Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky died from a lung hemorrhage on January 28, 1881, in St. Petersburg at the age of fifty-nine.

THE WORLD OF FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
AND CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

1821 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky is born on October 30 in Moscow. The second of seven children, he grows up in a middle class household run by his father, a former army surgeon and strict family man.
1833 Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin is published.
1836 Pushkin’s story “The Queen of Spades” is published.
1837 Fyodor’s mother dies. He and his older brother Mikhail are sent to a preparatory school in St. Petersburg.
1838 Dostoevsky begins his tenure at the St. Petersburg Academy of Military Engineers, where he studies until 1843. He becomes acquainted with the works of such writers as Byron, Corneille, Dickens, Goethe, Gogol, Homer, Hugo, Pushkin, Racine, Rousseau, Shakespeare, and Schiller.
1839 Dostoevsky’s father is, according to rumor, murdered on his country estate, presumably by his own serfs.
1842 Part 1 of Nikolai Gogol’s novel Dead Souls is published.
1843 Dostoevsky graduates from the Academy as a lieutenant, but instead of pursuing a career in the army, resolves to dedicate his life to writing.
1844 His first published work appears, a Russian translation of Honoré de Balzac’s 1833 novel Eugénie Grandet. Dostoevsky be gins work on his first novel, Poor Folk.
1845 On the basis of Poor Folk, Dostoevsky wins the friendship and acclaim of Russia’s premier literary critic, Vissarion Grig orievich Belinsky, author of the scathingly critical “Letter to Gogol” (1847).
1846 Poor Folk and “The Double” are published. “The Double” is the first work in which Dostoevsky writes about the psychology of the split self. Dostoevsky meets the utopian socialist M. V. Butashevich-Petrashevsky.
1847 Dostoevsky publishes numerous short stories, including “A Weak Heart,” “Polzunkov,” and “The Landlady.”
1848 He publishes the short story “White Nights.” The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, is published. Rev olutions break out in France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Poland.
1849 Dostoevsky is arrested for his participation in the socialist Pe trashevsky Circle. He first spends eight months in solitary confinement and is then condemned to death by firing squad. Tsar Nicholas I commutes his sentence to penal servitude in Siberia, but orders this to be announced only at the last minute.
1850 Dostoevsky begins his four-year internment at Omsk in west ern Siberia. His experiences there will influence many of his later works. While imprisoned he abandons the radical ideas of his youth and becomes more deeply religious; his only book in prison is a copy of the Bible.
1852 Part 2 of Gogol’s Dead Souls is published.
1853 The Crimean War breaks out; the cause is a dispute between Russia and France over the Palestinian holy places.
1854 Still exiled in Siberia, Dostoevsky begins four years of com pulsory military service.
1857 He marries the widow Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva.
1859 Dostoevsky and Maria are allowed to return to St. Petersburg.
1861 He and his brother Mikhail establish Vremia (Time); this year and the next the journal publishes Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead, a work based on his experiences in Siberia.
1862 Dostoevsky travels to England, France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, a trip that engenders in him an anti-European outlook. He gambles heavily at resorts abroad, losing money.
1863 Dostoevsky makes a second trip to Europe and arranges to meet Apollinaria Suslova in Paris; he had published a story by her in Vremia the previous year. The two have an affair.
1863 The progressive Nikolai Chernyshevsky publishes the utopian novel What Is to Be Done?, which Dostoevsky will react against a year later in “Notes from Underground.” Vremia is banned for printing a potentially subversive article regarding the Polish rebellion.
1864 Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail establish Epokha (Epoch), the short-lived successor to Vremia; the journal publishes “Notes from Underground,” the first of Dostoevsky’s master works. Dostoevsky’s wife, Maria, dies from tuberculosis. His brother Mikhail dies three months later.
1865 Burdened with debt, Dostoevsky embarks on another failed gambling spree in Europe. He proposes to Apollinaria Suslova without success.
1866 Crime and Punishment starts serial publication at the beginning of the year. Dostoevsky interrupts the writing in October in order to work on The Gambler, forced to meet the contract deadline for that book in order to retain the rights to his pub lished works, including Crime and Punishment. He dictates The Gambler to a stenographer, Anna Grigorievna Snitkina, over the course of a month. He and Anna, who is twenty-five years his junior, become romantically involved.
1867 Dostoevsky marries Anna Snitkina; the alliance is one of the most fortunate events of his life. To avoid financial ruin, the two live abroad for the next four years, in Geneva, Florence, Vienna, Prague, and finally Dresden. Dostoevsky’s epilepsy worsens. He begins work on his novel The Idiot, in which the protagonist is an epileptic. The first three of what will be six volumes of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace appear in print in De cember, bound in yellow covers.
1868 The Idiot is published in installments this year and the next.