Latest Posts by dostoevskyswife - Page 4

the urge to ignore your assigned summer readings in favour of starting yet another Dostoevsky book that will ruin your life

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating.”

— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

"For ever shall we be in quest of the shores, that we may sing and be heard. But what of the wave that breaks where no ear shall hear? It is the unheard in us that nurses our deeper sorrow. Yet it is also the unheard which carves our soul to form and fashion our destiny"

Khalil Gibran, The Garden of The Prophet

people will clown on me for this because he killed two people but I just love how sweet Rodya is. He is so cruel and mean and uncouth a lot or even most of the time, but then he does things like constantly thoughtlessly give the last of his money away to anyone who needs it more than him, cries when he’s in his psychotic episode and can’t remember who Razumikhin is, has that very sweet and tender moment with Polenka, begs the police to get a doctor for Marmeladov and says he’ll pay for it despite having nothing at all himself. At the same time he is capable of terrible things and is often terrible specifically to the people who love him and want to help, and oscillates wildly between the two. It’s that juxtaposition that holds so much of the interest of the narrative itself for me. A lot of people focus on how awful he is and while that is also honestly such a fun part of his character, that alone is not what makes him compelling to me. I have so much tenderness for his character despite what he’s done because he is just so mentally ill and has been through and been witness to so much hardship. He is not easy to love or understand but it’s so beautiful and sweet that Razumikhin, Sonya, his family and his other friends love him so dearly anyway. I truly think the suffering he is constantly surrounded by is the thing that has driven him to psychosis. Specifically I think of when he goes to the police station in part two and says he has been “shattered by poverty.” In these little moments of sweetness and lucidity towards others, even in the depths of his illness, we can still see the little boy in him who so desperately wanted to help that poor horse.

May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

— Anaïs Nin, from The Voice

'I love humanity,' he said, 'but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.'

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

snoopy after reading white nights by dostoevsky

I love Dostoevsky. I just don’t love him, I’m a Dostoevsky’s girl, I’m whatever he would want me to be. When I say I love him I don’t mean I just love ‘love’ him but I relate to him in every way a person would relate to another person, I relate to the words he wrote and I even relate to the words others wrote about him. In reality I would just do anything in my power to relate to him, my whole personality and the way I turned out as a person is based on Fyodor Dostoevsky. SO IF YOU EVER SEE DOSTOEVSKY TELL HIM I LOVE HIM.

Andrea Gibson, The Madness Vase

as soon as you feel the summer melancholy creep in on you and your brain is telling you to rot in bed BITCH NO you just need to swim in a lake and dry in the sun

Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

“I mistrust illuminations: what we take for a discovery is very often only a familiar thought that we have not recognized.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet

“Everything has been figured out,

except how to live.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

Jean-Paul Sartre

prince myshkin every time he meets someone, for some reason

you know that man vs bear conversation ppl are having? dostoy gets it

there's something about Dostoyevsky characters suddenly bursting into tears that just hits different

“Compassion was the most important, perhaps the sole law of human existence.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

dostoevsky was so funny in the sense that he’ll start a story/novel by saying “and please forgive me if i’ve omitted important details or facts, but if i mention everything with full explanation i would fill a very large volume!” and then describes every little thing, emotion, feeling and thought his characters are having like yes king !! go off the rails !! oh you’re saying 400 pages aren’t enough for your little story?? no worries!! cause we don’t mind reading a 700+ page retelling of a story !! people in their teens and 20 somethings yearn for your writings !!!

hey sorry your boyfriend said that russian classics are about that life is bleak. yeah he meant dostoyevsky and tolstoy. no, he didn't look beyond any of the lowest lows of the stories. he didn't even see the overarching themes of beauty and hope and connection. frankly we have all been laughing about him and we're gonna beat him up now. sorry

–Beau Taplin