ความคิดเห็นที่ 12
อาชญากรรมและการลงทัณฑ์ อ่านไม่ยากครับ อ่านแล้วติด วางไม่ลง จำสนพ.ที่แปลไม่ได้ แต่เข้าใจว่ามีขายลดราคาที่งานสัปดาห์หนังสือครับ
งาน 4 เล่มเอก Major Works ของเขา ผมเห็นพ้องกับนักวิจารณ์ว่า พี่น้องคารามาซอฟ เป็นงานที่ลุ่มลึกยิ่งใหญ่มากที่สุด ที่ไล่มาติดๆคือ Devil (Possessed) ส่วนอาชญากรรมและการลงทัณฑ์ เป็นเล่มที่เหมาะกับผู้เริ่มต้นอ่านดอสฯครับ
แม้แต่นาง ลอร่า บุช เคยบอกว่า เธอชอบหนังสือของดอสฯมาเป็นพิเศษ
First lady Laura Bush, on the occasion of the 2006 National Book Festival, stressed that one of her favorite books is Fyodor Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov." Bush noted her special admiration for the novel (which she has praised before) in the pages of the Wall Street Journal (Sept. 30):
"As I grew up I found 'The Brothers Karamazov' to be one of the deepest, most interesting of books I read -- one that was the most fun to re-read. Maybe I shouldn't say 'fun,' given that it is about spiritual struggle, but to read it over and over again at various times in my life was always rewarding. That includes the time I read the book while sitting by a swimming pool in Houston, when I worked as a teacher in the early 1970s."
The first lady fails to mention that "The Brothers Karamazov" has eloquent passages condemning the use of torture, a practice which her husband has shown, in the recent legislation his administration proposed to Congress, to be acceptable (under other designations) in the so-called war on terror. To be sure, no work of art can be reduced to a mere political statement, but the writings of one of Russia's greatest novelists -- himself the victim of czarist persecution -- reflect his repulsion toward torture.
Here is how Dostoevsky, sent to prison in 1849 for taking part in revolutionary action against the martinet Emperor Nicholas I, describes to his brother Mikhail the mock execution he had to endure on Nov. 16 of that year:
"They snapped swords over our heads, and they made us put on the white shirts worn by persons condemned to death. Thereupon we were bound in threes to stakes, to suffer execution. Being the third in the row, I concluded I had only a few minutes of life before me. I thought of you and your dear ones and I contrived to kiss Plestcheiev and Dourov, who were next to me, and to bid them farewell. Suddenly the troops beat a tattoo, we were unbound, brought back upon the scaffold, and informed that his Majesty had spared us our lives."
"One of the prisoners, Grigoryev, went mad as soon as he was untied, and never regained his sanity," notes a translator's preface to Dostoevsky's other great novel, "Crime and Punishment."
Dostoevsky's horror at torture -- which, for him, clearly was not just the product of his imagination -- is suggested by the words of the intellectual Ivan Karamazov to his saintly brother Alyosha:
"Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature -- that baby beating its breast, for instance -- and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.
'No, I wouldn't consent,' said Alyosha softly."
"All of us," says the U.N.'s Kofi Annan in his Message on International Day in Support of Victims of Torture (June 23, 2000), "must join the fight against torture and for justice. As we continue to build an international community of collective action, responsibility and conscience, it is worth recalling a question posed by Fyodor Dostoevsky in 'The Brothers Karamazov.' "
"Ivan's words remind us," writes the Chilean author Ariel Dorfman in The Guardian (May 8, 2004), "that torture is justified by those who apply and perform it: this is the price, it is implied, that needs to be paid by the suffering few in order to guarantee happiness for the rest of society, the enormous majority given security and wellbeing by those horrors inflicted in some dark cellar, some faraway pit, some abominable police station. Make no mistake: Every regime that tortures does so in the name of salvation, some superior goal, some promise of paradise."
Bush might wish to read the above passage from "The Brothers Karamazov" -- and the commentaries to it -- at the next White House event emphasizing the importance of books and reading. Doing so might at least suggest that she, sitting by her Houston swimming pool, had truly reflected about the Russian classic before her eyes.
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BlueWhiteRed
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18 ต.ค. 50 17:04:44
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