— Franz Kafka, Letters To Milena

"...the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn." - Nietzsche

"Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss." - Albert Einstein

"So great is the worth of Dostoevsky that to have produced him is by itself sufficient justification for the existence of the Russian people in the world: and he will bear witness for his country-men at the last judgement of the nations." - Nikolay Berdyaev

"...a prophet of God," and "mystical seer." - Vladimir Solvyov

"He lived in literature." - Konstantin Mochulsky

"Russia's evil genius" - Maxim Gorky

"...the Shakespeare of the lunatic asylum" - Count Melchoir de Vogue

"...an author whose Christian sympathy is ordinarily devoted to human misery, sin, vice, the depths of lust and crime, rather than to nobility of body and soul" - Thomas Mann

"Dostoevsky was human in that 'all too human' sense of Nietzsche. He wrings our withers when he unrolls his scroll of life." -Henry Miller

"He who gets nearer the sun is leader, the aristocrat of aristocrats, or he who, like Dostoevsky, gets nearest the moon of our non-being." - D. H. Lawrence

"Dostoyevsky wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious; that is in reality the reason why his characters seem 'pathological', while they are only visualized more clearly than any other figures in imaginative literature... He was in the rank in which we set Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe." - Edwin Muir

Dread

absolute love corrupts absolutely

Contemplating

— a fragment of a letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh

[text ID: Many people would undoubtedly consider it foolish and superstitious to go on believing in a change for the better. It is sometimes so bitterly cold in the winter that one says, `The cold is too awful for me to care whether summer is coming or not; the harm outdoes the good.' But with or without our approval, the severe weather does come to an end eventually and one fine morning the wind changes and there is the thaw. When I compare the state of the weather to our state of mind and our circumstances, subject to change and fluctuation like the weather, then I still have some hope that things may get better.]

the whole of my heart is an infinite cauldron of honey, for you. remove myself to make room. to house you with these bones as tired as blue ocean. im a good beggar. have the teeth for it. knelt to you for my knighting. waiting, a trembling dog, for you to name me beloved or beheaded. the weight of the world in your yes, in your hurricane decision. no sugar runs over. i clean my mouth after every kiss. i clean my wounds like ritual. this cauldron of honey, where flies sink & drown. this brittle collection of limbs ive coddled for you to make a bed out of. my loathing made small & menial in the shadow of your love. dwarfed by the hands you cast over me. your hands, touching me, that could smother any fire, could clench quick as a snake strike. your hands polishing me until i bleed honey into the mattress.

Silas Denver Melvin, from Grit: Poems; “Backdrop made beautiful by pity”

summer break

Grief