The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, short story by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, published in Russian in as “Son smeshnogo cheloveka.” It addresses questions about. : The Dream Of A Ridiculous Man (): Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Books. The Dream of a Ridiculous Man. By Fyodor Dostoyevsky. What do we know about the psyche that Dostoyevsky failed to illuminate for us more than a century ago.
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I sit up all night in my arm-chair at the table, doing nothing. Holy blood was shed on the threshold of the temples. Even the weather was foul.
They came to me themselves. I made this appeal and held my peace. In their songs they expressed all the sensations the parting day had given them. I want suffering in order to love. They had no places of worship, but they had a certain awareness of a constant, uninterrupted, and living union with the Universe mxn large.
I did not go with her; on the contrary, I had an impulse to drive her away. Children of the sun, children of their sun—oh, how beautiful they were! At first I told her to go msn find a policeman.
We had only one more lodger in our rooms, a thin little lady, the wife of an army officer, on a visit to Petersburg with her three little children who had all been taken ill since their arrival at our house. I remember that as I sat and meditated, I began to examine all these questions which thronged in my mind one after another from quite a different angle, and thought of something quite new.
It is an old truth, but this is what is new: That is what og said, and after saying such things everyone began to love himself better than anyone else, and indeed they could not do otherwise. Every one of them became so jealous of his own personality that he strove with might and main to belittle and humble it in others; and therein he saw the whole purpose of his life.
Tue, everything was just as it is with us, except that everything seemed to be tidiculous in the radiance of some public festival and ridiculoua some great and holy triumph attained at last.
Fifty-Two Stories » The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
It was then that I stamped my foot and shouted at her. I was going to turn into a cipher, into an absolute cipher. But never mind, I shall go on and I shall keep on talking, for I have indeed beheld it with my own eyes, though I cannot describe what I saw. Science supplants emotion, and the members of the former utopia are incapable of remembering their former happiness.
I could see that.
And all at once, not with my voice, but with my entire being, I called upon the power that was responsible for all that was happening to me: I seemed to have become blind and dumb.
But that was my own fault; I was so proud that nothing would have ever induced me to tell it to anyone. They rejoiced at the arrival of children as new beings to share their happiness.
Yes, they had discovered their language, and I am sure the trees understood them. After an indeterminate amount of time in his cold grave, water begins to drip down onto his eyelids.
And so it was now. I have a room in a flat where there are other lodgers. The voluptuousness was soon born, voluptuousness begot jealousy, and jealousy—cruelty. They say that even now I often get muddled and confused and that if I am getting muddled and confused now, what will be later on?
I had had scarcely any dinner that day. The unusual shape of Russian literary history has been the source of numerous controversies.
And this—I mean, the fact that they did not know it—was the bitterest pill for me to swallow. I believe I was standing on one of the islands which on our earth form the Greek archipelago, or somewhere on the coast of the mainland close to this archipelago. They knew love and they begot children, but I never noticed in them those outbursts of cruel sensuality which overtake almost everybody on our earth, whether man or woman, and are the only source of almost every sin of our human race.
How it could come to pass I do not know, but I remember it clearly. And so every night during these two months I thought of shooting myself as I was going home.
I still remember them. I told them that I alone was responsible for it all—I alone; that it was I who had brought them corruption, contamination, and lies! What is a dream? It was like being in love with each other, but nan all-embracing, universal feeling. What I did see was love that seemed to reach the point of rapture, but it was a gentle, self-sufficient, and contemplative rapture.
But since I grew to manhood, I have for some unknown reason become calmer, though I realised my awful characteristic more fully every drewm.
The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
A chance encounter with a young girl, however, begins the man on a journey that re-instills a love for his fellow man. At first I fancied that many things had existed in the past, but afterwards I guessed that there never had been anything in the past either, but that it had only seemed so for some reason. IV Well, you see, again let me repeat: One might think that they were still in contact with the departed after death, and that ridiculoud earthly union was not cut short by death.
They are making dostoevssky of me now by saying that it was only a dream.