Fyodor Dostoevsky

Alex Rover | November 12, 2022

Post Views: 18

Summary

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (October 30, 1821, Moscow, Russian Empire – January 28, 1881, St. Petersburg, Russian Empire) – Russian writer, thinker, philosopher and essayist. He was corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences since 1877. He is a classic of world literature, one of the most readable writers in the world according to UNESCO. Dostoevsky”s collected works consist of 12 novels, four novellas, 16 short stories and many other works.

The writer”s early works, like the novel Notes from the Dead House, contributed to the genre of psychological prose.

He was convicted in the Petrashevtsev case to four years of hard labor, serving his sentence in the military city of Omsk.

After his death, Dostoevsky was recognized as a classic of Russian literature and one of the best novelists of world significance, considered to be the first representative of personalism in Russia. The Russian writer”s work influenced world literature, in particular the work of several Nobel Prize winners in literature, the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as the formation of various psychological teachings and existentialism; his 1864 novel Notes from the Underground is considered one of the first works of existentialist literature.

Among the most significant works of the writer are the novels of the “great five books. Many of Dostoevsky”s famous works have been repeatedly filmed and dramatized in the theater, and ballet and opera productions have been staged.

Also read, history – Imperial Diet (Holy Roman Empire)

The Dostoyevsky family

The Dostoevskys originated from the boyar Danila Ivanovich Irtishchev (Rtishchev, Rtishchevich, Irtishchevich, Artishchevich), who on October 6, 1506 was granted an estate called Dostoev in the Porech volost of Pinsk uyezd, northwest of Pinsk. Researchers of the origin of the surname are virtually certain that all the Dostoevskys are descendants of Danila Irtishchev. According to local legends, the name Dostoevo came from the Polish Dostojnik – a dignitary, a close relative of the sovereign. “Dostojniki” was derisively called the inhabitants of the village, out of which the prince”s servants were hired. The implication was that these people were “worthy” of this service. In the Brest region of Belarus the village of Dostoevo is preserved. Danila Ivanovich Rtischev”s ancestor, according to researchers, was a Tatar, mentioned in historical sources, Aslan-Chelebi Murza, who had left the Golden Horde back in 1389 and was baptized into Orthodoxy by Moscow Prince Dmitry Donskoy. The son of this Tatar was nicknamed Shirokiy Rt, and his descendants became Rtischevs. The coat of arms of the Rtischevs, which depicted a crescent, a hexagonal star and a pair of armed Tatars, indicates the non-Orthodox origin of the family.

Finally, the surname “Dostoevsky” was assigned to the grandsons of Danila Ivanovich, whose descendants eventually became a typical servant nobility. The Pinsk branch of Dostoevskys was mentioned in various documents for almost two centuries, but in time it was integrated by the Polish-Lithuanian state, losing its nobility. In the second half of the XVII century the family moved to Ukraine. At the same time, the number of mentions of the surname in historical documents sharply decreased. Researchers haven”t discovered any connection between the writer and the founder of the family, Danila Irtishchev. It is known for sure that the writer”s direct ancestors lived in Volyn region in the first half of the XVIII century. To overcome the genealogical gap of several generations, researchers used the method of reconstruction. Even about the writer”s grandfather, Andrei Grigorievich Dostoevsky, there is no exact data. It is known that he was born about 1756 in Volyn in the family of a petty nobleman. In 1775 he moved with his father and brothers to Bratslav voivodeship, which after the second partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth became part of the Russian Empire. From 1782 Andriy Dostoevsky was a priest in the village of Voytovtsy.

Also read, biographies – Emperor Yingzong of Ming

The writer”s parents

The first Dostoevsky about whom there is reliable data is the writer”s father, Mikhail Andreevich Dostoevsky. According to the documents found, Mikhail Dostoevsky was born in 1789 in the village of Voytovtsy, and in 1802 entered the theological seminary at the Shargorod Nikolayevsky monastery. In August 1809 Alexander I issued a decree assigning to the Imperial Medical-Surgical Academy an additional 120 persons from ecclesiastical academies and seminaries. Mikhail Dostoevsky successfully passed the exams and on October 14, 1809 entered the number of state medical students in the Moscow branch of the Academy. During the Patriotic War of 1812 the student of the 4th class Dostoevsky was first sent to “use the sick and wounded”. On August 5, 1813 he was promoted to the rank of staff-surgeon in the 1st Department of the Borodino Infantry Regiment.

In April 1818 Mikhail Dostoevsky was transferred as a resident at a military hospital in Moscow, where through a colleague he soon met Maria Nechaeva, daughter of Fyodor Timofeyevich Nechaev, a merchant of the third guild who came from the old suburban town of Borovsk in Kaluga province. Nechaev”s cloth shop trade flourished until the invasion of Napoleon, after which the merchant lost virtually all of his fortune. Maria”s older sister Alexandra, who had been married to the wealthy first-class merchant Alexander Kumanin, took part in the writer”s fate later on.

On January 14, 1820, Mikhail Dostoevsky and Maria Nechaeva were married in the church of the Moscow Military Hospital. At the end of 1820, after the birth of his first son Mikhail, Dostoevsky resigned from military service and from 1821 went to work in the Mariinsky Hospital for the poor, despite its modest wages, which even by official recognition of “not enough to reward their labors and do not meet the necessary needs of each to maintain itself and his family. The main rule of the institution was that “poverty is the first right” to receive help at any time of the day or night. Moving to Bozhedomka, the Dostoyevskys were already expecting a family addition by the end of the fall.

Moscow Childhood

Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born on October 30, 1821 in Moscow on Novaya Bozhedomka Street, in the right wing of the Mariinsky Hospital for the poor of the Moscow educational home. In the “Book of Births…” of Peter and Paul Church at the hospital there is a record: “A baby boy was born, in the house of the hospital for the poor, to the staff physician Mikhail Andreevich Dostoevsky, his son Fyodor. The priest Vasily Ilyin prayed.” The name Fyodor was chosen, according to biographers, after his maternal grandfather, the merchant Fyodor Timofeyevich Nechaev. On November 4, Dostoevsky was baptized. The godparents were the staff physician, court counselor Grigory Pavlovich Maslovich and princess Praskovya Trofimovna Kozlovskaya, grandfather Fyodor Timofeyevich Nechaev and Alexandra Fedorovna Kumanina.

“I come from a Russian and pious family. Ever since I can remember myself, I remember my parents” love for me…,” Fyodor Mikhailovich recalled half a century later. In the Dostoevsky family patriarchal customs were strictly observed. The domestic order was subordinated to the service of the father. At six o”clock Mikhail Dostoyevsky woke up, made his morning rounds in the hospital, went around the patients” homes. After twelve there was dinner with the family, rest, and again an appointment at the hospital. “At 9 p.m., no sooner or later, the dinner table was usually set, and, having eaten, we boys would stand before the image; read our prayers, and, having said good-bye to our parents, retired to bed. This kind of pastime was repeated daily,” recalled Fyodor Mikhailovich. The earliest memories of the writer are dated 1823-1824 years. According to Orest Fyodorovich Miller, Dostoevsky”s first biographer, such memories were just praying before going to sleep in front of the images in the living room with his guests. After the birth of his sister Varvara at the end of 1822, Alyona Frolovna, about whom the future writer has the best memories, becomes the nurse of the Dostoevsky family: “She raised all of us children and nursed us all. She was then forty-five years old, clear, cheerful nature, and always told us such nice tales! In Dostoevsky”s works, the nanny is mentioned in the novel The Possessed. After Andrei”s birth in March 1825, the family moved to the left wing of the hospital. The new apartment, according to Andrei”s recollections, consisted of two rooms, a front room and a kitchen. The nursery for the older children was a “semi-dark room,” a partitioned-off back part of the front.

From Andrei”s recollections, as a child the Dostoevskys listened to tales of “The Firebird,” “Alyosha Popovich,” “The Bluebeard,” tales of “A Thousand and One Nights” and others. At Easter there were Podnovinskiye balagans with “pagliacci, clowns, strongmen, Petrushka and comedians.” In summer, family evening walks were organized in the Maryina grove. On Sundays and holidays, the Dostoevskys attended mass in the hospital church, and in the summer the mother and children went to the Trinity Sergius Lavra. As children, the Dostoevskys” house was visited by their mother”s sister Alexandra Kumanina and her husband, grandfather Fyodor Timofeyevich Nechaev and his second wife Olga Yakovlevna, and uncle Mikhail Fyodorovich Nechaev. Friends of the house were mostly my father”s coworkers and their families: Fyodor Antonovich Markus, the family of the senior physician Kuzma Alexeyevich Schirovsky and Arkady Alexeyevich Alfonsky, a resident of the hospital. Later, many of them appear in the works and are mentioned in the unrealized plans of the writer.

Also read, biographies – Gutzon Borglum

The beginning of training. Darovoye Estate

The Dostoevskys” home life fostered imagination and curiosity. Later in his memoirs, the writer referred to his parents, striving to break free from the commonplace and mediocrity, as “the best, advanced people. At family gatherings in the living room read aloud Karamzin, Derzhavin, Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Polevoy, Radcliffe. Later Fyodor Mikhailovich especially distinguished reading “History of the Russian State” by his father: “I was only ten years old when I already knew almost all the major episodes of Russian history. Maria Feodorovna taught the children to read. According to recollections, children were taught early: “as early as four years old they sat down at the book and told him: ”Learn! We started with cheap cheap popular fairy tales about Bova Korolevich and Yeruslan Lazarevich, stories about the Battle of Kulikovo, tales about Shut Balakirev and Ermak. The first serious book by which children learned to read was One Hundred and Four Sacred Stories of the Old and New Testament. Half a century later, Dostoevsky managed to find an edition from his childhood, which he later “cherishes <…> as a shrine,” saying that this book was “one of the first that struck me in life, I was still almost a baby then!”

Along with the rank of collegiate assessor in the spring of 1827 Michael Andreevich received the right to hereditary nobility; on June 28, 1828 Dostoevsky became a noble family, recorded in Part III of the genealogical book of Moscow province nobility, which allowed to purchase their own estate, where a large family could spend the summer months. In the summer of 1831 Michael Andreevich, having paid about 30 thousand rubles in assignations from the saved and borrowed funds, acquired the village Darovoye in Kashira District, Tula Province, 150 km from Moscow. The land in this area was lean, his eleven peasant households – poor, and the masters” house was a small, wattle and daub, tied with clay wing of three rooms. Because of the remaining six yards in the village, belonging to a neighbor, almost immediately began a dispute that turned into litigation. In addition, in the spring of 1832 there was a fire through the fault of one of the farmers in Darovoye, the total losses of which amounted to about 9 thousand rubles. The writer later recollected: “It turned out that everything was burned, all to the ground <…> from the first fear we imagined complete ruin. Giving money to the suffering peasants contributed to the fact that by the end of the summer “the village <…> was rebuilt from the needle,” but only in 1833 Cheremoshnya disputed managed to buy, having mortgaged Darovoye. In the summer of 1832 the children got their first glimpse of rural Russia. The Dostoevskys” house was in a large shady linden grove adjoining the Brykovo birch forest, “very dense and with a rather gloomy and wild area. Andrei Mikhailovich recalled that “from the very beginning his brother Fedya was very fond of Brykovo woods” and that “the peasants, especially the women, were very fond of them. The impressions of this trip were later reflected, in particular, in the novels “Poor People” and “The Possessed” as well as in “The Writer”s Diary”.

After their return to Moscow, the years of education begin for Mikhail and Fyodor. Initially his father was going to send his elder sons to the “Moscow University Noble Boarding School,” but he changed his mind because the latter had been converted into a gymnasium where corporal punishment was practiced. Despite the impatient, hot-tempered and demanding character of Mikhail Andreyevich, the Dostoyevsky family “used to treat their children very humanely <…> never punished them corporally, never anyone. The older children were tutored by teachers. The law of God, the Russian language, literature, arithmetic and geography were taught by a visiting deacon of Catherine Institute I. V. Hinkovsky. Every day went to half board at the teacher of the Alexander and Catherine Institutes, N. I. Drashusov, who taught the brothers the French language. There the sons of Drashusov also taught mathematics and verbal sciences. Since Drashusov had no Latin teacher, Mikhail Andreyevich “bought Bantyshev”s Latin grammar,” and in the fall and winter “began to study Latin with his brothers Michael and Fyodor every evening.” Michael later recalled that “his father, for all his kindness, was extremely demanding and impatient, and most importantly very irascible. Having become boarders, Mikhail and Fyodor could only come to Darovoye in the summer for a month and a half to two months. According to the revision carried out at that time, the Dostoevskys had “about a hundred peasants and over five hundred dessiatinas of land. In 1833-1834 Dostoevsky became acquainted with the works of Walter Scott. The writer later admitted that it allowed him to develop his “imagination and impressionability”, preserving many “beautiful and high impressions.” According to Andrei Mikhailovich”s recollections, he most often noticed Fyodor reading the historical novels Quentin Dorward and Waverly, or Sixty Years Ago.

Also read, biographies – Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi

Cermak”s Boarding House. Mother”s Death

In September 1834 Fyodor and Mikhail Dostoyevsky entered the boarding school of Leontius Ivanovich Chermak on Novaya Basmannaya Street, considered one of the best private educational institutions in Moscow. Tuition was expensive, but the Cumanins helped. The daily routine at the school was strict. On full boarding students went home only on weekends. Waking up was at the bell at six in the morning, and in winter at seven; after prayer and breakfast they studied until twelve; after lunch they studied again from two to six; from seven to ten they repeated their lessons, after which they had dinner and went to bed. The full course consisted of three classes of eleven months” duration each. They taught mathematics, rhetoric, geography, history, physics, logic, Russian, Greek, Latin, German, English, French, penmanship, drawing, and even dancing. Leontius Cermak tried to create the illusion of family life: “ate at the same table with his pupils and treated them kindly as his own sons,” entered into all the needs of children, watching over their health.

According to the recollections of the pupils at the time, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was “a serious, thoughtful boy, blond, with a pale face. He was little occupied with games: during recreations he left almost no books, spending the rest of his free time in conversations with the older pupils.” In the winter of 1835, supposedly, Dostoevsky had his first fit of paranoia. Among the boarding school teachers, Fyodor and Mikhail especially singled out Russian language teacher Nikolai Ivanovich Bilevich, who “simply became their idol, as they remembered him at every step. Bilevich studied at the same time as Gogol, attended literary meetings, composed poetry, and translated Schiller. Dostoyevsky”s biographers suggest that the teacher may have attracted students” attention to current literary events and Gogol”s work, and that Bilevich the literary man contributed to the fact that Dostoyevsky began to think of literature as a profession. At family readings on weekends and in the summer, they continued to read Derzhavin, Zhukovsky, Karamzin, and Pushkin. Presumably, from 1835, the Dostoevskys had a subscription to the magazine Library for Reading, in which the future writer first read Pushkin”s The Queen of Spades, Honoré de Balzac”s Father Horiot, works by Victor Hugo and George Sand, dramas by Eugene Scribe and other novelties of literature.

In April 1835, Maria Feodorovna and her younger children go to Darovoye. In Mikhail Andreevich”s letter of April 29, the first evidence of the beginning of her severe illness appears. Michael, Fyodor and Andrew at this time are preparing for examinations at the boarding school. They could now only come to Darovoye for a month in July and August. After the birth of a daughter in July, Maria Feodorovna”s illness worsened. The next summer of 1836 in Darovoye was her last. In autumn Maria Feodorovna became absolutely ill. Andrew Dostoevsky later recalled: “Since the beginning of the new, 1837 state of my mother”s very deteriorated, she almost did not get up from bed, and from February of the month and completely fell ill. Colleagues-doctors tried to help his wife, Mikhail Andreyevich, but neither mixtures or advice did not help; February 27 Maria Feodorovna Dostoyevskaya, not lived to 37 years died, and March 1 it was buried in Lazarevsky cemetery.

In May 1837 his father took the brothers Mikhail and Fyodor to St. Petersburg and assigned them to the preparatory boarding school of K. F. Kostomarov for admission to the General Engineering School. Mikhail and Fyodor Dostoyevsky wanted to engage in literature, but his father believed that the work of a writer could not ensure the future of his older sons, and insisted on their admission to an engineering school, service upon completion of which guaranteed a material well-being. In The Writer”s Diary, Dostoevsky recalled how, on the way to St. Petersburg with his brother, “we dreamed only of poetry and poets,” “and I ceaselessly composed in my mind a novel of Venetian life. The older brother was not admitted to school. The younger, however, studied with difficulty, not feeling any calling for future service. In the same year, their father in the rank of collegiate counselor left the service (during which he was awarded the Order of St. Vladimir 4th degree – 1829 and St. Anna 2nd degree – 1832) and settled in Darovoe, where in 1839, to the end of uncertain circumstances died.

Dostoevsky spent all his free time reading the works of Homer, Corneille, Racine, Balzac, Hugo, Goethe, Hoffmann, Schiller, Shakespeare, Byron, among Russian authors – Derzhavin, Lermontov, Gogol, and knew almost all Pushkin”s works by heart. According to the memoirs of the Russian geographer Semenov-Tyan-Shansky, Dostoevsky was “more educated than many Russian writers of his time, such as Nekrasov, Panayev, Grigorovich, Pleshcheyev and even Gogol himself.

Inspired by what he read, the young man took his own first steps in literary work at night. In the fall of 1838 his fellow students at the Engineering School under the influence of Dostoevsky organized a literary circle, which included I. I. Berezhetsky and D. V. Grigorovich. In June 1839 Fyodor received the tragic news of his father”s untimely death, which followed from an apoplectic stroke provoked by a conflict with his own peasants.

Upon graduation in 1843 Dostoevsky was enrolled as a field engineer lieutenant in the St. Petersburg engineering command, but in the early summer of the following year, deciding to devote himself entirely to literature, he resigned and October 19, 1844 was dismissed from military service with the rank of lieutenant.

While still a student at the school, Dostoevsky from 1840 to 1842 worked on the dramas “Mary Stuart” and “Boris Godunov,” excerpts from which he read to his brother in 1841. In January 1844 Dostoevsky wrote to his brother that he had finished the drama Yankel the Jew. These first works of youth have not survived. In late 1843 and early 1844 Dostoevsky translated Eugène Suet”s novel Matilde and, a little later, Georges Sand”s novel The Last of Aldini, while simultaneously beginning work on his own novel The Poor People. Both translations were not completed. At the same time, Dostoevsky was writing short stories that were not finished. Less than a year before his discharge from military service, Dostoevsky completed in January 1844 the first translation into Russian of Balzac”s novel Eugene Grande, published in Repertoire and Pantheon in 1844 without the name of the translator. At the end of May 1845 the novice writer completed his first novel, Poor People. Through the mediation of D. V. Grigorovich, the manuscript was read by N. A. Nekrasov and V. G. Belinsky. “The unbridled Vissarion” at first praised the work. Dostoevsky was welcome in Belinsky”s circle and became famous before the publication of the novel by N.A. Nekrasov in January 1846. Everyone was talking about a “new Gogol. Many years later, Dostoevsky recalled Belinsky”s words in The Writer”s Diary:

However, the next work, The Double, was met with incomprehension. According to D. V. Grigorovich, the enthusiastic recognition and elevation of Dostoevsky “almost to the degree of genius” was replaced by disappointment and dissatisfaction. Belinsky changed his first favorable attitude to the novice writer. The critics of the “natural school” wrote about Dostoyevsky as a new-fangled and unrecognized genius with sarcasm. Belinsky could not appreciate the innovation of The Double, about which M. M. Bakhtin wrote only many years later. Besides the “furious Vissarion,” only the novice and promising critic V. N. Maykov gave a positive assessment of Dostoevsky”s first two works. Dostoevsky”s close relations with Belinsky”s circle ended in a break-up after a clash with Ivan S. Turgenev at the end of 1846. At the same time Dostoevsky finally quarrelled with the editorial board of Sovremennik represented by N.A. Nekrasov and began to publish in A.A. Kraevsky”s Otechestvennye Zapiski.

High-profile fame allowed Dostoevsky to significantly expand his circle of acquaintances. Many acquaintances became prototypes of the characters of future works of the writer, with others were connected by a long friendship, closeness of ideological views, literature and journalism. In January-February 1846 Dostoevsky visited the literary salon of N.A. Maykov by invitation of the critic V.N. Maykov, where he got acquainted with I.A. Goncharov. Alexei Nikolaevich Beketov, with whom Dostoevsky studied at the Engineering School, introduced the writer to his brothers. From late winter – early spring of 1846 Dostoevsky became a member of the literary and philosophical circle of brothers Beketov (Alexei, Andrew and Nikolai), which included the poet Alexander Maykov, the critic Vladimir Maykov, Alexander Plecheev, a friend and doctor of the writer S. D. Yanovsky, Dmitri Grigorovich and others. In autumn of the same year members of this circle arranged “association” with a common household, which lasted until February 1847. In the circle of new acquaintances Dostoevsky found true friends, who helped the writer to find himself again after the rift with members of Belinsky”s circle. On November 26, 1846, Dostoevsky wrote to his brother Mikhail that the good friends Beketovs and others “cured me with their society.

In the spring of 1846 A.N. Pleshcheyev introduced Dostoevsky to M.V. Petrashevsky, an admirer of Fourier. But Dostoevsky began attending Petrashevsky”s “Fridays” from the end of January 1847, where the main issues discussed were freedom of printing, changes in court proceedings and emancipation of peasants. Among the Petrashevites there were several independent circles. In the spring of 1849 Dostoevsky attended the literary-musical circle of S. F. Durov, which consisted of members of the “Fridays” who disagreed with Petrashevsky on their political views. In the autumn of 1848 Dostoevsky met with Nikolai Speshnev, who called himself a communist, and soon seven of the most radical Petrashevsky members rallied round him forming a special secret society. Dostoevsky became a member of this society, whose goal was to create an illegal printing press and carry out a coup in Russia. In the circle of S. Dostoevsky several times read the forbidden Letter of Belinsky to Gogol. Shortly after the publication of “White Nights” in the early morning of April 23, 1849 the writer, among many other Petrashevites, was arrested and spent eight months in custody in the Petropavlovskaya Fortress. The investigation of the Petrashevtsev case remained unaware of the existence of the Speshnev Seven. This became known many years later from the memoirs of the poet A. N. Maykov after Dostoevsky”s death. During interrogations Dostoevsky provided the investigation with a minimum of compromising information.

At the beginning of his literary work, the young Dostoevsky rather suffered from an excess of ideas and plots than from a lack of material. The works of Dostoevsky”s first period belonged to various genres:

In the Alekseevsky Ravelin Dostoevsky wrote the story “The Little Hero” (1849). Many creative endeavors and plans of the young writer found their broader embodiment in his subsequent work. The best work of this period is the novel “Poor People”.

Although Dostoevsky denied the charges brought against him, the court found him “one of the most important criminals” for reading and “for failing to report on the dissemination of a letter written by the literary writer Belinsky, criminal about religion and the government.” On November 13, 1849 the Military Court Commission sentenced Dostoevsky to deprivation of all rights of estate and “death by firing squad”. On November 19 the death sentence of Dostoevsky was cancelled by the Auditor General”s report “in view of the inconsistency of his guilt” with a sentence of eight years hard labor. At the end of November the Emperor Nicholas I, when approving the sentence of the General Auditorium prepared for the Petrashevites, changed the eight-year hard labor term for Dostoyevsky to four years and his subsequent military service as a private soldier.

On December 22, 1849 (January 3, 1850) in the Semyonovsky Platz the verdict on “death by shooting” with breaking of a sword over the head was read to the Petrashevites, which was followed by a suspension of the execution and pardon. During the mock execution, the pardon and the punishment of hard labour were announced at the last moment. One of those sentenced to execution, Nikolai Grigoriev, went insane. The feelings Dostoyevsky might have had before his execution are reflected in one of Prince Myshkin”s monologues in The Idiot. Most likely, the writer”s political views began to change while still in the Petropavlovsky Fortress, while his religious views were based on the worldview of Orthodoxy. For example, the petrashevik F.N. Lvov remembered the words of Dostoyevsky, said before the demonstration execution on the Semyonovsky Platz to Speshnev: “Nous serons avec le Christ” (We will be with Christ), to which the latter replied: “Un peu de poussière” (A handful of ashes). In 1849 Dostoevsky, implicated in the Petrashevsky case, was exiled to Siberia.

During his short stay in Tobolsk from 9 to 20 January 1850 the wives of exiled Decembrists J. A. Muravyev and N. D. Fonvizin arranged a meeting of the writer with other exiled Petrashevites and through captain Smolkov with some money (10 rubles) discreetly pasted into the binding on their way to the place of hard labor. Dostoevsky kept his copy of the Gospel all his life as a relic. The next four years Dostoevsky spent in hard labor in Omsk. Besides Dostoevsky, only one other 19th century Russian writer, N.G. Chernyshevsky, went through the hard school of hard labor. Prisoners were deprived of the right to correspond, but being in the prison, the writer was able to secretly keep notes in so-called “Siberian notebook” (“my notebook katornaya”). Impressions of his stay in the prison were later reflected in the story “Notes from the Dead House”. It took years for Dostoevsky to break the hostile exclusion of himself as a nobleman, after which the prisoners began to take him for one of their own. The first biographer of the writer, O.F. Miller, believed that hard labor was “a lesson in people”s truth for Dostoevsky. In 1850 in the Polish magazine Library of Warsaw were published excerpts from the novel “Poor People” and a positive review of him. The doctor wrote the first medical note about his illness as a case of epilepsy, which is evident from the doctor Yermakov”s attached certificate to Dostoyevsky”s resignation letter addressed to Alexander II in 1858.

After his release from prison, Dostoevsky spent about a month in Omsk, where he met and made friends with Chokan Valikhanov, a future famous Kazakh traveler and ethnographer.

At the end of February 1854 Dostoevsky was sent as a private to the 7th Siberian linear battalion in Semipalatinsk. There, in the spring of that year, he began an affair with Maria Dmitrievna Isayeva, who was married to local official Alexander Ivanovich Isayev, a bitter drunkard. After some time, Isayev was transferred to Kuznetsk as a tavern keeper. August 14, 1855 Fyodor Mikhailovich received a letter from Kuznetsk: M. D. Isaeva”s husband died after a long illness.

After the death of Emperor Nicholas I, February 18, 1855 Dostoevsky wrote a loyal poem dedicated to his widow, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. Thanks to the petition of the commander of a separate Siberian corps, General of Infantry G. X. Dostoevsky was promoted to non-commissioned officer according to the minister of war order in connection with the manifesto of March 27, 1855 to mark the beginning of the reign of Alexander II, and giving privileges and favors to a number of convicted criminals. Hoping for a pardon from the new Emperor Alexander II, Fyodor Mikhailovich wrote a letter to his old acquaintance, the hero of the defense of Sevastopol, Adjutant General Eduard Totleben, with a request to petition the Emperor. This letter was delivered to St. Petersburg by a friend of the writer, Baron Alexander Yegorovich Vrangel, who published his memoirs after Dostoevsky”s death. E. I. Totleben achieved a definite pardon during a personal audience with the Emperor. On the coronation day of Alexander II, August 26, 1856, pardon was announced to the former Petrashevites. Alexander II, however, ordered the writer to be placed under secret surveillance until he was fully convinced of his good faith. On October 20, 1856 Dostoevsky was made an ensign.

On February 6, 1857, Dostoevsky was married to Maria Isaeva in the Russian Orthodox Church in Kuznetsk. A week after the wedding, the newlyweds traveled to Semipalatinsk and stayed four days in Barnaul with P. P. Semenov, where Dostoevsky had an epileptic seizure. Contrary to Dostoevsky”s expectations, this marriage was not a happy one.

Dostoevsky”s pardon (i.e. full amnesty and permission to publish) was announced by the highest decree on April 17, 1857, according to which the rights of the nobility were returned to the Decembrists as well as to all Petrashevites. The period of imprisonment and military service was a turning point in Dostoevsky”s life: from the still undecided in life “seeker of truth in man” he turned into a deeply religious man, whose only ideal for the rest of his life was Jesus Christ. All three of Dostoevsky”s “faithful” poems (“To the European events of 1854”, “To the first of July 1855”, <“To the coronation and the conclusion of peace”) were not published during his lifetime. Dostoevsky”s first published work after his penal servitude and exile was the story “The Little Hero” (“Otechestvennye Zapiski”, 1857, No. 8), which took place after a complete amnesty. In 1859 Dostoevsky”s stories “Uncle”s Dream” (in “Russkoe slovo” magazine) and “Stepanchikovo Village and Its Inhabitants” (in “Otechestvennye zapiski” magazine) were published.

On June 30, 1859 Dostoevsky was given a temporary ticket allowing him to leave for Tver, and on July 2 the writer left Semipalatinsk. At the end of December 1859 Dostoevsky with his wife and adopted son Pavel returned to St. Petersburg, but the tacit surveillance of the writer did not cease until the mid-1870s. Dostoevsky was released from police surveillance on July 9, 1875.

In 1860 a two-volume collection of Dostoevsky”s works was published. Nevertheless, since contemporaries were unable to give a worthy assessment to the novels Uncle”s Dream and The Village Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants, Dostoevsky needed a second high-profile literary debut, which was the publication of Notes from the Dead House (first in full in the magazine Vremya, 1861-1862). This pioneering work, the exact definition of whose genre is still impossible for literary critics to determine, stunned readers in Russia. For contemporaries, the Memoirs were a revelation. No one had ever touched the subject of depicting the life of convicts before Dostoevsky. This work alone was enough for the writer to occupy his rightful place in both Russian and world literature. According to A. I. Gertsen, in Notes from the Dead House, Dostoevsky appeared as a Russian Dante who was descending into hell. A. I. Hertzen compared Notes to Michelangelo”s fresco The Last Judgment and tried to translate the writer”s work into English, but because of the difficulty of translation the edition was not carried out.

From the beginning of 1861 Fyodor Mikhailovich helped his brother Mikhail to publish his own literary and political magazine Vremya, after the closure of which in 1863 the brothers began to publish the magazine Epoch. Such works by Dostoevsky as The Humiliated and the Insulted (1861), A Crude Anecdote (1862), and Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863) appeared on the pages of these magazines. Collaboration in the magazines Vremya and Epoch marked the beginning of Dostoevsky”s publicist activity, and his collaboration with N. N. Strakhov contributed to the formation of the Dostoevsky brothers on the positions of the soil science.

In the summer of 1862 Dostoevsky made his first trip abroad, visiting Germany, France, England, Switzerland, Italy, and Austria. Despite the fact that the main purpose of the trip was treatment at German resorts, in Baden-Baden the writer became addicted to a ruinous game of roulette and was in constant need of money. Part of his second trip to Europe in the summer of 1863 Dostoevsky spent with a young emancipated person Apollinaria Suslova (“infernal woman” according to the writer), with whom he also met in 1865 in Wiesbaden. Dostoevsky”s love for A. P. Suslova, their complicated relationship and the writer”s attachment to roulette are reflected in the novel The Gambler. Dostoevsky visited casinos in Baden-Baden, Wiesbaden and Hamburg in 1862, 1863, 1865, 1867, 1870 and 1871. The writer played roulette for the last time in Wiesbaden on April 16, 1871, when, after losing the game, he abandoned his passion for it forever. Dostoevsky described his impressions of his first trip to Europe and his reflections on the ideals of the French Revolution – “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” – in a cycle of eight philosophical essays, “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. The writer “in his Paris and London impressions found inspiration and strength” to “declare himself an enemy of bourgeois progress. The writer”s reflections on bourgeois civilization in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions anticipated the historical and sociological problems of the “great five-book”, whose philosophical basis, as defined by the Dostoevsky scholar A. S. Dolinin, was laid in Notes from the Underground.

“Notes from the Underground,” which marked a new stage in the development of Dostoevsky”s talent, were to become parts of the great novel “Confession,” the unrealized idea of which originated in 1862. The first part of the hero”s philosophical confession “The Underground” was written in January and February, and the second part (“A Tale of Wet Snow”) was written from March to May 1864. In the story, Dostoevsky acted as an innovator, endowing the reasoning of the “underground man” with great power of persuasiveness. Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, and the Karamazov brothers inherited this “persuasiveness” in the monologues of subsequent novels of the “great five books. Such an unusual device for contemporaries became the basis for the mistaken identification of the character with the author. Possessing his own notion of benefit, the “underground paradoxalist,” who has “disconnected from the soil and the people”s principles,” is engaged in a polemic not only with N. G. Chernyshevsky”s theory of “rational egoism.” His arguments are directed both against the rationalism and optimism of the eighteenth-century Enlighteners (Rousseau and Diderot) and against the supporters of the various camps of the socio-political struggle of the early 1860s. “Underground Man” is convinced that “living life” cannot be calculated by the formula “2 x 2 = 4.” The hero of “Notes from the Underground,” who in the last pages of the story calls himself “anti-hero,” is closer to the philosophical ideas of Kant, Schopenhauer and Stirner on free will – “his own, free and free will” is above all, and he takes his program of extreme individualism and skepticism to its logical limit. At the same time, to Dostoevsky”s great surprise, the thesis of “the need for faith and Christ” was not allowed by the censors. The image of the “superfluous man,” who had lost contact with the people, was the result of many years of Dostoevsky”s reflections and did not cease to worry him until the end of his life. Many of the thoughts of the author of “Notes from Underground” were developed in subsequent novels, beginning with “Crime and Punishment.

In 1864 the writer”s wife and older brother passed away. During this period, the socialist illusions of his youth (which were based on European socialist theories) are destroyed, and the writer”s critical perception of bourgeois-liberal values is formed. Dostoevsky”s thoughts on this subject will later be reflected in the novels of the “great five books” and “The Writer”s Diary”.

Among the most significant works of the writer literary critics include a unique in Russian and world literature monojournal of philosophical and literary journal “Writer”s Diary” and the so-called “great five books”, which includes the last novels:

Also read, biographies – Augustus John

“Crime and Punishment and The Gambler

In February 1865, six months after his brother”s death, the publication of the Epoch ceased. Having assumed responsibility for the debt obligations of the “Epoch” and experiencing financial difficulties, Dostoevsky was forced to agree to bondage terms for the publication of the collected works with the publisher F.T. Stellovsky and began work on the novel Crime and Punishment. From 1865 to 1870 Stellovsky was publishing a four-volume set of Dostoevsky”s complete works. The creation of Crime and Punishment began in August 1865 abroad. There is a draft of a letter from the writer to M. N. Katkov stating the plot of the nearly finished novel and offering to publish it in the “Russky Vestnik” magazine; the advance payment was sent to Dostoevsky in Wiesbaden. In this letter to Katkov, Dostoevsky described the content and main idea of the story. “A psychological account of one crime” of a young man, a university expelled student living in extreme poverty , who “by levity and wobbly notions succumbed to some strange ”unfinished” ideas.” “He resolved to kill an old woman, a titular counselor, who gave money on interest,” in order to make his mother and sister happy. Afterwards he could graduate from university, go abroad, and “all his life be honest, firm, steadfast in the fulfillment of a ”humane duty to mankind.””

“This is where the entire psychological process of the crime unfolds. Insoluble questions arise before the murderer, unsuspected and unexpected feelings torment his heart. God”s truth, earthly law takes its toll, and he ends up being forced to denounce himself. He is compelled to perish in prison, but to rejoin the people; the feeling of disconnection and isolation from mankind, which he felt immediately after committing the crime, has tormented him. The law of truth and human nature took its toll, killed the conviction, even without resistance. The criminal himself chooses to accept the torment in order to atone his cause.”

The plot outlined in the letter to Katkov was a synthesis of the writer”s early unrealized ideas. The existence of the main philosophical idea of the future “Crime and Punishment” is evidenced by the entry in the diary of A.P. Suslova of September 17, 1863: “<…> some Napoleon says: “Destroy the whole city. In a letter to his Semipalatinsk friend Baron A.E. Wrangel from September 28, 1865 Dostoevsky wrote: “And meanwhile the story I am writing now will be, The story I am writing now will be, perhaps, better than anything I have written, if they give me time to finish it. In early November, after his return to St. Petersburg, Dostoevsky continued work on the novella, which soon grew into a novel. In a letter from Petersburg to A. E. Wrangel on February 18, 1866, Dostoevsky wrote: “At the end of November much was written and ready; I burned everything; it is now possible to confess it. I did not like it myself. The new form, the new plan I was carried away, and I began again.” In the novel, the story was told in the first person. In the novel was added social background – the line of Marmeladov from the plot of the story “Drunken”, the hero was named Raskolnikov, the narrative was led from the author to give credibility to the description of psychology and to reveal the tense inner life of the main character. The new, substantially revised and expanded version of the novel “Crime and Punishment”, published in the journal “Russian Gazette” in 1866, was created from December 1865 to December 1866.

The first chapters were sent to M.N. Katkov directly to the set of the conservative journal Russky Vestnik, where they appeared in January and February 1866, the subsequent ones were printed from issue to issue. Before the end of the year Dostoevsky could finish the novel. However, under the strict terms of the “draconian contract,” under threat of losing copyright and royalties on his editions for 9 years in favor of the publisher F. T. Stellovsky, the writer had to submit a new unpublished novel by November 1, 1866. Dostoevsky was in a situation of time pressure, when it was physically impossible to write a new novel in such a short time. Quite by chance, the writer”s friend A. P. Milyukov came to his aid, who found the best stenographer Anna Grigorievna Snitkina to speed up the work on the novel “The Gambler”.

The novel was created in 26 days. From October 4 to 29 Anna Grigorievna was taking dictation at the writer”s apartment in the house of I. M. Alonkin in St. Petersburg on the corner of Malaya Meshchanskaya and Stolyarny Lane, rather than in Baden-Baden, as the inscription under Dostoyevsky”s bas-relief “Here the novel The Gambler was written” “testifies”. Perhaps it was not by chance that the writer chose this place, where the events described in Lermontov”s story “Stoss” took place and where Rodion Raskolnikov “lived”. Soon after the submission of the manuscript of The Gambler to the publisher, on November 8, 1866, Dostoyevsky proposed marriage to Anna Grigorievna. On February 15, 1867 in the Trinity Cathedral was the sacrament of marriage between Dostoevsky and A.G. Snitkina. The novel Crime and Punishment was paid very well by M.N. Katkov, but in order not to have this money taken away by the creditors, the writer went abroad with his new wife. The trip is reflected in the diary, which in 1867 began to keep the writer”s wife Anna Grigorievna. On their way to Germany, the couple stopped for a few days in Vilna.

“Idiot.”

The novel “The Idiot” was written abroad, work on which Dostoevsky began in September 1867 in Geneva, continued there until the end of May 1868, then wrote it in Vevey and Milan, and finished in Florence on January 17 (29), 1869. Dostoevsky described the basic idea of the novel in a letter from Geneva to A. N. Maykov of December 31, 1867 (January 12, 1868): “I have long been tormented by a thought, but I was afraid to turn it into a novel, because the idea is too difficult and I am not prepared for it, although the idea is quite seductive and I love it. The idea is to portray quite a beautiful man. It can”t be more difficult than that, in my opinion, especially in our time.” “The Idiot is one of Dostoevsky”s most difficult works. The tragedy of the novel lies in the fact that “Prince-Christ” (Myshkin – the writer”s favorite character) by interfering in the fates of other characters does not manage to make anyone happy, does not manage to defeat the hostile forces, of which he himself also becomes a victim.

Also read, history – English Civil War

“Demons.”

After completing the novel The Idiot, Dostoevsky conceived the epic Atheism (1869-1870), later changing its title to Lives of the Great Sinner. This plan was not carried out, but parts of the plan were embodied in 1870-1872 when preparing the novel The Possessed, in 1874-1875 when writing the novel The Teenager, and in 1878-1880 when creating the novel The Brothers Karamazov. In August 1869 the writer began writing the novel “Eternal Husband,” the text of which three months later was sent for publication in the journal “3arya. In the autumn of the same year Dostoevsky was simultaneously working on other unimplemented plans that were later included in the novel “The Possessed”, in particular the character of one of them – Kartuzov – was embodied in the image of Lebyadkin. Pay attention to the writer”s note from this period: “All in brief, like Pushkin, from the very beginning without psychological subtleties, with short phrases. Learn to write.

The novel The Possessed (1871-1872) reflects Dostoevsky”s bitter polemic with revolutionary Russia: both with the Nechaevites (“children” – nihilists of the “demons” generation), and with the liberals (“fathers”), to a certain extent responsible for the beginning of the terror. According to Dostoevsky”s letters to N.N. Strakhov of October 9 (21) and December 2 (14), 1870, the idea for an antinihilistic novel began in late 1869. The writer began work on The Possessed in January 1870 in Dresden, which is proved by preparatory material for the novel. In March 1870 Dostoevsky wrote to N. N. Strakhov that he would soon finish the tendentious novel-pamphlet. “Nihilists and Westerners demand the final lash.” A day later the writer reported to A. N. Maykov: “What I write – a tendentious thing, I want to speak out hotter. (Here′s howling about me nihilists and Westerners that a retrograde!) Yes, the hell with them, but I′ll say the last word. Work on the novel significantly halted in the summer, when the first plan began to take on a powerful image of Stavrogin, who became the key character in “The Possessed”. Then the idea of the work was radically revised, and the political pamphlet was combined with a novel-tragedy. The process of creating “The Possessed” cost Dostoevsky more labor than any other of his works.

Fleeing creditors, Dostoevsky was forced to spend four years abroad. On July 8, 1871, after a four-year stay in Europe, Dostoevsky and his family returned to St. Petersburg. His return to Russia marked the most financially favorable period of the writer”s life and the brightest period of his family happiness. His second wife Anna Grigorievna arranged the writer”s life, taking charge of the family finances, and from 1871 Dostoevsky gave up roulette forever. These years of life were very fruitful. From 1872 the writer”s family spent summers in the town of Staraya Russa, Novgorod province. To improve his health, Dostoevsky often traveled to Germany to the Ems resort.

In Russia, the writer continued to write the novel The Possessed, which was completed in St. Petersburg in the second half of November 1872. There were more negative reviews of the novel than positive ones. Defending himself against critics who misinterpreted the idea of the novel The Possessed, Dostoevsky placed in his Diary of a Writer an article entitled “One of the Modern Falsities” (1873), where he wrote that among the Nechaevs not all “idiotic fanatics,” pranksmen, “monsters” and “frauds.” “I do not believe it, not all of them; I am an old ”Nechaevite” myself.”

“The Writer”s Diary.”

Dostoevsky had a penchant for journalism since the first period of his career, when his feuilletons The St. Petersburg Chronicle were published in 1847. After a long forced hiatus from penal servitude and exile, the writer”s longing for coverage of topical problems was embodied in the publication of the magazines Vremya and Epoch. In the first January 1873 issue of the weekly Citizen, published by V. P. Meshchersky, a section entitled The Writer”s Diary appeared in which Dostoevsky explained his desire to reflect his own attitude toward current events by saying, “I shall also talk to myself… in the form of this diary. <…> What shall I talk about? About everything that will strike me or make me think”, when chaos, a lack of convictions and “points of reference” and cynicism were prevalent in post-reform Russia. N.K. Mikhailovsky called the new rubric a commentary on the novel The Possessed, whose publication and Dostoevsky”s work as editor-publisher of Grazhdanin gave his critics grounds for accusing the writer of reactionary and retrograde behavior. The fulfillment of editorial duties consumed much time and energy, so the writer decided to leave the post and proceed to the creation of the novel Teenager. The last issue of Grazhdanin, signed by Dostoevsky as editor, was published on April 15, 1874.

Innovative in form and content, the edition of one author consisted of a series of feuilletons, essays, polemical notes on the issues of the day, literary criticism, and memoirs. In the “writer”s diary” for the first time were published responses to readers” letters from all over Russia, were printed small works of fiction: “Bobok” (1873), “The Boy at Christ on the Christmas Tree” (1876), “Muzhik Marey” (1876), “The Hundred Years” (1876), “The Gentleman” (1876), “The Dream of a Funny Man” (1877). In 1880 he published an essay about Pushkin. On the pages of the monojournal in the form of a dialogue polemic was conducted by equally strong opponents, who represented different directions of the Russian social and literary thought: conservative (“Russkiy Mir”, “Russkiy Vestnik”), liberal (“Vestnik Evropy”) and revolutionary-democratic (“Otechestvennye Zapiski”). The author presented different points of view on contemporary events and his own attitude to them. The search for answers to acute questions of political, social and spiritual life in Russia was subsequently continued in independent editions of The Writer”s Diary for 1876, 1877, 1880 and 1881, in the novels “Teenager” and “The Brothers Karamazov”, in a speech about Pushkin in 1880. “The Writer”s Diary” enjoyed great popularity, thanks to which its author”s influence on public opinion increased.

Also read, biographies – Marsden Hartley

“Teenager.”

Dostoevsky gave his fourth novel of the “great five books” at the request of N. A. Nekrasov for publication in the journal “Fatherland Notes”, where it was published throughout 1875. The idea for the novel was formed during the writer”s editorial work for Grazhdanin magazine and was connected both to his publicistic speeches published there and to his earlier unimplemented plans, and to some earlier works (“The Double”, “The Little Hero”, “Notes from Underground”) and mature novels (“The Idiot”, “The Possessed”). Along with many protagonists in the novels of the “great five books,” the title character in The Teenager is a carrier of ideas. On this basis, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Imp, The Teenager, and The Brothers Karamazov are called ideological novels by literary scholars (the term was first used by B. M. Engelhardt). The hero of the novel, 19-year-old Arkady Makarovich Dolgoruky, tries to embody the “Rothschild idea” – “the goal is not material wealth, but power.” At the same time, Dostoyevsky considered the main thing in the work not the testing of Arkady Dolgoruky”s “idea” for durability, but his search for an ideal. Along with the theme of “fathers and children,” reflected in “The Impalas,” the theme of educating the Teenager comes to the fore, so literary scholars rank this work as a novel of education. At the end of “Notes” (a kind of penitential confession) the hero writes about the unrecognizable change in the “Rothschild idea”: “But this new life, this new path opened before me and is my own “idea”, the same as before, but already in a completely different form, so that it can no longer be recognized.

Also read, biographies – Pablo Picasso

“The Brothers Karamazov and the speech about Pushkin

In March 1878 the Committee of the French Literary Society invited Dostoevsky to participate in the International Literary Congress in Paris chaired by W. Hugo. On the list of members of the International Literary Association Dostoevsky headed the representatives from Russia. For reasons of illness and the death of his son Alexei on May 16, Dostoevsky was unable to attend the congress, which was held on May 30 (June 11), 1878.

In the winter of 1878 D. S. Arsenyev, the tutor of the Grand Dukes Sergei and Pavel Alexandrovich, met Dostoevsky at the request of Emperor Alexander II and invited the writer to dinner with the Grand Dukes in the spring. Dostoevsky did not know Alexander II personally, but three times he attended lunches with his sons Sergei and Pavel Alexandrovich. March 21 and April 24, 1878 at the lunches of the grand dukes with Dostoevsky attended by K. N. Bestuzhev Ryumin. The third lunch with Dostoevsky was on March 5, 1879, which the Grand Duke K. K. Romanov. On December 16, 1880 Dostoevsky was received by the heir and future emperor Alexander III On December 16, 1880 Dostoevsky was received by the heir and the future emperor Alexander III in the Anichkov Palace. In these years the writer got in touch with the conservative journalists, publicists and thinkers, he corresponded with the prominent statesman K.P. Pobedonostsev. In the spring of 1878 Dostoevsky became interested in the personality of N.F. Fedorov, one of the founders of Russian cosmism, whose ideas he considered ”as if his own”, and attended some lectures of V.S. Solovyov. The writer”s reflections on close to him philosophical ideas of N.F. Fyodorov and the problem of correlation between natural and moral principles of human personality, touched upon in the readings of V. Solovyov, will be reflected in “The Brothers Karamazov”.

The result of Dostoevsky”s creative and life journey was the last novel of the “great five books,” The Brothers Karamazov, which was conceived in the spring of 1878, but was associated with unrealized plans for large-scale works Atheism (1868-1869) and The Life of the Great Sinner (1869-1870). Some of the images, episodes, and ideological motifs of Dostoevsky”s last novel have their origins in almost all of his previous works, beginning with The Poor People and ending with The Writer”s Diary and The Undertaker. The first draft notes to the novel “about children” (“The Brothers Karamazov”) appeared after April 12, 1878, and were entitled “Memento” (about the novel). The writer was planning to include in the plot events from the unrealized plot of 1874 “Drama. In Tobolsk.” For several days in June 1878 Dostoevsky and Vl. Solovyov spent several days in the Optina Hermitage. Meetings with the monks influenced the creation of the image of the elder Zosima. After spending the summer of 1878 in Staraya Russa, Dostoevsky with his family returned to Petersburg and on October 5 settled in apartment building 5

On June 8, 1880, a little more than six months before his death, Dostoevsky gave his famous speech at the Noble Assembly on the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow.

The writer”s lifetime fame reached its peak after the publication of The Brothers Karamazov. Pushkin”s speech marked the peak of Dostoevsky”s popularity. D. S. Mirsky wrote: “This speech aroused enthusiasm, the like of which had not been seen in the history of Russian literature.

In early January 1881, at a meeting with D. V. Grigorovich, Dostoevsky shared a premonition that he would not survive the current winter. On January 26 (February 7), 1881 the writer”s sister Vera Mikhailovna came to the house of Dostoevsky in order to ask her brother to give up his share of the Ryazan estate, inherited by his aunt A. F. Kumanina, in favor of his sisters. L. F. Dostoevskaya recalled a stormy scene with explanations and tears, after which Dostoevsky”s throat bled. It is possible that this unpleasant conversation was the impetus for the aggravation of his disease (emphysema).

Two days later, on January 28, 1881, at the age of 60, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky died. The diagnosis was pulmonary tuberculosis, chronic bronchitis, and small amounts of pulmonary emphysema.

After the news of Dostoevsky”s death, the apartment began to fill with crowds of people who came to say goodbye to the great writer. There were many young people among those who were saying goodbye. Painter I. N. Kramskoy painted in pencil and ink a posthumous portrait of the writer, managing to convey a feeling imprinted in the memory of Dostoevskaya: “The face of the deceased was calm, and it seemed that he had not died, but was sleeping and smiling in his sleep at some “great truth” that he now recognized. These words of the writer”s widow are reminiscent of lines from Dostoevsky”s speech about Pushkin: “Pushkin died in the full development of his powers and undoubtedly carried with him to his coffin some great mystery. And now we are solving this mystery without him.

The number of deputies exceeded the announced number. The procession to the burial site stretched a mile. The coffin was carried by hand.

On February 1, 1881 F. M. Dostoyevsky was buried at the Tikhvin Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra in St. Petersburg. At the burial at Dostoevsky”s grave spoke A. I. Palm, the first biographer of the writer O. F. Miller, P. A. Gaideburov, K. N. Bestuzhev-Riumin, V. S. Solovyov, P. V. Bykov, students D. I. Kozyrev, Pavlovsky and others. The epitaph on the tombstone refers to the words of the grain of wheat from John”s Gospel (John 12:24), which were mentioned as an epigraph in The Brothers Karamazov. The ashes of the writer”s wife A.G. Dostoevskaya and their grandson Andrey (1908-1968) are also buried here.

Despite the fame that Dostoevsky gained at the end of his life, a truly enduring, worldwide fame came to him after his death. In particular, Friedrich Nietzsche acknowledged that Dostoevsky was the only psychologist from whom he could learn something (Twilight of the Idols).

From his first marriage with Maria Dmitrievna Dostoevskaya (Isaeva), which lasted seven years, F.M. Dostoevsky had no children. His second wife – Anna Grigorievna Dostoyevskaya – was born in the family of a petty St. Petersburg official. By her own admission, she loved Dostoevsky even before she met him. Anna Grigoryevna became the writer”s wife at the age of 20, shortly after finishing The Gambler novel. At that time (late 1866 – early 1867) Dostoevsky was experiencing serious financial difficulties, since in addition to paying debts to creditors, he kept his stepson from his first marriage, Pavel Aleksandrovich Isayev, and helped the family of his older brother. In addition, Dostoyevsky did not know how to handle money. Under such circumstances, Anna Grigorievna took control of the financial affairs of the family in his own hands, protecting the writer from creditors. After the writer”s death, Dostoevskaya recalled: “…my husband all his life was in a money vice. Dostoevsky dedicated his last novel The Brothers Karamazov to his wife. After the writer”s death, Anna Grigorievna collected documents related to the life and work of Dostoevsky, was engaged in the publication of his works, prepared for publication his diaries and memoirs.

Dostoevsky had four children from his marriage to Anna Grigorievna:

The writer”s son, Fyodor Fyodorovich Dostoyevsky, succeeded him. On July 15 (27), 1876 Dostoevsky wrote to his wife from Ems: “Fedya has my , my simplicity. This is perhaps the only thing I can boast of…”. A. G. Dostoevskaya recalled the Gospel given by the wives of the Decembrists: “About two hours before his death, when his children came to his call, Fyodor Mikhailovich ordered him to give the Gospel to his son Fyodor.

Descendants of Fyodor Mikhailovich continue to live in St. Petersburg. In an interview with Itogi magazine, the writer”s great-grandson Dmitry Andreevich Dostoevsky said that he considers himself an amateur Dostoevsky.

This article mentions more than 70 people from Dostoevsky”s entourage, including his relatives. The circle of contemporaries with whom the writer knew and communicated exceeds 1,800 persons – articles about them are presented in the resource “Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. Anthology of Life and Creation”, where they are published according to the two-volume monograph by Dostoevsky S. V. Belov.

Dostoevsky”s innovations in the field of poetics are considered in monographs and articles by researchers of the writer”s work.

Dostoevsky”s assessments of Dostoevsky as a philosopher are discussed in a separate article.

During Dostoevsky”s lifetime in the cultural strata of society concerning the alternative opposition between Russia and the West, two directions of public and philosophical thought were opposed – Slavophilism and Westernism, the essence of which is approximately as follows: the adherents of the first argued that the future of Russia in nationality, Orthodoxy and autocracy, adherents of the second believed that Russians should take the example of Europeans in everything. Both considered the historical destiny of Russia. The narrow circle of the staff of the journals Vremya and Epoch, together with Dostoevsky, held their own independent position, expressed as “pozvennosti”. The writer was and remains a Russian man, inseparably linked to the people, but at the same time he did not deny the achievements of Western culture and civilization. Dostoevsky”s views evolved over time: a former member of the Christian socialist utopian circle turned into a religious conservative, and during his third stay abroad he finally became a convinced monarchist.

Dostoevsky later called his political views of the Petrashevites “theoretical socialism” in the spirit of the Fourier system. After his first trip to Europe in 1862, “Dostoevsky becomes an opponent of the spread of universal, pan-European progressivism in Russia,” speaking in the article “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions” (1863) with a sharp criticism of Western European bourgeois society, which substituted freedom for “million”. Dostoyevsky filled Herzen”s notion of “Russian socialism” with Christian content. Dostoevsky denied the division of society into classes and the class struggle, believing that atheistic socialism could not replace bourgeoisie because it was not fundamentally different from it. In the magazines Vremya, Epoch, and The Writer”s Diary, Dostoevsky gave free expression to opposing views. The writer considered himself more liberal compared to the Russian liberals:

Dostoevsky”s political views should be considered within the framework of the theory of official nationality (Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality). Political scientist L. V. Polyakov lists F. M. Dostoevsky as an outstanding representative of Russian conservatism, while historian A. V. Repnikov considers F. M. Dostoevsky”s nobility to be Slavophilism and Russian conservatism. The monographs of the Polish political scientist Andrzej de Lazary and the Canadian historian Wayne Dowler provide the most thorough examination of the concept of the “nobility”.

Despite his opposition to Slavophilism, the writer himself counted himself among the Slavophiles, who advocated the unification of all Slavs (pan-Slavism):

Dostoevsky”s opponents at various times interpreted his political views as retrograde, reactionary, nationalistic, chauvinistic, anachronistic, anti-Semitic, and Black Hundreds. F.M.Dostoevsky was labeled as a retrograde and reactionary after the publication of his novel The Possessed, when part of the educated public supported the views of the nihilists, the Narodniks and revolutionary democrats. This opinion was reinforced by the work of N. This opinion was reinforced by N. K. Mikhailovsky”s work Cruel Talent, the epigraphs to which were quotations from the works of F. M. Dostoyevsky, indicating a misinterpretation of their ideological orientation.

The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams told the BBC Russian Service: “Dostoyevsky is a terribly uncomfortable author for any politician, whether left or right: he invariably strips away any arrogance. And that, in my opinion, is important.”

By the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, the shining glory of Ivan S. Turgenev, until then considered the best Russian writer, was overshadowed by Leo Tolstoy and F. M. Dostoevsky, whom the critics turned to compare, and about whom D. S. Merezhkovsky passionately wrote in his literary essay “Leo Tolstoy and Dostoevsky”. With few exceptions, readers divided their sympathies between the two great Russian writers. N. A. Berdyaev, who counted himself among Dostoevsky”s spiritual children, wrote about two structures of the soul: “<…> – one favorable for perceiving Tolstoy”s spirit, the other – for perceiving Dostoevsky”s spirit. And those who are too fond of the Tolstoyan spiritual structure and the Tolstoyan way hardly understand Dostoevsky. People of the Tolstoy type often reveal not only a misunderstanding of Dostoevsky, but also a real aversion to Dostoevsky,” Andrei Bely, V.V. Nabokov preferred Leo Tolstoy, which influenced their evaluation of Dostoevsky”s work: the light Tolstoy (living life) was opposed to the dark Dostoevsky (bathing house with spiders, tarantula).

И. I. A. Bunin adored Leo Tolstoy, and he suggested “throwing Dostoevsky off the ship of modernity. This position agrees with the words of I.V. Odoevtseva quoted by Bunin: “He has no descriptions of nature – from mediocrity. It is known that Bunin did not like Dostoevsky and considered him a bad writer. Nevertheless, G. N. Kuznetsova pointed out that “Bunin”s perception of Dostoevsky was much more complex than it might seem from his words, and it did not always remain negative. To prove that Dostoevsky was not Bunin”s enemy, V. A. Tunimanov quotes G. N. Kuznetsova: “Dostoevsky is unpleasant to him, his soul is alien, but he acknowledges his strength and often says himself: of course, the remarkable Russian writer – strength! There is more publicity about him that he dislikes Dostoevsky than there really is. All this because of his passionate nature and fascination with expression.

The translations of Tolstoy”s works became known in Europe in 1864 – 20 years earlier than the works of Dostoevsky. In 1908 André Gide wrote: “Along with the names of Ibsen and Nietzsche, it is not Tolstoy but Dostoevsky, who is as great as he is, and perhaps the most significant of the three.

A thorough comparative literary analysis of the giants of Russian prose was given by the Marxist critic V. F. Pereverzev in 1912. It is telling that the Soviet Dostoevist G. M. Friedländer at the end of the 20th century continued to compare these two pinnacles of history not only of Russian literature but of all world literature, two national geniuses who “in their artistic power, depth and breadth of reproduction of life are comparable to Homer and Shakespeare”.

According to G. S. Pomerantz, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky expressed “the sentiments of the deeper strata of Russia, sacrificed to the slaughter of progress. According to G. S. Pomerantz, Turgenev and Goncharov belonged to the liberal wing, the Sovremennik circle to the radical wing, and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to the Russophile wing with a popular aversion to bourgeois progress. In their novels, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy searched for the unraveling of evil in the human soul, which is a step forward in the artistic development of humanity.

Contemporaries

Dostoevsky”s work had a great influence on Russian and world culture. The writer”s literary legacy is assessed differently both in the homeland and abroad. Time has shown that one of the first reviews of V.G. Belinsky was correct: “His talent belongs to the category of those which are not suddenly apprehended and recognized. A lot, to continue his career, there will be talents, which will be opposed to him, but will end up that they will forget about it at the time when he reaches the climax of his fame.

Н. Н. Strakhov considered Dostoevsky”s main distinctive creative quality to be his “ability to have a very wide sympathy, the ability to sympathize with life in its very basest manifestations, the insight capable of discovering the truly human movements in the souls of the distorted and repressed, Apparently, to the end,” the ability “with great subtlety draw” the inner life of people, with the main characters he displays “weak people, from one or another reason sick at heart, reaching the last limits of collapse of mental strength, to the gloom of mind, to the crime. The constant theme of his works Strakhov called the struggle “between the spark of God, which can burn in every man, and all kinds of internal ills that overpower people.

Before 1917

In 1905, A. A. Polovtsov, editor of the Russian Biographical Dictionary, wrote that despite the extensive literature on F. M. Dostoevsky, a comprehensive and impartial assessment of him as a writer and man is complicated by misunderstandings, conflicting judgments and views.

Д. P. Mirsky, some (but not all) of the main theses of whose article on Dostoevsky were used 50 years later by V.V. Nabokov, “was remarkable for his versatile erudition, sharpness of his evaluations, polemical passion which sometimes led to subjectivism,” considered Dostoevsky a very complex figure both from a historical and psychological point of view, and pointed to the need to differentiate “not only between different periods of his life and different lines of his worldview, but also different levels of his personality.

During the writer”s lifetime, in addition to individual publications, two collections of works were published: two-volume (1860) and four-volume (1865-70), when Dostoevsky”s best work was considered Notes from the Dead House. This assessment was shared by Leo Tolstoy and Lenin. “The Double,” “Notes from the Underground,” and “The Idiot” were incomprehensible to his contemporaries. Later in the work “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” (1894) V. V. Rozanov wrote about Notes from the Underground as the cornerstone of Dostoevsky”s literary work, the main line in his worldview. The only critic who understood the idea behind The Idiot was the writer”s opponent and ideological opponent, M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin.

Over time, “Crime and Punishment” was recognized as the best novel. In the most significant articles of his contemporaries” critics, the “Russian Jacobin” P. N. Tkachev and theorist of Narodism N. K. Mikhailovsky, the complex philosophical problems of “The Possessions” were passed over in silence, and attention was mainly drawn to the novel”s anti-nihilistic tendency. Even before the publication of “The Possessed”, Dostoevsky foresaw that he would acquire the fame of a “retrograde”. His appraisal of the writer as a reactionary was firmly entrenched in liberal, revolutionary-democratic, Narodnik, and later Marxist criticism, and is found in contemporary authors. The words of Rosa Luxemburg, who agreed with the assessment of Dostoevsky as a reactionary, but considered the basis of his work not reactionary, sounded dissonant in Marxist criticism. After the writer”s death, The Brothers Karamazov received a higher appraisal. D.P. Mirsky wrote about the four great novels of the writer (“five books” without “Teenager”). It was not until the 2nd half of the 20th century that the five most famous novels of the writer were called “the great five-book” by Dostoevists.

Dostoevsky”s personality was assessed ambiguously by some liberal and democratic figures, in particular the leader of the liberal Narodniks, N.K. Mikhailovsky. In 1913 Maxim Gorky first assessed Dostoevsky as an “evil genius” and a sado-masochist.

In 1912, V. F. Pereverzev wrote that in sincerity and truth, in originality and novelty of content, the artistic value of Dostoevsky”s works is universally recognized, and he divided the assessment of the significance of Dostoevsky”s work into three points of view according to their best representatives:

Pereverzev wrote: “Mikhailovsky completely failed to understand the dual nature of the psyche of Dostoevsky”s characters. <…> Mikhailovsky misunderstood the nature of Dostoevsky”s work. N. K. Mikhailovsky could not appreciate the complexity and uniqueness of Dostoevsky”s work; he denied the humanism of the writer, to which V. G. Belinsky and N. A. Dobrolyubov had drawn attention, did not see in the psychology of the “great heart-throb” the innovation of realism, and considered his “cruel talent” a feature of his personal psychology. The dual assessments were shared by Dostoevsky”s ideological opponents – liberals, democrats, communists, Freudists, Zionists – when the world significance of the writer”s work was not disputed: “Dostoevsky is a genius, but…” The “but” was followed by a negative ideological label. Such points of view can still be found today.

In order to adequately perceive the contradictory mutually exclusive assessments of authoritative authors one should take into account the historical and political environment, adherence to a certain ideology. For example, V.S. Solovyov wrote that Dostoevsky the prophet “believed in the infinite power of the human soul”, and G.M. Friedlander cited the opinion of the founder of the literature of socialist realism M. Gorky, who polemized with Dostoevsky against his “disbelief in man, exaggerating the power of dark, “animal” beginning, generated in a man by the power of property”.

Dostoevsky was first compared to Shakespeare by the historian and passionate admirer of the writer E. V. Tarle, who considered the Russian writer “the greatest artist of world literature. After speaking in 1900 at the Russian Assembly in Warsaw with a lecture on “Shakespeare and Dostoevsky,” E. W. Tarle wrote to A. G. Dostoevsky: “Dostoevsky opened such chasms and abysses in the human soul, which for Shakespeare and for Tolstoy remained closed. According to theologian Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky the novelist thought in terms of creation, as did Shakespeare.

A number of authors (S.N. Bulgakov in his report “Russian Tragedy,” M.A. Voloshin, Vyacheslav Ivanov in a speech that became the basis for the article “The Main Myth in the novel The Imp”, V.V. Rozanov) were the first to speak of the tragic nature of Dostoevsky”s works. In 1911 Vyacheslav Ivanov introduced a new term “novel-tragedy” in relation to Dostoevsky”s novels, which, along with the authors mentioned above, was used by D.S. Merezhkovsky, I.F. Annensky, A.L. Volynsky, A.V. Lunacharsky, V.V. Veresaev, etc.

The Vekhovs and Russian religious philosophers N.A. Berdyaev, S.N. Bulgakov, V.S. Solovyov, G.V. Florovsky, S.L. Frank, and Lev Shestov were the first to draw attention to the philosophical orientation of Dostoevsky”s work. These authors were influenced by Dostoevsky”s ideas and in their articles and monographs gave the most positive assessment of the writer”s work in Russian criticism.

The lack of academic argumentation is characteristic of all authors who refute the significance of Dostoevsky”s work, for whose negative evaluation in the 19th and early 20th centuries mentioning the writer”s severe illness was sufficient, when there was a widespread misconception that epileptic seizures cause the destruction of personality. The main mistake made by authors who give a negative assessment of Dostoevsky”s work is to identify the author with the characters of his works, something the first biographer of the writer, O.F. Miller, warned against.

Also read, biographies – Federico Fellini

In the Soviet era

Dostoevsky did not fit the framework of official Marxist literary criticism, since he opposed violent methods of revolutionary struggle, preached Christianity, and opposed atheism. Lenin did not want to waste time reading the writer”s novels, but after the famous winged comparison with the “arch-quotest Dostoevsky,” revolutionary literary scholars had to follow the leader”s precepts. In the 1920s and 1930s there were cases of complete denial of Dostoevsky.

Marxist-Leninist literary criticism could not help but regard Dostoevsky as a class enemy, a counter-revolutionary. But the writer”s work had by that time become widely known and highly regarded in the West. In the conditions of the construction of proletarian culture, revolutionary literary criticism was forced to throw Dostoevsky off the ship of modernity, or to adapt his work to the requirements of ideology, bypassing acute uncomfortable questions.

In 1921, A. V. Lunacharsky, in a speech at a celebration in honor of the centennial of Dostoevsky”s birth, ranked him among the great writers, among the great prophets of Russia: “Dostoevsky is not only an artist but also a thinker. <…> Dostoevsky is a socialist. Dostoevsky is a revolutionary! <…> a patriot. The first Commissar of Education of the RSFSR announced the discovery of parts of the novel The Imp, unpublished in Dostoevsky”s lifetime editions for censorship reasons, and assured: “Now these chapters will be printed. The chapter “At Tikhon”s”, which cardinally changes the perception of the image of Stavrogin and the idea of the novel, was published as a supplement in the complete collection of Dostoevsky”s works in 1926.

In October 1921 in Petrograd the members of Wolfila widely celebrated the 100th anniversary of the birth of F. M. Dostoevsky. At meetings of the association eight reports were read in memory of the writer (in particular by V. B. Shklovsky, A. Z. Steinberg, and Ivanov-Razumnik). But Marxist ideology began to subjugate the humanities. As part of the struggle against dissent, the religious philosophers who had previously given high marks to Dostoevsky”s work were forced to leave the country on philosophical steamships, and the center for the study of Dostoevsky”s work shifted to Prague.

On November 20, 1929 A. V. Lunacharsky, in his opening speech at the evening dedicated to F. M. Dostoevsky, spoke about the greatest writer of our literature and one of the greatest writers of world literature, mentioned Dostoevschina and shared the assessment of V. F. Pereverzev: Dostoevsky “was, in spite of his officially noble origin, a representative of raznobischin Russia, a representative of the bourgeoisie. Dostoevsky “was, despite his officially noble origin, a representative of Russia”s raznochinstvo, a representative of the petty bourgeoisie. <…> But is Dostoevsky harmful? In some cases, very harmful, but this does not mean that I think it should be forbidden in the library or on the stage.

In the conditions of the campaign against counterrevolution and anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, Dostoevsky, an “anti-Semite” and “counterrevolutionary,” was not a banned writer. But the novel The Possessed and The Writer”s Diary were published only in collected works, never in separate publications, and their significance in the writer”s work was hushed up. An article about Dostoevsky was included in the first Soviet school textbook on literature published in 1935.

Dostoevsky”s name disappeared from the list of authors studied in the second school textbook, which was created in 1938-1940. The writer”s works were excluded from school and even university literature programs for a long time. Dostoevsky was not included in the pantheon of writers officially recognized by the Soviet authorities – among the bas-reliefs (or: Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, Mayakovsky) on Soviet school buildings his portrait is absent.

The writer was rehabilitated by Soviet literary criticism in 1956, when “Dostoevsky”s success in the West outweighed his ideological sins against the Soviet regime,” and the label “reactionary” disappeared from his characterization. Dostoevsky was included in the pantheon of Russian Soviet classics in the last textbook for schools published in 1969. This is why the words of the formal school theorist V. B. Shklovsky, “Dostoevsky”s work has fallen under the weighty shafts of history, under the heavy pressure of the leaden letters of time” may be taken not so much for the time before the victory of the proletarian revolution, but rather as after it. Soviet Dostoevsky”s later discoveries were reflected in the revised and enlarged commentaries of the last 30-volume Complete Works of F. M. Dostoevsky.

Also read, biographies – William McKinley

In modern Russia

Domestic researchers of Dostoevsky”s work have participated in the activities of the International Dostoevsky Society since the late 1980s. In 1991, G. M. Friedländer summed up the achievements of Soviet Dostoevism in his article “Dostoevsky in the Age of New Thinking. The editors of the edited volumes of the series “Dostoevsky. Materials and Studies” series warns of a cautious attitude toward articles, reports, and notes referring to Vladimir Lenin”s works, some of whose judgments may look like an anachronism, which may particularly apply to studies relating to the writer”s religious themes.

In 1997, the Dostoevsky Foundation was created in Russia by I.L. Volgin.

V.N. Zakharov, President of the International Dostoevsky Society, wrote that Dostoevsky is currently one of the most studied and researched writers. The bibliography of studies of his work is annually replenished by dozens of monographs and hundreds of articles all over the world.

Mutually exclusive assessments of Dostoevsky”s work have changed over time, but continue to exist today. Writer Mikhail Weller confessed that he began reading Dostoevsky “at the age of 25 – I didn”t enjoy it. It”s monstrously sloppy in language and depressing. You need a steady nervous system to read it. That is why at school we can limit ourselves to a lecture on Dostoevsky, where we sketch out the outline – ideological, philosophical, artistic – and then leave it to the schoolchild for the future. Dostoyevsky, B.N. Tikhomirov believes that despite the fact that in recent decades the novel Crime and Punishment “brings its own difficulties both in teaching and in the perception of students,” the proposal to replace this work with another did not find support – “it is an artistic masterpiece.

Also read, uncategorized-en – Konstantinos Karamanlis

Evaluation by psychoanalysts

Sigmund Freud praised the work of Dostoevsky:

He is the least controversial as a writer, his place is on a par with Shakespeare. “The Brothers Karamazov is the greatest novel ever written, and The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor is one of the highest achievements of world literature, impossible to overestimate.

In a letter to Stefan Zweig dated October 19, 1920, Freud wrote that Dostoevsky did not need psychoanalysis because psychoanalysis was incapable of examining the problem of writing. At the same time, Freud did not consider himself a connoisseur of art. Recognizing Dostoevsky as a great writer, the founder of psychoanalysis devoted much of his article Dostoevsky and Fatherland (1928) to examining other sides of his “rich personality” and was able “to draw many original and, within the limits of his logic, convincing conclusions from the limited information. Dostoevsky, with his typical Russian trait of making deals with his own conscience, was a sinner and a criminal. The Russian writer submitted to worldly and spiritual authorities, worshipped the tsar-batushka and the Christian God, and came to stale Russian nationalism. His moral struggles ended with an ignominious result: “Dostoevsky missed the opportunity to become a teacher and liberator of humanity, he joined his jailers; the future culture of humanity will owe him little.” The development of these theses can be traced in the works of Freud”s followers in their attempts to apply the psychoanalytic method to the study of Dostoevsky”s work.

The works of Sigmund Freud and his followers (I. Neufeld, T. K. Rosenthal, I. D. Ermakov, N. E. Osipov) on Dostoevsky show the failure of the method of psychoanalysis in literary studies. Psychoanalytic evaluations of the Russian writer”s work have not withstood academic criticism. V.S. Efremov quotes the opinion of the Dostoevist A.L. Böhm about “the unbridled invasion of psychoanalysis into the field of the study of literature: “undertaken without specialized knowledge of the field, these attempts usually led to dilettantism clothed in the form of scientific knowledge. In most cases, the conclusions in these works are based on a complete disregard for the specificity of the literary work. The conclusions of Freud”s followers cannot even be considered scientific hypotheses, since outdated, unreliable and unreliable sources were used in their argumentation, the memories of contemporaries and documents, which contradicted the theses about the oedipus complex, were not taken into account, and the authors” texts were freely interpreted. The author”s texts were interpreted loosely. N. Stroganova and M. V. Stroganov”s comments on I. D. Ermakov”s work on Dostoevsky, in which the writer was considered a forerunner of psychoanalysis, showed readers and researchers what psychoanalytic literary scholarship should not be, which earned philologists a friendly dislike, V. F. Khodasevich”s attitude with a large portion of humor, causing a smile and an active rejection of modern readers. In his 2012 article, I.A. Esaulov analyzed “some marginal provisions of Freud”s concept and his articles on Dostoevsky,” noting that the mental attitude of the founder of psychoanalysis toward “the cultural unconscious” is still common in post-Soviet literary studies, and “<…> the paths of Dostoevsky and Dostoevsky have somewhat blurred. For almost a hundred years.

В. G. Kalashnikov draws attention to the fact that T.K. Rosenthal, unlike Z. Freud and many other psychoanalysts, did not consider the “Oedipus complex” as determining for the personality of the writer, and quotes B.S. Meilach: “The main merit of psychoanalysis is the accurate interpretation of Dostoevsky”s illness as a manifestation of neurosis, which for many years was out of researchers” sight, which allows to overcome the common myth of the great writer”s epilepsy. The researcher believes that “many discoveries of the first psychoanalyst were implicitly and artistically anticipated in the work of the genius of world literature”.

Perception abroad

In Europe Dostoevsky became a famous writer even before the publication of translations of his famous novels. In May 1879, the writer was invited to the International Literary Congress in London, where he was elected a member of the honorary committee of the international literary association. In the notice of this event, sent to Dostoevsky from London, the Russian writer was called “one of the most illustrious representatives of modern literature.

One of the first foreign-language publications of Dostoevsky”s works was Wilhelm Wolfsohn”s (1820-1865) German translation of excerpts from The Poor People, published in the Sankt-Petersburgische Zeitung in 1846-1847. Most often the novels of the “great five-book” were translated and published in German. Listed below are their translations into three European languages according to the year of the first translated edition:

The best biography of the writer at the time was a monograph by the German researcher Nina Hoffmann.

From Kafka”s point of view, Dostoevsky is one of the four “with whom he (Kafka) felt a spiritual kinship. From “Letters to Felicia” (letter of 02.09.1913, translated by Rudnitsky): “Judge for yourself: of the four men with whom I (without putting myself next to them either in power or in the power of coverage) feel a blood kinship – Grilparzer, Dostoevsky, Kleist and Flaubert – only Dostoevsky alone married, … {Corresponding place in the original: “Sieh, von den vier Menschen, die ich (ohne an Kraft und Umfassung mich ihnen nahe zu stellen) als meine eigentlichen Blutsverwandten fühle, von Grillparzer, Dostojewski, Kleist und Flaubert, hat nur Dostojewski geheiratet,…”}

In 1931 E. H. Carr wrote: “Dostoevsky has influenced almost all the leading novelists in England, France and Germany in the last 20 years.

In Israel, the major works of the “anti-Semite” F. M. Dostoevsky were translated into Hebrew by Mordechai Wolfovsky in the 1940s and 1960s and were part of the school curriculum.

At the same time, in the West, where Dostoevsky”s novels have been popular since the early twentieth century, his work has had a significant influence on such generally liberal movements as existentialism, expressionism, and surrealism. In the preface to the anthology Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, Walter Kaufmann wrote that Dostoevsky”s “Notes from the Underground” already contained the preconditions for the emergence of existentialism.

Abroad, Dostoevsky is usually evaluated primarily as an outstanding writer and psychologist, while his ideology is ignored or almost completely rejected in the statement of Andrzej Wajda, who admired Dostoevsky the artist and categorically distanced himself from Dostoevsky the ideologue:

Dostoevsky”s ideology and journalism were suggested to be considered separately from the literary value of the writer”s artistic works by the Marxist critics Rosa Luxemburg, V. F. Pereverzev in 1912, whose views by 1930 had acquired a more aggressive vulgar-sociological hue, in the USSR by the dissident G. S. Pomerantz, and in the USA by Joseph Frank, biographer of the “heartbreaker.

The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, in an interview with the BBC Russian Service, spoke about the separation of Dostoevsky as a novelist and publicist: “The problem of Dostoevsky”s personality is a very serious one. One review of my book emphasized that Dostoevsky in his journalistic and publicistic speeches is not at all the dialogic and polyphonic author that we know from his novels. On the contrary, Dostoevsky the publicist is extremely intolerant and fanatical. <…> And he dealt with his opponents with scorn and derision. His pen was driven by rage.

Dostoevsky influenced the theoretical physicist Albert Einstein more than any scientific thinker, more than Gauss. Dostoevsky”s chief aim for Einstein “was to draw our attention to the riddle of spiritual being. In his agonizing search for world harmony, Albert Einstein was close to Dostoevsky”s worldview. In a letter to Ehrenfest in April 1920, Einstein wrote that he read the novel The Brothers Karamazov with rapture: “It is the most striking book of all that have fallen into my hands.

In his “confident and powerful complication of thought,” André Gide compared Dostoevsky-“a rare genius”-to Rembrandt and Beethoven and was not satisfied with an explanation in the spirit of Sigmund Freud: “as in Rembrandt”s paintings, the most The most important thing in Dostoevsky”s books is the shadow.

Marcel Proust considered Dostoevsky a great artist, whose creative method he compared with the artistic manner of Rembrandt. At the end of The Captive, Proust described his attitude to Dostoevsky”s work in more detail than in a brief note to an unfinished article about the writer in 1921, published posthumously in 1954. Proust marveled at the power of Dostoevsky”s imagination, which brought new beauty to the world and created more fantastic heroes than Rembrandt in The Night Watchman. The French writer concluded his letter to Marie Sheykevich of 21 January 1918 with the following words: “… You know that I will always remain faithful to the Russia of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Borodin and Mrs. Sheykevich. Based on more accurate translations, Proust”s perception of Dostoevsky”s poetics was analyzed by the St. Petersburg literary scholar S.L. Fokin, who also examined the attitude toward the work and the perception of the author of the “great five books” by French writers in his monograph Dostoevsky Figures in 20th Century French Literature.

Dostoevsky”s work has had an impact on world literature, in particular on Nobel Prize winners in literature Knut Hamsun, Hermann Hesse, William Faulkner, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Heinrich Boell, Joseph Brodsky, who shared the writer”s praise of Anna Akhmatova, John Maxwell Coetzee.

In 1971, Western researchers created the International Dostoevsky Society, which was timed to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the writer”s birth.

Joseph Franck, author of the most voluminous biography of Dostoevsky, cited Christopher Pike: “Nathalie Sarroth, Alain Rob-Grieux, and Michel Bouteur admired Dostoevsky.” According to The Guardian”s ranking, The Brothers Karamazov is one of the 100 greatest novels of all time, ranking 29th. According to German Slavist Reinhard Lauer (Lauer, Reinhard), “Dostoevsky is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential novelists of the golden age of Russian literature. Dostoevsky”s reflections on progress, revolution, materialism, God, man and his freedom, reason and justice are in harmony with the views of Pope Benedict XVI, who mentions the Russian writer in paragraph 44 of his encyclical Spe Salvi.

Modern translations of Dostoevsky”s works into foreign languages testify to the demand for the writer”s work today. Since 2007, a new (eighth) translation of the novel The Brothers Karamazov by Ikuo Kameyama, rector of the Tokyo Institute of Foreign Languages, has become a bestseller in Japan and caused a boom in Dostoevsky. According to Ikuo Kameyama, who participated in a discussion of the writer”s work on “Dostoevsky and Globalization” in Moscow in 2008, “…Dostoevsky was able to predict the state of modern man, his spiritual life in the current era of globalization. The Japanese historian Toyofusa Kinoshita regarded the popularity of Ikuo Kameyama”s translation as a commercial boom and repeatedly criticized it, pointing out its dubiousness, errors, text distortions and following a vulgar Freudianism, drawing an analogy with the television series “Dostoevsky” directed by V.I. Hotinenko.

Museums, monuments, commemorative plaques, numismatics, philately, and names in honor of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky are listed in:

The topic “Dostoevsky in literature”, the influence of Dostoevsky”s works on the creation of musical opuses, operas, theatrical and ballet productions based on the works of the writer, the image of Dostoevsky in documentaries and feature films and screen adaptations of the writer”s works are presented in:

In 2019, using a neural network, it was possible to virtually animate a picture of the writer Fyodor Dostoevsky. For this purpose, they used the technology of animating a static image, which uses a human face mask from a video sequence as the basis, transferring it to the image.

In 2021 in Italy there was a drawing on the field in the form of a portrait of Dostoyevsky. Its area was 25 thousand square meters. Its length is 250 meters.

Sources

Достоевский, Фёдор Михайлович
Fyodor Dostoevsky
«Живая жизнь» — распространённое в литературе и публицистике XIX века понятие впервые употреблено Достоевским в «Записках из подполья» как противопоставление логичности, рассудочности, математичности рационалистических теорий, как своего рода протест против нивелирования и устранения индивидуальности. В «Преступлении и наказании» у Разумихинина это «живой процесс жизни», в черновиках «Бесов» у Ставрогина это «источники живой жизни». Версилов в «Подростке» рассуждает о «великой идее» как источнике «живой жизни», полемизируя с «идеей Ротшильда». См.: Галаган, Г. Я. Примечания // Полное собрание сочинений : в 30 т. / Ф. М. Достоевский. — Л. : Наука, 1976. — Т. 17. — С. 285—287.
Указаны годы первых публикаций.
^ His name has been variously transcribed into English, his first name sometimes being rendered as Theodore or Fedor.
^ Before the postrevolutionary orthographic reform which, among other things, replaced the Cyrillic letter Ѳ with Ф, Dostoevsky”s name was written Ѳедоръ Михайловичъ Достоевскій.
^ In Old Style dates: 30 October 1821 – 28 January 1881
em russo: Фёдор Миха́йлович Достое́вский, Fyodor Mikháylovich Dostoyévsky; AFI: [ˈfʲodər mʲɪˈxajləvʲɪtɕ dəstɐˈjɛfskʲɪj] . A falta de critérios mais definidos para a transliteração do alfabeto cirílico para o latino no idioma português faz com que diversas variantes da grafia do nome possam ser utilizadas: além de Fiodor Dostoiévski, pode-se encontrar, também, a versão anglicizada Fyodor Dostoievsky, e híbridos como Dostoiévsky. Para maiores informações sobre transliteração, ver também Romanização do russo. No sistema de WP:RUSSO, seu nome completo seria transliterado Fiódor Mikháilovitch Dostoévski, mas aqui seu sobrenome será escrito Dostoiévski, em consistência com a forma mais frequentemente adotada pela mídia lusófona.
Todas as datas deste artigo referem-se ao calendário juliano.
Datas conforme o calendário gregoriano. Os registros na Rússia até o final do século XIX seguiam as datas do velho calendário juliano. Segundo a Encyclopædia Britannica (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Fyodor-Dostoyevsky), a qual oferece ambas as datas, a outra notação seria: (30 de outubro de 1821 — 28 de janeiro de 1881) (Morson, 2017).
O nome Sofia é antiga forma familiar do nome Sônia, segundo Paulo Bezerra em sua tradução de Crime e Castigo (pag.35)
Aussi Fedor, Fédor ou Théodore, dénomination utilisée par Dostoïevski lui-même. Par exemple lorsqu”il habita à Genève : « M-r Theodore Dostoiewsky, Suisse, Genève, poste restante » (lettre du 28 août 1867 à Apollon Maïkov).
En orthographe précédant la réforme de 1917-1918 : Ѳедоръ Михайловичъ Достоевскій.