One hundred and eighty five years ago, on November 11, 1861 (October 30, old style), the novelist Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow. One of the most influential writers in world literature, Dostoyevsky created works that have taken on an almost mystical aura. “Dostoyevsky,” wrote Russian philosopher Vasily Rozanov, “is not ‘he,’ like Tolstoy or anyone else; Dostoyevsky is ‘me’ – sinful, evil, weak, fallen yet rising up again. This is why he is ‘me,’ the ‘me’ that is every other human being.”
On a frosty morning in late December 1849, twenty-one prisoners were led into St. Petersburg’s Semyonovsky Square. Young, educated and talented, the accused were lined up on a platform, where they kissed a cross and a sword was broken over their heads (indicating the loss of their civil rights). Their sentences were read out. Three of the ringleaders were tied to stakes.
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, 28, was among the condemned standing in the cold, waiting for his friends to be shot. He and his 20 associates were accused of advocating political freedom, socialism and the liberation of serfs in the authoritarian Russian state. “Will we soon be with Christ?” Dostoyevsky reportedly asked one of his comrades, minutes before what he thought would be the end of his life.
But then, just after the order “Prepare to fire!” rang out, the drums sounded retreat. An official stepped forward and read a decree from the tsar sparing the men’s lives and sentencing them instead to exile and hard labor in Siberia (Dostoyevsky’s original sentence of eight years in exile was reduced by Tsar Nicholas to four years, plus four years as a private in the army, stationed in Siberia). The mock execution, it turned out later, had been a cruel theatrical flourish, part of the punishment dreamed up by a vindictive tsar.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow in 1821, the second of seven children. His father, Mikhail Dostoyevsky, was a doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, and the family lived in one wing of the hospital until Fyodor’s mother died in 1837, when Mikhail retired with the family to their estate of Darovoye, south of Moscow.
In 1838, Fyodor was sent off to study at the St. Petersburg Military Engineering Academy. He did not like the regimen at the school (contemporaries at the school said there was no one studying there less fit for a military life than he) and did poorly, failing the first-year exams to pass into the next year of study. But this blow was minor compared to the shock of the following year: his father’s sudden death.
The cause of Mikhail Dostoyevsky’s death is not known. Some have asserted he was killed by serfs on his estate, who became enraged during one of Mikhail’s violent drunken bouts, and poured vodka down him until he drowned. Another account has him dying of the alcoholism and despair which followed the death of his wife. A third explanation was that he died of a heart attack (the official cause is an “apoplectic stroke”), possibly contributed to by the news of Fyodor’s academic failure.
In any event, the impact of Mikhail’s death on Fyodor was profound. A strict and authoritarian father, Mikhail is often considered to have been the prototype for the father in The Brothers Karamazov, who is murdered by his illegitimate son while his three elder sons suffer varying amounts of guilt and punishment. Fyodor rarely mentioned his father, but Oedipal themes recur in his work.
After leaving the Academy and, in 1844, boldly resigning from the civil service, Dostoyevsky began work on his first novel, Poor Folk, which he finished in May 1845. It was hugely successful. Two of the most prominent writers and critics of the time, Nikolai Nekrasov and Vissarion Belinsky, were so impressed by his work that they dubbed him “a new Gogol,” running to his flat in the middle of the night, crying with happiness. The work was a masterpiece of social literature, at once mocking epistolary novels and both Russian and Western literature, while providing insight into the lives of St. Petersburg’s “forgotten” souls. Through this novel’s success, Dostoyevsky became a literary celebrity at the age of 24.
It was around this time, in late 1846, when Dostoyevsky is believed to have suffered the first effects of the onset of epilepsy, likely exacerbated by conflicts in the author’s personal life [in later years, the author himself said his first fit was in 1850, in prison].
Dostoyevsky was deeply influenced, as were many young intellectuals at this time, by the ideas of Belinsky, who argued for a “natural” or realist school in literature, esteeming literature by the degree of its humanism or “social content.” But Belinsky was far from the only influential critic and disputes over political ideology and art created a bitter environment. “Petersburg is hell for me,” Dostoyevsky wrote at the time. “How difficult, how difficult it is to live here.”
In 1847, living out his affection for Belinsky’s ideals, Dostoyevsky began attending so-called “Fridays” led by Mikhail Butashevich-Petrashevsky, an atheist, republican and socialist (who also happened to work in the Department of State).
A year later, when revolution began to unfold in France and much of Europe was taken by revolutionary fervor, the Petrashevsky Circle focused its efforts on setting up a secret publishing house to call for freeing the serfs and to incite rebellion. But, just as the parts of their printing press came together, the group was arrested. Dostoyevsky was arrested on the morning of April 23, 1849, and taken to cell number nine in the famed Alekseyevsky ravelin of Peter and Paul Fortress – currently one of the most popular tourist sights in St. Petersburg.
The investigation lasted eight months, after which the 21 men were taken to Semyonovsky Square for their mock execution. One of the prisoners later went crazy from the ordeal. Dostoyevsky himself never got over it, and is believed to have written about his own emotions regarding the episode in Chapter 2 of his novel, The Idiot, where the savior/fool Myshkin reflects passionately that capital punishment is horrendous because it removes all hope, that it creates the “most dreadful anguish,” that is the certain knowledge that death will come at an appointed hour: “Who dares to say that any man can suffer this without going mad? No, no! It is an abuse, a shame, it is unnecessary — why should such a thing exist? Doubtless, there may be men who have been sentenced, who have suffered this mental anguish for a while and then have been reprieved; perhaps such men may have been able to relate their feelings afterwards.”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, twenty-seven years old, by the decision of the General-in-Charge of the Military Court, for criminal conspiracy, for the distribution of a private letter filled with abusive remarks regarding the Orthodox Church and the Government, and for planning to set up an underground publishing house, in which to print anti-Government propaganda, is sentenced to death by firing squad.
Two weeks after setting off from St. Petersburg, Dostoyevsky reached Tobolsk, where he met three wives of Decembrists – Annenkova, Myravyova and Fonvizina – who had followed their husbands into Siberian exile two decades before. One of the women gave Dostoyevsky a copy of the Gospel, which he kept the rest of his life. It was all he was allowed to read over the next four years in prison.
His prison sentence, which he served alongside Sergei Durov, stipulated hard labor in the Omsk prison. Of his life at that time, Dostoyevsky wrote to his brother Andrei, “these four years I consider time which I was buried alive... it was inexplicable, endless suffering, because each hour, each minute, weighed like stones upon my soul...” Yet he continued writing: “I brought from the prison so many stories and characters. We lived together, and it seems that I know the people well. There were so many stories told to me by tramps, robbers; the dirty side of life. It will be enough for many volumes... This time was not lost for me. Maybe, I did not get to know Russia, but I got to know its people so well that very few know it as well as I do...”
In 1854, Dostoyevsky was transferred from hard labor to military service in Semipalatinsk. There, in the spring, he met the Isayev family – Alexander, his wife Maria and their son Pavel. Dostoyevsky, devoid of female society for a long time, was attracted to Maria, a high-strung, sickly and hysterical woman. She, for her part, was unhappy with her older, drunken lout of a husband.
A year later, when Alexander Isayev died, Dostoyevsky proposed to Maria. They married in 1857, the same year that Dostoyevsky was reinstated as a member of the nobility, which allowed him to be published again. Their marriage would not be a happy one, which perhaps Fyodor should have foreseen in Maria’s long period of indecision before agreeing to marry him. (“I am an unlucky lunatic!” Dostoyevsky wrote. “Love such as this is an affliction.”)
Meanwhile, in the years after his penal service, Dostoyevsky began compiling the notes for what would later become Notes from the House of the Dead (1860), and wrote a few short stories. His politics and faith also changed, as he put it “gradually and after a very, very long time.” He himself termed it “a return to the People’s roots, a discovery of the Russian soul and a recognition of the national spirit... a philosophy of the soil.” It was a conversion from liberal socialism to popular conservatism. Unfortunately, however, as was common with conservatism in that era, it sometimes bled over into nationalism and anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic prejudices.
On March 18, 1859, Dostoyevsky was released from military service, on grounds of his poor health (his epilepsy continued, and he had even had a bout on the way to church to be married). He was given permission to live in Tver, but not allowed to enter Petersburg or Moscow gubernias. In Tver, he began renewing his ties with former colleagues and family and, in November, was informed that permission was granted for him to live in the capital.
In the second half of December, exactly 10 years from when he had been carted out of St. Petersburg in chains, Dostoyevsky returned.
Dostoyevsky’s St. Petersburg is dark and miserable. It is a place where antiheros live in dank, miserable slums, where poverty and hopelessness give way to bizarre plots, unspeakable crimes and all-too-human dramas. In his novels, Dostoyevsky describes the places his characters lived with scrupulous detail, making them easy for a modern tourist to find. The writer himself lived at 19 ulitsa Grazhdanskaya for a time, and many believe this is the apartment he used as a model for Raskolnikov’s (other theories posit nearby Kaznecheyskaya 7). Today, modern graffiti covers the dilapidated stairwell leading to the Grazhdanskaya apartment. Using Rodion Raskolnikov’s diminutive, one tag reads, “Rodya! We are With You!”
On his way to murder the elderly pawnbroker, the fictional Raskolnikov of Crime and Punishment took 730 steps from his lodgings to the victim’s home at the corner of Canal Griboyedova and ulitsa Rimskovo-Korsakova. One can re-create this walk to the old and dilapidated apartment building today, but it now requires far more than 730 steps. Today, some modern city guides like Peter’s Walk offer tours of Dostoyevsky’s Petersburg, where they recreate the routes from his novels.
Among the many other addresses Dostoyevsky lived at during his years in Petersburg, there is a building on the corner of Kuznechy per. and Dostoyevsky ulitsa. (formerly Yamskaya) that holds particular significance. After moving between about 20 homes in the city, the writer and his family settled there in the beginning of October 1878, remaining at the address until the day of his death, January 28, 1881. It was in this apartment where many of Dostoyevsky’s contemporaries came to visit him and where he wrote his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov. In 1971, the Dostoyevsky Museum opened in this ordinary St. Petersburg apartment building. The museum includes rooms dedicated to Dostoyevsky’s life and to his major novels; there is also a map on the wall showing the many places that the writer lived in the city, as well as the locations from his novels.
Natalia Ashimbayeva, the museum’s director, says the landmark attracts 50,000 guests a year, both Russians and foreigners. “I believe Dostoyevsky’s everlasting popularity in the world has to do with the fact that his works are devoted to ideas and phenomena common to all mankind,” Ashimbayeva said. “Besides, Dostoyevsky was indeed a prophet who foresaw the events of the 20th century, such as revolutions.”
Yet, when Dostoyevsky returned to St. Petersburg in 1859, he could not have foreseen the convulsions that would rock his own life. Struggling to get back into the literary world, he joined his brother Mikhail in publishing ill-fated literary journals, while working toward completion of two new works, The Insulted and Injured (1861) and Notes from the House of the Dead (1860-61) – the “volumes” which drew heavily on his decade of experience in Siberia. These works regained his literary reputation and earned him enough income for a first trip to Europe, which did nothing to dissuade him of that continent’s decadence.
Returning to St. Petersburg in 1862, he found that his health was worsening and his money had run out. It was around this time that he apparently developed an infatuation with Apollinaria (Polly) Suslova, a 22-year-old red-haired beauty with blue eyes. An aspiring writer, she had appeared at one of his lectures in St. Petersburg. That Dostoyevsky was quite unhappy with Maria certainly encouraged the affair. It also seems to have been the primary reason for Dostoyevsky’s next trip to Europe – he was to rendezvous with Polly in Paris, where their affair could be conducted with less regard for secrecy.
Yet, on the way to Paris, traveling on borrowed funds, Dostoyevsky made a sidetrip to Wiesbaden, where he became ensnared by a gambling obsession that would haunt him for the next two decades. By the time he arrived in Paris, he had lost not only his money, he had also lost Polly to a Spaniard, who in turn jilted her (Polly, as it turned out, would have cameo roles as Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov, Polina in The Gambler and Nastasya Filipovna in The Idiot). Arriving back in Russia three months later, further indebted by gambling, Dostoyevsky was drawn to his dying wife’s bedside. During the long weeks that followed, he wrote Notes from the Underground, a novelistic rumination on free will, human suffering and utopian ideals.
Maria died of tuberculosis in April 1864. Three months later, Fyodor’s brother Mikhail died. “There I was,” Dostoyevsky wrote to a friend, “suddenly all alone, and it was simply awful.” He took on the debts of his brother, took care of his in-laws and generally sank deeper and deeper into debt. This, along with other circumstances, led him to accept a horrible deal from an unscrupulous publisher, Stellovsky: in exchange for 3,000 rubles, he would deliver a complete novel by the end of November 1866 or forfeit to Stellovsky all his literary earnings for nine years. Paying off his debts, Dostoyevsky again went to Europe, arriving in Wiesbaden with just 200 rubles, which he promptly lost at the roulette table.
Down and out in Germany, Dostoyevsky made a desperate pitch for a novella to the publisher of The Russian Messenger, about “the psychological account of a crime.” Thankfully, for Dostoyevsky and for world literature, the pitch was also convincing. Using the advance and generous help from friends, Dostoyevsky got himself back to St. Petersburg and began feverishly writing Crime and Punishment. Published in installments beginning in January 1866, it was a huge success. But the Stellovsky deadline loomed just a month in the distance. To beat it, Dostoyevsky stopped work on Crime and Punishment and hired a stenographer. He would dictate the novel – The Gambler – to her so that it might be completed more quickly.
The stenographer, 20-year-old Anna Snitkina, was a godsend. Efficient and practical, she enabled the novel’s timely delivery. But of course there was more. As they worked on the novel together, Dostoyevsky fell in love with Anna, and she reciprocated. It was the first time that he felt so loved. Anna, to her credit, was not scared off by their age difference, by his hard life, his incurable epilepsy or his huge debts. And he loved her deeply. After she arrived late for their lavish wedding ceremony, in February 1867, he grasped her by the hand in the deepest anxiety and said, “Finally you’ve come! Now I won’t ever let you go!”
The couple left on a honeymoon to Europe. It was intended to last three months, but stretched to four years.
The couple moved to Dresden. At one point, Fyodor traveled alone to Bad Homburg, where he gambled away all their money. “Soon I understood that it wasn’t simple weakness of the will,” Anna wrote in her memoirs about Fyodor’s gambling, “but an all-absorbing passion. Something spontaneous that even a strong character is unable to fight against.” In Baden-Baden, Fyodor even gambled away money from Anna’s pawned jewelry.
Debt chased them across Europe, to Switzerland, Italy (including a passage through the Alps in summer largely on foot) and back to Germany again. In Geneva, Anna gave birth to their first child, Sofia, who died at just three months of a sudden inflammation of the lungs. The couple was heart-broken, but they held on.
In 1868, Dostoyevsky began work on his next great novel, The Idiot, which he conceived of as depicting “a positively beautiful man” – the Christ-like idiot and epileptic, Prince Myshkin. The novel was a great success and helped stave off creditors for a time. Anna hoarded away money, allowing Fyodor one last (completely unsuccessful) gambling spree, in 1871, after which they returned to Russia. Dostoyevsky vowed to her he would never gamble again – a promise he kept.
A second daughter, Lyubov, was born in Dresden in 1869. After the couple’s return to Russia, two more children were born, Fyodor and Alexei, although Alexei died at the age of three of an epileptic fit.
Later in life, Lyubov, fascinated by her father’s work, tried to write, but never enjoyed success. She also never married or had children. In 1913, Lyubov traveled to Italy to look after her health, but never returned to Russia. She died in Italy in 1926.
Dostoyevsky’s family tree continued through his son Fyodor (1871-1921), a well-mannered, tall man, whom, contemporaries said, resembled his father little. He had two sons, Fyodor, who died at the age of 16, and Andrei.
Dmitry Dostoyevsky, 61, Andrei’s son and the writer’s great-grandson, currently lives in St. Petersburg. He worked as a tram driver and dabbled in other professions, including writing, occasionally submitting little stories for local magazines.
All of Dostoyevsky’s belongings were nationalized by the Bolsheviks in 1917, Dmitry said in an interview with Russian Life. “They took away not only the books from Dostoyevsky’s library, his letters, and manuscripts, but also the Gospel, the only book that my great grandfather was able to read during his four years in his exile,” he said.
Dmitry said that, when he was younger, he often “disagreed” with his great-grandfather, but has since changed his views. “I thought he was too complicated about many things,” Dmitry said, “that many of the problems he wrote about could have had easier solutions. However, as I got older and had more experiences, I realized how right Dostoyevsky was about many things in life.”
Once back in Russia, Dostoyevsky and his family settled into a more stable, comfortable life than the writer had ever known (though they were ever besieged by creditors, whom Anna ably parried), spending much time at an estate at Staraya Russa, near Novgorod. Age and fame provided comfort and some financial security, while appointment to edit the right-wing weekly, Citizen (Grazhdanin), provided an outlet for his political and philosophical musings.
He finished his next novel, The Possessed in 1872. It excoriated the “imported demons” of socialism, nihilism and revolution, which Russia needed to expel in order to be whole, to be holy. Like his previous novels, it was a huge success, making him a scion of the right. Yet it also turned out to be a scarily prophetic novel and, like all of Dostoyevsky’s later works, was deeply imbued with Christian themes. After all, as Dostoyevsky once said, “the existence of God has been the main question I have been tortured by throughout my conscious and unconscious life.”
Yet Dostoyevsky was also ever-focused on the question of Russia’s place in the world. And nowhere did he more eloquently express his thoughts on this question than in the speech he gave in Moscow on June 8, 1880, in honor of the centenary of Pushkin’s birth and the unveiling of the Pushkin monument.
Pushkin, Dostoyevsky said, was the embodiment of the Russian national spirit. It was he who first pointed to the pathology in the Russian bloodstream: the disaffected Onegin, who “lacks faith in his native soil and its native strength, rejecting Russia and, ultimately, himself.” But, more than that, Dostoyevsky said, Pushkin showed how to overcome this pathology. He was a universal genius who, alone among great literary geniuses, had an ability “to respond to the entire world and to assume completely the form of the genius of other nations in a reincarnation that is almost total.” Reflecting on this, Dostoyevsky asserted, one could discern the moral, messianic role for Russia: the transfer of these universalist abilities to bringing peace and harmony to the world. “The Russian soul,” Dostoyevsky said, “the genius of the Russian People, may have greater capacity than other nations to embrace the idea of the universal fellowship of humans, of brotherly love, the sober view that forgives enmity, distinguishes and excuses that which is dissimilar, eliminates contradictions.”
Just reading the text of the speech, it seems hardly remarkable – simply the musings of an aging writer, perhaps. But the impact of Dostoyevsky’s speech on the assembled crowd of Russia’s best and brightest was electric. He received “the creation and adoration of an idol;” people in the crowd wept; many people ran up to kiss his hands; he was called back again and again for ovations.
The speech cemented Dostoyevsky’s position at the pinnacle of Russian letters. Later that year, he crowned this with what many consider his finest novel: The Brothers Karamazov. Interestingly, this was to be the first of two novels. Dostoyevsky never got to start the sequel. On January 26, 1881, he began to suffer from internal bleeding. He died two days later of a lung embolism and was buried in St. Petersburg’s Tikhvin Cemetery at Alexander Nevsky Lavra.
Forty thousand people attended his funeral. RL
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