page_title: Fyodor Dostoevsky
section_title: Reception and influence
hierarchical_section_title: Fyodor Dostoevsky / Legacy / Reception and influence
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Dostojewski-Denkmal vor dem Kongresszentrum DresdenEnglish: Dostoyevsky memorial in front of the Dresden conference center
context_page_description: Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, sometimes transliterated Dostoyevsky, was a Russian novelist, philosopher, short story writer, essayist, and journalist. Dostoevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century Russia, and engage with a variety of philosophical and religious themes. His most acclaimed works include Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky's body of works consists of 12 novels, four novellas, 16 short stories, and numerous other works. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest psychological novelists in world literature. His 1864 novel Notes from Underground is considered to be one of the first works of existentialist literature.
  Born in Moscow in 1821, Dostoevsky was introduced to literature at an early age through fairy tales and legends, and through books by Russian and foreign authors. His mother died in 1837 when he was 15, and around the same time, he left school to enter the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute. After graduating, he worked as an engineer and briefly enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, translating books to earn extra money.
context_section_description: Dostoevsky is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential novelists of the Golden Age of Russian literature. Leo Tolstoy admired Dostoevsky's works and considered his novels magnificent (and, conversely, Dostoevsky also admired Tolstoy). Albert Einstein put him above the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, calling him a "great religious writer" who explores "the mystery of spiritual existence". Friedrich Nietzsche at one point called Dostoevsky "the only psychologist ... from whom I had something to learn; he ranks among the most beautiful strokes of fortune in my life."  Hermann Hesse enjoyed Dostoevsky's work and cautioned that to read him is like a "glimpse into the havoc". The Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun wrote that "no one has analyzed the complicated human structure as Dostoyevsky. His psychologic sense is overwhelming and visionary." The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's analysis of Dostoevsky came to be at the foundation of his theory of the novel. Bakhtin argued that Dostoevsky's use of multiple voices was a major advancement in the development of the novel as a genre.
  In his posthumous collection of sketches A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway stated that in Dostoevsky "there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true that they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know". James Joyce praised Dostoevsky's prose: "... he is the man more than any other who has created modern prose, and intensified it to its present-day pitch. It was his explosive power which shattered the Victorian novel with its simpering maidens and ordered commonplaces; books which were without imagination or violence." In her essay The Russian Point of View, Virginia Woolf said, "Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading". Franz Kafka called Dostoevsky his "blood-relative" and was heavily influenced by his works, particularly The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, both of which profoundly influenced The Trial. Sigmund Freud called The Brothers Karamazov "the most magnificent novel ever written". Modern cultural movements such as the surrealists, the existentialists and the Beats cite Dostoevsky as an influence, and he is cited as the forerunner of Russian symbolism, existentialism, expressionism and psychoanalysis. In her essay What Is Romanticism?, Russian-American author Ayn Rand wrote that Dostoevsky was one of the two greatest novelists (the other being Victor Hugo).  Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar also mentions Dostoevsky in his novel Hopscotch.
caption: Dostoevsky monument in Dresden, (Germany)
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