Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was a Russian writer whose novels explore the deepest questions of human life: Is there a God? If not, is everything allowed? Why do people choose to hurt themselves and others? Can suffering lead to something good? He is usually ranked, together with his contemporary Leo Tolstoy, among the greatest novelists of all time.

His life was as dramatic as his fiction. He became famous overnight with his first novel, was condemned to death for political activity, faced a firing squad that turned out to be a staged ceremony, spent four years as a convict in Siberia and six more as a soldier, suffered from epilepsy, gambled away his money in European casinos, lost his first wife, his closest brother and two of his children, and wrote many of his masterpieces under crushing debt and deadlines.

Dostoevsky’s novels are full of feverish conversations, sudden scandals and characters pushed to extremes: murderers and saints, drunkards and prostitutes, nihilists and monks. Yet behind this drama lies careful thought about philosophy, religion and the fate of Russia. That combination is what has made his work so powerful for readers across the world.

Dostoevsky was born in Moscow at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, where his father, Mikhail, was a doctor. The family was of modest noble status and deeply religious. His mother, Maria, died of tuberculosis in 1837, and his father died in 1839 on the family’s small country estate. According to a long-standing family story, the father was killed by his own serfs; some later researchers have questioned this, and the circumstances remain uncertain.

Following his father’s wishes, Fyodor studied at the Military Engineering School in Saint Petersburg, but he cared much more about literature, reading Pushkin, Gogol, Schiller, Balzac, Dickens and George Sand. He left government service in 1844 to write. His first published work was a translation of Balzac’s novel Eugénie Grandet.

In 1845 he finished Poor Folk, a novel in letters between a poor, elderly copying clerk and a young woman he tries to help. The poet Nikolai Nekrasov and the critic Vissarion Belinsky, the most powerful voice in Russian criticism, praised it enthusiastically, and it was published in January 1846. But his next works, such as The Double (1846), a strange story of a clerk who meets his own double, disappointed Belinsky, and Dostoevsky’s fame quickly faded.

In the late 1840s Dostoevsky joined the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of young men who met in Saint Petersburg to discuss banned books and utopian socialist ideas. Within it, a smaller secret group around Nikolai Speshnev discussed revolutionary action. At one meeting Dostoevsky read aloud Belinsky’s forbidden “Letter to Gogol”, which attacked the Church and serfdom. After revolutions swept Europe in 1848, Tsar Nicholas I was determined to crush any sign of dissent. In April 1849 about sixty members were arrested.

After months in the Peter and Paul Fortress, Dostoevsky and other prisoners were taken on 22 December 1849 (Old Style) to Semyonovsky Square, told they were sentenced to death, and dressed in white shirts. The first three were tied to posts facing a firing squad. At the last moment an officer announced that the tsar had commuted their sentences. The whole scene had been staged. Dostoevsky later described the thoughts of a man facing execution in The Idiot.

He spent four years (1850–1854) in the prison camp at Omsk, in chains, living among common criminals, and then served as a soldier in Semipalatinsk (in today’s Kazakhstan). There he married a widow, Maria Isaeva, in 1857. He also suffered his first clearly diagnosed epileptic seizures. On the way to Siberia, the wives of exiled Decembrists gave him a copy of the New Testament, the only book he was allowed in prison, and he kept it for the rest of his life. He was allowed to return to Saint Petersburg at the end of 1859.

Back in the capital, Dostoevsky rebuilt his career with his brother Mikhail. They edited the journals Time (Vremya, 1861–1863) and Epoch (Epokha, 1864–1865), which promoted pochvennichestvo, “return to the native soil”: the idea that Russia’s educated classes should reconnect with the moral and religious life of the common people rather than copy Western Europe. His Notes from the House of the Dead (1860–1862), a fictionalized account of prison life, was a major success and one of the first works to reveal the Russian penal system to the reading public.

In 1862 he made his first trip to Western Europe, which he described critically in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863), attacking the materialism and self-satisfaction of bourgeois Paris and London. On this and later trips he developed a compulsive passion for roulette that repeatedly left him in debt.

The year 1864 brought disaster: his wife Maria died in April and his brother Mikhail in July, leaving Dostoevsky responsible for debts and for Mikhail’s family. That same year he published Notes from Underground, the monologue of a bitter, isolated former official who rejects the idea that human beings are rational and will always choose their own advantage. People, the Underground Man insists, will act against their own interest just to prove they are free. The work is often seen as a starting point of existentialist literature.

Crime and Punishment (serialized in The Russian Messenger in 1866) follows Rodion Raskolnikov, a poor former student in Saint Petersburg who murders an old pawnbroker, partly to test his theory that “extraordinary” people have the right to step over moral laws. The novel is less about solving the crime than about his psychological torment, his duel of wits with the investigator Porfiry Petrovich, and his path toward confession through Sonya Marmeladova, a young woman forced into prostitution to feed her family. While writing it, Dostoevsky also had to deliver a short novel, The Gambler, to a publisher by a strict deadline; he dictated it in under a month to a young stenographer, Anna Snitkina, whom he married in February 1867.

Fleeing creditors, the couple lived abroad from 1867 to 1871, in Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Their first daughter died there in infancy. Dostoevsky wrote The Idiot (1868–1869), an attempt to portray a “positively beautiful” person, the gentle, epileptic Prince Myshkin, whose goodness fails tragically in a world of greed and passion. Demons (1871–1872), inspired by a real murder committed in 1869 by the revolutionary cell of Sergei Nechayev, is a dark satire of political radicalism and a study of how ideas can possess people.

Back in Russia, Anna managed the family’s finances and began publishing his books herself, which finally brought stability. Dostoevsky edited the conservative weekly The Citizen and then published his own monthly A Writer’s Diary, mixing journalism, memoir, stories and political commentary; it made him a national public figure. The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880), written after the death of his three-year-old son Alyosha in 1878, tells of the murder of a debauched father and the guilt shared by his sons: the passionate Dmitri, the intellectual Ivan, the devout Alyosha and the illegitimate Smerdyakov. It contains Ivan’s “Grand Inquisitor” poem and the teachings of the elder Zosima, one of the most debated pairs of chapters in all literature.

In June 1880 Dostoevsky gave a celebrated speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow, praising Pushkin’s “universal responsiveness” as the essence of the Russian spirit. The audience’s reaction was ecstatic. He died in Saint Petersburg less than a year later, in February 1881, and tens of thousands of people followed his funeral procession to the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.

Freedom is at the centre of Dostoevsky’s thought. He believed that human beings are not machines driven only by self-interest, as some rationalist and utilitarian thinkers of his time claimed. Freedom makes great evil possible, but it also makes love, faith and moral responsibility possible. In the Grand Inquisitor story, Christ is condemned for giving people a freedom too heavy to bear, while the Church offers them bread, miracle and authority instead.

Many of his characters test ideas by living them. Raskolnikov acts out the theory of the extraordinary man; Kirillov in Demons tries to prove his freedom through suicide; Ivan Karamazov’s argument that if there is no God and no immortality then morality has no foundation, often summarized as “everything is permitted”, is taken literally by Smerdyakov. Dostoevsky shows the consequences of ideas in real lives, which is why philosophers read him as a thinker as well as a novelist.

He was a Christian thinker, rooted in Russian Orthodoxy, who gave the strongest possible voice to doubt. Ivan’s rebellion against a world in which innocent children suffer is one of the most powerful arguments against faith ever written, and Dostoevsky answered it not with a logical proof but with the example of active love embodied in Zosima and Alyosha. His idea that “each of us is responsible for all” runs through the novel.

Saint Petersburg itself is almost a character in his fiction. Dostoevsky’s city is not the grand imperial capital of palaces and parades but a place of cramped rented rooms, stairwells, taverns and pawnshops, stifling in summer, where clerks, students, widows and the urban poor live on the edge of ruin. Building on Gogol’s Petersburg stories, he made the modern city a setting for isolation, poverty, rumour and sudden encounters between strangers, conditions that push his characters toward extreme ideas and actions. Critics have seen this as one of his great contributions to the European novel of urban modernity.

His political views became increasingly conservative and nationalist. In A Writer’s Diary he argued for Russia’s special religious mission, supported war against the Ottoman Empire in 1877, and attacked Catholicism, socialism and Western liberalism. It also contains antisemitic passages, which scholars treat as a serious and troubling part of his legacy, and which he defended in an 1877 article on the “Jewish question”.

Dostoevsky’s international fame grew rapidly after translations into French, German and English in the 1880s. Friedrich Nietzsche, who discovered him in a French translation in 1887, called him in Twilight of the Idols the only psychologist from whom he had anything to learn. Sigmund Freud wrote the essay “Dostoevsky and Parricide” (1928), and the novels became central texts for psychoanalysis.

In the twentieth century existentialist writers, including Albert Camus, who adapted Demons for the stage, and Jean-Paul Sartre, saw Dostoevsky as a precursor. Writers as different as Franz Kafka, André Gide and William Faulkner read him closely and acknowledged his importance. Religious philosophers such as Nikolai Berdyaev built on his work, and film-makers from Akira Kurosawa, who filmed The Idiot in 1951, to Robert Bresson adapted his works.

In the Soviet Union his reputation was complicated. His religious faith and his attack on revolutionaries in Demons made him suspect, and he was little taught in the Stalin era, although scholars continued to study him and his works were republished more widely from the mid-1950s. Today he is one of the most widely read Russian authors worldwide, including in Korea and Japan, where translations of his novels have long been popular.

The most influential theoretical reading is Mikhail Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art (1929), revised as Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1963). Bakhtin argued that Dostoevsky created a new kind of “polyphonic” novel, in which characters’ voices and ideas are not subordinated to the author’s single viewpoint but interact as independent, fully valid consciousnesses in unfinished dialogue. The concept of polyphony, along with Bakhtin’s idea of carnival, transformed literary theory far beyond Russian studies.

Critics have debated how far Bakhtin is right. Some argue that Dostoevsky, a committed Orthodox Christian and nationalist, clearly steers readers toward certain conclusions, for example through the structure of The Brothers Karamazov; others hold that his genius lies precisely in letting opposing voices, such as Ivan’s, speak with full force. The question of whether Zosima’s teaching successfully answers the Grand Inquisitor, as Dostoevsky hoped, remains open.

Another debate concerns the relation between the novelist and the publicist. Some scholars treat A Writer’s Diary, with its nationalism and antisemitism, as the key to the novels; others emphasize the gap between the dogmatic journalist and the open-ended artist. Historians of religion, meanwhile, examine how accurately he portrayed Russian Orthodox spirituality, for example the elders of Optina Pustyn, which he visited in 1878 with the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov.

The main sources for Dostoevsky’s life are his letters, his working notebooks for the novels, official records such as the files of the Petrashevsky case, and memoirs by people who knew him. The standard scholarly edition is the Academy of Sciences Complete Works in thirty volumes (Leningrad, 1972–1990), which includes drafts, notebooks and letters.

Memoirs must be used critically. Anna Grigoryevna Dostoevskaya’s Reminiscences, written late in her life and published in 1925, are invaluable but protective of her husband’s memory. The memoir of his daughter, Lyubov, contains unreliable stories. A notorious letter of 1883 from the critic Nikolai Strakhov to Tolstoy accused Dostoevsky of moral depravity, including a rumour of abusing a young girl; most biographers regard the accusation as unfounded gossip, partly echoing a scene from Demons that Dostoevsky’s publisher had refused to print.

Some famous facts rest on shaky evidence. The murder of his father by serfs has been doubted by researchers who found that the official investigation recorded a death from natural causes, while others think the family’s story may be true. The link between his epilepsy and his father’s death, central to Freud’s essay, is not supported by the available evidence, and most biographers reject it. Joseph Frank’s five-volume biography (1976–2002, abridged in one volume in 2009) is widely regarded as the most thorough modern account, placing Dostoevsky’s life within the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Russia.