Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky was born in Russian, on November 11, 1821.
His father was an army doctor, he was stern and self-righteous man while his mother was the opposite- passive, kind, and generous- and that had an impact on his novels- with characters who seem to possess opposite extremes of temperament. His family was religious, and Dostoevsky was deeply religious all his life.
“The darker the night, the brighter the stars.”
At first, Dostoevsky was educated by his parent and tutors, then he was sent to a privet school. Two years later his mother died; his father was murdered in 1839, when he was 18 years old.
Dostoevsky’s early education was in an army engineering school. However, he disliked school, and was more enthusiastic about literature. Therefore, when he finished school, he turned from the career that he trained for to start writing. He spent most of his time dabbling in literary matters and in reading the latest authors; his penchant for literature was obsessive.
His earliest letters show him to be a young man of passion and energy, as well as somewhat mentally unstable.
“To live without Hope is to Cease to live.”
After spending two years in the army, in 1843, Dostoevsky started his career with Poor Folk, a novel that was an immediate and popular success and one highly acclaimed by the critics. Dostoevsky’s second novel, The Double (1846), was received less warmly; his later works in the 1840s were received coldly. The Double, however, has come to be known as his best early work, and in many ways it was ahead of its time.
“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.”
Dostoevsky’s life showed some of the same pattern of uncertain experimenting. In 1847 he joined a somewhat subversive (antigovernment) group called the Petrashevsky Circle. In 1849 the members were arrested. He was sentenced to four years in prison and four years of forced service in the army in Siberia, Russia.
“There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.”
Dostoevsky returned to St. Petersburg in 1859 with an unhealthy wife, Maria Issaeva, whom he had married in Siberia. Dostoevsky’s life during this period was characterized by poor health, poverty, and complicated emotional situations.
Dostoevsky’s first wife died in 1864, and in the following year he married Anna Grigorievna Snitkina. She was practical and even-tempered, and therefore she was the very opposite of his first wife and his lover. There is very little doubt that she was largely responsible for introducing better conditions for his work by taking over many of the practical tasks that he hated and handled badly.
“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
In 1866 Dostoevsky published his first masterpiece, Crime and Punishment, which is the most popular of his great novels. Crime and Punishment also offers remarkable psychological portraits of the characters.
The Idiot, it was written between 1867 and 1869.Dostoevsky stated that in this work he intended to create a man who could not hate and who was incapable of base sensuality.
Dostoevsky’s last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, was his great masterwork and is today considered a masterpiece of Western literature. Only a year after its publication, Dostoevsky was dead, but already he was acknowledged to be one of Russia’s greatest writers.
