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Dostoyevsky: A Brief Biography

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a Russian author born in 1821 in Moscow to a religious family. He was educated at home and privately before attending a military school. Throughout his life, Dostoyevsky was deeply immersed in religion and explored themes of sin and redemption in his novels. His early works dealt with poverty and hardship among Russians. In 1847, Dostoyevsky was arrested for involvement in a radical group and sentenced to prison and exile in Siberia, experiences that influenced his later writing. His most famous novels include Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground, and The Brothers Karamazov, which explored psychology and philosophy. Dostoyevsky struggled with debt and gambling throughout his life

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507 views3 pages

Dostoyevsky: A Brief Biography

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a Russian author born in 1821 in Moscow to a religious family. He was educated at home and privately before attending a military school. Throughout his life, Dostoyevsky was deeply immersed in religion and explored themes of sin and redemption in his novels. His early works dealt with poverty and hardship among Russians. In 1847, Dostoyevsky was arrested for involvement in a radical group and sentenced to prison and exile in Siberia, experiences that influenced his later writing. His most famous novels include Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground, and The Brothers Karamazov, which explored psychology and philosophy. Dostoyevsky struggled with debt and gambling throughout his life

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Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky short

biography (1821 – 1881)


Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow, son of a doctor, in a
religious family. He himself was immersed in religion all
his life, and therefore treated sin and retribution for sin in
his novels which owe a lot to psychology. He was at first
educated at home by tutors and then went at age thirteen
to a private school. His mother died soon after and his
father was murdered when Dostoyevsky was eighteen; his
father was a cruel man apparently. Although Dostoyevsky
trained to be a military engineer, he loved literature and
when he finished school he turned to writing. Some of the
traits of his characters in the novels show up in himself, for
example, a degree of mental instability.

His novels often deal with people in poor circumstances,


and we can see in Crime and Punishment, the novel we
are reading, that there is a great deal of poverty,
degradation, and hopelessness among the people and the
dingy apartments they inhabit. Few can make ends meet.
His first novel was Poor Folk in 1843, a story of a down-
and-out government functionary. It was praised. His
second novel, The Double, was less successful. The lack
of success had an effect naturally and in that period he
wrote stories experimenting in different forms.

In 1847 he unfortunately got involved with a group


agitating against the government and got arrested and
sentenced, ultimately spending four years in prison and
four more in a Siberian army camp. All of this experience
was turned to use in his novels.
In 1859 he returned to St. Petersburg with a wife from
Siberia who contributed little to his happiness. He wrote
some unheralded work (Memoirs from the House of
the Dead) but it was his short novel, Notes from the
Underground, that explored new territory. He justifies
individual freedom as a necessary part of human life, even
if humans often do not use their freedom for good ends.

Dostoyevsky was a gambler and lost money and owed


debts and fled the country at times to get away from his
debtors. He married a second time when his first wife died
in 1864 and the new wife was both practical and even-
tempered, and a good help for him. In 1866 he published
Crime and Punishment, his most popular novel. Though
not strictly a detective story, it may be seen as a man
pursued by his conscience and unable to live by the reason
for which he committed the crime, namely to secure the
funds to achieve the greatness that he thought lay in him.
It was never his purpose to confess after what looked like a
random act of violence on a pawnbroker woman and her
maid. He is wracked by deliriums and nerves and seems to
give himself away to the detective Porfiry, and then
confesses the murder to the woman he loves, Sonya.

The novel The Possessed followed in 1871. His greatest


novel is considered to be the Brothers Karamazov, about
four brothers who murder their father. The psychology of
the four brothers is distinct and plays a major role in the
novel. Sigmund Freud thought the novel illustrated great
insight. Dostoyevsky died soon after he finished the novel.
Russians mourned his death.

Dostoevsky's body of work consists of 11 novels, 3 novellas,


17 short stories, and numerous other works.
(https://www.notablebiographies.com/De-
Du/Dostoevsky-Fyodor.html)

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