Incidentally, I wept during one of my shifts at the observatory upon reaching the epilogue of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Insulted and Humiliated. The roman-feuilleton, published in 1861 after his Siberian exile, marked the beginning of Dostoevsky’s trove of powerful literature among the likes of The House of the Dead, Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed/The Devils, and my favorite: The Brothers Karamazov. Albeit considered a minor gem against his later distinguished works, The Insulted and Humiliated masterfully captured my maiden-heart in this memorable performance of loss, poverty, and suffering central to all of Dostoevsky’s stories (Nietzsche is said to have wept over it, too).

Vanya, a poor writer at the bottom of Russian society, binds the tale of two families torn apart by greed and dishonor done upon them. Similar to the role of Devushkin in Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk, he is the polyphonic medium caught in a love triangle between his foster family’s daughter and their Machiavellian enemy. Vanya takes in Nellie, a child left with nothing but her illness from extreme destitution. The plot converges on the consequences of her family’s dissension.

It read like a soapy drama, at first, and quite often had me reeling from the onslaught of struggle and turmoil set against the characters. Everyone suffers as a result of their choices afflicted by societal pressures, vulnerability, and submit to their trauma: their “egoism of suffering”. They experience unrequited loves, youthful passion, humiliation, and collectively suffer from the human condition as I have two centuries later in empathetic tears. In its bittersweet conclusion, before my stinging eyes could betray me, my lips quavered into a deep, puckered frown at Nellie’s pure resolve to remember her painful life leading up to her becoming orphaned. Succumbing to her despair and humiliation, young Nellie would die a few days later, leaving her mark on the Ikhmenevs and its readers.

I cry when the dog dies, at The End of the World (Part I), over euthanasia, and when Charlie buries Algernon. While Death is a de facto element of these remarkable but sad stories, Death is not negative or something to be avoided. Often I cry not for the death of these individual characters, but for the understanding manifested out of utter loss—a testament of strength to be able to reflect trial after trial—and my quest to search for meaning in life. We live as we suffer as we die, having relationships with one another that alter the course of our lives. There is so much beauty in the mundanity of emotions captured throughout his works. Dostoevsky never fails to immortalize the poignancy of our desires and allows us to sympathize and exercise our capacity to feel, affect us and move us deeply to act righteously as Nellie’s melancholic story has.

The cultivation of emotional intelligence leads to a more beautiful human nature, awakening The Alchemist inside every single one of us. Pain speaks many languages, and the nectar of knowledge will yet be the answer to the suffering and “the [artful, artistic] cruelty of man”, as Dostoevsky describes it.

Today we are less inclined to reach for a book, despite the growing clamor of souls feeling misguided, disavowed, and humiliated. Books have the power to let us examine our thoughts and identify the things that may drive us, unite, and separate us.

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” - Franz Kafka, in Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

Friends, family, (internet): what book has utterly cleaved you within to release the sea ?