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Contemporary scientists reject Freud's pseudoscientific idea of a "hysteric epilepsy", as Dostoyevsky could also have epilepsy during sleep, which is not possible in cases of hysteria.

http://apt.rcpsych.org/content/15/1/32.full http://www.kiosek.com/dostoevsky/critical_works.html

http://fantlab.ru/series1675

Themes and style

http://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Mary_Shelley#Literary_themes_and_styles --

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Novels

Autobiographical elements

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The House of the Dead is a semi-autobiographical memoir written while Dostoyevsky was in prison and includes a few religious themes. Characters from the three Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Islam and Christianity– appear in it, and while the Jewish character Isay Fomich and characters affiliated with the Orthodox Church and the Old Believers are depicted negatively, the Muslims Nurra and Aley from Dagestan are depicted positively. Aley is later educated by reading the Bible, and shows a fascination for the altruistic message in Christ's Sermon on the Mount, which he views as the ideal philosophy.

Dostoyevsky's later works are also characterised by autobiographical elements. According to Norwegian Slavist and vice president of the International Dostoevsky Association, Geir Kjetsaa, "Dostoyevsky's life is a novel". The Idiot, perhaps Dostoyevsky's most autobiographical work, has many similarities to his life; for example, the viewing of Holbein's painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, Prince Myshkin's skilled handwriting and similarities between the fictional and real-life characters.

Gothic

Dostoyevsky's works explore irrational dark motifs, dreams, emotions and visions, all typical elements of Gothic fiction. He was an avid reader of the Gothic and enjoyed the works of Radcliffe, Balzac, Hoffmann, Charles Maturin and Soulié. Among his first Gothic works was "The Landlady". The stepfather's demonic fiddle and the mysterious seller in Netochka Nezvanova are Gothic-like. In Humiliated and Insulted, the villain has a typical demonic appearance. Other roots of this genre can be found in Crime and Punishment; for example the dark and dirty rooms and Raskolnikov's Mephistophelian character, or the vampire-like Nastasia Filippovna in The Idiot and femme-fatale Katerina Ivanovna in The Brothers Karamazov.

Romanticism, naturalism

Dostoyevsky investigated human nature. According to his good friend, the Russian philosopher Strakhov, "All his attention was directed upon people, and he grasped at only their nature and character", because he was "interested by people, people exclusively, with their state of soul, with the manner of their lives, their feelings and thoughts". Philosopher and Dostoyevsky researcher Nikolai Berdyaev stated that he "is not a realist as an artist, he is an experimentator, a creator of an experimential metaphysics of human nature". His characters live in an unlimited, irrealistic world, beyond borders and limits. Berdyaev remarks that "Dostoevsky reveals a new mystical science of man", limited to people "which have been drawn into the whirlwind".

Metaphysics

Dostoyevsky's use of space and time were analysed by philologist Vladimir Toporov, who stated that "the unexpected not only is possible but also always happens". Toporov compares time and space in Dostoyevsky with film scenes: the Russian word vdrug (suddenly) appears 560 times in the Russian edition of Crime and Punishment, and provides the reader with impressions of tension, inequality and nervousness, all characteristic elements of the structure of his books. Dostoyevsky's works often utilise extremely precise numbers (at two steps..., two roads to the right), as well as high and rounded numbers (100, 1000, 10000). Critics such as Donald Fanger and Roman Katsman, writer of The Time of Cruel Miracles: Mythopoesis in Dostoevsky and Agnon, call these elements "mythopoeic". Dostoyevsky's characters' growth occurs through repetition, events, and memory, despite how painful they may be for the characters.

The works Dostoyevsky published in the 1870s explore human beings' capacity for manipulation. The Eternal Husband and "The Meek One" describe the relationship between a man and woman in marriage, the first chronicling the manipulation of a husband by his wife; the latter the opposite. "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" raises this theme of manipulation from the individual to a metaphysical level. Philosopher Strakhov agreed that Dostoyevsky "a great thinker and a great visionary ... a dialectician of genius, one of Russia's greatest metaphysicians."

Polyphony

Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin highlights Dostoyevsky's use of literary polyphony, where independent, equal voices speak for an individual self, in a context in which they can be heard, flourish and interact together, which he calls "carnivalesque". Many of Dostoyevsky's works have elements of menippean satire, which he most likely revived as a genre, and which combines comedy, fantasy, symbolism and adventure and in which mental attitudes are personified. A Writer's Diary and "Bobok" are "one of the greatest menippeas in all world literature", but examples can be found in "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man", the first encounter between Raskolnikov and Sonja in Crime and Punishment, which is "an almost perfect Christianised menippea", and in "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor".

Translations

Dostoyevsky's translations of Balzac's Eugénie Grandet and Sand's La dernière Aldini differ from standard translations. In his translation of Eugénie Grandet, he often omitted whole passages or paraphrased significantly, perhaps because of his rudimentary knowledge of French or his haste. He also used darker words, such as "gloomy" instead of "pale" and "cold", and sensational adjectives, such as "horrible" and "mysterious". The translation of La desnière Aldini was never completed because someone already published one in 1837. He also abandonded working on Mathilde by Sue due to lack of funds. Influenced by the plays he watched during this time, he wrote verse dramas for two plays, Mary Stuart by Schiller and Boris Godunov by Pushkin, which have been lost.

Early life

Childhood

Mariinsky Hospital in Moscow, Dostoyevsky's birthplace

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born on 30 October 1821 (11 November 1821, according to the Gregorian Calendar), the second child of Mikhail Dostoyevsky and Maria Nechayeva. The Dostoyevskys were a multi-ethnical and multi-denominational Lithuanian noble family from the Pinsk region with roots back to the 16th century. Branches of his family included Orthodox and Catholic members, but his immediate forebears had fallen on hard times and had been reduced to the class of non-monastic clergy. Dostoyevsky's mother was descended from a family of Russian merchants.

Dostoyevsky's paternal great-grandfather and grandfather practised as priests in the Ukrainian town of Bratslava, where his father was born. Mikhail was expected to join the clergy as his father had done before him, but he ran away from home instead of going into seminary, thus breaking with his family permanently. In 1809, at the age of twenty, Mikhail was admitted to Moscow's Imperial Medical-Surgical Academy. He was assigned to a Moscow hospital where he served as a military doctor and was appointed senior physician in 1818. In 1819, he married Maria Nechayeva, but resigned from military service the following year to accept a post at the Mariinsky Hospital for the poor. After the birth of two sons, Mikhail and Fyodor, he was promoted to the post of collegiate assessor, a position that raised his legal status to nobility and enabled him to acquire a small estate, 150 versts (about 150 km or 100 miles) from Moscow, called Darovoye. Dostoyevsky's parents had five more children after he and his elder brother were born.

Dostoyevsky's birth house near the hospital

Dostoyevsky was raised in the family home on the grounds of the Mariinsky hospital. The family often visited their estate in Darovoye during the summers when he was a child. At the age of three he was introduced to heroic sagas, fairy tales and legends and, influenced by his nannies, he developed a deeply ingrained religious piety. His nanny Alina Frolovna and family friend, the serf and farmer Marei from Darovoye, were influential in his childhood; Marei helped him deal with his hallucinations, which began at an early age and were possibly caused by the Gothic literature that enthralled him. Dostoyevsky also discovered the hospital's garden, which was separated by a large fence from his parent's private garden. His parents forbade him to have contact with the patients in the hospital's garden in order to protect he and his siblings from them. Dostoyevsky often talked with the patients anyway, and encountered a nine-year-old girl who had been raped, which traumatised him.

Dostoyevsky's parents valued education, so at the age of four his mother taught him to read and write, using the Bible. One of the day's highlights was his parents' evening readings. They introduced him to Russian literature at an early age, including Karamzin's Russian Tales, the writing of Pushkin, Derzhavin and the English novelist Ann Radcliffe, as well as the works of the German Friedrich Schiller. Dostoyevsky was impressed by Schiller's play The Robbers, which he saw at the age of ten. He and his brother Mikhail enjoyed Pushkin's poems, which they memorised; Pushkin's death in 1837 was a shock for the whole family.

Dostoyevsky's father sent his son Fyodor first to a French boarding school and then, at the age of 13, to the best private high school in Moscow, the "College for Noble Male Children". His father had to take out loans and advances and extend his private medical practice to pay for the high school fees. Dostoyevsky felt inferior to his aristocratic classmates at the Moscow school, something that was later reflected in some of his works, especially The Adolescent.

Youth

Dostoyevsky as an engineer

On 27 September 1837 Dostoyevsky's mother died of tuberculosis. Dostoyevsky contracted a serious throat disease soon afterwards and since then had a brittle voice. The previous May his parents sent Fyodor and his brother Mikhail to St Petersburg to attend the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute, forcing the brothers to abandon their academic studies at the Moscow college for a military career.^[note] On the way to St. Petersburg, Dostoyevsky witnessed a violent incident in a posting house; a member of the military police beat a carter and the carter subsequently took out his anger on his horse with a whip; Dostoyevsky referred to this situation in his serial A Writer's Diary. Dostoyevsky entered the academy the following year, but only with the help of family members, who, unknown to him, had paid the tuition fees. He was separated from his brother, who was later sent to Reval, Estonia, because of his poor health and its better studying conditions.

Dostoyevsky did not enjoy the academy, primarily because of his lack of interest in science, mathematics and military engineering, and preference for drawing and architecture. As his friend Konstantin Trutovsky once said, "There was no student in the entire institution with less of a military bearing than F. M. Dostoyevsky. He moved clumsily and jerkily; his uniform hung awkwardly on him; and his knapsack, shako and rifle all looked like some sort of fetter he had been forced to wear for a time and which lay heavily on him." Among his 120 classmates, who were mainly of Polish or Baltic-German descent, Dostoyevsky's character and interests made him an outsider; he was brave and had a strong sense of justice, as opposed to many of his class fellows. He protected newcomers, aligned himself with teachers, criticised corruption among officers and helped poor farmers. Although he was a loner and lived in his own literary world, his classmates respected him. Dostoyevsky was called "Monk Photius" because of his reclusive way of life and his interest in religion.

The Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute

Dostoyevsky's first epileptic fit may have occurred after learning of the death of his father in 16 June 1839, the cause of which was unclear. Officially, Dostoyevsky's father died of an apoplectic stroke, but a peasant, Pavel Khotiaintsev, claimed he was killed by other peasants; however, the truth of Khotiaintsev's claims could not be verified because if they were true, he would inherit more land. After three investigations and over a year later, a criminal court in Tula decided that Dostoyevsky's father died of natural causes, and the peasants were acquitted. His son Fyodor continued with his difficult studies, passed his exams and obtained the rank of engineer cadet, which gave him the right to live away from the academy. After a short visit to his brother Mikhail in Reval, Fyodor often went to concerts, operas, theatres and ballets, and was introduced to gambling by two of his friends.

In August 1843 he became a draftsman and lived with Adolph Totleben, in an apartment owned by a friend of his brother Mikhail, the German-Baltic Dr. A. Riesenkampf,^[note] and as he had done when he was a child, Dostoyevsky showed an interest in the poor and the sick. He earned some badly-needed money by translating works of literature into Russian, and found his job "as boring as potatoes". He graduated from the academy on 19 October 1844 as a lieutenant. Already in financial trouble, Dostoyevsky decided to write his own novel.

Career

Early career

Dostoyevsky, 1847

In the autumn of 1844, Dostoyevsky shared an apartment with his friend from the academy, Dmitry Grigorovich. Dostoyevsky worked on his first novel, hoping to obtain a large readership, which would improve his finances. In a letter to his brother Mikhail he wrote, "It's simply a case of my novel covering all. If I fail in this, I'll hang myself." Dostoyevsky finished his manuscript, called Poor Folk, in May 1845, and asked Grigorovich to read the novel aloud. Grigorovich was so impressed, he took it the same night to his friend, the poet Nikolay Nekrasov, who was also enthusiastic about it. The next day, Nekrasov, who called Dostoyevsky the "New Gogol", showed the manuscript to the most well-known and influential literary critic of the time, Vissarion Belinsky. Belinsky was skeptical at first, but was astonished when he read it, calling it Russia's first "social novel". Poor Folk was released on 15 January 1846 in the almanac St. Petersburg Collection and was commercially enormously successful.

Shortly after the publication of Poor Folk, Dostoyevsky wrote his second novel, The Double, during a visit to Reval. Although the book was published in February 1846, it had already been published in the journal Annals of the Fatherland on 30 January. In the 1840s, socialism began to be more influential in Russia, while romanticism and idealism lost much of its importance. Dostoyevsky, who discovered socialism around 1846, was initially influenced by the French socialists Fourier, Cabet, Proudhon and Saint Simon. Dostoyevsky, through his early relationship with the literary critic Belinsky, extended his knowledge of the philosophy of socialism and was attracted to its logic, its sense of justice, and its interest in the poor and disadvantaged. His relationship with Belinsky became, however, increasingly negative as Belinsky's atheism and his dislike of religion clashed with Dostoyevsky's Orthodox beliefs, and he parted company with Belinsky and his associates. He focused on the issues of the existence of God and nihilism in his later books, as well as the nature of human coexistence, the requirements of fraternity, and the coherence of freedom and fortune.

As Dostoyevsky received negative reviews by the press about his second novel, his health declined and he suffered more epileptic seizures. He continued his prolific writing, however, and from 1846 to 1848 he released a number of short stories to the magazine Annals of the Fatherland including "Mr. Prokharchin", "The Landlady", "A Weak Heart" and "White Nights". These stories were unsuccessful and found himself in financial trouble again. He decided to join the Utopian socialist Betekov circle, whose members had created a tight-knit community, which helped him to survive. After the circle's break-up, Dostoyevsky befriended Apollon Maykov and his brother Valerian, and after the latter's death, Apollon became an important factor in Dostoyevsky's life. In spring 1846 he joined the Petrashevsky Circle, whose founder Mikhail Petrashevsky proposed social reforms in Russia, by the recommendation of Pleshcheyev's brother, poet Aleksey Pleshcheyev. In contrast to the former circles, the Petrashevsky Circle was socio-Christian. Dostoyevsky used the circle's library on Saturdays and Sundays, and sometimes participated in their discussions of themes like freedom from censorship and the abolition of serfdom.

Exile in Siberia

Before the mock execution, the members were split into three-man groups. Dostoyevsky was the third of the second row; next to him stood Pleshcheyev and Durov.

Dostoyevsky and other members of the Petrashevsky Circle were reported to Liprandi, an official with the Ministry of International Affairs, by Antonelli, a government agent, in 1849. Dostoyevsky was accused of reading several works by Belinsky, including Correspondence with Gogol, Criminal Letters and The Soldier's Speech, and of passing transcriptions of these and other works. Antonelli wrote in his report, "[Correspondence with Gogol] summoned a considerable amount of enthusiastic approval from the society, in particular on the part of Belasoglo and Yastrzhembsky, especially at the point where Belinsky says that religion has no basis among the Russian people. It was proposed that this letter be distributed in several copies." Dostoyevsky responded to these charges by stating that he had only read the essays "as a literary monument, neither more nor less" and argued about "personality and human egoism" instead of politics. Dostoyevsky and several members of the circle were arrested on 22 April 1849 upon the request of Count A. Orlov and Emperor Nicolas I, who feared a revolution like the Decembrist revolt of 1825 in Russia and the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, calling the Petrashevsky Circle "conspirators".

On 23 December 1849, Dostoyevsky and the rest of the circle were brought to Semyonov Place in St. Petersburg. A mock execution was staged and then cancelled by the Tsar. Dostoyevsky's sentence was commuted to four years of exile with hard labour at a katorga prison camp in Omsk, Siberia, followed by a term of compulsory military service. The prisoners were divided into groups of three, consisting of one convict, one gendarme and one military policeman. After a fourteen-day drive by sleigh they reached Tobolsk in Siberia, on 11 January 1850, and eleven days later, Durov and Dostoyevsky reached Omsk. He described the barracks in Omsk as follows:

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 ...

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Pisma, I: pp. 135–7.

Classified as "one of the most dangerous convicts", Dostoyevsky had his feet and hands chained which were not removed until his release. During his imprisonment, he was not allowed to read anything except his New Testament, of which he opened random pages if he had doubts. Apart from epileptic seizures Dostoyevsky suffered from hemorrhoids and was "burned by some fever, trembling and feeling too hot or too cold every night" and "losing weight".

Release from prison

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

After his release on 14 February 1854, Dostoyevsky asked his brother Mikhail to financially help him and to send books by authors such as Vico, Guizot, Ranke, Hegel or Kant. Dostoyevsky also began to work on The House of the Dead, basing it upon his experience in prison. It became the first novel about Russian prisons. The first parts of his third book, the novel Netochka Nezvanova, had been released in 1849, but the work had remained unfinished before he went sent to exile. In mid-March, Dostoyevsky moved to Semipalatinsk, where he was forced to serve in the Siberian Army Corps of the Seventh Line Battalion. Around this time, Dostoyevsky met Baron Alexander Egorovich Wrangel, an admirer of his who had attended the mock execution. They both rented houses outside of Semipalatinsk, in the "Cossack Garden".

During a visit with Lieutenant-Colonel Belikhov, Dostoyevsky met the family of Alexander Ivanovich Isaev and Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva. Dostoyevsky soon fell in love with Maria. After sending a letter through Wrangel to General Eduard Totleben, apologising for his activity in several Utopian circles, Dostoyevsky obtained, in the autumn of 1856, the right to publish books and to marry. After her husband's departure to Kuznetsk in August 1855 and his death the same year, Maria moved with Dostoyevsky to Barnaul. They married in Semipalatinsk on 7 February 1857. In 1859 Dostoyevsky was released from military service due to his medical condition; his health had worsened since his marriage to Maria. In the same year he was granted permission to return to Russia, first to Tver, where he met his brother for the first time in ten years, then on to St. Petersburg, arriving on 16 September 1859. Shortly thereafter, he joined the Society for the Aid of Needy Writers and Scholars, known as the Literary Fund. Its goal was to help scholars and writers who had found themselves in difficulty, such as those arrested on political grounds. He remained under police surveillance for the rest of his life.

Dostoyevsky in Paris (1863)

Dostoyevsky's only work to be completed whilst in prison, "A Little Hero", was issued in a journal, while "Uncle's Dream" and "The Village of Stepanchikovo" were not published until 1860. Notes from the House of the Dead was released in Russky Mir (Russian World) on September 1860, and "The Insulted and the Injured" was released in the newly established Time magazine,^[note] which was created with the help of funds from his brother's cigarette factory.

Dostoyevsky travelled to Europe for the first time in 1862. He visited the German cities Cologne, Berlin, Dresden and Wiesbaden (where he went to gamble), followed by a trip to Belgium, and arrived in Paris in mid-June. In London he met Herzen and visited the Crystal Palace; he travelled with Strakhov through Switzerland in July, visited Geneva, and then toured through cities in northern Italy, including Turin, Livorno and Florence. He wrote mainly negative comments about these European countries in his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. In this book he criticised such themes as capitalism, social modernisation, materialism, Catholicism and Protestantism.

From August to October 1863 Dostoyevsky made a second trip to Europe. In Paris he met his second love, Polina Suslova. He also lost all of his money gambling, in Wiesbaden and Baden-Baden. In Wiesbaden he wrote a letter to Wrangel, asking for a 100 thalers loan and mentioning, for the first time, his next novel. Dostoyevsky later asked his brother Mikhail for money and, after his brother's death in July 1864, he wrote again to Wrangel requesting money. Two months before his brother's death, Dostoyevsky's wife Maria died of tuberculosis, and he became the lone parent of his stepson, Pasha, and then almost immediately afterwards, of Mikhail's family. Added to this were the fees for the financing of Epokha. Without the help of his relatives and friends he would have gone bankrupt.

Travels

Anna Snitkina

The first two parts of Dostoyevsky's sixth novel, Crime and Punishment, were published in January and February 1866 in the periodical The Russian Messenger, bringing the magazine at least 500 new subscribers. The completed novel was also a success, prompting the critic Strakhov to remark afterwards, "Only Crime and Punishment was read during 1866". However, the novel initially received a mixed reception from critics. Most of the negative responses came from nihilists. Grigory Eliseev of the radical magazine The Contemporary called the novel a "fantasy according to which the entire student body is accused without exception of attempting murder and robbery". Strakhov was generally satisfied with the novel, stating that Dostoyevsky had successfully portrayed a Russian person aptly and realistically.

In late March 1866, Dostoyevsky moved to a country house in Lyublino with his brother-in-law Alexander Ivanov to escape the heat of Moscow. He returned to St. Petersburg in mid-September and promised his editor, F. T. Stellovsky, that he would complete the novel The Gambler by November, although he had not yet written a single line. Milyukov, one of Dostoyevsky's friends, advised him to hire a secretary. Dostoyevsky contacted Pavel Olkhin, one of the best stenographers in St. Petersburg, who recommended his pupil Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina. Dostoyevsky was Snitkina's favourite author, as well as that of her recently deceased father. Dostoyevsky hired Snitkina in October 1866; she recorded his dictation in shorthand, and The Gambler, which focused on gambling (a subject with which he was very familiar), was completed in 26 days on 30 October (his birthday).

Gambling "hell" in Bad Homburg

On 15 February 1867, Dostoyevsky married Anna Snitkina in the Trinity Cathedral in St. Petersburg. During the wedding celebrations he suffered a serious convulsion, caused by heavy consumption of champagne. This plunged Anna, who also suffered from bad relationships with his relatives and their neighbours, into despair. The 7,000 rubles he earned from Crime and Punishment did not cover all their debts, so to avoid a compulsory auction, Anna sold furniture, her piano and jewellery. On 14 April 1867, they began a delayed honeymoon in Germany with the money raised. In Berlin they stayed at the Hotel Union, and in Dresden Dostoyevsky visited the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, where he sought inspiration for his writing. He was deeply impressed by the paintings, especially Raphael's Sistine Madonna.

Three weeks later Dostoyevsky travelled to Homburg, where he lost all of his wife's money gambling. They continued their trip in early July through Germany, visiting Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Heidelberg and Karlsruhe. He gambled in casinos in Baden-Baden, despite his previous losses, so Anna was forced to go to pawnbrokers and sell her wedding presents, earrings and clothes, and even her wedding rings. In the meantime, Anna had become pregnant. On 23 August they left Baden-Baden and arrived in Basel to visit a museum, in which they viewed Holbein's The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, a painting that would prove influential for his next novel. Dostoyevsky was so captivated by the picture that his wife had to drag him away from the panel to avoid him having an epileptic seizure.

In Geneva they were low on funds and had to pawn more of their possessions, but found lodging and good doctors. Their first child Sonya, named after his beloved niece and the heroine in Crime and Punishment, was born there on 5 March 1868. Dostoyevsky occasionally gambled in Saxon-les-Bains to raise money, but as usual he was unsuccessful. Three months later the baby died from pneumonia; she was buried in a children's cemetery in Plainpalais. Again in financial trouble due to his addiction, he returned to Geneva to work on his next novel.

Dostoyevsky's study in Saint Petersburg

In September 1868, Dostoyevsky began working on The Idiot, managing to complete 100 pages in just 23 days. Sonya's death was devastating to both he and his wife, and Anna's health was affected by frequent trips to her grave. Dostoyevsky felt uncomfortable with their surroundings, so they left Geneva and moved to Vevey, and then Milan, so that he could complete The Idiot. While in Milan, Anna learned Italian and sometimes served as an interpreter. After enduring some rainy autumn months in Milan, they travelled southwards to Florence. The Idiot was completed there in January 1869. It was serialised in The Russian Messenger.

In May, Anna's mother visited the family to help them. They moved to an apartment on the Piazza del Mercato Nuovo due to lack of room. Its busy location near a marketplace and the summer heat caused the Dostoyevskys a great deal of trouble, and three months later they decided to leave the city for Prague. On their way to Prague, they stayed in Bologna and then in Vienna. Three days after their arrival in Prague they had to leave again because they could not find a furnished apartment to rent. They decided to return to Dresden, where they rented a house in the English quarter.

Shortly after their arrival, Anna's mother came to assist her daughter for the upcoming birth on 26 September of her second child Lyubov, whose name meant "love" in Russian.^[note] In April 1871 Dostoyevsky made a final visit to a gambling hall in Wiesbaden. According to Anna, Dostoyevsky was cured of his addiction after Lyubov's birth, but whether or not this is true is open to speculation. Another reason for his abstinence might have been the closure of casinos in Germany in 1872 and 1873; it was not until the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany that these were re-opened.

In July 1871, Dostoyevsky and Anna traveled by train to Berlin. During this trip, he burnt numerous manuscripts, including those for The Idiot, because he was afraid of problems going through customs. The family arrived in St. Petersburg on 8 July, marking the end of a honeymoon, originally planned to last for three months, that had lasted over four years.

Return to Russia

Manuscript of The Demons

Anna's younger brother Ivan Snitkin visited his sister and her husband in autumn 1869. A pupil at the Moscow Agriculture School, Snitkin told them about the unrest among the students there. One of his fellow students, Ivanov, had helped him with his travel preparations, and Dostoyevksy later discovered that this same Ivanov was murdered on 21 November by five men in a park near the university. Behind the murder was the nihilist Sergey Nechayev. Influenced by Bakunin's Alliance révolutionnaire européenne, Nechayev formed a terror organisation comprising several of these five-man groups. Subsequently, Dostoyevsky planned to write a novel about nihilism.

Back in Russia in July 1871, the family was again in financial trouble and had to sell their remaining possessions. Moreover, Anna was reaching the final term of pregnancy once more; Dostoyevsky thought the child would be born on 15 July and thus should be named Vladimir based on the calendar of saints, but their son, who they named Fyodor (Fedya), was born one day later. Soon after the birth, they moved to a different apartment on Serpukhovskaya Street, near the Institute for Technology. The family hoped to pay off their large debts by selling their house in Peski, but problems with the tenant resulted in a relatively low selling price, and disputes with their creditors continued. Anna proposed that they raise money on her husband's copyrights and negotiated with the creditors to pay off their debts in installments.

Dostoyevsky was able to revive his friendships with Maykov and Strakhov and to find new acquaintances, including Vsevolod Solovyov and his brother Vladimir, church politician Terty Filipov, and future Imperial High Commissioner of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who influenced Dostoyevsky's political progression to conservatism. In early 1872, art collector Pavel Tretyakov asked Dostoyevsky to pose for Vasily Perov. Perov's painting, which is according to Danish critic Georg Brandes, a depiction "half that of a Russian peasant, half that of a criminal", is one of the most popular images of Dostoyevsky created.

Around this time, the Dostoyevskys planned a vacation in Staraya Russa, a spa known for its pleasant salt baths. On the journey, they took the train to Sosnika and then to Novgorod. However, Lyuba had received a wrist injury a few weeks before their departure. A doctor told them she had a sprain, but it ultimately turned out to be a fracture, and Anna returned to St. Petersburg with her while Dostoyevsky waited with their son in Staraya Russa for their return. Shortly afterwards, Anna's sister died from typhus and Anna developed an abscess on her throat. Dostoyevsky's work on his next novel was delayed due to these issues.

Dostoyevsky, 1876

The family returned to St. Petersburg in September 1872. The Demons (also known as The Possessed) was finished on 26 November 1872 and released in January by the "Dostoyevsky Press", founded by Dostoyevsky and his wife. Although the books were available on a cash-only basis and their apartment served as a bookshop, the business was successful and about 3,000 copies of The Demons were sold. Anna was responsible for the financing. Dostoyevsky proposed that they establish a new periodical, A Writer's Diary, including a collection of essays of the same name, but due to lack of money it was published instead in Meshchersky's The Citizen, beginning on 1 January in return for a salary of 3,000 rubles per year. In the summer of 1873, Anna again travelled with her children to Staraya Russa, while Dostoyevsky stayed in St. Petersburg to continue with his Diary.

In March 1874, Dostoyevsky left The Citizen because of the stressful nature of the work and interference from the Russian bureaucracy. During his 15 months with The Citizen, he was brought to court twice: on 11 June 1873, for citing the words of Prince Meshchersky without permission, and again on 23 March 1874. Dostoyevsky offered to sell The Russian Messenger a new novel he had not yet begun to write, but the magazine refused to give him the fee he asked for.^[note] Nikolay Nekrasov visited him and proposed to publish A Writer's Diary in The National Annals; he would receive 250 rubles for each printer's sheet, 100 more than for The Russian Messenger.

Dostoyevsky's health began to decline, and he suffered from the first symptoms of a lung disease. He consulted several doctors in St. Petersburg and was advised to take a cure outside of Russia. One doctor recommended Bad Ems, another Bad Soden. Dostoeyvsky left Russia and in June visited a well-known pulmonologist in Berlin, who referred him to a doctor in Bad Ems. Around July, Dostoyevsky reached Ems but went to a different physician, where he was diagnosed with acute catarrh and prescribed a natural mineral water. During his stay at the health spa he began to work on The Adolescent, also known as The Raw Youth. In late July he returned to St. Petersburg.

His wife proposed that they spend the winter in Staraya Russa to give him a rest from his work, although doctors suggested that Dostoyevsky make a second visit to Ems because his health improved since his last visit. On 10 August the following year, in Staraya Russa, his son Alexey was born. In mid-September the family returned to St. Petersburg. Dostoyevsky finished The Adolescent at the end of 1875, although sections had been serialised since January of that year in the Annals. The Adolescent chronicles the life of a 19-year-old intellectual, Arkady Dolgoruky, who is the illegitimate child of a controversial and womanising landowner named Versilov. A focus of the novel is the recurring conflict between father and son, particularly in ideology, representing battles between the conventional "old" way of thinking in the 1840s and the new nihilistic view of the youth of 1860s Russia.

Last years

The unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow

In early 1876 Dostoyevsky continued to work on his Diaries. The book's main theme was, like The Adolescent, child abuse by adults. This essay collection sold over twice as much as his previous books. Dostoyevsky received more letters from readers than before, and people of all ages and occupations visited him. Thanks to Anna's brother, the family finally bought a dacha in Staraya Russa.

In the summer of 1876, Dostoyevsky again began suffering from breathlessness. He visited Ems for a third time, was prescribed a similar remedy as before and was told that he might live for another 15 years if he move to a more healthy climate. When Dostoyevsky returned to Russia, Tsar Alexander II ordered him to visit his palace and to present Diaries to him, and asked that Dostoyevsky educate his sons, Sergey and Paul. This visit led to the increase of his circle of acquaintances. He was a frequent guest in several salons in St. Petersburg and met with many famous people, including Princess Sofya Tolstaya, the poet Yakov Polonsky, the politician Sergei Witte, the journalist Alexey Suvorin, the musician Anton Rubinstein and artist Ilya Repin.

Dostoyevsky's health began to deteriorate further, and in March 1877 he had four epileptic seizures. Instead of going back to Ems he decided to visit Maly Prikol, a manor near Kursk. On the way back to St. Petersburg to finalise his Diaries, Dostoyevsky visited Darovoye, where he spent much of his childhood. At the same time Anna and her children made a pilgrimage to Kiev. In December he attended Nikolay Nekrasov's funeral and gave a speech. He was also appointed an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In early 1878 he heard a speech about the "Man of God" delivered by Vladimir Solovyov, which set him thinking about his next novel. In February 1879 he received an honorary certificate from the academy and in the spring he was invited to participate in an international congress about copyright in Paris, headed by Victor Hugo. He declined the invitation after his son Alyosha's death on 16 May, who suffered from an epileptic seizure that had lasted for two hours. The family later moved to an apartment on Yamskaya Street, where Dostoyevsky had written his first works. Around this time he was elected to the board of directors of the Slavic Benevolent Society in St. Petersburg, and that summer he was elected to the honorary committee of the Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale, which included Victor Hugo, Ivan Turgenev, Paul Heyse, Alfred Tennyson, Anthony Trollope, Henry Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Leo Tolstoy.

Funeral of Dostoyevsky

Dostoyevsky made his fourth and final visit to Ems in early August 1879. He was diagnosed as having early-stage pulmonary emphysema. His doctor believed that although his disease could not be cured, it could be successfully managed. The first parts of Dostoyevsky's final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, were serialised in The Russian Messenger on 1 February and the final sections were published in November 1880.

"He seems as if still alive, with a face of total quietude, as in the best moments of his life"

At nearly 800 pages, The Brothers Karamazov is Dostoyevsky's largest literary work and his largest contribution to literature; it is often cited as his greatest work, his magnum opus. It had both critical and popular acclaim. On 3 February 1880, Dostoyevsky was chosen as the vice president of the Slavic Benevolent Society, and was invited to speak at the unveiling of the Pushkin memorial in Moscow. Initially scheduled for 26 May, the date of the unveiling was rescheduled to 6 June because of the death of Empress Maria Alexandrovna. Dostoyevsky delivered his speech from memory two days later, inside a large room, giving such an impressive performance that had great emotional impact on many in his audience. His speech was met with thunderous applause, and even his long-time rival Ivan Turgenev embraced him. Dostoyevsky's speech was later attacked by several people. For example, the liberal political scientist Alexander Gradovsky thought that he idolized the people in his speech, and conservative thinker Konstantin Leontiev, in his essay "On Universal Love", compared the speech with French Utopian socialism rather than Christianity. However, Leontiev praised Dostoyevsky's last novel, stating that it features no "rosy Christianity". These attacks led to a further deterioration of Dostoyevsky's health.

On 25 January, the Tsar's secret police, searching for members of the terror organisation Narodnaya Volya ("The People's Will") who had assassinated Tsar Alexander II, executed a search warrant in the apartment of one of Dostoyevsky's neighbours. Anna denied that this might have been responsible for Dostoyevksy's pulmonary haemorrhage on 26 January 1881, stating that it occurred after Dostoyevsky's search for a dropped pen holder. The haemorrhage may have also been caused by the heavy disputes between his sister Vera shortly before his death, about his aunt's Aleksandra Kumanina estate, which was agreed upon on 30 March and discussed in the St. Petersburg City Court on 24 July 1879. His wife would later acquire a part of the estate of 500 acres (around 202 ha) of forest and 250 acres of farmland. Following another haemorrhage Anna called for doctors, who gave a grim prognosis. A third haemorrhage followed shortly afterwards.

Among Dostoyevsky's last words was his citation of Matthew 3:14: "But John tried to stop him, saying, 'I need to be baptised by you, and are you coming to me?'"

According to a Russian custom, his body was placed on a table. Dostoyevsky was interred in the Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Convent, near his favourite poets Karamsin and Zhukovsky. It is not exactly known how many visitors attended his funeral. According to a reporter, more than 100,000 mourners were there, while others state a number between 40,000 and 50,000. His burial attracted many prominent people. Nestor, archbishop of Vyborg, delivered the liturgy, while Ioann Yanyshev performed the consecration. His tombstone is inscribed with these words of Christ from the New Testament:

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.

— Jesus, from the Gospel According to John 12:24

Personal life

Affairs

Dostoyevsky's had his first known affair with Avdotya Yakovlevna, the wife of Panayev. He met her in the Panayev circle, which included Belinsky and Turgenyev as members, in the early 1840s. She was described as educated, interested in literature and a femme fatale. However, Dostoyevsky later admitted that he "fell hopelessly in love with Panayeva, I'm over it now, but I'm not sure". According to Dostoyevskaya in her memoirs, Dostoyevsky once asked his sister's sister-in-law Yelena Ivanova whether she would marry him (as her husband was deathly ill), but she denied his proposal.

Another short but intimate affair was with Polina Suslova, which peaked in the winter of 1862–63 and decreased in the following years. Suslova's infidelity with a Spaniard in late spring and Dostoyevsky's gambling addiction and age resulted in the end of their relationship. He later described her in a letter to Nadezhda Suslova as a "great egoist. Her egoism and her vanity are colossal. She demands everything of other people, all the perfections, and does not pardon the slightest imperfection in the light of other qualities that one may possess", and later stated "I still love her, but I do not want to love her any more. She doesn't deserve this love..." Around this time, his first wife, Maria Dostoyevskaya, née Isayevna, died of tuberculosis. She had previously refused his marriage proposal, stating that they were not meant for each other and that his poor financial situation precluded marriage. When Dostoyevsky later went to Kuznetsk, he discovered that she had had an affair with the 24-year-old schoolmaster Nikolay Vergunov. Despite this, Maria married Dostoyevsky in Semipalatinsk on 7 February 1857. Their family life was unhappy, however, and she found it difficult to cope with his seizures. Describing their relationship, he wrote "Because of her strange, suspicious and fantastic character, we were definitely not happy together, but we could not stop loving each other; and the more unhappy we were, the more attached to each other we became." They mostly lived apart.

In the spring of 1865, Dostoyevsky met Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya, a Russian socialist and daughter of General Vasily Korvin-Krukovsky. Their relationship was not certain; while Anna Dostoyevskaya spoke of a good affair, Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya's sister, the mathematician Sophia, thought that Anna rejected him after a visit. Around 1866, Dostoyevsky fell in love with the stenographer Anna Snitkina, a "very young and rather nice looking twenty-year-old woman with a kind heart... I noticed that my stenographer loved me sincerely, though she never told me about it. I also liked her more and more". He later "proposed to her and... got married".

Personality and physical appearance

At 2 arshins and 6 vershoks (approximately 1.60 m or 5'2"), Dostoyevsky had a powerful personality but a less robust physical constitution. He was described by his parents as a hot-headed youngster, stubborn and cheeky. Around the time that he was at the private high school in Moscow, several people depicted him as a pale, introverted dreamer and an over-excitable romantic. The most descriptive account during this time was made by a Dr. Alexander Riesenkampf: "Feodor Mikhailovich was no less-good natured and no less courteous than his brother, but when not in a good mood he often looked at everything through dark glasses, became vexed, forgot good manners, and sometimes was carried away to the point of abusiveness and loss of self-awareness"; but "in the circle of his friends he always seemed lively, untroubled, self-content".

As recorded by Baron Wrangel: "When [Dostoyevsky] came in, [he was] extremely reserved [ ... ] morose, his face pale and sickly and covered with freckles. His light-coloured hair was cut short, and he was of more than medium height. Intently looking at me with his sharp, grey-blue eyes, it seemed that he was trying to peer into my very soul – now what sort of man is he? ... ". Herzen characterised Dostoyevsky as "a naive, not entirely lucid, but very nice person".

On the first meeting with Dostoyevsky, Anna Snitkina described him as such: "[Dostoyevsky] was of average height, and he held himself erect. He had light brown, slightly reddish hair, he used some hair conditioner, and he combed his hair in a diligent way. I was struck by his eyes, they were different: one was dark brown; in the other, the pupil was so big that you could not see its color [caused by an injury]. The strangeness of his eyes gave Dostoyevsky some mysterious appearance. His face was pale, and it looked unhealthy..."

Epilepsy

It cannot be known for certain when Dostoyevsky's first epileptic seizure occurred. Some have proposed the age of nine, while others have argued that it was in his teens or early adulthood. Dostoyevsky, however, wrote that his first seizure occurred after the "psychological torture" of the mock execution. In his notebook he recorded a total of 102 seizures in 20 years. Some have thought Dostoyevsky suffered in adulthood from generalised epilepsy, others temporal lobe epilepsy, and some a combination of these two. Théophile Alajouanine stated that he had "partial and secondarily generalised seizures with ecstatic aura", while Henri Gastaut believed that his seizures were "idiopathic generalised". P.H.A. Voskuil described "complex partial seizures with secondarily generalised nocturnal seizures and ecstatic auras". According to Rosetti and Bogousslavsky, Dostoyevsky suffered from "temporal lobe epilepsy, most likely left mesiotemporal, with complex partial and secondarily generalised seizures, with a relatively benign course".

Sigmund Freud, the Austrian psychoanalyst, who linked epilepsy with hysteria, said the illness was caused by his father's death and suggested an Oedipus complex. Freud discussed his theory of the link between epilepsy and hysteria in Dostoevsky and Parricide.

Beliefs

Political

Dostoyevsky's utopia was a Christianized Russia, uninfluenced from European ideas.

In his youth, Dostoyevsky enjoyed reading Nikolai Karamzin's History of the Russian State, which praised conservatism and the independence of Russia from other countries, ideas which Dostoyevsky embraced in his late adulthood. Before his arrest due to participating in the Petrashevsky circle in 1849, Dostoyevsky remarked, "As far as I am concerned, nothing was ever more ridiculous that the idea of a republican government in Russia". In an 1881 edition of his Diaries, Dostoyevsky now favoured republicanism, stating that the tsar and people should form a unity: "For the people the tsar is not an external power, not the power of some conqueror... but a power of all the people, an all-unifiying power the people themselves desired, one they have nurtured in their hearts and have come to love, one for which they have suffered, because it was only through that power they expected their deliverance from the land of Egypt. For the people the tsar is the incarnation of themselves, of their whole idea, their hopes and their beliefs".

Dostoyevsky was critical of serfdom, but was skeptical about the creation of a constitution, which he viewed as a "gentleman's rule". He instead proposed to educate the peasantry into the upper class. Dostoyevsky believed in an utopian Christianized Russia where "if everyone were actively Christian, not a single social question would come up....If they were Christians they would settle everything". He thought democracy and Oligarchy were poor systems, exemplifying the French contemporary state: "the oligarchs are only concerned with the interest of the wealthy; the democrats, only with the interest of the poor; but the interests of society, the interest of all and the future of France as a whole—no one there bothers about these things." He maintained that political parties ultimately lead to social discord. Around the 1860s he discovered Pochvennichestvo. A movement similar to Slavophilism it rejects Europe and its contemporary views (such as nihilism and materialism). However, as opposed to Slavophilism it does not intend to establish an isolated Russia, but a more open, Peter the Great state. In his incomplete "Socialism and Christianity", Dostoyevsky views civilization as a turning point towards liberalism and loss of faith in God. He meant that the traditional concept of Christianity should be recovered. He views contemporary Europe as "lacking the instincts of the bee, which flawlessly and accurately construct their hives and anthills, people sought to construct something in the nature of a flawless human anthill. They rejected the single formula for their salvation that came from God and was proclaimed through revelation to humanity, 'Thou shalt love they neighbor as thyself', and replaced it with practical conclusions such as, 'Chacun pour soi et Dieu pour tous' (Every man for himself and God for all), or scientific slogans such as 'the struggle for survival'".

Dostoyevsky differentiated three "enormous world ideas": Catholicism, which for him was post-Rome, anti-Christian and pre-socialistic; Protestantism, while protesting against Catholicism, itself becomes no better than Catholicism as it will ultimately lose power and spirituality; Russian Orthodox, which was for him the ideal Christianity. During the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878), Dostoyevsky meant that war may be necessary if salvation is granted. He wanted to eliminate the Muslim Ottoman Empire and retrieve the Christian Byzantian Empire. Furthermore he hoped for a liberation of Balkan Slavs and unification with the Russian Empire.

Religious

Dostoyevsky was raised in a "pious Russian family" and knew the Gospel "almost from the cradle". He attended mass every Sunday from an early age, took part in annual pilgrimages at the St. Sergius Trinity Monastery and was introduced to Christianity through the Russian translation of Johannes Hübner's One Hundred and Four Sacred Stories from the Old and New Testaments Selected for Children, which was partly a German children's bible and partly a catechism. As well as having this material at home, Dostoyevsky was educated by a deacon near the hospital. One of his most cherished childhood memories was the prayers in front of guests, and a reading from the Book of Job, which "made an impression on [Dostoyevsky]" when "still almost a child".

According to an officer of the military academy, Dostoyevsky was deeply religious and orthodox and often read the Gospels and Heinrich Zschokke's Die Stunden der Andacht (Hours of Devotion). The latter book "preached a sentimental version of Christianity entirely free from dogmatic content and with a strong emphasis on giving Christian love a social application", which was perhaps his first introduction to Christian socialism. Through the literature of Hoffmann, Balzac, Sue and Goethe, Dostoyevsky created his own belief system similar to Russian sectarianism and Old Belief. After his arrest, subsequent mock execution and imprisonment in Siberia, his religious views focused significantly on Christ and the New Testament, the only book allowed in prison. In January 1854, Dostoyevsky wrote the following letter to a woman who had sent him the Testament:

I have heard from many sources that you are very religious, Natalia Dmitrievna ... As for myself, I confess that I am a child of my age, a child of unbelief and doubt up to this moment, and I am certain that I shall remain so to the grave. What terrible torments this thirst to believe has cost me and continues to cost me, burning ever more strongly in my soul the more contrary arguments there are. Nevertheless, God sometimes sends me moments of complete tranquility. In such moments I love and find that I am loved by others, and in such moments I have nurtured in myself a symbol of truth, in which everything is clear and holy for me. This symbol is very simple: it is the belief that there is nothing finer, profounder, more attractive, more reasonable, more courageous and more perfect than Christ, and not only is there not, but I tell myself with jealous love that there cannot be. Even if someone were to prove to me that the truth lay outside Christ, I should choose to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Pisma, XXVIII, i, p. 176

In a meeting with Baron Wrangel, Dostoyevsky revived his belief in an omniscient, omnipotent Creator by viewing the spangled sky. Wrangel said that he was "rather pious, but did not often go to church, and disliked priests, especially the Siberian ones. But he spoke about Christ ecstatically". Both planned to translate Hegel's works and Carus' Psyche, and Dostoyevsky explored Islam when he asked his brother to send him a copy of the Quran. Two pilgrimages and two works by the influential archbishop, Dmitri Rostovsky, who influenced Ukrainian and Russian literature and composed groundbreaking religious plays, strengthened his beliefs.

Through his visits to Europe and discussions with Herzen, Grigoriev and Strakhov, Dostoyevsky discovered Pochvennichestvo and the theory that the Catholic Church adopted the principles of rationalism, legalism, materialism and individualism from ancient Rome and passed on its philosophy to Protestantism and finally to socialism, which leads to atheism. But as Dostoyevsky never explicitly stated his faith, his real beliefs are uncertain. One exception to this might be his April 1876 response to a question about a suicide in Diary of a Writer, remarking that he was a "philosophical deist", originally a quote from The Adolescent, though he did not mention that it was. However, Dostoyevsky said two months later in his Diaries that his heroine George Sand "died a deisté, firmly believing in God and in the immortality of the Soul". But deists at that time held different beliefs about the immortality of the soul. Furthermore his belief in doctrines such as the Trinity, clearly discussed in The Brothers Karamazov, for example, suggests that he did not quite understand the meaning of this term. Overall, many critics have pointed out that Dostoyevsky's religion is unusual and partially at odds with Christian core beliefs. Malcolm V. Jones has found elements of Islam and Buddhism in his religious beliefs.

Themes and style

Themes

File:Fav Dostoevsky1929.jpg

Dostoyevsky, 1929 woodcut

Dostoyevsky represented the literary movement realism, which depicted contemporary life and society "as they were"; he called himself a "fantastic realist". Apollon Grigoryev called him a "sentimental naturalist". Dostoyevsky was "an explorer of ideas", his life "coincided with a particularly tumultuous period in Russian history, and was undoubtedly shaped by the sociopolitical happenings he witnessed". Beside his writings on human psychology and religion, Dostoyevsky was known for his frequent use of satire; critic Harold Bloom even meant that "satiric parody is the center of Dostoyevsky's art." Dostoyevsky's use of space and time were analysed by philologist Vladimir Toporov, who stated that "the unexpected not only is possible but also always happens". Through the minimisation of the passing of time, where facts suddenly appear, the instant wins the time and then relaxes, disappearing in the scenes. Toporov compares time and space in Dostoyevsky with film scenes: the Russian word vdrug(suddenly) appears 560 times in the Russian edition of Crime and Punishment, and provides the reader with impressions of tension, inequality and nervousness, which are characteristic elements of the structure of the Dostoyevskian romance. Dostoyevsky's works utilise numbers, sometimes with extreme precision: at two steps..., two roads to the right, as well as high and rounded numbers (100, 1000, 10000). Critics such as Donald Fanger and Roman Katsman, writer of The Time of Cruel Miracles: Mythopoesis in Dostoevsky and Agnon, call these elements "mythopoeic". Dostoyevsky's characters' growth occurs through repetition, events, and memory, despite how painful they may be for the characters.

Dostoyevsky described human nature; according to his good friend, the Russian philosopher Nikolay Strakhov, "All his attention was directed upon people, and he grasped at only their nature and character", because he was "interested by people, people exclusively, with their state of soul, with the manner of their lives, their feelings and thoughts". Philosopher and Dostoyevsky researcher Nikolai Berdyaev stated that he "is not a realist as an artist, he is an experimentator, a creator of an experimential metaphysics of human nature". His characters live in an unlimited, irrealistic world, beyond borders and limits. Berdyaev remarks that "Dostoevsky reveals a new mystical science of man", limited to people "which have been drawn into the whirlwind".

Dostoyevsky's works explore irrational dark motifs, dreams, emotions and visions, all typical elements of Gothic literature. He was an avid reader of the Gothic and enjoyed the works of Ann Radcliffe, Balzac, Hoffmann, Charles Maturin and Soulié. Among his first Gothic works was "The Landlady". The stepfather's demonic fiddle and the mysterious seller in Netochka Nezvanova are Gothic-like. In Humiliated and Insulted, the villain has a typical demonic appearance. Other roots of this genre can be found in Crime and Punishment; for example the dark and dirty rooms and Raskolnikov's Mephistophelian character, or the vampire-like Nastasia Filippovna in The Idiot and femme-fatale Katerina Ivanovna in The Brothers Karamazov.

Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin highlights Dostoyevsky's use of literary polyphony, where independent, equal voices speak for an individual self, in a context in which they can be heard, flourish and interact together, which he calls "carnivalesque". Many of Dostoyevsky's works have elements of menippean satire, which he most likely revived as a genre, and which combines comedy, fantasy, symbolism and adventure and in which mental attitudes are personified. A Writer's Diary and "Bobok" are "one of the greatest menippeas in all world literature", but examples can be found in "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man", the first encounter between Raskolnikov and Sonja in Crime and Punishment, which is "an almost perfect Christianised menippea", and in "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor".

Unnatural suicides are found in several of Dostoyevsky's books. The 1860s–1880s marked a near-epidemic period of suicides in Russia, mainly caused by the growth and popularity of atheist and positivist philosophy, and many contemporary Russian authors wrote about suicide. Dostoyevsky's suicide victims are disbelievers and models of the "new man": the Underground Man in Notes from Underground, Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Ippolit in The Idiot, Kirillov in The Demons, and Ivan Karamazov and Smerdiakov in The Brothers Karamazov. In The Demons, Kirillov remarks in a correspondence with the atheist Petr Verkhovensky that "God is necessary and therefore must exist", while Verkhovensky responds: "Well, that's wonderful". Kirillov answers: "But I know that He does not and cannot exist", and after a meaningless cliché by Verkhanovsky he continues: "Don't you understand that a man with these two thoughts cannot go on living?" At the end of the novel, Kirillov begins to kill himself; a conclusion like this one derives from the characters' disbelief in God and immortality and their acceptance of contemporary philosophies such as positivism and materialism). Dostoyevsky felt that a belief in God and immortality was necessary for human existence.

Early writing

Dostoyevsky, 1859

Dostoyevsky's early works were influenced by contemporary writers, including Pushkin, Gogol and Hoffmann, which led to accusations of plagiarism. Several critics pointed out similarities in The Double to Gogol's works The Overcoat and The Nose. Parallels have been made between his short story "An Honest Thief" and George Sand's François le champi and Eugène Sue's Mathilde ou Confessions d'une jeune fille, and between Dostoyevsky's Netochka Nezvanova and Charles Dickens' Dombey and Son. Like many young writers, he was "not fully convinced of his own creative faculty, yet firmly believed in the correctness of his critical judgement."

Dostoyevsky's translations of Balzac's Eugénie Grandet and Sand's La dernière Aldini differ from standard translations. In his translation of Eugénie Grandet, he often omitted whole passages or paraphrased significantly, perhaps because of his rudimentary knowledge of French or his haste. He also used darker words, such as "gloomy" instead of "pale" and "cold", and sensational adjectives, such as "horrible" and "mysterious". The translation of La desnière Aldini was never completed because someone already published one in 1837. He also abandonded working on Mathilde by Eugène Sue due to lack of funds. Influenced by the plays he watched during this time, he wrote verse dramas for two plays, Mary Stuart by Schiller and Boris Godunov by Pushkin, which have been lost.

Dostoyevsky's debut novel, Poor Folk, describes in the form of an epistolary novel the relationship between the elderly official Makar Devushkin and the young seamstress Varvara Dobroselova, a remote relative. They write letters to each other and through the tender, sentimental adoration for his relative and her confident, warm friendship with him, they seem to prefer a life in a higher society, although it forced them into poverty. Literature critic Harold Bloom called Poor Folk "Russia's first social novel"; it was well-received, especially by critic Vissarion Belinsky, who liked the depiction of poor and downtrodden people. Dostoyevsky's success would not continue with his next work, The Double, which centres on a shy protagonist Yakov Golyadkin, who discovers how his doppelgänger, who has achieved the success denied to him, has slowly destroyed his life. The novel was panned by critics and readers alike; Belinsky commented that the work had "no sense, no content and no thoughts", and that the novel was boring due to the protagonist's garrulity, or tendency towards verbal diarrhoea. He and other critics stated that the idea for The Double was brilliant, but that its external form was misconceived and full of multi-clause sentences.

The short stories Dostoyevsky wrote after this period but before prison have similar themes as Poor Folk and The Double. For example, his short story "White Nights", which "features rich nature and music imagery, gentle irony, usually directed at the first-person narrator himself, and a warm pathos that is always ready to turn into self-parody". The first three parts of his unfinished novel Netochka Nezvanova chronicle the trials and tribulations of Netochka, stepdaughter of a second-class fiddler, and in "A Christmas Tree and a Wedding", Dostoyevsky switches to social satire.

Later years

After his release from prison, Dostoyevsky's writing style changed drastically, moving away from the "sentimental naturalism" of Poor Folk and The Insulted and Injured, and featuring more psychological and philosophical themes. Even though he spent four years in prison in poor conditions, Dostoyevsky wrote two humorous books, the novella Uncle's Dream and the novel The Village of Stepanchikovo. His novel Notes From the Underground, which he partially wrote in prison, was his first secular book, with few references to religion. Later, he wrote about his reluctance to remove religious themes from the book, stating, "The censor pigs have passed everything where I scoffed at everything and, on the face of it, was sometimes even blasphemous, but have forbidden the parts where I demonstrated the need for belief in Christ from all this".

Since the publication of Notes from the Underground, critics have stated that Dostoyevsky's concern with the downtrodden was "motivated not so much by compassion as by an unhealthy curiosity about the darker recesses of the human psyche, ... by a perverse attraction to the diseased states of the human mind, ... or ... by sadistic pleasure in observing human suffering". Humiliated and Insulted was similarly secular; only at the end of the 1860s, beginning with the publication of Crime and Punishment, did Dostoyevsky's religious themes resurface.

The House of the Dead is a semi-autobiographical memoir written while Dostoyevsky was in prison and includes a few religious themes. Characters from the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, appear in it, and while the Jewish character Isay Fomich is portrayed negatively, so are characters affiliated with the Orthodox Church and the Old Believers, while the Muslims Nurra and Aley from Dagestan are depicted positively. Aley is later educated by reading the Bible, and shows a fascination for the altruistic message in Christ's Sermon on the Mount, which he views as the ideal philosophy.

Dostoyevsky's later works are characterised by autobiographical elements. According to Norwegian Slavist and vice president of the International Dostoevsky Association, Geir Kjetsaa, "Dostoyevsky's life is a novel". The Idiot, perhaps Dostoyevsky's most autobiographical work, has many similarities to his life; for example, the viewing of Holbein's painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, Prince Myshkin's skilled handwriting and similarities between he and his characters.

The works Dostoyevsky published in the 1870s explore human beings' capacity for manipulation. The Eternal Husband and "The Meek One" describe the relationship between a man and woman in marriage, the first chronicling the manipulation of a husband by his wife; the latter the opposite. "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" raises this theme of manipulation from the individual to a metaphysical level. Philosopher Nikolay Strakhov agreed, saying that Dostoyevsky was "a great thinker and a great visionary... a dialectician of genius, one of Russia's greatest metaphysicians."

Style

According to Strakhov, a close friend of Dostoyevsky's who wrote many memoirs describing the latter's writing attitudes and habits, "[Dostoyevsky] wrote late at night. Around midnight, when the whole house went to bed, he stayed alone, with his samowar, drinking not very strong, but almost cold tea, and writing until five or six o'clock in the morning. He got up around two or three o'clock in the afternoon." The lazy but hardworking Dostoyevsky wrote as fast as possible as he needed money badly. He also postponed the writing to the last possible day and only wrote when he had enough time to finish his work. It is not surprising that he often exceeded the time limit. Dostoyevsky was known for his artistic writing. Grigorovich described the letters as beads from a necklace. He only knew one person who could write in such a manner: Thomas-Alexandre Dumas.

Philosophy

Dostoyevsky's works were often called "philosophical" despite his lack of knowledge about philosophy; he described himself as "weak in philosophy". "Fyodor Mikhailovich loved these questions about the essence of things and the limits of knowledge", Strakhov wrote. Although theologian George Florovsky described Dostoyevsky as a "philosophical problem" because it is unknown whether Dostoyevsky believed in what he wrote, many philosophical thoughts are found in books such as A Writer's Diary and The Brothers Karamazov because he often wrote in the first person. He might have been critical of rational and logical thinking because he was "more a sage and an artist than a strictly logical, consistent thinker." He represented Kierkegaardian irrationalism, in works such as House of the Dead, Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment and Demons. His irrationalism is mentioned in William Barrett's Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy and in Walter Kaufmann's Existentialisms from Dostoevsky to Sartre.

Criticism

Dostoyevsky's work has not always met with a positive reception. Several critics, such as Dobrolyubov, Bunin and Nabokov, found that while his writing successfully explored psychological and philosophical themes, its artistic quality was "below criticism". Others found fault in chaotic and disorganised plots, while still others, such as Turgenev, in "excessive psychologising", or in a naturalism that was too detailed. His characters were called "unrealistic, schematic and contrived". His style was deemed to be "prolix, repetitious and lacking in polish, balance, restraint and good taste". The Idiot, The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov were criticised for including unrealistic characters by critics such as Saltykov-Shchedrin, Tolstoy and Mikhailovsky, They were described as "puppets", as "pale, pretentious and artificial", which is not what should be found in realism literature. The puppet-like appearance was compared with Hoffmann's characters, an author whom Dostoyevsky admired.

Basing his estimation on a stated criteria of enduring art and individual genius, Nabokov judged Dostoyevsky as "not a great writer, but rather a mediocre one—with flashes of excellent humor but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between." Compiling a list he demonstrates and complains that the novels are peopled by "neurotics and lunatics" and notes that Dostoyevsky's characters do not develop. "We get them all complete at the beginning of the tale and so they remain." He finds the novels full of contrived "surprises and complications of plot", which when first read are effective; but upon a second reading, and without the shock and benefit of these surprises, the books appear loaded with "glorified cliché".

Legacy

Together with Leo Tolstoy, and despite some criticism about his puppet-like characters and the off-topic verbiages, Dostoyevsky is often regarded as one of the greatest and most influential novelists of the Golden Age of Russian literature. The publication of his debut novel, Poor Folk, pushed him into the literary mainstream, and critics saw him as a rising star of Russian literature. He was known for his gifted narrative; according to Konstantin Staniukovich in his essay "The Pushkin Anniversary and Dostoevsky's Speech" from Business, "the language of Dostoevsky's [Pushkin Speech] really looks like a sermon. He speaks with the tone of a prophet. He makes a sermon as a pastor; it is very deep, sincere, and we understand that he wants to impress the emotions of his listeners." Through Dostoyevsky's sophisticated treatment of intellectual and political discussions he was described as a spiritual guide, a teacher and even a prophet.

Dostoyevsky's works also attracted readers outside of Russia. The German translator Wilhelm Wolfsohn published one of the first translations, parts of Poor Folk, in an 1846/1847 magazine, and a French translation followed. The first English translations were provided by Marie von Thilo in 1881, and the first acclaimed translations into English were produced between 1912 and 1920 by Constance Garnett.

Soviet Union stamp, 1971

Many non-Russians have been introduced to Dostoyevsky's works. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called Dostoyevsky "the only psychologist, incidentally, from whom I had something to learn; he ranks among the most beautiful strokes of fortune in my life ... " Thomas Mann advised reading his novels in their entirety. Hermann Hesse enjoyed Dostoyevsky's work; he also cautioned that to read him is like a "glimpse into the havoc". The Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun wrote that "no one has analysed the complicated human structure as Dostoyevsky. His psychologic sense is overwhelming and visionary. We have no yardstick by which to assess his greatness". André Gide said that Dostoyevsky "should be put beside Ibsen and Nietzsche; he is equal in size to these three, and maybe the most important".

In a letter to Gide by Edmund Gosse: "[Dostoyevsky] is the cocaine and morphia of modern literature". Ernest Hemingway acknowledged Dostoyevsky as one of those writers who had influenced his work. In his posthumously published collection of sketches A Moveable Feast, Hemingway stated that in Dostoevsky "there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true that they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know."

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."

Dostoyevsky monument in Dresden

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". Franz Kafka named Dostoyevsky as his "blood-relative", and was heavily influenced by his works, especially The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, both of which had a profound effect on The Trial. Sigmund Freud called his last work "the most significant novel ever written". Modern cultural movements such as the surrealists, the existentialists and the Beats named Dostoyevsky as an influence. Dostoyevsky is cited as the forerunner of Russian symbolism, existentialism, expressionism and psychoanalysis.

After the 1917 Russian Revolution, Dostoyevsky's books were often censored or banned. His philosophy, especially in The Demons, was deemed capitalistic and anti-communist, leading Maxim Gorky to nickname the author "our evil genius". Reading Dostoyevsky was forbidden, and those who did not observe this law were imprisoned. During the Second World War, however, his works were used as propaganda by both the Soviets and the Nazis, and after the war the prohibition law in the Soviet Union was overturned. His 125th anniversary in 1947 was celebrated throughout Russia; despite this, his novels were banned again until Nikita Khrushchev's accession to power ten years later, following de-Stalinization and a softening of repressive laws.

In the second half of the twentieth century, his works topped the best-seller lists worldwide. Philosophers, psychologists, theologians, politicians, literary critics, physicians, lawyers and students acknowledged his works, and many of his novels and short stories were filmed and dramatised in the Soviet Union and the West. Dostoyevsy's fictional characters and his work overall were popularised in graffiti, in presidential speeches, vaudeville, films and plays.

In 1956 an olive-green postage stamp dedicated to Dostoyevsky was released in the Soviet Union with a print run of 1,000 copies. A Dostoevsky Museum was opened on 12 November 1971 in the apartment where he wrote his first and last novels. A minor planet was discovered in 1981 by Lyudmila Karachkina and named 3453 Dostoevsky. Viewers of the TV show Name of Russia voted him the ninth greatest Russian of all time, behind chemist Dmitry Mendeleev and ahead of the Russian ruler Ivan IV. A Moscow Metro station on the Lyublinsko-Dmitrovskaya Line was scheduled to open to the public on 15 May, the 75th anniversary of the Moscow Metro; illustrations on the décor made by artist Ivan Nikolaev were criticised because of their depiction of suicides, but did not hinder the opening of Dostoyevskaya on 19 June 2010.

Four of Dostoyevsky's books, Crime and Punishment, The Possessed, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, are included on the list of 100 best books of all time.

Works

Dostoyevsky's works of fiction include 15 novels and novellas, 17 short stories, and 5 translations. Many of his longer novels were first published in serialised 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.

Plays

• (~1844) The Jew Yankel (unknown whether finished or not; title based on Gogol's character from Taras Bulba)

Novels and novellas

• (1846) Poor Folk
• (1846) The Double: A Petersburg Poem
• (1849) Netochka Nezvanova (unfinished)
• (1859) Uncle's Dream
• (1859) The Village of Stepanchikovo
• (1861) Humiliated and Insulted
• (1862) The House of the Dead
• (1864) Notes from Underground
• (1866) Crime and Punishment
• (1867) The Gambler
• (1869) The Idiot
• (1870) The Eternal Husband
• (1872) Demons
• (1875) The Adolescent
• (1880) The Brothers Karamazov

Short stories

• (1846) "Mr. Prokharchin"
• (1847) "Novel in Nine Letters"
• (1847) "The Landlady"
• (1848) "The Jealous Husband"
• (1848) "A Weak Heart"
• (1848) "Polzunkov"
• (1848) "The Honest Thief"
• (1848) "The Christmas Tree and a Wedding"
• (1848) "White Nights"
• (1849) "A Little Hero"
• (1862) "A Nasty Anecdote"
• (1865) "The Crocodile"
• (1873) "Bobok"
• (1876) "The Heavenly Christmas Tree"
• (1876) "The Meek One"
• (1876) "The Peasant Marey"
• (1877) "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man"

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)

Translations

• (1843) Eugénie Grandet, (Honore de Balzac)
• (1843) La dernière Aldini (George Sand)
• (1843) Mary Stuart (Friedrich Schiller)
• (1843) Boris Godunov (Alexander Pushkin)

See also

• MS Feodor Dostoevskiy
• L. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky
• Antimaterialism
• List of Russian philosophers

Notes

1.^ His name has been variously transcribed in English, his first name sometimes being rendered as Theodore or Fedor. 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.

2.^ Old Style date 30 October 1821 – 28 January 1881

3.^ The brother of Eduard Totleben, from whom Dostoyevsky would later appeal for his release from the military after prison.

4.^ The actual reason, which they kept secret from him, was that the periodical had already arranged to publish Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

5.^ Nicholas I supported the technical university which provided the opportunity for a good professional military career.

6.^ Lyubov later called herself Aimée (French for "beloved").

7.^ Time magazine was a popular periodical, with more than 4,000 subscribers before it was closed on 24 May 1863, by the Tsarist Regime due to its publication of an essay by Nikolay Strakhov about the Polish revolt in Russia. Time and its 1864 successor Epokha expressed the philosophy of the conservative and Slavophile movement Pochvennichestvo, which was supported by Dostoyevsky during his term of imprisonment and in his post-prison years.

Bibliography

• Bloshteyn, Maria R. (2007). The Making of a Counter-Culture Icon: Henry Miller's Dostoevsky. University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-0-8020-9228-1.
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• Burry, Alexander (2011). Multi-Mediated Dostoevsky: Transposing Novels Into Opera, Film, and Drama. Northwestern University Press. ISBN 978-0-8101-2715-9.
• Cicovacki, Predrag (2012). Dostoevsky and the Affirmation of Life. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-1-4128-4606-6.
• Jones, Malcom V.; Terry, Garth M. (2010). New Essays on Dostoyevsky. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-15531-1.
• Meier-Gräfe, Julius (1988). Dostoevsky: The Man and His Work. Frankfurt am Main: insel verlag.
• Lantz, Kenneth A. (2004). The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-313-30384-5.
• Mochulsky, Konstantin (1967) [1967]. Dostoevsky: His Life and Work. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01299-7.
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• Müller, Ludolf (1982). Dostojewskij: Sein Leben, Sein Werk, Sein Vermächtnis (in German). Munich: Erich Wewel Verlag.
• Sekirin, Peter (1997). The Dostoevsky Archive: Firsthand Accounts of the Novelist from Contemporaries' Memoirs and Rare Periodicals, Most Translated Into English for the First Time, with a Detailed Lifetime Chronology and Annotated Bibliography. McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-0264-9.
• Terras, Victor (1998). Reading Dostoevsky. University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 978-0-299-16054-8.

Biographies

• Bloom, Harold (2004). Fyodor Dostoevsky. Infobase Publishing. ISBN 978-0-7910-8117-4.
• Frank, Joseph (2009). Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time. Vol. 1–5. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-12819-1.
• Frank, Joseph (1979) [1976]. Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-01355-8.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Frank, Joseph (1987) [1983]. Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-01422-7.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Frank, Joseph (1988) [1986]. Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-01452-4.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Frank, Joseph (1997) [1995]. Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-01587-3.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Frank, Joseph (2003) [2002]. Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-11569-6.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Hingley, Ronald (1978). Dostoyevsky, his life and work. Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 978-0-684-15916-4.
• Kjetsaa, Geir (1989). A Writer's Life. Fawcett Columbine. ISBN 9780449903346.
• Lavrin, Janko (1947). Dostoevksy. New York: New York The Macmillan Company. OCLC 646160256.

Religion

• Bercken, Wil van den (2011). Christian Fiction and Religious Realism in the Novels of Dostoevsky. Anthem Press. ISBN 978-0-85728-976-6.
• Jones, Malcolm V. (2005). Dostoevsky And the Dynamics of Religious Experience. Anthem Press. ISBN 978-1-84331-205-5.
• Cassedy, Steven (2005). Dostoevsky's Religion. Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-5137-4.
• Pattison, George; Thompson, Diane Oenning (2001). Dostoevsky and the Christian tradition. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-78278-4.