A year later he finished his course at the Engineering College and was attached to the Army Engineering Corps in Petersburg, in the drawing department. In the same year appeared his first published work, a translation of Balzac’s novel Eugénie Grandet.

Already during his student years Dostoevsky revealed the characteristic trait which was to cause him so much trouble during his life, namely, his utter inability to manage his own personal affairs and his uncanny gift for getting into debt. In spite of his more than adequate allowance of five thousand roubles a year, he seemed incapable of living within his means. He spent his money almost as soon as he got it and during the rest of the year he literally starved. An illustration of his unpractical turn of mind is provided by the fact that he rented an expensive flat while still at college. He paid 1,200 roubles a year for it, although he only lived in one small room in which he froze during the winter as he never had enough money to keep even that one room warm. In 1844 Dostoevsky resigned his commission and devoted himself entirely to literary work.

From October, 1844, when Dostoevsky gave up his army career, to April, 1849, when he was arrested and imprisoned in the Petropavlovsk Fortress in Petersburg, Dostoevsky published ten novels and short stories. His first novel, Poor Folk, written in 1846, brought him fame literally overnight. He was hailed by the poet and editor Nekrassov, to whom he had sent the novel, and the great Russian critic Belinsky, as a successor to Gogol. At the age of twenty-four he became a celebrity, and it is perhaps not surprising that his success went to his head and that some of his subsequent stories did not come up to the expectations of his admirers, two of them, The Landlady and Prokharchin, being sharply criticised by Belinsky.

In his first appreciation of Dostoevsky, Belinsky at once singled out those characteristic features of his art which were later to make him (in spite of his exasperatingly careless style) one of the giants of Russian and, indeed, of world literature. What were these characteristic features? First of all, his amazing truthfulness in the description of life. Secondly, his masterly delineation of character and the social conditions of his heroes. Thirdly, his profound understanding and his wonderful artistic re-creation of the tragic side of life. Belinsky, too, from the very outset put his finger on the weakest spot of Dostoevsky’s genius: his diffuseness and his tendency to tire the reader by unnecessary repetitions and digressions.

As for Gogol’s influence on Dostoevsky, Belinsky was also the first to point out that in the case of so outstandingly original a writer as Dostoevsky this influence was merely superficial. “Dostoevsky as a writer of great talent,” Belinsky wrote, “cannot be called an imitator of Gogol, though he certainly owes a great deal to him. Gogol’s influence can even be seen in the structure of his sentences,* but there is so much originality in Dostoevsky’s talent that this obvious influence of Gogol will most probably disappear with his other shortcomings as a writer, though Gogol will always remain, as it were, the fount from which he drew his inspiration.”

Dostoevsky himself, in the often quoted phrase, “We have all emerged from under Gogol’s Overcoat,” acknowledged his indebtedness to Gogol, and, specifically, to Gogol’s faith in “the divine spark in man,” however degraded socially or however poor in spirit he might be. It was this deeply humane attitude to the lowly and the downtrodden that made Dostoevsky such a great admirer of Charles Dickens, to whom he had paid what is surely the finest compliment one great writer can pay to another by writing his own version of The Old Curiosity Shop in The Insulted and Injured (published in 1861).

The Honest Thief, the second story in this volume, written in 1848, is perhaps the best example of this early tendency in Dostoevsky’s works. Yemelyan is the first of Dostoevsky’s characters whose tragedy consists of their helplessness to resist evil in spite of, and perhaps even because of, the fact that they recognise it as evil. He is, as it were, the embryo from which the Yezhevikins, Marmeladovs, and Lebedevs later emerged. As with many another of Dostoevsky’s characters, he is merely the original theme of the different variations which Dostoevsky wrote as his own perception of life and his sensibility deepened and broadened.

The Honest Thief as well as White Nights is also remarkable for the fact that in them we find the first statement of the central idea of one of Dostoevsky’s greatest novels, Crime and Punishment, published in 1866. In White Nights the sentence expressing this idea, which Dostoevsky eliminated from subsequent editions of the story, ran: “I am told that the proximity of punishment arouses real repentance in the criminal and sometimes awakens a feeling of genuine remorse in the most hardened heart; I am told this is due to fear.” A more elaborate statement of the same idea (also omitted in the subsequent editions of the story) is found in The Honest Thief.

White Nights (i.e., the twilight summer nights in Petersburg), also published in 1848, is perhaps one of the most characteristic works of the young Dostoevsky. It is to a large extent autobiographical, the sentimental theme being developed against the background of his own personal impressions during his nocturnal wanderings in Petersburg. The story is remarkable for the way Dostoevsky avoids the more obvious pitfalls of such a romantic theme, for its gentle humour, and for its delicate touches of genuine feeling. Dostoevsky was to re-write this story in his true manner of creative artist and thinker seventeen years later under the title Notes from the Underground.

The Christmas Tree and a Wedding is perhaps the most artistically perfect short story Dostoevsky wrote during his first period as a fiction writer. Satiric in character, it drives home its main point in the last sentence with shattering force: the contrast between the young helpless victim of a stupid social order and the ruthless pursuit of wealth by a middle-aged careerist who calculates the amount of money he is to get by marrying the young girl with almost inspired correctness five years before the actual event. It is one of Dostoevsky’s most savage judgments on “success” under the acquisitive system of society.

In 1849 Dostoevsky was arrested and sent to prison in Siberia. His imprisonment at Omsk marks a break with the rather mild liberalism of his youth, a break that was much more complete than it would have been if he had not been involved in the so-called Petrashevsky case. Petrashevsky was a young and very rich political dilettante who dabbled in the utopian socialism of the French school. He was an enthusiastic admirer of Fourier, and his Friday at homes were frequented by the liberal-minded intellectuals of the day, of whom Dostoevsky was one. Politics was only one of the topics discussed at those social gatherings, and on one occasion Dostoevsky read Belinsky’s famous letter to Gogol, in which the Russian liberal critic attacked the reactionary opinions expressed by Gogol in his Correspondence with Friends.

Dostoevsky was arrested with the other members of the Petrashevsky “group” on April 23, 1849, imprisoned for eight months in the Petropavlovsk Fortress in Petersburg, and then sentenced to death, a sentence which was immediately commuted to eight years of imprisonment in Siberia.