Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was a notorious curmudgeon with little interest in visual art – or anything other than his own work and the Russian Orthodox Church, really – for most of his life, but after his virtual exile from St. Petersburg in April of 1867, he became obsessed with a number of paintings; some of which feature heavily in the fourth of his major works, The Idiot.

Dostoevsky’s Paintings is an exhaustive look at each of those paintings as instruments of meaning in his work, and life.