Fyodor Dostoevsky
Russian novelist
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Summary
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (11 November 1821 – 9 February 1881) sometimes translated as Dostoevsky, was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. A Slavophile, nationalist and monarchist, he criticised the bourgeois, pre-materialist West and nihilism in many of his works.
Moscow
Saint Petersburg
Biography
Born in Moscow's Foundling Hospital, where his father was a resident physician, Dostoevsky grew up showing an early interest in literature. After serving a year in the Engineering Corps, he resigned to devote himself to writing. His first novel, Poor Folk (1846), was a tremendous success.
Soon afterward, Dostoevsky and some others were arrested for participating in a study group that discussed, among other things, the writings of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier. They were led before a firing squad, then given a last-minute reprieve from the czar with a sentence of four years' exile to Siberia to be followed by five years in the army That incident left Dostoevsky permanently scarred psychologically.
While imprisoned, Dostoevsky was allowed to read only one book, the Bible, which had also played a significant part in his early education. He emerged from prison an ardent Russian nationalist and a Christian bound to the tenets of the Russian Orthodox Church. He gave a realistic account of his prison and exile experiences in The House of the Dead (1861).
Years of poverty followed his release, during which he published Notes from Underground (1864), which maturely treats his principal themes: the eccentric and self-conscious protagonist; the bankruptcy of humanism, rationalism, materialism, and socialism; suffering and humiliation; and salvation in Christ (although the specifically Christian passages were cut by the czar's censors). Both his wife and his brother died during that time, leaving him with a large family to support. Not financially solvent until ten years before his death, Dostoevsky fought a debilitating epilepsy and worked tirelessly at his novels, often dictating them at a feverish rate. In 1867 he married the young woman whom he had hired as a stenographer.
His two most famous novels, Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), are philosophical detective stories in which both the murderer and the meaning of life are simultaneously pursued. In The Brothers Karamazov, his last novel, Dostoevsky portrayed the relationships of four brothers to their depraved and spiteful earthly father on the one hand, and to a mysterious, often ambivalent heavenly Father on the other. Throughout, Dostoevsky was concerned with the justice of God and the idea that "if God does not exist, then everything is permitted."
Dostoevsky's novels anticipated later theories of the complexity and contradictions in human personality . He also wrote two other great novels, The Idiot (1868-1869) and The Possessed.
Quotes by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Works by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov is considered a supreme achievement in literature. Published near the end of the 19th century, it is one of the great works of world-renowned author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Brothers Karamazov tackles some of the most existential and important themes known to humankind--the existence of God, morality, free will, reason, doubt, and faith--just to name a few. Readers around the globe have found their lives transformed by this layered and complex book. A deeply spiritual work, The Brothers Karamazov is a work that every person should read.
Many consider Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground the first existentialist novel. The narrator and main character, often called “the Underground Man,” is a bitter, misanthropic retiree living in St. Petersburg. He lives each day in constant physical and psychological pain. He has no job and lives entirely off of his retirement funds. A bad tooth and an aching liver make it difficult for him to do anything but stay at home and write “notes” about his ennui and suffering. The Underground Man shares moments from his past, and through them, he explains how he came to despise both himself and other people. Masterfully, Dostoevsky immerses the reader in the dark, but fascinating, mind of his narrator. Notes from the Underground remains one of the great Russian novelist’s most popular works and is one of the most widely-read and influential works of classic literature of the last century.
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