Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"Dostoyevsky" and "Dostoevsky" redirect here. For other uses, see Dostoyevsky (disambiguation).

This name uses Eastern Slavic naming customs; the patronymic is Mikhaylovich and the family name is Dostoyevsky.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
1879
Born	Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky November 11, 1821(1821-11-11) Moscow, Russian Empire
Died	February 9, 1881(1881-02-09) (aged 59) Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer, essayist
Language	Russian
Nationality	Russian
Alma mater	Military Engineering-Technical University
Period	1846–1881
Genres	Novel, short story, journalism
Literary movement	Realism
Notable work(s)	Notes from Underground Crime and Punishment The Idiot Demons The Brothers Karamazov
Spouse(s)	Mariya Dmitriyevna Isayeva (1857–64) [her death] Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina (1867–1881) [his death]
Children	Sofiya (1868), Lyubov (1869—1926), Fyodor (1871–1922), Alexei (1875—1878)
Influences Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac, Miguel de Cervantes
Influenced Émile Zola, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Knut Hamsun, Anton Chekhov, André Gide, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Carl Jung, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Mikhail Bulgakov, Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir Nabokov, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Mario Puzo, Philip K. Dick, Richard Wright
Signature

Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky (Russian: Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский; IPA: [ˈfʲodər mʲɪˈxajləvʲɪtɕ dəstɐˈjefskʲɪj] ( listen); November 11, 1821 – February 9, 1881) was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov.

Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. With the embittered voice of the anonymous "underground man", Dostoyevsky wrote Notes from Underground (1864), which has been called the "best overture for existentialism ever written" by Walter Kaufmann. He is often acknowledged by critics as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature.

Early life

Childhood

Mariinsky Hospital in Moscow, Dostoyevsky's birthplace

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born on 30 October 1821 (11 November 1821, according to the Gregorian Calendar) as the second child of Mikhail Dostoyevsky and Maria Nechayeva. His father, who descended from a Lithuanian noble family, resided nearby in the Belarussian city of Pinsk. Like his father, Mikhail was a clergyman but when he refused to join a seminary, his family divorced. Subsequently Mikhail escaped from home. When he unsuccessfully searched for his family, he gave up and at the age of 20 then went to the Moscow Medical Surgical University, where he was appointed senior physician in 1818. In 1819 he married the eleven-years younger Maria. One year later he resigned from military service to move to a hospital. After the birth of Mikhail and Fyodor, Mikhail was able to retrieve his lost title and acquire a manor 150 verst of Moscow. Maria Nechayeva descended from a family of merchants.

Dostoyevsky was raised near the hospital--it was neither a wealthy nor a poor home. In his childhood, Fyodor often went with his family to summer visits in Darovoye. At the age of three he discovered heroic sagas, fairy tales, legends and a deeply ingrained piety from nannies. He was soon obsessed with tales. The nanny Alina Frolovna, who helped the family when their manor burnt down, and the serf and farmer Marei from Darovoye, who helped to fight his early hallucinations, possibly caused by the terrible tales, were influential for his childhood. Fyodor also discovered the miserable hospital garden, which was separated by a large grid from their civil and protected private garden. His parents forbade him the contact with the other side, as they intended to shield their children from uncontrollable influences. Fyodor, however, ignored their warnings and often talked with the reconvalescent people. There he also encountered a crime between a nine-year-old girl, who was found raped in the garden. He never forgot this traumatic experience.

Fyodor's parents placed value on a thorough upbringing. At the age of four he learned reading and writing by his mother from the Bible. One of the day's highlights were the evening readings by his father and mother. His parents introduced him at an early stage to Russian literature, such as Karamzin's Russian Tales, Pushkin, Derzhavin, as well as English literature of Ann Radcliffe and German literature of Friedrich Schiller. Fyodor was impressed by the latter's play "Räuber", which he saw at the age of 10. Fyodor and Mikhail both enjoyed Pushkin's poems, which they learned for the most part by heart; Pushkin's death was a shock for the whole family. Fyodor's father placed also value on a good education. He sent Fyodor first to a French boarding school and then to the best private high school in Moscow, the "College for Noble Male Children". As the school was too expensive, he had to make loans, take advances and extend his private practice. When the thirteen-year-old Fyodor arrived to this famous college, he experienced an inferiority complex towards his more polite classmates. This feeling was often documented on his works, especially The Adolescent.

Youth

Dostoyevsky as an engineer

In 27 September 1837 his mother died of tuberculosis. Fyodor contracted a serious throat disease. Subsequently, Fyodor and his brother Mikhail were sent around May to St Petersburg to attend the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute, while their younger siblings were sent to different families. Fyodor and Mikhail had to abandon the academic education at the Moscow college, as their adoptive parents were not able to pay for the schoolfee. Fyodor's career, however, seems to be apparent, as his father expected a space at the academy for his sons, and the political propensity under Nicholas I allowed them a good military professional career. On the way to St. Petersburg, Fyodor became a witness of a violence on violence situation in a posting house; one member of the military police beat the carter's neck, and the carter subsequently passed his pain to the horse through a whiplash; Fyodor betook to this situation on his book A Writer's Diary. At the academy he was separated from his brother, who was later sent to Reval, Estonia due to his poor health and the better studying conditions. Fyodor passed the entrance exam and entered the academy in 16 January the next year, but only with the help of godmothers, who paid the schoolfee for the unaware Fyodor.

Fyodor did no enjoy the academy, primarly because of his lack of interest in the subjects science, mathematics and military application, as he rather preferred drawing and architecture, and the atmosphere. The academy was a former castle built for the tsar Paul I, who was murdered shortly after his accession to the throne. Among the 120 classmates, mainly from Polish or Baltic-German descent, he was an outsider due to his different character; Fyodor was brave and had a strong sense of justice as against to the clownish and brutal class fellows. He protected newcomers, aligned oneself with teachers, criticized the corruption among officers and helped poor farmers. Although he was a loner and lived in his own literary world, his classmates showed respect for him. Fyodor was called "Monk Photius" because of his reclusive way of life and his interest in religion.

The first presence of epilepsy occured on Fyodor after receiving a message of the death of his father. Mikhail was murdered in 1839 by his adscript peasant; the cause was one of his Mikhael's irascibility attacks. Fyodor continued the disliked study. When he passed the exams and obtained the rank as ingenieur cadet, he was given the right to live off-site. After his short visit to brother Mikhail in Reval, Fyodor often went to concerts, operas, theatres and balletts, and discovered gambling by two friends. His independence was responsible for the financial troubles. In August 1843 he received an employment as a draftsman. In the meantime, Fyodor lived in an apartment of German-Baltic Dr. A. Riesenkampf, a friend of his brother Mikhael. Like in his childhood at the hospital, he showed interest in the ill people from the lower class. Aside this, he began to translate George Sand's La dernière Albini and Balzac's Eugénie Grandet, and upon the advice Schiller's Räuber, Don Carlos among others. With the help of his translations, he could obtain some money. His job became more and more humiliating. After quitting a duty travel, he was released in 19 October 1844 as a lieutenant. Fyodor was in financial troubles, so he decided to write his own novel.

Career

Early publications and circles

The young Dostoyevsky, in an 1847 portrait by Trutovsky

In the autumn of 1844, Fyodor shared an apartment with his friend from the academy, D. Grigorovich. Fyodor was working continuously on his first novel; he hoped to reach a wider readership to overspread his financial condition. He risked everything for his book to obtain some money. In a letter to Michael he wrote, "What matters is that my novel should cover everything. If it does not work, I will hang myself." In May 1845 Fyodor reworked on the script for the last time and asked Grigovoich to read the novel aloud. Grigorovich was impressed by the novel and subsequently brought it in the same night to Nikolay Nekrasov, a friend of him. Both were so impressed that they finalise the book and at four o'clock rang to Fyodor's apartment. On the same day, Nekrasov brought the manuscript by the "New Gogol" to the most famous and influental literary critic during that time, Vissarion Belinsky. Initially sceptical, the critic was later similiarly astonished. Poor Folk was released in 15 January 1846 in the almanac St. Petersburg Collection and was commercially enourmously successful.

The novel describes in the form of a epistolary novel the relationship between the somewhat elder, small official Makar Devushkin and the young sewer Varvara Dobroselova, a remote relative. Both write letters to each other and through the tender, sentimental adoration for his relative and the confident, warm friendship with him they seem to prefer a live in a society, but this urge them into a humiliating poverty. Their idyll will be destroyed by money and might. An unscrupulous merchant finds the inexperienced girl and hire her as his housewife and guarantor. He sent her into a manor somewhere in a steppe, while Devushkin alleviates his misery and pain with alcohol. The story focusses on poor people who fight against their self esteem. Their threat and destruction lead to the loss of their inner freedom, to the entire dependence of the social authorities and to the extinction of the person. Dostoyevsky shows how poverty and dependence are indissolubly aligned with profound inner damage, with deflection and deformation of the self esteem, which combine the inner and outer loss.

Apollon Maykov

Shortly after the publication of Poor Folk, Dostoyevsky wrote his second novel, The Double, during his visit in Reval. Although the book was released on February 1846, it was already included in the almanac Fatherland Notes on January 30. The Double centres on the shy protagonist Yakov Golyadkin discovering his doppelgänger, who ruins his life piece by piece. The doppelgänger succeeds the private and vocational rise, which is prohibited to the original Golyadkin. The novel was panned by critics and readers; Belinsky meant the work had "no sense, no content and no thoughts", and the novel appears overall boring due to the protagonist's garrulity. The idea for The Double is principally brilliant, but its external form is miscarried and is full of multi-clause sentences.

In the 1840s, interest under the population now turned more towards social questions as opposed to the romanticism and idealism. Dostoyevsky discovered socialism about 1846. His first influences were particularly the French socialists Fourier, Cabet, Proudhon and Saint Simon. Dostoyevsky had initially a good relationship with Belinsky. Through him he extended his knowledge of the philosophy of socialism; its intellectual world of sense of justice and the interest in the poor and disadvantaged people attracted him. His relationship with Belinsky became, however, more and more negatively later on, as Belinsky's atheism and his dislike of church and religion controntated with Dostoyevsky's Orthodox beliefs and Christ's teachings, and Dostoyevsky thus decided to quit the circle. Later, Dostoyevsky took up the issue of the existence of God and the nihilism in his later books, as well as the order of human coexistence, the requirements of fraternity and the coherence of freedom and fortune.

Dostoyevsky suffered from the assaults by the press of his second novel, his health became dissatisfying and epileptic seizures occured. He, however, worked frantic and released from 1846 to 1848 short stories in the magazine Annals of the Fatherland, including "Mr. Prokharchin", "The Landlady", "A Weak Heart" and "White Nights". His bad success continued from the release of the first short story on, and Dostoyevsky was again in financial troubles. Therefore he decided to join the utopian socialist Betekov circle, where the members created a living community, which became helpful for him. After the circle's break-up, Dostoyevsky befriended with Apollon Maykov and his brother Valerian, and after the latter's death, Apollon became an important component in his life. In spring 1846 he joined the Petrashevsky Circle by the recommendation of poet Pleshcheyev. As contrasted with the former circles, the Pethrashevsky Circle was socio-Christian. Mikhail Petrashevsky discussed in a harmless manner the possibilities of social reforms in Russia. Dostoyevsky attended its library and sometimes participated on this circle, discussing with other such themes as freedom of censorship, abolition of serfdom or reforms of counts.

Exile in Siberia

Statue of Dostoyevsky in Omsk

Dostoyevsky was incarcerated on 23 April 1849 for being part of the liberal intellectual group the Petrashevsky Circle. Emperor Nicolas I, after seeing the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, was harsh on any type of underground organization which might put autocracy in jeopardy. On November 16 of that year Dostoyevsky, with other members of the Petrashevsky Circle, was sentenced to death. After a mock execution, in which he and other members of the group stood outside in freezing weather waiting to be shot by a firing squad, Dostoyevsky's sentence was commuted to four years of exile with hard labour at a katorga prison camp in Omsk, Siberia. Later Dostoyevsky described his years of suffering to his brother, as being, "shut up in a coffin." In describing the dilapidated barracks which "should have been torn down years ago", he wrote:

In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall... We were packed like herrings in a barrel... There was no room to turn around. From dusk to dawn it was impossible not to behave like pigs... Fleas, lice, and black beetles by the bushel...

This experience inspired him to write The House of the Dead.

Dostoyevsky was released from prison in 1854, and was required to serve in the Siberian Regiment. He spent the following five years as a private (and later lieutenant) in the Regiment's Seventh Line Battalion, stationed at the fortress of Semipalatinsk, now in Kazakhstan.

While there, he began a relationship with Maria Dmitrievna Isayeva, the wife of an acquaintance in Siberia. After her husband's death, they married in February 1857.

Post-prison maturation as a writer

Dostoyevsky (right) and the Kazakh scholar Shokan Walikhanuli in 1859

Dostoyevsky's experiences in prison and the army changed his political and religious convictions. First, his ordeal caused him to repudiate contemporary Western European philosophical movements and to pay greater tribute in his writings to traditional, rustic Russian values, exemplified in the Slavophile concept of sobornost. Even more significantly he had what his biographer Joseph Frank describes as a conversion experience in prison, which greatly strengthened his Christian, and specifically Orthodox, faith. Dostoyevsky would later depict his conversion experience in the short story, The Peasant Marey (1876).

In his writings Dostoyevsky started to extol the virtues of humility, submission, and suffering. He now displayed a more critical stance on contemporary European philosophy and turned with intellectual rigour against the Nihilist and Socialist movements; and much of his post-prison work—particularly the novel, The Possessed, and the essays, The Diary of a Writer—contains both criticism of socialist and nihilist ideas, as well as thinly veiled parodies of contemporary Western-influenced Russian intellectuals (Timofey Granovskiy), revolutionaries (Sergey Nyechayev), and even fellow novelists (Ivan Turgyenyev). In social circles Dostoyevsky allied himself with known conservatives, such as the statesman Konstantin Pobyedonostsyev. His post-prison essays praised the tenets of the Pochvyennichyestvo movement, a late-19th century Russian nativist ideology closely aligned with Slavophilism.

Dostoyevsky's post-prison fiction abandoned the Western European-style domestic melodramas and quaint character studies of his youthful work in favor of dark, more complex story-lines and situations, played-out by brooding, tortured characters—often styled partly on Dostoyevsky himself—who agonized over existential themes of spiritual torment, religious awakening, and the psychological confusion caused by the conflict between traditional Russian culture and the influx of modern, Western philosophy. Nonetheless, this does not take from the debt which Dostoyevsky owed to earlier Western-influenced writers such as Gogol, whose work grew from the irrational and anti-authoritarian spiritualist ideas contained within the Romantic movement which had immediately preceded Dostoyevsky in West Europe. However, Dostoyevsky's major novels focused on the idea that utopia and positivist ideas were unrealistic and unobtainable.

Later literary career

Dostoyevsky in 1863

Dostoyevsky's last address where he died, now a memorial and literary museum, St Petersburg.

In December 1859 Dostoyevsky returned to Saint Petersburg, where he ran a series of unsuccessful literary journals, Vremya (Time) and Epokha (Epoch), with his older brother Mikhail. The former was shut down as a consequence of its coverage of the Polish Uprising of 1863.

In 1863 Dostoyevsky traveled to western Europe, and frequented gambling casinos. There he met Apollinaria Suslova, the model for his "proud women", such as the two characters named Katerina Ivanovna, in Crime and Punishment and in The Brothers Karamazov.

In 1864 Dostoyevsky was devastated by his wife's death; which was followed shortly thereafter by his brother's death. He was financially crippled by business debts; furthermore, he decided to assume the responsibility of his deceased brother's outstanding debts, as well providing for his wife's son from her earlier marriage and his brother's widow and children. He sank into a deep depression, frequenting gambling parlors and accumulating massive losses at the tables. He became dominated by his gambling compulsion. He completed Crime and Punishment in a hurry because he was in urgent need of an advance from his publisher, having been left practically penniless after a gambling spree. He wrote The Gambler simultaneously in order to satisfy an agreement with his publisher, Stellovsky who, if he did not receive a new work, would claim the copyrights to all Dostoyevsky's writings.

Wishing to escape creditors at home and to visit casinos abroad, Dostoyevsky traveled to western Europe. There he attempted to rekindle a love affair with Suslova, but she refused his marriage proposal. Dostoyevsky was heartbroken, but soon met Anna Grigorevna Snitkina, a twenty-year-old stenographer. Shortly before marrying her in 1867, he dictated The Gambler to her.

From 1873 to 1881 he published the Writer's Diary, a monthly journal of short stories, sketches, and articles on current events. The journal was an enormous success.

Dostoyevsky influenced, and was himself influenced by, the philosopher Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov. Solovyov was a source for the characters Ivan Karamazov and Alyosha Karamazov.

Dostoyevsky's study in Saint Petersburg.

In 1877 Dostoyevsky gave a eulogy at the funeral of his friend, the poet Nekrasov, to much controversy.

On 8 June 1880, shortly before he died, he gave his famous Pushkin speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow. In his later years Dostoyevsky lived for an extended period at the resort of Staraya Russa in northwestern Russia, which was closer to Saint Petersburg and less expensive than German resorts.

Death

Dostoyevsky died in St. Petersburg on 9 February [O.S. 28 January] 1881 of a lung hemorrhage associated with emphysema and an epileptic seizure. The copy of the New Testament given to him in Siberia sat on his lap. He was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Saint Petersburg. Forty thousand mourners attended his funeral. His tombstone is inscribed with the words of Christ, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. (from the Gospel According to John 12:24) – which are also the epigraph of his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov.)

The rented apartment where Dostoevsky spent the last few years of his life and wrote his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, and where he died is situated at 5 Kuznechnyi pereulok. It has been restored, by reference to old photographs, as it looked when he lived there, and opened in 1971 as the Dostoyevsky House Museum. It is a popular tourist attraction in Saint Petersburg.

Influence

Portrait of Dostoyevsky in 1872 painted by Vasily Perov.

Some, like journalist Otto Friedrich, consider Dostoyevsky to be one of Europe's major novelists, while others like Vladimir Nabokov maintain that from a point of view of enduring art and individual genius, he is a rather mediocre writer who produced wastelands of literary platitudes.

Dostoyevsky investigated in his novels religious concerns, particularly those of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. "Dostoyevsky and the Religion of Suffering," the essay devoted to Dostoyevsky in Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé's Le roman russe (1886), was an influential early analysis of the novelist's work, introducing Dostoyevsky and other Russian novelists to the West. Nabokov argued in his University courses at Cornell, that such religious propaganda, rather than artistic qualities, was the main reason Dostoyevsky was praised and regarded as a 'Prophet' in Soviet Russia.

James Joyce and Virginia Woolf praised his prose. Ernest Hemingway cited Dostoyevsky as an influence on his work, in his posthumous collection of sketches A Moveable Feast. Kurt Vonnegut in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five mentions Dostoevsky in such way:

[Eliot] Rosewater said an interesting thing to Billy [Pilgrim] one time ... He said that everything there was to know about life is in "The Brothers Karamazov," by Fyodor Dostoevsky. "But that isn't enough anymore," said Rosewater.

According to Arthur Power's Conversations with James Joyce, Joyce praised Dostoyevsky's prose:

...he is the man more than any other who has created modern prose, and intensified it to its present-day pitch. It was his explosive power which shattered the Victorian novel with its simpering maidens and ordered commonplaces; books which were without imagination or violence.

In her essay The Russian Point of View, Virginia Woolf said:

The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading.

Dostoyevsky monument at the Russian State Library in Moscow.

Dostoyevsky displayed a nuanced understanding of human psychology in his major works. He created an opus of vitality and almost hypnotic power, characterized by feverishly dramatized scenes where his characters are frequently in scandalous and explosive atmospheres, engaged in passionate dialogue. The quest for God, the problem of evil and the suffering of the innocent are the themes which haunt the majority of his novels.

His characters fall into a few distinct categories: humble and self-effacing Christians (Prince Myshkin, Sonya Marmeladova, Alyosha Karamazov, Saint Ambrose of Optina), self-destructive nihilists (Svidrigailov, Smerdyakov, Stavrogin, the underground man)^{[citation needed]}, cynical debauchees (Fyodor Karamazov, Dmitri Karamazov), and rebellious intellectuals (Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov, Ippolit); also, his characters are driven by ideas rather than by biological or social imperatives. In comparison with the realistic characters of Tolstoy those of Dostoyevsky are more symbolic of the ideas they represent; thus Dostoyevsky is often cited as a forerunner of Literary Symbolism, especially Russian Symbolism (see Alexander Blok).

Dostoyevsky statue, erected 1918, in front of Mariinsky Hospital, the writer's birthplace in Moscow.

Dostoyevsky's novels are compressed in time (many cover only a few days); and this enables him to get rid of one of the dominant presentations of realist prose, that of the corrosion of human life in the process of the time flux; his characters embody spiritual values that are timeless. Other themes include suicide, wounded pride, collapsed family values, spiritual regeneration through suffering, rejection of the West and affirmation of the Russian Orthodox Church and of tsarism. Literary scholars such as Mikhail Bakhtin have characterized his work as "polyphonic": Dostoyevsky does not appear to aim for a "single vision", and beyond simply describing situations from various angles, Dostoyevsky engendered fully dramatic novels of ideas, where conflicting views and characters are left to develop unevenly into unbearable crescendo.

Dostoyevsky and the other giant of late 19th century Russian literature, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, never met in person, though each praised, criticized, and influenced the other (Dostoyevsky remarked of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina that it was a "flawless work of art"; Henri Troyat reports that Tolstoy once remarked of Crime and Punishment that, "Once you read the first few chapters you know pretty much how the novel will end up").^{[citation needed]} A meeting was arranged but there was a confusion about where the meeting was to take place; and the two never rescheduled. Tolstoy wept when he learned of Dostoyevsky's death. A copy of The Brothers Karamazov was found on the nightstand next to Tolstoy's deathbed at the Astapovo railway station.

Dostoyevsky's tomb at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery

Dostoyevsky on Jews in Russia

Several writers and critics (including Joseph Frank, Maxim D. Shrayer, Stephen Cassedy, David I. Goldstein, Gary Saul Morson, and Felix Dreizin) have offered insights and suppositions regarding Dostoyevsky’s views on Jews and organized Jewry in Russia. One view is that Dostoyevsky perceived Jewish ethnocentrism and influence to be threatening the Russian peasantry in border regions.^{[citation needed]} In A Writer's Diary, Dostoyevsky wrote:

Thus, Jewry is thriving precisely there where the people are still ignorant, or not free, or economically backward. It is there that Jewry has a champ libre. And instead of raising, by its influence, the level of education, instead of increasing knowledge, generating economic fitness in the native population—instead of this the Jew, wherever he has settled, has still more humiliated and debauched the people; there humaneness was still more debased and the educational level fell still lower; there inescapable, inhuman misery, and with it despair, spread still more disgustingly. Ask the native population in our border regions: What is propelling the Jew—and has been propelling him for centuries? You will receive a unanimous answer: mercilessness. He has been prompted so many centuries only by pitilessness to us, only by the thirst for our sweat and blood.

And, in truth, the whole activity of the Jews in these border regions of ours consisted of rendering the native population as much as possible inescapably dependent on them, taking advantage of the local laws. They have always managed to be on friendly terms with those upon whom the people were dependent. Point to any other tribe from among Russian aliens which could rival the Jew by his dreadful influence in this connection! You will find no such tribe. In this respect the Jew preserves all his originality as compared with other Russian aliens, and of course, the reason therefore is that status of status of his, that spirit of which specifically breathes pitilessness for everything that is not Jew, with disrespect for any people and tribe, for every human creature who is not a Jew...

Dostoyevsky has been noted as both having expressed antisemitic sentiments as well as standing up for the rights of the Jewish people. In a review of Joseph Frank's book, The Mantle of the Prophet, Orlando Figes notes that A Writer's Diary is "filled with politics, literary criticism, and pan-Slav diatribes about the virtues of the Russian Empire, [and] represents a major challenge to the Dostoyevsky fan, not least on account of its frequent expressions of anti-semitism." Frank, in his foreword for David I. Goldstein's book Dostoevsky and the Jews, attempts to place Dostoyevsky as a product of his time. Frank notes that Dostoyevsky made antisemitic remarks, but that Dostoyevsky's writing and stance, by and large, was one where Dostoyevsky held a great deal of guilt for his comments and positions that were antisemitic.

Steven Cassedy alleges in his book, Dostoevsky's Religion, that much of the depiction of Dostoyevsky's views as antisemitic omits that Dostoyevsky expressed support for the equal rights of the Russian Jewish population, an unpopular position in Russia at the time. Cassedy also notes that this criticism of Dostoyevsky also appears to deny his sincerity when he said that he was for equal rights for the Russian Jewish populace and the serfs of his own country (since neither group at that point in history had equal rights). Cassedy again notes when Dostoyevsky stated that he did not hate Jewish people and was not antisemitic. Even though Dostoyevsky spoke of the potential negative influence of Jewish people, Dostoyevsky advised emperor Alexander II of Russia to give them rights to positions of influence in Russian society, such as allowing them access to Professorships at Universities. According to Cassedy, labeling Dostoyevsky anti-Semitic does not take into consideration Dostoyevsky's expressed desire to reconcile Jews and Christians peacefully in a single universal brotherhood of mankind.

Dostoyevsky and existentialism

Dostoyevsky's handwriting.

With the publication of Crime and Punishment, in 1866, Dostoyevsky became one of Russia's most prominent authors. Will Durant, in The Pleasures of Philosophy (1953), called Dostoyevsky one of the founding fathers of the philosophical movement known as existentialism, and cited Notes from Underground in particular as a founding work of existentialism. For the Underground Man, war is the people's rebellion against the idea that reason guides everything, and reason is not the ultimate guiding principle for history or mankind. After his 1849 exile to the city of Omsk, Siberia, Dostoyevsky focused on questions of suffering and despair in many of his works.

Friedrich Nietzsche referred to Dostoyevsky as "the only psychologist from whom I have something to learn: he belongs to the happiest windfalls of my life, happier even than the discovery of Stendhal." He said that Notes from Underground "cried truth from the blood." According to Mihajlo Mihajlov's "The Great Catalyzer: Nietzsche and Russian Neo-Idealism", Nietzsche constantly refers to Dostoyevsky in his notes and drafts throughout the winter of 1886–1887. Nietzsche also wrote abstracts of several of Dostoyevsky's works.

Freud wrote an article titled Dostoevsky and Parricide, asserting that the greatest works in world literature are all about parricide. Though critical of Dostoyevsky's work overall, he regarded The Brothers Karamazov as among the three greatest works of literature.

Works

Fiction

Dostoyevsky's works of fiction includes 2 translations, 15 novels and novellas, and 17 short stories. Many of his longer novels were first published in serialized form in literary magazines and journals (see the individual articles). The years given below indicate the year in which the novel's final part or first complete book edition was published. in English many of his novels and stories are known by several titles.

Translated books

• Eugénie Grandet, (Honore de Balzac) (1843)
• La dernière Aldini (George Sand) (1843)

Novels and novellas

• Poor Folk (Бедные люди [Bednye lyudi], 1846)
• The Double: A Petersburg Poem (Двойник: Петербургская поэма [Dvoynik: Peterburgskaya poema], 1846)
• Netochka Nezvanova (Неточка Незванова [Netochka Nezvanova], 1849)
• Uncle's Dream (Дядюшкин сон [Dyadyushkin son], 1859)
• The Village of Stepanchikovo (Село Степанчиково и его обитатели [Selo Stepanchikovo i ego obitateli], 1859)
• Humiliated and Insulted (Униженные и оскорбленные [Unizhennye i oskorblennye], 1861)
• The House of the Dead (Записки из мертвого дома [Zapiski iz mertvogo doma], 1862)
• Notes from Underground (Записки из подполья [Zapiski iz podpolya], 1864)
• Crime and Punishment (Преступление и наказание [Prestuplenie i nakazanie], 1866)
• The Gambler (Игрок [Igrok], 1867)
• The Idiot (Идиот [Idiot], 1869)
• The Eternal Husband (Вечный муж [Vechnyj muzh], 1870)
• Demons (Бесы [Besy], 1872)
• The Adolescent (Подросток [Podrostok], also published as A Raw Youth, 1875)
• The Brothers Karamazov (Братья Карамазовы [Brat'ya Karamazovy], 1880)

Short stories

• "Mr. Prokharchin" ("Господин Прохарчин" ["Gospodin Prokharchin"], 1846)
• "Novel in Nine Letters" ("Роман в девяти письмах" ["Roman v devyati pis'mah"], 1847)
• "The Landlady" ("Хозяйка" ["Hozyajka"], 1847)
• "The Jealous Husband" ("Чужая жена и муж под кроватью" ["Chuzhaya zhena i muzh pod krovat'yu"], 1848)
• "A Weak Heart" ("Слабое сердце" ["Slaboe serdze"], 1848)
• "Polzunkov" ("Ползунков" ["Polzunkov"], 1848)
• "The Honest Thief" ("Честный вор" ["Chestnyj vor"], 1848)
• "The Christmas Tree and a Wedding" ("Елка и свадьба" ["Elka i svad'ba"], 1848)
• "White Nights" ("Белые ночи" ["Belye nochi"], 1848)
• "A Little Hero" ("Маленький герой" ["Malen'kij geroj"], 1849)
• "A Nasty Anecdote" ("Скверный анекдот" ["Skvernyj anekdot"], 1862)
• "The Crocodile" ("Крокодил" ["Krokodil"], 1865)
• "Bobok" ("Бобок" ["Bobok"], 1873)
• "The Heavenly Christmas Tree" ("Мальчик у Христа на ёлке" ["Mal'chik u Hrista na elke"], 1876)
• "The Meek One" ("Кроткая" ["Krotkaja"], 1876)
• "The Peasant Marey" ("Мужик Марей" ["Muzhik Marej"], 1876)
• "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" ("Сон смешного человека" ["Son smeshnogo cheloveka"], 1877)

Non-fiction

• A Writer's Diary, collected essays
• Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863)
• A Writer's Diary (Дневник писателя [Dnevnik pisatelya], 1873–1881)
• Letters (collected in English translations in five volumes of Complete Letters)

See also

• Albert Camus
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Existentialism
• List of Russian philosophers
• Lev Shestov
• Nikolai Berdyaev
• Nikolay Strakhov
• Russian Orthodox Church
• Vasily Rozanov

Bibliography

• Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky Language, Faith and Fiction (2008)
• Elsäßer-Feist, Ulrike (1991) (in German). Fjodor M. Dostojewski. R. Brockhaus Bildbiographien. http://www.scribd.com/doc/36593356/Elsa%C3%9Fer-Feist-Ulrike-Fjodor-M-Dostojewski-Biographie. 
• Avsey, Ignat (2008). "Extra Material on Fyodor Dostoevsky's Humiliated and Insulted". Humiliated and Insulted. Trans. Avsey. London: Oneworld Classics. ISBN 978-1847490452. 
• M. Jones, Dostoevsky and the dynamics of religious experience (2005)
• W. J. Leatherbarrow, A Devil's Vaudeville: the demonic in Dostoevsky's major fiction (2005)
• The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii, ed. W. J. Leatherbarrow (2002)
• Frank, Joseph (1979) [First published 1976]. Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691013558. http://books.google.com/books?id=pDEAXltygUIC. 
• Frank, Joseph (1987) [First published 1983]. Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691014227. http://books.google.com/books?id=K98hhw0IEHgC. 
• Frank, Joseph (1988) [First published 1986]. Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691014524. http://books.google.com/books?id=QJj6qb6Rh3AC. 
• Frank, Joseph (1997) [First published 1995]. Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691015873. http://books.google.com/books?id=iAs4Lz5yog0C. 
• Frank, Joseph (2003) [First published 2002]. Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691115696. http://books.google.com/books?id=mQqonU-pweEC. 
• Dostoevsky and the Christian tradition, ed. G. Pattison, D. O. Thompson (2001)
• P. Evdokimov, Gogol et Dostoievski (2nd. ed. 1984)
• New Essays on Dostoevsky, ed. M. Jones, G. M. Terry (1983)
• S. Sutherland, Atheism and the rejection of God: contemporary philosophy and The Brothers Karamazov (1977)
• V. Seduro, Dostoevski's Image in Russia Today (1975)
• Mochulsky, Konstantin (1973) [First published 1967; Russian original 1947]. Dostoevsky: His Life and Work. Trans. Minihan, Michael A. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691012997. http://books.google.com/books?id=mDKphT8_XLsC. 
• D. Capetanakis, 'Dostoevsky', in Demetrios Capetanakis A Greek Poet In England (1947), p. 103–116
• P. Evdokimov, Dostoevski et le probleme du mal (1942; repr. 1978)
• N. Berdyaev, Dostoevsky (1934; Russian original 1923)
• L. Shestov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche (1969; Russian original 1903)
• Mochulsky, Konstantin (1967) [First published 1967]. Dostoevsky: His Life and Work. Trans. Minihan, Michael A. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691012997. http://books.google.com/books?id=mDKphT8_XLsC. 
• Belinsky, Vissarion (1847) (in Russian). Polnoye sobranye. 10. 
• Reber, Natalie (1964). Studien zum Motiv des Doppelgängers bei Dostojevskij und E.T.A. Hoffmann. Gießen. 
• Terras, Victor (1969). The young Dostoevsky (1846–1849): A critical study. Slavistic printings and reprintings. 69. University of Michigan. 

External links

• Works by Fyodor Dostoyevsky at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Fyodor Dostoyevsky in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Fyodor Dostoevsky at the Internet Book List
• Fyodor Dostoevsky at the Internet Movie Database