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In 1849, Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to death. He had been involved in the Petrashevsky Circle, an intellectual group that believed in social revolution, and he had been found out. It was a dangerous initiative to participate in, and with group-led activities that included reading forbidden works and discussing dangerous concepts, it was only a matter of time before the consequences would catch up to him. On December 22nd of that year, Dostoevsky stood before the firing squad, waiting for death. He had been convicted of promoting letters that contained unsavory comments about the Russian government and the Orthodox Church, and the cost would be his life. At the last moment, his sentence was reduced to four years of exile and hard labor at a Siberian camp. His life had been spared, and the world has benefited greatly from it.
Had Dostoevsky died that day, his most influential works would never have been revealed to the public. He never would have conjured up the idea for The Brothers Karamazov or Crime and Punishment; He never would have sat down to write Notes from Underground or The Idiot. His mark on literature would have been erased, with the world having lost out on the man who is, as Virginia Woolf once deemed him, “…the greatest writer ever born.”
In this article, we’re going to delve into everything there is to know about Dostoevsky’s incredible life experiences, influential works, and most notable pieces of writing advice.
Writing Under Pressure
There are generally two types of writers: the plotters and the pantsers. Plotters don’t start writing until they’ve got an outline so detailed it feels like the book has already been written! The map for their fantasy world has been drawn and the profiles for each character have been created before they even start to write the first chapter. Pantsers start writing as soon as the seed of an idea enters their mind. Their world isn’t fully fleshed out, and they may only have a handling of a couple of characters, but they’ve already set off on the page. Dostoevsky generally fell into the former of the two categories, having honed a reputation for producing philosophically complex stories that required quite a bit of preparation to produce, but there was one novel of his that proved the exception.
In 1865, Ivan Turgenev, the author of Fathers and Sons, received a letter from Dostoevsky that read in part, “I have lost everything already, just everything, including my watch….what can you do when you are drowning?” This was the state Dostoevsky was in when he picked up a pen and signed a contract that can be deemed as nothing less than predatory. At the time, Dostoevsky was struggling heavily after losses from his constant gambling and from taking on his late brother’s debts. It was with these financial burdens in mind that he signed a publishing contract with Fedor Stellovsky, promising Stellovsky that, if he did not provide him with a novel within a year, he would own the rights to publish all of Dostoevsky’s work without charge for nine years. Dostoevsky would later write that, “The thought of Stellovsky torments and disturbs me; it pursues me even in my dreams.” Even so, he continued to gamble frivolously and put off all work on his contracted novel until a month before his deadline, when he began frantically working on what would later become The Gambler.
The writing community is no stranger to challenges that largely mimic what Dostoevsky himself went through, with its notable being NaNoWriMo, but writers remain largely divided on whether this method works for them. There are those who can keep pace with the goal of writing 50,000 words and completing their novel in just one month, and there are those who prefer a slow and steady drafting style. Dostoevsky, however, could do it all! This might be your sign to step outside of your comfort zone and experiment with a writing challenge you’ve been thinking about!
Back to the Basics
From 1865 to 1880, Dostoevsky produced Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, The Adolescent, A Writer’s Diary, and Brothers Karamazov—more work than at any other point in his life. During this time, he wrote a combined 500 pages of notes before drafting his novels, with these notes often found in the margins of books and in letters he would seal in envelopes and address to himself. Dostoevsky’s handwriting would go from barely legible scratches to beautiful bouts of calligraphy all in a single page. These pages were frequently filled with eerie sketches of stern faces and Gothic architecture, with his drawings often impressively rich in detail and formal technique. His notes were roughly scattered across each page, with so much clutter that deciphering any sort of planned structure for his novels has proven almost impossible!
Nowadays, it’s less and less common to handwrite notes, or even entire drafts, when working on a novel. Even so, incorporating the act of writing by hand into your routine might yield some surprising benefits! If you knew with certainty that you would always be able to recover the early versions of your handwritten work, with no worries about technological glitches and shutdowns, you might be more comfortable with making revisions. Old-school writers are able to see every correction they make on the pages themselves, with some text crossed out with red ink and other text added in with arrows and circles. Writing by hand also allows for notes in the margins and sketches throughout the page, both of which Dostoevsky heavily relied upon, which might help spark your creativity in dire moments of writer’s block!
Dostoevsky has written that, “The greatest ability of a writer is to be able to cross out. One who knows how to do that and who can eliminate can go far. All the great writers wrote extremely briefly. And most importantly—do not repeat what has already been said or what is known by everyone.” The most talented writers are the ones who can cut what needs to be cut and still preserve their unique style of writing, the ones who can cut what needs to be cut and still hold onto things that others may deem unnecessary, but that they deem most necessary indeed.
Creativity is Intuitive
Dostoevsky has written that, “Creativity…is an integral, organic property of human nature…. It is a necessary accessory of the human spirit. It is just as legitimate in a human being like two hands, two legs, or a stomach. It is inseparable from a human being and is part of a human being.” To lack creativity is to lack the thing that propels us to tackle new challenges, confront difficult situations, and persevere through the good and the bad. Writing is an essential outlet for displaying and exploring our creativity, offering us an endless, boundless form of expressing ourselves and, in turn, connecting with those around us.
Human suffering, one of the larger themes within Dostoevsky’s novels along with freedom, wealth, and nihilism, was often used to explore the limits of the human mind. Dostoevsky himself suffered a great deal during his lifetime, but he also amounted to great things in part because of all that he suffered, and he often embedded flaws in his characters that would lead them directly to the path of suffering. In Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground, this is made especially clear, with the Underground Man having a multitude of character flaws that lead him down a difficult life path. Virginia Woolf once described Dostoevsky’s novels as, “…seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts that hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture.” Dostoevsky’s writing connects to an integral aspect of the human experience, something that readers from all walks of life can connect to and learn from. Most everyone who has read Dostoevsky can relate to the powerful experience recounted by Woolf, the kind of experience that tells us exactly why readers turn to Dostoevsky time and time again to learn.
Conclusion
Dostoevsky was nothing short of a genius. He was brave in his questioning of what exactly it means to be human, and he was masterful in his written exploration of the answer. His work has been hailed as revolutionary, with Notes from Underground recognized as the first piece of existentialist literature and Crime and Punishment known to be a work unlike any we’ve seen before or since. It’s clear that Dostoevsky has been cemented in history as one of the most incredible writers our world has ever known.
We hope you’ve learned some new and interesting information about Dostoevsky’s legacy and the writing methods that worked for him. If you’re still craving more, this is your sign to start reading that one novel of Dostoevsky’s that’s been sitting in your TBR pile for far too long. So much of Dostoevsky’s genius can’t be conveyed solely through learning about his legacy; only through reading his work can you fully understand the power of his rare gift. Trust us— the time and energy it takes to read one of his intimidating works is always worth what you serve to gain! For more information on reaching your full potential as a creative, check out our blog post, “The Search for Creativity; How to Lure in Your Creative Genius” and gain new inspiration to write!