Other Literary Forms
In addition to short fiction, Fyodor Dostoevski wrote novels, nonfiction, criticism, and Yevgeniya Grande (1844), a translation of Honoré de Balzac’s novel Eugénie Grandet (1833). In his own time, Dostoevski was exceptionally influential, especially through Dnevnik pisatelya (1876-1877, 1800-1881; The Diary of a Writer, 1949), a series of miscellaneous writings that he published occasionally in St. Petersburg. Dostoevski also wrote a series of essays on Russian literature, some feuilletons, and the well-known travelogue “Zimniye zametki o letnikh vpechatleniyakh” (1863; “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions,” 1955). His most famous contribution in his own time was his speech in Alexander Pushkin’s honor, given on the occasion of the dedication of a monument to Pushkin in 1880.
More Literary Forms
The collected works of Fyodor Dostoevski (dahs-tuh-YEHF-skee) are available in many Russian editions, starting from 1883. The most carefully prepared of these, comprising some thirty volumes, is the Leningrad Nauka edition, which began publishing in 1972. A wide variety of selected works are also available in English. While the novels dominate Dostoevski’s later creative period, he began his career with sketches, short stories, and novellas, and he continued to write shorter pieces throughout his working life. These works do not exhibit the same unity of theme as the major novels, though many of them in one way or another involve Dostoevski’s favorite topic, human duality.
Dostoevski’s nonfictional writing is diverse. In his monthly Dnevnik pisatelya (1876-1877, 1880-1881; The Diary of a Writer, 1949), he included commentary on sociopolitical issues of the time, literary analyses, travelogues, and fictional sketches. He also contributed many essays to his own journals and other publications. The nonfictional writings often clash with the views expressed in the novels and consequently enjoy wide circulation among specialists for comparative purposes. Equally popular is his correspondence, comprising several volumes in his collected works. The notebooks for the major novels, as well as other background comments, are also included in the collection. They became available in English in editions published by the University of Chicago Press during the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Achievements
In the world literature of the nineteenth century, Fyodor Dostoevski has few rivals. Some of his characters have penetrated literary consciousness and produced a new generation in the works of prominent twentieth century authors such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Jorge Luis Borges. He initiated psychological realism, inspiring both Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. His novels are read in translation in twenty-six languages. Dostoevski was originally suppressed in the Soviet Union, only to reemerge as even more influential in the second half of the twentieth century, finding a whole new generation of admirers in his transformed homeland. Even though his style is markedly nineteenth century, Dostoevski still seems quite modern even in the twentieth century.
More Achievements
Both Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevski, the giants of the Russian novel during the era preceding the 1917 October Revolution, are firmly part of the Western literary tradition today, but whereas Tolstoy’s outlook is solidly rooted in the nineteenth century, Dostoevski’s ideas belong to modern times. His novels go far beyond the parameters of aesthetic literature; they are studied not only by literary historians and critics but also by psychologists, philosophers, and theologians the world over. Each discipline discerns a different drift in Dostoevski’s work, and few agree on what the author’s basic tenets are, but all claim him as their hero. His contemporaries, too, were at a loss to categorize him, primarily because his style and subject matter had little in common with accepted literary norms. Russia’s most prominent writing, as espoused by Ivan Turgenev and Tolstoy, was smooth and lyric. While Turgenev analyzed topical social problems in a restrained, faintly didactic manner,...
(This entire section contains 593 words.)
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and Tolstoy presented panoramic visions of certain Russian social classes and their moral problems, Dostoevski brought an entirely new style and content to Russian writing. He disregarded his colleagues’ logically progressing, chronologicalnarrative mode and constructed his stories as mosaics or puzzles, often misleading the audience, experimenting with peculiar narrative voices, allowing his pathological figures to advance the plot in disconcertingly disorienting ways, and in general forcing the reader to reevaluate and backtrack constantly. Dostoevski was also revolutionary in his choice of subjects, introducing characters whose perception of outside reality essentially mirrored their own skewed personalities.
Dostoevski thus rendered obsolete both his contemporaries’ classical realism and the prevailing superficial treatment of the human psyche. In his choice of settings, he disdained the poetic landscapes preferred by others and concentrated on the teeming of the city or the starkly barren aspects of the countryside. Because of this preference for the seamy side of life, he is often linked to Nikolai Gogol, but Dostoevski’s descriptions of deviant behavior have a decidedly more modern flavor than do Gogol’s. During his enforced proximity to criminals, Dostoevski applied his powers of observation to their perverted worldview and, in the process, developed a new approach to literary portraiture; Sigmund Freud praised him for anticipating modern psychological approaches, and twentieth century psychologists on the whole have accepted Dostoevski’s observations as valid.
Dostoevski tended to be conservative and didactic in his nonfictional writings, though his often cantankerous and controversial assertions contributed to the lively journalistic interplays of the time; to this day, there is disagreement over whether he affected a conservative public stance in order to be trusted with censorially sensitive material in his fiction or whether conflicting elements were actually integral to his personality. In either case, Dostoevski is responsible for leading Russian literature away from its often tranquilly harmonious narratives, with their clearly discernible authorial points of view, to a polyphonic plane.
During Joseph Stalin’s reign as leader of the newly formed Soviet Union, severe censorial strictures limited the average Soviet reader’s access to Dostoevski, yet interest in him remained undiminished, and he returned to his prominent place after Stalin’s death. Outside his homeland, Dostoevski’s influence has been immeasurable. Albert Camus—to cite only one among countless examples of twentieth century writers awed by the power of Dostoevski’s metaphysical dialectics—transformed The Possessed into a gripping play, Les Possédés (pr., pb. 1959; The Possessed, 1960), because he saw in Dostoevski’s torturedprotagonists the forerunners of today’s existentialist heroes. Dostoevski’s work thus has remained topical and continues to appeal to widely divergent views.
Contribution
Although most of Fyodor Dostoevski’s major works deal with crime, especially murder and suicide, only two of his works fit into the genre of detective fiction, and only one is frequently associated with the popular form known as the murder mystery. Bratya Karamazovy (1879-1880; The Brothers Karamazov, 1912) deals with a murder, a manhunt, and a trial, but Prestupleniye i nakazaniye (1866; Crime and Punishment, 1886) focuses more closely on the nature of crime and its detection. In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevski elevates the murder mystery to the level of great art. Engaging in a penetrating study of the criminal mind, he probes deeply into the psychopathology of crime. He follows the criminal through his obsessions, his anxieties, and his nightmares.
By highlighting the effects of poverty and isolation on potential criminals, Dostoevski depicts the social milieu that breeds crime and encourages criminal behavior. Furthermore, he re-creates big-city life, with its nefarious characters and its hopeless derelicts living at the brink of despair. Probing deeply into the shadows of the human condition, he tries to unearth the root of crime itself.
Dostoevski goes beyond the sociology of crime and murder, however, to explore its politics and metaphysics. Instead of asking who the murderer is, he explores such questions as, is murder permissible? If so, by whom? Under what conditions does one differentiate between the revolutionary and the common criminal? He also follows the criminal beyond the act of his apprehension to explore how crime should be punished. To Dostoevski, crime becomes sin, a sin that must be expiated through deep personal suffering and a mystical transformation of character. Dostoevski does not ask who committed the murder, but why there is murder. In his opinion, the murder mystery is merely a vehicle for exploring the mystery of murder.
Discussion Topics
Why is it possible to have a better understanding of Fyodor Dostoevski’s psychological novels today than could readers of his time?
Present evidence that Notes from the Underground is a “literary archetype.”
Explain whether or not Dostoevski’s literary punishments fit the crimes.
Does a character like Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov verify that Dostoevski can demonstrate redeeming features in human nature?
Is Dostoevski’s opposition to atheism as an essential basis for immorality convincing?
To what extent does Dostoevski show his major characters overcoming criminal temptations?
