Dostoevskyswife - Stars, Hide Your Fires.

–Beau Taplin

"ماذا تطوي في قلبك حتى فاض على سيماك؟"

-صلاح عبد الصبور

"The Brothers Karamazov", Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Constance Garnett)

“They were only speaking the part of god that they themselves could glimpse. And this truth was only as small as they themselves were small.”

— Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds

"I exist as I am, that is enough,

If no other in the world be aware I sit content,

And if each and all be aware I sit content.

One world is aware and by far the largest to me,

and that is myself..."

Walt Whitman

Song of Myself

Franny Choi, from “Catastrophe is Next to Godliness”

Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet

Text ID: Everything in me tends to go on to become something else. My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while…

people will clown on me for this because he killed two people but I just love how sweet Rodya is. He is so cruel and mean and uncouth a lot or even most of the time, but then he does things like constantly thoughtlessly give the last of his money away to anyone who needs it more than him, cries when he’s in his psychotic episode and can’t remember who Razumikhin is, has that very sweet and tender moment with Polenka, begs the police to get a doctor for Marmeladov and says he’ll pay for it despite having nothing at all himself. At the same time he is capable of terrible things and is often terrible specifically to the people who love him and want to help, and oscillates wildly between the two. It’s that juxtaposition that holds so much of the interest of the narrative itself for me. A lot of people focus on how awful he is and while that is also honestly such a fun part of his character, that alone is not what makes him compelling to me. I have so much tenderness for his character despite what he’s done because he is just so mentally ill and has been through and been witness to so much hardship. He is not easy to love or understand but it’s so beautiful and sweet that Razumikhin, Sonya, his family and his other friends love him so dearly anyway. I truly think the suffering he is constantly surrounded by is the thing that has driven him to psychosis. Specifically I think of when he goes to the police station in part two and says he has been “shattered by poverty.” In these little moments of sweetness and lucidity towards others, even in the depths of his illness, we can still see the little boy in him who so desperately wanted to help that poor horse.

“Dickens told me,” Dostoyevsky recalled in a letter written years later, “that all the good, simple people in his novels … are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love… . There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel, I try to live my life.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky to his family and friends

Oh, Canada (2024)