![]() ![]() Or it's Ivan and the great story of "The Grand Inquisitor,". , it was Raskolnikov with Crime and Punishment, this person who thinks faith is all superstition and that his reason alone will raise him above human morality - but of course it doesn't. "I think faith is still something that's ever present in art, even when the artist is unaware of it" Everyone was saying the intellect is going to finally rise above the notion of faith in the world. What does it mean to be a person of faith, particularly a Christian in this case, in a world that, if you recall, was post-Enlightenment? It was the industrial revolution. A lot of his writings, in particular The Brothers Karamazov, grapple with what that even means. Dostoyevsky was very famously Russian Orthodox. I'd probably talk to him about how his struggle with his faith informed his artistic endeavors. ![]() ![]() Since you now have a show where you interview writers, what would you ask Dostoyevsky, if you could? Reza Aslan ![]() But when someone does that to you, it changes everything. That's why there are so few really great writers. They're emotions that you have tucked away in the back of your brain in the deepest, darkest regions of your identity, and suddenly someone steps forward and says, "Not only do I know what that emotion is, I'm going to describe it in words." The best thing a writer can do is to put into words emotions that you have always had but have never been able to actually verbalize, to actually admit to yourself. How would you describe that feeling? Reza AslanĪs though the lights had been turned on and I'd been caught naked. I wanted to be a writer, and I've never wanted to be anything else. I thought to myself, "I want to make other people feel the way that Dostoyevsky just made me feel," and that was it. I finished it, and I had this feeling I had never felt before. Instead of going to the dean's office, I sat on a bench outside to finish it. I was at the very end of the book when you finally discover who the murderer was. I just want to clarify that I got detention in English class for reading Dostoyevsky. I pulled it out again, and he said, "Put it away." I did, but I pulled it out again, and he gave me detention. The teacher caught me and said, "Put it away," and I did. I was sitting in my English class, reading it under the desk. I just thought, how cool would I be if I read this book? I started reading it, and I could not stop. I didn't want to read it, so I found this book and it was by a Russian author and it was 1,000 pages, and I knew nothing about it. "I thought to myself, 'I want to make other people feel the way that Dostoyevsky just made me feel,' and that was it" We were all reading James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, which I thought was awful. I'd always been very interested in reading and in literature, and I was in the advanced English class, but it wasn't all that advanced. I didn't go to a very good public school in California in the Bay Area. I was 16 years old, and it was The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The first book he read that changed his life Reza Aslan This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. We talked about Dostoyevsky, Wolf Hall, and Star Trek, among other things. In keeping with that theme, I wanted to ask Aslan about the books that have inspired him - and which of his own pieces he's most proud of (in spite of the fact that, like many writers, he's endlessly self-critical). Aslan is quite simply interested in what his guests might think about things beyond their work, but he's also interested in their working lives, their writing processes, and the technical details of that work. Airing on the Ovation cable network (a channel dedicated to the arts), Rough Draft features Aslan talking with different types of writers - though his season one guests mostly work in television - about their philosophies of life, their work, and their art. But Aslan also loves to talk about the craft of writing, about other writers whose work he's loved, and the sheer joy of a perfectly wrought sentence.Īslan recently brought that love to television with his new talk show, Rough Draft. That might seem like an obvious thing to say about a writer who's known for several approachable but scholarly nonfiction works about religion, including Zealot and No god but God, among others. ![]()
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