Dostoevsky, Fyodor
Dostoevsky, Fyodor (Mikhailovich) (1821–81),Russian novelist, often compared to Shakespeare, not least by the psychoanalyst Freud, for his penetration to the depths of the human personality; and some Russian critics have argued that Shakespeare is a main inspiration for Dostoevsky's own tragic art. Encouraged to read Shakespeare by his student friend Shidlovskii, Dostoevsky knew no English, although he later memorized by heart passages of N. A. Polevoi's 1837 translation of Hamlet, and also used Letourneur's 1821 French version of the works. In 1849, when Dostoevsky was under sentence of death, his elder brother Mikhail sent him Ketcher's prose translations (‘I thank you particularly for Shakespeare’). Dostoevsky affirmed Shakespeare's ‘uncontestable aesthetic worth’, admiring his truth to nature and the freedom and inconsistency of his gigantic characters; but he saw him also as a poet of despair, needing the antidote of...
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