My father Fyodor Dostoevsky

The reader of this book will look at a true literary biography of the famous Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. In this new biography, the Egyptian and Arab reader will discover how much false information they previously had about the giant of Russian literature, including, for example, that his gambling addiction was due to moral corruption. The reader will discover the transformations in Dostoevsky's life, and how he was a noble, honorable person, loving goodness, humanity, and the poor, biased towards Russian peasants, not arrogant towards his fellow countrymen from the poor classes. Rather, this nobility caused him to be subjected to financial blackmail by his closest relatives, including his siblings' children and his ward from his first wife. The book, published by the Egyptian-Lebanese House in Cairo under the title "Dostoevsky's Life," translated by Anwar Ibrahim, is an Arabic translation of the book published in French by the daughter of the most famous Russian writer, Luba Fedorovna Dostoevskaya, in 1920, after a long journey of patience and perseverance in describing her father's life. This book achieved great fame at that time. The book contains thirty chapters and two introductions, one by the Russian writer Boris Tikhomirov, and the other by Luba herself. In this introduction, she reviews her reasons for publishing her father's autobiography in Europe instead of Russia, as the centenary of his birth coincided with the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. This caused the Bolsheviks to seize her family's possessions. Luba attributed her desire to publish her father's biography in Europe because he had long since become a writer of global importance and one of the shining beacons illuminating the way for all humanity. The thirty chapters of the book address the stages of Dostoevsky's life and his family. The daughter dedicated herself to tracing the origins of the family and writing about them, starting from the grandfather and the family's origin in Lithuania, which is revealed in the first chapters. The book is written in a skillful narrative style, as its author had literary ambitions and was interested in images of the external world. She named one of her heroines after her own name, Luba Fedorovna, and gave another her maternal grandfather's family name, and a third she settled next to her in one of the streets of Saint Petersburg. The book also covers important stages in Dostoevsky's life, including his first marriage, which did not produce children, his involvement in a conspiracy against the Tsar, and his arrest in Siberia.