Biography 

Ancestry: 

Fyodor Dostoevsky was born from two people from Russian noble families and both of his parents were Russian Orthodox Christian's. The families roots trace back towards the Lithuanian Boyar Danilo Irtishch, who was said to have lived in the late 15th century and in the early 16th century. The man was granted lands and owned lands in the region of Pinsk, (which mostly used to be under the rule of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, but is now in modern Belarus). The lands were given to him from a local prince at the time, and then eventually Danilo's children claimed the name Dostoevsky from the local town near by, which had the name of Dostoïevo. The immediate ancestry of Fyodor Dostoevsky's mother was a line of merchants and on the other side his father's ancestors were a line of priests. 

In the year 1809, the then 20-year-old Mikhail Dostoevsky, (his father), enrolled in the "Moscow's Imperial Medical-Surgery academy". From there he was assigned to a Moscow hospitable, where he ended up serving as a military doctor, and then in 1818 he was appointed as a senior physician. The following year he married Dostoevsky's mother, (Maria Nechayeva), and then the year after that he took up a post in the Mariinsky hospitable for the poor. Then in 1828 when his sons, Fyodor and Mikhail were 7 and 8, he was promoted to a collegiate assessor. Which in taking this job he was raised to a high level of nobility in his legal status, which meant that he could buy a property of small size in a town called Darovoye, about 150km off of the main city of Moscow, (which is 100 miles, or in the old Russian unit of measurement it was about 140 Versts.) Where his family used to spend the summer in their Dacha. 

Dostoevsky's parents had six more children: Varvara (1822–1892), Andrei (1825–1897), Lyubov, meaning Love in Russian. (born and died 1829), Vera (1829–1896), Nikolai (1831–1883) and Aleksandra (1835–1889). 

His Brothers & Children: 

Mikhail: Mikail Dostoevsky was Fyodor's elder brother, only being one year older than him. Because of their close age they spent lots of their childhood time together. Mikhail Dostoevsky was born on 25 November 1820 in Moscow just before his brother the next year. The family of the Dostoevsky's was rather keen on writing, and Mikhail had his own career as a writer separate from Dostoevsky's own career. He began to write poetry at the age of nine and was rather fond of it. In 1834 he was sent to the boarding school of L. Chermak. His father then took him and his brother over to St Petersburg when they were older. He intended to enter a academy of engineering, but was subsequently rejected because of a medical examination that revealed he had tuberculous. In 1842 he married the woman to be his wife Emily von Ditmar, with whom he had two sons, Fyodor and Mikhail, and three daughters, Catherine, Maria and Varvara. In 1849 he was arrested, along with his brother, because of his connections to the literary group and political group called the Petrashevsky circle. In the year of 1861 he started his magazine called the time, or in Russian "Время". Mikhail's desire in the creation of this article was to establish an article that can be enjoyed and viewed by people of all nobility and wanted the article to be completely independent to anyone acting as a superior. At the same time he wanted it to appeal to mostly the common folk as a source of inspiration and hope for them, free from censorship, (which was rampant in Russia).   

The article became a very popular one in the early 1860s, with the amount of subscribers coming to about 4000. Officially the publisher and editing job belonged to Mikhail, but it was often taken on by his brother Fyodor instead. The magazine was eventually banned in consequence of an article being wrote about it. On 19 July 1864, under the strain of financial obligations arising with the magazine, and suffering from a terrible  liver ailment that left him unable to function properly, Mikhail collapsed after hearing that an important article was rejected by the censorship. He then died three days later at the age of forty three.

Dostoevsky and his brother were best friends their entire life's and Fyodor recalled his brother as being, hard working, a lover of European languages, and a harsh critic of his own writing, which is why he eventually gave up writing his novels and instead wrote more official writings, albeit having many novels under his name that he had wrote. 

Andrey Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky: Andrey Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was Fyodor's younger brother and he was the youngest brother in his family. Andrey was mainly an architect, memoirist, engineer, and building restorer. His son was a famous histologist. He was not as close to Fyodor as Fyodor was close to his other elder brother Mikhail, but yet they still maintained a close relationship together and even saw each other frequently at some times. Andrey was not apart of the infamous Petrashevsky literary group, but his other brothers were, and he was arrested because the police thought that he was his brother Mikhail, but he was soon released. He lived between March 27, 1825 – March 19, 1897... 

Lyubov: Lyubov Fyodorovna Dostoevskaya (Russian: Любо́вь Фёдоровна Достое́вская) was the second of Fyodor Dostoevsky, with his first daughter Sonya dying within six months of being born, with the cause of death being Pneumonia. She was a writer and a memoirist.  Lyubov Fyodorovna Dostoevskaya never married her whole life and in her life she eventually became estranged from her mother and moved out of their house. She died in Italy of pernicious anemia. 

When she died, which happened to be in Italy, her funerals rite was catholic by mistake, instead of being an orthodox Christian one. In the month of December in 1931 a grand pedestal was made for her grave with an epitaph written by the editor of Venezia Tridentina magazine. The original grave was persevered in Italy after the reconstruction of the graveyard, but her tomb was moved to the Bolzano city's cemetery in 1957. 

What Lyubov Dostoevsky was known for was her book she wrote about her father called "Dostoyevsky as Portrayed by His Daughter" which was meant to be the truth about her father as portrayed by his daughter, but the book actually contained many factual fallacies, because at the time she was only eleven when her father died, and many of the stories she heard about him were from her mother. The book is considered a work of subjective nature and not factual. She lived from 14 September 1869 – 10 November 1926. 

His Childhood: 

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born on the eleventh of November 1821 in Moscow during the Russian empire and was the second middle child to his parents. He was raised when he was younger in the hospitable family home that his father had worked at, which was the hospitable for the poor and was on the poor outskirts of Moscow. As a young boy he used to encounter the lower class patients who were very sick while he played in the hospitable garden. Dostoevsky was introduced to literature by his parents from a very young age, and when he was three his nanny used to read him lots of books about heroic stories, folk stories, fairy tales, the maid who introduced him to stories was maybe one of the most important figures in life for his love of literature. His parents had started to introduce to him a very large range of literature from his early days. Which included many Russian writers such as, Pushkin, Karamzin, Derzhavin and many more. And some other writers that consisted of Add Radcliffe, (who was a supernatural Gothic writer), Goethe the German writer, Schiller who was also a German writer, and Homer the ancient Greek writer. Dostoevsky was heavily influenced by the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. Although many people say that his fathers education of his child Dostoevsky could be described as very harsh and strict, Dostoevsky in his own words said that at night time when he would have stories read to him his imagination would come wild and nothing else would matter to him. Many of his childhood traumas and experiences have been found reflected in his writings in many ways. One of these experiences was when he witnessed a nine-year-old girl getting raped by a drunk, in which he was told to go and find his father to attend to the girl. This incident completely haunted him and the theme of the old drunk man with a desire for a young girl is found in many of his books, including Crime and Punishment, the Brother Karamazov, and Demons. Another incident that had haunted him in his childhood was when he had thought he had heard a wolf howl and went crying and asking for help from one of the house serfs called Marey, (which was in the very short story called "The Peasant Marey").  His parents often described him when he was a child as being rather cheeky, stubborn, and hotheaded, albeit he had a very frail psychical build and was described as "delicate". In the Year of 1833, when Dostoevsky was only twelve years old, his extremely religious father sent him to a French boarding school and learnt to speak French while he was there. He was described by the other students as being very shy, dreamy, and rather romantic and over excited. To pay for the expensive fees for his boarding school, his father had to take out loans, and borrow money from others while working more hours. Dostoevsky felt very out of place with his aristocratic classmates and this can be clearly seen in the book "The Adolescent" that he wrote.   

Youth Years: 

When Fyodor was at the young age of 14, on the 27th of September 1837, his mother sadly died by tuberculous. The may before this happened the brothers were all sent into St Petersburg to attend the free "Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute", (which still exists and was made when Alexander the First was still the Tsar of Russia all the way back in 1810.) Attending this school meant that they had to abandon all of their academic studies and normal lives so that they could pursue a military career, this of course was the parents idea. Dostoevsky eventually entered the academy in the first month of the year after his mothers death in 1838, and at this point he was 15 years old. His Brother Mikhail was in the process of being admitted to the school but was refused on health grounds, because he had tuberculous, but was sent to another academy in Reval, (which is now Tallin Estonia). Dostoevsky hated the university with a passion, the main reason being that he have any interest in mathematics, science, and military engineering, because his interests were mainly drawing and architecture. Dostoevsky's interests and hobbies made him an outsider in comparison to his other 120 class mates. His character traits showed in the university were, an interest in protecting newcomers, a liking of his teachers and interacting with them, speaking out against corruption among his officers, and showing a strong sense of justice. His friend Konstantin Trutovsky once said that: "There was no student in the entire institution with less of a military bearing than F.M. Dostoevsky. He moved clumsily and jerkily; his uniform hung awkwardly on him; and his knapsack, shako and rifle all looked like some sort of fetter he had been forced to wear for a time and which lay heavily on him." 

Although he was rather secluded from his peers and was described to be completely off in his own world, he was respected by his peers greatly. Fyodor's reclusive nature and his hermit like disposition, combined with his keen interest in Religion, earned him the nick name among his peers of "Monk Phoutius", (who was hermit Greek Orthodox Archbishop of Constantinople.) Signs of the epilepsy Dostoevsky would later develop, first originated from when his father, Mikhail, died in 1839 on the 16th of June, when he was just sixteen. But keep in mind that many of the reports of his seizures were documented by his daughter, which are now considered unreliable accounts of his life. The official cause of death for his father was an apoplectic stroke, (which is a stroke one has when their internal organs rupture), although their neighbor rumored that he did not die by a stroke and was in fact murdered by one of his serfs, and actually accused one of the serfs of the murder. If the serfs had been convicted they would of all been sent to Siberian Exile, but if that happened the neighbor would of been in a position to but the land that was left over from Mikhail. Although all of the serfs were acquitted from their crimes, his brother Mikhail rumored that there really was a murder and spread that rumor around more. Dostoevsky, after fathers death continued his studies at the military university and passed all of his exams and then finally obtained the rank of Cadet engineer, so he was allowed to live away from the university. He then visited his brother in Tallinn and frequently attended many operas, plays, ballets, and concerts. Also I will note at this time that his friends had introduced him to gambling, (Which would eventually take over his life for a small period). In 1843 on the 12th of august Dostoevsky took a job a lieutenant engineer, and lived in an apartment with his friend, which was owned by his brother Mikhail's friend, Rizenkampf, who described him as the following: "no less good-natured and no less courteous than his brother, but when not in a good mood he often looked at everything through dark glasses, became vexed, forgot good manners, and sometimes was carried away to the point of abusiveness and loss of self-awareness". He translated many books and articles from French to make some money such as translation of Honoré de Balzac's novel Eugénie Grandet, was published in June and July 1843 in the 6th and 7th volumes of the journal Repertoire and Pantheon. However all of the translations he were doing lead to nothing financially speaking, which lead him to write his first novel. 

The Start of His Career: 

In the May of 1845, Dostoevsky finished his first novel called "Poor folk". His friend and roommate at the time Dmitry Grigorovich, took the small novel over to the poet Nikolay Nekrasov, who in turn took the novel all the way over to the Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, who also called the novel the first "Social Novel". Poor folk was released on the 15th of January 1846 in the St Petersburg collection almanac, and very quicky it was loved by many people, and also became a commercial success. As all of his newly literary success was coming over him, he realized that the military career he still had would weigh him down, and so Dostoevsky resigned his post in a letter, and soon after he wrote his second novel called "the Double, which first appeared in the Russian literary magazine called "Notes from the Fatherland". At this point in time Dostoevsky discovered Socialism through many thinkers and writers such as, Marx, Fourier, Cabet, Proudhon, and Saint-Simon. And through his relationship with Belinsky the Literary Critic, he discovered much about the Socialism Philosophy and ideology. He was intrigued by its seemingly flawless logic and system, its emphasize on the working class, and its justice for all people and the disadvantaged. Although, his interest in Socialism was conflicted with strong Orthodox Beliefs, and Religious convictions, which was contrary to Belinsky's atheistic, Rational, scientific, utilitarianism beliefs, which led towards their relationship getting strained, and them eventually parting ways. Shortly after the parting of ways with his old friend Belinsky, his novel "the Double" had gotten lots of bad reviews and criticism, with one bad review coming Belinsky himself. All of this criticism around his novel soon led his seizures to intensify and make themselves more apparent, although as this was all happening he still kept writing. In a period of two years between 1846 and 1848 he published many short stories in the magazine Notes of the Fatherland, including "Mr. Prokharchin", "The Landlady", "A Weak Heart", and "White Nights".  These stories also received a large amount of criticism at the time, and this led to his health declining as well and his financial situation diminishing. Although, alot of his troubles were lifted after he happened to join his first socialist group called the Betekov circle, which was a socialist group built on helping the other members in order to survive and it helped him survive. But when the circle broke up, Dostoevsky befriended the romantic poet Apollon Maykov and his brother Valerian, who was associated with the new group he was about to join. In the year of 1846, from the recommendation of a poet called Aleksey Pleshcheyev, he joined the infamous Socialist group called the Petrashevsky circle, which was founded by the man called Mikhail Petrashevsky, which was someone who asked for and proposed social changes in Russian culture. A man called Mikhail Bakunin, who was a Russian revolutionary anarchist, once wrote a letter to Socialist thinker Alexander Herzen saying that the group was, in his own words: "The most innocent and harmless company" and he described the members as being: "Systematic opponents of all revolutionary goals and means", and keep in mind that this was all said by a Anarchist, so it really puts it all into perspective. The only connection Dostoevsky really had to the circle was that on the weekends he would use their libraries, and he would sometimes participate in the conversation when it was about the removal of censorship and the abolition of Serfdom. However the quote from the Anarchist Mikhail  was only true to a certain degree because one person in the group wanted to make a revolutionary society from within the group and pick its members.  This ended up happening and then Dostoevsky ended up joining it and was aware of the group means and ideas, although he had many doubts about it and their goals. In the year of 1849, Dostoevsky had finished many parts of one of novels called Netochka Nezvanova, but this was abandoned soon after because of his arrest. He never completed it. 

His Exile to Siberia: 

The members of the Petrashevsky Circle were denounced to Ivan Petrovich Liprandi, an official at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and a secret agent. Dostoevsky was accused of reading works by Belinsky, including the banned Letter to Gogol, and also circulating other banned media and such. The government agent who had reported the group, wrote in his statement that the novels and papers were trying to criticize Russian Tsarism and Russian Orthodoxy. Dostoevsky responded to these charges with the statement of: "as a literary monument, neither more nor less" and he spoke of "personality and human egoism" rather than of politics of the Russian Empire. Even though he claimed all of this he was still arrested along with all of his conspirators. On the 23rd of December 1849 and all were sentenced to the firing squad and the other members were sent to a prison in St Petersburg, and all of this was done by the Request of the Tsar Nicolas I because he feared there would be another revolution like the one in 1825 and the one in France. The members were taken to the Semyonov place in St Petersburg and were tied up and awaited their deaths. Although when they were all about to have their life's taken away, a cart drove in a stopped the execution with a letter from the Tsar.  Dostoevsky later described the experience of what he believed to be the last moments of his life in his novel The Idiot. This novel has a section where the main character narrates an execution he saw with his own eyes and Dostoevsky describes the amount of Physical and mental damage something like that would do to a person. This experience is also reflected in the court section of The Brothers Karamazov where I used as a example for a Philosophical exercise in my Reading response. Dostoevsky served four years of exile with hard labour at a katorga prison camp in Omsk, Siberia, followed by a term of compulsory military service. After a fourteen-day sleigh ride, the prisoners reached Tobolsk, a prisoner way station.  Although the situation was very dire, Dostoevsky consoled most of his prisoner friends, and even convinced one of the former members not to kill themselves and to push on. When they arrived at Tobolsk, revolutionary women gave the men clothes and food and copies of the Russian New Testament, with a gift of ten roubles inside each one. And eleven days later, Dostoevsky reached the labour camp in Omsk with only one other member from the circle, that being the writer Sergei Durov; Dostoevsky described the barracks that the writer was housed in as being the following:

"In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall ... We were packed like herrings in a barrel ... There was no room to turn around. From dusk to dawn it was impossible not to behave like pigs ... Fleas, lice, and black beetles by the bushel." 

Dostoevsky was classified as the "most dangerous criminal" and in consequence, he was chained up by the hands and the feet before he was released. He said  in the introduction to this third installment of his five-volume study of the writer's life, work and times, in Siberia Dostoyevsky came to see ''how much strength the human personality possesses to create the conditions under which it can survive amidst the worst adversity.''  In addition to his seizures, he had also hemorrhoids with his epilepsy , lost weight and was "burned by some fever, trembling and feeling too hot or too cold every night". The only thing that Dostoevsky was permitted to do was read his Bible. The smell in the building spread everywhere and in the novel where he describes the experience of being in the camp, there is a scene where he describes how the one bath would have to be shared by two hundred people at the same time when they wanted to shower and clean themselves. He described that many prisoners would pretend to be sick to go to the hospitable in the prison, and when he was sent there he read newspapers and read Dickens novels.  The prisoners had a general respect for him, although many of the Polish prisoners did not because of his anti-Polish Sentiments. He was released on the 14th of February 1854. and required to serve in the Siberian Regiment. 

His sentence was meant to much longer but he only got four years in exile, before being released. 

After Prison: 

Dostoevsky had his brother Mikhail help him financially while he was in his military service and he asked to be sent lots of reading material such as, Hegel, Kant, and other German philosophers. He then set out to write a book about his experience in prisons and other peoples experiences in the corrupt system of the Russian empire. The novel was published in his brothers article Vremya, (time), in 1861. The book had to be written from the perspective of a murderer instead of the perspective of a political prisoner to avoid censorship and getting arrested. And at this time it was the first novel ever written about the Russian prison experience. Dostoevsky ended up serving time in the mandatory military service, and in the place where he stayed at, a Cossacks cabin he met a certain Alexander Wrangler who was a fond admirer of all of his books at the time and was even a witness to all of the fake execution that happened. Wrangler described him as: 

"Looked morose. His sickly, pale face was covered with freckles, and his blond hair was cut short. He was a little over average height and looked at me intensely with his sharp, grey-blue eyes. It was as if he were trying to look into my soul and discover what kind of man I was". 

Dostoevsky spent the following five years as a private (and later lieutenant) in the Regiment's Seventh Line Battalion, stationed at the fortress of Semipalatinsk, now in Kazakhstan. While there he started to tutor many school children and in doing so he started to get into relations with the upper class. Consequently, he began a relationship with Maria Dmitrievna Isayeva, the wife of an acquaintance in Siberia. They married in February 1857 on the 7th, after her husband's death, and she even refused to marry him initially but then they grew to love each other. This would be his first wife. Maria said that before they were married they were never meant for each other and that the financial situation he was in was not a good sign before getting married, but they did anyway. Maria often was unhappy with him and she found it hard to deal with all of his illnesses and his seizures he would have often, together with the fact that she also had a son. Dostoevsky described that their relationship was unfit 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 in their relationship and it was not a happy one.

Unlike his second marriage, this one doesn't have that much information about it and was rather mysterious. 

(Maria Dimitrievna Dostoevskaya’s grandfather was a French refugee who had left France at the height of the French Revolution. Additionally, Maria Dimitrievna’s father was involved in quarantining travelers arriving from the Caspian Sea, and this position afforded Marya Dimitrievna and her siblings a higher quality of education than was usual in home and birthplace she was raised in. In consequence she made herself in cahoots with the upper class. Before the birth of her son, (Pavel Alexandrovich Isaev), she had gotten married to a man called Alexander Ivanovich Isaev, who was the one who died before Dostoevsky married her and his job was a civil servant. Although her relationship with her first husband was by all accounts very terrible and abusive because he was a chronic drunkard and spent the family's money, which caused her and her son Pavel to go into poverty.) 

I will also note that her Son who was Dostoevsky's stepson, who was not the son of her first husband could be considered in these times as an "Illegitimate Son", which is a rather big theme in his works and would of influenced the certain characters who were "Illegitimate". And the Illegitimate son of Fyodor Karamazov's name was Pavel, so there is a clear relationship between his stepson and the characters based off of him. Although he loved his Stepson. 

In 1859 he was eventually released from his military duties due to all of his illnesses and seizures, and then he was allowed to return to European Russian and the cities. First he went to small city of Tver, where he was reunited with his younger brother Mikhail for the first time in ten years and then he went to St Petersburg. After some time getting used to his freedom, (although he would be watched by the police for the rest of his life), he went traveling to many countries in western Europe for the first time on the 7th of June 1862. These countries included the likes of France and Paris, Germany (Berlin, Wiesbaden, and Dresden), Belgium, and London, (which includes lots of other ones he travelled to with different people). He recorded his impressions of those trips in the essay "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions", in which he also criticized capitalism, social modernization, materialism, Catholicism and Protestantism. Dostoevsky viewed the Crystal Palace as a monument to soulless modern society with no culture, the myth of progress, and the worship of empty materialism. From the August and October of 1863, Dostoevsky made another trip around Europe and then met his mistress called Polina Suslova, in Paris, and at this point his gambling had gotten to an all time high and he lost all of his money in Wiesbaden. The magazine Vremya was banned by the government in May 1863 because of an article by Nikolay Strakhov concerning Russian/Polish problems, including the recent January Uprising. This put his brother Mikhail into debt.

In 1864 his wife sadly died of tuberculous and at the same time his brother Mikhail also died, while it was all in the same year. This led him to being the sole caregiver of both his Stepson Pavel who had no mother and his brothers family all at the same time. When the magazine collapsed and his brother died he had to take on his debt which put him into even more debt, although the help of his family helped his situation. 

His Second Marriage: 

In 1866, published in the magazine "The Russian Messenger", between January and February, he completed the first two parts of Crime and Punishment, his magnum opus novel. Which added at least 500 more subscribers to the magazine. When Dostoevsky returned to the city of St Petersburg in September, he had promised his editor Fyodor Stellovsky that he would be able to finish the short novella he was writing called "the Gambler". Which is about, (you guessed it!) gambling and the addiction to gambling. Although when November came he had not even begun writing it. On the request of one of his friends, Dostoevsky decided to get a secretary. He contacted a stenographer, who recommend his pupil, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina. Her short hand skills helped Dostoevsky get down the notes for his book and then eventually finish it on the 30th of October after 26 days work. Her description of him says that he had: "He had light brown, slightly reddish hair, he used some hair conditioner, and he combed his hair in a diligent way ... his eyes, they were different: one was dark brown; in the other, the pupil was so big that you could not see its color, (this was caused by an injury). The strangeness of his eyes gave Dostoyevsky some mysterious appearance. His face was pale, and it looked unhealthy". His eye's could of had Horner's syndrome or Anisocoria, which are conditions with the enlargement of the pupil.

On the 15th of February 1867 Dostoevsky married Snitkina in the rather famous Trinity Cathedral, Saint Petersburg. The 7,000 rubles that he had earned from Crime and Punishment did not cover their debts, forcing Anna to sell her valuables. On 14 April 1867, they began a delayed honeymoon in Germany with the money gained from the sale. They stayed in Berlin and visited the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, where he sought inspiration for his writing from the paintings. He and his second wife ended up traveling through many other countries in Germany, and at one point he got into a argument and confrontation of the writer Turgenev, (Which was before Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and in the Book Demons you can see a character modeled after him where Dostoevsky insults him alot). Fyodor also lost lots of money at the roulette tables, while being in the height of his gambling addiction. And at one point, Dostoevsky's wife was rumored to have had to sell her underwear for money. On the September of the year 1867, Dostoevsky started to write and plan the book the Idiot, although this copy had no resemblance to the final copy. He finished the first 100 pages within only 23 days, and then the publishing began in the Russian Messenger in the January of 1868. Dostoevsky's first child, Sofya, was conceived in the town of Baden-Baden, and was born on the 5th of March 1868. Although, sadly, the baby died of Pneumonia only three months later from her birth and Anna recalled how Dostoevsky had: "Wept and sobbed like a woman in despair". The couple moved from Geneva to the town of Vevey and then to Milan before continuing to Florence. The Idiot was completed there in January 1869 in its totality, the final part appearing in The Russian Messenger in February 1869. They then had their second child, Lyubov, on the 26th of September 1869 in Dresden. In the April of 1871, Dostoevsky made his last visit to the gambling table when in Wiesbaden, and then Anna claimed that he had stopped gambling after the birth of his second daughter, although this is heavily debated among scholars. After hearing news that the socialist revolutionary group "People's Vengeance" had murdered one of its own members, Ivan Ivanov, on 21 November 1869, Dostoevsky began writing the book Demons, which is a very politically centered book around the murder of a groups own member. In 1871, Dostoevsky and Anna travelled by train to Berlin. During the trip, he burnt several manuscripts, including those of The Idiot, because he was concerned about potential problems with customs. The family arrived in Saint Petersburg on the 8th July, marking the end of a honeymoon (originally planned for three months) that had lasted over four years in its entirety. 

Russian Life Once Again: 

When Dostoevsky arrived back in Russia in the year of 1871 in the month of July, they ran into money problems once again, and they all had to sell the possessions they owned. Their son Fyodor was born on the 16th of July that year when they came back. They moved apartments when he was born soon after, and they hoped to alleviate their debts by selling their rental house in Peski, but with some great difficulties with the tenant, they had to settle for a very low price for the house. Amidst all of the conflict with their creditors Anna's idea was that Dostoevsky could raise money using his copy rights and then pay off their debt through a installment based payment. During his time back in Russia he remade many friends that he had not talked to in a while and he also made more church and political friends, which may have contributed to his change into conservativism and becoming a more intense Slavophile. And then around the time of 1872 he and his family spent some months in Starayara Russa, which is a Russian country town and it is a place known for its mineral spa baths and it would be here where Dostoevsky would write his last novel The Brothers Karamazov. But then Dostoevsky's work was halted when his wife's sister Maria Svatkovskaya died. The family all returned to St Petersburg in September. In the November Dostoevsky finished his book he had been writing "Demons" and it was published in the January of the next year in the company he founded for his books with the help of his wife and it was called the "Dostoevsky Publishing Company". They only allowed cash payments for the books they sold and it was all run in their apartment, but business was successful and they sold about 3000 copies of demons, if, (to add quantitative reasoning) each book was sold at one Rouble, (which is worth about 132 American dollars, and is about 200 in Aud), they would have obviously 3000 roubles, but it would be 600000$ in Aud today, (although I don't know how much they sold them at). His wife managed all of the finances of the business. Dostoevsky proposed that they establish a new periodical, which would be called A Writer's Diary and would include a collection of essays, but funds were lacking, and the Diary was published in Vladimir Meshchersky's The Citizen, beginning on the 1st January, in return for a salary of 3,000 rubles per year in return. In the summer of 1873, his wife returned to Starayara with the children while he continued his work in St Petersburg on the diary. In March 1874, Dostoevsky left The Citizen because of the stressful work and interference from the Russian bureaucracy and the government censorship. In his fifteen months with The Citizen, he had been taken to court twice: on 11th June 1873 for citing the words of Prince Meshchersky without permission, and again on 23 March 1874. Dostoevsky offered to sell a new novel he had not yet begun to write to The Russian Messenger, but the magazine refused completely. Nikolay Nekrasov suggested that he publish A Writer's Diary in Notes of the Fatherland; he would receive 250 rubles for each printer's sheet – 100 more than the text's publication in The Russian Messenger would have earned. And Dostoevsky accepted this gladly, but at this time his health had started to decline alot more so than it had before. He went through many doctors in St Petersburg and most of them told him to go and seek cures outside of Russia.  Around July, he reached Bad Ems, (German town), and consulted a physician, who diagnosed him with acute catarrh. At this time, in his stay, he started to work on his later novel, the Adolescent. He then returned to Saint Petersburg in July. His Proposed that he go back to Staraya with the family for his health to improve more, but the doctors suggested that instead he should go back to the German town because his health had improved more when he was there. His second son was born on the 10th of August 1875 when they were all in Staraya; he was called Alexey. They all moved back to St Petersburg in mid-September and then Dostoevsky finished The Adolescent at the end of the year. 

Twilight Years & Death:

In early 1876, Dostoevsky continued work on his Diary. The book includes numerous essays and a few short stories about society, religion, politics and ethics. The collection sold more than twice as many copies as his previous books. Dostoevsky received more letters from readers than ever before, and people of all ages and occupations visited him. With assistance from Anna's brother, the family bought a dacha in Staraya Russa, (which is a Russian summer house basically. See my panel pack list of words.) The family would go on to spend more time in Staraya. In 1876 Dostoevsky again started to experience more shortness of breath of he had before. He visited the town of Ems once again and was told that if he spent more time in better climates he might live another 15 years. At this time Dostoevsky grew very popular and enlarged his repertoire of acquaintances, which included the Tsar Alexander the 2nd who showed him his diary and asked Dostoevsky to educate his children. He made relationships with many famous people at the time. The list includes people such as, countess Sophia Tolstaya, (wife of Leo Tolstoy), Yakov Polonsky, Sergei Witte, Alexey Suvorin, Anton Rubinstein, (the composer), and Ilya Repin. Dostoevsky's health started to decline more and more as he aged and he suffered four more seizures in the march of 1877. While he returned to St Petersburg, he visited the place where he spent most of his childhood, Darovoye, when he was finalizing his diary. He ended up becoming a honorary member of the Russian Academy of sciences, from which he ended up getting an honorary certificate from in the February of 1879. 

His son Alyosha, or Alexey suffered a severe epileptic seizure, which he would of inherited from his father, and died on the 16th of may in 1879. The family later moved to the poor apartment where Dostoevsky had written his first works. Around this time, he was also elected to the board of directors of the Slavic Benevolent Society in Saint Petersburg. That summer, he was elected to the honorary committee of the Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale, whose members included Victor Hugo, Ivan Turgenev, Paul Heyse, Alfred Tennyson, Anthony Trollope, Henry Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Leo Tolstoy. 

Dostoevsky made his fourth and final visit to the German town of Ems. He was then diagnosed with the disease of Pulmonary Emphysema, which his doctor said would treatable but that it would not be curable at this point. On 3 February 1880 Dostoevsky was elected vice-president of the Slavic Benevolent Society, and he was invited to speak at the unveiling of the Pushkin memorial in Moscow. On 8 June he delivered his speech, giving an impressive performance that had a significant emotional impact on his audience. His speech was met with thunderous applause, and even his long-time rival Turgenev embraced him, whom Dostoevsky had ridiculed many times in writings and as a character in the novel Demons. The speech was mainly praised for his greatness with many people adoring it, but many people ridiculed his speech and these criticisms partly contributed to his death not long after. 

On the 9th of February Dostoevsky at the rather young age of 59, (all things considered), he died by the cause of a pulmonary hemorrhage, which he had multiple attacks of under stress and was taken to a doctor for a couple days and then finally died after suffering his third Hemorrhage. While Dostoevsky saw his children before he died he asked that the Parable of the Prodigal son be read out for him. The Parable of the Prodigal son is a revelation of Jesus in the bible in the gospel of Luke. In the story, a father has two sons. The younger son asks for his portion of inheritance from his father, who grants his son's request. This son, however, is prodigal (i.e., wasteful and extravagant), thus squandering his fortune and eventually becoming destitute. As consequence, he now must return home empty-handed and intend to beg his father to accept him back as a servant. To the son's surprise, he is not scorned by his father but is welcomed back with celebration and a welcoming party. Envious, the older son refuses to participate in the festivities. The father tells the older son: "you are ever with me, and all that I have is yours, but your younger brother was lost and now he is found." 

The themes of Father and son are maybe one of the most apparent out of all of the Dostoevsky themes and it is seen in all of his writings, but it seemed to happen mainly when he started the Adolescent and when he was writing the Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky was clearly tormented his entire life and the loss of his children is clearly seen in many forms of grief in all of his writings afterward. One thing we may be sure of is that he loved his family and his children and that he had made an eternal legacy on the literary world, the Philosophical, the Russian, and the Universal. Pointed out by Joseph Frank, the meaning of his request may of been that: "It was this parable of transgression, repentance, and forgiveness that he wished to leave as a last heritage to his children, and it may well be seen as his own ultimate understanding of the meaning of his life and the message of his work." 

Among the last words of Dostoevsky were the Quotation of the Gospel of Matthew in the verse saying: "But John forbad him, saying, I have a need to be baptized of thee, and comets thou to me? And Jesus answering said unto him, "Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness", and he finished with "Hear now—permit it. Do not restrain me!"  His last words to his wife Anna were: "Remember, Anya, I have always loved you passionately and have never been unfaithful to you ever, even in my thoughts!"  It is unclear how many attended his funeral. According to one reporter, more than 100,000 mourners were present, while others describe attendance between 40,000 and 50,000. His tombstone is inscribed with lines from the New Testament: 

Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it dies, it bringeth forth much fruit.

— John 12:24