Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky was the second of six children born to Dr. Mikhail A. Dostoevsky and Marya Feodorovna. Dr. Dostoevsky was a descendant of Lithuanian nobility that hailed from the small village of Dostoevo (presently in the Belarussian district of Pinsk), while Marya Feodorovna was the daughter of a prosperous Moscow merchant. The family was poor, and Fyodor spent his early childhood living in a small apartment on the grounds of the hospital where his father worked. However, the Dostoevskys still maintained a staff of six servants. Dostoevsky always spoke of his mother with great warmth and affection but less glowingly of his father—a man who suffered from depression and a nervous affliction, two conditions that Fyodor would later inherit. When he was nine years old, Fyodor suffered from his first epileptic fit. He would suffer from epileptic seizures sporadically throughout his life and would use his condition to inspire the creation of some of his characters, including Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov. Fyodor and his brother, Mikhail, were first educated at home. The Dostoevskys were adamant in providing their sons with thorough religious and secular instruction, particularly lessons in French, which were necessary to ensure social mobility. After Marya died of tuberculosis, Fyodor and Mikhail were sent to the Academy of Military Engineering in St. Petersburg to become military engineers, according their father’s wishes. After his father’s death, Fyodor Dostoevsky became a lieutenant and left the engineering academy the following year. In the same year, he completed a translation of Honoré de Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet. After leaving the army, he started to write fiction. His first work, Poor Folk, a short epistolary novel, was published in 1845 to great acclaim. To assert his opposition to serfdom, Dostoyevksy joined the Petrashevsky Circle—a group of intellectuals who favored utopian socialism. When Tsar Nicholas I went after the group as part of a crackdown on political dissent, Dostoevsky and other members of the circle were sentenced to death. Dostoevsky’s sentence was commuted to four years of exile in Siberia, where he lived in cramped, vermin-infested quarters. He was then forced to serve in the Siberian Regiment, where he spent five years as a private, and then as a lieutenant, in a battalion stationed at a fortress in present-day Kazakhstan. During his years in prison, he developed skepticism toward intellectuals and what he saw as their condescension toward poor, common people. After returning to St. Petersburg, Dostoevsky published his most important works, including Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868-1869), The Possessed (1872), and his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880). In 1864, Dostoevsky’s first wife died. He married the stenographer Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina in 1867, with whom he had four children, though only two survived to adulthood. Shortly after completing The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky died in bed of a hemorrhage at his home in St. Petersburg.