Fyodor was the second of seven children born to Mikhail and Maria Dostoevsky. Shortly after his mother died of tuberculosis in 1837,
he and his brother Mikhail were sent to the Military Engineering Academy at St. Petersburg, and they lost their father, a retired military
surgeon who served as a doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in Moscow, in 1839.
In 1849 he was arrested for engaging in revolutionary activity against Tsar Nikolai I and for membership in a secret utopian socialist organization,
the Petrashevsky Circle, and sent to into exile in Siberia for eight years. The arrest and imprisonment interrupted his career for nearly a decade.
He was released from prison in 1854, and was required to serve in the Siberian Regiment. Dostoevsky spent the following five years as a corporal
(and later lieutenant) in the Regiment's Seventh Line Battalion stationed at the fortress of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan.
This was a turning point in the author's life. Dostoevsky abandoned his earlier liberal sentiments and became deeply conservative and extremely religious.
There he married Maria Isaeva, the widow of an acquaintance in Siberia.
In 1860, he returned to St. Petersburg, where he ran a series of unsuccessful literary journals with his older brother Mikhail. Dostoevsky was
devastated by his wife's death in 1864, followed shortly thereafter by his brother's death. He was financially crippled by business debts and the
need to provide for his brother's widow and children. Dostoevsky sank into a deep depression, frequenting gambling parlors and accumulating massive
losses at the tables.
Motivated by the dual wish to escape his creditors at home and to visit the casinos abroad, Dostoevsky traveled to Western Europe. There, he attempted
to rekindle a love affair with Polina Suslova, a young university student with whom he had had an affair several years prior, but she refused his
marriage proposal. Dostoevsky was heartbroken, but soon met Anna Snitkina, a twenty-year-old stenographer whom he married in 1867. This period resulted
in the writing of his greatest books. From 1873 to 1881 he vindicated his earlier journalistic failures by publishing a monthly journal full of short
stories, sketches, and articles on current events - the Writer's Diary. The journal was an enormous success.
In his later years, Fyodor Dostoevsky lived for a long time at the resort of Staraya Russa which was closer to St Petersburg and less expensive than
German resorts. He died of a lung hemorrhage complicated by an attack of epilepsy on January 28, 1881 and was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the
Alexander Nevsky Monastery, St. Petersburg, Russia.
Works:
Dostoevsky's first published work, Poor Folk (1846), which brought him immediate critical and public recognition, reveals his characteristic
compassion for the downtrodden. His second novel, The Double (1846), less favorably received, shows the profound insight into human character
that dominates his later works. Notes from the Underground (1864), a detailed study of neurotic suffering, began the greatest period of
Dostoevsky's literary career. Crime and Punishment, a brilliant portrait of sin, remorse, and redemption through sacrifice, followed in 1866.
His next novel, The Idiot (1868), concerns a Christ figure, a meek, human epileptic whose effect on those around him is tragic.
The Possessed (1871-72) is a violent denunciation of the leftists and revolutionaries that Dostoevsky had previously admired.
In A Raw Youth (1875) he described decay within family relationships and the inability of science to deal with the primary need of human beings:
a purpose for living beyond the mere struggle for sustenance. Both of these themes are central to the enormously complex plot and character
development of his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80), generally thought to be one of the finest novels ever written.
A profound psychologist and philosopher, Dostoevsky depicted with remarkable insight the depth and complexity of the human soul.
His powerful though generally humorless narrative style, his understanding of the intricacies of character, especially the pathological
conscience, and his amplification of sin and redemption made him a giant among novelists and, in the realm of ideas, a precursor of Freudian
psychological analysis.
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