“Indeed, Dostoevsky was not content to “write” and “take notes” in the process of creative thinking, he moved in the space and time of the particular artistic universe of his notebook, where the meaning and significance of words interact reciprocally with other meanings expressed through visual images, a method of work specific to the writer.”

– from Dostoevsky: the drawing as writing by Konstantin Barsht

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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.”

– Konstantin Barsht

More in “manuscript“:

• Sketches of Nikolai Gogol, Count Fyodor Petrovich Tolstoy, and other Russian artists by poet Alexander Pushkin.
• Edo Period (1603-1868). Anatomical illustrations, late 17th century.
• From Isaac Newton’s “Waste Book”