"Beauty Will Save the World" - Fyodor Dostoevsky
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| Fyodor Dostoevsky |
What comes to mind when you first hear it? Perhaps the same thoughts that came to Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as he expressed in his Nobel Prize Speech in 1970:
“Beauty will save the world.” What sort of statement is that? For a long time, I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes – but whom has it saved?
What Dostoevsky means is not the beauty we see in our day-to-day lives, but indeed what we feel. By beauty, Dostoevsky means inner beauty, the beauty everyone holds. It's not the facial value the beauty the face holds because facial beauty may change on the basis of the observer, but Dostoevsky is talking about something on an inner level, the beauty everyone holds but only few admire. Dostoevsky is talking about the beauty of art, the beauty of hope, the beauty of love, the beauty of the tasks we perform, the beauty of our life and its activities.
As Solzhenitsyn further shares in his speech:
There is, however, a certain peculiarity in the essence of beauty, a peculiarity in the status of art: namely, the convincingness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable and it forces even an opposing heart to surrender. It is possible to compose an outwardly smooth and elegant political speech, a headstrong article, a social program, or a philosophical system on the basis of both a mistake and a lie. What is hidden, what is distorted, will not immediately become obvious.
There is beauty in everything in the world; it just depends on the eye of the observer how they like to observe it. Dostoevsky wants us to adopt this viewpoint, the viewpoint that sees the beauty around us and stops complaining about the experiences one is facing at the moment and instead admires its beauty.
In that case, Dostoevsky’s remark, “Beauty will save the world,” was not a careless phrase but a prophecy? After all, he was granted to see much, a man of fantastic illumination. - Solzhenitsyn