About Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821 to a middle-class family. His father, a doctor, was murdered by his own serfs when Dostoevsky was 18—an event that haunted him and influenced his exploration of violence, guilt, and justice throughout his work. He studied engineering but was more interested in literature, reading voraciously and eventually leaving his military career to write full-time. His early success with Poor Folk (1846) made him a literary celebrity overnight, but involvement with a progressive intellectual circle led to his arrest in 1849. Sentenced to death for reading banned literature, he faced mock execution—standing before a firing squad, awaiting death, only to be reprieved at the last moment and sent to Siberian labor camp instead. This experience profoundly shaped him: he entered a rational progressive and emerged a Christian conservative who believed suffering purifies the soul. He spent four years in brutal Siberian prison camp (House of the Dead, 1860-62, describes this), then five years of compulsory military service. He returned to St. Petersburg in 1859 a changed man—now Orthodox Christian, nationalist, and convinced that Western European rationalism was poisoning Russia. His post-exile works explore the consequences of rationalism divorced from faith: Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Crime and Punishment was written while Dostoevsky was desperately in debt and struggling with gambling addiction. He had to write quickly for serial publication, which gives the novel its breathless, feverish pace. His personal experience with moral failure (gambling away money his family needed) and with suffering (prison, epilepsy, poverty) informed Raskolnikov's story. Like his character, Dostoevsky understood how intelligent people rationalize destructive behavior and how guilt manifests physically. His final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, is considered one of the supreme achievements in world literature. He died just months after its publication in 1881. Thirty thousand people attended his funeral. He's now recognized as one of literature's greatest psychological realists and a profound explorer of moral philosophy, influencing Freud, Nietzsche, Camus, and existentialism.