Posted on 01/18/2024 12:48:23 PM PST by PoliticallyShort
The 150th anniversary of the publication of Dostoevsky’s Demons (also known as Devils and perhaps less accurately as The Possessed) provides a welcome opportunity to reengage this timely and timeless literary dissection of moral and political nihilism. In it, Dostoevsky gathered all his imaginative and prophetic powers to confront the spirit of radical negation that defines the modern revolutionary project. This powerful novel is at once an unerringly accurate diagnosis of the sickness of soul that drives the totalitarian temptation as well as an inexhaustible literary monument to the ideological scourge that is coextensive with late modernity. It is at moments darkly humorous even as it delves into spiritual and political pathologies of the first order.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn remarked about his great literary and spiritual forbear, Dostoevsky had an uncanny ability to see both profound truths about the soul and the human condition, and to foresee in all its demonic depths the totalitarian tragedy that would come to mark and deform the twentieth century. In L’homme revolté (1951), another Nobel Laureate in literature, Albert Camus, turned to Dostoevsky to rescue himself from the moral abyss that haunted existentialism and to diagnose the totalitarian temptation in all its amplitude. As we in the United States confront new waves of moralistic fanaticism and toxic nihilism, as spiritual and cultural repudiation have become both fashionable and obligatory, and as many young people and pseudo-intellectuals bow before the cult of revolution and increasingly fashionable nostalgia for Communism, it is time to turn once again to Dostoevsky’s jarring literary and political masterpiece as a source of unsurpassed spiritual nourishment and untimely wisdom.
(Excerpt) Read more at tomklingenstein.com ...
Bkmk
Bkmrk
Aka THE POSSESSED. I prefer the Constance Garnett translation.
The crime ridden, squalid, filthy, dangerous, drug dazed hellholes that cities have become, where this "sickness of the soul" has paralysed large percentages of the population spiritually, morally, intellectually, and politically, stand in stark contrast to the beautiful, enlightened cities of America's past and in places today unafflicted by the pandemic.
One must be severely afflicted by this "sickness of the soul" not to see the contrast and understand the etiology, pathogenesis, and morbidity.
This "sickness of the soul" pandemic is as dangerous and devastating as any that has every afflicted the world, including the black plague pandemics of centuries past, and it threatens to be far more deadly.
I adore Dostoevsky. His is definitely one of the greatest minds ever to grace the world and his writings among my favorites. The translations of great Russian works by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are magnificent.
“Sickness of soul” describes very well the serious mental disease gripping Western Civilization in pandemic proportions, the sickness known variously as “wokeism,” “liberalism,” and “progressivism,” and fundamental to the present Democrat Party and its determination to destroy the USA.
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It’s worse than that. The body’s soul is not sick, the body is soulless. Demons have dispossessed the soul and taken over the body
"wishes to be free of all 'prejudices,' including the one that leads a decent soul to prefer good to evil"
"True freedom, Shigalyov insists, can only be found in “perfect despotism.” Everything must be levelled since high aspiration, spiritual or intellectual, gives rise to dreaded inequalities. Human greatness, high and noble aspiration, must be crushed and beaten out of the human soul."
Familiar?
children who have been taught by their teachers to laugh at God,lawyers who shamelessly defend the deeds of murderers for fear of being insufficiently progressive,
schoolboys who kill “just to see how it feels,”
academics who defend murder as either a sign of insanity or material necessity, but never of evil.
"an intelligentsia that hates God, morality, country, and simple decency"'
Familiar?
Pray for the enlightenment of those who are blind before it's too late.
No! The translations of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are bright and brilliant and come alive in ways that Constance Garnett’s really don’t.
haven’t read it, but will put the book on my reading list. the war goes on until the day of Jesus Christ. thx.
“Yes. “Possessed” is an excellent word for the sick souls afflicted by “wokeism”/”liberalism”/”progressivism.””
Then again... perhaps some of them come by it naturally. Maybe it’s in their DNA. We’ve been jokingly calling the left demon-spawn for decades. Would be ironic if it was, in fact, true.
Is it more like Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamozov, which I really liked, or more like Notes from the Underground, which I found very difficult to slog through?
Wow, I read that and followed some links... that was like a deep muscle massage for the mind! Thank you!
It’s more like C and P.
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