47 Fun Facts About Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky's novels made Saint Petersburg their stage, but in which city was he born?

Moscow: he grew up in the grounds of the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, where his father was a doctor, and met its destitute patients while playing in the gardens.

Which novel shared a journal with Crime and Punishment during 1866?

War and Peace was appearing there under its first title, 1805. Dostoevsky had gone to the journal's editor only as a last resort, to ask for an advance.

Whom does Raskolnikov kill in Crime and Punishment?

Raskolnikov murders Alyona Ivanovna, an elderly pawnbroker, and then kills her half-sister Lizaveta when she walks in on the crime.

What weapon does Raskolnikov use in Crime and Punishment?

An axe, taken from the porter's room and hung from a loop he has sewn inside his overcoat, so that he can carry it through the streets unseen.

Which detective investigates the murders in Crime and Punishment?

Porfiry Petrovich has no proof, so he plays cat and mouse with Raskolnikov instead, and finally tells him to his face that he knows who the killer is.

In Crime and Punishment, who is Sonya, the young woman who guides Raskolnikov toward confession?

Marmeladov's daughter sells herself to feed her drunken father's family. She reads Raskolnikov the raising of Lazarus, then follows him to Siberia.

In "The Grand Inquisitor", how does the silent Christ finally answer the cardinal who condemns him?

With a kiss on the old man's bloodless lips, after which the cardinal lets him go. When the tale ends, Alyosha kisses its teller in the same way.

The plot of The Brothers Karamazov revolves around what crime?

Patricide: the dissolute Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is murdered and his eldest son Dmitri is convicted, though the novel shows that another man struck the blow.

Which Karamazov brother tells the prose poem "The Grand Inquisitor"?

Ivan, the intellectual middle brother, tells it to Alyosha over a tavern table: a cardinal arrests the returned Christ for burdening mankind with free will.

Who is the rumoured illegitimate Karamazov son who serves as his father's servant?

Smerdyakov's name means roughly "son of the reeking one": it was coined from the nickname of his mother, a mute homeless woman known as Stinking Lizaveta.

Which elder monk is Alyosha Karamazov's spiritual guide?

Father Zosima dies midway through the novel, and instead of the miracle the town expects, his body quickly begins to smell, a scandal that shakes Alyosha's faith.

Dostoevsky named Alyosha Karamazov after whom?

His son who died in childhood: little Alexei, known as Alyosha, died in May 1878 as the novel was taking shape, and the grieving father went on pilgrimage to Optina Monastery.

Who called The Brothers Karamazov "the most magnificent novel ever written"?

Sigmund Freud said so in a 1928 essay that ranked Dostoevsky just behind Shakespeare as a writer, then went on to psychoanalyse the novelist himself.

Who is the guileless prince at the centre of The Idiot?

Lev Myshkin, home from a Swiss sanatorium, was Dostoevsky's attempt to portray "the positively good and beautiful man". His goodness brings ruin to nearly everyone he tries to help.

Which painting erodes Rogozhin's faith in The Idiot?

Holbein's Dead Christ transfixed Dostoevsky himself in 1867: his wife had to lead him away from the panel. In the novel a copy hangs in Rogozhin's house, and the prince says a man could lose his faith over it.

Which fellow novelist did Dostoevsky caricature in Demons as the vain, fading writer Karmazinov?

Turgenev had helped circulate a mocking poem about the touchy young Dostoevsky in the 1840s. The preening Karmazinov, a generation later, was the payback.

Dostoevsky's first published work was his translation of a novel by which French writer?

Honoré de Balzac's Eugénie Grandet, which he rendered freely and with heightened emotion in 1843. Balzac's fiction went on to shape his own.

Notes from Underground is often cited as one of the first works of which movement?

Notes from Underground is widely called a founding text of existentialism; its narrator, a retired civil servant, rails against the rationalist idea that life reduces to 'two times two makes four'.

Which Russian novel's rational utopia does Dostoevsky's Underground Man set out to attack?

What Is to Be Done?, Chernyshevsky's 1863 novel, taught that enlightened self-interest would build a perfect society. The Underground Man retorts that people would wreck it just to feel free.

Dostoevsky's first novel, published in 1846, is titled what?

Poor Folk, a novel in letters, made him a celebrity overnight: the poet Nekrasov rushed the manuscript to the critic Belinsky, announcing, "A new Gogol has appeared!"

Dostoevsky was arrested in 1849 for belonging to which discussion group?

Dostoevsky was arrested in April 1849 as a member of the Petrashevsky Circle, young intellectuals who met to discuss banned writings; he had read Belinsky's Letter to Gogol aloud to them.

What happened at Dostoevsky's scheduled execution by firing squad in December 1849?

It was stayed at the last moment, by design: Tsar Nicholas I had made the mock execution part of the punishment, and the reprieve came only once the first three men were tied to the posts.

Dostoevsky served four years of hard labour at a prison camp in which Siberian city?

Dostoevsky served his sentence from 1850 to 1854 in the prison fortress at Omsk; the only book he was allowed was a New Testament given to him by Decembrist wives at Tobolsk.

Which novel drew on Dostoevsky's years in the Siberian prison camp?

The House of the Dead, a lightly fictionalised memoir of his four years among convicts, began Russia's tradition of prison-camp writing. Tolstoy thought it his masterpiece.

Which chronic medical condition did Dostoevsky suffer from for most of his adult life?

Epilepsy struck Dostoevsky hard from his prison years on. He described the instant before a fit as a flash of perfect harmony, and gave the illness to several of his characters.

Dostoevsky's ruinous addiction was to which casino game?

Dostoevsky's addiction was to roulette, which he played compulsively at German spa casinos such as Wiesbaden and Baden-Baden through the 1860s before giving up gambling in 1871.

Which novel did Dostoevsky dictate in under a month to a young stenographer he then married?

The Gambler was due by 1 November 1866, or a publisher would win the right to print all his work unpaid for nine years. Dictating, he finished in 26 days.

Which composer turned Dostoevsky's short casino novel into an opera first staged in 1929?

Sergei Prokofiev finished the score in 1917, but the planned Russian production fell apart after the February Revolution. The opera waited twelve years for its premiere, in Brussels.

Demons was inspired by the real murder of the student Ivanov by the followers of which agitator?

Sergey Nechayev's secret cell murdered the student Ivanov, a former comrade, in November 1869. Dostoevsky turned the crime into the killing of a defector by a revolutionary cell in Demons.

Constance Garnett's translation popularised Demons under which English title?

The Possessed was Garnett's choice. Later translators prefer Demons or The Devils, arguing that the Russian title names the spirits doing the possessing, not their victims.

In Dostoevsky's Demons, which master conspirator plunges a provincial town into chaos?

Pyotr Verkhovensky binds his cell of radicals together by making them accomplices in a murder. His father Stepan, a vague liberal of the 1840s, stands for the generation that bred such sons.

Who called Dostoevsky "the only psychologist from whom I had something to learn"?

Friedrich Nietzsche, who came across him in French translation, also counted the discovery among the most beautiful strokes of fortune in his life.

Before turning to literature, Dostoevsky trained and briefly served as what?

A military engineer, the career his father had chosen for him. Classmates nicknamed the solitary, devout cadet "Monk Photius", and he resigned his commission soon after graduating to write.

According to a long-repeated story that many scholars now doubt, how did Dostoevsky's father die in 1839?

Murdered by his serfs, the story ran, on his small country estate. The official cause was a stroke, and no murder was ever proved.

What was Dostoevsky fleeing when his three-month honeymoon abroad lasted four years?

His creditors: the fee for Crime and Punishment had not covered his debts, and his wife parted with her valuables to pay for the journey. They came home only in July 1871.

Dostoevsky delivered a famous 1880 speech at the unveiling of a memorial to which poet?

Pushkin was the subject of the triumph of Dostoevsky's life: the 1880 speech drew an ecstatic ovation, and it proved a farewell, for he died within months.

Which parable did the dying Dostoevsky ask to have read to his children?

The Prodigal Son was read to his children at his request as he lay dying. His biographer Joseph Frank took the choice as his last word on transgression, repentance and forgiveness.

Dostoevsky is buried in the Tikhvin Cemetery of which monastery?

Dostoevsky was buried in the Tikhvin Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, near Karamzin and Zhukovsky; tens of thousands followed the funeral procession through Saint Petersburg.

Which Russian tsar asked Dostoevsky to help educate his sons?

Alexander II wanted his younger sons, Sergei and Paul, to come under the novelist's influence, a striking turn for a man whom the tsar's own father had sent before a firing squad.

Dostoevsky's tombstone quotes which Gospel image?

Wheat grain: in John 12:24 it bears much fruit only if it falls into the ground and dies. The verse is also the epigraph of The Brothers Karamazov, finished months before his death in 1881.

Which literary theorist built his idea of the "polyphonic novel" on Dostoevsky?

Mikhail Bakhtin published the study in 1929, around the time of his arrest, and was then exiled to Kazakhstan. In it each character's voice stands on its own, with no final word from the author.

Which Dostoevsky novel is narrated by Arkady Dolgoruky, a landowner's illegitimate son?

The Adolescent, also translated as A Raw Youth, follows a young man's tangled dealings with his natural father. Dostoevsky quit editing a conservative weekly to write it.

In Crime and Punishment, which conqueror does Raskolnikov name among the "extraordinary" men free to shed blood?

Napoleon is his test case. After the murders he admits the test failed: he killed, he tells Sonya, to find out whether he was a Napoleon or a louse like everybody else.

Which 1870s monthly did Dostoevsky author, edit and publish entirely alone?

A Writer's Diary mixed stories, memoir, crime reports and politics, all by one hand. It proved immensely popular and paid handsomely.

Which London landmark did Dostoevsky view as a monument to soulless modern materialism?

The Crystal Palace stayed with him after his 1862 visit. Two years later his Underground Man rejects any such perfect glass edifice, precisely because no one could stick out a tongue at it.

Dostoevsky's second wife Anna was a pioneer in Russia of which hobby?

Stamp collecting began as a dare in 1867: her husband doubted that a woman could stick to one pursuit for years. She kept the album all her life and claimed never to have bought a single stamp.

How did Dostoevsky propose to his stenographer, according to her memoirs?

By sketching a plot for a novel: he asked whether a young girl could love an old, ailing painter, then told her to put herself in the girl's place and him in the painter's.