An artist was hired to paint scenes from Dostoevsky in a Moscow subway station. Does as asked. Hilarity ensues!
Ivan Nikolayev, the man who painted the murals didn’t understand all the fuss his work caused: “What did you want? Scenes of dancing? Dostoevsky does not have them,” he said. From the Telegraph:
The station, called Dostoyevskaya, is decorated with brooding grey and black mosaics which depict violent scenes from the nineteenth century writer’s best-known novels.
One controversial mural re-enacts the moment when the main character in the novel Crime and Punishment murders an elderly pawnbroker and her sister with an axe.
Another shows a suicide-obsessed character in Dostoevsky’s novel The Demons holding a pistol to his temple. If that was not enough to darken the mood, shadowlike characters are shown flitting across the cavernous new station’s walls and a giant mosaic of a depressed-looking Dostoevsky stares out at passengers.
The new station has been criticised as “gloomy and depressing,” and psychologists have warned that its “negative energy” could make it a favourite spot for committing suicide.
“The deliberate dramatism will create a certain negative atmosphere and attract people with an unnatural psyche,” Mikhail Vinogradov, a prominent psychologist said. He and other experts warned that people who wanted to end their lives by throwing themselves under a train could well choose the new station in future.
Maybe Los Angeles ought to rethink naming those Metro stops after Bukowski, Nabokov and Raymond Chandler, after all.
Moscow’s Dostoevsky station could be ‘suicide mecca’ (Telegraph)