Painter Vasily Perov’s portrait of Dostoevsky in 1872, twenty-four years after White Nights. Photo: ... the aesthetic emerged in 2020 with the onset of COVID-19 and lockdown forcing school closures.

When Dostoevsky wrote that for man to be saved it was necessary that he should believe in the Russian God, ... It’s the aesthetic principle, as the philosophers call it, ...

T he Brothers Karamazov has been my friend since I was 18 and first read David Magarshack’s 1958 translation. Then, as now, it struck me as the grandest, richest and strangest of Dostoevsky’s ...