Tag: literature

The shock I suffered after first reading Crime and Punishment, probably the most decisive of my entire life, was largely due to the realization that what Dostoevsky did in Crime and Punishment was unlike anything I had ever witnessed, both in and out of literature, and to the realization of the immense nobility of this attempt. Doing something like that, I concluded, justifies and dignifies an existence. And what Dostoevsky and some other authors do is so different that today, more than a decade on from that first impression, I realize that time has done nothing but reinforce it. A book like Crime and Punishment will never emerge from the pen of someone who simply wants to tell a story. That is why it is so natural for me to read Joseph Frank’s lines revealing that, after a dramatic combination of circumstances, Dostoevsky wrote to his brother saying that, from that moment on, the aim of his life would be to study the meaning of life and man. Without this conscious resolution, he would never have been able to come close to what he did.

The desire to be read is only the lowest of the possible motivations for writing, and is often absent when one of the higher ones manifests itself. There is little room for it when one feels the invincible urge to preserve oneself by engraving one’s spirit in letters, transcending time and dignifying experience with a lasting record. The awareness of uniqueness gives rise to the desire to express it, to perhaps elevate oneself to it through the right expression, which denotes its understanding. When one thinks about these things, one realizes how far they are from the trivial desire to be heard or the need for attention.

Perhaps the most difficult thing about building a character is getting a glimpse, beforehand, of the inner consistency that will have to be manifested in action. Often, this glimpse only comes when the character starts to move. Even so, practice shows that it is neither a simple nor a safe task when one intends to represent a convincing model, since to do so is to conceive unity through contradictions. In this sense, the work is similar to that of a biographer, although most of the time the latter can rely on concrete material to get started.