Обучение онлайн Уроки онлайн | "Cкоростные" уроки английского | Грамматика английского языка | Разговорники | Download | Личный опыт | Библиотека | Каталог ресурсов

Статьи (Аналитика) | Словари | Топики | ЧаВо | Книжные магазины | Распродажа учебников | Ссылки на тесты

Топики по английскому языку (English topics)

Литература / Книги и писатели

Версия для печати

Fedor Dostoevsky

The Russian writer Dostoevsky is regarded as one of the world's great novelists. In Russia he was surpassed only by Leo Tolstoy.

Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born on Nov. 11, 1821, in a Moscow hospital where his father was a physician. At 13 Fedor was sent to a Moscow boarding school, then to a military engineering school in St. Petersburg. Shortly after graduating he resigned his commission in order to devote his time to writing.

Dostoevsky had already published two novels and several sketches and short stories by the time he was arrested along with a group of about 20 others with whom he had been studying French socialist theories. After the 1848 revolutions in Western Europe, Russia's Czar Nicholas I decided to round up the country's revolutionaries, and in April 1849 Dostoevsky's group was imprisoned. He and several others were sentenced to be shot, but at the last minute their sentence was commuted to four years of hard labor in a prison in Omsk, Siberia. There, he said, they were "packed in like herrings in a barrel" with murderers and other criminals. He read and reread the New Testament, the only book he had, and built a mystical creed, identifying Christ with the common people of Russia. He had great sympathy for the criminals.

As a child Dostoevsky suffered from mild epilepsy, and it grew worse in prison. After four years in prison, he was sent as a private to a military station in Siberia. There in 1857 he met and married a widow named Marie Isaeva.

By 1860 he was back in St. Petersburg. The next year he began to publish a literary journal that was soon suppressed, though he had by now lost interest in socialism. In 1862 he visited Western Europe and hated the industrialism he saw there. Dostoevsky was separated from his wife but visited her in Moscow before her death in 1864. In 1867 he married his young stenographer, Anna Snitkina. He died on Feb. 9, 1881, in St. Petersburg.