Once, a few years ago, I was told that there was a piece of music whose weight was so tremendous, so dark and so dramatic that it seemed to contain something infernal. It was Prokofiev. I recognized the music immediately and smiled. Then, to make it clear that there was nothing exaggeratedly tremendous, dark or dramatic about it, I played a track from the Réquiem. At the first note, astonishment and certainty, opened up by an overwhelming contrast. The same feeling was repeated last night when, after four years, I returned to my favorite novelist, to the author to whom I have devoted the most hours and from whom I cannot separate myself. On the same day, I finished a work by Thomas Bernhard, a work in which the same technique is used exhaustively to express psychological tension, affliction, restlessness, despair, and who knows what else. So, Dostoyevsky. No need to say anything more.