Fyodor Dostoevsky

What failed

Poor Folk was released on 15 January 1846 and sold; The Double, out a fortnight later, was received badly enough to stall him; Vissarion Belinsky, the critic who had made his name, praised its power in print but faulted it for repetition and length, and in January 1847 dismissed his next story, Mr Prokharchin, as affected, mannered and incomprehensible. He was arrested on 23 April 1849 for belonging to the Petrashevsky Circle, taken in December to a parade ground to be shot and told, once the first men were tied to the posts, that the sentence had been commuted, a staging the Tsar had ordered in advance, and served four years of hard labour at Omsk; apart from one story written in the fortress before he went, nothing of his appeared in print for a decade. Vremya, the magazine he ran with his brother Mikhail, was banned by imperial order in May 1863 over Nikolay Strakhov's article on the Polish uprising, The Fatal Question; its replacement, Epokha, ran to thirteen issues and stopped in March 1865. From 1863 he played roulette in the German spa towns and lost nearly all his money at Wiesbaden and Baden-Baden. His wife Maria died of tuberculosis in April 1864 and Mikhail collapsed and died that July; Dostoevsky took on his brother's debts and the support of the widow, her four children and his own stepson. Hounded by creditors in July 1865, he took 3,000 roubles from the publisher Fyodor Stellovsky, handing over the rights to the work he had already written and undertaking to deliver a new novel by 1 November 1866; if he missed, Stellovsky could publish everything he wrote for the next nine years without paying him.

What happened next

He had begun Crime and Punishment in July 1865 and ran it through 1866 in The Russian Messenger, which gained at least 500 subscribers on the first two instalments, and with a month left on the Stellovsky deadline he dictated The Gambler to a twenty-year-old stenographer, Anna Snitkina, delivering it in twenty-six days. He married her in February 1867. Anna took over the money and the publishing, and by 1873 Demons was being sold for cash out of their apartment. The Brothers Karamazov ran as a serial from January 1879 to November 1880; he died on 9 February 1881, less than four months after it finished.

The point

The famous twenty-six days were not a burst of inspiration. They were the terms of a loan he could not repay, and the book they produced is about a man who cannot stop gambling. In an 1871 letter he dated ten years of dreaming about winning money to his brother's death, "when I suddenly found myself weighted down by debts", and what eventually cleared those debts was not a masterpiece but a change in who handled the money.