Dolls

ten-year-old Lucy and the five-year-old Devon at the bottom. The interior of the brownstone was a living museum of female artifacts, with galleries devoted to the display of bras and panties, blow-dryers and tampons, makeup jars and lipstick tubes, dolls and jump ropes, nighties and bobby pins, curling irons and facial creams and endless, endless pairs of shoes. To go there was like visiting a foreign country, but since I adored every person who lived in that house, it was the single place on earth

pointing at her, they may be shouting abuse at her. She looks trapped / cornered. They may accuse her of being under the influence of Satan. We can see a rag doll lying on the floor. It could be her child’s doll. Her child may be accused too as rag dolls are often associated with practices of black magic. The paper on the left may be what was written at the trial. What I find most striking about this picture, is the look on this poor woman’s face. She must be one of the women who were accused of being

councilors and yet at the same time, as it were, sort of fantastic titular councilors. Someone was grimacing in front of me, having hidden himself behind all this fantastic crowd, and he was fidgeting some thread, some springs through, and these little dolls moved, and he laughed and laughed away. The ambiguous laughter of this demiurge or demon can be heard in all of Dostoevsky's later works. Here, in germ, was the reality that challenged his powers of imitation, an indefinite “something new,” a completely