III.

Middle Works

The decade from 1860 to 1870 was tempestuous for Dostoyevsky, marked by severe financial problems, ill health, and a gambling mania, as well as some literary success. Dostoyevsky’s most significant works of the early 1860s are Zapiski iz mertvogodoma (1861; The House of the Dead), a powerful fictionalized memoir of his prison experiences, and Zapiski iz podpol’ia (1864; Notes from Underground). The latter is a penetrating psychological portrait of the spiteful and alienated narrator and, at the same time, a political work that challenges the idea that a good society could by constructed on the basis of reason alone. It also raises the dilemma of human freedom: If people are not free they are not truly human, but if they have freedom their human impulses to do evil may lead them to destroy themselves and others.

Dostoyevsky hoped to make a living by publishing a magazine, but his journalistic ventures, undertaken with his brother Mikhail, ended badly. Their first magazine had considerable success until it was abruptly shut down by the government in 1863 for a supposedly unpatriotic story about an uprising in Poland, and its successor never had sufficient funding to survive. In April 1864 Dostoyevsky’s wife died, and his brother Mikhail died three months later. Dostoyevsky was left with enormous debts from the failure of his second magazine and from the obligation he felt to support his brother’s family. In 1867 he married Anna Snitkina, a stenographer to whom he had dictated some of his writings. To avoid creditors the couple spent the next four years in Europe. Anna proved to be a steadying influence on her husband, sharing his poverty, enduring his frequent gambling sprees, nursing him through the aftereffects of his epileptic seizures, and helping repair his finances. They returned to Russia in 1871.