Skip to main content

The Charm of Falsehood

 


The Dream of a Ridiculous Man is a short story by Dostoevsky. The narrator-protagonist is a total misfit in the human world. “Oh, how hard it is to be the only one who knows the truth!” He reflects. The truth he knows makes him a ridiculous man first and later a mad man.

He knows that human life is absurd. That is the truth he knows. He is incapable of loving that life. He cannot accept the normal human jealousies, greed, mendacity, and so on. He is utterly frustrated and wants to kill himself. He buys a revolver and wants to fire the bullet right into his brain.

One day, while walking towards home in the night contemplating suicide, a little girl of eight tugs at his elbow frantically. The girl’s mother is in some danger and wants urgent help. The girl looks absolutely miserable wearing tattered clothes and torn shoes. The protagonist does not feel any sympathy for the girl. He pushes the girl away and walks off.

At home, the girl rises in his consciousness. He wonders why he did not feel pity for that helpless little creature. Why was he not even able to feel shame at his behaviour? Thinking about the wretchedness of human life, he falls asleep. He has a dream.

In the dream he picks up his revolver and shoots at his heart. Heart, not the brain as he had planned originally, he reassures us. When the coffin shakes on the shoulders of its carriers to the grave, our protagonist who is lying in that coffin realises without any doubt that he is dead. He is buried now.

Lying in his grave, he challenges the supernatural power, if there is any, saying that he would not surrender to its tyranny. After a while, he is carried to the space by a mysterious creature to a world that looks similar to the earth and yet is entirely different.

There are men and women in that world. But they are innocent. They are like children in their gaiety and playfulness. They sing songs and eat fruits and honey. There is no jealousy or quarrel of any sort among them. On the contrary, they appreciate one another for what they do. There is hardly any illness among them. Death is a peaceful affair like sleep. They have no temples or idols. Yet they have a sense of spirituality, a sense of oneness with the whole universe. Theirs is a utopia, the protagonist realises. Is it heaven?

The protagonist teaches those people to lie. To utter falsehood. Just for fun. It doesn't ever occur to him that the “fun” he introduces in that utopia will turn it into a dystopia so quickly. The heaven becomes a hell sooner than anyone could imagine. The people enjoy telling lies. They love “the charm of falsehood”. They deceive each other. They begin to view things as “mine and thine”. They divide themselves into us and them. Temples and idols come up soon for the different factions among them. A few become the custodians of knowledge and knowledge gains precedence over tender emotions. Slavery becomes a virtue. Those who talk of love and harmony are ridiculed and even tortured. Soon enough, wars start in the erstwhile utopia. All because of the frivolous falsehood that our protagonist introduced for fun.

The protagonist tries his best to make them understand that their earlier world was far, far superior. But they refuse to listen to him. He asks them to crucify him for his sin of corrupting them. They think he is mad. They conspire to throw him in a madhouse.

The protagonist wakes up from his dream. He is now a transformed person. He has seen both heaven and hell. He has seen how a heaven can be converted into a hell easily. Falsehood is a catastrophe. Falsehood enchants too. The protagonist wants to teach his new knowledge to people. He starts preaching. He preaches that we can be “beautiful and happy” easily.  

People don’t believe him, however. They scoff him for being a dreamer. They think he is under a hallucination.

The story ends with our protagonist finding out that little girl who had approached him that other night for help.

He won’t need his revolver anymore. Better still, he will live a happy life because he has learnt the secret of genuine happiness. He has seen the border between truth and falsehood. He has learnt that the charms of falsehood are delusions.

PS. You can download Dostoevsky’s story here: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

PPS. Praful Khoda Patel’s Lakshadweep reminded me of this story.

Comments

  1. Very nice. Enjoyed reading this one with a great message.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hari OM
    I am a fan of Dostoevsky - as you say, never disappoints!

    The subject certainly touches upon the subjects I have chose to write about today and tomorrow on Aatmaavrajanam, for I sense there is a rising tide of concern about how the world is now - yet we lack a blanket 'dream' to return our full humanity! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We need to relearn to dream, dream big...

      I'll definitely go through your posts related to the theme.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...

Dharma and Destiny

  Illustration by Copilot Designer Unwavering adherence to dharma causes much suffering in the Ramayana . Dharma can mean duty, righteousness, and moral order. There are many characters in the Ramayana who stick to their dharma as best as they can and cause much pain to themselves as well as others. Dasharatha sees it as his duty as a ruler (raja-dharma) to uphold truth and justice and hence has to fulfil the promise he made to Kaikeyi and send Rama into exile in spite of the anguish it causes him and many others. Rama accepts the order following his dharma as an obedient son. Sita follows her dharma as a wife and enters the forest along with her husband. The brotherly dharma of Lakshmana makes him leave his own wife and escort Rama and Sita. It’s all not that simple, however. Which dharma makes Rama suspect Sita’s purity, later in Lanka? Which dharma makes him succumb to a societal expectation instead of upholding his personal integrity, still later in Ayodhya? “You were car...