Russian writer. Is it good? Is it malicious? Is he the prophet of a universe of darkness, dominated by the share of shade - hatred, sadism, despair - human being, or the apostle of a Russian Christ, intended to regenerate the world?

Its tormented work is, in any case, at the base of the conscience that the modern man has of his existence and his destiny.

Shade of the father

With more than fifty years, whereas he seeks to explain to soft the Anna Grigorievna Snitkina, the child wife which he will marry, the torpor which seizes per moments him, Dostoïevski says to him why it is “a kind of sadness without object, as if I had committed a crime”. And, in fact, it will not cease being shown, in its life and its work, of the rape which it makes make in Stavroguine in the Demons. This act perpetrated on a child, and who does not certainly note that phantasm, seems on the other hand to have occulted a more concrete temptation, that of the parricide: Fiodor Mikhaïlovitch Dostoïevski has as a father a doctor addicted to drink, who tyrannizes his wife and maltreats domestic and country.

It is in its family that, as of his youths, the future author of the Karamazov Brothers knew the model of these subjected and resigned women, whose multiplied attentions and softness do nothing but exacerbate the cruelty of their torturer. Hypersensitive Fedor will take his/her father in dislike, with all the more of violence which he recognizes in itself of the traces of the paternal impulses. And, when he learns the murder from Doctor Dostoïevski, probably carried out by its mujiks, he will have the reaction of Dmitri Karamazov: “I am innocent death of my father, but I agree to expiate, because I wanted to kill it.” Atonement which results initially in the aggravation of its epileptic fits (the first had taken place at the time of the passage of a funeral convoy in a street of Saint-Pétersbourg).

Resentment with the revolutionary speech

However, if one believes Freud of it, it would be a new manifestation of the sunken parricide whom the adhesion of Dostoïevski to a group of young conspirators which plots against the life of the tsar in 1849. With this date, Dostoïevski is not any more the military engineer specialist in fortifications which his/her father forced it to become: he resigned in 1844, to translate Eugenie Grandet and to launch out in the adventure of the writing. At once, he knew an emblematic situation of his life and that of his heroes: exaltation and disillusion, pride and humiliation. In a few months, Poor People propel it like the author to the mode, the Double then the Landlady make it turn into ridiculous by radical intelligentsia. Adulated then made fun, Dostoïevski thus approaches the action - or rather the speech - revolutionist not by love of its similar and devotion to oppressed, but by the pivot of the resentment. The atonement, this time, will not be mimed: decree on on April 23rd, 1849, Dostoïevski is found, in the small hour of December 22nd, in front of the execution post. The Newspaper of a writer evokes the scene: the salvo which does not come, the mail of the tsar, the sentence commuted to four years of forced labors. In the Christmas Eve, Dostoïevski, irons with the feet, leaves for the prisons Siberia: it will discover there the “heart with naked men”, the Russian people and the Gospel.

The experiment, nun, of forgiveness, doubled that, human, regeneration by the love and the gift of oneself, however brought to Dostoïevski clearness on the major nature of the man more than peace of the heart and the spirit. Also it always with the mounting of the sign decisive redeemer will be. There perhaps is necessary it to see one of the reasons of its unrestrained passion of the play. Always with money court (its entry in literature by the translation of a novel of Balzac was, it also, programming science), Dostoïevski, as soon as it has a few roubles, the risk on the green carpet, despairing his wife and her creditors. It is that the grace is as the ball of the caster: it transfigures that on which it chose to stop.

“Do you Understand only yourself, young man, which you wrote? ”, asked Bielinski Dostoïevski, in the enthusiastic criticism which it made of Poor People. Not, Dostoïevski did not understand what he had written. In to a work made to like its immediate passage the promoter of a realistic and social literature with two accounts testifies, the Double and the Landlady, based on pathological obsessions and which flirt with the fantastic one. But the essential proof is to be sought in the swing of the work which mark, in 1864, publication of the Memories written in an underground. Bielinski itself had not understood what the inscription in the daily life of the reason for the unfolding meant, expensive with the romantic literature. By showing the irruption of irrational in the gestures of every day, Dostoïevski announced what expresses, in the second part of the Memories, the symbol of “molten snow”: the being is neither completely white nor completely black, it is most of the time of a dirty gray, as this minor official ridges some with vexations of his superiors and who is avenged by humiliating a poor prostitute. And the reason of the social attitudes is more to seek in are delirious and interior ressassements, in the “underground”, where the man struggles and takes pleasure at the same time, which in the coded relations of a hierarchical company.

The moral atonement of Dostoïevski thus doubled of a literary atonement. It will be diverted esthetics of the occidentalists, defenders of a utility literature; it will not sacrifice any more the secret or cursed share of the man to the profit of stereotyped heroes, fixed grotesque puppets in the routine of a company reactionary or blind actors of a random material and political progress; he will seek, not in the theories, but in the experiment, the means of a contact with others. Thus definitively will demolish the unauthenticity which made the screen of its work and its life. Its first marriage with the young widow tubercular patient Maria Dmitrievna Issaïeva is indeed a caricatural illustration of the triangular structure of the desire analyzed by Rene Girard in the romantic literature (the unauthentic man never wishes an object for itself, but because it is indicated to him by a model fascinator): Dostoïevski will dispute this “heart noble and angelica” with a young teacher, beautiful and poor, through episodes well in the vein of the sentimental novel (the two rivals readily cried in the arms one of the other); it will ignore some at once that it will be sure of its conquest. When Dostoïevski decides to live a passion for itself (it is what it will do with Paulina Souslova) and not to ape the romantic Westerners more, it will reach the heart of the human and romantic truth. It will do it not as a distinguished writer but, like still says it the hero of the Memories written in an underground, “as a true mujik”, incompetent to hold the installation until the end and which always lets bore, at one moment or another, under the sentences and the sublimes attitudes, the sordid one and the pitiful one which go up subsoils of its being.

Dostoïevski is initially a Russian writer. Starting with the way in which it delivers its accounts to the public, by making them appear initially in one of the great reviews which model the literary life. Itself founds Time, then the Time, which it directs with his Mikhaïl brother. It is Russian still by the part which it plays in the opposition between occidentalists - revolutionists and readily atheists and nihilists - and Slavophiles: Dostoïevski will often give in a kind of mystical populism, condemning the Western materialism and celebrating the mission of the Russian people, which his tests and his sufferings express. It is Russian, finally, by the way in which it prolongs and achieves Gogol, linking a tasty realism (its Notebooks show it pursueing the “small fact which makes true”) with the conviction of the spiritual mission of Article But Dostoïevski also reaches with universal while being placed in the line of Pouchkine, this writer “panhumain”, as it defined it itself: with the glance sharp-edged on the world, which results in an often bitter irony, it joint major intuition of the beings and things drawn from the direct contact with the humble ones and the traditions popular. It is besides phenomenon single that this literature Russian, which has at most century when Dostoïevski publishes its first book (at least this literature which, as pleasantly Gogol said it, left the church to go to the ball) and which reaches, with him and Tolstoï, in the space of a generation, the heart even of the major questions that the man can be posed on his presence in the world and his relationship with others, at the point to be used as model to the novelists of the confirmed Western literatures as to the writers of the nations which brutally discover the modern world, India or Japan.

Dostoïevski, as still Rene Girard notices it, traversed and expressed, in less than thirty years, every moment of the mythology of Ego, which is spread out over three centuries in Western Europe. The secrecy in is perhaps to seek in a “legend” that Dostoïevski enchased in its novel-will, The Brothers Karamazov, that of the “Grand inquisitor”. Christ reappears in a street of Seville, at the end of the XV ^E century: the Grand inquisitor makes it stop, then at night in its jail, comes to reproach him the “madness” of Christianity. By wanting that the men go to him freely, Christ charged them with a burden impossible to carry; by pushing back three temptations of the Devil in the desert (to change the stones into breads, to throw themselves from the top of Temple, to bow down in front of Satan), he wanted to abolish neither misery, neither the doubt, nor pride. The Grand inquisitor - and majority of the men - refuse to run the risk of the Grace; Christ, chose the redemption to him through the suffering, uncertainty and tearing. However Dostoïevski is recognized in these three temptations, those to which he succumbs. He is discovered recipient of this text of the Gospel: it is there the sign which he sought. “There is evil in its art”, said André Suarès de Dostoïevski. But it is because this art draws in hollow the way of the reconciliation, of the men between them and of the man divided - as Satan - against itself (the name of the famous hero of Crime and Châtiment, Raskolnikov, is formed on raskol, which means “schism”). It is because it is, with the letter, prophetic that the work of Fedor Mikhaïlovitch Dostoïevski - Poor People with the Karamazov Brothers - did not know the destiny of “molten snow”.

It published in the review Time its Memories of the house of deaths (1861-1862), incredible account of its years of prison, and Humiliated and offended (1861). In 1866 appears the Player and especially Crime and Punishment, centered on the figure of Raskolnikov that a crime committed by pride led to the acceptance of the evangelic values. The last part of its life was fertile. It published successively the Idiot (1868), pathetic history of a sick and mystical being, the Eternal Husband (1870), the Demons (1871-1872), description of the nihilist mediums and lawsuit of the materialism, its Newspaper of a writer (1873-1881), in whom figure celebrates it Discours on Pouchkine (1880), finally the book which it regarded as his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880).