The secret of a man's life is not just living, but why he lives, is one of the thoughts of the Russian writer, novelist, novelist and publicist Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, who was born on this day in 1821 in Moscow.
He was the son of a doctor, a member of the lower nobility who was killed by his own serfs because of cruelty and humiliation, while his mother died when he was still a child. The future writer attends and completes military engineering education in what was then Petrograd, and today's Saint Petersburg, but decided early on that he would devote himself to a literary vocation.
In his novels, Dostoevsky is the first among Russian writers to depict an urban environment full of heavy and gloomy tragedy that suffocates everything around it. Searching for the hidden motivations of human actions, looking for answers to existential questions, but also moral and philosophical questions of human existence, while penetrating the soul and psyche of man, bringing psychological portraits of his heroes.
Among the early influences, the most important is the German dramatist and poet Friedrich Schiller, while under the influence of Gogol he wrote his first work, the short epistolary novel "Wretches", which depicts the suffering and ecstasy of the so-called. little people delighted the most important Russian critic Visarion Bielinsky and launched Dostoyevsky into the sphere of eminent Russian literary circles.
In 1849, there was a police ban on the activities of "Petraševci", the arrest of members, and a sadistic farce performed by the imperial police. At dawn, Dostoevsky and his comrades were taken to a staged shooting, the death sentence was read to them, and while they were blindfolded waiting for the firing squad, the "imperial pardon" came, pardoning them and condemning them to Siberian imprisonment and exile.
The writer was imprisoned for four years, and after that he was forced to serve for four years as an ordinary soldier in the harsh conditions of remote parts of Asian Russia. It was there that he met his first wife, a tuberculous and hysterical widow, who later served as a prototype for a series of female characters in his novels. After returning to Petrograd, Dostoevsky publishes Notes from the Dead House, a semi-documented account of his enslavement that realistically recreates the conditions of Siberian captivity. However, unsettled and unhappy family circumstances, as well as personal human drama, put Dostoevsky in a difficult situation that partially slowed down his creativity.
In 1864, Dostoevsky published the brilliant "Zapise iz podzemlja", one of the most intense short novels in general, a forerunner of the confessional narrative works of Camus, Krleža, Rilke, Hamsun and Sartre.
Dostoevsky's great novels usually include "Crime and Punishment", his technically most perfect work, about an ideologically motivated murder with the main character Rodion Raskolnikov, the prototype of Nietzsche's superman, broken in nihilism and saved by the love of a prostitute, Saint Sonya, as well as "Marmelad the Idiot", in which Dostoevsky gave the character of the "femme fatale" Nastasya Filipovna, but also the last, most comprehensive and greatest work, "The Brothers Karamazov".
Dostoevsky died in 1881, suddenly, after bleeding caused by an epileptic seizure. In his last years, his life was settled, and it can be said that he got rid of the material poverty and troubles that accompanied him for most of his life. He achieved his greatest posthumous glory with a famous speech at the unveiling of the monument to Pushkin, in which he glorified the Russian national genius. He intended to write the rest of "The Brothers Karamazov", but fate prevented him from doing so.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky belongs to the narrowest circle of the world's top writers, such as Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Cervantes and several other authors. His influence on world literature is enormous, from Leonid Leonov to Hermann Hesse, from William Faulkner to Franz Kafka. It is rare that any modern writer has escaped his shadow, and the movements of expressionism and existentialism owe a lot to him.
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