Famous epileptics in representational art (III)

M. Liebermann: Dostoyevsky as Moses, 1896

Among the ranks of famous epileptics, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821 – 1880) is probably the best known. This position is due to him on the one hand because of his significant as one of the greatest authors of the 19th century, and on the other because we have very detailed descriptions of his frequent epileptic seizures. We owe these detailed descriptions of seizures on the one hand to the diary notes of this second wife, Anna Grigoryevna Dostoyevskaya, and on the other hand to the meticulous, almost anatomized descriptions of seizure symptoms, with which Dostoyevsky himself, in a kind of autobiographical rendering of his own experiences. Equips several of his fictitious epileptic protagonists in his novels.

M. Beckmann: Dostoyevsky, 1921

There are few artistic portrayals of Dostoyevsky made in his lifetime. Nevertheless, there are some photographs of him, which served more than a few artists as a model in later years. (This is probably the main reason why so many posthumous pictures of Dostoyevsky are so similar). Following the death of the great Russian author, over 1500 representations appeared in the last years of the 19th century and first half of the 20th century alone, with the portraitists including such significant names as Max Liebermann, Edvard Munch, Max Ernst and Max Beckmann.

Max Ernst: The Rendezvous of Friends, 1922

The pictures that we have of Dostoyevsky, photographs as well as artistic portrayals, as a rule show a very serious man, with whose mostly shaded eyes are often directed into an undefined distance and speak of meditativeness, reflection and internalisation. To what extent Dostojevksy's fairly active epilepsy shaped his personality is at best a matter of conjecture. Nevertheless it influenced his daily life and his literary activity so much that he made many of the lead figures in his novels have epilepsy, with Prince Mishkin in "The Idiot" and Smerdjakov in "The Brothers Karamazov" being the best known and most significant. Many biographers are of the view that the literary work of Dostoyevsky would have been quite different without his epilepsy. Reinhold Schneider, the writer and Catholic thinker from the time of World War 2, even speaks in this connection, with reference to the autobiographical figure of Prince Mishkin, of the "terrible gift of grace of epilepsy".