Hey Cig, Hand just told me about CC. I had no idea the two of you had been so close. So sorry for your loss.

sending you ((hugs)) at this sad time

Dostoyevsky graduated from engineering school but chose a literary career.

Dostoyevsky grew up in a middle-class family in Moscow. His father, a doctor, was a tyrant toward his family, and his mother was a mild, pious woman who died before Dostoyevsky was sixteen. Partly to escape the oppressive atmosphere of his father's household, the boy acquired a love of reading, especially the works of Nikolai Gogol, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Honore de Balzac. At his father's insistence, Dostoyevsky trained as an engineer in St. Petersburg. While the youth was at school, his father was murdered by his own serfs at the family's small country estate. Dostoyevsky rarely mentioned his father's murder, but Oedipal themes are recurrent in his work, and Sigmund Freud suggested that the novelist's epilepsy was a manifestation of guilt over his repressed wish for his father's death.

Dostoyevsky is considered one of the greatest writers in world literature. Best-known for his novels Prestupleniye i nakazaniye (1866; Crime and Punishment) and Bratya Karamazovy (1880; The Brothers Karamazov), he attained profound philosophical and psychological insights which anticipated important developments in twentieth-century thought, including psychoanalysis and existentialism. In addition, Dostoyevsky's powerful literary depictions of the human condition exerted a profound influence on modern writers, such as Franz Kafka, whose works further develop some of the Russian novelist's themes. The writer's own troubled life enabled him to portray with deep sympathy characters who are emotionally and spiritually downtrodden and who in many cases epitomize the traditional Christian conflict between the body and the spirit.

CAREER: Novelist, journalist, and short-story writer. Member of the Petrashevsky Circle (a radical group of socialist thinkers), 1847-1849; political prisoner at a prison labor camp in Tobolsk, Russia, 1850-54; Vremya (journal), Russia, co-owner and editor, 1861-63; Epokha (journal), Russia, co-owner and editor, 1864-65; Grazhdanin

January 29, 1881, in St. Petersburg, Russia; buried in the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Leningrad; son of Mikhail Andreevich (a physician) and Maria Fedorovna (Nechaeva) Dostoevsky; married Maria Dmitrievna Konstant Isaeva (died April 15, 1864); married Anna Grigorievna Snitkina (a stenographer), February 15, 1867; children: (second marriage) Sofia, Lyubov, Fyodor, Aleksei.

Personal Information: PERSONAL: (Name also transliterated as Fedor, Feodor; also Mikhailovich; also Dostoevski, Dostoievsky, Dostoevskii, Dostoevsky, Dostoiewsky, Dostoiefski, Dostoievski, Dostoyevskiy, Dostoieffski) Russian novelist and short story writer. Born October 30, 1821, in Moscow, Russia; died after suffering a hemorrhage in his throat,

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821 - 1881)

Dostoyevsky (Dostoevsky), Fyodor (Feodor) Mikhailovich, Russian author, born in Moscow, on the 3oth of October 1821, was the second son of a retired military surgeon of a decayed noble family.