Passion and Prophecy: the Sincere Intensity of the Russian Writers
The intensity of these works took the whole Western world by storm; their love of humanity moved generous spirits everywhere; their self-determined and almost unconscious technique became the envy of every great novelist in a century of great novelists and in lands with a far older literary tradition. As the grand century of peace and progress came to a close, their forebodings began to seem prophetic for a world that was moving toward universal and social upheaval. Now, in retrospect we can see that not Dickens, Thackeray, or Hardy, not Balzac, Zola, or Galdos, not even Turgeniev or Tolstoy, but Dostoevsky- whose voice sounded a trifle mad- was the prophet who came nearest to telling whither both Russia and the optimistic, self-confident, progressive West were blindly driving. The sufferings of his demon-ridden spirit enabled him to see depths in human psychology that were covered over, to discern the fearful outlines of the age in which at this moment we live, to express the compulsive, uncontrollable furies of our war-ridden, breakdown-tortured, totalitarian time- when an old order, dying, seems powerless to die, and a new order, aborning, seems powerless to be born.
Onward to the Next!
Quote from Three Who Made a Revolution, by Bertram D. Wolfe.
Copyright 1983, Stein and Day Publications.
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