Fyodor Dostoevsky's Meeting With Archbishop Nicholas Kasatkin the Missionary of Japan

By Michael K. Makrakis

Although Dostoevsky was born in Moscow (30 October 1821), he spent his life in St. Petersburg since May 1837 changing many times his place of abode. His last address was on Kuznechny Lane, near the Church of Vladimirskaya. This is where he received the invitation of the Society of the Friends of Russian Literature to attend the unveiling of the Pushkin bust in Moscow and give a speech. It was April-May of 1880. Dostoevsky was then writing his last book "The Brothers Karamazov". Although he did not want to interrupt his work, his huge love for Pushkin made him finally decide to travel to Moscow.

He left on 22 May. His wife, Anna Grigoryevna, who accompanied him to the station, begged him to write to her every day describing all the details. This is why he composed the letters covering the period he stayed in Moscow: from the next day of his arrival (23-24 May) until the 8th of June, 1880, the day he gave the speech for Pushkin. This speech caused so much upheaval that it was characterised as a true "historical fact". As he writes in one of his letters (13 June 1880) after his speech "the people started sobbing and embracing one another swearing to be better in the future."

The Beggar Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

 The Beggar Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree

By Fyodor Dostoevsky

(1887)

I am a novelist, and I suppose I have made up this story. I write “I suppose,” though I know for a fact that I have made it up, but yet I keep fancying that it must have happened on Christmas Eve in some great town in a time of terrible frost.

I have a vision of a boy, a little boy, six years old or even younger. This boy woke up that morning in a cold damp cellar. He was dressed in a sort of little dressing-gown and was shivering with cold. There was a cloud of white steam from his breath, and sitting on a box in the corner, he blew the steam out of his mouth and amused himself in his dullness watching it float away. But he was terribly hungry. Several times that morning he went up to the plank bed where his sick mother was lying on a mattress as thin as a pancake, with some sort of bundle under her head for a pillow. How had she come here? She must have come with her boy from some other town and suddenly fallen ill. The landlady who let the “concerns” had been taken two days before the police station, the lodgers were out and about as the holiday was so near, and the only one left had been lying for the last twenty-four hours dead drunk, not having waited for Christmas. In another corner of the room a wretched old woman of eighty, who had once been a children’s nurse but was now left to die friendless, was moaning and groaning with rheumatism, scolding and grumbling at the boy so that he was afraid to go near her corner. He had got a drink of water in the outer room, but could not find a crust anywhere, and had been on the point of waking his mother a dozen times. He felt frightened at last in the darkness: it had long been dusk, but no light was kindled. Touching his mother’s face, he was surprised that she did not move at all, and that she was as cold as the wall. “It is very cold here,” he thought. He stood a little, unconsciously letting his hands rest on the dead woman’s shoulders, then he breathed on his fingers to warm them, and then quietly fumbling for his cap on the bed, he went out of the cellar. He would have gone earlier, but was afraid of the big dog which had been howling all day at the neighbor’s door at the top of the stairs. But the dog was not there now, and he went out into the street.

Dostoevsky and the Parable of the Prodigal Son

Thirty young men, dressed in shrouds (and thus, nearly naked), were led to the scaffold. The morning was bitter, the temperature below freezing, as they were compelled to stand for half an hour while the burial service was slowly read. Facing them stood the soldiers with their muskets. A pile of coffins was stacked suggestively in a corner of the yard. At the last moment, with the muskets actually at the shoulders of the guards, a white flag was waved, and it was announced that the czar had commuted the sentence to ten years' exile in Siberia. Several of the prisoners lost their reason under the strain; several others died shortly afterward. Fyodor Dostoevsky passed courageously through the ordeal, but it affected his nerves; he never recalled the experience without a shudder, and he referred to it with horror in several of his books.

"An Honest Thief" by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Photios Kontoglou

An Honest Thief is an 1848 short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The story recounts the tale of the tragic drunkard, Emelyan Ilyitch. This story is here accompanied by a little-known sketch drawn by Photios Kontoglou, who drew it specifically to depict the character in the story by Dostoevsky. On the back of the original drawing there is a handwritten note by his daughter, Despos Kontoglou-Martinou: "The Honest Thief" by Dostoevsky, 1924, watercolor and ink on paper, 11 X 9.5 cm., Eleni Voila.

Read the complete short story here.  

Dostoevsky's Pandemic

[Raskolnikov] was in the hospital from the middle of Lent till after Easter. When he was better, he remembered the dreams he had had while he was feverish and delirious. He dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia. All were to be destroyed except a very few chosen. Some new sorts of microbes were attacking the bodies of men, but these microbes were endowed with intelligence and will. Men attacked by them became at once mad and furious. But never had men considered themselves so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible. 

 

Marilyn Monroe and Dostoevsky

I wrote this on August 5th to commemorate the death of Marilyn Monroe, but had issues publishing anything to this site that needed to be resolved. So here it is, albeit late.

On my last night in Los Angeles in March of 2018, I decided to take a self-guided tour to about a dozen locations associated with the dark side of Hollywood, basically where famous murders or deaths took place. One of the locations I visited was where Marilyn Monroe died of a drug overdose on August 5, 1962 at the age of 35. It was her house at the time, in Brentwood.

I visited the location because I always had a great admiration for Marilyn Monroe, and have read a lot about her, and seen pretty much all her films. One thing most people don't know about her is how she was admired as somewhat of an intellectual and voracious reader by her peers, despite the media pushing her image as a dumb blonde and sex goddess, to her dismay, and to which she responded: "Maybe I’m a sexless sex goddess."

Photios Kontoglou on Fyodor Dostoevsky

By Dr. Constantine Cavarnos

Having high esteem for the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), particularly impressed by his work The Brothers Karamazov, and knowing that I was like-minded, he invited me to join him one afternoon, together with his wife and daughter, Mrs. Despina Martinou, at a cinema on Stadiou Street, where this work was being shown. I gladly accepted the invitation, even though I was even less of a movie-goer than Kontoglou. After the show, he took us for a treat at a nearby shop where pastry was served. There we discussed our impressions about the film.

Both he and I were especially interested in "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" contained in The Brothers Karamazov. We were in accord with the opinion of the emigre Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev, that "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor is the high point of Dostoevsky's work and the crown of his dialectic" (See Berdyaev's Dostoievsky, trans. by Donald Attwater, ch. VIII). I had read this story as part of the reading that had been assigned by one of my teachers at Harvard, Professor Julius S. Bixler, in a course in Philosophy of Religion. The story made a great impression on me, as it had on Kontoglou when he read a French translation of the novel in the early forties. Seeing this film was expected to make this story and other parts of Dostoevsky's magnum opus more vivid for us. But to our disappointment, what interested us most, "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor," had been left out.

Dostoevsky and Spiritualism

By Thomas E. Berry, University of Maryland

From the reign of Catherine the Great to the Revolution of 1917, Russian society and literature were affected by the relationship between Western spiritualism with its seances and mediums and an ancient folk tradition with its superstitions and fancifulness. The common Russian belief in spirits, combined with the Western occult science, brought charlatans into the highest court circles throughout the last hundred and fifty years of the Romanov's rule. Cagliostro drew the attention of Catherine II; the Baroness Krudener instructed Alexander I; D.D. Home had the patronage of Alexander II; and Rasputin and Dr. Philippe had a close relationship with Nicholas II. The Czars were the inheritors of two strong social forces: a folk tradition based on the mystical and the miraculous dating back hundreds of years and a fervent search for historical and spiritual meaning among the Russian intelligentsia. Only Nicholas I failed to understand the popularity of spiritualism in Russia and his jack of interest separated him from the mainstream of Russian life. Most Russian monarchs were greatly influenced by the spread of spiritualistic forces. It was as if folk superstitions and Western spiritualism were destined to blend together and contribute to the fall of the Russian Empire.

Dostoevsky On Edgar Allan Poe

Excerpt from the Russian translation of the introduction to The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, and The Devil in the Belfry titled:

Three Tales of Edgar Poe

By Fyodor M. Dostoevsky (Vremia, 1861)

Dostoevsky's Spiritual Therapy

By David Starr

I. Introduction: His Life and Project

Fyodor Mihailovich Dostoevsky was not my mother’s idea of a great Christian writer. He wrote fiction, though he recognized that fact as a problem: In The Brothers Karamazov he has the attorneys at Dmitri’s murder trial discredit each other’s cases as novels. Could there be a truthful novel? In The Adolescent a nice tutor from Moscow advises young Arkady that a Russian novel needs more romance and nobility than his story — the novel ironically ending with these comments. Dostoevsky did not mean to write fiction as ordinarily conceived. What did he intend? I think he wrote investigations of the soul, hypothetical analyses of the sickness and healing of the human spirit, with himself as primary experimental subject. In one of his darkest tales, Notes from the Underground, his protagonist, in an utterly humiliating moment, observes, “I think it was a mistake to begin writing ... At least I’ve felt ashamed all the while I’ve been writing this story: so it’s no longer literature, but corrective punishment.”[1] Dostoevsky intends to strip the soul bare, to know himself at all cost.