Fyodor Dostoevsky's Biography:

Nationality: Russian

Place and Date of Birth: November 11th, 1821 in Moscow, Russia

Place and Date of Death: February 9th, 1881 in St. Petersburg, Russia

Introduction

The Russian novelist and essayist Fyodor Dostoevsky was well known in his country during his own life and has since been praised globally as a writer. He is best known for writing novels, short stories, and novellas that had a great understanding of human psychology in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century Russia, especially the mind of people who become insane or even commit murder. His most famous novels are Prestuplenie I nakazaniye (1866; Crime and Punishment) and Bratya Karamazovy (1880; The Brothers Karamazov).

Retrato de Fiódor Dostoyevski (1872) por Vasili Perov (Galería Tretiakov, Moscú).

Dostoyevski, F. (2021, January 29). 'Noches Blancas', UN cuento de Fiódor Dostoyevski. Semana.com Últimas Noticias de Colombia y el Mundo. Retrieved November 29, 2021, from https://www.semana.com/agenda/articulo/cuento-de-fiodor-dostoyevski-noches-blancas/62630/.

Early years:

Fyodor Dostoevsky belonged to a prosperous and comfortable background as his father was a doctor. He had been interested in philosophy and religion due to his strict, religiously oriented family, as his parents were very focused on spirituality and philosophy. Fyodor began reading extensively when he was in his youth as his parents introduced him to various books and authors, such as Russian writers Karamzin, Pushkin, and Derzhavin. Moreover, he was a big enthusiast of Gothic fiction like the works of writer Ann Radcliffe; romantic works by Schiller; heroic tales by Miguel de Cervantes and Walter Scott.

He was first educated by his mother, father, and tutors, but at thirteen years old he was sent to a well-known Russian private school, where he was bored with the dull routine and the unimaginative student life. However, when he was 15 years old, he suffered from personal issues as his mother, Maria Dostoevskaya, passed away from tuberculosis. His father also died, and the official cause of death was determined to be a stroke, but a neighbour and one of the younger Dostoevsky brothers spread a rumour that the family’s serfs had murdered him.

After his father’s death, Dostoevsky passed his exams and became an engineer cadet, which allowed him to move out of academy housing and into a living situation with friends.

The hospital where Dostoevsky was born (Hospital Mariinski de Moscú)

Manáiev, G. (2021, September 15). Honesto y Gran Lector: Así era Dostoievski de Niño. Russia Beyond ES. Retrieved November 29, 2021, from https://es.rbth.com/cultura/87994-honesto-gran-lector-dostoievski-nino.

Initial career

Poor Folk (1846)

The Double (1846)

"Mr. Prokharchin" (1846)

The Landlady (1847)

"Novel in Nine Letters" (1847)

"Another Man's Wife and a Husband under the Bed" (1848)

"A Weak Heart" (1848)

"Polzunkov" (1848)

"An Honest Thief" (1848)

"A Christmas Tree and a Wedding" (1848)

"White Nights" (1848)

"A Little Hero" (1849)

Fyodor Dostoevsky began his career by publishing translations. His first one was a translation of Honoré de Balzac's novel Eugénie Grandet, which was published in the summer of 1843. Although he published several translations around this time, none of them was very successful, and he found himself struggling financially.

Fyodor Dostoevsky started easy as his early writing’s main focus was fictional stories of people suffering from poverty and misery. The first novel he published was called Poor Folk, released in the market in 1843, in the St Petersburg Collection almanac, and became a commercial success. Poor Folk is written in the form of letters between the two main characters, Makar Devushkin and Varvara Dobroselova, who are poor second cousins.

He felt that his military career would endanger his flourishing literary career, so he wrote a letter asking to resign his post. Shortly thereafter, he wrote his second novel, The Double, which appeared in the journal Notes of the Fatherland on 30 January 1846, before being published in February. However, in contrast to his first one, this novel did not have a good response. Many people think that The Double was too modernized and open for the people in that era. The short stories and novels he wrote in this period are, for the most part, experiments in different forms and different subject matters. He continued to write about civil servants in such tales as Mr Prokharchin (1846) and The Faint Heart (1847). The Landlady (1847) is an experiment with the Gothic form; A Jealous Husband, an Unusual Event (1848) and Nine Letters (1847) are burlesques; White Nights (1848) is a sentimental romance; and the unfinished novel Netochka Nezvanova (1847) is a mixture of Gothic, social, and sentimental elements.

Dostoevsky as a military engineer.

Eliza. (2021, November 11). On this day, Dostoevsky was born. Interlude. Retrieved November 29, 2021, from https://interlude.hk/on-this-day-11-november-fyodor-dostoevsky-is-born/.

Siberian exile (1849–1854)

In 1847, Fyodor joined an anti-government group called the Petrashevsky Circle. In 1849, all of its members were arrested. After eight months in prison because of this particular reason, Dostoevsky was "sentenced" to death. This sentence was a hoax designed to impress the prisoners with the Czar's mercy, as, in the end, he was sentenced to four years in prison and four years of forced service in the army in Siberia, Russia.

Therefore, Dostoevsky served four years of exile with hard labour at a katorga prison camp in Omsk, Siberia, followed by a term of compulsory military service. After a fourteen-day sleigh ride, the prisoners reached Tobolsk, a prisoner way station. He also experienced his first epileptic seizure here.

Return From Exile and First Marriage (1854-1865)

Uncle's Dream (1859)

The Village of Stepanchikovo (1859)

Humiliated and Insulted (1861)

The House of the Dead (1862)

"A Nasty Story" (1862)

Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863)

Notes from Underground (1864)

"The Crocodile" (1865)

Dostoevsky completed his prison sentence in February 1854, and he published a novel based on his experiences, called “The House of the Dead,” in 1861. In 1854, he moved to Semipalatinsk to serve out the rest of his sentence, which was forced military service in the Siberian Army Corps of the Seventh Line Battalion. While he was there, he started working as a tutor to the children of the nearby upper-class families. In this place, he met Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, who he fell in love with, although she was married. Nevertheless, her husband was killed while in military service, so Maria moved herself and her son in with Dostoevsky.

After he sent a letter of formal apology in 1856 to the government, Dostoevsky had his rights to marry and to publish again restored. Therefore, he and Maria got married in 1857. Their relationship was not particularly described as happy since they were two very different people. Moreover, his health problems led to him being released from his military obligations in 1859. As a consequence, he moved back to St. Petersburg.

Dostoevsky's life during this period was characterized by poor health, poverty, and complicated emotional situations. He fell in love with a young student, called Polina Suslova, and had a frustrating affair with her for several years. He travelled outside the country in 1862 and 1863 to get away from the people to whom he owed money, to improve his health, and to gamble, which also describes one of his novels,” The gambler.”

His wife had some serious health problems and was close to death, while he was carrying an affair with a young girl. His journal had been closed down by the censors, and he was fatally pursuing his self-destructive passion for gambling.

He also wrote Notes from the Underground in 1864, and it is a short novel, written partly as a philosophical monologue and partly as a narrative. He attempts to justify the existence of individual freedom as a necessary and inevitable attribute of man. He insists that man desires freedom more than happiness, but he also perceives that unqualified freedom is a destructive force since there is no guarantee that man will use his freedom constructively.

Succesful writing years and second marriage (1866-1875)

Crime and Punishment (1866)

The Gambler (1867)

The Idiot (1869)

The Eternal Husband (1870)

Demons (1872)

This period in Dostoevsky’s life was to be considered more successful. In the first two months of 1866, the first instalments of what would become Crime and Punishment, his most famous work, were published in The Russian Messenger. The novel is concerned with the murder of an old woman by a student, Raskolnikov, while he is committing robbery in an attempt to help his family and his career. This work proved to be his most popular work and by the end of the year, he had also finished the short novel The Gambler.

Dostoevsky later decided to hire a secretary, since he wanted to finish The gambler. He hired twenty-year-old Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina. Her shorthand helped Dostoevsky complete The Gambler on October 30th, after 26 days of work.

On February 15th, 1867 Dostoevsky married Snitkina in Trinity Cathedral, Saint Petersburg. Despite the significant income (7,000 rubles) from Crime and Punishment, Anna was forced to sell her valuables to cover her husband’s debts. Their first child, daughter Sonya, was born in March 1868 and died only three months later.

In September 1867, Dostoevsky began work on The Idiot, and after a prolonged planning process that bore little resemblance to the published novel, he eventually managed to write the first 100 pages in only 23 days; the serialization began in The Russian Messenger in January 1868. The Idiot was completed there in January 1869, and, after that, Anna gave birth to their second daughter, Lyubov, on September 26th, 1869 in Dresden. In April 1871, Dostoevsky made a final visit to a gambling hall in Wiesbaden. Anna claimed that he stopped gambling after the birth of their second daughter, but this is a subject of debate.

By 1871, however, their family was in a difficult financial situation yet again. In 1873, they founded their own publishing company, which published and sold Dostoevsky’s latest work, Demons. Fortunately, the book and the business were both very successful. They had two more children: Fyodor, born in 1871, and Alexey, born in 1875.

During this period, he wanted to start a new periodical, A Writer's Diary, but he could not afford the costs. Instead, the Diary was published in another publication, The Citizen, and Dostoevsky was paid an annual salary for contributing the essays.

Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. (n.d.). Early works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved November 24, 2021, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Fyodor-Dostoyevsky/Early-works.

Poor Health (1875-1880)

The Adolescent (1875)

"A Gentle Creature" (1876)

"The Peasant Marey" (1876)

"The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" (1877)

The Brothers Karamazov (1880)

A Writer's Diary (1873–1881)

In March 1874, Dostoevsky decided to leave his work at “The Citizen.” His doctors also suggested he leave Russia for a time to try to restore his health or improve it, and he spent some months away before returning to St. Petersburg in July 1874. Besides, he finished an ongoing work, The Adolescent, in 1875.

Dostoevsky continued working on his A Writer’s Diary, which included a range of essays and short stories surrounding some of his favourite themes and concerns. This compilation became so successful that he was summoned to the court of Tsar Alexander II to present him with a copy of the book and to receive the tsar’s request to help educate his sons.

Even though his career was more successful than ever, his health was deteriorating, with four seizures in a single month in early 1877. He also lost his young son, Alexei, to a seizure in 1878. During this period, he received various awards, such as the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Slavic Benevolent Society, and the Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale.

On February 3th, 1880 Dostoevsky was elected vice-president of the Slavic Benevolent Society, and he was invited to speak at the unveiling of the Pushkin memorial in Moscow. On June 8th, he delivered his speech, giving an impressive performance that had a significant emotional impact on his audience.

Dostoevsky sent the last part of The Brothers Karamazov to his publisher on November 8th, 1880, and he died soon afterwards, on January 28th, 1881.

Death (1881)

On January 26, 1881, Dostoevsky suffered two pulmonary haemorrhages in quick succession. When Anna called for a doctor, Dostoevsky suffered a third haemorrhage soon after. He summoned his children to see him right before his death and insisted on the Parable of the Prodigal Son being read to them—a parable about sin, repentance, but forgiveness. Dostoevsky died on February 9, 1881.

Dostoevsky was buried in the Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Convent in St. Petersburg. His gravestone is inscribed with a quote from the Gospel of John: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it dies, it bringeth forth much fruit.”