“My God, a whole moment of happiness! Is that too little for the whole of a man's life?”
White Nights, 1848Fyodor 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.
The work they left
Notes from Underground opened the door in 1864, and through it came the great novels: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and last of all The Brothers Karamazov, finished months before his death. Raskolnikov's fever, Prince Myshkin's goodness, Alyosha and Ivan's argument about God: each began as serial chapters and became furniture of the modern mind.
The smaller rooms hold as much light: White Nights and its four evenings on a Petersburg canal, The Gambler written in twenty six days to outrun a debt, and A Writer's Diary, where he answered his century in monthly installments.
The estate keeps ten tributes · Franz Kafka · Nikola Tesla · Alan Turing · Marie Curie · Arthur Schopenhauer · Emily Dickinson · Charles Darwin · Sigmund Freud · Vincent van Gogh