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Fyodor Dostoevsky Biography
born: November 11, 1821 Moscow, Russia
died: February 9, 1881 St Petersburg, Russia
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (sometimes transliterated
Dostoyevsky) was one of the greatest of Russian writers,
whose works have a profound and lasting effect on twentieth-century
fiction. He is sometimes said to be a founder of existentialism.
Fyodor 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. They lost their father,
a retired military surgeon who served as a doctor at the
Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in Moscow, in 1839. 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 cheaply. Regardless of what may
have actually happened, Sigmund Freud focused on this tale
in his famous article, Dostoevsky and Parricide (1928).
Dostoevsky
was arrested and imprisoned in 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 was blind folded
and ordered to stand outside in freezing weather awaiting
to be shot by a firing squad, Dostoevsky's sentence was
commuted to a number of years of exile performing hard labor
at a katorga prison camp in Omsk, Siberia. The incidence
of epileptic seizures, to which he was predisposed, increased
during this period. He was released from prison in 1854,
and was required to serve in the Siberian Regiment. Dostoevsky
spent the following five years as a corporal (and latterly
lieutenant) in the Regiment's Seventh Line Battalion stationed
at the fortress of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan.
This
was a turning point in the author's life. Dostoevsky abandoned
his earlier liberal sentiments and became deeply conservative
and extremely religious. He later formed a peculiar friendship
with another archconservative, Konstantin Pobedonostsev.
He began an affair with, and later married, Maria Dmitrievna
Isaeva, the widow of an acquaintance in Siberia.
In
1860, 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. (It was published in 1866) 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 Dostoyevsky'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 Snitkina, 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.
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, 1881 and was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander
Nevsky Monastery, St. Petersburg, Russia.
Dostoevsky's influence cannot be overemphasized—from
Herman Hesse to Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Albert
Camus, Franz Kafka, Henry Miller, Yukio Mishima and Gabriel
García Márquez—virtually no great 20th
century writer has 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 has 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 Czarism. 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, Miguel de Cervantes,
Victor Hugo and a few others, Dostoevsky has decisively influenced
20th century literature, existentialism and expressionism
in particular.
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Books
Crime and Punishment is an upcoming release in the Smink Works Books
classics collection
OTHER WORKS
Poor Folk (1846)
The Double: A Petersburg Poem (1846)
Netochka Nezvanova (1849)
The Village of Stepanchikovo (or The Friend of the Family) (1859)
The Insulted and Humiliated (or The Insulted and the Injured) (1861)
The House of the Dead (1862)
A Nasty Story (1862)
Notes from Underground (or Letters from the Underworld) (1864)
The Gambler (1867)
The Idiot (1868)
The Possessed (or Demons or The Devils) (1872)
The Raw Youth (or The Adolescent) (1875)
The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
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