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Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821-1881): Life and Work.

Before Prison.

Dostoyevsky was born the son of a doctor, Mikhail Andreyevich, and Marya Fyodorovna, which explains the forenames of himself and his brother Mikhail (b.1820). Both brothers attended boarding school, but only Fyodor was admitted to the St. Petersburg Academy of Military Engineers. It seems pretty certain that the tedious nature of his studies here influenced his later ambivalence towards science, an ambivalence he would later identify with the Slavic/western (conservative/reformist) ambivalence.

Dostoyevsky's life is remarkably eventful for a writer. In 1839 his father was suspected murdered by serfs on his own estate, although apoplexy was, appropriately enough, the accepted cause. His father had the reputation of being cruel, overbearing, and avaricious (cf. Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov from The Brothers Karamazov). Dostoyevsky mentions in The House of the Dead (a pseudo-fictional work) that one of the people that most interested him in prison was a parricide, and his final work, The Brothers Karamazov, uses as its clou a parricide. Of course it is difficult to quantify exactly how much this event caused his later novels obsession with the nature of crime (or transgression as the Russian word more nearly means), especially given his later imprisonment.

As Russia became increasingly westernized, so novel writing began to emerge as an artistic pursuit. The tension between Slavic (conservative) and western (reformist) values, significant since the rein of Peter the Great, was as great as ever. Dostoyevsky translated both Balzac and Sand, before his first novel, the epistolary 'Poor Folk', was published. Much of both Dostoyevsky's and also Tolstoy's mature work is influenced by the opposition between the lives of the nobility and peasants. Three novelists are often selected as being Russia's most prominent in the nineteenth century: Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoyevsky. In terms of influences, though, two other figures stood larger: Pushkin, a poet and short story writer, and Gogol. Gogol's style perhaps influenced Dostoyevsky more than any other writer. Gogol, like Dostoyevsky, gradually became more and more religious, and in the end both men saw themselves as preachers or prophets, rather than novelists. The influence of Gogol's 'The Overcoat' (1842) on nearly all Dostoyevsky's work is startling.

In 1841 Dostoyevsky graduated from the academy and began work. He combined this work with translations

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