Dostoevsky Quotes

“His unrivaled genius as an ideological novelist was this capacity to invent actions and situations in which ideas dominate behavior without the latter becoming allegorical. He possessed what I call an eschatological imagination, one that could envision putting ideas into action and then following them out to their ultimate consequences. At the same time, his characters respond to such consequences according to the ordinary moral and social standards prevalent in their milieu, and it is the fusion of these two levels that provides Dostoevsky's novels with both their imaginative range and their realistic grounding in social life.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“On Tolstoy vs. Dostoyevsky: Tolstoy depicted the life “which existed in the stable Moscow landowners’ family of the middle-upper stratum.” Such a life was the life of the exceptions. The life of the majority on the other hand, was one of confusion and moral chaos. Dostoevsky’s work was an attempt to grapple with the chaos of the present, while Tolstoy’s were pious efforts to enshrine for posterity the beauty of a gentry life already vanishing and doomed to extinction.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“The atmosphere of man’s soul is composed of the union of heaven and earth; what an unnatural child man is; the law of spiritual nature is broken… It seems to me that the world has taken on a negative meaning, and that from roof hi, refined spirituality there has emerged satire.”

Dostoyevsky was beginning to think of human life as an eternal struggle between the material in the spiritual in man’s nature; and he would always continue to regard the world as a Purgatory, who's trials and triangulations serve the supreme purpose of more purification.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“For the young man from Moscow whose head was filled with thoughts of the beautiful and sublime, the moral mediocrity of his comrade came as a withering disillusionment. And if he had been out raged by the incident of the government courier, one can well imagine his horror of the savagery of the upper classes toward all those to whom they stood in a position of authority.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“I have such an awful, repulsive character. Sometimes, when my heart is full of love, you can’t get a kind word out of me. My nerves don’t obey me at such moments. I am ridiculous and disgusting, and I always suffer from the unjust conclusions drawn about me. People say that I am callous and without a heart. I can show that I am a man with a heart and with love only when external circumstances themselves, accidents, jolt me forcibly out of my usual nastiness. Otherwise I am disgusting. I attribute this lack of balance to illness.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“The suffering of the world, the mystery of the universe, the impulse towards the sublime in love and heroism, the grief and despair over a dreamt of but unattainable beatitude, the hamlet-like visits to cemeteries, the romantic parlour, romantic beards, and romantic haircuts-all these and similar things gave evidence of restive spirits. It was expected and feared that they would join conspiratorial sects and rise with arms in their hand the moment they had the chance.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“If it was his mother who had given birth to him in the flesh, it was Pushkin who had given birth to him in the world of the spirit.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“And there will come a time – I fervently believe it – when no one will be burned, no one will be decapitated, when the criminal will plead for death… And death will be denied him… When there will be no senseless forms and rites, no contract and stipulations on feeling, no duty and obligation, and we shall not yield to will but to love alone; when there will be no husbands and wives, but lovers and mistresses, and when the mistress comes to the lover saying: ‘I love another,’ the lover will answer: ‘I cannot be happy without you, I shall suffer all my life, but go to him whom you love,’ and will not accept her sacrifice,... but like God, will say to her: I want blessings, not sacrifices… There will be neither rich nor poor, neither kings nor subject, there will be brethren, there will be men, and, at the word of the Apostle Paul, Christ will pass his power to the Father, and Father-Reason will hold sway once more, but this time in a new heaven and above a new world.”

This will be the realisation, as Belinsky rightly says himself, of the dream of “the Golden Age,” and this dream is what Belinsky refers to as “Socialism.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“The most unbearable misfortune is when you yourself become unjust, malignant, vile; you realize it, you even reproach yourself—but you just can’t help it.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“Rise, prophet, rise, and hear, and see, And let my words be seen and heard By all who turn aside from me. And burn them with my fiery word.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“Lamennais’s work is a powerful “new Christian” attack on social injustice”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“His period of imprisonment also convinced him that the need for freedom, particularly the sense of being able to exercise one’s free will, was an ineradicable need of the human personality and could express itself even in apparently self-destructive forms if no other outlet were possible. Also, as Dostoevsky wrote himself, the four years he spent in the prison camp were responsible for “the regeneration of [his] convictions” on a more mundane level. This was a result of his growing awareness of the deep roots of traditional Christianity in even the worst of peasant criminals, who bowed down during the Easter service, with a clanking of chains, when the priest read the words “accept me, O Lord, even as the thief.” The basis of Dostoevsky’s later faith in what he considered the ineradicable Christian essence of the Russian people arose from such experiences.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“The most routine abstract thought,” he wrote, “very often struck him with an uncommon force and would stir him up remarkably. He was, in any case, a person in the highest degree excitable and impressionable. A simple idea, sometimes very familiar and commonplace, would suddenly set him aflame and reveal itself to him in all its significance. He, so to speak, felt thought with unusual liveliness. Then he would state it in various forms, sometimes giving it a very sharp, graphic expression, although not explaining it logically or developing its content” (3: 42). It is this inborn tendency of Dostoevsky to “feel thought” that gives his best work its special stamp, and why it is so important to locate his writings in relation to the evolution of ideas in his lifetime.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“His unrivaled genius as an ideological novelist was this capacity to invent actions and situations in which ideas dominate behavior without the latter becoming allegorical.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“«En todas las épocas, el hombre busca su autonomía, su libertad y, aunque arrastrado por la necesidad, no quiere actuar sino según su propia voluntad; no quiere ser un sepulturero pasivo del pasado ni una comadrona inconsciente del futuro; considera la historia como su obra libre e indispensable. Cree en su libertad como cree en la existencia del mundo exterior tal como se le presenta, porque confía en sus ojos y porque, sin esa confianza, no podría dar un paso. La libertad moral es, pues, una realidad psicológica o, si se quiere, antropológica».”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoievski: El escritor en su tiempo (Historia y Biografías)

“Crime and Punishment was a response to the ideas of another radical thinker, Dimitry Pisarev, who drew a sharp distinction between the slumbering masses and those superior individuals like Raskolnikov who believed they had a moral right to commit crimes in the interest of humanity. In the end, however, Raskolnikov discovers that his true motive was to test (unsuccessfully) whether he could overcome his Christian conscience to achieve such a goal.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“But the romantic dissatisfaction with the limits of earthly life and, in particular, it’s a positive valuation of more suffering always remained a feature of his own world view”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“My brother and I were then longing for a new life, we dreamt about something enormous, about everything beautiful and sublime; such touching words with and still fresh, and a third without irony.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“[Schelling] viewed art as an organ of metaphysical cognition. The vehicle through which the mysteries of the highest transcendental truths are revealed to mankind.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“Dostoyevsky had come to believe that “to love man like oneself, according to the commandment of Christ, is impossible. The law of personality on Earth binds. The ego stands in the way.” It is only in the afterlife that the “the law of personality” could be decisively overcome.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“His period of imprisonment also convinced him that the need for freedom, particularly the sense of being able to exercise one is free will, was an ineradicable need of the human personality and could express itself even in apparently self – destructive forms if no other outlet where possible.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“Mikhailovsky”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time