Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (????? ??????????? ????????????, sometimes transliterated Dostoyevsky {{Audio|ru-Dostoevsky.ogg|listen}}) (November 11, (October 30, Old Style), 1821, – February 9, (January 28, O.S.), 1881, St. Petersburg, Russia) was one of the greatest of Russian writers, whose works have a profound and lasting effect on twentieth-century fiction. Often featuring characters with disparate and extreme states of the mind, his works exhibit both an uncanny grasp in human psychology as well as penetrating analyses in the politics, social and spiritual state of Russia of his time. Many of his best-known works are prophetic as precursors of modern-day thought and preoccupations. He is sometimes said to be a founder of existentialism, most notably in Notes from Underground, which has been described by Walter Kaufmann as "the best overture for existentialism ever written".

Biography

Fyodor was the second of seven children born to Mikhail and Maria Dostoevsky. Shortly after his mother died of tuberculosis in 1837, he and his brother Mikhail were sent to the Military Engineering Academy at St. Petersburg, and they lost their father, a retired military surgeon who served as a doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in Moscow, in 1839. While not known for certain, it is believed that Mikhail Dostoevsky was murdered by his own serfs, who reportedly became enraged during one of Mikhail's drunken fits of violence, restrained him, and poured vodka into his mouth until he drowned. Another story was that Mikhail died of natural causes, and a neighboring landowner invented this story of a peasant rebellion so he could buy the estate cheaply. Regardless of what may have actually happened, Sigmund Freud focused on this tale in his famous article, Dostoevsky and Parricide (1928).

Related Topics:
Tuberculosis - 1837 - St. Petersburg - Moscow - 1839 - Serf - Vodka - Sigmund Freud - Parricide

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Dostoevsky was arrested and imprisoned in 1849 for engaging in revolutionary activity against Tsar Nikolai 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 was blind folded and ordered to stand outside in freezing weather awaiting to be shot by a firing squad, Dostoevsky's sentence was commuted to a number of years of exile performing hard labor at a katorga prison camp in Omsk, Siberia. The incidence of epileptic seizures, to which he was predisposed, increased during this period. He was released from prison in 1854, and was required to serve in the Siberian Regiment. Dostoevsky spent the following five years as a corporal (and latterly lieutenant) in the Regiment's Seventh Line Battalion stationed at the fortress of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan.

Related Topics:
1849 - Tsar - Nikolai I - November 16 - Petrashevsky Circle - Mock execution - Firing squad - Exile - Katorga - Omsk - Siberia - Epileptic - 1854 - Siberian Regiment - Semipalatinsk - Kazakhstan

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This was a turning point in the author's life. Dostoevsky abandoned his earlier liberal sentiments and became deeply conservative and extremely religious. He later formed a peculiar friendship with another archconservative, Konstantin Pobedonostsev. He began an affair with, and later married, Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, the widow of an acquaintance in Siberia.

Related Topics:
Conservative - Konstantin Pobedonostsev

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In 1860, he returned to St. Petersburg, where he ran a series of unsuccessful literary journals with his older brother Mikhail. 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 brother's widow and children. Dostoevsky sank into a deep depression, frequenting gambling parlors and accumulating massive losses at the tables.

Related Topics:
1860 - 1864 - Depression

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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 Dostoyevsky's writing

Related Topics:
The Gambler - Stellovsky

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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 Apollinaria (Polina) Suslova, a young university student with whom he had had an affair several years prior, but she refused his marriage proposal. Dostoevsky was heartbroken, but soon met Anna Snitkina, a twenty-year-old stenographer whom he married in 1867. This period resulted in the writing of his greatest books. From 1873 to 1881 he vindicated his earlier journalistic failures by publishing a monthly journal full of short stories, sketches, and articles on current events — the Writer's Diary. The journal was an enormous success.

Related Topics:
Stenographer - 1867 - 1873 - 1881

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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.

Related Topics:
1877 - Eulogy - Nekrasov - 1880 - Pushkin

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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 January 28 (O.S.), 1881 and was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, St. Petersburg, Russia.

Related Topics:
Staraya Russa - St Petersburg - January 28 - O.S. - 1881 - Tikhvin Cemetery - Alexander Nevsky Monastery - St. Petersburg, Russia

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