My life.

The world of Dostoevsky

- A fantastic story What if I were not to die! What if I could go back to life what eternity!
And it would all be mine! I would turn every minute into an age;
I would lose nothing, I would count every minute as it passed, I would not waste one!
The Idiot
If it is to believe Nastenka, the heroine from the dostoevskyan novella White Nights,
everyone should have a story to tell: But how could you live and have no story to tell? This
is going to be my story, a tale about Dostoevsky and his characters, about his fantastic world
which is probably more real than the reality itself. It is Dostoevsky told and retold in a novel.
The story itself is simple. Two brothers, twins, are going through a time of great watershed
which changes dramatically their lives. They love Dostoevsky and they almost know his
novels by heart. They talk, analyze and debate about his novels and other various issues,
trying, in the end, to make sense of their lives.
Paraphrasing A. N. Whitehead, I would like to show through my tale that the safest
general characterization of all lived or imagined worlds of modern man is that they consist of
a series of footnotes to Dostoevskys world. Thus, the twin brothers life story will merge with
discussions and reflections about some of the most remarkable moments from Dostoevskys
novels. The quest is a philosophical inquiry seeking the fundamental meaning of begin
human, of the significance of being man, in Dostoevskys view and also of the two brothers.
The underlying idea, hermeneutical in its essence, is that Dostoevsky through his artwork
reveals something of the truth of what is. And the hermeneutic-phenomenological approach
assumes that experience means the given of meaning in an encounter with things in the world.
French notes that Dostoevskys novels are philosophically important as they can make a
contribution to the truth concerning world and man: the truth can be experienced once you
understand Dostoevskys works and this truth can be articulated through that work of art. It is
precisely the process of finding the meaning in the totality of meaning articulated by what we
call our world1.
The story begins with the accident of one of the twin brothers, who fell from the
second floor and hit his head. He was in coma for two weeks and the doctors asked the other
brother to give his consent to extract the temporal lobe of the brain of the injured one. The
doctors considered to be the last chance for him to survive. The brothers, Eastern Europeans,
were at the time of the accident in England, benefiting by a scholarship at University of
Oxford. The healthier brother tells the one in coma to remember Dostoevskys words from
The Idiot, the writers thoughts before the supposed execution in the public square. That he
must survive to accomplish everything they planned before to arrive in Oxford and that they
would not lose any single minute from their life, that they will complete their doctorates, they
will write their books, and they will become famous In a word, that they will conquer the
world! Stepan Trofimovitchs word on his death bad (The Demons) Oh, I wish so much to
live again! are refrained by the brothers words who comes out of coma, written on a piece of
paper: I want to escape! The story continues with all the wanderings and adventures of the
two brothers and with Dostoevskys novels as the revolving center of their lives.
Similar like Dostoevskys general approach, the realism in the novel fuses the real
with the imaginary, the present with the eternity, the conscious with the unconscious, the base
with the sublime, all of which portray the complexity and fullness of life. The world of the
1 {French, 2001 #411}

brothers is indeed a dostoevskian world and they deal with the fundamental questions of life:
love and hate, good and evil, doubt and faith, determinism and free will and so on2.
Above all, this story is not going to be a simple story of the torments and struggles of
the two brothers, or of their moments of happiness. It will be about Golyadkins inner life
(The Double) or the philosophical meditations of Goryanchikov (The House of the Dead).
And about the extraordinary love stories of the two brothers, which will blend, up to
identification, with the immortal dostoevskyan love stories between Alyosha, Natasha and
Katerina (Humiliated and Insulted), between Prince Myshkin and Aglaia and Nastasia
Filipovna (The Idiot), between the narrator and Nastenka (White Nights), or between Sonia
and Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment), or between Stavroghin and Darya and Lizaveta, or,
finally, between Dmitri and Grushenka or Ivan and Katerina (The Karamazov Brothers).
Love as opposed to all evil in the world: "What is hell? I maintain that it is the
suffering of being unable to love" (The Brothers Karamazov). There will be investigated
Dostoevskys eternal questions, and eternal for us as well: Is there a God, is there
immortality? If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with
it? There will also be discussions and controversies about Dostoevsky's famous judgments:
the aesthetical and ontological at the same time assertion Beauty will save the world (The
Idiot) and Man is a mystery and Raskolnikovs bowing in front of Sonia: It wasn't you I
was bowing to, but the whole of human suffering.
At the core of Dostoevskys philosophy, of his Weltanschauung lies precisely the
relationship between man and woman. As it lies at the twin brothers life. In this relationship,
beyond love and humbleness, and meekness, there have always been tension, conflict,
opposition. An antinomy in itself. Not only expressed in the mentioned love stories, but in one
of the most extraordinary dostoevskyan texts: The Gentle Spirit (The Meek One). Several
crucial questions need to be addressed here: why The meek one kills herself? And why does
she smile before her tragically final act? Why she does not forgive her husband? Ultimately,
what is the meaning of that mysterious sentence, which appear three times in the novella: I
thought you would leave me like that! The story enfolds the unending struggle of man for
understanding life. The brothers belief is that if they come to understand why The meek one
smiles before her final gesture, they will understand the meaning of life! Directly related to
this issue is Dostoevskys article, Two suicides, published few months before he wrote The
Meek One in which the writer discusses two different suicides and, related to one of the
suicides, he concludes with the most enigmatic and paradoxical words: God didnt want it!
(A Writers Diary). The most puzzling and paradoxical words, incomprehensible and
fascinating at once.
The religious themes will be carefully approached, as, in the end, the Russian writer
provides religious solutions to most individual and social problems. The religion of
suffering, the association between suffering and happiness, suffering and faith, and the
writers wonder idea of the necessity of God, which had entered in the head of such a savage,
vicious beast as man or the famous and so much debated bernardian words of Rakitin,
quoted by Mitya, without God and immortal life all things are lawful". Faith is the last
redoubt against the assault of the cruel reality3.
In direct correlation is the idea of happiness, of the joy of life, of, why not, being alive,
the most fundamental characteristic of existence. The injured brother survives in the end and
it is then when both brothers realize how important is this apparently insignificant aspect of
2 {Fueloep-Miller, 1956 #361}
3 Believe to the end, even if all men went astray and you were left the only one faithful; bring your offering
even then and praise God in your loneliness (The Brothers Karamazov).

life, the fact of being alive. And Dostoevsky said it so many times: Only to live, to live and
live! Life, whatever it may be! (Crime and Punishment)4.
All of Dostoevskys characters are ate by an (existentialist) Idea. The Idea-Man or
Man-Idea as the driving force of everything happens in Dostoevsky world. And, as
Dostoevsky puts it, ideas have the power to change humans lives. Like the two brothers, who,
after the accident, become driven by an Idea. The final thought of the underground man, not
necessarily surprising, but definitely puzzling, needs an insight as well: Soon we shall
contrive to be born somehow from an idea (Notes from Underground).
These are only several examples of the themes and topics that will be approached, discussed,
analyzed in the book. The life story of the twin brothers will blend with the story of
Dostoevsky. It is a story about the two constitutive elements of mans journey towards
spirituality: life and knowledge. An attempt to describe the indescribable, to define the
indefinable, to know the unknowable.

4 Similar to these words: We don't understand that life is heaven and Love it [life] regardless of logic
(The Karamazov Brothers) and Ivans final conclusion: In thousands of agonies I exist. Im tormented on the
rack but I exist!