4.4 Second marriage and honeymoon (1866–1871)ĭostoevsky's paternal ancestors were part of a noble family of Russian Orthodox Christians.4.3 Release from prison and first marriage (1854–1866).His books have been translated into more than 170 languages, and served as the basis for many films. His writings were widely read both within and beyond his native Russia and influenced an equally great number of later writers including Russians such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Anton Chekhov, philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre, and the emergence of Existentialism and Freudianism. For a time, he had to beg for money, but he eventually became one of the most widely read and highly regarded Russian writers.ĭostoevsky was influenced by a wide variety of philosophers and authors including Pushkin, Gogol, Augustine, Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens, Balzac, Lermontov, Hugo, Poe, Plato, Cervantes, Herzen, Kant, Belinsky, Byron, Hegel, Schiller, Solovyov, Bakunin, Sand, Hoffmann, and Mickiewicz.ĭostoevsky's body of work consists of 12 novels, four novellas, 16 short stories, and numerous other works.

He began to travel around western Europe and developed a gambling addiction, which led to financial hardship. In the following years, Dostoevsky worked as a journalist, publishing and editing several magazines of his own and later A Writer's Diary, a collection of his writings. He spent four years in a Siberian prison camp, followed by six years of compulsory military service in exile. Arrested in 1849 for belonging to a literary group that discussed banned books critical of Tsarist Russia, he was sentenced to death but the sentence was commuted at the last moment. In the mid-1840s he wrote his first novel, Poor Folk, which gained him entry into Saint Petersburg's literary circles. After graduating, he worked as an engineer and briefly enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, translating books to earn extra money. His mother died in 1837 when he was 15, and around the same time, he left school to enter the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute. īorn in Moscow in 1821, Dostoevsky was introduced to literature at an early age through fairy tales and legends, and through books by Russian and foreign authors. Numerous literary critics rate him as one of the greatest novelists in all of world literature, as many of his works are considered highly influential masterpieces. His 1864 novella Notes from Underground is considered to be one of the first works of existentialist literature. His most acclaimed novels include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880).

Dostoevsky's literary works explore the human condition in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century Russia, and engage with a variety of philosophical and religious themes. Fyódor Mikháylovich Dostoyévskiy, IPA: ( listen) 11 November 1821 – 9 February 1881 ), sometimes transliterated as Dostoyevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, and journalist.

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