Hey, Pope Francis and I have something in common: admiration for Dostoyevsky and Guardini.
I went on a major Fyodor kick in my twenties. I read all his major works (except The Idiot, which, for some reason, I could never penetrate) and even bought A Writer's Diary and got about 100 pages into it (which left me well short of the goal line 1,300 pages away).
The Diary, incidentally, isn't a diary at all. It's not one man's reckless rambling to himself. It's written that way, but intentionally so. From my edition's Introductory Study: "[O]ne need only compare the published Writer's Diary with its notebooks to see how much processing was necessary to present the illusion of spontaneity."
One of my favorite quotes from that first 100 pages: "Don't you see that loving the universal man means surely to scorn and sometimes even to hate the real man standing next to you?"
BTW: If you want a great study of Dostoyevsky, get de Lubac's masterpiece, The Drama of Atheist Humanism
. It's a great book from start to finish, but the chapters on Dostoyevsky move on every level: spiritual, emotional, intellectual. If there were a Kindle version, I'd probably buy it. Back when I first tried to buy the book, it was out of print, so I copied it page-by-page at the Notre Dame library and that's the only copy I have to this day.
