"My intention is to portray a truly beautiful soul." Dostoevsky
Fyodor Mikailovich Dostoevsky's life was a dark and dramatic as the
great novels he wrote. He was born in Moscow in 1821, the son of a
former army surgeon whose drunken brutality led his own serfs to
murder him by pouring vodka down his throat until he strangled. A
short first novel, Poor Folk (1846) brought him instant success,
but his writing career was cut short by his arrest for alleged
subversion against Tsar Nicholas I in 1849. In prison he was given
the "silent treatment" for eight months (guards even wore velvet
soled boots) before he was led in front a firing squad. Dressed in
death shroud, he faced an open grave and awaited execution, when
suddenly, an order arrived commuting his sentence. He then spent
four years at hard labor in a Siberian prison, where he began to
suffer from epilepsy, and he only returned to St. Petersburg a full
ten years after he had left in chains.
His prison experiences coupled with his conversion to a
conservative and profoundly religious philosophy formed the basis
for his great novels. But it was his fortuitous marriage to Anna
Snitkina, following a period of utter destitution brought about by
his compulsive gambling, that gave Dostoevsky the emotional
stability to complete Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot
(1868-69), The Possessed (1871-72), and The Brothers Karamazov
(1879-80). When Dostoevsky died in 1881, he left a legacy of
masterworks that influenced the great thinkers and writers of the
Western world and immortalized him as a giant among writers of
world literature.
“Nothing is outside Dostoevsky’s province. . . . Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading.” —Virginia Woolf
"Nothing is outside Dostoevsky's province. . . . Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading." -Virginia Woolf
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