Few would argue against the claim that Fyo­dor Dos­to­evsky, author of such bywords for lit­er­ary weight­i­ness as Crime and Pun­ish­ment, The Idiot, and The Broth­ers Kara­ma­zov, mas­tered the nov­el, even by the for­mi­da­ble stan­dards of 19th-cen­tu­ry Rus­sia. But if you look into his papers, you’ll find that he also had an intrigu­ing way with pen and ink out­side the realm of let­ters — or, if you like, deep inside the realm of let­ters, since to see draw­ings by Dos­to­evsky, you actu­al­ly have to look with­in the man­u­scripts of his nov­els.

Above, we have a page from Crime and Pun­ish­ment into which a pair of solemn faces (not that their mood will sur­prise enthu­si­asts of Russ­ian lit­er­a­ture) found their way. Just below, you’ll find exam­ples from the same man­u­script of his pen turn­ing toward the orna­men­tal and archi­tec­tur­al while he “cre­at­ed his fic­tion step by step as he lived, read, remem­bered, reprocessed and wrote,” as the exhi­bi­tion of “Dos­toyevsky’s Doo­dles” at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty’s Har­ri­man Insti­tute of Russ­ian, Eurasian, and East Euro­pean Stud­ies put it.

Accord­ing to the exhi­bi­tion descrip­tion, Dos­to­evsky’s notes to him­self “rep­re­sent that key moment when the accu­mu­lat­ed pro­to-nov­el crys­tal­lized into a text. Like many of us, Dos­to­evsky doo­dled hard­est when the words came slow­est.” Some of Dos­to­evsky’s char­ac­ter descrip­tions, argues schol­ar Kon­stan­tin Barsht, “are actu­al­ly the descrip­tions of doo­dled por­traits he kept rework­ing until they were right.” He did­n’t just do so dur­ing the writ­ing of Crime and Pun­ish­ment, either; below we have a page of The Dev­ils that com­bines the human, the archi­tec­tur­al, and the cal­li­graph­ic, appar­ent­ly the three main avenues through which Dos­to­evsky pur­sued the doo­dler’s art.

Even if you would per­son­al­ly argue against his claim to great­ness (and thus side with his coun­try­man, col­league in lit­er­a­ture, and fel­low part-time artist Vladimir Nabokov, who found him a “mediocre” writer giv­en to “waste­lands of lit­er­ary plat­i­tudes”), sure­ly you can enjoy the charge of pure cre­ation you feel from wit­ness­ing his tex­tu­al mind inter­act with his visu­al one. Works by Dos­to­evsky can be found in our Free Audio Books and Free eBooks col­lec­tions.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vir­ginia Woolf Loved Dos­to­evsky, Oscar Wilde Some­times Despised Dick­ens & Oth­er Gos­sip from The Read­ing Expe­ri­ence Data­base

Albert Camus Talks About Adapt­ing Dos­toyevsky for the The­atre, 1959

Crime and Pun­ish­ment by Fyo­dor Dos­toyevsky Told in a Beau­ti­ful­ly Ani­mat­ed Film by Piotr Dumala

Nabokov Makes Edi­to­r­i­al Improve­ments to Kafka’s “The Meta­mor­pho­sis”

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, lit­er­a­ture, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Face­book page.

Pablo Picas­so had a long and com­plex rela­tion­ship with book illus­tra­tion. The mod­ern painter hat­ed to work on spec and resist­ed tak­ing com­mis­sions. Nonethe­less, when it came to lit­er­a­ture, he made well over 50 excep­tions, illus­trat­ing the work of scores of authors he admired. As John Gold­ing writes in The Inde­pen­dent, Picas­so had always grav­i­tat­ed toward the lit­er­ary; he wrote pro­lif­i­cal­ly, was “attract­ed to art that had a lit­er­ary fla­vor,” and “pre­ferred the com­pa­ny of writ­ers, par­tic­u­lar­ly poets, to that of oth­er painters and sculp­tors.” Gold­ing writes of the artist’s par­tic­u­lar love for the Span­ish Baroque poet Luis de Gongo­ra, whose work he illus­trat­ed in a 1948 edi­tion, and who was to “affect the future devel­op­ment of Picasso’s art in a way that his oth­er lit­er­ary col­lab­o­ra­tions did not.” But this may be a hasty judg­ment. As it turned out, Picasso’s 1931 illus­tra­tion of a short sto­ry by Hon­oré de Balzac, “The Hid­den Mas­ter­piece” (Le Chef‑d’oeuvre incon­nu), would affect him great­ly, and indi­rect­ly con­tributed to the cre­ation of his most famous work, the enor­mous anti-war can­vas Guer­ni­ca.

Picas­so accept­ed the Balzac com­mis­sion from art deal­er Ambroise Vol­lard (see the title page and fron­tispiece at top, Picasso’s por­traits of Balzac above) and com­plet­ed the thir­teen etch­ings in 1931 for a cen­ten­ni­al edi­tion (see ten of the illus­tra­tions here). Many have con­sid­ered these etch­ings “land­marks in the his­to­ry of engrav­ing.” Balza­c’s sto­ry, admired by oth­er painters like Cézanne and Matisse, is among oth­er things a tale of an artist ahead of his time. Set in the 17th cen­tu­ry, “The Hid­den Mas­ter­piece” tells of an aging painter named Fren­hofer, who obses­sive­ly labors over a work he has kept secret for years. When two younger admir­ers, painters Poussin and Por­bus, final­ly man­age to see Fren­hofer­’s secret can­vas, they are appalled—it appears to them noth­ing more than an indis­tinct mess of lines, col­ors and shapes—and they mock the old­er artist and assume their cel­e­brat­ed friend has gone insane. The next day, Fren­hofer destroys all his work and kills him­self.

Picas­so, writes Thomas Ganzevoort, “had faced some­thing of the same dumb­found­ed reac­tion from fel­low artists upon show­ing them his ground­break­ing pro­to-Cubist mas­ter­piece Les Demoi­selles d’Avignon.” He lat­er claimed that the ghost of Balzac haunt­ed him, and he found him­self so com­pelled by the sto­ry that in 1937, he chose for his new stu­dio a 17th cen­tu­ry town­house locat­ed at 7 Rue des Grands-Augustin, the very house many believed to be the set­ting of the open­ing scene in “The Hid­den Mas­ter­piece.” In April of that year, Ger­man war­planes bombed the Span­ish Basque city of Guer­ni­ca, and Picas­so aban­doned all oth­er projects and set to work on his famous large can­vas, which he com­plet­ed in June of that same year (below, see him in his Grands-Augustin stu­dio, at work on Guer­ni­ca). Like his ear­li­er, cubist work, Guer­ni­ca divid­ed crit­ics and per­plexed some of his peers. At its unveil­ing in the 1937 Paris Exhi­bi­tion, the paint­ing “gar­nered lit­tle atten­tion.” Unlike the trag­ic Fren­hofer of Balzac’s sto­ry, how­ev­er, Picas­so did not suc­cumb to self-doubt and lived to see his work vin­di­cat­ed. See this site to learn more about Balzac and Picas­so, includ­ing dis­cus­sion of a dis­put­ed 1934 draw­ing some believe to be Picasso’s own “hid­den mas­ter­piece.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See Pablo Picasso’s Spare, Ten­der Illus­tra­tions For a Lim­it­ed Edi­tion of Aristo­phanes’ Lysis­tra­ta (1934)

Watch Picas­so Cre­ate Entire Paint­ings in Mag­nif­i­cent Time-Lapse Film (1956)

A 3D Tour of Picasso’s Guer­ni­ca

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness