OPHELIA ~ A TORMENTED SOUL
Ophelia (second version) 1863 Arthur Hughes (1832-1915) Ophelia in literature Russian novelist Fyodor Dostojevski , in the first chapter of his 1880 masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov, described a capricious young woman who committed suicide by throwing herself off a steep cliff into a river, simply to imitate Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Dostoevsky concludes that “Even then, if the cliff, chosen and cherished from long ago, had not been so picturesque, if it had been merely a flat, prosaic bank, the suicide might not have taken place at all.” Dostoevksy also depicts...
