Dostoevsky

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This portrait of Dostoevsky was done from one of the few photographs made of him during his lifetime. Photography was just beginning when Dostoevsky was writing and I happen to think that he was influenced by the photographs he saw. Either he was affected by photographs or he was driven by the same desire to record the peculiar idiosyncratic detail of everyday life. Before photographs drawing and painting never attempted to record fleeting but highly individualised detail.
Dostoevsky wasn’t the first writer to do this however, his predecessors were equally keen observers. Take this example from Gogol’s “The Overcoat.”

“Petrovich reached for his round snuffbox, exactly which one is hard to say, as someone had poked his finger through the place where the face should have been and it was pasted over with a square piece of paper.” (Incidentally, that image is a metaphor for Russian society, the Russian Revolution, and the subsequent communist society.)

Or this example from Pushkin’s “Egyptian Nights.”

“He wore a black frock coat already greying at the seams, and a pair of summer trousers although it was well into autumn, a fake diamond glittered on his yellow shirt front...”

But Dostoevsky brings this kind of observation to an entirely different level, both in terms of precision, and in terms of meaning, suggestion, and metaphor. Take for example this passage from “Crime And Punishment.”

“He wore an old completely ragged black frock coat, which had shed all its buttons. Only one somehow still hung on, and this one he kept buttoned, obviously not wishing to shirk convention.”

Or this example from “The Brothers Karamazov.”

“This gentleman wore a thin topcoat, stained and patched. His trousers were of a light checked material such as no one wore anymore,and they were so crumpled below the knees that they didn’t reach his shoes, so it looked as though he had outgrown them, like a growing boy”

Sometimes his descriptions go beyond photography and seem to set a stage for cinema, such as this passage from “The Devils.”

“As for the Captain himself, he slept on the floor, without bothering to undress. Crumbs, dirt, and wet puddles were everywhere; a large soaking wet floor-cloth lay in the middle of the first room, together with an old, worn out shoe in the same puddle.”

And sometimes Dostoevsky brings literature beyond even cinema in his ability to describe an event in such a way that its visual image can never be forgotten, as in this example from “House of the Dead.”

“I asked Katya if she remembered her teacher. She looked at me without a word, turned her face to the wall and burst into tears.” (from the introduction)

Painting, oil on paper 1993, Richard Britell 6.5" x 6"
Collection of Julia Britell