Fyodor Dostoyevsky Research Paper

Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Life of a Criminal Author

No matter what background someone has, every person comes in contact with traumatic events, like death or family issues, at one point in their life. One such man who made it through these moments virtually unscathed and even came to express his thoughts on them in his own art form is Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Accentuating what traits make humans who they are, Dostoyevsky illustrated realistic societies much like the one during his life with disturbing realism. In his death and beyond, Dostoyevsky’s grim ideas of humanity’s fallacies as a whole have not faded in the slightest in his literature. The life of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, though tragic and dour, created an experience that nurtured his thoughts

One such influence came in the rule of the czar Nicholas the First, who Dostoyevsky thoroughly abhorred. Fyodor’s problems with the ruler came to a head when he had his own literal crime and punishment for resisting Nicholas the First’s reign (Frank). During his time in prison, Fyodor met prisoners with stories of their own, and he found these stories influential in his own writing later on (Aliprandini). While writing, Dostoyevsky would write down what problems he had in his own prose, filling notebooks upon notebooks with his issues. These books came to be very helpful to Dostoyevsky, as his toughest writer’s blocks came to be his greatest stories most of the time (Kashdan). As he progressed, Fyodor became more “republican” in his literary and social views, a hard left from what his typical writing fare contained. For example, Crime and Punishment was heavily influenced by his views that criminals deserve to be punished. From prison to his own political views, Dostoyevsky’s outlook on writing changed many times throughout his life due to the surroundings he had

For example, his prison time thoroughly inspired him to write about other criminals (Aliprandini). The event that began his creative flow, though, was a murder by college students at the time of the book’s writing. This led Dostoyevsky to write about a murder he had thought of via the actual murder (Garnett). The main character in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, is described as a very immoral man in the story. This description of him goes as far as to describe his current condition of life, and how horribly grotesque his normal days are (Garnett). It also mirrors the condition the students could have been in after the murders, so it fits quite well. The main theme of the book centers around what happens after all of the aforementioned psychological trauma, which is about the murder of two people in the story. This murder, continued in Dostoyevsky’s eyes, sees the main character dealing with his own demons and memories of the killing. Seeming as if he could be just as fitting in the real world, Raskolnikov’s moral ambiguity leaves the reader open to decide what his fate should be, leaving the reader in confusion at some points. This plot element thoroughly describes the theme of psychology affecting the criminal mind. Therefore, the theme of Crime and Punishment is fitting to what Dostoyevsky had around him at the