125 years on, still 'no Russia without Dostoyevesky'

By Friedemann Kohler Feb 9, 2006, 12:52 GMT

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Moscow/St. Petersburg - Even 125 years after his death, a glass of fresh tea always stands on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's writing desk in St. Petersburg.

'Our museum staff take care of this, it reminds us that Fyodor Mikhailovich used to like working at night and sustained himself with tea,' says Natalya Ashimbayeva, director of the museum in the author's St. Petersburg home.

Located in a lively shopping quarter in the northern city, the six-room apartment carries an air of middle-class cosiness. It was here that the Russian writer passed away after the trials of imprisonment, illness, gambling addiction and poverty.

His last novel, 'The Brothers Karamazov,' was penned at the desk where he died on February 9, 1881.

Even more than Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Dostoyevsky left the imprint of Russian literature on the world, plumbing the depths of the human soul and influencing such diverse 20th century authors as Herman Hesse, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Deeply religious, Dostoyevsky was a conservative philosopher and chronicler of social decay, an author for troubled times.

'Say what you will about world history, anything that comes to you in your most perverse fantasy, except that it is born of reason,' he wrote.

He was born in Moscow on November 11, 1821, the son of a doctor from an impoverished aristocratic family.

Dostoyevsky first won recognition at the age of 24 with his debut work 'Poor People.'

Four years later he was tried and sentenced to death for his association with an underground left-wing movement opposed to the tsar. During his captivity he was subjected to mock executions, the trauma of which triggered his dormant epilepsy. His sentence was eventually commuted to ten years in a Siberian jail.

After returning to St. Petersburg, Dostoyevsky's illness persisted, compounded by a gambling addiction and mounting debts which prompted him to spend long periods abroad in Europe.

In his latter years his writing generated an adequate income. The high point of his public acclaim came one year before his death, when he gave a speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow.

The figures from Dostoyevsky's novels still endure today, like the guilt-wracked student murderer Raskolnikov from 'Crime and Punishment', the helplessly naive 'Idiot' Prince Myshkin, and the well-intentioned novice Alyosha in 'The Brothers Karamazov.'

'Dostoyevsky could describe the condition of the soul in a state of crisis,' says museum director Ashimbayeva.

And his work 'Demons,' about the emergence of the terrorist movement in Russia, remains topical, she notes: 'He writes about the inner mechanism in such people.'

Some of his own hardships and the agitated actions of most of his characters may stem in part from the feverish pace with which he worked.

But Dostoyevsky planned his novels with care, imbuing their actors with disparate and extreme states of the mind, and, like a compere, engaging them with one another despite all their contradictions.

The writings of the religious, anti-revolutionary Dostoyevsky were banned for decades in the atheist Soviet Union until his collected works were published in 1972. 'Crime and Punishment' remains standard reading for Russian schoolchildren today.

'Dostoyevsky is Russia - there is no Russia without Dostoyevsky,' Russian author Alexei Remizov wrote from his Parisian exile in 1927.

When Dostoyevsky died in 1881, some 60,000 people attended his funeral. His grave lies in the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St. Petersburg.