Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Source: FedorDostoievsky.com
Albert Einsten about Dostoyevsky : "Dostoyevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss."
Biography ^
They were their parents Mikhail and Maria; Fyodor was the second of seven children. The mother of Fyodor died from an illness in 1837. Fyodor and their brother Michael were taken to the Academy of the Military Engineering of San Petersburgo soon after their mother's death, although these plans had even begun before she got sick.
A lot of time didn't pass until his father, a surgeon military pensioner that was good as doctor in the Hospital of Mariinsky for poor people in Moscow , also died in 1839. Although not confirmed with all security, it is believed that Mikhail Dostoevsky was murdered by his own servants that became furious during one of the attacks of violent drunkenness of Mikhail according to received reports, and they gave to streams the vodka in his mouth until he drowned. Another history says that Mikhail died from natural causes, and a neighboring farmer manufactured this history of a rural rebellion so that he could buy the very cheap property. Without keeping in mind what can have happened really, Sigmund Freud was focused in this story in their famous article, Dostoevsky and Patricide (1928).
Dostoevsky was arrested and imprisoned in 1849 to commit in revolutionary activity against the Czar Nicholas I. November 16 that year he was sentenced to death by anti-government activities related with a radical intellectual group, the Circle of Petrashevsky. His readings, limited to the Bible, pushed him to reject the socialist atheism, of western inspiration that he had practiced in their youth. Jesus Christ teachings became the supreme confirmation of their ethical ideas and of the possibility of the salvation through the suffering. The brutality that observed among the cruelest criminals, sprinkled at the same time by expressions of generosity and for noble feelings, they helped him to deepen in their knowledge of the complexity of the human spirit. After an execution simulated in the one that he faced a shooting platoon, Dostoevsky's sentence was commuted by several years of exile carrying out works forced in a camp of prisoners of Katorga in Omsk , Siberia . The epilepsy incidence to that he was predisposed increased during this period of suffering. It was liberated of the prison in 1854, and he was demanded to serve in the Siberian Regiment. Dostoevsky passed the following five years like corporal (and lately as lieutenant) in the Battalion of the Seventh Line of the Regiment parked in the strength of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan.
This was a point of deep change in the author's life. Dostoevsky abandoned his earlier radical feelings and he became deeply conservative and extremely religious. He cultivated a peculiar friendship later with another ultra conservative, Konstantin Pobedonostsev. A romance began with María Dmitrievna Isaeva, with the one who later married. She was the widow of an acquaintance in Siberia.
In 1860, he returned to San Petersburgo where it founded a series of fruitless literary newspapers with their bigger brother Mikhail. Dostoevsky was desolated by his wife's death in 1864, continued shortly by his brother's death. He was financially broken by the commercial debts and the necessity of maintaining their brother's widow and their children. Dostoevsky collapsed in a deep depression, while he frequented rooms of game for money and he accumulated happily thick losses in the tables.
To escape from the creditors in San Petersburgo, Dostoevsky traveled to Western Europe . There, he tried having again a loving adventure with Apollinaria (Polina) Suslova, a young university student with who had had a romance already before several years, but she refused to their marriage proposal. Dostoevsky was very heartbroken for this reason, but soon he met with Anna Snitkina, a nineteen year-old stenographer with which married in 1867. This period produced the writing of its biggest books. Of 1873 at 1881 he claimed their previous journalistic failures publishing a monthly newspaper full with short histories, sketches, and articles on the current events - the Writer's Newspaper. The newspaper was an enormous success.
In 1877 Dostoevsky he made the praise note in their friend's funeral, the poet Nekrasov, with a lot of controversy. In 1880, little before their death, he pronounced their famous speech from Pushkin when removing the veil of the monument of Pushkin in Moscow.
In their years later, Fyodor Dostoevsky lived during a lot of time in Staraya Russa that was more near San Petersburgo and less expensive than Germany. He died January 28 1881 and it was buried in the Cemetery of Tikhvin in the Monastery Alejandro Nevsky, in San Petersburgo , Russia.
Influence ^
Dostoevsky's influence cannot be overestimated: of Herman Hesse to Marcel Proust, of William Faulkner to Alberto Camus, of Franz Kafka to Gabriel García Márquez - virtually any great writer of the century 20 have escaped their long shade (the strange voices differing includes Vladimir Nabokov, Henry James and, more ambiguously, to David Herbert Lawrence). Essentially myth writer (and in this regarding times compared Herman Melville), Dostoevsky has created a work of immense vitality and the almost hypnotic power characterized by the following features: feverishly dramatized scenes (the conclaves) where their characters are frequently committed in the scandalous and explosive atmosphere, passionately committed with the Socratic dialogues of the Russia; the search of God, the problem of the Wrong and the suffering of the innocent ones frequent most of their novels; the characters fit in different categories: humble and modest Christian (prince Myshkin, Sonya Marmeladova, Alyosha Karamazov), nihilistic self-destructing (Svidrigailov, Smerdyakov, Stavrogin, the underground man), cynic libertines (Fyodor Karamazov), rebellious intellectuals (Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov); their characters are also managed by the ideas instead of the ordinary biological or social imperatives.
Dostoevsky's novels are compressed in the time (many only cover some few days) and this allows to the author that you free of one of the dominant features of the realistic prose, the corrosion of human life in the process of the flow of the time - their characters include mainly the spiritual values and these are, by definition, eternal. Other obsessive topics include the suicide, the wounded pride, the collapse of the family values, the spiritual regeneration through suffering (the most important reason), the western rejection and the statement of the Russian Orthodoxy and the Zarismo. Their work is sometimes characterized as 'polyphonic': contrary to other different novelists, Dostoevsky is free of 'a single vision', and although many writers have described the situations of several angles, Dostoevsky has only engendered completely dramatic novels of ideas where contradictory points of view and characters are developed toward an intolerable crescendo.
Works ^
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1846: Poor People 1846: The Double 1846: Prokharchin 1847: The Employer 1848: Polzum'kov 1848: A weak heart 1848: The woman of another 1848: An honest thief 1848: A tree of Christmas and a wedding 1848: The white nights 1849: Netochka Nezvamova 1849: A small hero 1859: The uncle's dream 1859: Stepantchikovo 1861: Humiliated and offended |
1861: Memoirs from the House of the Dead 1862: An unpleasant trance 1865: The crocodile 1866: Crime and punishment 1867: The gambler 1868: The Idiot 1870: The eternal husband 1871: Devils: The Possessed 1873: Bobok 1875: The adolescent 1876: Mareg the mujik 1876: The light blue Christmas tree 1876: The shy one 1877: The dream of a ridiculous man 1879: The Brothers Karamazov Diverse years: A Writer's Diary |
Quotes ^
- "If we can formulate ourselves the question: Am I or not responsible for my acts?, does it mean that yes we are it."
- "After a failure, the plans better elaborated they seem absurd."
- "My friends, God is necessary to me, because he is the only being that I can love eternally."
- "Anything is as difficult as the frankness, neither anything as easy as the flattery. The flattery is pleasant, and all they listen to it with certain delectation, with a rude delectation maybe, but delectation finally". (Crime and Punishment)
- "The man delights in enumerating his grieves, but he doesn't enumerate his happiness."
- "The woman, the devil only knows what is; I don't know it at all."
- "The true pain, the one that makes us suffer deeply, sometimes makes serious and constant until to the thoughtless man; the spirit poor even become more intelligent after a great pain."
- "If the God doesn't exist, later everything is allowed."
- "The jealous ones are the first ones that forgive, all the women they know it."
- "The innovators and the geniuses have always been treated at the beginning as crazy (and very often at the end) of their careers."
- "You don't look for prize, because you have a great recompense in this earth that the fair one can only enjoy."
- "The man should base his happiness by means of the suffering: it is the law of the earth."
- "One can know a man for their smile. If you like their smile before you know it completely, you trust in that will be a good man."