Biography | Fyodor Dostoevsky — He Died at 8:38 in the Study on Kuznechny Lane

People imagine a long decline in a clinic.

He died in the study of the rented flat, after three days of bleeding.

On the night of 25–26 January 1881 Old Style a pulmonary artery ruptured.

Anna later wrote that he had stooped to retrieve a fallen cigarette stand from under a bookcase.

The hemorrhage returned.

He asked for a priest from the Vladimir church across the lane, confessed, and took communion.

Nikolai Strakhov, who was in the house, recorded the time of death as 8:38 in the evening of 28 January Old Style — 9 February 1881 New Style.

He was fifty-nine.

The clocks now standing in the reconstructed study are set to that minute.

The cause was not the epilepsy that had marked him since the Omsk years.

It was the arterial rupture, against a chest already damaged by the prison climate.

The body lay in this apartment before the funeral procession to the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.

The rooms are the same six Anna described: study toward Kuznechny, living rooms behind, children in the inner chambers.

Because this house is a state museum, the pin can be exact.

It is not a private home.

The death and the writing of The Brothers Karamazov share an address and are not the same moment.

Stand in the study for the last night.

Walk the corner for the years of the novel.

Photo: Vasily Perov, portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1872, public domain, Tretyakov Gallery, via Wikimedia Commons