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Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky sometimes 
transliterated Dostoyevsky (born November 11, 
(October 30, Old Style), 1821, Moscow; died 
February 9, (January 28, O.S.), 1881, St. 
Petersburg, Russia), Russian writer, one of the 
major figures in Russian literature. He is 
sometimes said to be a founder of existentialism.

Biographical sketch
Born to parents Mikhail and Maria, Fyodor was the 
second of seven children. His mother died of an 
illness in 1837.

Fyodor and his brother Mikhail were sent to the 
Military Engineering Academy at St. Petersburg 
shortly after their mother's death.

It was not long before his father, a retired 
military surgeon who served as a doctor at the 
Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in Moscow, also 
died in 1839. While not known for certain, it is 
believed that Mikhail Dostoevsky was murdered by 
his own serfs, who reportedly became enraged 
during one of Mikhail's drunken fits of violence, 
restrained him, and poured vodka into his mouth 
until he drowned. Another story was that Mikhail 
died of natural causes, and a neighboring 
landowner cooked up this story of a peasant 
rebellion so he could buy the estate cheaply. 
Regardless of what may have actually happened, 
Sigmund Freud focused on this tale in his famous 
article, Dostoevsky and Parricide (1928).

Dostoyevsky was arrested and imprisoned in 1849 
for engaging in revolutionary activity against 
Tsar Nikolai I. On November 16 that year he was 
sentenced to death for anti-government activities 
linked to a radical intellectual group, the 
Petrashevsky Circle. After a mock execution in 
which he faced a staged firing squad, Dostoevsky's 
sentence was commuted to a number of years of 
exile performing hard labor at a katorga prison 
camp in Omsk, Siberia. The incidence of epileptic 
seizures, to which he was predisposed, increased 
during this period. He was released from prison 
in 1854, and was required to serve in the Siberian 
Regiment. Dostoevsky spent the following five years 
as a corporal (and latterly lieutenant) in the 
Regiment's Seventh Line Battalion stationed at 
the fortress of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan.

This was a turning point in the author's life. 
Dostoevsky abandoned his earlier radical sentiments 
and became deeply conservative and extremely 
religious. He later formed a peculiar friendship 
with another archconservative, Konstantin 
Pobedonostsev. He began an affair with, and later 
married, Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, the widow of 
an acquaintance in Siberia.

In 1860, he returned to St. Petersburg, where he 
ran a series of unsuccessful literary journals 
with his older brother Mikhail. Dostoevsky was 
devastated by his wife's death in 1864, followed 
shortly thereafter by his brother's death. He was 
financially crippled by business debts and the 
need to provide for his brother's widow and 
children. Dostoevsky sank into a deep depression, 
frequenting gambling parlors and accumulating 
massive losses at the tables.

To escape creditors in Petersburg, Dostoevsky 
traveled to Western Europe. There, he attempted 
to rekindle a love affair with Apollinaria (Polina) 
Suslova, a young university student with whom he 
had had an affair several years prior, but she 
refused his marriage proposal. Dostoevsky was 
heartbroken, but soon met Anna Snitkina, a 
nineteen-year-old stenographer whom he married 
in 1867. This period resulted in the writing of 
his greatest books. From 1873 to 1881 he 
vindicated his earlier journalistic failures by 
publishing a monthly journal full of short stories, 
sketches, and articles on current events — the 
Writer's Diary. The journal was an enormous 
success.

In 1877 Dostoevsky gave the keynote eulogy at 
the funeral of his friend, the poet Nekrasov, 
to much controversy. In 1880, shortly before he 
died, he gave his famous Pushkin speech at the 
unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow.

In his later years, Fyodor Dostoevsky lived for 
a long time at the resort of Staraya Russa which 
was closer to St Petersburg and less expensive 
than German resorts. He died on January 28 
(O.S.), 1881 and was interred in Tikhvin 
Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, 
St. Petersburg, Russia.


Influence
Dostoyevsky's influence cannot be 
overemphasized—from Herman Hesse to Marcel 
Proust, from William Faulkner to Albert Camus, 
from Franz Kafka to Gabriel García 
Márquez—virtually no great 20th century writer 
has escaped his long shadow (rare dissenting 
voices include Vladimir Nabokov, Henry James, 
and, more ambiguously, David Herbert Lawrence). 
American great novelist Ernest Hemmingway also 
cited Dostoyevsky in his autobiographic books, 
as a major influence on his work. Essentially 
a writer of myth (and in this respect sometimes 
compared to Herman Melville), Dostoyevski has 
created an opus of immense vitality and almost 
hypnotic power characterized by the following 
traits: feverishly dramatized scenes (conclaves) 
where his characters are, frequently in 
scandalous and explosive atmosphere, 
passionately engaged in Socratic dialogues a 
la Russe; the quest for God, the problem of 
Evil and suffering of the innocents haunt the 
majority of his novels; characters fall into 
a few distinct categories: humble and 
self-effacing Christians (prince Myshkin, 
Sonya Marmeladova, Alyosha Karamazov), 
self-destructive nihilists (Svidrigailov, 
Smerdyakov, Stavrogin, the underground man), 
cynical debauchers (Fyodor Karamazov), rebellious 
intellectuals (Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov); also, 
his characters are driven by ideas rather than 
by ordinary biological or social imperatives.

Dostoyevski's novels are compressed in time (many 
cover only a few days) and this enables the 
author to get rid of one of the dominant traits 
of realist prose, the corrosion of human life in 
the process of the time flux — his characters 
primarily embody spiritual values, and these are, 
by definition, timeless. Other obsessive themes 
include suicide, wounded pride, collapsed family 
values, spiritual regeneration through suffering 
(the most important motif), rejection of the West 
and affirmation of Russian Orthodoxy and Czarism. 
His work is sometimes characterized as 
'polyphonic': unlike other novelists, 
Dostoyevski is free from a 'single vision', and 
although many writers have described situations 
from various angles, only Dostoyevski has 
engendered fully dramatic novels of ideas where 
conflicting views and characters are left to 
develop even unto unbearable crescendo.

By common critical consensus one among the handful 
of universal world authors, along with Dante, 
Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, Victor Hugo 
and a few others, Dostoyevski has decisively 
influenced 20th century literature, existentialism 
and expressionism in particular.


Major works
The Double: A Petersburg Poem (1846) 
Netochka Nezvanova (1849) 
The Village of Stepanchikovo (or The Friend of 
the Family) (1859) 
The Insulted and Humiliated (or The Insulted and 
the Injured) (1861) 
The House of the Dead (1862) 
A Nasty Story (1862) 
Notes from Underground (or Letters from the 
Underworld) (1864) 
Crime and Punishment (1866) 
The Gambler (1867) 
The Idiot (1868) 
The Possessed (or Demons or The Devils) (1872) 
The Raw Youth (or The Adolescent) (1875) 
The Brothers Karamazov (1880)