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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
You want to force humanity not to talk in images … From the very earliest times, man has always talked in images. Every language is full of images and metaphors. You are attacking the expression of thought in images, you are conspirators against progress, you poor unhappy morons.
Dostoyevsky to the ‘destroyers of aesthetics’There is another fruitful and stimulating dialogue in the novels of Dostoyevsky: a dialogue with great living and contemporary literature. The profound realism sustained by assiduous reading of newspapers acquired a new dimension as Dostoyevsky orchestrated a confrontation between the anonymous and factual voice of the crowd and the great voices of literature.
The novel: chosen place of literature
The great ghosts of the past, transformed by Dostoyevsky, continually interrupted and challenged him. As soon as a plan took possession of him, they rose and freely offered their images, characters, even their aesthetic forms. In the very first sketches for The Idiot, Goethe brought forward Mignon, Pushkin Cleopatra from Egyptian Nights, Shakespeare the young, unjustly accused beauty from Much Ado about Nothing, Hero. As soon as Dostoyevsky decided to create a ‘positively good’ hero, Cervantes suggested Don Quixote, Dickens Pickwick, and Victor Hugo Jean Valjean. The Christ of the Gospels, a figure which Renan, mentioned several times in the preparatory notes, was trying to show in more human dimensions, appeared as the great model. During the research, Pushkin contributed The Poor Knight' and Shakespeare Othello, though traces of this appeared only in an unused variant.
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