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| - Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was a 19th century Russian author, famous for writing Notes From Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. A deeply philosophical writer with a nuanced understanding of human psychology, Dostoevsky is credited with being, depending on your view, either a forerunner or a founder of modern existentialism. Dostoevsky is known as "the Mad Russian" for two reasons:
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| abstract
| - Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was a 19th century Russian author, famous for writing Notes From Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. A deeply philosophical writer with a nuanced understanding of human psychology, Dostoevsky is credited with being, depending on your view, either a forerunner or a founder of modern existentialism. The funny thing about Dostoevsky is that he's really two different authors separated by a four year stretch of exile to Siberia in 1849. Pre-1849, Dostoevsky wrote two novels (Poor Folk and the incomplete Netochka Nezvanova) and several short stories and novellas. He's really remembered, however, for the work he turned out after he came back from exile. Having had a religious experience while in prison, he spent the rest of his life exploring themes such as free will, guilt, religious awakening, and the effects of nihilism. His most famous novels are all critically-acclaimed for being thought-provoking explorations of the human condition in the face of suffering and despair. Dostoevsky is known as "the Mad Russian" for two reasons:
* Something that tends to throw some readers off is that Dostoevsky's characters are all mad. Not literally mad, but they are all motivated by ideas instead of normal human drives. Because of this, several of the characters across his oeuvre tend to fall into molds or archetypes based on the ideas they represent (Sonya from Crime and Punishment and Alyosha from The Brothers Karamazov fall into a distinct category, as do Raskolnikov and Ivan Karamazov from the same books respectively), and his characters and their actions are symbolic of these ideas.
* As a reaction against the European philosophies that were becoming popular in Russia in his time, Dostoevsky wrote in a rural, slavophilic/Russian style, emphasizing national unity and what would be the equivalent of "family values" in 19th century Russia. Or maybe he was called "the Mad Russian" because the mindgames in his plots are so mind-bendingly complex one has to be mad to understand them. They devote university seminars to studying Dostoevsky's prose, and they can get away with it because the symbolism is real.
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