Moscow and Saint Petersburg
Born in Moscow, the son of a hospital doctor, he trained at the Main Engineering School and then left the service to write.
Philosophical novel · freedom and faith · 1821–1881
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Put ideas to the test of human lives.
Moscow · Saint Petersburg · Omsk
Biography
The thread of a life.
Fyodor Dostoevsky was a Russian novelist whose fiction stages philosophical arguments through characters who live, suffer and act on their ideas. A former political prisoner sentenced to hard labour in Siberia, he set freedom, guilt, faith and the limits of rational calculation against the confident theories of his age, without letting a single voice settle the debate.
Poor Folk
His first novel was greeted by the critic Vissarion Belinsky as the debut of a major writer.
Arrest, Siberia and return
Arrested with the Petrashevsky circle, he faced a staged execution, four years of hard labour in Omsk and army service before returning to Saint Petersburg.
Journals and the underground
With his brother Mikhail he edited the journals Time and Epoch; the second published Notes from Underground in 1864.
The great novels
Crime and Punishment appeared in 1866; The Idiot and Demons followed, largely written abroad with his second wife, Anna Snitkina.
Diary, Karamazov and death
A Writer’s Diary, the Pushkin speech of 1880 and The Brothers Karamazov preceded his death in Saint Petersburg in 1881.
Understanding a life in depth
01Youth, first success and arrest
Born in Moscow in 1821, Fyodor Dostoevsky grew up in the family of a doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor. After his mother’s death he was sent to the Main Engineering School in Saint Petersburg; he left the service in 1844 to write and translated Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet. His first novel, Poor Folk, published in 1846, was hailed by the critic Vissarion Belinsky, but The Double and the stories that followed met a cooler reception. In 1849 he was arrested with members of the Petrashevsky circle, which discussed French socialist ideas; there he had read aloud Belinsky’s forbidden letter to Gogol.
02Mock execution, hard labour and return
In December 1849 the condemned men were led out to Semyonovsky Square to be shot, and only at the last moment was the commutation of their sentences announced. Dostoevsky spent four years in the prison at Omsk, then served as a soldier in Semipalatinsk, where he married Maria Isaeva in 1857. Back in Saint Petersburg in 1859, he drew on his prison years in Notes from the House of the Dead and edited the journals Time and Epoch with his brother Mikhail. Close to the “native soil” movement, he hoped for a reconciliation between the educated classes and the Russian people, and the Gospel he had read in prison remained a lasting reference.
03Underground, debts and the great novels
In 1864 he published Notes from Underground, a polemical answer to the rational egoism defended in What Is to Be Done?, the novel Nikolai Chernyshevsky had published in 1863. The same year he lost his wife and his brother, and he struggled with heavy debts and compulsive gambling. Crime and Punishment, serialized in The Russian Messenger in 1866, established him as a major novelist; to meet a contract he dictated The Gambler to the stenographer Anna Snitkina, whom he married in 1867. The couple lived abroad until 1871, and there he wrote The Idiot and Demons, a novel prompted by the murder committed by Sergei Nechaev’s revolutionary cell.
04A Writer’s Diary, Karamazov and a contested legacy
Back in Russia, he edited the weekly The Citizen and then published A Writer’s Diary himself, a mixture of stories, memories and political commentary whose nationalism, anti-Catholic polemics and antisemitic passages belong to the record. After the death of his young son Alyosha in 1878 he visited the monastery of Optina Pustyn with Vladimir Solovyov. His speech on Pushkin in Moscow in 1880 was received with enthusiasm, and The Brothers Karamazov, serialized in 1879 and 1880, crowned his work. He died in Saint Petersburg in 1881, leaving novels that philosophers would read in strikingly different ways.
Nietzsche, Shestov, Berdyaev, Camus and Sartre read him as an explorer of freedom and nihilism, and Mikhail Bakhtin made his novels the model of a polyphonic form in which independent voices remain unmerged. His nationalism, his hostility to Catholicism and the antisemitic passages of his journalism also belong to that legacy and call for critical reading.
Sources & reference points