Dostoevsky's Great Gift

 

Dostoevsky possessed the power "to create people rather than types and to surround them with the atmosphere essential for their development and exhibition."

Reading the major novels of Dostoevsky's mature period, one feels the "intense, burning reality" of his greatest characters. The "depth and richness of Dostoevsky's psychological insight" has few peers in modern literature.

Little wonder, then, that Nietzsche named him "the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn."

                                            ~ Richard Curle

Triumvirates of Literature

 

Remembering Harold Bloom

                             He had few peers.

The Business of Philosophy

 

"The business of philosophy is to teach man to live in uncertainty--man who is supremely afraid of uncertainty, and who is forever hiding himself behind this or the other dogma. More briefly, the business of philosophy is not to reassure people, but to upset them."

 All Things are Possible, pp. 23-24.

Eternal Laws

 

"To escape from the grasp of contemporary ruling ideas, one should study history. The lives of other men in other lands in other ages teach us to realize that our 'eternal laws' and infallible ideas are just abortions. Take a step further, imagine mankind living elsewhere than on this earth, and all our terrestrial eternalities lose their charm."

~ Lev Shestov, All Things Are Possible, p. 22.

Lev Shestov: Philosophize with a Grenade

The Man Who Has the Incomprehensible Within His Grasp...

 

"It is terrible to watch a man who has the Incomprehensible within his grasp, does not know what to do with it, and sits playing with a toy called God!"

    ~ F. Dostoevsky to his brother Mikhail, August 9, 1838.