New Makers of Modern Culture

DOSTOEVSKY, Fyodor Mikhailovich 1821-81
Russian writer

Born in Moscow, the second son of a doctor at the hospital for the poor, his early life appears to have been enclosed and solitary. Deliberately segregated from local children, he was educated at home and at local schools, always in the company of his elder brother Mikhail. His father was short-tempered, domineering and fond of drink, but well educated by the standards of the time; his mother was more cultivated and of finer breeding. Apart from the Bible, the Dostoevsky family had reading tastes which embraced Russian literature and some of the most important journals of the day. Probably the most significant of Dostoevsky's childhood recollections concerns a visit to the theatre at the age of ten to see a production of Schiller's The Robbers. The dramatic qualities of the work and its romantic plea for freedom were to have enduring and profound meaning for Dostoevsky's development as a writer. Of equal importance was the fact that his father acquired in 1831 an impoverished estate of two peasant villages in the province of Tula on which the Dostoevsky family used to spend their annual holidays. This was Dostoevsky's only real introduction to the Russian people, or narod, about whom he was to write so eloquently. From Schiller and the wretched Tula estate grew themes and incidents stretching the length of Dostoevsky's life and receiving their fullest treatment in the last of his novels, The Brothers Karamazov (Brat'ya Karamazovy, 1878-80).

The death of his mother in 1837 was followed by the death of his father two years later, supposedly murdered by his peasants. The Dostoevsky family broke up. Dostoevsky himself had already entered the military engineering institute in St Petersburg where, though he received a technical education, he seems to have devoted a great deal of his time to reading the Russian classics and an assortment of European writers from Walter Scott to Hoffmann, De Quincey and Balzac. A predilection for the horrific and supernatural is evident in his tastes at this time. When he had completed his engineering training, he obtained permission to retire from army service and devoted himself to a literary career. A translation of Balzac's Eugénie Grandet was quickly followed, in 1846, by Dostoevsky's first original work, Poor folk (Bedniye lyudi), which received the accolade of high praise from the leading critic V.G. Belinsky, and established the author's place in Russian literature almost overnight. The first success was not repeated with his second work, The Double (Dvoynik, 1846), and on the whole his career showed signs of dribbling away into various unsatisfactory experiments with such themes as the power of legend (The Landlady, Khozyaika, 1847) or the power of dreams (White Nights, Beliye nochi, 1848). Towards the end of the 1840s he was drawn into discussions about utopian socialism and revolution at meetings of the Petrashevsky group. He was certainly influenced by such ideas at the time, though there are no grounds for assuming that he was ever sincerely committed to revolutionary views. In the spring of 1849 he was arrested along with other members of the Petrashevsky group, imprisoned, summoned before a military tribunal and sentenced to death. The evidence against him was based principally on his having read aloud at a meeting Belinsky's famous 'Letter to Gogol' in which the critic had attacked Gogol for his religious mania and declared that the Russian people were profoundly atheistic. It was not so much the content of the 'Letter' as its illegality which condemned Dostoevsky. The enactment of the death sentence, a horrific charade devised on Tsar Nicholas I's orders to strike terror into the convicted men, ended with the announcement that the sentences had been commuted to terms of penal servitude and exile.

At the beginning of 1850 Dostoevsky was put in chains and carried away to Siberia to spend four years in the penal settlement at Omsk. The experience was shattering. Whether or not it was a major cause of his epilepsy, which may have manifested itself earlier, remains unclear, but there is no doubt that for the rest of his life Dostoevsky was to suffer terribly from epileptic attacks. His account of his four-year incarceration in the penal settlement is a classic of prison literature (Notes from the House of the Dead, Zapiski iz myortvogo doma, 1861-2), telling both of the literal privations, chiefly the sheer absence of privacy, and of the stoic nobility of the convicts. When he was released in 1854, he was still confined in Siberia but able to live a relatively free life, especially after being commissioned as an officer. He married the widow of a colleague and was finally permitted to return to European Russia in 1859.

His marriage was on the whole unhappy. Moreover, he was now faced by the task of rehabilitating his reputation as a writer in a Russia dominated by talk of reform and possible revolutionary changes. His experiences had strongly confirmed in him the religious feelings latent in him during the 1840s and when with his brother's help, he launched a journal, Vremya, (Time) in 1861 his politics were conservative, jingoistic and vaguely 'populist' in the sense that they advocated a belief in the Russian peasantry and urged the intelligentsia to learn from them. It was in Time that he published his first novel, The Insulted and Injured (Unizhenniye i oskorblyonniye, 1861), as well as his account of his first trip to Western Europe, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (Zimniye zametki o letnykh vpechatleniyakh, 1863). The metropolitan capitalism of the West, particularly as he encountered it in London, shocked him and aroused in him strong anti-Western, anti-radical attitudes. Infatuated with a young woman, Polina Suslova, he gambled on his European trips and became addicted to it. Indebtedness increased and misfortunes followed. His journal was closed down by the authorities for printing an article on the Polish rebellion of 1863 and the following year, despite receiving permission to launch a second journal, Epoch (Epokha), disasters befell him in the shape of his wife's death, his brother's death and the death of one of his closest collaborators, Apollon Grigor'yev. Though he published his most outstanding work to date, Notes from the Underground (Zapiski iz podpol'ya, 1864), in Epoch, his journal soon faltered and then failed completely, leaving him with heavy debts which he attempted to recoup by gambling sprees abroad. In desperate straits, in Wiesbaden, in the early autumn of 1865, he conceived a project for a long novel, Crime and Punishment (Prestupleniye i nakazaniye, 1866), which he wrote the following year. In order to fulfil a contractual obligation for a novel to be completed by a deadline in 1866, he temporarily abandoned his major work to write The Gambler (Igrok, 1867), a novel which he dictated to a young stenographer. This young lady, Anna Snitkina, became his second wife early the following year and despite the quarter of a century which divided their respective ages it proved to be an exceedingly happy and successful marriage.

It began inauspiciously with the newly married couple forced into European exile in order to escape Dostoevsky's debtors. Four years were spent abroad, chiefly in Dresden, during which he completed two major novels, The Idiot (Idiot) (1868) and The Possessed or The Devils (Besy, 1871-2). On returning to Russia in 1871 his wife assumed the role of his publisher and created a stable, tranquil home life. Her careful, devoted management of Dostoevsky's finances gradually brought an end to his indebtedness. Although the early deaths of some of his children and serious epileptic attacks clouded the last decade of his life, his literary reputation prospered both through his publicistic activity (his Diary of a Writer, Dnevnik pisatelya, begun in 1873; continued, with intervals, until his death) and through his public readings, his editorial work (of the journal the Citizen, Grazhdanin, 1873-4) and his work as a novelist (The Raw Youth, Podrostok, 1875), crowned by the appearance of his greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov, in 1879-80. His greatest triumph occurred during the celebrations associated with the unveiling of the Pushkin memorial in Moscow in June 1880 when his speech was greeted by an enormous popular ovation. His funeral on 1 February 1881, after his death on 28 January, was an occasion for large-scale mourning.

Dostoevsky's first work, Poor Folk, may have the old-fashioned appearance of an exchange of letters between an impoverished middle-aged clerk, Devushkin, and a much younger girl, but this simple formula is given psychological depth and its particular Dostoevskian character through the way in which Devushkin's letters become intricate confessions not only of his passion for the girl but also of a dawning awareness of his own identity, his social place and the meaning of his poverty. Devushkin's sense of alienation in an urban world is the first instance of a major concern of Dostoevsky: the problem of human identity in urban society. Dostoevsky's second work, The Double, demonstrated on a pathological level a confusion over identity already discernible in Devushkin, though in this case the dilemma of Golyadkin senior persecuted by his malicious double, Golyadkin junior, has as many comic as schizophrenic features and is on the whole more noteworthy for its dramatic concentration of events in time and its use of the skandal scene than for its psychology. The greatest of Dostoevsky's works all have such a 'dramatic' time-scheme and are built on successive 'scandalous' scenes involving the public humiliation of one or another character. Dostoevsky experimented with many forms and themes in his work of the 1840s, but strictly speaking he became master of none. Nor is there any real evidence of prominence being given to socio-political or religious ideas, and it is hard to discern more than the faint lineaments of the writer's future stature in these beginnings.

On his release from penal servitude in 1854 he confessed to a correspondent his doubts and his faith in one of the most remarkable testaments of the nineteenth century:

I will tell you about myself that I am a child of the age, a child of disbelief and doubt up to this time and even (I know) to the end of my life. … And yet God sometimes sends me moments when I am completely at peace; at those times I love, and I find that I am loved by others, and in such moments I have composed for myself a symbol of faith, in which everything for me is lucid and holy. This symbol is very simple, it is: to believe that there is nothing more beautiful, profound, loving, wise, courageous and perfect than Christ, and not only is there not, but I tell myself with jealous love there cannot be. What is more, if someone proved to me that Christ was outside the truth, and it was really true that the truth was outside Christ, then I would still prefer to remain with Christ than with the truth. (Letter to N.D. Fon-Vizina, February 1854.)

This testament only began to achieve a specific literary relevance in his work some ten years later when, in his Notes from the Underground, he proclaimed his doubts about the scientism, materialism and radicalism of the 1860s by opposing the notion of man as an essentially rational creature with his own concept of man as essentially capricious, sceptical and wilful. But his first successful realization of this concept in a literary characterization came with Raskolnikov, the student drop-out of the novel Crime and Punishment who commits murder in order to prove his right to be a self-willed Napoleon but eventually discovers his fallibility and the nihilistic futility of his motives. Raskolnikov is confronted by a dilemma of choice which is reflected also in his own divided character. These choices are between the arrogance of man who has usurped the place of God (Svidrigaylov) and the humility of the prostitute Sonya who acknowledges the need for faith and forgiveness. Whether or not Raskolnikov achieves moral regeneration under Sonya's influence must remain in doubt, but the dramatic power of this majestic noveltragedy, the profundity of its ideas and its nightmarish blending of a squalid urban reality with the characters' fevered subconscious has made it the basis of Dostoevsky's reputation as Russia's leading nineteenth-century novelist.

In his second major novel, The Idiot, Dostoevsky attempted to embody his concept of a contemporary Christ in the child-like 'idiot' Prince Myshkin whose gospel is a mixture of salvation through the power of beauty and Russian messianism. Brilliant though the first and final parts of the novel are, as a whole the work is overburdened with talkative, polemicizing characters and sub-plots. If there is hope for Russia through the promise of a Russian Christ in The Idiot, in Dostoevsky's third great novel, The Possessed (or The Devils), the future of Russia is projected as one of turmoil in which an intelligentsia, poisoned by Western ideas and nihilistic influences, cannot discover a faith in itself or in the God-carrying Russian people. Stavrogin, the supposed saviour of the intelligentsia, is apparently torn between a nihilistic vision of freedom (represented by his disciple Kirillov) and the possibility of religious faith (embodied in the faith-seeking Shatov), but is eventually manipulated by the terrorist Pyotr Verkhovensky to serve his own destructive ends. As a diagnosis of the political tyranny awaiting Russia as a result of revolution this novel proved to be the most difficult of Dostoevsky's novels for Soviet critics to interpret.

After this powerful, if black, comedy Dostoevsky aspired to reappraise the situation of Russia in more positive terms, but his study of an 'accidental family' (A Raw Youth) contributed little to this process and it was not until he attended the trial of the terrorist Vera Zasulich in 1878 that he found the formula for his last and greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov. This novel is built around the trial of Dmitry Karamazov for the murder of his father. The result was a miscarriage of justice and the novel is so structured as to reveal, through an analysis of motive, why such a miscarriage should have occurred.

The Karamazov family is treated as a microcosm of the Russian situation. The three legitimate brothers represent, in Dmitry's case, mundane contemporary Russia, in Ivan's, the influence of the West and, in Alyosha's, holy Russia with its spirit of true Christian faith. Though Ivan's critique of the church and denial of God (especially in the famous 'Grand Inquisitor' chapter) appear to make an unanswerable attack on the injustice of the world, it is counterbalanced by the vision of a just world based on mutual responsibility for the world's sinfulness which Alyosha's mentor, Father Zosima, offers in his teaching. The ultimate guilt rests with those, like Ivan, who incite humanity to a total nihilistic freedom in the moral sphere.

The Brothers Karamazov, as the culmination of his achievement, sets in relief Dostoevsky's lifelong concern with the paradoxes of choice which confront mankind. Posed always in highly dramatic confrontations for and against, in fictional worlds that are as resonantly polyphonic as they are teeming with characters, Dostoevsky's heroes live their convictions and commitments at fever pitch; and in this intensity of commitment to life, as if to an act of faith that has passed through all the crucibles of doubt, lies Dostoevsky's greatness.

Richard Freeborn

Other works: (in Constance Garnett's translations) The Eternal Husband, and Other Stories, An Honest Thief, and Other Stories, The Friend of the Family, and Other Stories; (in Jessie Coulson's translation) The Gambler/Bobok, A Nasty Story; translations of Dostoevsky's notebooks for his major fiction are available in editions by the Chicago University Press and Ardis, Ann Arbor, Michigan. See: Joseph Frank's five-volume of life of Dostoevsky (1976-2002): The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-49 (1976); The Years of Ordeal, 1850-59 (1987); The Stir of Liberation, 1860-65 (1992); The Miraculous Years, 1865-71 (1995); and Mantle of the Prophet 1871-81 (2002). Other biographies available in English are by L. Grossman (trans. Mary Mackler, 1974), R. Hingley (1978) and K.V. Mochulsky (trans. M.A. Miniham, 1967). See also: M.M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (trans. R.W. Rotsel, 1973); D. Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism (1967); J. Frank, Dostoevsky, The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-49 (1976); a chapter on Crime and Punishment in R. Freeborn, The Rise of the Russian Novel (1973); M. Holquist, Dostoevsky and the Novel (1977); M. Jones, Dostoevsky, The Novel of Discord (1976); R. Peace, Dostoyeusky: An Examination of the Major Novels (1971); Dostoievsky: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R. Wellek (1962); Malcolm V. Jones, Dostoyevsky after Bakhtin: Readings in Dostoyevsky's Fantastic Realism (1990); Peter Kaye, Dostoevsky and English Modernism 1900-1930 (1999); Kenneth Lantz (ed.), The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia (2004).

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