"What's the use of torturing your body with not eating,

and let your soul swell with pride?

What good is it to us to fade from fasting,

if we turn pale with envy?

What virtue is it not to drink wine,

how about getting drunk on hate?

Or not to eat fish and meat,

but shall we eat our brothers with slander?"

We think that evil has historical roots; that there is a historical logic, that there are political culprits; that there is a way for us not to be a part of it. Dostoevsky does not think so…

…My grandmother, who was an old ordinary woman, once told me a story: how people lived in the villages once upon a time.

She told me that when misfortune befell someone in the village, the whole village rose up to support this someone. There was a case when a certain man lost all his sheep to a wolf. This has been his entire livelihood. Devastated by the loss he took a rope and went to the forest to hang himself.

His fellow villagers stopped him, caught him and started going from house to house. And from every house they gave him something, some gave him a lamb, some goat, some calf.

So in the end the man ended up with more livestock than he originally had before the loss. This was the true "welfare state," where one helps one's neighbor whom one knows,

In the old living and organic village community, idlers could not get anything, but only honest and hardworking people were helped when they got into any kind of trouble.

Moreover, without law and written rules.

People simply acted according to their heart, conscience and according to the good example they saw from their ancestors.

My grandmother also said to me that when someone started building a house, he only bought the nails, and the others helped him to collect and cut beams from the forest, and to make adobe from the clay in the yard, and a whole village rose up to build his house. So even the poorest had their own home without being enslaved to anyone or anything for the rest of their lives.

In today's age of individualism and selfishness, in consumption and labels we have lost these existential realities - being kind and supportive not in expectation of anything but because it is right to help when the need of help presents itself honestly and sincerely.

Here is why we are enslaved in the present system in which slavery to monetary fractions and creditors stifles the freedom of development , kindness and fulfillment.

Here is why "soul closure" ,"trust closure", "eye closure " "the murder of God on the spirit of the man" lead to mental problems labeled with different modern names and worn as a batch …of the modern day "achievements"

Fyodor Dostoevsky was born on October 30 (b.a. November 11 according to the new style) 1821 in Moscow, as the second child in the family of a doctor in a hospital for the poor. The family lived on the grounds of the hospital. And because he grew up around the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, where his father worked, Fyodor liked to talk to the patients. He experienced everything he heard from them, and soon his father banned these conversations, which, according to him, had a bad effect on the boy's psyche.

Fyodor was only 15 when he lost his mother, and he had six other siblings.

Fyodor and his brother Mikhail were sent to study at the St. Petersburg Military Engineering School, and their younger siblings - in foster families. When his brother Mikhail is sent to Estonia for health reasons, Fyodor completely withdraws into himself. His classmates began to call him "Monk Photius" because of his ascetic lifestyle.

"Demons" - an incredible novel about the diabolical temptation to renew the world, about the demonic obsession with the forces of evil and destruction.

Dostoevsky foresees widespread :

"Each member of society watches the others and is obliged to report upwards. Everyone belongs to everyone, and everyone belongs to everyone.

All are slaves, and in their slavery they are equal. Slander and murder are permissible, but only as a last resort, the main thing is equality"

Dostoevsky predicted in Demons :

"Only what is necessary is necessary - this will be the motto of the globe in the future."

"Slaves must have rulers. "

"...Unquestioning obedience, complete impersonality…”

Dostoevsky is an influencer in the true sense of the word. His words have struck people right in the heart for centuries and across different cultural boundaries. His powerful voice combines suffering and passion, suicide and love, tragedy and sacrifice.

.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner were amazed by Dostoevsky's ability to captivate, mesmerize and read people's minds.

According to James Joyce, Dostoevsky "created modern prose and raised it to the heights of today."

Franz Kafka, a fan of The Brothers Karamazov, called Dostoevsky his "blood relative".

Ernest Hemingway claimed that the author of "The Idiot" influenced him immensely:

"In Dostoevsky, there are things you believe and things you don't believe, but there are also such truths that, while reading, you feel yourself changing."

Not just anyone, but Sigmund Freud himself psychoanalyzed the Russian writer in his famous essay "Dostoevsky and Parricide", published in 1928 as a preface to a German collection of materials devoted to "The Brothers Karamazov". Freud wouldn't be Freud if he hadn't focused on Dostoevsky's Oedipus complex and relationship with his father, his epileptic fits, religious views, and his 10-year gambling addiction.

"Man is unhappy just because he does not know that he is happy, just for the sake of it"

"Feed them first and then ask them for virtues!"

Dostoevsky called "the ideas" - "the DNA of the spiritual gene."

The main problem in all his works is the "murder of God in the spirit of the man".

It is this "murder" that the writer considers death, not physical end…

Friedrich Nietzsche himself, in "The Sunset of the Gods", says of him:

"He is the only psychologist from whom I have learned anything, he is one of the happy accidents of my life - happier even than Stendhal".

Perhaps it is time to read Dostoevsky again…

Shared with joy and gratitude

A.A

Stob, Bulgaria