The family name Dostoevsky was derived from the village Dostoev in the Minsk region. It was granted by the Prince of Pinsk in perpetuity to the boyar Danil Ivanovich Rtishchev in 1506 for services rendered. The city of Pinsk goes back to the eleventh century and forms the heartland of Belorussia. No fewer than four nationalities – Belorussian, Russian, Ukrainian and Polish – go into the composition of the Dostoevsky family tree, and the end result is about as multinational as was possible at the time. The Rtishchevs were Russian, the setting was Belorussian, the suffix “-sky” is predominantly Polish, and over the years some of the Dostoevskys moved and settled in the Ukraine, while others, like the Fyodor Mikhailovich branch, ended up in Moscow. Dostoevsky’s father, Mikhail Andreyevich (1789–1839), was the son of a Ukrainian Uniate priest, Andrey Dostoevsky. Fyodor Mikhailovich himself, of course, never considered himself anything other than Russian. The eminent Dostoevsky scholar, Ludmila Saraskina, was recently asked if the writer was not of Polish blood, and she responded: “The Dostoevsky lineage presents a fascinating and unusual mixture of nationalities: in a family where the father was Lithuanian, the mother Ukrainian, there was a cult of Russian literature and history, the cult of reading. The atmosphere was one of devotion to the spoken word, and it is precisely this which above all else shaped the author’s creative make-up. Hence, Dostoevsky’s Russianness is a wholly cultural rather than ethnic phenomenon.” The concept “Lithuanian” must, of course, be understood in the traditional sense as in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which has precious little to do with modern Lithuania.
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in Moscow on 30th October 1821. In 1831, his father had bought a small estate, Darovoye, and two years later, the neighbouring Chermoshnya, which would acquire lasting fame as Chermashnya, in the violent murder plot of Karamazov senior in The Karamazov Brothers. Speaking of Darovoye, Dostoevsky confessed: “This small, insignificant place left in me the deepest and most memorable impression for life.” Fyodor was the second in a family of six siblings. His mother, Maria Fyodorovna (née Nechayeva, 1800–37), a religious minded woman, came from a merchant family. She taught him to read from an edition of One Hundred and Four Old and New Testament Stories, and within the family circle there were readings from Karamzin’s The History of the Russian State, as well as from the works of Derzhavin, Zhukovsky and Pushkin. Dostoevsky often sought the company of peasants, and his discussions with them proved to be a rich source of material for his future compositions.
In 1832 Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail were educated at home by visiting tutors, and from 1833 they were placed in various boarding schools. Dostoevsky found the atmosphere in these establishments oppressive and uncongenial, and his only solace was extensive and intensive reading. From late 1834 to early 1837 the two brothers attended one of Moscow’s best private boarding schools, run by the Czech-born Leontiy Ivanovich Chermak, a man of little or no education, but a brilliant, intuitive pedagogue and a humane and understanding father figure. State-run schools, on the other hand, had an overall unflattering reputation for frequent application of the disciplinary rod and staple bad food. The teacher of Russian, Nikolai Ivanovich Bilevich, turned out to be something of a role model and has allegedly served as the prototype for Nikolai Semyonovich in The Adolescent (variously known as Raw Youth and Accidental Family), whom the hero Arkady picked at random as an appraiser of his autobiographical notes. “At long last I decided to seek someone’s counsel. Having cast around, I chose this gentleman with purposeful deliberation. Nikolai Semyonovich was my former tutor in Moscow, and Marya Ivanovna’s husband…” (The Adolescent, penultimate chapter.)
By all accounts Dostoevsky’s father, Mikhail Andreyevich, was an upstanding, hard-working family man – his one failing, however, being his touchy, short temper. After the death of his wife in 1837, he retired and settled in Darovoye, where he died on 6th June 1839. Officially the cause of death was recorded as apoplexy, but by all popular accounts he perished at the hands of his peasants, forming a possible clue to the origins of the plot involving the mysterious death of the head of the family in The Karamazov Brothers. The loss of his mother in 1837 coincided with the shattering news of Pushkin’s fatal duel, which Dostoevsky perceived as a personal bereavement too. Dostoevsky’s adulation of Pushkin continued all his life, and reached its apotheosis in 1880, only months before his own death.
In May 1837 he enrolled at the Koronad Filipovich Kostomarov cramming institute, prior to applying to the Central Military Engineering Academy, where he got to know the highly colourful Ivan Nikolayevich Shidlovsky, subsequently a poet and church historian. Originally the name of the principal character in The Idiot was to be Shidlovsky, and when responding to Vladimir Solovyev’s request in 1873 for some biographical material for an article, Dostoevsky enjoined him to mention his friend. “Make sure you mention him in your article. It does not matter that no one knows of him and that he has not left behind a literary legacy. I beg you, my dear chap, mention him – he was a major figure in my life, and deserves that his name should live on.” Dostoevsky attended the Engineering Academy from January 1838; unfortunately his brother Mikhail had failed to qualify for entry. The gruelling, soul-destroying military regime was to a large extent relieved by the company of close and devoted friends, the writer Dmitry Vasilyevich Grigorovich being one of them. It was he who first noted Dostoevsky’s reticence and unsociability, and who later recorded the tumultuous effect upon Dostoevsky of his rift with Belinsky and his circle, most particularly with Ivan Turgenev.
The vast bulk of information on Dostoevsky’s early life comes from the Reminiscences of his younger brother Andrey. He was an architect, and also a meticulously scrupulous and tidy worker in everything he undertook. His Reminiscences are well executed, detailed and informative. Quaintly, and for an architect not inappropriately, the book is conceived as a mansion, and the chapters are termed rooms.
Dostoevsky’s first literary projects were conceived at the Engineering Academy. In 1841, at a soirée organized by his brother Mikhail, Dostoevsky read out excerpts from some of his dramatic compositions – Mary Stuart and Boris Godunov – none of which have survived. On graduation, and having served just under a year in the St Petersburg Engineering Corps, he resigned with the rank of senior lieutenant (поручик) to devote himself entirely to literature.
His first published work was a translation of Balzac’s Eugènie Grandet, which appeared in 1844. In the winter of the same year he started writing the epistolary novel Poor Folk. Dmitry Grigorovich and the poet Nikolai Nekrasov were so taken by it that they spent the night reading it in manuscript. They then headed for Belinsky’s and on the doorstep announced, “We’ve a new Gogol!” to which Belinsky retorted, “Gogols sprout like mushrooms with you!” But having read the work, his enthusiasm knew no bounds: “The novel reveals such profundities of characters and of life in Russia as no one had ever dreamt of before.” It was accepted for publication by the St Petersburg Anthology, edited by Nekrasov. The praise lavished on the novel obviously went to Dostoevsky’s head, because he requested that each page should have a black border to make the work stand out; the astonished Nekrasov refused point blank, and it was published without the borders. It was an overnight success.
At the end of 1845 at a soirée at Belinsky’s, Dostoevsky read out selected passages from The Double. Belinsky was quite interested at first, but later expressed his disapproval. This marked the beginning of the rift between the two men. Dostoevsky took it very badly and, stressed as he was, the very first symptoms of epilepsy, which were to plague him for the rest of his life, began to manifest themselves.
In spring 1847 Dostoevsky began to attend (on a far from regular basis) the Friday meetings of the revolutionary and utopian socialist Mikhail Petrashevsky. The discussions, which included literary themes, bore on the whole a political and sociological slant – the emancipation of the serfs, judicial and censorship reforms, French socialist manifestos and Belinsky’s banned letter to Gogol were typical subjects of debate. In 1848 Dostoevsky joined a special secret society, organized by the most radical member of the Petrashevsky Circle, one Nikolai Speshnev, by all accounts a colourful and demonic figure, whom Dostoevsky imagined to be his Mephistopheles. The society’s goal was to organize an insurrection in Russia. On the morning of 23rd April 1849, the author, together with other members of the group, was arrested and confined in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Many of them, including Speshnev, found themselves depicted twenty-three years later in the pages of Devils.
After eight months in the fortress, where Dostoevsky wrote his story The Little Hero, he was found guilty of “plotting to subvert public order” and was initially sentenced to death by firing squad, which was at the last moment commuted to mort civile, amounting to four years of hard labour and subsequent conscription into the army. His experiences as a convict of the Omsk Fortress are poignantly recorded in Notes from the House of the Dead (1860–62) and the theme of execution itself is treated in some detail in The Idiot.
After January 1854 Dostoevsky served as a private in Semipalatinsk, eastern Kazakhstan. Even before his departure for the army, he wrote to Natalya Dmitrievna Fonvizina, the wife of one of the Decembrists (members of the ill-fated uprising in December 1825):
I seem to be in some kind of an expectation of something; I can’t help feeling I’m ill, and that soon, very soon something decisive will happen. I feel that I’m approaching a turning point in my life, that I’ve reached a state of maturity and am on the verge of something peaceful, blithe – perhaps awesome – but certainly inevitable.
These were prophetic words. Almost immediately on arrival in Semipalatinsk he made the acquaintance of a minor clerk, Alexander Ivanovich Isayev, an impoverished customs-and-excise officer and alcoholic, and his wife, Maria Dmitrievna. Mrs Isayeva was then twenty-nine years old. Dostoevsky fell head over heels for her, although his love was not always requited and she considered him to be “a man with no future”. He was no doubt attracted by what he perceived to be her vulnerability and spiritual defencelessness. Dostoevsky’s own life was not of the happiest, and the two revelled in bouts of self-pity. And then came a terrible blow: Isayev was transferred to Kuznetsk, some six hundred versts from Semipalatinsk. Dostoevsky took the parting indescribably badly.
In August 1855 Maria Dmitrievna informed Dostoevsky that her husband had passed away. She was in dire straits – alone, without means, in an unfamiliar town, without relatives or friends to help her. Dostoevsky proposed to her immediately, but Maria Dmitrievna demurred. He realized, of course, that it was his own lowly status that was at the root of the problem. However, with the death of Nicholas I and the enthronement of Alexander II, there was hope in the improvement of the fate of the Petrashevtsy convicts. In December 1855 he was made a warrant officer; this elated him so much that in early 1856 he wrote to his brother of his intention to tie the knot: “I’ve taken my decision and, should the ground collapse under me, I’ll go through with it… without that, which for me is now the main thing in life, life itself is valueless…”
Dostoevsky was so desperately short of money that he implored his brother for a loan of 100 roubles or more, or as much as he could afford. Begging for money was to become a way of life for Dostoevsky. Almost in desperation, he made a daring move. Having obtained official leave to go to Barnaul, he took a secret trip to Kuznetsk. But, to his surprise, instead of being greeted with love and affection, he found himself in a situation such as is depicted in White Nights and Humiliated and Insulted. Maria Dmitrievna flung her arms round his neck and, crying bitterly and with passionate kisses, confessed that she had fallen in love with the schoolteacher Nikolai Borisovich Vergunov and was intending to get married to him. Dostoevsky listened in silence to what she had to say, and then sat down with her to discuss her prospective marriage to a man who had even less money than he, but had two incontestable advantages – he was young and handsome. Maria Dmitrievna insisted the two rivals should meet and, like the Dreamer in White Nights and Ivan Petrovich in Humiliated and Insulted, Dostoevsky decided to sacrifice his own love for the sake of others. This fairly bowled Maria Dmitrievna over: Dostoevsky wrote to Wrangel, quoting her words to him: “‘Don’t cry, don’t be sad, nothing has yet been decided. You and I, and there’s no one else.’ These were positively her words. I spent two days in bliss and suffering! At the end of the second day I left full of hope…”
But he had scarcely returned to Semipalatinsk when Maria Dmitrievna wrote to him that she was “sad and in tears” and loved Vergunov more than him. Dostoevsky was again absolutely distraught, but still found it in him to continue
to stand by the love of his life. He would seek to obtain
for her an assistance grant on the basis of her deceased husband’s government service record, try to enrol her son in the cadet corps and even assist Vergunov in securing a better position.
In those turbulent times, when Dostoevsky imagined he had lost Maria Dmitrievna for ever, there was suddenly new hope. On 1st October 1856 he was promoted to officer, and his dream of being able to return to St Petersburg became a distinct reality. It is unlikely that this was the only cause – Maria Dmitrievna had probably always loved him after a fashion, though obviously never as strongly as he loved her – but her resistance to him suddenly broke down to the extent that Vergunov simply melted into the background and was heard of no more. Later that month Dostoevsky went to Kuznetsk, sought and obtained Maria Dmitrievna’s hand and was married to her on 6th February 1857.
His happiness knew no bounds, but a major blow was just round the corner. On their way back to Semipalatinsk, when the newly-weds had stopped in Barnaul, Dostoevsky, as a result of all the emotional upheaval, had a severe epileptic fit. This had a shattering effect on Maria Dmitrievna. The sight of her husband staring wildly ahead, foaming at the mouth and kicking convulsively on the floor must have been disconcerting and frightening in the extreme. She burst into tears and began to reproach him for concealing his ailment. He was actually innocent; he had been convinced that what he suffered from were ordinary nervous attacks, not epilepsy – at least that’s what doctors had told him previously. All the same, he hadn’t told her even that much.
They settled in St Petersburg, but the local climate was too uncongenial for her, and she moved to Tver. From then on they saw each other only sporadically, moving, as they did, from town to town and from flat to flat. On 7th June 1862 he made his first trip abroad – alone. He felt he had his own life to lead. Maria Dmitrievna had little to do with it, and she was fast approaching death as she had contracted tuberculosis.
Dostoevsky returned to Russia in September. At the beginning of November 1863 the couple settled in Moscow. Maria Dmitrievna was fighting for her life, but on her deathbed she was getting more and more irritable and demanding. Dostoevsky looked after her assiduously, yet at the same time he was riveted to his writing desk. Her suffering and moodiness are reflected in the description of Marmeladov’s wife in Crime and Punishment and of Ippolit in The Idiot. Maria Dmitrievna died on 14th April 1864.
On his return from Siberia in 1859 Dostoevsky published Uncle’s Dream and The Village of Stepanchikovo, neither of which met with much success. Notes from the House of the Dead began its life in 1860 in the daily newspaper The Russian World (Русский мир), but only the introduction and the first chapter were printed, for Dostoevsky had to keep a wary eye on the censor, as he had pointed out to his brother Mikhail in a letter in 1859: “It could all turn out nasty… If they ban it, it can all be broken up into separate articles and published in journals serially… but that would be a calamity!” Chapters 2–4 were published in subsequent issues in 1861, but it was serialized no further in The Russian World. With some notable alterations, the early chapters were reprinted in the 1861 April issue of Time (Время), a journal he founded jointly with his brother, and the concluding chapter of Part II came out in May 1862. Certain passages, deemed subversive, were excised on the grounds that “morally regressive individuals, who are held back from crime by the severity of punishment alone, may be misled by the Notes to form a distorted impression as to the lack of efficacy of the legally prescribed sanctions” (Baron N.V. Medem, Chairman of the St Petersburg Board of Censors.) Humiliated and Insulted was also serialized in Time during 1861, and Notes from the Underground in Epoch (Эпоха), the second journal that the Dostoevsky brothers had founded in 1864.
In 1866 Dostoevsky was in dire financial straits and, in what could have been a moment of carelessness, but more likely for fear of being thrown in a debtors’ jail, he concluded one of the most dishonest and unfavourable contracts in recorded literary history. The other contracting party was the publisher Fyodor Timofeyevich Stellovsky, by all accounts a ruthless and unprincipled money-grubber. According to the terms of the contract Dostoevsky had to deliver a brand-new novel by 1st November 1866, or lose all rights in all his subsequent compositions for a period of the next nine years. Dostoevsky was to receive three thousand roubles, but contingently on the new novel being completed and delivered within the prescribed period. Over half of this money was already spoken for; it was needed for the discharge of promissory notes, the irony being that most of these – unbeknown to Dostoevsky – were already in Stellovsky’s hands. The wily Stellovsky knew perfectly well that Dostoevsky was a sick man and that the epileptic attacks, which occurred on a regular basis, made him unfit for work for days on end; besides, he was also aware that Dostoevsky was committed to completing Crime and Punishment and would be unable to write two novels simultaneously. It was very much in Stellovsky’s interests that the contract was not fulfilled.
Right up to the end of September Dostoevsky worked flat out on Crime and Punishment. This was a novel on which many of his hopes were pinned. It was to be a heavyweight: most of the fiction he had written previously was shot through with humour and had a tongue-in-cheek quality about it, but for whatever reason his best efforts had failed to find wide acceptance, let alone a demand for more either from the public or the critics. He was not giving his readers what they wanted, so Crime and Punishment was to change all that. But then came the end of September, and not a word of the contractual novel had yet been penned. The significance of this suddenly hit him. The as yet non-existent – and very likely to remain such – novel was, not inappropriately, to be called The Gambler. His friend, the writer Alexander Milyukov, on hearing the sad story, suggested that a few of his fellow writers should pool their efforts and write a chapter or so each, the more so since Dostoevsky had already sketched out a plan; or, if he didn’t wish to sacrifice that plan and wanted to keep it for his own use later, they’d work out something new themselves.
Dostoevsky declined, saying that he wouldn’t put his name under anything he hadn’t written himself. Milyukov then came up with the idea of using a stenographer. It was thus that the twenty-year-old Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, who by chance had just recently completed a course in the new-fangled (for Russia, at all events) skill of stenography, came on the scene. They started work on 4th October 1866, and on 30th October the manuscript was ready for delivery, the deadline being midnight.
But Stellovsky had one more dastardly trick up his sleeve. He arranged to be out of his office on the day, and there was no one to receive the manuscript. On legal advice, they found out that it would be enough for the script to be lodged at a police station and signed for by a senior officer. Dostoevsky and Snitkina rushed to a police station, and luckily found an officer – usually, come the afternoon, senior officers were in the habit of disappearing without notice. Even so it was not till after 10 p.m. that they obtained the sought-after receipt. And so the novel – a manic, surcharged paean to reckless abandon and desperation – was finished from scratch in twenty-six days flat.
Dostoevsky married Anna Snitkina, twenty-five years his junior, on 15th February 1867. Exactly two months after their wedding, they both went abroad. Anna had taken charge of Dostoevsky’s business affairs efficiently, and by and large successfully. She was proving herself indispensable on a second major front, making up for Dostoevsky’s inadequacy in dealing with day-to-day practical affairs. But there was a limit even to her frugality, acumen and, above all, the positive influence she could exercise, when she encountered Dostoevsky’s incurable penchant for gambling. This had manifested itself during his previous European tour with his mistress Apollinaria Suslova, immortalized as the enigmatic tease in The Gambler, whose story Anna was herself ironically obliged to set down on paper from the lips of her future husband.
While gambling with the devil-may-care Apollinaria had a romantic edge to it, indulging the habit on honeymoon with his level-headed, home-making wife Anna – impecunious as they were – became a cruel and pathetic, not to say sordid, human tragedy. He would find himself down to the last penny, dashing over to the tables, staking that very penny, losing it, running back home to pawn his cufflinks, his last remaining possessions, his wedding ring, his winter overcoat, his young wife’s lace cloak, on his knees in front of her, beating his breast, with tears in his eyes accusing himself and imploring for forgiveness, and yet begging for just another louis or two from their common purse to go and break even. And it was in these circumstances, his frame continually convulsed by epilepsy, constantly on the move across Europe – like a veritable Flying Dutchman, flitting from one foreign resort to another – that he deliberated over, planned and eventually completed The Idiot. Not least of his handicaps was separation from Russia and its living language, which he himself considered essential in maintaining the momentum of his creative
process.
On 5th March 1868 the couple experienced their first joys of parenthood with the birth of their daughter Sofia, but two months later followed the devastating blow of the infant’s death on 24th May. On 26th September 1869 their second daughter Lyubov was born (d.1926). The Dostoevskys had two more children: Fyodor, born 16th July 1871 (d.1922), and Alexei, born 10th August 1875, who died before he reached the age of three on 16th May 1878.
On their return from abroad to St Petersburg the Dostoevskys were beset by creditors for debts incurred before their departure. Fortunately the plucky and quick-witted Anna was able to fight them off, and the author went on to embark upon and complete the last four of his great works more or less undisturbed. Devils was published in 1871; The Writer’s Diary was begun in 1876 and, at intervals, continued till 1881; The Adolescent came out in 1875, followed by The Karamazov Brothers in 1880.
On 8th June 1880 Dostoevsky delivered his famous speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin memorial in Moscow organized by the Society of the Friends of Russian Letters. It had a most electrifying effect upon his audience, and has been subsequently referred to as “well nigh the most famous speech in Russian history”. Tolstoy declared it a farce, and point-blank refused to attend. It therefore fell to the two remaining pillars of Russian literature, the arch rivals Dostoevsky and Turgenev – who had had it in for each other ever since they first met some thirty years previously – to occupy the centre stage.
Of the two, his imposing, patrician-like physical presence apart, it was Turgenev who, by dint of his reputation abroad, coupled with his progressive, enlightened Western ideology at home, felt that precedence to occupy the throne of Russian literature should be accorded to him, rather than to the reactionary, stick-in-the-mud Slavophile Dostoevsky. Moreover the replies to such RSVP messages as had been received from Western celebrities, notably Victor Hugo, Berthold Auerbach and Alfred Lord Tennyson, were all addressed to Turgenev – doubtless confirming him as the only Russian writer known abroad – though it later transpired that all the three prospective guests from abroad had politely declined the honour to attend.
Still, home-grown honours were not to be spurned, and the two writers, in true prize-fighter fashion, retired to their
respective camps to prepare and hone their speeches – Turgenev to his magnificent country seat Spasskoye-Lutovinovo, Dostoevsky to his modest house in Staraya Russa.
The festivities were spread over two days. Turgenev spoke on the seventh of June, Dostoevsky on the eighth. Of all the numerous speakers on the occasion, it was only Turgenev’s and, above all, Dostoevsky’s performances that have gone down in history. Turgenev, ever the aristocrat, did not indulge in any personal gibes in his speech. But what he did, as far as Dostoevsky was concerned, was equally hurtful. Having given Pushkin his rightful due, he permitted himself to express some doubt as to whether the author of Eugene Onegin may be regarded as a truly national and consequently world poet such as Homer, Shakespeare and Goethe. This question, Turgenev remarked, “we shall leave open by and by for now”. Subsequently in his letter home to his wife, Dostoevsky remarked that Turgenev had humiliated Pushkin by depriving him of the title of national poet.
Dostoevsky himself was not present at this speech – he had been preparing his own. His famous speech took place the next day. He delivered an electrifying performance, passionately arguing for the greatness of Pushkin as the national writer. He claimed that Pushkin was not only an independent literary genius, but a prophet who marked the beginning of Russian self-consciousness and provided the paramount illustration of the archetypal Russian citizen as a wanderer and sufferer in his own land. Dostoevsky’s speech culminated in a plea for universal brotherhood and was met with rapturous applause.
That evening, Anna Grigoryevna records in her Reminiscences, after Dostoevsky returned to his hotel late at night, utterly exhausted but happy, he took a short nap and then went out to catch a cab to the Pushkin Memorial. It was a warm June night. He placed the huge laurel wreath at the foot of the memorial and made a deep, reverential bow to his great mentor.
On his return from Moscow in the summer of 1880, Dostoevsky embarked on a burst of writing activity that knows no precedent in Russian literature. There in a course of a few months he finished the bulk of The Karamazov Brothers, continued his Writer’s Diary and kept up an intensive correspondence, while all this time suffering shattering, debilitating fits of epilepsy. But it was not all doom and gloom. The summer of 1880 was particularly warm, perhaps reminding him of gentler climates. His correspondence, going back to these balmy, final days, is characterized by being written in bursts – several letters at a time without a break – during strategic gaps in his work. On completion of The Karamazov Brothers in 1880, Dostoevsky made far-reaching plans for 1881–82 and beyond, the principal task being an ambitious sequel to the novel; yet at other moments at the end of that year, he confessed of a premonition that his days were numbered.
Tolstoy, says Igor Volgin, left the world defiantly, with a loud bang of the door, which reverberated throughout the world. By contrast, Dostoevsky’s death was very low key. The author Boleslav Markovich, who came to see Dostoevsky just before he died, wrote: “He was lying on a sofa, his head propped up on a cushion, at the far end of an unpretentious, dismal room – his study. The light of a lamp, or candles, I can’t remember, standing on a little table nearby, fell directly on his face, which was as white as a sheet, with a dark-red spot of blood that had not been wiped off his chin… His breath escaped from his throat with a soft whistle and a spasmodic opening and shutting of his lips.” Dostoevsky died on 28th January 1881, at 8:36 p.m., according to Markovich’s watch.
Dostoevsky’s own universal legacy is, of course, indisputable, in the way that Shakespeare’s is – meaning that, adulators apart, both have their eminent detractors too. Henry James, Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence, to mention but three, famously disliked Dostoevsky.
Among the lesser known of Dostoevsky’s legacies in the West is what is termed in Russian достоевщина (Dostoevshchina). A dictionary definition of достоевщина would be: psychological analysis in the manner of Dostoevsky (in a deprecating sense); tendency to perversion, moral licence and degradation in society. This topic falls outside the scope of this account, but readers of his novels would see how in a traditional society, dominated by religion, such as was the case in nineteenth-century Russia, and also in the eyes of such fastidious arbiters as Turgenev, his repeated delving into the seedier aspects of human behaviour could easily attract severe censure. It is therefore fitting to end with the words – expressing Dostoevsky’s essential ambiguity – of Innokenty Annensky, one of Russia’s foremost Silver Age poets and literati: “Keep reading Dostoevsky, keep loving him, if you can – but if you can’t, blame him for all you’re worth, only keep reading him… and only him, mostly.”