Prison, censorship, gambling and writing to repay debts - everyone who read at least one of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novels in high school found all these elements in them.
Some learned then that Dostoyevsky was the creator of a psychological novel, as well as a realist who wrote about ordinary, poor people from the second half of the 19th century in Russia.
"In his literary works, Dostoevsky deeply and insightfully studies the issues of moral responsibility and free will," Ana Jakovljević Radunović, an assistant professor at the Department of Slavic Studies at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade, told the BBC.
"Dealing with these problems brought him fame as a writer-philosopher, an expert on the human soul, and even a prophet."
Dostoevsky was not only a writer - he was also a journalist, gambler, activist, and some consider him the prophet of the October Revolution.
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For those who, on November 11, Dostoevsky's birthday, wish to read and understand the Russian writer in addition to the obligatory reading, certain facts from his literary and private life - could help.
1. Dostoyevsky changed the crime novel
Dostoevsky wrote crime stories?
It is difficult for anyone who has any interest in literature to understand that it is Crime and Punishment - a psychologically layered novel whose main character, through seven days of suffering, wonders whether the crime justifies the means, that is, whether killing someone for the greater good is actually just an ordinary crime.
However, Ana Jakovljević Radunović says that this division is not so simple.
"Detective novels are a kind of adventure novel," she says.
"They appeared in the 19th century when, due to the growth of crime in cities, the police were formed, the institution of investigators and detectives was established.
"A detective novel is based on a crime, which is unraveled by logical analysis, intuition or the professional skill of the investigator".
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The elements of the detective novel, she claims, are still present in Crime and punishment, but Dostoevsky is precisely the writer who changes the laws of this genre.
"The reader is not familiar with the logic of the investigator's thinking, but he is familiar with the perpetrator's thoughts, which is why the detective line becomes secondary," says Jakovljević Radunović.
"The elements of the detective novel are also present in To the Idiot, to Evil Souls, to the Brothers Karamazov, but it is important for Dostoyevsky to investigate the psychology of the criminal, the motives for the crime, and not the disclosure of the crime, which is the main thing in detective literature".
Jasmina Ahmetagić, literary critic and author Books about Dostoyevsky says that the writer "mixed genres well in his work".
"By using popular genres and transforming a thriller into a metaphysical novel, it is still modern today," adds Ahmetagić.
Who is Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky?
- He was born on November 11, 1821 in Moscow
- He was the second of seven children in a family of Belarusian immigrants
- When he was 16, his mother died of tuberculosis, and he and his brother were sent to a military school
- At the age of 28, he was sentenced to death for participating in a revolutionary organization
- After the pardon, he spent four years in forced labor in Siberia
- He is considered the forerunner of numerous literary trends - the psychological novel, modernism, existentialism
- He died in 1864 from bleeding caused by an epileptic attack
2. Writer-psychologist
"They call me a psychologist," remarked Dostoevsky in one entry.
"It's not true, I'm only a realist in the highest sense, i.e., I show all the depth of the human soul".
Dostoevsky, confirms Ahmetagić, just introduced us to the depths of the human psyche.
"He introduced us to man's paradoxes, to how impossible it is for a man to know himself, let alone another human being completely, no matter how much time and life energy he spends in that process," says Ahmetagić.
"He confronted us with the vast spaces of the unconscious and irrational that rule our behavior, in fact, with the space on which the entire psychological science will grow.
"He truly showed us, as Mićka Karamazov (a character from the work) would say The Karamazov brothers), how much man is shoreless, problematically wide and that he needs to be narrowed down".
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Ahmetagić says that Dostoevsky wrote "about the psychological pitfalls that man falls into, in which he spends his short-sighted life and cannot truly love his neighbor".
"He wrote about freedom and the abundance of ways in which man betrays it: about vices, passions, crimes, vanities, inferiorities and man's constant need to be important," adds the literary critic.
3. Private life - zlawyer, gambler, debtor
Writing, activism, prison, military service, gambling, debts - all this was part of Dostoevsky's private life.
Shortly after the publication of the short story White night In 1849, Dostoevsky was arrested and spent eight months in custody.
He was sentenced to death because he allegedly worked and published articles against religion and the Russian government.
However, the death sentence was commuted to four years of hard labor in Siberia.
During that period, he experienced more and more epileptic attacks. When he was released from prison, he spent five years as a lieutenant in what is now Kazakhstan.
This period is considered a turning point in his life - it was then that Dostoevsky abandoned his earlier political views and returned to traditional Russian values.
He became a convinced Christian and a great opponent of the philosophy of nihilism. At that time, he also met Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, the widow of a friend from Siberia, whom he later married.
"His professional activities were diverse - fiction, criticism, journalism, editing, magazine publishing.
"Dostoevsky was a professional writer in every sense of the word. His writing activity includes not only literary works, but also work with mass media, social and charitable involvement," says Jakovljević Radunović.
In 1860, Dostoevsky published a magazine with his brother Mihail Mihajlovic Time, one of the most popular magazines at the time, with an impressive four thousand subscribers.
The magazine promoted the "Russian idea" that will unite the cultural achievements of the Russian people and European enlightenment, which attracted impartial readers of different persuasions, says Jakovljević Radunović.
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"It can even be said that Dostoevsky created a new artistic model of the world, in which many of the main points of the old artistic form underwent a radical transformation".
"Dostoevsky is the most prominent representative of ontological, reflective poetics, which, unlike traditional, descriptive poetics, leaves the character in a certain sense free in his relationship with the text, which describes him," she says.
When his wife and then his brother died four years later, Dostoevsky fell into depression, started gambling and went into debt.
It is just a more famous work Crime and punishmenta wrote in extremely short order to pay off gambling debts. As the publisher was blackmailing him to publish another book, he also wrote A gambler.
4. Did he foresee the October Revolution?
Evil souls are, says Jakovljević Radunović, a novel about obsession with an idea that separates a person from real life.
Some believe that with this work, Dostoevsky predicted the October Revolution and the change of the political regime in Russia from the Empire to Communism.
In the novel that was published four decades before the October Revolution, Dostoevsky explains the socialist revolution in terms of mental agony.
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He evokes its creation through two generations of characters, and sees the origin of the revolution in individualism - apostasy from moral and religious principles, rejection of the spiritual.
The writer portrays a father who tries to cover up his own incompetence by portraying himself as more important, as well as his son. who rushes even more to prove it.
"After the October Revolution, Evil souls became a novel whose interpretation depended on the reader's political views and on which side of the Soviet border he was," says Jakovljević Radunović.
The main opponent of the novel was Maxim Gorky - he condemned it "as reactionary and socially harmful and thus created the Soviet tradition of its perception", she says.
"On the other hand, symbolist criticism and existentialists declared Zle duhe prophetic book. (Philosopher Nikolay) Berdjaev wrote in 1918 that Dostoevsky predicted that nihilism, acting on the Russian Christian space, could not but be demonic."
After the 20th century with all the wars, revolutions, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes and democracies, the cult of leaders, violation of personal freedoms, mass repressions, the novel Evil souls it is revealed in a new light.
"This is not a novel-pamphlet - although it was conceived as such, and the elements of a pamphlet and parody are present in it, but a novel of tragedy, a prophetic novel that has universal significance," says Jakovljević Radunović.
5. Can we get to know Russia from Dostoyevsky's novel?
In his novels, Dostoevsky deals with the common man and his fate, and one of the central themes of his work is the theme of freedom and self-will," says Jakovljević Radunović.
The theme of "evil and crime" is also omnipresent, as well as heroes "who find their way to God and those who move away from him".
The heroes are ordinary people who live in the city and his novels reflect "the reality of 19th century Russia, but also our reality".
"Whatever city we live in, there are poor people everywhere who barely make ends meet.
"We all experience the same spiritual, psychological, social, everyday difficulties that the Russian author wrote about, and in this sense, Dostoyevsky's novels are texts that we can and must return to in search of the essential questions of human existence, and they are not only related to Russia, but are close to the readers around the world," says Jakovljević Radunović.
However, Jasmina Ahmetagić does not think that Dostoevsky's works are a realistic picture of Russia, but "only the writer's picture and experience of Russia".
"When he writes about a small Russian man, Dostoevsky realistically portrays his misery, suffering, humiliation, but that is not the main thing about him," says Ahmetagić.
Dostoevsky was "first of all sensitive to the ideological movements of his time, and he used this in his works to show through them universal questions and the multitude of human mental delusions."
Ahmetagić believes that the writer himself "had one illusion - first of all, he idealized Russia".
"And when he criticizes her, he does so in the name of the idea of Russia, which for him was an idealized, even somewhat sweetened, Orthodox mother Russia," she concludes.
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