quickly reversed. Tokhtamysh, who seized the opportunity to defeat Mamai, reunified the Horde and reasserted his claims as lord of the Russian lands. In 1382 Tokhtamysh’s army be-seiged Moscow and pillaged the city. Dmitry Don-skoy, who had fled to Kostroma, agreed to pay a much higher tribute to Tokhtamysh for the Vladimir patent than he had originally paid Mamai.
Dmitry Donskoy skillfully used the church to serve his political and commercial interests. He sponsored a 1379 mission, headed by the monk Stephen, to Christianize Ustiug and establish a new bishop’s see for Perm which, Martin documents, secured Moscow’s control over areas central to the lucrative fur trade. Metropolitan Alexis (1353-1378) and Sergius (c. 1314-1392), hegumen (abbott) of the Trinity Monastery, supported his policies and acted as his envoys in critical situations. After Alexis’s death, Dmitry moved to prevent Cyprian, who had been invested as metropolitan of Lithuania, from claiming authority over the Moscow see. Instead he supported Mikhail- Mityay, who died under mysterious circumstances before he could be invested by the patriarch. Dmitry’s second choice, Pimen, was invested in 1380 and with a brief interruption (Cyprian was welcomed back by Dmitry after the Battle of Kulikovo until Tokhtamysh’s siege of 1382) served as metropolitan of Moscow until his death in 1389.
In May 1389 Dmitry Donskoy died. He stipulated in his will that his son Basil should be the sole inheritor of his patrimony, including the grand principality of Vladimir. As Presniakov (1970) notes, the khan, by accepting the proviso, acknowledged the grand principality as part of the Moscow prince’s inheritance (votchina), even though, in the aftermath of the Battle of Kulikovo, Russia’s subservience to the Horde had been effectively restored and the grand prince’s power significantly weakened. In contrast to other descendants of the Moscow prince Daniel Alexandrovich, Dmitry Donskoy did not become a monk on his deathbed. Notwithstanding, grand-princely chroniclers eulogized him as a saint. The 1563 Book of Degrees, written in the Moscow metropolitan’s scriptorium, portrays him and his wife Yevdokia as chaste ascetics with miraculous powers of intercession for their descendants and their land, thereby laying the ground for their canonizations. See also: BASIL I; BOOK OF DEGREES; GOLDEN HORDE; IVAN II; KULIKOVO FIELD, BATTLE OF; SERGIUS, ST.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lenhoff, Gail. (1997). “Unofficial Veneration of the Dani-ilovichi in Muscovite Rus.’” In Culture and Identity in Muscovy, 1359-1584, eds. A. M. Kleimola and G. D. Lenhoff. Moscow: ITZ-Garant. Martin, Janet. (1986). Treasure of the Land of Darkness: The Fur Trade and Its Significance for Medieval Russia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Presniakov, Alexander E. (1970). The Formation of the Great Russian State, tr. A. E. Moorhouse. Chicago: Quadrangle Books. Vernadsky, George. (1953). A History of Russia, vol. 3: The Mongols and Russia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
(1821-1881), preeminent Russian prose writer and publicist.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born into the family of a former military physician, Mikhail Andreye-vich Dostoyevsky (1789-1839), who practiced at the Moscow Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor. Dos-toyevsky’s father was ennobled in 1828 and acquired
moderate wealth; he and his wife, Mariya Fyodor-ovna (1800-1837), had three more sons and three daughters. As a youth, Dostoyevsky lost his mother to tuberculosis and his father to an incident that officially was declared a stroke but purportedly was a homicide carried out by his enraged serfs.
After spending several years at private boarding schools (1833-1837), Dostoyevsky studied Military Engineering in St. Petersburg (1838-1843) while secretly pursuing his love for literature. He worked for less than a year as an engineer in the armed forces and abandoned that position in 1844 in order to dedicate himself fully to translating fiction and writing. Dostoyevsky’s literary debut, Bednye liudi (Poor Folk, 1845), was an immense success with the public; a sentimental novel in letters, it is imbued with mild social criticism and earned enthusiastic praise from Russia’s most influential contemporary critic, Vissarion Belinsky. But subsequent short stories and novellas such as “Dvoinik” (The Double, 1846)-an openly Gogolesque story of split consciousness as well as an intriguing experiment in unreliable narration-disappointed many of Dostoyevsky’s early admirers. This notwithstanding, Dostoyevsky continued to consciously resist attempts to label him politically or aesthetically. Time and time again, he ventured out from grim social reality into other dimensions-the psychologically abnormal and the fantastic-for which St. Petersburg’s eerie artificiality proved a most intriguing milieu.
In April 1848, Dostoyevsky was arrested together with thirty-four other members of the underground socialist Petrashevsky Circle and interrogated for several months in the infamous Peter-Paul-Fortress. Charged with having read Belin-sky’s letter to Gogol at one of the circle’s meetings, Dostoyevsky was sentenced to death. Yet, in a dramatic mock-execution, Nikolai I commuted the capital punishment to hard labor and exile in Siberia. A decade later, Dostoyevsky returned to St. Petersburg as a profoundly transformed man. Humbled and physically weakened, he had internalized the official triad of Tsar, People, and Orthodox Church in a most personal way, distancing himself from his early utopian beliefs while re-conceptualizing his recent harsh experiences among diverse classes- criminals and political prisoners, officers and officials, peasants and merchants. Dos-toyevsky’s worldview was now dominated by values such as humility, self-restraint, and forgiveness, all to be applied in the present, while giving up his faith in the creation of a harmonious empire in the future. The spirit of radical social protest that had brought him so dangerously close to Communist persuasions in the 1840s was from now on attributed to certain dubious characters in his fiction, albeit without ever being denounced completely.
Eager to participate in contemporary debates, Dostoyevsky, jointly with his brother Mikhail (1820-1864), published the conservative journals Vremya (Time, 1861-63) and Epokha (The Epoch, -65), both of which encountered financial and censorship quarrels. In his semi-fictional Zapiski iz mertvogo doma (Notes from the House of the Dead, 1862)-the most authentic and harrowing account of the life of Siberian convicts prior to Chekhov and Solzhenitsyn-Dostoyevsky depicts the tragedy of thousands of gifted but misguided human beings whose innate complexity he had come to respect. One of the major conclusions drawn from his years as a societal outcast was the notion that intellectuals need to overcome their condescension toward lower classes, particularly the Russian muzhik (peasant) whose daily work on native soil gave him wisdom beyond any formal education.
An even more aggressive assault on mainstream persuasions was “Zapiski iz podpol’ia” (“Notes from the Underground,” 1864); written as a quasi-confession of an embittered, pathologically self-conscious outsider, this anti-liberal diatribe was intended as a provocation, to unsettle the bourgeois consciousness with its uncompromising anarchism and subversive wit. “Notes from the Underground” became the prelude to Dostoyevsky’s mature phase. The text’s lasting ability to disturb the reader stems from its bold defense of human irrationality, viewed as a guarantee of inner freedom that will resist any prison in the name of reason, no matter how attractive (i.e., social engineering, here symbolized by the “Crystal Palace” that Dostoyevsky had seen at the London World Exhibition).
The year 1866 saw the completion, in a feverish rush, of two masterpieces that mark Dostoyev-sky’s final arrival at a form of literary expression congenial to his intentions. Prestuplenie i nakazanie (Crime and Punishment) analyzes the transgression of traditional Christian morality by a student who considers himself superior to his corrupt and greedy environment. The question of justifiable murder was directly related to Russia’s rising revolutionary movement, namely the permissibility of crimes for a good cause. On a somewhat lighter note, Igrok
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(The Gambler) depicts the dramatic incompatibility of Russian and Western European mentalities against the background of a German gambling resort. Pressured by a treacherous publisher, Dos-toyevsky was forced to dictate this novel within twenty-six days to stenographer Anna Grigor’evna Snitkina (1846-1918), who shortly thereafter became his wife.
Endlessly haunted by creditors and needy family members, the Dostoyevskys escaped abroad, spending years in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. They often lived near casinos where the writer unsuccessfully tried to resolve his financial ills. Against all odds, during this period Dostoyevsky created some of his most accomplished works, particularly the novel Idiot (1868), the declared goal of which was to portray a “perfectly beautiful human being.” The title character, an impoverished prince, clashes with the rapidly modernizing, cynical St. Petersburg society. In the end, although conceptualized as a Christ-like figure, he causes not salvation but murder and tragedy.
