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deardostoevsky 's review for:
The Insulted and Humiliated
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
She enjoyed her own pain by this egoism of suffering, if I may so express it. This aggravation of suffering and this rebelling in it I could understand; it is the enjoyment of man, of the insulted and injured, oppressed by destiny, and smarting under the sense of its injustice.
All through this work, a social element envelopes the characters, but it is not merely a social novel. There is a psychological element which deepens the characters, suiting the narration to the more dostoevskian shade.
The autobiographical essence through the narrator is also quite evident, for instance,
“You'll simply write yourself out, Vanya,” she said to me. “You're overstraining yourself, and you'll write yourself out; and what's more, you're ruining your health. S. now only writes a novel a year, and N. has only written one novel in ten years. See how polished, how finished, their work is. You won't find one oversight.”
“Yes, but they are prosperous and don't write up to time; while I'm a hack."
The villain in this story is one of the best villains I've ever read, the fact that he knows his wrongdoings yet attribute the very morality of the human fabric to be at fault, is what makes him so hauntingly evil. He is every bit an atrocious vile human yet one cannot help but agree with some of his reasonings. In one of the best chapters of the book, he proudly proclaims all of it as the narrator sat dumbfounded, much like the reader, and to quote one such instance,
"If it were possible for every one of us to describe all his secret thoughts, without hesitating to disclose what he afraid to tell and would not on any account tell other people, what he is afraid to tell his best friends, what, indeed, he is even at times afraid to confess to himself, the world would be filled with such a stench that we should all be suffocated. That's why, I may observe in parenthesis, our social proprieties and conventions are so good. They have a profound value, I won't say for morality, but simply for self-preservation, for comfort, which, of course, is even more, since morality is really that same comfort, that is, it's invented simply for the sake of comfort."
With Dostoevsky, you know the tale is not going to be a straight one, even though there might be a possibility for the villain to be defeated in the earthly terms, it isn't worth the philosophy Dostoevsky tries to so convey. It is kept open for the reader to take away the winning or the losing in their own aspect, and perhaps to see this conflict beyond a win or a lose, is what he expects most of all. As the heroine of the tale proclaims,
Everything is purified by suffering.
The concluding page of the novel only amplifies this conflict through the vileness of humans, both in their own suffering and their beastly cruelty for other's suffering, where Nellie, the sweet perfect (and my favourite character of the book) poetically embraces her mother's footsteps but never forgives, which takes me back to a somewhat similar interpretation in Ivan Karamazov's rebellion from The Brothers Karamazov, where he complains how the tears of a child can never be justified, and even if a mother can forgive the abusers of the child, the child never could.
This also makes me conclude, that the comprehension of this work would had been incomplete without being aware of Dostoevsky's philosophy through his later works. Undoubtedly, the story is poignant and carries some very emotional and profound moments but, personally, I was able to completely comprehend the characters, specially their psychological aspects, because of my prior acquaintance with his later works.
All through this work, a social element envelopes the characters, but it is not merely a social novel. There is a psychological element which deepens the characters, suiting the narration to the more dostoevskian shade.
The autobiographical essence through the narrator is also quite evident, for instance,
“You'll simply write yourself out, Vanya,” she said to me. “You're overstraining yourself, and you'll write yourself out; and what's more, you're ruining your health. S. now only writes a novel a year, and N. has only written one novel in ten years. See how polished, how finished, their work is. You won't find one oversight.”
“Yes, but they are prosperous and don't write up to time; while I'm a hack."
The villain in this story is one of the best villains I've ever read, the fact that he knows his wrongdoings yet attribute the very morality of the human fabric to be at fault, is what makes him so hauntingly evil. He is every bit an atrocious vile human yet one cannot help but agree with some of his reasonings. In one of the best chapters of the book, he proudly proclaims all of it as the narrator sat dumbfounded, much like the reader, and to quote one such instance,
"If it were possible for every one of us to describe all his secret thoughts, without hesitating to disclose what he afraid to tell and would not on any account tell other people, what he is afraid to tell his best friends, what, indeed, he is even at times afraid to confess to himself, the world would be filled with such a stench that we should all be suffocated. That's why, I may observe in parenthesis, our social proprieties and conventions are so good. They have a profound value, I won't say for morality, but simply for self-preservation, for comfort, which, of course, is even more, since morality is really that same comfort, that is, it's invented simply for the sake of comfort."
With Dostoevsky, you know the tale is not going to be a straight one, even though there might be a possibility for the villain to be defeated in the earthly terms, it isn't worth the philosophy Dostoevsky tries to so convey. It is kept open for the reader to take away the winning or the losing in their own aspect, and perhaps to see this conflict beyond a win or a lose, is what he expects most of all. As the heroine of the tale proclaims,
Everything is purified by suffering.
The concluding page of the novel only amplifies this conflict through the vileness of humans, both in their own suffering and their beastly cruelty for other's suffering, where Nellie, the sweet perfect (and my favourite character of the book) poetically embraces her mother's footsteps but never forgives, which takes me back to a somewhat similar interpretation in Ivan Karamazov's rebellion from The Brothers Karamazov, where he complains how the tears of a child can never be justified, and even if a mother can forgive the abusers of the child, the child never could.
This also makes me conclude, that the comprehension of this work would had been incomplete without being aware of Dostoevsky's philosophy through his later works. Undoubtedly, the story is poignant and carries some very emotional and profound moments but, personally, I was able to completely comprehend the characters, specially their psychological aspects, because of my prior acquaintance with his later works.