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The Best Fiction Books » Literary Figures

The best fyodor dostoevsky books, recommended by alex christofi.

Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life

Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life

His father had clawed his way up into the minor aristocracy, but Fyodor Dostoevsky chose to live the life of an impecunious author. He was sentenced to death, but his execution was stayed and he spent years in a Siberian labour camp instead. His books are about human compassion, but he was a difficult man who had trouble with his own personal relationships. Alex Christofi , author of a brilliant new biography of Dostoevsky, one of Russia's greatest novelists, recommends five books to learn more about the man and his work—including the novel of which Tolstoy said he ‘didn’t know a better book in all our literature’.

Interview by Cal Flyn , Deputy Editor

The Best Fyodor Dostoevsky Books - Lectures on Dostoevsky by Joseph Frank

Lectures on Dostoevsky by Joseph Frank

The Best Fyodor Dostoevsky Books - Memoirs from the House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Jessie Coulson

Memoirs from the House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Jessie Coulson

The Best Fyodor Dostoevsky Books - Dostoevsky: Reminiscences by Anna Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky: Reminiscences by Anna Dostoevsky

The Best Fyodor Dostoevsky Books - The Master of Petersburg: A Novel by J M Coetzee

The Master of Petersburg: A Novel by J M Coetzee

The Best Fyodor Dostoevsky Books - Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

best biography dostoevsky

1 Lectures on Dostoevsky by Joseph Frank

2 memoirs from the house of the dead by fyodor dostoevsky, translated by jessie coulson, 3 dostoevsky: reminiscences by anna dostoevsky, 4 the master of petersburg: a novel by j m coetzee, 5 crime and punishment by fyodor dostoevsky.

You are the author of a new biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1861) . It’s a book that intertwines the narrative of his life with his own words, taken from where his fiction has been drawn from lived experience, which is such a great way to do a literary biography. Having devoted all this time to his life and work, can you outline for our readers Dostoevsky’s significance as a writer?

Until recently he has been quite unfashionable – at least, compared to some of the other Russian greats like Turgenev and Tolstoy . He comes across as this very grumpy old man; despite his fierce intellect he could be difficult to be around, so he has this cloud hanging over his reputation.

He’s also  sometimes criticised, I think fairly, as being verbose or digressive. Because he was always broke, and he was paid by the page, most of his best known novels are understandably quite long. Those are some of the reasons why people feel intimidated by him as a writer. They don’t quite know their way in.

But what I think is really interesting about Dostoevsky, and speaks to modern readers, is that he’s concerned not with the aristocracy but with the vulnerable people of society, whether that’s serfs, people forced into prostitution, or the disabled, or the poor. So he’s looking at society in a completely different way to many of his peers.

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And, aside from being a magnetic writer, he has a huge amount to say about the human condition: what makes us good, whether it makes sense to believe in God… there are all these universal questions across his writing that I think speak to a modern audience. His are really interesting precursors to the modern novel.

So part of my idea was to try to rehabilitate him in the popular imagination, as a writer who’s had a really incredible life, but also has a lot to say in the here and now. He’s not just a historical relic.

Absolutely. Crime and Punishment is arguably Dostoevsky’s most famous book. Do you think it’s the best place to start, for someone coming fresh to his writing?

Not necessarily. He’s actually written some great short stories and novella-length work. So you could read something quite short, like Notes from the Underground , which is probably only 60 pages. It’s a super-intense, sometimes very funny, deeply absurd and weird little book. It packs so many ideas into a short space.

He’s also got a wonderful story from early in his career called The Double . It’s farcical, almost in the style of Nikolai Gogol, whom he admired a lot. It’s not long and great fun to read. So it depends what you’re most attracted to.

If you want the deep, serious book that’s going to tell you the whole meaning of life, you can go off and read The Brothers Karamazov . If you’re looking for something shorter and more entertaining, that’s there too. That’s part of what’s so exciting about Dostoevsky. You can find something that appeals to your sensibility from a really varied range of work.

Well, the first of the books you’ve selected is Lectures on Dostoevsky , by Joseph Frank. Why do you recommend it?

‘Lectures’ makes it sound more academic than it is, in a way. Joseph Frank was probably the leading scholar on Dostoevsky working in any language. He wrote an incredible five-volume biography of Dostoevsky , probably 2500-pages long. It took about 25 years to finish. He worked at Princeton and later Stanford, and he created this undergraduate lecture series, to bring people up to speed in a short space of time. These lectures were published for the first time at the end of 2019.

They’re a really good way to start learning about Dostoevsky, because he gives you just enough to really understand where he was coming from at these different moments in his life. It doesn’t cover all his books, but the important ones – with the notable exception of Devils – including his first and last work. So you could read this pretty short book and get a good sense of the man and the world he was born into. And you’re getting it from one of the world’s leading experts.

As a starting point, I think Lectures on Dostoevsky is more accessible than that vast biography might be.

I agree. But the mere existence of a five-volume biography gestures towards Dostoevsky’s remarkably eventful life. Could you give us a potted summary?

Yes. Let me give you the three-minute version.

Dostoevsky was born in a hospital for the poor. His father was a doctor, and had just about managed to climb onto the lowest rung of the hereditary nobility, basically through hard work, firstly as an army surgeon. So Fyodor grew up on the grounds of this hospital, looking out of the window at all these sick people in dressing gowns.

It wasn’t a particularly lovely childhood, but they did manage to buy this very rundown estate outside of Moscow. He loved going there in the summer with his mother. Unfortunately, while he was still pretty young, his mother died of consumption and the estate burned down in an accidental fire. Later his father died – either from alcoholism or because he was murdered by his peasants, who hated him.

“He became a literary sensation, literally overnight”

Dostoevsky ends up in an engineering academy in St Petersburg, but he really wanted to be a novelist. He just about finished his degree, but anyone who knows anything about him would be terrified to walk on a bridge made by Dostoevsky, put it that way. It would be a structural nightmare.

He quickly decided he would rather be poor, as long as he could be a writer. He wrote his first book, Poor Folk , and gave it to a friend of a friend who worked for a magazine one day in spring – during those lovely white nights that you get in St Petersburg, where it barely gets dark. He gave it to the guy, went out and had some drinks, came home at 4am. And the critic burst into the room, telling him he’s a literary genius and that he’s already shared a copy with the most important critic in all of Russia . Six hours later, the other critic agreed. Suddenly he was a literary sensation. Literally overnight.

Oh wow. The dream.

Well, he fell out with those friends quite quickly, and ended up in a second literary circle, which was more dangerous and plotting revolution… basically he fell in with the wrong crowd. He was caught, sentenced to death, subjected to a mock execution and sent off for years of hard labour in Siberia. So he was out there in the freezing cold, pounding alabaster and breaking up barges for several years.

Released as an army private, he fell in love with someone else’s wife, Maria. That guy also died of alcoholism, so he married her – but they had a deeply unhappy marriage. He managed to get back to St Petersburg, where he wrote these amazing memoirs of his time in prison, which became a total sensation and rehabilitated his literary reputation.

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From there he was well-known and well-respected as a writer, pretty much until the end of his life.  But his personal life was still very choppy. He had an affair with a young student called Polina, and ran away to Europe with her–but she was just stringing him along. He became a gambling addict, lost all his money and his beloved brother died. He was completely penniless, so he wrote a novel called The Gambler to pay off his debts; in doing that, he’d given himself such a tight deadline that he hired a stenographer so that he could actually write it in the month he had – and got on really well with her. They went on to have four children, although two of them died.

In the 1870s, he developed emphysema and his health worsened, but at least he was happy in love for that last decade of his life. So, yes. Pretty eventful. Writers are generally known for being sat at their desks writing for most of the time. I think he bucks the trend.

You chose to call your book Dostoevsky in Love . Can you tell us a little about that decision?

Yes. There were two types of love that I wanted to talk about.

Recent biographies have been very keen to talk about him as an intellectual, and I think most people – at least in terms of the general readership – don’t know much about his personal life. It’s a shame, because he had such a fascinating life and it makes a great story.

There’s another kind of love, maybe a gentler definition, which is about how he thought we could try to create a world that we all want to live in; that is, Christian love, compassion. He believed strongly that the world isn’t about good and bad people. It’s about the struggle in each person to act well or badly. We all have the capacity to do either. He really wanted to foster the instinct for love in his readers. I think that’s one of the best ways to read him consistently across his work.

As you mentioned, he has a very varied output, but it’s this worldview that brings it together?

Yes, for me, what draws it together is this underlying idea of love.

The next book you want to recommend is Memoirs from the House of the Dead , by Dostoevsky himself. You’ve specified the translation by Jessie Coulson.

During his lifetime, it was thought to be one of the most important books he’d written. Tolstoy didn’t have a huge amount of praise for his rivals, but when he read House of the Dead he said he “didn’t know a better book in all our literature.”

People think of Dostoevsky as writing these almost melodramatic plots with a large cast, what’s been described as ‘fantastic realism.’ It’s an intensified version of reality. Whereas House of the Dead is journalism, really, but it couldn’t be called that at the time so it’s framed as a novel. It’s part of a genre called Zapiski, which means ‘notes’ or ‘scribbles’. It’s nominally about a third person, but it’s obviously heavily influenced by his experience in prison. I don’t think you could have later writers like Solzhenitsyn without this book.

“He’d win arguments by pulling up his trouser leg, showing the scars from his shackles”

It’s also not very well known to English readers, and it’s a good way of understanding what Dostoevsky went through, how he became the writer that his contemporaries saw him as. He would go to literary salons and people revered him because of what he had been through; he’d win arguments by pulling up his trouser leg, showing the scars from his shackles… it was a big part of who he was, and his literary persona.

It’s also just a great book. There are incredible scenes – my favourite is a bathhouse scene, in a traditional Russian steam room. They’re all slapping themselves with birch twigs, about 80 prisoners crammed in a five by five metre cube. Grime is washing off them onto the people crouching below. He describes the sludge on the floor as being an inch thick, they’re slipping around in it and their chains are getting caught up in each other’s. And as they slap themselves with the birch twigs, you see all the scars from their various lashings and other corporal punishments getting redder and redder. That scene will stay with you forever.

That autofictional element, the crossover between Dostoevsky’s fiction and the events of his life, forms the basis of your book. Could you talk more about these commonalities?

Even his first biographers noted that there were very close relations between his life and some of the subjective passages scattered through his fiction. Other academics have noted that he made use of his life experience, mobilising it as a way of showing his authenticity. A good example is when he talks about what it’s like for the condemned man in the last minute of his life: anyone reading that passage for the first time would have known that it was something he spoke about from experience, that mock execution.

Most biographies will walk up to the line of fiction and talk about influence but are unwilling to overtly pick from the fiction events that appear to be resonant with his life experience. But there are so many clear parallels to his life. I suppose what I was interested in was trying to be faithful to his patterns of thinking. His fiction is one way to gain that insight.

Well sure. And given how eventful a life it was, it would be a waste if he didn’t make the most of it in his writing. But let’s talk about book three, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences , by Anna Dostoevsky, his second wife. The book’s translated by Beatrice Stillman.

Anna was vital in securing his legacy after he died. And it was Anna who was the love of his life. She’s written these Reminiscences of her time with him, and there are so many lovely insights into their relationship and the kind of person he was.

She was a stenographer so she wrote in shorthand, which meant she was writing a lot of these notes in real time, with Dostoevsky in the same room. You know: ‘He’s just annoyed me by spending all this money at the roulette table.’ He didn’t know what she was writing, so she was extraordinarily candid—more than you might expect, even from a diary format.

So we have real insight into what it was like to live with the guy, and it’s fascinating because novelists tend to have high ideals, and most of us find it hard to live up to our own ideals. It would be a sad thing if our ideals weren’t higher than our practice, but it does give you a sense of what it was like to live with a man who I think anyone would accept could be difficult company.

“The world isn’t about good and bad people. It’s about the struggle in each person to act well or badly.”

But their love for each other is genuinely really touching. The way he proposed was quite beautiful, he basically told her he was planning a new book, but he didn’t know if it was realistic, and he asked for her opinion. ‘There’s this sick old man, who’s kind of talented but never really found his moment. And he meets this young girl.’ And Anna said: ‘oh, is she handsome?’ and he said, ‘Well, not particularly, but she has a good soul and a good heart.’ The charmer.

He goes on: ‘is it reasonable to expect that such a lovely young woman could love an old, sick, poor man with no prospects?’ and she says, ‘well, if he has a good heart, that’s the main thing. I mean, does anyone love anyone for their riches?’ You’re thinking, bless you. Yes.

Anyway, eventually he says it. ‘What if that old man were me, and that young woman were you, and I asked for your hand. What would you say?’ She said: ‘I will love you for the rest of my life.’ That’s how they got married.

Terribly romantic. And what about the book that brought them together? The Gambler.  Did it pay off his debts?

It paid off that particular debt. The contract was with a thoroughly evil publisher called Stellovsky. Dostoevsky borrowed 3,000 rubles from the man, on the condition that he write a new novel for him in 12 months, otherwise he’d forfeit all his copyrights for the next nine years. Dostoevsky spent the next eleven months writing Crime and Punishment instead, then in the 11th month, he tried to ask for a deadline extension and Stellovsky said, ‘no, no. This is all just a tactic, I want your copyrights.’

That’s when Dostoevsky freaked out. His friend recommended a stenographer, and together they worked night and day for a full month and whipped out a 200-page book. It’s very impressive. It’s not his best work, but still an impressive feat.

Absolutely. Apparently Kazuo Ishiguro wrote The Remains of the Day in four intense weeks. It boggles the mind. Anyway, we’ll come to Crime and Punishment in just a minute, but first let’s talk about The Master of Petersburg , by J. M. Coetzee.

This is one of the books that inspired me to write mine. In The Master of Petersburg, Coetzee basically creates a fictional version of Dostoevsky who goes to St Petersburg from his exile in Europe with Anna, because his stepson has died in mysterious circumstances. In real life, Dostoevsky did have a stepson who he didn’t get on particularly well with. They had a rocky relationship.

So Coetzee’s created a sort of counterfactual, partly inspired – sadly – by his own son falling from an 11th-floor balcony. That plays into the emotional truth of this amazing novel, which also vividly evokes the atmosphere of the time – all these little alleyways and small courtyards where people are hanging out their laundry, the sights and sounds and smells of St Petersburg of the time. It’s a brilliant, atmospheric way of bringing this period to life.

I think it’s very true to the atmosphere of Dostoevsky’s life, and the way he thought about St Petersburg. Admittedly it’s brave to veer completely off script and create a new version – it’s not a historical novel, it’s very much a fictional novel. And that kind of gave me permission to conceive of a book about Dostoevsky as something more creative than the trainlines set out in a conventional biography.

Do you think a reader can gain understanding of Dostoevsky as a real person from a work of fiction like this?

It’s a good way to evoke the spirit of the times and to give people a rough sense of who the guy was. But the issue with fiction is that you don’t know which parts are faithful to historical events. Part of what I wanted to do was see if it was possible to write something both novelistic and true-to-life: are those impulses in fundamental conflict, or is it possible to create a synthesis? My book is an attempt to answer that question.

I think that brings us to Crime and Punishment . As you’ve already mentioned, Dostoevsky was writing this book at a time in his life when he was under a great deal of financial and emotional stress. It’s become a great classic, but I suspect more people have it on their bookshelf than have read it. So: is it worth it? Why should people read Crime and Punishment?

It’s definitely worth it. It’s hard to choose only five books. The temptation is just to put down Dostoevsky’s five long novels and say, look, here’s your reading list, off you go. Some people will be upset that I haven’t included The Brothers Karamazov , which in some ways is the culmination of his work.

I think Crime and Punishment is probably his most conventional novel. It’s effectively a sort of literary crime novel, and is in some ways quite typical of its time. It’s got a fascinating structure, where a full 80% of the novel comes after he’s committed the crime but before he reaches the punishment. So for the majority of the novel, you are in suspense and, despite the title, a part of you genuinely believes he might get away with it. It’s a real literary feat, I think, to bring you onside with a guy whose avowed mission is to kill an old woman with an axe. If you think about what his contemporaries were doing, I think it’s an incredible novel – in terms of the precedents that are set and the boundaries of what the novel can be and how risky it can be. It also explores a lot of the themes that preoccupy him in a really fine resolution.

One thing I wanted to mention: I recommend this specific translation by Oliver Ready, because his new translation gives us the clearest possible sense of how vivid the language can be. There has been a whole, long, troubled translation history of Dostoevsky, and huge arguments over whether you should be literal or true to the spirit. I think if you haven’t picked up a Dostoevsky book and enjoyed it, Oliver Ready’s translation is where you should go to get a sense of what he can do as a writer. Ready’s equal to the task of translating Dostoevsky. It’s an incredible edition.

Great tip, thank you. And – just as a sidebar – do you have a particular translation of The Brothers Karamazov that you favour?

This is just my personal taste, but I really like Constance Garnett’s . She’s quite true to Dostoevsky’s Victorian style. She’s not perfect, though. The other major translation was by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky . Debate rages over which of these is better. In general terms, I’d say Garnett is a bit more graceful at the expense of sometimes smoothing over rough patches, and the Pevear-Volokhonsky is maybe truer to the original. But some people find that literal-ness to get in the way of the reading experience. I personally prefer Garnett.

Finally, could you tell us what Dostoevsky has come to mean to you?

What’s been fascinating about immersing myself in his writing for the last few years has been watching someone tackle some of the biggest questions we face as a species. You know: what it means to be good, the existence of God, how to create a functioning society. And a number of questions we still wrestle with, like free speech . Watching him get closer and closer to his perfect argument, or his best articulation and never quite feeling that he’s reached it. But there’s this incredibly satisfying feeling of him spiralling around the truth, getting ever closer.

I don’t think it’s possible to pinpoint the one perfect sentence that will solve everything. But I do think that endeavour is worthwhile, and something we could all aspire towards.

February 8, 2021

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]

Alex Christofi

Alex Christofi

Alex Christofi is Editorial Director at Transworld and the author of the novels Let Us Be True and Glass , winner of the Betty Trask Prize for fiction. He has written for numerous publications including The Guardian , The London Magazine, New Humanist, The White Review and the Brixton Review of Books , and contributed an essay to the anthology What Doesn't Kill You: Fifteen Stories of Survival . Dostoevsky in Love is his first work of non-fiction.

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Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

A magnificent one-volume abridgement of one of the greatest literary biographies of our time

best biography dostoevsky

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Joseph Frank’s award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language—and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank’s monumental, 2,500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly readable volume with a new preface by the author. Carefully preserving the original work’s acclaimed narrative style and combination of biography, intellectual history, and literary criticism, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time illuminates the writer’s works—from his first novel Poor Folk to Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov —by setting them in their personal, historical, and above all ideological context. More than a biography in the usual sense, this is a cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia, providing both a rich picture of the world in which Dostoevsky lived and a major reinterpretation of his life and work.

Awards and Recognition

  • Co-Winner of the Etkind Prize, European University at St. Petersburg
  • Awards for Frank's Dostoevsky Volumes: National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography 1984 - Los Angeles Times Book Prize - 2 James Russell Lowell Prizes - 2 Christian Gauss Awards

best biography dostoevsky

"A monumental achievement. . . This is not a literary biography in the usual sense of the term. . . . It is, rather, an exhaustive history of Dostoyevsky's mind, an encyclopedic account of the author as major novelist and thinker, essayist and editor, journalist and polemicist. . . . Wrought with tireless love and boundless ingenuity, it . . . [is] a multifaceted tribute from an erudite and penetrating cultural critic to one of the great masters of 19th-century fiction."—Michael Scammell, New York Times Book Review

"It is unquestionably the fullest, most nuanced and evenhanded—not to mention the most informative—account of its subject in any language, and it has significantly changed our understanding of both the man and his work."—Donald Fanger, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"In his aim of elucidating the setting within which Dostoevsky wrote—personal on the one hand, social, historical, cultural, literary, and philosophical on the other—Frank has succeeded triumphantly."—J. M. Coetzee, New York Review of Books

" Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time thus immediately becomes the essential one-volume commentary on the intellectual dynamics and artistry of this great novelist's impassioned, idea-driven fiction. . . . To understand Dostoevsky's often savage satire or nightmarish visions or just the conversations among the Karamazov brothers, one needs to grasp not only the text but also the ideological context. To both of these there is no better guide than Joseph Frank."—Michael Dirda, Wall Street Journal

"Magnificent. . . . A deeply absorbing account."—James Wood, New Republic

"The ideal one-volume biography of Dostoevsky could only come through a distillation of the much-acclaimed five-volume biography (1976-2002) by Joseph Frank. In compressing his longer work, editor Mary Petrusewicz tightens the rigor of a narrative that already departed from traditional biography by focusing chiefly on the ideas with which the Russian author wrestled so powerfully, providing the details of his personal life only as incidental background. Thus, for example, while readers do learn of formative incidents during Dostoevsky's four years in tsarist prison camp, what they see most clearly is how the prison experience deepened the author's faith in God while dampening his zeal for political reform. In a similar way, Frank limns only briefly the life experiences surrounding the writing of the major novels— Crime and Punishment , Demons , and Brothers Karamazov —devoting his scrutiny largely to how Dostoevsky develops the ideological tensions within each work. Readers consequently see, for instance, how Napoleonic illusions justify Raskolnikov's bloody crimes, how the Worship of Man dooms Kirillov to suicide, and how deep Christian faith enables Alyosha to resist Ivan's corrosive rationalism. Yet while probing Dostoevsky's themes, Frank also examines the artistry that gives them imaginative life, highlighting—for example—perspectival techniques that anticipate those of Woolf and Joyce. A masterful abridgement."—Bryce Christensen, Booklist

"Frank displays a brilliant command of Dostoyevsky's heroic endeavors, and his biography reads readily, especially for such a scholarly work. It compares nicely with Leon Edel's multivolume biography of Henry James. Highly recommended."—Robert Kelly, Library Journal

"It is wonderfully lucidly written and a marvellous portrait of the man behind the books."—Nadine Gordimer, Independent

"This extraordinary biography succeeds in making both irony and great ideas wholly alive, immediately accessible to us. It is a great work, both of scholarship and of art."—A. S. Byatt, Sunday Times

"A narrative of such compelling precision, thoroughness and insight as to give the reader a sense not just of acquaintanceship, but of complete identification with Dostoevsky, of looking through his eyes and understanding with his mind."—Helen Muchnic, Boston Globe

"One of the finest achievements of American literary scholarship."—René Wellek, Washington Post Book World

" Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time at last offers non-specialist readers access to the definitive biography of an important figure in the history of the novel. . . . Patient, cautious, critical but not judgmental, using clear language and a chronologically ordered narrative structure, Frank neutralises the unreliable and hysterical self-constructions of which his subject was capable. The result is like watching an artist building an intricate, large-scale painting around a single figure. . . . Frank's great insight is that, just as no one aspect of Dostoevsky's complex personality can be separated from the others, no part of his writing—whether aesthetic, moral, religious or political—can be quarantined from the others. Frank's biography honours the polyphony of Dostoevsky's novelistic imagination: even in truncated form, it is a rare triumph."—Geordie Williamson, Australian

"Frank's monumental five-volume study of Dostoevsky deserves to be read, if only as an inspiring lesson about how much more thrilling a focus on ideas can be than the standard biography's obsession with the connections between creativity and the subject's personal life. The series has been condensed with incisive care and respect, giving those with limited time (and budget) a chance to engage with a revelatory vision of the Russian writer's enduring greatness."—Bill Marx, PRI's "The World"

"This is the Dostoevsky we encounter in Joseph Frank's superb Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time , a one-volume, 984-page condensation of Frank's five-volume biography of the author, written over the course of a long and distinguished career. . . . Few biographers could muster the intelligence and imagination needed to capture all this in a single tome. We should be grateful for Joseph Frank."—Peter Savodnik, Commentary

"With the publication of Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time earlier this year, a massive abridgement of five volumes written over three decades, Frank breaks once and for all with his early critic's stilted categories in portraying the human subject. His innovative method of biography, influenced heavily by literary criticism, starts with artistic expression and moves backward, seeking to carefully situate his subject within ideological context. . . . Without a doubt, the genius of Frank's form is in combining three modalities in crafting his narrative: literary criticism, social and intellectual history, and biography."—Aaron Stuvland, Politics and Culture

"Joseph Frank's magisterial five-volume biography of Dostoevsky—one of the exemplary achievements of our era—has invaluably been published in an abridged one-volume edition."—Jeff Simon, Buffalo News

"The depth of Frank's achievement is to put the writer and his work in social, political, ideological and historical context."—Jeff Baker, Oregonian

"Most of us spend much of our life trying to understand only a handful of people we know and love, in a span of time usually extending just three generations (from our parents to our children). Imagine, then, devoting your life to trying to make sense of one other person long dead, whom you had necessarily never met, with whom you may have nothing in common, and whose times and works must always seem elusive, encoded and frustratingly out of your reach. In a pursuit of that kind, Leon Edel trudged through five volumes on Henry James, Robert Caro is working away on his fourth installment of Lyndon Johnson's biography, and Edmund Morris is finalizing his third book on Teddy Roosevelt. Joseph Frank, though, trumps them all. After writing Feodor Dostoevsky's biography in five volumes, Frank and a gifted editor (Mary Petrusewicz) have now turned that massive, interminable endeavour into an abridged, accessible one-volume edition."—Mark Thomas, Canberra Times

"Joseph Frank, emeritus professor of Slavic and comparative literature at Stanford and Princeton universities, fully grasped the pressure of the political and religious issues seething in and around the visionary author to whom he dedicated his career. It took him five highly praised volumes and 26 years (1976-2002) to give a full account of Dostoevsky's life, works and times; this new, hefty condensation was done in collaboration with editor and Russian scholar Mary Petrusewicz, on condition that the original five volumes remain in print, available to anyone 'wishing for a wider horizon.' . . . Frank's magisterial homage deserves no less recognition."—Judith Armstrong, The Age

"Frank's five-volume biography has been called 'magisterial' and monumental,' as well as 'nuanced,' 'lucid' and 'penetrating.' The same might be said of this shorter version."—Marilyn McEntyre, Christian Century

"Frank's contribution to understanding Dostoevsky is no less than Dostoevsky's own gift to the world of literature."—Sarthak Shankar, Organiser

"Interspersed with others, it took me a while to read this altogether majestic book—but I'm so glad I did. [T]his tomb more than illuminates Dostoevsky's life vast array of brilliant writing."—David Marx, David Marx

"One of the greatest literary biographies ever written, Frank's five-volume account details the nearly unfathomable life and literary career of a writer who endured epilepsy and exile."—Jonathon Sturgeon, Flavorwire

"Although the pace has quickened, the serene and magnificent persistence that Joseph Frank brought to his five volumes resonates fully in this distilled story. If (as Frank tells us) Dostoevsky 'felt ideas,' then Frank 'feels biography' at any scale, with a perfect sense of proportion."—Caryl Emerson, Princeton University, author of The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

"[This book] ensures Frank's status as the definitive literary biographer of one of the best fiction writers ever."—David Foster Wallace

"The editing and deep thought that have gone into this magnificent one-volume condensation of Frank's magnum opus are to be greatly admired. This is the best biography of Dostoevsky, the best reading of some of the major novels, the best cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia. Just the best."—Robin Feuer Miller, Brandeis University, author of Dostoevsky's Unfinished Journey

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best biography dostoevsky

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book: Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote the classics Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. His work explored psychology and existentialism.

fyodor dostoyevsky

Who Was Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Quick facts.

FULL NAME: Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky BORN: November 11, 1821 DIED: February 9, 1881 BIRTHPLACE: Moscow

Born Nov. 11, 1821 in Moscow, Russia, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was educated at home until 1833. He studied to be a military engineer, but shortly after graduating decided to become a writer. He experienced traumatic events, including a mock execution and exile. His work explored the human condition and is credited with shaping existentialism. Crime and Punishment is one of his most well-known novels.

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best biography dostoevsky

  • M.F.A, Dramatic Writing, Arizona State University
  • B.A., English Literature, Arizona State University
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (November 11, 1821 – February 9, 1881) was a Russian novelist. His works of prose deal heavily with philosophical, religious, and psychological themes and are influenced by the complicated social and political milieu of nineteenth-century Russia.

Fast Facts: Fyodor Dostoevsky

  • Full Name:  Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
  • Known For:  Russian essayist and novelist
  • Born:  November 11, 1821 in Moscow, Russia
  • Parents:  Dr. Mikhail Andreevich and Maria (née Nechayeva) Dostoevsky
  • Died: February 9, 1881 in St. Petersburg, Russia
  • Education:  Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute
  • Selected Works:   Notes from Underground  (1864), Crime and Punishment  (1866), The Idiot  (1868–1869), Demons  (1871–1872), The Brothers Karamazov  (1879–1880)
  • Spouses:  Maria Dmitriyevna Isaeva (m. 1857–1864), Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina (m. 1867⁠–⁠1881)
  • Children:  Sonya Fyodorovna Dostoevsky (1868–1868), Lyubov Fyodorovna Dostoevsky (1869–1926), Fyodor Fyodorovich Dostoevsky (1871–1922), Alexey Fyodorovich Dostoevsky (1875–1878)
  • Notable Quote:  “Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.”

Dostoevsky descended from minor Russian nobility, but by the time he was born, several generations down the line, his direct family did not bear any titles of nobility. He was the second son of Mikhail Andreevich Dostoevsky and Maria Dostoevsky (formerly Nechayeva). On Mikhail’s side, the family profession was the clergy, but Mikhail instead ran away, broke ties with his family, and enrolled in medical school in Moscow , where he became first a military doctor and, eventually, a doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital for the poor. In 1828, he was promoted to collegiate assessor, which gave him status equal to certain nobles.

Along with his older brother (named Mikhail after their father), Fyodor Dostoevsky had six younger siblings, five of whom lived to adulthood. Although the family was able to acquire a summer estate away from the city, most of Dostoevsky’s childhood was spent in Moscow at the physician’s residence on the grounds of Mariinsky Hospital, which meant that he observed the sick and impoverished from a very young age. From a similarly young age, he was introduced to literature, beginning with fables , fairy tales , and the Bible, and soon branching out into other genres and authors.

As a boy, Dostoevsky was curious and emotional, but not in the best physical health. He was sent first to a French boarding school, then to one in Moscow, where he felt largely out of place among his more aristocratic classmates. Much like the experiences and encounters of his childhood, his life at boarding school later found its way into his writings.

Academia, Engineering, and Military Service

When Dostoevsky was 15, he and his brother Mikhail were both forced to leave their academic studies behind and begin pursuing military careers at St. Petersburg’s Nikolayev Military Engineering School, which was free to attend. Eventually, Mikhail was rejected for ill health, but Dostoevsky was admitted, albeit rather unwillingly. He had little interest in math, science, engineering, or the military as a whole, and his philosophical, stubborn personality didn’t fit in with his peers (although he did earn their respect, if not their friendship).

In the late 1830s, Dostoevsky suffered several setbacks. In the fall of 1837, his mother died of tuberculosis . Two years later, his father died. The official cause of death was determined to be a stroke, but a neighbor and one of the younger Dostoevsky brothers spread a rumor that the family’s serfs had murdered him. Later reports suggested that young Fyodor Dostoevsky suffered an epileptic seizure around this time, but the sources for this story were later proved unreliable.

After his father’s death, Dostoevsky passed his first set of exams and became an engineer cadet, which allowed him to move out of academy housing and into a living situation with friends. He often visited Mikhail, who had settled in Reval, and attended cultural events such as the ballet and the opera. In 1843, he secured a job as a lieutenant engineer, but he was already distracted by literary pursuits. He began his career by publishing translations; his first, a translation of Honoré de Balzac's novel Eugénie Grandet , was published in the summer of 1843. Although he published several translations around this time, none of them were particularly successful, and he found himself struggling financially.

Early Career and Exile (1844-1854)

  • Poor Folk  (1846)
  • The Double  (1846)
  • "Mr. Prokharchin" (1846)
  • The Landlady  (1847)
  • "Novel in Nine Letters" (1847)
  • "Another Man's Wife and a Husband under the Bed" (1848)
  • "A Weak Heart" (1848)
  • "Polzunkov" (1848)
  • "An Honest Thief" (1848)
  • "A Christmas Tree and a Wedding" (1848)
  • "White Nights" (1848)
  • "A Little Hero" (1849)

Dostoevsky hoped that his first novel, Poor Folk , would be enough of a commercial success to help pull him out of his financial difficulties, at least for the time being. The novel was completed in 1845, and his friend and roommate Dmitry Grigorovitch was able to help him get the manuscript in front of the right people in the literary community. It was published in January 1846 and became an immediate success, both critically and commercially. In order to focus more on his writing, he resigned his military position. In 1846, his next novel, The Double , was published.

As he immersed himself further in the literary world, Dostoevsky began embracing the ideals of socialism . This period of philosophical inquiry coincided with a downturn in his literary and financial fortunes: The Double was poorly received, and his subsequent short stories were as well, and he began suffering from seizures and other health problems. He joined a series of socialist groups , which provided him with assistance as well as friendship, including the Petrashevsky Circle (so named for its founder Mikhail Petrashevsky), who frequently met to discuss social reforms such as the abolition of serfdom and freedom of press and speech from censorship.

In 1849, however, the circle was denounced to Ivan Liprandi, a government official at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and accused of reading and circulating banned works that criticized the government. Fearing a revolution, the government of Tsar Nicholas I deemed these critics to be very dangerous criminals. They were sentenced to be executed and were only reprieved at the last possible moment when a letter from the tsar arrived just before the execution, commuting their sentences to exile and hard labor followed by conscription . Dostoyevsky was exiled to Siberia for his sentence, during which time he suffered several health complications but earned the respect of many of his fellow prisoners. 

Return From Exile (1854-1865)

  • Uncle's Dream  (1859)
  • The Village of Stepanchikovo (1859)
  • Humiliated and Insulted (1861)
  • The House of the Dead (1862)
  • "A Nasty Story" (1862)
  • Winter Notes on Summer Impressions  (1863)
  • Notes from Underground (1864)
  • "The Crocodile" (1865)

Dostoevsky completed his prison sentence in February 1854, and he published a novel based on his experiences, The House of the Dead , in 1861. In 1854, he moved to Semipalatinsk to serve out the rest of his sentence, forced military service in the Siberian Army Corps of the Seventh Line Battalion. While there, he began working as a tutor to the children of the nearby upper-class families.

It was in these circles that Dostoevsky first met Alexander Ivanovich Isaev and Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva. He soon fell in love with Maria, although she was married. Alexander had to take a new military posting in 1855, where he was killed, so Maria moved herself and her son in with Dostoevsky. After he sent a letter of formal apology in 1856, Dostoevsky had his rights to marry and to publish again restored; he and Maria married in 1857. Their marriage was not particularly happy, due to their differences in personality and his ongoing health problems. Those same health problems also led to him being released from his military obligations in 1859, after which he was allowed to return from exile and, eventually, move back to St. Petersburg.

He published a handful of short stories around 1860, including “A Little Hero,” which was the only work he produced while in prison. In 1862 and 1863, Dostoevsky took a handful of trips out of Russia and throughout western Europe. He wrote an essay, “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions,” inspired by these travels and critiquing a wide range of what he viewed as social ills, from capitalism to organized Christianity and more.

While in Paris, he met and fell in love with Polina Suslova and gambled away much of his fortune, which put him in a more severe situation come 1864, when his wife and brother both died, leaving him as the sole supporter of his stepson and his brother’s surviving family. Compounding matters, Epoch , the magazine he and his brother had founded, failed.

Successful Writing and Personal Turmoil (1866-1873)

  • Crime and Punishment (1866)
  • The Gambler  (1867)
  • The Idiot (1869)
  • The Eternal Husband  (1870)
  • Demons  (1872)

Fortunately, the next period of Dostoevsky’s life was to be considerably more successful. In the first two months of 1866, the first installments of what would become Crime and Punishment , his most famous work, were published. The work proved incredibly popular, and by the end of the year, he had also finished the short novel The Gambler .

To complete The Gambler on time, Dostoevsky engaged the help of a secretary, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, who was 25 years younger than him. The following year, they were married. Despite the significant income from Crime and Punishment , Anna was forced to sell her personal valuables to cover her husband’s debts. Their first child, daughter Sonya, was born in March 1868 and died only three months later.

Dostoevsky completed his next work, The Idiot , in 1869, and their second daughter, Lyubov, was born later that same year. By 1871, however, their family was in a dire financial situation yet again. In 1873, they founded their own publishing company, which published and sold Dostoevsky’s latest work, Demons . Fortunately, the book and the business were both successful. They had two more children: Fyodor, born in 1871, and Alexey, born in 1875. Dostoevsky wanted to start a new periodical, A Writer's Diary , but he was unable to afford the costs. Instead, the Diary was published in another publication, The Citizen , and Dostoevsky was paid an annual salary for contributing the essays.

Declining Health (1874-1880)

  • The Adolescent (1875)
  • "A Gentle Creature" (1876)
  • "The Peasant Marey" (1876)
  • "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" (1877)
  • The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
  • A Writer's Diary  (1873–1881)

In March 1874, Dostoevsky decided to leave his work at The Citizen ; the stress of the work and the constant surveillance, court cases, and interference by the government proved too much for him and his precarious health to handle. His doctors suggested he leave Russia for a time to try to shore up his health, and he spent some months away before returning to St. Petersburg in July 1874. He eventually finished an ongoing work, The Adolescent , in 1875.

Dostoevsky continued working on his A Writer’s Diary , which included a range of essays and short stories surrounding some of his favorite themes and concerns. The compilation became his most successful publication ever, and he began receiving more letters and visitors than ever before. It was so popular, in fact, that (in a major reversal from his earlier life), he was summoned to the court of Tsar Alexander II to present him with a copy of the book and to receive the tsar’s request to help educate his sons.

Although his career was more successful than ever, his health suffered, with four seizures in the span of a single month in early 1877. He also lost his young son, Alexei, to a seizure in 1878. Between 1879 and 1880, Dostoevsky received a slew of honors and honorary appointments, including the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Slavic Benevolent Society, and the Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale. When he was elected vice president of the Slavic Benevolent Society in 1880, he gave a speech that was praised widely but also criticized harshly, leading to further stress on his health.

Literary Themes and Styles

Dostoevsky was heavily influenced by his political, philosophical, and religious beliefs, which were in turn influenced by the situation in Russia during his time. His political beliefs were intrinsically tied to his Christian faith, which placed him in an unusual position: he decried socialism and liberalism as atheist and degrading to society as a whole, but also disapproved of more traditional arrangements like feudalism and oligarchy . Still, he was a pacifist and despised ideas of violent revolution. His faith and his belief that morality was the key to improving society are threaded through most of his writings.

In terms of writing style, Dostoevsky’s hallmark was his use of polyphony—that is, the weaving together of multiple narratives and narrative voices within a single work. Rather than have an overarching voice of the author who has all the information and steers the reader towards the “right” knowledge, his novels tend to simply present characters and viewpoints and let them develop more naturally. There is no one “truth” within these novels, which ties in closely with the philosophical bend to much of his work.

Dostoevsky’s works often explore human nature and all the psychological quirks of humankind. In some regards, there are Gothic underpinnings to these explorations, as seen in his fascination with dreams, irrational emotions, and the concept of moral and literal darkness, as seen in everything from The Brothers Karamazov to Crime and Punishment and more. His version of realism, psychological realism , was concerned particularly with the reality of the inner lives of humans, even more so than the realism of society at large.

On January 26, 1881, Dostoevsky suffered two pulmonary hemorrhages in quick succession. When Anna called for a doctor, the prognosis was very grim, and Dostoevsky suffered a third hemorrhage soon after. He summoned his children to see him before his death and insisted on the Parable of the Prodigal Son being read to them—a parable about sin, repentance, and forgiveness. Dostoevsky died on February 9, 1881.

Dostoevsky was buried in the Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Convent in St. Petersburg, in the same cemetery as his favorite poets, Nikolay Karamzin and Vasily Zhukovsky. The exact number of mourners at his funeral is unclear, as different sources have reported numbers as varied as 40,000 to 100,000. His gravestone is inscribed with a quote from the Gospel of John: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it dies, it bringeth forth much fruit.”

Dostoevsky’s particular brand of human-focused, spiritual, and psychological writing has played a part in inspiring a wide range of modern cultural movements, including surrealism, existentialism, and even the Beat Generation, and he is considered a major forerunner of Russian existentialism, expressionism, and psychoanalysis.

In general, Dostoevsky is considered one of the great authors of Russian literature . Like most writers, he was ultimately received with great praise alongside severe criticism; Vladimir Nabokov was particularly critical of Dostoevsky and of the praise with which he was received. On the opposite side of things, however, luminaries including Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ernest Hemingway all spoke of him and his writing in glowing terms. To this day, he remains one of the most widely-read and studied authors, and his works have been translated across the globe.

  • Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881 . Princeton University Press, 2003.
  • Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849 . Princeton University Press, 1979.
  • Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time . Princeton University Press, 2009.
  • Kjetsaa, Geir. Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Writer's Life . Fawcett Columbine, 1989.
  • Characters' Thoughts and Motivations in Psychological Realism
  • "Crime and Punishment"
  • Biography of Czar Nicholas II, Last Czar of Russia
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Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Life in Letters, Memoirs, and Criticism: Volume 1: In the Beginning, 1821–1845

Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Life in Letters, Memoirs, and Criticism: Volume 2: The Gathering Storm, 1846–1847

Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life

Lectures on Dostoevsky

How should one narrate the life of a great writer? Joseph Frank’s five-volume biography of Dostoevsky, now supplemented by his Lectures on Dostoevsky , revivified the form by situating the novelist within the ideological struggles of his day. The many fascinating primary sources about Dostoevsky’s life inspired Thomas Marullo to experiment with a new kind of biography in his brilliant Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Life in Letters, Memoirs, and Criticism. (A third volume is still to come.) The novelist Alex Christofi was similarly inspired, and while his innovative biography, Dostoevsky in Love , occasionally intrigues, it ultimately offers little that’s new. All three recognize the difficulty of distinguishing Dostoevsky’s actual life from the legends about him.

The special importance Russians have traditionally assigned to literature has conferred on writers a mythic aura. Not surprisingly, the real and imagined lives of Pushkin, Griboedov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Mandelstam, and others have prompted novelistic treatment by significant writers, from Yuri Tynyanov to J.M. Coetzee. As the Russian Formalist theoretician Boris Tomashevsky observed, widely shared legends shape readers’ experience and so become “literary facts” in themselves. Tomashevsky argued that scholars should therefore examine “how the poet’s biography operates in the reader’s consciousness.” Authors, eager to excite interest, “create for themselves an artificial legendary biography composed of intentionally selected real and imaginary events,” a process especially important during the Romantic period.

The romantic poet was his own hero. His life was poetry…. The readers cried: “Author! Author!”—but they were actually calling for the slender youth in a cloak, with a lyre in his hands and an enigmatic expression on his face.

In Russia this approach to writers’ lives continued long after Romanticism and, indeed, has never ceased. As poets and novelists became the national conscience, or what Solzhenitsyn called a “second government,” tradition required them not only to create great works but also to live appropriately high-minded lives. When the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov joined in the condemnation of dissident writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, and regretted that they had only been imprisoned rather than summarily executed, the editor and author Alexander Tvardovsky wrote in his diary that “Sholokhov is now a former writer.”

Few writers’ biographies have excited more interest than Dostoevsky’s, as the volumes under review suggest. Several incidents in his life seem like excerpts from his most fantastic tales. Most famous is the story of how, after being imprisoned from April to December 1849 for illegal political activity, Dostoevsky was condemned to death, led out with other prisoners to be shot, and offered last rites. The entire scene had been staged in advance—coffins had been strewn about to make everything look more terrifying—as part of the punishment. At the last possible moment, with the guns trained on the first group of condemned radicals, and Dostoevsky in the next group, the execution was called off. One of the prisoners went mad and never recovered his sanity; another wrote Crime and Punishment .

Dostoevsky, whose sentence was reduced to time in a Siberian prison camp followed by army service, made the most of this near escape. Prince Myshkin, the hero of The Idiot , three times imagines the thoughts of a man being led to execution. Time accelerates exponentially as the mind tries to cram decades into a few final minutes; looking at the crowd, the prisoner feels an infinite loneliness realizing that “not one of them is being executed, but I am to be executed”; his attempts to distract himself fail as everything becomes a symbol of what he wants to forget. “Perhaps there is some man who has been sentenced to death, exposed to this torture, and has then been told ‘you can go!, you are pardoned,’” Myshkin wonders. “Perhaps such a man could tell us” what the experience is like. As every reader knew, and as Dostoevsky counted on their knowing, there was such a man, and he was telling us.

The Idiot also dramatizes another well-known fact: Dostoevsky’s epilepsy. In one thrilling passage, Myshkin, just before an epileptic seizure, remembers in detail what the experience is like. Remarkably enough, it resembles the moments before execution: time accelerates to infinity until he understands “the extraordinary saying [in the Book of Revelation] that ‘there shall be time no longer.’” Epilepsy differs from execution because it replaces the unfathomable horror of the condemned prisoner with an equally unimaginable bliss, which affords a mystical understanding of the very essence of existence. Just before he loses consciousness, Myshkin has time to say to himself, “Yes, for this one moment one might give one’s whole life!” Readers might presume that such experiences enabled insights no other writer could attain.

Almost as famous was Dostoevsky’s addiction to gambling. Picture the scene: in 1867 he has hurried abroad with his bride to escape debtor’s prison. They pawn their clothing but do not raise enough to pay their hotel bill or buy food. At last Dostoevsky receives an advance from his publisher but cannot resist the roulette table, where he loses it all. His novella The Gambler describes this addiction, which, like execution and epilepsy, offers the vertiginous thrill of a maximally intense moment—in this case, because the next instant can make one either a millionaire or a beggar. When the novella’s hero wins, he wastes the money, because what matters to him is the thrill.

After Dostoevsky’s death, more legends accumulated. Best known is the one included in Freud’s “Dostoevsky and Parricide” and elaborated by later biographers and critics. Relying on a document mentioning an unspecified tragic incident in Dostoevsky’s life, Freud presumed that it must have been punishment by a tyrannical father for masturbation and the consequent onset of a nervous disease. When serfs murdered Dostoevsky’s father—as Dostoevsky’s daughter Lyubov reported—Dostoevsky, who in Freud’s view must have desired his father’s death, experienced intense guilt. The quasi death of epilepsy ensued as a self-inflicted punishment, and so the disease was not organic but “hysterical” in origin. Freud speculated that when Dostoevsky was actually punished in Siberia, the substitute punishment of epilepsy must have temporarily ceased.

As Frank and Marullo demonstrate, everything about this widely accepted story is wrong. To begin with, the comment on which Freud based his analysis referred not to an event in early childhood, as he supposed, but to the death of Dostoevsky’s father when Dostoevsky was seventeen. Since the author’s own son Aleksey died of an epileptic seizure at the age of three, it seems likely that the father’s epilepsy was inherited, and so organic rather than hysterical. Of course, as Frank observes, this argument would not have impressed Freud, who, as an unreconstructed Lamarckian, believed in the heritability of acquired characteristics.

Did Dostoevsky’s epilepsy begin when he learned of his father’s murder? Did it cease in Siberia? As Marullo notes, when his father died in 1839, Dostoevsky was studying at the academy of military engineering, and

a seizure would not have passed unnoticed by the hundred or so schoolmates with whom Dostoevsky lived on close terms…. If Dostoevsky had had such an attack, he would have been dismissed immediately by the administrators of the institution.

Far from ceasing in Siberia, Dostoevsky’s epilepsy began there. By then, he was worrying about the cause of his various nervous ailments, including attacks that weakened his memory and produced the sensation that he was dying, and he wanted to return to Russia “to see qualified doctors so as to know what my illness is.” He wondered whether it might be the forerunner of epilepsy. If he still did not know he had epilepsy at this time, he could hardly have experienced his first seizure years before, as Freud had argued.

Believe it or not, Dostoevsky’s first seizure occurred on his honeymoon in 1857, while he was still confined to Siberia. His first wife, Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, who knew nothing of his previous ailments, suddenly heard his unearthly shriek and witnessed his convulsive movements, fainting, foaming at the mouth, and uncontrolled urination. Christofi skillfully evokes this scene, from which the marriage never recovered. He aptly quotes Dostoevsky’s letter to his brother Mikhail about the event: “It scared my wife to death and filled me with sadness and depression. I begged [the doctor] to tell me the whole truth, on his honor. He advised me to beware of the new moon.”

“Dostoevsky now learned, for the first time, the true nature of his malady,” Frank explains in his biography. Dostoevsky explained to Mikhail that

the doctor (well-informed and serious) told me, contrary to everything said previously by doctors, that I had genuine epilepsy , and that I could expect, in one of these seizures, to suffocate because of throat spasms.

He still hoped that the diagnosis was mistaken:

In marrying I completely trusted the doctors who told me that [my symptoms] were only nervous seizures which would pass with a change in the circumstances of my life. If I had known as a fact that I had genuine epilepsy, I would not have married.

The first unmistakable attack, then, occurred precisely where, according to Freud, no attack should have happened. What’s more, it has become abundantly clear that Dostoevsky’s father, Dr. Mikhail Dostoevsky, was not murdered. Frank’s biography conveys the drama of discovering this fact. The text of his first volume accepts the murder as established, but a footnote reverses this judgment: “As the present volume goes to press,” Frank reports, “some important new material has come to light that casts considerable doubt on whether the death of Dr. Dostoevsky was a murder at all.” In asserting that the death was murder, Dostoevsky’s daughter Lyubov had relied on thirdhand information. What’s more, her biography of her father is notoriously unreliable and makes readily identifiable errors.

The murder story took on a life of its own. Not only did it fit Freud’s theory perfectly, it also included all sorts of lurid details. (In one version, the peasants crushed the doctor’s genitals.) But the truth is almost as interesting. Two doctors independently ascertained that Dr. Dostoevsky, who had recently suffered a stroke, died suddenly from another one. Proponents of the murder theory assert that the peasants must have bribed the doctors, but where they could have secured sufficient funds for a bribe has never been explained.

For obvious reasons, the tsarist regime took the charge of serfs’ killing their owners quite seriously, and when the rumor of murder reached them, authorities sent an investigating commission, which eventually exonerated the peasants. The rumor, the commission established, had been deliberately spread by one of Dr. Dostoevsky’s neighbors for financial reasons. If the charge were accepted, the peasants would have been exiled to Siberia, which would have meant that Dr. Dostoevsky’s land could be purchased for considerably less. Today, little doubt remains that this account is correct.

Marullo’s two new volumes supplement and question Frank’s conclusions on this and other matters. Perfecting a technique he first used in his three-volume study of the novelist Ivan Bunin, Marullo weaves a narrative by bringing together diverse illuminating documents—by Dostoevsky, his relatives, his friends, his first biographer, critics commenting on his work, other writers who knew him, Nicholas I, and the commission investigating Dr. Dostoevsky’s death. Letters written while events were unfolding appear side by side with memoirs, some thoughtful and others mendacious, written decades later. Marullo includes “anything and everything they have said about Dostoevsky—the truths and lies; the good, bad, and ugly; even the laughable and ludicrous.” Assembling the thrilling facts and legends about Dostoevsky, Marullo has invented a new genre of biography, “a portrait of the writer in a new and seminal way.” Readers can not only form their own opinions about disputed events, but also trace the origins of various legends. The documents reflect a haze of rumors, plausible mistakes, shrewd guesses, and vindictive falsities that shaped Dostoevsky’s reputation while he lived and the conclusions drawn by biographers and critics ever since.

In his introductions and extensive notes, Marullo corrects misstatements and argues with other scholars, including Frank. While Frank correctly contested most of the Freudian myth, Marullo argues, he still presumed that Dr. Dostoevsky was a tyrant and sadist guilty of “mistreating the peasants abominably.” As a result, Frank concluded that even if Dr. Dostoevsky had not been murdered, and even if his children never believed he had been, Dostoevsky may still have experienced intense guilt for his father’s cruelty to serfs. Such a reaction would explain why Dostoevsky became obsessed with the evils of serfdom and joined a revolutionary organization, a decision that led to his imprisonment.

Against this view, Marullo marshals evidence—impressive, if not conclusive—that Dr. Dostoevsky was an “exemplary” father, that he treated the peasants well, and that there is no reason to suppose Dostoevsky felt any guilt for his father’s death. Future biographers will need to weigh Frank’s and Marullo’s competing arguments in light of whatever evidence is available to them.

Marullo also adds to Frank’s account of events leading to the moment Dostoevsky described as his happiest. After graduating from the school of military engineering—where, according to a friend, “there was no student less capable of military bearing than F.M. Dostoevsky”—he briefly worked for the drafting department of the St. Petersburg Engineering Corps. Dreaming of becoming a writer who would solve the mysteries of the soul, Dostoevsky worked inattentively and once submitted a design for a fortress that had no gates. When Tsar Nicholas I happened to see the drawing, he asked, “What idiot drew this?” The future author of The Idiot was allowed to resign.

Dostoevsky roomed with a friend from the engineering academy, the writer Dmitri Grigorovich, who had developed good connections with literary Petersburg. One night when Dostoevsky was out, Grigorovich borrowed the manuscript of Dostoevsky’s first novel, Poor Folk , to show to the poet Nikolay Nekrasov. “We’ll be able to tell from the first ten pages” whether it is any good, they agreed, and before they knew it, they had finished the whole work. “They both decided to see me at once,” Dostoevsky recalled. “‘Who cares if he’s asleep,’ they said, ‘ this is more important than sleep!’” Having just returned home when they arrived at 4 AM , Dostoevsky was overwhelmed as the two friends, “speaking hastily and with exclamations,” told him of their decision to share the manuscript with the most influential critic of the day, Vissarion Belinsky. “A new Gogol has appeared!” Nekrasov told Belinsky, who replied, “You find Gogols springing up like mushrooms.”

When Nekrasov dropped in on Belinsky the following evening, he had already read Poor Folk and demanded to meet Dostoevsky, who was sure the severe critic would tear his novel apart. But Belinsky could not have been more enthusiastic. “Do you, your very self, realize what it is you have written?” he kept repeating. “Have you yourself comprehended all the terrible truth you have shown to us?” To explain his lack of enthusiasm over some of Dostoevsky’s subsequent works, critics have wrongly argued that Belinsky, whom the Soviets regarded as a forerunner of socialist-realist aesthetics, misread Poor Folk as social criticism rather than psychology. But what Belinsky grasped is that Dostoevsky revealed how economic deprivation is only the beginning of poverty’s ills. Still worse is the psychological harm of losing one’s self-respect. Belinsky especially praised the passages in which, he told Dostoevsky, “this wretched clerk of yours…from humility…does not even dare to acknowledge his own wretchedness…or claim even the right to his own unhappiness.”

“Cherish your gift, remain faithful to it, and be a great writer!” Belinsky advised. This was the moment Dostoevsky deemed his happiest. But it did not last. The extraordinary success of Poor Folk , Marullo explains, “so inflated the writer’s being that he lost contact…with reality,” a judgment with which Dostoevsky, when recalling this period of his life, largely concurred. “For two years…I was sick with a strange disease, a moral one,” he explained. “I fell into hypochondria. There was even a time when I lost my reason. I was extremely irritable, impressionable…and capable of distorting the most ordinary facts.”

Other writers and critics responded to Dostoevsky’s newfound self-importance with shocking cruelty. Turgenev, who became Dostoevsky’s lifelong enemy, deliberately provoked the irritable young man into saying absurdities and then circulated them. “Well, you are one to talk!” Belinsky rebuked Turgenev. “You pick on a sick individual, you egg him on as if you yourself do not see that he is irritated and does not understand what he is saying.” Turgenev, Nekrasov, and the critic Ivan Panaev concocted the story that Dostoevsky demanded that a literary anthology place Poor Folk at the end, the most striking position, and surround it with a border indicating its superior status. Their satiric poem “A Greeting from Belinsky to Dostoevsky” called the young author “a new pimple on literature’s nose” and ended with “Belinsky” enthusing, “I will surround you with a border/And put you at the end.” Marullo includes a translation of the poem and commentaries on Poor Folk. He also provides generous extracts from Nekrasov’s satire The Stone Heart (also called How Great I Am! ), which makes fun of both Belinsky and Dostoevsky.

In his classic biography of Alexander Pope, Maynard Mack assumed the task of presenting the irascible poet in the best possible light. “If the results of the effort in my case are dismissed as special pleading, so be it,” he wrote. “There are few poets who cannot use an advocate.” Scholars, however, are not defense attorneys; they owe their primary allegiance not to the poet but to the truth. Remarkably, neither Frank nor Marullo whitewashes Dostoevsky’s unattractive sides. For those dealing with the last years of Dostoevsky’s life, a crucial test of a biographer’s intellectual honesty is the terrible anti-Semitism that then possessed him. *

On this issue, Christofi, like many others, falls short. He minimizes Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitic outbursts as “of their time. Like his beloved Dickens, he was…too ready to found his edifices on stereotypes…. We must remember that, for many years, anti-Semitism was official policy in Russia.” These comments paint a wholly false picture. Dostoevsky’s diatribes against the Jews were extreme even for his day, and even by Russian standards, which is saying a lot. “What if it weren’t the Jews who numbered three million in Russia but the Russians; and what if there were eighty million Jews?” Dostoevsky asked.

Would they [the Jews] not turn them [the Russians] directly into slaves? Even worse…would they not massacre them altogether, exterminate them completely, as they did more than once with alien peoples in times of old?

No wonder Nazis and genocidal Russian nationalists made use of these comments.

Dostoevsky had once argued for Jewish rights, and always called for compassion for sufferers, so these comments have startled his admirers. Most studies ignore them and the work in which they occur, his one-person periodical, A Writer’s Diary , which he published monthly in 1876 and 1877. As if he were ideologically possessed, like the fanatics in his novel The Demons , he came to believe for about eighteen months that he had discovered the key to history, which enabled him to predict, with no hesitation, that the apocalypse would occur within months. Apocalyptic mythology often presents the Antichrist as a Jew who will lead his adherents in a final battle with true Christians, and these ideas seem to have fueled Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitism. When history failed to end, Dostoevsky suspended A Writer’s Diary . His last novel, The Brothers Karamazov , represents an attempt to rethink the ideas leading to such colossal errors.

Christofi, a novelist, presents his unconventional narrative of Dostoevsky’s life as accurate. Yet he takes extraordinary liberties. The book consists of three types of statements. Direct quotations from the sources are footnoted and presented accurately. Narrative exposition relies on “trusted scholars” but does not indicate the sources for particular facts. It is the third type of material, presented in italics, that involves “artistic license.” Christofi includes passages from Dostoevsky’s writings as if they were direct comments on incidents in his own life. The tortured ruminations of his characters become the author’s thoughts about himself.

“When authors conceive fiction,” Christofi explains, “they often shear memories off from their context to use them as the building blocks of their new world. It is a kind of willful source amnesia.” Christofi reverses this process so that he can “re-attribute many of the memories and sense impressions that litter his fiction” and apply them once again to Dostoevsky. But not all processes are reversible. An egg breaks, but the shards and liquid cannot be reassembled into an egg. And even if passages from novels reflect some real experience, why must they pertain to the author rather than to other people he knew? For that matter, why could they not, as Frank suggests in his lectures, magnify a barely discernible fact in order to examine its implications?

However dubious the method, the result is what counts. Does Christofi’s narrative help us “to understand how people thought…and to represent that thought faithfully so that others might know themselves better,” as he suggests? The reader will look in vain for anything beyond superficial, even mistaken, observations. For example, Christofi claims that Dostoevsky wrote “so much” of The Idiot with the powerful final scene “in mind,” but we know from Dostoevsky’s letters and notebooks that, desperate for money, he began publishing the first serialized parts of this novel without a clue as to its overall plot. The last scene did not occur to him until he was already halfway through the third of four parts, and even after that he continued to consider alternative endings.

In her foreword to the present collection of the lectures Frank delivered at Stanford after his retirement from Princeton, Robin Feuer Miller—long one of Dostoevsky’s subtlest interpreters—observes that Frank “made the genre of biography new again, helping to ignite our general fascination with cultural history.” In chapters on Poor Folk , The Double , The House of the Dead , Notes from Underground , Crime and Punishment , The Idiot , and The Brothers Karamazov , Frank distills his multivolume biography’s provocative and superbly argued readings. In one of his lectures, he addresses the criticism that “in focusing as much as I do on the social-cultural context, I reduce [Dostoevsky’s] novels to being a reflection of the limited issues and questions of his own day.” “There is something to be said for this point of view,” Frank observes, but there is also a danger in reading our own social and political concerns into them. When we do, the novels can no longer teach us anything we don’t already know.

It is also a mistake to read Dostoevsky’s works using “the most general psychological and philosophical categories,” such as “the eternal conflict in Western culture between love and justice,” because the novels’ greatness arises from the specifics of time and place that shed light on those questions as no generalities ever could. The best approach, in Frank’s view, is first to locate Dostoevsky’s fiction and ideas within his immediate concerns, and only then proceed, from the ground up rather than from generalities down, to consider their broader implications.

These lectures do that especially well. Particularly impressive is Frank’s thesis that the experience of the mock execution left Dostoevsky with a completely different view of time and ethics, which Frank calls “eschatological [apocalyptic] apprehension.” Dostoevsky concluded, he says, that “every instant takes on a supreme value,” and “each moment of the present is when a decisive choice has to be made.” That is why Dostoevsky offers so many brilliant descriptions of the agonies of choice at critical moments. What matters most, in his view, is what we can do for another person right in front of us right now. Most essential, as Frank puts it, “is action at every moment, at this very instant, as if time were about to stop and the world would come to an end.” This way of looking at things, which Albert Schweitzer called “interim ethics,” creates an especially urgent sense of compassion, but it also, I think, entails dangers, as Dostoevsky’s susceptibility to literal apocalypticism demonstrates.

Reviewing Dostoevsky’s second work, The Double , Belinsky observed that the young writer had demonstrated “the ability, so to speak, of migrating into the skin of another, a being completely different from himself.” One cannot expect a literary biographer to migrate into the skin of an author the way great novelists do with their characters, but one can hope to understand, if not to actually experience, how the writer viewed the world. Frank accomplishes that, and Marullo gives us the material to do so for ourselves.

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Gary Saul Morson is the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities and a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern. His latest book, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter , was published last year. (February 2024)

Susan McReynolds has explored Dostoevsky’s hatred of Jews in Redemption and the Merchant God: Dostoevsky’s Economy of Salvation and Antisemitism (Northwestern University Press, 2008).  ↩

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The Best Books by Fyodor Dostoyevsky You Should Read

Person holding Crime and Punishment Novel by Dostoyevsky

Fyodor Dostoyevsky is well and truly one of Russia ‘s most influential writers. The many hardships of his life found reflection in his work, helping him to create memorable characters that together form a detailed image of 19th-century Russia. Dostoyevsky brings forward ‘the little man’, a person you would pass on the street without giving a second thought, but in fact who represents the life of the majority of people. They are the backbone of a country, and only through understanding the life of a voiceless human can the psychological portrait of a country begin to be painted. Below are the best Dostoyevsky books that will acquaint you with some of his most memorable characters.

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Crime and Punishment (1866)

The best way to get acquainted with Dostoyevsky is by reading Crime and Punishment . One of the best-known books by the author, as well as a must-read for all Russian kids at school, this one is truly a classic. The story of a poor man that commits a crime in order to survive, but then deals with a greater struggle than poverty – extreme guilt. Along the way, the reader encounters some of the lowest and pitiful creatures that inhabit the streets of St Petersburg . As defined by Dostoyevsky himself, the novel is a psychological work, and the author stands next to the characters rather than controlling them.

Courtesy of Penguin Random House

If you ever feel that there isn’t enough kindness in the world, then it is certainly time to read The Idiot . The main character, Myshkin, is one of the most gentle and kind characters in literature, stuck in an imperfect world of judgemental and cunning people. He has just returned after undergoing treatment in a Swiss mental institution. His involvement in a scandalous love affair and the mistreatment by the people around him bring him back to where he started – a mental institution.

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Poor Folk (1846)

This epistolary novel is written as an exchange of letters between two poor people in St Petersburg – the elderly Makar Devushkin and his beloved Varvara Dobroselova. Despite the slightly ironic tone, the work is an important social novel that gives voice to the disadvantaged people in society. Devushkin’s love for his distant cousin Varvara leads him to continuously search for money to help support her, hoping one day to eventually marry her. But despite his hopes, her parents disapprove of him and a richer man proposes to her, so Varvara is faced with a choice that many young women used to stand against.

Courtesy of Penguin Random House

Demons (1871)

Demons was one of Dostoyevsky’s later works and one of his most politicised pieces. The plot is based on the story of the murder of a student named Ivan Ivanov, which was allegedly committed by members of a revolutionary circle. The novel was a reflection of the growing radical movements among the intelligentsia and the first signs of terrorism. The work is a reflection of Dostoyevsky’s thoughts on the protesting part of society of his time and perhaps also a reflection on his participation in free-thinking circles.

Courtesy of Penguin Random House

The Gambler (1866)

Ironically, this novel was written for money, because of Dostoyevsky having lost money. The commission for the work came after Dostoyevsky lost a significant sum of money belonging not just to himself, but also to his friend whilst gambling. Due to the burdening debt, the writer made a contract to complete work on The Gambler in a very short period of time. The basis of the novel was the idea of describing the psychological state of gambling that engulfs a person involved in the game. Unfortunately for Dostoyevsky , his gambling losses repeating soon after, and from then on he made a promise to his wife never to play again.

Courtesy of Penguin Random House

The Insulted and Humiliated (1861)

The idea to start writing this novel came to Dostoyevsky when he moved to St Petersburg, after having spent time in exile. To a certain extent, the novel is autobiographical and is told from the point of view of a young writer, Vanya, who is struggling to make a living in the 1840s. On the novel’s pages, St Petersburg becomes an open book, and many accurate details of the character’s lives make the city come to life, similar to the works of other writers of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens .

Courtesy of Delphi Classics

The Brothers Karamazov (1879)

The novel is Dostoyevsky’s final work – completed two months before the writer’s death. The complicated plot explores challenging questions, such as freedom, religion and ethics. As some critics suggest, it is a reflection of the different stages in the writer’s life, represented by the three brothers. The overall plot is interwoven with a story of murder, love and societal issues.

Courtesy of Penguin Random House

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28 Best Dostoevsky Books of All Time [Ranked for 2024]

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Fyodor Dostoevsky, a master storyteller from Russia, transformed his turbulent life experiences, including harsh imprisonment and a brush with death, into rich, intricate narratives.

His works, famed for their exploration of psychology, morality, and the human condition, delve into the darkest corners and the most illuminating heights of the human soul, often set against 19th-century Russian society.

With his stories, the mundane becomes extraordinary, and the simplest of stories reveal universal truths. Every word invites you to look deeper into the essence of what it means to be human.

Best Dostoevsky Books

Best overall: crime and punishment, most underrated: the insulted and humiliated, most inspirational: the brothers karamazov, editor’s pick: a gentle creature, 1. crime and punishment.

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Genres: Classics, Fiction, Russian Literature, Philosophy

The plot centers around Raskolnikov’s plan to murder a pawnbroker for her money. He believes this act is justifiable to escape poverty and use the stolen money for good deeds. But it’s not the crime itself that’s the focus of this book, but the aftermath of it.

You’ll find yourself inside Raskolnikov’s conflicted mind, grappling with guilt, fear, and philosophical dilemmas, exploring the darkest corners of the human psyche and society.

This novel is a psychological drama at its best, laying bare the complexities of the human soul. It delves into philosophical questions that are still relevant today. It’s a profound exploration of the struggle between good and evil within us all, making it a must-read.

Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.

What you might love:

  • The book vividly portrays 19th-century Russia, focusing on poverty, class conflict, and justice.
  • It explores philosophical ideas like existentialism and utilitarianism, stimulating deep thought.
  • The book prompts readers to consider moral dilemmas about right and wrong and their consequences.

What might not be for everyone:

  • Dostoevsky’s complex language and long sentences can challenge readers.
  • The book’s long dialogues might not suit those who prefer action or straightforward storytelling.
  • Some might find the novel’s deep dive into philosophical and ethical themes overwhelming.

2. The Brothers Karamazov

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Imagine yourself in a small Russian town, getting to know the Karamazov family. There’s the father, Fyodor Pavlovich, a morally dubious figure, and his three sons—the intellectual Ivan, the passionate Dmitri, and the saintly Alyosha.

Each brother represents different aspects of human nature, from the carnal to the spiritual. The plot thickens when their father is found dead under mysterious circumstances. Suspicion falls on Dmitri, but the truth is far more complex.

As you follow the story, it challenges you to question, reflect, and perhaps even understand a little more about the complexities of life and faith. This book is an essential read for anyone who seeks to explore the depths of human nature and morality.

You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.
  • Its characters and plot provide insights into Russian society, religion, and history.
  • The novel explores moral dilemmas, focusing on free will, justice, and the nature of evil.
  • Dostoevsky challenges readers with deep philosophical questions about life, faith, and morals throughout the story.
  • Its complex philosophical and theological themes might overwhelm some readers.
  • The novel’s moral ambiguity and lack of clear answers could be unsatisfying for some.
  • Readers unfamiliar with Russian history and culture may find certain references in the book difficult to understand.

3. Notes from Underground

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Genres: Classics, Fiction, Philosophy, Russian Literature

Meet the Underground Man, a unique and complex character. As a retired civil servant in St. Petersburg, he’s far from your average hero. Alienated and self-aware, he embodies the complexities and contradictions of being human.

“Notes from Underground” unfolds in two parts. In the first, he challenges common views on society, rationality, and freedom with his deep, sometimes bitter reflections. He questions the essence of human freedom and individuality.

The second part shifts to his awkward and conflict-ridden interactions with others, underscoring his deep sense of isolation from society.

This book is a profound exploration of the human experience, delving into themes of isolation, freedom, and the search for meaning. It’s a book that invites you to question and reflect on your beliefs and values.

Nature doesn’t ask your permission; it doesn’t care about your wishes, or whether you like its laws or not. You’re obliged to accept it as it is, and consequently all its results as well.
  • Despite its serious themes, the novel is laced with a dark, ironic humor that many find appealing.
  • Unlike some of Dostoevsky’s longer works, this novel is concise, making its powerful message more impactful.
  • The book is rich in philosophical ideas, challenging readers to think about free will, determinism, and the nature of human behavior.
  • Limited character interaction may disappoint those who prefer character-driven stories.
  • The narrator’s complex personality might make it hard for some readers to connect with the story.
  • The book’s abstract and dense philosophical discussions could overwhelm readers unfamiliar with such content.

4. The Idiot

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In “The Idiot,” you meet Prince Myshkin, an almost supernaturally innocent and honest character. After returning to Russia from a Swiss clinic, Myshkin gets caught in love, betrayal, and social schemes.

As you read, you’ll see Myshkin trying to find his way into the complex 19th-century Russian society. His simplicity and kindness starkly contrast with the ego-driven, greedy characters around him.

This explores love, morality, and the fine line between sanity and insanity. Myshkin’s interactions with Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya Yepanchin make the story emotionally intense and deeply thought-provoking.

What makes “The Idiot” stand out is Dostoevsky’s challenge to the reader: he makes you question the real meaning of goodness in a world that often values the opposite.

A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.
  • Dostoevsky examines deep moral questions, especially about being good in a corrupt world.
  • Its dialogues are realistic and meaningful, offering insights into the characters’ thoughts and their society.
  • The novel critiques the upper class and societal norms, remaining relevant to modern discussions about class and society.
  • The novel’s length and detailed descriptions may overwhelm those who like shorter stories.
  • The complex characters, though interesting, might confuse or overwhelm some readers.
  • Its dense philosophical discussions could be too heavy for those who prefer action-packed or lighter reading.

5. White Nights

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Genres: Classics, Fiction, Russian Literature, Russia, Short Stories, Romance

You’ll follow the story of a young, solitary man whose life changes when he meets Nastenka, a charming and equally lonely young woman.

As you delve into the pages, you’ll be captivated by their nightly conversations. The narrator, whose life was once isolated, finds a kindred spirit in Nastenka. Their bond deepens as they share their innermost thoughts under the light of the white nights.

“White Nights” reflects the human condition, the search for connection, and the bittersweet nature of unrequited love. The book portrays the inner turmoil of characters caught between their dreams and the harsh realities of life.

But how could you live and have no story to tell?
  • The first-person narration creates an intimate and immersive reading experience.
  • The novel explores themes of loneliness and longing in a relatable and heartfelt way.
  • It touches on universal themes of love, hope, and the search for connection, resonating with many readers.
  • The narrative’s dreamlike style might confuse fans of realistic stories.
  • Its abstract themes could fail to engage readers seeking tangible elements.
  • Focusing on a few characters and a limited setting may feel too narrow for some.

6. The House of the Dead

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Genres: Classics, Fiction, Russian Literature, Novels, 19th Century

“The House of the Dead,” drawn from Dostoevsky’s own experiences, gives you an unfiltered look into 19th-century Russian prison life. You’ll follow Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov, a nobleman serving hard labor for his wife’s murder.

As you read, you’ll experience the brutal conditions and the intense struggle to survive in the prison camp. Through Goryanchikov’s eyes, you’ll navigate the camp’s complex social world, meet various characters, and ponder over crime and punishment.

This novel offers a rare insight into a world few have seen. Challenging readers to understand and empathize with the plight of these prisoners.

Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.
  • The story prompts moral and ethical reflections about crime, punishment, and redemption.
  • The narrative is emotionally powerful, evoking empathy and reflection in the reader.
  • It serves as a critique of the Russian penal system and broader social issues of the time.
  • Graphic scenes of prison life and cruelty might disturb some readers.
  • The book’s detailed observations can seem tedious to those who prefer action.
  • Readers might struggle with historical and cultural references specific to 19th-century Russia.

7. The Grand Inquisitor

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Genres: Classics, Fiction, Philosophy, Russian Literature, Short Stories

You’ll be plunged into a fictional world where Christ returns during the Spanish Inquisition, only to be arrested by the Grand Inquisitor. As you delve into the story, you’ll witness a gripping dialogue between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor.

The Inquisitor argues that humanity needs to be guided and controlled, while Christ’s message is freedom and faith. This intense exchange will challenge you to think deeply about the human desire for freedom versus the lure of authority.

This book is a profound exploration of freedom, faith, and the nature of power. Whether you’re a fan of philosophical literature or just looking for a story that makes you think, this work stands out as a must-read in Dostoevsky’s work.

Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom
  • The story’s rich symbolism offers many layers of meaning for readers to explore.
  • Its intellectual depth encourages readers to think critically about complex issues.
  • Themes in the chapter, like power abuse and the fight for freedom, are still relevant today.
  • Focus on slow-paced conversation may not appeal to those who like faster-paced stories.
  • Readers uninterested in religious topics might struggle with the theological arguments.
  • Interpreting the story’s symbolism can be challenging without a strong interest in symbolic literature.

8. The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky

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Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Classics, Russian Literature, 19th Century

In this collection, you’ll find a diverse range of tales, each brimming with psychological depth and insight.

From the intense emotional drama of “White Nights” to the philosophical depths of “Notes from the Underground,” each story invites you into a different aspect of human experience.

Dostoevsky’s characters are complex and multifaceted, grappling with existential dilemmas, moral crises, and the often harsh realities of 19th-century Russian society.

What makes these stories stand out is they explore themes like redemption, suffering, and the quest for meaning with a depth that is both unsettling and enlightening—making you question and reflect on the deeper aspects of life.

  • Each story offers a unique theme, providing a diverse reading experience.
  • For those new to Dostoevsky, these stories are accessible introductions to his style and themes.
  • His use of language is masterful, combining simplicity and depth to convey complex ideas and emotions.
  • The collection’s depth may be too demanding for casual readers.
  • Its slow pace, emphasizing psychology over action, might not suit everyone.
  • The stories’ philosophical complexity could overwhelm those who prefer simpler storytelling.

9. Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky to his Family and Friends

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Genres: Nonfiction, Literature, Biography, Russia

In these pages, you’ll discover Dostoevsky’s personal side—his hopes, fears, joys, and sorrows. He writes to his family and friends with the same intensity and depth he brings to his novels.

His letters reveal his struggles with financial difficulties, his experiences in Siberian exile, his insights into human nature, and his deep love and concern for his family. Each letter is a piece of the puzzle that makes up this literary genius.

What sets this collection apart is the unguarded honesty and raw emotion that Dostoevsky pours into his writing. It starkly contrasts the polished prose of his novels, offering a more direct and personal connection to the man behind the celebrated works.

To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart—that’s what life is all about, that’s its task.
  • Readers get a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of his famous works.
  • He shares his thoughts on literature and writing, inspiring aspiring writers.
  • Readers see a different side of Dostoevsky’s writing style, more personal and less formal than his novels.
  • Certain letters focusing on everyday details can seem irrelevant or mundane.
  • Some readers might find recurring themes and concerns in the letters repetitive.
  • Fans of Dostoevsky’s fiction may not be as engaged by these real-life correspondences.

10. The Gambler

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Genres: Classics, Fiction, Russian Literature,19th Century, Novels

Meet Alexei Ivanovich, a tutor working for a Russian family in a German town. The twist? Alexei has a gambling addiction.

As you follow him, you’ll experience his intense addiction to roulette, his turbulent romance with the Polina, and his desperate attempts to understand and navigate the intricacies of luck, chance, and love.

It’s a captivating and insightful look into the human obsession with luck and risk. This novel isn’t just for those interested in gambling; it’s for anyone who’s ever faced the thrilling yet dangerous allure of taking a chance.

A true gentleman, even if he loses his entire fortune, must not show emotion. Money is supposed to be so far beneath a gentleman that it’s almost not worth thinking about.
  • The book is known for its fast pacing, keeping readers engaged throughout.
  • Dostoevsky delves into the psychology of addiction, particularly gambling addiction, offering deep insights.
  • The setting in a European spa town provides interesting cultural insights, particularly into the lives of Russian aristocrats abroad.
  • Readers might not engage with the novel’s social and economic commentary.
  • Moral ambiguity in the characters’ actions may disturb readers seeking clear morals.
  • Complex and flawed characters could be difficult for some to relate to or sympathize with.

11. The Insulted and Humiliated

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Genres: Classics, Fiction, Russian Literature,19th Century

You will journey alongside Ivan Petrovich, a young writer drawn into the turbulent lives of the Ikhmenev family, the heartbroken Natasha, and the scheming Prince Valkovsky.

As you navigate the twists and turns of the plot, you’ll find yourself deeply involved in the characters’ struggles with societal norms, personal betrayals, and the pursuit of redemption.

The book doesn’t shy away from the complexities of emotions like pride, despair, and forgiveness. His portrayal of the resilience of the human spirit in the face of adversity and humiliation is inspiring and deeply reflective, making it a read that shouldn’t be missed.

All love passes, but incompatibility stays for good.
  • The emotional struggles and triumphs of the characters resonate strongly with readers.
  • The story explores the themes of redemption and forgiveness in a thought-provoking manner.
  • The relationships between characters are portrayed realistically, adding to the narrative’s authenticity.
  • Lengthy descriptions might bore those who prefer action.
  • The story’s slow pace in introspective parts may not suit all readers.
  • The novel’s complex philosophical discussions could confuse some readers.

12. The Possessed (also known as The Devils / Demons)

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Genres: Classics, Fiction, Russian Literature, Philosophy, Novels

Set in a provincial Russian town, the novel is centered on the young revolutionaries led by the charismatic and manipulative Pyotr Verkhovensky. Next to him is Nikolai Stavrogin, a complex and troubled aristocrat whose nature drives the novel’s tension.

These characters become embroiled in a plot to overthrow the existing social order, leading to a series of tragic events that shake the very foundations of their community.

The book challenges you to think deeply about the nature of ideology, freedom, and the consequences of political extremism. It’s for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of human society and the dangers of unchecked ideological fervor.

  • The book is rich in Russian cultural and historical context, providing an immersive experience.
  • Readers get a deep look into the psychological motivations and turmoils of the characters.
  • Despite being set in the 19th century, political extremism and moral confusion are relevant to contemporary times.
  • Complex characters may be hard for some to relate to or empathize with.
  • The novel’s intricate structure and numerous subplots can be hard to follow.
  • The story’s moral ambiguity might unsettle those who prefer clear moral messages.

13. The Adolescent (also known as An Accidental Family or Raw Youth)

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Genres: Fiction, Russian Literature, Novels, Classics, 19th Century

Meet Arkady Dolgoruky, the protagonist, an illegitimate son eager to establish his own place in society. Raised in a rural area and later moving to St. Petersburg, Arkady’s story is about ambition, struggle, and the search for a father’s recognition.

Arkady’s journey involves intense relationships and moral choices. His interactions with characters like his self-absorbed aristocrat father and his nihilist half-brother add depth to his story of conflict and self-discovery.

This novel highlights the universal challenges of growing up and connecting with readers across generations. It gives readers a glimpse of Russian society during a period of significant change while touching on timeless themes that are still relevant today.

…to be able to judge the others, a man needs to gain himself the right to judge by suffering.
  • The story includes elements of mystery and intrigue, adding entertainment.
  • “The Adolescent” delves into identity, self-discovery, and the struggle to find one’s place in the world.
  • The novel presents a compelling coming-of-age story, exploring the journey from youth to adulthood.
  • Rapid mood shifts in the novel could disorient some readers.
  • The story’s slow pace in introspective and philosophical parts may not suit all readers.
  • “The Adolescent” requires significant attention and intellectual engagement, which might not fit everyone’s reading style.

14. A Gentle Creature (also known as A Gentle Spirit or A Meek One)

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Genres: Classics, Fiction, Short Stories, Russian Literature, 19th Century

The story revolves around a pawnbroker and his young wife, the ‘gentle creature.’ The narrative unfolds through the pawnbroker’s perspective after a tragic event. He reflects on their relationship, filled with misunderstandings and emotional distance.

The young wife, despite her quiet demeanor, holds a depth of emotion and inner turmoil, which the pawnbroker fails to comprehend until it’s too late.

The story is set against the backdrop of a society where material concerns often overpower deeper emotional needs. It’s a concise yet moving piece that resonates with the universal human experience of trying, sometimes failing, to connect with others.

Alas, I had always loved sorrow and grief, but only for myself, for myself; for them I wept in my pity.
  • It raises significant moral and ethical questions that provoke thought and discussion.
  • The story is an intense study of its main characters, especially the ‘gentle creature’ herself.
  • Despite its specific setting, the themes of love, regret, and misunderstanding are universal.
  • The story’s minimal action and drama might not appeal to fans of dynamic plots.
  • Its slow pace could be unappealing to readers who prefer action-focused stories.
  • Some might find the complex and contradictory characters hard to understand or empathize with.

15. Poor Folk

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“Poor Folk” unfolds through letters between Makar Devushkin, a humble clerk, and Varvara Dobroselova, a young woman in St. Petersburg. Their correspondence shares their daily challenges and aspirations, revealing a life marked by poverty but rich in joy.

The book vividly depicts the harsh realities of poverty and social injustice in 19th-century Russia. Despite their struggles, Makar and Varvara’s resilience and dignity in adversity are both moving and inspiring.

This novel offers deep insights into the lives of society’s marginalized, highlighting the enduring dignity and humanity found even in the most challenging situations.

I was too dreamy, and that saved me.
  • The prose is simple and accessible, yet it carries a powerful emotional weight.
  • The novel explores the depth of human emotion in the face of hardship and love.
  • Using letters to tell the story creates an intimate and personal reading experience.
  • Focusing on just a few characters could seem too limited for some readers.
  • The lack of dramatic events may disappoint those who prefer plot-driven stories.
  • Without historical context, key themes and references in the story might be missed.

16. Uncle’s Dream

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Prince K., an aging and somewhat senile nobleman, is known affectionately as ‘Uncle.’ The town’s social climbers, particularly the scheming Maria Alexandrovna and her daughter Zina, see the Prince’s visit as an opportunity to secure a prosperous marriage.

What ensues is a comedy of manners filled with misunderstandings, manipulations, and the ridiculousness of societal pretensions. The characters are vividly drawn, representing different facets of society’s obsession with status and appearance.

What sets “Uncle’s Dream” apart is its blend of comedy and social commentary. The book uses humor and satire in a story that still resonates with modern audiences, highlighting the timeless nature of societal absurdities.

Can you blame me, my dear, for looking on this attachment as a romantic folly inspired by that cursed Shakespeare who will poke his nose where he is not wanted?
  • The dialogue is often witty and entertaining, adding to the enjoyment of the story.
  • The story includes many comedic situations and characters, providing laughter and amusement.
  • Dostoevsky provides sharp commentary on the pretensions and follies of provincial Russian society.
  • Those uninterested in social satire may not find the novel’s societal focus engaging.
  • The novel’s heavy irony and sarcasm might not resonate with fans of direct humor or storytelling.
  • Exaggerated, caricature-like characters might not appeal to readers seeking realistic development.

17. A Writer’s Diary

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Genres: Non-fiction, Biography, Russian Literature, Classics, Writing, Essays

Spanning from 1873 to 1881, this work is a compilation of Dostoevsky’s articles, essays, and notes. He reflects on a wide range of topics, from everyday events to critical social and political issues of his time.

His commentary on Russian society, literature, and personal anecdotes provide an invaluable perspective on 19th-century Russia. This diary is a vibrant and living text that offers a deeper understanding of one of literature’s greatest minds.

Through his diary, you’ll experience Dostoevsky’s world as he saw it, making it a uniquely personal and insightful addition to your understanding of this literary giant. It’s an excellent read for those interested in Russian literature, history, or the human condition.

Rather than go preaching to people about what they ought to be, show them through your own example. Carry it out yourselves in practice, and everyone will follow you.
  • Readers can track how Dostoevsky’s ideas evolved and influenced his later works.
  • The diary shares his thoughts on socio-political issues, which are still relevant today.
  • It features a mix of autobiographical sketches, reflections, short stories, and journalism.
  • The diary’s mix of genres might not suit readers who prefer a single genre.
  • The non-linear format could confuse readers accustomed to traditional narratives.
  • Its personal, subjective style may not appeal to those who like objective or fictional stories.

18. The Eternal Husband

best biography dostoevsky

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Russian Literature, Novels, Short Stories

The plot centers around the character of Velchaninov, a middle-aged man leading a life of indulgence. His world is turned upside down with the sudden appearance of Trusotsky, the husband of his former lover, now deceased.

The arrival of Trusotsky and his young daughter in Velchaninov’s life brings a series of psychological confrontations and revelations, unveiling a tangled web of past emotions and resentments.

“The Eternal Husband” delves into the darkest corners of the human heart, exploring themes of obsession, guilt, and the inescapable past. It’s a concise but powerful read that will leave you contemplating the intricate dynamics of human relationships.

A dead enemy is good, but a living one is better.
  • The novel explores timeless themes of love, betrayal, and jealousy compellingly.
  • The characters are complex and well-developed, each with unique motivations and flaws.
  • There are undercurrents of dark humor throughout the story, which add a unique flavor to the narrative.
  • The novel’s deep psychological themes can be dense and hard to understand.
  • The story’s slow pace in introspective sections might not appeal to all readers.
  • Its emphasis on psychological and emotional dynamics over physical action may not suit everyone’s tastes.

19. Netochka Nezvanova

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Genres: Classics, Russian Literature, Fiction, Literature, Novels, 19th Century

Netochka Nezvanova takes you on a journey from her troubled childhood to adolescence. Orphaned at a young age and raised by a stepfather who is both talented and troubled, her life is a tapestry of emotional ups and downs.

Netochka’s story is one of resilience and determination in the face of adversity as she navigates a world that often seems cold and unfeeling.

The book offers an intimate and touching exploration of growth, resilience, and the enduring strength of the human heart. It is a must-read for anyone who appreciates literature that touches the soul.

  • The psychological complexity of the characters, especially Netochka, is intriguing and well-crafted.
  • The settings in the novel are atmospheric and contribute significantly to the overall mood of the story.
  • The novel features a strong and unique female protagonist, offering a different perspective than Dostoevsky’s other works.
  • Its slow pace, particularly in introspective sections, might not appeal to some.
  • The novel requires substantial intellectual and emotional involvement from readers.
  • Being unfinished, the novel may leave readers unsatisfied or frustrated due to its unresolved ending.

20. The Village of Stepanchikovo

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Genres: Classics, Fiction, Russian Literature, 19th Century, Novels

In “The Village of Stepanchikovo,” Sergei visits his uncle, Colonel Yegor Rostanev, only to find him under the thumb of the manipulative Foma Fomich Opiskin. This pseudo-intellectual has taken over the Colonel’s household and estate.

The story unfolds with humorous incidents as Sergei and other vivid characters try to liberate the Colonel from Foma’s clutches.

This novel mixes humor with sharp commentary on the absurdities and pretensions of manipulative social figures like Foma. It showcases comedy’s power to shed light on serious matters.

…he craved other people’s company: he loved to chat and argue and relished the fact that there was always someone there, sitting and listening to him.
  • The story is engaging with its mix of family drama, comedy, and intrigue.
  • The lively and often humorous dialogues add to the novel’s overall charm.
  • Despite its humorous tone, the novel offers deep insights into human nature and relationships.
  • Its culturally specific humor might not resonate with all readers.
  • The novel’s complex relationships and social dynamics could be confusing.
  • The unique narrative structure may not suit fans of conventional storytelling.

21. The Double

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Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, a low-level clerk in St. Petersburg, faces a bizarre situation when he meets a man who is his doppelgänger. This man not only looks exactly like him but also shares his name.

This encounter sets off a series of increasingly strange and disturbing events as Golyadkin struggles with the reality of his double, who begins to take over every aspect of his life.

“The Double” is a pioneering work in psychological fiction, vividly portraying the complexities and inner turmoil of the human mind. It’s an intriguing exploration of identity, duality, and the darker sides of human nature, making it a compelling read.

Good people live honestly, good people live without falseness, and they never come in twos.
  • The book offers a critique of social norms and the bureaucracy of the time.
  • Dostoevsky explores the protagonist’s psychological state deeply and insightfully.
  • The story is rich in symbolism, offering various interpretations and deeper meanings.
  • Its heavy symbolism might be hard for some to interpret or appreciate.
  • The story’s intense focus on the protagonist’s mental state could overwhelm or unsettle some readers.

22. The Crocodile

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You’ll meet Ivan Matveich, a civil servant who, during a visit to a shopping arcade with his wife and a colleague, is swallowed whole by a crocodile. Rather than being a tragic event, this absurd situation turns comical and surreal.

Remarkably, Ivan remains alive inside the crocodile, able to communicate from within. The story then unfolds around the reactions of his wife, the public, and authorities, each displaying varying degrees of concern, opportunism, and absurdity.

You shouldn’t miss “The Crocodile” because it offers a lighter, insightful side of Dostoevsky’s writing. It’s a perfect example of how literature can use humor to reflect on serious issues, making it a unique and entertaining read.

The emptier a man’s head is, for instance, the less he feels the thirst to fill it.
  • The interactions between characters are humorous and reveal deeper societal insights.
  • The dialogues are sharp and contribute significantly to the development of the plot and characters.
  • Through satire, the novel comments on the absurdities of bureaucratic systems and societal norms.
  • Its absurd and surreal plot might not attract those who prefer realistic stories.
  • The novel’s heavy use of irony and sarcasm may not suit readers who like other types of humor.

23. Mr. Prokharchin

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“Mr. Prokharchin” is about a solitary and eccentric man living in poverty in St. Petersburg. Obsessively frugal, he hoards every penny and lives in a run-down room despite having a hidden stash of money.

This paradoxical life highlights themes like loneliness, mental instability, and the false sense of wealth. The story delves deeply into his psyche, making you feel his isolation, paranoia, and the odd comfort he finds in his secret wealth.

It’s a compelling read that offers insight into human nature’s complexities and the irrational behaviors caused by fear and isolation.

  • It subtly comments on urban life’s conditions and the struggles of the lower classes.
  • The novel’s exploration of isolation and loneliness in an urban setting is relatable to many readers.
  • Its characters, particularly the protagonist, offer intriguing and thought-provoking psychological depth.
  • The lack of action or drama might disappoint fans of more dynamic plots.
  • Understanding or empathizing with Mr. Prokharchin’s complex character could be challenging for some.

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Genres: Short Stories, Classics, Fiction, Russian Literature, 19th Century, Fantasy

Ivan Ivanovich, a disillusioned writer, finds himself at a cemetery. Here, he overhears the dead conversing beneath the ground. These conversations are absurd, scandalous, and oddly insightful, revealing the deceased’s unfiltered thoughts and past lives.

The dead, unaware of how much time has passed since their demise, engage in discussions that range from the trivial to the philosophical, revealing their most intimate secrets and desires.

He uses the conversations of the dead to critique societal norms, exposing the hypocrisy and pettiness of human nature. “Bobok” is a fascinating exploration of what remains of us after death—our thoughts, regrets, and the unspoken truths of our lives.

The wisest of all, in my opinion, is he who can, if only once a month, call himself a fool—a faculty unheard of nowadays
  • “Bobok” offers clever satire on societal norms and human follies.
  • The dialogue among the characters is witty and thought-provoking.
  • Despite its brevity, the novel explores deep philosophical themes, engaging the reader’s intellect.
  • The story’s deep philosophy could be challenging and overwhelming for some readers.
  • International readers might find it hard to understand some Russian cultural references.

25. The Christmas Tree and the Wedding

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Genres: Short Stories, Classics, Fiction, Russian Literature, Christmas, 19th Century

In this tale, you’re taken to a festive New Year’s Eve party where children and adults celebrate. The story focuses on the interactions between the guests, particularly the wealthy and influential Julian Mastakovich and a poor young girl.

As the party unfolds, Julian’s interest in the girl is revealed not in her as a person but in her future dowry. The story contrasts the pure, joyous world of the children with the calculated, materialistic concerns of the adults.

It’s a timeless commentary on societal norms and the innocence of childhood. It’s a short but impactful read that resonates with Dostoevsky’s keen insight into the human condition.

It was awkward for him because he did not fit in with the crowd; those present had gathered more for the purpose of social networking and climbing than anything else.
  • The story’s rich symbolism adds depth to its narrative.
  • Emotional depth and tragedy subtly underlie the story.
  • The vivid description of a high-society party creates a compelling setting.
  • Its social commentary might not appeal to those seeking pure entertainment.
  • The story’s moral ambiguity and unclear resolution might disappoint some readers.

26. The Landlady

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Meet Vasily Mikhailovich Ordynov, a young man who moves into a new lodging in St. Petersburg. There, he becomes infatuated with his mysterious and alluring landlady, Katerina.

As Ordynov delves deeper into her world, he becomes entangled in a web of passion, mysticism, and a haunting past. The landlady and her previous lodger, Murin, share a strange and possibly supernatural bond that Ordynov struggles to understand.

“The Landlady” offers a unique blend of psychological thriller and Gothic horror. This story showcases Dostoevsky’s talent for exploring the human condition in extreme circumstances.

  • The story includes gothic elements, adding to its dark and moody tone.
  • The characters, especially the enigmatic landlady, are unique and memorable.
  • The novel is rich in symbolic imagery, which adds layers of meaning to the narrative.
  • The symbolism in the novel might be difficult for some to understand or appreciate.
  • The story’s pacing can be slow, which might not suit readers who prefer fast-paced narratives.

27. An Honest Thief

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The tale unfolds through the eyes of the narrator, who recounts the story of Emelyan Ilyitch, an impoverished drunkard. Emelyan is taken in by Astafy Ivanovich, a kind-hearted tailor. The crux of the story revolves around a stolen overcoat.

When Astafy discovers that Emelyan is the thief, the story turns poignant. Emelyan’s shame and subsequent actions paint a complex picture of a man struggling with his sense of morality and his dire circumstances.

What sets “An Honest Thief” apart is its exploration of the moral complexities in everyday life. Dostoevsky presents a touching story that challenges readers to consider the nature of honesty, guilt, and the potential for redemption.

  • The themes of the story are universal, dealing with guilt, honesty, and the human condition.
  • The story offers insights into the social conditions of 19th-century Russia.
  • The characters are well-drawn and relatable, each with their own compelling backstory.
  • The focus on human flaws and moral dilemmas might be discomforting for some.
  • Some readers might want a more in-depth exploration of the well-developed characters.

28. A Nasty Story

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“A Nasty Story” features Ivan Ilyich Pralinsky, a high-ranking official who impulsively visits a subordinate’s wedding party while drunk.

His attempt to seem kind and superior backfires, leading to a series of awkward and embarrassing incidents. Pralinsky’s effort to mingle with ordinary people turns into a night of uncomfortable and humorous events.

This story stands out for its mix of humor and social commentary. Dostoevsky skillfully blends entertaining storytelling with an insightful critique of societal norms and behaviors.

  • It raises interesting moral questions that provoke thought and discussion.
  • The novel is infused with dark humor, which adds a unique flavor to the narrative.
  • The story delves deep into the psychology of its characters, offering insightful observations.
  • Intense critique of social norms may not suit readers seeking lighter content.
  • Its 19th-century Russian cultural context might not resonate with all international readers.

Final Thoughts

So, there you have it—a sneak peek into the world of Fyodor Dostoevsky, where every story is a journey into the heart and mind—intense, unpredictable, and absolutely unputdownable.

Each book is a maze of the human condition, asking questions that don’t always have answers. So, if you’re up for a mind-bending adventure into the depths of human nature, Dostoevsky’s your ticket.

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Erika Maniquiz

Erika Maniquiz is a certified teacher and librarian with a Library and Information Science degree. She cherishes the calm moments reading books as much as the dynamic discussions she has in her classroom. Beyond her career, she is a fan of Kdrama and loves Kpop's lively beats.

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Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Best Books 📚

Take a look at four of Fyodor Dostoevsky's very best works. These works are universally adored for their literary quality and influence.

Israel Njoku

Written by Israel Njoku

Degree in M.C.M with focus on Literature from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

Fyodor Dostoevsky achieved literary fame at an early period of his career, with his books displaying the psychological depth and maturity that has come to be associated with him. Over a long career of critical acclaim, a few books stand out.

The Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov Digital Art

Written at the tail end of Dostoevsky’s life, The Brothers Karamazov represents a culmination of Dostoevsky’s most passionate ideas in their most mature form. Revolving around a patricide with three children and a lover at the very center, we are treated to a story that explores themes like faith, passion, justice, among others.  With typical insight and penetration, Fyodor Dostoevsky is able to bore deep into the recesses of the human psyche to create well-rounded and relatable characters. 

The story is about the impact of the murder of the patriarch, the irresponsible Pavlovich Karamazov, on his four children, from the passionate and tempestuous Dmitry, to the cold and rational Ivan, down to the pious Alyosha. It explores questions about the obligations of the parent, the husband, the intellectual, and the religious. There are questions asked about the fairness of God himself, the injustice of the world, and the defects in our just justice system.

Notes from Underground

Notes from Underground have been described as one of the first existentialist novels to surface. This work sees Dostoevsky use the character of a bitter and isolated middle-aged man to criticize certain liberal ideas like rational egoism, utilitarianism, the premium on logic, and a number of other ideas. 

The book is divided into two parts, with the first part taking us through a look down this unnamed “underground” man’s diaries containing his thoughts on a number of contemporary issues. His bitterness toward society, intense skepticism of human nature, and alienation are obvious. The second part of the book features a number of events that involve the narrator- events that drive him down this dark path of isolation and bitterness at humans. 

Crime and Punishment

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky Digital Art

Crime and Punishment is Dostoevsky’s most popular and widely read work. It features a young man’s corruption at the hands of harmful radical ideologies which drives him to commit murder and robbery. Primarily motivated by his desire to prove that he was superior and above conventional standards, the main character, Raskolnikov, ends up killing two women, one of whom he deems surplus to humanity’s requirements by virtue of her evil deeds.

Through his interaction with a wide variety of characters with a variety of predispositions, Raskolnikov comes to better understand himself and his motivations. Superior intellectual arguments eventually convince him of the folly of his ideas. The book represents Dostoevsky’s attempts to display the danger and folly of some of the radical ideas he came to discover when he returned to Russian society. 

The idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky Book Cover Illustrated Oil Painting

The Idiot is another of Dostoevsky’s major works. It represents his attempt to portray a positively good man, essentially the closest approximation of a Christ-like character with the intent of observing how he would fare in an immoral and worldly society. 

This character, Prince Mushkin, because of his goodness and childlike innocence, is seen as an idiot by a worldly society who could not understand him. There is a sharp contrast between Mushkin’s perception of the world and those around him. 

Mishkin arrives in Saint Petersburg as a poor psychiatric patient with an inheritance he is yet to access. He is immediately thrust upon the vile politics and immoral social organization of the St. Petersburg society he goes to. He exerts a profound influence on this society, but rather than changing it for the better, it is he who is permanently damaged by the rot he encounters.

What book first brought Dostoevsky fame?

‘Poor Folks ‘. Dostoevsky’s first novel written between 1844-1845, ‘Poor Folks’ explores the romance between two poor distant cousins and was lauded as an important humanitarian and social novel by notable contemporary critics like Vissarion Belinsky and Alexander Herzen.

How long does it take Dostoevsky to write a novel?

The answer varies on the purpose and length of the novel. Dostoevsky wrote ‘The Gambler’ in just 26 days, but also spent roughly two years on ‘ The Brother’s Karamazov’.

Which novel is considered Dostoevsky’s greatest?

Although ‘ Crime and Punishment ‘ is his most popular, ‘ The Brothers Karamazov ‘ is often considered his best work, as it is a culmination of his ideas in their most mature and final form.

Israel Njoku

About Israel Njoku

Israel loves to delve into rigorous analysis of themes with broader implications. As a passionate book lover and reviewer, Israel aims to contribute meaningful insights into broader discussions.

Cite This Page

Njoku, Israel " Fyodor Dostoevsky's Best Books 📚 " Book Analysis , https://bookanalysis.com/fyodor-dostoevsky/best-books/ . Accessed 19 February 2024.

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Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

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Joseph Frank

Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time Paperback – 5 November 2012

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Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language--and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly readable volume with a new preface by the author. Carefully preserving the original work's acclaimed narrative style and combination of biography, intellectual history, and literary criticism, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time illuminates the writer's works--from his first novel Poor Folk to Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov--by setting them in their personal, historical, and above all ideological context. More than a biography in the usual sense, this is a cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia, providing both a rich picture of the world in which Dostoevsky lived and a major reinterpretation of his life and work.

From the Back Cover

"Although the pace has quickened, the serene and magnificent persistence that Joseph Frank brought to his five volumes resonates fully in this distilled story. If (as Frank tells us) Dostoevsky 'felt ideas, ' then Frank 'feels biography' at any scale, with a perfect sense of proportion." --Caryl Emerson, Princeton University, author of The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

"[This book] ensures Frank's status as the definitive literary biographer of one of the best fiction writers ever." --David Foster Wallace

"The editing and deep thought that have gone into this magnificent one-volume condensation of Frank's magnum opus are to be greatly admired. This is the best biography of Dostoevsky, the best reading of some of the major novels, the best cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia. Just the best." --Robin Feuer Miller, Brandeis University, author of Dostoevsky's Unfinished Journey

About the Author

Joseph Frank is professor emeritus of Slavic and comparative literature at Stanford and Princeton. The five volumes of his Dostoevsky biography, published between 1976 and 2002, won a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Los Angeles Times book prize, two James Russell Lowell Prizes, two Christian Gauss Awards, and other honors. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies awarded Frank its highest honor.

  • Print length 984 pages
  • Language English
  • Publisher Princeton University Press
  • Publication date 5 November 2012
  • Dimensions 15.88 x 6.35 x 23.5 cm
  • ISBN-10 0691155992
  • ISBN-13 978-0691155999
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  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Princeton University Press; Revised edition (5 November 2012)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 984 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0691155992
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0691155999
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.88 x 6.35 x 23.5 cm
  • 22 in History & Criticism of Eastern European Literature
  • 90 in History & Criticism of Russian & Soviet Literature
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The ‘Sad, Happy Life’ of Carson McCullers

A new biography chronicles this essential American writer’s complicated love life, celebrated career and singular talents.

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A black-and-white photograph of a middle-aged woman with short dark hair. She is wearing a crisp gray top and dress, and holding a cigarette.

By Dwight Garner

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CARSON MCCULLERS: A LIFE , by Mary V. Dearborn

Mary V. Dearborn’s new book, “Carson McCullers: A Life,” is the first major biography of this essential American writer in more than 20 years. It is competent and professional, as if built from solid pine and good plaster. It is dispassionate and well researched. Reading it is brutal because McCullers’s life was brutal to endure.

It is Dearborn’s poor luck that the best-known biography, Virginia Spencer Carr’s “ The Lonely Hunter ” (1975), is a masterpiece of the form, as formidable in its way as Leon Edel’s life of Henry James . Carr’s book is a dense work of literature as well as a biography, and it contains vastly more detail, nuance, savvy, twisted humanity and practical magic.

Contrast, to take the easiest example at hand, these books’ openings. Here are Dearborn’s first two sentences:

Carson McCullers titled one of her first, more directly autobiographical stories “Wunderkind.” She was just such a child — which was, as with so many talented children, both a blessing and a curse.

And here’s Carr, flicking the lights on right away:

“Tell you what, Helen,” said the lanky Georgia girl, “let’s skip the cotton candy and hot dogs and save our dimes for the Rubber Man and all the freak shows this year. The Pin Head, the Cigarette Man, the Lady with the Lizard Skin … I don’t want to miss a single one.”

Multiply these styles across hundreds of pages. Dearborn’s style is clean; we’re in a doctor’s office or a museum, and McCullers’s life is in a lighted display box. Carr’s style was often low-lit and ground level; we’re in a nightclub, or the back seat of a rumbling car. You felt you were with McCullers in real time. Carr allowed you to see more things out of the corner of your eye.

“Carson McCullers: A Life” is a necessary book, though. It builds on Carr’s work and considers newly released material, including letters and journals and, most tantalizingly, transcripts of McCullers’s late-life psychiatric sessions with the female doctor who would become her lover and gatekeeper.

It has been seven years since McCullers (1917-67) had her centennial , when the Library of America released her complete works in two volumes. That was an occasion, which many critics took, to revisit her work, which includes the novels “ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter ” (1940) and “The Member of the Wedding” (1946), and the story collection “The Ballad of the Sad Café” (1951).

Special notice was paid, and justly so, to McCullers’s gifts for portraying loners and misfits, for addressing taboo topics such as mental illness and alcoholism and same-sex relationships. As Joyce Carol Oates put it in The New York Review of Books , “McCullers seemed to have identified with whatever is trans- in the human psyche, seeing it as the very fuel of desire.” Dearborn elaborates on these themes but essentially tells a straightforward story, vastly more in touch with the life than with the work.

Lula Carson Smith was born in Columbus, Ga. Her father was a jeweler, and her lively and well-educated mother took pride in her precocious daughter, whom the family called “Sister.” Carson — she began using her sexually ambiguous middle name in high school — thought she might become a concert pianist. She skipped college and headed for New York City, where she took writing classes at Columbia University. At 19, she married Reeves McCullers, a charming Alabama-born high school football star and future war hero — and future alcoholic.

The publishing world loves a Cinderella story and will invent one if necessary. McCullers was the real thing. “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” was published when she was just 23, and literary Manhattan fell at her feet. She was photographed for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. Truman Capote called her “a tall, slender wand of a girl” whose voice had a “gentle heat, like a blissful summer afternoon that is slow but not sleepy.” She was gawky and tall and androgynous; she wore crisp men’s clothing, with a special fondness for white dress shirts and spotless white sneakers. Alfred Kazin, whom she got to know at Yaddo, saw her most clearly:

Carson was pure sensibility, pure nerve along which all the suffering of the South and the Smith family passed. She was all feeling , an anvil on which life rained down blows. … Tremulous elfin, self-pitying charm. Always problems of identity . Internality of the American Dostoevskian sort without the slightest political sense of the word. … The southern isolato .

McCullers was an eccentric. She was needy and smothering and given to extravagant language and gestures. In the short run, these things can be enormously attractive. In the long run, they can make everyone hate you. By the end of this biography, when she has fallen apart from drinking and illness, a lot of contumely is dumped on McCullers by enemies and friends alike. Her Southern accent was adorable until people began to mock it behind her back.

The young McCullers moved into a large, Tudoresque apartment building in Brooklyn Heights with a gaggle of other artists, including the poet W.H. Auden, the composer Benjamin Britten and the statuesque burlesque star and writer Gypsy Rose Lee. This largely gay and lesbian commune became famous ; other artists lined up to try gain admission if not residence. There are great scenes, such as the time McCullers and Lee chased a fire truck down the street because they both loved a good conflagration. The pair may have had, briefly, a physical relationship.

Dearborn, who has also written biographies of Ernest Hemingway , Peggy Guggenheim and Henry Miller , among others, pauses to ask: Where was Reeves, McCullers’s husband, during this time? He slides in and out of this book. He was a frustrated man who never settled into a career. He sometimes forged her checks. They divorced and remarried. Both had same-sex affairs. There are hints of impulsive polycules. Their need for each other was a near constant, until Reeves died by suicide in a Paris hotel room in 1953.

McCullers’s romantic life outside her marriage was tangled and filled with unrequited feelings. She had a type, in terms of the women she fell for: older, elegant, distant and mostly unavailable, a predilection further examined in Jenn Shapland’s 2020 memoir “ My Autobiography of Carson McCullers .” She had many gay male friends, and she relished their attention. Though there is a canned quality to many of this book’s set pieces, it functions as a rich history of queer culture during the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s.

McCullers had two major strokes by the time was 30, brought on in part by strep infections in her youth. The second left her partially paralyzed on her left side. Some would accuse her of faking her paralysis because it seemed to come and go. But there can be no doubt that McCullers was deeply unlucky as regards her health. The second half of this book is a litany of ills, including a radical mastectomy and blood clot in her lung, that are hard to even read about. The lists of pills fill entire paragraphs. She must have rattled when she walked.

Her drinking did not help. She came from a family of alcoholics and she lived with enabler after enabler. On a typical day, she would have four and a half ounces of liquor (about two large drinks) three times a day: before lunch, dinner and bedtime, in addition to wine with meals. Each drink, taken to brace her lapsing morale, was a single act in the day’s drama. She would become stupefied, her mind velveted. Her friend Tennessee Williams commented, “A fish couldn’t drink so much without sinking.”

By the end, McCullers was no longer the viewer but the thing viewed. In addition to her health problems, her drinking and her romantic distress, McCullers was increasingly viewed as an irritant — a diva in the form of a waif. Her approach would arouse the fugitive instincts in others. She was a slice of cake that eventually attracted flies.

Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter bonded over their dislike of her. Welty called her “that little wretch.” To Jean Stafford, she was “most irritating.” The actress Julie Harris, who starred in a 1950 Broadway version of “The Member of the Wedding,” remarked that “everyone was her slave.” The New Yorker writer Janet Flanner called her a “pitiful spectacle.” An editor at her publishing house said that being with her was like “being impaled in the second act of a Tennessee Williams play.”

These drive-by shootings are vivid material, but none of us are reducible to what others say about us. It’s to Dearborn’s credit that she also suggests McCullers’s deep humanity, her subversive talents as a writer and lonely observer, and a strong sense of what McCullers herself called “her sad, happy life.”

CARSON McCULLERS : A Life | By Mary V. Dearborn | Knopf | 484 pp. | $40

Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade. More about Dwight Garner

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Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Great Russian writer

"To love someone means to see them as God intended them"

Date and place of birth:  October 30, 1821, Moscow Date and place of death:  January 28, 1881, St. Petersburg Occupation: novelist, translator, philosopher Movement: realism Genre: novel, novella, short story, poem Years of oeuvre: 1844-1880

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky is a classic of Russian and world literature, according to UNESCO, one of the most readable writers in the world. His most famous books, five books “Crime and Punishment” (1866), “The Idiot” (1868), “The Possessed” (1872), “Teenager” (1875), “The Brothers Karamazov” (1880).

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was born in 1821 in the Moscow Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in Tula Province. His father, Mikhail Andreevich, was a doctor at that hospital, and his mother, Maria Fyodorovna, came from a merchant family. The family lived in more than cramped conditions, the father of the family was a real tyrant, and Dostoevsky’s mother passed away early.

best biography dostoevsky

In 1837 Fyodor Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail moved to St. Petersburg, where after a brief training in a boarding school he entered the Military Engineering School. Dostoevsky called the years of study “hard labor”, he had no interest in military affairs, and devoted most of his time to literature – he read books by Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, Hugo, adored the German playwright Schiller, Pushkin and Gogol. After graduating from college in 1843 Fyodor Dostoevsky was enrolled in the St. Petersburg engineering command, but after six months in the rank of lieutenant retired.

best biography dostoevsky

Dostoevsky, the novice writer

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky wrote his first book, Poor People, in 1846. His friend, the writer Dmitry Grigorovich, persuaded him to show the manuscript to Nekrasov, who was publishing the literary magazine Sovremennik at the time. After reading it with the words “A new Gogol has appeared!” Nekrasov took the text to Belinsky, who came to indescribable delight. Dostoevsky would later describe his memories of the meeting with the critic in his book The Writer’s Diary. The success of Poor People was tumultuous, but short-lived. The second story “The Double” (1846) was received coldly, which struck at the ego of Dostoevsky, who already imagined himself a great writer.

Crime and punishment for unwanted views

Beginning in 1847, Dostoevsky began attending radical meetings at the Butashevich-Petrashevsky house, where they often criticized the government. For which he was later arrested and sentenced to eight years of hard labor in Siberia. He described his impressions in Notes from the Dead House (1862), where he also wrote Stepanchikovo Village (1859). In Siberia Fyodor Dostoevsky got married, but the marriage was short-lived. In 1855, Nicholas I died, and his son Alexander II, who granted amnesty to many prisoners, ascended the throne. Among them was Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Birth of a classic of world literature

After his amnesty, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky returned to St. Petersburg, where he and his brother began to publish the literary and political magazine Vremya. It was here that “Notes from the Underground” and “The Humiliated and Insulted” were first published. The magazine existed for a couple of years and was closed by order of the censors, and then the Dostoevsky brothers began publishing the magazine Znamya, but it was subsequently closed due to lack of subscribers.

From 1862 to 1863 he had a relationship with the writer Apollinaria Suslova, with whom the writer traveled to England, Germany and France. But his lady of the heart preferred another, which dealt Dostoevsky a blow. Part of the result was a pernicious passion for card games and roulette, which later brought Dostoevsky a lot of trouble and debt. Later, Fyodor Dostoevsky married Marina Dmitrievna Isaeva, with whom he lived for seven years. In 1864, he lost his wife and his beloved brother Mikhail, taking it upon himself to take care of his family. This meant writing a lot and fast.

The fantastic in creation

In the works of F.M. Dostoevsky there are often enough fantastic motifs, above all, the mystical component in the works.

Dostoevsky twice gave the subtitle “fantastic story” to his works. In The Gentleman, the fantastic device consists in the fact that the narrative is a stream of consciousness of the main character. Nowadays the fantastic nature of this technique is no longer felt, but it was on the example of The Gentleman that Dostoevsky once discussed the characteristics of his method as “realism in the highest sense,” “realism that reaches the fantastic.”

Another “fantastic story,” The Funny Man’s Dream, describes a fragile alien utopia and its destruction under the corrupting influence of an earthling who has gone there.

On the basis of a fantastic assumption – the sudden appearance of the protagonist of his complete double, who gradually takes his place in life – the story “The Double” is built. In “The Mistress” the then fashionable ideas of mesmerism and animal magnetism are used to motivate the plot.

Also fantastical in nature is the story “Bobok,” devoted to the negotiations of the dead in the cemetery. Also, a fantastic assumption underlies one of the author’s most famous humorous stories, “Crocodile” (a commoner swallowed by a crocodile feels very good about himself).

Semi-fantastical, mystical motifs are also found in Dostoevsky’s serious works, such as the novels The Brothers Karamazov (in particular, the chapters “The Grand Inquisitor,” “The Devil. Ivan Fedorovich’s Nightmare”) and The Possessed. Dostoevsky also uses science-fiction imagery, for example, describing Raskolnikov’s dream of intelligent microbes enslaving humanity, an artificial satellite of the Earth in Ivan Karamazov’s conversation with the devil. On the whole, most researchers recognize the presence of a fantastic element in Dostoevsky’s works, both as the basis of the plot and as a means of describing the places of action (“Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg” is sometimes recognized as a kind of fantastic city, a “ghost town” which does not repeat the real historical St. Petersburg in every detail).

Dostoevsky’s “Great Five Books”

From the mid-1860s Dostoevsky began to write the books that made up his main contribution to world literature, the famous five-book Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868), The Possessed (1872), The Teenager (1875), The Brothers Karamazov (1880).

best biography dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky wrote his main books in a great hurry, sometimes not even having time to reread dictated to stenographers, in order to meet the deadline for the magazines, where chapters of his works were published. “Very often it happened in my literary life that the beginning of a chapter of a novel or novella was already in the printer and in the set, and the ending was still sitting in my head, but must necessarily have been written by tomorrow,” – admitted Dostoevsky.

The Gambler” (1867), for example, was written in just 26 days, simultaneously with the work on Crime and Punishment.

In 1866 Fyodor Dostoevsky married his stenographer Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina. It was a happy marriage, his wife helped him in his work on manuscripts, made his work schedule, comforted him after card losses and guarded his peace from intrusive visitors. Without Anna Grigorievna Dostoevsky’s biography could have turned out quite differently: with her help the family was able to improve their financial situation and pay their debts. In the marriage were born four children.

The published novel “The Possessed” was a huge success, after its publication Dostoevsky was offered to publish in the conservative magazine Grazhdanin. Here Dostoevsky Fyodor Mikhailovich began to publish The Writer’s Diary.

Before his death, Dostoevsky was working on the second volume of the novel The Brothers Karamazov, which brought him his greatest fame. But the real sensation was his speech about Pushkin at the unveiling of the poet’s monument in Moscow in 1880. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky died on January 28, 1881.

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  3. 7 Best Dostoevsky Books

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COMMENTS

  1. Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

    Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time. Paperback - August 26, 2012. Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language―and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2,500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed ...

  2. The Best Fyodor Dostoevsky Books

    5 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Y ou are the author of a new biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1861). It's a book that intertwines the narrative of his life with his own words, taken from where his fiction has been drawn from lived experience, which is such a great way to do a literary biography.

  3. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky (born November 11 [October 30, Old Style], 1821, Moscow, Russia—died February 9 [January 28, Old Style], 1881, St. Petersburg) Russian novelist and short-story writer whose psychological penetration into the darkest recesses of the human heart, together with his unsurpassed moments of illumination, had an immense influence ...

  4. Dostoevsky

    Praise. Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language—and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2,500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly readable volume with a new ...

  5. Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time by Joseph Frank

    Joseph Frank. 4.51. 976 ratings83 reviews. Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language--and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly ...

  6. Fyodor Dostoevsky

    Childhood (1821-1836) Fyodor Dostoevsky, born on 11 November [ O.S. 30 October] 1821 in Moscow, was the second child of Dr. Mikhail Dostoevsky and Maria Dostoevskaya (born Nechayeva). He was raised in the family home in the grounds of the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, which was in a lower class district on the edges of Moscow. [13]

  7. Fyodor Dostoevsky Biography, Works, and Quotes

    Fyodor Dostoevsky Biography. Fyodor Dostoevsky is credited as one of the world's greatest novelists and literary psychologists. Born in Moscow in 1821, the son of a doctor, Dostoevsky was educated first at home and then at a boarding school. When he was a young boy, his father sent him to the St. Petersburg Academy of Military Engineering ...

  8. Dostoevsky

    Published: October 19, 2009. ISBN: 9781400833412. Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language--and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single ...

  9. Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

    Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language--and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly readable volume with a new preface by the author.

  10. Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

    A magnificent one-volume abridgement of one of the greatest literary biographies of our time Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language—and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2,500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single ...

  11. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    Quick Facts. FULL NAME: Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky BORN: November 11, 1821 DIED: February 9, 1881 BIRTHPLACE: Moscow. Who Was Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Born Nov. 11, 1821 in Moscow, Russia, Fyodor ...

  12. Biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Russian Novelist

    Full Name: Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky Known For: Russian essayist and novelist Born: November 11, 1821 in Moscow, Russia Parents: Dr. Mikhail Andreevich and Maria (née Nechayeva) Dostoevsky Died: February 9, 1881 in St. Petersburg, Russia Education: Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute Selected Works: Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868-1869 ...

  13. Dostoevsky and His Demons

    Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life. by Alex Christofi. Bloomsbury, 236 pp., $35.00. See All. Gary Saul Morson. Gary Saul Morson is the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities and a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern. His latest book, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless ...

  14. The Best Books by Fyodor Dostoyevsky You Should Read

    Crime and Punishment (1866) The best way to get acquainted with Dostoyevsky is by reading Crime and Punishment. One of the best-known books by the author, as well as a must-read for all Russian kids at school, this one is truly a classic. The story of a poor man that commits a crime in order to survive, but then deals with a greater struggle ...

  15. Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Biography of the Greatest Russian Novelist

    The biography of Russia's greatest novelist by his daughter, Aimée Dostoevsky. Includes chapters on the origins of the Dostoevsky family, the childhood of Fyodor Dostoevsky, adolescence, the Petrachevsky conspiracy, prison life, Dostoevsky as soldier, Dostoevsky's marriages, his travels, Dostoevsky as a father, his relations with Turgenev and Tolstoy, Dostoevsky as Slavophile and ...

  16. 28 Best Dostoevsky Books of All Time [Ranked for 2024]

    Best Dostoevsky Books Best Overall: Crime and Punishment Most Underrated: The Insulted and Humiliated ... Genres: Non-fiction, Biography, Russian Literature, Classics, Writing, Essays. Spanning from 1873 to 1881, this work is a compilation of Dostoevsky's articles, essays, and notes. He reflects on a wide range of topics, from everyday events ...

  17. 4 Best Fyodor Dostoevsky Books Ranked

    The Idiot. The Idiot Digital Art. The Idiot is another of Dostoevsky's major works. It represents his attempt to portray a positively good man, essentially the closest approximation of a Christ-like character with the intent of observing how he would fare in an immoral and worldly society.

  18. Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time by Frank, Joseph

    Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time. Hardcover - November 8, 2009. Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language―and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2,500-page work has been skillfully abridged and ...

  19. Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

    Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time. Paperback - 5 November 2012. Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language--and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed ...

  20. What are the best biographies about Fyodor Dostoyevsky?

    Answer (1 of 2): To me, all others must cede the field to the Joseph Frank's massive work. You can collect each of the five (I think it's five) volumes, or the one-volume digest. I realize that the one-volume edition is enough for most mortals, and it is, by any measure, a hefty tome. But the com...

  21. Books by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Author of Crime and Punishment)

    Refresh and try again. Rate this book. Clear rating. 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars. White Nights. by. Fyodor Dostoevsky. 4.04 avg rating — 136,927 ratings — published 1848 — 799 editions. Want to Read.

  22. Fyodor Dostoevsky bibliography

    The bibliography of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821 - 1881) comprises novels, novellas, short stories, essays and other literary works. Raised by a literate family, Dostoyevsky discovered literature at an early age, beginning when his mother introduced the Bible to him. Nannies near the hospitals—in the grounds of which he was raised—introduced ...

  23. Book Review: 'Carson McCullers: A Life,' by Mary V. Dearborn

    It is Dearborn's poor luck that the best-known biography, Virginia Spencer Carr's "The Lonely Hunter" (1975), is a masterpiece of the form, as formidable in its way as Leon Edel's life ...

  24. Biography

    Biography. Date and place of birth: October 30, 1821, Moscow Date and place of death: January 28, 1881, St. Petersburg Occupation: novelist, translator, philosopher Movement: realism Genre: novel, novella, short story, poem Years of oeuvre: 1844-1880 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky is a classic of Russian and world literature, according to UNESCO, one of the most readable writers in the world.