Subjected to a gruesome mock execution, the 28-year-old graduate engineer was afterwards deported to Siberia. In 1849 Dostoevsky and his co-conspirators were arrested and interrogated by General Nabokov, the great-great-uncle of the novelist. Tsar Nicholas I’s secret police were watching: opposing serfdom was a “clear threat to the throne”, Birmingham writes. In St Petersburg in the 1840s, he fell in with a circle of intellectuals who preached French utopian politics and the redemptive possibilities (as they saw it) inherent in the Russian peasant soul. Later, inspired by a reading of the gospels, he espoused a proto-Soviet socialism that sought to abolish serfdom and return Russia to a state of original Slav holiness. Unsurprisingly, Dostoevsky was left with a bewildered awareness of human cruelty. As Birmingham shows, Dostoevsky was exposed at an early age to tragedy when, in 1839, his landowning father was murdered by his own serfs. The radical politics and anti-tsarist personalities that fed into Crime and Punishment are the subject of Kevin Birmingham’s excellent biographical study, The Sinner and the Saint. In 1849, Dostoevsky and his co-conspirators were interrogated by General Nabokov, the great-great-uncle of the novelist Rowan Williams’s scholarly Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction concentrated instead on the novelist’s tormented Christian messianism. Joseph Frank’s celebrated five-volume biography, published between 19, devoted more than 2,500 pages to the life of a man who was dead at the age of 59 from untreated epilepsy and a gambling addiction (also untreated). With his appetite for affliction and self-torturing asceticism, he was a casebook of neuroses. He is a difficult quarry for biographers, though. His Slavophile bias and Orthodox-heavy chauvinism endeared him to Stalin’s propagandists, who tailored his image to fit Soviet ideology. (“Dostoevsky is a third-rate writer and his fame is incomprehensible,” he judged.) For all that, Dostoevsky remains a quasi-divine figure in Russia. Its murderous antihero, Raskolnikov (from the Russian raskolnik, “dissenter”), embodies a violent ideology of redemption through suffering that Vladimir Nabokov, for one, found distasteful. Crime and Punishment, his best-known novel, radiates a dark chaos and apocalyptic sensibility. His work teems with holy fools, holy prostitutes, nihilists and revolutionaries. F or many in the west, Fyodor Dostoevsky is the most “Russian” of Russian authors.
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