| Fyodor Dostoyevsky | |
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1879 |
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| Born | Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky November 11, 1821 Moscow, Russian Empire |
| Died | February 9, 1881 (aged 59) Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire |
| Occupation | Novelist, short story writer, essayist |
| Language | Russian |
| Nationality | Russian |
| Period | 1846–1881 |
| Notable work(s) | Notes from Underground Crime and Punishment The Idiot The Brothers Karamazov |
| Spouse(s) |
Mariya Dmitriyevna Isayeva (1857–64) [her death] Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina (1867–1881) [his death] |
| Children | Sofiya (1868), Lyubov (1869—1926), Fyodor (1871–1922), Alexei (1875—1878) |
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Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky (Russian: Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский; IPA: [ˈfʲodər mʲɪˈxajləvʲɪtɕ dəstɐˈjefskʲɪj] ( listen); November 11, 1821 – February 9, 1881[1]) was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays.[2] He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov.
His name has been variously transcribed in English, his first name sometimes being rendered as Theodore. This is because, before the post-revolutionary orthographic reform which, amongst other things, replaced the cyrillic letter Ѳ ('th') with the cyrillic letter Ф ('f'), Dostoyevsky's name was written Ѳеодоръ (Theodor) Михайловичъ Достоевскій.
Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. With the embittered voice of the anonymous "underground man", Dostoyevsky wrote Notes from Underground (1864), which has been called the "best overture for existentialism ever written" by Walter Kaufmann.[3] He is often acknowledged by critics as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature.[4]
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Dostoyevsky's father Mikhail and grandfather, Andrey, were born in modern central Ukraine.[5][6] Mikhail was a doctor and a devout Christian, who practised at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in Moscow.
Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow to Mikhail and Maria Dostoyevsky, the second of seven children.[7] The family lived in a small apartment in the Mariinsky Hospital grounds. The hospital was located in one of the city's worst areas near a cemetery for criminals, a lunatic asylum, and an orphanage for abandoned infants. This urban landscape made a lasting impression on the young Dostoyevsky, whose interest in and compassion for the poor, oppressed and tormented was apparent in his life and works. Although it was forbidden by his parents, Dostoyevsky liked to wander out to the hospital garden, where the patients sat to catch a glimpse of the sun. The young Dostoyevsky appreciated spending time with these patients and listening to their stories.
Stories of Dostoyevsky's father's despotic treatment of his children may be tempered by records of his care for his children and their upbringing. After returning home from work, the father would take a nap while his children, ordered to keep absolutely silent, stood by in shifts and swatted the flies that came near his head. But he was also careful to send his children to private schools where they would not be beaten. In the opinion of the biographer Joseph Frank, the father figure in The Brothers Karamazov is not based on Dostoyevsky's own father. Letters and personal accounts demonstrate that they had a fairly loving relationship.
In 1837 shortly after his mother died of tuberculosis Dostoyevsky and his brother were sent to St Petersburg to attend the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute, now called the Military Engineering-Technical University.[8]
Fyodor Dostoyevsky's father died in 1839. Though it has never been proven, it is believed by some that he was murdered by his own serfs.[9] According to one account, the serfs became enraged during one of his drunken fits of violence, and after restraining him, poured vodka into his mouth until he drowned. A similar account appears in Notes from Underground. Another story holds that Mikhail died of natural causes, and a neighboring landowner invented the story of his murder so that he might buy the estate at a cheaper price. Some, like Sigmund Freud in his 1928 article, "Dostoevsky and Parricide", have argued that his father's personality had influenced the character of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, the "wicked and sentimental buffoon", father of the main characters in his 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov, but such claims fail to withstand scrutiny.
From the age of nine Dostoyevsky suffered sporadically from epilepsy throughout his life [10] and his experiences are thought[11] to have formed the basis for his description of Prince Myshkin's epilepsy in his novel The Idiot and that of Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov, among others.
At the Saint Petersburg Institute of Military Engineering[12] Dostoyevsky was taught mathematics, a subject he despised. However, he also studied literature by Shakespeare, Pascal, Victor Hugo and E.T.A. Hoffmann. Though he focused on areas different from mathematics, he did well in the exams and received a commission in 1841.
In 1841, influenced by the German poet/playwright Friedrich Schiller, Dostoyevsky wrote two romantic plays: Mary Stuart and Boris Godunov. The plays have not been preserved. Dostoyevsky described himself as a "dreamer" when young. In the years when he wrote his great masterpieces he sometimes made fun of Schiller.
In 1842 Dostoyevsky was made a lieutenant, and in 1843 he left the Engineering Academy. That year he completed a translation into Russian of Balzac's novel Eugénie Grandet, but it brought him little attention.
Dostoyevsky started to write his own fiction in late 1844 after leaving the army. In 1846 his first work, the epistolary short novel, Poor Folk, printed in the almanac A Petersburg Collection, met with great acclaim. As legend has it, the editor of the magazine, poet Nikolai Nekrasov, walked into the office of liberal critic Vissarion Belinsky and announced, "A new Gogol has arisen!" Belinsky, his followers, and many others agreed. After the novel was published in book form at the beginning of the next year, Dostoyevsky became a literary celebrity at the age of 24.
In 1846 Belinsky and others reacted negatively to his novella, The Double, a psychological study of a bureaucrat whose alter ego overtakes his life. Dostoyevsky's fame began to fade. Much of his work after Poor Folk received ambivalent reviews, and it seemed that Nekrasov's prediction that Dostoyevsky would be one of the greatest writers of Russia was mistaken.
Dostoyevsky was incarcerated on 23 April 1849 for being part of the liberal intellectual group the Petrashevsky Circle. Emperor Nicolas I, after seeing the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, was harsh on any type of underground organization which might put autocracy in jeopardy. On November 16 of that year Dostoyevsky, with other members of the Petrashevsky Circle, was sentenced to death. After a mock execution, in which he and other members of the group stood outside in freezing weather waiting to be shot by a firing squad, Dostoyevsky's sentence was commuted to four years of exile with hard labour at a katorga prison camp in Omsk, Siberia. Later Dostoyevsky described his years of suffering to his brother, as being, "shut up in a coffin." In describing the dilapidated barracks which "should have been torn down years ago", he wrote:
In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall... We were packed like herrings in a barrel... There was no room to turn around. From dusk to dawn it was impossible not to behave like pigs... Fleas, lice, and black beetles by the bushel...[13]
This experience inspired him to write The House of the Dead.
Dostoyevsky was released from prison in 1854, and was required to serve in the Siberian Regiment. He spent the following five years as a private (and later lieutenant) in the Regiment's Seventh Line Battalion, stationed at the fortress of Semipalatinsk, now in Kazakhstan.
While there, he began a relationship with Maria Dmitrievna Isayeva, the wife of an acquaintance in Siberia. After her husband's death, they married in February 1857.
Dostoyevsky's experiences in prison and the army changed his political and religious convictions. First, his ordeal caused him to repudiate contemporary Western European philosophical movements and to pay greater tribute in his writings to traditional, rustic Russian values, exemplified in the Slavophile concept of sobornost. Even more significantly he had what his biographer Joseph Frank describes as a conversion experience in prison, which greatly strengthened his Christian, and specifically Orthodox, faith.[14] Dostoyevsky would later depict his conversion experience in the short story, The Peasant Marey (1876).
In his writings Dostoyevsky started to extol the virtues of humility, submission, and suffering.[15] He now displayed a more critical stance on contemporary European philosophy and turned with intellectual rigour against the Nihilist and Socialist movements; and much of his post-prison work—particularly the novel, The Possessed, and the essays, The Diary of a Writer—contains both criticism of socialist and nihilist ideas, as well as thinly veiled parodies of contemporary Western-influenced Russian intellectuals (Timofey Granovskiy), revolutionaries (Sergey Nyechayev), and even fellow novelists (Ivan Turgyenyev).[16][17] In social circles Dostoyevsky allied himself with known conservatives, such as the statesman Konstantin Pobyedonostsyev. His post-prison essays praised the tenets of the Pochvyennichyestvo movement, a late-19th century Russian nativist ideology closely aligned with Slavophilism.
Dostoyevsky's post-prison fiction abandoned the Western European-style domestic melodramas and quaint character studies of his youthful work in favor of dark, more complex story-lines and situations, played-out by brooding, tortured characters—often styled partly on Dostoyevsky himself—who agonized over existential themes of spiritual torment, religious awakening, and the psychological confusion caused by the conflict between traditional Russian culture and the influx of modern, Western philosophy. Nonetheless, this does not take from the debt which Dostoyevsky owed to earlier Western-influenced writers such as Gogol, whose work grew from the irrational and anti-authoritarian spiritualist ideas contained within the Romantic movement which had immediately preceded Dostoyevsky in West Europe. However, Dostoyevsky's major novels focused on the idea that utopia and positivist ideas were unrealistic and unobtainable.[18]
In December 1859 Dostoyevsky returned to Saint Petersburg, where he ran a series of unsuccessful literary journals, Vremya (Time) and Epokha (Epoch), with his older brother Mikhail.[19] The former was shut down as a consequence of its coverage of the Polish Uprising of 1863.
In 1863 Dostoyevsky traveled to western Europe, and frequented gambling casinos. There he met Apollinaria Suslova, the model for his "proud women", such as the two characters named Katerina Ivanovna, in Crime and Punishment and in The Brothers Karamazov.
In 1864 Dostoyevsky was devastated by his wife's death; which was followed shortly thereafter by his brother's death. He was financially crippled by business debts; furthermore, he decided to assume the responsibility of his deceased brother's outstanding debts, as well providing for his wife's son from her earlier marriage and his brother's widow and children. He sank into a deep depression, frequenting gambling parlors and accumulating massive losses at the tables. He became dominated by his gambling compulsion. He completed Crime and Punishment in a hurry because he was in urgent need of an advance from his publisher, having been left practically penniless after a gambling spree. He wrote The Gambler simultaneously in order to satisfy an agreement with his publisher, Stellovsky who, if he did not receive a new work, would claim the copyrights to all Dostoyevsky's writings.[20]
Wishing to escape creditors at home and to visit casinos abroad, Dostoyevsky traveled to western Europe. There he attempted to rekindle a love affair with Suslova, but she refused his marriage proposal. Dostoyevsky was heartbroken, but soon met Anna Grigorevna Snitkina, a twenty-year-old stenographer. Shortly before marrying her in 1867, he dictated The Gambler to her.[21]
From 1873 to 1881 he published the Writer's Diary, a monthly journal of short stories, sketches, and articles on current events. The journal was an enormous success.
Dostoyevsky influenced, and was himself influenced by, the philosopher Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov. Solovyov was a source for the characters Ivan Karamazov and Alyosha Karamazov.[22]
In 1877 Dostoyevsky gave a eulogy at the funeral of his friend, the poet Nekrasov, to much controversy.
On 8 June 1880, shortly before he died, he gave his famous Pushkin speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow.[23] In his later years Dostoyevsky lived for an extended period at the resort of Staraya Russa in northwestern Russia, which was closer to Saint Petersburg and less expensive than German resorts.
Dostoyevsky died in St. Petersburg on 9 February [O.S. 28 January] 1881 of a lung hemorrhage associated with emphysema and an epileptic seizure. The copy of the New Testament given to him in Siberia sat on his lap. He was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Saint Petersburg. Forty thousand mourners attended his funeral.[24] His tombstone is inscribed with the words of Christ, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. (from the Gospel According to John 12:24) - which are also the epigraph of his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov.)
The rented apartment where Dostoevsky spent the last few years of his life and wrote his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, and where he died is situated at 5 Kuznechnyi pereulok. It has been restored, by reference to old photographs, as it looked when he lived there, and opened in 1971 as the Dostoyevsky House Museum. It is a popular tourist attraction in Saint Petersburg.[25]
Some, like journalist Otto Friedrich,[26] consider Dostoyevsky to be one of Europe's major novelists, while others like Vladimir Nabokov maintain that from a point of view of enduring art and individual genius, he is a rather mediocre writer who produced wastelands of literary platitudes.[27]
Dostoyevsky investigated in his novels religious concerns, particularly those of Eastern Orthodox Christianity.[4] "Dostoyevsky and the Religion of Suffering," the essay devoted to Dostoyevsky in Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé's Le roman russe (1886), was an influential early analysis of the novelist's work, introducing Dostoyevsky and other Russian novelists to the West. Nabokov argued in his University courses at Cornell, that such religious propaganda, rather than artistic qualities, was the main reason Dostoyevsky was praised and regarded as a 'Prophet' in Soviet Russia.[28]
James Joyce and Virginia Woolf praised his prose. Ernest Hemingway cited Dostoyevsky as an influence on his work, in his posthumous collection of sketches A Moveable Feast. Kurt Vonnegut in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five mentions Dostoevsky in such way:
[Eliot] Rosewater said an interesting thing to Billy [Pilgrim] one time ... He said that everything there was to know about life is in "The Brothers Karamazov," by Fyodor Dostoevsky. "But that isn't enough anymore," said Rosewater.
According to Arthur Power's Conversations with James Joyce, Joyce praised Dostoyevsky's prose:
...he is the man more than any other who has created modern prose, and intensified it to its present-day pitch. It was his explosive power which shattered the Victorian novel with its simpering maidens and ordered commonplaces; books which were without imagination or violence.
In her essay The Russian Point of View, Virginia Woolf said:
The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading.[29]
Dostoyevsky displayed a nuanced understanding of human psychology in his major works. He created an opus of vitality and almost hypnotic power, characterized by feverishly dramatized scenes where his characters are frequently in scandalous and explosive atmospheres, engaged in passionate dialogue. The quest for God, the problem of evil and the suffering of the innocent are the themes which haunt the majority of his novels.
His characters fall into a few distinct categories: humble and self-effacing Christians (Prince Myshkin, Sonya Marmeladova, Alyosha Karamazov, Saint Ambrose of Optina), self-destructive nihilists (Svidrigailov, Smerdyakov, Stavrogin, the underground man), cynical debauchees (Fyodor Karamazov, Dmitri Karamazov), and rebellious intellectuals (Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov, Ippolit); also, his characters are driven by ideas rather than by biological or social imperatives. In comparison with the realistic characters of Tolstoy those of Dostoyevsky are more symbolic of the ideas they represent; thus Dostoyevsky is often cited as a forerunner of Literary Symbolism, especially Russian Symbolism (see Alexander Blok).[30]
Dostoyevsky's novels are compressed in time (many cover only a few days); and this enables him to get rid of one of the dominant presentations of realist prose, that of the corrosion of human life in the process of the time flux; his characters embody spiritual values that are timeless. Other themes include suicide, wounded pride, collapsed family values, spiritual regeneration through suffering, rejection of the West and affirmation of the Russian Orthodox Church and of tsarism. Literary scholars such as Mikhail Bakhtin have characterized his work as "polyphonic": Dostoyevsky does not appear to aim for a "single vision", and beyond simply describing situations from various angles, Dostoyevsky engendered fully dramatic novels of ideas, where conflicting views and characters are left to develop unevenly into unbearable crescendo.
Dostoyevsky and the other giant of late 19th century Russian literature, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, never met in person, though each praised, criticized, and influenced the other (Dostoyevsky remarked of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina that it was a "flawless work of art"; Henri Troyat reports that Tolstoy once remarked of Crime and Punishment that, "Once you read the first few chapters you know pretty much how the novel will end up"). A meeting was arranged but there was a confusion about where the meeting was to take place; and the two never rescheduled. Tolstoy wept when he learned of Dostoyevsky's death.[31] A copy of The Brothers Karamazov was found on the nightstand next to Tolstoy's deathbed at the Astapovo railway station.
Several writers and critics (including Joseph Frank, Maxim D. Shrayer[32], Stephen Cassedy, David I. Goldstein, Gary Saul Morson, and Felix Dreizin) have offered insights and suppositions regarding Dostoyevsky’s views on Jews and organized Jewry in Russia. One view is that Dostoyevsky perceived Jewish ethnocentrism and influence to be threatening the Russian peasantry in border regions. In A Writer's Diary, Dostoyevsky wrote:
Thus, Jewry is thriving precisely there where the people are still ignorant, or not free, or economically backward. It is there that Jewry has a champ libre. And instead of raising, by its influence, the level of education, instead of increasing knowledge, generating economic fitness in the native population—instead of this the Jew, wherever he has settled, has still more humiliated and debauched the people; there humaneness was still more debased and the educational level fell still lower; there inescapable, inhuman misery, and with it despair, spread still more disgustingly. Ask the native population in our border regions: What is propelling the Jew—and has been propelling him for centuries? You will receive a unanimous answer: mercilessness. He has been prompted so many centuries only by pitilessness to us, only by the thirst for our sweat and blood.
And, in truth, the whole activity of the Jews in these border regions of ours consisted of rendering the native population as much as possible inescapably dependent on them, taking advantage of the local laws. They have always managed to be on friendly terms with those upon whom the people were dependent. Point to any other tribe from among Russian aliens which could rival the Jew by his dreadful influence in this connection! You will find no such tribe. In this respect the Jew preserves all his originality as compared with other Russian aliens, and of course, the reason therefore is that status of status of his, that spirit of which specifically breathes pitilessness for everything that is not Jew, with disrespect for any people and tribe, for every human creature who is not a Jew...[33]
Dostoyevsky has been noted as both having expressed antisemitic sentiments as well as standing up for the rights of the Jewish people. In a review of Joseph Frank's book, The Mantle of the Prophet, Orlando Figes notes that A Writer's Diary is "filled with politics, literary criticism, and pan-Slav diatribes about the virtues of the Russian Empire, [and] represents a major challenge to the Dostoyevsky fan, not least on account of its frequent expressions of anti-semitism."[34] Frank, in his foreword for David I. Goldstein's book Dostoevsky and the Jews, attempts to place Dostoyevsky as a product of his time. Frank notes that Dostoyevsky made antisemitic remarks, but that Dostoyevsky's writing and stance, by and large, was one where Dostoyevsky held a great deal of guilt for his comments and positions that were antisemitic.[35]
Steven Cassedy alleges in his book, Dostoevsky's Religion, that much of the depiction of Dostoyevsky's views as antisemitic omits that Dostoyevsky expressed support for the equal rights of the Russian Jewish population, an unpopular position in Russia at the time.[36] Cassedy also notes that this criticism of Dostoyevsky also appears to deny his sincerity when he said that he was for equal rights for the Russian Jewish populace and the serfs of his own country (since neither group at that point in history had equal rights).[36] Cassedy again notes when Dostoyevsky stated that he did not hate Jewish people and was not antisemitic.[36] Even though Dostoyevsky spoke of the potential negative influence of Jewish people, Dostoyevsky advised emperor Alexander II of Russia to give them rights to positions of influence in Russian society, such as allowing them access to Professorships at Universities. According to Cassedy, labeling Dostoyevsky anti-Semitic does not take into consideration Dostoyevsky's expressed desire to reconcile Jews and Christians peacefully in a single universal brotherhood of mankind.[36]
With the publication of Crime and Punishment, in 1866, Dostoyevsky became one of Russia's most prominent authors. Will Durant, in The Pleasures of Philosophy (1953), called Dostoyevsky one of the founding fathers of the philosophical movement known as existentialism, and cited Notes from Underground in particular as a founding work of existentialism. For Dostoyevsky, war is the people's rebellion against the idea that reason guides everything, and reason is not the ultimate guiding principle for history or mankind. After his 1849 exile to the city of Omsk, Siberia, Dostoyevsky focused on questions of suffering and despair in many of his works.
Friedrich Nietzsche referred to Dostoyevsky as "the only psychologist from whom I have something to learn: he belongs to the happiest windfalls of my life, happier even than the discovery of Stendhal." He said that Notes from Underground "cried truth from the blood." According to Mihajlo Mihajlov's "The Great Catalyzer: Nietzsche and Russian Neo-Idealism", Nietzsche constantly refers to Dostoyevsky in his notes and drafts throughout the winter of 1886–1887. Nietzsche also wrote abstracts of several of Dostoyevsky's works.
Freud wrote an article titled Dostoevsky and Parricide, asserting that the greatest works in world literature are all about parricide. Though critical of Dostoyevsky's work overall, he regarded The Brothers Karamazov as among the three greatest works of literature.
Dostoyevsky's works of fiction includes 2 translations, 15 novels and novellas, and 17 short stories. Many of his longer novels were first published in serialized form in literary magazines and journals (see the individual articles). The years given below indicate the year in which the novel's final part or first complete book edition was published. in English many of his novels and stories are known by several titles.
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