Born yesterday, Dostoyevski was the Cassandra of his day [by David Lehman]

Born yesterday, November 11, 1821, in Moscow, Fyodor Dostoyevski was haunted all his life by an overwhelming burden of sin, its temporary relief, and its hyperbolic return in the catastrophic sequence of events that led to the second World War. He suspected that the evil that men do lives after them while their good is oft interred with their bones. There was no remedy other than a centralized government within which the church was universally respected. "Only God can save us now," he said when he saw rioters in the streets and foresaw the Russian Revolution and the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat, which amounted to ruthless totalitarianism comparable to that of the Nazis.

On the basis of his novels, The Brothers Karamaziov and Crime and Punishment in particular, it is possible to mount the argument that the great writer knew in his bones that on his birthday ninety-seven years later, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year, the War to End All Wars would end -- with the seeds of a new global conflagration already planted.

Asked to provide a head note on the great writer for a new edition of the Astrological Dictionary of Artistic Greatness, Walter Lehmann wrote:

<<< Dostoyesvki suffered from epilelptic fits (see The Idiot) but did well in his examinations though he loathed mathematics. On April 23, 1849, the twenty-seven-year-old Dostoyevski was arrested for belonging to a group of crazy liberal loudmouth intellectuals. He was sent to Siberia, was sentenced to be executed, and faced a firing squad in the freezing rain. But it turned out to be a mock execution and Dostoyevski went back to his cell the shape and size of a coffin convinced that it is better and wiser to be a saintly fool in Siberia than to pimp in St. Petersburg. Released in 1854, he wrote Crime and Punishment in a hurry because he needed the money to cover his gambling debts. He was a compulsive gambler. Confronted by Sartre on the matter of his anti-Semitism, he reminded the other that he was not alone in this particular vice, naming Ezra Pound and Edgar Degas as similarly stupid on the subject of Jews.

From analyzing Dostoevski's astrological profile, you can safely arrive at several conclusions. His favorite songs would have been “I Fall in Love Too Easily” (Sinatra version, late 1940s) and “He's a Rebel” (from the early 1960s). The prophetic nature of his writings, including The Brothers Karamazov and Notes from Underground, doom him to be a Cassandra without honor in his native land. He believed that his novels constituted irrefutable proof that politics implies either madness or betrayal or both; that the sensual man can win absolution while the intellectual who has demolished god will face eternity alone; and that a beggar woman in the street with her children can out-argue all the philosophers and police inspectors in Saint Petersburg. Much of what he wrote was difficult for the Russian people to accept. Yet his fame eclipses that of all other Russian authors with one exception. His chart predicts him to die in his sixtieth year, and this indeed he did on February 9, 1881.

Dostoyevski's birth pattern -- a full house, with only one empty chamber -- is replicated exactly on the second day of August 1914. Had this fact been understood correctly, World War I might have been averted. The celestial mechanics of Saturn, Neptune, and Pluto intimate that Dostoyevski would die on the same day as the end of the war, and indeed, the armistice was signed on the novelist's ninety-seventh birthday. The sweet release would have come more than four years earlier if in the prison of his days the free man had learned to praise. The German minister smoked a Turkish cigarette in a jade holder. "Nothing ever happens in Brussels," he shrugged.

On November 11, 1918 – Dusty’s birthday – in graveyards in the Ukraine and Byelorussia, in Latvia and Estonia, school children in tatters stood shouting, "Hooray for Karamazov!"

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-- DL

Comments

[Maggie Wells]

Love this.

[The Best American Poetry]

Thank you, Maggie.

[Lewis Saul]

Never knew about the faux-execution. Sounds exactly like the scene in The Idiot!