Contemporary Literary Review India | eISSN 2394-6075 | Vol 5, No 3: CLRI August 2018
Ravi Teja Mandapaka
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky – The Socrates of Literature
Literature, as a many a critic would sky,
From souls in fens and cordillera in a way,
Is the heart and zest of time, Life’s cardinal shine.
Art, is treasured in a form of Language,
Artistry, in a poetic bandage.
English, for once and all has seen,
Writers and bards, the greatest, there had ever been,
Of varied substance and style, Of grace, humility and guile.
There, we had, Chaucer of The Canterbury Tales,
Gower of The Cinkante Ballades,
Swinburne of The Whippingham Papers,
Johnson of The Unfortunates,
And, our Shakespeare of Sonnets.
Life and time under sky’s den,
Squelched and creep-ed on from then.
Medievalism followed Neo-Platonism,
Romantism followed Neo-Classicism,
And thereupon towards Structuralism,
To Modernism to Post-Colonialism.
I, a child in a theater environment,
Adored Shakespeare’s allegory in print,
The benovelence of Chaucer,
And the anastrophe of Gower.
Yet, and but in the openness of this show,
There stood a writer to whom all homage owe,
“The Socrates of Literature” art’s eternal destiny,
“The Shakespeare of Lunatic Asylum”, Fyodor Dostoevsky.
To this man, my well-being, I owe,
And in reverence and faith, I bow.
His’s are writings that threw me into a world conceived,
For tales unflappable and unabated to read.
The ignorant in me, to wise, turned,
The pessimist in me, to the optimist, bent.
Hence, there, to the best of my understanding, lies,
The need to learn his language and parlance, till time dies.
He, Dostoevsky, lived in solace of a closed room,
Stationed in its forgotten corner, till doom,
And, in many a grotesque hour, he penned, “The Notes from the Underground”.
A novel that, canons of psychology bore, Where life’s mundane meaning told.
This masterpiece, a book written in resentment,
Was followed by Crime and Punishment,
Then, The Idiot and, towards his last writing,
The Brothers Karamazov, an oeuvre of reading.
A thing in common, reader makes,
Of the above works is,
They are visibly dialectic
And emotionally didactic.
His’s are novels, psychological
And imminently experimental.
Psychological, for they make you retrospect,
And submit us to introspect,
Experimental, for they submit our senses,
To a level of eminent reminiscences.
Socrates, was once, a noble teacher,
To his humble student and a doctrine educator,
Pluto, Dostoevsky too, from his master Shakespeare,
Imbibed wisdom and made his master proud and richer,
For Dostoevsky, in short, is The Socrates of Literature.
His’s are works of finest tapestry,
For they weave a web in poetry,
Of deceit and eloquence in quandary.
Analogous to the quatrains and couplets,
In Shakespeare’s jaw dropping sonnets,
Dostoevsky too, through his novels, Puts us, readers and mere mortals,
Into a surreal world, where ebullience excels.
Readers, are then found afloat in open skies.
Combating the belligerent turbulence with ease,
And plummeting from grace at an hapless pace.
If Raskolnikov proved an absolute villain turned hero,
Poor folk’s Dobroslava depicted a new low
Of things turning from good to bad
And to worse in a second lead.
The Landlady and A Faint Heart are,
A proof of brotherly love and care.
Shumkov and Nefedev in the latter,
Are friends turned brothers and sisters in one chatter,
And so, is the case of Katerina and Ordynov with the former.
If in Stavrogin, Dostoevsky heralded to the birth,
Of literature’s finest villian in wrath and mirth,
In, The Notes from Underground, the reader,
For once and all in a a delirious rupture,
Opens eyes to a lunatic man in choler.
Brothers Karamozov, is nothing but an evidence
And a brevity of thought and coherence.
The reader, though, is flabbergasted,
By the soul playing nature of the scripted,
And feels as if Dostoevsky is writing on his behalf instead.
The later, through his protagonist, lies positioned In the core of the reader’s heart,
And answers like open sweetness of tart.
He puts the reader to unanswerable questions And fools with varied answers.
If the reader is hugged in silence,
He is slapped against public’s dissidence.
In short, Dostoevsky is unseen but heard,
And felt but untouched, a god.
His’s are stories filthy and vivacious,
Like forests dense and sparse,
Like the evergreen woods,
In the modern-day, a scarce. of life.
To me, a dilettante of me,
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, Is a writer of top quality verse and legacy,
A poet of supreme prose and virtuosity.
And so, To read Dostoevsky is wisdom,
To understand him is a blessing and one’s decorum.
Works Cited
1) Ravi Teja Mandapaka, “The Eloquent Importance of Knowing Fyodor
Dostoevsky Through the Understanding of a Dilettante”, Motifs Volume 1, Number 2, July-December 2015, pp. 122-124 DOI: 10.5958/2454-1753.2015.00021.5.