About Me
My influence cannot be overemphasized: from Herman Hesse to Marcel Proust, from William Faulkner to Albert Camus, from Franz Kafka to Gabriel Garcia Marquez- virtually no great 20th century writer has escaped my long shadow (rare dissenting voices include Vladimir Nabokov, Henry James and, more ambiguously, David Herbert Lawrence). Essentially a writer of myth (and in this respect sometimes compared to Herman Melville), I have created opus of immense vitality and almost hypnotic power characterized by the following traits: feverishly dramatized scenes (conclaves) where my characters are, frequently in scandalous and explosive atmosphere, passionately engaged in Socratic dialogues a la Russe; quest for God, the problem of Evil and suffering of the innocents haunt the majority of my novels; characters fall into a few distinct categories: humble and self-effacing Christians (prince Myshkin, Sonya Marmeladova, Alyosha Karamazov), self-destructive nihilists (Svidrigailov, Stavrogin, the underground man), cynical debauchers (Fyodor Karamazov), rebellious intellectuals (Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov); also, my characters are driven by ideas rather than by ordinary biological or social imperatives. My novels are compressed in time (many cover only a few days) and this enables me to get rid of one of the dominant traits of realist prose, the corrosion of human life in the process of the time flux- my characters primarily embody spiritual values, and these are, by definition, timeless. Other obsessive themes of mine include suicide, wounded pride, collapsed family values, spiritual regeneration through suffering (the most important motif), rejection of the West and affirmation of Russian Orthodoxy and Czarism. My work is sometimes characterized as polyphonic: unlike other novelists, I am free from single vision, and although many writers have described situations from various angles, only I have engendered fully dramatic novels of ideas where conflicting views and characters are left to develop even unto unbearable crescendo.By common critical consensus one among the handful of universal world authors, along with Dante, Shakesperare, Cervantes, Proust and a few others, I have decisively influenced the 20th century literature, existentialism and expressionism in particular.
