Dostoyévskiy — His first Novel

Few authors have been so well received, from their very first appearance in literature, as Dostoyévskiy was. In 1845 he arrived in St. Petersburg, a quite unknown young man who only two years before had finished his education in a school of military engineers, and after having spent two years in the engineering service had then abandoned it with the intention of devoting himself to literature. He was only twenty-four when he wrote his first novel, Poor People, which his school-comrade, Grigoróvitch, gave to the poet Nekrásoff, offering it for a literary almanack. Dostoyévskiy had inwardly doubted whether the novel would even be read by the editor. He was living then in a poor, miserable room, and was fast asleep when at four o’clock in the morning Nekrásoff and Grigoróvitch knocked at his door. They threw themselves on Dostoyévskiy’s neck, congratulating him with tears in their eyes. Nekrásoff and his friend had begun to read the novel late in the evening; they could not stop reading till they came to the end, and they were both so deeply impressed by it that they could not help going on this nocturnal expedition, to see the author and tell him what they felt. A few days later Dostoyévskiy was introduced to the great critic of the time, Byelínskiy, and from him he received the same warm reception. As to the reading public, the novel produced quite a sensation. The same must be said about all subsequent novels of Dostoyévskiy. They had an immense sale all over Russia.

The life of Dostoyévskiy was extremely sad. In the year 1849, four years after he had won his first success with Poor People, he became mixed up in the affairs of some Fourierists (members of the circles of Petrashévskiy), who used to meet together to read the works of Fourier, commenting on them, and talking about the necessity of a Socialistic movement in Russia. At one of these gatherings Dostoyévskiy read, and copied later on, a certain letter from Byelínskiy to Gógol, in which the great critic spoke in rather sharp language about the Russian Church and the State; he also took part in a meeting at which the starting of a secret printing office was discussed. He was arrested, tried (of course with closed doors), and, with several others, was condemned to death. In December, 1849, he was taken to a public square, placed on the scaffold, under a gibbet, to listen there to a profusedly-worded death-sentence, and only at the last moment came a messenger from Nicholas I., bringing a pardon. Three days later he was transported to Siberia and locked up in a hard-labour prison at Omsk. There he remained for four years, when owing to some influence at St. Petersburg he was liberated, only to be made a soldier. During his detention in the hard-labour prison he was submitted, for some minor offence, to the terrible punishment of the cat-o’-nine-tails, and from that time dates his disease — epilepsy — which he never quite got rid of during all his life. The coronation amnesty of Alexander II. did not improve Dostoyévskiy’s fate. Not until 1859 — four years after the advent of Alexander II. to the throne — was the great writer pardoned and allowed to return to Russia. He died in 1883.