Fyodor Dostoevsky

• 1. Introduction

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  Fyodor Dostoevsky stood in Semyonov Place in Saint Petersburg on the 23rd of December 1849, waiting to be shot. He had been split into a three-man group with the firing squad before him, the third man in the second row. Beside him stood Pleshcheyev and Durov. Then a cart arrived carrying a letter from the tsar, and the sentence was commuted at the last moment. The man who survived that morning would become one of the greatest novelists in Russian and world literature. His books would be translated into more than 170 languages. Yet the road to that point ran through a Siberian labour camp, a gambling addiction so severe he once begged for money, and a body shaken by epileptic seizures. What kind of mind emerges from a mock execution still able to write? What did four years among convicts teach a man who would spend his life mapping guilt, faith, and the human soul? And how did a reclusive cadet nicknamed Monk Photius come to be called, by Friedrich Nietzsche, the only psychologist from whom he had something to learn?

• 2. Hospital Gardens

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  Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821, the second child of Dr Mikhail Dostoevsky and Maria Dostoevskaya. The family home sat in the grounds of the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, in a lower-class district on the edge of the city. From the age of three, his nanny Alena Frolovna read him heroic sagas, fairy tales, and legends, and she became an especially influential figure in his love of stories. When he was four, his mother used the Bible to teach him to read and write. His parents opened a wide door into literature: the Russian writers Nikolai Karamzin, Alexander Pushkin, and Gavrila Derzhavin; the Gothic fiction of Ann Radcliffe; the romantic works of Schiller and Goethe; the tales of Cervantes and Walter Scott; and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The work of Nikolai Gogol left a deep mark on him. Some of what he saw in those years entered his fiction. When a nine-year-old girl was raped by a drunk, the young Fyodor was sent to fetch his father to attend to her. The incident haunted him, and the theme of a mature man's desire for a young girl later surfaced in The Devils, The Brothers Karamazov, and Crime and Punishment. His father, profoundly religious, sent him in 1833 to a French boarding school and then to the Chermak boarding school, where he felt out of place among aristocratic classmates.

• 3. The Reluctant Engineer

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  On the 27th of February 1837 Dostoevsky's mother died of tuberculosis. The previous May, his parents had sent him and his elder brother Mikhail to Saint Petersburg to attend the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute, forcing both boys to abandon their academic studies for military careers. Mikhail was refused admission on health grounds and sent to an academy in Reval, now Tallinn. Dostoevsky entered the academy in January 1838 and disliked nearly everything about it. He had no interest in science, mathematics, or military engineering, preferring drawing and architecture. His friend Konstantin Trutovsky remembered him plainly: "There was no student in the entire institution with less of a military bearing than F.M. Dostoevsky. He moved clumsily and jerkily; his uniform hung awkwardly on him." Among his 120 classmates he was an outsider who protected newcomers, criticised corruption among officers, and helped poor farmers. His reclusiveness and interest in religion earned him the nickname Monk Photius. Word of his father's death on the 16th of June 1839 may have triggered the first signs of his epilepsy, though those reports came from later, unreliable accounts. After completing his exams, he frequented concerts, operas, plays, and ballets, and two friends introduced him to gambling. His first completed literary work was a translation of Balzac's Eugénie Grandet, published in 1843. None of his translations succeeded, and financial trouble pushed him toward writing a novel of his own.

• 4. Entering The Circles

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  Poor Folk, completed in May 1845, opened the doors of literary Saint Petersburg to Dostoevsky. His friend Dmitry Grigorovich carried the manuscript to the poet Nikolay Nekrasov, who showed it to the critic Vissarion Belinsky. Belinsky called it Russia's first social novel, and when it was released on the 15th of January 1846 it became a commercial success. The triumph convinced Dostoevsky to resign his military post. His second novel, The Double, appeared soon after but drew negative reviews, including a scathing one from Belinsky himself. His health declined and his seizures grew more frequent. Through Belinsky he deepened his knowledge of socialism, but his Russian Orthodox faith could not be reconciled with Belinsky's atheism and scientific materialism, and the two eventually parted. In 1846 Dostoevsky joined the Petrashevsky Circle, founded by Mikhail Petrashevsky, who had proposed social reforms in Russia. Mikhail Bakunin once described the group to Alexander Herzen as the most innocent and harmless company, its members systematic opponents of revolutionary means. That description did not fit the aristocrat Nikolay Speshnev, who joined in 1848 and began building a secret revolutionary society from the circle's members. Dostoevsky joined that society too, aware of its aims, though he harbored significant doubts about its actions.

• 5. Four Years In Omsk

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  Arrested on the 23rd of April 1849, Dostoevsky was held in the Peter and Paul Fortress, which housed the most dangerous convicts. The investigative commission, headed by the tsar, included Adjutant General Ivan Nabokov and Leonty Dubelt, head of the secret police. After the staged execution in Semyonov Place, he served four years of hard labour at a katorga prison camp in Omsk, Siberia. At a way station in Tobolsk, the Decembrist women gave the prisoners food, clothes, and copies of the New Testament with a ten-rouble banknote hidden inside each one. Dostoevsky reached Omsk with only one other circle member, the writer Sergei Durov. His own description of the barracks is bleak. "In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick... We were packed like herrings in a barrel." Classified as one of the most dangerous convicts, he kept his hands and feet shackled until his release, and was permitted to read only his New Testament. He suffered seizures, hemorrhoids, weight loss, and fevers, while the smell of the privy filled a building shared by more than 200 men. Most prisoners respected him, though some Polish political prisoners despised him for his Russian nationalism. The experience became The House of the Dead, published in 1861, the first published novel about Russian prisons. The memory of the firing squad later entered The Idiot, where Prince Myshkin tells of a man reprieved at the last moment.

• 6. Exile, Love, And Roulette

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  After his release on the 14th of February 1854, Dostoevsky was sent to serve in the Siberian Army Corps at Semipalatinsk. There he met Baron Alexander Egorovich Wrangel, an admirer of his books who had attended the aborted execution. Wrangel recalled a man who "looked morose," with a sickly pale face covered in freckles and sharp grey-blue eyes that seemed to look into the soul. In Semipalatinsk Dostoevsky met Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva and fell in love. They married in Kuznetsk on the 7th of February 1857, though she had first refused him. Their life together was unhappy and she struggled with his seizures, yet he wrote that the more unhappy they were, the more attached they became. In 1859 deteriorating health freed him from military service and let him return to European Russia. He travelled to western Europe for the first time on the 7th of June 1862, visiting Cologne, Dresden, Paris, and London, where he met Herzen and saw the Crystal Palace, which he viewed as a monument to soulless materialism. On a second trip he met his second love, Polina Suslova, and lost nearly all his money gambling in Wiesbaden and Baden-Baden. In 1864 both his wife Maria and his brother Mikhail died, leaving him the sole supporter of his stepson Pasha and his brother's family.

• 7. The Stenographer

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  The first two parts of Crime and Punishment appeared in The Russian Messenger in early 1866, drawing at least 500 new subscribers. That September Dostoevsky promised his editor, Fyodor Stellovsky, a novel called The Gambler by November, though he had not begun it. A friend advised him to hire a secretary, and the stenographer Pavel Olkhin recommended his twenty-year-old pupil, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina. Her shorthand let Dostoevsky finish The Gambler in 26 days, completing it on the 30th of October. She described his uneven eyes, one dark brown and one with a pupil so large its color vanished, the result of an injury, which gave him a mysterious look. They married in Trinity Cathedral on the 15th of February 1867 and left for a delayed honeymoon, with Anna selling her valuables to fund the trip. In Baden-Baden he quarreled with Ivan Turgenev and lost heavily at roulette, and at one point Anna was reportedly forced to pawn her underwear. Their first child, Sofya, was born in Geneva on the 5th of March 1868 and died of pneumonia three months later. Anna recalled that Dostoevsky wept and sobbed like a woman in despair. He finished The Idiot in Florence in January 1869, and after hearing that a revolutionary group had murdered one of its own members, Ivan Ivanov, he began Demons. The honeymoon, planned for three months, lasted over four years before the family reached Saint Petersburg on the 8th of July 1871.

• 8. The Final Heritage

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  A Writer's Diary, the collection of essays Dostoevsky had long wanted, sold more than twice as many copies as his earlier books and brought him a flood of letters from readers of all ages. His own publishing company, run by Anna, sold Demons out of their apartment for cash only, and it moved around 3,000 copies. Honors accumulated as his health failed. He was made an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in February 1879, and joined an international literary committee whose members included Victor Hugo, Alfred Tennyson, and Leo Tolstoy. On the 8th of June 1880 he delivered his speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin memorial in Moscow, to thunderous applause, and even his long-time rival Turgenev embraced him afterward. The end came in early 1881. The tsar's secret police searched the apartment of his neighbor Alexander Barannikov, and the next day Dostoevsky suffered a pulmonary hemorrhage, though Anna blamed it on his stooping to retrieve a dropped pen-holder. As he died, he asked that the parable of the Prodigal Son be read to his children. His last words to Anna were a vow of faithful love. He was buried in the Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Convent, near his favourite poets Karamzin and Zhukovsky, his tombstone inscribed with lines about a corn of wheat that must fall and die before it brings forth much fruit. Decades on, a crater on Mercury would bear his name, and in 2021 Kazakhstan marked the 200th anniversary of his birth.