Letteratura e arte ungherese, e altro

ALBERTO MANGUEL

The most remarkable book I’ve read this year was recommended to me by Cees Nooteboom: a fifty-page-long essay by the Hungarian scholar László Földényi, Dosztojevszkij Szibérában Hegelt Olvassa, és sírva fakad (Dostoevsky reads Hegel in Siberia and weeps). I have no Hungarian, so I read it in a Spanish translation. Földényi suggests (quite plausibly) that Dostoevsky may have read Hegel’s Lessons in the Philosophy of World History in his Siberian prison, and that he deduced from Hegel’s philosophical methods the miseries of our present self-defeating society. I don’t think the essay has yet been translated into English and I urge any publisher not afraid of short books to consider it.