Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose exploration of the psychological extremes of human experience — guilt and redemption, suffering and faith, freedom and the will to self-destruction — made him one of the most influential writers in the history of world literature. In a career that survived mock execution, four years in a Siberian prison labor camp, military exile, devastating poverty, and an addiction to gambling that brought him repeatedly to ruin, he produced a body of work that includes several of the greatest novels ever written: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. These books did not merely represent psychological reality; they helped to create the modern understanding of what psychological reality is.

He was born in Moscow in 1821, the son of a hospital physician who was murdered by his own serfs — an event so traumatic that Sigmund Freud would later use it as the basis of a celebrated psychoanalytic essay. He studied military engineering in St. Petersburg, published his first novel at twenty-four to the rapturous praise of the leading literary critic of the age, was arrested at twenty-seven for participation in a politically suspect reading circle, was subjected to a staged mock execution before being sent to four years of hard labor in Siberia, and returned from that experience — broken in health, deepened in spiritual understanding, and transformed as a writer — to produce the works that placed him in the first rank of European literature.

The central concerns of Dostoyevsky's work are suffering, free will, the nature of faith, the psychology of the criminal and the saint, and the question of how human beings can live morally in a world where God's existence is uncertain and human nature is demonstrably capable of the most extreme violence and the most extreme self-sacrifice. These are not merely literary themes but the questions that Dostoyevsky himself was compelled to address by the extremity of his own experience. A man who has faced a firing squad and spent four years in chains among murderers and thieves does not theorize about suffering and guilt from the outside; he writes from within them.

His influence on world literature and thought has been enormous and continuing. Nietzsche, who read him with passionate intensity, found in him a psychologist of the first order — the man who had understood the will to power and self-destruction more deeply than any philosopher. Freud drew on The Brothers Karamazov and its portrayal of patricide and guilt for his theory of the Oedipus complex. Kafka's sense of guilt-ridden bureaucratic nightmare has Dostoyevskian roots. Albert Camus, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre found in him an anticipator of existentialist themes. Twentieth-century novelists from William Faulkner to Kenzaburo Oe have acknowledged his influence. And the religious and philosophical tradition of Russian Orthodoxy found in him its greatest literary defender, a man who had worked through the most powerful arguments for atheism and materialism and emerged, at the end of his life, committed to faith not despite but because of the suffering he had witnessed.

Early Life and Education: Moscow and St. Petersburg

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was born on November 11, 1821, in Moscow, in the wing of the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor where his father served as a staff physician. The household was one of modest professional respectability: Mikhail Andreyevich Dostoyevsky was a man of stern religious temperament, autocratic domestic habits, and genuine if demanding affection for his children. Fyodor's mother, Maria Fyodorovna Nechaeva, was a warm, gentle woman who provided the emotional counterbalance to the father's severity and who died of tuberculosis in 1837 when Fyodor was fifteen.

The family spent summers at the small estate of Darovoye near Moscow that the elder Dostoyevsky had purchased, and Fyodor's childhood memories of the Russian countryside — the peasants, the birch forests, the smell of the Russian earth — remained with him throughout his life as a counterweight to the St. Petersburg urban world that became his literary territory. His reading as a child was wide and serious: the Bible, Pushkin, Walter Scott, and the Gothic novels that he loved with a mixture of aesthetic pleasure and moral unease that would shape his literary sensibility.