Sublime

three decades earlier, however, on April 23, 1849, Dostoevsky had been arrested along with other members of a secret utopian society and sentenced to death. The emperor Nikolai I, father of Alexander II, changed the sentence but ordered that the reprieve be announced only at the last minute. After eight months in the Petropavlovsky Fortress,

Dostoevsky’s heroes ‘feel deeply because they think deeply; they suffer endlessly because they were endlessly deliberative; they dare to will because they have dared to think’.

Yet he loved people: it seems that he lived his whole life with an absolute faith in people, though no one ever thought of him as simple or naïve. There was something in him that said, and made you believe (and this was so throughout his life), that he did not wish to sit in judgement on others and would never take it upon himself to censure anyone

‘Despite all the weirdness and incongruousness of the situations in which his characters are placed, despite the oddness of their behaviour and reasoning, [Dostoevsky’s characters] never cease to be living human beings. The reader may sometimes feel he has strayed into a lunatic asylum, but never into a museum of waxworks.