Final Chapters by Jim Bernhard

Author:Jim Bernhard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2015-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

Four years of hard labor in Siberia might not be considered a lucky break by most people—but for Fyodor Dostoyevsky, it was a welcome lifesaver. Minutes before he was to be executed by a firing squad, the tsar commuted his sentence to imprisonment. After serving his term, Dostoyevsky returned to Moscow, full of religious fervor and with a sharpened desire to be a writer.

The son of an army doctor, young Fyodor had set out to be an army engineer—but his interest in literature, social reform, and religion kept distracting him. Born in Moscow on October 30, 1821, he was well schooled in the classics at home and at boarding schools, and then graduated from St. Petersburg’s Army Engineering College. He resigned his army position when he was twenty-three and began to write, publishing his first novel, Poor Folk, followed shortly by The Double.

Dostoyevsky’s interest in social reform led him to join a group of utopian socialists whose activities were considered treasonous by the tsar. This involvement led to his arrest and sentence to death. His prison experiences formed the basis of The House of the Dead and two other novels.

Dostoyevsky married a young widow, Maria Isaev, and worked as a journalist for several publications. Maria died after seven years of marriage, and a distraught Dostoyevsky began to gamble heavily, which left him broke most of the time. But he kept cranking out novels and reached a watershed in his development with Notes from the Underground, followed shortly by Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Possessed. At last, Dostoyevsky was recognized as one of Russia’s preeminent authors.

When he was forty-six, he married his twenty-two-year-old secretary, Anna Snitkina, with whom he had four children. Anna helped Dostoyevsky shake his gambling habit, which had drained his finances, and he devoted himself to his final masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, published in 1879.

Dostoyevsky’s religious views pervaded much of his writing. Nominally Russian Orthodox, with a profound hatred of Roman Catholicism, he did not attend regular services, and referred to himself on some occasions as a Deist. Despite the imprecision of his views, he was devoted to Jesus Christ, to the theological concept of the trinity, and to a firm belief in personal immortality. Although it is in the voice of one of his characters, Dostoyevsky probably agreed with this notion from The Brothers Karamazov: “If there is no immortality, then there is no virtue. If you destroyed the belief in immortality, then love and every living force that inspires the world would also die.”

Troubled by epilepsy from the age of nine, Dostoyevsky also developed pulmonary problems, for which he received periodic treatment at European spas. An inveterate smoker who rolled his own cigarettes, he was diagnosed with early-stage emphysema in August of 1879. Seventeen months later, in January of 1881, at his home in St. Petersburg, he began hemorrhaging from his throat and lungs, which his wife attributed to his agitation while searching for a lost penholder. A second and a third hemorrhage

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