dostoevsky the years of ordeal 1850 1859

The author was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress and after a two-week trial sentenced to death. In 1847 Dostoyevsky joined the Petrashevsky Circle, a utopian socialist discussion group whose members were arrested by the tsarist police in 1849.

His second novel, The Double ( Dvoynik, 1846), was less successful. Petersburg Military Engineering School in 1843, Fyodor entered civil service, which he soon left to become a full-time writer.Īfter finishing a translation of Balzac's Eugénie Grandet, Dostoyevsky began writing Poor Folk (Bednye lyudi, 1846), which, like most of his novels, was published serially by the well-known critic and author Nikolai Nekrasov it brought him instant fame. Fyodor was shocked and began to experience periodic fits of epilepsy. During his stay at the boarding school, Dostoyevsky learned that his father was killed by his own serfs because he treated them cruelly. Hoffmann, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Nikolai Gogol. Although he was studying engineering, Fyodor was able to become acquainted with classic Russian and European writers such as Alexander Pushkin, E. Petersburg at the age of sixteen, one year before their mother's death. Fyodor had seven siblings but became close only to his older brother Mikhail with whom he was sent to a boarding school in St. His father, Mikhail Andreyevich, was an ill-tempered physician and his mother, Maria Fyodorovna, was a loving woman who liked to play music and read poetry. DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR (1821–1881), Russian novelist.įyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, the creator of the modern psychological novel and arguably the most important influence on the twentieth-century novel, was born on 11 November (30 October, old style) 1821 in Moscow's Hospital for the Poor.

Dostoevsky the years of ordeal 1850 1859