Few will dare to argue against the claim that Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, the author of titles that are synonymous with literary masterpieces, "Crime and Punishment", "The Idiot", "The Brothers Karamazov", is an absolute grandmaster of novels, even by extremely demanding standards of the 19th century in Russia. But if one looks at the manuscripts of his works, the observer will not miss the intriguing way in which he rules with pen and ink even outside the realm of letters - these are Dostoevsky's drawings in the margins of the novel.
A pair of solemnly serious faces found their way to one page of the "Crime and Punishment" manuscript, whose mood and presence in this place will not surprise fans of Russian literature. A few pages later, his pen turns to ornamentation and architecture. These and similar pages from the legacy of the famous writer make up the exhibition "Dostoyevsky's Doodles" at Columbia University's Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies.
Some of the descriptions of Dostoyevsky's characters, claims the scientist Konstantin Barsht, "are actually descriptions of scribbled portraits that he reworked until they became good." He did this not only when writing "Crime and Punishment"; as part of the exhibition, a page from the work "Evil Souls" is presented, which is a combination of human and architectural representations and calligraphy, apparently the three main directions of the incidental art of the great writer.
"Dostoevsky's lack of taste, his monotonous dealing with faces suffering from pre-Freudian complexes and wallowing in tragic accidents of human dignity - all this is hardly admirable," wrote his colleague Vladimir Nabokov about his famous predecessor.
Even those who agree with Nabokov's evaluations and are not lovers of the writer's work, will surely enjoy the creation and the moment of interaction between the textual and visual mind of Dostoyevsky, looking at the displayed pages.
Lermontov, a talented painter
And the most famous Russian poet, Vladimir Sergeyevich Pushkin drew a lot - on the margins and blanks of his manuscripts, he left not only women's legs and profiles, but also portraits of friends, literary characters and his self-portraits, pictures of different Pushkins of various years.
His contemporary, Mihail Lermontov, did not deal with painting and graphics just by the way, but professionally, systematically. His drawings are unusually expressive and dynamic, the painter's canvases are rich in color, and exude the spirit of his poetry. Lermont's poet and Lermont's prose writer were often helped by painters.
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