Quotes About Dostoevsky

Oh, God, today I pray [to] you on my knees for Dostoevsky's obscurity, blindness, the most sacred and precious of all things.

The liberation of the instincts, of the inchoate etc. (except that with Lawrence it is restricted to the sexual problem and Dostoevsky was larger).

The "Genuine 'real life,'" as Dostoevsky called it, is an obsession, a torment for the writer. With greater or less ability we fabricate fictions not so that the false will seem true but to tell the most unspeakable truth with absolute faithfulness through the fiction.

There are strange friendships," Dostoevsky writes, with reference to Stepan Trofimovich and Varvara Petrovna in Demons. "Two friends are almost ready to eat each other, they live like that all their lives, and yet they cannot part. Parting is even impossible: the friend who waxes capricious and breaks it off will be the first to fall sick and die." A marvelous passage, communicating so economically the diabolical undercurrent of certain friendships, their weird fatalism.

If divorce is like death, then is not the perpetration of divorce a kind of murder? That is, are we not risking putting ourselves through the same torment—the same sleepless nights, feelings of persecution and guilt, the regret—as one of those pathetic characters from a Dostoevsky novel? It's like you've just struck your wife with a candelabra and now you're looking at her lifeless body on the floor, and suddenly she looks pretty.

It is a pity that there was no Dostoevsky living near this most interesting decadent [Jesus], I mean someone with an eye for the distinctive charm that this sort of mixture of sublimity, sickness, and childishness has to offer.

Since I wasn't consulted at the time of the creation of the world, I reserve for myself the right to have my own opinion about it.

She indulged his long-winded Tolstoy bashing (he saw Tolstoy, "in no way equal to Dostoevsky," as a kind of highbrow Margaret Mitchell who had helped prepare the way for socialist realism)

Shakespeare et Dostoievski font persister en vous le regret de n'etre pas un saint ou un criminel. Ces deux manieres de s'autodetruire...

Tout Occidental tourmenté fait penser à un héros dostoïevskien qui aurait un compte en banque.

Shakespeare si Dostoievski îÈ›i las? în suflet un regret chinuitor: acela de a nu fi sfânt sau criminal. Cele dou? forme ale autodistrugerii

Unlike Tolstoy, Dostoevsky was ardently persuaded of Christ's divinity, but that divinity moved his soul and solicited his intelligence most forcefully through its human aspect.

I'd say that the question whether love still exists plays the same role in my novels as the question of God's existence in Dostoevsky.

Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoievsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist.

read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment,

For Nietzsche and Dostoevsky alike, freedom—even the ability to act—requires constraint. For this reason, they both recognized the vital necessity of the dogma of the Church. The individual must be constrained, moulded—even brought close to destruction—by a restrictive, coherent disciplinary structure, before he or she can act freely and competently.

What has emerged from behind its corpse, however—and this is an issue of central importance—is something even more dead; something that was never alive, even in the past: nihilism, as well as an equally dangerous susceptibility to new, totalizing, utopian ideas. It was in the aftermath of God's death that the great collective horrors of Communism and Fascism sprang forth (as both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche predicted they would).

Nietzsche, for all his brilliance, allows himself anger, but does not perhaps sufficiently temper it with judgement. This is where Dostoevsky truly transcends Nietzsche, in my estimation—where Dostoevsky's great literature transcends Nietzsche's mere philosophy.

Nietzsche and Dostoevsky both foresaw that communism would appear dreadfully attractive—an apparently rational, coherent, and moral alternative to religion or nihilism—and that the consequences would be lethal.

I am trying to concentrate on books. You know, I love Dostoevsky; he's my favourite writer.

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

my longing was for Russia...Not Soviet Russia. But nineteenth-century Russia, the Russia of Dostoevsky's saintly prostitutes and Alyosha; of Tolstoy's Pierre; and Aksionov, the sufferer in God Sees the Truth But Waits. A country where the characters in books were allowed to ask one another the questions: How must I live to be happy? What is goodness? Why does man suffer? What is to be done?

The heavy opulence of Dostoevsky's world was where I had lived forever. The gloomy, lightless interiors, the complex ratiocinations of the characters and their burdensome humors, were as familiar to me as loneliness.

Bolshevism is a close tyrannical bureaucracy, with a spy system more elaborate and terrible than the Tsar's, and an aristocracy as insolent and unfeeling, composed of Americanised Jews. No vestige of liberty remains, in thought or speech or action. I was stifled and oppressed by the weight of the machine as by a cope of lead. Yet I think it the right government for Russia at this moment. If you ask yourself how Dostoevsky's characters should be governed, you will understand. Yet it is terrible.