Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) is a great writer, the most widely read Russian author abroad, creator of the novels Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868), Demons (1871–1872), The Adolescent (1875) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880); from 1873 to 1881 – the publisher of A Writer's Diary. The portrait was made when Dostoyevsky was working on Demons. The painting’s psychological dramatic effect lies in the contrast between the writer’s concentrated, frozen face (“the head with its frozen suffering” – as I.N. Kramskoi put it) and his tightly folded arms that seem to remember being in shackles. Dostoyevsky was sentenced to death for his part in the revolutionary circle of M.V. Butashevich-Petrashevsky, but at the last moment his punishment was changed to hard labour. The writer’s spouse A.G. Dostoyevskaya said that “Perov captured…Dostoyevsky’s ‘creative moment’ … he seems to be ‘peering into himself’.” Dostoyevsky is depicted in a pose that is similar to that of Christ in Kramskoi’s Christ in the Desert. This resemblance was not coincidental for the writer’s contemporaries. According to Kramskoi, “the main virtue [of the portrait] is obviously the fact that it expressed the character of the famous writer and man.”.
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow