Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Dostoyevsky’s had their roots in the Russian nobility. But their genealogy presents a long line of mystics, the mentally unbalanced, geniuses and the criminally insane.

A Maria Dostoevsky was sentenced to death for killing her first husband after trying to kill her stepson. As the result of a thousand vicissitudes and shake ups, the Dostoyevsky were dispossessed of their fiefdoms and sank into misery or slightly better.

Mikhail Dostoyevsky — the father of the famous writer — enrolled in the Moscow Medical-Surgical Academy, having escaped the clergy a short time after having entered it. When Napoleon’s troops entered Russia in 1812, he was appointed an army doctor but was later transferred to Moscow and obtained the position of assistant physician at the hospital for the poor, working in the infirmary. In the same year, he married the daughter of a merchant, who put in the son-in-law’s hands a good amount of money. Over the years, Mikhail Dostoyevsky was debilitated by an unhealthy avarice that proved a misfortune to those around him and for himself would prove fatal. He became a tyrant over his own poor charges at the hospital, and especially, over his children and his wife. The Dostoyevsky family lived in rooms on the mezzanine of the same hospital. There, on October 30, 1821, was born the second child of the marriage, Fyodor.

In Fyodor’s infancy, his mother and his nurse, Aliova Federovna, instilled him with the elements of fantasy that would familiarize the boy with fairy tales and Russian folklore.

Together with his brother Mikhail, Fyodor’s education took place between the Sanchard French preparatory academy, a half-boarding school, and the Tchemak private boarding school, a true sacrifice for the miserly father who, in all justice, wanted to give his children a loftier and more efficient education than that offered at the government schools, in which backward methods still reigned. During this era, Fyodor surrendered himself to his passion for reading, devoting himself to it every hour in Moscow, which years later when Fyodor was a teenager, would be absolutely destroyed during a fire, causing great pain to Fyodor. Another great sorrow was the death of the nationalist poet Pushkin, whose verses Fyodor knew by heart. Naturally, the death of his mother proved the worst of his sufferings.

Dostoyevsky’s childhood was sown with contradictions, as would be his entire life. Doctor Janovsky, a medical practitioner and friend of Dostoyevsky, referring to Dostoyevsky’s childhood said: “Fyodor experienced during childhood many dark and distressing things, among them those that imprint upon a character the trait that leads to neurosis, to epilepsy and to hypochondria.”

Youth and Fame:

Making a final effort, the miserly Mikhail Dostoyevsky, brought his children to St. Petersburg and enrolled them in the Military Engineers School. Fyodor, who was seventeen, read voraciously and began to write. He experienced extreme monetary difficulties and wrote letter after letter asking for aid from his father, who had retired to the countryside and become even more miserly. His father, now fully possessed by his greed, became detested by his servants, and on one day in which he had beaten one of them, the farmers met together and decided to kill him. They caught him drunk, tried to drown him with alcohol … and finally brutally abusing him put an end to his life. The family refused to press charges and the public authorities turned a blind eye. His son Fyodor never spoke to anyone or ever wrote anything about this horrible death.

Poorer, more tormented than before, Fyodor continued his career. He read, wrote and suffered bitter misery, but, above all, penetrated deeper and deeper into the soul of his people, which led him to write his first book “Poor Folk.” The great critic Bielinsky, after reading Dostoevsky’s work, brought it to the public’s attention and enthusiastically labeled it as genius, upon which Fyodor awoke at the pinnacle of fame.

Fyodor firmly planted his feet in the world of the dispossessed and revolutionaries. He attended clandestine meetings given by Petraschevski, and, in December 1848, was arrested as a conspirator by the Tsar’s police. Dostoyevsky and the rest of the conspirators were sentenced to death. In Semionovsky Square a crowd gathered to witness the spectacle. In the center of the square stood the scaffold and the condemned were lined up on the platform. The court martial judge, after having pronounced the names of the nine conspirators, read the verdict nine times; Dostoevsky trembled at the sound of his name, not truly sure of what he had heard. Then … someone approached at a slow pace. A hand had positioned itself on his chest. A few steps away, the Cossacks formed the firing squad. The deadly weapons were set and the drums begin to intensify.

It was a moment that lasted a century! A voice was heard. Stop! An officer came forward and read the order in which the Tsar changed the death sentence to hard labor in Siberia. It was December 22, 1849.
Finishing his sentence in 1856, he obtained permission to return to Moscow, and after a few exalted and romantic affairs, married a widow, expecting everything from a marriage that provided him instead new sufferings. The same night of the marriage, he had a repeat attack of the epilepsy that he had already suffered during his exile in Siberia. His wife, tubercular and neurotic, failed to provide even a shred of peace to the tormented spirit of Dostoevsky. This union lasted for seven years, ending with her death. His brother Michael also died, leaving Fyodor absolutely alone at that time in his life.

Nevertheless, he had to work to stay alive. Taking refuge in absolutist nationalism, he worked obscurely writing serializations.

During this time, he fell in love more than once, but in conflict with his amorous temperament, he had his ugly side, represented by his epilepsy and his physical and moral scars. He fell in love with an actress, a nihilist, and a beautiful revolutionary, all of those loves being ill fated, and Dostoevsky, thirsting for love, had no choice but to marry Ana Grigorievna, the stenographer to whom he dictated his serials. Twenty years younger than him and used to admiring and venerating him from the age of fifteen, Maria Grigorievna was the only element of relative peace and repose in Dostoyevsky’s agitated life.

The End:

On the occasion of a national tribute to the poet Pushkin, Dostoevsky, charged with delivering the speech, made the nation vibrate with the strength and valor of his words. Three months later, on February 9, 1881, he died of a pulmonary hemorrhage.

“The whole country takes part in the mourning of the one departed.”

“Thirty thousand people accompanied the mortal remains of the author of “Poor Folk.” Writers and students carried the coffin on their shoulders. Fifteen choirs formed the entourage, sounding their canticles. The philosopher Solovyov uttered the final words, which contained the lofty human and sacred significance of who Dostoevsky was and what he had done.

The only authentic biography of Dostoevsky is in his works.

He is “The Demon,” “The Adolescent,” “Ivan Karamazov” and “Rodion Roskolnikov.” Within his breast nested all of those furious beings — madmen, enlightened rebels — who populate his novels. But Fyodor Dostoyevsky tamed the furious and achieved total victory over them, arriving — and in this he can be compared to Beethoven — at supreme joy through supreme suffering.