ellauri042.html on line 697: Dostoevsky´s literary work has strong autobiographical elements. We know from him that he suffered from hallucinations already in early childhood. He presented idiotic characters with confused views about freedom of choice, religion, socialism, atheism, good and evil. Many of his characters suffered – like the author himself – from epilepsy. Other famous people also suffered from epilepsy (Alexander the Great, Caesar, Gustave Flaubert, and Lord Byron). Flaubert had religiously tinted visions. The first 2 guys thought they were gods.
ellauri042.html on line 701: In 1833, the family moved to Tula where the father bought a manor. Shortly after the death of his mother in 1837, Fyodor (16 yrs) was sent to St. Petersburg where he entered the Army Engineering College. 2 years later, in 1839, Dostoevsky´s more and more tyrannical father died, probably of apoplexy, but there were strong rumours that he was murdered by his own serfs in a quarrel. (Unless it was Fedja who dunit.) Against the background of this legend, Sigmund Freud later interpreted the patricide in the novel “The brothers Karamazov” as showing Fedja hated his father´s guts. True, but the main thing was the epilepsy, wait and see.
ellauri042.html on line 705: In Katorga, Dostoevsky spent four years in hard labour and wearing fetters, hating immigrants. During that time, Dostoevsky´s health dramatically deteriorated and he suffered from his first generalized epileptic attacks.
ellauri042.html on line 712: In 1864, Dostoevsky´s wife number one died at last, and shortly after he left Petersburg again to meet his beloved Apollinaria. The reunion with Apollinaria became a great failure, because he continued gambling.
ellauri042.html on line 713: He returned to St. Petersburg impecuniously and started to write his novel “Crime and Punishment” (1866), which was followed by the novel “The Gambler” (1866), an honest testimonial of Dostoevsky´s own gambling which was written within a few weeks.
ellauri042.html on line 717: Dostoevsky´s illness influenced some peculiarities of his writing, his language and style. Dostoevsky´s bad memory was well known; he had to take notes for everything His language is nervous, tense and impulsive. His phrases are sometimes long and complicated, containing a fanciful conglomeration of colloquial words and expressions, official, journalistic and scientific terms, and slips of the tongue, foreign words, names and quotations. But now and then we can see here very short, elliptic phrases.
ellauri042.html on line 719: Dostoevsky´s favorite word was “vdrug” (“suddenly”). A lot of events in Dostoevsky´s novels begin suddenly, without preparations and explanation – like seizures. (But he did at times have a manic aura just before.) Dostoevsky also used frequent repetitions of the same word with different intonations. It made an impression of convulsions and shocked the literary critics. He wrote in a meticulous manner, using every empty space of a sheet (see Fig. 2). His style showed a tendency toward extensive and in some cases compulsive writing, and the writings were often concerned with moral, ethical, or religious issues. This may reflect a syndrome of interictal behavior changes that was described in temporal lobe epilepsy by Waxman and Geschwind.
ellauri042.html on line 730: There is no doubt that Dostoevsky´s writing witnesses a large awareness of and sometimes even obsession with religious, philosophical and emotional questions as well as question of guilt. Myshkin from the novel “The Idiot” shared many character traits with his creator, such as russophilia, hyperreligiosity with profound belief in the Russian-orthodox church, melancholy, auras of happiness, generalized seizures. Furthermore, Dostoevsky wrote in large letters, and his style was sometimes compulsive and abrupt.
ellauri042.html on line 732: In conclusion, the exact classification of Dostoevsky´s idiocy is pretty clear. Many signs indicate that this famous writer suffered from mesial temporal lobe epilepsy.
ellauri203.html on line 214: Fyodor Dostoevsky´s novels mirrored his life: complicated, tense and full of psychological unrest. He was as dedicated to the women that accompanied him on this difficult journey as he was to the novels that he felt compelled to write. Lets explore the great writer’s relationships with his three key hens, Isajeva, Suslova and Snitkina. (There were more, but they were not key.)
10