The great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky was born 200 years ago and should be celebrated as one of the world’s greatest writers. books literature
. I read the first two when I was young, and marvelled at how they took me inside the heads and hearts of their deluded, obsessive and homicidal characters.
This year is his 200th birthday, and it is being celebrated around the world, no more so than in Russia, where museums and art galleries have special exhibitions dedicated to his life and work. In Italy, a land artist drove a tractor around a field to create a giant image of the literary giant. Who among us reads and studies him now? His work has not been on Australian high school curricula since the 1990s and universities have been phasing out Russian departments. However, Monash University academic Slobodanka Millicent Vladiv-Glover tells me she is one of the leaders in an active Australian Dostoevsky Society that provides a platform for advanced research and has links to scholars around the world.
Dostoevsky has had a huge influence on writers and thinkers, from Sigmund Freud to Ernest Hemingway. Vladimir Nabokov was a dissenting voice – he nicknamed the writer “Dusty” and judged him a mediocre novelist – but others have been full of praise. “He is the man more than any other who has created modern prose, and intensified it to its present-day pitch,” James Joyce said. “It was his explosive power which shattered the Victorian novel with its simpering maidens and ordered commonplaces.
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