We have begun in our literary group to read and discuss a collection of novellas and short stories. The book is ISBN-13: 978-0553214444, a paperback by the same translators of the other works of Fyodor Dostoevsky that we have so far read and thought about.
Since I am not yet an educated man and have not the critical apparatus to write great intellectual essays on the significance of every aspect of a work to the overall field of literature, I am going to quote a passage from the preface of this collection of stories. This passage is about FD's use of dreams, et al, in his writing; everything is well put, check it out:
"Dostoevsky made very wide use of the artistic possibilities of the dream in almost all its variations and nuances. Indeed, in all of European literature there is no writer for whom dreams play such a large and crucial role as Dostoevsky." We must distinguish, however, between the dreamer and the dream, because dreaming takes two main forms in Dostoevsky. The first is the form of a reverie produced by the dreamer, who longs to transform the squalid reality around him inot something nobler, loftier, more beautiful. The dreamer is a fervent idealist, a great reader of German romantic poetry, but his consciousness is isolated and he usually ends badly. Reality triumphs. Yer the dreamer's aspirations receive a backhanded vindication: aesthetically he is right; art and sensibility are exalted in his person above the meanness of the world. The bubble of this sort of romantic dreaming, which Dostoevsky himself indulged in as a young liberal of the 1840's, was definitively pricked in Notes from Underground. There the dreamer becomes a far more complex and contradictory figure; his tone changes from sentimental idealism to bitter sarcasm, much of the sarcasm directed against himself and his own former dreams: "...to tell long stories of how I defaulted on my life through moral corruption in a corner, through an insufficiency of milieu, through unaccustom to what is alive, and through vainglorious spite in the underground--is not interesting, by God; a novel needs a hero, and here there are purposely collected all the features for an anti-hero..." Isolated consciousness has recognized its isolation. This recognition marked all of Dostoevsky's work after Notes.
The second form dreaming takes in Dostoevsky is that of an unexpected and intense vision, which comes to the dreamer in sleep as a gift or a final revelation, a 'living image' that awakens him to a truth he had not suspected or had not understood before. Such are Alyosha's dream of the messianic banquet and Mitya's dream of 'the wee one' in Brothers Karamazov. These are confirming, saving dreams. They have a negative counterpart, ultimately serving the same purpose, in the nightmares of Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov in Crime & Punishment, of Stavrogin in Demons, and finally in Ivan Karamazov's 'hallucination' of the devil.
More to follow as we examine the stories in this collection.
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