2012-02-25 26 notes

The girl is self-willed and fantastic, insane, she’s wicked, wicked!

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, from The Idiot, 1869

2012-02-16 53 notes

It’s after one and you must be asleep.
Or maybe you can feel the night as well.
I’m in no hurry. There’s no need
to wake you or disturb you with telegrams or thunder.

— from the suicide note of Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1930 (trans. Erik Korn)

Source: csee.umbc.edu

And with which of them was Alyosha to sympathise? And what was he to wish for each of them? He loved them both, but what could he desire for each in the midst of these conflicting interests? He might go quite astray in this maze, and Alyosha’s heart could not endure uncertainty, because his love was always of an active character.

He was incapable of passive love. If he loved anyone, he set to work at once to help him. And to do so he must know what he was aiming at; he must know for certain what was best for each, and having ascertained this it was natural for him to help them both. But instead of a definite aim, he found nothing but uncertainty and perplexity on all sides.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, from The Brothers Karamazov, 1880 (trans. Constance Garnett)

2012-02-04 49 notes

vintageanchor:

Tolstoy and Dostoevsky plan a collaboration: “War and Punishment… it’ll make us a bundle.”

(via thesonalsorises)

Source: vintageanchor

2012-01-11 105 notes

Alexander Pushkin monument in St. Petersburg, Russia, taken by Mark Nelson

2012-01-09 18 notes

Levin vs. Scherbatskaya

There was only one creature in the world that could concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was she. It was Kitty.

And everything that had been stirring Levin during that sleepless night, all the resolutions he had made, all vanished at once. He recalled with horror his dreams of marrying a peasant girl. There only, in the carriage that had crossed over to the other side of the road and was rapidly disappearing, there only could he find the solution of the riddle of his life, which had weighted so agonizingly upon him of late.

[…]

“No, he said to himself, “however good that life of simplicity and toil may be, I cannot go back to it. I love her.”

—Lev Tolstoy, from Anna Karenina, 1877 (trans. Constance Garnett)

2011-12-07 30 notes

Bazarov vs. Odintsova

“So you have noticed reticence…as you expressed it, constraint?”

“Yes.”

Bazarov got up and went to the window. “And would you like to know the reason of this reticence? Would you like to know what is passing inside me?”

2011-12-01 3 notes

This capacity consciously to behave stupidly is an enviable virtue of strong and intelligent people. A dispassionate and dried-up person always acts according to logical calculations; a timid and weak person tries to deceive himself with sophistry and assure himself of the rightness of his desires and actions; but Bazarov has no need for such trickery; he says to himself straightforwardly: This is stupid, but nevertheless, I will do what I want, and I do not want to torment myself over it. When it becomes necessary I will have the time and strength to do what I must. A wholehearted, strong nature is manifested in this capacity to become completely carried away: a healthy, incorruptible mind is expressed in this capability to recognize as folly the passion which has consumed the whole organism.

— Dmitri Pisarev, in his essay “Bazarov” on the protagonist of Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Children

2011-11-25 15 notes

You are still seeking with what to fill not your life, but your day. The very things which elsewhere provide the necessary framework of life, within which daily events are naturally ordered, this condition, as indispensable to a healthy moral existence as good air is to a healthy physical existence, is completely lacking for you. You understand that I am speaking here not of moral principles of philosophical maxims, but simply of a well-ordered life , of those habits, of those routines of the mind which put the soul at ease, which give it a regulated motion.

— Pyotr Chaadayev, “Letter One”