The rebellious writer and his friends were, of course, soon deemed treasonous revolutionaries and placed in prison, and after nine months a number of them, including Dostoevsky, were tried, found guilty, and condemned to be shot by a firing squad. The many articles Dostoevsky wrote concerning the various political questions, he published knowing full well that they were illegal and that all printing was controlled and censored by the government. He was, for example, deeply influenced by new and radical ideas entering Russia from the West and soon became affiliated with those who hoped to revolutionize Russia with all sorts of Western reforms. Using influences acquired with his literary achievements, he became involved in political intrigues of questionable nature. 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. Perhaps the most crucial years of Dostoevsky's melodramatic life occurred soon after the publication of Poor Folk. 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. Never before had a Russian author so thoroughly examined the psychological complexities of man's inner feelings and the intricate workings of the mind. Dostoevsky was never free of the horrors of homicide and even at the end of his life, he chose to write of a violent death - the death of a father - as the basis for The Brothers Karamazov.Īfter 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. This sudden and savage murder smoldered within the young Dostoevsky, and when he began to write, the subject of crime, and murder in particular, was present in every new publication. And almost as obsessive was Dostoevsky's preoccupation with death, for while the young student was away at school, his father was killed by the serfs on his estate. He spent most of his time, therefore, dabbling in literary matters and reading the latest authors his penchant for literature was obsessive. His father, an army doctor attached to the staff of a public hospital, was a stern and self-righteous man while his mother was the opposite - passive, kindly, and generous - and perhaps this fact accounts for Dostoevsky's filling his novels with characters who seem to possess opposite extremes of temperament.ĭostoevsky's early education was in an army engineering school, where he was apparently bored with the dull routine and the unimaginative student life. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in 1821, the second of seven children, and lived until 1881.
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