i love this world, even in its hard places

so it wasn't as though he was writing it in by accident. in fact, it's extremely easy to read this passage and understand some of the examples i gave above as being purposeful. in idiot, rogozhin and nastasya both use queerness to manipulate myshkin and aglaya respectively. both characters are "damaged goods" both mentally and in terms of sexual development, leading to perversion. in the cases of trusotsky and stavrogin, both characters are explicitly villainous and their villainy comes in part from their willingness to corrupt other men by any means possible, including sexually.

i can't think of any god-fearing excuse for whatever the hell happens in netochka nezvanova. the state tried to execute him because they knew that if he wrote a complete novel with a lesbian protagonist he would be too powerful. sad!

obviously this isn't woke or anything, and there were authors writing in the same period and similar circumstances who wrote much more liberal viewpoints into their works. however dostoevsky was a conservative & intensely religious man, so this isn't exactly surprising. i just wish that people could talk about this subtext without being shot down or ignored. these toxic relationships are among the most interesting parts of dostoevsky's novels to me as a gay person and i'm sick of people pretending that dostoevsky couldn't have been a) an incredible writer b) a conservative christian c) purposefully engaging with a spectre of queerness.

anyway. here are some articles i've found that do discuss the topic. i haven't had a chance to read through all of them, but they at least look interesting (all free and available for download)

dostoevsky and the (missing) marriage plot by anna a. berman (2021)

dostoevsky's comley boy: homoerotic desire and aesthetic strategies in a raw youth by susanne fusso (2000)

+ fusso has a whole book called "discovering sexuality in dostoevsky"

a falliable narrator and an inscrutable object: desire as structure in dostoevsky's the eternal husband by james phillips (2024)

"mann-mannliche" love in dostoevsky's fiction (an approach to the possessed) by irene zohrab (2002)

dostoevsky in europe: "the life of a great sinner" as source material for "the possessed" and "the adolescent", and ulrichs's confessional 'third sex' theory and some court cases in germany by irene zohrab (2001)

dostoyevsky: epilepsy, mysticism, and homosexuality by j.r. maze (1981)

An interesting game where you are presented with 10 artifacts from the MET. You have to place where the artifact is from and what time period it is from. Each artifact scores up to 10,000 points, and you lose points the further away your guess is and how far off in time you are. You can only play once a day. Thanks to @baebeylik for showing this to me.

Today I scored really well. Yesterday ... not so much.