happy birthday, dostoyevsky

Today marks the birthday of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Despite his failings as a person, Dostoyevsky was one of the most influential writers of the last 200 years, as well as my personal favourite. His works speak to me like no others do. More than that, his works were the first to help me to see the way literature often strives and succeeds to express the inexpressible realities of life, the existential joys and agonies we all act out in our minds and in day-to-day lives, and how our imaginations can bring these worlds to life within us.

I realized while reading his works, especially things like The Brothers Karamazov, Demons, and The Idiot, that literature isn't just art or entertainment, it's also a means of self-discovery and a doorway to insights about being human that science and rationality alone are unable to unlock. Literature immerses us amongst these places and people in a way that allows us to live them from all sides and experience them in their fullness, seeing equally into the ecstatic and tormented hearts and minds of each and every character, and what I think ultimately amounts to a collective reflection of ourselves and the many contradictions that embody our humanity.

We are a multitude, with each character reflecting aspects of our own psyches and potentialities, each giving voice to our shared desires and fears, joys and sorrows, victories and defeats, and everything else in between. Some dominating over others and standing out as being more relatable to our own experience. Some making us laugh or cry. Some serving to inspire us in who we wish to become. Still others sobering us to the evils we're all capable of 'if but for the grace of God.' We live through them; but more than that, they live in us, are us, and we can begin to see ourselves more clearly through them.

And that's what truly amazes me—the paradoxical way these fictional accounts of fictional people can somehow express reality better than reality itself often can. How they can enlighten us about ourselves and the world, about the experience of life itself, and make us feel so much so deeply. These stories communicate things indescribable in objective ways. In essence, I increasingly find myself marvelling at great authors less for their artistry and more for the way their art reveals truth. And I have Dostoevsky to thank for that.