Dostoevsky’s Empathy
One of my favorite character studies is a brief section in Dostoyevsky&#x27;s <i>The House of the Dead</i>. The man truly understood people.<p><i>He was a man with a terrible strength of will and a proud awareness of his strength . . . [He] . . . was not really quite an ordinary mortal. . . . I can say unequivocally that never in my life have I met a man of stronger, more adamantine character. . . . This was truly a case of total victory over the flesh. It was evident that this man had a boundless self-mastery, that he had nothing but contempt for any kind of torture and punishment, and that he was not afraid of anything under the sun. All that could be seen in him was an infinite energy, a thirst for activity, for revenge, and for the attainment of the goal he had set himself. I was also struck by his strange arrogance. He looked at everything in an incredibly haughty manner. . . . I do not think that there was any being in the world that could have influenced him by its authority alone.</i>