Antoni Tàpies

Antoni Tàpies i Puig, 1st Marquess of Tàpies (Catalan pronunciation: [ənˈtɔni ˈtapiəs]; 13 December 1923 – 6 February 2012) was a Catalan^[1] painter, sculptor and art theorist, who became one of the most famous European artists of his generation.

Life

The son of lawyer Josep Tàpies i Mestre, and Maria Puig i Guerra, Antoni Tàpies Puig was born in Barcelona on December 13, 1923. His father was a lawyer and Catalan nationalist who served briefly with the Republican government. At 17, Tàpies suffered a near-fatal heart attack caused by tuberculosis. He spent two years as a convalescent in the mountains, reading widely and pursuing an interest in art that had already expressed itself when he was in his early teens.^[2]
Tàpies studied at the German School of Barcelona. After studying law for 3 years, he devoted himself from 1943 onwards only to his painting. He lived mainly in Barcelona and was represented by The Pace Gallery in New York. Tàpies died in early February 2012.^[3] He was 88.^[4]

Work

Tàpies was perhaps the best-known Catalan artist to emerge in the period since the Second World War. He first came into contact with contemporary art as a teenager through the magazine D’Ací i D’Allà, published in Barcelona, and during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), while he was still at school, he taught himself to draw and paint.^[5] On a French government scholarship in the early 1950s he lived in Paris, to which he often returned. Both in Europe and beyond, the highly influential French critic and curator Michel Tapié (no relation, despite the similar name) enthusiastically promoted the work of Antoni Tàpies.
In 1948, Tàpies helped co-found the first Post-War Movement in Spain known as Dau al Set which was connected to the Surrealist and Dadaist Movements. The main leader and founder of Dau al Set was the poet Joan Brossa. The movement also had a publication of the same name, Dau al Set. Tàpies started as a surrealist painter, his early works were influenced by Paul Klee and Joan Miró; but soon become an informal artist, working in a style known as pintura matèrica, in which non artistic materials are incorporated into the paintings. In 1953 he began working in mixed media; this is considered his most original contribution to art. One of the first to create serious art in this way, he added clay and marble dust to his paint and used waste paper, string, and rags (Grey and Green Painting, Tate Gallery, London, 1957).

Tàpies' international reputation was well established by the end of the 1950s. From the late 1950s to early 1960s, Tàpies worked with Enrique Tábara, Antonio Saura, Manolo Millares and many other Spanish Informalist artists. In 1966 he was arrested at a clandestine assembly at the University of Barcelona; his work of the early 1970s is marked by symbols of Catalan identity (which was anathema to Franco).^[6] In 1974 he made a series of lithographs called Assassins and displayed them in the Galerie Maeght in Paris, in honour of regime critic Salvador Puig Antich's memory. From about 1970 (influenced by Pop art) he began incorporating more substantial objects into his paintings, such as parts of furniture. Tàpies's ideas have had worldwide influence on art, especially in the realms of painting, sculpture, etchings and lithography. Examples of his work are found in numerous major international collections. His work is associated with both Tachisme and Abstract Expressionism.

The paintings produced by Tàpies later in the 1970s and in the 1980s reveal his application of this aesthetic of meditative emptiness, for example in spray-painted canvases with linear elements suggestive of Oriental calligraphy, in mixed-media paintings that extended the vocabulary of Art informel, and in his oblique allusions to imagery within a fundamentally abstract idiom, as in Imprint of a Basket on Cloth (1980).^[7] Among the artists' work linked in style to that of Tàpies is that of the American painter Julian Schnabel as both have been connected to the art term "Matter".^[8]

Graphic work
Alongside his production of pictures and objects, since 1947 Tàpies has been active in the field of graphic work. He has produced a large number of collector’s books and dossiers in close association with poets and writers such as Alberti, Bonnefoy, Du Bouchet, Brodsky, Brossa, Daive, Dupin, Foix, Frémon, Gimferrer, Guillén, Jabès, Mestres Quadreny, Mitscherlich, Paz, Saramago, Takiguchi, Ullán, Valente and Zambrano.

Essays
Moreover, Tàpies has written essays which have been collected in a series of publications, some translated into different languages: La pràctica de l’art (1970), L’art contra l’estètica, (1974), Memòria personal (1978), La realitat com a art (1982), Per un art modern i progressista (1985), Valor de l’art (1993) and L’art i els seus llocs (1999).^[9]


Above Extracts & Below Image Taken From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoni_T%C3%A0pies

Como Me Tornei Dali (as confissões inconfessáveis de Salvador Dali apresentadas por André Parinaud)

Info On The Master of Madness:

Salvador Domènec Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989), known as Salvador Dalí (Catalan pronunciation: [səɫβəˈðo ðəˈɫi]), was a prominent Spanish surrealist painter born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain.
Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters.^[2][3] His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire includes film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.
Dalí attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes"^[4] to a self-styled "Arab lineage", claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.
Dalí was highly imaginative, and also had an affinity for partaking in unusual and grandiose behavior. His eccentric manner and attention-grabbing public actions sometimes drew more attention than his artwork to the dismay of those who held his work in high esteem and to the irritation of his critics.^[5]

Symbolism

Dalí employed extensive symbolism in his work. For instance, the hallmark "soft watches" that first appear in The Persistence of Memory suggest Einstein's theory that time is relative and not fixed.^[26] The idea for clocks functioning symbolically in this way came to Dalí when he was staring at a runny piece of Camembert cheese on a hot day in August.^[59]
The elephant is also a recurring image in Dalí's works. It first appeared in his 1944 work Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening. The elephants, inspired by Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture base in Rome of an elephant carrying an ancient obelisk,^[60] are portrayed "with long, multijointed, almost invisible legs of desire"^[61] along with obelisks on their backs. Coupled with the image of their brittle legs, these encumbrances, noted for their phallic overtones, create a sense of phantom reality. "The elephant is a distortion in space", one analysis explains, "its spindly legs contrasting the idea of weightlessness with structure."^[61] "I am painting pictures which make me die for joy, I am creating with an absolute naturalness, without the slightest aesthetic concern, I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly." —Salvador Dalí, in Dawn Ades, Dalí and Surrealism.
The egg is another common Dalíesque image. He connects the egg to the prenatal and intrauterine, thus using it to symbolize hope and love;^[62] it appears in The Great Masturbator and The Metamorphosis of Narcissus. The Metamorphosis of Narcissus also symbolized death and petrification. Various animals appear throughout his work as well: ants point to death, decay, and immense sexual desire; the snail is connected to the human head (he saw a snail on a bicycle outside Freud's house when he first met Sigmund Freud); and locusts are a symbol of waste and fear.^[62]

Science

References to Dalí in the context of science are made in terms of his fascination with the paradigm shift that accompanied the birth of quantum mechanics in the twentieth century. Inspired by Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, in 1958 he wrote in his "Anti-Matter Manifesto": "In the Surrealist period, I wanted to create the iconography of the interior world and the world of the marvelous, of my father Freud. Today, the exterior world and that of physics has transcended the one of psychology. My father today is Dr. Heisenberg."^[63]
In this respect, The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, which appeared in 1954, in hearkening back to The Persistence of Memory, and in portraying that painting in fragmentation and disintegration summarizes Dalí's acknowledgment of the new science.^[63]

Endeavors outside painting

Dalí was a versatile artist. Some of his more popular works are sculptures and other objects, and he is also noted for his contributions to theatre, fashion, and photography, among other areas.

Sculptures and other objects

Two of the most popular objects of the surrealist movement were Lobster Telephone and Mae West Lips Sofa, completed by Dalí in 1936 and 1937, respectively. Surrealist artist and patron Edward James commissioned both of these pieces from Dalí; James inherited a large English estate in West Dean, West Sussex when he was five and was one of the foremost supporters of the surrealists in the 1930s.^[64] "Lobsters and telephones had strong sexual connotations for [Dalí]", according to the display caption for the Lobster Telephone at the Tate Gallery, "and he drew a close analogy between food and sex."^[65] The telephone was functional, and James purchased four of them from Dalí to replace the phones in his retreat home. One now appears at the Tate Gallery; the second can be found at the German Telephone Museum in Frankfurt; the third belongs to the Edward James Foundation; and the fourth is at the National Gallery of Australia.^[64]
The wood and satin Mae West Lips Sofa was shaped after the lips of actress Mae West, whom Dalí apparently found fascinating.^[23] West was previously the subject of Dalí's 1935 painting The Face of Mae West. Mae West Lips Sofa currently resides at the Brighton and Hove Museum in England.
Between 1941 and 1970, Dalí created an ensemble of 39 jewels. The jewels are intricate, and some contain moving parts. The most famous jewel, "The Royal Heart", is made of gold and is encrusted with 46 rubies, 42 diamonds, and four emeralds and is created in such a way that the center "beats" much like a real heart. Dalí himself commented that "Without an audience, without the presence of spectators, these jewels would not fulfill the function for which they came into being. The viewer, then, is the ultimate artist." (Dalí, 1959.) The "Dalí – Joies" ("The Jewels of Dalí") collection can be seen at the Dalí Theater Museum in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, where it is on permanent exhibition.

Theatre and film

In theatre, Dalí constructed the scenery for Federico García Lorca's 1927 romantic play Mariana Pineda.^[66] For Bacchanale (1939), a ballet based on and set to the music of Richard Wagner's 1845 opera Tannhäuser, Dalí provided both the set design and the libretto.^[67] Bacchanale was followed by set designs for Labyrinth in 1941 and The Three-Cornered Hat in 1949.^[68]
Dalí became intensely interested in film when he was young, going to the theatre most Sundays. He was part of the era where silent films were being viewed and drawing on the medium of film became popular. He believed there were two dimensions to the theories of film and cinema: "things themselves", the facts that are presented in the world of the camera; and "photographic imagination", the way the camera shows the picture and how creative or imaginative it looks.^[69] Dalí was active in front of and behind the scenes in the film world. He created pieces of artwork such as Destino, on which he collaborated with Walt Disney.
He is credited as co-creator of Luis Buñuel's surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, a 17-minute French art film co-written with Luis Buñuel that is widely remembered for its graphic opening scene simulating the slashing of a human eyeball with a razor. This film is what Dalí is known for in the independent film world. Un Chien Andalou was Dalí's way of creating his dreamlike qualities in the real world. Images would change and scenes would switch, leading the viewer in a completely different direction from the one they were previously viewing. The second film he produced with Buñuel was entitled L'Age d'Or, and it was performed at Studio 28 in Paris in 1930. L'Age d'Or was "banned for years after fascist and anti-Semitic groups staged a stink bomb and ink-throwing riot in the Paris theater where it was shown."^[70] Although negative aspects of society were being thrown into the life of Dalí and obviously affecting the success of his artwork, it did not hold him back from expressing his own ideas and beliefs in his art. Both of these films, Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or, have had a tremendous impact on the independent surrealist film movement. "If Un Chien Andalou stands as the supreme record of Surrealism's adventures into the realm of the unconscious, then L'Âge d'Or is perhaps the most trenchant and implacable expression of its revolutionary intent."^[71]
Dalí also worked with other famous filmmakers, such as Alfred Hitchcock. The most well-known of his film projects is probably the dream sequence in Hitchcock's Spellbound, which heavily delves into themes of psychoanalysis. Hitchcock needed a dreamlike quality to his film, which dealt with the idea that a repressed experience can directly trigger a neurosis, and he knew that Dalí's work would help create the atmosphere he wanted in his film. He also worked on a documentary called Chaos and Creation, which has a lot of artistic references thrown into it to help one see what Dalí's vision of art really is.
He also worked on the Disney short film production Destino. Completed in 2003 by Baker Bloodworth and Roy E. Disney, it contains dreamlike images of strange figures flying and walking about. It is based on Mexican songwriter Armando Dominguez' song "Destino". When Disney hired Dalí to help produce the film in 1946, they were not prepared for the work that lay ahead. For eight months, they continuously animated until their efforts had to come to a stop when they realized they were in financial trouble. They had no more money to finish the production of the animated film; however, it was eventually finished and shown in various film festivals. The film consists of Dalí's artwork interacting with Disney's character animation.
Dalí completed only one other film in his lifetime, Impressions of Upper Mongolia (1975), in which he narrated a story about an expedition in search of giant hallucinogenic mushrooms. The imagery was based on microscopic uric acid stains on the brass band of a ballpoint pen on which Dalí had been urinating for several weeks.^[72]

Fashion and photography

Dalí built a repertoire in the fashion and photography industries as well. In fashion, his cooperation with Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli is well-known, where Dalí was hired by Schiaparelli to produce a white dress with a lobster print. Other designs Dalí made for her include a shoe-shaped hat and a pink belt with lips for a buckle. He was also involved in creating textile designs and perfume bottles. In 1950, Dalí created a special "costume for the year 2045" with Christian Dior.^[67] Photographers with whom he collaborated include Man Ray, Brassaï, Cecil Beaton, and Philippe Halsman.
With Man Ray and Brassaï, Dalí photographed nature; with the others, he explored a range of obscure topics, including (with Halsman) the Dalí Atomica series (1948)—inspired by his painting Leda Atomica — which in one photograph depicts "a painter's easel, three cats, a bucket of water, and Dalí himself floating in the air."^[67]
One of Dalí's most unorthodox artistic creations may have been an entire person. At a French nightclub in 1965, Dalí met Amanda Lear, a fashion model then known as Peki D'Oslo.^[73] Lear became his protégé and muse,^[73] writing about their affair in the authorized biography My Life With Dalí (1986).^[74] Transfixed by the mannish, larger-than-life Lear, Dalí masterminded her successful transition from modeling to the music world, advising her on self–presentation and helping spin mysterious stories about her origin as she took the disco-art scene by storm. According to Lear, she and Dalí were united in a "spiritual marriage" on a deserted mountaintop.^[73] Referred to as Dalí's "Frankenstein,"^[75] some believe Lear's name is a pun on the French "L'Amant Dalí", or Lover of Dalí. Lear took the place of an earlier muse, Ultra Violet (Isabelle Collin Dufresne), who had left Dalí's side to join The Factory of Andy Warhol.^[76]

Architecture

Architectural achievements include his Port Lligat house near Cadaqués, as well as the Dream of Venus surrealist pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair, which contained within it a number of unusual sculptures and statues. His literary works include The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942), Diary of a Genius (1952–63), and Oui: The Paranoid-Critical Revolution (1927–33). The artist worked extensively in the graphic arts, producing many etchings and lithographs. While his early work in printmaking is equal in quality to his important paintings as he grew older, he would sell the rights to images but not be involved in the print production itself. In addition, a large number of unauthorized fakes were produced in the eighties and nineties, thus further confusing the Dalí print market. He took a stab at industrial design in the 1970s with a 500-piece run of the upscale Suomi tableware by Timo Sarpaneva that Dalí decorated for the German Rosenthal porcelain maker's Studio Linie.^[77]

Novels

Under the encouragement of poet Federico García Lorca, Dalí attempted an approach to a literary career through the means of the "pure novel". In his only literary production, Hidden Faces (1944), Dalí describes, in vividly visual terms, the intrigues and love affairs of a group of dazzling, eccentric aristocrats who, with their luxurious and extravagant lifestyle, symbolize the decadence of the 1930s.

Politics and personality

Salvador Dalí's politics played a significant role in his emergence as an artist. In his youth, he embraced both anarchism and communism, though his writings account anecdotes of making radical political statements more to shock listeners than from any deep conviction. This was in keeping with Dalí's allegiance to the Dada movement.
As he grew older his political allegiances changed, especially as the Surrealist movement went through transformations under the leadership of Trotskyist André Breton, who is said to have called Dalí in for questioning on his politics. In his 1970 book Dalí by Dalí, Dalí was declaring himself an anarchist and monarchist.
With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Dalí fled from fighting and refused to align himself with any group. Likewise, after World War II, George Orwell criticized Dalí for "scuttling off like a rat as soon as France is in danger" after Dalí prospered there for years: "When the European War approaches he has one preoccupation only: how to find a place which has good cookery and from which he can make a quick bolt if danger comes too near." ^[78] In a notable 1944 review of Dalí's autobiography, Orwell wrote, "One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being." ^[78]
After his return to Catalonia after World War II, Dalí became closer to the authoritarian Franco regime. Some of Dalí's statements supported the Franco regime, congratulating Franco for his actions aimed "at clearing Spain of destructive forces."^[40] Dalí, having returned to the Catholic faith and becoming increasingly religious as time went on, may have been referring to the Republican atrocities during the Spanish Civil War.^[79][80] Dalí sent telegrams to Franco, praising him for signing death warrants for prisoners.^[40] He even met Franco personally^[81] and painted a portrait of Franco's granddaughter.
He also once sent a telegram praising the Conducător, Romanian Communist leader Nicolae Ceauşescu, for his adoption of a scepter as part of his regalia. The Romanian daily newspaper Scînteia published it, without suspecting its mocking aspect. One of Dalí's few possible bits of open disobedience was his continued praise of Federico García Lorca even in the years when Lorca's works were banned.^{[not in citation given][17]}
Dalí, a colorful and imposing presence in his ever–present long cape, walking stick, haughty expression, and upturned waxed mustache, was famous for having said that "every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí."^[82] The entertainer Cher and her husband Sonny Bono, when young, came to a party at Dalí's expensive residence in New York's Plaza Hotel and were startled when Cher sat down on an oddly shaped sexual vibrator left in an easy chair. When signing autographs for fans, Dalí would always keep their pens. When interviewed by Mike Wallace on his 60 Minutes television show, Dalí kept referring to himself in the third person, and told the startled Mr. Wallace matter-of-factly that "Dalí is immortal and will not die." During another television appearance, on The Tonight Show, Dalí carried with him a leather rhinoceros and refused to sit upon anything else.^{[citation needed]}
Salvador Dalí frequently traveled with his pet ocelot Babou, even bringing it aboard the luxury ocean liner, SS France.

Legacy

Salvador Dalí has been cited as major inspiration from many modern artists, such as Damien Hirst, Noel Fielding, Jeff Koons and most other modern surrealists. Salvador Dalí's manic expression and famous moustache have made him something of a cultural icon for the bizarre & surreal. He has been portrayed on film by Robert Pattinson in Little Ashes, and Adrien Brody in Midnight in Paris. He was also parodied in a series of painting skits on Captain Kangaroo as "Salvador Silly" (played by Cosmo Allegretti) and in a Sesame Street muppet skit as "Salvador Dada" (an orange gold AM performed by Jim Henson).


Above Extracts & Below Images: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dal%C3%AD

O Mito Trágico do Angelus de Millet

About Dali, Millet & Angelus:


Influences in the Life of Salvador Dali

The Angelus of Millet

This was a painting that hung outside a classroom in one of Dali's schools, that he was later to remember and include in many of his works, such as The Architectonic Angelus of Millet and The Angelus of Gala. It depicts a man and a woman praying over a harvest, and is seen my many as a symbolic religious piece. However, Dali read many sinister meanings into it. He saw the woman as being aggressive, and described the picture as being about sexual repression rather then humble worship.
He also claimed that if the picture were to be x-rayed it would reveal that the figures were originally praying over the coffin of a child. This was always seen as another manifestation of Dali's bizarre fantasies, but an x-ray did actually reveal a geometric shape, which had been painted over, and resembled a small coffin. Dali's interpretation had been correct.

Source: http://h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/A585344

The painting was commissioned by Thomas Gold Appleton, an American art collector who was based in Boston, Massachusetts, and who had previously studied with Barbizon painter, Constant Troyon, a friend of Millet's. It was completed during the summer of 1857. Millet added a steeple and changed the initial title of the work, Prayer for the Potato Crop to The Angelus when the purchaser failed to take possession in 1859. Displayed to the public for the first time in 1865, the painting changed hands several times, increasing only modestly in value, since some considered the artist's political sympathies suspect. Upon Millet's death a decade later, a bidding war between the US and France ensued, ending some years later with a price tag of 800,000 gold francs.
The disparity between the apparent value of the painting and the poor estate of Millet's surviving family was a major impetus in the invention of the droit de suite, intended to compensate artists or their heirs when works are resold.^[9]

Info & Image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Millet#The_Angelus

More Info Related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoiac-critical_method
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dal%C3%AD
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Millet

Dostoievski

About Fyodor Dostoyevsky:

Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky^[1] (Russian: Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский; IPA: [ˈfʲodər mʲɪˈxajləvʲɪtɕ dəstɐˈjefskʲɪj] ( listen); November 11, 1821 – February 9, 1881^[2]) was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. With the embittered voice of the anonymous "underground man", Dostoyevsky wrote Notes from Underground (1864), which has been called the "best overture for existentialism ever written" by Walter Kaufmann.^[3] He is often acknowledged by critics as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature.^[4]

Early life

Childhood

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born on 30 October 1821 (11 November 1821, according to the Gregorian Calendar) as the second child of Mikhail Dostoyevsky and Maria Nechayeva. His father, who descended from a Lithuanian noble family, resided nearby in the Belarussian city of Pinsk. Like his father, Mikhail was a clergyman but when he refused to join a seminary, his family divorced. Subsequently Mikhail escaped from home. When he unsuccessfully searched for his family, he gave up and at the age of 20 then went to the Moscow Medical Surgical University, where he was appointed senior physician in 1818. In 1819 he married the eleven-years younger Maria. One year later he resigned from military service to move to a hospital. After the birth of Mikhail and Fyodor, Mikhail was able to retrieve his lost title and acquire a manor 150 verst of Moscow. Maria Nechayeva descended from a family of Russian merchants.^[5]
Dostoyevsky was raised near the hospital—it was neither a wealthy nor a poor home. In his childhood, Fyodor often went with his family to summer visits in Darovoye. At the age of three he discovered heroic sagas, fairy tales, legends and a deeply ingrained piety from nannies. He was soon obsessed with tales. The nanny Alina Frolovna, who helped the family when their manor burnt down, and the serf and farmer Marei from Darovoye, who helped to fight his early hallucinations, possibly caused by the terrible tales, were influential for his childhood. Fyodor also discovered the miserable hospital garden, which was separated by a large grid from their civil and protected private garden. His parents forbade him the contact with the other side, as they intended to shield their children from uncontrollable influences. Fyodor, however, ignored their warnings and often talked with the reconvalescent people. There he also encountered a crime between a nine-year-old girl, who was found raped in the garden. He never forgot this traumatic experience.^[6]
Fyodor's parents placed value on a thorough upbringing. At the age of four he learned reading and writing by his mother from the Bible. One of the day's highlights were the evening readings by his father and mother. His parents introduced him at an early stage to Russian literature, such as Karamzin's Russian Tales, Pushkin, Derzhavin, as well as English literature of Ann Radcliffe and German literature of Friedrich Schiller. Fyodor was impressed by the latter's play "Räuber", which he saw at the age of 10. Fyodor and Mikhail both enjoyed Pushkin's poems, which they learned for the most part by heart; Pushkin's death was a shock for the whole family. Fyodor's father placed also value on a good education. He sent Fyodor first to a French boarding school and then to the best private high school in Moscow, the "College for Noble Male Children". As the school was too expensive, he had to make loans, take advances and extend his private practice. When the thirteen-year-old Fyodor arrived to this famous college, he experienced an inferiority complex towards his more polite classmates. This feeling was often documented on his works, especially The Adolescent.^[7]

Youth

In 27 September 1837 his mother died of tuberculosis. Fyodor contracted a serious throat disease.^[8] Subsequently, Fyodor and his brother Mikhail were sent around May to St Petersburg to attend the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute, while their younger siblings were sent to different families. Fyodor and Mikhail had to abandon the academic education at the Moscow college, as their adoptive parents were not able to pay for the schoolfee. Fyodor's career, however, seems to be apparent, as his father expected a space at the academy for his sons, and the political propensity under Nicholas I allowed them a good military professional career. On the way to St. Petersburg, Fyodor became a witness of a violence on violence situation in a posting house; one member of the military police beat the carter's neck, and the carter subsequently passed his pain to the horse through a whiplash; Fyodor betook to this situation on his book A Writer's Diary. At the academy he was separated from his brother, who was later sent to Reval, Estonia due to his poor health and the better studying conditions.^[8] Fyodor passed the entrance exam and entered the academy in 16 January the next year, but only with the help of godmothers, who paid the schoolfee for the unaware Fyodor.^[9]
Fyodor did not enjoy the academy, primarily because of his lack of interest in the subjects science, mathematics and military application, as he rather preferred drawing and architecture, and the atmosphere. The academy was a former castle built for the tsar Paul I, who was murdered shortly after his accession to the throne. Among the 120 classmates, mainly from Polish or Baltic-German descent, he was an outsider due to his different character; Fyodor was brave and had a strong sense of justice as against to the clownish and brutal class fellows. He protected newcomers, aligned oneself with teachers, criticized the corruption among officers and helped poor farmers. Although he was a loner and lived in his own literary world, his classmates showed respect for him. Fyodor was called "Monk Photius" because of his reclusive way of life and his interest in religion.^[10][8]
The first strong presence of epilepsy occurred on Fyodor after receiving a message of the death of his father. Mikhail was murdered in 1839 by his adscript peasant; the cause was one of Mikhail's irascibility attacks. Fyodor continued the disliked study. When he passed the exams and obtained the rank as ingenieur cadet, he was given the right to live off-site.^[10] After his short visit to brother Mikhail in Reval, Fyodor often went to concerts, operas, theatres and balletts, and discovered gambling by two friends. His independence was responsible for the financial troubles.^[8] In August 1843 he received an employment as a draftsman. In the meantime, Fyodor lived in an apartment of German-Baltic Dr. A. Riesenkampf, a friend of his brother Mikhael. Like in his childhood at the hospital, he showed interest in the ill people from the lower class.^[10] Aside this, he began to translate George Sand's La dernière Albini and Balzac's Eugénie Grandet, and upon the advice Schiller's Räuber, Don Carlos among others.^[8] With the help of his translations, he could obtain some money. His job became more and more humiliating. After quitting a duty travel, he was released in 19 October 1844 as a lieutenant. Fyodor was in financial troubles, so he decided to write his own novel.^[10]

Death

Dostoyevsky died in St. Petersburg on 9 February [O.S. 28 January] 1881 of a lung hemorrhage associated with emphysema and an epileptic seizure. The copy of the New Testament given to him in Siberia sat on his lap. He was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Saint Petersburg. Forty thousand mourners attended his funeral.^[22] His tombstone is inscribed with the words of Christ, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. (from the Gospel According to John 12:24) – which are also the epigraph of his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov.)
The rented apartment where Dostoevsky spent the last few years of his life and wrote his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, and where he died is situated at 5 Kuznechnyi pereulok. It has been restored, by reference to old photographs, as it looked when he lived there, and opened in 1971 as the Dostoyevsky House Museum. It is a popular tourist attraction in Saint Petersburg.^[23]


Source Material: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyodor_Dostoyevsky

( http://www.livrosdobrasil.com/ )

A Voz Subterrânea

Notes From Underground:

Notes from Underground (Russian: Записки из подполья, Zapiski iz podpol'ya) (also translated in English as Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld) is an 1864 novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Notes is considered by many to be the first existentialist novel. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man) who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. The first part of the story is told in monologue form, or the underground man's diary, and attacks emerging Western philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?.^[1] The second part of the book is called "Àpropos of the Wet Snow," and describes certain events that, it seems, are destroying and sometimes renewing the underground man, who acts as a first person, unreliable narrator.

Plot summary

The novel is divided into two parts.
Part 1: "Underground"
It consists of an introduction, three main sections and a conclusion. (i) The short introduction propounds a number of riddles whose meanings will be further developed. (1) Chapters two, three and four deal with suffering and the enjoyment of suffering; (2) chapters five and six with intellectual and moral vacillation and with conscious "inertia"-inaction; (3) chapters seven through nine with theories of reason and logic; (c) the last two chapters are a summary and a transition into Part 2.
War is described as people's rebellion against the assumption that everything needs to happen for a purpose, because humans do things without purpose, and this is what determines human history.
Secondly, the narrator's desire for happiness is exemplified by his liver pain and toothache. This parallels Raskolnikov's behavior in Dostoyevsky's later novel, Crime and Punishment. He says that, due to the cruelty of society, human beings only moan about pain in order to spread their suffering to others. He builds up his own paranoia to the point he is incapable of looking his co-workers in the eye.
The main issue for the Underground Man is that he has reached a point of ennui^[2] and inactivity.^[3] Unlike most people, who typically act out of revenge because they believe justice is the end, the Underground Man is conscious of his problems, feels the desire for revenge, but he does not find it virtuous; this incongruity leads to spite and spite towards the act itself with its concomitant circumstances. He feels that others like him exist, yet he continuously concentrates on his spitefulness instead of on actions that would avoid the problems he is so concerned with. He even admits at one point that he’d rather be inactive out of laziness.
The first part also gives a harsh criticism of determinism and intellectual attempts at dictating human action and behavior by logic, which the Underground Man mentions in terms of a simple math problem two times two makes four (see also necessitarianism). He states that despite humanity’s attempt to create the "Crystal Palace," a reference to a famous symbol of utopianism in Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, one cannot avoid the simple fact that anyone at any time can decide to act in a way which might not be considered good, and some will do so simply to validate their existence and to protest and confirm that they exist as individuals. For good as a general term is subjective and in the case of the Underground Man the good here he's ridiculing is enlightened self interest (egoism, selfishness). It is this position being depicted as logical and valid that the novel's protagonist despises. Since his romantic embracing of this ideal, he seems to blame it for his current base unhappiness. This type of rebellion is critical to later works of Dostoyevsky as it is used by adolescents to validate their own existence, uniqueness, and independence (see Dostoyevsky's The Adolescent). Rebellion in the face of the dysfunction and disorder of adult experience that one inherits when reaching adulthood under the understanding of tradition and society.
In other works, Dostoyevsky again confronts the concept of free will and constructs a negative argument to validate free will against determinism in the character Kirillov's suicide in his novel The Demons. Notes from Underground marks the starting point of Dostoyevsky's move from psychological and sociological themed novels to novels based on existential and general human experience in crisis.

Part 2: "Apropos of the Wet Snow"
The second part is the actual story and consists of three main segments that lead to a furthering of the Underground Man's consciousness.
The first is his obsession with an officer who physically moves him out of the way without a word or warning. He sees the officer on the street and thinks of ways to take revenge, eventually deciding to bump into him, which he does, finding to his surprise that the officer does not seem to even notice it happened.
The second segment is a dinner party with some old school friends to wish Zverkov, one of their number, goodbye as he is being transferred out of the city. The underground man hated them when he was younger, but after a random visit to Simonov’s, he decides to meet them at the appointed location. They fail to tell him that the time has been changed to six instead of five, so he arrives early. He gets into an argument with the four after a short time, declaring to all his hatred of society and using them as the symbol of it. At the end, they go off without him to a secret brothel, and, in his rage, the underground man follows them there to confront Zverkov once and for all, regardless if he is beaten or not. He arrives to find Zverkov and company have left, but, it is there that he meets Liza, a young prostitute.
The story cuts to Liza and the underground man lying silently in the dark together. The underground man confronts Liza with an image of her future, by which she is unmoved at first, but, she eventually realizes the plight of her position and how she will slowly become useless and will descend more and more, until she is no longer wanted by anyone. The thought of dying such a terribly disgraceful death brings her to realize her position, and she then finds herself enthralled by the underground man’s seemingly poignant grasp of society’s ills. He gives her his address and leaves.
After this, he is overcome by the fear of her actually arriving at his dilapidated apartment after appearing such a "hero" to her and, in the middle of an argument with his servant, she arrives. He then curses her and takes back everything he said to her, saying he was, in fact, laughing at her and reiterates the truth of her miserable position. Near the end of his painful rage he wells up in tears after saying that he was only seeking to have power over her and a desire to humiliate her. He begins to criticize himself and states that he is in fact horrified by his own poverty and embarrassed by his situation. Liza realizes how pitiful he is and tenderly embraces him. The underground man cries out “They — they won't let me — I — I can’t be good!”
After all this, he still acts terribly towards her, and, before she leaves, he stuffs a five ruble note into her hand, which she throws onto the table. He tries to catch her as she goes out onto the street but cannot find her and never hears from her again. He tries to stop the pain in his heart by "fantasizing", "And isn't it better, won't it be better?...Insult — after all, it's a purification; it's the most caustic, painful consciousness! Only tomorrow I would have defiled her soul and wearied her heart. But now the insult will never ever die within her, and however repulsive the filth that awaits her, the insult will elevate her, it will cleanse her..." He recalls this moment as making him unhappy whenever he thinks of it, yet again proving the fact from the first section that his spite for society and his inability to act like it makes him unable to act better than it.
The concluding sentences recall some of the themes explored in the first part, and the work as a whole ends with a note from the author that while there was more to the text, "it seems that we may stop here."

Literary significance and criticism

Like many of Dostoyevsky's novels, Notes from Underground was unpopular with Soviet literary critics due to its explicit rejection of utopian socialism^[4] and its portrait of humans as irrational, uncontrollable, and uncooperative. His claim that human needs can never be satisfied, even through technological progress, also goes against Marxist beliefs. Many existentialist critics, notably Jean-Paul Sartre, considered the novel to be a forerunner of existentialist thought and an inspiration to their own philosophies.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was very impressed with Dostoyevsky and claimed that he was "one of the few psychologists from whom I have learned something," and that Notes from Underground "cried truth from the blood."^[5]


Source Material: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_from_Underground