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Fyodor Dostoevsky

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Dostoevsky was arrested and imprisoned on [[April 23]] 1849 for engaging in revolutionary activity against Tsar Nicholas I of Russia. On [[November 16]] that year he was sentenced to death for anti-government activities linked to a liberal intellectual group, the Petrashevsky Circle. After a mock execution in which he and other members of the group stood outside in freezing weather waiting to be shot by a firing squad, Dostoevsky's sentence was commuted to four years of exile performing hard labor at a katorga prison camp in Omsk, Siberia. His first recorded epileptic seizure happened in 1850 at the prison camp. It is said that he suffered from a rare form of temporal lobe epilepsy, sometimes referred to as "ecstatic epilepsy." It is also said that upon learning of his father's death before the elder could reply to a letter of criticism from Fydor, the younger Dostoevsky experienced his first seizure. Seizures then recurred sporadically throughout his life, and Dostoevsky's experiences are thought to form the basis for his description of Prince Myshkin's epilepsy in the ''The Idiot''. He was released from prison in 1854, and was required to serve in the Siberian Regiment. Dostoevsky spent the following five years as a private (and later lieutenant) in the Regiment's Seventh Line Battalion stationed at the fortress of Semipalatinsk, now in Kazakhstan. While there, he began a relationship with Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, the wife of an acquaintance in Siberia; they married in February 1857, after her husband's death.
Dostoevsky's experiences in prison and the army resulted in major changes in his political and religious convictions. He became disillusioned with 'Western' ideas, and began to pay greater tribute to traditional Russian values. Perhaps most significantly, he had what his biographer Joseph Frank describes as a [[Religious conversion|conversion]] experience in prison, which greatly strengthened his Christian, and specifically [[Russian Orthodox|Orthodox]], faith (the experience is depicted by Dostoevsky in ''The Peasant Marey'' (1876)). In line with his new beliefs, Dostoevsky became a sharp critic of the [[Nihilist movement|Nihilist]] and [[Socialism|Socialist]] movements of his day, and he dedicated his book ''The Possessed'' and his ''The Diary of a Writer'' to espousing conservatism and criticizing socialist ideas [http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jim_forest/pevear.htm]. He later formed a peculiar friendship with the conservative statesman [[Konstantin Pobedonostsev]].
In December 1859, he returned to St. Petersburg, where he ran a series of unsuccessful literary journals with his older brother Mikhail. Dostoevsky was devastated by his wife's death in 1864, followed shortly thereafter by his brother's death. He was financially crippled by business debts and the need to provide for his brother's widow and children. Dostoevsky sank into a deep depression, frequenting gambling parlors and accumulating massive losses at the tables.
Essentially a writer of myth (and in this respect sometimes compared to Herman Melville), Dostoevsky displayed a nuanced understanding of human psychology evident in his major works. He created an opus of immense vitality and almost hypnotic power, characterized by the following traits: feverishly dramatized scenes (conclaves) where his characters are, frequently in scandalous and explosive atmosphere, passionately engaged in Socratic dialogues ''à la Russe''; the quest for God, the problem of Evil and suffering of the innocents haunt the majority of his novels; characters fall into a few distinct categories: humble and self-effacing [[Christianity|Christians]] (prince Myshkin, Sonya Marmeladova, Alyosha Karamazov), self-destructive [[nihilism|nihilists]] (Svidrigailov, Smerdyakov, Stavrogin, the underground man), cynical debauchers (Fyodor Karamazov), rebellious intellectuals (Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov); also, his characters are driven by ideas rather than by ordinary biological or social imperatives.
Dostoevsky's novels are compressed in time (many cover only a few days) and this enables the author to get rid of one of the dominant traits of realist prose, the corrosion of human life in the process of the time flux — his characters primarily embody spiritual values, and these are, by definition, timeless. Other obsessive themes include [[suicide]], wounded pride, collapsed family values, spiritual regeneration through suffering (the most important motif), rejection of the West and affirmation of [[Russian Orthodoxy]] and Tsarism. Literary scholars such as [[Mikhail Bakhtin|Bakhtin]] have characterized his work as 'polyphonic': unlike other novelists, Dostoevsky does not appear to aim for a 'single vision', and beyond simply describing situations from various angles, Dostoevsky engendered fully dramatic novels of ideas where conflicting views and characters are left to develop unevenly into unbearable crescendo.
By common critical consensus one among the handful of universal world authors, along with Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Miguel de Cervantes, Victor Hugo and a few others, Dostoevsky has decisively influenced twentieth century literature, [[existentialism]] and [[expressionism]] in particular.
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