The second of seven children, he was closest to his older brother, Mikhail. Dostoevsky later wrote with warmth about his mother, Mariia Fedorovna, but wrote nearly nothing about his father and is reported to have said that his childhood was difficult and joyless. The correspondence between his parents, written in the effulgent, sentimental style of the time, reveals little. The Mariinskii Hospital served the indigent, and inasmuch as the Dostoevsky family was quartered on its premises, the young boy gained impressions of urban poverty that he later was able to use in his fiction and journalism. Walks in the hospital gardens and readings from the Bible, the
Lives of the Saints, and Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin's
Istoriia gosudarstva Rossiiskogo (History of the Russian State, 1818- 1829) were the main family activities of Dostoevsky's early childhood.
In 1828 Mikhail Andreevich Dostoevsky was granted a nobleman's rank, and shortly thereafter the family purchased an estate at Darovoe. Little is known about this period except for the fragmentary accounts the author himself provided in his journal Dnevnik pisatelia (Diary of a Writer, 1876-1877, 1880, 1881). Most of this material also served Dostoevsky's ideological projects of the 1870s--including, for example, his argument about the necessary link between the educated classes and the peasantry.
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