Fyodor Dostoevsky - Complete Letters
On the meaning of life, in a letter to his brother, after surviving execution
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“Brother! I’m not despondent and I haven’t lost heart. Life is everywhere, life is in us ourselves, not outside. There will be people by my side, and to be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart — that’s what life is all about, that’s its task. I have come to recognize that. The idea has entered my flesh and blood… The head that created, lived the higher life of art, that recognized and grew accustomed to the higher demands of the spirit, that head has already been cut from my shoulders… But there remain in me a heart and the same flesh and blood that can also love, and suffer, and pity, and remember, and that’s life, too!
I haven’t lost heart, remember that hope has not abandoned me… After all I was at death’s door today, I lived with that thought for three-quarters of an hour, I faced the last moment, and now I’m alive again!
If anyone remembers me with malice, and if I quarreled with anyone, if I made a bad impression on anyone — tell them to forget about that if you manage to see them. There is no bile or spite in my soul, I would like to so love and embrace at least someone out of the past at this moment.
When I look back at the past and think how much time was spent in vain, how much of it was lost in delusions, in errors, in idleness, in the inability to live; how I failed to value it, how many times I sinned against my heart and spirit — then my heart contracts in pain. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each moment could have been an eternity of happiness. Si jeunesse savait!
About Fyodor Dostoevsky - Complete Letters
A potent mixture of spontaneous patter, soul-searching, manic highs and lows, these letters are as Dostoevskian as anything the great Russian novelist ever wrote. Three intertwined topics keep recurring: his thirst for literary fame, his constant need for loans and his absorption in books, evinced in critical comments on dozens of writers. Dostoevsky was capable of outpourings of tenderness, as in the correspondence to his first wife, and the letters he wrote while imprisoned in Peter-Paul Fortress reveal his inner strength.