Existence Explored

 Literature has always been a space that makes one's point of view truly spacious and deletes all that is specious in us or ours. Even in that inherently generous and palliative context, there are certain authors, reading whom is not merely a joy. It is indeed an education.

The opening up of our consciousness and conscience by their writings need not always be goody-goody and optimistic and/or positive. Instead, certain authors' deep texts rush us to the very brink of a chasm that has no bottom at all. Such a read is always an eye-opener. The Russian author, Fyodr Dostoevsky, whose bicentenary falls on November 11, is one such genius reading whom is indeed an exploration of the very existence.

His dark novels, which reflect in a way his own extremely difficult days lifelong, show up the reality, warts and all. A great realist, both stylistically as well as psychologically, he indeed would be the first author to depict the wounded selves and the fractured realities. He shows us the flip side of existence.  Very local and yet truly universal he was!

In his own times, his was a very modern thinking that critiqued the traditional Euro- mania, the obsession with the "progressive" Europe of the big and mighty of his times. Instead, he chose to deify the real folk Russian-ness. Though his move might now be dismissed as "deshivad", as " nativism", in his times, it was a radical, modernising critique of the status quo. Dostoevsky is, in brief, a deeply unsettling, but richly rewarding author. 

Let us end this tribute to him with a few of his quotes: Hell for him is the "inability to love", a plight our self obsessed times would easily relate to. " Man only counts," he writes in a very knowing way,"his misfortunes, never his happinesses." True indeed! No wonder, he felt, "to go wrong in one's way", the swadharma followed in a non-religious way so to say, " is better than to go right in someone else's".  

Pratima@at such times, I thank Aai-Papa from the bottom of my heart for not blasting my fascination with Literature!