Born out of suffering: the inspiration of Dostoevsky’s great novels

A death sentence, prison in Siberia, and chronic epilepsy. The death of his young children, a gambling addiction, and possible manic depression. Few writers endure such dark lives or possess such bright creativity as Fyodor Dostoevsky.

His incomparable experiences inform many of his novels’ most powerful scenes, from accounts of innocent suffering and crazed revolutionaries to nightmarish epileptic fits. He intended to reflect on his traumatic life by writing a memoir but, aged 59, he died of a pulmonary haemorrhage.

Noting this literary vacuum, Alex Christofi challenges himself to write a sort of third-person memoir for Dostoevsky. Examining the author’s letters, notebooks, and journals — as well as the leading secondary sources — Christofi attempts a profile of the writer which interweaves his biography with his novels. When he describes Dostoevsky the political prisoner, and his last moments before facing the Tsar’s executioners, Christofi quotes Prince Myshkin’s story of the firing squad from The Idiot. His chapter on Dostoevsky’s internment in a forced-labour camp draws heavily on the semi-autobiographical Notes from the House of the Dead. Such personal tragedies help explain Dostoevsky’s singular novelistic focus on the deep recesses of the human mind. He was, said Nietzsche, ‘the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn’.

Dostoevsky’s turbulent life didn’t just provide material for his fiction; it also raised the stakes. The author, who regularly went on destructive gambling sprees, was constantly on the precipice of financial ruin. On one occasion, he had to pawn his lover’s watch so he could return to his estranged and dying first wife. Whereas Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy could write in peace, Dostoevsky was forever rushing his work so the proceeds would appease his rapacious editor, the creditor who threatened him with debtors’ prison, or the pawnbroker who had his wedding rings.