| Dostoevskian: Pertainting to the Russian novelist Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1812-81), known especially for Crime and Punishment (1869), The Possessed (1872) and The Brothers Karamazov (1878). Dostoevsky lived in a time of great social unrest when Western liberal ideas were infiltrating Russian orthodoxy. In 1849 he was arrested for seditious conspiracy and sentenced to death before a firing squad, but at the last moment was repreived and his sentence was commuted to eight years of hard labor in Siberia. There he underwent a religious conversion. He accepted his suffering as expiation for his sins. His sympathy for the poor and the wretched, always strong, was reinforced. He exalted the meek and the simple to sainthood. The difficult facts of Dostoevsky's life, however, are likely the genesis of most, if not all of his work. Born on December 30, 1821 in Moscow, he lived much of his childhood distanced from his frail mother and officious father. In these formative years, he formed a close bond with his elder brother Mikhail. They would spend many hours reading Pushkin by meager candlelight in their family's comfortable suburban home. When they were teenagers, however, both Fyodor and Mikhail were enrolled in separate boarding schools, Fyodor matriculating at an engineering school in St. Petersburg. It is possible that being confronted with the rigorous schedule of the engineering school (that served as a recruiting pool for the Russian bureaucracy) helped assure Dostoevsky that his destiny was the written word; even as he was studying the trade of government, he was honing his skills as a writer, inking drafts of what would become his first novel- Poor Folk. In 1846, it was published to warm critical response. Something of a literary figure at the age of twenty-five, Dostoevsky began attending the discussion group that would result in his imprisonment, and the eventual mock execution. Released from his imprisonment and service by 1858, he began a fourteen-year period of furious writing, in which he published many significant texts. Among these are: The House of the Dead (1862), Notes From The Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868), and Devils (1871). During this period, Dostoevsky's life was in upheaval, as he lost both his first wife and his brother. On February 15, 1867, he married his stenographer Anna Grigorevna Snitkina who would manage his affairs until his death in 1881. Two months before he died, Dostoevsky completed the epilogue to The Brothers Karamazov (1880), which was published in serial form in the Russian Messenger. His funeral attracted thousands of citizens, as Russia mourned the death of a significant literary hero. In Dostoevsky's novels the dualism between free thought and humble acceptance, between intellect (bad) and feeling (good), is a major theme. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment falls victim to his theory that everything is permissable to certain extraordinary men. He stifles his naturally generous and compassionate nature and commits a murder to test this idea. Sonia, a girl of pure feeling, is the instrument of his redemption. Dostoevsky's characters are either saints or sinners, and often the saint and the sinner are at war within the same individual. His books teem with passionate, tormented, often poverty-stricken minor characters who inhabit the slums of St.Petersburg. A montage of images depicting their life would superimpose pictures of littered courtyards, crowded tenements, low-ceilinged smoky rooms, ragged finery, consumptive coughing, contant quarreling, prostitution, drunken scenes of masochistic hell... Dostoevsky has given the world what it has come to reconise as the "Russian soul". Dostoevskian refers to the duality of human nature, the good at war with the dark impulses of evil. ~Professor Thomas R. Beyer, Jr. and Facts on File Dictionary of Cultural and Historical Allusions. ** For art work inspired by Dostoevsky, go HERE |