The Importance of Dostoevsky
And why not reading it is the end of civilization.
The figure of Fyodor Dostoevsky is familiar to anyone, or practically everyone.
They may not be able to say that he is a writer, but the name will be familiar to them. They will confuse him with a musician, or perhaps with a filmmaker (if it were a confusion with Tarkevski, it would be really surprising), they may even believe that he was a Soviet leader. Be that as it may, that a literary figure still endures in the collective imagination without even having been read is something extraordinary.
We all remember when the infamous Spanish Minister of Culture Mr. Wert horrified us all when he made public that Universal Literature was to be eliminated as an optional subject in the branch of Humanities in High School, a despicable act that automatically erased it from the University Entrance Exam as well. It happened a year and a half ago; this academic year that is just ending is the first without the subject.
This means that students have not been allowed to discover the literary wonders of Cervantes, Shakespeare, Austen, Tolstoy, Woolf, Kafka… and of course, Dostoevsky will not be discussed in the classrooms.
The dimension of the Russian writer is so great that even now, 136 years later, his works continue to…
