Fyodor Dostoevsky 1821 – 1881

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was a Russian novelist and essayist whose late masterpieces, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov, place him among the greatest novelists in any language. After youthful involvement in a circle of utopian socialists, he was sentenced to death and reprieved at the last moment, then sent to four years of penal labor in Siberia, an experience that shaped the rest of his writing. His novels are extended philosophical and religious investigations of guilt, faith, freedom, and the problem of evil that have decisively influenced twentieth-century existentialism and theology.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was a Russian novelist whose work sits at the borderline of philosophy and literature and whose influence on twentieth-century existentialism, theology, and political philosophy is enormous. Born in Moscow to a strict and abusive father, educated as a military engineer in St. Petersburg, he abandoned the army for literature in 1844 and was sentenced to death in 1849 for participation in a circle of utopian socialists; the sentence was commuted at the last moment to four years of hard labor in Siberia.

Dostoevsky's mature novels — Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872), The Adolescent (1875), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) — form one of the most sustained philosophical projects in modern literature. The novels examine the spiritual condition of nineteenth-century Russia under the pressure of Western secularism, revolutionary politics, and the loss of traditional religious frameworks. The figures of Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, Ivan Karamazov, and the Grand Inquisitor are among the most influential single creations in the philosophical analysis of nihilism and unbelief.

Dostoevsky's late religious-political vision — Russian Orthodox Christianity as the answer to the spiritual crisis of European modernity — was articulated in his journalistic Diary of a Writer and in the novels themselves. His influence on Nietzsche (who called him the only psychologist from whom he had something to learn), on Kierkegaard's reception, on twentieth-century existentialism, and on Russian religious philosophy from Solovyov to Berdyaev is foundational.