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Fyodor
Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821-1881)
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 The
son of a doctor, Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in on October 30
[November 11], 1821 in Moscow. In 1837 he moved to
St. Petersburg to attend the Military Engineering School
with his brother. Inspired by figures such as Schiller,
Pushkin, and Sir Walter Scott, Dostoevsky was more
interested in literature than engineering, however, and a
year after his graduation in 1843, he resigned his
commission and devoted himself to writing. His first
published work was a translation of Balzac's Eugénie
Grandet (1844). He went on to write an epistolary novel
entitled Poor Folk (1846), a treatment of the urban
poor in which naturalistic descriptions are punctuated by
moments of effusive sentiment. The novel was acclaimed by
one of Russia's foremost "progressive" critics, Vissarion
Belinsky. The critics, however, disapproved of Dostoevsky's
second novel, The Double (1846), which explored a
clerk's growing paranoia about the appearance of an
identical double in his world; it was perceived as a poor
copy of Nikolai Gogol's work. During the late 1840s,
Dostoevsky was attracted to the ideas of French Utopian
Socialism, and he joined a group to discuss and disseminate
these ideas. In 1849, Dostoevsky and the other members of
the group were arrested, and he was sentenced to 4 years of
penal servitude and 4 years in the ranks as a private in the
army. Dostoevsky, however, was led to believe that he was to
be executed, and it was only on the execution ground itself
that the true sentence was revealed.
The years Dostoevsky spent in the penal colony in Omsk
were perhaps the most difficult of his life. He emerged from
the experience disillusioned with his earlier socialist
views; he now had a deeper appreciation of the unfathomable
and irrational elements in the human psyche. A fictional
account of this experience is recorded in Notes from the
House of the Dead (1860-62). Dostoevsky was now
convinced that only by following the teachings of Christ
would humanity find happiness, but he realized that Christ's
teachings were nearly impossible for egocentric humans to
adopt. He offered a seminal examination of the themes of
reason and free will in his Notes from the
Underground (1964), a work that had profound influence
on later generations of writers and thinkers. He then went
on to create one of his most haunting novels, Crime and
Punishment (1866), surely one of the great works of
world literature. In subsequent years, Dostoevsky wrote a
series of novels in which he explored both the social ills
threatening Russian society and the unfathomable depths of
the human soul. These novels include The Idiot
(1868), The Devils (1871-72), and A Raw Youth (1875).
The culmination of Dostoevsky's career was reached in his
greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80), a
work that utilizes a dense network of recurring images and
ideas to illustrate in profoundly human terms the incessant
battle between divine and demonic forces. After giving a
triumphal speech on the occasion of the unveiling of a
monument to Alexander Pushkin in 1880, Dostoevsky died early
in 1881.
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