Fedor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)

Fedor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)

The Russian writer Dostoevski is regarded as one of the world_s great novelists. In Russia he was surpassed only by Leo Tolstoi.

Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevski was born on Nov. 11, 1821, in a Moscow hospital where his father was a physician. At 13 Fedor was sent to a Moscow boarding school, then to a military engineering school in St. Petersburg. Shortly after graduating he resigned his commission in order to devote his time to writing.

Dostoevski had published two novels and several sketches and short stories when he was arrested along with a group of about 20 others with whom he had been studying French socialist theories. After the 1848 revolutions in Western Europe, Russia_s Czar Nicholas I decided to round up all of that country_s revolutionaries, and in April 1849 Dostoevski_s group was imprisoned. Dostoevski and several others were sentenced to be shot, but at the last minute their sentence was changed to four yyears of hard labor in a prison in Omsk, Siberia. There, Dostoevski said, they were „packed in like herrings in a barrel“ with murderers and other criminals. He read and reread the New Testament, the only book he had, and bbuilt a mystical creed, identifying Christ with the common people of Russia. He had great sympathy for the criminals.

As a child Dostoevski suffered from mild epilepsy, and it grew worse in prison. After four years in prison, he was sent as a private to a military station in Siberia. There in 1857 he met and married a widow named Marie Isaeva.

In 1860 Dostoevski was back in St. Petersburg. The next year he began to publish a ...