Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The following years, spent abroad to escape creditors, were marked by physical hardship and poverty but great productivity: seeing the completion of the novels Crime and Punishment (1866), begun in fact before The Gambler, The Idiot (1868-1869), and The Possessed (1871-1872). When Dostoyevsky returned to Russia in 1873 he was world-renowned. The last novel, The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880), was completed not long before his death in St Petersburg on February 9, 1881.

It is on these last four novels, in which Dostoyevsky dramatizes moral and political problems, that his fame ultimately rests. Within skilfully constructed suspense plots, he creates dynamic, autonomous heroes and places them in extreme situations. Each novel is centred on the exploration of their conflicting drives and motivations and the philosophical justification for their existence. For each of these novels Dostoyevsky kept a notebook. Edited and translated in the late 20th century, these journals are an invaluable revelation of his creative methods.

In Crime and Punishment, probably his best-known work, a poor student, Raskolnikov, commits murder to rid the world of a human being he sees as a parasite, and to help his indigent family; but his main motive is the testing of his right as an extraordinary individual (as he conceives himself to be) to transgress moral law. Tormented by guilt and isolation, he confesses and is spiritually redeemed. The main protagonist of The Idiot is a Christlike figure, conceived by Dostoyevsky as the positively good man. Myshkin radiates sincerity, compassion, and humility and becomes a mentor to those around him, but is finally broken in spirit by their destructive hatreds and lusts. The Possessed is a novel about a revolutionary conspiracy that uses terrorist tactics, based on press reports of a Moscow student's murder by fellow revolutionaries. An unlimited propensity for wantonly cruel acts is embodied in the demonic, self-destroying hero, Stavrogin. The Brothers Karamazov, considered one of the masterpieces of world literature, is the most powerful artistic expression of Dostoyevsky's psychological insights and philosophical and religious views. It is plotted as a gripping murder mystery; concerned with the tragedy of patricide, it surges with family tensions. The profound intellectual and spiritual significance of the massive novel is gradually revealed in the confrontations among the Karamazov brothers: the intellectual sceptic, Ivan; the emotional man of action, Dmitri, a novice from the monastery; and the saintly boy, Alyosha. The three protagonists—metaphysical symbols of body, mind, and spirit of the modern human being—engage in passionate debate, revolving around themes considered in the author's earlier works: the expiation of sin through suffering, the need for a moral force in an irrational universe, the struggle between good and evil, the supreme value of the individual and freedom. The ultimate question is raised of how one is to live and what one is to live by—to which only fragmentary answers are given.

The symbolic creation of worlds where heroes, pervaded by the tragic sense of life, search for truth and self-fulfilment endows the novels of Dostoyevsky's last creative period with a timeless and universal quality. Dostoyevsky anticipated modern psychology by his exploration of hidden motives and intuitive understanding of the unconscious, manifested in the irrational behaviour, psychic suffering, dreams, and lapses into insanity of his characters. He also prepared the way for the subjective approach of much 20th-century literature and for Surrealistic and Existential writing. Dostoyevsky's influence on most serious contemporary thinkers and writers is significant: Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that Dostoyevsky had inspired his own Existentialist beliefs. The first major English translation of Dostoyevsky's novels was made by Constance Garnett between 1912 and 1920.