Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821, the second of seven children, to a physician who worked at a hospital for the poor. His father was murdered by his serfs in 1839 — or possibly died of natural causes; the account varies — when Dostoevsky was seventeen, an event that later biographers have proposed as formative for his fiction's obsession with guilt, violence, and the psychology of perpetrators. He studied military engineering in St. Petersburg, graduated in 1843, and almost immediately abandoned the career to write. His first novel, Poor Folk (1846), was praised extravagantly by the critic Belinsky and launched him into St. Petersburg literary society.

In 1849 he was arrested for participation in the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of progressive intellectuals who discussed utopian socialism and read forbidden literature. He was convicted of conspiracy against the state and sentenced to death. He was led before a firing squad, had the sentence read to him, watched the first group of condemned men tied to the posts — and received a last-minute reprieve from the Tsar, commuted to four years of hard labor in a Siberian prison camp followed by compulsory military service. He wrote later that those moments before the firing squad were among the most important of his life; the experience of nearly dying, and then of four years in prison with murderers and criminals, transformed his politics and his understanding of human nature.

He returned to St. Petersburg in 1859, resumed writing, and entered the most productive period of his career. Notes from Underground (1864) is often cited as the first existentialist novel: its underground narrator is a man who has understood that rational self-interest is a lie and that people often act against their own interests because they cannot tolerate having no will of their own. Crime and Punishment (1866) was written under severe financial pressure — he dictated parts of it to a stenographer who later became his wife — and follows a student who commits a murder on the theory that exceptional individuals are exempt from ordinary moral law, then spends the rest of the novel discovering that the theory is wrong and what that costs. The Idiot (1869), The Possessed (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) followed. He died in February 1881, four months after the publication of The Brothers Karamazov, which is generally considered his masterpiece.

His novels work by accumulation: they are long, they contain many characters, they include scenes of humiliation and suffering that are deliberately uncomfortable to read, and they arrive at their arguments through the collision of characters who embody competing ideas. Ivan Karamazov's argument against God — the existence of children's suffering is incompatible with a just creator — is not refuted by the novel but answered obliquely by Alyosha's life and Father Zosima's teaching, and the answer is experiential rather than logical. Dostoevsky's method is to take an idea seriously enough to let it destroy a character, and then to show what survives.

The element of his work that most resists description is what Bakhtin called polyphony: the sense that every character in a Dostoevsky novel speaks with their own full voice, that no single consciousness controls the narrative, that the novel contains several complete worldviews in genuine collision. This is why the novels feel larger than their arguments: they cannot be reduced to the position Dostoevsky held, because they contain positions he rejected given full expression.