Fyodor Dostoevsky Books In Order

Publication Order of Fyodor Dostoyevsky Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Fyodor Dostoyevsky Short Story Collections

Publication Order of Writer's Diary Books

Publication Order of Fyodor Dostoyevsky Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Alexander Pushkin Collections

Publication Order of The Brothers Karamazov Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Regarded as one of the finest novelists to ever live, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was also renowned for his activities as a journalist. The Russian novelist was well-known in his country during his life. He has since been praised all around the world as a writer and is best known for writing novels which had a great understanding of psychology (study of how the human-mind works), in particular the psychology of people who, after losing their reason, would commit murder or become insane. Existentialism, literary modernism, and various schools of theology, psychology, and literary criticism were profoundly shaped by his ideas.
Fyodor Mikhailevich Dostoevsky, Russia’s greatest novelist, was born in Moscow’s Hospital for the Poor on 30th October, 1821, as the second of 7 children of Maria Dostoevsky and Mikhail Andreevich. His parents had remarkably different characters. His family being very religious, made Dostoevsky lead a deeply religious life. His father, an army doctor, was a member of the Russian nobility and owned serfs and owned a considerable estate near Moscow wherein he lived together with his family. He started reading books widely when he was a youth. Dostoevsky was first educated by his father, mother, and tutors, but at thirteen years old Dostoevsky was sent to a private school. 2 years later his mother died and his father, a cruel man, got murdered in 1839, when Dostoevsky was 18 and attending school in St. Petersburg, Russia. Dostoevsky’s father was a stern and ‘self’ righteous man who held his second son to rigorous standards. On ther other hand, Dostoevsky’s mother was the opposite – generous, kind and passive – and who provided unconditional love to her son. That tension – between forgiving love and harsh judgment – would be Dostoevsky’s life’s theme, which recurred throughout his major works. This fact accounts possibly for Dostoevsky’s often filling his remarkable novels with characters who seem to have opposite extremes of character.

He was educated at home and then at a private school in Moscow with Mikhail, his older brother. In 1837, shortly following the death of his mother, Dostoevsky was sent to St. Petersburg, where he was admitted to the Army Engineering College. Dostoevsky’s father died in 1839 probably of apoplexy although there were strong rumors that he could have been murdered by his own serfs. In 1843, Dostoevsky graduated as a military engineer, although he resigned in 1844 so as to devote himself to writing. He preferred a writing career to being mired in-the bureaucratic Russian military. Poor Folk, his first original published work, appeared in 1846. It was a widely-acclaimed short novel that was championed by Vissarion Belinsky, the influential critic. This was then followed by The Double, a work that depicted a man who got haunted by a look- alike who eventually usurps his position.

Dostoevsky experienced traumatic events, including a harrowing near-mock execution and exile. His terrible years of imprisonment made an-indelible impression on him and converted him to a life-long intense spirituality. Such beliefs formed the basis for his amazing novels. His work have explored the human condition and he’s credited with shaping existentialism. He often complained that writing to beat a deadline could prevent him from attaining his full literary powers. However, it’s equally possible that his frenzied composition style lent his novels an vitality and energy that have remained part of their appeal. Dostoyevsky explored the lives of “accidental-families” and of “the humiliated and the insulted,” contrary to writers from the-nobility who often described the family-life of their own class as shaped by stable traditions and “beautiful forms.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky died on 28th January, 1881, of complications that were related to his epilepsy. Thirty to forty thousand people followed his coffin at the funeral procession held in St. Petersburg.

Notes from the Underground (1864; Zapiski iz podpolya ), Dostoyevsky’s early published novella, is one of his most philosophical books. It established his reputation as the most challenging and innovative writer of fiction in his generation. The title could mislead unwary readers. The “underground” isn’t a 20th century underground of counter-culture and political resistance; indeed you could translate this title better as something as “Notes from Under the Floorboards”. It’s a dark, satirical defence of the central significance of human identity and the freedom of the will. The novel touches upon existential dilemmas, conducting an open polemics with the contemporary Western philosophy. Dostoevsky, characteristically, makes us understand that if we believe liberty is inseparably connected with human dignity, we’re also giving room to the arbitrary self assertion of the obsessive.

The underground man of this novella suffers what was later known as ‘the disease of the century’ – inactivity, or ineptitude emerging from his mental and physical pain besides the sensation that progress isn’t worth any effort. That notion was later explored by several writers, such as Italo Svevo or Jean-Paul Sartre. The first part is triggered by the optimistic social-radicalism of the day, which is a radicalism that Dostoevsky shared as a younger man (which led to his exile in Siberia). It assumed that humanity would naturally turn to the good once freed from political and religious tyranny; this a society of enlightened self-interest and rational mutual service would evolve as a matter of course. In the first part of the book, an unnamed first- person narrator delivers a smart attack on a set of beliefs that are shared by both radicals and liberals: that it’s possible to discover the laws of personal psychology, that human beings as a result have no free choice, that history gets governed by laws, and that it’s very possible to design a utopian society on the basis of the human nature and laws of society. Even if such kind of a society could be built, the protagonist argues, people would loathe it just because it defined them as utterly predictable and denied them caprice.

The second part of the novella illustrates all this with an account, which is both funny and devastating. In the second part of the novella, the anti-hero recalls incidents from his past, which reveal him behaving, in answer to determinism, in line with sheer spite. The underground-man’s receives social humiliation and in turn attempts to avenge himself by abusing and insulting a teenage prostitute. And as he sends the prostitute away he reflects, again with self- disgust, that he has offered her something precious – a humiliation experience that would at least save her from self-dramatising and illusion.

Dostoyevsky thus makes it crystal clear that the protagonist’s irrationalist solution is no better-than the systems by rationalists. Notes from the Underground also parodied Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s utopian-fiction What Is to Be Done? (1863), which is viwed as the bible of the radicals. Dostoevsky does not do happy endings, and the novella concludes with the acid response that the underground man wrote muchmore in the same vein, although this looks “a good place to stop” – a veiledecho of the end of St John’s New Testament Gospel, which says that the world couldn’t contain all the books that could-be written about the acts of Jesus, although this should be adequate to make the reader believe.

Crime and Punishment is probably the novel that Dostoyevsky is most famous for, yet he only took a short-while to write it. It was initially being published in chapters inside the monthly ‘The Russian Messenger’, since Dostoyevsky was struggling to remit his gambling debts. Published in 1866, Crime and Punishment is a classic for a reason. It’s perhaps appealing on different levels as it explores the notions of crime & redemption through suffering like no-other literary work. The novella can be read as a serious & complex work of art, although it can also be enjoyed as one gripping detective story. It explores a philosophical idea of being more valuable and capable than others, thereby deciding who deserves to dwell in a God-like manner, could have dangerous consequences. The novella is concerned with the heinous murder of an old woman by one young intellectual, Raskolnikov. He’s willing to gamble on ideas and commits robbery in an attempt to aide his family and his own career. The crime takes place at the very beginning of the book, and the rest of the novel has to do with the pursuit of the student by the detective Porfiry and also by his very own conscience. Raskolnikov unaccountably finds himself gripped by “mystic-terror” and a very horrible sense of isolation.Eventually, he gives himself up and the chooses to accept the punishment for his act.