Happy Birthday Fyodor Dostoevsky!

To live without hope is to cease to live. 

– Fyodor Dostoevsky

Ever since we started celebrating the birthdays of beloved authors like Roald Dahl, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Shel Silverstein and T. S. Eliot in my "Famous Author Birthday" series, I've been waiting for November 11. Today, we get to celebrate the birthday of one of my all time favourite authors – Fyodor Dostoevsky. Please join me in wishing him a very С Днем Рождения (happy birthday in Russian)!

Fyodor Dostoevsky (November 11, 1821 – 9 February, 1881) was a Russian author, essayist and philosopher. His most famous works include Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov, all of which are amongst some of my favourite books.

Dostoevsky, along with Leo Tolstoy, is considered one of the greatest authors of the Golden Age of Russian literature. His books have been translated into more than 170 languages! Not only that, he has influenced a lot – and I mean a lot – of writers, philosophers, scientists and psychologists. Albert Einstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Anton Chekhov, Herman Hesse, Knut Hamsun, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud and Kurt Vonnegut (who incidentally shares the same birthday – happy birthday Kurt Vonnegut!) are all fans of his work!

Dostoevsky's notes for Chapter 5 of The Brothers Karamazov

Dostoevsky's novels are often very complex, and his characters very dark. He joined a lot of different points of views and voices together to explore many deep themes including religion, guilt, dreams, emotions, visions and human nature. To give an example, the picture to the left is his notes for one chapter of The Brothers Karamzov. His works encompass so many ideas and themes that I will leave it up to him to do the explaining himself with a quote.

Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.

Dostoevsky was the reason I fell in love with Russian literature, and I hope that one day you, my students, will get the chance to read at least one of his books and feel for yourself what a mind-blowing experience it really is! To conclude, here is some advice from the very wise man himself:

Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to live.

– The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

P.S. To find out more about our Kurt Vonnegut, our other birthday boy, the Huffington Post wrote a wonderful post about what Vonnegut can teach us about life.