Biography: Dostoyevsky (1975)

[Music] [Applause] when the bolsheviks sees pie in Russia in the October Revolution of 1917 one of the first administrative acts of the new Revolutionary Government was to transfer the capital from Petrograd whose spirit like its elegant architecture belong to Western Europe the mosque at the heart of Russia and of Russian history at the time there was every reason strategic economic and political for doing this but he'd also settled a controversy which had agitated and divided the Russian intelligence if he years passed between the westernizers and the Slava fields though the triumphant Bolsheviks look to a German Jew Karl Marx for their ideology and to the 20th century's most successful exponent of capitalism America for their technology their regime was to be in its aspirations its strategy in its character essentially and insistently Russian [Music] in October 1821 a second son was born to the resident doctor in this Moscow hospital then known as the Marin scare hospital for the poor baby who thus came into the world in obscure enough way was destined to become one of the most famous writers of his time not just in Russia but everywhere throughout the world the family name was dusty f king and he was christened Theodor like so many of my generation I first read Dostoevsky's normal crime and punishment when I was very young I read it like a thriller with mounting excitement later when I came to read dostoevsky's other works especially his great masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov I realized that he was not just a writer with a superlative gift for storytelling but that he had a special insight into what life is about into man's relationship with his creator making him a prophetic voice looking into and illumining the future I came to see that the essential thing of all his writing is good and evil the two points round which the drama of our mortal existence is enacted [Music] but Dostoyevsky family's own circumstances were decidedly somber the father seems to have had a harsh and irascible temperament made worse by growing tendency to drink too much and the mother naturally a cheerful soul succumbed to tuberculosis during her ninth pregnancy when Fyodor was 15 it was the end of family life for Dostoyevsky along with his brother Michael he was sent off to Petersburg to prepare for early entry into the military engineering college there [Music] when Dostoevsky had been only some six months of the engineering Academy here he heard that his father had died allegedly murdered by some serfs on his estate in revenge for his admittedly drunken incalculable and lecherous wails for obvious reasons the family kept the details to themselves even assuming they knew them within his certitude the authorities too were anxious that such murders apparently all are common at the time should not be widely publicized the death of his father in circumstances so mysterious and so sinister cannot that have affected Dostoevsky profoundly it's even been suggested that it brought on the epileptic fits which were to afflict him for the rest of his life dostoevsky's six years of the engineering Academy seemed to have left little mark in 1844 when he was 23 he took the plan resigned his commission and set up as a writer in Petersburg hazardous enterprise but almost immediately successful poor folk his first published work a study in the goggle Dickens style of a poor of Petersburg whose rapturously received by among others billions the famous critic in whom Dostoevsky was later to see and misguided Westerners few writers have got off to so promising a start everything seemed to be sit there for a dazzling career the belinskiy circle like the Bloomsbury one and all such circles was no doubt a great ball and Dostoyevsky found more exciting and as it turned out dangerous company in the patrushev ski circle this was a group of revolutionaries all bent on overthrowing the existing social order inevitably the Petra chefs kites were infiltrated by the secret peace and some thirty four of them Dostoyevsky among them he like shut off in The Devil's having been entrusted with the clandestine printing press were arrested and sent off for examination [Music] Dostoevsky found himself in solitary confinement here in his peter and paul fortress where so many revolutionaries Bakunin francis where at one time or another incarcerated for Dostoevsky it was the true beginning of his inner life of the illumination out of which his great works were to come prisoners let it be said a fast and far more supreme art a mystical insight than any arts council Ministry of Culture or other such efforts in the way of governmental encouragement in the Peter and Paul Fortress he was willy-nilly introduced to the theme of punishment which he was suffering and crying to which a long elaborate examination sought to relate it the punishment was tangible the crime more elusive in the questions put to him by his interrogation there is the same insistent repetition the same cat-and-mouse tactics taking advantage of dust I have skis ignorant of the extent of his questioners knowledge as in the interrogation of Raskolnikov by porphyry in crime and punishment Dostoevsky had been eight months in his fortress when the verdict was at last announced 23 of the prisoners including Dostoyevsky were condemned to death with a secret proviso by the saw that in view of their youth at the very last moment the sentence should be committed to a more lenient one so the 23 condemned men were taken before an execution squad the guns were actually lifted the order to shoot was actually given when one of the Czar's abcs were dramatically up and announced a reprieve in the idiot Prince Myshkin describes a similar experience as happening to a friend of his on his first visit to the Apache ins three posts were dug into the ground about 20 paces from the scaffold which was surrounded by a crowd of people and soldiers where there were several criminals the first three were led to the posts and tied to them the death vestments long white smocks were predominant and white caps were drawn over their eyes so that they shouldn't see the rifles next a company of soldiers was drawn up against each post the priest went to each of them with the cross it seemed my friend that he had only five more minutes to live he told me that those five minutes were like an eternity to him which is beyond the dreams of avarice he calculated the exact time he needed to take leave of his comrades and decided that he could do that in two minutes then he spent another two minutes in thinking of himself for the last time and finally one minute for a last look round there was a church not far off its gilt roof shining in the bright sunshine he remembered staring with all four intensity at that roof and the sunbeams flashing from it he couldn't tear his eyes of those rays of light those rays seemed to him to be his new nature and he felt it in three minutes he'd somehow merged with him the uncertainty and the feeling of disgust with that new thing which was bound to come in a minute was dreadful but he said that the thing was most horrible to him was the constant thought what if I had not done what if I couldn't turn Oh what an eternity and all that would be mine I should turn every minute into an age I should lose nothing I should count every minute separately and waste none he said that this reflection finally filled him with such bitterness that he prayed to be shot as quickly as possible thus they asked his sentence was four years penal servitude to be served in fortresses and then as a common soldier at midnight Dostoevsky was fitted with 10-pound irons on his feet and then set out in an open sledge for Siberia the four years he spent in the OMPs penal settlement fettered in the most harsh conditions of confinement were seemingly lost years he wrote nothing and suffered much yet it may be doubted whether without him he would ever have been more than a gifted writer and man of his time his own subsequent account in the house of the dead is no more than the bare bones of the experience the great works which follow probe and expounded in crime and punishment Raskolnikov his similarly sent to Siberia and like Dostoyevsky begins by being proud and aloof with his fellow prisoners then he comes to see that their brothers to many of them have profound strong beautiful natures some you can't help respecting others are downright beautiful he makes Raskolnikov emerge from the terrible squalor monotony and cruelty of prison life with a conviction that the experience of living is somehow more than dialectics military service was a decided improvement for instance Dostoyevsky could get letters and books and an element of excitement was added by a friends at love affair with Maria Dimitri Hermes cipher who after many turbulent meetings and partings at last became his wife it took five years of maneuvering of one sort and another for Dostoyevsky to be released from military service and get permission to return to Petersburg finally he arrived there in December 1859 almost exactly 10 years since he left in that open slave office at first he occupied himself largely with journalistic work in collaboration with his brother Michael overjoyed to be back in a swim to have newspapers to read and polemics to engage in and friends to see when three months after the death of his wife Maria Dostoyevsky's brother Michael died sad ma'am he was left with financial responsibility for the magazine epic they had been jointly running this involved him in chronic insolvency for years to come but induced him to return to his true work the first fruit being the appearance in 1866 of crime and punishment in serial publication the scene had to be Petersburg one of those seedy neighborhoods where his long perambulations often took him tall shabby apartment blocks teeming with people coming and going dark doorways and stairways as for the crime he found one that would suit perfectly in the newspapers he was an avid reader of crime reports an aged moneylender widow of a titular councillor an old crone who lent grudgingly and collected evidence had along with her sister been struck down with an axe in her own apartment times were hard and there were many such money lenders come pawn brokers in the district in the circumstances a certain amount of sympathy for her assailant might be expected he was the rest Garnica one of Dostoyevsky's great creations is conduct he'd long projected a Russian 19th century version or perhaps his Faust or his rusty knack an aspiring hero of our time as characteristic as Lermontov a down-at-heel student who never studied slothful and penniless a half-baked intellectual with all the fashionable current ideologies rattling about in his mind Moody and they and given to violence in thought if not in word and beam [Music] at no point does Raskolnikov feel express any pity for the murdered women or remorse of having killed them nor does he seek to justify having murdered them by his need for money in fact he doesn't so much as look over his booty but just hides it away on a building site where he can recover it if ever he has a mind to in the days after the murder that his friends brooding on it he experiences no regrets and knows no penitence only fear not so much that he'll be found out as that he'll weaken and confess as it turns out there's no occasion for him to confess he's in the clear as far as the police are concerned and yet he does confess but to Sonia a pathetic girl who's taken to prostitution to help support the indigent of her Duncan father he realized that power is given only to him who dares to stoop and take it that's why I kill their woman his only regret now is he almost whimpers that he's proved an equal is high in depth and he's come to Sonia to ask what you ought to do in the character rest Kuniko Dostoevsky takes us to the very ultimate inhuman godlessness to the point at which man worships his own will and thereby finds his only sanctification in its exercise ultimately in violence for violence's own sake violence in art and in literature and in entertainment violence in thought and indeed violence on the streets and on campuses violence in football stadiums and on the cinema and the television screen violence in politics and in ideologists and even in religion I kill therefore I am scissor scholar Macomb and even as he says it he realizes that it was not the old hag he murdered but himself I did myself in at one blow and for good he tells Sonya so it will be Dostoyevsky says to us to all who follow this Devils way we're a singly or collectively it is in Sonja's mouth but Dostoyevsky puts the answer get up she's seized him by the shoulder and he raised himself looking at her almost in astonishment go at once this very minute and stand at the crossroad bow down first kiss the earth which you have defiled and say to all men aloud I am a murderer then God will send you life again except suffering and be redeemed by it that's what you must do at first he rejects it but it lasts after his trial and being sent to Siberia where Sonja follows him he sees in her love and devotion the possibility of a rebirth of a gradual regeneration of becoming acquainted with a new and hitherto unknown reality accept suffering and be redeemed by it this was Dostoyevsky's message to a world having frenziedly in the opposite direction seeking to abolish suffering and find happiness since Dostoevsky's time the world has known much trouble and found little happiness and so maybe the better disposed to heed his words [Music] [Applause] [Music] the severe financial difficulties in which his brother Michael's death involved Dostoyevsky got him into the habit of retreating abroad when the pressure of his creditors became insupportable this involved him in frequent stays of German spars such as this one Lee's father where a casino is provided to relieve the tedium of imbibing large quantities of distasteful medicinal waters one wonders what the blameless bourgeois dyspeptic going to and from the pure house or listening to the orchestra the gardens made of this crazed looking bird in rational income among [Applause] we ended up here in his short brilliant novel again lease pardon and the other spas appear as lettin burg and the hero Alexis Ivanovich is drawn irresistibly to the tables as Dostoyevsky was it was not her eyes Alexis Ivanovich explains just the plays excitement he wanted the money what is it desperately and wanted it to come to him in this particular way I share chunks rather than by work or strategy or calculation how strange it is to think of his inspired writers the hour after car evening after evening utterly absorbed in the monotonous repetition of fake version oriane about Putin with the players friends in lists taking their money at the very last moment changing their minds and pulling some back or pilings and more on then the announcement of the inexorable number which the little ball has come to rest and the agonized calculations of winnings and losses Dostoevsky said of himself that he carried everything to excess love and hate hope and despair ecstasy and sentimentality gambling was for him the reductio ad absurdum of money just to give it and lose it on the turn of a wheel to acquire riches by chance and then lose them as suddenly and unaccountably the bank of a speculator even the prospective of gold might persuade himself that his cupidity performs am useful service but gamblers are the monks of greed dedicated only to its service with the green baize tables from altar on which to set out the sacrificial offerings of coins and banknotes as money loses its value will the cup go on it's a possibility Dostoevsky would have enjoyed exploring [Music] some of Dostoyevsky's most phonetic gambling excesses were associated with the most physical of his love affairs with apolinaria Sir Slava a student who approached Dostoyevsky initially in a mood of all his greatness and then found him a common campus drama far from the grating bed she appears in the gambler as a willful femme fatale rising the gambler fooled in every sense therapeutic for financial reasons it had to be completed in 2016 and to achieve this Dostoevsky procured the services of a stenographer Anna grigoryevna snit khanna who turned out to be exceptionally competent sensible and in glucose became his second and last wife on their travels in Europe she had to endure one last gambling divorce and describes in her diary the appalling straits to which had reduced the pawning of everything they had including her wedding room at times the actual starvation to which they were subjected all made worse for Anna because she was going through her first pregnancy then again in Wiesbaden the mania spent itself as mysteriously as it had begun and for the last decade of his life thanks to Anna's quiet competence steady affection and careful management Dostoyevsky had the peace of mind to produce great works in relative ease and security Dostoevsky who normally kept away from his arms and picture galleries as far as possible paid a special visit to this Museum of Art in Basel to see this painting Christ taken down from the cross by Hans Holbein the younger he'd heard about this picture and what he had heard had greatly impressed him this is how his wife Anna in her diary describes dostoevsky's reaction to seeing the original the painting overwhelmed Fyodor Mikhailovich and he stopped in front of it as if stricken on his agitated face was a sort of frightened expression I'd often noted during the first moments of an epileptic seizure I quietly took my husband's arm led him to another room and made him sit down on a bench expecting him to have a seizure any minute fortunate there didn't come little-by-little Fyodor Mikhailovich calm down when we were leaving he insisted on going to take another look at the painting that had made such an impression on him anna's own reaction was one of revulsion she writes of the painting that contrary to tradition Christ is depicted with an emaciated body the bones and ribs showing the hands and feet pressed by wounds swollen and very blue as in a corpse that is beginning to rot the face is agonized in the eyes are half open but unseen and expressionless the nose mouth and chin have turned blue the reason that anna was so horrified was that whole Bynes picture shows the body of Christ in a state of decomposition on the other hand as far as Dostoyevsky was concerned the pictures fascination was precisely that it did show Christ's body decomposing if his body was not subject to decay like other bodies then the sacrifice on the cross was quite meaningless Christ had to be a man like other men in order to die for men in other words at the Incarnation God did truly become a man [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Dostoyevsky's wanderings outside russia brought him in 1867 to this famous city of geneva where so many wonders of one sort and another had come on the shores of this lake it's safe to say that more explosive words of another and more explosive eiders entertaining than anywhere else in modern times from Rousseau to Menon it's been the seabed of revolution as though to redress the balance the city itself has remained one of the bastions of bourgeois orthodoxy when so many of its Citadel's elsewhere had been falling an ideological adventurer may still deposit his savings here with a reasonable assurance that they'll remain intact whatever may have been the consequences of the propagation of his ideas elsewhere [Music] Harris by his usual money troubles and over the late delivery of his work in this case the idiot which he was struggling to finish dostoevsky's a sour view of both the revolutionary ideas and their bourgeois cushioning in his letters he complains equally of the awfulness of life in Geneva on Sundays particularly and of the various Raj assembled for an International Congress and the auspices of a league for peace and freedom some of whom Hetson and bakunin for instance were known to him how many such Congress's that were to be in Geneva culminating in the largest longest most publicized and most futile the League of Nations whose fine new paladinous jean was completed just when the organization itself to all intents and purposes had ceased to function for the title of his next novel written here in Geneva Dostoevsky chose the devil's his theme is that the subversive ideas of the age were entering into people's minds as the devil's entered into the gadarene swine and would similarly destroy them Raskolnikov sinned systems that he had a right to kill translated into politics led straight to back Coonans dictum that destruction is in itself creative and so to revolution for revolutions own sake thus today's Raskolnikov is tomorrow's Nechayev the young student revolutionary terrorists on whom Dostoevsky based the character Peter Beck elinsky by inducing the young to follow Raskolnikov and throw aside all restraint in their personal behavior the way is prepared for a corresponding lack of restraint in the exercise of power a generation or two of debauchery Patera karinski says followed by a little drop of nice fresh blood just to accustom people and then the turmoil will begin today a century later it's well underway what does the S key understood with such wonderful clarity is that there are mentok notions of old decadence key are the inevitable prelude to the devilish ones of his son Peter and that both derive from the man who might be regarded as the patron saint of this place jean-jacques rousseau who insist that men can only be free when they do what they like and then doing what they like is conducive to their individual and collective happiness peace and security exactly the opposite Dostoevsky says is the case when men are dominated by their own desires they fall into the most terrible of all servitudes young the Kerensky is simply old veca rensky writ large the old one is serious and foolish the young one is frivolous and merciless and after them booth comes in eggs ablai the gadarene rush over the cliff old vicar ensk is a marvelous piece of characterization immensely funny and in his own way immensely touching how often his voice has been heard in this place calling for peace for liberty for democracy he's mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt he's Bertrand Russell he's Pope John he's every siren voice urging us to follow Peter recommends key who's waiting to hand us over to the slogan ears the brainwashers the dogmatists from whom that can be no escape with the Devils out of the way Dostoevsky knew that the book he projected next could only be written in Russia and it was with infinite relief and delight that he and Anna made arrangements to return there after their long and troubled exile they arrived back in Petersburg in the summer of 1871 with ten years the most fruitful and serene of his life before them thanks to Anna's careful management they were able to acquire a house in stereo an ancient town in Novgorod province and there are in tranquillity he wrote a raw youth worked on The Brothers Karamazov and prepared his Pushkin memorial speech there's a description of the town in The Brothers Karamazov and he imagined that from his window he could see the old white monastery where a Yasha was a monk and father Zosima died [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] before starting work seriously on the brothers karamazov in the spring of 1878 Dostoyevsky paid a visit to opt in a pristine monastery in the neighborhood of Tula and the family estate where his father had been murdered by his serfs he stayed there two days and had several conversations with the sainted father Ambrosius the original of father's Ashima and The Brothers Karamazov many years later Tolstoy visited optin a pristine on his lost tragic journey which ended in the stationmaster's house at a startled both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky near different ways were fascinated by monasticism which is now in the old traditional sense been ended in Russia but many of the monasteries themselves like this novodevichy on the outskirts of Moscow have been painstakingly preserved and restored as national monuments to be stared at by tourists and perhaps one day as Christians may dream to receive back their monks [Music] [Applause] Dostoevsky was a God possessed man if ever there was one as is clearing everything he wrote in every character he created all his life he was questing for God and only found him if indeed he ever really did at the end of his days after passing through what he called the Hellfire of doubt freedom to choose between good and evil he saws the very essence of earthly existence better even to choose evil than to have no choice the devil he insists has a necessary role in our human drama without him that can be no play though they can be contentment and well-being of a kind this was toast to his dream of a kingdom of heaven on earth which was to Dostoevsky deeply abhorrent this is the dream - of all authoritarians Templar an ecclesiastic especially the latter as Dostoevsky explains in one of his most famous passages Ivan Kerimov sophs account to his brother and Yasha I'm an imaginary encounter between the Grand Inquisitor and the returned Christ in 16th century surreal Christ has reappeared among the people and been recognized he's performed miracles as he did in Galilee in His infinite mercy he once more walked among men in the semblance of man the people had drawn to him by an irresistible force they surround him they throng about him they follow him he walks among them in silence with a gentle smile of infinite compassion the Sun of love burns in his heart rays of light of enlightenment and of powers dream from his eyes and pouring over the people stir their hearts with responsive love he stretches forth his hands to them blesses them and a healing virtue comes from contact with him even from his ganas then in the Cathedral of Seville he raises from the dead a small girl who has been brought in there for burial just as she is sitting up in her coffin and looking round her with surprise in her smiling eyes just a DEP moment the Cardinal himself the Grand Inquisitor passes by the cathedral in the square he's an old man of nearly 90 tall and erect with a shriveled face and sunken eyes from which though a light like a fiery spark still gleams he stops in front of the crowd and watches from a distance he sees everything and his face darkness he knits his grave beetling brows and his eyes flashed with an ominous far he stretches forth his finger and commands the guard to seize him the guards take their prisoner to the dark narrow vaulted prison in the old building of the sacred court and lock him in there the day passes and night falls the dark hot and breathless Seville night the air is heavy with the scent of law and lemonis amid the profound darkness the ardor of the prison is suddenly opened and the old Grand Inquisitor himself slowly enters the prison with a light in his hair he's alone and the dog once closes behind him he stops in the doorway and gazes for a long time for more than a minute into his face at last he approaches him slowly puts the lamp on the table and says Dave is it you you the terrible burden that Christ laid on mankind the grand inquisitor explained was freedom when in the wilderness the devil offered deliverance from this burden the offer was recklessly rejected thus Christ refused to turn stones into bread there by abolishing hunger and refused to jump from a high pinnacle in the temple to create wonder and all thereby attracting people to him and his cause and refused to take over the kingdoms of the earth thereby putting himself in a position to create utopias everywhere he even for the sake of freedom insisted on dying himself however quite soon after his death his church decided to close with the devil's offer and in place of freedom provided miracles mystery and authority in contemporary terms efference the marvels of science and an all-powerful state to the very great betterment of the human condition if no christ remained in the world he'd upset everything again with this terrible devastating sublime freedom of his so again he must die all the time the Grand Inquisitor has been speaking Christ has remained quite silent sin not a word as on a previous occasion before Caiaphas the grand inquisitor saw that the prisoner had been listening intently to him all the time looking gently into his face and evidently not wishing to say anything in reply the old man would have liked him to say something have a bitter and terrible but he suddenly approached the old man and kissed him gently on his bloodless age of lips that was all his answer the old man gave a start there was an imperceptible movement at the corners of his mouth he went to the door and opened it and said to him go and come no more don't come at all never never and he let him out into the dark streets and lanes of the city the prisoner went away leaving the old man with that kiss glowing in his heart and his idea staying in his mind and so it remained still [Music] this statue to Russia's national paid Pushkin was unveiled in June 1880 providing Dostoevsky with the opportunity he'd longsword actually to speak to his fellow countrymen exhorting them like the prophets of old warning them of the dangers of their head and of the ruinous consequences that would surely ensue if they followed the Western assets with their fraudulent promises of purpose and freedom seemingly everything that Dostoevsky most of all has come to pass in Russia the institutions in which he pinned his hopes the monarchy and the church have collapsed the one abolished and the other a shadow of itself the revolution he so dreaded has happened and the Westerners may be said to have triumphed in the sense that industrialization sans and agnosticism are now the order of the day dusty F's gives great moment came on the third day he delivered his address in this Hall of columns which was largely used in those days by the nobility social occasions and receive the imperial family forty-four years later its name changed to the house of trade unions Lenin's body was to Lyon state there one way imagine the scene Dostoevsky a truly prophetic figure bearded Wild Eye his brow fire and speaking though from a prepared text with great force and elephants and leading up to his tremendous climax when he proclaimed the coming of a universal brotherhood brought about not by socialism and revolution but by the full and perfect realization of this Christian enlightenment of hours in the sarena circumstances of his last year's Dostoyevsky's essential love of life and joy in all God's creation found a sure expression a never before beauty he makes dmitry karimov sir perhaps his favorite of the three brothers say is not only a terrible it's also a mysteriously their God and the devil strive for mastery and the battleground is in the heart of men almost exactly 42 years ago I was passing through named van and some impulse led me to seek out Dostoyevsky's grave I found it with some difficulty and stood by it for a while thinking of this great writer and of the extraordinary range of his genius and depths of his insight and how his works far from seeming to belong to a vanished past grow ever more relevant to the dilemmas and distractions which are part of the experience of living in this world at any time and in any circumstances I was much younger than of course in sight of the beginning of a life as now of its ending in the intervening years a great deals happen to the world to dostoevsky's reputation and for that matter to me yet I still find myself marveling as I did on that other occasion and how one man's genius can as it were pick up all the strands of a name revealing its pattern all its absurdity all its dialysis and all its splendor all the world in a grain of sand Blake said yes and all of life in a word on that previous occasion when I visited Dostoyevsky's grave it had an air of neglect today this is far from being the case his reputation and his native Russia after some ups and downs stands higher than ever his books are published in editions not of tens but of hundreds of thousands every word he wrote his parsley preserved studied and commented upon sometimes I dare say in ways that would surprise him all this would be a source of great satisfaction to his love for his native Russia was one of a few only consistent themes of his life abroad he was always homesick and his faith that some are Russian and the Russian people had some special role to fulfill in the working out of the world's destiny never wavered and only burnt brighter as the years passed standing beside Dostoevsky's grave it's impossible for me not to think of another which I've also got very vivid memories I mean Tolstoy jasna Pollyanna on a ridge overlooking a forest in which he was told as a child a green stick was buried inscribed with the secret of everlasting happiness Tolstoy I never did find that green stick and Dostoevsky never even looked for it yet somehow these two great Russian writers seemed linked together in life as it happens whether by accident or deliberation they never actually met but certainly they took great account of one another's works Tolstoy aspiring so ardently after his king of heaven on earth and arriving at a stop apart Dostoevsky plunging down so frenziedly into his kingdom of hell on earth and arriving at Golgotha two parallel lines which nuclear terrorists never meet but which Einsteins discovered after all dude it's where they meet that we mortals must live [Music]

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Keywords: Malcolm Muggeridge, Dostoyevsky, Dostoyevsky Documentary, Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky Novel Audio Book, Russian History, Russian Documentary, Russian Revolution, Vintage Documentary, Dostoyevsky Biography

Id: 8hDo436bnfk

Length: 55min 36sec (3336 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 07 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Shigalyov]

Thanks for sharing this!

[u/Woeseian]

Malcolm Muggeridge was also one of the first western journalists to report on the true state of the Soviet union, outside the Potemkin villages

[u/stiggpwnz]

!Listen

[u/I_am_Norwegian]

The soundtrack sounds like someone tried to spin the record by hand when transferring the audio.