How Lucky We Are

 

               My son is a senior in high school and has been assigned to read a series of Great Books produced by mankind over the past several centuries. One is the 1865 classic, Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. A few weeks ago, he bought a copy and put in on his bedroom floor (he'll read it later in the school year). One evening I picked it up and began perusing the story from page one. I recalled reading the book, or at least parts of it, about 30 years ago, but as often happens I was startled by how little I could remember of what I'd read back in the 1970s. The only thing familiar to me was that the plot followed the adventures of the young Raskolnikov as he made his way around St. Petersburg before committing a murder.

               As I began reading in 2010, I was struck again and again by one aspect of the book: the extreme poverty the author had chronicled on almost every page. The plot is slow by today's standards, and the writing can appear overdone in places, but Dostoevsky was brilliant at describing what it's like to be abjectly poor -- too poor to eat. You feel this condition of the characters, and the feeling accumulates and thickens as you go further into the book. It isn't clear if this was primarily what Dostoevsky was trying to convey to 19th Century readers, but it slams a 21st Century reader in the face. Crime and Punishment had a tone of misery and despair due to poverty that's almost overwhelming.

               Did people really live in such desperate circumstances, you ask yourself, 150 years ago in Russia and Europe? How did they survive with almost nothing in terms of material goods -- only rags for clothing, only one tiny room to themselves, basically no furniture, and constantly in a state of hunger? Then you think about our lives today and all the computers we own, all the cars and all the garages full of tools and other knickknacks, all the Ipods, Ipads, Blackberries, cell phones, flat-screen TVs, and everything else that's sprung up within the past decade and become for many of us virtual necessities. We think nothing of getting on an airplane and flying across the country, or even across the ocean. What we're now doing every day would have been not just unimaginable a century and half ago, but impossible. We aren't merely living like gods, in terms of our recent past, but acting like them when hurtling through the sky at 600 miles an hour. 

               The grinding poverty of Crime and Punishment made a far deeper impression on me than the legal, moral, and religious questions Dostoevsky was painstakingly laying out in the novel -- the things the book is really known for. This is not meant to diminish the poverty that still pervades parts of America and many pockets of humanity around the world. People are dying of hunger every day, and there may be more humans suffering now, in terms of sheer numbers, than in the 1860s. My point has more to do with the intended and unintended value of a work of literature that can survive for a lengthy period of time (history, it's been said, is reflected nowhere so well as in the handful of fictional writings that have lasted and truly captured a given time and place). It's one thing to read a scholarly tome about the conditions in Russia that led up to the revolution of 1917 and produced the Soviet Union. It's quite another to see and to feel a great writer creating or re-creating those same conditions in ways that makes one squirm and feel terribly conscious of the fabulous wealth generated for many people during the past hundred years. Some of us are fortunate beyond belief.

               Dostoevsky has made me appreciate more what I have in my own life, and to focus less on what I think I might be missing. That alone is a religious/spiritual experience, even though it may have never occurred to the author that he'd transmit such a perception/feeling to future generations. All writing is an act of faith -- a belief that it can affect someone you'll never meet, or someone living long after you're dead. What better gift than to be reminded that your life is a wonder that people from past centuries could not have conceived of? After that thought comes a wave of humility and we all need a good dose of that about every other day. 

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