3 - The heritage: literature

Summary

The stories and novels of Dostoyevsky are swarming with literary references and allusions. All his writings are an immense passionate interpretation of literature, which he took to include philosophy and history. For Dostoyevsky the book had infinite powers. The hero is described psychologically by the books he reads; man in society and his rebellious mind are reflected in literary discussions; spontaneously and sometimes inaccurately quoted, flattered or parodied, exalted or cast down, the book allowed the author to define himself, to find his place in the literary conflicts of the time, which seethed with anathematising revolutions. Dostoyevsky's dialogue with the ghosts of past and present literature went on for the whole of his working life. Filled with awe for the profession of literature, and eager to win a place in its ranks, he engaged in a trial of the writing in the magazines and books of the time, and soon after his first creative work, he began to cross-examine his own image as a writer, which criticism, with its eagerness for labels, tended to freeze. In an agony of uncertainty, trying to escape from the prisons created by his first idols and his first works, he moved towards his guiding stars through the dense thicket which he continuously created around himself by his prodigious appetite for reading. But he was always accompanied by his good geniuses: the writers who were his peers.

Anchorage of youth

Childhood and youthful reading leave such a deep trace on the mind that an ocean of libraries studied in later years is powerless to wash it away. This was particularly true for Dostoyevsky.