I was burning, while you came blaming me for the smell of ashes.

Where it really comes from

No such sentence occurs in the 19 works in the source texts (Poor Folk, White Nights, The House of the Dead, Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Gambler, The Idiot, Demons, The Brothers Karamazov, Bobok, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man; and in Russian also Humiliated and Insulted, Winter Notes, The Eternal Husband, The Adolescent, The Meek One, the Writer's Diary, the Pushkin speech and the letters). The English texts were searched for 'smell of ashes', 'burning' and 'blaming me'; the Russian for горел, пепел, запах гари, пахнет гарью, запах пепла and упрекать, alone and together. 'Ashes' occurs only literally or as a stock image, for instance Petrov's passions 'smouldering, like burning coals beneath ashes' in The House of the Dead; The Gambler, the title story of the volume it is credited to, contains nothing like it. The earliest dated trace found is the Goodreads entry, whose oldest visible like is of 29 July 2025; who added it, and from where, is not shown. Searches for a Russian, Italian, Turkish or Arabic original found none, so neither the date nor the real author could be established. The closest genuine scene is in The Idiot, Part 3, chapter 6, where the dying Ippolit confesses: 'I was continually proving to him that he was to blame for his own poverty', until, at the corpse of Surikov's frozen baby, 'I began to explain to Surikov again that it was ‘his own fault,’' and the meek man showed him the door: 'Go, sir!' There the blaming onlooker is the one the book condemns.