The global significance of Dostoevsky's work in brief. Biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky briefly the most important thing

Dostoevsky was sad at school; I had to endure drills, cram sciences for which there was no true calling. We learn about material deprivation from his letters to his father: “The camp life of every student of a military educational institution requires at least 40 rubles. money. (I am writing all this to you because I am talking to my father.” In that amount I do not include such needs as, for example, having tea, sugar, etc. This is already necessary, and it is necessary not out of decency alone, but out of need . When you get wet in wet weather in the rain in a canvas tent or in such weather, coming back from training tired, chilled, without tea you can get sick, which happened to me last year on a hike. But still, respecting your need, I won’t "Drink tea. I demand only what is necessary for two pairs of simple boots - sixteen rubles."

By 1839, Dostoevsky was already aware of his calling. He composes dramas in the style of Shakespeare and Pushkin, reads excerpts from them to his brother who came to take the officer exams. The passion for literature is growing stronger.

Made a grave impression on Fyodor Mikhailovich mysterious death father. According to stories, he was killed by peasants for his cruel treatment of them. Dostoevsky never mentioned the tragic death of his father in his correspondence, did not say anything about him, and even asked not to ask anything about his father. He, according to the testimony of his comrades, turns into a secretive, gloomy and thoughtful young man. “The son’s imagination was shocked not only by the dramatic situation of the old man’s death, but also by the feeling of guilt before him. He did not like him, complained about his stinginess, and shortly before his death he wrote to him
an irritated letter... The problem of fathers and children, crime and punishment, guilt and responsibility met Dostoevsky on the threshold of his conscious life. It was his physiological and mental wound” (K. Mochulsky).

Having received the rank of lieutenant in 1842, Dostoevsky changed his position. He rented an apartment on Vasilyevskaya Street; the manager of his father's estate, Karepin, the husband of Varvara's sister, sent him a monthly share of the income. Together with the salary received, this amounted to a considerable amount, but money it was still not enough. In the mornings, Dostoevsky attended lectures for officers, in the evenings he attended theater and concerts. In 1843 the school was completed. After serving for a year in the Engineering Department, future writer resigns and has since devoted himself to literary activity.

First works.

Dostoevsky's first major work was the story “Poor People” (1845), which made a great impression on V. G. Belinsky. The appearance of “Poor People” in the “Petersburg Collection” (1846) made the author’s name widely known among the reading public. They saw it as a continuation of traditions N. V. Gogol in the image of the “little man”. Dostoevsky, expressing deep sympathy for disadvantaged and humiliated people, focuses on their spiritual world, unsuccessfully searching for a way out of the situation in which they find themselves.

The story consists of letters from the poor official Makar Devushkin and Varenka Dobroselova, which reflect St. Petersburg life and present a wide gallery of people, mostly as defenseless and disadvantaged as they themselves were. However, Dostoevsky strives to find in the “little man” a “big one”, capable of “acting nobly, thinking and feeling nobly, despite his poverty and social humiliation. This is the new contribution that Dostoevsky made, in comparison with Gogol, to the development of the theme of “the little man” (T. Friedlander).

The letters reveal, although carefully expressed, the deep and tender love of the sentimentally inclined Makar Alekseevich for a young girl, the desire to help her. The real grief for him was Varenka’s decision to marry the seducer Bykov, with whom she would never be happy, but this marriage would return her honorable name and “will avert poverty, deprivation and misfortune from her in the future.” In Devushkin’s reflections, humility and submission coexist with thoughts containing elements of protest and indignation at this injustice. V. G. Belinsky highly appreciated the humanistic orientation of “Poor People”.

“Poor People” was followed by the stories “The Double”, “Mr. Prokharchin”, “ Novel in nine letters”, as well as a number of stories about dreamers, among which “White Nights” (1848) stand out. The hero of this work is immersed in a fictional world created by him in his imagination, and finds himself unable to fight for his real happiness. He is defeated at the first meeting with reality.

A tragic turn in fate.

At the end of the 40s, Dostoevsky in his views came to combine the idea of ​​utopian socialism with faith in Christ and the immortality of the soul. Since 1847, having separated from Belinsky, he became a regular visitor to the “Fridays” of M.V. Butashevich-Petrashevsky, a former employee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At these meetings, political, economic, and philosophical problems related to the further development of Russia were discussed. Petrashevites advocated the abolition of serfdom and reforms government agencies. Dostoevsky accepted
participation in the society of Speshnev and Durov, where the coup in Russia was discussed.

On the night of April 22-23, 1849, the Petrashevites were arrested. Dostoevsky spent almost nine months in solitary confinement in the Alekseevsky ravelin of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Finally, after all the investigative actions were carried out, the state criminals were sentenced to death. On December 22, at the Semyonovsky parade ground in St. Petersburg, all those condemned were put on the scaffold. Petrashevsky was the first to stand on the left flank, followed by Fyodor Mikhailovich a few people later. Everyone was shivering from the cold, as they were dressed in spring overcoats. A few seconds later appeared important official and began to unfold long sheets of paper and read the verdict, carefully listing everyone’s guilt and repeating “subject to death by shooting...”.

The condemned were given white canvas robes with hoods and long sleeves; the priest, standing in front of the condemned, spoke about earthly sins. Dostoevsky exclaimed: “We will be together with Christ!” The convicts were forced to their knees and their swords were broken over their heads. Then the command came: “Take aim!”

Suddenly, a military official appeared from around the corner of the Semyonovsky parade ground, approached the general and conveyed a message to him. The auditor entered the scaffold and solemnly announced that the Emperor and Autocrat would grant life to the condemned, listing the punishment for each. Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years of hard labor followed by conscription as a soldier.

From that moment on, the process of rebirth of the writer’s views began. Doubts arose about the truth of utopian socialism. At hard labor he became closely acquainted with ordinary people who hated nobles, even those convicted. As a result, Dostoevsky came to the conviction that the intelligentsia should abandon political struggle, it should accept the views and moral ideals of the people: religiosity, readiness for self-sacrifice. He now contrasted the political struggle with the path of moral improvement of man.

In 1854, after the Omsk convict prison, Dostoevsky arrived in Semipalatinsk for military service. By this time, a symbol of faith had formed in his mind: “... To believe that there is nothing more beautiful, deeper, prettier, more reasonable, courageous and more perfect Christ, and not only not, but... it cannot be.” Hence, the conviction of the need to accept suffering in the name of salvation becomes increasingly stronger, a conviction that was later embodied in his artistic works.

Return to life and literature.

In Semipalatinsk, Dostoevsky first served as a soldier, then was promoted to non-commissioned officer and finally received the restoration of his officer rank. This eased his lot, gave him time for literary pursuits, and expanded his circle of acquaintances. He carried on extensive correspondence with his brother Mikhail, friend A.E. Wrangel, who lobbied for the writer before his superiors, and the wives of the Decembrists P.E. Annenkova and N.D. Fonvizina. In 1857, Dostoevsky’s wedding took place in Semipalatinsk with Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, the widow of a retired official. It was the first time in my life passionate love 35-year-old Fyodor Mikhailovich. However, this marriage did not bring him happiness: his wife was a very sick woman, mentally unstable. Soon it was decided to let Dostoevsky retire for health reasons, and he and his family moved to St. Petersburg. In Siberia, he wrote two stories “The village of Stepanchikovo and its inhabitants” and “ Uncle's dream».

The return to the capital took place in 1859. There he was actively involved not only in literary but also publishing activities, together with his brother Mikhail he began publishing the magazine “Time”, and after its closure in 1863, the magazine “Epoch”. Collaborated with the Dostoevsky brothers famous critics that time Ap. A. Grigoriev, N. N. Strakhov, poets A. N. Maikov and Ya. P. Polonsky.

During these years, with the support of Strakhov and Grigoriev, Dostoevsky actively developed the theory of pochvennichestvo. The Pochvenniki called for a search for an original path of development for Russia, rejecting both serfdom and the bourgeois path of development. They believed that it was necessary to overcome the isolation of the educated layer of society from the people, merge with them and accept its main element - Christianity. Like the Slavophiles, the Pochvenniki advocated the religious, moral and patriarchal foundations of people's life. The reforms of Peter 1, according to Dostoevsky, separated society, but now the time has come again for national identity, to create “a new form, our own, native, taken from our soil, taken from the people’s spirit and from the people’s principles... and before this entry into new life reconciliation of the followers of Peter's reform with popular beginning has become a necessity." The Pochvenniks sought to smooth out the contradictions between opposing ideological groups and call them to spiritual reconciliation.

Dostoevsky also occupied a special place in the struggle between supporters of aesthetic and revolutionary democratic theory of art. Art, according to him, is always modern and does not exist in isolation from life. However, it cannot be subordinated to the tasks of public service, it cannot be required to resolve political issues, and works of art can only be assessed from the point of view of artistic value.

In the summer of 1862, the writer traveled abroad for the first time, visiting Italy, Switzerland, Germany, France, and London. During the trip, he experienced a strong and for some time mutual love for a Russian girl of revolutionary populist convictions, Apollinaria Suslova. However, they were separated by ideological positions and attitudes towards religion. “A woman of extremes, always prone to extreme sensations, to all psychological and life polarities, she showed that “demandingness” towards life, which testifies to a passionate, captivating, greedy nature. A heart inclined to noble manifestations was no less prone to blind impulses of passion, to violent persecution and revenge” (L. Rossman).

In 1863, for the publication of N. N. Strakhov’s “The Fatal Question,” the magazine “Vremya” was closed “by the highest command.”

The year 1864 was very difficult for Dostoevsky. He lost his brother Mikhail, his wife Maria Dmitrievna died. Fyodor Mikhailovich cannot withstand the difficulties that befell him in connection with concerns about the Epoch magazine, and next year he stops publishing it. Financial difficulties forced him to sign an enslaving agreement with the publisher F. T. Stellovsky: Dostoevsky was obliged to submit the novel “The Gambler” for publication by November 1, 1866, otherwise the ownership of all the writer’s works would pass to Stellovsky for ten years. Dostoevsky was helped out of a difficult situation by the young stenographer Anna Grigorievna Snitkina, to whom he dictated his novel for a month. After the difficulties were overcome, Fyodor Mikhailovich realized that he future life impossible without this woman, and she became his wife.

In 1866, Dostoevsky’s new novel, a confessional novel, an ideological novel, “Crime and Punishment,” was published.

Life and creativity abroad.

Moving abroad was associated with the desire to get rid of creditors at least temporarily, as well as in the hope of improving health. The Dostoevskys lived in Dresden, Berlin, Basel, Geneva and Florence.

In Baden-Baden, Dostoevsky's final break with Turgenev took place, whom he accused of atheism, hatred of Russia and admiration for the West. “Their dispute was not a simple literary quarrel: it expressed the tragedy of Russian self-awareness” (K. Mochulsky). It will be a long time before the two great Russian writers embrace as a sign of reconciliation at Pushkin's celebrations.

In 1868, the Russian Messenger magazine published the novel The Idiot. “The main idea of ​​the novel,” Dostoevsky writes in one of his letters, “is to portray a positively beautiful person. There is nothing more difficult in the world than this, especially now... There is only one positively beautiful face in the world - Christ, so the appearance of this immeasurably, infinitely beautiful face is certainly an infinite miracle.”

Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin becomes an exceptionally positive hero of the novel. He has many things in common with his favorite heroes of Dostoevsky’s previous works - the Dreamer from White Nights, Ivan Petrovich from The Humiliated and Insulted. He is obsessed with the idea of ​​achieving harmony among all people, regardless of their position in society and character. He sees a bright beginning in everyone and everyone, in his opinion, deserves compassion. Myshkin is kind, direct in communication and often naive. He is able to understand the suffering of people, since he himself suffered a lot and suffered mental illness. People are drawn to him, and not only the suffering Nastasya Filippovna, but even General Epanchin or the bitter merchant Rogozhin. They are attracted to him by something that has long been lost to them. For the sake of saving Nastasya Filippovna, Myshkin is ready to sacrifice his own happiness and the happiness of his beloved girl. However, the preaching of Christian love and harmony fails. the hero turns out to be powerless in the face of the world of anger, violence and irrepressible passions. Myshkin himself returns to a state of madness, Nastasya Filippovna dies, hopes for Aglaya’s happiness are dashed.

The novel depicts the world of people opposing Myshkin's world. These people are possessed by a destructive passion for profit, which devastates their souls. Kolya Ivolgin, in a conversation with the prince, characterizes society as follows: “There are terribly few honest people, so, even there is no one to respect at all... and you noticed, prince, in our age everyone is an adventurer! And it is here in Russia, in our dear fatherland.” Dostoevsky depicts people burdened with the idea of ​​acquisition. General Epanchin participates in tax farming and joint-stock companies, has two houses in St. Petersburg and a factory, and has a lot of money. Ghana Ivolgin needs a lot of money to carry out his ambitious plans. For the sake of the money he receives from Totsky, he is ready to marry Nastasya Filippovna, whom he does not love.

Rogozhin is also subject to the power of money, in whose mind love coexists quite well with the cult of wealth. He does not hesitate to publicly offer a huge fortune to Nastasya Filippovna, whom he loves with sensual passion. The scene is colorful when Nastasya Filippovna throws 100 thousand rubles into the fireplace and allows only Gana to take them out. The base feelings of those present are exposed: Lebedev screams and crawls into the fireplace, Ferdyshchenko asks permission to pull out only one pack with his teeth, Ganya faints.

Dostoevsky explains the social and moral crisis in society by the loss of faith, as a result of which the “dark foundation of our nature” triumphs, and a person is controlled by pride and greed, hatred and sensuality. Elizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina, expressing the author’s position, says: “The last times really have come... Crazy! Vain ones! They don’t believe in God, they don’t believe in Christ! But you have been so consumed by vanity and pride that you will end up eating each other, I predict that. And this is not confusion, and this is not chaos, and this is not disgrace?”

The novel also develops one of the favorite themes of Dostoevsky's works - the theme of beauty. First of all, she is embodied in the image of Nastasya Filippovna, a proud, noble, suffering woman. Her outer beauty is in harmony with inner, spiritual beauty (“With this kind of beauty you can turn the world upside down”). However, in the world of money, her beauty becomes the subject of vile bargaining, the reason for her humiliation and reproach.

Dostoevsky, as an artist, deeply suffers that beauty, the dignity of the human person, the greatness of the beautiful female image are desecrated and humiliated.

The relationship between Prince Myshkin and Nastasya Filippovna can be characterized by the concept of love-suffering. The motive of tragic guilt, the fatal doom of love-suffering, the constant increase in disaster and the death of the heroine of the novel - all this testifies in favor of defining the genre of “The Idiot” as a tragedy novel.

The last decade of life and creativity.

At the end of 1871, Dostoevsky and his wife, having partially paid off their debts, returned to St. Petersburg.

In 1872, the novel “Demons” was published, which caused great discussion in contemporary criticism of the author and in literary works of subsequent times. He is polemical in relation to revolutionary democratic and liberal ideas, and is directed against the anarchist theories that were spreading in Russia. The novel depicts a closed group of revolutionaries as adventurers and ambitious people who do not disdain anything for the sake of social upheaval in Russia (Stavrogin, Verkhovensky, etc.). One of the most important themes of the novel is the exposure of atheism, the question of faith in God and unbelief. Without faith, a person, according to Dostoevsky, loses moral guidelines, confuses good and evil and ends tragically (Kirillov and Stavrogin). One of the modern researchers of the work of F. M. Dostoevsky in her monograph called the novel “Demons” a novel-warning (L. Saraskina).

The last decade of Dostoevsky’s life and work was filled with disturbing events, financial difficulties, concern for the health of loved ones, editing the magazine “Citizen,” and meeting outstanding writers, government and cultural figures. The “Citizen” section opened a “Writer’s Diary” column, where Dostoevsky’s philosophical and journalistic works were published. The writer, as if talking with readers, talks to them about the past, about current events. about theater, literature, polemicizes with opponents. K. Mochulsky called the “Diary of a Writer” a half-diary, half-confession due to its free, flexible and lyrical form. Several articles were devoted to memories.

Dostoevsky’s creative refuge during these years was Staraya Russa, where he settled with his family and wrote “The Teenager” (1874-1875). The writer exposes in this work the depravity of society, its greed, thirst for enrichment, and spiritual decay. Influenced by the idea of ​​enrichment, Arkady Dolgoruky, the illegitimate son of the aristocrat Versilov, the Teenager, strives to become a Rothschild, since, in his belief, money can make him free and independent. The author constructs the narrative in such a way that he forces the hero to become convinced of the falsity of the ideal, abandon it and embark on the path of good.

Completion creative path Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov” (1878-1879), recognized as the most significant work of the writer, the perfection of his artistic genius. It deeply reflects the philosophical idea of ​​Dostoevsky. Denouncing the immorality of society, anti-moral political, philosophical and social ideas embodied in the images of representatives of the Karamazov family (Fedor Pavlovich, Dmitry, Ivan, Smerdyakov), the writer continues to develop the concept of a Christian worldview as a condition for establishing harmony in the souls of people, proclaims human suffering as an inevitable law of existence, a means of achieving peace and happiness. This author’s position is reflected in the images of Elder Zosima and Alyosha Karamazov. While working on this novel, Dostoevsky sought answers to the most important questions about the ways and prospects for the development of human society.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born on November 11, 1821 in Moscow. His father Mikhail Andreevich came from the family of nobles Dostoevsky of the Radvan coat of arms. He received a medical education and worked in the Borodino Infantry Regiment, the Moscow Military Hospital, and also in the Mariinsky Hospital for the poor. The mother of the future famous writer, Nechaeva Maria Fedorovna, was the daughter of a capital merchant.

Fedor's parents were not rich people, but they worked tirelessly to provide for their family and give their children a good education. Subsequently, Dostoevsky admitted more than once that he was immensely grateful to his father and mother for their excellent upbringing and education, which cost them hard work.

The boy was taught to read by his mother; she used the book “104 Sacred Stories Old and New Testaments." This is partly why in Dostoevsky’s famous book “The Brothers Karamazov” the character Zosima says in one of the dialogues that in childhood he learned to read from this book.

Reading Skills young Fedor mastered and biblical book Job, which was also reflected in his subsequent works: the writer used his thoughts about this book when creating the famous novel “The Teenager”. The father also contributed to his son's education, teaching him Latin.

A total of seven children were born into the Dostoevsky family. So, Fyodor had an older brother, Mikhail, with whom he was especially close, and an older sister. In addition, he had younger brothers Andrei and Nikolai, as well as younger sisters Vera and Alexandra.

In their youth, Mikhail and Fedor were taught at home by N.I. Drashusov, teacher at the Alexander and Catherine schools. With his help, the eldest sons of the Dostoevskys studied French, and the sons of the teacher, A.N. Drashusov and V.N. Drashusov, taught the boys mathematics and literature, respectively. In the period from 1834 to 1837, Fedor and Mikhail continued their studies at the capital's boarding school L.I. Chermak, which was then a very prestigious educational institution.

In 1837, a terrible thing happened: Maria Fedorovna Dostoevskaya died of consumption. Fedor was only 16 years old at the time of his mother’s death. Left without a wife, Dostoevsky Sr. decided to send Fyodor and Mikhail to St. Petersburg, to the boarding house of K.F. Kostomarova. The father wanted the boys to subsequently enter the Main Engineering School. It is interesting that both of Dostoevsky’s eldest sons at that time were fond of literature and wanted to devote their lives to it, but their father did not take their hobby seriously.

The boys did not dare to contradict their father’s will. Fyodor Mikhailovich successfully completed his studies at the boarding school, entered the school and graduated from it, but all free time he devoted himself to reading. , Hoffmann, Byron, Goethe, Schiller, Racine - he devoured the works of all these famous authors, instead of enthusiastically comprehending the basics of engineering science.

In 1838, Dostoevsky and his friends even organized their own literary circle at the Main Engineering School, which, in addition to Fyodor Mikhailovich, included Grigorovich, Beketov, Vitkovsky, Berezhetsky. Even then, the writer began to create his first works, but still did not dare to finally take the path of a writer. Having completed his studies in 1843, he even received the position of engineer-second lieutenant in the St. Petersburg engineering team, but did not last long in the service. In 1844, he decided to focus exclusively on literature and resigned.

The beginning of a creative journey

Although the family did not approve of young Fedor’s decisions, he diligently began to pore over the works he had begun earlier and develop ideas for new ones. The year 1944 was marked for the aspiring writer with the release of his first book, “Poor People.” The success of the work exceeded all the author's expectations. Critics and writers highly appreciated Dostoevsky's novel; the themes raised in the book found a response in the hearts of many readers. Fyodor Mikhailovich was accepted into the so-called “Belinsky circle”, they began to call him “the new Gogol”.

The success did not last long. About a year later, Dostoevsky presented the book “The Double” to the public, but it turned out to be incomprehensible to most admirers of the talent of the young genius. The writer's delight and praise gave way to criticism, dissatisfaction, disappointment and sarcasm. Subsequently, writers appreciated the innovation of this work, its difference from the novels of those years, but at the time of the book’s publication almost no one felt this.

Soon Dostoevsky quarreled with and was expelled from the “Belinsky circle”, and also quarreled with N.A. Nekrasov, editor of Sovremennik. However, the publication Otechestvennye Zapiski, edited by Andrei Kraevsky, immediately agreed to publish his works.

Nevertheless, the phenomenal popularity that his first publication brought to Fyodor Mikhailovich allowed him to make a number of interesting and useful contacts in literary circles St. Petersburg. Many of his new acquaintances partly became prototypes for various characters in the author’s subsequent works.

Arrest and hard labor

Fateful for the writer was his acquaintance with M.V. Petrashevsky in 1846. Petrashevsky organized so-called “Fridays,” during which the abolition of serfdom, freedom of printing, progressive changes in the judicial system and other similar issues were discussed.

During meetings, one way or another connected with the Petrashevites, Dostoevsky also met the communist Speshnev. In 1848, he organized a secret society of 8 people (including himself and Fyodor Mikhailovich), which advocated a coup in the country and the creation of an illegal printing house. At meetings of the society, Dostoevsky repeatedly read “Belinsky’s Letter to Gogol,” which was then prohibited.

In the same year, 1848, Fyodor Mikhailovich’s novel “White Nights” was published, but, alas, he did not manage to enjoy the well-deserved fame. Those same connections with radical youth played against the writer, and on April 23, 1849, he was arrested, like many other Petrashevites. Dostoevsky denied his guilt, but Belinsky’s “criminal” letter was also remembered, and on November 13, 1849, the writer was sentenced to death. Before that, he languished in prison for eight months in the Peter and Paul Fortress.

Fortunately for Russian literature, the cruel sentence for Fyodor Mikhailovich was not carried out. On November 19, the Auditor General considered him not to be guilty of Dostoevsky, and therefore the death penalty was replaced with eight years of hard labor. And at the end of the same month, the emperor softened the punishment even more: the writer was sent to hard labor in Siberia for four years instead of eight. At the same time, he was deprived of his noble rank and fortune, and after completing hard labor he was promoted to ordinary soldier.

Despite all the hardships and deprivations that such a sentence implied, joining the soldier meant the complete return of Dostoevsky’s civil rights. This was the first similar case in Russia, since usually those people who were sentenced to hard labor lost their civil rights, even if they survived after many years of imprisonment and returned to a free life. Emperor Nicholas I regretted young writer and did not want to ruin his talent.

The years that Fyodor Mikhailovich spent in hard labor made an indelible impression on him. The writer had a hard time experiencing endless suffering and loneliness. In addition, it took him a lot of time to establish normal communication with other prisoners: they did not accept him for a long time because of his noble title.

In 1856, the new emperor granted forgiveness to all Petrashevskyites, and in 1857 Dostoevsky was pardoned, that is, he received a full amnesty and was restored to the rights to publish his works. And if in his youth Fyodor Mikhailovich was a man undecided in his destiny, trying to find the truth and build a system life principles, then already at the end of the 1850s he became a mature, fully formed personality. The difficult years in hard labor made him a deeply religious person, which he remained until his death.

Creativity flourishes

In 1860, the writer published a two-volume collection of his works, which included the stories “The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants” and “Uncle’s Dream.” About the same story happened to them as with “The Double” - although the works were subsequently given a very high rating, contemporaries did not like them. However, the publication of “Notes from the House of the Dead” helped return readers’ attention to the matured Dostoevsky. dedicated to life convicts and written mostly during imprisonment.

For many residents of the country who have not encountered this horror on their own, the work came almost as a shock. Many people were stunned by what the author was talking about, especially since the topic of hard labor used to be something of a taboo for Russian writers. After this, Herzen began to call Dostoevsky “the Russian Dante.”

The year 1861 was also noteworthy for the writer. This year, in collaboration with his older brother Mikhail, he began publishing his own literary and political magazine called “Time”. In 1863, the publication was closed, and instead the Dostoevsky brothers began publishing another magazine called “Epoch”.

These magazines, firstly, strengthened the brothers’ position in the literary community. And secondly, it was on their pages that “The Humiliated and Insulted,” “Notes from the Underground,” “Notes from the House of the Dead,” “A Bad Anecdote” and many other works of Fyodor Mikhailovich were published. Mikhail Dostoevsky died soon after: he passed away in 1864.

In the 1860s, the writer began to travel abroad, finding inspiration for his new novels in new places and familiar ones. Including, it was during that period that Dostoevsky conceived and began to realize the idea of ​​the work “The Gambler.”

In 1865, the publication of the Epoch magazine, the number of subscribers of which was steadily declining, had to be closed. Moreover: even after the closure of the publication, the writer had an impressive amount of debt. In order to somehow get out of a difficult financial situation, he entered into an extremely unfavorable agreement for himself on the publication of a collection of his works with the publisher Stelovsky, and soon after that he began to write his most famous novel"Crime and Punishment". The philosophical approach to social motives received wide recognition among readers, and the novel glorified Dostoevsky during his lifetime.

Fyodor Mikhailovich’s next great book was “The Idiot,” published in 1868. The idea of ​​portraying a wonderful person who tries to make other characters happy, but cannot overcome hostile forces and, as a result, suffers himself, turned out to be easy to implement in words alone. In fact, Dostoevsky called The Idiot one of the most difficult books to write, although Prince Myshkin became his most favorite character.

After finishing work on this novel, the author decided to write an epic called “Atheism” or “The Life of a Great Sinner.” He failed to realize his idea, but some of the ideas collected for the epic formed the basis for Dostoevsky’s next three great books: the novel “Demons,” written in 1871-1872, the work “Teenager,” completed in 1875, and the novel “Brothers.” The Karamazovs", work on which Dostoevsky completed in 1879-1880.

It is interesting that “Demons,” in which the writer initially intended to express his disapproval of representatives of revolutionary movements in Russia, gradually changed during the course of writing. Initially, the author did not intend to make Stavrogin, who later became one of his most famous characters, the key character of the novel. But his image turned out to be so powerful that Fyodor Mikhailovich decided to change the plan and add political work real drama and tragedy.

If in “The Possessed,” among other things, the theme of fathers and sons was discussed quite widely, then in the next novel, “The Teenager,” the writer brought to the fore the issue of raising a mature child.

A unique result of Fyodor Mikhailovich’s creative path, a literary analogue of summing up the results, was The Brothers Karmazov. Many episodes, storylines, and characters of this work were partly based on the writer’s previously written novels, starting with his first published novel, “Poor People.”

Death

Dostoevsky died on January 28, 1881, the cause of death being chronic bronchitis, pulmonary tuberculosis and emphysema. Death overtook the writer at the age of sixty.

Crowds of admirers of his talent came to say goodbye to the writer, but Fyodor Mikhailovich, his timeless novels and wise quotes received the greatest fame after the death of the author.

Personal life

Dostoevsky's first wife was Maria Isaeva, whom he met shortly after returning from hard labor. In total, the marriage of Fyodor and Maria lasted about seven years, until the sudden death of the writer’s wife in 1864.

During one of his first trips abroad in the early 1860s, Dostoevsky was captivated by the emancipated Apollinaria Suslova. It was from her that Polina in “The Player”, Nastastya Filippovna in “The Idiot” and a number of other female characters were written.

Although on the eve of his fortieth anniversary the writer had at least a long-term relationship with Isaeva and Suslova, at that time his women had not yet given him such happiness as children. This deficiency was made up for by the writer’s second wife, Anna Snitkina. She became not only a faithful wife, but also an excellent assistant to the writer: she took upon herself the troubles of publishing Dostoevsky’s novels, rationally resolved all financial issues, and prepared her memoirs about her brilliant husband for publication. Fyodor Mikhailovich dedicated the novel “The Brothers Karamazov” to her.

Anna Grigorievna gave birth to her wife four children: daughters Sophia and Lyubov, sons Fyodor and Alexei. Alas, Sophia, who was supposed to be the first child of the couple, died a few months after giving birth. Of all the children of Fyodor Mikhailovich, only his son Fyodor became the successor of his literary family.

Dostoevsky Quotes

• No one will make the first move, because everyone thinks that it is not mutual.
• It takes very little to destroy a person: you just need to convince him that the work he is doing is of no use to anyone.
• Freedom is not about not restraining yourself, but about being in control of yourself.
• A writer whose works have not been successful easily becomes a bitter critic: just like a weak and tasteless wine can become excellent vinegar.
• It's amazing what one ray of sunshine can do to a person's soul!
• Beauty will save the world.
• A person who knows how to hug is a good person.
• Don’t clog your memory with grievances, otherwise there may simply be no room left for beautiful moments.
• If you set off towards your goal and start stopping along the way to throw stones at every dog ​​barking at you, you will never reach your goal.
• He is a smart man, but to act smartly, intelligence alone is not enough.
• He who wants to do good can do a lot of good even with his hands tied.
• Life goes breathless without an aim.
• We must love life more than the meaning of life.
• The Russian people seem to enjoy their suffering.
• Happiness is not in happiness, but only in its achievement.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky belongs to the world-famous writers. He glorified Russia with his outstanding works, one of whom (“the Karamazov brothers”) is one of the hundred best novels peace.

But fellow writers had an ambivalent attitude towards Dostoevsky’s work. Bunin called for throwing Dostoevsky “from the ship of modernity.” He considered the lack of description of nature in his works a manifestation of mediocrity. Proust was amazed by the power of Dostoevsky's imagination, and Sigmund Freud admired the Russian writer's talent for depicting people's inner world with filigree precision. Mikhailovsky considered all the characters in Dostoevsky’s works to be mentally ill people.

Biographical milestones

Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in the capital Russian Empire November 11 (new style) 1821. The Dostoevsky family already had the first-born Mikhail, and later the family was replenished with six more children. A large family lived in a government apartment at the Marininsky hospital for the poor, where the father treated the sick. Dostoevsky recalled his childhood as the best time of his life.

The parents tried to give their son a decent education. Until 1834, he was home-schooled, where his mother taught reading, his father taught Latin, mathematics, French and literature were taught by teacher N.I. Drashusov and his sons. Then Fedor and his brother Mikhail continued their education in prestigious boarding schools in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Concerned about the future of his sons and their material well-being, the father insisted that the brothers enter the Main Engineering School, although they showed a clear disposition towards literature.

Loss of loved ones

In 1837, sixteen-year-old Fedor lost his mother, who died from a very common disease at that time - consumption, and in 1839 his father. According to official documents, the cause of death was apoplectic stroke, and according to relatives, Mikhail Andreevich was killed by serfs on his estate, which he purchased in 1831.

With pain in his heart, the young man also accepted the death in a duel of his beloved poet A.S. Pushkin, many of whose works he knew by heart.

The beginning of the writing journey

Having graduated from engineering school in 1843, the young lieutenant Dostoevsky resigned a year later and devoted his life to writing work. The debut turned out to be successful - the first novel of the aspiring writer, which was completed in 1845 and was called “Poor People,” was highly praised by Belinsky. But Dostoevsky’s second work, entitled “The Double,” caused complete disappointment for everyone.

Dostoevsky's early work is characterized by such genres as novels, short stories, essays, humorous and tragicomic stories.

Twist of fate

In 1849, the government became aware of the Petrashevsky circle that opposed the autocracy, which included the young Dostoevsky. The circle was destroyed, and Dostoevsky was imprisoned Peter and Paul Fortress and sentenced to death. Although the harsh sentence was canceled by Emperor Nicholas I, the mock execution still took place on December 22, 1849. After an eight-month stay in solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress, the Petrashevites were brought to the Semenovsky parade ground, dressed in white shrouds, and guns pointed. But the command “pli” did not come. The reversal of the verdict was announced to the beat of drums. One of the participants in this painful action, Grigoriev, went crazy, and Dostoevsky’s epilepsy worsened. The terrible moments of waiting for death are reflected in the novel “The Idiot.” For four years the writer served hard labor, about which he later wrote the book “Notes from the House of the Dead.”

Family relationships

Family life began for Dostoevsky quite late, at 36 years old. His first wife was Maria Isaeva, a widow with a child in her arms and the debts of her ex-husband.

This union, which lasted 7 years, did not bring happiness to both; the couple often quarreled. Maria Dmitrievna believed that if she had not married Dostoevsky, she would have been much happier. And Dostoevsky himself said that they lived “somehow.” In 1860, the writer was allowed to return from Semipalatinsk to St. Petersburg, where four years later his wife and older brother died literally one after another.

Dostoevsky's next hobby was Suslov's Appolinaria, and only in his declining years Dostoevsky found family happiness with the young girl Anna Snitkina who idolized him. From an ordinary stenographer helping her employer, she turned into faithful wife and a friend who appreciated the talent of her husband-writer and admired him. Soon after the wedding, the Dostoevskys went on a long trip abroad, visited Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and in 1871 returned to St. Petersburg.

In Geneva, the Dostoevsky couple had their first child, daughter Sophia, who died at the age of three months, which plunged the father into deep despair. The bitterness of the loss was somewhat smoothed by the birth in 1869 in Dresden of the daughter Lyuba, and already in Russia of the sons Fyodor and Alexei.

In Europe, F.M. Dostoevsky wrote the novel “The Idiot”.

Disease

It’s no secret that F.M. Dostoevsky suffered from epilepsy, which since the times of Ancient Rus' was called “epileptic”. This fact at one time shocked his first wife and negatively affected their family life. After all, those suffering from the disease develop a kind of “epileptic character”, which is characterized by irritability, slowness, and mood swings. Heavy character is also supplemented by convulsive seizures, which the patient subsequently does not even remember.

Dostoevsky did not dwell on his illness and called it “a little bit of a breeze.” According to him, before each attack he experienced a state of unearthly bliss that he would not agree to exchange for anything in the world. All manifestations of the insidious disease were described in several works based on their own feelings and experiences. Epilepsy affected the writer's writing style - some sentences are incredibly long and take up almost an entire page.

Love for Roulette

Dostoevsky poured out all the emotions of a man who became dependent on roulette in the novel “The Gambler” (1866).

The writer himself was brought to the casino by the hope of winning a large sum of money. For many years he was a slave to roulette and sometimes threw away all his money. But it was not possible to escape from the “cash grip” with the help of the game; the scheme developed by the writer for a probable big win did not work.

Anna Grigorievna had to pawn things after her husband’s visits to the gambling establishment. Dostoevsky was tormented, felt guilty before his wife, but again manically went to the green table. And only in adulthood did Dostoevsky manage to overcome his destructive passion for gambling.

Creative results

Peru of F.M. Dostoevsky belongs wonderful works: “Crime and Punishment”, “Idiot”, “The Gambler”, “The Brothers Karamazov”, in which the emphasis is on human psychology, the struggle of good against evil.

Dostoevsky's idols were A.S. Pushkin and N.V. Gogol, although he also highly valued the works of Shakespeare, Balzac, and Hugo.

Dostoevsky considered himself a realist, drawing material from the surrounding reality.

On the morning of January 28, 1881, Dostoevsky told his wife that he would die that day. And so it happened. By evening, blood began to flow down his throat, he lost consciousness, his pulse began to weaken, and at 20:28 Fyodor Mikhailovich passed away into the next world in the arms of his wife. Before his death, he thanked Anna Grigorievna for happy life and confessed his love to her for the last time.

And finally,

All works of the writer in chronological order:

1846 - the novel “Poor People”, the story “The Double”, the stories “Mr. Prokharchin” and “How dangerous it is to indulge in ambitious dreams”.

1847 - humorous story “Novel in 9 Letters”, story “Mistress”, collection of feuilletons “Petersburg Chronicle”

1848 - stories “Weak Heart”, “Netochka Nezvanova” and “White Nights”, stories “Crawlers”, “Honest Thief”, “Christmas Tree and Wedding”.

1849 - story “Little Hero”

1854 - the poem “On European Events in 1854” was created

1855 - poem “On the First of July 1855”

1856 - the poetic work “For the Coronation and Conclusion of Peace” was created

1859 - stories “Uncle’s Dream”, “The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants”.

1860 - story “Someone else’s wife and husband under the bed”, collection “Notes from the House of the Dead”

1861 - novel “The Humiliated and Insulted”

1862 - satirical story “Bad Anecdote”, journalistic essay “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions”

1864 - story “Notes from the Underground”, “Epigram on a Bavarian Colonel”

1865 - story “Crocodile”

1866 - novels “The Gambler” and “Crime and Punishment”

1868-69 - novel “The Idiot”

1870 - story “The Eternal Husband”

1871-72 - work on the novel “Demons”

1873 - story “Bobok”, feuilleton “The struggle of nihilism with honesty”

1874 - epigram on Leskov “Describe everything entirely to priests”

1875 - novel “The Teenager”

1876 ​​- stories “The Peasant Marey” and “The Boy at Christ’s Christmas Tree”, the story “The Meek”, the essay “The Centennial”, the poem “The Collapse of Baimakov’s Office”.

1877 - story “Dream” funny man", poem "Children are Expensive"

1879-80 - the novel “The Brothers Karamazov” was completed, the journalistic essay “Pushkin” (1880) and the comic poem “Don’t Rob, Fedul” (1879) were written.

Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky born October 30 (November 11), 1821. The writer's father came from an ancient family of Rtishchevs, descendants of the defender of the Orthodox faith of Southwestern Rus', Daniil Ivanovich Rtishchev. For his special successes, he was given the village of Dostoevo (Podolsk province), where the Dostoevsky surname originates.

By the beginning of the 19th century, the Dostoevsky family became impoverished. The writer's grandfather, Andrei Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, served as an archpriest in the town of Bratslav, Podolsk province. The writer's father, Mikhail Andreevich, graduated from the Medical-Surgical Academy. In 1812, during the Patriotic War, he fought against the French, and in 1819 he married the daughter of a Moscow merchant, Maria Fedorovna Nechaeva. After retiring, Mikhail Andreevich decided to take the position of doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, which was nicknamed Bozhedomka in Moscow.

The Dostoevsky family's apartment was located in a wing of the hospital. In the right wing of Bozhedomka, allocated to the doctor as a government apartment, Fyodor Mikhailovich was born. The writer's mother came from a merchant family. Pictures of instability, illness, poverty, premature deaths are the child’s first impressions, under the influence of which the future writer’s unusual view of the world was formed.

The Dostoevsky family, which eventually grew to nine people, huddled in two rooms in the front room. The writer's father, Mikhail Andreevich Dostoevsky, was a hot-tempered and suspicious person. Mother, Maria Fedorovna, was of a completely different type: kind, cheerful, economical. The relationship between the parents was built on complete submission to the will and whims of father Mikhail Fedorovich. The writer's mother and nanny sacredly honored religious traditions, raising their children with deep respect for the Orthodox faith. Fyodor Mikhailovich's mother died early, at the age of 36. She was buried at the Lazarevskoye cemetery.

Science and education in the Dostoevsky family were given importance great importance. Fyodor Mikhailovich at an early age found joy in learning and reading books. At first these were folk tales of nanny Arina Arkhipovna, then Zhukovsky and Pushkin - his mother’s favorite writers. At an early age, Fyodor Mikhailovich met the classics of world literature: Homer, Cervantes and Hugo. My father arranged in the evenings for the family to read “The History of the Russian State” by N.M. Karamzin.

In 1827, the writer's father, Mikhail Andreevich, for excellent and diligent service, was awarded the order St. Anne 3rd degree, and a year later he was awarded the rank of collegiate assessor, which gave the right to hereditary nobility. He knew the price well higher education, therefore, he sought to seriously prepare his children for admission to higher educational institutions.

In his childhood, the future writer experienced a tragedy that left an indelible mark on his soul for the rest of his life. With sincere childish feelings, he fell in love with a nine-year-old girl, the daughter of a cook. In one of summer days a cry was heard in the garden. Fedya ran out into the street and saw that this girl was lying on the ground in a torn white dress, and some women were bending over her. From their conversation, he realized that the tragedy was caused by a drunken tramp. They sent for her father, but his help was not needed: the girl died.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky received his primary education in a private Moscow boarding school. In 1838 he entered the Main Engineering School in St. Petersburg, which he graduated in 1843 with the title of military engineer.

The Engineering School in those years was considered one of the best educational institutions in Russia. It is no coincidence that a lot came out of it wonderful people. Among Dostoevsky's classmates there were many talented people who later became outstanding personalities: famous writer Dmitry Grigorovich, artist Konstantin Trutovsky, physiologist Ilya Sechenov, organizer of the Sevastopol defense Eduard Totleben, hero of Shipka Fyodor Radetsky. The school taught both special and humanities: Russian literature, domestic and world history, civil architecture and drawing.

Dostoevsky preferred solitude to the noisy student society. His favorite pastime was reading. Dostoevsky's erudition amazed his comrades. He read the works of Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Hoffmann, and Balzac. However, the desire for solitude and loneliness was not an innate trait of his character. As an ardent, enthusiastic nature, he was in a constant search for new impressions. But at the school, he experienced first-hand the tragedy of the “little man’s” soul. Most of the students in this educational institution were children of the highest military and bureaucratic bureaucracy. Wealthy parents spared no expense for their children and generously gifted teachers. In this environment, Dostoevsky looked like a “black sheep” and was often subjected to ridicule and insults. For several years, a feeling of wounded pride flared up in his soul, which was later reflected in his work.

However, despite ridicule and humiliation, Dostoevsky managed to gain the respect of both teachers and schoolmates. Over time, they all became convinced that he was a man of outstanding abilities and extraordinary intelligence.

During his studies, Dostoevsky was influenced by Ivan Nikolaevich Shidlovsky, a graduate of Kharkov University who served in the Ministry of Finance. Shidlovsky wrote poetry and dreamed of literary fame. He believed in a huge, world-transforming power poetic word and argued that all great poets were “builders” and “world creators.” In 1839, Shidlovsky unexpectedly left St. Petersburg and left for an unknown direction. Later, Dostoevsky found out that he had gone to the Valuysky monastery, but then, on the advice of one of the wise elders, he decided to perform a “Christian feat” in the world, among his peasants. He began to preach the Gospel and achieved success in this field great success. Shidlovsky, a religious romantic thinker, became the prototype of Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov, heroes who have occupied a special place in world literature.

On July 8, 1839, the writer’s father died suddenly from an apoplexy. There were rumors that he did not die a natural death, but was killed by men for his tough temper. This news greatly shocked Dostoevsky, and he suffered his first seizure - a harbinger of epilepsy - a serious illness from which the writer suffered for the rest of his life.

On August 12, 1843, Dostoevsky completed a full course of science in the upper officer class and was enlisted in the engineering corps of the St. Petersburg engineering team, but he did not serve there for long. On October 19, 1844, he decided to resign and devote himself to literary creativity. Dostoevsky had a passion for literature for a long time. After graduating, he began translating the works of foreign classics, in particular Balzac. Page after page, he became deeply involved in the train of thought, in the movement of images of the great French writer. He liked to imagine himself as some famous romantic hero, most often Schiller's... But in January 1845, Dostoevsky experienced an important event, which he later called “the vision on the Neva.” Returning home from Vyborgskaya one winter evening, he “cast a piercing glance along the river” into the “frosty, muddy distance.” And then it seemed to him that “this whole world, with all its inhabitants, strong and weak, with all their dwellings, beggars’ shelters or gilded chambers, in this twilight hour resembles a fantastic dream, a dream, which, in turn, immediately will disappear, disappear into steam towards the dark blue sky.” And at that very moment, a “completely new world” opened up before him, some strange “completely prosaic” figures. “Not Don Carlos and Poses at all,” but “quite titular advisers.” And “another story loomed, in some dark corners, some titular heart, honest and pure... and with it some girl, offended and sad.” And his “heart was deeply torn by their whole story.”

A sudden revolution took place in Dostoevsky’s soul. The heroes, so dearly loved by him just recently, who lived in the world of romantic dreams, were forgotten. The writer looked at the world with a different look, through the eyes of “little people” - a poor official, Makar Alekseevich Devushkin and his beloved girl, Varenka Dobroselova. This is how the idea of ​​the novel arose in the letters of “Poor People,” Dostoevsky’s first work of fiction. Then followed the novellas and short stories “The Double”, “Mr. Prokharchin”, “The Mistress”, “White Nights”, “Netochka Nezvanova”.

In 1847, Dostoevsky became close to Mikhail Vasilyevich Butashevich-Petrashevsky, an official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a passionate admirer and propagandist of Fourier, and began to attend his famous “Fridays”. Here he met the poets Alexei Pleshcheev, Apollon Maikov, Sergei Durov, Alexander Palm, prose writer Mikhail Saltykov, young scientists Nikolai Mordvinov and Vladimir Milyutin. At meetings of the Petrashevites circle, the latest socialist teachings and programs for revolutionary coups were discussed. Dostoevsky was among the supporters of the immediate abolition of serfdom in Russia. But the government became aware of the existence of the circle, and on April 23, 1849, thirty-seven of its members, including Dostoevsky, were arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress. They were tried by military law and sentenced to death, but by order of the emperor the sentence was commuted, and Dostoevsky was exiled to Siberia for hard labor.

On December 25, 1849, the writer was shackled, seated in an open sleigh and sent on a long journey... It took sixteen days to get to Tobolsk in forty-degree frosts. Remembering his journey to Siberia, Dostoevsky wrote: “I was frozen to my heart.”

In Tobolsk, the Petrashevites were visited by the wives of the Decembrists Natalia Dmitrievna Fonvizina and Praskovya Egorovna Annenkova - Russian women whose spiritual feat was admired by all of Russia. They presented each condemned person with a Gospel, in the binding of which money was hidden. The prisoners were forbidden to have their own money, and the shrewdness of their friends to some extent at first made it easier for them to endure the harsh situation in the Siberian prison. This eternal book, the only one allowed in the prison, was kept by Dostoevsky all his life, like a shrine.

At hard labor, Dostoevsky realized how far the speculative, rationalistic ideas of the “new Christianity” were from that “heartfelt” feeling of Christ, the true bearer of which is the people. From here Dostoevsky brought out a new “symbol of faith”, which was based on the people’s feeling for Christ, the people’s type of Christian worldview. “This symbol of faith is very simple,” he said, “to believe that there is nothing more beautiful, deeper, more sympathetic, more intelligent, more courageous and more perfect than Christ, and not only is there not, but with jealous love I tell myself that it cannot be... »

The writer's four-year hard labor changed military service: from Omsk Dostoevsky was escorted under escort to Semipalatinsk. Here he served as a private, then received an officer rank. He returned to St. Petersburg only at the end of 1859. A spiritual search began for new ways of social development in Russia, which ended in the 60s with the formation of Dostoevsky’s so-called soil-based beliefs. Since 1861, the writer, together with his brother Mikhail, began publishing the magazine “Time”, and after its ban, the magazine “Epoch”. Working on magazines and new books, Dostoevsky developed his own view of the tasks of a Russian writer and public figure - a unique, Russian version of Christian socialism.

In 1861, Dostoevsky’s first novel, written after hard labor, was published, “The Humiliated and Insulted,” which expressed the author’s sympathy for the “little people” who are subjected to incessant insults from the powers that be. “Notes from the House of the Dead” (1861-1863), conceived and begun by Dostoevsky while still in hard labor, acquired enormous social significance. In 1863, the magazine “Time” published “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions,” in which the writer criticized the political belief systems of Western Europe. In 1864, “Notes from the Underground” was published - a kind of confession by Dostoevsky, in which he renounced his previous ideals, love for man, and faith in the truth of love.

In 1866, the novel “Crime and Punishment” was published, one of the writer’s most significant novels, and in 1868, the novel “The Idiot” was published, in which Dostoevsky tried to create the image of a positive hero opposing the cruel world of predators. Dostoevsky's novels “The Demons” (1871) and “The Teenager” (1879) became widely known. The last work summing up the writer’s creative activity was the novel “The Brothers Karamazov” (1879-1880). The main character of this work, Alyosha Karamazov, helping people in their troubles and alleviating their suffering, becomes convinced that the most important thing in life is a feeling of love and forgiveness. On January 28 (February 9), 1881, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky died in St. Petersburg.

F.M. Dostoevsky was born on October 30 (November 11), 1821 in Moscow, in the family of a doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor. In 1838 he entered the St. Petersburg Military Engineering School. After graduating in 1843, he was enlisted in the engineering department, but a year later he retired, convinced that his calling was literature.

In his childhood and youth, Dostoevsky passionately loved to read - the Bible, the works of N.M. Karamzin, V.A. Zhukovsky, A.S. Griboedov, M.Yu. Lermontov, and was especially fond of the works of A.S. Pushkin and N.V. Gogol. According to the writer, the death of Pushkin shocked him almost more than the death of his mother in the spring of 1837. Dostoevsky was also interested in foreign literature - plays by Shakespeare and Moliere, novels by E. Hsu, Charles Dickens, J. Sand, O. Balzac and especially dramas F. Schiller, which he “raved about”, memorizing them by heart.

The pinnacle of Dostoevsky’s work are five social and philosophical novels written in the last fifteen years of his life: “Crime and Punishment” (1866), “The Idiot” (1868), “Demons” (1871-1872), “Teenager” (1875) and "The Brothers Karamazov" (1879-1880). It was in these works that Dostoevsky's genius revealed itself with all its power and depth. Their appearance was preceded by two decades of ideological and artistic quests and the most difficult life trials.

In the early 1860s. Dostoevsky wrote “A Series of Articles on Russian Literature,” where he substantiated his view of modern prose. In his opinion, Russian literature after Pushkin and Gogol was in dire need of updating socio-historical issues and artistic principles. Writers of the 1850s - 1860s. Turgenev, Goncharov and Tolstoy developed only one of the lines outlined by Pushkin. They were primarily writers of everyday life of Russian noble society with its historically established features. According to Dostoevsky, they developed the circle of motives that Pushkin in “Eugene Onegin” designated as “legends of the Russian family.”

Dostoevsky believed that modern writers should portray the “Russian man of the majority.” The life and soul of this person are complex, unsettled, chaotic. According to Dostoevsky, the urgent task of all literature is to discover in a person something more than his class or professional affiliation allows us to see in him: the soul, the inner world, the circle of ideas and moods. Thus, the writer raised the question of a “mass”, democratic hero, but demanded not a simplified, but a psychologically in-depth artistic research not only the external, social and everyday forms of his life, but also all the “variegated”, contradictory that gave birth to modern life in the confused, disturbed souls of the “heroes of the time”.

The features of this creative program are revealed in his works created back in the first period of creativity - the 1840s. During these years, the novel “Poor People” (1845), the stories “The Double” (1846), “The Mistress” (1847), “White Nights” (1848) and “Netochka Nezvanova” (1849, unfinished) were written.

The beginning of Dostoevsky's literary activity dates back to 1844-1845, when, having retired, he devoted himself entirely to literature. In May 1845, Dostoevsky read the novel “Poor People” to his only friend, the writer D.V. Grigorovich. V.G. Belinsky highly appreciated it as the first experience of a social novel in Russian literature. The publication of “Poor People” in the “Petersburg Collection” (1846) strengthened the authority of the “natural school” - an association of young realist writers of the 1840s.

The works that appeared after his debut novel put Dostoevsky among the first writers in Russia. The greatest critics - V.G. Belinsky and V.N. Maikov - compared him with Gogol, although in the stories written after “Poor People”, the young Dostoevsky did not so much follow the idol of the realists of the 1840s, but rather rethought his creative experience , went his own way, groping for his own method of depicting a person.

Already the novel in letters “Poor People”, from the point of view of the interpretation of the personality of the official Makar Alekseevich Devushkin, was a work emphatically “non-Golevsky”. It was important for Dostoevsky to show what the “little people” themselves thought about themselves - the poor titular adviser and the addressee of his letters, the seamstress Varenka Dobroselova, snatched from the hands of the pimp by Devushkin. The writer was primarily interested in the self-awareness of the characters. Devushkin understands that in the social sense he is a “rag” (nonentity), but this does not prevent him from being a thinking and feeling person.

He is not just a “little man”, a St. Petersburg official crushed by life, an inhabitant of bad apartments, like the hero of Gogol’s story “The Overcoat” Bashmachkin. Devushkin is a humiliated and insulted creature. He is a “cog” of the bureaucratic machine, but a “cog” with “ambition”, with a sense of his own dignity. He demands respect for himself, he respects both other people's poverty and other people's pride. For Devushkin, respect for a poor person is more important than material well-being. He even needs new boots “to maintain his honor and good name.” “In boots with holes,” he notes, “both were lost... believe me.”

The goal of Gogol and his followers in the literature of the 1840s. — to awaken in the reader’s soul empathy and compassion for the “little man.” Dostoevsky’s goal is different - to give Devushkin and others like him the opportunity to “confess”, to speak out about what humiliates and insults them. At the same time, the hero’s word has a special character: it is the word of a person who experiences a burning need for communication, dialogue, and polemics. Devushkin confesses in his letters, but his confession is addressed not only to Varenka. It’s as if he feels someone else’s, unkind, skeptical gaze on him, and cannot get rid of the feeling of hostility from the people around him.

The hero always begins by refuting someone who is ready to get into his soul, humiliate and insult him. This determines the style of the novel (primarily Devushkin’s letters): the hero’s word seems to “shrink”, “writhe” under someone else’s gaze. Devushkin’s speech reflects the psychological complex of a humiliated and insulted person: a timid, bashful glance at an imaginary opponent and a muted challenge - a variant of self-defense. “After all, you wear an overcoat for people, and perhaps you wear boots for them,” Devushkin justifies himself.

The character of a humiliated and insulted person is Dostoevsky’s main discovery in “Poor People.” A kind of sensation in the literature of the 1840s. became the principle of depicting this literary hero, found by the writer: he analyzed not so much social status as the psychological phenomenon of an “ambitious” person, fighting with words for his honor and dignity, wanting to receive from people the same respect as the mighty of the world this.

Dostoevsky by no means idealized his hero. The writer clearly saw that his personality was ugly deformed, because Devushkin does not strive to live for himself, wanting one thing: for his reflections in the mirrors of other people’s opinions to look quite “decent”. Both in “Poor People” and in subsequent stories, the motif of the duality of the heroes is important. The impulse for dialogue with people and with the world, the need for understanding and confession are combined in them with alienation even from close people, with a painful thirst for conflict with what surrounds them.

The isolation of “poor people”, their mutual “impenetrability” and alienation from each other, the combination of good and evil in their souls - these problems came to the fore in the stories “The Double” and “Mr. Prokharchin”. In them, Dostoevsky is as far from the Gogolian tradition of depicting the “little man” as in the first novel. The hero of the story “The Double” Golyadkin ventured into some kind of rebellion. Thrown out of “good society,” he goes out of his way to prove that he, too, is a person to be reckoned with, and tries to explain himself to his offenders. But his ridiculous figure and tongue-tiedness cause them only momentary confusion and uncontrollable laughter. The hero's rebellion, which ended in a madhouse, is absurd and tragicomic.

The most remarkable thing in the story is the appearance of Golyadkin’s double, who became his psychological antipode. The hero is timid, honest and naive. His double is impudent and is not averse to snatching someone else’s property. Golyadkin did no harm to anyone - his double is always ready to do harm to his neighbor. “Younger” Golyadkin is the product of the soul of an ambitious official. He appeared because envy, anger and meanness seemed to separate from the real Golyadkin and took on an independent life. The hero recognizes himself with horror in the distorting mirror of his double, who turned out to be stronger than himself. The double contains everything that the poor official got rid of: flattery, ingratiation with his superiors, deceit and arrogance.

The hero of the story “Mr. Prokharchin” is the predecessor of the “underground man.” Dostoevsky emphasized in him an exaggerated sense of self-esteem. Having made hoarding the meaning of his life (after his death, “capital” was found in his mattress - two and a half thousand rubles), he is proud of the awareness of his secret wealth. Money became for Prokharchin a symbol of unlimited power over people. With morbid voluptuousness, he indulges in “Napoleonic” dreams, completely closing himself off from people. Obsessed with fear of life, the first “underground” hero in Dostoevsky’s work himself evokes horror: this “rag man” is obsessed with the dream of subjugating the whole world. He revels in the flight of his uninhibited thoughts, as if he were pushing apart the walls of his beggarly closet, dreaming of either subjugating the whole world or benefiting humanity. But behind all the “Napoleonic” plans of Prokharchin, the first “St. Petersburg dreamer” depicted by the writer, one can discern the broken ties between society and man, the tragic alienation from people and the painful desire to get closer to them not in dreams, but in reality.

The images of the “St. Petersburg dreamers” were created in a series of works written in 1847-1849: “The Mistress”, “Weak Heart”, “White Nights” and “Netochka Nezvanova”. Each of them contains the story of the collapse of the “dreamer” and his dream.

Particularly interesting is the image of Ordynov, the hero of the most fantastic of Dostoevsky’s stories - “The Mistress”. The action in it takes place on the verge of reality and sleep, and Ordynov is depicted as an obsessed, nervous person, on the verge of a mental breakdown. The hero of the story, the first “theoretician” in Dostoevsky’s work, is busy creating a universal system of knowledge in which he wants to merge art and science.

During one of his walks around St. Petersburg, Ordynov meets the beautiful Katerina, accompanied by a gloomy old man. The intrigued hero “headlong”, like any “dreamer” in Dostoevsky, rushes into the maelstrom of everyday circumstances, completely forgetting about his “project”. Now he thinks about only one thing: how to snatch Katerina from the hands of the schismatic merchant, but he is wrecked. The writer emphasizes the unviability and groundlessness of Ordynov’s dreams, the tragic discord between his altruistic impulse and complete ignorance of life and people. It is this contradiction that will largely determine Raskolnikov’s fate later.

The first period of Dostoevsky's creativity covers about five years. The writer's creative development was forcibly interrupted in April 1849 by arrest in the Petrashevsky case. The fact is that in the second half of the 1840s. Dostoevsky not only worked actively in literature, but was also at the epicenter of the then debate about the future of Russia, about ways to transform society. The writer was attracted by the ideas of utopian socialism - he was strongly influenced by the ideas of V. G. Belinsky and the views of the French utopian socialists, especially Charles Fourier. Since 1847, Dostoevsky was a member of the circle of M.V. Petrashevsky, a convinced “Fourierist” who considered the phalanstery (a human community organized on the basis of the principles of common property and common labor, freedom from the power of money and family responsibilities). Dostoevsky was ironic about the utopias of Petrashevsky and his supporters, but he sincerely dreamed of a “deed,” a just reorganization of society. Being a deeply religious person, the writer believed that the renewal of society was possible on the basis of combining socialism with Christianity. He placed special hopes, like many of his contemporaries, on the peasant community.

At a meeting at Petrashevsky’s on April 15, 1849, Dostoevsky read Belinsky’s censored letter to Gogol, in which the critic gave a sharp assessment of “Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends.” It was for this that Dostoevsky, along with other Petrashevsky members, was sentenced to death. On December 22, 1849, an execution was staged on the Semenovsky parade ground in St. Petersburg - in last minute Dostoevsky, who was awaiting death, was announced about the tsar’s “mercy”: the execution was replaced by four years of hard labor followed by soldiering. The writer experienced an unforgettable spiritual drama. On December 24 he was sent to hard labor in the Omsk prison. From 1854, after completing his term of hard labor, Dostoevsky served as a soldier in the Siberian Line Battalion.

The time of hard labor and soldiering is a long pause in the creative development of the writer. For Dostoevsky, the “hard labor” of moral torment became more severe than hard labor. Already in the first year of his stay in prison, a moral revolution took place in the writer: his entire past life seemed deceitful and inauthentic to him. Books and magazines were prohibited - the only book allowed was the Gospel, a gift from the wives of the Decembrists. It became a constant reading of Dostoevsky, deepened his ideas about the meaning of the Gospel images, interpreted by him in the context own destiny and the fate of humanity.

In penal servitude, Dostoevsky, who lived among criminals, in an atmosphere of drunken revelry and stabbings, painfully searched for the answer to the question: was the Russian peasant, on whom he and other Petrashevites pinned so much hope, a bandit? The writer took a fresh look at one of the memorable episodes of his childhood: when he was 9 years old, a wolf scared him, and he rushed to the peasant Marey, who was plowing his field. The man extended his hand, stroked little Fedya on the cheek and said: “Look, you’re scared... That’s enough, dear... Christ is with you, come to your senses...” Dostoevsky remembered the kind, gentle, as if maternal, smile of the serf Marey. This man became for the convict writer a symbol of people's kindness: not only bandits and murderers, but also soft, kind, simple Russian men were revealed to him as neighbors in the convict barracks.

Kindness, justice, participation - the foundations of people's morality - resurrected Dostoevsky, forced, despite everything he saw in hard labor, to believe in the people, but not in the “ideal” one invented by utopian dreamers, but in the real, cruel and terrible in appearance, but naive and good people who have maintained contact with popular ideas about morality. It was faith in the people, faith in God and in the ultimate triumph of goodness and justice that helped Dostoevsky withstand the test of hard labor and soldiering. Only in 1859 Dostoevsky received permission to move to Tver, and then to St. Petersburg.

With his return to the capital, a new period of Dostoevsky’s life and work began, covering 1859-1885. Back in 1858-1859. he wrote the novel “The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants” and the story “Uncle’s Dream”. These works became “test”: after all, Dostoevsky was forced to determine his place in the new literary environment, which had changed greatly since the 1840s.

For ten years his name did not appear in print, he was completely forgotten, while the writers who began with him in the 1840s former members“natural school”, were at the zenith of their fame (I.S. Turgenev, N.A. Nekrasov, I.A. Goncharov, M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, political emigrant A.I. Herzen), and new names appeared (L.N. Tolstoy, N.G. Chernyshevsky), and, most importantly, a new reader. At the age of 37, Dostoevsky actually needed to start over, to “emerge” from Lethe, returning to literature. Note that the situation in which he found himself was unique: none of the Russian writers had to start twice, restoring their literary name.

In the novel “The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants,” a new Dostoevsky appeared before readers - a brilliant satirist and at the same time a subtle psychologist. However, the writer’s favorite brainchild, on which he had special hopes, was not understood and accepted by his contemporaries. This is partly explained by the fact that the novel was for Dostoevsky a kind of “reckoning with the past”: in the main character Foma Fomich Opiskin, Gogol’s character traits appeared recent years life, the style of his “Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends” was openly parodied. Dostoevsky's psychological satire caused confusion. The main question for critics was the question in which direction his work would develop. The reader demanded topical stories. Neither skill, nor in-depth psychologism, nor an ironic-parody style of writing could compensate for the lack of modern issues.

It took five years for Dostoevsky to restore his literary reputation. Two works written in the early 1860s - the novel “Humiliated and Insulted” (1861) and the artistic and documentary “Notes from the House of the Dead” (1860-1862) - again made him an active participant in the literary process. Both works are closely related to Dostoevsky’s journalistic and publishing activities. Together with his brother M.M. Dostoevsky, he published the magazine “Time” (1861-1863), and then its continuation, “Epoch” (1864-1865). In these publications, the Dostoevsky brothers carried out a program of “soilism”, which became the ideological basis of both journalism and artistic works of F.M. Dostoevsky in the 1860s - 1870s.

The main point of this socio-philosophical program is disengagement with the two most authoritative currents of Russian spiritual life: Westernism and Slavophilism. Dostoevsky decisively reconsiders the liberation aspirations of the nobility and the “old” sociological and philosophical ideas. He considers the common intelligentsia to be divorced from the people, from the “soil”, and therefore not expressing their fundamental aspirations. The Dostoevsky brothers and their supporters, in particular the famous writer and critic A.A. Grigoriev, also acutely felt their isolation from the people, from the “people's soil.” They expected a “new word” from the Russian people themselves, awakened by the peasant reform of 1861. The “soilers” saw their task in spiritual and practical activities: by enlightening the people, the educated strata of society must themselves perceive the original foundations of the people’s worldview and become morally closer to them.

In folk morality, Dostoevsky identified three main points: a sense of organic connection between people; brotherly sympathy and compassion; willingness to voluntarily come to the aid of a suffering “brother” without violence against oneself or limiting one’s own freedom. It is these qualities that, according to the writer, determine the essence of “socialism of the Russian people.” He contrasted this “ground-based”, popular socialism with utopian socialism, and in the 1870s. - “political”, that is, revolutionary socialism. From the pages of magazines, Dostoevsky conducted active polemics on socio-political and literary issues. The publications of new works of art in Vremya, enthusiastically received by readers, were also “replicas” of the writer in his dispute with his contemporaries.

The novel “Humiliated and Insulted” is close to the tradition of the European “feuilleton novel,” which is also popular in Russia (novels of this type include, for example, Vs. Krestovsky’s huge novel “Petersburg Slums”). Plot secrets, intricate relationships between characters, compositional and semantic completeness of each part - all these features of the urban “feuilleton novel” were necessary for Dostoevsky to solve complex socio-psychological problems. The novel continues two themes that were developed back in the works of the 1840s - the theme of St. Petersburg and the theme of “the humiliated and insulted” (the very title of the work accurately determined the type of hero that was already emerging in Dostoevsky’s first works). The interpretation of these themes has changed: the St. Petersburg world is shown in the light of “soil” ideals, in it the morality of the “humiliated and insulted” (Nelly, Natasha Ikhmeneva and her parents, narrator Ivan Petrovich) and those who humiliate and insult (the Valkovsky princes) openly clashed.

“Notes from the House of the Dead” made the impression of a bomb exploding: no one wrote about hard labor and convicts before Dostoevsky - he discovered not only new material, but also the form of its presentation. The topic itself made the book an event: the writer paved the way whole literature about penal servitude and prisons. Russian writers after Dostoevsky, in the 1880s - 1890s, already knew how to write about these phenomena of social life. And in numerous “camp” novels, stories, “notes” created by prisoners of prisons and concentration camps already in the 20th century, it is easy to detect features of their literary “prototype”. In Notes from the House of the Dead, Dostoevsky created a “canon” of prison life stories: from the appearance of a newcomer in a barracks, going through the experience of punishment and hard labor, communication with the prison environment, to escape or release.

In the artistic and documentary autobiographical narrative, the writer managed to combine the seemingly incompatible: the truth of the fact, the document and the psychological truth. The narrator is a certain Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, convicted of murdering his wife, but the center of the work is not the fate of a criminal. For the first time, a documentary story became a form of moral and psychological self-knowledge and the formulation of social and philosophical problems. The writer came to the conclusion that the old system of punishment is not capable of correcting the criminal. “Prison and intensive hard labor” develop in him “only hatred, a thirst for forbidden pleasures and terrible frivolity.” Dostoevsky developed his own concept of punishment, which was later realized in the novel “Crime and Punishment”: a criminal can be punished not by an official court or hard labor, but only by the court of his conscience.

From those details of life at hard labor in the book grows symbolic image The house of the dead, which has several meanings that go beyond what is depicted in “Notes...” This is not only an image of a convict prison, but also an image-symbol of the “dead” (bureaucratic Nikolaev Russia and a symbol of any society “in which legal system becomes a soulless machine, rolling around a person, not correcting, but crippling his soul, robbing him of hope for humanity and justice. It is noteworthy that one of the cross-cutting problems of the book was the problem of alienation of educated, noble Russia from the Russian people. Not abstract reasoning, but the fate of the narrator and his comrades, who remained for other convicts representatives of the hated noble class, confirm Dostoevsky’s favorite idea about the need to return the educated “tops” of Russian society to the people’s “soil.”

One of the pressing problems of the 1860s is posed polemically in Notes from the House of the Dead. - a problem of the social environment. Without denying the role of the sociocultural environment in the formation of personality, Dostoevsky rejected the then popular explanation of the personality and behavior of people by the fact that “the environment is stuck.” The writer considered the person himself, his moral self, to be the final authority determining a person’s actions and psychology. According to Dostoevsky, the influence of the environment does not free a person from moral responsibility before God and people. Any attempt to shift responsibility from a specific person to the environment is a trick of bourgeois jurisprudence, necessary to justify crimes. This is one of Dostoevsky’s fundamental convictions, artistically embodied in all his novels of the 1860s and 1870s.

In 1862 -1864. Dostoevsky created two works that were, as it were, two prologues to his five great novels. “Zimina’s notes on summer impressions,” written under the impression of his first trip abroad in 1862-1863, is a journalistic “prologue.” In a series of journalistic essays, an image of European civilization was created, which seemed to Dostoevsky to be the new kingdom of Baal - mythological monster eating people. According to the writer, in the West, whose spirit is destroyed by “possessiveness,” there are not even prerequisites for achieving human brotherhood. Dostoevsky’s ethical ideal is the ability of an individual to freely, without any violence against himself, expand his “I” to understand the needs of other people and other nations, to “all humanity”, “ worldwide responsiveness“He connected his hopes for the future unity of people with the Russian people,

“Notes from the Underground” is a philosophical and psychological “prologue.” Dostoevsky explores the soul of the modern individualist, the “underground man,” by extremely concentrating the action in time and space. In just a few hours, he makes his hero go through all phases of mood: humiliation, proud self-indulgence and suffering, ultimately leading him to an understanding of his own insignificance.

From a social point of view, the “underground” hero is of little interest - he is an ordinary St. Petersburg official. The writer's attention is not focused on social status, but to the consciousness of this person. His consciousness is like a malignant tumor: the “underground” hero is possessed by a painful, pathological thirst for self-affirmation. He can only establish himself by suppressing and humiliating other people. He has developed a need for psychological “tyranny”, and the object of this “tyranny” becomes not only the unfortunate and gullible prostitute Lisa, but also he himself. The meaning of self-torture is that the hero subjects his every thought, every action or impulse to a merciless “dissection.” As a result, he almost goes crazy from contradictions: it seems to him that he knows everything about himself, then a terrible truth is suddenly revealed to him - the hero is drowning in his own paradoxes, doubting the sincerity of any of his words. He recognizes only personal whim as the only law for himself and the whole world. To refuse to satisfy it means, in the hero’s opinion, to become like a “pin” or a “piano key” pressed by someone else’s hand.

Dostoevsky’s “anti-hero” rebels against “naked” rationalism, against life’s arithmetic, arguing that “twice two makes four is still an unbearable thing.” From the writer’s point of view, this rebellion of a person demanding unlimited freedom is immoral and leads him to self-destruction. The “underground paradoxist” withdraws into his “wish,” plunging into the evil infinity of the “sick consciousness.” The new, individualistic “arithmetic” turns out to be no better than the old, rejected one.

In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky the psychologist used two principles that allowed him to penetrate deeply into individualistic consciousness and into the nature of evil. The first principle is the confession of an “anti-hero”. Confession has become one of the most important forms psychological analysis in Crime and Punishment, Possessed, The Teenager and The Brothers Karamazov. The second principle, the absence of the author’s word about the hero, the author’s commentary on his thoughts, did not find application in later works. Dostoevsky preferred not to leave his “antiheroes” alone with the reader. A counterbalance to the “orgy” of thoughts and feelings of “underground” people in the novels of the 1860s - 1870s. The judgments of the writer and the characters-reasoners, reflecting the author's point of view, always serve.

The last period of Dostoevsky's work (late 1860s - 1881) was the time for creating masterpieces. The first of the novels that brought the writer world fame was the novel “Crime and Punishment” - the result of the entire previous development of Dostoevsky the thinker and artist and an exploratory, innovative work that opened the final stage of his work.

In the novels written in the last period of creativity, the main features were especially clearly manifested art world Dostoevsky. Let us characterize some of them.

Dostoevsky expanded the boundaries of “social” realism, for the first time forcing literature to talk about philosophical problems not in philosophical-illustrative language, but in the language artistic images. If before Dostoevsky the antithesis “artist - thinker” was quite common, then in him the artist and the thinker organically merged, which led to the emergence of a new type of artistry. Through the eventful and social content of his works, the writer leads the reader to their philosophical core.

Dostoevsky's realism is philosophical, psychological. Artistic method writer is based on keen attention to the most confusing and contradictory forms of life and public consciousness his era. In the most complex (“fantastic”, according to his definition) facts of the spiritual life of his contemporaries, he found a reflection of universal human (“all-human”) problems. Dostoevsky's heroes are people of the “age of industry.” In his novels, ideas generated by bourgeois relations struggle. Dostoevsky became one of the first critics of the ideas of individualism and anarchism, self-will and permissiveness, which for many of his contemporaries were more attractive than the “decrepit” humanistic morality. Contrasting these destructive ideas with his faith in God and his conviction in the indestructibility of the ideals of Christian humanity, the writer created an original concept of personality: in his novels, “anti-heroes” are opposed by people inspired by faith in goodness, striving for justice, rejecting the possibility of achieving universality! harmony at the cost of suffering (Sonya Marmeladova, Prince Myshkin, Alyosha Karamazov).

Despite the tendency to put “eternal” philosophical questions, Dostoevsky is an acutely topical writer, obsessed, in his words, with “longing for the present.” In modern events and in the characters of his contemporaries, he sought to see both a generalizing, final meaning and a prologue to a new era of social and cultural development in Russia and Europe. All Dostoevsky's novels of the 1860s - 1870s. can be called “forecast” novels, “prophecy” novels, the meaning of which was fully revealed in the 20th century.

Dostoevsky is an urban writer who created a terrible portrait of a big city, an “octopus” city that subjugates and depersonalizes a person (first of all, this is, of course, St. Petersburg). But he did not limit himself to depicting a mercantile and inhuman urban “civilization.” Dostoevsky is convinced that the more “fantastic” and hostile the world that surrounds people, the stronger their longing for the ideal, the more important it is for the artist to “find the person in the person.” In the writer’s language, this formula meant a search for a way out of a chaotic and ugly world, which, however, must be depicted “with complete realism,” objectively, without idealization. Dostoevsky saw his moral duty in discovering the impulse toward beauty and harmony “hidden in the human soul.” Like Schiller, the idol of his youth, Dostoevsky believed: it is “beauty that will save the world” and help restore “ dead person, crushed by the unfair pressure of circumstances, the stagnation of centuries and social prejudices.”

In Dostoevsky’s works there are no passive and impersonal “victims of circumstances, environment or upbringing.” Even the most robbed person by life - a “rag”, a “pin”, a “piano key”, a criminal, an outcast - is portrayed as a person with “ambition”, with his own view of people and himself. The personal principle, which violates class forms of behavior and thinking, elevates even the most “insignificant” hero.

The artistic world of Dostoevsky is a world of thought and intense moral and philosophical quest. People from various classes are drawn into this complex process: a former student; nobleman Raskolnikov, landowner Svidrigailov and painter Mikolka (“Crime and Punishment”), “righteous” Prince Myshkin, kept woman Nastasya Filippovna and merchant son Rogozhin (“Idiot”), even children (for example, the teenage “nihilist” Kolya Krasotkin from the novel “ Brothers Karamazov"),

Psychologism is the most important feature of all Dostoevsky’s works. Already in the 1840s. he paid more attention to describing the inner world of the heroes than to his social characteristics. This made him stand out among the writers of the “natural school” and caused the displeasure of its head, V.G. Belinsky. Unlike the realist “sociologists,” the “fantastic” realist Dostoevsky did not shift responsibility for people’s actions and their results onto the “environment” and circumstances. In the early 1860s. he ironically noted that he “started a process” with all Russian literature, in full voice declaring that every person is “responsible” for all the disorder of life and its “abominations.” According to Dostoevsky, the “universal man” (that is, all of humanity) will come to the “golden age” only when people understand and overcome their own imperfections. The writer defined his creative method as “fantastic realism”, since, in his opinion, there is nothing more fantastic than the soul of a person experiencing his conflict with the world.

Dostoevsky created the genre of the “polyphonic” novel (M. M. Bakhtin’s term). Starting with Crime and Punishment, his novels become grandiose artistic “laboratories” in which ideas, theories, and concepts are tested in the practice of life. Ideological systems and types of human behavior collide in them, and there is a struggle of opinions. Each person in Dostoevsky represents some kind of life position, a look at the world, becoming a “hero-ideologist”, a living embodiment of an idea. But not a single voice, including the voice of the author himself, is decisive. The meaning of the intense “dialogues of ideas” conducted in the novels is the acquisition of moral truth, which cannot belong to one person: it is the property of everyone and is revealed to each person in the experience of his suffering and painful spiritual quest, in his movement towards moral perfection, towards God.