Fyodor Dostoevsky: Part of the Process
Part of the Process is a series in which we chronicle the often turbulent, usually absurd and always interesting lives of authors we admire. It’s not easy to be a writer in the 21st century, but in a strange way, reading about the trials and tribulations of those who seem to have ‘made it’ can be a reminder that it has always been a difficult process.
*
It seems almost farcical to attempt to summarise the life of a writer quite as storied and legendary as Fyodor Dostoevsky in a short article. Nineteenth century Russia was a place that had a penchant for drama of all kinds, as well as for producing some of the most famed literary figures of all time. So take this not as an exhaustive account of the life of Dostoevsky, but rather an introduction to some of the anecdotes that make up the strangest or perhaps most fraught experiences of his long career and life.
Russia in the 1800s was not an easy place to live. From strict social hierarchies to serfdom to large families to poverty, Dostoevsky witnessed much in the first few decades of his life that would go on to influence his work and beliefs. The second child of a doctor and his wife, he grew up at the family home in the grounds of the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor. Unlike many of his successful contemporaries, Dostoevsky was not a member of the landed aristocracy or gentry, but rather grew up in a way that was decidedly lower middle class.
As a twelve year old, Fyodor was packed off to a French boarding school and then to the Chermak boarding school, where he felt out of place amongst aristocratic classmates. He was described being hot-headed, stubborn, having a delicate physical constitution and being an ‘overexcitable, introverted romantic’. By the age of fifteen, he and his brother Mikhail were sent to the Military Engineering Institute in Saint Petersburg, abandoning their academic studies for military careers. By the age of 18, Fyodor had lost both his parents - his mother to tuberculosis in 1837 and his father to a sudden stroke, which was hypothesized to have been caused by his serfs, in 1839. It was around this time that Dostoevsky was reported to have started having epileptic seizures.
Dostoevsky passed his exams despite losing his parents and became an engineer cadet. Always entranced by literature since his nanny used to read to him as a child, he became interested in operas, plays, books and became interested in utopian socialism. He completed his first novel, Poor Folk, in 1845. His friend took the manuscript to a poet who showed it to renowned literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, who praised the work. It became a commercial success, and he was at first lionised. But over the years, his shyness and vanity provoked hostility among the members of Belinsky’s circle. This was a theme that continued in his literary feuds with other great Russian writers of the time like Turgenev and Tolstoy, who he saw as focusing on beautiful forms and bourgeosie family life, rather than his explorations of the marginalised, insulted and humiliated.
In 1847, Dostoyevsky began to participate in the Petrashevsky Circle, a small utopian socialist group that was devoted to revolution. He was motivated by his strong disapproval of serfdom and the feudal system he’d grown up around. But in 1849, on charges of spreading illegal propaganda, he and other members of the group were arrested. Dostoyevsky spent eight months in prison until one day, the prisoners were led without warning to Semyonovsky Square. A sentence of death by firing squad was pronounced, last rites were offered, and three prisoners were led out to be executed. But at the last possible moment, guns were lowered and a messenger arrived, stating the tsar had deigned to spare their lives. The mock execution ceremony was, in fact, an instrument of punishment unto itself. One of the prisoners went insane on the spot, while the impact on Fyodor was a deepening into the dark, psychological themes he went on to be known for.
Instead of being executed, Dostoyevsky was exiled to four years in a Siberian prison labour camp, to be followed by an indefinite term as a soldier. After his return to Russia almost a decade later, he wrote a novel based on his Siberian experiences, called The House of the Dead. From the youthful idealism and romanticism of his early work, the transition to horrific and powerful desolation was underway. From the horrors he witnessed to the brutality of the guards to the existence of humanity even in these depths, his work was considered a masterpiece by none other than Tolstoy, and was the first prison camp novel, a genre that would later become popular in Russia and in modern literature.
Around November 1854, he met Baron Alexander Egorovich Wrangel, an admirer of his writing who had attended the aborted execution. They both rented houses in the Cossack Garden outside Semipalatinsk. Dostoevsky tutored schoolchildren and came into contact with upper-class families, including that of Lieutenant-Colonel Belikhov, who used to invite him to read passages from newspapers and magazines. During a visit to Belikhov, Dostoevsky met the family of then married Maria Isaeva and fell in love with her. When her husband died at a new army post, Maria and her son moved with Dostoevsky to another Siberian city. In 1856, Dostoevsky sent a letter through Wrangel apologising for his activity in several utopian circles. As a result, he obtained the right to publish books and marry, although he remained under police surveillance for most of his life.
Maria married Dostoevsky in Semipalatinsk in 1857, even though she had initially refused his proposal, stating that they were not meant for each other and that his financial situation and seizures were negative factors. Of their relationship, Dostoevsky wrote that “due to her strange, suspicious, fantastic character, we were definitely not happy together, but we could not stop loving each other; and the more unhappy we were, the more attached to each other we became". They lived apart for much of this time after Dostoevsky obtained permission in the early 1860s to leave Siberia and travel to Western Russia and Europe, visiting several cities on the continent.
Through this time, he was becoming increasingly addicted to gambling and also writing prolifically despite financial difficulties. On one of his travels, he met Polina Suskova, his second love, in Paris, but on later trips, he lost nearly all of his money gambling in what would become modern day Germany while allegedly being on the run from creditors in Russia. Back in St. Petersburg, an unscrupulous publisher offered him a desperately needed advance on the condition that he deliver a novel by a certain date. The publisher was counting on the forfeit provisions, which would allow him the right to publish all of Dostoyevsky’s works for free for nine years. With less than a month remaining, Dostoyevsky hired a stenographer and dictated his novel The Gambler, based on his affair with Suslova and the compulsive, obsessive addiction to gambling. He finished it just in time, and then, a few months later, he married the stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina.
During this period, he wrote for and edited several Russian journals, some along with his brother Mikhail, with parts of Crime and Punishment and The Idiot appearing in ‘The Russian Messenger’. His second marriage began with a honeymoon through Europe that was meant to last three months, but ended up taking the majority of four years. His first child, Sofya, was born in Geneva and passed away due to pneumonia at just three months of age. According to Anna, this drove him deeper into gambling and debt until the birth of his second daughter, though the veracity of these claims are debated in academic circles.
In the 1870s, Dostoevsky and Anna returned to Russia and he became increasingly involved in the literary and political worlds while his health deteriorated for a variety of reasons. A deeper examination of this period would reveal a lot about his later works, including The Brothers Karamazov, but the man simply did too much to be summarised in a short piece like this one. His seizures worsened and in 1881, he died of a haemorrhage. But even in his own time, Dostoevsky’s writing was arguably the most influential of the nineteenth century. Many of his greatest characters draw upon his own experiences, and he had already achieved great celebrity at that time, despite his debts and health problems. But more than celebrity, he became the father of the modern psychological novel, the prison novel, and various other genres, plumbing depths of the human mind that feel relevant even centuries later, influencing many of the greatest thinkers after him including Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka and Joyce.
***