Fyodor Dostoevsky Day: The Novels Written Against the Clock

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in Moscow on November 11, 1821. He grew up on the grounds of the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, where his father worked as a doctor, so the first world he saw up close was a charity hospital full of people with nothing.

He died in Saint Petersburg in February 1881 at fifty-nine. Between those dates he survived a staged execution, four years of hard labor in Siberia, epilepsy, the deaths of a wife and a brother in the same year, and a gambling habit that kept him broke for most of his working life. He wrote Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov anyway, most of them in monthly installments, with a creditor or a publisher counting the days.

Readers remember a philosopher who wrote novels. Writers should see a professional who sold philosophy by the page.

Why are there two birth dates for Fyodor Dostoevsky?

Russia used the old Julian calendar until 1918. By the nineteenth century the Julian calendar ran twelve days behind the Gregorian calendar used in Western Europe.

On the day he was born, his family and every document in Moscow called it October 30, 1821. Anybody in Paris or London would have called the same day November 11. Reference books now give the Gregorian date first and put the Old Style date in brackets.

The same split runs through his whole life. His death on February 9, 1881 was January 28 to the people at his bedside.

A page that marks his birthday on October 30 is using the calendar he lived by, and one using November 11 follows the calendar the rest of the world adopted, including Russia in the end.

What happened at Dostoevsky’s mock execution in 1849?

In April 1849 the police arrested him with other members of the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of young intellectuals who met to read and discuss banned political and social writing. He was twenty-seven. The authorities treated reading as conspiracy and sentenced the group to death.

In December 1849 the prisoners were taken to Semyonov Place in Saint Petersburg, read their sentences, and lined up for the firing squad. Guards tied the condemned men to posts in groups of three, and Dostoevsky stood in the second group. Then a messenger arrived from Tsar Nicholas I with a pardon. The Tsar had granted it the day before. The ritual of preparing to die was the punishment.

He wrote about the minutes before an execution for the rest of his life. In The Idiot, Prince Myshkin talks at length about what a condemned man thinks while he waits to die, with a precision only somebody who’d stood there could supply. Most writers have to research the scenes they fear. Dostoevsky had lived his, and he went back to that square in fiction again and again for thirty years.

How did Siberian prison change Dostoevsky’s writing?

The commuted sentence was four years of hard labor in a prison camp at Omsk, followed by compulsory service as a soldier in Semipalatinsk. He came out of the camp in February 1854.

The camp put him among murderers, thieves and peasants, people the educated young man from the Petrashevsky meetings had argued about in the abstract. Notes from the House of the Dead, published in installments starting in 1860, turned the experience into a thinly fictionalized account. Its narrator is serving ten years for killing his wife. The book made Dostoevsky’s name a second time.

Before the arrest he’d been a literary sensation for about three years. He finished his first novel, Poor Folk, in 1845, and it came out on January 15, 1846. The poet Nikolai Nekrasov read the manuscript and took it to Vissarion Belinsky, the leading critic in Russia, who called it the country’s first social novel. A twenty-four-year-old engineering graduate went to bed unknown and woke up famous.

Siberia ended all that.

The change shows up in everything after. The early books feel like a talented young writer’s sympathy for the poor. The later ones are written by somebody who had slept beside violent men for four years and found them more complicated than any theory about them.

Raskolnikov, Rogozhin, the Karamazov brothers and the narrator of Notes from Underground all come out of that education. None of them is a type, and each one argues back.

The worst year came after his return. In 1864 his first wife, Maria Isaeva, died, and so did his brother Mikhail, his closest ally and business partner. The magazine the brothers had run together, Vremya, had already been shut down by the authorities, and its replacement, Epoch, was failing and dragging his finances with it. That same year he published Notes from Underground, a short, furious monologue by a man who argues against reason itself. Grief and debt didn’t stop him writing. They fed the work.

How did Dostoevsky write The Gambler in twenty-six days?

He signed a bad contract and then ran out of time.

Short of money in July 1865, he agreed with the publisher Fyodor Stellovsky to deliver a new novel of at least twelve printer’s signatures by November 1, 1866. If he missed the date, Stellovsky got the right to publish everything Dostoevsky wrote for nine years without paying him anything. Through most of 1866 he was busy writing Crime and Punishment for a magazine and hadn’t started the Stellovsky book at all.

A friend recommended a young stenographer named Anna Grigorievna Snitkina, among the earliest trained in Russia. She started on October 4, 1866. He dictated, she took it down in shorthand, transcribed it at home overnight and brought back clean pages the next day.

They finished The Gambler on October 30, twenty-six days later, and he delivered it in time.

The novel follows a young tutor ruined by roulette in a German spa town. Dostoevsky knew the subject from his own losses at Wiesbaden and Baden-Baden in 1863.

He married her in February 1867.

Anna then did something just as important for literature as the stenography. She took over the money, the contracts and the publishing business, sold his books directly from their apartment in Saint Petersburg, and got him out of debt. The great late novels were written by a man whose wife had taken the creditors off his desk.

How was Crime and Punishment first published?

In monthly installments in The Russian Messenger, a literary magazine, starting in January 1866. The first two parts reportedly brought the magazine at least 500 new subscribers. He was paid by the printer’s sheet, and later another journal, Notes of the Fatherland, offered him 250 rubles a sheet, a hundred more than The Russian Messenger had paid.

He’d sent the first two parts to the editor in December 1865, only weeks after burning his first draft and starting over.

Serial publication shaped the books as much as theology did. Each installment had to end with the reader wanting the next one, and he was writing new parts while earlier parts were already in print, unable to go back and fix them. The long feverish scenes, the sudden arrivals and the confrontations that break off mid-crisis all come partly from the monthly format. The Idiot ran the same way starting in January 1868. He finished its last part in Florence a year later, long after the opening chapters had reached subscribers.

The novel itself opens with Raskolnikov already walking toward the pawnbroker’s flat to rehearse the murder. The reader gets the theory behind the crime later.

I open almost all my own novels the same way, with action first and the explanation in a flashback. Crime and Punishment makes the case for that structure better than any craft book.

Why do Dostoevsky’s characters argue so much?

Because he gave every major character a real case and let them make it at full strength. The murderer gets his theory, the prosecutor gets his trap, and the devout brother and the atheist brother both get their best arguments.

The clearest example sits in The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan, the doubting brother, tells his religious younger brother Alyosha a story he calls “The Grand Inquisitor.” In it the returned Christ is arrested and lectured by a church official who says people don’t want freedom. Dostoevsky was a believer, and he wrote the strongest case against his own belief into the book and left it standing.

Alyosha’s answer to the story is a kiss.

Few novelists manage that trick. A writer who stacks the deck for the characters he agrees with produces a sermon. Dostoevsky wrote characters he disagreed with in their own voices, at their own length, and readers still argue about which side the book takes. I write in the character’s voice too, and I think most writing rules are a bit much, but no rule I’ve broken comes close to what he did with Ivan.

What does not hold up in Dostoevsky’s novels?

Length, first. Serial writers were paid by volume, and it shows.

Whole chapters go to scenes that a modern editor would cut to a page, and characters deliver monologues that run on for pages without interruption. Secondary characters wander in, talk for a chapter and wander out again. Plot threads get dropped when a new installment needed something else. The modern reader pays for the monthly format in patience. I cut a lot in my own drafts, and his pages would have kept my pen busy.

Then there are the women, too many of them designed to suffer or to redeem a man. Sonya in Crime and Punishment exists largely to lead Raskolnikov toward confession. Nastasya Filippovna in The Idiot gets more fire and more contradiction, and she still ends up as the object other men fight over.

His journalism, collected as A Writer’s Diary, carries ugly national and ethnic prejudices that the novels mostly keep offstage. Readers who meet him through the diary get a worse man than the one in the fiction.

None of those flaws kills the books. They’re real, and a reader should know about them going in.

What can a writer learn from Dostoevsky?

Start with the business. He wrote masterpieces on contract, against deadlines, for money he’d already spent. The romantic picture of the novelist waiting for inspiration doesn’t survive contact with his biography. My own writing day runs client work in the morning, my own books in the afternoon and client work again in the evening, and his life is the best defense of that kind of split I can name.

Next, give the opposition its best lines. A villain or an antagonist who argues badly makes a dull book, and the fix for most weak villain motivations is to let the other side be right about something.

Then use what happened to you. He stood in front of a firing squad and spent four years in a camp, and both experiences reappear across the novels transformed, never as a straight memoir.

And get help with the parts you’re bad at. Anna ran the business, and he wrote better books once somebody else answered the creditors.

How should you mark Fyodor Dostoevsky Day?

Read Crime and Punishment if you haven’t, or read it again if you only met it in school. The site’s catalog entry for Crime and Punishment is a fair place to start. If seven hundred pages sounds like too much, read the short Notes from Underground, or the Grand Inquisitor chapter of The Brothers Karamazov on its own.

If you write, try his method for a week. Set a hard deadline with a real cost, write to it, and see what comes out. Writers who juggle a book with a paying job will find practical help in time management for writers with a day job, and anybody with a book that needs a professional hand can look at ghostwriting services.

When he died in 1881, crowds filled the streets of Saint Petersburg for the funeral. Estimates run from 40,000 mourners to more than 100,000. Seven months earlier, on June 8, 1880, he had given a speech on Pushkin in Moscow that turned into the triumph of his public life. The prisoner from Semyonov Place left the world as the most famous writer in Russia.

He shares the serialized novel with Charles Dickens, whose novels he read in Siberia, and the rest of the year’s author birthdays are on the literature-related holidays calendar.

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