The Prisoner and The Fugitive by Marcel Proust

Author:Marcel Proust [Proust, Marcel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature
ISBN: 9780141956787
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Published: 1925-01-01T23:00:00+00:00

But at least I can believe that Baudelaire is being insincere. But Dostoevsky … I feel as far away as possible from all that, unless there are parts of me that I don’t know about, for one realizes oneself only one piece at a time. In Dostoevsky I find impossibly deep abysses, but only at some points of the human soul. But he is a great creator. First, the world that he describes seems genuinely to have been created for him. All those recurring buffoons, Lebedev, Karamazov, Ivolgin, Segrev, that incredible procession of fools, is a humanity more fantastic than the background figures in Rembrandt’s Night Watch. But perhaps it is fantastic only in the same way, thanks to the costumes and lighting, and in fact is everyday and familiar. In any case it is full of truths, profound and unique, and belongs only to Dostoevsky. It almost seems, that series of buffoons, like a stock stage role which has ceased to exist, like certain characters in ancient comedy, and yet, how well they reveal certain unchanging aspects of the human soul! What I can’t bear is the solemn way in which people talk and write about Dostoevsky. Have you noticed the part self-love and pride play in his characters? You would say that for him love and the wildest hatred, kindness and treachery, timidity and insolence, are only two states of the same nature, as self-love and pride prevent Aglae, Nastasya, the captain who has his beard pulled by Mitya, and Krassotkin, Alyosha’s friend-cum-enemy, from showing themselves as they “truly are” in reality. But there are many other fine things. I know very little about his books. But can’t we call it something simple and sculptural, worthy of the most ancient art, a frieze interrupted and resumed in which Vengeance and Expiation unfold their story, that tale of old Karamazov making the madwoman pregnant and the mysterious, unexplained, animal urge which drives the mother, the unwitting instrument of destiny’s revenge, in obedience to her mama’s instinct and perhaps also to a kind of resentment combined with physical gratitude to her violator, to go back and give birth at Karamazov’s house? This is the first episode, mysterious, grandiose, majestic, like a Creation of Woman among the sculptures of Orvieto. And it is balanced by the second episode, more than twenty years later, the murder of old Karamazov by the madwoman’s son, Smerdyakov, followed soon after by an action equally mysterious, sculptural and inexplicable, as obscurely beautiful and natural as the birth in old Karamazov’s garden, Smerdyakov hanging himself, having carried out his crime. As for Dostoevsky, I was not leaving him behind as much as you thought when I spoke of Tolstoy, who imitated him a great deal. And in Dostoevsky there is, in a concentrated form, still turned in on itself and cramped, a lot of what will blossom in Tolstoy. Dostoevsky has that early, morose quality of primitives which their followers will open out. – Oh, darling, if

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