Dostoyevsky

"Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged."

— Ernest Hemingway (via tealrallythong)

"I have taken to celebrating the anniversaries of my sensations, the anniversary of something that was delightful at one time, of something that actually never occurred. I am reduced to celebrating anniversaries because I no longer have anything with which to replace even those silly, flimsy dreams. For dreams… have to be renewed too"

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s White Nights (via tealrallythong)

Kurosawa’s The Idiot.

(Source: namelesshere)

"Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad."

— Fyodor Dostoevsky (via theclutterismine)

"Yes, yes, it ended in my corrupting them all! How it could have happened I do not know, but I remember it clearly. The dream encompassed thousands of years and left in me only a vague sensation of the whole. I only know that the cause of the Fall was I. Like a horrible trichina, like the germ of the plague infecting whole kingdoms, so did I infect with myself all that happy earth that knew no sin before me…"

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.

The Letter That Got Dostoyevsky Exiled

In 1847, Vissarion Belinsky misinterpreted Gogol’s newest collection of stories and accused him of being anti-abolitionist. Gogol could actually care less about the serfs. Belinsky wrote a famous letter response to Gogol and it was so radical at the time that it could not be published in Russia until 1906.

However, the copied manuscript was read aloud in different radical groups including the Petrashevsky Circle. Dostoyevsky read Belinsky’s letter aloud to the Petrashevsky Circle and afterwards was convicted and exiled to Siberia.

"People are constantly complaining that we have no practical men; that we have, for instance, hundreds of politicians and hundreds of generals; that one can find as many business managers of all sorts as one wants nowadays, but that we have no practical men. At least everyone is complaining that there are not any to be found… "

— the narrator in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.

Fyodor Dostoevsky statue in Moscow (via http://bartschaneman.wordpress.com/category/russia/ ).

“The idea of the story cannot run counter to your magazine’s; on the contrary. It is a psychological account of a crime. A young man expelled from the university, a bourgeois by origin and living in extreme poverty, lighthearted, unstable in his ideas, has surrendered to several strange, “unfinished” ideas which are in the air. He decided to get out of his bad position at one stroke. He decided to kill an old woman, a Titular Councillor’s wife, who lent money on interest… “

- Dostoevsky’s draft of a letter to M.N. Katkov (an editor) in 1865 describing his ideas for a novel which would later become Crime and Punishment.

Camera: Nikon D70
Aperture: f/8
Exposure: 1/1600th
Focal Length: 28mm

"I am a ridiculous man. They call me a madman now. That would be a distinct rise in my social position were it not that they still regard me as being as ridiculous as ever. But that does not make me angry any more. They are all dear to me now even while they laugh at me - yes, even then they are for some reason particularly dear to me…"

— Fyodor Dostevsky’s opening lines from The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877).

Mariinsky Hospital, Moscow

Dostoyevsky soviet stamp

First page from the first edition of Brothers Karamazov.

Dostoyevsky@Dresden

Dostoyevsky@Omsk (The Cross Bearing)

Dostoyevsky Comics.