Raindrops of Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky, a divine figure in the world of literature and arguably considered to be the greatest writer, author and novelist of all time has inspired countless number of authors in their works and I am no exception. When I first discovered Dostoevsky, I was terrified of the labour I was going to put to go through his works, both intellectual and time labour. Somebody once said, “Reading Dostoevsky is like eating an elephant, you have to take your time” so I wasn’t in a hurry and took my time, but after finishing several of his works especially Crime and Punishment, something shifted inside of me. The narrative and the psychological torture he puts through the protagonist Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment might never be matched again by any author ever. No lover of literature remains the same after finishing, Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky will drag the reader through emotional, psychological and intellectual pain but leave you much wiser if you have the discipline and the temperament to keep pressing on and stay till the end.

The pain I will have for a lifetime will be that I will never be as good a writer as Dostoevsky was, I could never achieve what he accomplished. His divine comprehension of the human psyche and the gift to weave words to make a story were straight from heaven. God was annoyingly generous towards Dostoevsky or that his ability to write like a god was a direct result of the suffering he went through when he was imprisoned in Siberia for four years. It might be canon that suffering is requisite for the human soul to be great. My sufferings are nothing compared to what he might have gone through, I presume I haven’t suffered enough to write like him, so the best thing I can do is to derive inspiration from him and name this poetry book in honour of him, Raindrops of Dostoevsky.

Raindrops because it is impossible to write like him, only cheap emulation might be possible. As the Romanian philosopher, Emil Cioran said, “But Dostoevsky went to the limits of his mind, to the point of extreme vertigo. For me, Dostoevsky is the greatest writer, the one who understands almost everything in every field, even in politics”. Here is to someone whose genius was birthed in the freezing cold prison of Siberia.