Fyodor Dostoevsky

(1821 - 1881) Novelist

Very influential Russian writer who plumbed the psychology of man, the nature of morality, Christianity and Western culture with fevered tales of contemporary Russian life.

Biography

Born October 30, 1821 Moscow Ethnicity Russian Residence St. Petersburg

Died January 28, 1881 St. Petersburg Nationality Russian Language Russian

Other occupations engineering student, journal editor, soldier, labor camp prisoner

Dostoevsky was one of seven children born into a middle class but upwardly mobile family headed by a stern ex-military physician and his cultured and kindly wife. He began his life in a cramped apartment until his father became a nobleman with an estate and serfs. Fyodor lost his mother at sixteen and, shortly after, was sent to study military engineering by his father. Dostoevsky, along with his beloved brother, loved literature and he suffered at the academy until his father's death when his small inheritance allowed him to begin his writing career and a life of financial worries. He produced a few translations before completing his Gogolesque first book, Poor Folk. A very prominent literary critic declared him a major new voice; this praise consoled him when sales didn't match the size of his talent (or ego). Dostoevsky was shy, vain, very sure of his talent and irascible, which despite his sympathy with the poor and liberal ideas, alienated many of his early supporters. However he still cherished romanticism and western ideals which led to his involvement with a group of utopian socialists and later his arrest. Dostoevsky was spared in a mock execution and labored for four years in a Siberian prison camp, where he met and smelled the poor and downtrodden who had earlier earned his sympathies. This experienced killed his romantic and liberal leanings while intensifying his irascibility. Because of the trauma, he began to suffer from severe epilepsy and a Slav-centric orthodox Christianity. Turgenev dubbed him the nastiest Christian he had ever met. During six years as a soldier, Dostoevsky discovered the miseries of marriage with a moody and cruel consumptive who often drove him into the arms of other women despite his perverse attachment to her. He was pardoned and allowed to return to St. Petersburg where he resumed his writing career with a novel about his prison camp experiences. With his brother, he started a couple of influential journals that were increasingly antagonistic to radicals and the intelligentsia. In 1864 Dostoevsky suffered the death of his wife and his beloved brother. Fyodor then spent the remainder of the decade traveling Europe, exploring its culture, pursuing an affair with a minor author and escaping his creditors. One publisher offered to pay off Dostoevsky's debts if the writer could deliver a novel in a month, Dostoevsky accepted the offer and wrote the Gambler. He then married the stenographer who worked with him of the story. She provided both financial and emotional stability, and bore him four children. During this period, Dostoevsky produced most of his major works in a fevered 10-year period. He then poured himself into an experimental one-man journal, Diary of Writer, in which he published his own short stories, autobiographical essays, sketches and analysis of sensational current events. The journal was widely read and lucrative despite its increasingly extreme political and religious subject matter. He then worked on his massive Brothers Karamazov before his feverish and high-strung temperament finally expressed itself physically with a fatal hemorrhage on January 28, 1881.

Influences

Bible, Nikolai Gogol, Influenced

Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Villy Sorensen

Themes: Free will vs. determinism, Spirit vs. Materialism, Eastern Slav Orthodoxy vs. Western liberalism. Christian sympathy and love as the solution to man's debased state. Origin of evil and possibility for redemption.

Style: He wrote as if in a fever, with words piling on top of each other with an intensity and rhythm equal to the high strung emotions of their author. There is probably not one measured or 'carefully crafted' sentence in all of his works. The time pressure under which he wrote often forced him to skimp on craft with numerous repetitions and a lack of concision. The total affect can be over wrought for some and awe- and terror- inspiring for others. The novels are very concerned with ideas but he explores them only through very human (if extreme) personalities.

Major Work

Notes from the Underground: (Novella) The narrator attacks the ideals of the deterministic and materialistic west with a venom that exposes his own vile and debased character while explaining his own irrational assertions of free will and individuality.

Crime and Punishment: (Novel) A poor sensitive law student murders a vile landlady/usurer believing himself exempt from moral law. He is pursued by a suspicious police detective and becomes involved with a saintly prostitute who leads him to confession and the road to redemption.

Brothers Karamazov: (Novel) A sprawling novel of late 19th Century Russian culture and intellectual ideas involving a stern uncaring father and his three sons, a healthy lustful man, a poor intellectual and the Christ-like youngest son. When the father is murdered, the sons wrangle among themselves, spiritually, intellectually, and emotionally, to find the murderer.