The Russian writer Dostoevski is regarded as one of the world's great
novelists. In Russia he was surpassed only by Leo Tolstoi.
Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevski was born on Nov. 11, 1821, in a
Moscow hospital where his father was a physician. At 13 Fedor was sent
to a Moscow boarding school, then to a military engineering school in
St. Petersburg. Shortly after graduating he resigned his commission in
order to devote his time to writing.
Dostoevski had published two novels and several sketches and
short stories when he was arrested along with a group of about 20 others
with whom he had been studying French socialist theories. After the
1848 revolutions in Western Europe, Russia's Czar Nicholas I decided to
round up all of that country's revolutionaries, and in April 1849
Dostoevski's group was imprisoned. Dostoevski and several others were
sentenced to be shot, but at the last minute their sentence was changed
to four years of hard labor in a prison in Omsk, Siberia. There,
Dostoevski said, they were "packed in like herrings in a barrel" with
murderers and other criminals. He read and reread the New Testament, the
only book he had, and built a mystical creed, identifying Christ with
the common people of Russia. He had great sympathy for the criminals.
As a child Dostoevski suffered from mild epilepsy, and it grew
worse in prison. After four years in prison, he was sent as a private to
a military station in Siberia. There in 1857 he met and married a widow
named Marie Isaeva.
In 1860 Dostoevski was back in St. Petersburg. The next year he
began to publish a literary journal that was soon suppressed, though he
had by now lost interest in socialism. In 1862 he visited Western Europe
and hated the industrialism he saw there. Dostoevski had been separated
from his wife but visited her in Moscow before her death in 1864. In
1867 he married his young stenographer, Anna Snitkina. He died on Feb.
9, 1881, in St. Petersburg.
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