7 - Foretelling

Summary

All the Scripture is called a prophesie.

John Daus

Oh, memory of the heart! thou art more powerful than the memory of sad reason.

Batyushkov

Of all Russia's great writers of the nineteenth century, Dostoevsky is the one who seems most modern, who speaks most to our century. He was by far the one who was most intensely preoccupied with discerning the future. Uppermost for him were the questions ‘Whither strives the world, what is its aim’? as Müller puts it, and, we should add, what is the ultimate fate of every soul? To these questions Dostoevsky brought his extraordinary gift for hearing his epoch as a great ‘Russian and world wide dialogue’, in which he heard not only the ‘voice-ideas’ of past and present, but also ‘latent ideas heard as yet by no one but himself, ideas that were just beginning to ripen, embryos of future worldviews’. He brought these ‘voices’ into his novels by giving them a dialogic form in which past, present and future could ‘meet and quarrel on the plane of the present’. Dostoevsky's striving to divine and overtake the future finds its fullest, most varied and urgent expression in his last novel where the ‘plane of the present’ covers those hectic months of ‘thirteen years ago’ in which the dialogues about the future take place.