The World of Dostoevsky in the spotlight of the Presidential Library

November 11, 2019 marks the 198th anniversary of the birth of the writer, thinker and publicist Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Presidential Library’s portal features the electronic collection Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881). The World of Dostoevsky, which includes digital copies of rare editions, for example: “The Diary of a Writer for 1877”, “Memoirs of A. G. Dostoevskaya”, “Letters of Dostoevskaya to A. G. Nikolsky B. Vl”. The materials about the life and work of the writer, research papers of the last century and abstracts of dissertations of our days are also available.

The fate of Dostoevsky was rather complicated. Having decided to devote himself entirely to literature after graduating from the Engineering School in St. Petersburg, Fyodor Mikhailovich writes the novel The Poor Folk and, after a series of alterations painful for an inexperienced writer, gives it to print. The success was deafening! A literary circle was formed almost immediately around the prose writer. But the young Dostoevsky was looking for answers to “damned questions” and beyond fiction: in the spring of 1847 he became a visitor to the “Fridays” of M. V. Petrashevsky.

The participation in the organization of a secret printing house for printing appeals to peasants and soldiers was not without consequences: in April 1849, Dostoevsky was arrested, among other "Petrashevists". He spent eight months in the Alekseevsky ravelin of the Peter and Paul Fortress. This period of the writer’s life is described in an article by the literary critic, historian A. Milyukov, “Fyodor Dostoevsky”, published in one of the issues of the historical journal Russian Antiquity in 1881.

The situation reached its highest tension on December 22, 1849, when the writer, together with his fellow Petrashevists, was awaiting the execution of the death sentence at Semyonovsky Square. However, by the will of Nicholas I, the execution was replaced by a 4-year hard labor with the deprivation of "all rights of the state".

The years of hard labor became for Fyodor Mikhailovich the stage of philosophical understanding of life, the intense search for the spiritual path in it as a single individual, and the State as a whole. In the publication "Guru of Russian thought. [Volume 1]. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Vlad. Solovyov” - 2 volumes (1904–1905) in the chapter “Sociology. The State and the Sociology| Dostoevsky’s views are interpreted: “Peoples are composed and moved by another force <...>. This is the power of continuous and relentless confirmation of one’s being and the denial of death - the spirit of life, as the scripture says, is “a river of living water”, the Apocalypse is so threatened by its failure”.

Dostoevsky believes that “demons”, revolutionaries without spiritual roots, the nature of which he later explores in the novel “Demons”, can lead to the apocalypse, and he will begin to study the prerequisites for their appearance in hard labor, in the crucible of which his convictions set forth in the aforementioned publication "The Luminaries of Russian thought. [Volume 1]. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Vlad. Solovyov".

Hard labor did not harden the writer, but only accelerated the maturation of his civic qualities. “Dostoevsky before Siberia was a young engineer officer who discovered an extraordinary literary talent. <...> A completely different person returned from Siberia - not only a great writer, whose talent was hardened in the crucible of true, not fictional suffering, but also a man of unbending civil courage, says the video lecture “The Spiritual Birth of Fyodor Dostoevsky in Siberia” : the book of fate "Notes from the Dead House"» (2014).

The electronic collection also includes modern scientific works on the literary heritage of the classic. Among them one can find abstracts of dissertations on the themes: “The Gospel parable in the author’s discourse of Fyodor Dostoevsky”, “Confessionalism as a principle of the formation of poetry of prose by Fyodor Dostoevsky”,

“The artistic logic of shame in prose by Fyodor Dostoevsky”, ““Notes from the Underground” by Fyodor Dostoevsky in the Context of the Authorship Myth of God-fighting” and many others. O. Danilenko reflects on the logic of psychological analysis in the works of Dostoevsky in his abstract of the dissertation: “Psychological analysis in the work of F. M. Dostoevsky was formed on the basis of a deep philosophical and religious understanding of the problems of conscience, self-will, freedom and suffering in human destiny, the tragic inconsistency in the world of being ideal and real".  

It was on the basis of the psychological approach and philosophical and religious understanding of the origins of spirituality that Dostoevsky’s great novels subsequently were born: Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov and the Possessed

Dostoevsky’s creativity researcher A. Zakrzhevsky notes that in these works, the writer “measured the depths of <...> passion and gave a picture with dips into such bowels where the burning of the flesh becomes the fire of the spirit”.

It is worth noting that Fyodor Dostoevsky was in good, comradely relations with the Chief Prosecutor of the Holy Governing Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev. For a long time, from youth, they knew each other, and each of them forged its own character and views, passing the test. Dostoevsky visited Pobedonostsev in the service, the results of these meetings are still awaiting research by historians and literary critics.