From the March 2011 Believers & Doubters Booklist:
Religious Novels
1. The Idiot
Dostoevsky, Fyodor
Dostoevsky's motives for writing The Idiot stem from his desire to depict the "positively good man". This man is naturally likened to Christ in many ways. Dostoevsky uses Myshkin's introduction to the Petersburg society as a way to contrast the nature of Russian society at the time and the isolation and innocence of this good man. [Wikipedia note on major themes of the novel.]
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Excerpts from Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia:
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Personality and physical appearance
Dostoyevsky had a powerful personality but a less robust physical constitution. He was described by his parents as a hot-headed youngster, stubborn and cheeky. Around the time that he was at the private high school in Moscow, several people depicted him as a pale, introverted dreamer and an over-excitable romantic.
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Religious beliefs
In January 1854, Dostoyevsky wrote the following letter to a woman from whom he received the Testament:
I have heard from many sources that you are very religious, Natalia Dmitrievna ... As for myself, I confess that I am a child of my age, a child of unbelief and doubt up to this moment, and I am certain that I shall remain so to the grave. What terrible torments this thirst to believe has cost me and continues to cost me, burning ever more strongly in my soul the more contrary arguments there are. Nevertheless, God sometimes sends me moments of complete tranquility. In such moments I love and find that I am loved by others, and in such moments I have nurtured in myself a symbol of truth, in which everything is clear and holy for me. This symbol is very simple: it is the belief that there is nothing finer, profounder, more attractive, more reasonable, more courageous and more perfect than Christ, and not only is there not, but I tell myself with jealous love that there cannot be. Even is someone were to prove to me that the truth lay outside Christ, I should choose to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Pisma, XXVIII, i, p. 176
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Legacy
Thomas Mann advised reading his novels in their entirety. Hermann Hesse enjoyed Dostoyevsky's work; he also cautioned that to read him is like a "glimpse into the havoc". The Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun wrote that "no one has analysed the complicated human structure as Dostoyevsky. His psychologic sense is overwhelming and visionary. We have no yardstick by which to assess his greatness"
Ernest Hemingway acknowledged Dostoyevsky as one of those writers who had influenced his work. In his posthumously published collection of sketches A Moveable Feast, Hemingway stated that in Dostoevsky "there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true that they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know."
According to Arthur Power's Conversations with James Joyce, Joyce praised Dostoyevsky's prose: " ... he is the man more than any other who has created modern prose, and intensified it to its present-day pitch. It was his explosive power which shattered the Victorian novel with its simpering maidens and ordered commonplaces; books which were without imagination or violence."
In her essay The Russian Point of View, Virginia Woolf said: "The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading". Franz Kafka named Dostoyevsky as his "blood-relative", and was heavily influenced by his works, especially The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, both of which had a profound effect on The Trial. Sigmund Freud called his last work "the most significant novel ever written". Left-wing groups such as the surrealists, the existentialists and the Beats named Dostoyevsky as their influence. Dostoyevsky is cited as the forerunner of Russian symbolism, existentialism, expressionism and psychoanalysis.
After the 1917 Russian Revolution, Dostoyevsky's books were often censored or banned. His philosophy, especially in The Demons, was deemed capitalistic and anti-communist, leading Maxim Gorky to nickname the author "our evil genius". Reading Dostoyevsky was forbidden, and those who did not observe this law were imprisoned. During the Second World War, however, his works were used as propaganda by both the Soviets and the Nazis, and after the war the prohibition law in the Soviet Union was overturned. His 125th anniversary in 1947 was celebrated throughout Russia; but despite this, his novels were banned again until Nikita Khrushchev's accession to power ten years later, following de-Stalinization and a softening of repressive laws.
In the second half of the twentieth century, his works topped the best-seller lists worldwide. Philosophers, psychologists, theologians, politicians, literary critics, physicians, lawyers and students acknowledged his works, and many of his novels and short stories were filmed and dramatised in the Soviet Union and the West. Dostoyevsy's fictional characters and his work overall were popularised in graffiti, in presidential speeches, vaudeville, films and plays.
In 1956 an olive-green postage stamp dedicated to Dostoyevsky was released in the Soviet Union with a print run of 1,000 copies. A Dostoevsky Museum was opened on 12 November 1971 in the apartment where he wrote his first and last novels. A minor planet was discovered in 1981 by Lyudmila Karachkina and named 3453 Dostoevsky. Viewers of the TV show Name of Russia voted him the ninth greatest Russian of all time, behind chemist Dmitry Mendeleev and ahead of the Russian ruler Ivan IV. A Moscow Metro station on the Lyublinsko-Dmitrovskaya Line was scheduled to open to the public on 15 May, the 75th anniversary of the Moscow Metro; illustrations on the décor made by artist Ivan Nikolaev were criticised because of their depiction of suicides, but did not hinder the opening of Dostoyevskaya on 19 June 2010.
Four of Dostoyevsky's books, Crime and Punishment, The Possessed, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, are included on the list of 100 best books of all time.
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The 100 Best Books of All Time
From Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia
The World Library is a list of the 100 best books, as proposed by 100 writers from 54 different countries, compiled and organized in 2002 by the Norwegian Book Club. This list endeavours to reflect world literature, with books from all countries, cultures, and time periods. Eleven of the books included on the list are written by women, eighty-five are written by men and four have no known author.
Each writer had to select his or her own list of ten books.
The 100 books selected by this process and listed here are not ranked or categorized in any way; the organizers have stated that "they are all on an equal footing", with the exception of Don Quixote which was given the distinction "best literary work ever written".
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