Dostoevsky, Fyodor

DOSTOEVSKY, FYODOR (1821–1881), Russian novelist. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky's childhood was spent in the constrained atmosphere of a Muscovite charity hospital, where his father served as a doctor. It was the murder of his father (1838) that was alleged by Freud to have determined the course of Dostoevsky's epilepsy. This theory is usually discounted, but there is no doubt about the epilepsy itself, nor about its capacity to inspire in its victim something of a "higher awareness." Early symptoms of the condition were experienced in 1849 during his first period of imprisonment. By this time the young Dostoevsky, a graduate of the Academy of Military Engineering in Saint Petersburg, had already established a reputation with some works of fiction, the earliest and most acclaimed of which was Poor Folk (1846).

But it was not for his writings that Dostoevsky had been arrested. His crime was having participated in a utopian-socialist discussion group. At a time of repression in the aftermath of the European revolutions of 1848, Dostoevsky and his fellow "conspirators" found themselves arbitrarily sentenced to death. Only minutes before the execution was the sentence commuted. The years of penal exile in Siberia that followed (four years of hard labor and four of military service in the ranks) could not efface the memory of the cynically contrived mock execution, and Dostoevsky was to return to this near experience of death more than once in his later fiction.

The penal exile itself provided ample material for a semidocumentary study of it, Notes from the House of the Dead (1860–1861), which was to be published on Dostoevsky's return to European Russia. Part of the book was to be serialized in the short-lived journal Vremia, which Dostoevsky founded with his brother (1861). Despite the suppression of this journal, Dostoevsky was to revert to journalism throughout the years to come in order to ensure a modest income. But the greater part of his rarely adequate income was derived from the serial publication of his novels and novellas in the well-established literary periodicals of the day.

It was in the second of Dostoevsky's own periodicals, Epokha, that the first of his major works appeared, Notes from the Underground (1864). This anguished work ushered in the period (and introduced some of the thematics) of the great novels. The majority of these novels were composed in western Europe, to which Dostoevsky withdrew to escape his creditors. He found it necessary to mortgage his writings for some time, much to his disadvantage. Only after completing abroad much of Crime and Punishment (1866), all of The Idiot (1868), and The Possessed (1871–1872) was Dostoevsky in a position to return to his homeland. A Raw Youth (1875) and the unfinished The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880) were thus exceptional in being composed on Russian soil by this most Europhobic of Russian patriots. Even so, with rare exceptions (such as The Gambler, 1867) all the novels have a Russian setting.

This is not to say that the novels are restricted by their time and place, deeply rooted though they are in each. In the dismal byways of Dostoevsky's Saint Petersburg or his provincial towns, problems and myths with universal implications are encountered. The significance of suffering, the limitations of reason, and the importance of free will are debated as early as Notes from the Underground. Each of the major novels has moral and religious problems at its center. Yet answers to these problems are not necessarily to be expected. Rather (as one of Dostoevsky's characters urges in The Idiot), "it is the continuous and perpetual process of discovery [which is important], not the discovery itself." Dostoevsky does not set himself up as an arbitrator between the characters engaged in this process. Indeed, in The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov he even abandons his role as narrator to "independent" surrogates.

It is one of these surrogates who notes that "reality strives toward fragmentation." The world of the novels is replete with disorientation and disorder. Yet in the privacy of his notebooks Dostoevsky still insists that there is or ought to be some "moral center" or "central idea." However eroded such a central idea may be, however obscured in the contemporary mind, merely to depict its erosion should not be sufficient for someone like himself who has progressed to his "hosanna" through what he describes as "a great crucible of doubt."

After his second marriage (1867), and especially in the last decade of his life, Dostoevsky gradually reverted to the Orthodox Christianity of his youth. Indeed, even in the darkest days of his exile, he had never abjured his residual loyalty to "the image of Christ," regardless (as he wrote in 1854) of whether it corresponded to the truth or not. Nor had he abandoned a certain faith in some kind of golden age, yet to be recaptured. But none of this was enough to overcome a deep-seated reluctance, an organic inability, to proceed with a didactic novel. The creative process inevitably involved him in the production of works that are multicentered and polyphonic in both their philosophical and psychological concerns.

Nevertheless, he continued to nurture the hope that he might one day "compel people to admit that a pure and ideal Christianity is not an abstraction, but a vivid reality, possibly near at hand; and that Christianity is the sole refuge of the Russian land from all its evils." Toward the end of his life it seemed that The Brothers Karamazov might prove the appropriate vehicle for such a demonstration. The saintly figure of the elder Zosima would be called upon to act as the principal spokesman of faith in the work. Thus, the spokesman was required to perform a task to which his author was ill-suited. Equally important, the faith that Dostoevsky invokes was curiously diluted, even secularized. Not that it fails to reflect a "process of discovery"—but necessarily a part of that process are the incisive arguments presented by Ivan Karamazov and his Grand Inquisitor, critics of the divine dispensation.

The Dostoevsky whom one emperor had seemingly sought to execute was to be offered a state funeral by another. The didacticism that had little opportunity to flourish in the novels had found an outlet in the brash and chauvinistic journalism of the writer's later years—hence at least some of the acclaim which accompanied him to his grave. But it was the reputation of a novelist who had given his readers an insight into his crucible of doubt which was to live on. Had he not taken pride in the fact that he "alone had brought out the tragedy of the underground"? It was a tragedy, he had noted in 1875, "which consists of suffering and immolation; of the awareness of that which is better, and of the inability to attain it."

Generally recognized as an outstanding survey of Dostoevsky, and one written with considerable insight into his development as a religious thinker, is Konstantin Mochul'skii's Dostoevsky: His Life and Work (Princeton, 1967). Another wide-ranging survey is provided by Richard Peace, Dostoyevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels (Cambridge, U.K., 1971). This contains interesting material on the novelist's treatment of religious sectarians. Robert L. Jackson's Dostoevsky's Quest for Form (New Haven, 1966) is concerned with the subject's idealism and his reluctance to confine himself merely to the phenomena of everyday life. Malcolm V. Jones, in his Dostoyevsky: The Novel of Discord (London, 1976), discusses the centrifugal forces in the fiction with erudition and tact. The classic treatment of the novelist's polyphonic technique is Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1973). By contrast, L. A. Zander in Dostoevsky (London, 1948) argues that his subject is essentially a proponent of Orthodox Christianity. Less partisan is the useful study of The Religion of Dostoevsky by A. Boyce Gibson (London, 1973). The symposium New Essays on Dostoyevsky, edited by Malcolm V. Jones and Garth M. Terry (Cambridge, U.K., 1983), contains my analysis of the teachings attributed to the elder Zosima, "The Religious Dimension: Vision or Evasion? Zosima's Discourse in The Brothers Karamazov," pp. 139–168.

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