Diary of a Writer

24 hrs. 8 min.

Classics

Language Russian

Author Fyodor Dostoevsky

Narrator Sergey Krusko

Description

This volume includes the main journalistic works by Dostoevsky that may be of interest to a wide range of readers. The texts are printed according to the edition: Dostoevsky F. M. Full collected works: In 30 vols. L.: Nauka, 1972–1987. The texts are printed in abbreviated form. Abbreviations are indicated by angle brackets. Comments to the specified edition served as the basis for these notes. The book’s volume does not allow publishing “The Diary of a Writer” in full. Therefore, it does not include works that require detailed academic-type commentary and special reader preparation. The very listing of the excluded chapters (“Three Ideas,” “From the book of predictions by Johannes Lichtenberger, 1528,” “The German world question. Germany — a protesting country,” “The Black Army. The opinion of the legions as a new element of civilization,” “Dreams of Europe,” “Roman clericals among us in Russia,” “As to what Austria thinks now,” etc.) shows that in them the discussion is mostly about narrowly focused or, on the contrary, globally political issues—either having lost their relevance or requiring profound knowledge of world history. In addition, time has not confirmed certain predictions by Dostoevsky, which reflected the complexity of social processes in his era, processes with a very intricate genealogy. The contradictory nature of the real historical situation of the 1860s–1870s must also be borne in mind, for example when Dostoevsky, in the pages of “The Diary,” enters into a philosophical-journalistic polemic with Belinsky or Herzen, Chernyshevsky or Saltykov-Shchedrin, regarding the spiritual renewal of society and the paths leading to it. “The contrast between the Olympian grandeur of theory and the painful sensitivity of life constitutes the aching wound of the modern person” — that was how Saltykov-Shchedrin characterized one of the most important features of this situation. Dostoevsky paid due tribute to the “grandeur of theory” of advocates of a just social rearrangement, and one can find in him many deeply felt words about them. For instance, he called Dobrolyubov “a fighter for truth,” and in his polemic with liberals about Belinsky he wrote: “...the very mistakes of Belinsky, if only they exist, are above your truth, and above everything you have done and written.” However, Dostoevsky could not fail to see the “aching wound” of life, when high ideas of truth, goodness, and justice were discredited by the “nihilism of the 1860s,” by the practical realization of Jacobin calls of Bakunin, Tkachev, and Nechaev. Such a displacement—or its potential possibility—caused Dostoevsky sharp rejection. This stance is characteristic of Dostoevsky toward any social tendency. Reflecting on the Decembrist movement, he noted: “Meanwhile, with the disappearance of the Decembrists—something like a pure element vanished from the nobility. Only cynicism remained: that is, there is no honest way to live, you see… It got so filthy that when they exposed Belinsky—all rushed after him…” In this way, the writer admits that after the defeat of the Decembrists, the “pure element” of society went after Belinsky. And it was precisely the repetition of history that worried him most: the dissolution of the “pure element” into the actions of adventurers who attached themselves to the democratic movement, an attachment he witnessed firsthand. The same concern (“I consider myself more liberal than everyone else, even if only because I absolutely do not want to be at ease”) is also found in Dostoevsky in relation to liberals who “sometimes throw out such liberalisms that even the most terrible despotism and violence could not invent.” From the standpoint of the free development of the people and the distortion of lofty ideas, Dostoevsky also did not favor the conservative part of his contemporary society: “...how many scoundrels joined it.” And though in the heat of polemic and passionate thirst for justice Dostoevsky could contradict himself and be mistaken, those were mistakes of a wise man who seeks truth, and in him the “pure element” never disappeared. Such contradictions should be kept in mind by the reader when encountering “The Diary of a Writer.”