Remind me not to be a Russian in the 1800s.

Picked up a copy of The Idiot by Dostoevsky last night, and I'll probably start in on it in earnest once I finish Rebel Angels. (I'm also reading world history stuff for the impending podcast and two books for work...my readin' brain is spread a little thin.)

Anyway, The Idiot starts off with the usual six or seven prefaces. I was shocked not to find a family tree of major characters and the 17 names for each person.

But it did have a timeline of Dostoevsky's life and a lengthy bio explaining what was going on while he was writing The Idiot and his other stuff.

So what was happening to him? The answer was almost always "bad things."

Here are a few highlights of the big man's life:

• 1821 - Fyodor Dostoevsky is born in a "hospital for the poor" in the worst part of Moscow. His father is both a "violent alcoholic" and a doctor! What a combo! Check out this line from Wikipedia:

There are many stories of Dostoevsky's father's despotic treatment of his children. After returning home from work, he would take a nap and his children, ordered to keep absolutely silent, stood silently by their slumbering father in shifts and swatted flies around his head.

• 1837 - His mom dies from tuberculosis, and Fyodor is sent off to military school.

• 1839 - His dad is murdered, most likely by the serfs he oversaw. And he sounded like such a good guy. Wikipedia says that the peasants drowned him by pouring vodka down his throat while they restrained him. How quaintly Russian!

• 1849 - He's arrested for being a liberal agitator and is sentenced to death. On the day of his execution, as he's standing in the rain and waiting for the firing squad to kill him, he's told that the tsar has commuted the sentence to four years in Siberian exile. Tsar Nicholas I intentionally waited until the last second to maximize the psychological torture of Dostoevsky.

• 1850 - While in a prison camp, he has the first of many epileptic seizures.

• 1854 - He's released from prison -- and promptly forced to enlist in the Siberian Regiment.

• 1864 - His wife dies. And his brother.

• 1860s-70s - He squanders his book advances on his gambling addiction.

• 1881 - He dies of an emphysemic lung hemorrhage/epileptic seizure.

Of course, scattered in there are some of the most incredible books ever written, but still. The one thing that did surprise me is that he kinda sounds like he was a jerk. Slept around quite a bit, gambled his life away, etc.

The only reason that seems strange to me is because the good guys in his books are just so good. I was talking about that with Open(s) Book(s) today at lunch, and she pointed out that it probably tormented him all his life that he could recognize what it takes to be a great person, but he couldn't actually be that person. Heavy.