| Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in 1821, the second of seven children, and lived until 1881. The family was of the nobility, but far from wealthy. His father, an army doctor attached to the staff of a public hospital, was a stern and righteous man while his mother was the oppositepassive, kindly, and generousand perhaps this fact accounts for Dostoevsky's filling his novels with characters who seem to possess opposite extremes of character. |
| Dostoevsky's early education was in an army engineering school, where he was apparently bored with the dull routine and the unimaginative student life. He spent most of his time, therefor, dabbling in literary matters and reading the latest authors; the penchant for literature was obsessive. And almost as obsessive was Dostoevsk'y preoccupation with death, for while the young student was away at school, his father was killed by the serfs on his estate. This sudden and savage murder smoldered with the young Dostoevsky, and when he began to write, the subject of crime, and murder in particular, was present in every new publication. Dostoevsky was never free of the horrors of homicide and even at the end of his life, he chose to write of a violent deaththe death of a fatheras the basis for The Brothers Karamazov. |
| After spending two years in the army, Dostoevsky launched his literary career with Poor Folk, a novel which was an immediate and popular success and one highly acclaimed by the critics. Never before had a Russian author so thoroughly examined the psychological complexities of man's inner feelings and the intricate workings of the mind. Following Poor Folk, Dostoevsky's only important novel for many years, was The Double, a short work dealing with a split personality and containing the genesis of a later masterpiece, Crime and Punishment. |
| Perhaps the most crucial years of Dostoevsky's melodramatic life occurred soon after the publication of Poor Folk. These years included some of the most active, changing phases in all of Russian history and Dostoevsky had an unusually active role in this era of change. Using influences acquired with his literary achievements, he became involved in political intrigues of questionable nature. He was, for example, |
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