Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (11 November [O.S. 30 October] 1821 – 9 February [O.S. 28 January] 1881) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and journalist. He is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in both Russian and world literature, and many of his works are considered highly influential masterpieces. Dostoevsky's literary works explore the human condition in the troubled political, social and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century Russia, and engage with a variety of philosophical and religious themes. His most acclaimed novels include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872), The Adolescent (1875) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). His Notes from Underground, a novella published in 1864, is considered one of the first works of existentialist literature.

Born in Moscow in 1821, Dostoevsky was introduced to literature at an early age through fairy tales and legends and through books by Russian and foreign authors. His mother died of tuberculosis on 27 February 1837, when he was 15, and around the same time, he left school to enter the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute (later renamed the Military Engineering-Technical University). After graduating, he worked as an engineer and briefly enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, translating books to earn extra money. In the mid-1840s, he wrote his first novel, Poor Folk, which gained him entry into Saint Petersburg's literary circles. However, he was arrested in 1849 for belonging to a literary group, the Petrashevsky Circle, that discussed banned books critical of Tsarist Russia. Dostoevsky was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted at the last moment. He spent four years in a Siberian prison camp, followed by six years of compulsory military service in exile. In the following years, Dostoevsky worked as a journalist, publishing and editing several magazines of his own and later A Writer's Diary, a collection of his writings. He began to travel around Western Europe and developed a gambling addiction, which led to financial hardship. For a time, he had to beg for money, but he eventually became one of the most widely read and highly regarded Russian writers.

Dostoevsky's body of work consists of thirteen novels, three novellas, seventeen short stories, and numerous other works. His writings were widely read both within and beyond his native Russia, influencing an equally great number of later writers, including Russians such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Anton Chekhov, the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and the emergence of Existentialism and Freudianism. His books have been translated into more than 170 languages, and served as the inspiration for many films.

Dostoevsky's paternal ancestors were part of a Russian noble family of Russian Orthodox Christians. The family traced its roots back to Aslan Chelebi-Мurza, a Tatar warlord who defected from the Golden Horde and joined the Russian side in 1389, eventually converting to Christianity from Islam. A few centuries later, another ancestor of Dostoyevsky, Danilo Irtishch, was granted lands in the Pinsk region (for centuries part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, now in Belarus) in 1509 for his services under a local prince, his progeny then taking the name "Dostoevsky" based on a village there called Dostojewo [pl] (derived from Old Polish dostojnik – dignitary).

Dostoevsky's immediate ancestors on his mother's side were merchants; the male line on his father's side were priests.

In 1809, the 20-year-old Mikhail Dostoevsky enrolled in Moscow's Imperial Medical-Surgical Academy. From there, he was assigned to a Moscow hospital, where he served as a military doctor, and in 1818 he was appointed a senior physician. In 1819, he married Maria Nechayeva. The following year, he took up a post at the Mariinsky Hospital for the poor. In 1828, when his two sons, Mikhail and Fyodor, were eight and seven respectively, he was promoted to collegiate assessor, a position which raised his legal status to that of the nobility and enabled him to acquire a small estate in Darovoye, a town about 150 km (100 miles) from Moscow, where the family usually spent the summers. Dostoevsky's parents subsequently had seven more children: Varvara (1822–1893) – Married a civil servant and lived a quiet life, Andrei (1825–1897) – Memoirist and wrote about family history, Lyubov (born and died 1829), Vera (1829–1896) – Married a doctor and maintained family ties, Nikolai (1831–1883) – Struggled with alcoholism and had a troubled life, Aleksandra (1835–1889) – Married a military officer and lived privately, and Yelizaveta (born and died 1837).

Fyodor Dostoevsky, born on 11 November [O.S. 30 October] 1821 in Moscow, was the second child of Dr Mikhail Dostoevsky and Maria Dostoevskaya (née Nechayeva). He was raised in the family home in the grounds of the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, which was in a lower class district on the edges of Moscow. Dostoevsky encountered the patients, who were at the lower end of the Russian social scale, when playing in the hospital gardens.

Dostoevsky was introduced to literature at an early age. From the age of three, he was read heroic sagas, fairy tales and legends by his nanny, Alena Frolovna, an especially influential figure in his upbringing and his love for fictional stories. When he was four, his mother used the Bible to teach him to read and write. His parents introduced him to a wide range of literature, including the Russian writers Nikolai Karamzin, Alexander Pushkin and Gavrila Derzhavin; Gothic fiction such as the works from the English novelist Ann Radcliffe; romantic works by Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; heroic tales by Miguel de Cervantes and Walter Scott; and Homer's epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Dostoevsky was greatly influenced by the work of Nikolai Gogol. Although his father's approach to education has been described as strict and harsh, Dostoevsky himself reported that his imagination was brought alive by nightly readings by his parents.