Fyodor Dostoevsky (also
spelled Dostoyevsky) is renowned as one of the world’s greatest
novelists and literary psychologists. His works grapple with deep
political, social, and religious issues while delving into the often
tortured psychology of characters whose lives are shaped by these
issues. Born in Moscow in 1821, the son of
a doctor, he was educated first at home and then at a boarding school.
His father sent him to the St. Petersburg Academy of Military Engineering,
from which he graduated in 1843. But, as
he had long set his sights on literature, Dostoevsky immediately
resigned his position as a sublieutenant in exchange for the much
less stable life of a fiction writer. His first book, Poor
Folk, was published to critical acclaim in 1846.
In 1847, Dostoevsky became active
in socialist circles, largely because of his opposition to the institution
of serfdom. On April 23, 1849, he was arrested
for his participation in a group that illegally printed and distributed
socialist propaganda. After spending eight months in prison, he
was sentenced to death for membership in the group and 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.
During his time in prison, Dostoevsky suffered the first
of many epileptic seizures. He also underwent something of a political
conversion, rejecting the radical socialist positions that had led
to his arrest in favor of a conservative concern for traditional
values. His dismissal of leftist political thought is evident in Crime
and Punishment. For instance, Raskolnikov’s crime is motivated,
in part, by his theories about society. Lebezyatnikov, whose name
is derived from the Russian word for “fawning,” is obsessed with
the so-called new philosophies that raged through St. Petersburg
during the time that Dostoevsky was writing the novel. Luzhin, a
mid-level government official, is continually afraid of being “exposed”
by “nihilists.”
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 and struggled with poverty, epilepsy, and an addiction to gambling.
But with the 1866 publication of Crime
and Punishment, a long, delirious trip through the psyche
of a tormented murderer, his fortunes improved. The novel’s popular
and critical success allowed him to keep ahead, 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 was married a second time, to Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, who
helped him cope with his epilepsy, depression, and gambling problems,
and who had served as his stenographer for his novel The
Gambler. After Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky
went on to write a number of other classics of world literature.
These include The Idiot, published in 1868, and
another masterwork, The Brothers Karamazov, published
in 1880. He died in 1881.
Dostoevsky’s novels and other writings were major
influences on twentieth-century literature and philosophy. Some
people saw the political themes of his novels as prescient 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.
