(1821–81). Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky is regarded as one of the world’s great novelists. He specialized in the analysis of states of mind that lead to insanity, murder, and suicide and in the exploration of the emotions of humiliation, self-destruction, tyrannical domination, and murderous rage. His psychological penetration into the darkest recesses of the human heart exerted a great influence on 20th-century fiction.
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was born on November 11 (October 30, according to the calendar in use at the time), 1821, in a Moscow, Russia, hospital where his father was a physician. He was educated at home until 1833, when he was sent to a day school and then to a Moscow boarding school. Dostoyevsky then attended a military engineering school in St. Petersburg, Russia. Shortly after graduating in 1843, he resigned his commission in order to devote his time to writing.
Dostoyevsky had published two novels and several sketches and short stories when he was arrested along with a group of about 20 others with whom he had been meeting to discuss utopian socialist theories. After the 1848 revolutions in western Europe, Russia’s Tsar Nicholas I decided to round up all that country’s revolutionaries, and in April 1849 Dostoyevsky’s group was imprisoned. Dostoyevsky and several others were sentenced to be shot, but at the last minute their sentence was changed to hard labor in a prison in Omsk, Siberia. There, Dostoyevsky said, they were “packed in like herrings in a barrel” with murderers and other criminals. He read and reread the New Testament, the only book he had, and built a mystical creed, identifying Christ with the common people of Russia. He had great sympathy for the criminals.
Dostoyevsky suffered his first attacks of epilepsy while in prison. These seizures would plague him for the rest of his life, and he would at times incorporate aspects of the disorder into his fictional characters. After four years in prison, Dostoyevsky was sent as a private to a military station in Siberia. There in 1857 he met and married a widow named Mariya Dmitriyevna Isayeva.
In 1860 Dostoyevsky was back in St. Petersburg. The next year he began to publish a literary journal that was soon suppressed, though he had by now lost interest in socialism. In 1862 he visited western Europe and hated the industrialism he saw there. Dostoyevsky had been separated from his wife but visited her in Moscow before her death in 1864. In 1867 he married his young stenographer, Anna Snitkina. Dostoyevsky died on February 9 (January 28, according to the calendar in use at the time), 1881, in St. Petersburg.
Many of Dostoyevsky’s novels are unsurpassed in their excellence of plot, characterization, and social description. He frequently drew on the highly dramatic incidents of his life—including his poor upbringing and his epileptic seizures—in creating his greatest characters. Dostoyevsky himself best defined his intent when he said: “I portray all the depths of the human soul.” He also portrayed a profound devotion to the New Testament Christianity that he learned during his Siberian exile.
Dostoyevsky’s two earliest novels, Bednyye lyudi (Poor Folk) and Dvoynik (The Double), both published in 1846, were minor efforts. Poor Folk was considered the first Russian social novel, and it is a narration of the tragic futility of the life of the poor. The Double was a study in schizophrenia, with the hero begetting a double of himself, who mocks him and usurps his place.
It was 18 years after these works that Dostoyevsky wrote the first of his masterpieces, Zapiski iz podpolya (1864; Notes from the Underground). In it he created the antihero, a type of fictional character that became prominent in 20th-century novels. The antihero of Notes is a nameless individual whose self-analysis reveals a person for whom all truth and morality are relative, a man torn by conflict between reason and his will. In some ways Notes serves as an introduction to the great novels of the next 16 years: Prestupleniye i nakazaniye (1866; Crime and Punishment), Idiot (1868–69; The Idiot), Besy (1872; The Possessed), and Bratya Karamazovy (1879–80; The Brothers Karamazov), considered by many critics to be the finest novel ever written.
At their simplest level, both Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov are ingenious murder mysteries, but they are much more. The first is a social novel whose main character, Raskolnikov, is an intellectual rebel against society. His struggles with good and evil lead him to conclude that the murder he commits is justified by his humanitarian goals. In The Brothers Karamazov it is the extravagant father who is killed. Through the conflict of three very different brothers—Ivan, Dmitry, and Alyosha—Dostoyevsky probes the nature of moral and actual guilt. And in so doing he clarifies the meaning of Christianity and the search for faith.
The Idiot is the story of Prince Myshkin, whose faith and personality are symbolic of Christ. The Possessed is an action-packed novel about a Moscow student’s murder by fellow revolutionaries. The story reflects Dostoyevsky’s own opposition to revolution and his devotion to the Russia of the tsars and to the Russian Orthodox faith. (See also Russian literature.)