Worthless Chemistry

Consciously, I was religious in the Christian sense [during boyhood], though always with the reservation: “But it is not so certain as all that!” or, “What about that thing under the ground?” And when religious teachings were pumped into me and I was told, “This is beautiful and this is good,” I would think to myself: “Yes, but there is something else, something very secret that people don’t know about.”

Dostoevsky is inwardly so infinitely vast that he reaches beyond the boundaries of man and on his verge relates to both elder brothers of Adam, both the angel and the demon. In him they have enough space to quest, alternately govern him and pursue in him the eternal struggle for man. That angel is, after all, corrupt, that saint is fallen, and that demon has not lost the memory of his fatherland hoping to compel his return. With Dostoevsky nothing is definite apart from the desire for grace of God. But had he ever attained it fully? - that is the question. And the rest is divergence - which Dostoevsky himself confesses - schism, combat for self with the self, inner war between delight and torture, love and capture, humility and pride, contempt and fear of taunt, wrathful envy and will to sacrifice, magnanimity and vileness, grace and infamy, clairvoyance and blindness, tears of repentance and frenetic malediction. And this is my Dostoevsky: magnificent always, often odious, always perilous and terrifying.