For his bicentenary, a documentary, like a thriller, analyzes the moment when the life of the Russian author, forced to write in the emergency to pay his lucky debts, bounces for the best and for the worst with The writing of his novel “the player”.
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To celebrate the 200 years of the birth of the Russian writer Fiodor Dostoevski, October 30, 1821 (November 11 in the Gregorian calendar), Arte offers a unique documentary of Rolf Lambert and Hedwig Schmutte, authors, in 2020 , a seizure “Friedrich Hölderlin. An absolute poet”, who already chose the revealing articulation to the ease of biopic.
“Fiodor Dostoyevski. Playing his life” opens on the genesis of the brief Roman the player who not only marks a turning point in the life and literary commitment of the writer, but unveils more than any other the temperament of man and the strength of an addiction to the game that determined his wanderings like his psychological impres.
The case is a thriller. Ever constrained by the debts it contracts, largely related to its addiction for the game, to write in the emergency, Fiodor Mikhailovitch Dostoevski signed a Leonin contract with the editor Fiodor Stellovski (1826-1875) which, which, Not content to have allocated a misery to the writer for his next novel, reserves the right to edit without any gratification, for nine years, all he will write if he does not give him the manuscript completed the 1 er November 1866.
Challenge a little crazy
Twenty-seven days of the deadline, Dostoevski did not write the slightest line of this narrative strongly inspired by his own life because it’s the pangs of a young player, similarly alienated by the table Game and his passion for a young beauty too proud to consider it. As at the game table, the writer has made mats. Can it reflect the bet?
It’s a young stenographer of just 20 years, Anna Grigorievna Snitkina (1846-1918), that he owes his salvation. For the first time, given the urgency, he dictates his text, alternating black tea and coffee by arpearing the room where he closed; And it is she who ensures the cleaning of the novel. The day before the fateful term, the player is ready, and the writer, that his publisher flees to win his bet, must file it in a police station to attest to his good right.
This a little crazy challenge turns out to be more than a rebound, a turning point. Soon Fiodor marry Anna, who, from his lifetime as beyond death, until his own disappearance – and she survives him thirty-seven years – will strive to defend his work. Starts above all, then, a footing against this madness of the game that compromises all the reestablishment of the material situation of the writer and threatens his creative fertility, the access of depression ruining the energy that lives it while it is chained The masterpieces: crime and punishment, the idiot, the demons …
It will be almost five years old, but finally, in the spring of 1871, Dostoyevski renounces the game and camps a new character, resolutely hostile to the young rebel he was, preservative now exalted and singing of messianic slavism.
In order not to lose the viewer, the authors certainly evoke the years of training, the political motion, the death sentence, the simulated execution and the deportation in Siberia, like the first writings of the one who, with Memories of the house of the dead, “invented” concentration literature. But the choice of the feverish pari in October 1866 reveals better than all the demons and fevers of a writer whose birthday deserves to compete with those of Flaubert and Baudelaire.