Azure A's List: Literature

• he male line on his father's side were priests.^[4][5] His father, Mikhail, was expected to join the clergy but instead ran away from home and broke with the family permanently.
• When a nine-year-old girl had been raped by a drunk, he was asked to fetch his father to attend to her. The incident haunted him
• In 1833, Dostoyevsky's father, who was strict and profoundly religious, sent him to a French boarding school and then on to the Chermak boarding school, where several people described him as a pale, introverted dreamer and an over-excitable romantic.
• Through his relationship with Belinsky, he expanded his knowledge of the philosophy of socialism, becoming attracted to its logic, its sense of justice and its preoccupation with the destitute and the disadvantaged. His relationship with Belinsky became increasingly strained as Belinsky's atheism and dislike of religion clashed with Dostoyevsky's Russian Orthodox beliefs.
• The members of the Petrashevsky Circle were denounced to Liprandi, an official at the Ministry of International Affairs. Dostoyevsky was accused of reading works by Belinsky, including Correspondence with Gogol, and of circulating copies of these and other works. Antonelli, the government agent who had reported the group, wrote in his statement that at least one of the papers criticised Russian politics and religion. Dostoyevsky responded to these charges by declaring that he had read the essays only "as a literary monument, neither more nor less"; he spoke of "personality and human egoism" rather than of politics. Even so, he and his fellow "conspirators" were arrested on 23 April 1849 at the request of Count A. Orlov and Emperor Nicolas I, who feared a revolution like the Decembrist revolt of 1825 in Russia and the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe. The members were held in the well-defended Peter and Paul Fortress, which housed the most dangerous convicts

• They sentenced the members of the circle to death by firing squad, and the prisoners were taken to Semyonov Place in St Petersburg on 23 December 1849 where they were split into three-man groups. Dostoyevsky was the third in the second row; next to him stood Pleshcheyev and Durov. The execution was stayed when a cart delivered a letter from the Tsar commuting the sentence.

   

  Dostoyevsky served eight years of exile with hard labour at a katorga prison camp in Omsk, Siberia, followed by a term of compulsory military service.
• In Tobolsk, the members received food and clothes from the Decembrist women, as well as several copies of the New Testament with a ten-ruble banknote inside each copy.
• Classified as "one of the most dangerous convicts", Dostoyevsky had his feet and hands shackled until his release. He was permitted to read nothing but his New Testament. In addition to his seizures, he had haemorrhoids, lost weight and was "burned by some fever, trembling and feeling too hot or too cold every night"
• Maria married Dostoyevsky in Semipalatinsk on 7 February 1857, even though she had initially refused his marriage proposal, stating that they were not meant for each other and that his poor financial situation precluded marriage. Their family life was unhappy and she found it difficult to cope with his seizures. Describing their relationship, he wrote: "Because of her strange, suspicious and fantastic character, we were definitely not happy together, but we could not stop loving each other; and the more unhappy we were, the more attached to each other we became". They mostly lived apart
• Their first child, Sonya, was conceived in Baden-Baden, and was born there on 5 March 1868. The baby died of pneumonia three months later, and Anna recalled how Dostoyevsky "wept and sobbed like a woman in despair"
• He declined an invitation to an international congress on copyright in Paris after his son Alyosha had a severe epileptic seizure and died on 16 May.
• While critical of serfdom, Dostoyevsky was sceptical about the creation of a constitution, a concept he viewed as unrelated to Russia's history. He described it as a mere "gentleman's rule" and believed that "a constitution would simply enslave the people". He advocated social change instead, for example removal of the feudal system and a weakening of the divisions between the peasantry and the affluent classes. His ideal was a utopian, Christianized Russia where "if everyone were actively Christian, not a single social question would come up ... If they were Christians they would settle everything".
• After his arrest, aborted execution and subsequent imprisonment, he focused intensely on the figure of Christ and on the New Testament, the only book allowed in prison.^[126] In a January 1854 letter to the woman who had sent him the New Testament, Dostoyevsky wrote that he was a "child of unbelief and doubt up to this moment, and I am certain that I shall remain so to the grave." He also wrote that "even if someone were to prove to me that the truth lay outside Christ, I should choose to remain with Christ rather than with the truth."
• In Semipalatinsk, Dostoyevsky revived his faith by looking frequently at the stars. Wrangel said that he was "rather pious, but did not often go to church, and disliked priests, especially the Siberian ones. But he spoke about Christ ecstatically."
• From an analysis of religious perspectives in Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov, James Townsend concludes that Dostoyevsky held orthodox Christian beliefs except for his view of salvation from sin. According to Townsend, "Dostoevsky almost seemed to embrace an in-this-life purgatory," in which people suffer to atone from their sins, in contrast with the Christian doctrine of salvation through Christ.^[133] Malcolm V. Jones has found elements of Islam and Buddhism in Dostoyevsky's religious convictions.

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• So, I myself hate those company people — salarymen, businesspeople. But after those interviews, I had some compassion for them. Honestly, I don’t know why they are working so hard. Some of them got up at 5:30 in the morning to commute to the center of Tokyo. It takes more than two hours by train, all of it packed like this [hunches]. You can’t even read a book. But they are doing that for 30 or 40 years. That’s incredible to me. They come home at 10 p.m. and their kids are sleeping. The only day they see their children is Sunday. It’s horrible. But they don’t complain. So I asked them why not and they said it’s no use. It’s what all the people are doing, so there’s no reason to complain.

• You say that imagination is very important in your works. Sometimes your novels are very realistic, and then sometimes they get very … metaphysical.

  I write weird stories. I don’t know why I like weirdness so much. Myself, I’m a very realistic person. I don’t trust anything New Age — or reincarnation, dreams, Tarot, horoscopes. I don’t trust anything like that at all. I wake up at 6 in the morning and go to bed at 10, jogging every day and swimming, eating healthy food. I’m very realistic. But when I write, I write weird. That’s very strange. When I’m getting more and more serious, I’m getting more and more weird. When I want to write about the reality of society and the world, it gets weird. Many people ask me why, and I can’t answer that. But I recognized when I was interviewing those 63 ordinary people — they were very straightforward, very simple, very ordinary, but their stories were sometimes very weird. That was interesting.

• Did you ever sit in the bottom of a dry well, like your hero, Toru?

  No. But I’ve always been attracted by wells, very much. Every time I see one, I go over and look in.

  Do you think you’ll go down one some day?

  No, no.

  Too scared?

  Too scared. I read some writings by people who dropped down wells. One story, by Raymond Carver, was about a boy who dropped into a well and spent a day at the bottom. It’s a good story.

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