When watching Kurosawa’s films, I’ve always sensed something—this is Dostoevsky’s thought.
Take Watanabe’s rebirth in Ikiru, for instance. But it was just a fleeting question, without concrete evidence.
Until I came across the passage about the little beggar girl in Humiliated and Insulted. Before I’d even finished reading it, I was shouting inside: Isn’t this exactly the prototype for the child prostitute in * Red Beard*?
You can’t even call it homage—it’s wholesale reproduction.
Case closed.
My excitement was beyond words; I had to stop and revel in it for a while.
Look! My favorite film master also loves my favorite intellectual giant.
Actually, it’s not just films. I suspect manga artist Inoue Takehiko is also paying tribute to Dostoevsky in Vagabond—the monk Takuan is practically the incarnation of Elder Zosima from * The Brothers Karamazov*.
No amount of praise could overstate Dostoevsky’s greatness.
But tragically, having read The Brothers Karamazov first—that pinnacle of world literature—everything else seems shallow by comparison.
There’s an interesting comment about this book on Douban: When old Dostoevsky was still young Dostoevsky, he was basically a Maugham.
That was exactly my feeling after finishing The Painted Veil: Maugham is just a budget version of Dostoevsky.
Yesterday on Bilibili, I heard someone comparing Dostoevsky to Lu Xun as China’s equivalent. I was inwardly cursing—what nonsense, they’re not even in the same league. What gives Lu Xun the right?
Thinking back to when Dream of the Red Chamber was my favorite book makes me feel somewhat ashamed. Though * Dream of the Red Chamber* and * The Brothers Karamazov* were written barely a century apart, the gap in their intellectual depth spans millennia—they’re not even in the same weight class.
This really highlights the significance of literary criticism.
That’s why I bristle when people try to teach me to approach books with reverence.
It’s precisely the absence of literary criticism that wastes so much of our time on cultural garbage.
Many books simply aren’t worth reading. After Black Myth: Wukong became popular, many people hyped up * Journey to the West*, but in my view, later adaptations like * A Chinese Odyssey* and * The Monkey King* actually surpass the original.
These classics serve mainly as source material. Their intellectual merit hardly deserves praise. Some even promote seriously twisted values.
But back to this book. It’s one of the author’s early works, less profound than his later ones, with a simple plot about a woman who elopes and then gets abandoned.
But the villain isn’t the one who directly abandons her—it’s the young man’s father, a noble duke who was himself involved in another elopement and abandonment case.
When the duke righteously spouts the most shameless words in the book, I actually found myself amused by this brazen shamelessness. I’ve seen plenty of terrible people, but such frank ones are rare.
Many people I’ve known came to mind—I’ve seen too many of these egoistic types in reality, even ones this thoroughly rotten. Especially those with privilege like the duke.
Conversely, when the book says “There are many, many good people in the world. It’s your misfortune: you haven’t met good people, and when you needed help, you didn’t encounter them,” I have to think long and hard to come up with examples.
But though the villains are villainous, the author spends more ink criticizing the father who won’t forgive his eloped daughter—who clearly loves her deeply yet, out of wounded pride, hardens his heart to disown and even curse her.
So when the old father finally sees the light through the orphan Nelly’s tragic plight and chooses to forgive his daughter, his heartfelt hymn to love is especially moving:
Oh, I thank You, God, I thank You for everything, everything, for Your wrath and for Your mercy! And for the sun that shines on us again after the storm has passed!
For this priceless moment, I thank You! Oh! Though we are the insulted, though we are the injured, we are together again, so let those arrogant and mighty ones, let those who have insulted and injured us now triumph! Let them throw stones at us!
Don’t be afraid, Natasha… We’ll go out hand in hand, and I’ll say to them: This is my beloved daughter, this is my precious one, this is my innocent daughter whom you have insulted and injured, but I love her and will bless her forever!