Who was Fyodor Dostoevsky and why did he nearly face a firing squad?

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born on 11 November 1821 in Moscow, the second of seven children of Mikhail Dostoevsky, a staff doctor at a Moscow hospital, and Maria Nechaeva. He grew up in a modest apartment attached to the hospital, where the family lived alongside the poor and the sick. He was educated in St Petersburg, graduated from the military engineering academy, and immediately resigned his commission to write.

His first novel, Poor Folk (1846), was celebrated as a masterpiece by the critic Vissarion Belinsky before Dostoevsky had finished writing it. He was twenty-four years old and famous.

Three years later he was arrested and led in front of a firing squad.

What happened at the firing squad?#

Dostoevsky had joined a radical intellectual circle, the Petrashevsky Circle, which met to discuss utopian socialism and to criticise the Tsar. He was arrested in April 1849 as part of a broader crackdown on political dissidents. After eight months in the Peter and Paul Fortress, he was tried and sentenced to death.

On 22 December 1849, he and twenty other prisoners were led to Semyonovsky Square in St Petersburg. They were made to wear burial shrouds. Three men were tied to posts and blindfolded. Dostoevsky was in the next group, watching, certain he had minutes to live.

A rider arrived with a commutation from Tsar Nicholas I. The execution was a staged mock execution -- a psychological punishment designed to demonstrate imperial power. The sentence was commuted to four years of hard labour in Siberia followed by compulsory military service.

Dostoevsky survived this experience and wrote about it extensively. The "four years I spent there" that he refers to throughout his later work are those years in the Siberian prison camp at Omsk, which he described in The House of the Dead (1862).

What did the experience do to his writing?#

Everything. The Dostoevsky who entered Siberia was a promising young novelist with radical political views. The man who emerged was something entirely different: a writer deeply committed to Christianity, profoundly suspicious of Western rationalist progressivism, and in possession of a knowledge of human suffering and psychological extremity that most writers never acquire.

He also acquired epilepsy in Siberia, or at least the condition first became pronounced there. He suffered grand mal seizures for the rest of his life, and his descriptions of the "aura" that precedes an epileptic seizure -- a moment of extraordinary clarity and unity that he described as worth more than any normal happiness -- appear in his fiction, most directly in the character of Prince Myshkin in The Idiot (1869).

What are his major works?#

Crime and Punishment (1866) is the best starting point for most readers. The question it spends 500 pages investigating -- why does a man confess to a murder he believes was philosophically justified? -- drives one of the most compelling narratives in Russian literature. For the specific answer to that question, why Raskolnikov confesses covers the argument in detail.

The Idiot (1869) is his most formally unusual major novel: an attempt to depict a genuinely good man in a society that will inevitably destroy him. Prince Myshkin is the "positively beautiful individual" Dostoevsky described wanting to create.

Demons (also translated as The Possessed, 1872) is his most directly political novel and his most prophetic: a study of revolutionary nihilism that many readers found a remarkably accurate prediction of 20th-century totalitarianism.

The Brothers Karamazov (1880) is his last and longest novel, and what he considered his masterpiece. For how long it takes to read and how to approach it, that guide covers the practical questions.

What did he believe?#

Dostoevsky was a Russian Orthodox Christian who believed that suffering was the path to spiritual regeneration, that Western rationalism was spiritually destructive, and that the Russian people had a specific historical mission connected to their religious character. These beliefs are embedded in all the major novels and are argued over -- rather than simply asserted -- through the conflicts between his characters.

The most famous formulation of his central problem is Ivan Karamazov's rebellion in The Brothers Karamazov: if God is all-powerful and all-good, how can the suffering of innocent children be justified? Ivan cannot accept any theological answer that requires the suffering of one child to be part of a greater good. Alyosha cannot refute him. The novel holds both positions and refuses to resolve them.

He died on 9 February 1881, two months after The Brothers Karamazov was completed. He was fifty-nine. The city of St Petersburg gave him a public funeral that drew tens of thousands of people.

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Further reading#

For the practical guide to reading his novels, how to read Dostoevsky: starting points and reading order covers every question about where to begin.

Crime and Punishment is free on Foxing. The Brothers Karamazov is free on Foxing.

Sources#

• Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849, Princeton University Press, 1976 (first of five volumes -- the definitive biography)
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead, 1862
• Dostoevsky Research Station