A Curse on Dostoevsky by Atiq Rahimi Read Free Book Online

in his hands. He can destroy you with a single breath. Don’t be arrogant. Present your life simply and humbly: you spent a few years in Russia, in Leningrad … No, better call it Saint Petersburg. Speak about your setbacks, the conflict with your communist father who sent you to study in the USSR against your will. You only stayed three years, from ’86 to ’89. Over there, you knew a girl whom you called
Kissenka
, poppet. No, don’t mention the love affair with a Russian girl. This mujahideen wouldn’t approve of that kind of thing with an unbeliever. Just write that you met aDostoevsky scholar who gave you an initial book,
Crime and Punishment
, which changed your life. You gave it all up …
    No! That’s far too long to write. You have to be concise, precise.
    He starts describing his life, but has barely written the first sentence when he is interrupted by the man’s rich and thoughtful voice. He is reading aloud from one of the handwritten pages—Rassoul’s translated passages from
Crime and Punishment
—and stops to say that he read
The Devils
a long time ago, but not this book. Rassoul leaps up and rummages through his papers to find his translation of the back cover of
Crime and Punishment
. He finds it and gives it to the man, who takes it and reads into his beard:
“The founding act of the novel is the student Raskolnikov’s murder of an old moneylender, in her flat in Saint Petersburg. Raskolnikov’s reflection on the motive for his crime, plus the influence of Sonia or a mysterious inner impulse, leads him to hand himself in and freely agree to punishment. It is during his years of hard labor that he becomes aware of his love for Sonia, and the path to redemption.”
He nods his head in admiration, then says out loud: “An excellent lesson for murderers.” Rassoul bites his lips, these lips that move in vain, unable to express the thousand things he has to say about the book. He would like to explain, for the hundredth time, the motives of that murder: it was not only for robbery—to Raskolnikov, the moneylender isan evil beast who steals from people in desperate straits, and therefore killing her is an act of justice; by doing it, Raskolnikov claims his membership of a race of superior beings who exist “beyond good and evil”; for him, his murder is the supreme transgression of the moral and social code, and strikes a blow for independence and freedom, like all the great men in history—Mohammed, Napoleon …
    What a shame!
    “… It looks like an interesting book. A mystical story,” persists the man seriously. And Rassoul continues to curse his muteness, his inability to explain that indeed Dostoevsky is not a revolutionary or a communist, but a mystic. He has said this countless times, but his Russian lecturers would never agree; they didn’t approve of that sort of eastern interpretation. And in any case, they couldn’t stand Dostoevsky. In Russia, the communists hated him. They wouldn’t accept that Dostoevsky’s thought went beyond individual psychology to dwell on the metaphysical. This book is best read in Afghanistan, a land previously steeped in mysticism, where people have lost their sense of responsibility. Rassoul is convinced that teaching it here would decrease the number of murders!
    What naivety!
    Forget Dostoevsky, save yourself, pay attention to this man who is saying to you: “As soon as you get your voice back, come and see me and we’ll discuss all this in a civilized manner.”
    OK, nods Rassoul, lethargically.
    “My boys won’t give you any more trouble,” says the man, gathering up the books. Then he looks curiously at Rassoul, remembering something: “There is one thing that intrigues me.”
    What?
    “Jano tells me that when they came in, you tried to run away. Why?”
    No, he didn’t want to run away, honestly. He was having a nightmare. The door and the window were jammed shut and he was unable to open them. Look how he has injured his