A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Russian novelist, journalist, short-story writer whose psychological penetration into the human soul had a profound influence on the 20th century novel. Dostoevsky presented interacting characters with contrasting views or ideas, any of which may be used as a key to reading the text as whole. Dostoevsky's central obsession was God, whom his characters constantly search through pain, evil and humiliations. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in the Hospital for the poor in Moscow on October 30, 1821. He was to be the second of seven children. His childhood has been described by himself as happy and peaceful where he held particular warm feelings towards his two older siblings Misya and Varenka. Other sources put weight on the despotic father. It is said that the father, a physicist who had retired to his estate in the province of Tula, was murdered by his own serfs in 1839 because of his hot temperedness and irritable state of mind. Dostoyevsky rarely mentioned his father's murder, but Oedipal themes are recurrent in his work, and Sigmund Freud suggested that the novelist's epilepsy was a manifestation of guilt over his repressed wish for his father's death. The mother, on the other hand, is described as tender and sensitive with a literary and musical talent. She died in 1837 when young Fyodor was only fifteen years old. Partly to escape the oppressive atmosphere of his father's household, the boy acquired a love of reading, especially the works of Nikolai Gogol, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Honore de Balzac. In 1831 Fyodor and his brother Mikhail (1820-1864) were sent to boarding schools in Moscow. After the death of their mother in 1837 they started preparatory school in St. Petersburg. At his father's insistence, Dostoyevsky trained as an engineer in St. Petersburg. Then, in 1838, Fyodor was admitted to St. Petersburg's Academy of Military Engineers, leaving Misya behind. He graduated in 1843 from the Academy as lieutenant, and was assigned to a military department in St. Petersburg where he worked for a year. Dostoevsky soon realized that working in a department gave no creative satisfaction. He wanted to write and work as an author. His new career started by translating Honore de Balzac's Eugenie Grandet in 1843 and George Sand's La derniere Aldini in 1844. Two years later, he published his first novel, Poor Folk, 1846, a naturalistic tale with a clear social message as well as a delicate description of life's tragic aspects as manifested in everyday existence. The twenty-four-year-old author became an overnight celebrity when Vissarion Belinsky, the most influential critic of the day, praised Dostoyevsky for his social awareness and declared him the literary successor of Gogol. Dostoyevsky joined Belinsky's literary circle but later broke with it when the critic reacted coldly to his subsequent works. Belinsky judged the novel The Double, 1846, and the short stories Gospodin Prokharchin (1846; Mr. Prokharchin ) and Khozyayka (1847; The Landlady ) as devoid of a social message. In 1848 Dostoyevsky joined a group of young intellectuals, led by Mikhail Petrashevsky, which met to discuss literary and political issues. In the reactionary political climate of mid-nineteenth-century Russia, such groups were illegal, and in 1849 the members of the so-called Petrashevsky Circle were arrested and charged with subversion. Up to the point of his arrest in 1849, Dostoevsky published amongst other works, A Strange Wife, A Faint Heart and The Jealous Husband. At this time he was also acquainted with the utopian socialist M. V. Butashevich-Petrashevsky and Dostoevsky seems to have been one of the strongmen in the Petrashevsky group. This association got him four years in Siberian prison. Dostoyevsky described his life as a prisoner in The House of the Dead, 1862, a novel demonstrating both an insight into the criminal mind and an understanding of the Russian lower classes. While in prison the writer underwent a profound spiritual and philosophical transformation. His intense study of the New Testament, the only book the prisoners were allowed to read, contributed to his rejection of his earlier liberal political views and led him to the conviction that redemption is possible only through suffering and faith, a belief which informed his later work. Dostoyevsky was released from the prison camp in 1854; however, he was forced to serve as a soldier in a Siberian garrison for an additional five years. By 1857 things started to look better. February 6 Dostoevsky married the widow Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva and two months later regained his rights of a nobleman. In August The Small Hero was published, he was released from army service in March 1858 and was alowed to return to St. Petersburg in December. When Dostoyevsky was finally allowed to return to St. Petersburg in 1859, he eagerly resumed his literary career, founding two periodicals and writings articles and short fiction. The articles expressed his new-found belief in a social and political order based on the spiritual values of the Russian people. These years were marked by further personal and professional misfortunes, including the forced closing of his journals by the authorities, the deaths of his wife and his brother, and a financially devastating addiction to gambling. It was in this atmosphere that Dostoyevsky wrote Notes from the Underground, 1864, and Crime and Punishment. In Notes from the Underground Dostoyevsky satirizes contemporary social and political views by presenting a narrator whose notes reveal that his purportedly progressive beliefs lead only to sterility and inaction. In 1862 he made his first trip abroad to Germany, England, Switzerland, and Italy. He started an affair with the young student Apollinaria Suslova which he regarded as his intellectual equal - apart from being a good looking woman who followed her passions... Dostoevsky also started the review Time which published The Insulted and the Injured and A Silly Story in 1861. The period of relative prosperity and happiness stopped abruptly in 1864 when first Dostoevsky's wife Maria Dmitrievna, and then brother Mikhail, died. A further blow was when Apollinaria Suslova declined his marriage proposal in 1865. Dostoevsky was all alone, left with his brother's debts. He now resorted to gambling as a way out from his economical difficulties, but to no avail of course. He also signed a slave contract with a publisher for a new novel. As time went by, and running out, he had to hire a stenographer in order to get the novel ready in time. That stenographer was the nineteen year old Anna Grigorievna Snitkina. Together they worked hard for a month and the same day the contract expired out Dostoevsky delivered the manuscript for The Gambler to the publisher. Had he not done so, the publisher would have gained the rights to Dostoevsky's work. Intense work then transformed into intense love and Fyodor asked Anna to marry him. She accepted and the wedding stod in February 15 1867. Viewed by critics as one of his masterpieces, Crime and Punishment is the novel in which Dostoyevsky first develops the theme of redemption through suffering. The protagonist Raskolnikov whose name derives from the Russian word for schism or split is presented as the embodiment of spiritual nihilism. The novel depicts the harrowing confrontation between his philosophical beliefs, which prompt him to commit a murder in an attempt to prove his supposed superiority, and his inherent morality, which condemns his actions. In 1867, Dostoyevsky fled to Europe with his second wife to escape creditors. Although they were distressing due to financial and personal difficulties, Dostoyevsky's years abroad were fruitful, for he completed one important novel and began another. The Idiot, 1869, influenced by Hans Holbein's painting Christ Taken from the Cross and by Dostoyevsky's opposition to the growing atheistic sentiment of the times, depicts the Christ-like protagonist's loss of innocence and his experience of sin. Dostoyevsky's profound conservatism, which marked his political thinking following his Siberian experience, and especially his reaction against revolutionary socialism, provided the impetus for his great political novel The Possessed, 1871-72. Based on a true event, in which a young revolutionary was murdered by his comrades, this novel provoked a storm of controversy for its harsh depiction of ruthless radicals. In his striking portrayal of Stavrogin, the novel's central character, Dostoyevsky described a man dominated by the life-denying forces of nihilism. Except for the last ten years, the Dostoevsky family suffered from economical difficulties caused by brother Mikhail's debts, the always begging step-son Pavel (from the marriage with Isaeva) and Fyodor's gambling spree. They also was extremely unlucky regarding their three children. Sofia was born in Geneva in 1868, but lived for only three months. The next year, in Dresden, the daughter Lyubov was born. She had a nervous breakdown when her father died and never recovered. The relation between her and Anna was thereafter tense. In 1875 Aleksey was born, but met death three years later in fever. Dostoevsky was supposedly a good father, a modern husband for his time; a house rule was that at dinner they never talked about things that the children wouldn't understand. The last years of his life, Dostoevsky finally saw both artistic and economical success coming his way. In 1879 he began publishing The Brothers Karamazov in The Russian Messenger which received great reviews, and Anna started to sell books in the countryside. The Brothers Karamazov is a family tragedy of epic proportions, which is viewed as one of the great novels of world literature. The novel recounts the murder of a father by one of his four sons. Initially, his son Dmitri is arrested for the crime, but as the story unfolds it is revealed that the illegitimate son Smerdyakov has killed the old man at what he believes to be the instigation of his half-brother Ivan. Ivan's philosophical essay, The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, is a work now famous in its own right. Presented as a debate in which the Inquisitor condemns Christ for promoting the belief that mankind has the freedom of choice between good and evil, the piece explores the conflict between intellect and faith, and between the forces of evil and the redemptive power of Christianity. Dostoevsky also gained reputation as a speaker and gave lectures which the listeners enjoyed greatly. But his health was never good and deteriorated even further in 1880. An epileptic all his life, Dostoevsky died in St. Petersburg on February 9, 1881. He was buried in the Aleksandr Nevsky monastery, St. Petersburg. Dostoyevsky's novels anticipated many of the ideas of Nietzsche, and Freud, and influenced among others such non-Russian writers as Thomas Mann and Albert Camus. |
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