GEORGE GROSZ AND DOSTOYEVSKY
Very few writers infuse characters with as much rich humanness and complexity as Dostoyevsky. His characters are so filled in with real minds that we as readers cannot help but be pushed into the same dense emotional environment that we find ourselves in when we are interacting with living human beings. We feel for his characters the same admiration, frustration, anger, sadness, pity, torment and love that we feel for our own family members. His characters are hugely different from one another and we get the sense that when the book is closed and these people are not on our current page being activated by our reading, they go about their lives full of all the difficulties and pursuits that we have in our own lives.
George Grosz infused his characters with a similar fullness. He was part of a much larger movement that allowed artists to use different stylistic tools inside a single piece of art. Rather than being confined by the realism of human anatomy, this allowed artists like Grosz to describe the vast difference between mental states of several people in the same scene. And his depictions focused on much of the same conflict, embarrassment, vulnerability, arrogance, joy, frustration, and humiliation that Dostoyevsky explored.