Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others."Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky lived an extremely grim life which was due, in much part, to his dark childhood with a violent, alcoholic father. The family lived in one of the most dreadful areas of 19th century Moscow and Fyodor would often sneak out of the house and spend time listening to the stories of the impoverished, suffering patients who lived in a nearby hospital. He suffered an epileptic seizure at the age of nine and then his mother died of tuberculosis when he was only 16. His father finally died two years later when Fyodor was 18.

At the end of his painful life, Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamozov, which was hailed by Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud as “The most magnificent novel ever written". Freud published a famous paper entitled “Dostoevsky and Parricide” wherein he famously argued that Dostoevsky’s novel illustrated how his epilepsy was not a natural condition but a physical manifestation of the author's Oedipal guilt over having wished for his own father's death.

Dostoevsky was said to have suffered fits of epilepsy immediately after profound moments of joy and Freud argued that this was the result of a hidden guilt which manifested in the form of seizures. A friend, Fyodor Mikhailovich had noted the following;

...before the onset of an attack there were minutes in which he [Dostoevsky] was in rapture. ‘For several moments,’ he said, ‘I would experience such joy as would be inconceivable in ordinary life; such joy that no one else could have any notion of. I would feel the most complete harmony in myself and in the whole world and this feeling was so strong and sweet that for a few seconds of such bliss I would give ten or more years of my life, even my whole life perhaps.

The Brothers Karamazov is said to operate on two levels. On the surface, it is a story of a parricide, or the killing of a relative, but on a deeper level, it is a spiritual drama of the moral struggles colored by athiesm, love, free will and the afterlife. James Joyce noted,

...though [Dostoevsky’s] characters do act extravagantly, madly, almost, still their basis is firm enough underneath...Madness you may call it, but therein may be the secret of his genius... I prefer the word exaltation, exaltation which can merge into madness, perhaps. In fact all great men have had that vein in them; it was the source of their greatness; the reasonable man achieves nothing.


References

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, (2002),The Brothers Karamazov, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, (2003), The Idiot, Vintage
Einstein, Albert, The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 9 The Berlin Years: Correspondence, January 1919 - April 1920, Princeton University Press
Freud, Sigmund, (1997), Writings on Art and Literature, Stanford University Press
Power, Arthur, (2000), Conversations With James Joyce, Lilliput Press, pg. 58-60