Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

1879

Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky Born November 11, 1821 Moscow, Russian Empire

February 9, 1881 (aged 59) Died Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire

Occupation

Novelist, short story writer, essayist

Language

Russian

Nationality

Russian

Period

18461881

Notes from Underground Crime and Punishment Notable work(s) The Idiot The Brothers Karamazov Mariya Dmitriyevna Isayeva (185764) [her death] Spouse(s) Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina (18671881) [his death] Sofiya (1868), Lyubov (18691926), Children Fyodor (18751878)

Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky[1] (November 11, 1821 February 9, 1881[2]) was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays.[3] He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoyevsky's literary works explored human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. Considered by many as a founder or precursor of 20th-century existentialism, Dostoyevsky wrote, with the embittered voice of the anonymous "underground man", Notes from Underground (1864), which was called the "best overture for existentialism ever written" by Walter Kaufmann.[4] Dostoyevsky is often acknowledged by critics as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature.[5] Biography Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow, the second of seven children born to Mikhail and Maria Dostoyevsky.[6] Dostoyevsky's father Mikhail was a doctor and a devout Christian, who practiced at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in Moscow. The family lived in a small apartment in the hospital grounds, and it wasn't until he was 16 years old, that Dostoyevsky moved to St Petersburg to attend a Military Engineering Institute. The hospital was located in one of the city's worst areas; 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 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. There are many stories of Dostoyevsky's father's despotic treatment of his children, but this despotism was tempered by his extreme care for his children and their upbringing. After returning home from work, he would take a nap while his children, ordered to keep absolutely silent, stood by their slumbering father in shifts and swatted the flies that came near his head. But the father was also careful to send his children to private schools where they would not be beaten. In the opinion of Joseph Frank, author of a definitive biography of Dostoyevsky, the father figure in The Brothers Karamazov is not based on Dostoyevsky's own father. Letters and personal accounts demonstrate that they did have a fairly loving relationship.

The young Dostoyevsky, in an 1847 portrait by Trutovsky 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, nowadays called the Military Engineering-Technical University.[7] Fyodor's father died in 1839. Though it has never been proven, it is believed by some that he was murdered by his own serfs.[8] 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 could 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 the scrutiny of many critics[who?]. Dostoyevsky suffered from epilepsy and his first seizure occurred when he was nine years old.[9] Epileptic seizures recurred sporadically throughout his life, and Dostoyevsky's experiences are thought[10] 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[11] 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. That year, influenced by the German poet/playwright Friedrich Schiller, he wrote two romantic plays: Mary Stuart and Boris Godunov. The plays have not been preserved. Dostoyevsky described himself as a "dreamer" when he was a young man. He also revered Schiller at that age. However, in the years during which he wrote his great masterpieces, his opinions changed and he sometimes made fun of Schiller. Dostoyevsky was made a lieutenant in 1842, and left the Engineering Academy the following year. He completed a translation into Russian of Balzac's novel Eugnie Grandet in 1843, but it brought him little to no 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 (published by N. Nekrasov), was 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 fully 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 many 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 Belinsky's prediction that Dostoyevsky would be one of the greatest writers of Russia was mistaken. Death Dostoyevsky died in St. Petersburg on 9 February [O.S. 28 January] 1881 of a lung hemorrhage associated with emphysema and an epileptic seizure. A copy of the New Testament Bible 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.[23] 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. (Excerpt from John 12:24, which is also the epigraph of his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov.) The rented apartment where he died and spent the last few years of his life is where he wrote his final novel The Brothers Karamazov. The apartment, situated in a building at 5 Kuznechnyi pereulok, has been restored with old

photographs to how it looked when he lived there. It opened in 1971 as the Dostoyevsky House Museum and is a popular tourist attraction in the city.[24] Influence

Portrait of Dostoyevsky in 1872 painted by Vasily Perov. Some, like journalist Otto Friedrich,[25] 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.[26] Dostoyevsky promoted in his novels religious moralities, particularly those of Eastern Orthodox Christianity.[5] Indeed, "Dostoyevsky and the Religion of Suffering," the essay devoted to Dostoyevsky in Eugne-Melchior de Vog's Le roman russe (1886), is widely considered to be the most 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.[27][clarification needed] James Joyce and Virginia Woolf praised his prose. Ernest Hemingway cited Dostoyevsky as a major influence on his work, in his posthumous collection of sketches A Moveable Feast. In a book of interviews with Arthur Power (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.[28] Dostoyevsky monument at the Russian State Library in Moscow. 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, passionately engaged in Socratic dialogues. The quest for God, the problem of evil and suffering of the innocents 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)[citation needed], cynical debauchees (Fyodor Karamazov, Dmitri Karamazov), and rebellious intellectuals (Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov, Ippolit); 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 Dostoyevsky are usually more symbolic of the ideas they represent, thus Dostoyevsky is often cited as one of the forerunners of Literary Symbolism, especially Russian Symbolism (see Alexander Blok).[29] Dostoyevsky statue, erected 1918, in front of Mariinsky Hospital, the writer's birthplace in Moscow. 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 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 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, even 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").[citation needed] There was a meeting arranged, but there was a confusion about where the meeting was to take place and they never rescheduled. Tolstoy wept when he learned of Dostoyevsky's death.[30] A copy of The Brothers Karamazov was found on the nightstand next to Tolstoy's deathbed at the Astapovo railway station. Novels and novellas y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y Poor Folk ( [Bednye lyudi], 1846) The Double: A Petersburg Poem ( : [Dvoynik: Peterburgskaya poema], 1846) Netochka Nezvanova ( [Netochka Nezvanova], 1849) Uncle's Dream ( [Dyadyushkin son], 1859) The Village of Stepanchikovo ( [Selo Stepanchikovo i ego obitateli], 1859) Humiliated and Insulted ( [Unizhennye i oskorblennye], 1861) The House of the Dead ( [Zapiski iz mertvogo doma], 1862) Notes from Underground ( [Zapiski iz podpolya], 1864) Crime and Punishment ( [Prestuplenie i nakazanie], 1866) The Gambler ( [Igrok], 1867) The Idiot ( [Idiot], 1869). Translated into English by Henry Carlisle and Olga Carlisle. The Eternal Husband ( [Vechnyj muzh], 1870) Demons ( [Besy], 1872) The Adolescent ( [Podrostok], 1875) The Brothers Karamazov ( [Brat'ya Karamazovy], 1880)

[edit] Short stories y y y y y y y y y y y y y " ["Gospodin Prokharchin"], 1846) "Mr. Prokharchin" (" "Novel in Nine Letters" (" " ["Roman v devyati pis'mah"], 1847) "The Landlady" (" " ["Hozyajka"], 1847) "The Jealous Husband" (" " ["Chuzhaya zhena i muzh pod krovat'yu"], 1848) "A Weak Heart" (" " ["Slaboe serdze"], 1848) "Polzunkov" (" " ["Polzunkov"], 1848) "The Honest Thief" (" " ["Chestnyj vor"], 1848) "The Christmas Tree and a Wedding" (" " ["Elka i svad'ba"], 1848) "White Nights" (" " ["Belye nochi"], 1848) "A Little Hero" (" " ["Malen'kij geroj"], 1849) "A Nasty Anecdote" (" " ["Skvernyj anekdot"], 1862) " ["Krokodil"], 1865) "The Crocodile" (" "Bobok" (" " ["Bobok"], 1873)