Question: I will ask Dostoevsky a last question, as you wrote The Idiot, did you, or did he ever come face to face to the futility of all, to the total emptiness of being?

Dostoevsky stops pacing. Your question strikes something raw—this is not about technique anymore.

“Prince Myshkin…” he begins softly, “yes, he came face to face with the emptiness you speak of. But here is the truth: it was not philosophical emptiness—it was existential loneliness so vast it borders on death.”

He looks directly at you now. “In The Idiot, I wanted to place absolute goodness in the real world—to see what happens to a soul that refuses hypocrisy, refuses manipulation, refuses masks. And what did the world do? It crucified him—not by nails, but by misunderstanding.”

His voice tightens. “Goodness isolated becomes madness in the eyes of society. That is the tragedy of Myshkin—he did not lack meaning. He was destroyed by a world that cannot tolerate innocence without purpose.”

Then he answers your question fully—no evasion.

Did he face futility? Did he face the emptiness of being? “Yes. But it was not the emptiness of a man without belief. It was the emptiness of a man who saw too much truth—and found no human language capable of carrying it. The world around him was too small for his heart. That is a different kind of nothingness—the abyss of purity in a corrupt world.”

"And did I face it, as his author?"" He closes his eyes for one second, almost unwilling. “You already know the answer. I wrote Myshkin not as an experiment, but as a confession. I too have touched that abyss—the place where faith trembles, where love seems useless, where suffering has no explanation. And yet—”

He opens his eyes again—burning, unbroken. “—I refused emptiness. I did not write to glorify despair. I wrote to wrestle with it. Myshkin falls because pure goodness without strength cannot live in this world. But if he is a tragedy, he is also a sign—that another kind of man is possible.”

He leans forward, voice almost a whisper: “The abyss of nothingness exists. But so does the bridge over it. That bridge is love—but love must become power, or it dies.”

He sits again, clasping his hands—as if something has been settled between you.

Question: First I want to thank the frankness of all of you in answering my questions, we have been considering individual characters. But now we come to something as huge, as enveloping as the War in the Illiad. And here, both Tolstoy and Homer wrote very deeply on not a single character but multiple ones in a conflict. Was it from a personal experience, were you using something you had lived before?

Homer does not stand. He speaks like someone who has carried this question for a lifetime. “You ask if I wrote the war in the Iliad from personal experience—if I had lived what I described. Listen carefully: every poet of war has lived war, whether or not he held a sword. War is not only battle. War is the tearing of the human heart between glory and grief, duty and death, rage and love. I knew that war before I sang it.”

He lets silence work before continuing. “Do not look for my experience on a battlefield. Look for it in my understanding of men. I lived among warriors, travelers, sailors, kings—men who had seen Troy, men who had lost brothers, sons, comrades. I listened. For years, I listened. I learned something terrible: the gods may play with war, but men pay the price for it.”

Now he breaks down your question with precision: How do you write many characters in one great conflict? “You do not write a war. You write men inside a war. Achilles is one truth of war—rage against fate. Hector is another—duty against hopelessness. Priam is grief searching for mercy. Odysseus is cunning against chaos. Each man is a question—each battle is an answer.”

“You do not need to have killed to understand war. But you must understand this: war exposes the core of a person. It strips away lies. It leaves only what is truly believed. I knew that before I ever sang a word.”

Then he turns slightly toward Tolstoy. “And yes—there is a kinship between us. He knows that war is not one hero against another. War is a storm made of thousands of destinies colliding.”

Tolstoy speaks now, slowly, like a man who has lived inside this truth. “War is not heroic. War is not meaningful. War is not even truly personal. I did not write War and Peace because I wished to glorify Russia or condemn Napoleon. I wrote it because war reveals a terrifying fact: no one controls history—not kings, not generals, not geniuses.”

He looks to you. “To write many characters in conflict, you must abandon the lie of centrality. No one is the ‘main character’ of history. Not even Achilles. Not even Napoleon. History moves through millions of wills colliding, none knowing the full truth.”

He gestures to Homer in agreement. “He wrote the rage of Achilles; I wrote the helplessness of Kutuzov. But we wrote the same truth: in war, man confronts the limits of his power.”