Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes

“Dostoevsky hardly fits the stereotype of ‘art for art’s sake’, but there are striking parallels between his aesthetic statements and those of Walter Pater, who in an essay from 1868 described the power of art in terms Dostoevsky would have found familiar: we are all condamnés, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve [. . .] we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among ‘the children of this world’, in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion – that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiple consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.8”
― Robert Bird, Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Though his impudence and inconstancy strained his relations with family and colleagues, Dostoevsky appears almost to have cultivated these stresses as major sources of his fiction, most directly of the novel Poor Folk, the first draft of which he completed about a year after resigning his commission. The novel, like almost all of Dostoevsky’s writing, is a study of the forces that constrain human freedom, both exterior forces such as money and power, and interior ones like illness and sexual desire. Moreover Dostoevsky immediately set about questioning the very distinction between the two realms, showing how subjective experience becomes objectified in material objects of desire and fear, and vice versa. However, like most of Dostoevsky’s fiction, Poor Folk also revealed his belief in the power of fiction to redeem the world by manifesting an imaginative realm in which freedom is – or, at least, can be – sovereign.”
― Robert Bird, Fyodor Dostoevsky