Wednesday Writing Essentials: Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov:Guilty, Guilty, Guilty

Welcome to Wednesday Writing Essentials. Today, October 3  is an OPEN  day.

This means that fiction, poetry, memoir, essays about writing or publishing, creative non-fiction, or play/screenwriting may be FEATURED.

For theme days, articles that fall under the themes may be Featured. All articles that fall within the guidelines of Gather Essentials: Writing (writing.gather.com) can be accepted by the Member Editor Moderators.

Schedule:

October 10th: Memoir, Essays about Writing, Publishing

October 17: OPEN

October 24: Fiction, Poetry, Non-Fiction Essays  (Memoir, Essays about Writing, or other Essays)

October 31: Halloween Features! Anything scary or Halloweenish. Also includes articles relating to All Saint's Day and All Soul's Day. History of these holidays would be most interesting or your Halloween experiences.  Poetry, Video, Images, Prose - Anything Halloween!

Non-Halloween articles accepted into group but on October 31, only articles relating to Halloween, All Saint's Day or All-Soul's Day will be Featured. 

 *           *               *        

Now for a discussion of Dostoevksy.

Raskolnikov, the main character in Fyodor's Crime and Punishment, is tormented by guilt (more on the novel later). How many of you, after reading the title cringed (even a bit, perhaps feeling guilty about some real or imagined wrong, even a slight wrong you may have done at some point in your life).

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821-1881), a Russian novelist, is considered to be one of the precursors of 20th century existentialism, especially with Notes from Underground, written in the voice of an anonymous 'underground man.' 

 Fyodor Dostoevsky, public domain image

Dostoevksy's father was a retired military surgeon and an alcoholic who was prone to violence; Dostoeskvy was exposed to much of Moscow's worst during the 19th century, as his father was stationed at Moscow's hospital for the poor, where nearby landmarks included  a cemetary for criminals, a lunatic asylum and an orphanage for abandoned babies. 

It seems this grim landscape made for a fitting setting for much of Dostoevsky's gripping explorations into gritty reality and his psychological explorations.

Dostoevsky loved to sit with the patients at his father's hospital and listen to their stories. 

Dostoevsy's father had a stern but loving relationship with his children. Dostoevsky's mother died when Dostoevsky was 16 and his father when he was 18. A persistent rumor about the death of Dostoevsky's father tells of murder by Dostoevsky's own serfs, who, after another of the elder Dostoevsky's drunken and violent outbursts, the servants poured vodka down his throat until he drowned. Or perhaps Dostoevsky died of natural causes and that rumor was a story invented by someone who wanted to buy Dostoevsky's land on the cheap. 

Dostoevsky's father plays a significant role in the  character of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, father of the brothers in  The Brothers Karamazov.

Dostoevsky was an epileptic and seizures continued off and on  throughout his life. In school, Dostoevsky studied mathematics,  Shakespeare, Pascal, Victor Hugo and E.T.A. Hoffmann.

Dostoevsky's next work, The Double,  was a psychological study of a bureaucrat whose alter ego overtakes his life, but this was not well received at the time and his reputation began to cool.  

Dostoevksy was soon part of a liberal intellectual group which earned him a black mark in the political book of Czar Nicholas I, who was suspicious of any underground organization that might put his rule into jeopardy. Dostoevksy was arrested. Dostoevsky was sentenced to death.

However, a mock execution was staged  and his sentence was commuted to four years in exile at a prison camp in Omsk, Siberia.

Dostoevksy described his experiences in Siberia:

"In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall...We were packed like herrings in a barrel...There was no room to turn around. From dusk to dawn it was impossible not to behave like pigs...Fleas, lice, and black beetles by the bushel..."

 

 Monument of Dostoevsky at Omsk, Siberia. Public domain image, Wikipedia

After release from prison, he was required to serve in the Siberian Regiment where he served first as a private then later as a lieutenant; he was  stationed at the fortress of Semipalatinsk, now Kazakhstan. While there, he met Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, the wife of an acquaintance. Fyodor and Maria married in 1857, after her husband's death.

After prison, Dostoevksy became more in line with traditional Russian Orthodox belief and became sharply critical of nihilist and socialist thought in his day.

 At age 38, Dostoevksy started several literary journals but they did not meet with much success; in 1863,  the Epokha (Epoch) was shut down after he covered the Polish Uprising of 1863.

In 1864, at age 43, Dostoevsky's wife died and he fell into a profound depression and accumulated staggering amounts of gambling debt.

In 1867, he married Anna Grigorevna Snitkina, his stenographer to whom he dictated The Gambler, a book he'd written in a hurry to pay for gambling debts and to prevent his copyrights from being transferred to another. 

It was during this period in his life that Dostoevsky created his greatest and longest lasting literary achievements, including Crime and Punishment, which was originally published in installments. 

Dostoevksy died in 1881, as the result of a hemorrhage in his lung, probably the combined result of emphysema and a seizure from his lifetime of epilepsy. He was 
interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, St Petersburg, Russia. Forty thousand mourners attended his funeral.

Tomb of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Tikhvin Cemetery. Alexander Nevsky Monastery, St Petersburg, Russia.

The composer Tchaikovsky read Dostoevsky all his life but did not always bestow great praises upon Dostoevksy's work, stating that of  The Brothers Karamazov  "This is becoming intolerable. Every single character is crazy."

That antipathy was not shared by Tchaikovsky's younger contemporaries, who saw, for the first time, in both Tchaikovsky and Dostoevsky, a much suffering Russian, conflicted by life and tragedy.

Dostoevsky is often considered to have had an immense influence upon the modernist movements in twentieth century philosophy and psychology, with his influence felt by writers such as  Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Charles Bukowski, Albert Camus, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry Miller, Yukio Mishima, Gabriel García Márquez, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan and Joseph Heller. Ernest Hemingway cited Dostoevsky as a major influence.

When Dostoevsky published Crime and Punishment in 1866,  Dostoevsky secured for himself a place in the annals of Russia's greatest literary halls. In Crime and Punishment, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov (the word Raskol means 'split or schism' in Russian),  Raskolnikov is a poor student who plans then kills an old pawnbroker in cold blood  for her money, solving his financial problems and ridding the world of her evil, a warped thought, at best. 

But, of course, Raskolnikov's guilt plagues him until the very end, torturing him until he confesses. Dostoevksy's goal was to write a 'psychological account of a crime' and a separate story 'The Drunkards." The two merged into one and Crime and Punishment was born.  

After the murder of the old pawnbroker and her sister, Raskolnikov becomes ill with a fever; he becomes paranoid, believing that everyone suspects him of the murder and his sanity is eventually compromised.

Even though Raskolnikov is sent to a Siberian labor camp, his real punishment is the psychological torture he provides himself.

Excerpt:

 Raskolnikov's thoughts:

"If I am so scared now, what would it be if it somehow came to pass that I were really going to do it?" he could not help asking himself as he reached the fourth storey. There his progress was barred by some porters who were engaged in moving furniture out of a flat...  This German was moving out then, and so the fourth floor on this staircase would be untenanted except by the old woman. "That's a good thing anyway," he thought to himself, as he rang the bell of the old woman's flat. The bell gave a faint tinkle as though it were made of tin and not of copper. The little flats in such houses always have bells that ring like that. He had forgotten the note of that bell, and now its peculiar tinkle seemed to remind him of something and to bring it clearly before him. . . .

 
"He started, his nerves were terribly overstrained by now. In a little while, the door was opened a tiny crack: the old woman eyed her visitor with evident distrust through the crack, and nothing could be seen but her little eyes, glittering in the darkness. But, seeing a number of people on the landing, she grew bolder, and opened the door wide. The young man stepped into the dark entry, which was partitioned off from the tiny kitchen. The old woman stood facing him in silence and looking inquiringly at him. She was a diminutive, withered up old woman of sixty, with sharp malignant eyes and a sharp little nose. Her colourless, somewhat grizzled hair was thickly smeared with oil, and she wore no kerchief over it. Round her thin long neck, which looked like a hen's leg, was knotted some sort of flannel rag, and, in spite of the heat, there hung flapping on her shoulders, a mangy fur cape, yellow with age. The old woman coughed and groaned at every instant. The young man must have looked at her with a rather peculiar expression, for a gleam of mistrust came into her eyes again. "