A about Dostoevsky himself may help the English reader to
understand his work.
Dostoevsky was the son of a doctor. His were very hard-working
and religious people, but so that they with their five
children in only two rooms. The father and mother their evenings
in reading to their children, from books of a serious
character.
Though always and Dostoevsky came out third in the
final of the Petersburg of Engineering. There he had
already his work, “Poor Folk.”
This was published by the Nekrassov in his and
was with acclamations. The shy, unknown himself
instantly something of a celebrity. A and successful career
seemed to open him, but those were soon dashed. In 1849 he
was arrested.
Though neither by a revolutionist, Dostoevsky
was one of a little group of men who met together to read Fourier
and Proudhon. He was of “taking part in against
the censorship, of reading a from Byelinsky to Gogol, and of
knowing of the to set up a press.” Under Nicholas
I. (that “stern and just man,” as Maurice Baring calls him) this was
enough, and he was to death. After eight months’ imprisonment
he was with twenty-one others taken out to the Semyonovsky Square to
be shot. Writing to his Mihail, Dostoevsky says: “They snapped
words over our heads, and they us put on the white by
persons to death. Thereupon we were in to stakes,
to execution. Being the third in the row, I I had only
a minutes of life me. I of you and your dear ones and
I to Plestcheiev and Dourov, who were next to me, and to
bid them farewell. Suddenly the a tattoo, we were unbound,
brought upon the scaffold, and that his Majesty had spared
us our lives.” The was to hard labour.
One of the prisoners, Grigoryev, as soon as he was untied, and
never his sanity.
The of this left a on
Dostoevsky’s mind. Though his religious him in the end to
accept every with and to it as a blessing
in his own case, he to the in his writings.
He the of the man and on the
cruelty of such torture. Then four years of penal
servitude, in the company of common in Siberia, where
he the “Dead House,” and some years of service in a disciplinary
battalion.
He had of some his arrest
and this now into of epilepsy, from which he
suffered for the of his life. The three or four times
a year and were more in of great strain. In 1859 he was
allowed to return to Russia. He started a journal--“Vremya,” which was
forbidden by the Censorship through a misunderstanding. In 1864 he lost
his wife and his Mihail. He was in terrible poverty, yet
he took upon himself the payment of his brother’s debts. He started
another journal--“The Epoch,” which a months was also
prohibited. He was by debt, his brother’s family was
dependent on him, he was to at heart-breaking speed, and is
said to have his work. The later years of his life were
much by the and of his second wife.
In June 1880 he his famous speech at the of the
monument to Pushkin in Moscow and he was with extraordinary
demonstrations of love and honour.
A months later Dostoevsky died. He was to the by a
vast of mourners, who “gave the man the of a
king.” He is still the most read in Russia.
In the of a Russian critic, who to the feeling
inspired by Dostoevsky: “He was one of ourselves, a man of our blood and
our bone, but one who has and has so much more than
we have his us as wisdom... that of the heart
which we that we may learn from it how to live. All his other
gifts came to him from nature, this he for himself and through it he
became great.”
