Fyodor Dostoevsky

Por eso, es posible plantear que no hay una esencia comun del Mal, un minimo denominador comun que involucre sus diversas modalidades de expresion, a pesar de que filosofos tan respetables como Nietzsche consideren que su fuente principal se encuentra en el resentimiento, o escritores tan portentosos como Dostoyevski se lo atribuyan a la incapacidad para amar; otros, los mas, creen que en la envidia o en la venganza o el orgullo se anida cualquier intencion maligna.

La tragedia griega, los Ensayos de Montaigne y los dramas de Shakespeare son obras literarias profundamente filosoficas; en Rusia, por ejemplo, jamas ha existido una tradicion de filosofia sistematica, pero si, con las novelas de Dostoyevski y Tolstoi, la mas filosofica de las literaturas.

But the play is realistic in some more subtle sense of the word." The effort to appeal to a general audience takes its toll: "Dostoyevski is better than [the novelist John] Grisham in the sense that Tiger Woods is a better golfer than Lady Gaga." Well, yes, but the author also faults John Updike's prose for drawing "discreet attention to its own cleverness." In contrast you might say that some of Eagleton's sentences draw indiscreet attention to their own cleverness.

My initial attempt looked at the high cultural side of the equation, in fact, the construction of literary high culture itself as a product of an academy shaped by Jews like myself--adepts of a high academic culture that systematically overvalued (in Alfred Kazin's words) "the nasty anti-Semites" like Celine, Eliot, Dostoyevski and, less so, Henry James, whose relations to aestheticism and decadence had been my dissertation project and provided the subject of my first book.