In the bright sunlight of a paradisal day

All at once I was standing, almost without being aware of it, on that other earth in the bright sunlight of a paradisal day. I was apparently standing on one of the islands which on our earth make up the Greek archipelago, or somewhere on the coast of the mainland adjoining that archipelago. Ah, it was all exactly as with us, but it seemed that everywhere glowed with a kind of festive air, some great sacred triumph finally achieved. The tender emerald sea lapped quietly against the shores, caressing them with a love which was obvious, palpable, almost conscious. Tall, beautiful trees stood clad in the full luxuriance of their blossom; their numberless leaves, I am convinced, greeted me with a low, caressing murmur, seeming to utter words of love. The grass sparkled with bright, sweet-smelling flowers. Flocks of birds flew across the skies, and, quite unafraid of me, perched on my shoulders and hands and gladly fluttered their dear little wings at me.  

- Fyodor Dostoevsky, 'The Dream of a Ridiculous Man' (1879), trans. Alan Myers

The protagonist of this story is ready to commit suicide when he falls asleep and dreams of being taken to another prelapsarian planet where people live in harmony - that is until he himself inadvertently introduces them to sin, war and technological progress. Eventually he begs them to crucify him, but they consider him mad.  

As the translator Alan Myers points out, this vision of utopia had already appeared in two of Dostoevsky's books, The Devils (aka The Possessed) and A Raw Youth. Philip Rahv discussed these in a 1972 New York Review article.

The first hint of this vision is contained in The Possessed, in Stavrogin’s dream of “a corner of the Greek archipelago as it was some three thousand years ago.” The dream derives from Stavrogin’s persistent memory of Claude Lorraine’s painting Acis and Galatea, which he had once seen in the Dresden museum and which he chooses to call “The Golden Age.” (According to his biographers, Dostoevsky had seen this picture several times and it made an indelible impression on him.) In Stavrogin’s version of the dream only the mythological past with its connotations of innocence and happiness is recalled, whereas in later works the past is displaced by the future. In a more elaborate form the vision is explored in A Raw Youth (1875). It receives further elaboration in “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” published two years later, in which the vision of a golden age is transposed to a distant star whose inhabitants live harmoniously in their human and natural environment, as men might some day live on our own planet. Finally, in The Brothers Karamazov a recapitulation of this dream of an earthly paradise is mockingly recited by the devil, Ivan’s alter ego and the product of his hallucination.     

I have written about this painting before, along with other work inspired by the myth. Here is how Helen Langdon describes the beautiful but transient scene Claude painted in her 1989 monograph on the artist. 

The lovers, in their insubstantial shelter, are unaware of the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, who, glimpsed on the rugged cliff before Mount Etna, laments his love for Galatea so loudly that 'the whole mountain and the waves below heard the pastoral strains'; later, inflamed with jealousy, he kills Acis with a great rock. Yet here Polyphemus is unstressed, and it is the landscape itself that conveys the swiftness of time and the frailty of love. The beauty of the sea and light echo the lovers' joy; and yet the stormy sky, encircling smoky Etna, foretells impending tragedy.  

Claude Lorrain, Landscape with Acis and Galatea, 1657