Fyodor Dostoyevsky Biography and List of Works

"The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man."

Russian novelist, journalist, short-story writer whose psychological penetration into the human soul had a profound influence on the 20th century novel. Dostoyevsky's novels are ultimately dialogic. He presented interacting characters with constrasting views or ideas, any of which may be used as a key to reading the text as whole.

Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow, as the second son of a former army doctor. He was educated at home and at a private school. Shortly after the death of his mother in 1837 he was sent to St. Petersburg, where he entered the Army Engineering College. Dostoyevsky graduated as a military engineer, but resigned in 1844 his commission to devote himself to writing. His first novel, Poor Folk appeared in 1846. It was followed by The Double, which depicted a man who was haunted by a look-alike who eventually usurps his position.

In 1846 he joined a group of utopian socialists. He was arrested in 1849 during a reading of Vissarion Belinsky's radical letter Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, and sentenced to death. With mock execution the sentence was commuted to imprisonment in Siberia. Dostoyevsky spent four years in hard labour and four years as a soldier in Semipalatinsk. These events provided subject matter for the author and motivated the fiction of extreme passions and situations for which his novels are famed. He returned to St. Petersburg in 1854 as a writer with a religious mission and published three works that derive in different ways from his Siberia experiences: The House of the Dead, a fictional account of prison life, The Insulted and Injured, which reflects the author's refutation of naive Utopianism in the face of evil, and Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, his account of trip to Western Europe.

In 1857 Dostoyevsky married Maria Isaev, a 29-year old widow. He resigned from the army two years later. Between the years 1861 and 1863 he served as editor of the monthly periodical Time, which was later suppressed because of an article on the Polish uprising. In 1862 he went to abroad for the first time.

In 1864-65 his wife and brother died and he was burdened with debts, making his situation even worse by gambling. From the turmoil of the 1860s emerged Notes from the Underground, psychological study of an outsider, which marked a watershed in Dostoyevsky's artistic development. The novel starts with a confessions by a mentally ill narrator and continues with the promise of spiritual rebirth. It was followed by Crime and Punishment, an account of an individual's fall and redemption, The Idiot, depicting a Christ-like figure, Prince Myshkin, through whom the author revealed the bankruptcy of Russia, and The Possessed, an exploration of philosophical nihilism.

Dostoyevsky married Anna Snitkin, his 22-years old stenographer in 1867. They travelled abroad and returned in 1871. From 1873 to 1874 Dostoyevsky was editor of the conservative weekly Citizen, and in 1876 he founded his own monthly, The Writer's Diary.

By the time of The Brothers of Karamazov, which appeared in 1879-80, Dostoyevsky was recognized in his own country as one of its great writers. Dostoyevsky's final novel culminated his lifelong obsession with parricide - the murder of his father had left deep marks on the author's psyche in childhood. The novel is constructed around a simple plot, dealing with the murder of the father of the Karamazov family by his illegitimate son, Smerdiakov. One of the sons, Dmitri, is arrested. The brothers represent three aspects of man's being: reason (Ivan), emotion (Dmitri) and faith (Alesha). This material is transcended into a moral and spiritual statement of contemporary society.

An epileptic all his life, Dostoyevsky died in St. Petersburg on February 9 (New Style), 1881. He was buried in the Aleksandr Nevsky monastery, St. Petersburg.

In his essays Dostoyevsky strongly supported the Westernizers, who believed that the modernization of Russia by Peter the Great had been for the best, while Slavophiles argued that modernization buried age-old Russian social and cultural values. Dostoyevsky was strongly influenced by such thinkers as Aleksandr Herzen and Vissarion Belinsky. He saw that great art must have liberty to develop on its own terms, but it always addresses central social concerns.

Crime and Punishment (1866) - The story was serialized in Ruskii vestnik in 1866 and appeared in book form next year. Raskolnikov, a young student, kills a pawnbroker. He attempts to justify the murder in terms of its advantageous social consequences. Under the influence of the meek, Christian prostitute Sonia, he confronts irrational depths of his nature, which ultimately leads to confession and redemption. Raskolnikov realizes in his novel-long search for the motive of his crime, that in murdering he has killed the essential human in himself.

For further reading: Dostoyevskyby André Gide (1925); Dostoevsky: His Life and Art by Avram Yarmolinsky (1957); Dostoevsky: His Life and Art by Konstantin Mochulsky (1967); Dostoevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels by Richard Peace (1971); Dostoevsky by John Jones (1983); A Dostoevsky Dictionary by Richard Chapple (1983); Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Writer's Life by Geir Kjetsaa (1987); Fyodor Dostoevsky by Peter Conradi (1988); The Genesis of 'The Brothers Karamazov' by Robert L. Belknap (1990); Dostoevskly and the Woman Question by Nina Pelikan Straus (1994); Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment by Henry Buchanan (1996) - See also influence on later writers: Leonid Leonov, Kobo Abe, Georges Simenon

DVOYNIK, (1846)