![]() The Possessed (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) one could also add to this list the 1864 proto-existentialist novella Notes from the Underground. But his titanic stature rests on four novels written after his 1855 return from the penal colony: Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868-1869), The Demons, a.k.a. By the time of his arrest in 1849, he had published two more novellas and several installments of a novel, Netochka Nezvanova (which remained unfinished). The text messages in the Dominion case show that Fox was intentionally pushing lies about…ĭostoevsky first found literary success with his debut, the 1846 novella Poor Folk, a moving tale of the struggles of a kind, sensitive, shy, middle-aged clerk and an impoverished young woman of genteel background making a living as a seamstress. Figures as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ayn Rand admired his genius while vehemently rejecting his beliefs, and even detractors such as Nabokov could not quite escape his magnetism. ![]() ![]() Indeed, Vladimir Nabokov (not a fan, to put it mildly) suggested that Dostoevsky was “the most European of the Russian writers.” He had, in turn, an immense influence on Western literature and culture among other things, he has been described as a forerunner of psychoanalysis, existentialism, expressionism and surrealism. He scorned the West for its rationalism and materialism, yet was deeply influenced by Western literature, from late eighteenth-century Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe to Honoré de Balzac and Charles Dickens. A Slavophile (or quasi-Slavophile) for whom Russianness was the core of all goodness, he also believed that Russia’s special mission to the world was to be the bringer of universal brotherhood. Dostoevsky was a bold thinker with radical visions of freedom and justice, and a reactionary defender of the established order a prophet of human universalism and a militant ultranationalist a passionate champion of all-encompassing Christian love and the author of shocking passages filled with ethnic and religious bigotry. In the remaining three decades of his life, Dostoevsky spent four years in a penal colony (reduced from the original eight-year sentence) had a stormy marriage and an even more tumultuous love affair before finding happiness and stability with his second wife, Anna overcame a gambling addition that at one point reduced him and Anna to penury fathered four children and was devastated by the deaths of two of them at a young age struggled for years to establish himself as a writer and journalist and finally achieved fame that brought more than 60,000 mourners to his funeral when he died at 59 of a pulmonary hemorrhage on February 9, 1881.Īlmost by definition, a great writer is a creature of paradox, containing (as Walt Whitman said) multitudes. This was not, as some accounts have erroneously said, a last-minute change of heart by the tsar but a pre-planned sadistic charade. The sentence was read out loud, the first three victims were tied to posts before a firing squad, the soldiers took aim then, drums signaled a retreat and a messenger from Tsar Nicholas I announced a pardon and commutation to hard labor in Siberia. On December 23, 1849, shortly after his twenty-eighth birthday, the former military engineer was taken to what he believed would be his execution, with twenty other men condemned as dangerous subversives for membership in a clandestine literary circle that trafficked in banned books. The life of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, the towering cultural icon whose two hundredth anniversary was among the past year’s great literary events, would itself have made a remarkable novel-or film, since its pivotal moment was a harrowingly cinematic scene.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |