Who Was Fyodor Dostoevsky?
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born on 30 October 1821 (11 November new style) in Moscow, the second of seven children of Mikhail Andreevich Dostoevsky, a former military doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, and Maria Fyodorovna Nechayeva, the daughter of a Moscow merchant of Orthodox Old-Ritualist background. He died on 28 January 1881 (9 February new style) in St Petersburg, a few months after delivering the public address that would make him the centre of a national cult. In the years between, he produced a body of work that has placed him in the small company of nineteenth-century novelists — Tolstoy, Dickens, Balzac, Flaubert — whose writings are part of the world canon (see Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, 2010).
The Petrashevsky Circle and the mock execution
The decisive event of Dostoevsky’s life was his arrest on 23 April 1849 as a member of the Petrashevsky Circle, the Friday-evening discussion group organised by Mikhail Petrashevsky. Dostoevsky was, in the circle, an advocate of Fourier’s utopian socialism, and he had read aloud the Letter of Belinsky to Gogol — the famous 1847 letter criticising the Russian Orthodox and Slavophile tradition. The Russian secret police had been watching the circle for nearly two years, and on 23 April 1849 the 38 members were arrested.
Dostoevsky was sentenced to death by firing squad. On 22 December 1849, in the cold of the Semenovsky Square in St Petersburg, he was taken to the scaffold and bound; only at the last moment was a courier from Nicholas I read out, commuting the sentence to four years’ hard labour in the Omsk prison, followed by soldier’s service. The mock execution was the central trauma of his life. The semi-autobiographical novel The House of the Dead (1862), based on his Omsk experience, would be the first of his major works (Frank, 2010).
The great novels
After his release from Siberian service in 1859, Dostoevsky embarked on the great sequence of novels that would make his reputation. Notes from the House of the Dead appeared in 1860-1862, and Notes from Underground in 1864. The four great novels of the 1860s and 1870s followed: Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872, also translated as The Possessed or The Devils), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880).
Crime and Punishment is the story of the student Raskolnikov, who murders a pawnbroker in St Petersburg in July 1865 and is gradually consumed by guilt; the novel was first published as a serial in the Russkiy Vestnik in 1866. The Idiot is the story of Prince Myshkin, a Christian figure returning from a Swiss sanatorium, who is destroyed by the corruption of the Russian upper class. Demons is a political novel, based on the murder of the student Ivan Ivanov in 1869 by Sergei Nechaev’s group. The Brothers Karamazov is the longest, the most expansive, and the last of the major novels; its central “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” is one of the most widely discussed passages in modern literature.
The conservative turn
Dostoevsky’s politics shifted through the 1860s. He had been a Westerniser in the 1840s, a Slavophile by the 1860s, and a conservative pan-Slavist by the 1870s. He edited the conservative journal Grazhdanin (“The Citizen”) in 1873-1874 and the writer’s journal Dnevnik pisatelya (“The Writer’s Diary”) from 1873 to 1881. His Pushkin Speech — the address at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow on 8 June 1880 — was a long meditation on the Russian people’s capacity for universal brotherhood, and it was the occasion of his reconciliation with Tolstoy after a long estrangement. The speech was the high point of his public life; he died eight months later (Frank, 2010).
Dostoevsky and the empire
Dostoevsky’s novels are set in the Russian Empire of the 1850s-1870s. Crime and Punishment is the St Petersburg of the Stieglitz factory workers and the Haymarket; The Idiot is the resort life of the Russian upper class; Demons is the Russian provincial town in the period of revolutionary agitation; The Brothers Karamazov is the provincial Russia of monasteries and family disputes. Dostoevsky’s empire is a complex moral terrain, populated by petty clerks, the poor of the slums, the nobility, the monastic life of the Optina Pustyn (which he visited in 1878), and the revolutionary conspirators of the 1860s.
The Russian Empire was also the imperial structure within which Dostoevsky’s writing was published, censored, and read. He was published in the Russian journals (Otechestvennye Zapiski, Russkiy Vestnik, Zarya); he was a member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, which elected him in 1877; he was decorated by the Russian state. The cult of Dostoevsky that began at his death in 1881 was carried forward by the Slavophile movement of the late nineteenth century and by the Russian literary emigration of the twentieth. He is, with Pushkin, the most-cited Russian writer in the world (Jones, Dostoevsky and the Dynamics of Religious Experience, 2005).