Fyodor Dostoevsky
1821 · 1881
“He went down into the human heart and lit a lamp there.”
Kept by Here After All · open to visitors
Their story
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821, was sentenced to death at twenty seven, and was reprieved with the firing squad already assembled. Every book after carries the weight of that unspent minute.
From the prison yards of Siberia he brought back the dead house; from his own trembling hands, the gambler; from the long argument with his own faith, the Karamazovs. He wrote people no one had dared to write, and forgave them on the page where the world would not.
A tribute, kept by Here After All.
Standing here now
You are standing at Fyodor's plot. Whoever arrives will see you here.
Words spoken here stay only with those standing here. Nothing is recorded.
Remembrances
Where the family and those who loved Fyodor gather, post, and return. Visitors may leave a tribute in the family's keeping.
"Love all of God's creation, the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light." From The Brothers Karamazov, 1880. Translated from the Russian for Here After All.
"My God, a whole minute of bliss! Is that truly so little, even for the whole of a human life?" From White Nights, 1848. Translated from the Russian for Here After All.
"Compassion is the chief law, perhaps the only law, of all human existence." From The Idiot, 1868. Translated from the Russian for Here After All.
Nevsky Prospekt and Gostiny Dvor in the middle of the century. The crowds of his pages passed here.
A notebook page from 1865, the idea of Crime and Punishment finding its first words.
Horse Guards Street in the 1870s, by the Lorens studio. Petersburg as he walked it.
His working notes for The Brothers Karamazov, chapter five. The last novel, planned line by line.
Near the end of the decade, The Brothers Karamazov underway.
Petersburg, 1876. The years of A Writer's Diary.
Perov's portrait, 1872. The novelist between Demons and the years of the last great books.