Fyodor Dostoevsky

Life

Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821, the son of a physician at a charity hospital. He completed his studies at the Military Engineering School in St. Petersburg and began his literary career in 1846 with Poor Folk. In 1849 he was arrested on charges of taking part in the Petrashevsky Circle, a group that discussed socialist ideas, and was sentenced to death. That December, at the place of execution, an imperial order commuting the sentence was read moments before he was to be shot. This "mock execution" had been staged from the outset as part of the punishment.

While he was being taken to Siberia, the wives of Decembrists (participants in the 1825 uprising) gave him a copy of the Gospels in Tobolsk. He then served a sentence of hard labor in the Omsk prison from 1850 to 1854, after which he served as a private soldier. A letter he wrote in February 1854 to Natalya Fonvizina, who had given him the Gospels, is frequently cited as a statement of his faith. He died in St. Petersburg in 1881.

Work and Achievements

Dostoevsky was a novelist, not a clergyman or theologian. After Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868–1869), and Demons (1871–1872), he serialized his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880), in a magazine.

In 1878, around the time he began writing this novel, he lost his young son Alyosha. Afterward he visited Optina Monastery with the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov and received consolation from Elder Ambrose, a starets (a monk who serves as a spiritual guide). The novel's Elder Zosima is said to have been modeled on him.

In the novel, the second son, Ivan, composes a dramatic poem, "The Grand Inquisitor," in which an aged Grand Inquisitor imprisons Jesus, who has returned to the world. The Inquisitor accuses Jesus of having burdened humanity with a freedom it cannot bear by rejecting the devil's three proposals during the temptation in the wilderness. Jesus makes no reply but kisses him. In the book that immediately follows, the teaching of Elder Zosima that people are to bear one another's sins comes as though in response.

Assessment

Dostoevsky is regarded as one of the greatest masters of Russian literature and exerted a major influence on the twentieth-century novel. The philosopher Walter Kaufmann described Notes from Underground as an overture to existentialism. Within Orthodoxy, he is honored as a writer of faith, with particular reference to his ties to Optina Monastery.

At the same time, his conservative political views after his Siberian exile and his antisemitic remarks have drawn criticism from later scholars. Interpretations of "The Grand Inquisitor" also differ. Some read the passage as a critique of the Roman Catholic Church, while others see it as a rejoinder to atheism's critique of Christianity.