About Me
I don't like talking about myself, so this will be fast and abridged.
I was born in Moscow, Russia, on November 11, 1821. My early years were as dismal as my later years: In 1837 my mother died of tuberculosis, and after sending my bother and I to a Military Engineering Academy in St. Petersburg, my father quickly followed. I would like to take a brief pause, for I feel that the latter death probably deserves a quick digression.
Throughout my life (and well into today, I hear) there was great speculation concerning the causes of my fathers death. Although I'm as in the dark about the actual details of my father's death as many of your are, I would like to say that it is typical of Russia to take a seemingly innocuous event and romanticize it. And, furthermore, I hear that there are quite a few people who consider a couple of my novels some of the greatest ever written. So, of course, with me being "one of the great novelists," there is the need to want to make my life more romantic than it indeed was. God forbid, we "great novelists" just lived sedentarily, prosaic lives; no, we must be revolutionaries and philosophers; and may the Lord further forbid that our anguishes were just transitory "bouts of the blues"; our depression must be derived from some piquant source: women, lack of fame, lack of money, et cetera. But this has been a digression inside a digression--so, back to my father. There is this wonderful story circulating that states: Mikhail Dostoevsky, in one of his drunken rampages, upset his serfs, who then proceeded to kill him by restraining him and forcing him to drink vodka until he drowned. However, there is also another, just as valid a theory, in which, my father simply died from normal causes.
After I was sent to the St. Petersburg Academy of Military Engineering and realized that I was poor in mathematics (a subject I despised), I, instead, focused all of my attention on literature. This is about when I started to write my own fiction, it was around 1846; my first work, the epistolary short novel, Poor Folk, was met with great acclaim especially by the liberal critic Vissarion Belinsky with his famous exclamation: "A new Gogol has arisen!" I do have to admit, as humble as I try to be, Belinsky's exclamation did give me a great sense of pride, and it gave me the determination to pursue a literary career.
It must now be said that any affiliations I had with the "intelligent men" of Russia, were irrevocably severed after their "enlightened ways of thinking" and "brilliant, proletarian governmental ideologies" landed me a death sentence, exile, and five years in the Siberian Regiment (although, I did eventually make lieutenant). I then, instead, rediscovered my Christian upbringing and held it close to help me through the quagmire of nihilism, in which, I was submerged.
The rest of my life I will quickly summarize, being that, for one, it's long and involved; and that, for two, I'm sure it cannot be conveyed without sounding like self-loathing.
My epileptic seizures, which I was predisposed, were exacerbated following my exile to Siberia. I developed a terrible gambling compulsion. My wife and my beloved brother both died (a topic that I will not even being to discuss, for it causes too much pain). I met Anna Grigorevna, a twenty-year-old stenographer, whom I married in 1867. This is around the time I started working on, what many hail, my greatest works. Life was tolerable from that point on, I moved to Staraya, Russia, which was close to St. Petersburg... (Listen to my pontification) I'll just end all of this levity: I died on January 28, 1881 of a lung hemorrhage associated with emphysema and an epileptic seizure and was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St. Petersburg, Russia.
