Читать книгу Brothers Karamazov, The The - Федор Достоевский - Страница 3

About Fyodor Dostoyevsky:

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (November 11, 1821—February 9, 1881) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist and philosopher. Dostoevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of nineteenth-century Russia, and engage with a variety of philosophical and religious themes.

He began writing in his twenties, and his first novel, Poor Folk, was published in 1846 when he was 25. His most acclaimed works include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Dostoevsky's oeuvre consists of eleven novels, three novellas, seventeen short stories and numerous other works. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest psychological writers in world literature. His 1864 novella Notes from Underground is considered one of the first works of existentialist literature.

Born in Moscow in 1821, Dostoevsky was introduced to literature at an early age through fairy tales and legends, and through books by Russian and foreign authors. His mother died in 1837 when he was 15, and around the same time he left school to enter the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute. After graduating, he worked as an engineer and briefly enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, translating books to earn extra money. In the mid-1840s he wrote his first novel, Poor Folk, which gained him entry into St. Petersburg's literary circles. Arrested in 1849 for belonging to a literary group that discussed banned books critical of tsarist Russia, he was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted at the last moment. He spent four years in a Siberian prison camp, followed by six years of compulsory military service in exile.

In the following years, Dostoevsky worked as a journalist, publishing and editing several magazines of his own and later A Writer's Diary, a collection of his writings. He began to travel around western Europe and developed a gambling addiction, which led to financial hardship. For a time, he had to beg for money, but he eventually became one of the most widely read and highly regarded Russian writers. His books have been translated into more than 170 languages. Dostoevsky was influenced by a wide variety of philosophers and authors, including Kierkegaard, Pushkin, Gogol, Augustine, Shakespeare, Dickens, Balzac, Lermontov, Hugo, Poe, Plato, Cervantes, Herzen, Kant, Belinsky, Hegel, Schiller, Solovyov, Bakunin, Sand, Hoffmann, and Mickiewicz. His writings were widely read both within and beyond his native Russia and influenced an equally great number of later writers, including Russians such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Anton Chekhov, and philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Source: Wikipedia