Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (Redirected from Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoevsky. Portrait by Vasily Perov, 1872Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (Фёдор Миха́йлович Достое́вский, sometimes transliterated Dostoyevsky listen[?]) (November 11, (October 30, Old Style), 1821, – February 9, (January 28, O.S.), 1881, St. Petersburg, Russia) The nineteenth century Russian novelist has had a profound and lasting effect on twentieth-century culture and fiction. Often featuring characters with disparate and extreme states of mind, his works exhibit both an uncanny grasp in human psychology as well as penetrating analyses in the politics, social and spiritual state of Russia of his time. Many of his best-known works are prophetic as precursors of modern-day thought and preoccupations. His famous comment, “Without God, everything is permitted” is seen by some as a prediction of post-Christian western culture. He is widely considered 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". Contents [hide] 1 Biography 2 Works and Influence 3 Major works 4 External links and references

[edit] Biography Fyodor was the second of seven children born to Mikhail and Maria Dostoevsky. Shortly after his mother died of tuberculosis in 1837, he and his brother Mikhail were sent to the Military Engineering Academy at St. Petersburg. They lost their father, a retired military surgeon who served as a doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in Moscow, in 1839. It was long rumored 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. More probably, Mikhail died of natural causes, and a neighboring landowner invented this story of a peasant rebellion so he could buy the estate cheaply. This tale served as the focus of Sigmund Freud's famous, but now largely discredited article, Dostoevsky and Parricide (1928). Dostoevsky’s first novel, Poor Folk (1846), was well-received by the pre-eminent Russian literary and social critic,Vissarion Belinsky, who saw in it a social criticism of an uncaring society. It was followed by another novel, The Double (1846), which was not well received, but that would serve as a harbinger of Dostoevsky’s later interest in extreme psychological states. His literary career was seemingly cut short when he was arrested and imprisoned in 1849 for engaging in revolutionary activity against the arch conservative Tsar Nikolai I. On November 16 that year he was sentenced to death for anti-government activities based on his participation in the Petrashevsky Circle, a circle of liberal intellectuals who met on Fridays to discuss topics like Fourierist socialism and the emancipation of the serfs in Russia. After a mock execution in which he was blind folded and ordered to stand outside in freezing weather awaiting to be shot by a firing squad, Dostoevsky's sentence was commuted to exile, performing hard labor at a katorga prison camp in Omsk, Siberia. Dostoevsky writes about the experience of awaiting execution in his novel, The Idiot (1868). The incidence of epileptic seizures, to which he was predisposed, increased during this period. He was released from prison in 1854, and was required to serve in the Siberian Regiment. Dostoevsky spent the following five years as a corporal (and latterly lieutenant) in the Regiment's Seventh Line Battalion stationed at the fortress of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. His experiences in the prison camp would profoundly alter his outlook on life. Based on what he saw there, Dostoevsky abandoned his earlier socialist sentiments. He became politically conservative and embraced Orthodoxy. He would come to be associated with the Slavophiles, a movement of thinkers that embraced Russia’s unique history and traditions and opposed the Westernization of Russian society. He began an affair with, and later married, Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, the widow of an acquaintance in Siberia. In 1860, he returned to St. Petersburg, where he ran a series of unsuccessful literary journals, notably Vremya (Time) and Epokha (Epoch) with his older brother Mikhail. Dostoevsky was devastated by his wife's death in 1864, followed shortly thereafter by his brother's death. He was financially crippled by business debts and the need to provide for his brother's widow and children. Dostoevsky sank into a deep depression, frequenting gambling parlors and accumulating massive losses at the tables. Dostoevsky suffered from an acute gambling compulsion as well as from its consequences. By one account Crime and Punishment(1866), 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 (1867) simultaneously in order to satisfy an agreement with his publisher Stellovsky who, if he did not receive a new work, would have claimed the copyrights to all of Dostoyevsky's writing. Motivated by the dual wish to escape his creditors at home and to visit the casinos abroad, Dostoevsky traveled to Western Europe. There, he attempted to rekindle a love affair with Apollinaria (Polina) Suslova, a young university student with whom he had had an affair several years prior, but she refused his marriage proposal. Dostoevsky was heartbroken, but soon met Anna Snitkina, a twenty-year-old stenographer whom he married in 1867. This period resulted in the writing of his greatest books. From 1873 to 1881 he vindicated his earlier journalistic failures by publishing a monthly journal full of short stories, sketches, and articles on current events — the Diary of a Writer. The journal was an enormous success, although later critics have raised concerns about its anti-semitic tendencies. In 1877 Dostoevsky gave the keynote eulogy at the funeral of his friend, the poet Nekrasov, to much controversy. In 1880, shortly before he died, he gave his famous Pushkin speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow. In his later years, Fyodor Dostoevsky lived for a long time at the resort of Staraya Russa which was closer to St Petersburg and less expensive than German resorts. He died on January 28 (O.S.), 1881 and was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, St. Petersburg, Russia. [edit] Works and Influence Dostoyevsky's tomb at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery.Dostoevsky's influence cannot be overemphasized—from Herman Hesse to Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Henry Miller, Yukio Mishima and Gabriel García Márquez—virtually no great 20th century writer has escaped his long shadow (rare dissenting voices include Vladimir Nabokov, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and, more ambiguously, D.H. Lawrence). American novelist Ernest Hemingway also cited Dostoevsky in his autobiographic books, as a major influence on his work. Style Dostoevsky is often accused on not being a stylist. His prose is considered “messy,” especially in comparison with someone like Tolstoy, whose language is cleaner and whose plots are almost mathematical in their precision. However, Dostoevsky’s lack of style stems from his attempt to give his characters free reign. He creates situations that permits disparate characters to come into contact with one another, and allows the conflicts between them to play out. In fact, one characteristic feature of Dostoevsky’s style is that the action frequently degenerates into feverishly dramatized scandal scenes which appear to reach their depth, only to have something even more scandalous occur. The period in was Dostoevsky wrote was dominated by 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. His novels are compressed in time (many cover only a few days) and space is also compressed sometimes for artistic effect. (For example, much of the action in Crime and Punishment takes place in basements, hallways, foyers, and other assorted cramped spaces.) He refers to this style as “realism in a higher sense.” In other words, he in not interested in normal, everyday life, but in extraordinary states of mind. 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), we are no even sure whether the characters even eat. Characters That is because his characters are are driven by ideas rather than by ordinary biological or social imperatives. 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.) The goal of Dostoevsky’s art is to allow full expression and interaction between these ideas.

Themes While his characters can be easily categorized, his ideas cannot. Anti-semite, Christian prophet, existentialist philosopher, depth psychologist, he is all of these and perhaps more. His novel, Besy, (literally, Demons) translated as either The Devils or The Possessed, is often credited with forseeing the coming of Communism to Russia. He feared that rationalism would lead to disasterous consequences in Russia because, as he put it, “without God, everything is permitted.” Criticism Dostoevsky’s novels have been endlessly dissected and analyzed by literary scholars too numerous to mention. Of note are two 20th century critics for whom his texts became models and test cases. Russian critic, Bakhtin praised them as models of dialogism. 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. In this regard, Dostoevsky is more like a playwrite and his novels are “dialogic.” French critic, Rene Girard, saw in Dostoevsky’s novels a proof text of the operation of his theory of mimetic desire, in which human desire is imitative of the desires of others. By common critical consensus he is on a short list of world authors, along with Dante, Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, Victor Hugo and a few others, whose readership and impact are too broad to fully categorize.

[edit] Major works 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) [edit] External links and references Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Fyodor DostoevskyFyodorDostoevsky.com - The Definitive Dostoevsky fan site Fyodor Dostoevsky's brief biography and works Works by Fyodor Dostoevsky at Project Gutenberg Selected Dostoevsky e-texts from Penn Librarys digital library project Full texts of some Dostoevsky's works in the original Russian Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Biography, ebooks, quotations, and other resources Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Vintage Classics, 1992, New York. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Constance Garnett, introduction by Joseph Frank. Bantam Books, 1987, New York. Some photos of places and statues that are reminiscent of Dostoevsky and his work Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyodor_Dostoevsky" Categories: 1821 births | 1881 deaths | Russian novelists | Russian short story writers ViewsArticleDiscussionEdit this pageHistory Personal toolsCreate account / log in Navigation Main Page Community portal Current events Recent changes Random article Help Contact us Donations Search

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