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Introduction

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Nobody did suffering better than Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky—and with good reason. Raised by an alcoholic father and a sick mother, Dostoevsky had to contend with severe epilepsy at an early age. As a young man, he was exiled to Siberia, where he lived a torturous existence for five years. Yet he emerged from his imprisonment having undergone a kind of religious conversion and having developed a more conservative worldview. As a result, most of his great works were written in the last two decades of his life: Notes From Underground, Crime and Punishment, and The Idiot. Completed less than a year before his death, The Brothers Karamazov was Dostoevsky’s final novel. In it, he explores the murder of a father, the collapse of faith, and the (im)possibility of truth—suffering indeed.

Essential Facts

1. Dostoevsky is considered one of the founding fathers of existentialism, and his 1864 novel Notes From Underground is seminal to the movement.
2. Writers as diverse (and important!) as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway have been influenced by Dostoevsky’s work.
3. Dostoevsky was a relative contemporary, but not a colleague, of the other great nineteenth-century Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy. Scholars continue to debate the level of influence each exerted upon the other’s work.
4. Dostoevsky is often compared to the great Russian composer Tchaikovsky, particularly because of their mutual ability to evoke great anguish. Despite the emotional parallels in their work, the two men only met once.
5. Shortly before his death, Dostoevsky famously gave a speech at the unveiling of a monument to Alexander Pushkin, a Russian author whose writing deeply affected Dostoevsky.