Family origins
Dostoyevsky was of an old noble family originating from Volynia. Dostoyevsky's grandfather Andriy was a priest in modern central Ukraine. Dostoyevsky's mother was Russian. His paternal ancestors were from a village called Dostoyev in Belarus, in the Guberniya (province) of Minsk, not far from Pinsk; the stress on the family name was originally on the second syllable, matching that of the town (Dostóev), but in the nineteenth century was shifted to the third syllable. According to one account, Dostoyevsky's paternal ancestors were Polonized nobles (szlachta) of Ruthenian origin and went to war bearing Polish Radwan Coat of Arms. Dostoyevsky (Polish "Dostojewski") Radwan armorial bearings were drawn for the Dostoyevsky Museum in Moscow.
Early life
Dostoyevsky was the second of six children born to Mikhail and Maria Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky's father Mikhail was a retired military surgeon and a violent alcoholic, who had practiced at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in Moscow. The hospital was located in one of the city's worst areas; local landmarks included a cemetery for criminals, a lunatic asylum, and an orphanage for abandoned infants. This urban landscape made a lasting impression on the young Dostoyevsky, whose interest in and compassion for the poor, oppressed and tormented was apparent. Though his parents forbade it, Dostoyevsky liked to wander out to the hospital garden, where the suffering patients sat to catch a glimpse of sun. The young Dostoyevsky loved to spend time with these patients and hear their stories.
There are many stories of Dostoyevsky's father's despotic treatment of his children. After returning home from work, he would take a nap while his children, ordered to keep absolutely silent, stood by their slumbering father in shifts and swatted at any flies that came near his head. However, it is the opinion of Joseph Frank, a biographer of Dostoyevsky, that the father figure in
The Brothers Karamazov is not based on Dostoyevsky's own father. Letters and personal accounts demonstrate that they had a fairly loving relationship.
Shortly after his mother died of tuberculosis in 1837, Dostoyevsky and his brother were sent to the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute, now Military Engineering-Technical University (Russian: ??????? ?????????-??????????? ???????????), at Saint Petersburg. Fyodor's father died in 1839. Though it has never been proven, it is believed by some that he was murdered by his own serfs. According to one account, they became enraged during one of his drunken fits of violence, restrained him, and poured vodka into his mouth until he drowned. A similar account appears in
Notes from Underground. Another story holds that Mikhail died of natural causes, and a neighboring landowner invented the story of his murder so that he might buy the estate inexpensively. Some, like Sigmund Freud in his 1928 article, "Dostoevsky and Parricide", have argued that his father's personality had influenced the character of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, the "wicked and sentimental buffoon", father of the main characters in his 1880 novel
The Brothers Karamazov, but such claims fail to withstand the scrutiny of many critics.
Dostoyevsky had epilepsy and his first seizure occurred when he was nine years old. Epileptic seizures recurred sporadically throughout his life, and Dostoyevsky's experiences are thought to have formed the basis for his description of Prince Myshkin's epilepsy in his novel
The Idiot and that of Smerdyakov in
The Brothers Karamazov, among others.
At the Saint Petersburg Institute of Military Engineering (Now Military Engineering-Technical University - Russian: ??????? ?????????-??????????? ???????????), Dostoyevsky was taught mathematics, a subject he despised. However, he also studied literature by Shakespeare, Pascal, Victor Hugo and E.T.A. Hoffmann. Though he focused on areas different from mathematics, he did well on the exams and received a commission in 1841. That year, influenced by the German poet/playwright Friedrich Schiller, he wrote two romantic plays:
Mary Stuart and
Boris Godunov. The plays have not been preserved. Dostoyevsky described himself as a "dreamer" when he was a young man, and at that time revered Schiller. However, in the years during which he yielded his great masterpieces, his opinions changed and he sometimes poked fun at Schiller.
Beginnings of a literary career
Dostoyevsky was made a lieutenant in 1842, and left the Engineering Academy the following year. He completed a translation into Russian of Balzac's novel
Eugénie Grandet in 1843, but it brought him little or no attention. Dostoyevsky started to write his own fiction in late 1844 after leaving the army. In 1846, his first work, the epistolary short novel,
Poor Folk, printed in the almanac
A Petersburg Collection (published by N. Nekrasov), was met with great acclaim. As legend has it, the editor of the magazine, poet Nikolai Nekrasov, walked into the office of liberal critic Vissarion Belinsky and announced, "A new Gogol has arisen!" Belinsky, his followers, and many others agreed. After the novel was fully published in book form at the beginning of the next year, Dostoyevsky became a literary celebrity at the age of 24.
In 1846, Belinsky and many others reacted negatively to his novella,
The Double, a psychological study of a bureaucrat whose alter ego overtakes his life. Dostoyevsky's fame began to fade. Much of his work after
Poor Folk received ambivalent reviews and it seemed that Belinsky's prediction that Dostoyevsky would be one of the greatest writers of Russia was mistaken.
Exile in Siberia
Dostoyevsky was incarcerated on 23 April 1849 for being part of the liberal intellectual group the Petrashevsky Circle. Tsar Nicholas I, after seeing the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, was harsh on any sort of underground organization which he felt could put autocracy in jeopardy. On November 16 of that year, Dostoyevsky, along with the 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 labor at a katorga prison camp in Omsk, Siberia. Dostoyevsky described later to his brother the sufferings he went through as the years in which he was "shut up in a coffin". 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.
He was released from prison in 1854, and was required to serve in the Siberian Regiment. Dostoyevsky 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. They married in February 1857, after her husband's death.
Post-prison maturation as a writer
Dostoyevsky's experiences in prison and the army resulted in major changes in his political and religious convictions. First, his ordeal somehow caused him to become disillusioned with "Western" ideas; he repudiated the contemporary Western European philosophical movements, and instead paid greater tribute in his writing to traditional, rustic Russian values exemplified in the Slavophile concept of
sobornost. But 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 much 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 well-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 West-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. This, nonetheless, 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
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 latter was shut down as a consequence of its coverage of the Polish Uprising of 1863. That year Dostoyevsky traveled to Europe and frequented the gambling casinos. There he met Apollinaria Suslova, the model for Dostoyevsky's "proud women", such as the two characters named Katerina Ivanovna, in
Crime and Punishment and
The Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoyevsky was devastated by his wife's death in 1864, 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, and he also provided for his wife's son from her earlier marriage and his brother's widow and children. Dostoyevsky sank into a deep depression, frequenting gambling parlors and accumulating massive losses at the tables.
Dostoyevsky suffered from an acute gambling compulsion and its consequences. By one account he completed
Crime and Punishment, possibly his best known novel, in a mad hurry because he was in urgent need of an advance from his publisher. He had been left practically penniless after a gambling spree. Dostoyevsky wrote
The Gambler simultaneously in order to satisfy an agreement with his publisher Stellovsky who, if he did not receive a new work, would have claimed the copyrights to all of Dostoyevsky's writings.
Motivated by the dual wish to escape his creditors at home and to visit the 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 influenced by the philosopher Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov. Solovyov was the inspiration for the characters Ivan Karamazov and Alyosha Karamazov.
In 1877, Dostoyevsky gave the keynote 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, Fyodor 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. He died on of a lung hemorrhage associated with emphysema and an epileptic seizure. He was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Saint Petersburg. Forty thousand mourners attended his funeral. His tombstone reads "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 John 12:24, which is also the epigraph of his final novel,
The Brothers Karamazov.
