Life and creative path of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. Life and creative path F

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 vocation 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. Gogol. According to the writer, Pushkin's death shocked him almost more than the death of his mother in the spring of 1837. Dostoevsky was also interested in foreign literature - the plays of Shakespeare and Moliere, the novels of E. Xu, C. Dickens, J. Sand, O. Balzac and especially dramas F. Schiller, which he "raved about", memorizing.

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

In the early 1860s Dostoevsky wrote "A number of articles on Russian literature", where he substantiated his view on 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 mostly writers of everyday life of the Russian noble society with its historically established features. According to Dostoevsky, they developed the circle of motives that Pushkin in "Eugene Onegin" designated as "traditions of the Russian family."

Dostoevsky believed that contemporary writers should portray the "Russian man of the majority". The life and soul of this person are complex, unsettled, chaotic. According to Dostoevsky, the actual task of all literature is to discover something more in a person than his class or professional affiliation allows us to see in him: the soul, inner world, 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 study of not only the external, social forms of his life, but also everything “variegated”, contradictory that gave rise to modern life in troubled , disturbed souls of the "heroes of time".

Features of this creative program are found in his works created in the first period of creativity - the 1840s. During these years, the novel "Poor People" (1845), the novels "The Double" (1846), "The Mistress" (1847), "White Nights" (1848) and "Netochka Nezvanova" (1849, not finished) were written.

The beginning of Dostoevsky's literary activity dates back to 1844-1845, when, after retiring, he devoted himself entirely to literature. In May 1845, Dostoevsky read the novel "Poor People" to his only acquaintance, the writer D.V. Grigorovich. V. G. Belinsky highly appreciated it as the first experience in Russian literature social novel. 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 the debut novel put forward Dostoevsky among the first writers of Russia. Major critics - V. G. Belinsky and V. N. Maikov - compared him with Gogol, although in the stories written after "Poor Folk", the young Dostoevsky did not so much follow the idol of the realists of the 1840s, but rather rethink his creative experience , went his own way, groping for his own method of depicting a person.

Already the novel in the letters "Poor People" from the point of view of the interpretation of the personality of the official Makar Alekseevich Devushkin was a work emphatically "Negolian". It was important for Dostoevsky to show what the "little people" themselves thought of themselves - the poor titular adviser and the addressee of his letters, the seamstress Varenka Dobroselova, torn from Devushkin's hands by a procurer. The writer was primarily interested in the self-awareness of the characters. Devushkin understands that in the social sense he is a “rag” (insignificance), 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, as was 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 consciousness of his own dignity. He demands respect for himself, he respects both the poverty of others and the pride of others. For Devushkin, respect for a poor person is more important material well-being. He even needs new boots "to maintain honor and good name." “In boots with holes,” he remarks, “both are gone ... believe me.”

The goal of Gogol and his followers in the literature of the 1840s. - to awaken in the soul of the reader sympathy, compassion for the "little man". Dostoevsky's goal is different - to give Devushkin and his ilk the opportunity to "confess", to speak out about what humiliates and insults them. At the same time, the word of the hero has special character: this is the word of a person who has a burning need for communication, dialogue, polemics. Devushkin confesses in his letters, but his confession is addressed not only to Varenka. He seems to feel a strange, unkind, skeptical look on himself, he cannot get rid of the feeling of hostility from the people around him.

The hero always begins with a refutation of the one who is ready to get into his soul, humiliate and insult him. This is the reason for the style of the novel (primarily Devushkin's letters): the hero's word seems to "shrink", "writhing" 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 muffled challenge - a variant of self-defense. “After all, you walk in an overcoat for people, and, perhaps, you wear boots for them,” Devushkin justifies himself.

The character of a humiliated and offended person is Dostoevsky's main discovery in Poor Folk. A kind of sensation in the literature of the 1840s. became the image principle of this literary hero found by the writer: he analyzed not so much social status, How many psychological phenomenon an “ambitious” person who fights with words for his honor and dignity, who wants to receive from people the same respect that powers of the world this.

Dostoevsky by no means idealized his hero. The writer saw well that his personality was ugly deformed, because Devushkin does not strive to live for himself, wanting one thing: that his reflections in the mirrors of other people's opinions look quite "decent". Both in "Poor People" and in subsequent stories, the motive of the duality of heroes is important. The impulse to dialogue with people and 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 closeness 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 "Double" and "Mr. Prokharchin". In them, Dostoevsky is just as far from Gogol tradition Images " little man', just like in the first novel. The hero of the story "The Double" Golyadkin ventured into some kind of rebellion. Thrown out of "good society", he climbs out of a rut to prove that he, too, is a person to be reckoned with, tries to explain himself to his offenders. But his ridiculous figure and tongue-tied tongue cause them only momentary confusion and uncontrollable laughter. The hero's rebellion, which ended in a lunatic asylum, 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 arrogant and not averse to snatching someone else's. Golyadkin did no harm to anyone - the double is always ready to spoil his neighbor. The "younger" Golyadkin is the product of the soul of an ambitious official. He appeared because envy, malice and meanness, as it were, separated from the real Golyadkin and began to live an independent life. The hero with horror recognizes himself in the distorted mirror of his double, who turned out to be stronger than himself. The double has everything that the poor official got rid of: flattery, fawning over the authorities, deceit and arrogance.

The hero of the story “Mr. Prokharchin” is the predecessor of “ underground man". Dostoevsky emphasized in him an exaggerated self-esteem. Having made hoarding the meaning of his life (after his death, “capital” was found in a mattress - two and a half thousand rubles), he is proud of the consciousness of his secret wealth. Money became for Prokharchy-na a symbol of unlimited power over people. With painful voluptuousness, he indulges in "Napoleonic" dreams, completely closing himself off from people. Possessed by the fear of life, the first "underground" hero in Dostoevsky's work evokes horror himself: this "rag man" is obsessed with the dream of subjugating the whole world. He revels in the flight of his uninhibited thought, as if pushing 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 "Petersburg dreamer" depicted by the writer, one can guess 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 "Petersburg dreamers" were created in a cycle of works written in 1847-1849: "The Mistress", "Weak Heart", "White Nights" and "Netochka Nezvanova". In each of them - the story of the collapse of the "dreamer" and his dreams.

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 a man possessed, nervous, on the verge of a mental breakdown. The hero of the story, the first "theorist" 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 of only one thing: how to snatch Katerina from the hands of a schismatic merchant, but 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 the fate of Raskolnikov later.

The first period of Dostoevsky's work spans about five years. The creative development of the writer was forcibly interrupted in April 1849 by the arrest in the case of Petrashevsky. The fact is that in the second half of the 1840s. Dostoevsky not only actively worked in literature, but was also at the epicenter of the then disputes 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 phalanstere (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) to be the ideal of a harmonious society. Dostoevsky was ironic about the utopias of Petrashevsky and his supporters, but he sincerely dreamed of a "deed", of a just reorganization of society. Being a deeply religious person, the writer believed that the renewal of society was possible on the basis of the union of socialism with Christianity. He placed special hopes, like many of his contemporaries, on the peasant community.

At a meeting with Petrashevsky on April 15, 1849, Dostoevsky read Belinsky's letter to Gogol, banned by the censors, in which the critic gave a sharp assessment of "Selected passages from correspondence with friends." It was for this that Dostoevsky, along with other Petrashevites, was sentenced to death. On December 22, 1849, an execution was staged on the Semyonovsky parade ground in St. Petersburg - at the last minute, Dostoevsky, who was awaiting death, was announced the royal "mercy": the execution was replaced by four years of hard labor, followed by soldiery. The writer experienced an unforgettable emotional drama. On December 24, he was sent to hard labor in the Omsk jail. Since 1854, after the end of the term of hard labor, Dostoevsky served as a soldier in the Siberian linear battalion.

The time of hard labor and soldiery is a long pause in creative development writer. Harder hard labor became for Dostoevsky "penal servitude" of moral torment. Already in the first year of his stay in prison, a moral upheaval took place in the writer: the whole past life seemed to him false, inauthentic. Books and magazines were banned - the only book allowed was the Gospel, a gift from the wives of the Decembrists. It became a constant reading of Dostoevsky, deepening his understanding of the meaning of the gospel images, interpreted by him in the context of his own fate and the fate of mankind.

In hard labor, Dostoevsky, who lived among criminals, in an atmosphere of drunken revelry and stabbing, painfully searched for an answer to the question: is the Russian peasant a bandit, on whom he and other Petrashevites assigned such great expectations? The writer took a fresh look at one of the memorable episodes of his childhood: when he was 9 years old, he was frightened by a wolf, and he rushed to the peasant Marey, who was plowing his field. The peasant stretched out his hand, stroked little Fedya on the cheek and said: “Look, you got frightened ... That's it, my dear ... Christ is with you, goodbye ...” Dostoevsky remembered the kind, gentle, as if motherly, smile of the serf Marey. This peasant became for the convict writer a symbol of people's kindness: not only bandits and murderers, but also soft, kind, simple Russian peasants revealed themselves to him in the neighbors in the convict barracks.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born on November 11, 1821 in Moscow. His father was a retired military doctor Mikhail Andreevich (participant in the Patriotic War of 1812), and his mother was Maria Fedorovna (nee Nechaeva). Mikhail was the first child in the family, and Fedor was the second.

Throughout his life, the two older brothers remained the closest people.

There were 8 children in the family.

The father of the family was a strict man. He established order at home and demanded that everyone strictly observe it. But she was a kind and loving mother. There was also a nanny hired from Moscow bourgeois women, whose name was Alena Frolova. Dostoevsky remembered her with the same tenderness as Pushkin remembered Arina Rodionovna. It was from her that he heard the first fairy tales: about the Firebird, Alyosha Popovich, the Blue Bird. Often in the evenings, family readings were held in the Dostoevsky family.

Literary interests were determined early. Under the influence of Walter Scott and A. Radcliffe, Fedorov wrote novels "from Venetian life." The journal "Library for Reading", ordered for the sons by the father, provided an acquaintance with the latest foreign literature:

O. de Balzac, E.T.A. Hoffmann.

The historian Karamzin, writers and poets Derzhavin, Lazhechnikov, Zagostin, Zhukovsky and, of course, Pushkin were read. Younger brother Fyodor Mikhailovich, Andrei Mikhailovich wrote that “Brother Fedya read more historical, serious works, as well as novels that came across. Brother Mikhail loved poetry and wrote poetry himself ... but they put up with Pushkin, and both, it seems, then knew almost everything by heart ... ". The death of Alexander Sergeevich by young Fedya was brought up as a personal grief.

Andrei Mikhailovich wrote: “Brother Fedya, in conversations with his older brother, repeated several times that if we didn’t have family mourning (his mother, Maria Fedorovna, died), he would ask his father’s permission to mourn for Pushkin.”

Since 1834, young Fedor and Mikhail have been placed in a private boarding school by L.I. Chermak, one of the best in Moscow, where they studied until 1837. The boarding house was located on Basmannaya street.

His fellow student V.M. Kachenovsky told about the Dostoevsky boarding house: “... It was a serious, thoughtful boy, blond, with a pale face. He was little interested in games: during recreation he did not leave, he did not leave almost books, spending the rest of his free time in conversations with the senior pupils of the boarding school ... ”.

Dostoevsky grew up in a "Russian and pious" family, where they got acquainted with the Gospel "almost from the first childhood."

“I was only ten years old when I already knew almost all the main episodes of Russian history from Karamzin, which my father read aloud to us in the evenings. Every time a visit to the Kremlin and Moscow cathedrals was something solemn for me, ”the writer recalled.

Every Easter, the mother took her sons on a pilgrimage to the Trinity-Sergius Lavra.

In the winter of 1837, Fyodor Mikhailovich's mother died, and this period is considered to be the end of the writer's childhood. And exactly one year later, together with his brother Mikhail, he goes to St. Petersburg and enters the Engineering School. But Mikhail cannot be enrolled there for health reasons, and he was forced to enter the engineering cadets in Reven (now Tallinn).

For the first time, Fedor was separated from his brother for a long time. However, the connection between the brothers was not interrupted thanks to a lively correspondence, where the work of Homer and Racine, Goethe and Balzac was discussed. Hugo and Schiller, whom the young Dostoevsky "raved about" and whom he "learned everything by heart." These letters express ideas that determined spiritual search throughout life: “Man is a mystery. It must be unraveled, and if you will unravel it all your life, do not say that you have wasted time; I am engaged in this secret, because I want to be a man.

In the early summer of 1839, his father died.

The future writer endured this tragedy very hard, especially since there were persistent rumors that Mikhail Andreevich was killed by his own peasants in the village of Darovoye (Tula province), which they bought in 1831 and in which little Fedya spent every summer.

And it was with the death of his father that the first attack of epilepsy was connected, which haunted Fyodor Mikhailovich until the end of his life.

The Engineering School was located in the Mikhailovsky Castle, where Tsar Paul 1 was killed. Pushkin. however, St. Petersburg powerfully attracted Dostoevsky to itself. But it was Petersburg Meshchansky and Podyachesky streets, where he settled his future heroes.

One of happy moments in the first years of Dostoevsky's life and study in St. Petersburg, communication with the romantic poet I.N. Shidlovsky.

Here is what he wrote to his brother Mikhail: "... Oh, what a frank, pure soul! ... Oh, if you knew those poems that he wrote last spring ...".

Grigorovich, who studied with him: “Fyodor Mikhailovich even then showed signs of unsociableness, avoided taking part in games, sat deep in a book and looked for a secluded place ... In reactionary times, he could always ... be found ... with a book. And again: "His erudition amazed me."

Dostoevsky read at that time Schiller and Shakespeare, Goethe and Balzac. And it was during the years of study that he learned to understand Gogol, or rather, to notice those life situations, which Gogol was so able to embody on paper. While still a cadet, he composed the works “Boris Godunov” and “Maria Steward” that have not come down to us.

After graduating from college, in 1843, Dostoevsky was enlisted in the drawing room of the engineering department, but a year later he quit, together with D.V. Grigorovich (already a well-known writer), he rented an apartment and took up writing.

In May 1845, Poor People were written.

Dostoevsky read the novel “Poor People” to Grigorovich, who, in turn, showed it to N.A. Nekrasov, who, with the words “ New Gogol appeared!" took the book to V. G. Belinsky.

Enraptured, V. G. Belinsky called the author to him and said: “Do you understand yourself, ... what you wrote! But maybe you, in your twenty years, already understand this ... The truth is revealed to you and proclaimed as an artist, you got it as a gift, appreciate your gift and remain faithful to "him" and you will be a great writer!

Subsequently, Fedor Mikhailovich recalled: "It was the most delightful minute in my whole life."

The enthusiasm was universal, and Dostoevsky became one of the participants in the so-called 2 natural school. On January 15, 1856, his novel opened "Petersburg Collection", the second almanac of the natural school, where the works of Nekrasov, Turgenev, Panaev, Herzen, Sollogub, Belinsky were collected.

Dostoevsky remained true to his gift, but he parted ways with Belinsky. (See. critical articles In ... Belinsky about the work of F.M. Dostoevsky: about long lengths, "fantastic coloring" disapproved by Belinsky, etc.).

However, later Dostoevsky more than once recalled the great critic with nobility.

"Poor People" opens a whole cycle of works showing the life of various strata of society. Dostoevsky writes the novels The Double, The Mistress, A Novel in Ten Letters, Mr. Prokharchin, Crawlers, and, to the delight of many, several stories about "dreamers." The appearance of works about "dreamers" was preceded by the publication by Dostoevsky of a number of feuilletons under the general title "Petersburg Chronicle" (1847), in which he explained the reason for the appearance of "dreamers" in life. Not feeling in themselves the strength to fight, they ("dreamers") go into their fictional world, fantasies and dreams.

Dostoevsky's most "main" dreamer was main character story "White Nights".

The appearance of "dreaming" in Dostoevsky coincides with the enthusiasm for utopian socialism, participation in the circles of brothers. Beketov, M.V. Petrashevsky, S.F. Durov.

The main authority in the circle br. Beketov was a young critic V.N. Maikov, who put forward psychologism, the study of human nature, as the first task of contemporary literature. Under the influence of his ideas around the journal "Domestic Notes" formed the so-called. "School of sentimental naturalism", of which Dostoevsky became the recognized head.

From the spring of 1847, the writer became a permanent member of the Petrashevsky circle. The meetings discussed political, socio-economic, literary and other problems. Dostoevsky was a supporter of the abolition of serfdom and the abolition of censorship of literature. But unlike the rest of the Petrashevites, he was a vivid opponent of the flat overthrow of the existing government.

In Petrashevsky's circle, Dostoevsky becomes close to Durov, Speshnev, Mombelli, they conceive their own printing house, but do not have time.

On one of the "Fridays" the writer read Belinsky's famous letter to Gogol with sharp criticism of "Selected passages from correspondence with friends." Reading this "criminal" letter became one of the main points of Dostoevsky's accusation.

Early in the morning, at 4 o'clock on April 23, 1849, gendarmes came to Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky on the personal order of Tsar Nicholas 1, arrested him and imprisoned him in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Several dozen Petrashevites were arrested along with him.

By decision of the court, Dostoevsky and ten other members of the circle were deprived title of nobility, ranks and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress. But this arrest did not break his will in any way: “I see that there is so much vitality in me that you can’t draw it out,” this is a line from a letter written from the fortress to his brother.

The military court recognized Dostoevsky as "one of the most important criminals" and, accusing him of criminal plans against the government, sentenced him to death penalty.

Emperor Nicholas 1 order: "Announce pardon only at the moment when everything is ready for execution." The staging of the death penalty took place on December 22, 1849. And two days later, Dostoevsky was shackled and sent to the Omsk jail, where he was kept until February 1854.

Fyodor Mikhailovich described his life in a Siberian prison in the work “Notes from the House of the Dead” (1860), where he showed not romantic robbers, but the natural life of real thugs who had lost everything human; He also showed quiet and meek people who could not stand the torment of soldier's service and killed their officer. And completely innocent, accused of crimes that they did not commit.

In prison, Dostoevsky was alone. The prisoners often did not want to communicate with him, considering him a person from another world. The “Siberian Notebook” was written there, where he contributed his thoughts, prison songs, proverbs, etc. "Siberian Notebook" and became the main material for the creation of the "Record of the Dead House".

In February 1854, Dostoevsky, by a court decision, was appointed as a private in the Semipalatinsk linear battalion.

Dostoevsky is already known and thanks to this he becomes a friend of the regional prosecutor Wrangel, who was present at the staged execution of the Petrashevites in the winter of 1849. This gave Fyodor Mikhailovich the opportunity to visit high society(he also met Ch.Ch. Valikhanov, a prominent Kazakh figure, with whom he kept in touch even after his exile). Thanks to the beginning of the liberal reign of Alexander 2, Private Dostoevsky received an officer rank on October 1, 1856, and a little earlier he was returned to the noble title.

At the beginning of 1857 Dostoevsky marries. His first wife was the widow of a retired official, Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva. He fell in love with her (even when she was married) at first sight. Maria Dmitrievna had a difficult character, and therefore the marriage turned out to be difficult.

Dostoevsky rescues literary work: he makes sketches for the works " Uncle's dream and "The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants", which were completed after the exile.

The family settled in Semipalatinsk, and two years later Dostoevsky still seeks his resignation, already in the rank of ensign. He is not immediately allowed to live in St. Petersburg or Moscow, but is settled in Tver (March 1859). However, very soon Dostoevsky sought to move to the northern capital, and in the second half of December 1859, exactly 10 years after the "execution" on Semyonovsky parade ground, he again ended up in St. Petersburg.

Upon his return from Siberia, Dostoevsky actually begins to manage the political magazine Vremya, which was founded by his brother Mikhail in 1861. The ideological platform of the journal is pochvenism: the tragic fragmentation of the intelligentsia and the people - the fruit of Peter's reforms - must be overcome, relying on original national soil.

The Orthodox idea of ​​brotherhood will allow, according to Dostoevsky, the Russian person to fulfill in the future his national super-task - the idea of ​​universal humanity, that is, the unification and reconciliation of all peoples of the world in a higher synthesis. Dostoevsky developed his views on soil throughout his life.

And the first major work written after the exile was published precisely in the first issues of Vremya in early 1861. It was the novel "Humiliated and Insulted".

Almost at the same time, Notes from the House of the Dead was published, describing the Siberian prison. In 1863, a series of essays “Winter Notes on summer impressions» - about life in European countries seen in the summer of 1862.

In April 1863, the magazine "Vremya" was closed by censors for the article "The Fatal Question", written by N.N. Strakhov and dedicated to the Polish uprising.

In 1864, Mikhail Mikhailovich Dostoevsky managed to obtain a license to publish a new magazine - Epoch, in the same year he wrote Notes from the Underground.

In 1864, Dostoevsky's wife, Maria Dmitrievna, died, and on July 22 of the same year, brother Mikhail died of illness. For Fyodor Mikhailovich, this was a heavy blow, and besides, all the main forgotten items associated with the Epoch fell on his shoulders, and in June 1865 the editorial board went bankrupt. In order to get out of the financial impasse, Dostoevsky concludes an agreement with the publisher Stelovsky on the release of his collected works with the obligation to write new novel. This novel became "The Gambler".

Even before the death of his first wife (1862), Dostoevsky met Apollinaria Suslova, who was very attracted to everything revolutionary and immediately fell in love with Dostoevsky, who had recently served his sentence in the political case. Dostoevsky proposes to her, but she rejects it. Apollinaria is the prototype of Polina in the novel The Gambler.

The novel "The Player" is to some extent autobiographical, Dostoevsky himself was a player and lost "to the thread." The novel was written in 28 days. Anna Grigoryevna Snitnikova, who took shorthand of the novel, became the second wife of the writer on February 15, 1867.

Anna Grigoryevna recalled: “Fyodor Mikhailovich, in the first weeks of our married life, walking with me, took me to the courtyard of a house and showed me the stone under which Raskolnikov hid the things stolen from the old woman.”

Work on Crime and Punishment began in 1865 in Wiesbadan, Germany, where Dostoevsky went for treatment. In the center of the novel is a crime, an ideological murder.

“A young man, expelled from university students, ... living in extreme poverty, out of frivolity, out of precariousness in concepts, succumbing to some strange“ unfinished ”ideas that are in the air, decided to get out of his bad position at once” - to kill and rob the old Rostov woman , a nasty "louse" that seizes someone else's eyelid. With her money, Raskolnikov dreams of doing thousands of good deeds, and first of all, saving his beloved mother and sister from shame and poverty.

The second marriage of the writer was truly happy.

From 1867 to 1871, the writer, together with his wife, escaped from loans, spent abroad, only occasionally coming to Russia.

They alternately lived in Dresden, Berlin, Basel, Geneva, and Florence. And only at the end of 1871, after the writer managed to pay off his debts (some of which he had done by playing often in a casino, some was left from his brother), he was able to return to St. Petersburg.

During this journey, Dostoevsky finishes writing the novel The Idiot, which was published in the journal Russky Vestnik in 1868.

Here is what Dostoevsky wrote about the intentions of this work: “The main idea of ​​the novel is to depict positively beautiful person. There is nothing more difficult than this in the world, and especially now. All writers, not only ours, but even all European ones, who just did not undertake to portray the positively beautiful, always gave in. Because this task is immeasurable.

In 1871, Dostoevsky wrote the novel "Demons".

In 1873, Prince Meshchersky, the owner of the conservative magazine Grazhdanin, offered Dostoevsky to become the editor of his magazine. Fyodor Mikhailovich. missing you public life gladly accepts his offer.

On the pages of this magazine is printed "The Diary of a Writer". Stories, for example, "The Meek One", "The Boy at Christ on the Christmas Tree." In April 1874 Dostoevsky left the magazine.

Since 1872, the Dostoevsky family spends every summer (and even the winter of 1874-75) in a small town Staraya Russa that in the Novgorod province.

Here Dostoevsky and his family rested from the hectic Petersburg life, and later he bought a house here. One metropolitan acquaintance of Dostoevsky was extremely surprised that famous writer wanders around the city and looks for his cow that did not return home.

It was here that many chapters of The Brothers Karamazov and the novel The Teenager were written.

N.A. Nekrasov suggested publishing "The Teenager" in "Notes of the Fatherland", to which Dostoevsky agreed with pleasure, especially since this was the resumption of relations between the two writers 30 years later.

December 27, 1877 N.A. Nekrasov died. And Dostoevsky said with deep regret that they spent their whole lives apart. Dostoevsky wrote a lot about the great poet in his diary.

In the 1870s, Dostoevsky is at the peak of his talent. He is elected a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences in the Department of the Russian Language and Literature

In 1877, the Dostoevsky family moved to a house on the corner of Kuznechny Lane and Yamskaya Street (which now bears the name of the great writer) - Kuznechny Lane, 5. The Brothers Karamazov, a novel that is the result of Dostoevsky's creative path, was written here.

L. Grossman noted that in most of Dostoevsky’s works, “the path human soul descending to underworld sinful wanderings for rebirth to a new life, enlightened to the end by the suffering experienced ”(Creativity of Dostoevsky. - Odessa, 1921. - P. 108). This gave the right to speak in connection with Dostoevsky about the mystery novel, building in a certain sense in the image of the ancient medieval religious drama. At the same time, the writer studied “from all novels: tabloid and psychological, picaresque and sentimental, adventurous and philosophical, epistolary and memoirs” (L.P. Grossman, Dostoevsky’s poetics).

As early as the end of 1879, doctors examining Dostoevsky noted that he had a progressive lung disease. He was advised to avoid physical activity and fear emotional disturbances.

On January 26, 1881, Dostoevsky, who often worked at night, accidentally dropped his pens on the floor. Trying to get it, he moved a heavy bookcase with books. the physical exertion caused the throat to bleed. This led to a sharp exacerbation of the disease. The bleeding then stopped, then resumed again. On the morning of January 28, Dostoevsky told his wife: "... I know, I must die today!" At 8:38 pm on the same day, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky died. Thousands of people came to say goodbye to the great writer.

MAIN MILESTONES. The novel "Crime and Punishment" even purely chronologically occupies a central place in Dostoevsky's work, being one of his peaks, but far from the only one.

Exceptional success and fame brought him even the very first of the written works - the novel “Poor People”, which appeared in print in 1845, when the author had just graduated from the Main Engineering School and almost immediately broke with military career decided to devote himself entirely to literature. Following Gogol, Dostoevsky gave realistic sketches of life in St. Petersburg in Poor People and continued the gallery of “little people” that arose in Russian literature of the 1930s and 1940s. (“ Stationmaster" and " Bronze Horseman” Pushkin, “The Overcoat” and “Notes of a Madman” Gogol). But Dostoevsky managed to put new content into this image. Makar Devushkin in Dostoevsky, in contrast to Akaky Akakievich and Samson Vyrin, is endowed with a bright pronounced individuality and deep introspection. Thanks to "Poor People" Dostoevsky immediately entered the circle of writers of the "natural school" and became close to Belinsky, the universally recognized head of the movement.

However, Dostoevsky's next story, The Double (1846), despite its original and psychologically sophisticated depiction of a split in consciousness, Belinsky did not like it for its protractedness and obvious imitation of Gogol. Even colder was the critic's acceptance of the third, romantic story, The Mistress (1847), which, together with Dostoevsky's quarrel with Nekrasov and Turgenev, caused Dostoevsky's break with everything. literary circle, united just at that time around the Sovremennik magazine.

Strongly hurt by harsh reviews, Dostoevsky nevertheless continued to actively literary activity and created a number of short stories and novellas, of which the most striking are "White Nights" (1848) and "Netochka Nezvanova" (1849).

At the same time, Dostoevsky entered the revolutionary circle of Butashevich-Petrashevsky and became interested in the socialist theories of Fourier. After the unexpected arrest of all Petrashevites, Dostoevsky, among others, was sentenced, among others, first to "mortal porridge by shooting", and then, under the "highest amnesty" of Nicholas I, to four years of hard labor, followed by surrender to the soldiers.

Dostoevsky stayed in hard labor from 1850 to 1854, after which he was enlisted as a private in an infantry regiment stationed in the city of Semipalatinsk. In 1857 he was promoted to officer and the hereditary nobility was returned along with the right to publish. Starting to write again, Dostoevsky works at first in a purely comic way, in order to avoid any censorship criticism. This is how two comic “provincial” stories appeared - “Uncle's Dream” and “The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants” (1859), written in the tradition of Dickens.

During Dostoevsky's stay in Siberia, his beliefs changed radically. Not a trace remains of the former socialist ideas. While following the stage, Dostoevsky met in Tobolsk with the wives of the Decembrists, who presented him with the New Testament - the only book allowed in hard labor, and over the next terrible five years he thoughtfully read it, and since then the ideal of Christ has become a lifetime for him moral guide. In addition, the experience of dealing with convicts not only did not embitter Dostoevsky against people from the people, but, on the contrary, convinced him of the need for the entire noble intelligentsia “to return to the folk root, to the recognition of the Russian soul, to the recognition of the spirit of the people.”

In 1859, Dostoevsky received permission to return to St. Petersburg, and immediately upon arrival he developed a vigorous social and literary activity. Together with his brother M.M. Dostoevsky, he begins to publish the magazines "Time" (1861-1863) and "Epoch" (1864-1865), where he preaches his new convictions of "pochvennichestvo" - a theory very close to Slavophilism, which consisted in the fact that " Russian society must unite with the people's soil and take in the people's element", in the words of Dostoevsky himself. The educated classes of society were conceived as carriers of the most valuable Western culture, but at the same time cut off from the “soil” - national roots and folk faith, which deprived them of the correct moral guidelines. Only if the European enlightenment of the nobility was combined with the popular religious worldview would it become possible, in the opinion of the Pochvenniks, to transform Russian society on a Christian, fraternal basis, to strengthen the future of Russia and the implementation of its national idea.

In 1861, Dostoevsky wrote the novel Humiliated and Insulted for the Vremya magazine, then his famous Notes from dead house” (1860-1861), where Dostoevsky artistically comprehended everything he saw and experienced in hard labor. This book was a new word in Russian literature of that time and returned Dostoevsky to his former literary reputation.

In 1864, Dostoevsky's wife dies of consumption, and two months later his brother M.M. Dostoevsky, with whom the writer had a special closeness. Dostoevsky is forced to stop publishing Epoch. The tragic experiences of this year were reflected in the story "Notes from the Underground" - the confession of an "underground paradoxicalist", unexpected and unusual in its gloomy, evil and mocking tone. In this work, Dostoevsky finally finds his style and his hero, whose character will then become psychological basis for the heroes of all his later novels.

In 1866, Dostoevsky simultaneously worked on two novels: The Gambler and Crime and Punishment, of which the latter, according to Dostoevsky himself, was “extremely successful” and immediately put him in the forefront of Russian novelists along with Tolstoy, Goncharov and Turgenev. . In 1867, Dostoevsky married a second time to A.G. Snitkina and leaves with her abroad, where he soon writes the novel "Idiot" (1868-1869), the main idea of ​​which is the image of a "positively beautiful person" in the conditions of modern Russian reality. This is how the image of Prince Myshkin (“Prince of Christ”) is created - the bearer of the ideals of humility and forgiveness. But the outcome of the novel turns out to be tragic: the hero dies in the sea of ​​unbridled passions, evil and crimes that overwhelm him, reigning in the world around him. In 1871, “Demons "- an anti-nihilistic novel-pamphlet, the plot of which was based on the sensational murder of student Ivanov, committed by a group of anarchist revolutionaries led by S. G. Nechaev. In 1875, the novel "Teenager" - "a novel of education ”, a kind of “Fathers and Sons” by Dostoevsky.

Since 1875, Dostoevsky began to single-handedly publish the original periodical - The Diary of a Writer, which consisted of feuilletons, journalistic articles, essays, memoirs and works of art. The “Diary of a Writer” became for him a kind of tribune, from which he spoke on all topical issues of European and Russian socio-political and cultural life. In The Writer's Diary, Dostoevsky continued to develop the ideas of pochvenism, however, over time, his views became more and more “right”, drawing closer, on the one hand, to Slavophilism, and on the other, to official ideology. This publication had a huge public resonance and strengthened the fame of Dostoevsky both as a writer and as a public figure. External evidence of this was Dostoevsky's friendship with K.P. Pobedonostsev, the future chief prosecutor of the Holy Synod.

The last major work of Dostoevsky, completing his great novelistic "Pentateuch", was The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880), where all the most important ideas of the writer's mature work received the final and brilliant artistic embodiment. Especially widespread was the “Poem about the Grand Inquisitor”, which often exists separately from the novel and gave rise, thanks to its inexhaustibly deep content, to many philosophical and literary interpretations (see the collection “On the Grand Inquisitor”, compiled by Yu. Seliverstov. M., 1991 ).

The last, already dying triumph of Dostoevsky was his speech about Pushkin at the Pushkin festivities in Moscow in 1880, met by all listeners with extraordinary enthusiasm. It can be perceived as a testament of Dostoevsky, last confession his cherished thought about the “all-humanity, all-reconciliation” of the Russian soul and about the great historical mission of Russia - the unification in Christ of all the peoples of Europe.

In October 1821, a second child was born in the family of the nobleman Mikhail Dostoevsky, who worked in a hospital for the poor. The boy was named Fedor. So the future was born great writer, author immortal works"The Idiot", "The Brothers Karamazov", "Crime and Punishment".

They say that the father of Fyodor Dostoevsky was very hot-tempered, which to some extent was transmitted to the future writer. The emotional nature was skillfully "extinguished" by the children's nanny, Alena Frolovna. Otherwise, the children were forced to grow up in an atmosphere of total fear and obedience, which, however, also had some influence on the future of the writer.

Studying in St. Petersburg and the beginning of a creative path

1837 turned out to be a difficult year for the Dostoevsky family. Mom passes away. The father, who has seven children left to take care of, decides to send his eldest sons to a boarding school in St. Petersburg. So Fedor, along with his older brother, ends up in northern capital. Here he goes to study at a military engineering school. A year before his graduation, he begins to translate. And in 1843 he published his own translation of Balzac's work "Eugene Grande".

Own creative way The writer begins with the story "Poor People". The described tragedy of the little man found worthy praise from the critic Belinsky and the poet Nekrasov, already popular at that time. Dostoevsky enters the circle of writers, meets Turgenev.

In the next three years, Fyodor Dostoevsky published the works "Double", "Mistress", "White Nights", "Netochka Nezvanova". In all of them, he made an attempt to penetrate the human soul, describing in detail the subtleties of the character of the characters. But these works were received by critics very cool. Innovation was not accepted by Nekrasov and Turgenev, revered by Dostoevsky. This forced the writer to move away from friends.

in exile

In 1849, the writer was sentenced to death. This was connected with the "Petrashevsky case", for which a sufficient evidence base was collected. The writer was preparing for the worst, but just before the execution, his sentence was changed. AT last moment the condemned are read the decree, according to which they must go to hard labor. All the time that Dostoevsky spent in anticipation of execution, all his emotions and experiences, he tried to display in the image of the hero of the novel "The Idiot" Prince Myshkin.

The writer spent four years in hard labor. Then he was pardoned good behavior and sent to serve in the military battalion of Semipalatinsk. Immediately he found his destiny: in 1857 he married the widow of an official Isaev. It should be noted that in the same period, Fyodor Dostoevsky turned to religion, deeply idealizing the image of Christ.

In 1859, the writer moved to Tver, and then to St. Petersburg. Ten years of wandering in hard labor and military service made him very sensitive to human suffering. The writer had a real revolution of outlook.

European period

The beginning of the 60s was marked by turbulent events in the writer's personal life: he fell in love with Appolinaria Suslova, who fled abroad with another. Fyodor Dostoevsky followed his beloved to Europe and traveled with her to different countries for two months. At the same time, he became addicted to playing roulette.

The year 1865 was marked by the writing of Crime and Punishment. After its publication, fame came to the writer. At the same time in his life appears new love. She became a young stenographer Anna Snitkina, who became his faithful friend until her death. With her, he fled from Russia, hiding from large debts. Already in Europe he wrote the novel The Idiot.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky is probably the most famous writer Russia, his works are rightfully considered the best examples of world literature. The first novel of the writer "Poor people" (1846) gave rise to classify him in the so-called Gogol direction of Russian literature - the natural school. But in subsequent creations, such as "Double" (1846), "White Nights" (1848), "Netochka Nezvanova" (1849), the degree of Dostoevsky's realism, the in-depth psychologism of the writer-thinker, the exclusivity of situations and characters became obvious. worldviews were influenced by the democratic, socialist ideas of V. G. Belinsky, the views of the French utopian socialists.The young writer attended the Petrashevsky society, actively participated in the ideological activities of the revolutionary circles of S.F. Durov and N.A. Speshnev. from the House of the Dead "(1861-62) deeply reflected the suffering ordinary people, A.I. Herzen compared it with " Doomsday» Michelangelo, and I.S. Turgenev with Dante’s “Hell”.

Dostoevsky was more than an active participant in the social life of the country, put forward social and political theories, promoted the theory of soil movement, wrote a lot about possible ways of social transformation, attitudes towards the people, problems of ethics, and the essence and role of art. The author created his most outstanding works: "Crime and Punishment", "Idiot", "Demons", "Teenager", "The Brothers Karamazov" in the 60-70s. In these works, moral, philosophical and social views great writer and thinker. His work deeply reflects the contradictions of gray reality and public views in an era of breaking social relations. The basis of the realistic work of the greatest Russian writer is human suffering, the tragedy of a humiliated, infringed person. He ingeniously displayed the dual feeling of a person in a situation where, on the one hand, feeling his insignificance, on the other, he longs for protest. He defended the right of individual freedom, but believed that unlimited willfulness gives rise to anti-humanistic actions, he considered crime as a typical manifestation of the so-called law of individualistic self-affirmation. In his works, he contrasted heroes with an analytical all-destroying mind, heroes with subtle spiritual intuition. The genius combined the intellectual depth of a thinker, the strength of an unsurpassed psychologist, and the passion of a publicist. He founded an ideological novel in Russian literature, the plot of which develops mainly around the struggle of ideas, the clash of worldviews, the bearers of which are the heroes of works of art.