Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, My Favourite Author

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Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky is my favourite author. I like him because to me, no 19th-century author had greater psychological insight or philosophical depth or as systematically plumbed the mysteries of the human soul in the field of human Psychic and spiritualistic ideology of real life phenomena.

A short Account of the Author

The Russian novelist Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, b. Nov. 11 (NS), 1821, d. Feb. 9 (NS), 1881, stands at the very summit of Russian literature and is considered by many to have brought the Western novel to the peak of its possibilities. Sigmund Freud, for one, considered the treatment of patricide in The BROTHERS KARAMAZOV the equal of that of Shakespeare in Hamlet

The son of a Moscow military doctor who was murdered by his serfs, Dostoyevsky grew up in materially comfortable but psychologically damaging circumstances. After finishing a military engineering education in 1843, he soon turned to literature.



• BROTHERS KAMRAMAZOV

The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80; Eng. trans., 1927) is DOSTOYEVSKY’s last work and greatest novel. In it, Dostoyevsky presents four Karamazov Brothers—the passionate Dimitri, the intellectual Ivan, the mystical Alyson, and the misanthropic Smerdayakov.e dramatizes their fate, their relationship with their father, and the guilt they suffer because of his murder. The novel concerns with everything that Dostoyevsky struggled with during lifetime: faith and doubt, love of authority and hatred of it, sensuality abstinence, hatred of the human race and the love of it.

Crime and Punishment

Crime and Punishment (1866), is a psychological masterpiece by the Russian novelist Fyodor DOSTOYEVSKY, mixes such contemporary 19th-century themes as the anonymous, alienating power of society with the universal problems of crime, guilt, and redemption. Raskolnikov, an impoverished student in Saint Petersburg, kills and robs a grasping old woman pawnbroker, but his ostensible motives serve merely to introduce the author's exploration of the nature of justice and truth. Raskolnikov ultimately decides to accept punishment through his love for the young prostitute Sonya, whose life is one of suffering and remorse.

Notes from the underground

The Underground (1864), a powerful work that is considered the philosophical testament of existentialism as well as the prologue to DOSTOYEVSKY’s great tragic novels. The Underground Man is a cynical denizen of St. Petersburg, alienated from his surroundings and his fellow man, who nevertheless poses a powerful challenge to the impersonal forces of rationalism, progress, and social engineering. He is an intransigent champion of free will.

The Idiot

The Idiot (1869; Eng.trans.,1913) portrays a morally blameless man, Prince ,whose Mishkin, whose innocent and simple nature and epileptic seizures cause him to be taken from a certain. His Christ like qualities, far from influencing those about him, is to be utterly incongruous in a sinful world. Nastasya Filipovna, who has been cruelly treated by a former lover, is attracted both to Mishkin and the evil Rogozin, and is unable to commit herself to either. When Rogozhjn kills her, Miskin's allows him to be an unwitting accomplice in the murder.

The Possessed

DOSTOYEVSKY’s next novel, Besy (1872; The Possessed), earned him the permanent hatred of the radicals. Often regarded as the most brilliant political novel ever written, it interweaves two plots. One concerns Nikolay Stavrogin, a man with a void at the centre of his being. In his younger years Stavrogin, in a futile quest for meaning, had embraced and cast off a string of ideologies, each of which has been adopted by different intellectuals mesmerized by Stavrogin's personality. Shatov has become a Slavophile who, like Dostoyevsky himself, believes in the "God-bearing" Russian people. Existentialist critics (especially Albert Camus) became fascinated with Kirillov, who adopts a series of contradictory philosophical justifications for suicide. Most famously, Kirillov argues that only an utterly gratuitous act of self-destruction can prove that a person is free because such an act cannot be explained by any kind of self-interest and therefore violates all psychological laws. By killing himself without reason, Kirillov hopes to become the "man-god" and so provide an example for human freedom in a world that has denied Christ (the God-man).

I Like His Books

Since his death Dostoyevsky's fame has continued to grow. None speaks more immediately to the mood and tone of the present century. In fact, it might be said that Western civilization in the second half of the 20th century has become "Dostoyevskian."