Quotes about Dostoevsky (from noted scholars)

//////////////////////////// taken from

http://www.fyodordostoevsky.com/quotes.php

"...the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn." -Nietzsche (1887)
"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 (1923)
"...a prophet of God," and "mystical seer." - Vladimir Solvyov (1883)
"He lived in literature." - Konstantin Mochulsky
"Dostoevsky is finished. He will no longer write anything important." -Nekrasov (1859)
"Russia's evil genius" - Maxim Gorky (1905)
"...the Shakespeare of the lunatic asylum" - Count Melchoir de Vogue (1848-1910)
"A sick, cruel talent" - Nikolay Mikhailovsky (1882)
"Dostoevsky preaches the morality of the pariah, the morality of the slave." - Georg Brandes (1889)
"...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" and described Notes from Underground as "...an aweand terror-inspiring example of this sympathy." - Thomas Mann
"Dostoevsky was human in that 'all too human' sense of Nietzsche. He wrings our withers when he unrolls
his scroll of life." and "Dostoevsky had virtually to create God -- and what a Herculean task that was!
Dostoevsky rose from the depths and, reaching the summit, retained something of the depths about him
still." and "Dostoevsky is chaos and fecundity. Humanity, with him, is but a vortex in the bubbling
maelstrom." -Henry Miller
Joseph Conrad described The Brothers Karamazov as "... an impossible lump of valuable matter. It's
terrifically bad and impressive and exasperating. Moreover, I don't know what Dostoevsky stands for or
reveals, but I do know that he is too Russian for me. It sounds like some fierce mouthings of prehistoric
ages."
"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
Kenneth Rexroth once described Dostoevsky as a "man of many messages, a man in whom the flesh
was always troubled and sick and whose head was full of dying ideologies--at last the sun in the sky, the
hot smell of a woman, the grass on the earth, the human meat on the bone, the farce of death"
Turgenev on Dostoevsky: "...the nastiest Christian I've ever met".

"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