ABSTRACT
About the author Fyodor Dostoyevsky is, of course, one of the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century, and it is time for us to make his acquaintance. He was born in Moscow in 1821, the second son of a poor, struggling doctor. (The close connections between medicine and literature never cease to amaze and delight me.) Young Fyodor (in English his name would be Theodore) qualified as a military engineer but soon decided that he would rather be a writer. He had an early success ( Folk, 1846) but then in 1849 got himself arrested for belonging to a group of political dissidents. Along with five comrades, he was sentenced to death by firing squad. Then, just as they were about to be shot, they were all told that they had been reprieved by Tsar Nicholas I and Fyodor was taken off to Omsk for four years of penal servitude. He was transported on a sledge, his legs in iron fetters, in temp eratures which went down to -40°F. About this time, he started to get generalised convulsive epilepsy (described in The Idiot). When he was released from prison and was able to take his leg irons off, he soon became a writer again. In 1865, he began work on Crime and Punishment (the one we all read as students, wondering if we could ever behave like Raskolnikov). Dostoyevsky's personal life
wasn't as grim as his hero's but it was fairly bad. He was still having frequent fits, his first marriage was a disaster and he was in chronic debt. Then, in 1866, when he was struggling to write a new novel to meet a deadline, his friends sent him a typist, a 20-year-old girl called Anna. They fell in love and Anna tried her best to get Fyodor's life into some sort of order, but unfortunately, he developed a taste for gambling (that book she was typing was called The Gambler).They travelled all over Western Europe and he went through thousands of roubles, as well as writing some brilliant books (mainly at night). At last they decided to go back to Russia and, after a final fling at the Wiesbaden casino (in which he lost the money for their train fare), they eventually did go home. And he really did give up gambling. The rest of their married life seems to have been very happy. They had great times in bed; he had an erotic obsession with her feet, but apparently she didn't mind. (I wish I had time to tell you more about things like that.) In 1878, Fyodor started writing his last and greatest book: The Brothers Karamazov. Like so many great nineteenth-century novels this was serialised in a magazine and copies were soon in great demand. Dostoyevsky had become a famous and respected writer, although his religious fervour and his eccentric political views confused people (he believed in the Russian People but not in parliamentary government). He died, probably of pulmonary tuberculosis, in 1881, and 20 000 people are said to have followed his funeral procession. After his death his reputation went up and down. Stalin thought he was brilliant but dangerous and had him banned. But, after the death of the considerably more dangerous dictator, Dostoyevsky was restored to his position as one of Russia's best-loved and most-read novelists.
