Fyodor Mikailovich Dostoevsky's life was as dark and dramatic as
the great novels he wrote. He was born in Moscow in 1821,hroat
until he strangled. A short first novel, Poor Folk (1846) brought
him instant success, but his writing career was cut short by his
arrest for alleged subversion against Tsar Nicholas I in 1849. In
prison he was given the "silent treatment" for eight months (guards
even wore velvet soled boots) before he was led in front a firing
squad. Dressed in a death shroud, he faced an open grave and
awaited execution, when suddenly, an order arrived commuting his
sentence. He then spent four years at hard labor in a Siberian
prison, where he began to suffer from epilepsy, and he returned to
St. Petersburg only a full ten years after he had left in
chains.
His prison experiences coupled with his conversion to a profoundly
religious philosophy formed the basis for his great novels. But it
was his fortuitous marriage to Anna Snitkina, following a period of
utter destitution brought about by his compulsive gambling, that
gave Dostoevsky the emotional stability to complete Crime and
Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868-69), The Possessed (1871-72),
and The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80). When Dostoevsky died in 1881,
he left a legacy of masterworks that influenced the great thinkers
and writers of the Western world and immortalized him as a giant
among writers of world literature.
“One finally gets the musical whole of Dostoevsky’s original.”—The New York Times Book Review, on Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of The Brothers Karamazov
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