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A disaster waiting to happen.

I finished the big 4 and can FINALLY read the 5th ; Fyodor’s magnus opus!!

So far, my personal favourite is The Idiot, which I feel tends to be overshadowed by Crime and Punishment and the Brothers Karamazov, online at least. I think The Idiot was as much of a masterpiece and it really tore at my heart strings, plus, it has my personal favourite character, Nastasya Fillipovna.

“What is it, what are you doing? Before me! She murmured, turning pale, and her heart was suddenly wrung very painfully.

He rose at once.

I was not bowing to you, I was bowing to all human suffering”

“I want to talk about everything with at least one person as I would with myself”

You know when things are too good to be true and you have a presentiment that something wrong will happen at any moment. Something so pure and good can’t remain untainted by the envy and greed surrounding it.

No one, no one here is worth your little finger, or your intelligence, or your heart! You’re more honest than all of them, nobler than all of them, better than all of them, kinder than all of them, more intelligent than all of them! There are people here who aren’t worthy of bending down to pick up the handkerchief you’ve just dropped. Why do you humiliate yourself and place yourself lower than everyone else?

I had the measure of you and hated you a long time ago when I first heard of you, I hated you with every fibre of my body…It was you who brought me to this! It was you who have caused me to have this fit! You have caused a dying man to blush in shame, you, you, you are the cause of my base cowardice! Had I been able to live, I’d have killed you!

Nastasya Fillipovna is a Queen 👑 Enough said.

I really can’t handle animal violence, this is the second book where Dostoevsky scars me with that 😭

I can’t stay away from a Dostoevsky book for too long.

God is necessary and therefore must exist.

But I know that he does not and cannot exist.

Don’t you understand that a man with these thoughts cannot go on living ?

You are a leader, you are a sun, and I am your worm.

And is it possible to believe in a demon, without believing at all in a God ? Stavrogin laughed

Oh quite possible, it happens all the time

We’ll instiguish desire, we’ll get drinking, gossip, denunciation going : we’ll get get unheard of depravity going ; we’ll stifle every genius in infancy. This will be taken care of us by us, the rulers. Slaves must have rulers. Complete obedience, complete impersonality

It is a sign of nation extinction when there begins to be Gods in common. When many nations start having common ideas of evil and good, then the nations die out and the very distinction between evil and good begins to fade and disappear. Reason has never been able to define evil and good, or even to separate evil from good, if only approximately on the contrary, it has always confused them, shamefully and pitifully

These men of yours never loved the people, never suffered for them or sacrificed anything for them, no matter what they themselves imagined for their own good pleasure

I succumbed to the temptation.

I skipped the other books recommended before as this seems to be Fyodor’s darkest, most political and underrated masterpiece.

Nikolai is too much of an intriguing and terrifying character.

Here I embark on a long journey.

I hated them all in our office, from first to last, and despised them all.. I loved falling into the common rut, and feared any eccentricity in myself with all my soul. But how could I hold out ? I was morbidly developed, as a man of our time ought to be developed. And they were all dull-witted and as like one another as a flock of sheep.

I am a sick man…a wicked man.

One ought, Milena, to take your face in both hands and look you square in the eye, so that you would see yourself in the eye of the other person, then you could not even think the kind of things you wrote there