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Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Painted portrait by Vasily PerovPainted portrait by Vasily PerovVasily Perov; Google Art Project reproduction · Public domain

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Life dates: 1821 AD — 1881 AD

Dostoyevsky’s arguments change with speaker and circumstance. Read Razumihin’s excited defence of independent mistakes beside the narrator’s account of possible renewal, keeping Garnett’s English wording and the scene in view.

▷ Play this voiceSearch these words ↗Place in time ↗lovetruthfaithlifetimeknowledgedeathjustice

Life and writing

The catalogue identifies Fyodor Dostoyevsky and gives his lifetime as 1821–1881. It credits Constance Garnett with the English translation; the linked text repeats that credit before a biographical introduction and the novel. The introduction must remain distinct from the characters and narrator. Digital credits name John Bickers, Dagny and David Widger. The checked record does not identify the underlying printed edition or publisher. This profile binds the existing Dostoyevsky-labelled identity and selected passages only; it does not merge other spelling labels or fill their unknown quotation dates.

In Part III, Chapter I, Razumihin excitedly defends making one’s own mistakes while escorting Raskolnikov’s mother and sister. His forceful speech and their responses belong to a particular social exchange, not a licence to act carelessly. Epilogue II then describes Raskolnikov feeling a possible change before he can analyse it, with Sonia and a New Testament in the surrounding scene. Both complete selected English extracts match the checked Garnett text under limited normalization. The ending suggests renewal within the novel; it does not guarantee recovery or erase responsibility for harm.

Reading this voice

Read Part III, Chapter I with its listeners and their responses, then the final section of the epilogue with its religious setting. Distinguish Razumihin’s speech from the narrator’s account of Raskolnikov. Both selected complete English extracts match this Garnett text under punctuation, case and spacing comparison. Other attribution spellings and unknown archive dates remain separate and unchanged.

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Profile sources and editorial notes

Agent-assisted editorial profile, updated 2026-10-05. A human reviewer is not recorded. Biographical context does not independently authenticate every quotation attributed to this person.

Quotations and sayings

01c. 1851 AD
Oh, you knew that your deed would be preserved in books, would reach tghe depths of the ages and the utmost limits of the earth, and you hoped that, following you, man, too, would remain with God, having no need of miracles. But you did not know that as soon as man rejects miracles, he will at once reject God as well, for man seeks not so much God as miracles. And since man cannot bear to be left without miracles, he will go and create new miracles for himself... Oh, there will be centuries of free reason, of their science and anthropophagy... Freedom, free reason, and science willl lead them into such a maze, and confront them with such miracles and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, unruly and ferocious, will exterminate themselves.
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12c. 1851 AD
[Alyosha] was to some extent a youth of our last epoch — that is, honest in nature, desiring the truth, seeking for it and believing in it, and seeking to serve it at once with all the strength of his soul, seeking for immediate action, and ready to sacrifice everything, life itself, for it. Though these young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply tenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set before them as their goal, such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of them.
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16c. 1851 AD
...if there really is some day discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices - that is, an explanation of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, how they develop, what they are aiming at in one case and in another and so on, that is a real mathematical formula - then, most likely, man will at once cease to feel desire, indeed, he will be certain to. For who would want to choose by rule? Besides, he will at once be transformed from a human being into an organ-stop or something of that sort; for what is a man without desires, without freewill and without choice, if not a stop in an organ?
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17c. 1851 AD
One's own free unfettered choice, one's own caprice, however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at times to frenzy -- is that very "most advantageous advantage" which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.
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22c. 1851 AD
I am leaving now; but know, Katerina Ivanovna, that you indeed love only him. And the more he insults you, the more you love him. That is your strain. You precisely love him as he is, you love him insulting you. If he reformed, you would drop him at once and stop loving him altogether. But you need him in order to continually contemplate your high deed of faithfulness, and to reproach him for his unfaithfulness. And it all comes from your pride. Oh, there is much humility and humiliation in it, but all of it comes from pride.
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