at the time, there was something about the writing and the little nuggets of raw psychological reality that I understood without knowing why. I couldn’t put my finger on the difference between his books and the contemporary novels I checked out of the school library.

My first copy of Crime and Punishment

I found more books by Dostoyevsky in the literature section of the mall bookstore and they were just the right price. Because the copyrights had expired, they almost always were less expensive than a comparable (in size) contemporary novel. Over the next few years every time I was at the mall, I dropped in the book store and enlarged my library. After buying all Dostoyevsky’s books, I moved on to Turgenev, Chekov, Tolstoy. It took me years to read all his novels (I had school reading, other novels and life in general to take up my time) but to me, just to own the thick 700+ page paperbacks was like having treasure in reserve. 

Dostoyevsky is one of my all-time favorite authors, but favorite doesn’t seem to express my admiration. His books were always with me after that. I wrote an autobiographical book report on him in the 9th grade and when I graduated I lugged the novels back and forth to college, reading them Friday nights when my roommate and friends were out drinking. It was a luxury for me to drop all my course work and assigned reading to be able to spend some time in those stories. 

A year ago I had re-read Crime and Punishment and besides being a little shocked by the murder scene (I suppose that is a good thing) I was overwhelmed with the meaning, the quality of the writing, the story and what he showed me through it. 

Beat-up paperbacks

Dostoyevsky is not light reading. It’s complex, impassioned, controlled and filled with philosophy and theology. Unless you have a lot of time on your hands, you can’t read his novels in one sitting. I'm not saying that to infer that I am a good reader-I'm not. I read slowly and sometimes don't pick up on obvious themes in the stories.

 The man was a mess and he could tease that brokenness out of himself, paint it in vivid, brilliant words that act like a mirror to humanity and its ills. He was an epileptic, was always sickly and addicted to gambling. His father was murdered by his serfs, Dostoyevsky was psychologically unstable and despite when his books sold, was always poor due to giving away his royalties, selling his copyrights and supporting needy relatives.

My admiration for him peaked and put me forever in his debt when a few years back I had what one might call a spiritual crisis. It was minor, you wouldn’t be able to tell from looking at me, but I was teetering on the edge of my faith. When I came across this quote from him in a history book, though it seems unreasonable, it set me upright again, giving me a stable foundation on which to start building. It saw me through. I keep that history book close, so when I feel doubt pressing in, I re-read it:

“If anyone proved to me that Christ was not the truth, and it really was a fact that the truth was not in Christ, I would rather be with Christ than with the truth.” 

(page 499 A History of Russia, the Soviet Union and Beyond, MacKenzie, Curran, 1993)