Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was a Russian novelist, philosopher, short-story writer, essayist, and journalist. He is widely considered one of the most important novelists in Russian and world literature, with many of his works regarded as highly influential masterpieces. His writing examines the human condition against the backdrop of 19th-century Russia’s turbulent political, social, and spiritual climate, engaging with a range of philosophical and religious questions. His best-known novels are *Crime and Punishment* (1866), *The Idiot* (1869), *Demons* (1872), *The Adolescent* (1875), and *The Brothers Karamazov* (1880). The novella *Notes from Underground* (1864) is often cited as one of the earliest examples of existentialist literature.

Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821. He encountered literature early through fairy tales, legends, and books by Russian and foreign authors. After his mother died in 1837, he left school to attend the Nikolayevsky Engineering Academy. Following graduation, he worked as an engineer and briefly enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, supplementing his income by translating books. In the mid-1840s, his first novel, *Poor Folk*, brought him into Saint Petersburg’s literary circles. However, in 1849 he was arrested for being part of the Petrashevsky Circle, a literary group that discussed books banned by the Tsarist regime. Sentenced to death, he was reprieved at the last moment. He then spent four years in a Siberian hard labour camp, an experience that inspired *The House of the Dead* (1860–1862). After the camp, he served six more years of compulsory military exile. Later, he worked as a journalist, publishing and editing several magazines and eventually *A Writer’s Diary*, a collection of his writings. He travelled through Western Europe, where he developed a gambling addiction that caused financial hardship, at one point forcing him to beg for money. Despite this, he eventually became one of the most widely read and highly regarded Russian writers.

His body of work includes thirteen novels, three novellas, seventeen short stories, and many other pieces. His writings were read widely both in Russia and abroad, influencing later writers such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Anton Chekhov, as well as philosophers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, and contributing to the development of existentialism and Freudianism. Friedrich Nietzsche called him “the only psychologist from whom I had something to learn” in *Twilight of the Idols*. Dostoevsky’s books have been translated into more than 170 languages.

On his father’s side, Dostoevsky’s ancestors were part of a Russian noble family of Russian Orthodox Christians. The family traced its origins to Aslan Chelebi-Murza, who left the Golden Horde and joined the Russian side in 1389, eventually converting from Islam to Christianity. Centuries later, another ancestor, Danilo Irtishch, was granted lands in the Pinsk region (then part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, now in Belarus) in 1509 for his service to a local prince; his descendants took the name “Dostoevsky” from a village there, derived from the Old Polish word *dostojnik* (dignitary). On his mother’s side, his immediate ancestors were merchants; on his father’s side, the male line consisted of priests.

In 1809, Dostoevsky’s father, Mikhail Dostoevsky, then 20, entered Moscow’s Imperial Medical-Surgical Academy. He was later assigned to a Moscow hospital as a military doctor, and in 1818 became a senior physician. In 1819, he married Maria Nechayeva. The next year, he took a post at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor. In 1828, when his sons Mikhail and Fyodor were eight and seven, he was promoted to collegiate assessor, which raised his legal status to nobility and allowed him to buy a small estate in Darovoye, about 150 km from Moscow, where the family spent summers. Dostoevsky’s parents had seven more children: Varvara (1822–1893), who married a civil servant and lived quietly; Andrei (1825–1897), a memoirist who wrote about family history; Lyubov (born and died 1829); Vera (1829–1896), who married a doctor and kept family ties; Nikolai (1831–1883), who struggled with alcoholism and had a troubled life; Aleksandra (1835–1889), who married a military officer and lived privately; and Yelizaveta (born and died 1837).

Fyodor Dostoevsky, born in Moscow, was the second child of Dr Mikhail Dostoevsky and Maria Dostoevskaya (née Nechayeva). He grew up in the family home on the grounds of the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, located in a lower-class district on Moscow’s outskirts. While playing in the hospital gardens, he encountered patients from the lowest rungs of Russian society. From age three, his nanny Alena Frolovna read him heroic sagas, fairy tales, and legends, making her a key influence on his love of fiction. At four, his mother taught him to read and write using the Bible. His parents exposed him to a broad range of literature, including Russian writers Nikolai Karamzin, Alexander Pushkin, and Gavrila Derzhavin; Gothic fiction by Ann Radcliffe; romantic works by Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; heroic tales by Miguel de Cervantes and Walter Scott; and Homer’s epics. The work of Nikolai Gogol also greatly influenced him. Although his father’s educational approach has been described as strict and harsh, Dostoevsky himself reported...