W
hen I was about 24, I read several books in a row that were absolutely defining for me. In fact, at the time, it felt like they had been written specifically for me; I was positioned in such a way to appreciate every joke, to identify with every character, to have my previously vague and muddled thoughts given perfect clarity by geniuses who had had similar mental experiences. Those books were Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon; The Wrenchies, by Farel Dahlrymple; and a collection of Kafka's short fiction. There is a very distinct sort of literary deconstruction running through each of these books, which was apparently the wavelength I was riding on at the time. All of these authors were grasping at the paradoxes associated with self-perception and self-reference, and with the problems that arise from assuming we know what kind of story we are in.
I've just picked up a collection of three of Dostoevsky's short novels, and I'm getting a similar feeling from these works. Dostoevsky is intimately concerned with the inner knots that get tied within the minds of particularly inward-looking people. In particular, prefiguring Kafka, he tries to draw out the often tenuous connection between our thoughts, and our rationality, and the actions that we in fact perform. Something that I think the Russians do particularly well in their literature is capture the way that the mind changes over time -- in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the person is constantly in flux, making decisions then reversing them, having great revelations and then forgetting, making errors and learning from them. Of course, Dostoevsky's characters tend to be much darker and neurotic than Tolstoy's, and their inner lives are tortured and unstable, but the principle of trying to understand what drives a mind, and what its true form is, is shared in common between the two.
Tolstoy is definitely the more enjoyable read, but Dostoevsky's voice is powerful -- prophetic, and unable to be ignored.