Russian Lit Quotes

“Now life is given in exchange for pain and fear, and that's the basis of the whole deception. Now man is still not what he should be. There will e a new man, happy and proud. Whoever doesn't care whether he lives or doesn't live, he himself will be God. And that other God will no longer be.'
'So, that other God does exist, in your opinion?'
'He doesn't exist, but he does exist. In the stone there' no pain, but in the fear of the stone there is pain. God is the pain of the fear of death. Whoever conquers pain and fear will himself become God.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Not only had his wife Anna made Dostoyevsky’s creations possible, but, in a way, Anna was the [female] ideal behind his creations.”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

“Remember this, Anya,” Dostoyevsky told his wife on his deathbed, “I always loved you passionately and was never unfaithful to you even in my thoughts.”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

“His wife Anna’s presence can be felt everywhere in these final years of Dostoyevsky’s life: in his writings, his speeches, in the very fact of his physical survival.”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

“Standing quietly in the shade of the literary giant Dostoyevsky, his wife Anna is often erased from the historical record.”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

“His wife Anna was the living embodiment of the principles of Russian courage, moral integrity, and active love that had become central to Dostoyevsky’s worldview.”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

“Anna Dostoyevskaya found a purpose to guide her life: to honor her own experiences and potential while celebrating the work of Dostoyevsky, the artist, the man, she loved.”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

“His widow Anna dedicated most of her energy in her later years to shaping Dostoyevsky’s legacy and presenting it to the world.”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

“Dostoyevsky’s widow insisted that her husband was to literature what the physicist-founder of the X-ray was to the human body: the inventor of a wholly new means of peering inside the human soul.”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

“Beyond participating in Dostoevsky’s creative work as his stenographer, first reader, and editor, his wife Anna also controlled all other aspects of their publishing enterprise.”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

“Thus began Anna Dostoyevskaya’s career as Russia’s first sole woman publisher, a career that would in time wrest Dostoyevsky out of debt and continue to provide for their family for almost the next four decades.”
― Andrew D. Kaufman, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky