Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was a Russian philosopher, novelist, short story writer, essayist, and journalist, born in Moscow on 11 November 1821 and dead in Saint Petersburg on 9 February 1881. He wrote in the troubled political, social, and spiritual climate of 19th-century Russia, and his fiction returned again and again to the human condition, religion, guilt, suffering, freedom, and moral choice. He is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in Russian and world literature.

Dostoevsky is best known for the major novels of his later career: Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872), The Adolescent (1875), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). His 1864 novella Notes from Underground is considered one of the first works of existentialist literature. Across a body of work that includes thirteen novels, three novellas, seventeen short stories, and many other writings, he built stories that put private torment and public disorder on the same page.

His early life gave him unusually close views of both books and suffering. He was raised on the grounds of the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, where his father, Dr. Mikhail Dostoevsky, worked. As a child, Fyodor encountered patients at the lower end of the Russian social scale while playing in the hospital gardens. He was introduced to literature early through fairy tales, legends, the Bible, Russian authors such as Nikolai Karamzin, Alexander Pushkin, and Gavrila Derzhavin, and foreign writers including Ann Radcliffe, Friedrich Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Miguel de Cervantes, Walter Scott, and Homer. Nikolai Gogol greatly influenced him.

His life also carried severe breaks. His mother died in 1837, and around the same time he left school to enter the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute. After graduation he worked as an engineer and translated books for extra money. In the mid-1840s, his first novel, Poor Folk, brought him into Saint Petersburg literary circles. In 1849, however, he was arrested for belonging to the Petrashevsky Circle, a literary group that discussed banned books critical of Tsarist Russia. He was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted at the last moment.

Dostoevsky then spent four years in a Siberian hard labour camp, an experience that inspired The House of the Dead (1860–1862). Six years of compulsory military service in exile followed. Later he worked as a journalist, published and edited several magazines of his own, and produced A Writer’s Diary, a collection of his writings. He also traveled in Western Europe and developed a gambling addiction that brought financial hardship. For a time he had to beg for money, yet he eventually became one of the most widely read and highly regarded Russian writers.

Readers still return to Dostoevsky because his books ask hard questions without making human beings simple. His work has been read far beyond Russia, translated into more than 170 languages, and has inspired cinema. It influenced writers and thinkers including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Anton Chekhov, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as the development of Existentialism and Freudianism. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Twilight of the Idols that Dostoevsky was “the only psychologist from whom I had something to learn.”