And Did Dostoevsky Say ‘Beauty Will Save’

Leave a Comment / By Paul Hughes / November 18, 2024

Short answer: he did not.

Neither did Prince Myshkin, that we know of.

Likely both believed it. Beauty — in the person of Christ — will do so.

And clearly D wrote of M in The Idiot to explore art and beauty and ugliness and salvation.

But did he say it, and did he believe that a person could live so as to embody it — to re-incarnate Christ in our lives.

He did not.

Some discussion of it here.

And herein my longer treatment of it, tho not long enough.

For this we need life eternal, and the Life.

Image:
The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb [detail]
Hans Holbein the Younger, via the Public Domain

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"The difference between writing for stage and for television is almost an optical one. Language on the stage has to be slightly larger than life because it is being heard in a much larger space. Plot counts for less on the television screen because one is seeing the characters at closer quarters than in the theatre. The shape and plot of a stage play count for more in consequence of the distance between the audience and the action. A theatre audience has a perspective on a play as a television audience does not. The audience in a theatre is an entity as a television audience is not. On television the playwright is conversing. In the theatre he is (even when conversing) addressing a meeting. The stage aspires to the condition of art as television seldom does (which is not to say that it shouldn’t). The most that can be said for these plays in that respect is that occasionally they stray into literature. "

— Alan Bennett

Be still and know

And Did Dostoevsky Say ‘Beauty Will Save’

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Recent

Coyotes and Christians

And Did Dostoevsky Say ‘Beauty Will Save’

What I Recalled Watching Netflix

Seeking the King

Random

Burning and Bleeding

Happy in Our Work

Tubercular Dude

You’re Doing It Wrong

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Finding Level

Covidomatic Libs

More Research Necessary

Trusting Taylor Sheridan

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