Fyodor Dostoevsky’s father was a retired army surgeon who envisaged a military career for his son and, after a good education at home and at Chermak’s School in Moscow, Fyodor studied at the Academy of Military Engineering, graduating as a War Ministry draughtsman in 1843. Soon after, he resigned his post and devoted himself to writing. Acclaimed for its deep psychological insight and emotive storytelling, his first novel, Poor Folk (1846), was an instant success; but was to be overshadowed by the masterpieces written decades later....
While writing the early novels and stories, often focused on themes of poverty and madness, Dostoevsky became involved with the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of socialist intellectuals. Although not fully committed to their politics, he was among the Circle members arrested in 1849. They were imprisoned, sentenced to death and ‘reprieved’ as they faced the firing squad. His sentence commuted to imprisonment followed by compulsory military service, Dostoevsky was to spend the next ten years in Siberia and the army.
The trauma of a mock execution and the hardships of life in prison deepened Dostoevsky’s understanding of human strength and weakness; but he also underwent a religious awakening, rejecting socialism and embracing the Russian Orthodox Church – the faith of the Russian people.
When he returned from military service, Dostoevsky joined his brother Mikhail in founding and writing for a journal, Time, in 1861. The following year he was travelling in Western Europe, where he indulged in gambling, and in Britain, where he was appalled at the poverty in London’s East End. Back in Russia, he married Anna Grigoryevna Smitkina, who had been his secretary and was to help him overcome the problems created by compulsive gambling and cope with the epilepsy that had begun while he was in exile.
During the years following his return to literary life, Dostoevsky produced some of the most celebrated writing in western literature, starting with The House of the Dead (1864), a novel based on his years in Siberia. He was a profound thinker, with extraordinary insight into the psychological challenges of poverty, crime, urban life and existential threat, whose great novels – Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868), The Devils (1872) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) – were to influence generations of psychologists, philosophers and writers and have retained their power to engage readers to this day.
In his later years, Dostoevsky began the Diary of a Writer as a compendium of thoughts, stories, journalism and memoir, but in 1881 he died of a pulmonary haemorrhage, with the Diary unfinished.
