The name of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky is not unfamiliar to the vast number of readers in our country.Everyone knows that he was a dazzling star in the Russian literary world in the 19th century. He is as famous as the great writers Leo Tolstoy and Turgenev, and he is also an outstanding representative of Russian literature.He took an extremely difficult and complicated life and creation path, and he is one of the most complicated and contradictory writers in the history of Russian literature.His creations are unique and unique in the star-studded nineteenth-century Russian literary world, occupying a very special place.

He was born in Moscow in 1821 in an ordinary doctor's family. When his father served as a medical officer in the army, he acquired the status of aristocrat and owned two small estates.But generally speaking, the family is not well off.He lived with his father in the civilian hospital since he was a child, and all he came into contact with were poor patients.This had a great influence on his later thoughts and creations. Due to the poverty of his family, after three years of boarding school, he entered a military engineering technical school in Petersburg.However, he was not interested in engineering and technical work. One year after graduation, he applied for resignation and left the Drawing Department of the Engineering Bureau.Since then, he has embarked on the road of a professional writer, specializing in literary translation and creation.Within a year after resigning, he translated Balzac's masterpiece "Eugenie Grandet" and wrote his first work "The Poor".As soon as the novel was published, it caused a sensation in the literary world and was widely praised by readers.Belinsky called it "the first attempt at social fiction".

Two years later, he was arrested for participating in the activities of the Petrasevsky Group against the Tsarist government, and was sentenced to death and deprived of public rights for life. , served as a private for four years).In fact, nine years later, he was allowed to leave the army due to illness and returned to settle in Petersburg.At this time, he was over thirty-seven years old, and it can be said that his entire youth was spent in military camps and hard labor.The creation he just started was interrupted for ten years because of this. The inhuman hard labor and life in exile seriously damaged his body. He was originally weak and suffered from epilepsy, and now his condition has become more serious.Frequent hysterical attacks.This serious disease has not been cured since then, and has been with the author throughout his life.When it happened, the author was miserable.

When he returned from exile and picked up his pen again to engage in the interrupted creation, his mental outlook had undergone tremendous changes, and he was completely different from before. The dreams and hopes he embraced in his youth were completely shattered and killed by real life.His original beliefs changed; he refused to participate in any political struggle, and no longer called on people to rebel, but asked people to tolerate, retreat, compromise, obey, and reconcile, and seek a moral new life from religion.He no longer believes in revolution, and he is mentally depressed.But despite this, he was not trusted by the tsarist government, and the secret surveillance of him by the police was not withdrawn until five years before his death.

He is an ill-fated writer, and his personal and family life is not going well.First, he married a widow, and the relationship was not harmonious.The son brought by the widow caused him a lot of trouble, became his heavy burden, and became an important reason for his debts.Three years after the death of his first wife, he married his young typist in 1867, found a faithful companion, and lived happily for fourteen years. He is engaged in creation under the weight of life.The debt owed by his brother needs to be repaid by him. The son brought by his ex-wife does not do any labor, and all the expenses of the family are borne by him, so he often has high debts.In order to pay off his debts and to live, he had to write crazily, sometimes picking up a pen to write shortly after a hysterical attack.He is completely incapable of writing at his leisure and at will, as a writer with a secure life can do.In his memoirs, his wife wrote many times about his hardships during creation.Due to his heavy debts, he often took the initiative to submit articles to various magazines. In this way, his remuneration was much less than that of writers such as Turgenev and Goncharov who had a guaranteed life.Often it is only one-third of what they earn. For example, the author's remuneration after publishing in the "Russian Herald" is 150 rubles per printed page, while Turgenev's novel published in the same magazine is 150 rubles per printed page. Five hundred rubles.In order to earn more money to pay off his debts, his wife also had to personally run the business of publishing and promoting his works.Even so, he still couldn't get rid of poverty completely.He died less than a year after paying off his debts.

He has traveled abroad many times and has been to Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Czech Republic and other countries.After his reunion in 1867, he and his newlyweds went abroad for the first time. They originally planned to stay for three months, but ended up staying for four years.He wrote the novels "Idiot" and "Demons" and some short novels abroad.But abroad, he fell into the bad habit of gambling.Maybe it has something to do with his illness. He is addicted to gambling. He often goes to the casino as soon as he gets the money, and loses almost every time he gambles.When he had no money to gamble, he would have a fit of hysteria, and even cry bitterly, kneeling in front of his wife.

It can be said that he is a pathological gambler.It was not until his later years that he made up his mind to quit the bad habit of gambling. The life of poverty and misfortune, especially the nine years of hard labor and military camp life, left an indelible mark on his thoughts and creations, making him a unique writer, a Writer full of contradictions.In all fairness, he has contributed to Russian literature, and even world literature.A history of Russian literature would hardly be complete without his chapter.His creative influence goes far beyond Russia.Realist writers can absorb beneficial nutrition from his creation, modernist writers have just regarded his works as classics, and call him their pioneer and mentor.Western literary critics' evaluation of him is staggering.Even the revolutionary writers who criticized him most sharply cannot deny his artistic talent.For example, Gorky, the founder of proletarian revolutionary literature, said that he is "the greatest genius", "In terms of artistic expression, his talent is probably only comparable to Shakespeare."

However, Dostoevsky is also one of the most controversial writers.The root cause of controversy, criticism and blame is the ideas he promotes in his works.Almost all of his published works have aroused controversy, especially several of his novels, which received so much criticism and censure, which was rare in the Russian literary world in the 19th century.He originally believed in utopian socialism, opposed serfdom, and tsarist rule. After returning from hard labor and exile, he gave up his original beliefs and turned against violence and revolution.He believed that to solve the contradictions in Russian society, we should not adopt the method of struggle and revolution like Western Europe, but should adopt the method of reconciliation to unite the people of all walks of life.In this way, he openly stood on the opposite side of the revolutionary democrats, and in the eyes of the revolutionary democrats, he naturally became a "reactionary writer" and "counter-revolutionary writer".Even so, no one can deny the authenticity and artistry of his creations.For more than a hundred years, the evaluation of him by the progressive literary and art circles has generally been like this: fully affirming his artistry and completely denying his ideological tendencies.Until the 1980s, some theorists criticized his work quite harshly, thinking that although it was a "social psychological novel with the most historical significance" and brought unprecedented honor to the author, but However, it is "full of reactionary ideas" and "actually blatantly opposes revolutionary democracy"; his other full-length novel "Bullyed and Insulted" is "directly opposed to the revolutionary struggle and defends the idea of ​​obedience"; His "Notes on the House of the Dead" is a real work based on the author's personal experience, showing the terrible situation and mental state of all kinds of convicts. Turgenev regarded it as a chapter in Dante's "Divine Comedy", while Herzen Said it was Michelangelo's "Last Judgment", Lenin also said it was an "insurmountable work".But despite this, this work is still "extremely obvious in reactionary tendencies."As for his novel "Demons", it is even more reactionary, because it directly attacks the revolutionary democrats and is "extremely vicious".In the early 1930s, someone planned to adapt "Demons" into a script and put it on the stage. Gorky firmly opposed it, saying that this work was "among countless attempts to viciously attack the revolutionary movement in the 1970s, Most genius, and most vicious."

However, criticism is criticism, his works are still widely circulated, and even in the former Soviet Union, they were not completely banned.Especially several of his novels such as "Bullyed and Insulted", "Notes from Underground", "Idiot", "Demons", "Youth", "The Brothers Karamazov"... Almost all of them have been translated into the world. Various major languages ​​are welcomed by readers from all over the world, and some of them are called the treasures of Russian literature and treasures in the treasure house of world literature. Therefore, the author himself is respected as a worldwide master of novels.

In our country, his works were translated as early as the 1920s.In 1926, Lu Xun wrote a preface to his translation of "The Poor", and since then he has expressed positive opinions on his creative thinking and writing skills.Until the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, almost all of his major works had translations from English.After the founding of New China, some new translations directly from Russian were published one after another.During the Cultural Revolution, his works, like those of all foreign authors, were banned.However, since the reform and opening up, new translations of his works have been released continuously, and some have already had several translations.This shows that Dostoevsky's works are still very popular among readers in our country.It should be said that he is one of the favorite foreign writers of Chinese readers.

As mentioned earlier, Dostoevsky is a master of novels, and his artistic achievements are, of course, mainly his novels.His novels are not only numerous (about ten) and long ("The Brothers Karamazov" with more than 700,000 words), but also have high artistic achievements and far-reaching influence.However, due to space limitations, we will not discuss it.Next, we would like to briefly talk about his short stories, which are mainly a little bit of personal understanding, and I hope readers will criticize and correct them if they are inappropriate. Although the author's short stories (including some short novelettes) are not many in number, they are quite distinctive, and there are many excellent works that can be called fine works.Through these works, we can basically get a glimpse of the author's creative thinking tendency and his artistic style. We know that Dostoevsky was a writer born as a civilian intellectual.He was poor all his life and had a special affection for the poor.The first work he wrote was called "The Poor".In these short stories we have translated, the protagonists, without exception, are all poor people, "little people" who have been bullied and insulted. The children he wrote are also some suffering victims who have completely lost their childhood life. Here There are Mr. Prokhalchin, a clerk who died tragically ("Mr. Prokhalchin"), Shumkov, a crazed clerk ("The Fragile Heart"), Yemelya, a thief who starved to death ("The Honest Thief"). "), the little boy who froze to death by the pyre ("The Little Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree"), "the clown who had to be made fun of to make a living" Poltankov ("Poltankov") , the impoverished visionary (the hero)... Writing little characters did not begin with Dostoevsky in the history of Russian literature.Pushkin's "The Postmaster" and Gogol's "Overcoat" are pioneering works in this regard.But Dostoevsky carried on and developed this tradition, deepened and expanded the theme.He introduced into literature a world that had never been noticed and studied—the slums of the great Russian cities of the nineteenth century.He was the first writer to show this strange corner.This is a dark corner, "the sun that shines on all the people in Petersburg seems to refuse to patronize these places, and what shines on these places seems to be another sun specially made for these places" ().And in these corners where the sun does not shine, there are groups of homeless people, beggars, thieves, prostitutes... These are a group of people who have been thrown into the bottom by the society. The warmth in the world can only be lived by fantasy! However, Dostoevsky found them, understood their plight, sympathized with their misfortune, raised their problems as acute social problems, and attracted people's attention.He is neither a singer of aristocratic life nor a creator of "superfluous people", but a writer who sympathizes with the weak and exposes the darkness, ignorance, powerlessness, oppression and exploitation of society. In all these short works of the author, the plots are not too complicated, but the atmosphere is tense, the conflict is sharp, full of unexpected disasters, and the ending is often heartbreaking and horrible.Almost all works are full of hysterical atmosphere.His hero is always in a state of panic and anxiety.Almost all the protagonists are dissatisfied with everything around them.They are extremely lonely, depressed, hopeless, desperate, and many of them are on the verge of madness, or become lunatics, or commit suicide.The relationship between people in his works is often pathological, distorted and abnormal.Almost all of his works have a dark mood of pessimism and despair.When reading his works, we often have a sense of oppression, and sometimes even feel breathless.Among the works we have translated, probably only "Little Hero" is an exception.The protagonist "little hero" in it is a rare clear and harmonious image, and only this work is full of extraordinary optimism. Yes, in the author's pen, there are no angry and rebellious characters, his characters are all docile, crazy, crazy, starving to death, suicidal suicide, but there is very little resistance, at most there is only a little verbal protest , like Poltankov, "his every protest is extremely tolerant" ("Poltankov").This is naturally a reflection of the writer's thinking, which is what he embraced after returning from hard labor.He was against waging a struggle. The author is an expert in psychological description, obsessed with morbid psychological description, not only describing the result of behavior, but also focusing on describing the psychological process of behavior, especially those abnormal behaviors that are conscious or unconscious, and abnormal states that are close to coma and madness.The abnormal thinking and behavior of the characters is precisely the characteristic of his works. Prokhalchin in "Mr. Prokhalchin", Shumkov in "A Fragile Heart", the protagonists in "Dreams of Ridiculous People", "Bad Jokes", "A Gentle Woman" and others, They are all "abnormal" weirdos.The author seems to want to reflect the reality through the characters' perverted behavior, fantasies, dreams, coma, madness, etc., to create a unique reality, because he believes that "it is impossible to express reality according to its true colors".Perhaps, this is the uniqueness of the author's art. Although the characters in the author's works have low status, abnormal behavior and ridiculous behavior, they still retain some noble qualities in their hearts. For example, although the protagonist Poltankov in "Poltankov" is A "true sufferer," but "good-natured," "the most honest and noblest man in the world," "even sacrificing himself to save others," and "sometimes willing to take risks and sacrifices." Everything about myself, almost a little heroic."It is "love money like life" Mr. Prokhalchin "is not from a famous family, but he is faithful and reliable", and he is also a "good man with a gentle personality".Although the author wrote about many of their absurd and ridiculous behaviors, he did not vilify them. Therefore, the images of these miserable people arouse deep sympathy instead of contempt for them in the hearts of readers.We may not be able to help laughing at their absurd behavior, but when we think about it after laughing, we often feel like crying, and we can't help but shed tears of sympathy.I think this is the brilliance of the author's artistic expression. Of course, the short stories written by the author, like his novels, are not all pearls. After all, such poetic masterpieces are rare.This has nothing to do with his creative conditions.Not to mention his illness, the poverty of his life had a great negative impact on his creation.Because of poverty, he was unable to repeatedly revise, polish and carve his own works with great care.This negative influence is particularly prominent in his novels.Therefore, some people blamed his novels for being too complicated, unsuccessful in artistic form, and unclear in context.In short, his works are not as refined and graceful as those of Turgenev and others.However, if we consider his poverty and illness, it seems that we don't need to blame him for everything, not to mention that even his short stories are flawless. Li Heling Written in Changsha Yuelu Mountain May 1995