Quotes from Joseph Frank

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Here Dostoevsky draws what seems to him the moral of the revolutions of 1848, and applies it to the Russian situation... "Every society can accommodate only that degree of progress that it has developed and begun to understand. Why reach further, why reach for the stars in the sky? This can destroy everything because it can frighten everyone.

Mikhailovsky

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.

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.

Schelling] viewed art as an organ of metaphysical cognition. The vehicle through which the mysteries of the highest transcendental truths are revealed to mankind.

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.

Pouchkine était son père spirituel. Pouchkine domina la vie littéraire de Dostoïevski du début à la fin. C'est pour lui, l'idole littéraire de sa jeunesse, que le romancier prit pour la dernière fois la parole en public. En 1880, à l'occasion de l'inauguration du monument Pouchkine, Dostoïevski prononça un discours qui eut un immense retentissement dans toute la Russie.

Ce n'est qu'après de longues années d'épreuves et d'expériences extraordinaires, que Dostoïevski cet influence en art tragique et authentique tempéré par la vie.

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