Dostoievsky himself was abnormal. He was what the physician calls a neuropathic and psychopathic individual. In addition, he had genuine epilepsy, that is, epilepsy not dependent upon some accidental disease, such as infection, injury, or new growth. He was of psychopathic temperament and at different times in his life displayed hallucination, obsession, and hypochondria.
He wrote of them as if he were the professor, not the possessor. The psychopathic constitution displays itself as:
“An unstable balance of the psychic impulses, an overfacile tendency to emotion, an overswift interchange of mental phases, an abnormally violent reaction of the psychic mechanism. The feature most striking to the beholder in the character of such sufferers is its heterogeneous medley of moods and whims, of sympathies and antipathies; of ideas in turn joyous, stern, gloomy, depressed and philosophical; of aspirations at first charged with energy then dying away to nothing. Another feature peculiar to these sufferers is their self-love. They are the most naïve of egoists; they talk exclusively and persistently and absorbedly of themselves; they strive always to attract the general attention, to excite the general interest and to engage everyone in conversation concerning their personality, their ailments and even their vices.”
Scores of his characters had such constitution, and in none is it more perfectly delineated than in Katerina Ivanovna, though Lise Hohlakov, of the same novel, had wider display of the hysteria that grew on this fertile soil.
The facts of Dostoievsky's life that are important to the reader who would comprehend his psychopathic creations are that his father, surgeon to the Workhouse Hospital at Moscow, was a stern, suspicious, narrow-minded, gloomy, distrustful man who made a failure of life. “He has lived in the world fifty years and yet he has the same opinions of mankind that he had thirty years ago,” wrote Feodor when seventeen years old. His mother was tender-minded, pious, and domestic, and died early of tuberculosis. Although much has been written of his boyhood, there is nothing particularly interesting in it bearing on his career save that he was sensitive, introspective, unsociable, and early displayed a desire to be alone. The hero of the book “Youth” relates that in the lowest classes of the gymnasium he scorned all relations with those of his class who surpassed him in any way in the sciences, physical strength, or in clever repartee. He did not hate such a person nor wish him harm. He simply turned away from him, that being his nature. These characteristics run like a red thread through the entire life of Dostoievsky. A tendency to day-dreaming was apparent in his earliest years, and he gives graphic accounts of hallucination in “An Author's Diary.” At the age of sixteen he was admitted to the School of Engineering and remained there six years. During the latter part of his student days he decided upon literature as a career. Before taking it up, however, he had a brief experience with life after he had obtained his commission as engineer, which showed him to be totally incapable of dealing with its every-day eventualities, particularly in relation to money, whose purpose he knew but whose value was ever to remain a secret. It was then that he first displayed inability to subscribe or to submit to ordinary social conventions; indeed, a determination to transgress them.
From his earliest years the misfortunes of others hurt him and distressed him, and in later life the despised and the rejected, the poor and the oppressed, always had his sympathy and his understanding. God and the people, that is the Russian people, were his passion. “The people have a lofty instinct for truth. They may be dirty, degraded, repellent, but without them and in disregard of them nothing useful can be effected.” The intellectuals who held themselves aloof from the masses he could not abide, and atheists, and their propaganda socialism, were anathema. He demanded of men who arrogated to themselves a distinction above their fellow men, “who go to the people not to learn to know it, but condescendingly to instruct and patronise it,” not only repentance, but expiation by suffering.
His first important literary contribution was entitled “Poor Folk.” He was fortunate enough to be praised by his contemporaries and particularly by Bielinsky, an editor and great critic, who saw in the central idea of the story corroboration of his favourite theory, viz.: abnormal social conditions distort and dehumanise mankind to such an extent that they lose the human form and semblance. As the result of this publication, Dostoievsky made the acquaintance of the leading literary lights of St. Petersburg, many of whom praised him too immoderately for his own good, as he produced nothing worthy of his fame until many years after the event in his life which must be looked upon as the beginning of his mental awakenment—banishment and penal servitude in Siberia.
Toward the middle of the nineteenth century the doctrines of the Frenchman, Charles Fourier, were having such acceptance in this country, where the North American Phalanx in New Jersey and the Brook farm in Massachusetts were thriving, as to encourage the disciples of that sentimental but wholly mad socialist in other lands, particularly in Russia, that their hopes of seeing the world dotted with Phalansteres might be fulfilled. Dostoievsky later stated most emphatically that he never believed in Fourierism, but nibbling at it nearly cost him his life. In fact, all that stood between him and death was the utterance of the word “Go,” which it would seem the lips of the executioner had puckered to utter when the reprieve came. Dostoievsky was suspected of being a Revolutionary. One evening at the Petrashevsky Club he declaimed Pushkin's poem on Solitude:
“My friends, I see the people no longer oppressed,
And slavery fallen by the will of the Czar,
And a dawn breaking over us, glorious and bright,
And our country lighted by freedom's rays.”
In discussion he suggested that the emancipation of the peasantry might have to come through a rising. Thus he became suspected. But it was not until he denounced the censorship and reflected on its severity and injustice that he was taken into custody. He and twenty-one others were sentenced to death. He spent four years in a Siberian prison and there became acquainted with misery, suffering, and criminality that beggars description.