Wednesday 28 June 2017

BEAUTY WILL SAVE THE WORLD - FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY


Let me start this Blog post about Dostoyevsky with his famous quote "Beauty will save the world".












It is not easy to discuss something which is not possible to define, like beauty, love, and happiness.
Let us try to define Beauty as a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight.   
Beauty will compel the mankind to live once again expecting the never ending charm and ecstasy of tomorrows highlighting the pleasant yesterdays.  Beauty makes the humans to love the world.

“Beauty will save the world.” This oft-quoted maxim of Dostoevsky’s, derived from The Idiot, is widely misunderstood and misused in our times. As the author demonstrates throughout the novel, beauty alone cannot save the world. However, one of his primary insights, well illustrated throughout the story, is that beauty and suffering can seize the human heart of the observer for reasons other than carnality or even romanticized idealized attraction, though these may be present at the early stages of a relationship. As the lover grows in love of the beloved, he must continuously seek the ultimate good of the beloved.
























It is a beauty that shakes us to the core, which illuminates us, and ultimately is the beauty that will save the world.

One could turn the world upside down with the feminine beauty.













Image of Dostoyevsky


Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) is one of the most famous writers in world literature. His great works masterfully interrogate the most important questions of life and death.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, sometimes transliterated Dostoevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist and philosopher.

Dostoyevsky's psychological penetration into the darkest recesses of the human heart, together with his unsurpassed moments of illumination, had an immense influence on 20th-century fiction.

Dostoyevsky is usually regarded as one of the finest novelists who ever lived. Literary modernism, existentialism, and various schools of psychology, theology, and literary criticism have been profoundly shaped by his ideas. His works are often called prophetic because he so accurately predicted how Russia’s revolutionaries would behave if they came to power. In his time he was also renowned for his activity as a journalist.

As a teenager I read his book "Crime and Punishment" with a great deal of curiosity and enthusiasm.    Dostoyevsky is best known for his novella Notes from the Underground and for four long novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed (also and more accurately known as The Demons and The Devils), and The Brothers Karamazov. Each of these works is famous for its psychological profundity, and, indeed, Dostoyevsky is commonly regarded as one of the greatest psychologists in the history of literature. He specialized in the analysis of pathological states of mind that lead to insanity, murder, and suicide and in the exploration of the emotions of humiliation, self-destruction, tyrannical domination, and murderous rage. These major works are also renowned as great “novels of ideas” that treat timeless and timely issues in philosophy and politics. Psychology and philosophy are closely linked in Dostoyevsky’s portrayals of intellectuals who “feel ideas” in the depths of their souls. Finally, these novels broke new ground with their experiments in literary form.



Dostoyevsky's oeuvre consists of 11 novels, three novellas, 17 short stories and numerous other works.

His 1864 novella Notes from Underground is considered to be one of the first works of existentialist literature.

Novels and novellas

Short stories

Essay collections
Translations
Personal letters
  • (1912) Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to His Family and Friends by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (Author), translator Ethel Colburn Mayne Kessinger Publishing, LLC (May 26, 2006) ISBN 978-1428613331
Posthumously published notebooks

A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY :
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in full Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky, Dostoyevsky also spelled Dostoevsky (born November 11 [October 30, Old Style], 1821, Moscow, Russia—died February 9 [January 28, Old Style], 1881, St. Petersburg, Russia.

He began writing in his 20s, and his first novel, Poor Folk, was published in 1846 when he was 25. His most acclaimed works include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880).  Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest psychologists in world literature.
Born in Moscow in 1821, Dostoyevsky was introduced to literature at an early age through fairy tales and legends, and through books by Russian and foreign authors. His mother died in 1837 when he was 15, and around the same time, he left school to enter the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute. After graduating, he worked as an engineer and briefly enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, translating books to earn extra money. In the mid-1840s he wrote his first novel, Poor Folk, which gained him entry into St. Petersburg's literary circles. Arrested in 1849 for belonging to a literary group that discussed banned books critical of "Tsarist Russia", he was sentenced to death but the sentence was commuted at the last moment. He spent four years in a Siberian prison camp, followed by six years of compulsory military service in exile.
In the following years, Dostoyevsky worked as a journalist, publishing and editing several magazines of  his own and later A Writer's Diary, a collection of his writings. He began to travel around western Europe and developed a gambling addiction, which led to financial hardship. For a time, he had to beg for money, but he eventually became one of the most widely read and highly regarded Russian writers. His books have been translated into more than 170 languages. Dostoyevsky was influenced by a wide variety of philosophers and authors including Kierkegaard, Pushkin, Gogol, Augustine, Shakespeare, Dickens, Balzac, Lermontov, Hugo, Poe, Plato, Cervantes, Herzen, Kant, Belinsky, Hegel, Schiller, Solovyov, Bakunin, Sand, Hoffmann, and Mickiewicz. His writings were widely read both within and beyond his native Russia and influenced an equally great number of later writers including Russians like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Anton Chekhov as well as philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre.
 
Dostoyevsky's parents were part of a multi-ethnic and multi-denominational Lithuanian noble family from the Pinsk region, with roots dating to the 16th century. Branches of the family included Russian Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholics and Eastern Catholics  Dostoyevsky's immediate ancestors on his mother's side were merchants; the male line on his father's side were priests.  His father, Mikhail, was expected to join the clergy but instead ran away from home and broke with the family permanently.



                                                                                                    Mikhail Andreyevich
                                                                                                     Dostoyevsky   
   
Maria                       
    Fyodorovna                                                                                          
    Dostoyevskaya                                                                                       

       
In 1809, the 20-year-old Mikhail Dostoyevsky enrolled in Moscow's Imperial Medical-Surgical Academy. From there he was assigned to a Moscow hospital, where he served as military doctor, and in 1818, he was appointed a senior physician. In 1819 he married Maria Nechayeva. The following year, he took up a post at the Mariinsky Hospital for the poor. After the birth of his first two sons, Mikhail and Fyodor, he was promoted to collegiate assessor, a position which raised his legal status to that of the nobility and enabled him to acquire a small estate in Darovoye, a town about 150 km (100 miles) from Moscow, where the family usually spent the summers.   Dostoyevsky's parents subsequently had six more children: Varvara (1822–92), Andrei (1825–97), Lyubov (born and died 1829), Vera (1829–96), Nikolai (1831–83) and Aleksandra (1835–89).

Dostoyevsky was introduced to literature at an early age. From the age of three, he was read heroic sagas, fairy tales and legends by his nanny, Alena Frolovna, an especially influential figure in his childhood. When he was four his mother used the Bible to teach him to read and write. His parents introduced him to a wide range of literature, including Russian writers Karamzin, Pushkin and Derzhavin; Gothic fiction such as Ann Radcliffe; romantic works by Schiller and Goethe; heroic tales by Cervantes and Walter Scott; and Homer's epics.  Although his father's approach to education has been described as strict and harsh, Dostoyevsky himself reports that his imagination was brought alive by nightly readings by his parents.

After his parents death, Dostoyevsky continued his studies, passed his exams and obtained the rank of engineer cadet, entitling him to live away from the academy. He visited Mikhail in Reval, and frequently attended concerts, operas, plays and ballets.  During this time, two of his friends introduced him to gambling.

On 12 August 1843 Dostoyevsky took a job as a lieutenant engineer and lived with Adolph Totleben in an apartment owned by Dr. Rizenkampf, a friend of Mikhail. Rizenkampf characterized him as "no less good-natured and no less courteous than his brother, but when not in a good mood he often looked at everything through dark glasses, became vexed, forgot good manners, and sometimes was carried away to the point of abusiveness and loss of self-awareness".  Dostoyevsky's first completed literary work, a translation of Honoré de Balzac's novel Eugénie Grandet, was published in June and July 1843 in the 6th and 7th volume of the journal Repertoire and Pantheon,  followed by several other translations. None were successful, and his financial difficulties led him to write a novel.

Meanwhile, the members of the Petrashevsky Circle were denounced to Liprandi, an official at the Ministry of International Affairs. Dostoyevsky was accused of reading works by Belinsky, including the banned Letter to Gogol, and of circulating copies of these and other works. Antonelli, the government agent who had reported the group, wrote in his statement that at least one of the papers criticized Russian politics and religion. Dostoyevsky responded to these charges by declaring that he had read the essays only "as a literary monument, neither more nor less"; he spoke of "personality and human egoism" rather than of politics. Even so, he and his fellow "conspirators" were arrested on 23 April 1849 at the request of Count A. Orlov and Tsar Nicolas I, who feared a revolution like the Decembrist revolt of 1825 in Russia and the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe. The members were held in the well-defended Peter and Paul Fortress, which housed the most dangerous convicts.
The case was discussed for four months by an investigative commission headed by the Tsar, with Adjutant General Ivan Nabokov, senator Count Pavel Gagarin, Count Vasili Dolgorukov, General Yakov Rostovtsev and General Leonty Dubelt, head of the secret police. They sentenced the members of the circle to death by firing squad, and the prisoners were taken to Semyonov Place in St Petersburg on 23 December 1849 where they were split into three-man groups. Dostoyevsky was the third in the second row; next to him stood Pleshcheyev and Durov. The execution was stayed when a cart delivered a letter from the Tsar commuting the sentence.

After his release on 14 February 1854, Dostoyevsky asked Mikhail to help him financially and to send him books by Vico, Guizot, Ranke, Hegel and Kant.   The House of the Dead, based on his experience in prison, was published in 1861 in the journal Vremya – it was the first published novel about Russian prisons.  Before moving in mid-March to Semipalatinsk, where he was forced to serve in the Siberian Army Corps of the Seventh Line Battalion, Dostoyevsky met geographer Pyotr Semyonov and ethnographer Shokan Walikhanuli. Around November 1854, he met Baron Alexander Egorovich Wrangel (de), an admirer of his books, who had attended the aborted execution. They both rented houses in the Cossack Garden outside Semipalatinsk. Wrangel remarked that Dostoyevsky "looked morose. His sickly, pale face was covered with freckles, and his blond hair was cut short. He was a little over average height and looked at me intensely with his sharp, grey-blue eyes. It was as if he were trying to look into my soul and discover what kind of man I was."

In Semipalatinsk, Dostoyevsky tutored several schoolchildren and came into contact with upper-class families, including that of Lieutenant-Colonel Belikhov, who used to invite him to read passages from newspapers and magazines. During a visit to Belikhov, Dostoyevsky met the family of Alexander Ivanovich Isaev and Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva and fell in love with the latter. Alexander Isaev took a new post in Kuznetsk, where he died in August 1855. Maria and her son then moved with Dostoyevsky to Barnaul. In 1856 Dostoyevsky sent a letter through Wrangel to General Eduard Totleben, apologising for his activity in several utopian circles. As a result, he obtained the right to publish books and to marry, although he remained under police surveillance for the rest of his life. Maria married Dostoyevsky in Semipalatinsk on 7 February 1857, even though she had initially refused his marriage proposal, stating that they were not meant for each other and that his poor financial situation precluded marriage. Their family life was unhappy and she found it difficult to cope with his seizures. Describing their relationship, he wrote: "Because of her strange, suspicious and fantastic character, we were definitely not happy together, but we could not stop loving each other; and the more unhappy we were, the more attached to each other we became". They mostly lived apart.  In 1859 he was released from military service because of deteriorating health and was granted permission to return to Russia, first to Tver, where he met his brother for the first time in ten years, and then to St Petersburg.

Dostoyevsky travelled to western Europe for the first time on 7 June 1862, visiting Cologne, Berlin, Dresden, Wiesbaden, Belgium, and Paris. In London, he met Herzen and visited the Crystal Palace. He travelled with Nikolay Strakhov through Switzerland and several North Italian cities, including Turin, Livorno, and Florence. He recorded his impressions of those trips in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, in which he criticized capitalism, social modernization, materialism, Catholicism and Protestantism.
From August to October 1863, Dostoyevsky made another trip to western Europe. He met his second love, Polina Suslova, in Paris and lost nearly all his money gambling in Wiesbaden and Baden-Baden. In 1864 his wife Maria and brother Mikhail died, and Dostoyevsky became the lone parent of his stepson Pasha and the sole supporter of his brother's family. The failure of Epoch, the magazine he had founded with Mikhail after the suppression of Vremya, worsened his financial situation, although the continued help of his relatives and friends averted bankruptcy.
Dostoyevsky returned to Saint Petersburg in mid-September and promised his editor, Fyodor Stellovsky, that he would complete The Gambler, a short novel focused on gambling addiction, by November, although he had not yet begun writing it. One of Dostoyevsky's friends, Milyukov, advised him to hire a secretary. Dostoyevsky contacted stenographer Pavel Olkhin from Saint Petersburg, who recommended his pupil, the twenty-year-old Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina. Her shorthand helped Dostoyevsky to complete The Gambler on 30 October, after 26 days' work. She remarked that Dostoyevsky was of average height but always tried to carry himself erect. "He had light brown, slightly reddish hair, he used some hair conditioner, and he combed his hair in a diligent way ... his eyes, they were different: one was dark brown; in the other, the pupil was so big that you could not see its color, [this was caused by an injury]. The strangeness of his eyes gave Dostoyevsky some mysterious appearance. His face was pale, and it looked unhealthy."
On 15 February 1867 Dostoyevsky married Snitkina in Trinity Cathedral, Saint Petersburg. The 7,000 rubles he had earned from Crime and Punishment did not cover their debts, forcing Anna to sell her valuables. On 14 April 1867, they began a delayed honeymoon in Germany with the money gained from the sale. They stayed in Berlin and visited the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, where he sought inspiration for his writing. They continued their trip through Germany, visiting Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Heidelberg and Karlsruhe. They spent five weeks in Baden-Baden, where Dostoyevsky had a quarrel with Turgenev and again lost much money at the roulette table.  The couple travelled on to Geneva.

Their first child, Sonya, had been conceived in Baden-Baden, and was born in Geneva on 5 March 1868. The baby died of pneumonia three months later, and Anna recalled how Dostoyevsky "wept and sobbed like a woman in despair".  The couple moved from Geneva to Vevey and then to Milan, before continuing to Florence. The Idiot was completed there in January 1869, the final part appearing in The Russian Messenger in February 1869. Anna gave birth to their second daughter, Lyubov, on 26 September 1869 in Dresden. In April 1871, Dostoyevsky made a final visit to a gambling hall in Wiesbaden. Anna claimed that he stopped gambling after the birth of their second daughter, but this is a subject of debate.

In 1871, Dostoyevsky and Anna travelled by train to Berlin. During the trip, he burnt several manuscripts, including those of The Idiot, because he was concerned about potential problems with customs. The family arrived in Saint Petersburg on 8 July, marking the end of a honeymoon (originally planned for three months) that had lasted over four years.
Back in Russia in July 1871, the family was again in financial trouble and had to sell their remaining possessions. Their son Fyodor was born on 16 July, and they moved to an apartment near the Institute of Technology soon after. They hoped to cancel their large debts by selling their rental house in Peski, but difficulties with the tenant resulted in a relatively low selling price, and disputes with their creditors continued.  Anna proposed that they raise money on her husband's copyrights and negotiate with the creditors to pay off their debts in installments.

The family returned to St Petersburg in September. Demons was finished on 26 November and released in January 1873 by the "Dostoyevsky Publishing Company", which was founded by Dostoyevsky and his wife.  Although they only accepted cash payments and the bookshop was in their own apartment, the business was successful, and they sold around 3,000 copies of Demons. Anna managed the finances. Dostoyevsky proposed that they establish a new periodical, which would be called A Writer's Diary and would include a collection of essays, but funds were lacking, and the Diary was published in Vladimir Meshchersky's The Citizen, beginning on 1 January, in return for a salary of 3,000 rubles per year.  In the summer of 1873, Anna returned to Staraya Russa with the children, while Dostoyevsky stayed in St Petersburg to continue with his Diary.

In March 1874, Dostoyevsky left The Citizen because of the stressful work and interference from the Russian bureaucracy.  In his fifteen months with The Citizen, he had been taken to court twice: on 11 June 1873 for citing the words of Prince Meshchersky without permission, and again on 23 March 1874.  Dostoyevsky offered to sell a new novel he had not yet begun to write to The Russian Messenger, but the magazine refused. Nikolay Nekrasov suggested that he publish A Writer's Diary in Notes of the Fatherland; he would receive 250 rubles for each printer's sheet – 100 more than the text's publication in The Russian Messenger would have earned.  Dostoyevsky accepted.  As his health began to decline, he consulted several doctors in St Petersburg and was advised to take a cure outside Russia.  Around July, he reached Ems and consulted a physician, who diagnosed him with acute catarrh.  During his stay he began The Adolescent.  He returned to Saint Petersburg in late July.

Anna proposed that they spend the winter in Staraya Russa to allow Dostoyevsky to rest, although doctors had suggested a second visit to Ems because his health had previously improved there.  On 10 August 1875 his son Alexey was born in Staraya Russa, and in mid-September the family returned to Saint Petersburg.   Dostoyevsky finished The Adolescent at the end of 1875, although passages of it had been serialised in Notes of the Fatherland since January. The Adolescent chronicles the life of Arkady Dolgoruky, the illegitimate child of the landowner Versilov and a peasant mother.  It deals primarily with the relationship between father and son, which became a frequent theme in Dostoyevsky's subsequent works.

He was appointed an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, from which he received an honorary certificate in February 1879. He declined an invitation to an international congress on copyright in Paris after his son Alyosha had a severe epileptic seizure and died on 16 May. The family later moved to the apartment where Dostoyevsky had written his first works. Around this time, he was elected to the board of directors of the Slavic Benevolent Society in Saint Petersburg. That summer, he was elected to the honorary committee of the Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale, whose members included Victor Hugo, Ivan Turgenev, Paul Heyse, Alfred Tennyson, Anthony Trollope, Henry Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Leo Tolstoy. Dostoyevsky made his fourth and final visit to Ems in early August 1879. He was diagnosed with early-stage pulmonary emphysema, which his doctor believed could be successfully managed, but not cured.

On 25 January 1881, while searching for members of the terrorist organisation Narodnaya Volya ("The People's Will") who would soon assassinate Tsar Alexander II, the Tsar's secret police executed a search warrant in the apartment of one of Dostoyevsky's neighbors.  On the following day, Dostoyevsky suffered a pulmonary haemorrhage.  Anna denied that the search had caused it, saying that the haemorhage had occurred after her husband had been looking for a dropped pen holder.  After another haemorrhage, Anna called the doctors, who gave a poor prognosis. A third haemorrhage followed shortly afterwards.




When he died, his body was placed on a table, following Russian custom. He was interred in the Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Convent, near his favorite poets, Nikolay Karamzin and Vasily Zhukovsky.
According to one reporter, more than 1,00,000 mourners were present, while others describe attendance between 40,000 and 50,000.

In 1956 an olive-green postage stamp dedicated to Dostoyevsky was released in the Soviet Union, with a print run of 1,000 copies.





 A Dostoevsky Museum was opened on 12 November 1971 in the apartment where he wrote his first and final novels.   A crater on Mercury was named after him in 1979, and a minor planet discovered in 1981 by Lyudmila Karachkina was named 3453 Dostoevsky. Music critic and broadcaster Artemy Troitsky has hosted the radio show "FM Достоевский" (FM Dostoyevsky) since 1997.  J.M. Coetzee featured Dostoyevsky as the protagonist in his 1997 novel The Master of Petersburg.
The famous Malayalam novel Oru Sankeerthanam Pole by Perumbadavam Sreedharan deals with the life of Dostoyevsky and his love affair with Anna.

Over the years there are several Films made in different  languages based on works by Fyodor  Dostoyevsky.
 


 


                                                 Dostoyevsky's grave in Saint Petersburg.


His tombstone is inscribed with lines from the New Testament:
Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it dies, it bringeth forth much fruit. – John 12:24


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