Dostoyevsky – Life and Work

Dostoyevsky’s novels make for compelling reading but they also provide profound insights into human psychology and the human soul. Dostoyevsky drew inspiration from his own troubled life for his writing. Five years after he had begun to establish himself seriously as a writer he was arrested on grounds of subversion and led before a firing squad, only to be reprieved at the last moment. Marked by four years of hard labour in a Siberian prison camp, he underwent a spiritual conversion but continued to question Russian Orthodoxy and religion. He never overcame his addiction to gambling, losing vast sums of money almost to the point of bankruptcy. The death of two of his children shattered his equilibrium, leaving him a broken man.

In this biopic Vitali Konstantinov shows sequential images to produce a compelling account of the different phases of Dostoyevsky‘s life, the tragedies he suffered and the complexities of his writings.