Бесы = The Possessed = Demons = The Devils, Fyodor Dostoyevsky He who can’t find his place in the sun always ends up trying to destroy the word… There is nothing in it but an immense animal hatred for Russia which has eaten into their organism… They'd have no one to hate then, no one to curse, nothing to find fault with. They'd be the first to be terribly unhappy if Russia could be suddenly reformed, even to suit their own ideas, and became extraordinarily prosperous and happy.
Men made of paper! It all comes from flunkeyism of thought. They are hollow men, men of paper but united, they turn into a disturbed wasp nest or a skein of venomous snakes…
They are fascinated, not by realism, but by the emotional ideal side of socialism, by the religious note in it, so to say, by the poetry of it… second-hand, of course. There always are some fashionable ideas and human beings, who can’t think indepedably, prefer to follow this fashion blindly and those people are eventually used by the others… They just become cat’s paw.Īnd you know it all comes from that same half-bakedness, that sentimentality. o) Everything.įyodor Dostoyevsky’s portrayal of human nature is so idiosyncratic that he simply can’t be surpassed by anybody in this art. But I truly believe people who hide in dreary commercial art are betraying their capacity to think and improve and understand. n) This isn’t a homily, it’s an anecdote. The only way to grow as a human being through art is to confront difficulty, to embrace difficulty, and be pleasantly surprised when that effort translates into bliss. l) I surprised myself by tackling Dostoevsky novels and finding them relevant to my own life, psychology, etc.
i) Does this make me a pompous girlie-man? j) No. One day, I heard some Stravinsky and burst into tears. h) I spent four years thinking Green Day made the greatest music in the universe. Who cares about all that bulldash, the haw-hawing in ginsenged dining rooms? g) All you have to do is read, watch, listen. You don’t have to speak eloquently about anything with intellectuals.
f) It’s not hard to respect difficult art and escape the self-perpetuating loops of populist cliché. After a decade of unbridled virtual hedonism I crushed Sonic the Hedgehog to death with The Brothers Karamazov. d) How did I escape this declension? e) I learned words like declension. I witnessed first hand the slow declension of burgeoning intellects through a routine of television, video games and a fear of reading books. But that’s hardly Beckett, is it? c) I first became an intellectual snob in my late teens. All populist entertainment is repulsive, useless, dangerous and witheringly anti-intellectual. Popular Culture: An Alphabetical Contempt.
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