Fyodor Dostoevsky is renowned as
one of the world’s greatest novelists and literary psychologists.
Born in Moscow in 1821,
the son of a doctor, Dostoevsky was educated first at home and then
at a boarding school. When Dostoevsky was a young boy, his father
sent him to the St. Petersburg Academy of Military Engineering,
from which he graduated in 1843.
Dostoevsky had long been interested in writing, and he immediately
resigned from his position as a sublieutenant to devote his time
to his craft. His first book, Poor Folk (1846),
was immediately popular with critics.
Dostoevsky’s early view of the world was shaped by his
experience of social injustice. At the age of twenty-six, Dostoevsky
became active in socialist circles, largely because of his opposition
to the institution of serfdom. His political opinions were influenced
by his experiences as a young boy—his father was murdered by his
own serfs while Dostoevsky was away at school. Another experience
that greatly affected Dostoevsky, and that found its way into his
writing, was the time he spent in prison. On April 23, 1849,
Dostoevsky was arrested for his participation in a group that illegally
printed and distributed socialist propaganda. After spending eight
months in prison, Dostoevsky was sentenced to death for membership
in the group and was led, with other members of the group, to be
shot. But the execution turned out to be a mere show, meant to punish
the prisoners psychologically. Dostoevsky then spent four years
at a labor camp in Siberia, followed by four years of military service. Raskolnikov’s
time in a Siberian prison, described in the Epilogue of Crime
and Punishment, is based on Dostoevsky’s own experiences at
a similar prison, and he devoted many passages in his other books to
scenes involving criminal justice, including the courtroom scenes of The
Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoevsky’s time in prison affected him in at least
two important ways. First, during his imprisonment Dostoevsky began
suffering from epileptic seizures, a condition from which he suffered
for the rest of his life. He portrays the experience of epilepsy
through the character of Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov. The
second important change that Dostoevsky underwent in prison was
his rejection of the radical socialist positions that had led to
his arrest, and his development of a conservative concern for traditional
values. His conservative religious and philosophical inclination
is evident throughout his works written after this period, including The Brother’s
Karamazov. For instance, Dostoevsky specifically questions
whether good and evil can exist in a world in which there is no God.
Through the character of Rakitin, Dostoevsky parodies the progressive
theories of his contemporaries, intellectuals who move from popular
idea to popular idea according to the whims of fashion, without
regard for the truth.
In 1857,
Dostoevsky married Mariya Dmitriyevna Isayeva, who died of consumption
seven years later. He spent much of the 1860s in
Western Europe, experiencing the culture that was slowly invading
Russia. During this time he struggled with poverty, epilepsy, and an
addiction to gambling. But with the publication of Crime
and Punishment (1866),
his fortunes improved. The novel’s popular and critical success
allowed him to keep ahead, albeit just barely, of daunting debts
and the burden of supporting a number of children left in his care
after the deaths of his brother and sister. In 1867, he married
a second time, to Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, who helped him cope
with his epilepsy, depression, and gambling problems. Anna had served
as his stenographer for his novel The Gambler (1867).
After writing Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky
wrote The Idiot (1868),
and perhaps his greatest masterwork, The Brothers Karamazov (1880). The
Brothers Karamazov is Dostoevsky’s deepest and most complex
examination of crucial philosophical questions of human existence.
In it, he addresses the conflict between faith and doubt, the problem
of free will, and the question of moral responsibility. The
Brothers Karamazov is one of the greatest novels of the
nineteenth century, and remains the capstone of Dostoevsky’s achievement
today. Dostoevsky died in 1881,
only a year after The Brothers Karamazov was published.
Some people have seen Dostoevsky’s novels as prophetic
depictions of life under the Soviet regime. The existentialist movement that
took shape in the middle of the twentieth century looked to him for
his descriptions of human beings confronting mortality, despair, and
the anxiety of choice. Writers such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul
Sartre valued Dostoevsky’s writing for his profound insights into
human dilemmas, which, along with his style, themes, and unforgettable
characters, continue to influence writers more than a century after
his death.
