Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in Moscow on 11 November 1821 (30 October, Old Style) and died in Saint Petersburg on 9 February 1881 (28 January, Old Style). He made his literary debut with Poor Folk (1846). In 1849 he was arrested for his involvement with the Petrashevsky Circle, subjected to a mock execution, and sentenced instead to hard labor in Omsk, Siberia (1850–1854), followed by military service. The experience of prison, described in The House of the Dead (1860–1862), and his return to Orthodox Christian faith deeply shaped his later work.

Dostoevsky wrote no philosophical treatises, but his novels stage the great problems of modern philosophy through characters who embody opposing positions. In Notes from Underground (1864), the narrator rebels against the rationalism and utilitarianism that reduce the human being to a calculation of interests, asserting will and caprice as expressions of freedom. In Crime and Punishment (1866), Raskolnikov tests the idea that “extraordinary” men are entitled to transgress morality, and the novel examines the psychological and spiritual consequences of that thesis. In The Idiot (1868–1869), he explores a man of radical goodness in a world governed by self-interest. In Demons (1871–1872), he analyzes the political face of nihilism and revolutionary fanaticism. In The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880), his final novel, the problem of evil and the suffering of the innocent, voiced by Ivan, and the legend of the Grand Inquisitor set faith against revolt, and freedom against security.

Key Concepts

  • Freedom and the “underground man” — a critique of rationalist determinism and of the idea that human beings always act according to their enlightened self-interest.
  • Nihilism and its consequences — embodied in Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, and Ivan Karamazov, nihilism is put to an existential and moral test.
  • The problem of evil and the suffering of the innocent — in Ivan Karamazov, the moral refusal to accept a future harmony that costs a child’s suffering.
  • The Grand Inquisitor — a parable within The Brothers Karamazov on freedom, authority, and the burden of human choice.
  • Polyphony — the category proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art (1929), reworked as Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1963), to describe the coexistence of autonomous voices, none subordinated to the author’s own.
  • Faith, guilt, and redemption through suffering — themes tied to Orthodox spirituality, central to the figure of the elder Zosima.

Influenced by

  • Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol — the matrices of the Russian literature that formed him
  • Friedrich Schiller — a reading of his youth, important in his formation
  • Orthodox Christianity and the Gospel — the spiritual source of his mature work
  • Honoré de Balzac — especially early in his career

Influenced

  • Friedrich Nietzsche — who discovered Dostoevsky in 1887 through a French translation of Notes from Underground and, in Twilight of the Idols (1888), called him the only psychologist from whom he had anything to learn
  • Mikhail Bakhtin — the theory of the polyphonic novel
  • Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov — religious and existential readings of his work
  • Sigmund Freud — the essay “Dostoevsky and Parricide” (1928)
  • Existentialism — Albert Camus (who adapted Demons for the stage, 1959) and Jean-Paul Sartre engaged with his themes

Works

Poor Folk (1846); The House of the Dead (1860–1862); Notes from Underground (1864); Crime and Punishment (1866); The Idiot (1868–1869); Demons (1871–1872); A Writer’s Diary (1873–1881); The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880).

See also

Nikolai Berdyaev, Mikhail Bakhtin, Lev Shestov, Friedrich Nietzsche, Existentialism, Russian Philosophy