Fedor Dostoevsky

1821-1881

The portrait of a writer…

• Epileptic• Idealist• Spendthrift• Compulsive gambler• Conservative thinker• Russian nationalist• Anti-semite• Prolific writer and

journalist

Early life

• Born in Moscow in family of military doctor who had become a nobleman through hard work

• Educated at home: parents read to their children

• Strongly religious family: yearly pilgrimages to monastery

• Summers spent at a country estate

Literary influences…

• Influences included German Romantic Schiller and sentimental Russian writer Nikolai Karamzin

• Karamzin’s “Poor Liza” tells of a peasant girl seduced and abandoned by a nobleman. She throws herself in a pond and drowns.

• Pushkin: Petersburg theme

Off to St Petersburg…

• 1837 Sent to study at the Military Engineering Academy in St Petersburg located in the St Michael Castle where in 1803 the emperor Paul had been murdered with the apparent connivance of his son, Alexander

• Dostoevsky experiences first-hand the squalor and brutality of the capital

St Michael CastleМихайловский замок

Father’s Death

• Father had retired to his village, taken a mistress, drank

• 1839 father dies, perhaps murdered by the peasants in his village, perhaps because of a stroke.

Literary beginnings

• Interest in French literature: Victor Hugo, Balzac

• 1843, translates Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet• Strong influence of Gogol beginning in 1843

when Dead Souls appears• Starts to write in earnest, first an epistolary

novel Poor Folk, then The Double

Disaster…

• 1847 joins revolutionary Socialist group known as the Petrashevsky circle

• 1849 arrested and condemned to death• Mock execution staged• Sentence commuted to 4 yrs hard labour in

Siberia and 4 yrs as private in army• 1857 marries soldier’s widow Maria Isaeva

Back to writing…

• 1859 returns to St Petersburg• 1861-2 Notes from the House of the Dead- Describes life in the prison camp, raises the

question of redemption of the damned• 1861-63 publishes journal Vremya with

brother, 1864-5 Epokha• 1864 First wife dies

Life in turmoil…

• 1862 Goes abroad for the first time to England and France

• 1863 & 1865 travels again to Europe• 1864 publishes Notes from the Underground• 1866 publishes Crime and Punishment, first

serialized in journal, then as book

Main themes

• “Les misérables” – the downtrodden• Rejection of rationalism: 2+2 =4 • Determinism and free will• The moral bankruptcy of the revolutionary• Spiritual redemption of the individual through

suffering, achieving faith• Murder of father by son• Crime and the nature of guilt• Sexual abuse of girls

February 1st: Questions

• Parts I and II• What main themes do you discern?• What characters do we meet?• Which is your favourite character?• Pick out a recurrent motif in these two Parts• Which scene or passage do you find the most

striking?

February 4th: Parts III & IV

February 8: Parts V & VI

February 11: The Epilogue