page_title: Themes in Fyodor Dostoevsky's writings
section_title: Themes and style
hierarchical_section_title: Themes in Fyodor Dostoevsky's writings / Themes and style
caption_attribution_description: English: Manuscript for Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel Demons, 1870-71.
context_page_description: The themes in the writings of Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which encompass novels, novellas, short stories, essays, epistolary novels, poetry, spy fiction and suspense, include suicide, poverty, human manipulation and morality. Religious themes are found throughout his works, especially after his release from prison in 1854. His early works emphasised realism and naturalism, as well as social issues such as the differences between the poor and the rich. Influences from other writers are evident, especially in his early works, leading to accusations of plagiarism, but his style gradually developed over his career. Elements of gothic fiction, romanticism and satire can be found in his writings. Dostoyevsky was "an explorer of ideas", greatly affected by the sociopolitical events occurring during his lifetime. After his release from prison his writing style moved away from what Apollon Grigoryev called the "sentimental naturalism" of his earlier works, and became more concerned with the dramatization of psychological and philosophical themes.
context_section_description: Though sometimes described as a literary realist, a genre characterized by its depiction of contemporary life in its everyday reality, Dostoevsky saw himself as a "fantastic realist". According to Leonid Grossman, Dostoevsky wanted "to introduce the extraordinary into the very thick of the commonplace, to fuse... the sublime with the grotesque, and push images and phenomena of everyday reality to the limits of the fantastic." Grossman saw Dostoevsky as the inventor of an entirely new novelistic form, in which an artistic whole is created out of profoundly disparate genres—the religious text, the philosophical treatise, the newspaper, the anecdote, the parody, the street scene, the grotesque, the pamphlet—combined within the narrative structure of an adventure novel. Dostoevsky engages with profound philosophical and social problems by using the techniques of the adventure novel as a means of "testing the idea and the man of the idea". Characters are brought together in extraordinary situations for the provoking and testing of the philosophical ideas by which they are dominated. For Mikhail Bakhtin, 'the idea' is central to Dostoevsky's poetics, and he called him the inventor of the polyphonic novel, in which multiple "idea-voices" co-exist and compete with each other on their own terms, without the mediation of a 'monologising' authorial voice. It is this innovation, according to Bakhtin, that made the co-existence of disparate genres within an integrated whole artistically successful in Dostoevsky's case.
  Bakhtin argues that Dostoyevsky's works can be placed in the tradition of menippean satire. According to Bakhtin, Dostoyevsky revived satire as a genre combining comedy, fantasy, symbolism, adventure, and drama in which mental attitudes are personified. The short story Bobok, found in A Writer's Diary, is "one of the greatest menippeas in all world literature", but examples can also be found in The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, the first encounter between Raskolnikov and Sonja in Crime and Punishment, which is "an almost perfect Christianised menippea", and in "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor". Critic Harold Bloom stated that "satiric parody is the center of Dostoyevsky's art."
  Dostoyevsky investigated human nature. According to his friend, the critic Nikolay Strakhov, "All his attention was directed upon people, and he grasped at only their nature and character", and was "interested by people, people exclusively, with their state of soul, with the manner of their lives, their feelings and thoughts". Philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev stated that he "is not a realist as an artist, he is an experimenter, a creator of an experimental metaphysics of human nature". His characters live in an unlimited, irrealistic world, beyond borders and limits. Berdyaev remarks that "Dostoevsky reveals a new mystical science of man", limited to people "who have been drawn into the whirlwind".
  Dostoyevsky's works explore the irrational, dark motifs, dreams, emotions and visions. He was an avid reader of the Gothic and enjoyed the works of Radcliffe, Balzac, Hoffmann, Charles Maturin and Soulié. Among his first Gothic works was The Landlady. The stepfather's demonic fiddle and the mysterious seller in Netochka Nezvanova are Gothic-like.  Other aspects of the genre can be found in Crime and Punishment, for example the dark and dirty rooms and Raskolnikov's Mephistophelian character, and in the descriptions of Nastasia Filippovna in The Idiot and Katerina Ivanovna in The Brothers Karamazov.
  Dostoyevsky's use of space and time were analysed by philologist Vladimir Toporov. Toporov compares time and space in Dostoyevsky with film scenes: the Russian word vdrug (suddenly) appears 560 times in the Russian edition of Crime and Punishment, reinforcing the atmosphere of tension characteristic of the book. Dostoyevsky's works often use precise numbers (at two steps ... , two roads to the right), as well as high and rounded numbers (100, 1000, 10000). Critics such as Donald Fanger and Roman Katsman, writer of The Time of Cruel Miracles: Mythopoesis in Dost
caption: Manuscript of Demons
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