ABSTRACT
No Russian author has had a greater influence on modern European literature than Fyodor Mikhailovitch Dostoevsky. It was he who added to the psychological novel the entire region of the subconscious. His literary debut began with a translation of Balzac's Pere Goriot. In January 1846 his first original work, Poor Folk, appeared. Although inspired by Gogol's Greatcoat, this story about the 'insulted and injured', established at once Dostoevsky's reputation. Prompted to some extent by Gogol's A Madmans Diary, Dostoevsky gave in it a fine study of self-divided personality. In The Brothers Karamazov, the background of actual Russia serves only as a canvas for a powerful drama of human mind and spirit. The House of the Dead is a record of Dostoevsky's life among the criminals in Siberia and can be classed among the greatest human documents in literature.
