Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Email
Answers.com

Fedor Dostoevsky

 
Who2 Profiles:

Fedor Dostoevsky, Writer

Fedor Dostoevsky
Source

  • Born: 11 November 1821
  • Birthplace: Moscow, Russia
  • Died: 28 January 1881
  • Best Known As: The author of Crime and Punishment

Name at birth: Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

Fedor Dostoevksy (also spelled Fydor, Fyodor or Feodor Dostoyevsky) is the 19th century Russian author who wrote the classic novels Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Fedor Dostoevsky turned to writing as a profession after a brief military career, publishing his first novel, Poor Folk in 1846. Poor Folk was a success, but in 1849 Dostoevsky was arrested for his participation in an allegedly subversive literary/political group and sentenced to prison. Although he narrowly escaped execution, Dostoevsky spent nearly ten years isolated in Siberia (four of them in prison) before returning to St. Petersburg. There he began writing again, and his books Crime and Punishment (first published as a magazine serial in 1866) and The Gambler (1867) brought him fame and fortune. (Though he then squandered much of the fortune through relentless gambling.) His novels explored the psychology and moral obligations of modern man, and he is famous for creating the "underground hero," a protagonist alienated from society and in search of redemption. Fedor Dostoevsky remains one of Russia's greatest authors and was a strong influence on 20th century literature. His other works include House of the Dead (1862), Notes From The Underground (1864) and The Idiot (1868).

Fedor Dostoevsky was born 30 October 1821 according to the Julian Calendar, 11 November 1821 in the Gregorian calendar.

Previous:Faye Dunaway (Actor), Fats Domino (Pop Musician)
Next:Fitzwilliam Darcy (Fictional Heartthrob), François "Papa Doc" Duvalier (Political Leader / President of Haiti)
Search unanswered questions...
Enter a question here...
Search: All sources Community Q&A Reference topics
Chase's Calendar of Events:

Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky

Top
Birth Date

Nov 11, 1821. Russian novelist, author of The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment and The Idiot, was born at Moscow, Russia, and died at St. Petersburg, Russia, Feb 9, 1881. A political revolutionary, he was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to death, but instead of execution he served a sentence in a Siberian prison and later served in the army there.

See more events for Nov 11, 2011.



Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:

Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky

Top

(born Nov. 11, 1821, Moscow, Russia — died Feb. 9, 1881, St. Petersburg) Russian novelist. Dostoyevsky gave up an engineering career early in order to write. In 1849 he was arrested for belonging to a radical discussion group; sentenced to be shot, he was reprieved at the last moment and spent four years at hard labour in Siberia, where he developed epilepsy and experienced a deepening of his religious faith. Later he published and wrote for several periodicals while producing his best novels. His novels are concerned especially with faith, suffering, and the meaning of life; they are famous for their psychological depth and insight and their near-prophetic treatment of issues in philosophy and politics. His first, Poor Folk (1846), was followed the same year by The Double. The House of the Dead (1862) is based on his imprisonment and The Gambler (1866) on his own gambling addiction. Best known are the novella Notes from the Underground (1864) and the great novels Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), The Possessed (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), which focuses on the problem of evil, the nature of freedom, and the characters' craving for some kind of faith. By the end of his life, he had been acclaimed one of his country's greatest writers, and his works had a profound influence on 20th-century literature.

For more information on Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky, visit Britannica.com.

Gale Encyclopedia of Biography:

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Top

The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) mixed social, Gothic, and sentimental elements with psychological irrationalism and visionary religion. The form of the novel vastly increased in scope and flexibility as a result of his works.

Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821, the son of a staff doctor of a Moscow hospital. His father, a cruel man, was murdered by his serfs in 1839, when Dostoevsky was 18 and attending school in St. Petersburg. Sigmund Freud and other psychoanalysts believed that throughout his life Dostoevsky felt a secret guilt about his father's murder. Dostoevsky was trained to be a military engineer, but he disliked school and loved literature. When he finished school, he abandoned the career he was trained for and devoted himself to writing. His earliest letters show him to be a passionate, enthusiastic, and somewhat unstable young man.

Early Works

Dostoevsky began his writing career in the tradition of the "social tale" of the early 1840s, but he transformed the fiction about poor people in abject circumstances into a powerful philosophical and psychological instrument. His entry on the literary stage was brilliant. In 1843 he finished his first novel, Poor Folk, a social tale about an abject civil servant. The novel was praised profusely by the reigning critic, Vissarion Belinsky. Dostoevsky's second novel, The Double (1846), was received less warmly; his subsequent works in the 1840s were received coldly and antagonistically by Belinsky and others, and Dostoevsky's literary star sank quickly. The Double has emerged, however, as his most significant early work, and in many respects it was a work far in advance of its time.

Dostoevsky was always sensitive to critical opinion, and the indifferent reception of The Double caused him to back off from the exciting originality of the novel. From 1846 to 1849 his life and work are characterized by some aimlessness and confusion. The short stories and novels he wrote in this period are for the most part experiments in different forms and different subject matters. He continued to write about civil servants in such tales as Mr. Prokharchin (1846) and The Faint Heart (1847). The Landlady (1847) is an experiment with the Gothic form; A Jealous Husband, an Unusual Event (1848) and Nine Letters (1847) are burlesques; White Nights (1848) is a sentimental romance; and the unfinished novel Netochka Nezvanova (1847) is a mixture of Gothic, social, and sentimental elements. Despite the variety and lack of formal and thematic continuity, one may pick out themes and devices that reappear in the mature work of Dostoevsky.

Dostoevsky's life showed some of the same pattern of uncertain experimentation. Although he had already shown the religious and conservative traits that were to become a fixed part of his character in his mature years, he was also attracted at this time to current revolutionary thought. In 1847 he began to associate with a mildly subversive group called the "Petrashevsky Circle." In 1849, however, the members were arrested and the circle was disbanded. After 8 months of imprisonment, Dostoevsky was sentenced to death. This sentence was actually a hoax designed to impress the prisoners with the Czar's mercy, when he commuted the death penalty. At one point, however, Dostoevsky believed he had only moments to live, and he was never to forget the sensation and feelings of that experience. He was sentenced to 4 years of imprisonment and 4 years of forced service in the Siberian army.

Years of Transition (1859-1864)

Dostoevsky returned to St. Petersburg in 1859 with a consumptive wife, Maria Issaeva, a widow whom he had married in Siberia. Their marriage was not happy; Dostoevsky and his wife reinforced each other's unhealthy tendencies. To support himself, Dostoevsky edited the journal Time with his brother Mikhail and wrote a number of fictional works. His first published works after returning from Siberia were the comic stories The Uncle's Dream (1859) and The Village Stepanchikovo (1859). In 1861 he published Memoirs from the House of the Dead, a fictionalized account of his experiences in prison. That year he also published The Insulted and the Injured, a poorly structured novel characterized by improbable events and situations. By and large his work during this period showed no great artistic advance over his early work and gave no hint of the greatness that was to issue forth in 1864 with the publication of Notes from the Underground.

Dostoevsky's life during this period was characterized by poor health, poverty, and complicated emotional situations. He fell in love with the young student Polina Suslova, a girl of complicated and difficult temperament, and carried on a frustrating and torturous affair with her for several years. He went abroad in 1862 and 1863 to get away from his creditors, to repair his health, and to engage in his passion for gambling. His impressions of Europe were unfavorable; he considered European civilization to be dominated by rationalism and rampant with rapacious individualism. His views on Europe are contained in Winter Notes and Summer Impressions (1863).

Thus, at the point when his great talent was to become evident, Dostoevsky was pursued by creditors, his wife was dying, and he was carrying on a love affair with a young girl. His journal had been closed down by the censors, and he was fatally pursuing his self-destructive passion for gambling.

Notes from the Underground (1864) is a short novel, written partly as a philosophical monologue and partly as a narrative. In this work Dostoevsky attempts to justify the existence of individual freedom as a necessary and inevitable attribute of man. He argues against the view that man is a rational creature and that society may be so organized as to assure his happiness. He insists that man desires freedom more than happiness, but he also perceives that unqualified freedom is a destructive force since there is no guarantee that man will use his freedom constructively. Indeed, the evidence of history suggests that man seeks the destruction of others and of himself.

Crime and Punishment

Dostoevsky's first wife died in 1864, and in the following year he married Anna Grigorievna Snitkina. She was efficient, practical, and serene and therefore the very opposite of his first wife and his mistress. There is very little doubt that she was largely responsible for introducing better conditions for his work by taking over many of the practical tasks that he loathed and handled badly.

In 1866 Dostoevsky published Crime and Punishment, which is the most popular of his great novels, perhaps because it appeals to various levels of sophistication. It can be read as a serious and complex work of art, but it can also be enjoyed as an engrossing detective story. The novel is concerned with the murder of an old pawnbroker by a student, Raskolnikov, while he is committing robbery, ostensibly to help his family and his own career. The murder occurs at the very beginning of the novel, and the rest of the book has to do with the pursuit of Raskolnikov by the detective Porfiry and by his own conscience. In the end he gives himself up and decides to accept the punishment for his act.

Raskolnikov's intentions in committing the murder share something of the complexity and impenetrability of Hamlet's motives. One can, however, dismiss some of the aims that Raskolnikov consciously gives. The humanitarian motive of murdering a useless old woman to save the careers of many useful young men is clearly a rationalization, since Raskolnikov never makes use of, or even appears interested in, the money he has stolen. The "superman" theory divides mankind into extraordinary and ordinary people, and the extraordinary people are permitted to cross the boundaries of normal morality. This theory appears to be a more accurate representation of Raskolnikov's thoughts. But some critics consider this too a rationalization of something deeper in his nature. There is some evidence that Raskolnikov suffered from a deep sense of guilt and committed the murder to provoke punishment and thus alleviate his guilt.

The Idiot

The Dostoevskys went abroad in 1867 and remained away from Russia for more than 4 years. Their economic condition was very difficult, and Dostoevsky repeatedly lost what little they had at the gaming tables. The Idiot was written between 1867 and 1869, and Dostoevsky stated that in this work he intended to depict "the wholly beautiful man."

The hero of the novel is Prince Myshkin, a kind of modern Christ. He is a good man who attempts to live in a corrupt society, and it is uncertain whether he succeeds or not, since he leaves the pages of the novel with the world about him worse than when he entered. Nastasya Fillipovna, one of Dostoevsky's great female characters, shares the stage with Prince Myshkin. When she was a young girl, her honor had been violated, and she lives to wreak vengeance on the world for the hurt she had suffered. While Prince Myshkin preaches forgiveness, Nastasya Fillipovna burns with the desire to pay others back. Nastasya Fillipovna is nevertheless attracted to Prince Myshkin, and throughout the novel she vacillates between Myshkin, the prince of light, and Rogozhin, an apostle of passion and destruction. In the end Rogozhin kills Nastasya Fillipovna, and Prince Myshkin is powerless to prevent this crime.

Some readers view The Idiot as Dostoevsky's finest creation, while others see it as the weakest of his great novels. It is certainly a less tidy work than Crime and Punishment, but it is perhaps a more challenging novel.

The Possessed

Dostoevsky began The Possessed (also translated as The Devils) in 1870 and published it in 1871-1872. The novel began as a political pamphlet and was based on a political murder that took place in Moscow on Nov. 21, 1869. A radical named Nechaev had a member of his conspiratorial group murdered because the member would not obey him unquestioningly. Nechaev escaped to Switzerland but was arrested and returned to Russia, where he died in prison. Nechaev's actual influence on revolutionary movements in Russia was small, but his bravado and his friendship with Mikhail Bakunin worked to increase his reputation. Dostoevsky saw Nechaev as the end product of pernicious tendencies in liberalism and radicalism.

In The Possessed Dostoevsky raises a minor contemporary event to dimensions of great political and philosophical importance. The novel is a satire of liberalism and radicalism; it is set in a small provincial town and concerns the contrasting influence of father and son. The father, Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, represents the liberalism of the 1840s, and the son, Peter Verkhovensky, represents the radicalism of the 1860s. Dostoevsky believed that the earlier liberalism was responsible for the later radicalism. Nicholas Stavrogin, a mysterious and compelling figure, stands apart from the political and ideological struggle, but it is clear that Dostoevsky sees in him the ultimate principle from which the disastrous consequences stem. Stavrogin represents the totally free will, attached to nothing and responsible for nothing. In Stavrogin, Dostoevsky re-confronted the problem of free will.

Many readers see The Possessed not only as an accurate portrayal of certain tendencies of the politics of the time but also as a prophetic commentary on the future of politics in Russia and elsewhere.

The Brothers Karamazov

During the 1870s Dostoevsky became increasingly interested in contemporary social and political events and increasingly concerned about liberal and radical trends among the youth. Except for his brief flirtation with liberal movements in the 1840s, Dostoevsky was a staunch conservative. The novel A Raw Youth (1875) grew out of his interest and concern about the youth of Russia, and the theme of the novel may be described as a son in search of his father. The novel is something of a proving ground for The Brothers Karamazov but is not generally considered to be on the same level as the four great novels.

The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880) is the greatest of Dostoevsky's novels and the culmination of his life-work. Sigmund Freud ranked it with Oedipus Rex and Hamlet as one of the greatest artistic achievments of all time. The novel is about four sons and and their guilt in the murder of their father, Fyodor. Each of the sons may be characterized by a dominant trait: Dmitri by passion, Ivan by reason, Alyosha by spirit, and Smerdyakov by everything that is ugly in human nature. Smerdyakov kills his father, but in varying degrees the other three brothers are guilty in thought and intention.

The greatest section of the novel is "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor," in which Ivan narrates a meeting between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor, a devil surrogate. The Grand Inquisitor presents man as slavish, cowardly, and incapable of freedom; Christ sees him as potentially capable of true freedom. The novel, however, does not confirm the validity of either view.

Dostoevsky sent the epilogue to the The Brothers Karamazov to his publisher on Nov. 8, 1880, and he died soon afterward, on Jan. 28, 1881. At his death he was at the height of his career in Russia, and mourning was widespread. His reputation was beginning to penetrate into Europe, and interest in him has continued to increase.

Further Reading

Translations of Dostoevsky's works are available in many editions; those by Constance Garnett and David Magarshack are recommended.

There are many biographies of Dostoevsky. Two competent ones which differ in approach are Edward Hallett Carr, Dostoevsky (1821-1881): A New Biography (1931), and Henry Troyat, Firebrand: The Life of Dostoevsky (trans. 1946). Useful biographical data may be found in Robert Payne, Dostoevsky: A Human Portrait (1961), which treats Dostoevsky's life and work. An intimate view of Dostoevsky the man is presented in the reminiscences of his daughter, Aimée Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Study (1921). See also A. Steinberg, Dostoievsky (1966).

Ernest J. Simmons, Dostoevski: The Making of a Novelist (1940), is a detailed and objective account of the circumstances surrounding the production of Dostoevsky's novels, as well as a consideration of their substance. Konstantin Vasilevich Mochulski, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, translated by Michael A. Minihan (1967), is the most detailed analysis of Dostoevsky's work. A critical analysis of the individual works may be found in Edward Wasiolek, Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction (1964). For a philosophical and theological consideration of Dostoevsky's work, Nikolai A. Berdiaev, Dostoevsky, translated by Donald Attwater (1957), is a classic. For a psychological approach, Sigmund Freud's widely anthologized essay "Dostoevsky and Parricide" is recommended. It may be found in William Phillips, ed., Art and Psychoanalysis (1957). For general historical and literary background, Prince D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature (2 vols., 1927), is recommended; it is also available in an abridged volume, edited by Francis J. Whitfield (1958).

Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy:

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Top

Dostoevsky, Fyodor (1821-81) The great Russian novelist is ‘philosophical’ in the sense that his writings explore deep themes of psychology, politics, and religion. They are often cited as ‘existentialist’ in their general tendency, and are also important to literary theorists and critics interested in the polymorphous and diverse forms which literary production can take. See Bakhtin.

Gale Encyclopedia of Russian History:

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky

Top

(1821 - 1881), preeminent Russian prose writer and publicist.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born into the family of a former military physician, Mikhail Andreyevich Dostoyevsky (1789 - 1839), who practiced at the Moscow Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor. Dostoyevsky's father was ennobled in 1828 and acquired moderate wealth; he and his wife, Mariya Fyodorovna (1800 - 1837), had three more sons and three daughters. As a youth, Dostoyevsky lost his mother to tuberculosis and his father to an incident that officially was declared a stroke but purportedly was a homicide carried out by his enraged serfs.

After spending several years at private boarding schools (1833 - 1837), Dostoyevsky studied Military Engineering in St. Petersburg (1838 - 1843) while secretly pursuing his love for literature. He worked for less than a year as an engineer in the armed forces and abandoned that position in 1844 in order to dedicate himself fully to translating fiction and writing. Dostoyevsky's literary debut, Bednye liudi (Poor Folk, 1845), was an immense success with the public; a sentimental novel in letters, it is imbued with mild social criticism and earned enthusiastic praise from Russia's most influential contemporary critic, Vissarion Belinsky. But sub-sequent short stories and novellas such as "Dvoinik" (The Double, 1846) - an openly Gogolesque story of split consciousness as well as an intriguing experiment in unreliable narration - disappointed many of Dostoyevsky's early admirers. This notwithstanding, Dostoyevsky continued to consciously resist attempts to label him politically or aesthetically. Time and time again, he ventured out from grim social reality into other dimensions - the psychologically abnormal and the fantastic - for which St. Petersburg's eerie artificiality proved a most intriguing milieu.

In April 1848, Dostoyevsky was arrested together with thirty-four other members of the underground socialist Petrashevsky Circle and interrogated for several months in the infamous Peter-Paul-Fortress. Charged with having read Belinsky's letter to Gogol at one of the circle's meetings, Dostoyevsky was sentenced to death. Yet, in a dramatic mock-execution, Nikolai I commuted the capital punishment to hard labor and exile in Siberia. A decade later, Dostoyevsky returned to St. Petersburg as a profoundly transformed man. Humbled and physically weakened, he had internalized the official triad of Tsar, People, and Orthodox Church in a most personal way, distancing himself from his early utopian beliefs while re-conceptualizing his recent harsh experiences among diverse classes - criminals and political prisoners, officers and officials, peasants and merchants. Dostoyevsky's worldview was now dominated by values such as humility, self-restraint, and forgiveness, all to be applied in the present, while giving up his faith in the creation of a harmonious empire in the future. The spirit of radical social protest that had brought him so dangerously close to Communist persuasions in the 1840s was from now on attributed to certain dubious characters in his fiction, albeit without ever being denounced completely.

Eager to participate in contemporary debates, Dostoyevsky, jointly with his brother Mikhail (1820 - 1864), published the conservative journals Vremya (Time, 1861 - 63) and Epokha (The Epoch, - 65), both of which encountered financial and censorship quarrels. In his semi-fictional Zapiski iz mertvogo doma (Notes from the House of the Dead,1862) - the most authentic and harrowing account of the life of Siberian convicts prior to Chekhov and Solzhenitsyn - Dostoyevsky depicts the tragedy of thousands of gifted but misguided human beings whose innate complexity he had come to respect. One of the major conclusions drawn from his years as a societal outcast was the notion that intellectuals need to overcome their condescension toward lower classes, particularly the Russian muzhik (peasant) whose daily work on native soil gave him wisdom beyond any formal education.

An even more aggressive assault on mainstream persuasions was "Zapiski iz podpol'ia" ("Notes from the Underground," 1864); written as a quasi-confession of an embittered, pathologically self-conscious outsider, this anti-liberal diatribe was intended as a provocation, to unsettle the bourgeois consciousness with its uncompromising anarchism and subversive wit. "Notes from the Underground" became the prelude to Dostoyevsky's mature phase. The text's lasting ability to disturb the reader stems from its bold defense of human irrationality, viewed as a guarantee of inner freedom that will resist any prison in the name of reason, no matter how attractive (i.e., social engineering, here symbolized by the "Crystal Palace" that Dostoyevsky had seen at the London World Exhibition).

The year 1866 saw the completion, in a feverish rush, of two masterpieces that mark Dostoyevsky's final arrival at a form of literary expression congenial to his intentions. Prestuplenie i nakazanie (Crime and Punishment) analyzes the transgression of traditional Christian morality by a student who considers himself superior to his corrupt and greedy environment. The question of justifiable murder was directly related to Russia's rising revolutionary movement, namely the permissibility of crimes for a good cause. On a somewhat lighter note, Igrok (The Gambler) depicts the dramatic incompatibility of Russian and Western European mentalities against the background of a German gambling resort. Pressured by a treacherous publisher, Dostoyevsky was forced to dictate this novel within twenty-six days to stenographer Anna Grigor'evna Snitkina (1846 - 1918), who shortly thereafter became his wife.

Endlessly haunted by creditors and needy family members, the Dostoyevskys escaped abroad, spending years in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. They often lived near casinos where the writer unsuccessfully tried to resolve his financial ills. Against all odds, during this period Dostoyevsky created some of his most accomplished works, particularly the novel Idiot (1868), the declared goal of which was to portray a "perfectly beautiful human being." The title character, an impoverished prince, clashes with the rapidly modernizing, cynical St. Petersburg society. In the end, although conceptualized as a Christ-like figure, he causes not salvation but murder and tragedy.

Dostoyevsky's following novel, Besy (The Devils,1872), was interpreted as "anti-nihilist." Openly polemical, it outraged the leftist intelligentsia who saw itself caricatured as superficial, naïve, and unintentionally destructive. Clearly referring to the infamous case of Sergei Nechaev, an anarchist whose revolutionary cell killed one of its dissenting members, The Devils presents an astute analysis of the causality underlying terrorism, and societal disintegration. Yet it is also a sobering diagnosis of the inability of Russia's corrupt establishment to protect itself from ruthless political activism and demagoguery.

While The Devils quickly became favorite reading of conservatives, Podrostok (A Raw Youth, 1875) appealed more to liberal sensitivities, thus reestablishing, to a certain extent, a balance in Dostoyevsky's political reputation. Artistically uneven, this novel is an attempt to capture the searching of Russia's young generation "who knows so much and believes in nothing" and as a consequence finds itself in a state of hopeless alienation.

In the mid-1870s, Dostoyevsky published the monthly journal Dnevnik pisatelia (Diary of a Writer) of which he was the sole author. With its thousands of subscribers, this unusual blend of social and political commentary enriched by occasional works of fiction contributed to the relative financial security enjoyed by the author and his family in the last decade of his life. Its last issue contained the text of a speech that Dostoyevsky made at the dedication of a Pushkin monument in Moscow in 1880. Pushkin is described as the unique genius of universal empathy, of the ability to understand mankind in all its manifestations - a feature that Dostoyevsky found to be characteristic of Russians more than of any other people.

Brat'ia Karamazovy (The Brothers Karamazov, 1878 - 1880) became Dostoyevsky's literary testament and indeed can be read as a peculiar synthesis of his artistic and philosophical strivings. The novel's focus on patricide is rooted in the fundamental role of the father in the Russian tradition, with God as the heavenly father, the tsar as father to his people, the priest as father to the faithful, and the paterfamilias as representative of the universal law within the family unit. It is this underlying notion of the universal significance of fatherhood that connects the criminal plot to the philosophical message. Thus, the murder of father Fyodor Karamazov, considered by all three brothers and carried out by the fourth, the illegitimate son, becomes tantamount to a challenge the world order per se.

Dostoyevsky's significance for Russian and world culture derives from a number of factors, among them the depth of his psychological perceptiveness, his complex grasp of human nature, and his ability to foresee long-term consequences of human action - an ability that sometimes bordered on the prophetic. Together with his rhetorical and dramatic gifts, these factors outweigh less presentable features in the author's persona such as national and religious prejudice. Moreover, Dostoyevsky's willingness to admit into his universe utterly antagonistic forces - from unabashed sinners whose unspeakable acts of blasphemy challenge the very foundations of faith, to characters of angelic purity - has led to his worldwide perception as an eminently Christian author. But it also caused distrust in certain quarters of the Orthodox Church; as a matter of fact, his confidence in a gospel of all-forgiveness was criticized as "rosy Christianity" (K. Leont'ev), a religious aberration neglecting the strictness of divine law. From a programmatic point of view, Dostoyevsky preached a Christianity of the heart, as opposed to one of pragmatism and rational calculation.

Dostoyevsky's impact on modern intellectual movements is enormous: Freud's psychoanalysis found valuable evidence in his depictions of the mysterious subconscious, whereas Camus' existentialism took from the Russian author an understanding of man's inability to cope with freedom and his possible preference for a state of non-responsibility.

Dostoyevsky was arguably the first writer to position a philosophical idea at the very heart of a fictional text. The reason that Dostoyevsky's major works have maintained their disquieting energy lies mainly in their structural openness toward a variety of interpretative patterns, all of which can present textual evidence for their particular reading.

Bibliography

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1973). Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics. Ann Arbor: Ardis.

Catteau, Jacques. (1989). Dostoyevsky and the Process of Literary Creation. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Frank, Joseph. (1976). Dostoyevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821 - 1849. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Frank, Joseph. (1983). Dostoyevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850 - 1859. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Frank, Joseph. (1986). Dostoyevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860 - 1865. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Frank, Joseph. (1995). Dostoyevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865 - 1871. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Frank, Joseph. (2002). Dostoyevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871 - 1881. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Pattison, George, ed. (2001). Dostoyevsky and the Christian Tradition. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Scanlan, James. (2002). Dostoevsky the Thinker. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

—PETER ROLLBERG

Columbia Encyclopedia:

Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky

Top
Dostoyevsky or Dostoevsky, Feodor Mikhailovich (fyô'dər mēkhī'ləvĭch dəstəyĕf'skē), 1821-81, Russian novelist, one of the towering figures of world literature.

Early Life and Work

Dostoyevsky was born and raised in Moscow by Russian Orthodox parents. His father, a military surgeon and an alcoholic of harsh, despotic temperament, was brutally slain (1839) by his own serfs. This event haunted Dostoyevsky all his life and perhaps accounts in part for the preoccupation with murder and guilt in his writings. Dostoyevsky attended military engineering school in St. Petersburg and upon graduation entered government service as a draftsman. He soon abandoned this career for writing.

Dostoyevsky's first published work, Poor Folk (1846), which brought him immediate critical and public recognition, reveals his characteristic compassion for the downtrodden. His second novel, The Double (1846), less favorably received, shows the profound insight into human character that dominates his later works.

At about this time Dostoyevsky became involved with a group of radical utopians. The discovery of their illegal printing press brought about their arrest and condemnation. The prisoners were reprieved but were forced to take part in a pre-execution ceremony before the reprieve was read to them. Dostoyevsky was sentenced to four years at hard labor in a Siberian penal colony. During this harrowing period he suffered great physical and mental pain, including repeated attacks of epilepsy. The prison experience worked a profound change of heart in him. He abandoned his belief in the liberal, atheistic ideologies of Western Europe and turned wholeheartedly to religion and to the belief that Orthodox Russia was destined to be the spiritual leader of the world.

After several years of obligatory military service in Siberia, he was allowed to return to St. Petersburg. With him was the widow he had married in Siberia and her son. Dostoyevsky joined his beloved brother Mikhail in editing the magazine Time, which serialized The Insulted and The Injured (1861-62) and the record of his experience in the penal colony, The House of the Dead (1862). He made several trips to Western Europe. One result was Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863), reflecting his severely anti-Western attitudes.

Financial troubles, combined with a turbulent love affair and a passion for roulette, led to a nightmarish period in Germany, partly described in the short novel The Gambler (1866). In 1864 his unhappy marriage ended with the death of his wife. The same year his financial problems increased when his brother died and Dostoyevsky assumed responsibility for the remaining family. In 1867 he married his young secretary, who gave him profound affection and understanding and greatly enriched his later years.

Mature Works

Notes from the Underground (1864), a detailed study of neurotic suffering, began the greatest period of Dostoyevsky's literary career. Crime and Punishment, a brilliant portrait of sin, remorse, and redemption through sacrifice, followed in 1866. His next novel, The Idiot (1868), concerns a Christ figure, a meek, human epileptic whose effect on those around him is tragic.

The Possessed (1871-72) is a violent denunciation of the leftists and revolutionaries that Dostoyevsky had previously admired. In A Raw Youth (1875) he described decay within family relationships and the inability of science to deal with the primary need of human beings: a purpose for living beyond the mere struggle for sustenance. Both of these themes are central to the enormously complex plot and character development of his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80), generally thought to be one of the finest novels ever written.

A profound psychologist and philosopher, Dostoyevsky depicted with remarkable insight the depth and complexity of the human soul. His powerful though generally humorless narrative style, his understanding of the intricacies of character, especially the pathological conscience, and his amplification of sin and redemption made him a giant among novelists and, in the realm of ideas, a precursor of Freudian psychological analysis. Dostoyevsky died of a lung hemorrhage complicated by an attack of epilepsy.

Bibliography

See his Diary of a Writer (tr. 1949) and diaries and notebooks from 1860 to 1881, ed. by C. R. Proffer (1972); his letters, ed. by E. C. Mayne (1964); the notebooks for his novels, ed. by E. Wasiolek (5 vol., tr. 1967-71); biographies by E. J. Simmons (1940), A. Yarmolinsky (1971), and J. Frank (5 vol., 1976-2002; abr. ed., 2009); studies by V. Rozanov (1891, tr. 1972), K. Mochulsky (1947, tr. 1967), and E. Wasiolek (1964); collection of critical essays, ed. by R. Wellek (1962).

Word Tutor:

Dostoevsky

Top
pronunciation

IN BRIEF: n. - Russian novelist who wrote of human suffering with humor and psychological insight (1821-1881).

LearnThatWord.com is a free vocabulary and spelling program where you only pay for results!

Wikipedia on Answers.com:

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Top
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

1879
Born Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky
November 11, 1821(1821-11-11)
Moscow, Russian Empire
Died February 9, 1881(1881-02-09) (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)

Signature

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]

Contents

Early life

Mariinsky Hospital in Moscow, Dostoyevsky's birthplace

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.[citation needed]

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.

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, 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.

Career

Early publications

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.

Exile in Siberia

Statue of Dostoyevsky in Omsk

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.

Post-prison maturation as a writer

Dostoyevsky (right) and the Kazakh scholar Shokan Walikhanuli in 1859

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]

Later literary career

Dostoyevsky in 1863
Dostoyevsky's last address where he died, now a memorial and literary museum, St Petersburg.

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]

Dostoyevsky's study in Saint Petersburg.

In 1877 Dostoyevsky gave a eulogy at the funeral of his friend, the poet Nekrasov, to much controversy[who?].

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.

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. 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]

Influence

Portrait of Dostoyevsky in 1872 painted by Vasily Perov.

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][clarification needed]

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 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, 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)[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 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 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 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").[citation needed] 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.

Dostoyevsky's tomb at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery

Dostoyevsky on Jews in Russia

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.[citation needed] 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]

Dostoyevsky and existentialism

Dostoyevsky's handwriting.

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 the Underground Man, 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.

Works

Fiction

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.

Translated books

Novels and novellas

Short stories

  • "Mr. Prokharchin" ("Господин Прохарчин" ["Gospodin Prokharchin"], 1846)
  • "Novel in Nine Letters" ("Роман в девяти письмах" ["Roman v devyati pis'mah"], 1847)
  • "The Landlady" ("Хозяйка" ["Hozyajka"], 1847)
  • "The Jealous Husband" ("Чужая жена и муж под кроватью" ["Chuzhaya zhena i muzh pod krovat'yu"], 1848)
  • "A Weak Heart" ("Слабое сердце" ["Slaboe serdze"], 1848)
  • "Polzunkov" ("Ползунков" ["Polzunkov"], 1848)
  • "The Honest Thief" ("Честный вор" ["Chestnyj vor"], 1848)
  • "The Christmas Tree and a Wedding" ("Елка и свадьба" ["Elka i svad'ba"], 1848)
  • "White Nights" ("Белые ночи" ["Belye nochi"], 1848)
  • "A Little Hero" ("Маленький герой" ["Malen'kij geroj"], 1849)
  • "A Nasty Anecdote" ("Скверный анекдот" ["Skvernyj anekdot"], 1862)
  • "The Crocodile" ("Крокодил" ["Krokodil"], 1865)
  • "Bobok" ("Бобок" ["Bobok"], 1873)
  • "The Heavenly Christmas Tree" ("Мальчик у Христа на ёлке" ["Mal'chik u Hrista na elke"], 1876)
  • "The Meek One" ("Кроткая" ["Krotkaja"], 1876)
  • "The Peasant Marey" ("Мужик Марей" ["Muzhik Marej"], 1876)
  • "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" ("Сон смешного человека" ["Son smeshnogo cheloveka"], 1877)

Non-fiction

  • A Writer's Diary, collected essays
  • Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863)
  • A Writer's Diary (Дневник писателя [Dnevnik pisatelya], 1873–1881)
  • Letters (collected in English translations in five volumes of Complete Letters)

See also

References

  1. ^ Old Style date October 30, 1821 – January 29, 1881.
  2. ^ Ukrainian origin of Dostoyevsky (Українське коріння Достоєвського)
  3. ^ Existentialism: from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufmann, Penguin Books, 1989 ISBN 0452009308 p. 12
  4. ^ a b "Russian literature". Encyclopædia Britannica. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/513793/Russian-literature. Retrieved 2008-04-11. "Dostoyevsky, who is generally regarded as one of the supreme psychologists in world literature, sought to demonstrate the compatibility of Christianity with the deepest truths of the psyche." 
  5. ^ ORIGIN OF THE DOSTOYEVSKY FAMILY ... become priests in Ukraine.
  6. ^ Dostoevsky: his life and work, Princeton University.
  7. ^ The Best Short Stories of Dostoevsky Translated with an Introduction by David Magarshack. New York: The Modern Library, Random House; 1971.
  8. ^ Russian: Военный инженерно-технический университет
  9. ^ Notes from the Underground Coradella Collegita Bookshelf edition, About the Author.
  10. ^ Epilepsy.com Famous authors with epilepsy.
  11. ^ Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, Richard Pevear, and Larissa Volokhonsky. The Idiot. New York: Vintage, 2001. Print. Introduction pp. xix
  12. ^ Russian: Военный инженерно-технический университет,
  13. ^ Frank 76. Quoted from Pisma, I: 135–37.
  14. ^ Frank 1987, pp. 124–27.
  15. ^ Vladimir Nabokov (1981) Lectures on Russian Literature, lecture on Russian Writers, Censors, and Readers, p.14
  16. ^ Dostoevsky the Thinker James P. Scanlan. Dostoevsky the Thinker. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. xiii, p. 251
  17. ^ Dostoevsky's View of Evil Reprinted from In Communion, April 1998.
  18. ^ Sirotkina, Irina (1996). Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880. Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 55. ISBN 0801867827. 
  19. ^ "A few words about Mikhail Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky". F. M. Dostoyevsky. Collection of works in 15 volumes. 11. Leningrad: Nauka. 1993. pp. 361–365. 
  20. ^ "Fyodor Dostoevsky". Russia Today (RT). http://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/literature/fyodor-dostoevsky/. Retrieved 12 July 2011. 
  21. ^ Dostoevsky, Fyodor (2004) [First published 1879–1880]. "Endnotes". The Brothers Karamazov. Barnes & Noble Classics. Notes and Introduction by Maire Jaanus. Translated by Constance Garnett. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble Books. p. 703. ISBN 978-1-59308-045-7. OCLC 34325193. "Anna Grigorievna Snitkina, Dostoyevsky's second wife, was a stenographer to whom Dostoyevsky dictated his novel The Gambler in 1866; they married the following year." 
  22. ^ Zouboff, Peter, Solovyov on Godmanhood: Solovyov’s Lectures on Godmanhood Harmon Printing House: Poughkeepsie, New York, 1944; see Czeslaw Milosz’s introduction to Solovyov’s War, Progress and the End of History. Lindisfarne Press: Hudson, New York 1990.
  23. ^ Dostoyevsky Az.lib.ru Пушкинская речь (Pushkin's style) (in Russian)
  24. ^ Dostoevsky, Fyodor; Introduction to The Idiot, Wordsworth Ed. Ltd, 1996.
  25. ^ Woodworth, Bradley; Harold Bloom, Constance Richards (2005). Harold Bloom. ed. St Petersburg. Infobase Publishing. p. 69. ISBN 0791083845, 9780791083840. http://books.google.com/books?id=tMn6qHyTIywC&dq=dostoevsky+house+museum,+St+Petersburg&source=gbs_navlinks_s. Retrieved 19 November 2010. 
  26. ^ Otto Friedrich (6 September 1971). "Freaking-Out with Fyodor". Time Magazine. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,943893,00.html?promoid=googlep. Retrieved 2008-04-10. 
  27. ^ Nabokov, Vladimir. “Lectures on Russian Literature”. Harcourt, 1981, p. 98
  28. ^ Nabokov, Vladimir. “Lectures on Russian Literature”. Harcourt, 1981, p. 104
  29. ^ The Russian Point of View Virginia Woolf.
  30. ^ Dostoievsky by A. Steinberg p. 112
  31. ^ Letter from Leo Tolstoy to Nikolai Strakhov, from Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to his Family and Friends, page 337, Chatto and Windus, London, 1914.
  32. ^ Shrayer, Maxim D. “The Jewish Question and The Brothers Karamazov.” In: A New Word on “The Brothers Karamazov.” Ed. Robert Louis Jackson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2004. 210-233
  33. ^ Dostoevsky, F. M. The Diary of a Writer, trans. Boris Brasol (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons), 1949.
  34. ^ Figes, Orlando. "Dostoevsky's leap of faith This volume concludes a magnificent biography which is also a cultural history", Sunday Telegraph (London), p.13. September 29, 2002.
  35. ^ Frank, Joseph. "Foreword" p. xiv. in Goldstein, David I. Dostoevsky and the Jews, University of Texas Press, 1981. ISBN 0292715285
  36. ^ a b c d Cassedy, Steven (2005). Dostoevsky's Religion. Stanford University Press. pp. 67–80. ISBN 0804751374. 

Bibliography

External links


 
 

 

Copyrights:

Who2 Profiles. Copyright © 1998-2012 by Who2, LLC. All rights reserved. See the Fedor Dostoevsky biography from Who2.  Read more
Chase's Calendar of Events. Chase's Calendar of Events 2011. Copyright © 2010 by McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 1994-2012 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
$copyright.smallImage.alttext Gale Encyclopedia of Biography. Gale Encyclopedia of Biography. © 2006 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Copyright © 1994, 1996, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
$copyright.smallImage.alttext Gale Encyclopedia of Russian History. Encyclopedia of Russian History. Copyright © 2004 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/ Read more
Word Tutor. Copyright © 2004-present by eSpindle Learning, a 501(c) nonprofit organization. All rights reserved.
eSpindle provides personalized spelling and vocabulary tutoring online; sign up free Read more
 Rhymes. Oxford University Press. © 2006, 2007 All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia on Answers.com. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Fyodor Dostoyevsky Read more

Follow us
Facebook Twitter
YouTube