Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s last two years before his exile to Siberia. In 1848 and 1849, Dostoevsky became more estranged from God, family, and friends. He continued to alienate Belinsky and other members of the Russian literary world, and he visited a circle of individuals who, however wrongly, were seen by officials as radical and revolutionary. Worse, he read a seditious piece, Belinsky’s infamous letter to Gogol, no fewer than three times to individuals and groups. It was the ultimate irony in Dostoevsky’s life that in his last two years before exile, he became known not as a writer carrying Russian literature aloft, but as an insurgent casting down the Russian state. Nevertheless, in 1848 and 1849, Dostoevsky was privy to people who, beyond their diverse and colorful personalities, expanded social and intellectual horizons. It was also in these last two years before exile that Dostoevsky internalized his views on literature and life and set himself against utopians and social engineers. Also in this time, consciously and subconsciously, Dostoevsky directed his trials and travails to his later fiction.