Dostoevsky: the great gambler, the pathological genius.
At twenty-four, on the strength of a single novella, Poor Folk, he suddenly became the talk of St Petersburg and won the admiration of the famous Russian critic Belinsky. At twenty-eight, because of his involvement in a revolutionary circle, he stood in front of a firing squad and was spared only at the last moment; his sentence was commuted to ten years of hard labor and exile in Siberia.Gorky once said he was not a good man.
Turgenev went even further, calling him a malicious Christian and a pathological genius.He was proud to the point of arrogance, yet came from an ordinary background: his father, a doctor and a notorious drunk, was rumored to have died at the hands of serfs who could no longer bear his abuse. He was obsessed with gambling and lived in permanent debt; even on his honeymoon, he had to pawn his new wife’s coat just to pay off his losses so they could afford to return to Russia. He cared fiercely about his dignity and public image, yet he had no choice but to live his whole life with epilepsy, a disease that had first struck him when he was nine.
Youth and Rise to FameFyodor Dostoevsky was born in 1821, in Moscow.At that moment, the wider world looked very different: Napoleon’s heart had only recently been removed on the island of Saint Helena, and the old monarchs of Europe were rejoicing that the barbaric sword of Damocles hanging over their crowns was finally gone. In the United States, the “Missouri crisis” had temporarily subsided; the price of holding together a deeply divided system was to compromise and allow the entire South to go on treating Black people as slaves. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the Qing empire in East Asia was already in decline, and the clouds of a war sparked by opium—bringing with them a fresh kind of national humiliation—were quietly spreading along the horizon of that ancient state.Fyodor’s father was a doctor, but even better known in the neighborhood as a drunk. By purchasing a small estate he had only just managed to enter the lower ranks of the nobility, yet the family finances were still strained, and they had to rely on his medical practice to keep going. Fyodor’s mother, eleven years younger than her husband, came from a modest merchant family. She was sweet-looking, gentle by nature, and devoutly Christian—the kind of wife most Russian men of that era dreamed of.
Dostoevsky had seven brothers and sisters. As the second son, he bore his father’s expectations from an early age. He was first sent to the Chermak boarding school in Moscow, where he received a basic classical education and studied several languages—Russian, of course, but also Latin, French and others. Then, at sixteen, after his mother died young of tuberculosis, he and his older brother were sent to the Military Engineering Academy in St Petersburg to study engineering and architectural drawing.During his time at the Academy, his quick mind kept his grades consistently excellent, and his teachers praised him often. He himself, though, was utterly unimpressed. The courses seemed unbearably dull to him, and he secretly hated the rigid, suffocating discipline of military life. In a letter to his brother, he wrote in disgust: “Man is not a machine made to draw straight lines.” Almost all his free time was spent in a kind of obsessive reading; night after night he devoured the works of Pushkin, Hugo, Hoffmann, Kant, Hegel and other writers and philosophers.
Then, in 1839, fate struck without warning. After one drunken outburst too many, his father was allegedly seized by local serfs who took their revenge by holding him down in vodka until he drowned. The small inheritance he left behind was not only insufficient to provide for the children; a large part of it had to be used to pay off outstanding debts.The sudden shock brought on another attack in Dostoevsky, who already had a history of epilepsy. One afternoon he collapsed in front of his horrified classmates—his limbs jerking, foam at his mouth, slipping into unconsciousness. It was only his second seizure since the age of nine, but it was the first time in his life that the illness had stripped him so brutally of his basic human dignity in full public view.He had just turned eighteen. In today’s terms, that seizure—which tore open his pride and left him permanently afraid of the next attack—was his cruel, indelible “coming-of-age ceremony,” one that went on tormenting him for the rest of his life.
After countless hardships and years of swallowing his pride—forcing himself through studies he didn’t love and enduring the mockery of others—Dostoevsky finally graduated in 1843, the year he turned twenty-two, with the rank of sub-lieutenant granted by his academy. Through the help of acquaintances, he found a position in the drafting department of the Engineering Corps and drew a salary many would have envied.And yet, that calm, orderly life was almost unbearable to him. A man who lived and breathed literature, he could not resign himself to being “taken care of” by the comfortable security that society deemed ideal. After barely a year, he quit his post in defiance of his brother’s objections, determined to become a writer. He told his brother, stubborn and unyielding:“I’d rather starve to death than give up literature.”
At the time, almost no one could have guessed that this seemingly reckless, all-or-nothing decision was lighting one of the brightest stars in the history of literature. And in the not-too-distant future, that star would blaze across the sky, illuminating not only Russia’s letters, but the entire world’s literary tradition.Have you ever had a moment when you felt utterly small?“I have feelings too—feelings just like everyone else.” That line comes from Dostoevsky’s first important work, Poor Folk. The protagonist, Makar, loves his neighbor and correspondent, Varvara, with a depth that borders on self-effacement. In the eyes of the world, his love is weightless, hardly worth mentioning. Yet in his threadbare clothes, he is still willing to hand over almost every kopek he earns to help her with her household expenses. He shrugs off other people’s laughter and contempt; all he wants is to pour out everything he has, to offer her even a sliver of happiness amid crushing poverty.But how does Varvara see all this? To her, his sacrifices are kindness, friendship, compassion—at most the care of a father or an older brother. She can name it many things, but she never allows herself to name it love. So is it really that she fails to see his love?
At just twenty-four, Dostoevsky, with a pen full of pity and cruelty in equal measure, tells us that the cruelest thing for Makar is not that Varvara does not recognize his love, but that in his love she can see no hope of a new life. That is why, in the end, she feels she has no choice but to accept the proposal of the cold, hard landowner, Bykov.When Poor Folk was published, it caused an immediate stir in the Russian literary world. The well-known poet Nekrasov, unable to contain his excitement, cried out: “A new Gogol has been born!” The usually restrained critic Belinsky praised it as “a new experiment in the social novel.” He believed that, while inheriting Gogol’s spiritual tradition, Dostoevsky had gone even further, achieving a deeper breakthrough in the depiction of human emotion.By 1846, Dostoevsky had already become a shining new star of the “natural school” within Russian critical realism. He moved energetically from one cultural salon to another, debating intellectual currents with the leading literary figures of his day. More remarkably, while constantly absorbing new influences, he still managed to preserve his own original way of thinking and a consistent artistic vision.
He continued to dig deeper into his characters’ psychology and inner consciousness, producing one masterpiece after another, including The Double and White Nights. Yet as he basked in applause and honor, he also seemed to lose himself in an ocean of pride and self-satisfaction. In the struggle between faith and nihilism he began to drift out of control, steering ever closer to a dangerous, inevitably sinking island. Convinced he knew exactly what he was doing, he was in fact handing his soul over to the devil with his own two hands—without the slightest awareness that, somewhere out of sight, a terrifying wave was already gathering, ready to crash down and overturn his entire life.
In Russia in 1847, currents of thought from every direction were converging, and a great historical wave was gathering, ready to smash into the old order. It was also a time when the tsar, the aging ruler of a tottering empire, was thrashing about in his death throes—stretching the tired limbs of the state as far as they would go in order to crush any spark that might ignite into revolution.The Petrashevsky Circle was one of countless small, half-clandestine groups with vaguely revolutionary leanings, and in itself, it was nothing special at all. If the twenty-six-year-old Dostoevsky had not joined it, the group would probably have disappeared into the dust of history, just like so many other gatherings of bright, restless young people from that era.At the beginning, the Petrashevsky meetings were simply a space for exchanging ideas, and most of the discussion revolved around literature, philosophy, and social questions in general. But as thoughts clashed more fiercely and the more radical members deliberately fanned the flames, their attention shifted. They began openly criticizing serfdom, the courts, censorship, and the autocratic monarchy itself. Soon they were secretly printing and distributing banned works, and at one point even raising money to buy weapons—an ominous sign that some members were seriously considering an armed uprising.So in April 1849, the tsar’s secret police swooped down on them, arresting more than sixty members in a single operation. After months of investigation and hearings, twenty-one men were convicted. Fifteen of them, Dostoevsky among them, were sentenced to death.
In his later novel The Idiot, Dostoevsky has Prince Myshkin say:“The most frightening thing is not death itself, but those final moments when you know death is coming and nothing can change it. When you are tied to the execution post and you know for certain that you have only one minute left to live—that minute becomes absolutely inescapable.”Very few writers, if any, have gone to the edge of that particular abyss and then come back. Even Dostoevsky, tied to the stake, waiting for the rifles to fire, could hardly have imagined that, at the very last second—when the muzzles were about to spit flame and swallow his life and soul—a messenger on horseback would arrive with the tsar’s pardon. His death sentence was commuted to penal servitude and exile in Siberia.What he could not yet imagine was this: from the moment he escaped death and began preparing to leave, his future would mean ten long years of hard labor, lived out in the endless snow and wind of Siberia.How unbearable was such a life? In Notes from the House of the Dead, his account of his prison years, Dostoevsky describes it like this:“In the life of hard labor there is one torment more painful than all the rest: enforced company. For the entire term of your sentence, you are not alone for even a single minute.”
For a writer—and especially for a writer of Dostoevsky’s stature—this was nothing less than a devastating punishment. He could no longer write freely. Like every other prisoner, he had to shoulder the same back-breaking physical labor every day. All the abstract convictions he had once held dear were no defense against the Siberian cold that seemed to have no end; the theories he had believed in could no longer give him the strength to open his eyes each morning and face another day of misery in the camp.Everything was grinding him down, tormenting him, leaving him with nowhere to turn. At times he felt it would be better to die. At night he wept helplessly, and in his weakness he thought of his mother—of those childhood days when he prayed with her every evening. In those simple, almost banal memories of love he had long tried to leave behind, he slowly found a new source of strength.That strength allowed him to start talking with the men around him—the poorest, most downtrodden people in the empire—to watch them, to try to understand them, to live among them as one of them. And when, with tears in his eyes, he traced on his own chest a slow, unusually solemn sign of the cross, he knew he had stumbled upon a new kind of redemption.
For the first time since stepping down alive from the execution scaffold, he had found a new life that truly belonged to him.
Redemption and FallBy 1854, Dostoevsky was thirty-three. One day, a guard in the prison camp informed him that his four-year term of hard labor was finally over. Next, he was to be transferred into a frontier regiment and serve as a soldier.The good news was that he no longer had to break his body at forced labor; he would be allowed to read, to write, and enjoy a small measure of personal freedom and private life. The bad news was that his posting was still in the frozen reaches of Siberia, and the conditions in a regular infantry barracks were hardly better than those in the penal camp.
“As long as I have time to take up my pen again, I can be reborn. Every day I am afraid that I’ll be forgotten, pushed out to the margins of literature,” he wrote more than once in letters to friends during his military service. “But here, for the first time, I’ve really come to know the Russian people. They have a toughness, a morality, a strength and a faith that intellectuals simply don’t possess.”His inborn humanism tormented him and comforted him at the same time. He was afraid of losing himself forever in the endless silver emptiness of Siberia, never writing again. Yet he also longed, sincerely, to become like the people around him—to be remade from head to toe into one of those ordinary men whose endurance and spirit seemed to embody the soul of the nation.Three years later, Dostoevsky—no longer a writer, no longer the man who went from salon to salon talking about ideas—completed one of the great milestones of his private life. He married Maria, a woman he had met two years before.Maria had once been a schoolteacher’s wife. She was educated, she loved books, but her life had been harsh. Her husband was a chronic drunk; his drinking cost him his job and left the family without income, and after one heavy binge he fell into a stupor and died.
When Dostoevsky heard her story, he was immediately drawn to the strange blend of romantic charm and quiet sorrow she carried with her. His courtship, however, did not go smoothly. Harsh realities stood between them. His status as an ex-convict, his income that barely covered basic needs, and the epilepsy that could strike again at any time—all of it formed a chasm that seemed impossible to cross.
Maria once confided to a friend: “I love him, but I will not marry him. You know I want a peaceful life.”And yet, perhaps because human feelings are more tangled than reason, perhaps because she was moved by Dostoevsky’s persistent devotion, her clear-headed resolve could not hold out forever against her own heart. In the quiet duel for her affection between Dostoevsky and another teacher who also adored her, it was Dostoevsky who finally won. He proposed, she accepted, and he got what he had so stubbornly hoped for.Two years later, now promoted to sub-lieutenant in the frontier forces, he completed his term of service. With the help and lobbying of old friends, he was allowed to leave the army and return to St Petersburg, bringing Maria with him.Marriage, discharge from the army, a return to Petersburg.
With all these “happy ending” labels attached to Dostoevsky by 1860, it’s tempting to think he was finally ready to set out on a smooth, steady road to becoming a “great man of letters”: to live, like Tolstoy, on his own estate; to be, like Turgenev, free from money worries; to shut himself away in a quiet study and write with all his strength, then collect generous fees, enjoy universal respect, and hold in his hands the wealth and fame his genius deserved—never again having to fear the chaos of life outside his art.
Let’s not forget that Dostoevsky’s very nature was always split between two poles: heaven and hell, grace and ruin. If fate hadn’t torn at him again and again with its claws, how could he have left the world this strange, enduring legend of a “degenerate gambler” who was at the same time a “great genius”?Finishing ten years of exile, returning to St Petersburg with his new wife, taking up his pen once more—on the surface, all of this sounds like cause for unrestrained joy. But behind it lay folds of hardship no outsider could see, and a bitterness that could hardly be put into words.To begin with, his wife Maria simply never adapted to life in the city. Almost every day she complained to him in a nervous, jittery way, even mocking him at times:
“You only care about your writing. You don’t care about this family, you don’t even care about your own body.”
Of course Dostoevsky knew exactly what she meant by “your body.” It meant their marriage might already be doomed. Not long after the wedding he realized that what Maria really needed from him was material security and the intellectual support his education could provide. “She clings to me, but she doesn’t truly love me,” he wrote bluntly in a letter to a friend. “She no longer respects me. And I never really felt passion for her either—only pity and a sense of duty.”And that “body,” that shadow hanging over him like a nightmare, was his weakest point—the thing he never had the courage to confront honestly with anyone. Everyone more or less understood: his epilepsy, like Maria’s weariness with him, was growing steadily worse. That, in truth, was the real reason the authorities had agreed to release him from Siberia.But Dostoevsky no longer had the luxury of worrying about all that. It wasn’t just that he could no longer resist the pull of literature; there were also the large debts he had taken on in order to pull strings and secure his return. Those needed to be repaid. Ignoring his wife’s objections, he all but moved into his study, sleeping there and writing day and night. He kept reminding himself that he was already thirty-nine, and had to make up for the ten lost years.
Again and again he summoned to mind the faces of the men who had shared the prison camp with him—faces etched with every kind of earthly misery. “Those are the real faces,” he told himself, as he mentally replayed each of their smallest gestures, each coarse and “uneducated” remark that a refined intellectual might have dismissed as vulgar. He chewed over their words and movements endlessly. And at last, out of that mixture of suffering and fierce devotion, two great works were born.In 1861, Dostoevsky published Humiliated and Insulted, the book that announced his full return to the Russian literary scene—and with it, he managed to clear all his debts. Soon afterward, he brought out the documentary novel Notes from the House of the Dead, which he had begun drafting in the final years of his military service and which drew directly on his years in Siberian exile.In Humiliated and Insulted, he turned his gaze on Russia in the immediate aftermath of the reforms that began dismantling serfdom. He focused on the gaping social and economic divide between nobles and peasants in that in-between moment when old privileges were collapsing but no new order had yet been built.The novel tells the story of the hypocritical and greedy prince Valkovsky and his son, and how they treat Natasha—the beautiful daughter of a poor man—as a commodity and a plaything. They toy with her feelings, trample on her soul, and step by step drive her toward a threefold ruin: the loss of love, of family, and of dignity.
With a kind of solid, deeply rooted “Russian spirit” that was almost unique in the literature of his time, Dostoevsky used this story to mount a powerful critique of how both human rights and human nature were being distorted in that society.
If Humiliated and Insulted can still be seen as “just” a very good novel, then Notes from the House of the Dead—with its stark portrait of life in a Siberian penal camp and its erasing of the line between fact and fiction—is something else entirely: a work that fully deserves the way later generations have described it, as “a landmark of non-fiction” and “an epic dissection of the human soul.”In Notes from the House of the Dead there are no big dramatic showdowns, no mystery, no revenge plot, no romance. What we get instead are broken fragments of daily life. Dostoevsky fixes his entire attention on one question: how do the prisoners actually live?Getting up in the dark before dawn. Hauling stones. Sitting in a damp barrack, chewing on rock-hard bread. At any moment you might be whipped, chained, thrown into solitary. The sheer physical reality of it, described line by line, is suffocating and terrifying.Among the convicts he portrays there are peasants who have killed in fits of violence, and habitual thieves who can’t stop stealing. But he refuses the old cardboard division into “good” and “evil.” The murderer longs for freedom; the greedy pickpocket, when a fellow prisoner falls ill, will quietly slip him a piece of bread he has secretly saved.
“Rip away the lies and look straight at what human nature is.” Tolstoy wrote in a letter to a friend: “There is not a single false note in it, not a single exaggeration. Including Pushkin, I honestly don’t know of any book in our new literature that is better than Notes from the House of the Dead.”The book is realism at its finest and, at the same time, a forerunner of modernist literature. You could say that as the most direct “sample” of his prison experience, it laid the entire foundation for Dostoevsky’s later ideas and creative work.In 1863, as the tsarist government tightened its censorship of the press, the journal Dostoevsky had founded with his brother just two years earlier was shut down. Because the magazine had been running at a loss, its closure pushed him back into debt, and the brief easing of his financial burden was swallowed once again by anxiety.Fate, however, was not finished with him. Barely a year after the journal was suppressed, his brother—the one who had been at his side through so much of his life—collapsed under the combined strain of financial pressure and overwork, and his lung disease worsened. Three months earlier, Dostoevsky’s wife Maria had died of the same illness. Now his brother followed her into the grave.
Dostoevsky was shattered by his brother’s death. As he thought back over their shared past, he finally broke down, sobbing uncontrollably until he collapsed, convulsing, and fell into unconsciousness. The losses the two brothers had once shared now fell on him alone; on top of that, he had to support his sister-in-law and nephew and take responsibility for paying off their family’s debts.He spoke with brutal honesty to his friends:“If death cannot be avoided, then Maria’s death, which ended her suffering and my obligations, was a complicated kind of release for me. But Mikhail’s death made me a true orphan. I realized that the purpose my life once had disappeared with them. As for the future—it has become something foreign, something I cannot be reconciled with.”
Perhaps it was this “irreconcilable future” he described; perhaps it was the terror brought on by his seizures, which kept returning again and again. In any case, during those years without his wife or his brother beside him, even the publication of the work he had been struggling over—Notes from Underground, hailed later as a precursor to existentialism and a scalpel cutting into the darkest corners of human nature, the book that finally vaulted him into the very top rank of Russian writers—could not dispel his confusion and disappointment with the life he was actually living.
Many readers see Notes from Underground—with its “underground man” talking in the first person and breaking into long stretches of philosophical reflection—as a kind of index to all of Dostoevsky’s later work.In the book, this underground man describes his own contradictory experiences: how, at a reunion with former classmates, he is desperate to assert himself yet somehow ends up letting them walk all over him; how, in his encounters with a young prostitute, he both longs for love and seethes with contempt. At the same time, he keeps using himself as a specimen, cutting into his own mind and motives as ruthlessly as if he were dissecting a corpse. Again and again he challenges the idea of human rationality; step by step he descends into the depths of human nature.
It’s the sort of book that made Hemingway—the archetypal “tough-guy” writer—later throw up his hands and exclaim: “If you go up against Mr. Dostoevsky, you won’t last three rounds.”And yet, for all its power to shock and awaken other people, Notes from Underground could not rescue Dostoevsky himself, who by this point was emotionally stripped bare. Squeezed between crushing debts and a life that felt empty and painful, he finally opened the Pandora’s box he had pushed into a corner and tried to forget: he went back to the roulette tables that, for the next decade and more, would keep luring him back and almost destroy every relationship he had.Walking through the noisy casino hall and sitting down at that quiet, dangerous table, he no longer had to play the part of the respected man of letters, the calm, reasonable guide to others. Here, everything came down to a single decision—red or black, this number or that—and the risk, the possibility of losing everything in an instant, thrilled him. More than that, it gave him a sense of freedom he had almost never felt in ordinary life. In the face of that intoxicating “freedom,” the original idea of using gambling to pay off his debts quickly began to look ridiculous and trivial.
In 1866, after losing one pile of gold coins after another and signing IOU after IOU, Dostoevsky was finally forced to pause work on Crime and Punishment. He borrowed more money, hired a stenographer named Anna, and in the space of three and a half weeks dictated the entire manuscript of The Gambler in order to meet urgent payments.The Gambler follows the growth of the main character Alexei’s addiction and the emotional entanglements that surround it. Working as a tutor in a retired general’s household, Alexei falls in love with the general’s foster daughter. Because he is poor, the general refuses to accept him. In despair, Alexei throws himself into gambling, determined to risk everything in one wild attempt. He does indeed manage, through sheer luck, to win an enormous sum—but in the frenzy of the roulette wheel, he loses himself.Though The Gambler is not usually counted among Dostoevsky’s very greatest works, its social critique and psychological insight are in no way weaker than in his more famous novels. Written under intense pressure, it shows him, through his choice of theme, slyly turning his wit and scrutiny back on himself. Even more importantly, it was this book that bound his fate to that of Anna, the stenographer—laying the groundwork for the second marriage that would see him through the rest of his life.
Misfortune and Grace“Human beings fall into two categories. The first are the ordinary people, who obey laws and morals, who live within the rules and form the material of society. The second are the extraordinary ones. They possess a higher kind of intelligence and courage, and they have the right to break the rules—even to kill—for the sake of a greater goal. Just as Napoleon, in building his empire, sacrificed countless lives and is still called great.”This is the inner argument of Rodya—Raskolnikov—the protagonist of Crime and Punishment, who sees himself as one of those “extraordinary” men. After he murders the old pawnbroker and flees, these thoughts torment him endlessly. On the one hand, he comforts himself by insisting that the old woman is a “louse,” a useless parasite. On the other, he cannot find a single shred of real satisfaction in his botched attempt at “killing the rich to help the poor.”No one understands him. No one knows what he has done. He cannot bring himself to confess his ideas or his crime to anyone—not his mother, not his sister, not even his closest friend. As the investigating officer slowly closes in on the truth, the tension and self-contradiction inside him drive him to the edge of mental collapse.
And then there is Sonia, the young woman who has been driven by poverty into prostitution. She faces him not with outrage but with faith and kindness.When she has quietly listened to the whole story of his crime, she does not condemn him or recoil from him. Instead, in tears, she tells him: “You must go and confess. You must accept suffering. Only then can you become a human being again.”Sonia’s gentleness in the midst of her own pain, and the way her faith refines rather than erases her humanity, makes Raskolnikov see how pitiful his proud theories really are. In the end, with Sonia’s help, he tears himself away from his inner darkness, walks into the police station, and submits to punishment rather than go on being tortured by his conscience.
Sonia, for her part, leaves prostitution behind. She chooses, without hesitation, to follow him into exile in Siberia. They become, each for the other, an embodiment of what it means to be redeemed.
This was Dostoevsky at forty-six, pouring himself completely into what would become the defining novel of his career, finished not long after the publication of The Gambler.If we set aside, for a moment, all the later critical talk—the “Übermensch” prototype that would influence Nietzsche, the towering achievement in critical realism—and look at Crime and Punishment simply as a story, focusing on the redemptive bond between Raskolnikov and Sonia, then Dostoevsky’s own marriage to his stenographer Anna starts to look like a rare form of redemption as well.As mentioned earlier, he met Anna at a time when his life was in ruins, introduced by a mutual friend who thought she might be able to help. She was twenty-five years younger than he was, and came to him as a professional stenographer. In her, he found all the qualities he longed for—maybe even didn’t dare to long for: calm, practical, steady, and deeply serious about his writing. Because of his experience with Maria, he was afraid these virtues were just his wishful thinking, or something that would vanish as quickly as they appeared.
After the two of them worked side by side at breakneck speed to finish The Gambler, he spoke with great caution—but also with barely contained emotion—to the friend who had introduced her:“Thank you. This young woman has saved me… Forgive me for putting it this way, but she didn’t just help me complete an impossible task. Through her, I’ve realized that life still holds such things as reliability and peace.”From then on, Anna became Dostoevsky’s best assistant and his ideal reader. When he read her the latest chapters of Crime and Punishment, she listened carefully and then asked, with a mixture of seriousness and tact:“Is Raskolnikov’s psychological change perhaps a bit too abrupt, too idealized?”
He took her objection seriously and revised accordingly. She admired him deeply and was willing to spend hours copying out and correcting his manuscripts until the novel was finally completed and released to great success.He was so moved that he wrote back to a friend:“Without Anna’s corrections, my manuscript would be a chaos of errors. She makes my writing clearer and stronger. I can’t do without her now.”In 1867, Dostoevsky finally stopped worrying about the gap in age, social position, or outlook between them and asked Anna to marry him. And Anna, brave in her own quiet way, did not turn away because of his unsettled debts, his recurring illness, or his fragile, wounded inner life.Two months later, they were married in a small church in St Petersburg. There were no friends or relatives present, no celebration of any kind. In the dim light of the candles, they simply looked at one another, calm but resolute, slipped cheap rings onto each other’s fingers, and embraced.
It should have been the happiest moment of Dostoevsky’s life. But just as he and Anna loosened their embrace, their eyes meeting as they turned to thank the priest, disaster— that old curse that had clung to him for so many years—struck again.Anna first felt the hand holding hers begin to tremble violently. Then came a jerk, a struggle, and suddenly his fingers went limp and slipped away. Still half-smiling, thinking he was playing some kind of harmless joke, she turned toward the man she loved and revered—only to hear a heavy thud beside her.The priests rushed over, helpless and alarmed, staring at him on the floor: his body convulsing, foam at his mouth, urine spreading across the church’s wooden boards.Yes—his notebooks show that over the course of his life he recorded 102 seizures in all. But this one, on the day of his wedding, was the blow that cut deepest.
“Please,” you can almost hear someone whisper, “tell me—what is it like, in that instant when the illness takes you down?”
Dostoevsky didn’t answer Anna’s question.He left the little hotel they’d rented for their honeymoon in Germany and walked out into the street, turning her words over in his mind. I’ll answer you, but not yet, he told himself. Then he got up, and almost as if pushed by some dark impulse, decided he was going to reclaim his lost dignity—by walking into a casino.He took in the scene and thought how much grander, how much livelier these German gambling halls were than the ones back home in Russia. It was the first time he’d gambled since meeting Anna, and it turned into the most reckless session of his entire life. In less than an hour he had lost every coin he had on him.“If they won’t let me sign an IOU, I’ll go back to the hotel and get more money!”Half out of his mind, he ran back and forth between the casino and the hotel, until he had burned through every last bit of cash they had brought with them. Then he reached for Anna’s jewelry—the rings and earrings in her box—and after that even the coat folded in her suitcase.
In 1868, flat broke, Dostoevsky managed with the help of friends to publish The Idiot. The novel takes as its center the love and eventual ruin of Prince Myshkin, a man afflicted with epilepsy and utterly out of place in the world. It tells of how this impoverished, pure-hearted prince, armed only with simple faith, stumbles into a high society ruled by money and desire, and sincerely tries to save everyone with his unblemished goodness—only to be slowly devoured by the evil that closes ranks around him almost without effort.In a sense, it is one of the works closest to Dostoevsky’s own life. Myshkin’s illness, his witnessing of a condemned man pardoned at the last moment before execution, the proud young Ippolit shouting his defiant speeches to the crowd, hoping to prove himself through death and earning only their mockery—these scenes all echo Dostoevsky’s own experiences and temperament too clearly to miss.
“Just before an epileptic fit, there is always a phase when, in the midst of sadness, oppression and a kind of mental darkness, the brain suddenly flares up more than once with a brief, blazing light. All the forces of life, under an unusual impulse, seem to be called up at once. In those instants—which last no longer than a flash of lightning—one’s sense of being alive, one’s awareness of self, can become ten times more intense. Thought and soul are illuminated by a strange radiance. Every agitation, every doubt and anxiety is, for a moment, completely stilled.But this is only the last second before the seizure truly begins, and of course that second is also the hardest to endure. And yet at the same time it is the highest, the most beautiful, a final second that offers a fullness and exactness of feeling unlike anything ever known or guessed at.”That is how Dostoevsky describes an epileptic attack in The Idiot.When he’d written it, he read the passage aloud to Anna in a calm, almost matter-of-fact voice. Then he said to her: “Do you remember that question of yours I never answered?”
This time, it was Anna who fell silent. She understood that this cruelly beautiful monologue, buried in the pages of his book, was his answer. She saw him clearly, not only in his greatness and genius, but also in his fragility and collapse.So even when she remembered the times he had knelt at her feet, swearing he would never gamble again—and then gone back to the casino anyway—she never hated him, not for a single second. She would only tell him gently, steadying him: “It’s all right. It’s going to be okay.”Under Anna’s influence and her patience, Dostoevsky slowly began to rein himself in. He handed over all of his income for her to manage, and only now and then asked her for a little spending money, enough for a brief visit to the casino when the pressure of writing and thinking became unbearable.Gradually, those visits grew fewer and fewer.
In 1871, the novel Demons—shaped directly by his youthful involvement in the Petrashevsky Circle—was published.
After returning from exile, Dostoevsky became a fierce champion of a distinctly “Russian” spiritual tradition. In Demons—a brilliant and notoriously complex novel—he was one of the first to launch a deep, unsparing attack on nihilism and political extremism. The way he does it is strikingly ahead of its time, and in many ways helped shape the later course of dystopian and modernist literature. You can feel its aftershocks in works like Kafka’s The Castle, George Orwell’s 1984, and Camus’s The Stranger.The book peels back, step by step, the process by which self-styled “nihilists,” lost in emptiness, twist their ideals into violence. With a structure almost worthy of a detective novel—tightly wound, full of clues and reversals—it naturally arrives at its core idea: if you don’t fight the devil with some kind of faith, sooner or later you become the devil yourself. In the end, it stands as one of world literature’s classic texts on “absolute inner emptiness” and “collective madness.”After countless upheavals and collisions with fate, Dostoevsky—now fifty-one—finally managed, under Anna’s steady guidance and encouragement, to pay off all his debts and break free of his gambling addiction. His later years were, for the first time, genuinely peaceful and inwardly happy.Nine years after the publication of Demons, in 1880, he brought to completion the novel that would be the summit of his life’s work, and one of the highest peaks in all of literature: The Brothers Karamazov.
This book, often called “an encyclopedia of the human soul” and “a spiritual mirror of nineteenth-century Russia,” takes a single act of parricide as its hinge. Through the fate of the Karamazov family, Dostoevsky concentrates the whole spiritual crisis of his age into one story. The conflicts among the four central figures don’t just stand for greed versus truth, desire versus morality, reason versus faith, and feeling versus guilt.More importantly, far beyond the usual limits of a “family tragedy,” the novel stares straight into the human soul and lashes it with question after question: “Does God exist?” “What truly counts as a crime?” “Where, exactly, is the line between good and evil?”
Its influence spills out of literature into philosophy, psychology, sociology, and beyond. Gorky once said, “With The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky illuminated every corner of the human soul.” Kafka remarked, “He tore open the soul of modern man, and we still live within his diagnosis.” Through language alone, the book drives its readers toward a direct confrontation with the essence of human nature.With that, Dostoevsky’s creative journey was complete. Two years after The Brothers Karamazov appeared, he died in St Petersburg of lung failure brought on by his epilepsy, at the age of sixty.
As for whether he was a scoundrel, a gambler, or a genius—by now, each of us probably carries a very clear answer in our own mind.
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