Overview of Life and Works
Fyodor Dostoevsky is with out a
doubt (in my humble opinion, anyway...) the greatest author who ever lived.
No other writer (save Leo Tolstoy) comes anywhere close to having the philosophical
depth and all-around awesomeness as the great Dostoevsky.
Dostoevsky was born at a hospital
for the poor in Moscow in 1821. His mother dies in 1837, and he moved to
St. Petersburg the same year in order to attend the Army engineering
college. In 1839, his father dies--murdered by his own serfs.
Dostoevsky graduated from the academy in 1843, but he resigned in 1844 to devote
his life to writing. His first novel, Poor Folk, was published in
1846. This was a psychological study of its main character written in the
form of a letter. It was a huge success. A few weeks later, his
second novel, The Double, was published. This one didn't go over as
well. It was about a poor civil servant who is mentally tortured by a
"look-a-like" and goes insane (remember Poe's William Wilson?).
It was considered a failure.
Haunted by his failures,
Dostoevsky left the literary circle which he was a part of and, in 1847, joined
the Petrashevsky circle, a group of socialists who met in secret to discuss
books which the government had banned on economics and politics. In 1849,
he and other members of the group were arrested. Dostoevsky spent
eight months in solitary confinement and then was brought to the place of
execution with the others from the circle. Right before the executions
took place, the Czar's pardon was announced an their sentence was reduced to
four years of hard labor in Siberia and then four more years of military
service. It was during this time that he embraced the Orthodox church,
which became the center of his life and writing. He was also married
during his military service.
Upon his release in 1859, he moved
back to St. Petersburg where more of his writings were published. Based on
his experiences in prison, he wrote Memoirs from the House of the Dead.
After that, he wrote The Insulted and the Injured in 1861, a work crying
out against naive utopianism where evil is present. He then took a trip to
western Europe, which ws the inspiration for Winter Notes on Summer
Impressions in 1863.
Next began the second phase of
Dostoevsky writing: the unbeatable phase of greatness. This is a complex
psychological analysis of an outcasted man who hates himself, and yet has an
extremely sensitive ego. Basically, he goes through the novel asking what
is the meaning of life and explaining his reasonings on so many aspects of why
humans are what they are and even what humans are. It is truly incredible.
By this point of his life,
however, Dostoevsky was very much in debt. He had a deal with his
bookseller that if he did not produce a new, long novel by Nov. 1st, 1866,
all rights of Dostoevsky's previous and future works would go to him. He
turned in the novel on (you guessed it) November 1st. The book was The
Gambler.
After this came the greatest works
the world has ever seen: his four king novels. The fist was published the
same year as The Gambler. The book is one which everyone has heard
of: Crime and Punishment. This is an AWESOME story about a poor
student, Raskolnikov, who murders an old, despicable pawnbroker for what
he thinks is the good of man kind. The whole rest of the book is his
mental process on trying to justify it and him being haunted by a genius
investigator, Porfiry. It is surely one of the greatest things ever
written. The next work was The Idiot, a story about Prince
Myshkin. Myshkin is the epitome of a Christ-like character. He has
recently come from an asylum. The book basically shows that the only place
a true saint can exist is not in this world--in an asylum of some sort.
His next work, the lesser read of the four greats, is The Devils or The
Demons (mistranslated as The Possessed), a novel of philosophical
nihilism. To quote Encarta, "Dostoyevsky’s most political novel.
Its dark humor contains a direct and powerful attack on those who were, in the
author’s opinion, driving Russia to destruction by trying to build a society
without God and therefore without genuine moral principles. Dostoyevsky argues
that the ideas of a high-minded, idealistic generation of liberals of the 1840s
had given birth to the violent and unprincipled revolutionaries of the 1860s.
The novel also explores profound philosophic issues through its central
character, the mysterious Nikolay Stavrogin. Stavrogin is Dostoyevsky’s most
willful character, but his will leads him only to inaction and he eventually
commits suicide." Next came the greatest piece of literature
EVER written: The Brothers Karamazov. This is it. It doesn't
get any better than this. The plot of this novel is not the important
part. This is the plot. Fyodor Karamazov has four sons, three of
whom are legitimate: Dmitri (the sensual, voluptuous and pleasure seeking), Ivan
(the logical and intellectual), Alyosha (the spiritual and good) and Smerdyakov
(the illegitimate evil one). He is murdered. They pin it on Dmitri,
it was really Smerdyakov. He kills himself. Dmitri is found guilty,
however, and put into prison. I feel I have committed a great sin in doing
that--I just completely butchered the plot. That in no way comes anywhere
close to summarizing the plot in any respectable way. The story is so
intricate and moving that it has to be read over and over to be believed.
You can read more about it on the The Brothers Karamazov page.
Anyway, the story deals with the point of life and how to deal with God.
God was the central part of this novel (it is traditionally accepted as a
Christian novel) and most of his other writings. The way he...you just
have to read it. Also, some of the most famous chapters in all of
literature are found in this book. THE most famous is called "The
Grand Inquisitor", a story told by Ivan about how Jesus should have
acted and the difference between needing earthly bread and the bread of heaven.
As hard as it is to believe, yes, Dostoevsky was
mortal. He died on February 9th, 1881 in St. Petersburg. His coffin
was followed by 40,000 people--that's how great he was.
