Tag Archives: “Crime and Punishment”.

RKS RUSSIAN LITERATURE:  A Tremendous Fall from Grace at a Funeral Dinner for Her Husband (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

Perhaps the chief element was that peculiar ‘poor man’s pride’ which compels many poor people to spend their last savings on some traditional special ceremony, simply in order to do ‘like other people’ and not ‘be looked down upon’. It is very probable too, that Katerina Ivanovna longed on this occasion, at the moment whenContinue reading “RKS RUSSIAN LITERATURE:  A Tremendous Fall from Grace at a Funeral Dinner for Her Husband (Fyodor Dostoevsky)”

RKS RUSSIAN LITERATURE:  There Can be No Deception in a “Free Marriage” (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

“I understand it now where the unpleasantness is of being deceived in a legal marriage, but it’s simply a despicable consequence of a despicable position in which both are humiliated. When the deception is open, as in a free marriage, then it does not exist, it’s unthinkable. Your wife will only prove how she respectsContinue reading “RKS RUSSIAN LITERATURE:  There Can be No Deception in a “Free Marriage” (Fyodor Dostoevsky)”

RKS RUSSIAN LITERATURE:  A Misconception About Eternity (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it’s one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that. FyodorContinue reading “RKS RUSSIAN LITERATURE:  A Misconception About Eternity (Fyodor Dostoevsky)”

RKS RUSSIAN LITERATURE:  All Men are Mad (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

‘There is some truth to your observation’ the latter replied. ‘In the sense we are certainly all not infrequently like madmen, but with the slight difference that the deranged are somewhat madder, for we must draw a line. A normal man, it is true, hardly exists. Among dozens-perhaps hundreds of thousands-hardly one is to beContinue reading “RKS RUSSIAN LITERATURE:  All Men are Mad (Fyodor Dostoevsky)”

RKS RUSSIAN LITERATURE:  The Key to Youth for Women (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

“Although Pulcheria Alexandrova was forty-three, her face still retained traces of her former beauty; she looked much younger than her age, indeed, which is almost always the case with women who retain sensitivity of spirit, sensitiveness and pure sincereness of heart to old age. We add in parenthesis that to preserve all this is theContinue reading “RKS RUSSIAN LITERATURE:  The Key to Youth for Women (Fyodor Dostoevsky)”