Anaedobe Olisazaraekpere

ENG4U

Kayla Hill

22nd October 2021

*MT-A: Midterm Project – Part A [70 marks]

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, born on 11th November 1821 and died on 9th

February 1881, was a famous Russian journalist, short story writer, novelist, and essayist. He

was the second son of a military doctor, Mikhail Andreyevich Dostoevsky and his wife, Maria

Fyodorovna Dostoevskaya. Throughout his childhood, Fyodor loved to read and had a passion

for literature. He was an Orthodox Christian and was profoundly religious. His works often

reflected his strong condemnation of anything that did not align with his Orthodox faith. He

released many unsuccessful stories, such as The Landlady, White Nights, Mr. Prokharchin, and

A Weak Heart. However, his successful works include Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The

Brothers Karamazov, Demons, etc.; these works were famous when they were published and

still have some traction today. Along with his faith, his life experiences impacted the plot and

character portrayal in his novels and works in general. His works’ characters and plot lines

reflect his childhood experiences, Orthodox Christian faith, and the health issues he faced.

The events Fyodor experienced as a child appears in his novels. One example was when

Fyodor was a child, a drunk raped a nine-year-old girl, and he had to get his father. The theme

of lust older men tend to have towards younger women appears in his books like Crime and

Punishment where Raskolnikov’s main character prevents a drunk lady from being assaulted

by Svidrigailov. His father sent him to a French boarding school and then to the Chermak

boarding school; Fyodor often felt out of place among his classmates in the Chermak school,

which is reflected in some of his works, especially The Adolescent (Wikipedia 2021). However,

in 1837, after the death of his mother, his father sent Fyodor and his older brother Mikhail to
the Mykolaiv Military Engineering Institute and an academy in Tallinn, Estonia respectively.

Fyodor disliked the institute because he had no interest in the subjects taught there. He was an

outsider among his one hundred and twenty classmates; this is somewhat like Raskolnikov in

Crime and Punishment, who never really fit in with the crowd and was generally a loner.

Dostoevsky’s orthodox Christian faith also had an effect on this literary works. His parents

raised him in the Orthodox Christian faith; his mother used the Bible to teach him to write at a

young age. He read the gospels often and had extensive knowledge of the lives of saints, which

he would often mention in some of his works. In Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, an

essay collection he wrote while travelling to Europe, he condemns the Anglicans and the

Catholics. He referred to the Anglicans as “proud and rich…pompously and seriously

[believing] in their own solidly moral virtues and their right to preach a staid and complacent

morality.”; he also believed that Catholic priests manipulated the poor into conversion by acts

of charity (Wikipedia 2021). In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky condemns atheism and

Catholicism, which the Inquisitor represents in the chapter The Grand Inquisitor of the book.

The Russian Orthodox Church Dostoevsky was raised in taught that evil originates from

various forces. It taught that man is born into an already corrupt world, causing people to be

born with ailments and disabilities (Ewald 10). Dostoevsky was epileptic and had epileptic

characters, but he also had characters with other illnesses. Marya Timofeyevna, from the novel,

Demons, (1872) is physically crippled, Katerina Ivanovna from the novel, Crime and

Punishment, (1866) was plagued by tuberculosis.

Dostoevsky had temporal lobe epilepsy; he has multiple epileptic characters across

multiple of his works and there is much debate about the origin of his epilepsy. Carr,

Dostoevsky’s biographer, believed that his (Dostoevsky’s) seizures did not start before his

incarceration in 1849 or his second marriage in 1857 (Bhattacharyya 476). Dostoevsky’s

epilepsy and his experience helped him describe the experience of many characters across
various of his works. He never actually wrote or said that these characters had epilepsy, but the

characters’ affairs were somewhat similar to his. An example is in his book The Insulted and

The Injured (1861), a character, Nelly, who was known to be quite proud, had an epileptic

attack, “suddenly, she exclaimed. Her face convulsively shivered, and she fell” (Baumann 327).

His second wife and his friend have described Dostoevsky’s epileptic attacks, and they were

pretty similar to this. Dostoevsky has other books with characters that display these same

issues, showing how his epilepsy affected him. His epilepsy also influenced his writing style.

His works have a shared sense of urgency or impulsiveness, as though he wrote them in short

bursts of creativity.

The life of Fyodor Dostoevsky is filled with turmoil, grief, failure, success and so much

more. He does not hide his life in his work and uses it to strengthen the emotions and plot of

his works. His published works are remarkable because they break down the human

psychology and describe in detail what the plight of men looks like and how it can lead a person

to unravel faster than any illness ever could. Dostoevsky’s characters all pass through some

sort of mental turmoil usually after they do something unethical, immoral or commit a crime.

While some criticize his work for being repetitive and too psychologically inclined, others

praise him for that. He uses his work to address illnesses in a way that would hit home for

readers and for people who are not familiar with those struggles. For that reason, he is a

renowned artist and remains an inspiration to many writers.

 Works Cited

Baumann, Christian R., et al. Did Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky Suffer from Mesial

Temporal Lobe Epilepsy? Science Direct, vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 324-330.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105913110500066X

Bhattacharyya, Kaylan B. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky and His Epilepsy. Neurology

India, vol. 63, no. 4, 2015, pp. 476-479.

https://www.neurologyindia.com/text.asp?2015/63/4/476/161979

Ewald, Elizabeth J. The Mystery of Suffering: The Philosophy of Dostoevsky’s Characters. Trinity

College, 2015, pp 7-10. https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/theses/18

Wikipedia. Fyodor Dostoevsky. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyodor_Dostoevsky