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[[Image:Dostoevsky 1872.jpg|thumb|right|Portrait by Vasily Perov, 1872]]'''Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky''' (Russian: Фёдор Миха́йлович Достое́вский, ''Fëdor Mihajlovič Dostoevskij'', sometimes transliterated '''Dostoyevsky''' [[October 30]]/[[November 11]], 1821 – [[January 28]]/[[February 9]], 1881) is considered one of the greatest Russian writers, whose works have had a profound and lasting effect on twentieth-century fiction. His works often feature characters living in poor conditions with disparate and extreme states of mind, and exhibit both an uncanny grasp of human [[psychology]] as well as penetrating analyses of the political, social and spiritual states of Russia of his time. Many of his best-known works are prophetic precursors to modern-day thoughts. He is sometimes considered to be a founder of [[w:existentialism|existentialism]], most frequently for ''Notes from Underground'', which has been described by Walter Kaufmann as "the best overture for existentialism ever written".
== Biography ==
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 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 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 [[Constantine Petrovich Pobedonostsev|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.
Motivated by the dual wish to escape his creditors at home and to visit the casinos abroad, Dostoevsky traveled to Western Europe. There, he attempted to rekindle a love affair with Apollinaria (Polina) Suslova, a young university student with whom he had had an affair several years prior, but she refused his marriage proposal. Dostoevsky was heartbroken, but soon met Anna Grigorevna, a twenty-year-old stenographer whom he married in 1867. This period resulted in the writing of his greatest books. From 1873 to 1881 he vindicated his earlier journalistic failures by publishing a monthly journal full of short stories, sketches, and articles on current events — the ''Writer's Diary''. The journal was an enormous success. Dostoevsky is also known to have influenced and been influenced by famous Russian Philosopher [[Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov]]. Solovyov is noted as the inspiration for the character Alyosha Karamazov. <ref>Zouboff, Peter, Solovyov on Godmanhood: Solovyov’s Lectures on Godmanhood Harmon Printing House: Poughkeepsie, New York, 1944; see Czeslaw Milosz’s introduction to Solovyov’s War, Progress and the End of History. Lindisfarne Press: Hudson, New York 1990.</ref>
In 1877 Dostoevsky gave the keynote [[eulogy]] at the funeral of his friend, the poet Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov, to much controversy. In 1880, shortly before he died, he gave his famous Aleksandr Pushkin speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow.
In his later years, Fyodor Dostoevsky lived for a long time at the resort of Staraya Russa which was closer to St Petersburg and less expensive than German resorts. He died on [[January 28]] ([[Julian calendar|O.S.]]), 1881 of a lung hemorrhage associated with emphysema and an epileptic seizure and was interred in [[Tikhvin Cemetery]] at the [[Alexander Nevsky MonasteryLavra]], St. Petersburg, Russia. Forty thousand mourning Russians attended his funeral.{{ref|1}} His tombstone reads "Verily, Verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." from John 12:24, which is also the epigraph of his final novel, ''The Brothers Karamazov''.
== Works and influence ==
[[Image:450px-Grab-dostojewsky.jpg|thumb|Dostoevsky's tomb at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery.]]
Dostoevsky's literary influence cannot be overemphasized. From Herman Hesse to Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, [[Friedrich Nietzsche]], Henry Miller, Yukio Mishima, Gabriel García Márquez, Jack Kerouac and Joseph Heller, virtually no great twentieth century writer escaped his long shadow (rare dissenting voices include[Vladimir Nabokov, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and, more ambiguously, D.H. Lawrence). American novelist Ernest Hemingway, in his autobiographic books, also cited Dostoevsky as a major influence on his work.
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.
==Bibliography==
===Translations===
Many Orthodox readers prefer the translations of [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=books&field-author-exact=Richard%20Pevear Richard Pevear] and [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=books&field-author-exact=Larissa%20Volokhonsky Larissa Volokhonsky] because of their attention to Orthodox liturgical terminology. These replace the translations of an earlier generation by Constance Garnett.
=== Major works ===
* ''Бедные люди'' (1846) Translated as ''Poor Folk'') by Garnett (1846ISBN 978-1593081942). * ''Двойник. Петербургская поэма'' (1846) Translated as ''The Double: A Petersburg Poem'') by Pevear and Volokhonsky (1846ISBN 978-0375719011).
* ''Неточка Незванова'' (''[[Netochka Nezvanova]]'') (1849)
* ''Село Степанчиково и его обитатели'' (''The Village of Stepanchikovo'' or ''The Friend of the Family'') (1859)
* ''Униженные и оскорбленные'' (''The Insulted and Humiliated'') (1861)
* ''Записки из мертвого дома'' (novel) (1860) Translated as ''The House of the Dead (novel)'') by Garnett (1860ISBN 978-1593081942). * ''Скверный анекдот'' (''1862) Translated as "A Nasty Story'') " by Jesse Coulson (1862ISBN 978-0140441796). * ''Записки из подполья'' (1864) Translated as ''Notes from Underground'' by Pevear and and Volokhonsky (ISBN 978-0679734529) and by some as ''Letters from the Underworld''.
* ''Преступление и наказание'' (1866) Translated as ''Crime and Punishment'' by Pevear and Volokhonsky (ISBN 978-0679734505) and by Garnett (ISBN 978-1905432516).
* ''Игрок '' (novella) (1867) Translated as ''The Gambler (novella)''by Pevear and Volokhonsky (ISBN 978-0375719011) and Garnett (1867ISBN 978-0812966930).
* ''Идиот'' (novel) (1868) Translated as ''The Idiot'' by Pevear and Volokhonsky (ISBN 978-0375702242) and Garnett (ISBN 978-0679642428).
* ''Бесы'' (1872) Translated as ''The PossessedDemons''by Pevear and Volokhonsky (ISBN 978-0679734512), also known as ''DemonsThe Possessed'' or by Garnett (ISBN 978-1593082505), and as ''The Devils'') by Michael Katz (1872ISBN 978-0199540495).* ''Подросток'' (1875) Translated as ''The Raw YouthAdolescent'' or by Pevear and Volokhonsky (ISBN 978-0375719004) and as ''The AdolescentA Raw Youth'') (1875)by Garnett.
* ''Братья Карамазовы'' (1880) Translated as ''The Brothers Karamazov'' by Pevear and Volokhonsky (ISBN 978-0374528379) and Garnett (ISBN 978-0486437910).
===Short stories===
* ''Белые ночи'' (''"White Nights (short story)''") (1848)* ''Елка и свадьба'' (''"A Christmas Tree and a Wedding''") (1848)* ''Честный вор'' (''"An Honest Thief''") (1848)
* ''The Peasant Marey'' (1876)
* ''Сон смешного человека'' (1877) in Pevear and Volokhonsky ''The Dream of a Ridiculous ManEternal Husband and Other Stories'') (1877ISBN 978-0553214444).* ''A Gentle Creature,'' sometimes translated as "The Meek One" (1876) in Pevear and Volokhonsky ''The Meek GirlEternal Husband and Other Stories'' (1876ISBN 978-0553214444). * ''"A Weak Heart''"* "The Eternal Husband" in Pevear and Volokhonsky ''The Eternal Husbandand Other Stories''(ISBN 978-0553214444).
==Quotes==
