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Fyodor Dostoevsky

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Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Portrait of Dostoyevsky in 1872 painted by Vasily Perov
Portrait of Dostoyevsky in 1872 painted by Vasily Perov
BornFyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky
(1821-11-11)11 November 1821
Moscow, Russian Empire
Died9 February 1881(1881-02-09) (aged 59)
Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire
NationalityRussian
EducationMilitary engineering-technical university, St. Petersburg
Period1846–1881
GenreNovel, short story, journalism
Literary movementRealism
Notable works
Spouse
ChildrenSonya (1868)
Lyubov (1869–1926)
Fyodor (1871–1922)
Alexey (1875–1878)
Signature

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky[1] (Russian: Фёдор Миха́йлович Достое́вский, IPA: [ˈfʲodər mʲɪˈxajləvʲɪtɕ dəstɐˈjefskʲɪj] ⓘ; 11 November 1821 – 9 February 1881[2]) sometimes transliterated Dostoevsky, was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. Although Dostoyevsky began writing books in the mid-1850s, his best remembered work was done in his last years, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. He wrote eleven novels, three novellas, seventeen short novels and three essays and is often acknowledged by critics as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature.[3]

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born and raised within the grounds of the Mariinsky hospital in Moscow, Russia. At an early age he was introduced to English, French, German and Russian literature, as well as to fairytales and legends. His mother's sudden death devastated him and, around the same time, he had to leave private school for a military academy. After his graduation he worked as an engineer and briefly enjoyed a quite liberal lifestyle. He soon began translating books to earn some extra money. Around the mid-1840s he wrote his first novel, Poor Folk, which brought him into the mainstream. In 1849 he was arrested for his involvement with the Petrashevsky Circle, a progressive discussion group. He and other members were condemned to death for their participation in this group, but the execution proved to be a mock execution at the last moment, and Dostoyevsky's sentence was commuted to four years of imprisonment in Siberia. After his release from prison he was forced to serve as a soldier, but was discharged from the military due to ill health and allowed to continue with his writing.

In the following years Dostoyevsky began working as a journalist. He also published and edited several magazines of his own and later his serial, A Writer's Diary. Beginning with his travels to Europe he struggled with money issues due to a gambling addiction, resulting in the humiliation of being forced to beg for money. He also suffered from epilepsy throughout his adult life. But through the sheer energy and volume of his work he eventually became one of the most widely read and renowned writers in Russia. His books have been translated into more than 170 languages and have sold around 15 million copies.[4] Dostoyevsky left a lasting legacy that has influenced many other writers, ranging from James Joyce to Ernest Hemingway.

Early life

Childhood

Mariinsky Hospital in Moscow, Dostoyevsky's birthplace

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born on 30 October 1821 (11 November 1821, according to the Gregorian Calendar), the second child of Mikhail Dostoyevsky and Maria Nechayeva. The Dostoyevskys were a multi-ethnic and multi-denominational Lithuanian nobility from the Pinsk region; however, Dostoyevsky's immediate forebears had fallen on hard times and had been reduced to the class of non-monastic clergy. Dostoyevsky's paternal great-grandfather and grandfather practised as priests in the Ukrainian town of Bratslava, where his father was born. As was the custom, Mikhail was expected to follow his father into the clergy, but instead of joining a seminary he ran away from home at the age of fifteen. This break with his family was permanent.[5][6]

In 1809, at the age of twenty, Dostoyevsky's father Mikhail gained entry to Moscow's Imperial Medical-Surgical Academy. He was assigned to a Moscow hospital where he served as a military doctor and was appointed senior physician in 1818. In 1819 he married Maria Nechayeva. One year later he resigned from military service to accept a post at the Mariinsky Hospital for the poor. After the birth of two sons, Mikhail and Fyodor, he was promoted to the post of collegiate assessor, a position that entitled him to the legal status of nobility and enabled him to acquire a small estate, 150 versts (about 150 km, 100 miles) from Moscow, called Darovoye. Dostoyevsky's mother Nechayeva was descended from a family of Russian merchants. Both parents may have had Tatar ancestry as well.[7] Maria and Mikhail went on to have five more children after Fydor and his elder brother were born.[5][6]

Dostoyevsky's birth house near the hospital

Dostoyevsky was raised in the family home within the grounds of the Mariinsky hospital. It was neither a wealthy nor a poor home. In his childhood, Dostoyevsky often went with his family on summer visits to the estate in Darovoye. At the age of three he was introduced to heroic sagas, fairy tales and legends, and he began developing a deeply ingrained piety under the influence of nannies. He was soon obsessed with stories. The nanny Alina Frolovna and the serf and farmer Marei from Darovoye were influential in his childhood, the latter helping him to fight his early hallucinations, which were possibly caused by the terrible tales and Gothic literature that the young boy was so enthralled by. Dostoyevsky also discovered the miserable hospital garden, which was separated by a large fence from his parent's protected private garden. His parents forbade him to have contact with those on the other side, intending to shield their children from undesirable influences. Dostoyevsky, however, ignored their warnings and often talked with convalescing patients. On the other side of the fence, Dostoyevsky once encountered a nine-year-old girl who had been raped by a lunatic. He never forgot this traumatic experience.[5][8]

Dostoyevsky's parents placed a high value on giving their son a thorough education. At the age of four his mother taught him to read and write, using the Bible as a teaching aid. One of the day's highlights was the evening readings by his father and mother. They introduced him to Russian literature at an early age, including Karamzin's Russian Tales, the writing of Pushkin, Derzhavin and the English novelist Ann Radcliffe, as well as the works of the German Friedrich Schiller. Dostoyevsky was impressed by the latter's play The Robbers, which he saw at the age of ten. Fyodor and his brother Mikhail both enjoyed Pushkin's poems, which they learned for the most part by heart; Pushkin's death was a shock for the whole family.

Dostoyevsky's father sent his son Fyodor first to a French boarding school and then to the best private high school in Moscow, the "College for Noble Male Children". As the school fees were more than he could afford, he had to get loans, take advances and extend his private medical practice. When the thirteen-year-old Dostoyevsky arrived at this famous college, he felt inferior to his aristocratic classmates, a feeling that was later reflected in some of his works, especially The Adolescent.[5][8]

Youth

Dostoyevsky as an engineer

On 27 September 1837 Dostoyevsky's mother died of tuberculosis. Dostoyevsky contracted a serious throat disease soon afterwards. In May, before his mother's death, it had been decided that Fyodor and his brother Mikhail should be sent to St Petersburg to attend the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute. Fyodor and Mikhail were therefore forced to abandon their academic studies at the Moscow college in favour of a career path that seems already to have been decided, since his father expected spaces to be available at the academy for his sons, and the political propensity under Nicholas I allowed them the opportunity of a good professional military career. On the way to St. Petersburg, Dostoyevsky witnessed a violent incident in a posting house; a member of the military police beat a carter and the carter subsequently took out his anger on his horse, with a whip; Dostoyevsky referred to this situation in his serial A Writer's Diary. At the academy he was separated from his brother, who was later sent to Reval, Estonia, due to his poor health and the better studying conditions that were available there. Dostoyevsky passed the entrance exam and entered the academy on 16 January the following year, but only with the help of his godmothers, who, unknown to him, had paid the tuition fees.[9][10]

Dostoyevsky did not enjoy the academy, primarily because of his lack of interest in science, mathematics and military engineering. His preference was for drawing and architecture. As his friend Konstantin Trutovsky once said, "There was no student in the entire institution with less of a military bearing than F. M. Dostoyevsky. He moved clumsily and jerkily; his uniform hung awkwardly on him; and his knapsack, shako and rifle all looked like some sort of fetter he had been forced to wear for a time and which lay heavily on him."[11] The academy was located in a former castle built for Tsar Paul I, who was murdered shortly after his accession to the throne. Among his 120 classmates, who were mainly of Polish or Baltic-German descent, Dostoyevsky's character and interests made him an outsider; he was brave and had a strong sense of justice, as opposed to his uncultured and brutal class fellows. He protected newcomers, aligned himself with teachers, criticised corruption among officers and helped poor farmers. But although he was a loner and lived in his own literary world, his classmates respected him. Dostoyevsky was called "Monk Photius" because of his reclusive way of life and his interest in religion.[9][12]

The Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute

Dostoyevsky's first serious epileptic fit occurred after receiving a message informing him of the death of his father. The circumstances of his father's death were unclear. The officially accepted cause is an apoplectic stroke. However, one peasant, Pavel Khotiaintsev, meant that he was killed by the other peasents, but whether it is true is unknown as he may have ruthlessly said that only to buy their land. After three investigations and more than a year later, a criminal court in Tula decided that he died of natural death, and ultimately acquitted the peasants.[13] His son Fyodor persevered with the burdensome studies he had been set to, passed the exams and obtained the rank of engineer cadet, giving him the right to live away from the academy. After a short visit to his brother Mikhail in Reval, Fyodor often went to concerts, operas, theatres and ballets. Significantly, he was introduced to gambling by two of his friends.[9][12]

His independence led to financial troubles. In August 1843 he took employment as a draftsman and lived around this time in an apartment with Adolph Totleben (the brother of Eduard Totleben, whom Dostoyevsky would later appeal for his release from the military after prison)[14] owned by the German-Baltic Dr. A. Riesenkampf, who was a friend of his brother Mikhail. As in his childhood at the hospital, Dostoyevsky showed an interest in the poor and the sick. He began to work on translations, including George Sand's La dernière Albini and Balzac's Eugénie Grandet as well as Schiller's Mary Stuart, Pushkin's Boris Godunov and Goethe's Reineke Fuchs,[15] and upon advice, Schiller's The Robbers, and Don Carlos, among others. With the help of these translations, he was able to obtain some badly-needed money. His job became a humiliation to him, as he found it "as boring as potatoes".[14] He was released from the academy on 19 October 1844 as a lieutenant. Dostoyevsky was already in financial trouble, so he decided to write his own novel.[9][12]

Career

Early career

In the autumn of 1844, Dostoyevsky shared an apartment with his friend from the academy, Dmitry Grigorovich. Dostoyevsky worked continuously on his first novel, hoping to obtain a sufficiently wide readership to allow his financial condition to improve. He risked everything for this book. In a letter to Mikhail he wrote, "What matters is that my novel should cover everything. If it does not work, I will hang myself." In May 1845, Dostoyevsky worked on the manuscript for the last time and asked Grigorovich to read the novel aloud. Grigorovich was impressed and took it the same night to Nikolay Nekrasov, who was a friend of his. Both were so enthused with it that after finishing the book at four o'clock in the morning, they rang at Dostoyevsky's apartment. On the same day, Nekrasov brought the manuscript by this "New Gogol" to the most well-known and influential literary critic of that time, Vissarion Belinsky. Initially sceptical, Belinsky was astonished upon reading the piece. Poor Folk was released on 15 January 1846 in the almanac St. Petersburg Collection and was commercially enormously successful.[16][17]

Dostoyevsky, 1847

Shortly after the publication of Russia's first social novel,[18] Poor Folk, Dostoyevsky wrote his second novel, The Double, during a visit to Reval. Although the book was published in February 1846, it had already been included in the journal Annals of the Fatherland on 30 January. The Double centres on a shy protagonist named Yakov Golyadkin who discovers his doppelgänger, who proceeds to ruin his life piece by piece. This doppelgänger achieves the fine career and worldly success that is denied to the original Golyadkin. The novel was panned by critics and readers alike; Belinsky commented that the work had "no sense, no content and no thoughts", and that the novel was boring and tedious due to the protagonist's garrulity, or tendency towards verbal diarrhoea.[19] The idea for The Double is brilliant, but its external form is misconceived and full of multi-clause sentences.[20][21][22][17]

In the 1840s, the interests of the Russian population began to turn more toward social questions, as opposed to romanticism and idealism. Dostoyevsky discovered socialism around 1846. His first influences were the French socialists Fourier, Cabet, Proudhon and Saint Simon. Dostoyevsky initially had a good relationship with the literary critic Belinsky. Through him he extended his knowledge of the philosophy of socialism and was attracted to its intellectual world, its sense of justice and interest in the poor and disadvantaged. His relationship with Belinsky became, however, increasingly negative as Belinsky's atheism and his dislike of religion clashed with Dostoyevsky's Orthodox beliefs and trust in Christ's teachings. Dostoyevsky decided at last to quit the Belinsky circle. He took up the issues of the existence of God and nihilism in his later books, as well as the nature of human coexistence, the requirements of fraternity, and the coherence of freedom and fortune.[23][17]

As Dostoyevsky weathered assaults by the press on his second novel, his health declined and he suffered more epileptic seizures. He continued to work frantically, however, and from 1846 to 1848 he released a number of short stories to the magazine Annals of the Fatherland including "Mr. Prokharchin", "The Landlady", "A Weak Heart" and "White Nights". These stories were not successful and he was soon, again, in financial trouble. He decided to join the Utopian socialist Betekov circle, whose members had created a tight-knit community, and this helped him to survive. After the circle's break-up, Dostoyevsky befriended Apollon Maykov and his brother Valerian, and after the latter's death, Apollon became an important factor in Dostoyevsky's life. In spring 1846 he joined the Petrashevsky Circle by the recommendation of the poet Aleksey Pleshcheyev. In contrast to the former circles, the Petrashevsky Circle was socio-Christian.[24] Mikhail Petrashevsky discussed in a harmless manner the possibilities of social reforms in Russia. Dostoyevsky used its library on Saturdays and Sundays, and sometimes participated in the discussion of such themes as freedom from censorship and the abolition of serfdom.[25][17]

Exile in Siberia

Before the mock execution, the members were split into three-man groups. Dostoyevsky was the third of the second row; next to him stood Pleshcheyev and Durov.

Dostoyevsky and other members of the Petrashevsky Circle were revealed to the authorities by the agent Antonelli, who submitted reports to the official Liprandi of the Ministry of International Affairs. Dostoyevsky was accused of having read several works by Belinsky, including Correspondence with Gogol, Criminal Letters and The Soldier's Speech, and passing transcriptions. Antonelli wrote in his report, "[Correspondence with Gogol] summoned a considerable amount of enthusiastic approval from the society, in particular on the part of Belasoglo and Yastrzhembsky, especially at the point where Belinsky says that religion has no basis among the Russian people. It was proposed that this letter be distributed in several copies." Dostoyevsky responded that he did not like those essays but had only read them "as a literary monument, neither more nor less" and argued about "personality and human egoism" instead of politics. Dostoyevsky and several members of the circle were nonetheless arrested on 22 April 1849 upon the request of Count A. Orlov and Emperor Nicolas I. The latter feared a revolution or revolt similar to the Decembrist revolt of 1825 in Russia and the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, calling the Petrashevsky Circle "conspirators".[26][27][28]

On 23 December 1849, Dostoyevsky and the rest of the circle were brought to Semyonov Place in St. Petersburg. A mock execution was staged and then cancelled by the Tsar. Dostoyevsky's sentence was commuted to four years of exile with hard labour at a katorga prison camp in Omsk, Siberia, followed by a term of compulsory military service. The prisoners were divided into groups of three, consisting of one convict, one gendarme and one military policeman. After a fourteen-day drive by sleigh they finally reached Tobolsk, a meeting place for prisoners, on 11 January 1850. Twelve days later, Durov and Dostoyevsky reached Omsk.[27] He described the barracks as follows:

In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall ... We were packed like herrings in a barrel ... There was no room to turn around. From dusk to dawn it was impossible not to behave like pigs ... Fleas, lice, and black beetles by the bushel ...

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Pisma, I: 135–7.

Release from prison

Dostoyevsky (right) and the Kazakh scholar Shokan Walikhanuli in 1859

After his release on 14 February 1854, Dostoyevsky asked his brother Mikhail to financially help him and to send books by authors such as Vico, Guizot, Ranke, Hegel or Kant.[29] Dostoyevsky also began to work on The House of the Dead, basing it upon his experience in prison. The first parts of his third book, the novel Netochka Nezvanova, had been released in 1849, but understandably, the work had remained unfinished.

Dostoyevsky moved in mid-March to Semipalatinsk, where he was forced to serve in the Siberian Army Corps of the Seventh Line Battalion. Around this time, Dostoyevsky met Baron Alexander Egorovich Wrangel, an admirer of his who had attended the mock execution. They both rented houses outside of Semipalatinsk, in the "Cossack Garden".[30][31]

During a visit with Lieutenant-Colonel Belikhov, Dostoyevsky made acquaintance with the family of Alexander Ivanovich Isaev and Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva. Dostoyevsky soon fell in love with Maria. After sending a letter through Wrangel to General Eduard Totleben, apologising for his activity in several Utopian circles, Dostoyevsky obtained, in the autumn of 1856, the right to publish books and to marry. After her husband's departure to Kuznetsk in August 1855 and his death the same year, Maria moved with Dostoyevsky to Barnaul, but later refused his marriage proposal, stating that they were not meant for each other and that his poor financial situation precluded marriage. Dostoyevsky later went to Kuznetsk and discovered that she had had an affair with the 24-year-old schoolmaster Nikolay Vergunov. Despite this, Maria married Dostoyevsky in Semipalatinsk on 7 February 1857. Their family life was unhappy, however, and she found it difficult to cope with his seizures. They mostly lived apart.[32][31]

Dostoyevsky in Paris (1863)

In 1859 Dostoyevsky was released from military service due to his medical condition; his health had worsened since his marriage to Maria. In the same year he was granted permission to return to Russia, first to Tver, where he met his brother for the first time in ten years, then on to St. Petersburg, arriving on 16 September 1859. Shortly after his arrival in St. Petersburg, he joined the Society for the Aid of Needy Writers and Scholars, known as the Literary Fund. Its goal was to help scholars and writers who found themselves in difficulty, such as those arrested on political grounds. He remained under police surveillance for the rest of his life.

Dostoyevsky's only work to be completed whilst he was in prison, "A Little Hero", was issued in a journal, while "Uncle's Dream" and "The Village of Stepanchikovo" were not published until 1860. Notes from the House of the Dead was released in Russky Mir (Russian World) on September 1860, and "The Insulted and the Injured" was released in the newly established Time magazine, which was created with the help of funds from his brother's cigarette factory.[33][34][31]

Dostoyevsky began a planned trip to Europe on 7 June 1862. He first visited the German cities Cologne, Berlin, Dresden and Wiesbaden (where he went to gamble), followed by a trip to Belgium, and arrived in Paris in mid-June. In London he met Herzen and visited the Crystal Palace; he travelled with Strakhov through Switzerland in July, visited Geneva, and then toured through cities in northern Italy, including Turin, Livorno and Florence. He wrote mainly negative comments about these European countries in his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. In this book he criticised such themes as capitalism, social modernisation, materialism, catholicism and protestantism.[35][36]

Time magazine proved a very popular periodical, with more than 4,000 subscribers before its closure on 24 May 1863. The Tsarist Regime closed it because of a misunderstanding resulting from the publication of an essay by Nikolay Strakhov about the Polish revolt in Russia. Time and its 1864 successor Epokha followed the philosophy of the conservative and Slavophile movement Pochvennichestvo, which was supported by Dostoyevsky during his term of imprisonment and in the post-prison years.[37]

From August to October 1863 Dostoyevsky made a second trip to Europe. In Paris he met his second love, Polina Suslova. He also lost all of his money gambling, in Wiesbaden and Baden-Baden. In Wiesbaden he wrote a letter to Wrangel, asking for a 100 thalers loan. In this letter he first mentions his next novel. Suslova's infidelity with a Spaniard and his gambling addiction resulted in the end of their relationship. Dostoyevsky subsequently asked his brother for money and, after his brother's death in July 1864, he wrote again to Baron Wrangel asking for money. Two months before Mikhail's death, Dostoyevsky's wife Maria died of tuberculosis, and he became the lone parent of his stepson, Pasha, and then almost immediately afterwards, of Mikhail's family. Added to this were the fees for the financing of Epokha. Without the help of his relatives and friends he would have gone bankrupt.[38][36]

Crime and Punishment

Anna Snitkina

The first two parts of his sixth novel, Crime and Punishment, were published in January and February 1866 in the periodical The Russian Messenger. This novel was a success, prompting the critic Strakhov to remark afterwards, "Only Crime and Punishment was read during 1866". However, the novel initially received a mixed reception from critics. Most of the negative responses came from nihilists. Grigory Eliseev of the radical magazine The Contemporary called the novel a "fantasy according to which the entire student body is accused without exception of attempting murder and robbery". Strakhov was generally satisfied with the novel, stating that Dostoyevsky had successfully portrayed a Russian person aptly and realistically.[39]

The magazine was also doing well, bringing in around 500 new subscribers. In summer 1866, Dostoyevsky moved to a country house in Lyublino with his brother-in-law Alexander Ivanov – who was married to his sister Vera – to escape the heat of Moscow. He returned to St. Petersburg in late September and promised editor F. T. Stellovsky that he would complete the novel The Gambler by November, although he had not written a single line of it yet. Milyukov, one of Dostoyevsky's friends, advised him to hire a secretary. Dostoyevsky contacted Pavel Olkhin, one of the best stenographers in St. Petersburg, who recommended his most talented pupil, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina. Dostoyevsky was the favourite author of Snitkina and her recently deceased father. On 4 October 1866 she made a visit to Dostoyevsky. He began to dictate to her, while she wrote shorthand. Snitkina brought the last transcription of The Gambler to Dostoyevsky on 30 October (his birthday). Thanks to her skills the novel was completed in just 26 days. The Gambler treated a subject Fyodor Dostoyevsky himself was very familiar with – gambling.[39][36]

Gambling "hell" in Bad Homburg

On 15 February 1867, Dostoyevsky married Anna Snitkina in the Trinity Cathedral in St. Petersburg. During the wedding celebrations he suffered a serious double fit, caused by heavy consumption of champagne, which plunged Anna into despair. Also problematic were her bad relationships with his relatives and their neighbours. Nor were the 7,000 rubles paid for Crime and Punishment enough to cover all the debts. To avoid a compulsory auction, Snitkina (now Dostoyevskaya) sold furniture, her piano and jewellery. With this money, on 14 April 1867, they finally began a delayed honeymoon in Germany. In Berlin they stayed in the Hotel Union, and in Dresden Dostoyevsky visited the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, where he sought inspiration for his writing. He was deeply impressed by the paintings, especially Raphael's Sistine Madonna.[40][41]

Three weeks later he travelled to Homburg, where he lost all of his wife's money gambling. She and Dostoyevsky continued their trip in early July through Germany, visiting Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Heidelberg and Karlsruhe. In Baden-Baden he entered casinos despite having lost all his money already. It was predictable that Dostoyevsky again gambled whatever he had, and Anna Dostoyevskaya had no other choice but to go to pawnbrokers and receive whatever cash she could for her wedding presents, earrings and clothes, even her wedding rings. In the meantime, Dostoyevskaya had become pregnant. On 23 August they left Baden-Baden and arrived in Basel to visit a museum, in which they viewed Holbein's The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, a painting that would prove influential for his next novel. Dostoyevsky was so captivated by the picture that his wife had to drag him away from the panel to avoid him having an epileptic seizure.[42][41]

In Geneva they were low on funds and had to pawn more of their possessions. Finally they found a lodging. Geneva was a pleasant location for the birth of their first child, and the city had good doctors. Dostoyevsky occasionally gambled in Saxon-les-Bains to raise money, but as usual he was unsuccessful. In December they rented a larger apartment on Rue du Mont-Blanc next to an English church. On 5 March 1868, Anna gave birth to their daughter Sonya, named after his beloved niece and the heroine in Crime and Punishment. Three months later the baby died from pneumonia. She was buried in a children's cemetery in Plainpalais. Again in financial trouble due to his addiction, he returned to Geneva to work on his next novel.[43][41]

The Idiot

Dostoyevsky's study in Saint Petersburg

In September 1868, Dostoyevsky began working on The Idiot, managing to complete 100 pages in just 23 days. Sonya's death was devastating to them both, and Anna's health was affected by frequent trips to her grave. Dostoyevsky felt himself squeezed between the mountains and the Geneva lake. They left Geneva and moved to Vevey, hoping for a better atmosphere for Dostoyevsky to complete The Idiot. Then they left for Milan via the shortest route, above the two-thousand-metre high Simiplon. While in Milan, Anna began to learn Italian and sometimes served as an interpreter. After enduring some rainy autumn months in Milan, they travelled southwards to Florence. The Idiot was completed there in January 1869. It was serialised in The Russian Messenger.[44][45]

In May, Anna's mother visited the family to help them. They moved to an apartment on the Piazza del Mercato Nuovo due to lack of room. Its busy location near a marketplace and the summer heat caused the Dostoyevskys a great deal of trouble, and three months later they decided to leave the city for Prague. On their way to Prague, they stayed in Bologna and then in Vienna. Three days after their arrival in Prague they had to leave again because they could not find a furnished apartment to rent. They did not have the money to furnish an apartment themselves, as furniture and tableware were too expensive. They decided to return to Dresden, where they rented a house in the English quarter.[44][45]

Shortly after their arrival, Anna's mother came to assist her daughter for the upcoming birth on 26 September of her second child Lyubov, meaning "Love" in Russian. Lyubov later called herself Aimée (French for "beloved"). In April 1871 Dostoyevsky made a final visit to a gambling hall in Wiesbaden. According to Anna, Dostoyevsky was cured of his addiction after the birth of Lyubov, but whether or not this is true is open to doubt. Another reason for his abstinence might have been the closure of casinos in Germany in 1872 and 1873; it was not until the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany that these were re-opened.

In July 1871, Dostoyevsky and Anna took the train to Berlin. For fear of customs calamities Dostoyevsky burnt numerous manuscripts, including those for The Idiot. The family finally arrived in St. Petersburg on 8 July, marking the end of a honeymoon that had lasted for over four years, although originally planned to last for only three months.[44][45]

Return to Russia

Manuscript of The Demons

Anna's younger brother, Ivan Snitkin, visited his sister and her husband in autumn 1869. A pupil at the Moscow Agriculture School, Snitkin told them about the unrest among the students there. One of his fellow students, Ivanov, had helped him with his travel preparations, and Dostoyevksy later discovered that this same Ivanov was murdered on 21 November by five men in a park near the university. Behind the murder was the nihilist Nechayev. Influenced by Bakunin's Alliance révolutionnaire européenne, Nechayev formed a terror organisation comprising several of these five-man groups. Subsequently, Dostoyevsky planned to write a novel about nihilism.[46][47][48]

Back in Russia in July 1871, the family was again in financial trouble and had to sell their remaining possessions. Moreover, Anna was reaching the final term of pregnancy once more; Dostoyevsky thought the child would be born on 15 July and thus should be named Vladimir based on the calendar of saints, but baby Fyodor (Fedya) was born one day later. Soon after the birth, they moved to a different apartment on Serpukhovskaya Street, near the Institute for Technology. The family hoped to clear the large debts they had accumulated by selling their house in Peski, but problems with the tenant meant that the building was sold in an auction for a relatively low price. Disputes with creditors continued. Anna proposed that they raise money on her husband's copyrights and negotiated with the creditors to pay off their debts in instalments.[47][49]

Dostoyevsky was able to revive his friendships with Maykov and Strakhov and to find new acquaintances, including Vsevolod Solovyov and his brother Vladimir, church politician Terty Filipov, and future Imperial High Commissioner of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who influenced Dostoyevsky's political progression to conservatism. In early 1872, art collector Pavel Tretyakov asked Dostoyevsky to pose for Vasily Perov. The resulting painting, according to Danish critic Georg Brandes a depiction of a "partly Russian peasant face, partly the likeness of a criminal", is possibly the most popular image of Dostoyevsky we have.

Around this time, the Dostoyevskys planned a vacation in Staraya Russa, a spa known for its pleasant salt baths. On the journey, they took the train to Sosnika and then to Novgorod. However, Lyuba had received a wrist injury a few weeks before their departure. A doctor told them she had a sprain, but it ultimately turned out to be a fracture, and Anna returned to St. Petersburg with her while Dostoyevsky waited with their son in Staraya Russa for their return. Shortly afterwards, Anna's sister died from typhus and Anna developed an abscess on her throat. Dostoyevsky's work on his next novel was delayed due to these issues.[47][49]

Dostoyevsky, 1876

The family returned to St. Petersburg in September 1872.[48] The Demons (also known as The Possessed) was finished on 26 November 1872 and released in January by the "Dostoyevsky Press", founded by Dostoyevsky and his wife. Although the books were available on a cash-only basis and their apartment served as a bookshop, the business was successful and about 3,000 copies of The Demons were sold. Anna was responsible for the financing. Dostoyevsky proposed that they establish a new periodical, A Writer's Diary, including a collection of essays of the same name, but due to lack of money it was published instead in Meshchersky's The Citizen, beginning on 1 January in return for a salary of 3,000 rubles per year. In the summer of 1873, Anna again travelled with her children to Staraya Russa, while Dostoyevsky stayed in St. Petersburg to continue with his Diary.[50][51]

In March 1874, Dostoyevsky left The Citizen because of the stressful nature of the work and interference from the Russian bureaucracy. During his 15 months of activity as a journalist for The Citizen he was brought to court twice: on 11 June 1873, for citing the words of Prince Meshchersky without permission, and again on 23 March 1874. Dostoyevsky offered The Russian Messenger a new novel he had not yet begun work on, but the magazine refused to give him the fee he asked for (the actual reason, which they kept secret from him, was that the periodical had already arranged to publish Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina). Nikolay Nekrasov visited him and proposed to publish A Writer's Diary in The National Annals; he would receive 250 rubles for each printer's sheet, 100 more than for The Russian Messenger.[52][53]

Dostoyevsky's health was beginning to decline, and he suffered from a cough and breathlessness, the first symptoms of a lung disease. He consulted several doctors in St. Petersburg and was advised to take a cure outside of Russia. One doctor recommended Bad Ems, another Bad Soden. Dostoeyvsky left Russia and in June visited a well-known pulmonologist in Berlin, who referred him to a doctor in Bad Ems. Around July, Dostoyevsky reached Ems but went to a different physician, where he was diagnosed with acute catarrh and prescribed a natural mineral water. During his stay at the health spa he began to work on The Adolescent, also known as The Raw Youth. In late July he returned to St. Petersburg.[54][55]

His wife proposed that they spend the winter in Staraya Russa to give him a rest from his work, although doctors suggested that Dostoyevsky make a second visit to Ems, as his health had improved since his last visit. On 10 August the following year, in Staraya Russa, his son Alexey was born. In mid-September the family returned to St. Petersburg. Dostoyevsky finished The Adolescent at the end of 1875, although parts of it had been serialised since January of that year in the Annals. The Adolescent chronicles the life of a 19-year-old intellectual, Arkady Dolgoruky, who is the illegitimate child of a controversial and womanising landowner named Versilov. A focus of the novel is the recurring conflict between father and son, particularly in ideology, representing battles between the conventional "old" way of thinking in the 1840s and the new nihilistic view of the youth of 1860s Russia.[56][55]

Last years

The unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow

In early 1876 Dostoyevsky continued to work on his Diaries. The book's main theme was, like The Adolescent, child abuse by adults. This essay collection sold more than twice as many as any of his previous books. Dostoyevsky received more letters from readers than at any time before. People of different ages and occupations visited him, now a theology student who had religious doubts, now an agnostic teacher. Thanks to Anna's brother, the family finally bought a dacha in Staraya Russa.[57][58]

In the summer of 1876, Dostoyevsky again began suffering from breathlessness. He visited Ems for a third time, was prescribed a similar remedy as before and was told that he might live for another 15 years if he could find a healthy climate. When Dostoyevsky returned to Russia, Tsar Alexander II ordered him to visit his palace and to present him his Diaries. He also asked him to educate his sons, Sergey and Paul. This visit led to the increase of his circle of acquaintances. He was a frequent guest in several salons in St. Petersburg and met with many famous people, including Princess Sofya Tolstaya, the poet Yakov Polonsky, the politician Sergei Witte, the journalist Alexey Suvorin, the musician Anton Rubinstein and artist Ilya Repin.[57][58]

Dostoyevsky's health began to deteriorate further, and in March 1877 he had four epileptic seizures. Instead of going back to Ems he decided to visit Maly Prikol, a manor near Kursk. On the way back to St. Petersburg to finalise his Diaries, Dostoyevsky visited Darovoye, the scene of many childhood memories. At the same time Anna and her children made a pilgrimage to Kiev. In December he attended Nikolay Nekrasov's funeral and gave a speech. Around that time he was appointed an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.[59][58]

In early 1878 he listened to a speech about the "Man of God" delivered by Vladimir Solovyov, which set him thinking about his next novel. In February 1879 he received an honorary certificate from the academy and in the spring he was invited to participate in an international congress about copyright in Paris, headed by Victor Hugo. He declined the invitation after his son Alyosha's death on 16 May, after an epileptic seizure that had lasted for two hours. The family later moved to an apartment on Yamskaya Street, where Dostoyevsky had written his first works. Around this time he was elected to the board of directors of the Slavic Benevolent Society in St. Petersburg, and that summer he was elected to the honorary committee of the Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale, which included Victor Hugo, Ivan Turgenev, Paul Heyse, Alfred Tennyson, Anthony Trollope, Henry Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Leo Tolstoy.[60][58]

Funeral of Dostoyevsky

Dostoyevsky made his fourth and final visit to Ems in early August 1879. He was diagnosed as having pulmonary emphysema in an early stage. The doctor believed that it was not possible to effect a cure, but said that the disease could be managed with a high likelihood of success. The first parts of his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, were serialised in The Russian Messenger on 1 February and the last parts were published in November 1880.[61][62]

"He seems as if still alive, with a face of total quietude, as in the best moments of his life"

At nearly 800 pages, The Brothers Karamazov is Dostoyevsky's largest literary work and his largest contribution to literature; it is often cited as his greatest work, his magnum opus. Apart from being successful with the critics, the book was popular generally.[63] On 3 February 1880, Dostoyevsky was chosen as the vice president of the Slavic Benevolent Society. He was invited to speak at the unveiling of the Pushkin memorial in Moscow. Initially scheduled for 26 May, the date of the unveiling was rescheduled to 6 June because of the death of Empress Maria Alexandrovna. Dostoyevsky delivered his speech from memory two days later, inside a large room, giving such an impressive and hypnotising performance that many people cried or were in other ways emotionally overwhelmed. His speech was met with thunderous applause, and even his long-time rival Ivan Turgenev embraced him. Dostoyevsky's delivery was later, however, attacked by several people, among them the liberal political scientist Alexander Gradovsky and conservative thinker Konstantin Leontiev. These attacks led to a further deterioration in his health.[64][65]

On 25 January, the Tsar's secret police executed a search warrant in the apartment of one of Dostoyevsky's neighbours. They were searching for members of the terror organisation Narodnaya Volya ("The People's Will") who had assassinated Tsar Alexander II. Anna denied that this might have been responsible for Dostoyevksy's pulmonary haemorrhage on 26 January 1881, stating that it occurred after Dostoyevsky had searched for a dropped pen holder. Following another haemorrhage Anna called for doctors, who gave a grim prognosis. A third haemorrhage followed shortly afterwards.

Among Dostoyevsky's last words was his quoting of Matthew 3:14: "But John tried to stop him, saying, 'I need to be baptised by you, and are you coming to me?'"

According to a Russian custom, his body was placed on a table. Dostoyevsky was interred in the Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Convent, near his favourite poets Karamsin and Zhukovsky. It is not exactly known how many visitors attended his funeral. According to a reporter, more than 100,000 mourners were there, while others state a number between 40,000 and 50,000. His burial attracted many prominent people. Nestor, archbishop of Vyborg, delivered the liturgy, while Ioann Yanyshev performed the consecration. His tombstone is inscribed with these words of Christ from the New Testament:[66][67]

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.

— Jesus, from the Gospel According to John 12:24

Personality and physical appearance

Dostoyevsky had a powerful personality but a less robust physical constitution. He was described by his parents as a hot-headed youngster, stubborn and cheeky.[68] Around the time that he was at the private high school in Moscow, several people depicted him as a pale, introverted dreamer and an over-excitable romantic.[69] The most descriptive account during this time was made by a Dr. Alexander Riesenkampf: "Feodor Mikhailovich was no less-good natured and no less courteous than his brother, but when not in a good mood he often looked at everything through dark glasses, became vexed, forgot good manners, and sometimes was carried away to the point of abusiveness and loss of self-awareness"; but "in the circle of his friends he always seemed lively, untroubled, self-content".[70]

As recorded by Baron Wrangel: "When [Dostoyevsky] came in, [he was] extremely reserved [ ... ] morose, his face pale and sickly and covered with freckles. His light-coloured hair was cut short, and he was of more than medium height. Intently looking at me with his sharp, grey-blue eyes, it seemed that he was trying to peer into my very soul – now what sort of man is he? ... ".[71] Herzen characterised Dostoyevsky as "a naive, not entirely lucid, but very nice person".[72]

On the first meeting with Dostoyevsky, Anna Snitkina described him as such: "[Dostoyevsky] was of average height, and he held himself erect. He had light brown, slightly reddish hair, he used some hair conditioner, and he combed his hair in a diligent way. I was struck by his eyes, they were different: one was dark brown; in the other, the pupil was so big that you could not see its color [caused by an injury]. The strangeness of his eyes gave Dostoyevsky some misterious appearance. His face was pale, and it looked unhealthy..."[73]

Epilepsy

It cannot be known for certain when Dostoyevsky's first epileptic seizure occurred. Some have proposed the age of 9, while others have argued that it was in his teens or early adulthood. Dostoyevsky, however, wrote that his first seizure occurred after the "psychological torture" of the mock execution. In his notebook he recorded a total of 102 seizures in 20 years.[74] Some have thought Dostoyevsky suffered in adulthood from generalised epilepsy, others temporal lobe epilepsy, and some a combination of these two. Théophile Alajouanine stated that he had "partial and secondarily generalised seizures with ecstatic aura", while Henri Gastaut believed that his seizures were "idiopathic generalised". P.H.A. Voskuil described "complex partial seizures with secondarily generalised nocturnal seizures and ecstatic auras". According to Rosetti and Bogousslavsky, Dostoyevsky suffered from "temporal lobe epilepsy, most likely left mesiotemporal, with complex partial and secondarily generalised seizures, with a relatively benign course".[75]

Sigmund Freud, the Austrian psychoanalyst, who linked epilepsy with hysteria, said the illness was caused by his father's death and suggested an Oedipus complex. Freud discussed his theory of the link between epilepsy and hysteria in Dostoevsky and Parricide.

Religious beliefs

Dostoyevsky was raised in a "pious Russian family" and knew the Gospel "almost from the cradle".[76] He attended mass every Sunday from an early age,[77] took part in annual pilgrimages at the St. Sergius Trinity Monastery and was introduced to Christianity with the Russian translation of Johannes Hübner's One Hundred and Four Sacred Stories from the Old and New Testaments Selected for Children, which was partly a German children's bible and partly a catechism.[78][76][79] As well as having this material at home, Dostoyevsky was educated by a deacon near the hospital.[79] One of his most remembered accounts of his childhood were the prayers in front of guests: a reading from the Book of Job, which "made an impression on [Dostoyevsky]" when "still almost a child", and "Mother of God, keep me and preserve me under Thy wing!".[80]

According to an officer of the military academy, Dostoyevsky was deeply religious and orthodox and often read the Gospels and Heinrich Zschokke's Die Stunden der Andacht (Hours of Devotion). The latter book "preached a sentimental version of Christianity entirely free from dogmatic content and with a strong emphasis on giving Christian love a social application", which was perhaps his first introduction to Christian socialism.[81] Through the literature of Hoffmann, Balzac, Sue and Goethe, Dostoyevsky created his own belief system similar to Russian sectarianism and Old Belief.[81] After his arrest, the subsequent mock execution and his imprisonment in Siberia, his religious views focused significantly towards Christ and the New Testament, the only book allowed in prison.[82] In January 1854, Dostoyevsky wrote the following letter to a woman from whom he received the Testament:

I have heard from many sources that you are very religious, Natalia Dmitrievna ... As for myself, I confess that I am a child of my age, a child of unbelief and doubt up to this moment, and I am certain that I shall remain so to the grave. What terrible torments this thirst to believe has cost me and continues to cost me, burning ever more strongly in my soul the more contrary arguments there are. Nevertheless, God sometimes sends me moments of complete tranquility. In such moments I love and find that I am loved by others, and in such moments I have nurtured in myself a symbol of truth, in which everything is clear and holy for me. This symbol is very simple: it is the belief that there is nothing finer, profounder, more attractive, more reasonable, more courageous and more perfect than Christ, and not only is there not, but I tell myself with jealous love that there cannot be. Even if someone were to prove to me that the truth lay outside Christ, I should choose to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Pisma, XXVIII, i, p. 176

In a meeting with Baron Wrangel, Dostoyevsky revived his belief in an omniscient, omnipotent Creator by viewing the spangled sky. Wrangel said that he was "rather pious, but did not often go to church, and disliked priests, especially the Siberian ones. But he spoke about Christ ecstatically". Both planned to translate Hegel's works and Carus' Psyche, and Dostoyevsky explored Islam when he asked his brother to send him a copy of the Quran. Two pilgrimages and two works by the influential archbishop, Dmitri Rostovsky, who influenced Ukrainian and Russian literature and composed groundbreaking religious plays, strengthened his beliefs.[83]

Through his visits to Europe and discussions with Herzen, Grigoriev and Strakhov, Dostoyevsky discovered Pochvennichestvo and the theory that the Catholic Church adopted the principles of rationalism, legalism, materialism and individualism from ancient Rome and passed on its philosophy to Protestantism and finally to socialism, which leads to atheism.[84] But as Dostoyevsky never explicitly stated his faith, his real beliefs are uncertain. One exception to this might be his April 1876 statement to a question about a suicide in Diary of a Writer, remarking that he was a "philosophical deist", originally a quote from The Adolescent, though he did not mention that it was. However, Dostoyevsky said two months later in his Diaries that his heroine George Sand "died a deisté, firmly believing in God and in the immortality of the Soul". But deists at that time held different beliefs about the immortality of the soul. Furthermore his belief in doctrines such as the Trinity, clearly discussed in The Brothers Karamazov, for example,[85] suggests that he did not quite understand the meaning of this term.[86][87] Overall, many critics have pointed out that Dostoyevsky's religion is unusual and partially at odds with Christian core beliefs. Malcolm V. Jones has found elements of Islam and Buddhism in his religious beliefs.[88]

Stance on Jews in Russia

Several writers and critics (including Joseph Frank, Maxim D. Shrayer,[89] Stephen Cassedy, David I. Goldstein, Gary Saul Morson and Felix Dreizin) have offered insights and suppositions regarding Dostoyevsky's views on the Jews and the presence of organised Jewry in Russia. One view is that Dostoyevsky perceived Jewish ethnocentrism and influence to be threatening to the Russian peasantry in poorer areas of the country. In A Writer's Diary, Dostoyevsky wrote:

Thus, Jewry is thriving precisely there where the people are still ignorant, or not free, or economically backward. It is there that Jewry has an open field. And instead of raising, by its influence, the level of education, instead of increasing knowledge, generating economic fitness in the native population – instead of this the Jew, wherever he has settled, has humiliated and debauched the people still more; there humaneness was still more debased and the educational level fell still lower; there inescapable, inhuman misery, and with it despair, spread still more disgustingly. Ask the native population in our border regions: What is propelling the Jew – and has been propelling him for centuries? You will receive a unanimous answer: mercilessness. He has been prompted so many centuries only by pitilessness to us, only by the thirst for our sweat and blood.

And, in truth, the whole activity of the Jews in these border regions of ours consisted of rendering the native population as much as possible inescapably dependent on them, taking advantage of the local laws. They have always managed to be on friendly terms with those upon whom the people were dependent. Point to any other tribe from among Russian aliens which could rival the Jew by his dreadful influence in this connection! You will find no such tribe. In this respect the Jew preserves all his originality, in contrast to other Russian aliens, and of course, the reason therefore is that his status, that spirit of which specifically breathes pitilessness for everything that is not Jew, with disrespect for any people and tribe, for every human creature who is not a Jew ...

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a Writer, translated by Boris Brasol (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons), 1949.

Dostoyevsky expressed antisemitic sentiments such as these, but he also stood up for the rights of the Jewish people. In a review of Joseph Frank's book, The Mantle of the Prophet, Orlando Figes notes that A Writer's Diary is "filled with politics, literary criticism, and pan-Slav diatribes about the virtues of the Russian Empire, [and] represents a major challenge to the Dostoyevsky fan, not least on account of its frequent expressions of antisemitism."[90] Frank, in his foreword for David I. Goldstein's book Dostoevsky and the Jews, attempts to paint Dostoyevsky as a product of his time, noting that Dostoyevsky made antisemitic remarks, but that these views were ones which he was not entirely comfortable with.[91]

Dostoyevsky expressed support for the equal rights of the Russian Jewish population, which was an unpopular position in Russia at the time.[92] Dostoyevsky stated that he did not hate Jewish people and was not antisemitic, and even though he spoke of the potential negative influence of Jewish people, he advised Emperor Alexander II of Russia to allow them positions of influence in Russian society, such as access to professorships at universities. Labelling Dostoyevsky as antisemitic does not take into consideration his expressed desire to reconcile Jews and Christians peacefully in a single universal brotherhood of mankind.[92]

Themes and style

File:Fav Dostoevsky1929.jpg
Dostoyevsky, 1929 woodcut

Dostoyevsky represented the literary movement realism, which depicted contemporary life and society "as they were"; he called himself a "fantastic realist".[93] Apollon Grigoryev called him a "sentimental naturalist". Dostoyevsky was "an explorer of ideas", his life "coincided with a particularly tumultuous period in Russian history, and was undoubtedly shaped by the sociopolitical happenings he witnessed".[94] Beside his writings on human psychology and religion, Dostoyevsky was known for his frequent use of satire; critic Harold Bloom even meant that "satiric parody is the center of Dostoevsky's art."[95]

The space and time in Dostoyevsky were analysed by philologist Vladimir Toporov as "discreet, where the unexpected not only is possible but also always happens".[96] Through the minimization of the passing of time, where the facts suddenly appear, the instant wins the time and then relax, disappearing in the scenes. Toporov compares time and space in Dostoyevsky with film scenes: the constant use of the Russian word vdrug (suddenly), which appears 560 times in the Russian edition of Crime and Punishment, has the proposal of taking to the reader the impression of tension, of inequality and of nervousness, which are characteristic elements of the structure of the Dostoyevskian romance.[96] Beyond the word vdrug in Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky's works utilize numbers a lot, sometimes using them with extreme precision: at two steps..., two roads to the right, as it also uses high and rounded numbers (100, 1000, 10000). Critics such as Donald Fanger[97] and Roman Katsman, writer of The time of cruel miracles: mythopoesis in Dostoevsky and Agnon, said that these elements are "mythopoeic":[98] In the Dostoyevskian literature, the process of evolution of mankind happens through repetition and occasions, and also through the use of memory and remembrance, no matter how painful all these may sound for the character.[96]

Dostoyevsky described human nature in many works. According to Strakhov, "all his attention was directed upon people, and he grasped at only their nature and character", as he was "interested by people, people exclusively, with their state of soul, with the manner of their lives, their feelings and thoughts". Philosopher and Dostoyevsky researcher Berdyaev meant that he "is not a realist as an artist, he is an experimentator, a creator of an experimential metaphysics of human nature". His characters live in an unlimited, irrealistic world, beyond borders and limits. Berdyaev remarks that "Dostoevsky reveals a new mystical science of man", limited to people "which have been drawn into the whirlwind".[99]

Early writing

His first works were heavily influenced by contemporary writers, including Pushkin, Gogol and Hoffmann, even leading to accusations of plagiarism. Several critics pointed out similarities in The Double to Gogol's works The Overcoat and The Nose. Parallels have been made between his short story "An Honest Thief" and George Sand's François le champi and Eugène Sue's Mathilde ou Confessions d'une jeune fille, and between Netochka Nezvanova and Charles Dicken's Dombey and Son. Like many young writers, he was "not fully convinced of his own creative faculty, yet firmly believed in the correctness of his critical judgement."[100]

In the short story "White Nights", Dostoyevsky "truly captured the spirit of German Romanticism". The story "features rich nature and music imagery, gentle irony, usually directed at the first-person narrator himself, and a warm pathos that is always ready to turn into self-parody". The first three parts of the unfinished novel Netochka Nezvanova chronicle the trials and tribulations of the poor Netochka, stepdaughter of a second-class fiddler, and in "A Christmas Tree and a Wedding" he switches to social satire.[100]

Dostoyevsky, 1859

Although spending four years in prison in very poor conditions, Dostoyevsky wrote two humorous books, the novella Uncle's Dream and the novel The Village of Stepanchikovo.[101] The novel, Notes From the Underground, which he partially wrote in prison, became his first secular book, in that it shows little concern with religion. Yet he had obviously wanted to include a religious element in it, since he wrote: "The censor pigs have passed everything where I scoffed at everything and, on the face of it, was sometimes even blasphemous, but have forbidden the parts where I demonstrated the need for belief in Christ from all this".[102]

Since the release of Notes from the Underground, critics began to believe that Dostoyevsky's concern with the downtrodden was "motivated not so much by compassion as by an unhealthy curiosity about the darker recesses of the human psyche, ... by a perverse attraction to the diseased states of the human mind, ... or ... by sadistic pleasure in observing human suffering".[93] Humiliated and Insulted was similarly secular; only at the end of the 1860s, beginning with the publication of Crime and Punishment, did Dostoyevsky's religious themes resurface.[103]

The House of the Dead are semi-autobiographical memoirs from the prison and do, in fact, include a few religious themes. Characters from the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, appear in it, and while the Jew Isay Fomich is negatively treated, along with those from the Orthodox Church and the Old Believers, the Muslims Nurra and Aley from Dagestan are depicted largely positively. Aley is later educated by reading the Bible, and shows a fascination for the Sermon on the Mount, which he views as the ideal philosophy with its altruistic message.[103]

Later years

A characteristic typical of Dostoyevsky's later work is the occurrence of autobiographical elements. According to Norwegian Slavist and vice president of the International Dostoevsky Association, Geir Kjetsaa, "Dostoyevsky's life is a novel". The Idiot, perhaps his most autobiographical work, bears great resemblances to his life, for example the viewing of Holbein's painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, Prince Myshkin's skilled handwriting and similarities between his characters and himself.[45]

The works published in the 1870s explore human beings' capacity for manipulation. The Eternal Husband and "The Meek One" describe the relationship between a man and woman in marriage, the first chronicling the manipulation of a husband by his wife, while the latter switches the genders around. "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" raises this theme of manipulation from the individual to a metaphysical level.[104] In fact, philosopher Nikolay Strakhov once remarked that he was "a great thinker and a great visionary... a dialectician of genius, one of Russia's greatest metaphysicians."[105]

Caricature of Dostoyevsky

Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin highlights Dostoyevsky's use of literary polyphony, where independent, equal voices speak for an individual self, in a context in which these distinct, individual voices can be heard, flourish and interact together, which he calls "carnivalesque".[106] Many of Dostoyevsky's works have elements of menippean satire, where mental attitudes are personified, and he can even be said to have revived this underground genre which combines elements of comedy, fantasy, symbolism and adventure. A Writer's Diary and "Bobok" are "one of the greatest menippeas in all world literature", but examples can also be found in "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man", the first encounter between Raskolnikov and Sonja in Crime and Punishment, which is "an almost perfect Christianised menippea", and "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor".[107]

Unnatural suicides are found in several of Dostoyevsky's books. The 1860s–1880s marked in Russia a near-epidemic period of suicides mainly caused by the growing atheist and positivist philosophy.[108] Many Russian authors at that time wrote about these suicides in their works. Dostoyevsky's suicide victims are always disbelievers and models of the "new man": the Underground Man, Raskolnikov, Ippolit, Kirillov, Ivan Karamazov, Smerdiakov. In a correspondence with the atheist Petr Verkhovensky, Kirillov remarks in The Demons that "God is necessary and therefore must exist", while Verkhovensky responds: "Well, that's wonderful". Kirillov then answers: "But I know that He does not and cannot exist", and after a meaningless cliché by Verkhanovsky he continues: "Don't you understand that a man with these two thoughts cannot go on living?" Verkhovensky meant that one must shoot oneself. At the end of the novel, Kirillov begins suicide. Such a conclusion comes from the characters' disbelief in God and immortality and their acceptance of the contemporary beliefs (for example positivism or materialism). Dostoyevsky saw that a belief in God and immortality was necessary for human existence.[109][110]

Dostoyevsky's work has not always met with a positive reception. Several critics, such as Dobrolyubov, Bunin and Nabokov, found that while his writing successfully explored psychological and philosophical themes, its artistic quality was "below criticism". Others found fault in chaotic and disorganised plots, while still others, such as Turgenev, in "excessive psychologising", or in a naturalism that was too detailed. His characters were called "unrealistic, schematic and contrived". His style was deemed to be "prolix, repetitious and lacking in polish, balance, restraint and good taste". The Idiot, The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov were criticised for including unrealistic characters by critics such as Saltykov-Shchedrin, Tolstoy and Mikhailovsky, They were described as "puppets", as "pale, pretentious and artificial", which is not what should be found in realism literature. The puppet-like appearance was compared with Hoffmann's characters, an author whom Dostoyevsky admired.[111]

Philosophy

Dostoyevsky's works were often called "philosophical", despite his lack of knowledge in that area and his self-description as "weak in philosophy".[112] "Fyodor Mikhailovich loved these questions about the essence of things and the limits of knowledge", as Strakhov once meant.[112] Although theologian George Florovsky described Dostoyevsky as a "philosophical problem", as it is unknown whether he belived in what he wrote, a plethora of philosophical thoughts can be found in books as A Writer's Diary and The Brothers Karamazov; this is so because he often spoke in the first person. An assumption is that he was critical of rational and logical thinking, as he was "more a sage and an artist than a strictly logical, consistent thinker."[113] Furthermore he was often said to representing a Kierkegaardian irrationalism, as can be found in House of the Dead, Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment and Demons. His irrationalism is mentioned in William Barrett's Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy and in Walter Kaufmann's Existentialisms from Dostoevsky to Sartre.[114]

Writing habit

According to Strakhov, a close friend of Dostoyevsky's who wrote many memoirs describing the latter's writing attitudes and habits, "[Dostoyevsky] wrote late at night. Around midnight, when the whole house went to bed, he stayed alone, with his samowar, drinking not very strong, but almost cold tea, and writing until five or six o'clock in the morning. He got up around two or three o'clock in the afternoon."[115] The lazy but hardworking Dostoyevsky wrote as fast as possible as he needed money badly. He also postponed the writing to the last possible day and only wrote when he had enough time to finish his work. It is not surprising that he often exceeded the time limit.[116]

Legacy

File:Omsk Dostoyevskiy Monument.jpg
Dostoyevsky monument in Omsk

Together with Leo Tolstoy, and despite this criticism, Dostoyevsky is often regarded as one of the greatest and most influential novelists of the Golden Age of Russian literature.[117] The publication of his debut novel, Poor Folk, pushed him into the literary mainstream, and critics saw him as a rising star of Russian literature. He was known for his gifted narrative, and through his sharp and often deep and sophisticated treatment of intellectual and political discussions he was described as a spiritual guide, a teacher and even a prophet.[118]

Dostoyevsky's works also attracted readers outside of Russia. The German translator Wilhelm Wolfsohn published one of the first translations, parts of Poor Folk, in an 1846/1847 magazine,[119] and a French translation followed. The first English translations were provided by Marie von Thilo in 1881, and the first acclaimed translations into English were produced between 1912 and 1920 by Constance Garnett.[120]

Soviet Union stamp, 1971

Many non-Russians have been introduced to Dostoyevsky's works. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called Dostoyevsky "the only psychologist, incidentally, from whom I had something to learn; he ranks among the most beautiful strokes of fortune in my life ... "[118] Thomas Mann advised reading his novels in their entirety. Hermann Hesse enjoyed Dostoyevsky's work; he also cautioned that to read him is like a "glimpse into the havoc".[121] The Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun wrote that "no one has analysed the complicated human structure as Dostoyevsky. His psychologic sense is overwhelming and visionary. We have no yardstick by which to assess his greatness".[122] André Gide said that Dostoyevsky "should be put beside Ibsen and Nietzsche; he is equal in size to these three, and maybe the most important".[123]

In a letter to Gide by Edmund Gosse: "[Dostoyevsky] is the cocaine and morphia of modern literature".[124] Ernest Hemingway acknowledged Dostoyevsky as one of those writers who had influenced his work. In his posthumously published collection of sketches A Moveable Feast, Hemingway stated that in Dostoevsky "there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true that they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know."

According to Arthur Power's Conversations with James Joyce, Joyce praised Dostoyevsky's prose: " ... he is the man more than any other who has created modern prose, and intensified it to its present-day pitch. It was his explosive power which shattered the Victorian novel with its simpering maidens and ordered commonplaces; books which were without imagination or violence."[125]

Dostoyevsky monument in Dresden

In her essay The Russian Point of View, Virginia Woolf said: "The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading".[126] Franz Kafka named Dostoyevsky as his "blood-relative",[127] and was heavily influenced by his works, especially The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, both of which had a profound effect on The Trial.[128] Sigmund Freud called his last work "the most significant novel ever written".[129] Left-wing groups such as the surrealists, the existentialists and the Beats named Dostoyevsky as their influence.[130] Dostoyevsky is cited as the forerunner of Russian symbolism,[131] existentialism,[132] expressionism[133] and psychoanalysis.[134]

After the 1917 Russian Revolution, Dostoyevsky's books were often censored or banned. His philosophy, especially in The Demons, was deemed capitalistic and anti-communist, leading Maxim Gorky to nickname the author "our evil genius". Reading Dostoyevsky was forbidden, and those who did not observe this law were imprisoned. During the Second World War, however, his works were used as propaganda by both the Soviets and the Nazis, and after the war the prohibition law in the Soviet Union was overturned. His 125th anniversary in 1947 was celebrated throughout Russia; despite this, his novels were banned again until Nikita Khrushchev's accession to power ten years later, following de-Stalinization and a softening of repressive laws.[135]

In the second half of the twentieth century, his works topped the best-seller lists worldwide. Philosophers, psychologists, theologians, politicians, literary critics, physicians, lawyers and students acknowledged his works, and many of his novels and short stories were filmed and dramatised in the Soviet Union and the West.[121] Dostoyevsy's fictional characters and his work overall were popularised in graffiti, in presidential speeches, vaudeville, films and plays.[136]

In 1956 an olive-green postage stamp dedicated to Dostoyevsky was released in the Soviet Union with a print run of 1,000 copies.[137] A Dostoevsky Museum was opened on 12 November 1971 in the apartment where he wrote his first and last novels.[138] A minor planet was discovered in 1981 by Lyudmila Karachkina and named 3453 Dostoevsky. Viewers of the TV show Name of Russia voted him the ninth greatest Russian of all time, behind chemist Dmitry Mendeleev and ahead of the Russian ruler Ivan IV.[139] A Moscow Metro station on the Lyublinsko-Dmitrovskaya Line was scheduled to open to the public on 15 May, the 75th anniversary of the Moscow Metro; illustrations on the décor made by artist Ivan Nikolaev were criticised because of their depiction of suicides, but did not hinder the opening of Dostoyevskaya on 19 June 2010.[140][141]

Four of Dostoyevsky's books, Crime and Punishment, The Possessed, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, are included on the list of 100 best books of all time.

Works

Dostoyevsky's works of fiction include 15 novels and novellas, 17 short stories, and 5 translations. Many of his longer novels were first published in serialised form in literary magazines and journals (see the individual articles). The years given below indicate the year in which the novel's final part or first complete book edition was published. In English many of his novels and stories are known by several titles.

Plays

  • (~1844) The Jew Yankel (unknown whether finished or not; title based on Gogol's character from Taras Bulba)

Essays

  • Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863)
  • A Writer's Diary (Дневник писателя [Dnevnik pisatelya], 1873–1881)
  • Letters (collected in English translations in five volumes of Complete Letters)

Translations

See also

References

  1. ^ His name has been variously transcribed in English, his first name sometimes being rendered as Theodore. This is because, before the post-revolutionary orthographic reform which, amongst other things, replaced the Cyrillic letter Ѳ ('th') with the Cyrillic letter Ф ('f'), Dostoyevsky's name was written Ѳеодоръ (Theodor) Михайловичъ Достоевскій.
  2. ^ Old Style date 30 October 1821 – 28 January 1881.
  3. ^ "Russian literature". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 April 2008. Dostoyevsky, who is generally regarded as one of the supreme psychologists in world literature, sought to demonstrate the compatibility of Christianity with the deepest truths of the psyche.
  4. ^ Kjetsaa 1989, p. 7.
  5. ^ a b c d Kjetsaa 1989, pp. 9–35.
  6. ^ a b Frank 1979, pp. 6–22.
  7. ^ Lavrin 1947, p. 7.
  8. ^ a b Frank 1979, pp. 23–54.
  9. ^ a b c d Kjetsaa 1989, pp. 35–67.
  10. ^ Frank 1979, pp. 69–90.
  11. ^ Lantz 2004, p. 2.
  12. ^ a b c Frank 1979, pp. 69–111.
  13. ^ Lantz 2004, p. 109.
  14. ^ a b Lantz 2004, p. 3.
  15. ^ Lavrin 1947, pp. 10–11.
  16. ^ Frank 1979, pp. 113–57.
  17. ^ a b c d Kjetsaa 1989, pp. 69–103.
  18. ^ Bloom 2004, p. 12.
  19. ^ Belinsky 1847, p. 96.
  20. ^ Reber 1964, p. 22.
  21. ^ Terras 1969, p. 224.
  22. ^ Frank 1979, pp. 159–82, 259–311.
  23. ^ Frank 1979, pp. 159–82.
  24. ^ Mochulsky 1967, pp. 115–21.
  25. ^ Frank 1979, pp. 239–46, 259–346.
  26. ^ Mochulsky 1967, pp. 121–33.
  27. ^ a b Frank 1987, pp. 6–68.
  28. ^ Kjetsaa 1989, pp. 103–69.
  29. ^ Frank 1988, pp. 8–20.
  30. ^ Frank 1987, pp. 165–267.
  31. ^ a b c Kjetsaa 1989, pp. 171–213.
  32. ^ Frank 1987, pp. 175–221.
  33. ^ Frank 1987, pp. 290 et seq.
  34. ^ Frank 1988, pp. 8–62.
  35. ^ Frank 1988, pp. 233–49.
  36. ^ a b c Kjetsaa 1989, pp. 215–46.
  37. ^ Frank 1988, pp. 34–64.
  38. ^ Frank 1988, pp. 197–211, 283–94, 248–365.
  39. ^ a b Frank 1997, pp. 60–182.
  40. ^ Frank 1997, pp. 151–202.
  41. ^ a b c Kjetsaa 1989, pp. 247–88.
  42. ^ Frank 1997, pp. 184–212.
  43. ^ Frank 1997, pp. 223–39.
  44. ^ a b c Frank 1997, pp. 241–363.
  45. ^ a b c d Kjetsaa 1989, pp. 274–309.
  46. ^ Frank 1997, pp. 413–33.
  47. ^ a b c Frank 2003, pp. 14–63.
  48. ^ a b Kjetsaa 1989, pp. 310–22.
  49. ^ a b Kjetsaa 1989, pp. 329–31.
  50. ^ Frank 2003, pp. 38–118.
  51. ^ Kjetsaa 1989, pp. 335–6.
  52. ^ Frank 2003, pp. 38–111.
  53. ^ Kjetsaa 1989, pp. 335–61.
  54. ^ Frank 2003, pp. 120–47.
  55. ^ a b Kjetsaa 1989, pp. 337–61.
  56. ^ Frank 2003, pp. 149–97.
  57. ^ a b Frank 2003, pp. 199–280.
  58. ^ a b c d Kjetsaa 1989, pp. 337–93.
  59. ^ Frank 2003, pp. 320–75.
  60. ^ Frank 2003, pp. 361–407.
  61. ^ Frank 2003, pp. 462–73.
  62. ^ Kjetsaa 1989, pp. 337–414.
  63. ^ Frank 2003, pp. 390–441.
  64. ^ Frank 2003, pp. 475–531.
  65. ^ Kjetsaa 1989, pp. 337–414, 427–43.
  66. ^ Frank 2003, pp. 707–50.
  67. ^ Kjetsaa 1989, pp. 444–51.
  68. ^ Kjetsaa 1989, p. 16.
  69. ^ Kjetsaa 1989, p. 55.
  70. ^ Frank 1979, pp. 114–5.
  71. ^ Kjetsaa 1989, pp. 149–50.
  72. ^ Frank 2009, p. 355.
  73. ^ Sekirin 1997, p. 178.
  74. ^ "Diagnosing Dostoyevsky's epilepsy". Neurophilosophy.com. 16 April 2007. Retrieved 1 May 2012.
  75. ^ Andrew Larner (March/April 2006). "Dostoevsky and Epilepsy" (PDF). 6 (1). ACNR – Advances in Clinical Neuroscience & Rehabilitation. Retrieved 12 May 2012. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  76. ^ a b Frank 1979, p. 401.
  77. ^ Kjetsaa 1989, pp. 11, 19.
  78. ^ Kjetsaa 1989, p. 19.
  79. ^ a b Jones 2005, p. 1.
  80. ^ Frank 2009, p. 30.
  81. ^ a b Jones 2005, p. 2.
  82. ^ Jones 2005, p. 6.
  83. ^ Frank 1979, pp. 22–3.
  84. ^ Jones 2005, p. 7-9.
  85. ^ Pattison & Thompson 2001, p. 136.
  86. ^ Cassedy 2005, p. 64.
  87. ^ Frank 2003, p. 223.
  88. ^ Jones 2005, p. 68-9.
  89. ^ Shrayer 2004, pp. 210–33.
  90. ^ Figes, Orlando (29 September 2002). "Dostoevsky's leap of faith This volume concludes a magnificent biography which is also a cultural history". London: Sunday Telegraph. p. 13. {{cite news}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help)
  91. ^ Frank 1981, p. xiv.
  92. ^ a b Cassedy 2005, pp. 67–80.
  93. ^ a b Terras 1998, p. preface.
  94. ^ Terras 1998, p. 59.
  95. ^ Bloom 2004, p. 10.
  96. ^ a b c Vladimir Toporov, p. 4 Cite error: The named reference "Toporov" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  97. ^ Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol, Northwestern University Press, 1998, p. 14
  98. ^ Boris Sergeyevich Kondratiev. "Мифопоэтика снов в творчестве Ф. М. Достоевского". Retrieved 2 August 2012. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |trans_title= ignored (|trans-title= suggested) (help)
  99. ^ Nikolay Berdyaev (1918). "The Revelation About Man in the Creativity of Dostoevsky". Retrieved 18 August 2012.
  100. ^ a b Terras 1998, pp. 14–30.
  101. ^ Terras 1998, pp. 32–50.
  102. ^ Pisma, XVIII, 2, 73
  103. ^ a b Bercken 2011, p. 23-6.
  104. ^ Neuhäuser 1993, pp. 94–5.
  105. ^ Scanlan 2002, p. 2.
  106. ^ Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin wrote the influential essay Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1963), which is according to René Wellek "one of the most stimulating and original books of the enormous literature on Dostoevsky".
  107. ^ René Wellek. "Bakhtin's View of Dostoevsky: "Polyphony" and "Carnivalesque"". University of Toronto. Retrieved 3 June 2012.
  108. ^ Paperno 1997, pp. 45, 53, 73–7.
  109. ^ Paperno 1997, pp. 123–6.
  110. ^ Lantz 2004, pp. 424–8.
  111. ^ Terras 1998, pp. 3–4.
  112. ^ a b Anna Dostoyevskaya, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii F. M. Dostoevskogo, St. Petersburg, 1882–83, 1:225
  113. ^ Vladimir Solovyov, Sobranie sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov'eva, St. Petersburg, Obshchestvennaia Pol'za, 1901–07, 5:382
  114. ^ Scanlan 2002, p. 3-6.
  115. ^ Sekirin 1997, p. 153.
  116. ^ Sekirin 1997, pp. 152–53.
  117. ^ Lauer 2000, p. 364.
  118. ^ a b Müller 1982, p. 7.
  119. ^ Meier-Gräfe 1988, p. 492.
  120. ^ Jones & Terry 2010, p. 216.
  121. ^ a b Müller 1982, p. 8.
  122. ^ Lavrin 1947, p. 161.
  123. ^ Lavrin 1947, p. 162.
  124. ^ Bloshteyn 2007, p. 3.
  125. ^ Arthur Power, James Joyce. Conversations with James Joyce. University of Toronto. pp. 51–60. ISBN 978-1-901-86641-4.
  126. ^ Woolf, Virginia. "Chapter 16: The Russian Point of View". The Common Reader. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 978-0-1560-2778-6.
  127. ^ "Briefe an Felice", ed. E. Heller and J. Born (Frankfurt, S. Fischer, 1967), p. 460.
  128. ^ Roman S. Struc. "Kafka and Dostoevsky as "Blood Relatives"". University of Toronto. Retrieved 8 June 2012.
  129. ^ Rieff, Philip (1979). Freud, the Mind of the Moralist (3rd ed.). University of Chicago Press. p. 132. ISBN 9780226716398.
  130. ^ Bloshteyn 2007, p. 5.
  131. ^ Lavrin2 2005, p. 38.
  132. ^ Bloom 2004, p. 108.
  133. ^ Burry 2011, p. 57.
  134. ^ Breger 2008, p. 270.
  135. ^ Bloshteyn 2007, pp. 7–8.
  136. ^ Bloshteyn 2007, p. 4.
  137. ^ "USSR (Soviet Union) Postage – Stamps: 1956–1960". CPA – "Souzpechat" Central Philatelic Agency. Retrieved 10 May 2012.
  138. ^ "Museum". Fyodor Dostoevsky Literary Memorial Museum. Retrieved 10 May 2012.
  139. ^ "Результаты Интернет голосования" (in Russian). Name of Russia. Retrieved 15 May 2012. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |trans_title= ignored (|trans-title= suggested) (help)
  140. ^ "Liublinsko-Dmitrovskaya Line". Moscow Metro. Retrieved 10 May 2012.
  141. ^ "Opening delayed for Moscow metro's "station of suicides"". Russia Today. TV-Novosti. 15 May 2010. Retrieved 10 May 2012.

Bibliography

Biographies
Essays
  • Evdokimov, Paul (1984) [1961]. Gogol et Dostoievsky: la descente aux enfers (2nd ed.). Desclée De Brouwer. ISBN 978-2-2200-2485-1.
  • New Essays on Dostoevsky, ed. M. Jones, G. M. Terry (1983)
  • V. Seduro, Dostoevski's Image in Russia Today (1975)
  • D. Capetanakis, 'Dostoevsky', in Demetrios Capetanakis A Greek Poet In England (1947), p. 103–116
  • P. Evdokimov, Dostoevski et le probleme du mal (1942; repr. 1978)
  • N. Berdyaev, Dostoevsky (1934; Russian original 1923)
  • L. Shestov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche (1969; Russian original 1903)
Religion

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