Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky. Portrait by Vasily Perov, 1872

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (Фёдор Миха́йлович Достое́вский, sometimes transliterated Dostoyevsky ) (November 11, 1821, – February 9, 1881) was one of the greatest Russian writers of all time, whose works have a profound and lasting effect on twentieth-century thought and fiction. Often featuring characters with disparate and extreme states of the mind, his works exhibit both an uncanny grasp of human psychology as well as penetrating analyses of the political, social, and spiritual state of Russia during his time. Many of his best-known works are prophetic as precursors of modern-day thought and preoccupations.

He is sometimes said to be a founder of existentialism, most notably in Notes from Underground, which has been described by Walter Kaufmann as "the best overture for existentialism ever written." Ironically, it was not a worldview which he personally endorsed.

His greatest concern appears to have been the loss of spiritual values, especially by the rationalists of his day. Rationalists held that human beings were basically good, but that society was corrupt; therefore by changing the social conditions, people's natural goodness would shine through. Dostoevsky's response, as in his Notes from Underground, was simply to portray human irrationality. Rather than argue with socialist ideology, Dostoevsky "burst the bubble" with a description of an irrational man, who could not be redeemed by merely changing the social order. His novel, Besy, (literally, “Demons”) translated as either The Devils or The Possessed, is often credited with foreseeing the coming of communism to Russia. He feared that rationalism would lead to disastrous consequences in Russia because, as he famously put it, “Without God, everything is permitted.”

Biography

Fyodor was the second of seven children born to Mikhail and Maria Dostoevsky. His father was a nobleman; his mother came from a family of merchants. Shortly after his mother died of tuberculosis in 1837, he and his brother Mikhail were sent to the Military Engineering Academy at St. Petersburg. Their father, a retired military surgeon who served as a doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in Moscow, died in 1839. Rumors circulated that Mikhail Dostoevsky was murdered by his own serfs, who reportedly became enraged during one of Mikhail's drunken fits of violence, restrained him, and poured vodka into his mouth until he drowned. Most likely Mikhail died of natural causes, and a neighboring landowner invented this story of a peasant rebellion so he could buy the estate cheaply. Regardless of what may have actually happened, Sigmund Freud focused on this tale in his famous, but largely discredited article, Dostoevsky and Parricide (1928).

Arrest and Imprisonment

Dostoevsky served in the Corps of Engineers until 1844, when he resigned his commission to become a full-time writer. His first novel, Poor Folk, was well-received by the famous Russian literary critic, Vissarion Belinksy. His second novel, The Double, signaled his later psychological interests. Just as his career was starting to take off, Dostoevsky was arrested and imprisoned in 1849 for engaging in revolutionary activity against Tsar Nikolai I. On November 16 of that year he was sentenced to death for anti-government activities linked to a liberal intellectual group, the Petrashevsky Circle, a reading circle of liberal intellectuals who met on Fridays to discuss Fourierist socialism and the emancipation of the serfs. After a mock execution in which he was blindfolded and ordered to stand outside in freezing weather awaiting death by firing squad, Dostoevsky's sentence was commuted to exile, performing hard labor at a Katorga prison camp in Omsk, Siberia. The incidence of epileptic seizures, to which he was predisposed, increased during this period. He was released from prison in 1854, but required to serve in the Siberian Regiment. Dostoevsky spent the following five years as a corporal (and latterly lieutenant) in the Regiment's Seventh Line Battalion stationed at the fortress of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan.

This was a turning point in the author's life. Dostoevsky abandoned his earlier liberal sentiments. He became politically conservative and embraced Orthodoxy. He began an affair with, and later married, Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, the widow of an acquaintance in Siberia, who died of consumption several years later.

Return to St. Petersburg

In 1860, he returned to St. Petersburg, where he began a successful literary journal, Time, with his older brother, Mikhail. After it was shut down by the government for publishing an unfortunate article by their friend, Nikolai Strakhov, they began another unsuccessful journal, Epoch. Dostoevsky was devastated by his wife's death in 1864, followed shortly thereafter by his brother's death. Financially crippled by business debts and the need to provide for his brother's widow and children, Dostoevsky sank into a deep depression, frequenting gambling parlors and accumulating massive losses at the tables.

Dostoevsky suffered from an acute gambling compulsion and its consequences. By one account Crime and Punishment, possibly his best-known novel, was completed in a mad hurry because Dostoevsky was in urgent need of an advance from his publisher. He had been left practically penniless after a gambling spree. Dostoevsky wrote The Gambler in similar fashion in order to satisfy an agreement with his publisher Stellovsky. The agreement stipulated that if Stellovsky did not receive a new work, he would claim the copyrights to all of Dostoyevsky's writing.

Dostoevsky traveled to Western Europe, motivated by the dual wish to escape his creditors at home and to visit the casinos abroad. There, he attempted to rekindle a love affair with Apollinaria (Polina) Suslova, a young university student with whom he had had an affair several years prior, but she refused his marriage proposal. Dostoevsky was heartbroken, but soon met Anna Snitkina, a 20-year-old stenographer whom he married in 1867. With her help Dostoevsky wrote some of the greatest novels ever written, including Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. From 1873 to 1881 he vindicated his earlier journalistic failures by publishing a monthly journal full of short stories, sketches, and articles on current events, titled the Writer's Diary. The journal was an enormous success.

In 1877, Dostoevsky gave a controversial keynote eulogy at the funeral of his friend, the poet Nekrasov. In 1880, shortly before he died, he gave his famous Pushkin speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin Monument in Moscow.

In his later years, Fyodor Dostoevsky lived at the resort of Staraya Russa, which was closer to St. Petersburg and less expensive than German resorts. He died on February 9, 1881, and was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, St. Petersburg, Russia.

Major Works

File:450px-Grab-dostojewsky.jpg

Dostoyevsky's tomb at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery.

From the time of his return to St. Petersburg, until the end of his life, Dostoevsky wrote some of the most important novels in history. Notes from Underground, published in 1864, became the founding document of twentieth-century existentialism, although the "underground man" was not speaking for the author, but for himself. Written in part as a response to N. G. Chernyshevsky's socialist utopian What Is to Be Done?, it demonstrates that human beings are at bottom quite capable of acting against their own best rational interest, which Chernyshevsky and other disciples of Feuerbach, including Marx, had touted as the anthropological principle that would lead humankind into progress and freedom. "Part One" of the novel reads like the ravings of a lunatic, a 40 year old Petersburg intellectual who expounds on his "philosophy" in a rambling, disjointed diatribe. What becomes clear is that this underground man is the dark side of human nature: a neurotic, self-conscious, misanthropic hypochondriac. By simply placing on display this aspect of human nature, Dostoevsky undermines the pretensions in socialist utopianism.

Crime and Punishment is one of the most beloved novels ever written. Like all great novels, it operates on many different levels at once. It is a first-rate crime story, although unlike the conventional "who dunnit," the murder of the old pawnbroker and her sister is presented early in the narrative, and the rest of the novel represents both an attempt to unravel its motive, but also the resolution of the evil deed and the redemption of its anti-hero, Rodion Raskolnikov. This crime thriller and spiritual allegory is also, first and foremost, the tale of a dysfunctional family. Raskolnikov's "superman theory," which predated and clearly influenced that of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, was merely a thought experiment until he learns through a letter from home that his sister, Dunya, is throwing her life away to marry a scoundrel in order to save him and secure his future. Further, he learns that his mother is coming to Petersburg, apparently to better organize and run his life. The "cat and mouse" game that Raskolnikov and the police detective plays together with Raskolnikov's interactions with the prostitute, Sonya, as he seeks forgiveness, form the two poles between which the narrative oscillates. The brilliance of the story lies in Dostoevsky's ability to weave all these narrative threads together.

The Possessed is widely seen as a revolutionary allegory that foreshadows events a generation later. The title literally means "demons," and the collection of characters, from the Luciferian Stavrogin, to the revolutionary organizer Verkhovensky, to the madman Kirilov, is a veritable demonology. Kirilov is a nihilist who sets out to kill himself to prove God's nonexistence, but eventually kills himself in despair. When it was published, the censors refused the chapter entitled, "Stavrogin's Confession," which contained his confession to the rape of a young girl. This led to many unsubstantiated rumors that the chapter was autobiographical.

Dostoevsky's notes for chapter 5 of The Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov was Dostoevsky's last and perhaps greatest novel. Like Crime and Punishment, it is a religious and moral allegory rooted in the struggles of one family, Fyodor Karamazov and his three sons, Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha. It is widely understood that each of the sons represents a different human faculty or quality. Dmitri is the sensualist, Ivan the intellectual, and Alyosha the spiritual element. Like Crime and Punishment, the action of the novel centers around a murder mystery, as Fyodor is killed and Dmitri is convicted of the murder. While Dmitri is actually innocent of this deed, the novel raises larger questions of innocence and guilt, and ultimately all the brothers are implicated on some level in the murder. Dmitri and his father are rivals for Grushenka, which forms the basis of his conviction. Ivan provides the rational for the deed that was committed by Smerdyakov, Fyodor's valet and reputed to be his bastard son. Only the saintly Alyosha played no part in the actual murder, but he nonetheless feels guilty for his inability to prevent the murder.

The most famous passage of The Brothers Karamazov is the section on "The Grand Inquisitor." A story told by Ivan to Alyosha, the section is an intellectual's argument with God about the suffering of innocent children. In the story, Christ returns only to find that the church is run by men who, knowing that there is no God, have created a false faith to comfort the masses. Reminiscent of the philosophy of the Devil during Christ's temptation in the wilderness, this new church must exclude Christ because his teachings would cause trouble for their earthly paradise. Ivan eventually has a nervous breakdown, unable to face up to the consequences of such a world. This parable represents the last in a line of Dostoevsky's indictments of the attempt to create a secular paradise without God. Dostoevsky's works presaged many of the struggles of the twentieth century, especially within Russia itself.

Criticism and Influence

By common critical consensus one among the handful of universal world authors, along with Dante, Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, Victor Hugo and a few others, Dostoevsky has decisively influenced twentieth-century literature, existentialism, and expressionism in particular. His influence cannot be overemphasized—from Herman Hesse to Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Henry Miller, Yukio Mishima, Gabriel García Márquez, even Ernest Hemingway—virtually no great twentieth-century writer has escaped his long shadow. In his day, he was popular, but not considered a great artist. His style was considered "messy," especially in comparison to a technician like Tolstoy, whose language is clean and neat and whose plots are almost mathematical in their precision. Dostoevsky's texts often contain feverishly dramatized scandal scenes, which appear to reach their depth, only to have something even more scandalous occur. For this reason, he became known as a writer who depicted extreme psychological states. He created situations that permit disparate characters to come into contact with one another, and allowed the conflicts between them to play out.

However, this "lack of style" was reinterpreted by Formalist literary critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, in his Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, as a feature of Dostoevsky's own unique style. According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky's work was a polyphonic composition, which allowed each of his characters to express their own idea and to interact in dialogic fashion with all the other characters in the novel. Most represent a single idea: the humble and self-effacing Christians (Prince Myshkin, Sonya Marmeladova, Alyosha Karamazov, Father Zossima), the self-destructive nihilists (Svidrigailov, Smerdyakov, Stavrogin, the underground man), the cynical debaucher (Fyodor Karamazov), and the rebellious intellectuals (Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov). Every word, or idea, is confronted with another and placed in dialogue with it. Bakhtin characterized his work as “polyphonic”: unlike other novelists, Dostoevsky does not appear to aim for a “single vision.” Rather, he allows each idea to have free reign in the interplay of ideas. For this reason, Dostoevsky often brings together characters that do not necessarily come from the same milieu, or that don't belong together. (This was Nabokov's complaint about Sonya and Raskolnikov reading The Bible together in Crime and Punishment.) He does this in order to give each character free reign to express their idea and to interact with all the other ideas in the novel. This interplay gives his novels a fully dramatic quality. They are more like plays than typical novels. The goal of Dostoevsky’s art is to allow full expression and interaction between these ideas. This creates a "messy" structure, but it is not due to a lack of artistry, but characteristic of Dostoevsky's unique artistic vision.

One reason that Dostoevsky was not considered a great stylist is that the period in which he wrote was dominated by realism. In realism, the milieu of the story is usually described in great detail as an indication of character. Dostoevsky’s novels contain very little detail about milieu. That is because his characters are driven by ideas rather than by ordinary biological or social imperatives. When Tolstoy describes a dinner between two men, such as he does in the beginning of Anna Karenina, he will take pages to describe the restaurant, the settings, the dishes—everything about the encounter. When Dostoevsky describes a dinner meeting in The Devils (1872), the reader is not even sure whether the characters even eat.

Dostoevsky's novels depart from another convention of realism. They are compressed in time (many cover only a few days) and space (the action in Crime and Punishment, for example, takes place in hallways, basements, foyers, and other cramped spaces). This enables the author to mitigate some of the aspects of realist prose. Dostoevsky called his method "realism in a higher sense."

Major Texts

• Poor Folk (1846)
• The Double: A Petersburg Poem (1846)
• Netochka Nezvanova (1849)
• The Village of Stepanchikovo (or The Friend of the Family) (1859)
• The Insulted and Humiliated (or The Insulted and the Injured) (1861)
• The House of the Dead (1862)
• A Nasty Story (1862)
• Notes from Underground (or Letters from the Underworld) (1864)
• Crime and Punishment (1866)
• The Gambler (1867)
• The Idiot (1868)
• The Possessed (or Demons or The Devils) (1872)
• The Raw Youth (or The Adolescent) (1875)
• The Brothers Karamazov (1880)

External links and references

• FyodorDostoevsky.com—The Definitive Dostoevsky fan site
• Fyodor Dostoevsky's brief biography and works
• Selected Dostoevsky e-texts from Penn Library’s digital library project
• Full texts of some Dostoevsky's works in the original Russian
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky—Biography, e-books, quotations, and other resources
• Some photos of places and statues that are reminiscent of Dostoevsky and his work

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