Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Life

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow in 1821, the son of a doctor at a hospital for the poor. He was educated as a military engineer in Saint Petersburg but resigned his commission to write, and his first novel, Poor Folk (1846), was praised by the leading critics of the day. His early promise was cut short in 1849, when he was arrested for taking part in a circle of young men who discussed banned political writings. He was sentenced to death, led out to be shot, and reprieved at the last moment, then sent to a labor camp in Omsk, Siberia, for four years, followed by compulsory military service.

He returned to Saint Petersburg in 1859 a changed man: devout, politically conservative, and preoccupied with questions of guilt, freedom, and faith. The next two decades were difficult. He suffered from epilepsy, lost his first wife and his brother within months of each other, and ran up heavy debts through a gambling habit that he later wrote about directly. He worked under constant financial pressure, often dictating to meet deadlines, and his second wife, Anna Snitkina, whom he married in 1867, managed his affairs and kept him solvent.

His major novels were written in this period: Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). He died in Saint Petersburg in January 1881, a few months after the last of these was completed, and his funeral drew a very large crowd.

Literary significance

Dostoyevsky is regarded as one of the central figures of nineteenth-century fiction and as a writer whose influence extends well beyond Russia. His novels are built around characters in extreme states, arguing with themselves and each other about God, morality, and the limits of reason, and they anticipate much of what twentieth-century psychology and philosophy would later say about the divided mind. Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, and the existentialist writers all acknowledged a debt to him. His prose is often rough, his plots crowded, and his pacing uneven, and none of this has reduced his standing.

Where to start

Crime and Punishment is the usual starting point and the right one: it has a single central character, a plot with strong forward motion, and all of the author’s main concerns in a form that does not require background knowledge.