— The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Book 3, Chapter 3
About this quote
हिन्दी में
भयानक बात तो यह है कि सुंदरता जितनी भयावह है, उतनी ही अबूझ भी।
What it means
The sentence hinges on as well as. Beauty being terrible would be bearable — you could stay away from it. Beauty being mysterious would be bearable too — you could study it. What he calls awful is the pair: a force strong enough to wreck a life, which also gives no reading of which way it is pulling until the pulling is done.
The word doing the most damage is terrible, and it is usually softened in quotation into something like awe-inspiring, as if the line were praising beauty for having depth. It means dangerous. The claim underneath is that beauty is not evidence of anything — a thing can be lovely and still be an argument for ruin, and nothing in the loveliness will tell you which you are looking at.
What it teaches you
When something strikes you as beautiful — a person, a plan, a sentence — register that you have reported a pull, not made a judgement. The pull is accurate information about you and almost none about where it leads. Holding those two apart costs nothing when the beauty is harmless, and is the entire difference when it is not.
अर्थ और सीख
यह पंक्ति कहती है कि सुंदरता की सबसे डरावनी बात यह नहीं कि वह भयावह है, बल्कि यह कि वह भयावह होने के साथ-साथ अबूझ भी है — वह खींचती है, पर यह नहीं बताती कि किस ओर। यहाँ ‘भयावह’ का अर्थ ‘विस्मयकारी’ नहीं, सचमुच ख़तरनाक है। सीख यह कि किसी चीज़ का सुंदर लगना इस बात का प्रमाण नहीं कि वह भली भी है।
Where it comes from
Dmitri Karamazov, trying to explain why beauty is not a safe subject. His argument is that beauty is a battlefield rather than a comfort — that the ideal of the Madonna and the ideal of Sodom can live in the same heart.
Read alone, the sentence sounds like an aesthetic observation. In the novel it is a confession about his own divided appetites, made in the middle of a sentence he cannot finish cleanly.
