Novel By Dostoevsky Novels & Stories

As she entered, her eyes landed on a table set with food and, next to it, a stack of books in Russian. Her breath caught. She hadn’t expected that. Dante had ordered books in her language. She approached with caution, letting her fingertips glide over the bound spines. Dostoevsky, Pushkin… and there it was—as if fate were daring her to drown in melancholy once again—Anna Karenina. Her lips curved into a wistful smile. For the fifth time, she surrendered to Anna’s tragedy, feeling with each word the familiar desperation of a woman torn between duty and desire. She read voraciously, as if the pages were the only escape left to her.

The only connection that I had with life and my existence on earth was pain. I felt numb without the pain, felt nothingness, at least the pain made me feel like something, it made me feel a little, like other humans. Without the pain, I was totally detached from reality, totally removed from the realm where normal people lived. He took a copy of the book he had been reading and turned the back page to write something. It was a copy of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. A modernist novel that we were currently reading. His copy wasn’t brand new, it had dog pages, had been read over and over again. With some lines underlined.

There were not much dust alongside the shelves which meant Anton did care about them. “You told me you are a fan of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy right? I went here the other day and found this.” He pulled out the first edition, hard cover print of Anna Karenina in three volumes, three books completed with the cards and everything. It was wrapped in a protective box to shield it. When Ana saw it, her eyes widened.

Not quite registering the question, she looked at her hand, which now rested on the wooden panel. Derek reached over and took the book from her lap, examining the cover and the blurb on the back. "Fyodor Dostoyevsky, huh?" he asked, proceeding to read the page that Ashlyn had bookmarked. "'But how could you live and have no story to tell?' That was him, right?" Derek asked, and Ashlyn nodded, a ghost of a smile possessing her lips. How had he known that? The quote was not referenced in the pages that he read. It wasn't often that she met someone who knew Dostoyevsky, at least not outside of her World History class.