RP308 Struggle and Genius

 RP308 Struggle and Genius

“Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery,” or so says Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his 1866 classic Crime and Punishment. These words reflect an intimate knowledge of what it is to be human, and they came from the pen of a literary genius on the verge of financial ruin.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, one of the giants of Russian literature, was born in Moscow on November 11, 1821. His parents had emigrated from what is now Ukraine. He was the second of seven children, and he almost immediately began to suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy. This was a condition that would linger for his entire life. Dostoyevsky went to school for mathematics, a subject he despised. He served in the Russian army for three years, from 1841 to 1844. After being discharged from the military, he began to write fiction.
Things started to go badly for Fyodor in 1849. This was the year when he was arrested and sentenced to death along with a group of intellectuals in St. Petersburg. Tsar Nicholas I, the leader of Russia at the time, was terrified of revolution. Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his fellow intellectuals were brought out into a courtyard, tied to poles, blindfolded, and told they were going to be shot in the head. But the bullets never came.
It was all a trick, a mock execution meant to teach them a lesson. The experience shattered Fyodor's nerves, and he never quite recovered his peace of mind. Afterward, he was sent to Siberia, where he was forced to labor and serve in the army until 1859.
After returning to St. Petersburg, Fyodor continued his writing, but things didn't get any easier. He began to drown in debt following the deaths of his wife and brother in 1864. He also developed a terrible gambling habit. It is said that he had to rush the last part of Crime and Punishment because he had gambled away his last kopek.
In the years leading up to his death in 1881, Fyodor wrote some of his most famous novels such as The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. He was survived by his second wife and four children.