Looking back on his early twenties, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote that “many, many of the young people of the day seemed to be filled with a spirit of some sort and seemed to be awaiting something.” It was 1845. No one quite knew what to wait for. But surely some explosive change was coming. Everyone around Dostoevsky could feel it, like a building static charge: something was going to happen. In an instant, unforeseen though long-awaited, the future would fall away from the past.
Young Fyodor would certainly see his share of decisive events, starting that very summer. One evening in May, the wide-eyed luminary Vissarion Belinsky sent for him by way of mutual friends. Professor Gary Saul Morson describes the episode early on in his beautiful new book, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter. Belinsky greeted Dostoevsky’s first novel, Poor People, with a characteristic ecstasy of raw excitement. “Have you yourself comprehended all the terrible truth you have shown us?” raved Belinsky to the bashful young artist. In a matter of days, this obscure doctor’s son became a cause célèbre among the Bohemians of St. Petersburg.
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