Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (
Russian: Фёдор Миха́йлович "остое́вский,
Fëdor Mihajlovič Dostoevskij, sometimes
transliterated Dostoyevsky ) ( – ) is considered one of the greatest of
Russian writers, whose works have had a profound and lasting effect on
twentieth-century fiction. His works often feature characters living in poor conditions with disparate and extreme states of mind, and exhibit both an uncanny grasp of human
psychology as well as penetrating analyses of the
political,
social and
spiritual states of Russia of his time. Many of his best-known works are prophetic precursors to modern-day thoughts. He is sometimes considered to be a founder of
existentialism, most frequently for
Notes from Underground, which has been described by
Walter Kaufmann as "the best overture for existentialism ever written".
Dostoevsky was the second of seven children born to Mikhail and Maria Dostoevsky. Shortly after his mother died of
tuberculosis in
1837, he and his brother Mikhail were sent to the Military Engineering Academy at
St. Petersburg. In
1839 they lost their father, a retired military surgeon and a violent alcoholic, who served as a doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in
Moscow. While not known for certain, it is believed that Mikhail Dostoevsky was murdered by his own
serfs, who reportedly became enraged during one of Mikhail's drunken fits of violence, restrained him, and poured
vodka into his mouth until he drowned. Another story was that Mikhail died of natural causes, and a neighboring landowner invented this story of a peasant rebellion so he could buy the estate inexpensively.
Dostoevsky was sent to the St. Petersburg Academy of Military Engineering and since he was not very good at mathematics, a subject he despised, he did not do very well. Instead, he focused on literature. His literary idol was
Honoré de Balzac and in
1843 even translated one of Balzac's greatest works,
Eugenie Grandet, into Russian. Dostoevsky started to write his own fiction around this time and in
1846, his first work, the epistolary short novel,
Poor Folk, was met with great acclaim especially by the liberal critic
Vissarion Belinsky with his famous exclamation, "A new
Gogol has arisen!"
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Monument to Dostoyevskiy in Omsk, his place of exile |
Dostoevsky was arrested and imprisoned on
April 23 1849 for engaging in revolutionary activity against
Tsar Nikolai I. On
November 16 that year he was
sentenced to death for anti-government activities linked to a liberal intellectual group, the
Petrashevsky Circle. After a
mock execution in which he and other members of the group stood outside in freezing weather waiting to be shot by a
firing squad, Dostoevsky's sentence was commuted to four years of
exile performing hard labor at a
katorga prison camp in
Omsk,
Siberia. His first recorded
epileptic seizure happened in 1850 at the prison camp. Seizures then recurred sporadically throughout his life, and Dostoevsky's experiences are thought to form the basis for his description of Prince Myshkin's epilepsy in the
The Idiot. He was released from prison in
1854, and was required to serve in the
Siberian Regiment. Dostoevsky spent the following five years as a private (and later lieutenant) in the Regiment's Seventh Line Battalion stationed at the fortress of
Semipalatinsk, now in
Kazakhstan. While there, he began a relationship with Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, the wife of an acquaintance in Siberia; they married in February 1857, after her husband's death.
Dostoevsky's experiences in prison and the army resulted in major changes in his political and religious convictions. He became disillusioned with 'Western' ideas, and began to pay greater tribute to traditional Russian values. Perhaps most significantly, he had what his biographer Joseph Frank describes as a
conversion experience in prison, which greatly strengthened his Christian, and specifically
Orthodox, faith (the experience is depicted by Dostoevsky in
The Peasant Marey (
1876)). In line with his new beliefs, Dostoevsky became a sharp critic of the
Nihilist and
Socialist movements of his day, and he dedicated his book
The Possessed and his
The Diary of a Writer to espousing conservatism and criticizing socialist ideas [
1]. He later formed a peculiar friendship with the conservative statesman
Konstantin Pobedonostsev.
In December
1859, he returned to St. Petersburg, where he ran a series of unsuccessful literary journals with his older brother Mikhail. Dostoevsky was devastated by his wife's death in
1864, followed shortly thereafter by his brother's death. He was financially crippled by business debts and the need to provide for his brother's widow and children. Dostoevsky sank into a deep
depression, frequenting gambling parlors and accumulating massive losses at the tables.
Dostoevsky suffered from an acute gambling compulsion as well as from its consequences. By one account
Crime and Punishment, possibly his best known novel, was completed in a mad hurry because Dostoevsky was in urgent need of an advance from his publisher. He had been left practically penniless after a gambling spree. Dostoevsky wrote
The Gambler simultaneously in order to satisfy an agreement with his publisher
Stellovsky who, if he did not receive a new work, would have claimed the copyrights to all of Dostoevsky's writing.
Motivated by the dual wish to escape his creditors at home and to visit the casinos abroad, Dostoevsky traveled to Western Europe. There, he attempted to rekindle a love affair with Apollinaria (Polina) Suslova, a young university student with whom he had had an affair several years prior, but she refused his marriage proposal. Dostoevsky was heartbroken, but soon met Anna Grigorevna, a twenty-year-old
stenographer whom he married in
1867. This period resulted in the writing of his greatest books. From
1873 to
1881 he vindicated his earlier journalistic failures by publishing a monthly journal full of short stories, sketches, and articles on current events — the
Writer's Diary. The journal was an enormous success. Dostoevsky is also known to have influenced and been influenced by famous Russian Philosopher
Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov. Some see Solovyov as the prototype for the character Alyosha Karamazov (see
Joseph Frank The Mantle of a Prophet).
In
1877 Dostoevsky gave the keynote
eulogy at the funeral of his friend, the poet
Nekrasov, to much controversy. In
1880, shortly before he died, he gave his famous
Pushkin speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow.
In his later years, Fyodor Dostoevsky lived for a long time at the resort of
Staraya Russa which was closer to
St Petersburg and less expensive than German resorts. He died on
January 28 (
O.S.),
1881 of a lung hemorrhage associated with
emphysema and an
epileptic seizure and was interred in
Tikhvin Cemetery at the
Alexander Nevsky Monastery,
St. Petersburg, Russia. Forty thousand mourning Russians attended his funeral. His tombstone reads "Verily, Verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." from John 12:24, which is also the epigraph of his final novel,
The Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoevsky's influence cannot be overemphasized; from
Herman Hesse to
Marcel Proust,
William Faulkner,
Albert Camus,
Ayn Rand,
Franz Kafka,
Friedrich Nietzsche,
Henry Miller,
Yukio Mishima,
Gabriel García Márquez,
Jack Kerouac and
Joseph Heller. Virtually no great twentieth century writer escaped his long shadow (rare dissenting voices include
Vladimir Nabokov,
Henry James,
Joseph Conrad and, more ambiguously,
D.H. Lawrence). American novelist
Ernest Hemingway also cited Dostoevsky in his autobiographic books, as a major influence on his work. Essentially a writer of myth (and in this respect sometimes compared to
Herman Melville), Dostoevsky displayed a nuanced understanding of human psychology evident in his major works. He created an opus of immense vitality and almost hypnotic power characterized by the following traits: feverishly dramatized scenes (conclaves) where his characters are, frequently in scandalous and explosive atmosphere, passionately engaged in Socratic dialogues
à la Russe; the quest for God, the problem of Evil and suffering of the innocents haunt the majority of his novels; characters fall into a few distinct categories: humble and self-effacing
Christians (
prince Myshkin,
Sonya Marmeladova,
Alyosha Karamazov), self-destructive
nihilists (
Svidrigailov,
Smerdyakov,
Stavrogin, the underground man), cynical debauchers (
Fyodor Karamazov), rebellious intellectuals (
Raskolnikov,
Ivan Karamazov); also, his characters are driven by ideas rather than by ordinary biological or social imperatives.
Dostoevsky's novels are compressed in time (many cover only a few days) and this enables the author to get rid of one of the dominant traits of
realist prose, the corrosion of human life in the process of the time flux — his characters primarily embody spiritual values, and these are, by definition, timeless. Other obsessive themes include
suicide, wounded pride, collapsed family values, spiritual regeneration through suffering (the most important motif), rejection of the West and affirmation of
Russian Orthodoxy and
Tsarism. Literary scholars such as
Bakhtin have characterized his work as '
polyphonic': unlike other novelists, Dostoevsky does not appear to aim for a 'single vision', and beyond simply describing situations from various angles, Dostoevsky engendered fully dramatic novels of ideas where conflicting views and characters are left to develop unevenly into unbearable crescendo.
By common critical consensus one among the handful of
universal world authors, along with
Dante,
Shakespeare,
Goethe,
Cervantes,
Proust and a few others, Dostoevsky has decisively influenced twentieth century literature,
existentialism and
expressionism in particular.
Dostoevsky,Fyodor; Introduction- The Idiot, Wordsworth Ed. Ltd, 1996.
*
Бедные люди (
Poor Folk) (
1846)
*
"войник. Петербургская поэма (
The Double: A Petersburg Poem) (
1846)
*
Неточка Незванова (
Netochka Nezvanova) (
1849)
*
Село Степанчиково и его обитатели (
The Village of Stepanchikovo or
The Friend of the Family) (
1859)
*
Униженные и оскорбленные (
The Insulted and Humiliated) (
1861)
*
Записки из мертвого дома (
The House of the Dead) (
1860)
*
Скверный анекдот (
A Nasty Story) (
1862)
*
Записки из подполья (
Notes from Underground or
Letters from the Underworld) (
1864)
*
Преступление и наказание (
Crime and Punishment) (
1866)
*
Игрок (
The Gambler) (
1867)
*
Идиот (
The Idiot) (
1868)
*
Бесы (
The Possessed or
Demons or
The Devils) (
1872)
*
Подросток (
The Raw Youth or
The Adolescent) (
1875)
*
Братья Карамазовы (
The Brothers Karamazov) (
1880)
*
Белые ночи (
White Nights) (
1848)
*
Елка и свадьба (
A Christmas Tree and a Wedding) (
1848)
*
Честный вор (
An Honest Thief) (
1848)
*
The Peasant Marey (
1876)
*
Сон смешного человека (
The Dream of a Ridiculous Man) (
1877)
*
A Gentle Creature, sometimes translated as
The Meek Girl (
1876)
*
A Weak Heart* Interestingly, Fyodor Dostoevsky and the other giant of late 19th Century Russian literature,
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, never met in person, even though each praised (Dostoevsky remarked of Tolstoy's
Anna Karenina that it was a "flawless work of art"), criticised (Tolstoy once denounced
Crime and Punishment in the account in the
Henri Troyat biography where Tolstoy is reported to have remarked loosely that, "Once you read the first few chapters you know pretty much how the novel will end up") and influenced the other. There was, however, a meeting arranged, but there was a confusion about where the meeting place was and they never rescheduled. Tolstoy reportedly burst into tears when he learnt of Dostoevsky's death. Since their time, the two are considered by the critics and public as two of the greatest novelists produced by their homeland.
*
Nietzsche said of Jesus: "it is regrettable that no Dostoevsky lived near him." He also stated "Dostoevsky was the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn: he belongs to the happiest windfalls of my life, happier even than the discovery of
Stendhal". He said that
Notes from the Underground "cried truth from the blood". According to
Mihajlo Mihajlov's "The great catalyzer: Nietzsche and Russian neo-Idealism" Nietzsche constantly refer to Dostoevsky in his notes and drafts through out the winter of 1886-1887. Nietzsche also wrote abstracts of several of Dostoevsky's works.
*
Anti-Catholicism*
existentialism*
Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov*
Friedrich Nietzsche*
Mikhail Epstein*
Russian Orthodox Church*
Søren Kierkegaard*
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn*
entropy*
free will*
determinism*
apophatic theology*
Albert Camus*
Jean-Paul Sartre*
FyodorDostoevsky.com - The Definitive Dostoevsky fan site
*
Fyodor Dostoevsky's brief biography and works*
Free ebook of Fyodor Dostoevsky at
Project Gutenberg*
Selected Dostoevsky e-texts from Penn Librarys digital library project*
Free audiobook of
Notes from Underground from
LibriVox*
Full texts of some Dostoevsky's works in the original Russian*
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Biography, ebooks, quotations, and other resources
*
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Vintage Classics, 1992, New York.
*
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Constance Garnett, introduction by Joseph Frank. Bantam Books, 1987, New York.
*
Some photos of places and statues that are reminiscent of Dostoevsky and his work*
Dostoevsky Research Station*
ALEXANDER II AND HIS TIMES: A Narrative History of Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy, and DostoevskyDostoevsky, Joseph Frank. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1979-2003 (5 volumes).
