Cohen Wonders What Would Happen If Dostoevsky Had Google

It's a brilliant piece, just for fun, by one of my favorite bloggers, Richard Lawrence Cohen. I, in turn, couldn't help wondering how Dostoevsky would react if he read Richard's post and felt compelled to comment on it (also just for fun):

It was nearly midnight when I read your post, Richard Ivanovich. I was in no mood for reading the words of a pre-Revolutionary pontificator and yet, I found I could not tear my eyes from the screen before me.

I wanted to shout, "It does not matter who said it, Richard Ivanovich, any more than it matters whether 'A Million Little Pieces' is factual or not. Whether it was Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn, the statement is true."

And it is true, isn't it? The line between good and evil truly is drawn not between nations or parties, but through every human heart.

Indeed, I found as I wearily read your words that line between good and evil divided my own heart. I moved from pity for you to disgust.

What is wrong with Richard Ivanovich?, I wondered. What has happened for him to have become so distracted? What might he do under such conditions? What might I do to him?

Freud would say, I suppose, that my friend will surrender to deeper and deeper levels of madness until it might become thinkable for him to murder his landlord. Jarred by the imperfections of his memories, he might be lured into undertaking the perfect crime against a person he deems superfluous, as scandalously incorrect and as unworthy of life as a person who would attribute words to Solzhenitsyn that most probably belong to Dostoevsky, words that might not have been written by Dotoevsky, but were surely thought by him.

Once imperfection impinges on the sensitive mind of someone like Richard Ivanovich, I reflected, a slow unraveling of the psyche might happen, one that could make the gravest acts of bestiality thinkable.

I began to perspire profusely. I needed a drink. But there was nothing to drink in this miserable little apartment overlooking Gorky Park. I put on my paper-thin sweater and went out into the wintry street. A single street light illuminated my way as I trudged through the snow, the only sound that of a sleigh, its deformed bell emitting a sorrowful peel that filled me with foreboding. I purposed to go to a pawnbroker. There, I would sell the brooch I stole from my landlord, hopefully securing enough money to buy a drink to steady my nerves.

But when I arrived, I found that no one in the darkened room answered my insistent knocking. Overwhelmed, I fell down in the snow and wept. "Where is God?" I sobbed. "Where is Richard Ivanovich? Where can I get a drink? Where is my copy of 'Crime and Punishment'?"