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Fyodor Dostoevsky

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Writers and critics

   CAPTION: Fyodor Dostoevsky

       Born:      November 11, 1821
       Died:      February 9, 1881
   Occupation(s): Novelist
    Influences:   Soren Kierkegaard

   Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (Russian: Фёдор Миха́йлович
   Достое́вский, Fëdor Mihajlovič Dostoevskij, sometimes transliterated
   Dostoyevsky listen ) ( November 11, 1821 [ O.S. October 30] – February
   9, 1881 [ O.S. January 28]) is considered one of the greatest Russian
   writers. His works have had a profound and lasting effect on
   twentieth-century fiction.

   Dostoevsky's novels often feature characters living in poor conditions
   with disparate and extreme states of mind, and explore human psychology
   while analysing the political, social and spiritual states of the
   Russia of his time. Some scholars consider him to be the founder of
   existentialism for having published Notes from Underground (1874).
   Walter Kaufmann argues that this text constitutes "the best overture
   for existentialism ever written."

Biography

Early life

   Dostoevsky was the second of seven children born to Mikhail and Maria
   Dostoevsky. The family originated from the Polish Szlachta family
   Dostojewski Radwan Coat of Arms.

   Dostoevsky's father was a retired military surgeon and a violent
   alcoholic, who served as a doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital for the
   Poor in Moscow. The hospital was situated in one of the worst areas in
   Moscow. Local landmarks included a cemetery for criminals, a lunatic
   asylum, and an orphanage for abandoned infants. This urban landscape
   made a lasting impression on the young Dostoevsky, whose interests in
   and compassion for the poor and oppressed tormented him. Though his
   parents forbade it, Dostoevsky liked to wander out to the hospital
   garden, where the suffering patients sat to catch a glimpse of sun. The
   young Dostoevsky loved to spend time with these patients and hear their
   stories.

   There are many stories of Dostoevsky's father's despotic treatment of
   his children. After returning home from work, he would take a nap and
   his children, ordered to keep absolutely silent, stood silently by
   their slumbering father in shifts and swatted flies around his head.

   Shortly after his mother died of tuberculosis in 1837, Dostoevsky and
   his brother were sent to the Military Engineering Academy at St
   Petersburg. Mikhail Dostoevsky, too, died in 1839. Though it has never
   been proven, it is widely believed that he was murdered by his own
   serfs. Reportedly, they became enraged during one of his drunken fits
   of violence, restrained him, and poured vodka into his mouth until he
   drowned. 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 inexpensively. The figure of his domineering father
   would exert a large effect upon Dostoevsky's work, and is notably seen
   through the character of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, the "wicked and
   sentimental buffoon" father of the three main characters in his 1881
   novel The Brothers Karamazov.

   At the St Petersburg Academy of Military Engineering, Dostoevsky was
   taught mathematics, a subject he despised. However, he also studied
   literature by Shakespeare, Pascal, Victor Hugo and E.T.A. Hoffmann.
   Though he focussed on different areas to mathematics, he did well on
   the exams and received a commission in 1841. That year, he is known to
   have written two romantic plays, influenced by the German Romantic
   poet/playwright Friedrich Schiller: Mary Stuart and Boris Godunov. The
   plays have not been preserved. Though Dostoevsky, a self-described
   "dreamer" as a young man, at the time revered Schiller, in the years
   which yielded his great masterpieces he usually poked fun at him.

Beginnings of a literary career

   Dostoevsky was made a lieutenant in 1842, and left the Engineering
   Academy the following year. He completed a translation into Russian of
   Balzac's novel Eugenie Grandet in 1843, but it brought him little or no
   attention. Dostoevsky started to write his own fiction in late 1844
   after leaving the army. In 1845, his first work, the epistolary short
   novel, Poor Folk, published in the periodical "The Contemporary", was
   met with great acclaim. The editor of the magazine, the poet Nikolai
   Nekrasov, walked into the office of the liberal critic Vissarion
   Belinsky, and announced: "A new Gogol has arisen!" Belinsky, his
   followers and many others agreed and after the novel was fully
   published in book form at the beginning of the next year, Dostoevsky
   became a literary celebrity at the age of 24.

   In 1846, Belinsky and many others reacted negatively to his novella,
   The Double, a psychological study of a bureaucrat whose alter ego
   overtakes his life. Dostoevsky's fame began to cool. Much of his work
   after Poor Folk was met with mixed reviews and it seemed that
   Belinsky's prediction that Dostoevsky would be one of the greatest
   writers of Russia was mistaken.

Exile in Siberia

   Monument to Dostoevsky in Omsk, his place of exile
   Enlarge
   Monument to Dostoevsky in Omsk, his place of exile

   Dostoevsky was arrested and imprisoned on April 23, 1849 for engaging
   in revolutionary activity against Tsar Nicholas I. On November 16 that
   year he was sentenced to death for anti-government activities linked to
   a liberal intellectual group, the Petrashevsky Circle. 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, Dostoevsky's
   sentence was commuted to four years of exile with hard labor at a
   katorga prison camp in Omsk, Siberia. Dostoevsky described later to his
   brother the sufferings he went through as the years in which he was
   "shut up in a coffin." Describing the dilapidated barracks which, as he
   put in his own words, "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..."

   His first recorded epileptic seizure occurred in 1850 at the prison
   camp. It is said that he suffered from a rare form of temporal lobe
   epilepsy, sometimes referred to as "ecstatic epilepsy". It is also said
   that upon learning of his father's death before the elder could reply
   to a letter of criticism from Fyodor, the younger Dostoevsky
   experienced his first seizure.

   Seizures recurred sporadically throughout his life, and Dostoevsky's
   experiences are thought to have formed the basis for his description of
   Prince Myshkin's epilepsy in the The Idiot. He was released from prison
   in 1854, and was required to serve in the Siberian Regiment. Dostoevsky
   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 Isaeva, the wife of an acquaintance in Siberia.
   They married in February 1857, after her husband's death.

   Dostoevsky's experiences in prison and the army resulted in major
   changes in his political and religious convictions. He became
   disillusioned with 'Western' ideas, and began to pay greater tribute to
   traditional Russian values. Perhaps most significantly, he had what his
   biographer Joseph Frank describes as a conversion experience in prison,
   which greatly strengthened his Christian, and specifically Orthodox,
   faith (the experience is depicted by Dostoevsky in The Peasant Marey (
   1876)). In line with his new beliefs, Dostoevsky became a sharp critic
   of the Nihilist and Socialist movements of his day, and he dedicated
   his book The Possessed and his The Diary of a Writer to espousing
   conservatism and criticizing socialist ideas . He later formed a
   friendship with the reactionary statesman Konstantin Pobedonostsev.

Later literary career

   In December 1859, Dostoevsky returned to St Petersburg, where he ran a
   series of unsuccessful literary journals, Vremya (Time) and Epokha
   (Epoch), with his older brother Mikhail. The latter had to be shut down
   as a consequence of its coverage of the Polish Uprising of 1863. That
   year Dostoevsky traveled to Europe and frequented the gambling casinos.
   There he met Apollinaria Suslova, the model for Dostoesvky's "proud
   women", such as Katerina Ivanovna in both Crime and Punishment and The
   Brothers Karamazov.

   Dostoevsky was devastated by his wife's death in 1864, followed shortly
   thereafter by his brother's death. He was financially crippled by
   business debts and the need to provide for his wife's son from her
   earlier marriage and his brother's widow and children. Dostoevsky sank
   into a deep depression, frequenting gambling parlors and accumulating
   massive losses at the tables.

   Dostoevsky suffered from an acute gambling compulsion as well as from
   its consequences. By one account Crime and Punishment, possibly his
   best known novel, was completed in a mad hurry because Dostoevsky was
   in urgent need of an advance from his publisher. He had been left
   practically penniless after a gambling spree. Dostoevsky wrote The
   Gambler simultaneously in order to satisfy an agreement with his
   publisher Stellovsky who, if he did not receive a new work, would have
   claimed the copyrights to all of Dostoevsky's writing.

   Motivated by the dual wish to escape his creditors at home and to visit
   the casinos abroad, Dostoevsky traveled to Western Europe. There, he
   attempted to rekindle a love affair with Suslova, but she refused his
   marriage proposal. Dostoevsky 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. This period
   resulted in the writing of what are generally considered to be his
   greatest books. From 1873 to 1881 he published the Writer's Diary, a
   monthly journal full of short stories, sketches, and articles on
   current events. The journal was an enormous success.

   Dostoevsky is also known to have influenced and been influenced by the
   philosopher Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov. Solovyov is noted as the
   inspiration for the character Alyosha Karamazov.

   In 1877, Dostoevsky gave the keynote eulogy at the funeral of his
   friend, the poet Nekrasov, to much controversy. In 1880, shortly before
   he died, he gave his famous Pushkin speech at the unveiling of the
   Pushkin monument in Moscow. From that event on, Dostoevsky was
   acclaimed all over Russia as one of her greatest writers and hailed as
   a prophet, almost a mystic.

   In his later years, Fyodor Dostoevsky lived for a long time at the
   resort of Staraya Russa, which was closer to St Petersburg and less
   expensive than German resorts. He died on February 9 ( January 28
   O.S.), 1881 of a lung hemorrhage associated with emphysema and an
   epileptic seizure. He was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander
   Nevsky Monastery, St Petersburg, Russia. Forty thousand mourners
   attended his funeral.^1 His tombstone reads "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 John 12:24,
   which is also the epigraph of his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov.

Works and influence

   Dostoevsky's tomb at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery.
   Enlarge
   Dostoevsky's tomb at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery.
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   Dostoevsky's influence has been acclaimed by a wide variety of writers.
   From Herman Hesse to Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Albert Camus,
   Franz Kafka, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry Miller, Yukio
   Mishima, Gabriel García Márquez, Jack Kerouac and Joseph Heller,
   virtually no great twentieth century writer escaped his long shadow
   (rare dissenting voices include Vladimir Nabokov, Henry James, Joseph
   Conrad and, more ambiguously, D.H. Lawrence). American novelist Ernest
   Hemingway, in his autobiographic books, also cited Dostoevsky as a
   major influence on his work. Despite his death in 1881, Dostoevsky is
   often considered to have had an immense influence upon the modernist
   movements in twentieth century philosophy and psychology.

   Though a writer of myth (and in this respect sometimes compared to
   Herman Melville), Dostoevsky displayed a nuanced understanding of human
   psychology in his major works. He created an opus of vitality and
   almost hypnotic power, characterized by the following traits:
   feverishly dramatized scenes (conclaves) where his characters are,
   frequently in scandalous and explosive atmosphere, passionately engaged
   in Socratic dialogues à la Russe; the quest for God, the problem of
   Evil and suffering of the innocents haunt the majority of his novels;
   characters fall into a few distinct categories: humble and
   self-effacing Christians ( Prince Myshkin, Sonya Marmeladova, Alyosha
   Karamazov), self-destructive nihilists ( Svidrigailov, Smerdyakov,
   Stavrogin, the underground man), cynical debauchers ( Fyodor
   Karamazov), and rebellious intellectuals ( Raskolnikov, Ivan
   Karamazov); also, his characters are driven by ideas rather than by
   ordinary biological or social imperatives. In comparison with Tolstoy,
   whose characters are realistic, the characters of Dostoevsky are
   usually more symbolic of the ideas they represent, thus Dostoevsky is
   often cited as one of the forerunners of Literary Symbolism.

   Dostoevsky's novels are compressed in time (many cover only a few days)
   and this enables the author to get rid of one of the dominant traits of
   realist prose, the corrosion of human life in the process of the time
   flux — his characters primarily embody spiritual values, and these are,
   by definition, timeless. Other obsessive themes include suicide,
   wounded pride, collapsed family values, spiritual regeneration through
   suffering (the most important motif), rejection of the West and
   affirmation of Russian Orthodoxy and Tsarism. Literary scholars such as
   Bakhtin have characterized his work as ' polyphonic': unlike other
   novelists, Dostoevsky does not appear to aim for a 'single vision', and
   beyond simply describing situations from various angles, Dostoevsky
   engendered fully dramatic novels of ideas where conflicting views and
   characters are left to develop unevenly into unbearable crescendo.

   Dostoevsky and the other giant of late 19th century Russian literature,
   Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, never met in person, even though each praised
   (Dostoevsky remarked of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina that it was a "flawless
   work of art"), criticised (Tolstoy once denounced Crime and Punishment
   in the account in the Henri Troyat biography where Tolstoy is reported
   to have remarked loosely that, "Once you read the first few chapters
   you know pretty much how the novel will end up") and influenced the
   other. There was, however, a meeting arranged, but there was a
   confusion about where the meeting place was and they never rescheduled.
   Tolstoy reportedly burst into tears when he learnt of Dostoevsky's
   death. Since their time, the two are considered by the critics and
   public as two of the greatest novelists produced by their homeland.

   Nietzsche said of Jesus: "it is regrettable that no Dostoevsky lived
   near him." He also stated "Dostoevsky was the only psychologist from
   whom I had anything to learn: he belongs to the happiest windfalls of
   my life, happier even than the discovery of Stendhal." He said that
   Notes from the Underground "cried truth from the blood." According to
   Mihajlo Mihajlov's "The great catalyzer: Nietzsche and Russian
   neo-Idealism" Nietzsche constantly refers to Dostoevsky in his notes
   and drafts through out the winter of 1886-1887. Nietzsche also wrote
   abstracts of several of Dostoevsky's works.

   Freud wrote an article entitled Dostoevsky and Parricide that asserts
   that the greatest works in world literature are all about parricide
   (though he is critical of Dostoevsky's work overall, the inclusion of
   The Brothers Karamazov in a set of the three greatest works of
   literature is remarkable).

   By common critical consensus he is one among the handful of universal
   world authors, along with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Cervantes,
   Hugo and a few others, Dostoevsky has decisively influenced twentieth
   century literature, existentialism and expressionism in particular. It
   might not be considered too far fetched to say that if one were to sum
   up literary modernism in two names, the names would be Nietzsche and
   the "only psychologist from whom he had anything to learn," Fyodor
   Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (without forgetting, of course, the enormous
   differences between the two; for instance, Dostoevsky would have
   abhorred Nietzsche's Ubermensch).

Major works

     * Бедные люди ( Poor Folk) ( 1846)
     * Двойник. Петербургская поэма ( The Double: A Petersburg Poem) (
       1846)
     * Неточка Незванова ( Netochka Nezvanova_(novel)) ( 1849)
     * Село Степанчиково и его обитатели ( The Village of Stepanchikovo or
       The Friend of the Family) ( 1859)
     * Униженные и оскорбленные ( The Insulted and Humiliated) ( 1861)
     * Записки из мертвого дома ( The House of the Dead) ( 1860)
     * Скверный анекдот ( A Nasty Story) ( 1862)
     * Записки из подполья ( Notes from Underground or Letters from the
       Underworld) ( 1864)
     * Преступление и наказание (Crime and Punishment) ( 1866)
     * Игрок ( The Gambler) ( 1867)
     * Идиот ( The Idiot) ( 1868)
     * Бесы ( The Possessed, also known as Demons or The Devils) ( 1872)
     * Подросток ( The Raw Youth or The Adolescent) ( 1875)
     * Братья Карамазовы (The Brothers Karamazov) ( 1880)

Short stories

     * Белые ночи ( White Nights) ( 1848)
     * Елка и свадьба ( A Christmas Tree and a Wedding) ( 1848)
     * Честный вор ( An Honest Thief) ( 1848)
     * The Peasant Marey ( 1876)
     * Сон смешного человека ( The Dream of a Ridiculous Man) ( 1877)
     * A Gentle Creature, sometimes translated as The Meek Girl ( 1876)
     * A Weak Heart
     * The Eternal Husband

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